Auburn: Outcasts and Underdogs

by Valerie Thomas

  Chapter 17

  Singing with Aras hadn’t been the nirvana I thought it would be; yes, he was very good, and yes, listening to him perform our song was fun. But afterward, watching the crowd slowly dwindle was slightly disheartening.

  We performed a couple more songs before calling it a night; by the time our audience was down to a few people at the back of the line, we figured there was no point in continuing for too much longer. The audience didn’t exactly start singing along with any of the songs, but they didn’t boo us off the makeshift stage either. I suppose, considering how our earlier performances had gone, I should’ve been happy that our reception wasn’t terrible.

  And we sold one or two CDs. It wasn’t much—not even enough to cover the cost of making them—but when the old man handed us a crisp hundred, we felt like the richest kids in the neighborhood. Considering that it included the payment for our performance in addition to the ten bucks for the CDs he’d sold for us, it wasn’t exactly much… But we felt rich, all the same.

  As a band, we agreed that the money should be reinvested in ourselves. The real question was how to go about it. Joey wanted to press the CD idea and get some better recording equipment, Charlie thought we should order some shirts to sell, and I thought it might be cool to pay for a professionally-designed logo.

  I wanted to support Charlie’s suggestion, to show some small bit of appreciation for the way he was always there for me, but before I could switch my vote he decided that Joey’s idea made more sense. So, with a vote of two-to-one, Joey got his way. A hundred dollars wasn’t quite enough to pay for even the cheapest home recording equipment, so we put it aside until we could make some more.

  After the weekend, we went back to school just like normal. As if the Cat’s Cradle performance hadn’t even happened. Jessica didn’t forget about it, though. There were plenty of Loser McGee posts making fun of the fact that we’d been performing next to the dumpsters, like I was garbage waiting to be thrown out. It seemed as if the posts were getting even worse, too. Where before they’d been half-jokes or thinly veiled insults… Well, the veil had been torn off. Loser McGee was nothing more than a place for Jessica to insult me.

  Charlie helped me through the worst of it. He stayed up late with me on more nights than I could have hoped for, chatting over the phone or hanging out at the park. We’d kiss every once in a while, but it hadn’t moved beyond that.

  Winter break came, granting me a few weeks off from seeing Jessica every day. But then Charlie came up with the idea of announcing our relationship to his family. Over Christmas dinner. With his entire extended family present. He had a flair for the theatrical sometimes, and I was too afraid to express how afraid I was.

  I spent hours getting ready; trying on different dresses in front of my mirror, experimenting with a hundred hairstyles, deciding between my usual look and a toned down, eyeliner-less and generally makeup-less one. The dinner was supposed to start sometime around six, but at five-thirty I still didn’t feel ready.

  The one thing I could tell for sure was that I didn’t look anything like myself. I looked like… I twisted in the mirror to assess. I looked like Jessica. Good God, we are similar, I thought, pulling at my own face. We both had curly hair, but there was more than that: a wide jaw, a nose that didn’t quite look right. We would never have been able to pass as twins, but there was a resemblance that made me cringe.

  The doorbell rang upstairs, but I ignored it. Mom was home, she would answer. I turned to my disheveled bed, pushing the white comforter around to lay out all of the dress options I’d found. There was a frilly pink one, a plain black dress that wouldn’t have been out of place at a funeral, a light blue sundress that came closest to the impression I wanted to give. But my best option seemed to be the simple, sunflower yellow A-line dress I already had on. I looked a little like Jessica, but I decided I’d have to deal with it.

  Someone knocked on the door to my room. My mom’s voice came from behind it, “Honey? Charlie’s here.”

  “Oh, okay.” I sighed; my hands were already starting to shake at the thought of what the night might hold. My mind kept inventing scenarios where I said something wrong or did something wrong, or both. Trying to quash those feelings, I walked over to my door and opened it.

  Mom had her hair pulled up in a ponytail and she had almost no makeup on. I took that to mean she’d be spending the night alone; at least, once I left. “Hey,” she said, “You heard me, right?”

  “Yeah, I heard you. Um, send him down, I guess. I’m not quite ready.” I gestured vaguely to my face, not willing to admit the real problem.

  “Okay.” She smiled and turned back toward the stairs. In a few moments, I heard them creak with the weight of her footsteps. I waited at my door, catching snippets of a conversation between Mom and Charlie, and then louder footsteps came sounding down the stairs.

  Charlie was wearing a normal shirt and jeans. It wasn’t exactly his usual style, but he didn’t look as dressed up as me, either. When he met my eyes, a laugh came bubbling up. “Ash…”

  “What?” I snapped, feeling hot anger rise at his rude reaction.

  “N-nothing. I just… You, um, don’t look like yourself.” The remnants of his laugh still seemed present on his face and in his tone, but he seemed to realize that I didn’t get the joke. “I guess it’s just a little weird seeing you like this. I mean… Yeah.”

  Even though I’d had a similar thought less than a minute ago, it hurt to hear the words from someone else. I stared at him, letting my face fall into a slack scowl. “I think you’re supposed to compliment your date, not run her down.”

  Charlie exhaled heavily; it lasted for several seconds, like the slow deflating of a balloon. By the time he finished, he looked exhausted. “Ash, today’s been kind of hard for me. Trust me, I want to say the right thing. I really do. But I can’t right now. I’m trying to hold it together, but it’s hard. So hard.” When our eyes met, it shocked me to see his clenched, as if he was fighting off some unseen pain.

  “Okay… Okay. Here, come on in. Let’s talk about whatever’s going on.” I stepped back and gestured to my bed, before realizing there were still three dresses on it. I tossed them at the foot and took a seat.

  With heavy, plodding steps, Charlie joined me. He fell against the springs like a dead weight. “I don’t know where to start,” he whispered.

  As silly as it might sound, I was reminded of that lyric from Sound of Music: Let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start. “Start wherever you want. Take as long as you want.” It was nice to feel like the therapist in our relationship for once; I couldn’t remember seeing Charlie weak before, except for the very beginning of our freshman year.

  He tapped a hand against his thigh. “My grandpa’s dying. Granny… She passed a few weeks ago, and my dad thinks he just lost the will to go on after that.”

  Oh God, I thought. The world had suddenly become heavy, dull. I tried to bully my mind to come up with some words of comfort, but all I could do was wrap an arm around Charlie.

  “I dunno,” he continued, “I guess I’ve never seen someone without a will to live. Granny was… She was a…” He sniffled loudly. “Sorry. She was a fighter, right to the end. I could understand that. She didn’t let death take her gently. But there’s nothing wrong with Grandpa. I mean, physically, noth-ing. When we were visiting him earlier today, the nurse said he’d just checked out. How can someone do that? How can someone look their family in the eye and decide that they just aren’t worth fighting for anymore?”

  I had no words for him. That was the sad truth. I’d never been close to my grandparents, and I was ill-equipped to imagine what losing a loved one felt like. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he just really loved your grandmother. Losing her must have hit him pretty hard.”

  Charlie leaned into my shoulder. “Yeah, I guess so. The hardest part was seeing that, hearing my dad talk about it, and then pretending everything was okay. Grandpa just kept
joking about how old I’d gotten. How I was practically grown up.”

  “Oh.” I felt like a terrible person, worrying about something as inconsequential as stress while Charlie was in real pain. But it occurred to me that he could use the night off too. “Look, let’s not go to that dinner with your family. You don’t have to pretend that everything’s okay with Mom and me. Trust me, we’re good at not okay. You can cry as much as you want, and we’ll order pizza and keep things simple.”

  He took a moment to think about it. Then another moment. He reached into a jean pocket and pulled out his phone, fiddling with it as he stayed quiet. “Dad drove me here,” he finally said. “What would I say to him?”

  “Blame me. Tell him I was too afraid of meeting your family, and I begged you to stay here instead.” It was close to the truth, and I was happy to finally be of some use.

  “Hmm… Okay.” Charlie slowly rose from the bed.

  If it had been me, I probably would have just texted the man and told him something to the effect of ‘hey, dinner’s a no go. See you in a while.’ But Charlie left the room, presumably to tell his dad in person. I was left alone with nothing other than my thoughts for quite some time.

  What would it be like to lose Mom? I wondered, figuring that was the closest analogy to my own life. Thinking about it, I started to tear up. But I realized something: if I lost Mom, it would suck, but less so if I knew that she was going to be with someone she loved.

  My brain felt twisted. I was pretty sure I believed in some kind of heaven, some form of afterlife, but it had been years since the last time I’d stepped foot in a church. Besides, promises of heaven came from the same liars who’d told me that Santa Claus was real, that a big man in the sky was waiting to answer all my prayers if I just prayed them hard enough. If that man existed, he’d long since turned a deaf ear my way.

  Charlie came back, almost immediately finding his old spot on the bed. “He said I could stay. I mean, I kind of had to tell him about us before he really understood, but once I did he was cool with it.”

  The words sounded dead; his mood obviously hadn’t improved from the short conversation with his father. I frowned, trying to remember if Charlie was religious. I thought so, but we didn’t talk about it much.

  “Do you still want to talk about your grandpa?” I asked rather bluntly.

  His response was quick this time. “No. No, not at all. But I can’t stop thinking about it, so… I guess so?”

  “Okay, that’s fine with me. I was just thinking about how hard this must be for you and… I don’t know, I decided it would make things a little easier to think about how he might be able to reconnect with his wife.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, although I got the feeling it was more to cut me off than in agreement with what I was saying. “Look, I have a hard time with that because no one knows that will happen. I mean, if you’re Christian, then yeah, I guess. But if you’re Buddhist, then they’ll both just get reincarnated without seeing each other. And Atheists don’t get any sort of afterlife.” He shook his head. “All I know for certain is that he will wake up tomorrow if he chooses to. And the next day, and the next. If he doesn’t decide to die, I’ll get to visit him. Otherwise, he’s jumping into a great unknown. Somewhere none of us can follow.”

  His tone struck me as slightly condescending, but I tried to see past my immediate feelings about the way he was getting his point across. “Somewhere all of us will eventually follow,” I corrected, as gently as I could.

  Charlie looked up at me. He seemed to be calming down a little; there hadn’t been any tears for a while, and no sniffling either. “Ashley, we all make that trip alone. When he dies, no one goes with him. I’m not okay with that yet.”

  His use of my full name took me back for a moment. “Maybe no one goes with him, but you have to believe he’ll meet up with your granny, right? There’s no way that wouldn’t happen…”

  “No way? There’s a ton of ways it couldn’t happen.” He moved away from me, just enough that I could see the angry look in his eyes. “Like I said, no one knows. He might be fine with that, but I’m not. I don’t think my dad is either. It’s just selfish to die like that, when there are so many people who want him in their life.”

  Maybe, I thought, but isn’t it more selfish to demand that he live without the love of his life just because you want to be able to see him every once in a while? Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to bite my tongue until I had something slightly gentler to say. “Look, in the end I think it’s his choice. I can get why someone might decide they don’t want to live without… You know, without someone he’s probably spent most of his life with.”

  Charlie shook his head. “That’s just stupid. He lived for twenty years before he met her. Ash, he’s being selfish.”

  “He’s not being selfish, and it’s not stupid!” I could hear my voice rising; on some level it felt like his insult had been directed at me, instead of my idea. “All I’m saying is that I understand what he’s thinking. How can you say that’s stupid? What, you think he’s crazy or something? Or are you just so callous that you can’t even sympathize with someone who just lost his wife?”

  “I’m not callous!” He inhaled slowly, exhaled, gritted his teeth together. “Whatever, let’s not talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

  Of course not, because I wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear. I decided to try a different method of cheering him up. “Okay. Come on, let’s go upstairs. We’ll play some games and make fun of Mom’s TV dinner.”

  “Sure.” It wasn’t an enthusiastic response, but it was something.

  We found Mom in the living room, kicking back in her sweats and watching reruns of The Bachelor. She jumped when she heard us moving in the hall behind her. “Oh! Ashley, you scared me. What are you guys still doing here?”

  “Nothing much,” I answered, “We decided not to go to the dinner with Charlie’s family. We were just gonna hang out here for a while.”

  “Oh, alright. Well, you can come and watch TV if you want. This isn’t the most interesting show in the world, but…” She seemed to recognize that something wasn’t quite right in the world of teens, and fortunately she reacted perfectly. No interrogations, no overtly worried looks. For as much grief as I gave her, Mom really pulled through sometimes.

  I glanced at Charlie. “Do you want to watch this?”

  “Sure.” Sure, sure, sure. It felt as if he was slowly withdrawing into himself. Maybe I’d been wrong to argue philosophy with him, but I just didn’t like his philosophy. People had to go somewhere when they died; even I believed that.

  We found our way into the dimly lit and sat down on the couch next to Mom. It was a legacy from the apartment, the blue plush couch that had been our only comfortable furniture for so long.

  “Courtney’s the bitch this season,” Mom announced. “And everyone knows Meghan stuffs her weave.”

  I had no clue what ‘stuffs her weave’ even meant. But for some reason, it brought a weak smile to Charlie’s face. “Good to know. Have they had any big fights yet?”

  “Oh yeah, of course.” Mom leaned across me to speak directly to Charlie. “One of the girls tried to start an all-yogurt diet that made her go crazy. She ended up throwing her fancy gown into the pool. Along with Courtney.”

  “Well, Courtney is a bitch,” Charlie joked. Mom laughed, and I tried to join in without much success. It just wasn’t that funny to me.

  When Courtney came on the screen, Mom practically had a fit. “There she is! See? She even looks crazy!”

  Curly black hair, green eyes, tan lines… I couldn’t see how she looked crazy. Maybe she’d taken one too many trips to the fake tanning booth, but that was it.

  “Oh yeah, she totally does.” Charlie poked me in the ribs. “She looks like Jessica in ten years, doesn’t she?”

  I liked that idea; maybe in ten years Jessica would be the crazy bitch on TV, and everybody would make fun of her the wa
y she made fun of me. “Oh my god, she totally does!” I said, managing a real laugh.

  Charlie joined in. “Phew, no wonder she’s crazy. Anyone who looks like her or Jessica would have to be.”

  “Yeah, totally.” But I look like Jessica, I thought. Charlie and Mom kept joking, and I let them. But maybe they were wrong. Wrong to mock someone just because they didn’t think it would do any harm. I knew how easy it was for some people to take what was said at home and put it online. Just like Jessica.