Anyway, that’s how things went for a few months or so, me giving Jason some stretched out version of the truth, then reporting back to Danni, then getting my next truth-stretching assignment. All of this—interspersed with Danni’s agonies of love.
Then things got over-the-top weird. I got this email from Jason telling me how he’d loved me for a long time. He was too shy to tell me in person, but he could no longer keep his feelings all bottled up inside.
I read the email over and over about ten times, not believing my eyes. Then I emailed him back, telling him how important he was to me, as a friend, and that I wanted us to stay friends. He emailed me back that he would be patient. I was worth waiting for, and he was sure I’d change my mind about him.
Until then, Danni and I had always told each other everything. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Jason’s confession of love for me. Our whole junior year, besides playing on a champion volleyball team, and running track, and me working my head off to get good grades, and Danni barely working to get mediocre grades, and us laughing our heads off over any silly thing, Danni kept feeding me lines to say to Jason to get him to like her. And I kept getting emails from Jason, declaring his love for me, to which I constantly responded “only friends.” The longer it went on the guiltier I felt, even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
I kept hoping Danni’d start liking Austin and forget about Jason. She did go out with Austin a few times, but that was only because she hoped it would make Jason jealous. But Jason hardly even noticed, even though I told him about it.
The other hope I had was that Jason would forget about me, but he keeps telling me he loves me, and he knows I’m going to change my mind any day now. Well . . . he doesn’t exactly tell me any of that. He emails me. We never, ever, talk about how we feel, or don’t feel about each other. We only email on that subject.
“Hey, Autumn!”
Coach Nicholson, Nikki, leaning out the window of her silver Subaru, waving and calling my name in her loudest coach-voice.
jolts me back to now.
“Need a ride?”
“Sure,” I say, climbing into the passenger seat as Nikki tosses team rosters and notebooks into the back.
“Going home?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Nikki starts talking about how great it is that so many girls from our volleyball team are going to camp this year.
“I think we’ve got an excellent chance at state. You and Danni and Krystal are already fantastic, and Stacy’s getting really good, too, plus there’s . . .”
When Coach talks about volleyball she gets so enthused no one else needs to say a word. It’s not that I stop listening. It’s just that I keep thinking about Danni being mad at me.
“This is your street, right?” Coach says, turning onto Camellia Street.
“Yeah. The house with the yellow submarine mailbox.”
Coach laughs and pulls into our driveway.
“That always gets me—your dad and his yellow submarine fetish.”
“He’s sort of normal otherwise,” I say, getting out of the car.
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” Nikki says. “I wish all of our parents were as supportive as your dad. Your grandmother, too.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I say, slamming the Subaru door closed.
She backs out the driveway and stops at the curb. Lowering the window and leaning out she flashes her big Coach Nicholson smile.
“Have a great time at camp! Have a great summer!”
“You, too,” I call back to her.
She takes off down the street in the same direction we just came from and I realize she went out of her way to give me a ride. But that’s just how she is. We’re lucky. The volleyball coach at Wilson is a total witch. It’s a good team, but I don’t think they have much fun.
Inside I go straight to my email. One from Jason, the usual, and one from Danni.
“You could at least have told me,” she wrote.
I email back that I’m sorry, and remind her that Jason and I are
only friends.
“It’s just that I love him so much,” she sent back to me.
It would be lots easier to talk on the phone, but Danni’s parents are super strict and she’s only allowed one personal call a day, which I happen to know she already used this morning because she called to ask what I was wearing to school.
I want to tell her to get over Jason—find someone she’s got a chance with. But she’s so into her Jason fantasy, she can’t possibly listen to reason.
What Jason told me when he invited me to dinner was that he wanted more than anything to celebrate his eighteenth birthday with me, his longtime best friend.
“What about Danni?” I asked. “You know, the Three Musketeers and all?”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it used to be, when we were kids, but Danni and I aren’t that close anymore.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. I mean, she’s still ditzy in that funny kind of way, but she’s changed a lot this past year or so. Don’t you think?”
“We’ve all changed,” I tell him. “We’re in our late teens. We’re supposed to change.”
“Yeah, well, I still like her and all, but I guess I’ve sort of outgrown her.”
That was one conversation I didn’t report back on.
“Anyway, the deal is dinner for two, not dinner for three.”
It’s not a date, he told me, just two best friends going out to dinner to celebrate a very big birthday. I could hardly say no to that. We are best friends and eighteen is incredible!
Because we’re going to such a nice restaurant, I decide to wear the white silk dress I got when I went to a very fancy tea wedding for someone from my dad’s work. It’s got spaghetti straps and a sort of scoop neck, and a matching jacket. Grams helped me choose the outfit.
I guess it sounds funny to be taking fashion advice from an old blind woman, but she knows a lot about clothes. We don’t do this for casual stuff, but for special clothes she always goes with me. She runs her hands over both sides of the fabric, checks all the seams, then, if the dress, or blouse, or whatever, meets her standards, she and I and Casper, Gram’s guide dog, crowd into a dressing room where she checks the fit, and how it drapes, and the evenness of the hem. Finally, if we all like it, she pays for it with her Braille Visa and we celebrate our successful shopping trip with peppermint chip double ice cream cones and an extra cone for Casper.
Anyway . . . that’s what I’m wearing to dinner. My dad’s eyes get all shiny when he sees me.
“Awesome Autumn,” he says. Then he goes on and on about what a beautiful young woman I’ve become, and how much I look like my mother.
“You’ve got her exact same hair—that light gold color that glows in the sun.”
I was only five when my mother died, so I don’t exactly remember what she looked like—I only know how she looks in pictures. And I know my dad gets all sentimental sometimes when the way I look, or something I do or say, reminds him of her.
It’s lucky Jason shows up in time for me to get out of there before Dad goes totally sappy. I mean, it’s sweet and all that, but it’s sort of embarrassing, too.
Jason’s dad let him borrow his very cool Lexus and we drive over to the Hollywood Hills with the moon roof open and the stereo blasting. Not blasting like rappers do, but loud enough to feel surrounded by the music.
Walking from the parking lot to the restaurant, Jason runs his hand lightly, quickly, over my hair.
“You should always wear your hair down,” he says.
I laugh.
“Too much trouble. Besides it gets in my eyes when I play volleyball. Sometimes I think I should get it all chopped off—like Krystal’s.”
Jason groans.
“That’s what my dad says, too.”
“Smart man.”
The restaurant has crisp white tablecloths and silverware that’s really silver. The waite
rs wear tuxedos and are polite but not exactly friendly. These are not the kind of waiters who sit down next to you and say “Hi, I’m Jimmy and I’ll be taking care of you this evening.”
I’m shocked by the prices on the menu. You could buy a month’s worth of double cheeseburgers with fries and a drink at McDonald’s for the cost of the cheapest dinner here.
In an old fashioned way, though, the whole thing is sort of glamorous, like in one of those old movies where people are always dressed up and sipping drinks from fancy glasses and smoking cigarettes.
After dinner the waiter brings us two wedges of chocolate cake, one with a candle in it.
“We didn’t order dessert.” Jason says.
“Your mother called ahead,” the waiter says. “Happy Birthday.”
I give Jason his present, a book of poetry by this guy, Luis Rodriguez, who Jason really admires. Jason says he’s going to be a writer. All the other guys I know want to be basketball stars, or pilots, or lawyers. But Jason’s different. He’s been accepted to some school in Iowa that’s famous for its writing program. He’s already got plans for graduate school. I guess he’s really dedicated. I mean Iowa? From California? But he’s all jazzed about it. He’s leaving in August, which is sad in a way. But at least I won’t have to be delivering any more of Danni’s “stretched truth” messages once he’s gone.
A lot of the poems in the new book are about life in East Los Angeles, which is where Jason used to live. He took me and Danni down there once, just after he got his driver’s license. He drove us past his old school and the house he used to live in. It looked way different than Hamilton Heights.
The title of the book. My Nature Is Hunger, makes us laugh since we’re definitely not hungry after our tricolore salad, hand cut pappardelle with meat ragu, and chocolate cake.
After dinner we drive up to the planetarium. Jason wants to see the new “Brightest Stars of the Universe” show, but it turns out we need reservations, which we don’t have. A volunteer hands us a slick brochure and we take the elevator back down to the parking lot.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ planetarium,” Jason says, laughing. “We’ll go look at real stars.”
We drive out past lights and traffic and park at the edge of a dirt road with a “no trespassing” sign posted. Jason opens the moon roof and we look up into the night sky from our reclined leather seats.
“Sure beats the planetarium show,” Jason says.
A very bright falling star streaks across the sky, as if to prove Jason’s point that the real thing is best.
“You’re supposed to make a wish,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says, looking at me for too long.
“You’re supposed to close your eyes when you make your wish.”
“You too,” he says.
We squinch our eyes closed for a few seconds and I wish for a volleyball scholarship to Cal Poly.
“What’d you wish?” Jason asks.
“If you tell, your wish won’t come true,” I say.
“It’s just a game. It probably won’t come true, anyway.”
“Mine might,” I say, but really, I know it will take more than wishing. It will take a lot of hard work and discipline. Which is okay by me.
After a while, Jason picks up the book I gave him, turns on the map light, and reads one of the poems to me. It’s about people who have to scramble just to get food for their kids, and who live with violence every day.
“That’s so sad.” I tell him. “I wish I’d bought you a happier book.”
“Nah. This is the book I wanted. You gave me exactly what I wanted,” he says. Then he adds, “Well . . . almost exactly what I wanted.”
I pretend not to even hear that part about almost exactly. I know from all of his emails exactly what he wants. He wants me to do the sex thing with him but that’s never going to happen.
Jason reaches behind the seat and takes one of those little bottles of champagne from an ice cooler. He opens one and hands it to me.
“I never drink alcohol,” I tell him. “You know that!”
“Yeah, but this is really good. Just taste it, for my birthday,” he says, opening another bottle for himself.
“Come on, here’s to eighteen,” he says, clinking his bottle against mine and taking a sip.
I’m a serious athlete and besides, parties where people binge and get stupid and then throw up all over everything aren’t exactly my idea of fun. But a sip of champagne for Jason’s birthday? No big deal. And he’s right—it tastes pretty good. We sit sipping champagne and reminiscing and watching for more shooting stars.
Jason points to the planetarium brochure on the floor beside my feet.
“Hey, remember when we were in the fourth grade, and Mr. Westly brought us all up there on that field trip?”
“And Danni kept telling her mom we were going to see the stars at the sanitarium?”
Jason starts laughing. “And her mom got mad because she thought it was rude to put sick movie stars on display?”
“Rude and sinful,” I remind him, which makes us laugh more.
“It’s the Eleventh Commandment,” Jason gasps out, “Thou shalt not look at sick movie stars.”
I’m laughing so hard I snort champagne out my nose.
“Watch out for the bees,” Jason yells and puts his hand over my nose, pretending to be terrified. Then he jerks his hand away, looks at it in disgust, and wipes it carefully on the carpeted floor mat beneath the driver’s seat.
By that time even if a swarm of bees did fill the car we could only have laughed harder. If I’d been with a real boyfriend instead of Jason, I’d have been embarrassed to death about spewing champagne from my nose. That would have been horrible, but with Jason it’s just soooo funny.
Finally, when our stomachs ache from laughing and we’re on the last of the champagne, Jason gets all serious.
“Look at that sky. Look at those stars. Maybe there really are whole other worlds out there, like in that old ‘Lightning Strike’ story from Weird World.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“But there’s got to be more than just us,” Jason says. “I mean, we can’t be the most highly intelligent forms of life in the whole universe. In this whole universe? That would be stupid . . . I don’t think God’s that wasteful, to make this whole, huge universe just for us.”
“Do you think God made everything in six days?”
“No. That’s just a metaphor.”
Sometimes I don’t get Jason when he talks like that, but right now, under the stars, feeling the glow of champagne, he’s making sense. And when he leans over and kisses me, that makes sense, too. And when we do exactly what he wanted to do for his birthday, well, that seems right at the time, too.
Chapter
3
I’m on the floor in the living room, stretching my quads and hamstrings, which is part of the routine Nikki bangs into our heads every day at the end of practice. To be fair, all of the coaches at last summer’s volleyball camp were stretch fanatics.
At the end of each day’s practice, Nikki yells, “Morning and night! Stretch ‘em out, stretch ‘em out, wayyyy out!” This is her own variation of Hamilton High’s favorite defensive football cheer to “Push ‘em back, push ‘em back, wayyyy back.”
With her drill sergeant voice and volume, she really gets into our heads. I could be ten thousand miles away from Hamilton Heights, but if I even think about skipping my morning stretches, Nikki’s voice comes screaming into my brain.
“Hey, Kid,” Dad says, walking over my outstretched legs on his way to the kitchen.
My mom named me Autumn. Autumn Elena Grant. The Elena’s after my other grandmother, but she died a long time ago, too. Everyone else calls me Autumn, but my dad calls me Kid. Except sometimes, after a really good volleyball game, or a really good report card, or when he’s getting all sentimental, then he calls me Awesome Autumn. And there are other times when he calls me Fall.
Autumn? Fall? Get it? My dad, the comedian.
Mostly, though, I’m Autumn, after my mom’s favorite season. She loved seeing the bright reds and yellows and oranges when the leaves change color in October. At least that’s what my dad and Grams tell me. Like I said before, I hardly even remember her. I think I remember that she laughed a lot, and sang me to sleep, but maybe I only know that because of what Dad and Grams tell me. They want to keep her memory alive for me, so I’ll know how much she loved me, but it’s hard to really feel the love of a dead mother.
I breathe out slowly, releasing the stiffness in my left upper thigh, pushing the stretch a bit farther.
“Firing up the griddle,” Dad announces from the kitchen.
“I’ll be done in a sec,” I say.
Moving on to hip flexor stretches and spine twists. I’m hoping there’s still a chance to twist a little something loose and finally get my period. Well . . . more than my period, since it’s been over four months since I’ve had a period and no matter how many times I lock myself in the bathroom and pee on a little plastic strip, it always turns pink and says I’m pregnant. Absolutely no one else knows, not even Danni. Especially not Danni, considering the circumstances of my pregnancy, and my plan for abortion. Well . . . the counselor at Planned Parenthood knows, but that’s all.
I read somewhere that a huge percentage of teen pregnancies end before the first trimester, so I’ve been hoping all along it would just go away. Hoping, and doing jumping jacks, and torturous stretches, and painfully hot baths, but nothing happened.
Well. . . things have been happening, just not what I want to have happen. The first thing that happened was that all I wanted to do was sleep. It took every ounce of strength I had just to drag myself out of bed. And the only thing I could eat without hurling was plain crackers with Coca Cola. Since everyone knows I’m a total health nut, my sudden switch to a diet of soda and crackers was hard to explain. And what’s happening now that the queasy stomach thing is over is I’m getting these butterfly-tickle feelings in my stomach. I guess it’s the . . . you know . . . the embryo moving around. And it’s getting harder and harder to get my jeans zipped up. Any day now someone’s sure to notice it’s more than bloat that’s enlarging my belly. But . . . just four more days and it’s over. Four more days.
No More Sad Goodbyes Page 2