We Were Promised Spotlights

by Lindsay Sproul

  The Crack

  I spent the whole weekend at Susan’s. When I got to school on Monday, I found out that Brad and I had broken up.

  Susan spent her time at home drinking and watching Full House. The mom was dead on that show, but it felt far away, and they basically had three parents anyway.

  We couldn’t get Susan out of the house again. People did bring casseroles—they piled up in the fridge, then on the counter. I finally started tossing them, dish and all. Out of respect, I didn’t eat much either. Susan’s mom mostly stayed in the kitchen, saying, “You bastard,” over and over again.

  On Monday morning, I was in a stall in the girls’ bathroom, trying to figure out whether or not my period had come and gotten on my skirt, when I heard PJ talking to Heather.

  “Taylor Garland is a bitch. I can’t believe she did that to Brad,” said PJ. “Of course he would break up with her.”

  Break up? I tried to make myself as small and invisible as possible.

  I lifted my feet, silently, from the floor and squatted on the toilet seat. I squinted through the crack in the stall door and saw that PJ, who had curly hair that I thought about sometimes, was in just her bra, washing something out of her shirt in the sink.

  “I can’t believe she did it to you either,” PJ added.

  Heather snorted.

  “I’m not with Scottie,” she said. “I don’t care.” She raised her eyebrows at PJ’s reflection in the mirror. She looked a little bit relieved, even.

  “Still,” said PJ.

  “Brad is so sweet,” Heather said. She was reapplying foundation, frowning at her reflection and covering her freckles.

  The word bitch stung a little, coming from PJ. She was my lab partner, and we were usually friends, but Heather had this way of looking at people that made them say cruel things. I knew because I’d been around Heather a lot, and it happened to me sometimes too. Heather was someone I wanted to conspire with, even if it felt terrible later. Heather was someone I wanted to impress, and someone I felt connected to by a magnetic force that I didn’t quite understand.

  “Yeah,” PJ said, sighing dramatically. She liked Brad too. “I know.”

  Heather finished her makeup and looked again at PJ’s reflection.

  “Why do you always apply makeup like you’re about to step out onstage?” she said. “Here, let me fix it.”

  PJ turned to Heather, and I watched Heather’s hands moving a wet paper towel over PJ’s cheeks, then applying foundation in a soft little circle. Heather had done this same thing to me many times, and it was just about the most intimate she ever was with another girl. I wanted to switch places with PJ—I wanted Heather’s hands on my face.

  “Thanks,” said PJ, examining her new face. “You’re so good at this.”

  Standing there, staring at PJ through the crack of the bathroom stall door, I couldn’t help but think about her in primary school, of how we became friends.

  In second grade, PJ peed her pants while wearing a semicolon costume in the grammar pageant. In front of everyone. She ran off the stage crying, and I ran after her. I was the question mark, the star of the show, even though I couldn’t sing. PJ didn’t get to sing her semicolon song, and the thing was, she actually could sing. It made you feel like crying when she sang. We collected gypsy moths during recess that day and put them in a shoe box, and I wouldn’t let anyone make fun of her.

  Now she was always the lead role in the school plays, and even though our theater department was terrible, she managed to save every play. Last year, during Beauty and the Beast, in the middle of a cardboard set that was falling down, she sang “Something There” so beautifully that you forgot Sonny O’Connell was even on the stage in that stupid gorilla costume.

  “I can’t believe Taylor, making out with Scottie right in front of Brad,” said PJ. She was repeating herself now. “Aren’t you pissed-off?”

  “I think I’d be more pissed-off if I were Susan,” Heather said absently.

  Susan? I crouched lower. I didn’t see how Susan factored into this. She didn’t bring up Scottie all weekend. I guessed she was mostly glad to see me hurt Brad in public.

  “I know. I mean, Susan is her best friend,” PJ said. “And she always loved Brad, and Taylor is throwing it all away, right in front of her. Plus, her dad is dead.”

  I wondered if anyone knew Brad told me he loved me. I couldn’t imagine him telling anyone, and I certainly hadn’t.

  “Susan is wicked annoying, but I still feel kind of bad for her,” Heather said. “Her obsession with Brad has been so obvious since seventh grade.”

  “I know,” PJ said, examining her shirt, now that her face was perfect. “Fuck. This salad dressing is not coming out.”

  I opened the stall door and walked through. “I have an extra shirt in my gym locker,” I said casually.

  PJ and Heather stared at me, their mouths open.

  “Oh,” PJ said. “No, that’s okay.”

  Heather’s face changed from shocked at being caught in the act of gossiping to a steady, calm look of superiority.

  “Don’t act surprised,” she said to me, looking me straight in the eye. “You know all of this is true.”

  I ignored Heather, addressing PJ instead.

  “Well, see you in biology,” I said.

  I left them there.

  * * *

  —

  I needed to find Brad. It was second period, so he had shop. I walked to the south wing of campus, then stood outside the shop classroom and waved to Brad, trying to stay out of Mr. Walsh’s view.

  When Brad saw me, he looked away, but I waved harder, and finally he went up to Mr. Walsh’s desk and grabbed the hall pass, which was a little piece of metal shaped like a saw.

  “So we’re over?” I asked Brad when he got out into the hallway. “It’s really awesome, hearing it from someone other than you.”

  I knew I had no right to be angry, but I was anyway. I was angry at him for making me feel guilty, for making me feel inadequate. I was angry at him for having been hurt by me.

  “You tell me.” His face was stony. He sounded like he had a cold.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said lamely. “Sometimes I just do stupid things for no reason.”

  But there was a reason, and we both knew it.

  “You don’t love me,” he said to the floor. And then, in a smaller voice, “Scottie is my best friend.”

  “I’m sorry.” I leaned against a puke-green locker. The words Matt McDonough is a punk ass chump were carved into the door.

  “Are you sorry?” he asked. “Do you love me?”

  I wished he hadn’t asked me outright.

  I pretended to think for a minute.

  “No,” I finally said.

  Brad’s eyes teared up, but I didn’t feel like slapping him this time. I definitely didn’t want to see him cry, but I also understood what you could expect from people.

  “Just don’t cry,” I said anyway. It was more of an order than anything—I was trying to tell him how to act—how he was supposed to act. It was fine to be upset, but he shouldn’t show it in public.

  I thought about Mr. Blackford. How, probably, he should have just said that he didn’t love Susan’s mom. Then maybe Susan’s mom could have found somebody else, and maybe she wouldn’t be smoking two cigarettes at once in the kitchen all the time. And maybe Mr. Blackford wouldn’t have had the chance to hurt Susan. Maybe he wouldn’t have died.

  “I knew it,” Brad said. His voice sounded gray and chewed.

  “Well,” I said, “if it makes you feel any better, everyone hates me now.”

  Brad moved farther away from me. I watched him readjust his shoulders, setting them straight, standing tall. He looked better this way—angry, strong, clear-eyed. If he could only act that way more often, maybe I could have stayed with
him.

  “Everyone’s always hated you,” he said, in a tone not unlike Heather’s when she was annoyed.

  I felt like I was going to barf. I was definitely going to barf.

  “I know,” I managed to say before running away, toward the secret bathroom.

  The Tide

  On Tuesday after school, a day I had off from work, Susan drove me around Hopuonk on her mission to sell yearbook ads to different stores. It was supposed to take her mind off everything. Hopuonk looked smaller and crappier than it used to, the houses buckling in on themselves, the streets unplowed, the Christmas decorations sparse and outdated. With the Christmas lights up, it was easier to notice how many of the buildings were empty, and because all the lights were tacky, they showed the town’s bad taste even more.

  “How did everyone act at school after you kissed Scottie?” Susan asked, her eyes on the snowy road. She didn’t quite smile, but the expression on her face was the closest I’d seen to happiness since her dad died. She hadn’t come back to school yet, and she was avoiding Instant Messenger, so she didn’t know the gossip.

  I wasn’t ready to tell her everything.

  “Brad’s really pissed-off,” I said, stretching my legs out in front of me, feet on her dashboard.

  I was smearing salt from the road and melted snow everywhere, but Susan didn’t mind. None of us took care of our cars. Cars, to us, were just trash receptacles for holding our bodies and whatever waste we brought with us from one place to another. None of us went very far, and we were lazy. If we took the empty water bottles and Emmylou’s cups out of the cars with us, we’d have to find a place to throw them away.

  “But what did he say?” she pressed.

  “Not a whole lot,” I said.

  “He must have said something,” Susan said.

  “He told me he loved me after your dad . . . you know,” I said, “and I didn’t answer him.”

  Susan reached over and shoved me, her expression both interested and fearful. I knew she was glad I didn’t say it back, that I didn’t love Brad, but knowing for sure that he loved me must have also hurt her.

  “How could you not have told me this?” she said, turning up the heat in the car. Her cheeks flushed, bringing out the red in the cable-knit sweater that poked out from her black peacoat. We were both wearing the same outfit, all from Abercrombie, but my sweater was hunter green and my peacoat was gray.

  I shoved her back.

  “There’s been a lot going on,” I said.

  “When I saw you and Brad go upstairs at the party,” she said, “did you guys have sex? Did you finally do it?”

  I couldn’t bear to tell her about it, because I was embarrassed about how it felt but also because I knew she didn’t really want to hear the details.

  “You never tell me anything,” she whined.

  “That’s not true,” I lied.

  Susan pulled into the parking lot of Gerald’s Turkey Farm, where they sell Thanksgiving sandwiches year-round, little plastic containers of gravy, and also entire turkeys.

  She got out of the car, then leaned in through the open door.

  “We’re not done talking about this,” she said.

  While I waited for her to come back, I bit my nails down to where you can’t bite them anymore. Then I just sat there, waiting. The fact that her dad had just died, Susan said, would make the store owners more likely to buy ads.

  Our yearbook was called The Tide. The name hadn’t changed since long before Sandra went to Hopuonk High. When I thought of the tide, I thought of the awful smell when it was low—like rotten fish, like the inside of a dog’s mouth. Tides have to do with the way the sun and moon line up, which decides how the water moves. We learned it all in primary school, along with everything about the Pilgrims. It honestly scared me—how everything was always moving, how space made decisions for us and for the starfish that washed up and got stuck between rocks in the tide pools, only to be picked up and prodded by children. But I guess it was a good name for the yearbook, really, because we were just like those starfish.

  Hopuonk, at one point, had some kind of downtown where you could walk around, browse the shops, enjoy yourself. Scituate, the next town over, had a town center like that. Ours still had the buildings, but they were empty except for a Chinese takeout place; Ocean State Job Lot, which was where you went to get cheap stuff; and a surf shop that hadn’t been repainted since the 1970s.

  Instead of a real town center, everything in Hopuonk was organized by which beach you lived near, and which crab shack and ice cream parlor was next to that beach. Each one had its own packie to buy liquor and cigarettes and Hostess cupcakes and Slush Puppies.

  If you looked at The Tide, you would see about eight million pictures of me. It made it seem like I’m everywhere, all the time, in the center of everything.

  I was flipping through a paper sample of the yearbook that Susan brought with her to show the businesses.

  There I was, at the junior semiformal, wearing a turquoise dress that showed my belly button. Sandra made me get it. And there I was, standing in the front row of Key Club—Hopuonk High’s community service club. You know, the people who collect cans of food for poor people during Thanksgiving and Christmas, the people who tutor primary school kids who have trouble with reading and math, the people who tell each other how awesome they are. I only went to two meetings, but I was still in the photo.

  And there I was again, in my Emmylou’s apron, standing with Heather.

  Heather also appeared a lot. In her cheerleading uniform. In her Abercrombie cutoffs. Standing next to her flashy new Volkswagen Jetta. You mostly saw that she was blond and tall, that her boobs were big, and that she made duck lips constantly.

  Then there was Susan, who was pictured less. The yearbook showed her on every court at dances, but always on the edge. There she was, between me and Heather, smiling without showing her teeth. There she was again, in the background of a picture of Brad in his lacrosse uniform, staring at his back.

  The rest of the yearbook was predictable. There were a million photos of Brad, captain of everything. Then there was Scottie, the joker, in his Hawaiian shirt and oversized sunglasses. There was PJ onstage, wearing costume makeup, holding a bouquet of flowers padded with baby’s breath.

  Corvis was only pictured twice: once at the front of the National Honor Society photo, and one other time with Kristen.

  The yearbook tried to capture everything, but of course, it couldn’t. In the back, there were empty pages for us to write stupid messages to each other, which weren’t any of the things we really wanted to say:

  Dear Brad, I wish I could love you, but I’m defective. I hope one day you go to Asia and tell me what it’s like, and let me know if it’s real.

  Dear PJ, I thought you were my friend. But you’re not.

  Dear Heather, why do you have to be such a bitch all the time? Why do I also feel like I want to show you what an orgasm feels like?

  Dear Corvis, I wish I were you. Or not you, but like you. You’re the only one who wouldn’t switch places with me if you had the chance, and it makes me feel bad.

  Dear Susan, I love you. Not like a friend.

  Of course, I knew I would just write, Stay sweet, never change! and hate myself.

  The Vampires

  When Susan and I were six, we saw a family of vampires at Humming Rock Beach. We were collecting jellyfish and storing them in Sandra’s cooler, and there they were—vampires. It was an entire family, all very pale, wearing black Victorian outfits with collars buttoned up to their chins.

  “Oh my God, it’s vampires,” I said, dropping an armful of moon jellies.

  “Vampires?” said Susan. She stopped in her tracks, salt water dripping down her skinny legs.

  They walked past, not looking at anyone. In fact, it seemed like they were on a different beach at a different
time.

  “This is bad,” I said. “They can turn us.”

  “How?” Susan asked. The littlest vampire was the scariest. He was basically translucent.

  I didn’t know how vampires turned people, so I didn’t answer.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s protect ourselves.”

  We started making crosses out of driftwood, wound together with seagrass. We placed them on our chests. When we got back to my house, we took the jar of chopped garlic out of the refrigerator and smeared it on ourselves.

  Susan looked at me, tiny cubes of garlic all over her cheeks. “Do you think it’s working?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Pray.”

  That night in my bedroom, I kept thinking about vampires. I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want them to make me.

  I understood later that they couldn’t have been vampires. But we both remembered them that way.

  Now, sitting in Susan’s living room, I asked her about it again. We were both drinking Harpoon and wearing pajamas.

  “They were definitely wearing Victorian clothes,” she assured me.

  But they were probably just a regular pale family, walking the beach in the summer, fully clothed. Maybe they were albinos. Maybe they were Amish tourists. The funny part of it, too, was that we assumed they were vampires instead of ghosts, which would have been a more logical explanation.

  “Vampires can’t be out in the daytime,” I said.

  “Oh my God, I know,” said Susan. “What were they doing?”

  “Brad broke up with me,” I said abruptly. There was a look of relief in her eyes.

  “For kissing Scottie?”

  “I’m like a vampire,” I said. “I suck everything good out of people. Everything warm.”

  Susan shoved me.

  “What are you, a poet?” she said. “Elaborate.”

  I looked around the room—the worn leather sofa and love seat, the vaulted ceiling with exposed beams, the vase of dried flowers and cranberries on the mantel, the painting of Humming Rock Beach that Susan’s mother made in high school hanging on the wall. I looked at everything—really looked—like I would never see it again.