“No, Soup is the manager, and he’s like thirty and married and balding. It’s just another employee.”
“Name?”
I pause. “Reed.”
“Reed? Like the plant? What’s his last name?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m logging into your Facebook right now so I can friend him for you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Last name?”
“Mo, no.”
“Because you don’t know his last name, or you don’t want me knowing his last name?”
“Because I don’t want you making fun of him before I decide you’re allowed to make fun of him.”
Mo groans. “But how are we going to gush about how cute Reed is if I’m not allowed to check out his shirtless so-plastered-over-the-weekend pics?”
“He’s not even cute. Forget this conversation ever happened. And log out of my Facebook now.”
“Fine. Whatever. Back to the Danube. Did you know it touches ten countries? Ten. That’s like all of Eastern Europe.”
“Ten. Wow.” I brake for a red light ahead.
I’m not lying to Mo. Cute is the wrong word for Reed. Rugged. That’s a better one. Like that hint of gold stubble on his cheeks that makes me think of camping and autumn. And there’s a thickness to him. I’m pretty sure I could run into him and he wouldn’t budge, like he’s all muscle and bone and density. His hair hangs in his eyes and it’s that same buttery color as the caramel sauce: blond and brown and red all mixed together. If warm was a color, it would be that.
The heavy black-framed glasses—those aren’t rugged—but even the strangeness of that is intriguing. One mismatched piece of him. They make me wonder.
Not cute, though. Cute is boy-band shine and skinny jeans and varsity swim team with a gleaming smile and greedy hands. Chris Dorsey was cute.
Reed is either shy or he dislikes everyone. We’ve worked the same shift every day this week, and he has spent most of the time avoiding eye contact. During his break he sits in the back room and reads a cookbook (which seemed a little weird until I found out he’s in between years at culinary school) and drinks his complimentary iced tea, rather than smoking with Flora and the college girls.
I’ve sat out there with them once or twice just to be social, inhaling their secondhand tar fumes and listening to their charming sorority stories about getting wasted in their dorms and getting wasted at football games and getting wasted at every possible place between the two. But they aren’t my friends. They know who I am, whose sister I am.
People at art school will be different. More interesting. They have to be.
Mo is nattering about Budapest now (calling it Budapesht like he’s Polish or whatever), but I’m trying to remember the exact expression on Reed’s face when Soup asked him to give me the Twisty Tower tutorial. Annoyance? Not really. But he wasn’t jumping at it either. It was like he was being asked to babysit. The look lasted for only half a second but long enough to make me feel dumb.
But after, there was that feeling like he was looking at me. Just once, but when I looked up, he wasn’t.
“You have no idea what I just said,” Mo says.
“You were talking about the Danube.”
“Five minutes ago.”
“Sorry.”
“Apology not accepted. This guy’s melted your brain already. Where’s he from? I don’t know any Reeds.”
“Nashville, I think. He goes to culinary school there. His grandma lives next door to the Cleets—you know, on Newberry. He’s helping her out with some painting and stuff for the summer.”
“Wow, older. Way to go. More mature.”
I shudder. “Please stop trying to girl-talk before you sprain something. Just go back to rambling about European capitals.”
I don’t point out that at nineteen, Reed is only a year older than me. Sometimes Mo forgets about my lost year.
“Fine,” Mo says. “But if you aren’t going to tell me anything about him, why did you bring him up?”
“Temporary insanity. I’m better now.”
“Good. You want to come get me for a 7-Eleven run? I am in dire need of high-fructose corn syrup. The higher the better. I’m thinking Sour Patch Kids and cream soda.”
“I’m just pulling into my driveway,” I lie. “Mom is waiting for me to help her mulch stuff.” I’m still a good ten minutes from home, and my mom wants my gardening help even less than I want to give it. I’d screw something up.
“You’re lying.”
I sigh. He can always tell. He says it’s because I’m crappy at it, but I lie to other people just fine. “Okay fine. I’m ten minutes from home, and my mom won’t let me near her garden. I’m just dying to crack open these cans of paint and start on the coral.”
“Lame. Fine, work on your mural. I’ll go suck on a Froot Loop or something. Or maybe I’ll just eat straight sugar. Yeah, I’ll do that.”
“Good-bye, Mo.”
“A raisin. We probably have raisins. I’m sure nature’s candy will hit the spot.”
“Good-bye.”
“Bye.”
I drive the rest of the way home listening-but-not-listening to the radio. Out my window, sunlight rolls over the bluegrass hills of horse farms. It’s distractingly pretty, with velvet green slopes and regal white fences. Before I’d started the mural, maybe I’d have pulled over and taken a few pictures to work from later.
But it’s different now. I’ve got winding ocean currents waiting at home and fresh paint begging to be used. I’ve never even dipped a toe in the real ocean, but I can almost sense waves pulsing when I stand in the center of my room.
That makes me sound crazy.
There’s no reason I shouldn’t want to tell Mo about Reed. Mo’s been my best friend before, during, and after both of my boyfriends (if we’re counting that three weeks of holding Jordan Mailer’s sweaty hand in ninth grade) and all the insignificant crushes in between. Sure, he mocks—he’s Mo—but I’ve never had a problem shrugging it off before. I shouldn’t be embarrassed just to admit that I think someone is interesting.
Interesting. Another good word for Reed.
He makes me want to know things. I want to know what his favorite song is, and if he’s ever been in a fight, and what kind of movies he likes, and why he isn’t friendly with the college girls at Mr. Twister. I want to know if he’s ever had his heart broken.
He has no idea that every time he walks by, my spine tingles and my stomach drops, or that I’m trying not to stare at his hands and wondering if his neck smells like what I’m imagining it might. Interesting is indefinable, but it’s what keeps me imagining what it would feel like if he touched my cheek. Or the insides of my arms, the ticklish side. Or my back.
I should stop myself. I have jingling bracelets that are supposed to remind me why. Maybe I’m ignoring them because I really could feel him looking at me, and it felt kind of sweet.
By the time I pull into the driveway, I’m certain. I’m never letting Mo at Reed. He’s a genius at finding faults, and if he rips Reed apart, that sweet feeling might turn sour. It didn’t matter so much with the other guys—I already knew they were all cocky idiots—but Reed just might be different.
I’m not going to feel guilty about it either. Just because Mo’s my best friend doesn’t mean he has to know all my secrets.
Chapter 4
Mo
Annie knows all my secrets. Every single one of them. I can’t trust Bryce with my locker combination, and whatever I tell Sarina in confidence has at least a 20 percent chance of being accidentally blabbed to Dad, but Annie’s different. Since the fifth grade I’ve been telling her things she could’ve easily fed to the bloodthirsty masses in a weak moment, but she’s never leaked. Not once. She’s tighter than a submarine.
I’d say the first secret was a mistake, but that’s too mild. It was a calamity, a natural disaster so horrific I’m still amazed it didn’t kill me.
We’d only just moved
to the States, and I was certain life could not possibly suck more. Chemically speaking, if my life was a solvent, and misery the solute, saturation point had been reached. I missed Jordan so bad my whole body ached, and unlike Sarina, who kept asking when we were going home to Teta and Jido’s (Grandma and Grandpa’s), I was old enough to really get it. We weren’t going back.
There were the obvious things to miss: the pack of boy cousins I roamed our neighborhood with and our cutthroat war games; fat Teta with her paper-soft skin and her sugared dates that left my fingers and tongue sticky; the boys next door, Ali and Barzy, and Barzy’s deaf dog, Hoda, that was so old his hair was falling out. I don’t even know why I missed that ugly dog, but I did.
And the food. The food. I was dying for the crispy hot falafel and chewy manakish Teta’s cook would let me eat fresh from the oven, and baklava so sweet it hurt a little. I hadn’t really known it until the move, but Mom’s cooking skills were crap. I guess she wasn’t really up to cooking at that point anyway. That first year was mostly crying for her.
But I think I missed the intangibles even more. I missed being cool. I missed being around people who didn’t tell me I smelled like skunk spice, whatever that even meant. It felt like I’d been kidnapped from the predictable calm of my Jordanian private school and delivered into a foreign war zone: Lincoln Middle. Here nothing was certain, except the fact that I had no allies. Predators were ruthless. Anything could happen.
And outside the chain-link fence of Lincoln, I missed being smiled at. Ten-almost-eleven is old enough to feel the uneasy stares of grown-ups you don’t even know. It’s old enough to understand that you make people uncomfortable.
I thought I’d learned English at my school in Jordan, but I guess that was British English, and the garbled Kentucky drawl around me sounded nothing like it. Just breaking up the flow of foreign sounds into words required brain-aching levels of concentration. And I, apparently, sounded like Harry Potter on crack—again, whatever that meant.
So I practiced. Southern-speak made my cheeks and tongue ache, but I did it. Every night I’d lie in bed and say things properly, drill the words that I’d been teased most recently for first. Ha not hello. Deyesk not desk. Bayethrum not loo. Never loo, unless I wanted to be stuffed into one during recess again.
Accent turned out to be nothing, though, because that at least I could change. My new names, however, may as well have been tattooed on me. Iraqi boy. Sand nigger. Saddam. Terrorist.
My parents should’ve warned me. Or somebody should’ve warned them. Now I see how it had to happen, but at ten, how was I supposed to guess that my classmates were going to hate me no matter what? Their dads and uncles and brothers had been in Iraq killing and being killed by people that looked like me. And not just looked like me, but talked like me and prayed like me. Hating me was practically their patriotic duty.
At first I tried to correct false assumptions one at a time, but I learned pretty quickly that talking back only ended in getting shoved against my locker or leveled by a kick to the back of the knee. It didn’t matter how firmly I insisted my name wasn’t Saddam and that we weren’t even Iraqi, because my real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein, was bad enough. And after a few attempts at trying to explain we were less-than-devout mainstream Muslims, barely likely to go to mosque, let alone to suicide-bomb the local Kroger, I gave up. My brown skin, my accent, my stinky lunches, my too-dressy khakis shorts and lame button-up polos—I was worthy of a shunning.
It hurt. But it made sense too. Ostracizing the weird one is what ten-year-olds do best. I’d seen it done back in Amman to the kid with the small head and the lisp. Maybe I’d even joined in. Maybe I deserved this.
After that first month of school in Kentucky, when I realized how bad it was going to be, I just wanted it to be summer so I could float around in our swimming pool in peace without having to field angry questions about why my soggy falafel looked like dog crap and why my God wanted me to hijack airplanes and kill people.
I just wanted to be left alone.
And then I went and did the unthinkable: I pissed myself.
You can’t piss yourself. Not in Amman, not in Elizabethtown, not anywhere. It’s the unpardonable sin, trumped only by crapping yourself, which I thankfully did not do.
We were on a field trip to the Louisville Science Center, and I’d been too nervous to ask an adult where the bathroom was. I figured I could hold it. All day. At ten I was clearly not aware of my physical limitations. By the time I realized that holding it all day was absolutely not going to happen, I had a wet spot blooming over the front of my khakis and hot piss running down my legs and into my socks.
It was the albino boa constrictor that saved me. All the kids were standing around a science center employee, mesmerized by the grotesque yellowish snake draped around his shoulders, and by some act of God, or maybe just an act of exclusion, I was behind them.
At first the physical relief was too sweet to feel anything else. But then pleasure was swallowed whole by panic. I couldn’t move. I should’ve been running to find the bathroom, or hiding somewhere, or at the very least, looking for one of the parent volunteers, but my urine-soaked legs were frozen.
Standing helplessly, waiting for people to notice what I’d done, I realized that my isolation was about to turn into something much, much uglier. I had been a pariah. Now I’d be prey. I’d have a better chance of survival with that snake than with my classmates after this.
That’s when I saw Annie. Birdlike. Pale. Silent. Her sunken eyeballs were like marbles, staring unblinking from the far side of the cluster of students. I didn’t notice then that she was just as separate from them as I was. I only saw that she was inches taller than the crowd and practically incandescent. Later, I learned how phobic she was of snakes, how she’d been close to throwing up, trying not to stare at its glistening body or hear the shlip, shlip of its flicking tongue. But in that moment, her paleness made her look like a ghost, or maybe an angel.
An angel who was staring at my crotch.
I shuddered, feeling the paralysis breaking and a rush of tears flooding my eyes. But before I could even start crying, she was in front of me, pushing me hard, driving me backward, whispering, Go-go-go-go-go!
I turned, stumbled along with no choice—she was skinny but surprisingly strong—and even if I did have a choice, I didn’t have any ideas of my own. Bewildered, I let her shove me all the way to the women’s bathroom and into a stall.
“Stay here!” she hissed, her pink lips quivering, sky-blue eyes wide and fierce. Then she was gone.
I slid the metal lock shut with a quivering index finger and waited. Forever. I stood shivering in the overly air-conditioned ladies’ room, afraid to sit on the toilet, afraid to move, afraid that Annie had left me there to die, afraid she was about to throw open the door and bring my classmates through one by one to laugh at the pants-pissing freak show.
Someone came in and I tensed every muscle, bracing for whatever was about to be done to me. Orthopedic shoes and enormous ankles appeared in the stall next to mine. Not her. I listened to the stranger pee and sigh, flush, use the sink, and leave.
Maybe Annie wasn’t coming back. Maybe she’d found her friends and forgotten about me. She had lots of them. Everyone liked Annie Bernier, or at least they were nice to her, which from what I could tell, was the same thing. She never smiled, but she wasn’t like the pouting popular girls. Not viciously pretty or loud-talking or hair-twirling—and yet everyone treated her like royalty.
I didn’t know then about Lena. I didn’t know that they weren’t her friends any more than they were my friends, that we were both being ostracized, just in different ways.
The door swung opened again, and Annie’s pale-pink Chucks appeared on the mottled tile just beyond my stall.
I held my breath.
“Put these on,” she whispered, even though we were alone.
A pair of black sweatpants appeared on the floor, and she slid them under with her foot.
I snatched them greedily. I didn’t even ask or care where she’d found them. They were too big, but not so big they’d fall down unless someone gave them a yank.
I opened the door. Annie stood in front of me, spindly arms crossed, examining the fit.
No place to look. I stared at the wall, cheeks burning as the mortification returned, mixed with the overpowering relief of being rescued.
She held out her hand and waited. What did she want, a high five? Money?
“Your pants,” she whispered finally.
I stared at the piss-soaked khakis on the ground. I didn’t ask what she was going to do with them when I handed them over, and I didn’t argue when she stuffed them into the garbage can. I just followed her out of the restroom.
We rejoined the group together, as if nothing else needed to be said. And when she inexplicably saved the seat beside her on the bus back, I was too shocked to ask why.
She didn’t tell a soul. I didn’t know why then, and I only sort of know why now.
Lying in bed that night, I felt the change. Something had happened to me. I’d pivoted, and while one foot was still firmly planted in misery, the other was somewhere else. And the view from my new stance was not entirely desolate.
I’d been saved.
Only then did I realize I’d forgotten to say thank you.
Chapter 5
Annie
They all forget to say thank you. Every single kid who walks through the door manages to remember we have an unlimited sample policy, though. Sometimes a mom will squeeze out some gratitude with a nudge or a What do you say? after I’ve handed over twenty or so mini spoonfuls of custard, but in general, the adults don’t do much better.
And in general, I just smile and keep scooping.
But right now the smile is slipping. The arches of my feet ache, and my arm is burning, and I’m still several hours away from the end of my shift.
Reed warned me when I clocked in this morning that it would be nuts. “Swim camp starts today,” he said.
The Vow Page 3