Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  When I get to school, my best friend, Pilar, says hello by sneaking up behind me and cheerfully hip-checking me away from the locker we both share.

  “Where were you last night, Professor?” she asks, pulling out her books. “I called your house and your cell and no one picked up, and I e-mailed you and sent you a text message and five IM’s.” She takes a deep breath. “Plus I sent a carrier pigeon, a singing telegram, and a robot.”

  Her bangs are cut into a blunt line low across her forehead. The rest of her thick black hair is pulled firmly into a braid that hangs heavy and straight down her back.

  “Bad cheese,” I say, ducking down underneath her arms and inserting myself in the exact space she was just in, using my butt to bump her out of my way. “I spent all night in the bathroom.”

  “Gross,” she says, stepping away, and motioning for me to take my sweet time gathering my books. I forget about the bruise on my cheek until Pilar grabs my chin. “Is that from falling off the can yesterday? Holy crap.”

  “I’m all right,” I say, pulling away.

  “Whatever you say. So can you still come over to babysit Gracie with me tonight? The professors have one of their special parent-teacher conferences.”

  “Totally.” Gracie is Pilar’s year-and-a-half-old sister. She was a souvenir from the Midwest, where Pilar and her parents went the summer after our first year of high school. Her parents were teaching a summer program at a college out there, and at the very end of the summer, right before they were supposed to come home, Pilar’s mom got pregnant. Pilar called to tell me that her mom was having a “tough” pregnancy, and that they’d be staying out there for the whole school year. It was the first time I’d talked to Pilar in weeks, and I cried when she told me she wasn’t coming back, not for our entire sophomore year. “You’ve barely e-mailed me or called or anything! And now you’re not even coming back?” I had to repeat it two or three times before she could understand, because I was crying so hard. That was the longest year of my entire life, and no matter how much MayBe and even moody Thea tried to include me in everything they did, I could always feel the emptiness of not having Pilar beside me. Sometimes, between Pilar and my dad, I felt like there was more space being taken up by people who weren’t there than by the people that actually were.

  We’re almost to homeroom when a blur of skintight jeans and layered flannel skirts comes sliding by us on the linoleum floor.

  Its cry, as it passes, sounds something like, “EEEWWW-UUURRRRLLL!”

  Pilar and I stop and wait for MayBe (hippie skirts, hemp slippers, beaded necklaces) and Thea (skintight jeans, blue Mohawk with rattail) to untangle themselves from each other, and from our homeroom teacher, Mr. Mueller, who managed to stop their slide by yelling “Ack!” and trying to jump out of the way, but not fast enough.

  “There’s going to be a new girl!” MayBe says.

  “Yeah! A new girl’s starting tomorrow, or maybe on Thursday,” Thea says. She gasps at my cheek. “Dude, is that from your faceplant in the bathroom yesterday?”

  I shrug her off.

  “Ladies,” Mr. Mueller warbles, straightening his tie and retaking his station at the classroom door, “please enter and take your seats.”

  When we imitate Mr. Mueller, we usually just end up saying “gobble wobble yobble mobble” because that’s what it sounds like when he talks.

  “There’s a new girl?” Pilar asks him.

  “You seem to have that information already,” he warbles.

  “Yeah, but what do you know about her?” I ask.

  “All will be revealed in due time. Please, take your seats.”

  We file into the classroom and settle into our usual seats in the back row. The four of us always say that we were alphabetically fated to be friends, from the very first day of kindergarten, when our teacher lined us up next to one another, our first and last names written on stickers in Magic Marker and stuck to our chests.

  “Benjamin Franklin and Cray!” we hear Mr. Mueller call from the hallway. “Please stop pretending to be looking for books in your lockers, and come to homeroom!”

  A few seconds later Thea’s boyfriend, Frank; her brother, Cray; and my neighbor Ben walk into the classroom and file into the row in front of ours to take their seats.

  “Are they sauntering? Oh my God, they’re so cool,” Pilar whispers to me as the boys take their time getting into their seats. “Sauntering rocks!” she says loudly enough for the others to hear.

  “Eat me,” Frank replies, leaning back in his chair so Thea can lean forward and kiss him. His chair smacks against Pilar’s desk.

  “With salt!” Pilar says, kicking his chair forward again.

  “Neighbor,” Ben says, nodding at me.

  Cray sits quietly in his seat, only meeting his sister’s eyes for a moment. For as much as they look alike—the stretched-out, lanky frames, the light brown freckles sprayed over their noses and across their cheeks—their personalities are just way different. Thea’s all fast-moving parts, and husky laughter, and plans to hitchhike to New York City after high school. She lives with MayBe’s family most of the time, sharing MayBe’s “space” behind a Strawberry Shortcake curtain in their giant dome-shaped house that has no walls and where you are allowed to use only organic bath products because the family uses the old water from the shower to water the vegetable garden.

  Thea and MayBe have been best friends forever, just like Pilar and me. When she was a little kid, Thea tried to be exactly like MayBe. She’d wear MayBe’s hippie sundresses and love beads and hand-printed dancing-bear T-shirts. She’d go with MayBe’s family to Rainbow Gatherings and full-moon drum circles in the woods, where they’d sleep in teepees, volunteer to peel potatoes by the fire pit, and be called “Little Sister” by all the grown-ups. Pilar and I cried and threw giant day-long hissy fits, begging our parents to let us go too. We wanted to come to school on Monday still smelling like campfire after a weekend away, with cracked and peeling berry-based face paint and singing songs about the earth mother.

  One summer there was going to be this giant drum circle at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. MayBe and Thea said thousands and thousands of people were going to go, and that the drums would be so loud you could hear them from the rim of the canyon. There’d be dancing and singing, and cute little babies named Sunflower and Echo whose moms would let Thea and MayBe babysit, strapping the baby to one of their backs in a sling, “like the native Americans,” MayBe said, “or like Swedish people.” They were going to sleep in a tent, just the two of them, and they wouldn’t have to take a bath for five whole days.

  That was the first time I ever felt like I might die of want. Now I know that I didn’t even know what want was. Because back then, we still had my dad. I thought that wanting was what Pilar and I did for the weeks before the Grand Canyon drum circle. We would lie on the braided rug in my room, the loose hardwood floor beneath poking into our backs, and we would plot and plan and scheme and declare the general meanness of parents. We would borrow her parents’ lab coats and make presentations about the “scientific proof that girls who are allowed to go on camping adventures to the Grand Canyon are more likely to succeed than girls stuck on this stupid old mountain for the whole summer.”

  MayBe’s parents even came over to our house one night, to talk with Mom and Dad, and with Pilar’s mom and dad, about why it was perfectly healthy for little girls to run around the woods and dance around campfires. Mom and Dad, though, were not having it. Neither were Pilar’s parents. Pilar and I lay on our bellies and listened from the top of the stairs, whispering into the phone to MayBe and Thea, who were at MayBe’s house. We still think the deal breaker was the fact that we would have had to poop in the woods. At first I thought that was the part that really offended our parents, especially the leaves-as-toilet-paper part.

  Of course, it wasn’t about the toilet paper. It was about Clarence, and the fact that the sheriff had never caught the Drifter, and I bet Pilar’s and my parents were
having a hard time letting us out of their sight to go to school, never mind letting us drive three states away in a converted school bus to hang out in the woods with a bunch of grown-up strangers who called themselves Moonbeam and Pine Tree.

  That’s what it came down to. “How can we see this as an acceptable risk for our children?” Pilar’s mom asked MayBe’s mom. “How can the benefits of fresh air and community building outweigh the possible risks of our children being murdered while they sleep?”

  MayBe says her parents fought when they came home from our house. They started locking the front door and wouldn’t let wandering hippies camp on their land anymore. They stopped going to the drum circles and Rainbow Gatherings and put up a gate with a video camera at the end of their long dirt driveway. Sometimes, when we’re back in the woods behind MayBe’s house, we see other cameras her dad put up, high in trees, their motion detectors set into action by our walking, their one blank eye following us as we move.

  MayBe’s the only one who kept the flowered dresses and hemp necklaces. Thea dresses like me and Pilar, except she chooses fierce high heels over Converse high-tops. Practice, she says, for when she moves to New York, where everyone wears spike heels, all the time, even to take out the trash.

  Cray, though, is, like, the absolute absence of energy. He barely talks, or laughs; he barely even moves. For some reason he reminds me of oatmeal. Tasteless, lumpy, boring oatmeal. I’m guessing he has some sort of personality that comes out when it’s just him and Frank and Ben, because they never complain about the fact that 99 percent of the time he just … sits … still. Maybe that other 1 percent of the time he’s like an acrobatic circus clown, and that makes it worth it to put up with him.

  He never makes eye contact either, which is why the fact that he’s pointedly turned around in his seat to stare at me with his stupid expressionless face has made me go cold. He couldn’t have seen me last night, in the deputy’s truck. It was dark and I turned away from the window to hide my face.

  “I heard you rejects f-ed up the Willows sign again last night,” Pilar says to Frank.

  Cray raises his eyebrows at me and then turns away.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Frank asks, grinning.

  Pilar snorts. “Oh, I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a secret? Maybe you should shut the heck up about it and stop asking everybody if they ‘saw anything interesting on the way to school this morning.’ You’re so fricking obvious.”

  Frank laughs, and then glances at Ben, who’s staring hard at him. “It was a last-minute thing,” Frank says to him in a low voice. “We’ll come get you next time.” He turns and winks at Thea. “You too, babe.”

  “That’s not my name,” Thea says, with a glance and a smile at MayBe. “And don’t bother, because I don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “Seriously, Frank, leave her out of your extracurriculars,” MayBe says.

  Frank ignores her.

  “Sure seemed like that was your name yesterday afternoon,” he says to Thea, a not-exactly-friendly smile twitching at his lips. “And you’re already a part of it. And, MayBe,” he says to MayBe with the same twitchy smile and a nod toward Thea, “she is my extracurricular.”

  “Dude,” Ben says under his breath, “really unnecessary.”

  “Yeah, jackass,” Pilar says, kicking Frank’s chair again, “totally unnecessary.”

  “Hey, Frank,” I say loudly. “Don’t be such a fartknocker, you fartknocker!”

  “You guys.” Thea laughs. “It’s fine. He was just joking.”

  “He shouldn’t talk about you like that, Thea,” MayBe says.

  “True,” Pilar and I say in unison.

  There’s a sort of classroom-wide breath-holding as Thea climbs over her desk and slips onto Frank’s lap.

  “Oh, Jesus, somebody say something quick so I don’t have to hear them kiss!” Pilar practically yells. “I hate that sound! I hate that sound! It sounds like Dylan eating cereal.”

  “Hey!” I say, just as loudly. “It tastes better when you slurp!”

  “I’ll say.” Frank groans.

  “Oh, holy barf!” Pilar yells.

  “Dude.”

  We all look to where Cray is still facing toward the front of the classroom.

  “Did Cray just say ‘dude’?” I stage-whisper.

  “That’s enough, Frank,” Cray says.

  “Hey.” Thea stands up. “You don’t get to decide what’s enough.”

  Cray looks at her. “That’s enough.”

  “Shit head,” Thea says, but she doesn’t sit back down with Frank. She squeezes between the desks to sit in her own seat.

  I can hear MayBe’s whisper as she leans toward Thea. “Your body is a temple.”

  “Shove it,” Thea says, tipping back in her chair.

  “Lala!” Grace yells my nickname when I follow Pilar into her house that afternoon. Grace reaches up for me, opening and closing her hands and stomping her pudgy bare feet until I scoop her up and give her perfectly fat cheek a loud kiss. She squirms in my arms and reaches out for Pilar, who holds Grace comfortably in the crook of her left arm, while her right hand runs quickly over Gracie’s body like she’s checking to make sure it’s all still there, finishing by gently touching a finger to Grace’s nose.

  “Dylan, hello!” Pilar’s dad puts his hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. “Are you taking care of your mother? We worry about you, up there all alone.”

  Pilar’s parents are scientists. Not just scientists but some sort of bigwig scientists who show up in public television documentaries and in scientific journals and newspapers because of the work they’re doing to find a way to stop the nasty little beetles that are eating a lot of the trees up-mountain.

  “We’re okay,” I tell him. And then add, “We have the Abbotts right down the slope from us.”

  “You know what I’d like to do—,” he says.

  “I like your suspenders,” I say quickly, before he can make me his monthly offer to find my dad and “bop him one, right on the nose.”

  “Why, thank you!” he says, hooking his thumbs under the suspenders and stretching them forward. He’s wearing his school suspenders today, which have “A+” embroidered in different colors all over them. They are the bane of Pilar’s existence. Her dad puts his hands back on my shoulders and says, “If I ever see that old man of yours again, I’m going to pop—”

  Pilar puts Grace down and ducks under her dad’s arms so she is squeezed between him and me.

  “Hello, pumpkin,” her dad says.

  “Daddy,” she says pointedly, “why are you wearing the suspenders?”

  “Because you are my A-plus daughter and I want your teachers to know that I know how smart you are.”

  She laughs. “You are an A-plus big dork.” It’s weird, being this close to a father-and-daughter moment. We’re still pressed against one another, cradled by her dad’s arms, so when Pilar leans a tiny bit forward to give her dad a peck on the nose, my body has to shadow hers, and it’s like a split-second heartbreak, leaning in to kiss someone who’s not there. I step back, out of the circle, and pick up Gracie again. I hold her for only a moment before Pilar’s mom comes downstairs and takes her from my arms.

  “Dylan,” she says crisply, and I know that’s about as much of a greeting as I’m going to get.

  “Hello. How are you?” I ask.

  Pilar’s mom doesn’t respond, she just sets Grace down on the floor. Pilar rolls her eyes at me. Her mom’s outfit is almost comically the opposite of Pilar’s dad’s. She’s dressed head to toe in black, looking like a big-city art critic, with her artsy, clunky jewelry and owl-eye glasses. I would love to see Pilar’s parents at parent-teacher conferences, their version of good cop-bad cop involving her dad’s dorky suspenders and her mom’s exact and somehow terrifying pronunciation of words like “potential” and “institutional inadequacy.”

  I love Pilar’s house. It’s an A-frame like mine, but the first floor is basically j
ust one big wonder of a room, with no walls, the kitchen and dining area and living room just flowing into one another. It feels like the room has taken a really deep breath and stretched out to take a nap. The wood-plank ceiling stretches up fifty feet to the very top of the A, and the side of their house that overlooks the mountains is made entirely of windows.

  After Pilar’s parents leave, we color with Grace for a while, and then Pilar brings her upstairs for a nap, switching on the radio on her way back into the kitchen. At Pilar’s house it’s always either folk or jazz, although occasionally I’ll come over and her mom will be dissecting a bug while listening to triumphant metal. This time it’s the scratchy recording of a raspy-voiced old man singing about a mountain. Not our mountain, but we know what he means.

  “Let’s make cookies,” Pilar says.

  I wrinkle my nose.

  “What?” she asks, laughing.

  “I just … don’t know if I feel like having cookies … that you make.”

  “Oh, come on!” Pilar says, stamping her foot. “They’ll be fine.”

  “All right,” I say, obviously unconvinced.

  “You’ll see,” she says, in the voice Mom used to use when I’d ask her what Santa had gotten me for Christmas. When she used that voice, it was always something good.

  I lean against the counter as Pilar pulls ingredients out of the cabinets. Dry oats, raisins, brown sugar. Brown sugar!

  “Oooh!” I say, lunging forward and grabbing the sugar. “Sweet stuff!”

  “I know!” Pilar crows. “We only have it because it’s organic and farmed by minority workers who own shares in the company.”

  Usually any sweets we cook at Pilar’s house taste suspiciously like something that’s good for you and that will “keep you regular.”

  “Yuuuuummmm … ,” I say, sticking my finger into the box and licking off the tiny grains. Even though I have a house full of sweets at home, five minutes at Pilar’s house and I’m already feeling seriously sugar deprived.

  “Are you helping or eating?” she says, handing me a measuring cup.