Equilibrium

by Lorrie Thomson

  Either Heather was joking or Darcy was even more tired than she’d realized. “Do you mean Sunday night? That’s fine. You can probably even sleep over, if you want. Mom’s extra easy after a punishment, like she feels bad she’s such a sergeant and—”

  “Right now. I mean, I’m already over. Look out your window.”

  Darcy tiptoed across the room and pulled aside the heavy insulated drapes left over from the winter. Heather’s blond hair shone, reflecting the half-moon. She waved, and her arm gleamed, too.

  Darcy threw open her window—glass plate and screen—and gave Heather the one-minute signal, not knowing whether she could see her from the unlit bedroom. Darcy jabbed the flash button. “Nick? Heather’s here. Now.”

  “So tell her you’ll call her back later or see her in school Monday.”

  “No, I mean she’s standing outside my window, at the bottom of the fire escape.” If Mom weren’t so predictably neurotic, she would’ve dismantled the escape hatch as part of Darcy’s punishment, instead of giving her another chance.

  “Are you shitting me? That’s just all wrong. First, you’re gonna get in worse trouble. And second, I should be climbing in through your bedroom window, if anyone. Tell her to get lost. Tell her I said so. Tell her—”

  The fantasy that Nick and Heather could become friends died a quick death, reminding Darcy of how Daddy would suddenly need her mother whenever Elle or Maggie called.

  Heather needs me, too. “I promise I’ll call you back later,” Darcy told Nick. “This won’t take long.”

  Nick wasn’t even listening. “Tell her to fuck off. Okay, Darce? Can you do that for me?”

  She could almost understand Nick getting jealous of boys calling to her from a car. But Heather was her best friend. She wouldn’t give up Heather, not even for Nick.

  She couldn’t imagine her life without Nick, either.

  “I’ll call you back.” She hung up the phone, then stared at the receiver.

  Darcy locked her bedroom door and switched on her desk lamp. Heather climbed through the window and sat on Darcy’s bed while Darcy shut the screen.

  “So what’s up?” Darcy said, borrowing one of Nick’s favorite expressions. She didn’t need a mirror to know her face looked like her mother’s, pale with nerves and worry. Pale with trying to please the world.

  Darcy sat down beside Heather on the bed, feeling as if a third person were in the room—the problem Heather had been hinting at for months. Darcy had thought she was acting as a friend by not pushing Heather too hard. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe she didn’t really want to know.

  Heather drew a breath from her toes, and then turned to look Darcy in the eye. “Don’t bother talking to Stevie. I’m not going to the prom with him.”

  That was what Heather had walked half a mile in the dark to tell her? Darcy blew out a breath. She’d forgotten how sensitive Heather could be, how relatively small issues could blow up blimp-sized unless Darcy diffused them. “No problem. I haven’t talked to him yet, and I won’t.” Then Darcy’s whole body smiled, and she laughed. “It’s Cam, isn’t it?” She should’ve known Heather would finally take a page from the Darcy rule book and play hard to get.

  “It’s Amy.”

  “Who?” Heather must’ve said Andy, but they didn’t know any Andys, except for the band kid with the acne problem.

  “Amy. A girl.”

  Was some girl named Amy going after Cam? Heather wasn’t looking directly at her anymore, but Darcy noticed the way Heather was staring sideways, and her eyes lost focus. A smile tugged at the corners of Heather’s mouth.

  Darcy went across the room and flicked on the overhead light. The brightness woke up her sleepy brain, flashing the face of a girl she and Heather had met last summer.

  “Amy from the party?” Darcy asked, even though she must’ve already known the answer. Why else would her voice quaver? Last summer, she’d left Heather talking to Amy and had gotten in line for the bathroom, even though she hadn’t really needed to go. Darcy couldn’t shake the feeling Amy was peering through a very feminine mask with the eyes of a teenage boy and checking out the girls.

  Heather nodded. “Yup. We’ve been talking since last summer, and she’s really helped me understand some stuff.”

  “What stuff?” Since the summer, and Heather hadn’t told her? What could she talk to a stranger, this Amy, about that she couldn’t discuss with her best friend? Besides, Darcy was reasonably sure Amy was gay, so—“Oh, my God!” Darcy said, automatically lowering her voice to a whispered shout. “You think you’re gay?”

  “I don’t think it. I know it. And Amy made me feel better about it.” Nick was right. She should’ve locked her window and told Heather to come back on another day. A day when she wouldn’t claim something that simply was not true. Heather had always been susceptible to suggestion, a follower rather than a leader. But if Amy had gotten into her head, this was going too far.

  “You are so not gay. What about all the boys you’ve gone out with, all the boys you’ve kissed?” Heather’s kissing list that had suddenly and inexplicably halted almost a year ago.

  Heather shook her head, frowning. “It just never felt right. It’s, like, remember that caviar we had at the freshman dance? The teachers kept swearing it was a delicacy and that we should like it. So I tried it, kept trying it. And each and every time, I kept thinking, Yuck, fish eggs. Even if I’d tried it twelve times, it still would’ve tasted disgusting.”

  Twelve boys on Heather’s kiss list, and each one of them she’d found as unappetizing as fish eggs. Fish eggs!

  “Are you sure?” Darcy asked.

  “Pretty sure.” The hazy, dazed daydream smile. Heather had a crush on Amy.

  God, this was so weird. Darcy looked at her best friend as though she’d just met her. Maybe she’d never asked Heather the right questions. “Does Amy know? I mean, that you like her?”

  “Oh, I think she has a good idea.” Heather wasn’t wearing any barrettes, and her usually smooth hair was standing up at the back, the way hair complained if you mussed it before it dried completely. The way hair complained if you’d lain down on a wet head.

  “You’ve been, like, dating her?” Darcy asked.

  “Tonight. First date, first kiss.”

  She’d trusted Heather not to keep secrets from her, and Heather had taken her for a fool. What if Heather had already joined the gay-student alliance? What if she’d come out to other kids at the high school?

  What if Darcy was the last person on earth to find out?

  Darcy had thought she was so cool, open to anything, but the unkind edge to her voice spoke of something else. “Did you add Amy to your list?”

  “No, I started a new list.” Heather sounded just as mean, maybe meaner. “What do you care? You have Nick. You don’t need to fix me up with boys anymore so we can go to dances together.”

  “Fix you up? Boys always wanted to go out with you. And we always had so much fun,” Darcy said, and the past tense stung.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I was crying when Nick asked you to the prom. I knew I couldn’t fake it anymore and go out with another boy. I actually saw a big neon sign in my head: Game over.”

  Heather couldn’t fake it anymore. Back in fifth grade, the three of them had vowed honesty—she, Heather, and Cam. Darcy had swiped alcohol and sewing needles from her house, and they’d taken turns pricking each other’s forefingers. They’d stood in the shaded woods and pressed their fingers together until the blood ran together. Blood brother and sisters. Forever.

  Giving her left-hand ring finger a good hard stare, Darcy could still make out the tiny point of raised skin, the evidence of their shared tattoo. “I just don’t think you’re gay. Maybe you’re just experimenting? Maybe this is, like, that phase where you’d only kiss redheads?”

  Heather smirked. “Ever notice there aren’t many boys with red hair?”

  “What if next week you change your mind and decide you’re straight ag
ain?”

  Heather stood up. “So now you’re saying I’m too stupid to figure out if I’m gay or straight?”

  “I never said you were stupid, Heath, it’s just—”

  “Why is everything you do okay? Like, you can go out with a delinquent, but I can’t have something real? You can’t even stand the possibility this has nothing to do with you. It’s not about you, okay? It’s about me.”

  “Did you just call Nick a delinquent?”

  Heather’s jaw dropped, releasing a huff. “I don’t believe you! To think I defend you when people talk about you behind your back, tell them how nice you really are, even though you treat me like dirt whenever you have a boyfriend.” Heather narrowed her gaze, and her arms trembled even after she’d crossed them. “Now you’re blowing me off for a drug dealer, a kid you don’t even know.”

  “I do know him!” All at once, Darcy was trembling, too, her body working hard while her mind tried to figure how to best express Nick to Heather, without betraying Nick’s family history. She spoke extra softly, so her voice wouldn’t crack. “Nick gets what I’ve gone through, what I went through with my dad.”

  “Like I don’t! Who did you call whenever your dad was sick? Huh? Who stayed over all week after he—after he died, even slept in the same bed with you, so you wouldn’t get scared?”

  “You’re not going to tell anyone about that, are you?”

  “This is not about you! It’s about me, what I’m going through, right here, right now.” Heather unfolded her arms and dropped her hands to her sides, so Darcy could see the full extent of their tremors. “I’m scared, and you won’t even look at me.”

  True enough; Darcy was staring at Heather’s hands. Darcy pulled focus and worked her gaze back to her friend’s paler than usual complexion, her quivering lower lip, and her moist eyes. The back of Darcy’s head tingled as she saw herself from Heather’s point of view: selfish.

  What did Heather want from She of the Crazy House? Darcy had always thought Heather was her soul sister, that she loved her as if they were truly related, even before they’d performed the blood sister ritual. But that was when Darcy had thought she understood the meaning of love, when she’d thought, incorrectly, that love healed, instead of harmed. That, just like in countless corny songs, love lifted you up, instead of grinding you into dust. Maybe her doubts about Heather being gay would work as a backhanded blessing, since everything Darcy touched went to seed.

  She went to Heather and gave her the best hug she could muster, all she possessed. Heather’s heart fluttered beneath her like the hummingbirds that had fed at last summer’s red plastic feeder. Her narrow shoulders leaned into Darcy. You thought you knew someone, thought you understood everything about the why of what they did, and it turned out, you didn’t know anything at all.

  If she didn’t know a thing about Heather, then she knew even less about Troy. She stepped back and handed Heather a tissue, and the need to tell Heather absolutely everything itched her skin until she just had to scratch. “My mom made Troy an appointment with Dr. Harvey.”

  Heather grimaced, making her wide-set eyes cuddle up to the bridge of her nose. Maybe she didn’t remember the name.

  “My dad’s shrink. You know, the famous guy who’s such a great doctor that patients are dying to see him.” Right away, she wished she hadn’t thought of that joke. She really wished she hadn’t said it.

  “God! I’m so sick of hearing about your family.”

  Heather’s words slapped Darcy across the face, and her cheeks burned. “Troy could die,” Darcy said. The three little words she hadn’t dared to even think before this moment now hung in the air between them, like a flipped car. Like a bottle of sleeping pills. Like the taste and shape of a gun’s barrel in your mouth.

  Heather wrapped her arms around herself, her face reenacting the time she’d accidentally bitten into a habanero pepper.

  Darcy went in for a second hug, and Heather jabbed out her palm inches from Darcy’s face. Talk to the hand. “My whole life has just changed,” Heather said. “Can you think about that for even a minute?”

  Heather withdrew the obnoxious hand signal but kept an arm’s-length away.

  “So what, you kissed a girl. Big deal. Big fucking deal.” Darcy counted on Heather to remember how funny she used to think it sounded when Darcy pronounced fuck so properly. She crossed the invisible line Heather had drawn. “C’mon, Heather. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Remember how we used to practice kissing and then practically pee our pants, we’d laugh so hard.”

  “You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said!”

  Darcy glanced at her locked door, sure her mother would awaken from the tone if not the volume of Heather’s voice. Sure, Darcy had listened plenty. She’d just confided her fear Troy might kill himself, and Heather had equated Darcy’s worry with her out-of-whack angst over kissing a girl, as though being gay were fatal.

  “I am so outa here,” Heather said.

  “Wait!” Darcy said, trying to wrangle her scrambled thoughts into something approaching coherence. Trying to decide what to do about their friendship.

  “Oh, by the way,” Heather said, already halfway out the window. “I want the clothes you borrowed back.”

  Too late now. Heather had decided for both of them.

  Chapter 20

  Darcy had just lost her best friend, and now she was supposed to call Nick back for more talk about his wife-beater father. What if Nick really did have to see his father? What if Nick’s father beat up Nick?

  Daddy used to say, “What would Laura do?” also known as WWLD, whenever Darcy came to him with a problem he couldn’t solve. Way funnier than, “Go ask your mother.”

  Darcy couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to Mom for advice or what the problem had been. But she remembered Mom pulling back her blanket. She remembered climbing into her parents’ bed. She’d let her mother stroke her hair, and with each caress, with each whisper and kiss, the trouble had lifted.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, twisted open the lid of her special occasion body butter, and released the cupcake aroma. She breathed deeply, dipped into the swirls, and massaged her feet. Darcy didn’t doubt Mom’s nighttime pledge that she’d do anything to keep her safe, which meant she’d keep Darcy safe from Nick, not that she’d help Darcy keep Nick safe from his father. Mom’s pledge guaranteed if she knew about Nick’s family history, she’d forbid Darcy from seeing Nick.

  Besides, Mom had sworn to keep Daddy safe, proving she wasn’t good at everything.

  Darcy dug her thumbs into her sole to the point of pain, and her foot relaxed. She rubbed her palms together, releasing more fragrance, and then massaged the remaining moisturizer into her hands.

  She hoped it wasn’t too late to call Nick and that his household slept as soundly as her mother. What difference would another minute make? Counting out the seconds, she slipped out of her cami and sleep pants and flash-buttered the rest of her body. No time for more massage though. Instead of wrestling her sticky body back into sleep clothes, she left them at the foot of her bed, and slipped her unwrapped cupcake-self between the sheets.

  Nick listened to her. She could take care of Nick.

  She dialed Nick’s number from under the blankets. The phone rang twice, and silence seeped in while she waited for Nick to answer.

  “Whazzup?” he said, sounding as if he were dragging himself from the depths of sleep.

  “Just me. Go back to bed.”

  He coughed, then cleared his throat. “No, it’s okay. I’m awake.”

  “Now that I woke you.”

  “What did Heather want?”

  Darcy wasn’t even completely sure. Heather had wanted to come out of the closet, she supposed, to reveal her newly acquired gayness. More than that, Heather had been asking for Darcy’s acceptance, which she’d given with a hug. Then, out of nowhere, Heather had rejected Darcy’s family, rejected her. Same difference.

  Heather was so sic
k of hearing about Darcy’s family. “She didn’t want anything at all.”

  “Yeah? Like I said. She was trying to get you in trouble.”

  “Maybe.” Her slight friend, or ex-friend, had made so much noise clambering down the fire escape that Darcy had been sure her mother or Troy would wake up, convinced of a breakin, and autodial the police. If her mother had woken up and seen Heather, Mom would’ve quadrupled the grounding, extending it for a month, maybe even stopped Darcy from going to the prom with Nick before Darcy had even asked permission.

  “I don’t think Heather and I are friends anymore.” Probably, Heather would come out to Cam next and form a newly strengthened alliance, a bond that excluded Darcy. “In fact, I don’t think I have many real friends left.” First Daddy and now Heather. Darcy couldn’t ignore the common denominator.

  “Are you okay?” Nick asked.

  “I’m fine.” She actually sounded as if she didn’t care about a thing. If she acted as though nothing mattered, then nothing could hurt. “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

  “No, wait. I’ve got an idea. I can’t come over, right? But nobody’s gonna use the phone between now and sunrise. So let’s stay on the line.”

  “I’m already half asleep.”

  “Good. I want to sleep with you. Get where I’m going with this?”

  “Uh, phone sex?”

  “I mean the dreaming kind of sleep. Stay on the phone, pretend you’re right next to me.” He chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that might turn into phone sex.”

  “Okay.” Now she got it. “I’ll do it. The sleeping part, I mean.” She didn’t dare tell him what she wasn’t wearing.

  “Hey, I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  She cuddled up to the phone, keeping it near enough so they could talk if they wanted. She couldn’t hold down the giggles. “Are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “I feel funny.”

  “You look funny, too, I bet. Hey, Darce? I just wanna tell you I’m your friend. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Okay.”