With a groan Rose pulled a sticky note from her front pocket, smudged at one corner. “It’s no big deal,” she said, “really. It’s even dumber than last time.”
On it was another drawing in black ink, similar to the one before, though this one was much more elaborate. It showed a station wagon puttering down a road. Tied to its roof was a moose, its eyes just two big Xs. The moose’s tongue stuck out comically.
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“It’s just a joke,” she said. “He looks funny with his tongue hanging out like that, don’t you think?”
“It’s not a joke,” Wolf said. “It’s obviously a threat. You should tell somebody.” He turned to me. “Tell her she should tell somebody.”
“I did tell someone,” Rose interjected before I could tell her anything. “I told you. Besides, you really think I’m afraid of whatever idiot drew this? I’m a ninja wizard princess, remember? This,” she said, holding the note between them, “this is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Wolf muttered. “You can’t just ignore it.”
“Why not? You do,” Rose fired back. “What about that note on your locker this morning?”
Wolf shot her a look. It seemed like a warning, but Rose didn’t flinch.
“What note?” Deedee asked.
“It’s no big deal,” Wolf said. “Just the usual stupid crap. It wasn’t anything like this.” He plucked the dead moose drawing from Rose’s fingers. She snatched it right back.
“What did you do with it? Can I see it? What did it say?” Deedee’s questions were aimed directly at Wolf, but he ignored them, continuing to stare at Rose.
“He crumpled it up and threw it away. Just . . . like . . . so.” Rose squeezed her drawing into a wrinkled ball and stuffed it in her still-full carton, sloshing milk up over the side. “There. Gone. Now we don’t have to talk about it anymore.”
For a moment I thought Wolf was going to reach over to Rose’s tray, grab the carton, and fish the crumpled note out. Instead he just said, “It’s not that easy.”
“I didn’t say it was easy. I just said we didn’t have to talk about it anymore.”
For the first time since she’d sat with us, Rose and Wolf were not laughing with each other. They stared, arms crossed, a silent stalemate. Deedee looked down and stirred his pudding. Behind us, Bench’s table erupted with laughter again.
I had to look. Fear of missing out. Bench was shaking his head, flashing his teeth through that double-wide grin of his. I felt the hole inside open even wider.
“I’m going to get some food,” I said.
Deedee looked at me gloomily. Wolf and Rose continued to glare at each other. I stood up and pushed my chair in and headed for the line, not hungry, just needing to get far enough away that I couldn’t hear Bench and his buddies over the usual cafeteria chaos. All the voices mixed together again, a hundred conversations that I wasn’t a part of, blending to a steady incomprehensible roar. I stood in line and closed my eyes.
No words. Just noise. It wasn’t the same as quiet, but I didn’t want quiet.
I just didn’t want to know what people were saying.
School is never quiet. Even in the library there’s whispering, giggling, shushing. In class somebody’s always making some comment or another.
But that doesn’t mean quiet’s always better.
In the last year before the Big Split, the quiet moved into our house for good, settling over everything like a blanket of heavy snow. My parents had stopped fighting. In fact, they’d stopped saying anything at all.
The silence felt so much a part of us, I imagined it sitting in the empty chair across from me at the dinner table, a ghostlike figure made of smoke or mist, one foggy finger perpetually at its lips. My parents wouldn’t even ask for the other one to pass the butter. Instead they would reach across the table, sometimes knocking over other things along the way. My mother couldn’t stand it for long, so she would use me as her excuse to make noise, asking me for the third time about my day or about homework or something random. Did I need new socks? How was the chicken? And once, did I notice that it was a new moon today?
You don’t notice it’s a new moon, I told her. The absence of something isn’t remarkable. Unless it’s the absence of conversation. Then it’s painfully obvious.
After dinner my father would escape to his study to work and my mother would do the dishes and I would fight back against the silence. Turn on the television. Listen to music. Hum to myself. I would go out and shoot baskets only so I could hear the ball bricking off the backboard, the sound of it striking the pavement—thump, thump, thump. Silence was better than shouting, I told myself. But it wasn’t. It was just another kind of bad.
The night before he moved out, there still wasn’t even any shouting. Just a conversation—the briefest one in history, I think—carried out at the dinner table. After ten minutes of quiet my mother put down her fork slowly, setting it on the edge of her plate. Even that sound, the metal on porcelain, was startling, like the clang of a church bell. She folded the napkin in her lap and set it on the table. Then she looked across the bowl of mashed potatoes at my father and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” he asked.
“Just sit here and do nothing,” she said.
They stared at each other for a few seconds, then my father nodded and reached halfway across the table for the salt.
And that was it. In the silence that followed it was decided. They were done. And I could hear my heart in my chest. Thump. Thump. Thump.
There are times when I envy Wolf and his house full of shouting. There are times when I wish my parents had gritted their teeth and kept fighting, even if the end turned out the same. That way, at least, I would feel like they’d given it everything rather than simply given up. But that’s not how it happened. It happened in quiet. The mashed potatoes congealing on our plates. The three of us chewing and chewing as if we were afraid to swallow.
There are some nights even a can of Prego can’t save my mother’s cooking. The pasta was undercooked—she called it al dente, which I assumed was Italian for “crunchy.” I sat across the table from Mom, who was still wearing her name tag from work. Less than eight hours ago Casey Hillman had been kicked out of math and sent to the office for a nasty note that she’d apparently written to her BFF, who was now neither a BF or even an F. Six hours ago, I sat at the lunch table and listened to Bench cracking jokes with a bunch of other people who weren’t part of his tribe while Rose and Wolf held a wordless blinking contest. Three hours ago I rode home on the bus alone—or at least with the seat to myself. It’s not that Bench sat with someone else—he wasn’t on the bus at all. Maybe he had practice. Maybe he got a ride. Maybe it was no big deal and I was worrying too much. But so many maybes didn’t change the fact that I spent the ride home with my head pressed against the window, biting my lip and wishing I’d brought something other than Julius Caesar to bury myself in.
At least at home you didn’t have to worry about who to sit with. I split open my fourth crescent roll and slathered it with butter while my mother told me all about her day. One advantage to the Post Sarasota Shuffle is that our dinners weren’t quiet anymore. My mother did most of the talking. She also played music, and half the time the television was on in the background. She was afraid of silence.
That was all right. I’d much rather talk to her than to Dad. In fact, I’d rather talk to her than most anyone. So long as we avoided certain topics. But tonight there was something on my mind.
“Can I ask you a question?” I began.
Mom cocked one eyebrow, suspicious, her own buttered roll halfway to her mouth. She was usually the one to start our conversations. “Of course.”
“Were you ever popular?”
She cocked the other eyebrow. Both barrels now. “Seriously?”
“It’s just a question.”
“I know, but you don’t have to say it like that.”
“
Like what?”
“Like with the ever. ‘Were you ever popular?’ How do you know I’m not popular now?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t really thought about it. Adults didn’t have to worry about that stuff. “Okay. Are you popular?”
She grunted, setting her roll back on her plate. “Are you kidding? All the tottering old men who come to the dentist’s office think I’m the greatest thing since color TV.”
I pushed my still-stiff pasta around the plate some more, trying not to think of my forty-year-old-mother flirting with some sixty-year-old men. “But back when you were in school. When you were my age,” I pressed.
“Oh. When I was your age. Sure. I was popular, I guess. At least I think so. I had friends.”
“That’s not the same,” I said. I had friends. Even Winston Ferman had friends, though I was kind of just assuming that—in theory he would have to, wouldn’t he? You find your people. It doesn’t mean you’re popular. When you’re popular you don’t have to find anyone; they find you.
“Well, I had a fair number of friends. A lot of people signed my yearbooks. And I wasn’t really picked on. Does that count as being popular?”
I thought about the red letter L on my locker. The cartoon moose tied to the roof of the car. The notes and the nudges. All the kids like Jason and Cameron giving kids like Wolf and Deedee and me a hard time. Maybe Mom was popular. Or maybe it was just different when she was growing up. “What about Dad?”
Mom nearly choked on her water. “Your father? Oh god, no. He was never popular. Not that it mattered to him. In fact, that’s one of the things that I liked about him at first—the fact that he was always in his own little world, that he didn’t care a bit about what anybody thought of him. It made him sort of . . . mysterious.”
I never thought of my father as mysterious. What was mysterious about a man who went to work in his boxer shorts and drank orange juice straight out of the carton? But I could easily picture him in his own world. “You mean he didn’t have any friends?”
“There were people he hung out with sometimes. But no. I’m not sure he had any true friends until he met me. And when he did . . .” Mom paused, put down her fork, and leaned across the table. “Is there something going on at school? Something you want to talk about?”
I pictured my dad, working up the courage to come sit at Mom’s table—if that’s even how it happened. I wondered what her friends thought when they saw him standing there. If they let him have the empty seat or pushed him away. I wondered what they called him behind his back after he left. What kinds of notes they left in his locker. “No,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough for her. My mother’s looks could pull confessions out of hardened criminals. “It’s just that, there’s this new kid at school, and she’s having kind of a hard time fitting in—” I figured I could always start with Rose and work my way up from there.
“She?” Mom narrowed her eyes and gave me a sly grin, like she’d just cracked the code.
I put down my fork. “You know what, it’s not a big deal. Just forget I said anything.”
“No. Tell me. I want to know. Because if this is about a girl, I can help you.”
“Right,” I muttered. “Because you’re such an expert on relationships.”
My eyes dropped immediately to my plate. It just slipped out. Words are like that sometimes. There was a really long pause. The old quiet creeping in. I looked up to see her frowning. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No, you did,” she said, clearly hurt. “But it’s okay. What I meant is, I remember what it’s like to be thirteen and wanting people to like you. It’s not easy.” She reached across the table and gently took hold of my wrist.
“But I’ll tell you this, kiddo—being liked isn’t even close to the same thing as being loved. Got it?”
I nodded and she took that as her cue that she could let go.
“I think next time I’ll boil the noodles a little longer,” she said, and pushed her plate away.
After the table was cleared I let Mom help me with homework—I didn’t actually need it, but I could tell it made her happy getting involved, and I still felt like a jerk for what I’d said. We built an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile out of a paper towel roll for my history presentation (Wolf was in charge of the poster—he had much neater handwriting), complete with the letters USSR, which, as it turned out, didn’t have the word “Russia” in it at all.
When she finally said good night after asking me again if there was anything else I wanted to talk about, I waited for her door to shut, then snuck past it down the hall.
The office at the new house was nothing like the study at the old one, with its tall bookshelves and mahogany rolltop desk full of unpaid bills, where my father would sit for hours writing his articles and ignoring the rest of the world. The office at the new place was actually just the extra bedroom, complete with a day bed, a scratched-up student desk Mom had found at Goodwill, and a couple of IKEA shelves lined with whatever cheap paperbacks Mom and I picked up at library sales. We had a lot more books once, but Dad took most of them with him, minus the Frost, which was mine now.
Mom got to keep the photo albums, though. There weren’t a ton of pictures. Mostly family vacations to Cancun and Canada. One album was filled with pictures of me running around the house in my diaper or smearing carrots in my hair. You’re never more photogenic, apparently, than when you are half naked and covered in pureed vegetables. My toddler years were equally well documented. Probably because I was an only child. After that the pictures sort of trailed off. You take more pictures when people are having a good time.
Next to the albums sat what I’d come for. My mother’s high school yearbooks, a layer of dust from the new house already settling on top of the layer of dust carried over from the old. There were four of them; I had seen them before. For a school project on family trees once I needed a picture of my parents as kids. Mom was easy; Grandma had thousands, most of them Polaroid instants with the glossy black back and white frame. But for Dad’s we actually had to scan his freshman year picture in one of these yearbooks and blow it up.
I slid the first year of Midvale High’s Reflections off the shelf and opened it to the inside cover, reading the messages scrawled there. She was right. It was full of signatures. My mother was awesome. And the coolest. She was totally rad. There were phone numbers from boys named Dan and Jacob, asking my mom to call sometime over the summer. Someone with the nickname of KK said she would always remember something called “the marshmallow surprise.” Another girl named Sarah wrote, I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m guessing it was from a book. I didn’t know if it qualified as an aphorism or not. On the inside back cover it was more of the same. The whole thing was filled with signatures.
She really was popular.
I took the next year off the shelf. Looked for familiar names. KK was there again. And Sarah. And some others. The pages were still filled, but the handwriting was bigger. Some drawings took up a good amount of space. My mother was still cool. She would still be missed. But her junior year, there were fewer messages. Sarah wrote a long note that took up half of the back page, telling my mother what a good friend she was and that next year would be different. She didn’t say how.
By her senior year the number of signatures in my mother’s yearbook had dwindled to fewer than ten. The girl named Sarah signed it simply, Good luck out there. There was a note from someone named Mr. Feldman, presumably a teacher. On the cover page there was an angry tornado of blue ink, nearly clawing clean through the page. Something had been written there once, something I’m guessing my mother wasn’t interested in seeing again.
On the back inside cover there was only one name. My father’s. Following a short message, two sticky-note-worthy words.
Love always, it promised.
It mattered. Who signed your yearbooks mattered. I sat with the last year in my lap until I heard a sound out in the hallway and s
ilently slid all four of the books back into place. I waited for my mother to close the bathroom door before sneaking back to my bedroom and shutting off the light.
I lay there in the darkness, looking up at the ceiling, thinking about my mother’s yearbooks, the fact that there were fewer and fewer signatures in each one, wondering how something like that happens. And how much, if anything, it had to do with Dad. I never heard her say anything about anyone from high school. Had never heard her mention a Sarah or a KK or anyone else whose names were inked on the inside cover. Most of the friends she had now either came from college or were colleagues from work. Where did they all go? Did they leave her or did she leave them? Where was her tribe?
Maybe that’s how it worked. Maybe the people you know when you’re a kid are destined to be just a bunch of signatures in your yearbook when you grow up. I didn’t want to believe it though. I thought about Bench sitting on the bus next to me. And Deedee reaching into his front pocket for his die.
And Wolf bent over one of his models, putting all the pieces into place.
And Rose, standing at the edge of our table, eyeing the empty seat.
I thought about Dad, reaching for the salt, having run out of things to say. How do you keep someone from leaving when it’s clear they don’t want to stay?
I bent over and grabbed my jeans from the floor, pulling out the note that I’d found in my locker that afternoon. Not the one that had been stuck to the outside with its lone capital letter. This one I’d found shoved through the slots, right before dismissal.
I knew who put it there. I recognized the handwriting.
SORRY ABOUT LUNCH, it said.
Bench always wrote in all caps.
Then, a little smaller underneath.
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.
It wasn’t about me. Sure.
But I’m still the one who rode the bus home alone.
THE OFFER
THE DAY WOLF AND I NEARLY BLEW UP HIS HOUSE WAS THE SAME day my parents’ divorce finally went through.
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