I look at Stephanie, who is tugging on her skirt and twirling a lock of her red hair—peeking out from under her purple wig—which is what she always does when she doesn’t know what to do. I look around for Matt to see if he has any plans to help out his girlfriend, but he’s in the corner flirting with Lena, a junior, and has no clue that Tracy is being force-fed vodka. Or maybe he just couldn’t care less. I stomp over to the punch bowl table and yank the funnel out of Tracy’s mouth, knocking over our platter of cookies and sending punch flying. It splatters across everyone holding Tracy down.
“What the fuck?” says Regina, staring at me as if no one has ever taken anything away from her before.
“You’re choking her!” I yell.
“This is her initiation, bitch, so back off,” she says in a quiet, scary voice.
Even though I can tell Regina is about half a second away from ripping my eyes out, I stand my ground. Tracy turns over, still coughing and spitting out punch, her eyes watering, her triple-action mascara running down her face. The other cheerleaders are frozen, looking at Regina—who is staring at me—waiting for their cue to do something. Kristin is watching me like she’s never seen me before, even though we’ve been in all the same classes for almost two months now. For some reason, she’s not dressed as a pop star. She looks more like a demonic fairy princess, with iridescent wings sprouting from her shoulders and a nasty scowl on her face.
I reach over and whack Tracy on the back a few times, trying to help her get the vodka out of her lungs. But her choking turns into giggling, and she whirls back around, yelling, “Hit me again!” The banshees scream and throw her back down on the table.
And suddenly I can see the future so clearly I can’t believe I couldn’t see it before. There is no room for me in this world of vodka and cheer-witches, which is fine, because I don’t want to be in it anyway. At least, I don’t think I do. But is it possible that, even though we’ve been friends since before we could read, Tracy and I might not make it through this year?
As they jam the funnel down Tracy’s throat again, Matt and Lena sneak up the stairs, not even bothering to go separately so no one gets suspicious. Regina leaves the funnel ritual to her minions and plops herself down on Jamie’s lap on the couch, shouting instructions to the girls. My heart sinks. I didn’t want to believe that he was with her, but if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t let her do that to him. Not to mention that he wouldn’t be in Tracy’s basement in the first place.
Jamie is watching Tracy’s initiation, looking like he’s confused about what he’s doing here and wondering if he should attempt to stop the madness. I understand the feeling. And then, without any warning, he looks up at me.
I can’t look away. And of course that is the very moment Regina stops squawking for a second, turns on Jamie’s lap to say something to him and then follows his gaze to me. She looks at me for a good long time, as if everything is clicking into place in her brain, and then she turns back to him and forces him to kiss her. Literally. She grabs his head and pastes her mouth on his, wrapping her arms around his neck as if she wants to suffocate him. I keep looking. He doesn’t really kiss her back, but he doesn’t not kiss her, either.
I want to rip her stupid bustier right off in front of everyone. Instead, I grab my stuff and head up the stairs, waiting for Tracy or Stephanie or someone to call after me and tell me to come back. For a second, I even imagine Jamie calling my name, but when I think about the fact that he’s got a girl on his lap making out with him, I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten all about me. And suddenly, the reason I’ve been so mad at everyone and everything for the past few weeks is very clear to me: I don’t understand any of this. The rules of high school are completely, entirely, disturbingly mysterious to me.
But everyone else seems to get them.
I let the door slam shut behind me.
execrable (adjective): very bad; deplorable; appalling
(see also: Peter)
7
AT FIRST, IT'S just a normal Saturday morning after a bad Friday night. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop, watching an animated short about photosynthesis for a biology project. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m doing a search for my dad.
I’ve typed his name into the blank box a few times before, but I’ve never had the courage to hit the search button. I was afraid of what I’d find. Would a picture of him I’d never seen before pop up? What if someone posted footage of the explosion that they’d taken with their phone? What if I saw a photograph of him dead? I already had plenty of images in my head—did I really need more?
Today, however, before I take any time to think about it, I type in “Alfonso Zarelli” and hit Search.
Too quickly, the photosynthesis cartoon vanishes, replaced by a results page. Google claims that there are about eight thousand “Alfonso Zarelli” results, but most of those results beyond the first few pages won’t have anything to do with my dad. As I scroll down, I see links to articles on news sites about the explosion and pages from his old company’s website where his name is still listed. Nothing weird or unexpected—until I see the memorial sites.
At first, I’m confused about why his name is listed on pages for other people who died—I don’t want to take in what’s right in front of me. But I can’t stop looking and reading, and as I do, I realize that these are the soldiers and contractors who died with my dad. Their friends and families built websites for them and took the time to list the names of everyone who died in the explosion.
How have I gone this long without even thinking about these people? I didn’t know any of them. I don’t even know if Dad knew them—he could have just been riding with them, like people on a train or a bus who, if they met tomorrow, would have no idea that they’d actually seen each other for the first time the day before. So should I feel bad that I never thought of them until just now?
Yes, I decide. I should.
I click on a site dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old sergeant. There are three photos of him on the home page—his graduation photo from a military academy in California, a picture of him in uniform sitting next to a girl who seems to be laughing at something he said, a photo of a memorial service that his unit had for him, a rifle jammed into the sand, a helmet resting on the butt of the gun. There’s a link to letters from his father, his sister, his best friend—some were written while he was still alive, some after he died—and an email he sent to his sister the night before the explosion. And then there’s a page with a description of what happened to his unit the day he died, and a list of the people who were killed alongside him.
My dad was one of those people.
I close my laptop and push it away from me on the bed. I look at the clock. It’s time to call Peter. We always talk on Saturdays around eleven.
Usually when we’re on the phone, I can tell he’s fishing for information about how I’m doing. He never seems to believe it when I tell him I’m fine. But I get it—I don’t believe him when he says it, either.
Sometimes he’s not awake when I call, so I leave him a totally random, incomprehensible message in the weirdest voice I can come up with, and he calls me back later. But today he answers right away, on the first ring, which is good because I don’t have it in me to come up with a weird voice right now.
“Rosie?”
“Hey.”
“You don’t sound so good,” he says, coughing a little, his voice rough.
“You sound like yo
u just woke up two seconds ago when your phone rang. Did you go out last night?”
“Friday nights in college rock, Rosie. So do Thursday nights. And Saturdays. And the rest of them. It’s awesome,” he says. I can tell he wants me to believe what he’s saying, but the way he sounds, he might as well be talking about doing his laundry.
“It sounds awesome,” I say, playing along anyway. I realize that even though I’m fourteen, and I’m supposed to be into the idea of going out every night of the week, I have no desire to do so. Zero. Zip. None. I guess that means I’ll be a social loser in college, too. Something to look forward to.
As Peter tells me about the party he went to last night, I lie back on my bed. The corner of Peter’s old PSAT book digs into the back of my head, and I yank it out from underneath me and start doodling on it with a blue marker I find under a pile of crap on my nightstand. My room is a mess, but my mom doesn’t say anything about it anymore. She used to tell me all the time that a messy room shows a lack of self-respect. But I don’t think she’s even set foot in here since the beginning of summer. My walls are neat, but that’s just because there’s nothing on them. After Tracy made the squad, I ripped down all the posters she’d made me buy of bands and boys I would never like in a million years, and I tore them into shreds. The shreds are still lying on the floor. I like the way they crunch under my feet when I get up in the morning.
I look at my bare walls and have the sudden urge to draw on them. I wonder if my mother would notice that. Without thinking further, I take the blue marker and draw one petal of a tiny daisy—because it’s the only thing I know how to draw—on the wall next to my bed. I wait. Nothing happens—the wall doesn’t collapse, no alarm bells go off—so I draw the rest of the flower and start to color it in while Peter continues to talk. Drawing on the wall is oddly exciting. Which means my life is pretty sad and pathetic. But I knew that already.
I look at the green light blinking slowly on and off on my closed laptop, and I think about the sergeant still on the screen. Has Peter ever done a search for Dad? I’m just about to ask him when he says, “What did you do last night?”
“Nothing.”
“You stayed home?”
“No,” I say, pausing. I know he’s not going to like it when I tell him about leaving Tracy’s party. He thinks I need to be more social; I think that’s the last thing I need. “I went to Tracy’s Halloween party.”
It’s quiet on the other end, and then I hear what sounds like a long exhale. My blue marker freezes in the middle of filling in a petal as I place the sound.
“Are you…smoking?” I ask.
“You didn’t stay, did you,” he counters.
“Are you smoking?” I ask again.
“Yeah. It helps me wake up.”
“Gross,” I say, completely thrown off by the image of Peter with a cigarette in his mouth. “Dad would kill you for that, you know.”
“Yeah, well, he’s never going to find out, is he?”
My marker falls out of my hand and down into the space between my bed and the wall. I expect him to say he’s sorry, but he doesn’t say anything at all, and the silence is weird, like he’s waiting for me to call him out for talking like that. But I can’t. I can’t even believe he said it in the first place.
“So why’d you leave Tracy’s?” he finally says.
“Because I hate her,” I say, not meaning it.
“What happened this time?”
I was expecting Peter to say, What did she do now? His neutral response pisses me off, and I immediately want to make things sound worse than they are.
“She’s become one of those idiot girls who turns her back on her real friends, and who’s obsessed with all the wrong things.”
“Like what?” he says. I can practically hear him rolling his eyes. This conversation isn’t going how I pictured it at all. Peter is always on my side, no questions asked. But now he just sounds annoyed.
“Like sex, and vodka funnels, and being a cheerleader.”
“That’s called fun, Rose. Look into it. High school is short. So is fucking life, I guess.”
I can hardly believe my ears. My brother—the guy who was so worked up about me being safe and taking care of myself and not doing anything stupid—is acting like I’m a dud for not partying like Tracy, who’s probably going to end up pregnant or diseased or both by the end of the year.
“I thought…you…” I trail off, confused about how to explain why he suddenly seems like an alien to me. He exhales loudly again. “I can’t believe you’re fucking smoking.” It feels so good to swear, even if I’m not really swearing at him.
“So why’d you leave? Did something happen?”
“The cheerleaders were forcing Tracy to drink by pouring vodka into her mouth—some stupid initiation thing. And when I tried to help her, everyone got mad at me, especially Regina Deladdo.”
“Oh, man. I forgot about her. She’s scary.”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“Does she still have her claws in Jamie Forta?”
“She did last night,” I say, trying to keep any hint of anything out of my voice. It’s strange to hear my brother mention Jamie. But not as strange as what he says next.
“Have you seen Jamie a lot this year?”
“Um, I have study hall with him. Well, I did until he got pulled out for remedial English.”
“You guys friends?”
“Not…no, not really. I mean, he gave me a ride home once, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends.” My heart is pounding so loud I can barely hear myself talk. “Why?”
“No reason. I just…I know you had a crush on him back when he and I played hockey together.”
I’m blushing instantly. “I never had a crush on Jamie.”
“Oh, Rosie, come on. When you came to my games, Dad always teased you about watching Jamie instead of me. Remember?”
I don’t remember that. What does that mean?
Did I block it out because I was embarrassed, or is everything I ever did with Dad starting to disappear from my mind? I try to run through my mental catalog of Dad memories but my brain seizes up, and I can only see him lying on the ground, fractured into bloodless sections.
I start to panic. Think, I command myself, remember....
I can’t afford to lose a single memory of my dad—even if it’s just of him taking out the garbage—because there aren’t going to be any new ones.
“He teased me about Jamie?” My throat feels like it’s closing off, and my voice sounds strangled.
“Hey, Rosie, it’s not a big deal. Look, Forta’s actually a good guy. And he’s a badass. That’s one of the reasons I asked him to keep an eye on you this year.”
I’m so shocked by what Peter said that I gasp, which works in my favor, in terms of getting air into my lungs.
“You what?” I ask, hoping against hope that I just heard him incorrectly.
“I saw Jamie at a party this summer. He came up and said he was sorry about Dad, which is more than I can say for any of the other Union High assholes. He asked how the family was doing. I told him you were starting at Union and that I felt bad that I couldn’t be there. He said he’d keep an eye on you, if I wanted him to.”
I’m an idiot. A huge, idiotic idiot. So that’s why Jamie has been paying attention to me. Not because he likes me, but because Peter asked him to. How could I have ever thought that Jamie liked me? I’m a freshman. He’s a junior. He has a girlfriend.
“Why—why didn’t you—ask Tracy or Robert?” I stutter.
“Jamie’s older, he knows the school, people are kind of afraid of him....” He trails off, his words lingering in the air.
There’s something else, but he’s not saying it. I am able to take a few deep breaths, and just as I’m about to give him total hell, he changes the subject.
“Rosie, I have something to tell you.”
I can tell by the tone of his voice that whatever he’s about to say is not good, and I’m not sure how much more I can take in one conversation. My panic is now complemented by dread, and my head is spinning from overload. I suddenly realize that whatever he’s about to say is the reason he answered my call on the first ring, and he’s probably spent our entire conversation trying to figure out a way to say it.
Maybe if I don’t answer him, he won’t say it at all.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah…”
“I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving.”
What?
How can he leave my mom and me alone on Thanksgiving? What are we going to do—stare at each other across the turkey while we don’t talk about Dad?
“Rosie, did you hear me?”
“I’m not sure. I could have sworn you said you weren’t coming home for Thanksgiving.”
Silence.
“So where are you going instead, Peter?”
“To my girlfriend’s. She invited me to her house.”
Going to his girlfriend’s house for our first Thanksgiving without Dad. Nice. Real nice. Who is this “girlfriend” he’s never mentioned before? And what is wrong with him?
It takes everything I have not to hang up. I don’t really believe in heaven and all that, but I do believe in some kind of afterlife, and I hope Dad can see this from wherever he is. I hope he can find a way to kick Peter’s ass from the great beyond, because Peter deserves it, that’s for sure.
Confessions of an Angry Girl Page 6