by Gurley, Jan
By now all of us were looking ashamed, no one meeting anyone else’s eyes.
“Finally, let’s not forget the last two. They’re the best. We’ll get Celia to be our cook for a week, ‘cause she’s too gullible and pathetic to object.”
She let slip a snubbing sound, the kind a baby makes when it’s been crying too long, then hardened her face, her arms crossed tight across her waist, “And last. How’d you pick Gonzo to play his part? Did he draw the short straw?”
Gonzo said, “If you believe all that, then why did you even come here?”
Celia burst out, refusing to look at him, “Because I’m sick of this high school crap” (only she didn’t say crap). “I’m not going to take it any more and smile and edge away and never say anything because saying the truth might make you an even bigger target. I don’t have to see you freaks any more. Why shouldn’t I tell you off?”
Alex said, “If you’re planning on living the truth, why start with a lie?”
Celia whirled, “Don’t you dare call me a liar.”
“Well you are. You’re not here to tell us off. Not entirely. You’re here because there’s some tiny part of you that’s still not sure. You need to know, before you can let it go.”
“I don’t need to know anything. I don’t need anything from you people.”
Helena said, picking at her fingernails, “What about lunch tomorrow?”
“You think I’m stupid enough to fall for another vicious game?”
“Nope. I flubbed it, and we all starved today. Wasn’t right to expect you to bring lunch when you didn’t know how the system works. Doing this week will make it two weeks in a row for me, but heck, I figure I owe it to everyone to pull a second week. Penance, you know. Besides, Phoebe has done two weeks back-to-back before.”
Groans of don’t remind me! and ugh-I’ll never eat a banana again bounced in low voices around the group.
I knew that feeling Celia had right then, the look of naked horror and panic and pain, and wanting oh-so-much for a chance, just one chance, to turn back the clock. Watching it jerk across her face, her lower lip suddenly trembling, I felt my eyes get hot and my nose sting. It was too painful to see, when I’d just felt it myself with Drew. Because now, for Celia, it was like the absolute, worst-ever, epic-disaster possibility was coming true. That the Greenbacks had been, well, Greenbacks, to her. That she’d been one of us and she had destroyed it all with her own two hands.
And Gonzo, pink-eared, asparagus-haired, gourmet-making, adoring Gonzo…
I couldn’t help it, and anyone who’d seen the pain on her face would have done the same thing too. I said, “Celia, you didn’t know.”
She went ramrod straight and raised a shaking finger at me, “Don’t you, don’t you dare be nice to me.” Her face looked like it was swelling, like if she didn’t let the tears out soon, tears would seep out her eyes from the pressure and run over the dam of her eyelids and down her face without her actually crying. “I do not — I repeat — do not have to take this.”
Everyone froze. Then Gonzo, his mouth tight and his eyes blotchy, put a hand on her shoulder and Celia jerked away. She still had not once looked at him.
She clapped a palm on the spot on her shoulder that Gonzo had touched, like it burned, and said to all of us, in a shaking voice. “I will not be an object of pity. You watch me. I’ ll, I’ll, so help me God, I’ll fix this. I’ll fix it all.” She gave a huge, blind sweep of her arm, “And then we’ll see who’s NICE!”
Celia wheeled and ran, leaving our entire group staring. Gonzo put his back to us, and then he too ran. In the opposite direction.
***
Helena, Alex, Robin, Phoebe and Viola were the only ones left. They edged away from me, not sure what to do.
Helena said, “Maybe they’ll, I don’t know, have a truck break down or something. Maybe the trees won’t get cut tomorrow.”
We all knew there weren’t any other trees on campus. Legacy had acres of concrete, field after field of grass, walls of shrubbery, but no other trees.
Helena’s words, the false hope in them, sounded worse than nothing.
“I’m going home,” I said, and headed, alone, to my fairy circle.
***
Sometimes you cry and it’s a weep. Sometimes you cry and it’s a sob.
But sometimes you cry and it’s a painful, wracking gasp, a thing that grips you and hurts you, tears you open, ripping out all the things that needed to come out.
I hugged the stump of the tree, feeling my fingernails dig in, getting strength from it.
I hoped, eventually, the hurt would pass.
***
It was dark when I got home. My mom was worried an she seemed even more worried when she saw me. She held my shoulder, slid my bag off, and walked me to my room. She sat on her heels and undid my shoes like I was in preschool again, stacking them side-by-side under my bed. She pulled down the covers and climbed in herself, sat cross-legged and guided my head to her lap.
She stroked my hair and murmured things and slid curls through her fingers and talked about her day and I rolled over, her jeaned-thigh wet with tears, and she started on the other side, untangling and murmuring and stroking all over again.
After a couple of hours, she tried some hot chocolate on me. She even put the teeny marshmallows in it.
I sat up and tried to drink it for her. I really did. But I just kept seeing Drew’s face, the way he’d looked at me. And the glass shards would explode out my chest again, everything I ever secretly hoped for, in my pathetic, silly, unrealistic way, shattered all over again. I hadn’t even admitted to myself what I hoped — that he might like me, even just for the last few days of his high school — until it was too late.
When she took the cup back in the kitchen, she returned and stood at the side of the bed, hands on hips and eyed me, as thoroughly as a biologist classifying a new species. She seemed to come to some conclusion about my state of mind, because she said, “Okay, then. Are you ready?”
I said, with a sniff, “Yep.”
And I told her everything. Even about Drew.
Scratch that. Especially about Drew.
And at the end, she said, “I have something to tell you.”
***
Olivia Baptista, the crazy woman who calls herself my mother, is probably lucky to be alive. Once I found out she and Eileen Bullard discussed the whole arrangement between them (“well, you don’t think I’d let someone put my daughter in the middle of that kind of situation without knowing in advance, do you?”), she frankly was lucky that we have very few items that could be called daggers, and zero rocket launchers (at least that I know about) in our house.
“WHAT?”
I don’t know if I shouted it, or said it between gritted teeth. I’m pretty sure, although this seems physiologically impossible, that I shouted it through gritted teeth. “WHY would you do this?”
To give her credit, my mother did look flushed. Or afraid. Or possibly both.
“Honey, Eileen was at her wit’s end. Do you know how close Drew came to doing something that would forever destroy his future?”
I gave her a look.
“Um. Yes. I guess you do know.”
“But what about me?” I wailed. “You just threw me on the stake, is that it?”
My mom did what she always does when she’s nervous, or angry, or both. She tidied my room, moving from object to object, shifting things that didn’t need shifting, folding and re-folding.
“You may be upset to hear this, Katharine Baptista, but you and I both know you spent most of your high school hiding.”
“What?” I said, “My life was perfect before all this happened.”
“No. It was not. It was safe. You had friends who never dared disagree with you. You took classes that never once challenged you. You never mingled with anyone who might be different.”
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, seeing red. “You don’t understand high school. ALL my friends are�
��different.”
“That’s my point. They’re all flavors of the same.” She waggled an index finger at me, her pulse now thumping in her neck. “There’s a great big world out there of people who you’ve been afraid of. People who are different in ways you don’t know how to deal with.”
I choked. “So you two, you cooked this up between you?”
“Well,” she said, not meeting my eye, “families used to do it all the time.”
“Arranged impossible relationships for money?”
She put a hand on her hip and gave me an oh-grow-up look. “Exactly. Back then, it was called marriage.”
My face flame-throwered a whooshing red.
“You two actually discussed that Drew and I, might, might like each --” I gacked before I could finish the sentence, but I think she got my drift.
My mom clearly decided she’d had enough. “Why not look at it this way. I know about your crusade to save those trees. Maybe I thought Eileen Bullard’s money ought to go to something worthwhile, and this was a way to do it. And at the same time, you’d definitely earn every penny.”
She headed to the door.
“Oh, by the way, we’ve had some messages.” She pulled out of her pocket little memo-sized pieces of paper and flipped through them. “One, I’m supposed to be in the Dean’s office tomorrow to answer questions about your stolen-goods fencing operation. Two, Tio is freaked about being expelled. Call back, but not if you have — and I quote here — only more of your hair-brained plans to offer. Three, Eileen called to say her daughter’s tutor is now under investigation, which may void your agreement. And four, a manager from Dino-Dog suggested I get your urine checked, and asked what he’s supposed to wear.”
She gave me a surprisingly genuine smile. “I hope that makes more sense to you than it did to me.” She waved airily as she left my room, “Why should I know what’s going on? After all, I’m just the mother.”
***
I called Tio. He said, “I’ve got no other way of seeing Bianca. So I’m not going to stop. They can’t make me.”
“Tio, you won’t be allowed back into tutoring. They’ll know your dad didn’t sign that form when he shows up for the parent-meeting.”
I could hear Tio breathing. “He’s not coming.”
“That doesn’t sound like your dad.”
“I deleted the message from the school on our answering machine before he got home.”
I sighed. “Tio, that doesn’t solve anything. They’ll insist on speaking to him. They’ll find his cell number. You’re going to end up expelled.”
I could almost hear his teeth grinding. “I don’t care. They can’t make me not see her.”
My heart seemed to give a painful hiccup in my chest. “Tio, what are you talking about?”
“If I found someone to pretend to be my dad, then no one’ll ever know, will they?”
I breathed into the phone, “Tio, sweetie. That’s crazy-talk. The school will figure it out. And who would do something like that, impersonating a dad at a school?”
He hung up.
All I could hope was that he’d realized how hopeless the whole thing was. But somehow I didn’t think so.
***
I got to the grove before dawn, but there were already Danger: Do Not Cross yellow tape lines held up on thigh-high stakes, surrounding the entire area. I stood for a second, the truth of it hitting me like a cramp deep inside that made me want to bend over and pant through it to catch my breath.
But I realized I didn’t want to waste a second of whatever time I had left with the trees, so I clicked off my flashlight, waited a sec for my eyes to adjust, slipped under the tape and went inside the fairy circle.
There, face down on the stump in the spread-eagle position, was Drew.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Good Money In Trans Fats
Chapter 12
I must have shifted or gasped or something because Drew opened his eyes, slow, and sat up. His face looked sleep-warm, but not dull the way people look when they wake. His eyes were all heavy but still alert.
Sexy, in fact (not that I noticed).
He blinked at me, like memories were shifting in his brain, bringing him up to date. Then his gaze went opaque, impossible to read, like he cut me off.
He nodded his chin at the trees. “This your reason?”
I bit my upper lip. No more reason to hide. “Yep. It is.”
“Worth it?”
“The trees by themselves? Sure.” I walked past him, slow, circling as I looked up. “You know how much lunch-money we gathered, between eight of us, for months?”
“Nah. Not sure I care.”
“Not enough. That’s all that counts. Not even half of enough.”
He crossed his arms, watched me circle. “Redwoods are expensive.”
“Not really. School doesn’t even want the wood. See, this ground’s an easement. Means when you buy it, you get to control it. It’s what they do with teeny strips of land like this, when it’s not worth the effort to sell them outright.”
Drew looked at the circle of ground. “Kind of important land. At least for the trees, I mean.”
“Yep. No ease-ment about it for them. So for the trees, all by themselves, yeah, I’d say it was worth it.”
“What about us?” He said, his eyes dark and hard.
“Like there ever was an us?”
He kept silent.
“See, the trees alone were worth it, but then there’s you.”
“Me?”
“Well, honestly, at first, I didn’t actually care that much.”
“Gee, thanks,” he actually smiled at me.
“Seemed to me like you’d had everything handed to you. You’re grown. If you wanted to throw it away, what did I care?”
“Decent of you.” A bitter tang of sarcasm lingered after his words.
“Yeah, I believe in free-will, especially when it comes to controlling moms.”
“Don’t get me started,” he said.
“Or me.”
“She confessed?” he asked.
“Yep — did yours?”
“Crumpled under the pressure like a piñata.”
I stopped circling and sat on the other side of the stump from him. “First there was the trees. But then there was you.”
The air, chirping with dawn, rosied around us, a slow exhalation of light and warmth.
“Me?” he said, his voice all husky.
“Yeah. I learned about you. You’re the kind of person who’d want to help us save the trees.”
“You sure of that?”
I remembered the way Drew asked Alex and Robin about depps and pitts, the way he swiped at Gonzo to make everything okay, even the way he’d said, Kiss me, Kate, in front of everyone.
“Oh yeah.”
We sat in silence.
“You lied to me,” he said.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Except that’s not exactly true.”
“You’re saying I’m lying by saying I lied?”
“Basically. Because the fact is, unless you took my mother’s offer, you were actually going to be expelled. Which is what I thought all along.”
“But I didn’t tell you what your mother asked me to do. What I agreed to do.”
“What you said you’d try to do, you mean.”
“Even later I never told you.”
“Because, in the end, you didn’t want me getting in trouble because of these trees. You can’t have me screwing up my life more than I already have,” he said, his voice too flat.
“Um. No. See I can’t live with being the reason your life gets screwed.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, paused. “You’d do that? Risk these trees. Risk us. Just so I’d sail past graduation and on to college?”
I tried to be casual, and cool, and act like it was a game, but my heart hung heavy in my chest and my skin felt raw from exhaustion and stress. “Kind of a big deal. You being a sports star and all. Besi
des, who can’t empathize with another human’s desperate need to get out of their mother’s house.”
“I don’t know. I might miss the old bag. Eventually. One day.”
“Yeah. After this week, might take me a while too.”
“Well, no. You’re not going to ever have to miss your mom, Kate. Aren’t you the one getting expelled for everything? Looks like you’re taking the fall for the camera. And the trees. And the photos. And, knowing you, probably somehow the tutoring mess. You won’t see college in this lifetime. How’d you corner all that blame?”
“I dunno. Desperate need for attention?”
“Hogging the limelight.” He gave a slow smile, and my pulse began to thrum.
That’s when it began to dawn on me, finally, that maybe he wasn’t angry now. That maybe he’d never been quite as angry as I had thought he’d been. Just the idea of it, the possibility of it, gave me that sensation when you’re feeling your way downstairs in the dark and you miss a step, your world tilting as you stumble.
All I could do was blink at him.
“So what you’re saying, Kate, is that this is really all about you.”
“Aren’t you..” And then my voice died. If I was wrong, and he was really still cold and furious but hiding it really well, it would hurt so very much more. I was afraid to ask.