Around the same time I began ducking my parents as much as possible, I wandered into Mr. Burke’s office at school.
“Hey, Mr. Burke,” I said from the doorway.
“Lucy, hi. I’m just running over to the yearbook meeting. We’re setting the layout. Come on, we’ll walk over.”
“Actually, I need to talk to you about that.”
“How are the interviews coming?” He was gathering a big pile of papers, not really listening.
“Yeah, you know, I actually don’t think it’s such a good idea anymore. I think people will think it’s stupid.”
He stopped sorting papers and looked at me. “What?”
“Maybe you can get someone else to do it.”
“Sit down, Lucy.”
I walked into his small office and he lifted a stack of papers off the chair next to his desk.
“It’s a fresh and original idea, Lucy.”
“Okay, but I just don’t think so.”
“Where’s this coming from? When you came to me and presented the idea, you were so excited. It was your enthusiasm that sold us all. And now everyone is counting on you.”
I stared at my hands. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it anymore.” I couldn’t tell him that I had only spoken to nine people. There was no way I was going to get the other fifteen interviews done in time. He was a sweet man; he didn’t deserve to get ditched.
6
Later that week, one of the first almost hot days of the year arrived. All of a sudden you could really feel the end of the school year coming, thank God. Heading home, I was scuffing my feet on the sidewalk, trying to get the left and right feet to scrape evenly. For some reason it became really important for me to get them even, and the fact that I couldn’t get them to scuff in the same way had begun to stress me out, so I was really glad when I heard someone call my name. It was Maxine.
“Hey,” she caught up with me. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to skim the ground the same on each foot, but I can’t quite do it; my left keeps scraping a little bit more than my right.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
She tried it for a few steps, then basically lost interest. “Want to head over to my house?”
It turned out that Maxine lived just a few blocks past my house, in the direction that I never go, away from town and school. It was like going to a totally new place on the map, which felt refreshing.
Her house was a yellow stucco structure with dark beams that cut through it at diagonals; it didn’t look like any other house on the block. Apparently her parents were never home after school, so we could just hang out. I’m not quite sure where Maxine had gotten her reputation for not liking anyone, but it was proving to be false—she was surprisingly easy to be with. Plus, she was the only person I knew other than me who wasn’t into staring at her phone all day long. The only thing that she really liked to do was post random photos occasionally—just let them speak for themselves, let people read whatever meaning they wanted into them.
“Do you miss your horse riding?” I asked her when we were taking pictures of our hands.
“I’m kind of surprised,” she said, and snapped a super tight photo of the lines in her palm. “But I don’t miss it at all. I hardly even think about it. It’s like there was that life, now there’s this life. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I knew exactly what she meant. I hadn’t considered mentioning Thomas to anyone since Arianna betrayed me with her callousness, but I almost said something there in Maxine’s room.
“It’s kind of a relief,” she said, and started bending the tip of her finger back.
I was glad that at least her new life was better.
“Does the tip of your finger do this?” She was bending it back till it looked like it hurt.
“Ow! No. Gross. You must be double-jointed or something.”
Later, we were in the kitchen, on the stools at the counter. We were drinking 7 Ups when this kid walked in. His hair was long, and if it hadn’t swooped off to the right just below his eyebrows, it would have gone down past his nose. He was wearing a T-shirt and his arms were really skinny and he looked at the ground when he walked, like he had lost something important and was searching carefully for it. He didn’t say anything. He just went to the fridge and stuck his head in it for a long time.
“Where’s the 7 Up?” he said when he emerged.
“We drank the last two,” Maxine said.
He didn’t say anything else; he just turned without looking at me even once and left. I heard him walking up the stairs.
“My brother,” Maxine said.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said.
As we were going back up to Maxine’s room, he was coming out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his pants.
“I’m Lucy,” I said as he passed.
“Simon,” he mumbled. He brushed up against the wall and hunched his shoulders as he went. His hair fell into his face. He was very tall. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going good,” I told him. I had this crazy urge to reach up and push his swooping bangs away from his eyes, but he had already gone into his room. The door shut before I finished my sentence.
“What grade is your brother in?” I asked Maxine when I walked back into her room. She lay down on her bed, with her head dangling off the side, and tried to drink her 7 Up upside down.
“He’s a junior.”
“But he doesn’t go to our school?” I half asked, half said. I was being a bit cagey with my questions. I wasn’t exactly sure why—maybe I was distracted by his wavy hair.
“No, he goes to Meadowlark. It’s a special school for people with learning issues.”
“What’s his issue?”
Apparently Simon had to spend a lot of time learning to organize information and compose research papers and whatnot. “My parents won’t medicate him, so he has to learn how to harness his distractions.”
“That’s cool,” I said. The way Maxine put it, it didn’t sound that serious to me.
Then the next time I was at Maxine’s, I was just looking out her bedroom window when I saw Simon in the backyard. He was by the edge of the garage. He kept poking his head out of sight around the corner looking for something. Maxine distracted me by showing off this new shirt she had bought, but when she went to the bathroom I looked out the window again.
Maybe I was looking for Simon, or maybe I was just looking—I’m not one hundred percent sure. In any event, Simon was still doing his searching-for-something-around-the-corner-of-the-garage act, so I decided to go out and see what was going on.
“Get out of here,” he said when he saw me coming across the backyard. I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not, but he was smiling so I decided to ignore his words and just kept walking until I was right next to him. I looked around the corner of the garage. There was nothing but a big pile of old leaves, grass clippings, and a stack of wood, with a few rakes and shovels leaning up against the garage.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him.
“Nothing.” He opened the palm of his hand. In it was a small metal pipe, with a faint wisp of smoke coming out of the tiny bowl.
I thought I had smelled something as I was walking over. It’s not like I didn’t smell pot all the time. In the mornings, you couldn’t walk past the woods a block from school and not get knocked over by the clouds wafting out of there. But the potheads I knew all hung out together.
“Want a hit?” Simon asked.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Stick your head around the corner,” he told me.
He hadn’t been looking for anything at all. He was actually poking his head around the corner of the garage to smoke. Then, after exhaling, he’d go back to standing normally and make sure one of his parents’ cars wasn’t coming up the driveway.
He handed me the pipe. I leaned over and put it up to
my mouth; it was still wet from his lips. He lit a match and held it over the bowl. I sucked in really hard and instantly began coughing my lungs out. I almost dropped the pipe. He started laughing, then slapped my back a few times. “Are you okay?”
“It’s been a while,” I said, when I finally stopped coughing.
“Yeah,” Simon said. He pulled his hand away, but I could still feel the spot where it had been.
We then traded the pipe back and forth a few times. I took a couple of smaller hits and didn’t cough as much.
When we were walking back toward the house he said, “Don’t worry, you don’t get high the first time.”
The next time I saw Simon I didn’t actually see him at all. I was walking past his room on my way upstairs from the kitchen. I had gone down to get some sodas for Maxine and me, and his door was open a few inches. I’d swear it had been closed when I walked past on the way down.
“How’s it going?” I heard from inside the room.
I stopped in the hall and backed up a few feet, so I was standing right outside the door. I couldn’t see in, but I knew he was there.
“I’m okay,” I said. “How you doing?”
“I’m cool,” he said.
I was just hanging there in limbo-land.
“How was school?” I sounded like my parents.
“Fine,” he said. “Almost done, thank God.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said.
I stood there for a minute. “You want a Coke?” I had two in my hands, one for me and one for Maxine.
“No, I’m good.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Okay, well, good to see you,” I said, although of course I hadn’t seen him at all.
“You, too,” Simon said.
When I went back into Maxine’s room she was sending out a picture of her betta fish.
“Is your brother kind of weird sometimes?” I asked her.
“Not really.” She shrugged. “Why?”
7
Apparently, Romeo and Juliet spoke only 117 words to each other before they kissed for the first time. I know this useless bit of information because last year, when my ninth-grade English class read the play, Heather Simton—who some of my peers liked to call Heather Simpleton—counted.
“It just seemed way too fast to be believable,” she said.
“That’s because she was a slut,” Rick Vemond, one of the most popular kids in my grade—and one of its most dangerous assholes—blurted out from the last row. How he was so popular I could not understand. No, that’s not really true, I knew why. He was very handsome, with incredibly sexy dirty blond hair. And his girlfriend was Deidre Messier, a tall willowy figure. If you took away those two things, he would have lost a great deal of his appeal. Which also happened when he spoke.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Vemond. An insightful observation, as always,” our English teacher, Mr. Schneider, said. “Actually, at this point in the text, act 1, scene 5, after delivering the backstory of the families and setting the stage for things to come, the plot needs to be propelled forward. And more important, the kiss gives us an indication of the urgency of their love.”
Mr. Schneider seemed to be the last person on earth to understand love’s urgency. He was bald and round—not that chubby people with no hair can’t be in love. It’s just that everything he did, he did so slowly that urgency was simply not a word I would have ever used in relation to him. But I suppose you never know what love’s arrow will do to you—or when it will strike.
For example, the first time Simon kissed me we were out by the garage, smoking weed. Not quite as romantic as some fancy Elizabethan costume ball, but I’m no Juliet, and frankly, Simon does not have Romeo’s way with words.
Simon was doing more smoking than I was. I wasn’t really doing any. The stuff mostly just made me feel spacey, and I couldn’t seem to smoke without coughing. I wasn’t even sure how much Simon liked it, either. I suppose the best part about the whole thing was the way Simon looked at me while he held his breath after he took a hit. He would end up bugging his eyes out, or puffing up his cheeks, whatever, just to make me laugh. Which he always did.
“Come back here,” he said, and walked around the corner of the garage, beside the pile of old grass clippings. There wasn’t much room between the pile and the pricker bushes that grew between the trees.
“What?” I said as I stepped toward the pile, keeping my eye on the thorns. All my life I always seem to get caught in those things, and I didn’t want it to happen there with him. When I looked up from the thorns, he was standing really close and leaning down toward me. It was an odd sensation, exacerbated by the fact of my slightly less than average stature, which made him seem even taller. He looked like some kind of bird, a stork or something, bending toward me. I didn’t know what was happening and then he was kissing me. He pushed his tongue against my mouth. I kind of pulled away because it surprised me. But obviously I knew what to do, and so after a second I opened my mouth.
“You have to use your tongue,” he said.
“I am,” I told him. I admit, I was a bit defensive, but I didn’t like being told how to kiss. Granted, I didn’t have a whole ton of experience at it—but still, a girl likes to find her own way.
I think I had been waiting for Simon to kiss me from that first time I saw him and wanted to push his hair back, so I was glad it was finally game on. I grabbed his shirt, pulled him toward me, and went for it. I may have been a bit overeager because I think I made him gag a little, but things settled down after that and it was actually pretty fun in that gross kind of way.
I will confess now that I was very late to the whole sex thing. I am slightly embarrassed to admit this, but it’s simply a fact—after fifteen and a half years of life, this was my first real kiss. I had a few chances to make out before, most notably with this good-looking kid named Todd Scully after the fall choir concert, but up close he had bad breath, so I declined. There were a few other opportunities as well, but they never presented themselves in a way that I felt good about. Then, of course, when you don’t do something that you want to do—especially if everyone else is constantly doing it—it becomes even more difficult to break through. But smooching Simon helped me to see the reasons behind why I never did it before. It was much easier to admit that in the past I had simply been afraid—which for someone like me, who does not like to show that particular emotion, had been a challenge. But now, with our faces mashed firmly together, I was in the club. All in all, this was perhaps one of the three most exciting and pleasurable things that had ever happened to me.
After that, whenever I would go over to Maxine’s and Simon was there, Maxine and I would hang out for a while, and then I would make some kind of excuse and go to the bathroom or down to the kitchen to get a Coke, and on the way back, Simon’s door would be open and I’d pop in and say hello. Usually he was sitting on the futon mattress that was bent up like a couch on the floor. He was often messing with his phone. I’d go sit next to him on the futon and we’d just start kissing. Usually we’d say a few things first, such as, “How’s it going?” or something clever like that—generally it was way less than 117 words. Then we’d begin kissing. But we didn’t always speak first. Sometimes I just went over to the couch and sat down next to him. After a few minutes I’d head back to Maxine’s room—she never asked where I’d been.
I didn’t think she even knew about our extracurricular activity, and then one day I walked back into her room and she was reading horoscopes from one of those ridiculous teen magazines.
“What’s your sign?” she said after I flopped on the bed beside her.
“Sagittarius.”
She was quiet for a bit while she read.
“Says here you’re going on a journey soon, and being a Sag”—her voice changed to sound all moody and mysterious—“let your natural inquisitiveness be your guide.” She was silent again while she read some more. When she s
poke again she was just herself. “Oh, and romance is peaking around the eighteenth of the month. So I guess you’ll want to make sure Simon is around and doesn’t get detention or anything like that.”
I’m not a big blusher, but I could feel my cheeks getting red.
“It’s cool,” Maxine said. “He’s good people. But make sure that it’s just kissing.” Then she smiled that big open smile of hers.
“What’s September 24?” I asked her.
“Um, let’s see . . .” She consulted her magazine. “Ah, Libra. The scales of justice.”
Some justice, I thought.
“Shall I read on?” Maxine asked.
“No, doesn’t matter,” I lied to her.
At home things were the same. Dinner at six thirty, clean the kitchen, avoid the parents. They acted like they always had, as if there wasn’t some eight-year-old Libra child who lived somewhere in town who was my dad’s kid. Then one day I swear I saw him—Thomas.
The day after school let out for the summer, I was at the mall with Maxine. I’d hardly noticed school the last few weeks of class. It didn’t seem to matter; I basically did just the same in my finals as I had all semester. I don’t know what that says about how much attention school usually gets from me, but it was done and now I was free. At least my body was free; my mind was still the prisoner of this eight-year-old I had never met.
Simon wasn’t with us at the mall. He never went out with us. Maxine and I were eating hot pretzels from Auntie Molly’s, sitting on a bench outside the Sunglass Hut, when this skinny kid with short brown hair, carrying what was obviously a new baseball glove, went zipping past. There was no way to tell for sure, but he sort of looked like my dad. I have only ever seen one picture of my dad as a little kid—he was sitting on a split-rail fence with a really sweet smile on his face. My dad has always had a lovely smile—he’s lucky. But it was more the feeling I got when I saw the kid in the mall than the way he looked. A chill went down my spine. I got up to follow him.
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