by Rachel Vail
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said last time it came up, this past fall. “I don’t even remember it, except in the story, and anyway, it was completely my fault. You totally made the right call.”
“But you were just a little child,” Mom said. She blinked twice and went to take a shower. That was weird. It was just a bead necklace. How much of a rare beauty could it even have been?
This morning I woke up with a jolt. I was in the middle of a dream where Mom was telling that old story of the time I threw down Rare Beauty, and she stopped where she always stops, but this time not because she got suddenly sad but instead to go get the secret small blue box of stationery and photos of Bret out of her sock drawer. In it were no old photographs. Instead the blue box held only the most perfect bead necklace anyone had ever made. As she put it over my head, Mom said, “I picked it up at the last minute. All this time, I was just saving it to give back to you at the right moment.”
My hand was clutching the necklace Emmett had given me.
30
WHAT I LEARNED TODAY AT SCHOOL
1. Nothing.
31
WHY
All everybody wanted to talk about was Sienna and AJ: what a cute couple they are, how he had asked her out by cute texts, and when are they going to kiss? Maybe at the party at Michaela’s house? Which is on Wednesday after the volleyball and baseball games and isn’t actually a party. It’s just chilling (we don’t say hanging out anymore; keep up). All the guys on the baseball team and the girls on volleyball, chilling at Michaela’s.
Sienna is sure it would be fine for me to come too, and in fact, she’s not going unless I go too, so I absolutely have to go.
Even though Sienna is on the volleyball team, she doesn’t usually hang out with (I mean chill with) the Loud Crowd after. Usually she just hangs out with, well, me.
I finally got used to not saying have a playdate with.
The only really good thing that happened all day was that in English, we found out our next book is Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, and raise your hand if you already read it (if I had seven hands, I couldn’t raise them enough to be accurate about how many times I read that book last summer; so good), and Emmett raised his hand too. We were the only ones. So the two of us have to take a quick quiz on it tomorrow, and if we both pass, we will be in a group of our own.
I guess we’ll probably read and discuss a different book chosen by Ms. Valerian. Or, more likely, we will discuss Sienna and AJ, because truly that is all there is now.
I really hope the alternate book is good so I don’t regret admitting that I already read Brown Girl Dreaming. I could have just shut up and reread it, and been partners with Sienna if there’s a project. That would’ve left Emmett alone in the alternate book group though, so maybe it’s good I got excited and raised my hand without thinking.
It’s definitely a good thing I don’t need to reread Brown Girl Dreaming tonight to prep for tomorrow’s quiz because I am very, very busy making up funny, subtle, not-too-romantic but not-too-stiff responses to the texts AJ is sending to Sienna.
It’s crazy easy to respond to him. It’s like he sets me up for what to say, and I set him up right back, and then he zings it back to me, just perfect for me to respond.
But I don’t respond to him. I respond to Sienna. Who copies and pastes.
And tells me how amazing and awesome I am.
Wouldn’t it be so much more efficient if AJ and I just texted directly? (This is the thing I did not text to Sienna. Instead I texted: aww shucks.)
Also I am very busy watching Lightning sunbathe in a patch of light near the living room window-doors, while I try with every brain cell to invent a reason I can’t go to a party with all the kids who are on teams, including the entire Loud Crowd, at which Sienna might get her first kiss. Even though I just texted my best friend that obvi I will come if she wants me to, and Sienna responded: omg, yes, I need you there.
Even though if the situation were reversed, I know she would just be psyched for me, and I would need her there for support, and she would be there, no question.
32
LUCKILY WE HAVE THE UNLIMITED TEXTING PLAN BECAUSE
AJ: So r u going 2 Michaela’s Wednesday?
SIENNA (via me): Not sure—are you going?
AJ: Yeah probably
SIENNA: (didn’t respond because she was still texting with me to figure out what to say when he popped up again)
AJ: You should def come. It’ll be fun. Michaela’s parents usually order in lots of food and we eat up on the roof.
SIENNA (me): the roof? yikes.
(Sienna has been to Michaela’s; we all have. She knew what that meant, that they’d eat in the party area on the roof garden of Michaela’s building. It was a way of stalling on our part, and also of teeing up something for him to say back, is what I told Sienna. She was doubtful, but she trusted me. She always trusts me.)
AJ: Hahahaha there’s a whole party area up there, chairs, tables, lights
SIENNA (me): oh cool, much less sketchy than it sounded. ;-)
AJ: Yeah a party on a different kind of roof would be kind of overwhelming.
SIENNA (me): or underwhelming.
AJ: When ideally you really want a party to just be whelming.
SIENNA (me): the perfect amount of whelm is such a tough thing to achieve.
AJ: Right? If it’s either over or underwhelming we’re so leaving
SIENNA (me): we demand exact amounts of whelm!
AJ: whelm us properly, world!
SIENNA (me): what do we want? to be whelmed! when do we want it?
AJ: Always!
SIENNA (me): exactly. including now, but: gtg, ten pm . . . parents . . .
AJ: May take me a while to fall asleep.
SIENNA (me): same.
AJ: GN. Stay whelmed.
(Sienna to me: GN?)
(Me to Sienna: good night?)
(Sienna to me: oh, obv. ugh, can you get a concussion from flirting by text? will you just take my phone and deal from now on?)
(Me to Sienna: hahahaha. just say you too. GN)
SIENNA (me): you too. GN.
me: that was awesome Sienna. are you so happy?
SIENNA (actually Sienna, texting only me): yeah. I am. kind of. also, exhausted? but that was fun.
me: ya think? that was completely wonderful
SIENNA: what will happen though if we have to talk face to face and you’re not there to help? he’s gonna think I turned into such a dud.
me: no way. you’re funny and sweet and perfect. and you’re so pretty he’ll forget how to form words anyway so it won’t matter.
SIENNA: oh then we’ll be the perfect couple, going like duh and ummm and staring at our shoes.
me: maybe that’s why people end up kissing
SIENNA: because they have nothing to say to each other?
me: good a reason as any
SIENNA: let’s meet early tomorrow morning, so I never have to face anybody without you, okay?
me: sure sounds good. xoxoxox
SIENNA: hahahaha.
33
THE LATEST
Guess I left my computer open on my floor while I slept last night. I woke up to find Lightning, sitting on it, looking up at me, very pleased with the status update she had just posted for me.
It was:
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiwwwwwww22222222222222222222w wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww , . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk kffffffff66666666666666668
It’s better than any I’ve posted lately, so I figured I’d leave it.
In case I was feeling all kinds of creative and genius for writing other people’s messages for them: so can my tortoise.
34
ALONE TOGETHER
> On the way to English today, Dorin asked if I wanted to come to the pet shop on Wednesday. “Since Sienna’s going to that party,” she said. “I thought you’d be free.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering how she even knew that. “Thanks! But I can’t. I have to . . . I told my mom I would do a . . . a thing, help her.”
“Oh,” Dorin said, smiling. “Okay. Maybe some other time.”
“Definitely,” I said. “Thanks. That would be fun, hanging at the, you know.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I love your necklace. That’s new, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, touching it. “Thanks. Birthday present.”
“From your parents?”
I was just going to lie and say yes, since I was in a lying groove already, but that seemed weird, a lie for no reason, so I said, “No, Emmett got it for me.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s . . .”
“That’s what?” I asked.
“That’s really romantic,” she said.
“No, not at all,” I explained. “It’s just . . .”
Riley lunged forward and yanked Dorin close enough to whisper to her. I couldn’t hear what Riley asked.
“Emmett,” Dorin said to Riley, her voice definitely loud enough. “Why?”
Riley shhh’d Dorin, raised her eyebrows twice, then smiled at me.
“What?” I asked her.
She chuckled to herself and then turned to whisper something to Beth, whose eyes flicked up at me and then quickly away. Ms. Valerian told me to sit down at the table in the back. When Emmett showed up, she sent him to the back table too and then handed us facedown quizzes on Brown Girl Dreaming. She explained that assuming we both passed the quiz—“Don’t worry; I know you both will,” she said, winking—we could work alone together on the extra project, since we didn’t have to do the nightly reading of twenty pages and then answering five questions about it. I had thought we’d get assigned some cool other book, but this was even better.
We flipped over our papers when Ms. Valerian said to, and quickly filled in the answers. It was an easy quiz, just confirming that we’d read the book, no big deal. Except that everybody kept glancing over at us. Every time I looked up, heads whipped away.
As if it meant something about us, that we were segregated at the back table, both taking a quiz on a book, just the two of us plus my necklace, which, why did I wear it to school, two days in a row? Or, worse, that I thought it meant something about us, about Emmett and me, as if I wanted it to be, well, more.
Come on. Obviously not. It was just Emmett and me, forced to take a quiz and then work on a project together. We just both happened to have read a particular book already. Plus, we’re friends. We do stuff together all the time, always have.
I would never want to mess that up, or take a chance of messing that up.
We’re friends. No subtext.
It’s just Gracie and Emmett, you guys. Not, like, Michaela and David, or Sienna and AJ or Beth and Ben or something. Yikes. Look away, look away. It’s just two not-super-popular, kind-of-brainy regular kids, discussing quietly whether it would be more fun to make a diorama or a triptych poster board or do a short scene with reading aloud some portions of Brown Girl Dreaming or if that’s not culturally okay because I am a white girl and he is an only somewhat brown boy, being half-Filipino and half-Israeli. But still, we could both relate to so many of Jacqueline Woodson’s poems—and even with the ones we didn’t directly relate to, we felt like, Yeah—so maybe reading them in some kind of organized or dramatic way, or memorizing them and presenting them to the class, would be okay, or even good?
It was cool, working on that, fun and almost relaxing, just doing schoolwork for a change—until I accidentally glanced up again and saw so many eyes flicking away from us. I groaned so Emmett would know I wasn’t thinking anything other than what a bunch of deluded losers they all were, to think this was anything. He did the same, and then we looked back down at our books. His book was in much nicer shape than mine. It looked practically new. I should be less brutal, gentler with my books, I decided. And then, hallelujah, it was time to go to Spanish, so we made a plan to get together later and work on the project more after he got home from opera class.
Anyway, that felt like the big drama of the day, until I got home from school. Well, that and the continued plotting about how and whether the Sienna-AJ kiss would happen Wednesday on the roof of Michaela’s building: Would they go off alone behind the storage shed? Or go down to Michaela’s to get more food and kiss in her kitchen? Or just be holding hands and accidentally start kissing in front of everybody, like Michaela and David sometimes do but they’ve been going out for months and also have both kissed other people before so they know what they’re doing and are unlikely to faint or miss like Sienna fears she might?
I walked home alone in the bright sunshine of the afternoon, since Sienna and the rest of them had practice for all their sporty things, and Emmett had left school a little early for an opera rehearsal (so I guess that’s what he meant by after he got home from opera—not class but rehearsal). I walked home, thinking about that, about how you can think you know a thing, but then it turns out you’re wrong—usually just little things, like if a person has opera class or rehearsal, or, like, if a person (a different person from the one in the opera example) definitely wants to kiss your best friend, or maybe in fact he’s scared too, or unsure if he really likes exactly her in a kissing way. If it can turn out that your assumptions are sometimes just flat wrong, doesn’t that make even the hard concrete of truth feel alarmingly spongy beneath a person?
I said hi to the homeless woman outside the bank and assured her that, yes, I was keeping up my studies, and said hi to the jewelry/hat guy on the corner, but I didn’t point out my necklace to him. I wasn’t wearing the hilarious hat, which would have been more noticeable. I just said hello and he smiled with his mouth but not with his sad, sleepy eyes. Some people have sad eyes even when they’re smiling. The rest of the way down the block toward home I wondered what might have happened to the jewelry/hat guy in his past to make his eyes so sad all the time, and also thought about the fact that there’s very little likelihood I’d ever find out.
You can’t just go up to people and say, Why do you seem so sad? as if you were asking, How much does that amazing hat cost? You just have to wait and wonder.
Usually.
35
ALONE
I’m not a baby. I’m fourteen. I’ve been in my apartment alone before. I have my own keys. I come home to nobody plenty. It’s not that.
I walked in, hung my keys on the hook, and said hello. Nobody answered. The ceiling fans were off and the AC hadn’t been turned on in any of the rooms, but the windows were all closed, so it was hot and still in the apartment. All the lights were off. No note. I had the feeling, maybe the fear, that they were gone, both of my parents—that they had left and not taken me with them, maybe had moved back to Boston or just gone away together to Tahiti or Europe and forgotten all about me. It was just for a second, part of a second, that old worry I used to have in nightmares and, well, daymares. Before I could even fully feel it, I knew that was ridiculous. Never. Gonna. Happen.
They would never move on without me. Right?
And then I remembered what day it was.
The day Bret died.
April 17. Eighteen years ago today, my sister died, and I had gone through the whole day selfishly not remembering. Not even realizing in the morning that my parents were unusually quiet, folding their lips into their mouths, trying to smile more than actually smiling when they looked at me. Not even really looking at me, now that I thought about it. Most of the time they scan my face, checking for any sign of sadness or worry, watching me, looking too closely until I want to scream at them to leave me alone. But this morning they weren’t really looking at me at all. They were trying not to cry in front of me
, maybe, or just, like, thinking. Having stuff in their heads that had nothing to do with me, that was prior to me.
Once, when I was little, Dad was telling some story about when he was a kid and went to a football game with his grandfather. The point of the story was his grandfather’s Boston accent, but I interrupted Dad to ask if I had gone to the game with him and his Boston grandfather. He said, “No, sweetheart. I was a kid. You weren’t alive then!”
I remember that freaked me out. I remember asking him, “Wait, I was dead? When was I dead? Why didn’t you ever tell me I was dead before?”
“You weren’t dead,” Dad said, laughing. “You just weren’t alive yet. I was a little boy.”
He gathered me up onto his lap. But I wasn’t in the mood to be cuddled. I remember his cheek was scratchy against mine, and I pulled away to look him in his blue eyes. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, because it seemed like I had just stumbled upon some secret truth about myself that had been kept from me. “If I wasn’t alive, I was dead! Right?”
“No,” he said, rubbing his head the way he always does when he’s thinking, and smiled at me, his bright little girl, so interesting, so sunshiney. “You weren’t dead; you just weren’t yet.”
“I weren’t what?”
His eyes crinkled appreciatively. “You weren’t born yet. You weren’t anything.”
“Was I with Bret?”
He blinked, and the joyful crinkles dissolved instantly and the whites of his eyes turned red before tears formed in their inside corners. I remember watching it happen, the tear in one of his blue eyes gathering itself into a small globe. I watched to see if it would fall. It didn’t.