Do-Overs

by Christine Jarmola

  “No stupid. I asked if Jeremy could come. Why would I want Josh to come?”

  Al looked at me and I shook my head sadly. “Don’t let them bother you.”

  “They don’t think you can hear their conversations,” added Jason from the end of the table while making the crazy sign with his finger around his ear.

  “It’s a twin thing,” mom clarified. “So don’t let them make you feel unwelcome. We are so happy to have you and Stina with our family.” I think she almost said in our family, but caught herself in time.

  Saved by the waitress taking our orders it quickly became total chaos. Poor waitress, especially since my dad is the stingiest tipper of all time. Her evening was not looking so good.

  Once the orders were taken my mom turned to Al. The grand inquisition had taken a rest, but it had not been finished. “Al, you look so familiar. Why is that?”

  Strange question. Yet, in our family strange was the new normal.

  “Um, Mrs. Lambert, I don’t know. I guess I just have one of those familiar faces.” That was so not true. Al had one of those one-in-a-million movie star type looks.

  “No, no that’s not it,” mom continued. “There’s something there. Someone we know that you look just like. Maybe a younger version? What do you think Julius?”

  My dad took off his glasses, rubbed them with his napkin, put them back on again and turned to look at Al like a specimen in a museum exhibit. “Now that you say that Julie, yeah, he does look like someone we know. Looks a lot like,” then he smiled and paused for dramatic effect. “A lot like that boy that Lottie’s been dating.”

  Strange. Al gave a big sigh of relief, like he had just escaped being outed in the witness protection agency. Had I been in the mood to contemplate, rather than salivate, I might have started to notice that Al was consistently evasive about himself. Unusual for an actor. A stereotypical actor is normally very self-focused and self-promoting, but Al always redirected questions about himself, into wanting to know more about those he was around.

  “Now, Mrs. Lambert,” he began but was interrupted with a “Just-call-me-Julie,” from my mom.

  “Julie,” Al corrected and gave her a dazzling smile. My mom smiled back. Had I been a more insecure person I would have thought my mother was flirting with my man. Gross. But then, poor old cougar, who could blame her. He was very hot. Sick. There have been many times in my life that I have been thankful that no one could read my thoughts. That moment ranked as number one. I suspected it ranked in my mom’s top ten also. “Do you get mistaken a lot for anybody famous?”

  “Lottie does,” Jennifer answered.

  “Yeah, she does,” chimed in Jessica too.

  “Who?” Al and Stina both asked.

  This brought double twin giggles, and scary unison twin speak, “The bride of Frankenstein.”

  “You two are ridiculous,” said my father coming to my defense.

  “I think she looks like the blonde girl in that movie we saw last summer,” Jason added. This brought on a discussion of which movie, and that yes, when I let my hair dry wavy, I looked just like her. We then went around the table trying to decide what movie star each of us resembled. Jason got that guy on the TV show that no one could remember the name of but by using her iPhone Jennifer was able to find it. That sent my dad off on an observation that was quickly turning into a dissertation about how amazingly easy it was to access information using the World Wide Web. Jason successfully derailed him by listing five beautiful actresses that he thought couldn’t come close to being as cute as Stina. This made Stina blush and everyone else at the table squirm. The twins brought us out of the awkward pause by wanting to know who they resembled and then vetoed everyone we suggested. My mom was the hardest as she and my dad kept listing actresses we had never heard of. Al decided my dad was Gregory Peck. Maybe not from looks as much as manner. Or maybe we were confusing him with the character Atticus Finch. What I never realized until somewhere in the flat boring landscape of Wyoming was that no one ever said who Al’s doppelganger was.

  Walking back to the condo, Al and I let the family (strange how quickly I was beginning to think of Stina as one of the family) pass. It was a beautiful starry night. The air was crisp, but unlike Oklahoma, no wind. Strolling hand-in-hand, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. A year before I had been in a destructive, manipulative relationship that I had thought would scar me for life. But life had given me a do-over at my new school, with my new friends and my new life. It hadn’t taken a magic eraser to give me that start, just my own determination to look for a better way. Perhaps I didn’t need that eraser after all. Perhaps I should have gotten rid of it. Those were my thoughts right before a sudden sneeze came into my nose. A massive, snot filled sneeze that I never saw coming. And neither did Al, as he was just turning to kiss me and got snotted right in the face. Ick.

  Maybe I did need that special eraser after all. Out it came. Again we were walking hand in hand. No snot on my beloved.

  “Hold that thought,” I said, as Al turned to kiss me. I turned my head the other way and sneezed. Yeah, I could philosophize all I wanted about the ethical and moral responsibilities of changing time, but sometimes I really did love having the means to redo the blunders in life.

  -53-

  On The Road Again

  “I like your Al,” my mom told me in hour number two of the infinite journey home. On our seat rotation the women were in the back again, the men up front driving.

  “I do too,” said Jessica. “Wish he had a brother.”

  “Does he have a brother?” Jennifer asked. “He never talks about his family.”

  “So mysterious,” answered Jessica in her mystical voice.

  Okay there was definitely some evasiveness of his California life if even the totally self-absorbed twins could notice. When we got back to campus I was going to demand some answers. If I was involved with a Mafioso, I had the right to know.

  Mom was still in her own thoughts. “You know what I like best about him?”

  Jennifer answered, “His hair.

  Stina said, “His smile. It’s so contagious.”

  “His butt,” laughed Jessica. Then receiving a glare from my dad in the rearview mirror she amended, “Not that I was looking. No way, no how.”

  Then all of us girls joined in a conspiratory whisper, “Yeah, right. Nice.”

  “No, you silly girls,” my mom continued trying to pretend like she had never noticed his butt, “I like how he likes you Lottie. In fact it appears that that poor boy is totally head over heels in love with you. And the look on your face shows that I’m right,” she said. And then she smugly added, “As usual.”

  That got a heavy sigh from the females in the car. A throat clearing from my father and no response from Jason. He’s a true guy, probably wasn’t listening.

  Hour four of the trip, just after the second rest stop, saw another seat rotation. Dad was driving and I was riding shotgun for the first time. Mom and the twins were in the back seat, each with some sort of headphones and electronic apparatus (or would that be apparati?) keeping them occupied. Jason and Stina had the middle. They seemed completely occupied without any electronic stimuli.

  “Daddy, can I ask you a question.” He gave me a wary look. Most questions that started with Daddy usually ended with a request for money or longer curfews. “What changed your mind about Al?”

  He tried to give me a blank look, but my bad poker face was inherited and he was the person I had gotten it from.

  “Come on. Something happened. When we went into the emergency room you acted like you wanted him out of my life as fast as possible. By the time I had my cast on your were bosom buddies. What happened?”

  “Lottie bug, you’re my little girl. Even if you are almost twenty-one, when I look at you I still see a little four year old running through the water sprinklers covered with blue popsicle juice down your face and on your swimsuit. No matter how old you get, you’re still my little girl,” he said w
ith a bittersweet smile on his face. He even looked a little misty eyed. Now I was used to that behavior from my mom, but not Dad. He always seemed more comfortable helping with math homework or showing me how to balance my checkbook. He was my practical parent leaving the emotions to my mom. “I saw you hurt, badly hurt last year. I was afraid it was going to happen again. Guess I wasn’t even going to give Al a chance. But having two hours stuck in the waiting room together, it was either talk it out or read a two-year-old Good Housekeeping. We decided to talk.”

  “So what did he say? What did you say? Please say you didn’t say anything embarrassing.”

  My dad laughed. “It was a talk between the two of us. None of your business. Let’s just say, I like your young man. And he likes you. And he knows that you have a huge football playing brother that will make sure that you don’t ever get treated badly again.”

  -54-

  When Non-Reality Hits The Fan

  “What is going on?” Rachel shouted in her room, but we could easily hear her in ours too. Stina and I gave each other a startled look that non-verbally reiterated what Rachel had so eloquently just shouted.

  “Should we go see what’s going on?” Stina asked.

  “Or hide until it blows over?” I asked.

  We both knew what we had to do. With fear and trepidation we crossed the safety of the shared bathroom, the line of demarcation, into the war zone. And war zone it resembled. Olivia was frantically pulling down posters and throwing her belongings into two huge cardboard boxes. Her closet was already empty and the sheets and comforter gone off her bed.

  “Lottie, Stina—talk some sense into her,’ Rachel pleaded.

  I felt like I had entered the bullring as a matador, except without my red cape. However, I was clutching my special eraser just in case I had to make a speedy exit. “Olivia, “ I said very calmly, like talking to a spooked horse, “Are you okay?”

  Olivia turned on us, threw down the poster she had in her hands and let us have it. “Okay? Do I look okay? Is a person okay when her supposedly best friend for life tells her most intimate secrets to someone else? Okay? When I confront her and she won’t even have the cojones to admit it? You bet your freaking life I’m not okay. If you and Rachel want to discuss all my personal business, I’ll just get out of your way and let you have at it. I’m moving out!”

  And with that she picked up her last two boxes and walked out the door, throwing her room key crashing against the wall.

  We all stood there stunned. What had happened? When had we betrayed a confidence?

  Rachel sat down on her bed, put her head in her hands and started to cry. “How could she think such a thing? Lottie, have I ever, ever told you anything about Olivia behind her back that I haven’t said to you right in front of her face? NEVER, that’s the answer. How can she think I did?” Then she rounded on me. “What did you say to make her think I did?”

  Fast on my feet as always, I responded, “Uh, nothing.” But a slow dimming light was starting to click on. I had made a crack about not running over S.P.B. and just before spring break I mentioned a stepfather and looked straight at Olivia. All info she had once confided in me. But through the miracle of do-overs she would never remember.

  “Can you two leave?” Rachel asked none too nicely. “I just need to be alone.”

  Stina and I slunk back into our room. We were both bewildered.

  “What just happened there?” Stina asked. “Did Rachel really tell you confidential stuff?”

  “No,” I adamantly denied. “It’s just some misunderstanding. I’ll just wait until Olivia has had some time to calm down and then I’ll talk to her. She has to see. It’s just got to be a misunderstanding,” I kept repeating like a mantra. “She has to see.”

  But what could she see? No one but me saw the changes the eraser made. No one knew the things that didn’t happen. Again I was realizing there was detritus left from changing time. Little tiny slivers that weren’t apparent at the time, but seemed to show up when not expected, in a dream that seemed too real, a jaw that hurt for no reason, or a friendship that was destroyed by my all too knowing looks.

  “I have to fix this,” I said out loud without realizing.

  “But how can you?” asked Stina. Was the doubt in Stina’s voice because the situation looks so unfixable? Or was she doubting that I was telling the truth that Rachel hadn’t broken a confidence? “How do you prove that Rachel didn’t tell you anything? How do you prove that something didn’t happen?”

  I thought and thought. I had no idea. How did you disprove a negative? With two positives was all I could guess.

  -55-

  Undoing Do-Over Damage

  “She’ll come around,” Al had advised.

  “She’ll get over it,” Butch added.

  “She’ll just have to get her happy panties back on sooner or later, cause this being mad and sulking just ain’t a working for any of you,” La—ah said, putting it all in perspective.

  It had been a week since Olivia had moved to a new room on the third floor. I guessed she was trying to get as far away from us as possible while still living in the same building. It was a Wednesday lunch and we were eating in the cafeteria. It was so sad. All of us together: Al, Stina, Rachel, Trevor, Butch, La—ah, Kasha, Kaylee, Kyra, and me. All at one table. Olivia was as far away as possible, sitting with none other than the jerk soccer player. Had she totally deserted us, even Keesha? Or was she working on revenge, cutting us out of the equation? Because, Lord please, oh please, don’t let her have been so depressed and insecure that she was really considering him as a friend or even possibly a date.

  The K’s had noticed Olivia’s new dining partner also. I tuned in to their conversation.

  “She had better be working on a plan and not a date, or she’s going down with him,” said Kyra. It was at that moment I realized two things. One that they were thinking the same thing about Olivia as I was and two, I could finally tell the K’s apart.

  I just played with my food. Ever since Olivia’s departure I had felt like Benedict Arnold. I had caused two bosom friends to be enemies and couldn’t find a way to correct the situation.

  “Lottie, it’s not your fault,” Al consoled yet again. “You have to quit blaming yourself for Olivia’s overactive imagination. If Rachel didn’t tell you anything,”

  Rachel interrupted, “Which I didn’t!”

  Al continued, “You can’t fix something you never did.”

  Little did he know how insightful his words were. How could I fix something that I never really had done? It was my mess and my responsibility to find a solution. I had thought that time would settle the storm, but instead the battle lines between Rachel and Olivia were being dug even deeper. Not only had I ruined their friendship, but also others who had confided in Rachel, our amateur psychologist, were beginning to give her suspicious looks and avoid any confidences with her. I had to do something. The only problem with that brilliant conclusion was I had no idea what. I had already told Olivia that Rachel was telling the truth and that hadn’t worked. I couldn’t tell her the real truth. Come on, would anybody really believe that load of hooey?

  “Darling,” He said ‘Darling.’ Some parts of my life might have been filled with remorse and guilt, but when Al Dansby said Darling, it was like a ray of glorious sunshine bursting through the clouds. “You really need to eat.” Then sometimes he sounded just like my mother.

  -56-

  Didn’t See That One Coming

  I was in her room. That was a step in the right direction. When I had set out to find a solution to reconcile my suitemates, I had doubted that Olivia would even let me through the door into her new room. But there I was, standing like a kid in the principal’s office trying to think of a credible excuse to get me set free.

  Olivia sat on her bed fiddling with her iPhone. I couldn’t get her to make eye contact with me. “Lottie, it’s nice of you to keep trying to patch things up with my lying ex-best friend, but be honest, i
t’s not gonna work. Somehow you know about my horrible past and there is only one person other than my family who could have told you. So either tell me the truth or leave.”

  The truth. What a novel idea. Maybe it was time to tell the truth. My time-altering eraser, which I had thought was the best invention since tampons, had turned out to be the cause of unintended deception. The truth. Right then and there I had a plan. I’d tell Olivia the truth. If nothing else she’d think I was mental, and it was my entire fault and maybe in some twisted way forgive Rachel. And if it didn’t work I’d just do it over.

  “Here it is Olivia. You are the person who actually told me about your stepfather and his molesting you and his sudden, accidental death.”

  Olivia was furious. Up until that point she had only been guessing that I knew her past. With my revelation she knew that the pitying looks had been for real. Unfortunately, my honesty sounded like another lie.

  “I never told you anything like that,” she said in a low, whispered hiss.

  How was I ever going to explain? “It’s like this, I have this magic eraser.” I held it up to show her. Obviously the believing me part wasn’t working, but the insanity defense was beginning to build. “My aunt gave it to me last summer. I thought she was crazy, but one day I accidentally used and it worked. When I want to change time, I just give it a wave and I go back in time. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes up to an hour. Anyway, one night you were a little tipsy. Well, if it’s time to be honest, you were totally wasted. And you told me about your stepfather. Then right afterwards I could tell that you wished you hadn’t. So, I thought I’d make things better for you by redoing it. That way you would never have told me. The only flaw is that when I redo things, I still remember them. You were so sad. I can’t forget it. And it shows on my face no matter how hard I try for it not to.”