The Next To Last Mistake

by Jahn, Amalie

  It was killing me, seeing it again, without you around. And that was before I realized it wasn’t going into the moving truck. It was going to the dump. The dump, Tess, can you believe it? I’m hoping you didn’t know they were getting rid of it, or maybe you didn’t think about it at all, so that’s why I hope you don’t mind what I did next because last night, after everyone else was asleep, I snuck over to your house and pulled it outta the trash heap. It’s in our barn now, behind the feed. And with your blessing, that’s where it’s gonna stay. Cuz I thought maybe someday you’d want it back. Or at least I was hoping you might.

  So anyway, I hope you’re not too mad I haven’t called or texted since you left. I read this article online about how you should give people time and space to get acclimated if they’re adjusting to a new situation. It seemed like sound advice at the time, but after purposely ignoring a bunch of your texts, I’m starting to realize maybe you needed a friend more than you needed space. Now I feel like a jerk, and I’m scared you might be too mad at me to answer when I do call, which is why I’ve written this letter instead. I want to hear how the move went and how everything’s going at your new school. As for here, everything is pretty much the same. Except for the part about everything being completely different.

  Text me if you get a chance.

  Z

  I set the letter on the floor and stare out the window at someone who I assume is one of my new neighbors, a stranger, walking her schnauzer in the glow of the streetlight. My mind is swimming, swirling, trying to make sense of the wash of emotions bubbling to the surface.

  The dog stops to poop in our yard.

  As I watch the woman cleaning the mess, I am struck by the many implications of Zander’s confession. That his recent unresponsiveness was born of compassion instead of pain or selfishness, as I had wrongfully assumed, is certainly a relief, but I’m also moved by the longing he must have felt as he watched my house being emptied. Was it mere nostalgia that inspired him to save the stupid go-kart from the trash? Or was it something more? Something deeper?

  I tuck the letter into the bottom of my sleeping bag—the only place I have to hide it—and slide my phone from my back pocket to send him a text. My fingers hover over the screen not knowing exactly what to say or how to say it. Should I pretend everything’s great? Tell him I got his letter, and I’m glad he kept the go-kart. Should I tell him about Leonetta and her purple and blue striped hair and affinity for Tabasco? About how Alice and I are going to be tutoring each other, and how there’s a possibility I might finally compete in a legitimate chess competition on an actual team? Should I mention Summer Phillips and how much he would like her because as it turns out she’s beautiful and charismatic and snarky but not in a mean sort of way?

  I don’t realize I’ve bitten my cuticle below the quick until I taste blood. I wrap my finger in my t-shirt to stop the bleeding and toss my phone onto the floor. As much as I want to reach out to Zander, I can’t. I’m too afraid. Afraid he’ll stop being the person he’s always been now that we’re apart. And so instead, I suppress the sadness and the longing and the homesickness and return to the kitchen to be with my family.

  chapter 9

  Converging Coordinate Planes

  Wednesday, January 16

  I slide the last of my jeans into my bottom dresser drawer and peel the tape from the seams of the cardboard box to break it down. It’s about the hundredth box I’ve emptied over the past week, and it feels good to be done. At least my bedroom finally feels like a bedroom instead of the Fed Ex distribution center it’s resembled since the movers arrived.

  The clock on my nightstand reads 6:49 pm. Alice will be here any minute, and I still haven’t looked at our math homework, much less prepared any history notes to review. I slide my geometry book out of my bag and flip to the assignment—using the distance formula on the coordinate plane.

  Super.

  Maybe she’ll want to do our homework together, I think.

  Moments later the doorbell rings, and I usher Alice into the foyer—or, more accurately, foyer-like space. She’s stately and elegant, looking more like a full-grown woman in her slacks and blouse than the sixteen-year-old she is. Standing beside her in my frayed jeans and faded Hy-Vee t-shirt makes me feel like the before photo in one of those make-over shows. Alice, however, doesn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m sorry I’m early,” she says breathlessly, slipping off her coat. “But my little brother Foster was driving me crazy, and I had to get out of the house. I bolted outta there as soon as my mom got home from work.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, taking her jacket and tossing it across the back of the nearby sofa. “I haven’t even looked at the history assignment yet so it’ll give us a few extra minutes to work on it together.”

  I lead her into the kitchen where the light from the overhead lamp is bright, and my mom and Ashley are still cleaning up from dinner.

  “You must be Alice,” Mom says, setting down her dishtowel as we enter the room.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Goodwin,” she says, easing onto one of the kitchen chairs around our newly acquired dinette table. “You have a beautiful home.”

  I have no idea why she says it. The house is far from beautiful and even further from being a home. Boxes still litter the floor space and the walls are devoid of my mom’s beloved photographs and hand-made wreaths. Still, the simple gesture, the sincerity with which she says it, endears her to me.

  We start with our history assignment, a five-hundred-word essay on the repercussions of Russia’s entry into the First World War on August 1, 1914. I end up having to backtrack, explaining to her about Russian interests in Serbia, but after about twenty minutes she’s able to construct a good outline of dates and facts to use for the essay.

  “How hard would it be for Ms. Krenshaw to actually explain all this stuff to us like you just did?” she asks rhetorically, tucking away her history notes and extracting her math text and a pack of gum from her bag. She offers me a piece as she has on every occasion since the first day we met. “It helps me focus,” she says, popping a stick of Wintergreen in her mouth.

  I peel mine from the wrapper, relishing the minty coolness against my tongue. “Is there some sort of guarantee on the label, because when it comes to math, God knows I need as much help as I can get.”

  She laughs, but after attempting the first two problems together, I can tell by the look on her face she’s realized I wasn’t kidding about my geometric ineptitude or the need for divine intervention. It’s clear she may have taken on a project beyond her level of tutorial prowess. She’s getting frustrated, and so am I. It’s as if I’ve walked in on a theatrical performance in its final act without any prior knowledge of the characters or plot.

  “You’re completely lost,” she says, closing her book. “Which means we need to get back to basics. I need to teach you how to use a coordinate plane.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay. So, let’s think about this for a minute. You play chess, right?”

  I nod.

  “Then let’s start there. Bring me a chess board—an old one if you’ve got it—and a few pieces.”

  Mom gives me a strange look over her shoulder as I make my way to the family room, where, after a brief scan, I spot the container I’m looking for at the bottom of a stack of boxes beneath the window. I shimmy it out without causing an avalanche, and inside, I’m relieved to find my collection of chess boards. I flip through them (there are eleven) and choose the rattiest, a cardboard one with peeling edges and a gaping crack in the spine.

  Shoving the remaining boards back into the box, I come across the homemade wooden one with tiny brass hinges and perfect squares of inlaid cherry and birch. The board is my father’s and was my grandfather’s before him. It’s the board Dad taught me to play on, where I slid my first tentative pawn from one square to the next.

  Although I was only six, I remember the details of that game as if I’m still a small child, sit
ting on his lap while he coached me through the logistics of every move. I recall the way he encouraged me to think carefully about the long-term implications of each decision, seeing forward not just to the next move, but the one after that and the one after that, predicting what he might do in response to my own moves. Reminding me even though pawns can only move vertically one or two spaces, they can capture diagonally. It was the first time I remember him using The Face, the one he reserves for when I’m falling into one of his traps. He never told me outright what I was doing wrong but encouraged me instead to discover and remedy the situation on my own. I lost that first game and many more in subsequent years. He never let me win, refusing to lure me into a false sense of security in the hopes of bolstering my confidence. How it frustrated me as a child to never win. To always presume to be so close to victory, only to be placed in check, blindsided by my instructor.

  Looking at the board now, as beautiful in my hands today as it was a decade before, I understand my dad’s resolve. Why he never gave in to the temptation to let me beat him, as I’m sure he probably wanted to on many occasions, his daughter sitting across the table from him on the verge of tears. Because once the day finally arrived, a year ago in November of my sophomore year, the legitimate victory was the sweetest, most glorious moment of my young life. I ran, without stopping to relish Dad’s congratulatory hug, across the field and past the tree to Zander’s, where news of my victory was celebrated with unmitigated exuberance and ice cream. If he had let me win at seven, or nine, or twelve, before I was able to reasonably beat him on my own, our hours together would have been tarnished, marred by the inauthentic and underlying belief I would never be truly capable of it on my own. With this knowledge and understanding, I return to the kitchen, armed with a clearer perspective of my undertaking with Alice, only to find her chatting like old friends at the table with my mom.

  “There are ten cousins in all,” Alice is saying, “and I’m the oldest. It’s mostly fun, watching them grow and learn, but it’s hard to get anything done when we’re all together, you know what I’m sayin’? Especially school work. And the little ones are the neediest. Poor little Patsy can’t even tie her own shoes.”

  Mom smiles sympathetically and glances up, realizing I’ve stepped into the room. “Tess, did you know Alice’s family keeps a plot of farmland down the road on the other side of Spring Lake? You said you grow soybean and sorghum and cotton?”

  Alice nods.

  “Tell Tess about the farm’s history. It’s fascinating.”

  I can’t imagine Alice, with her chewing gum and chic hairstyle and fitted slacks working on a farm. I slip onto the empty chair beside her as she begins to explain.

  “The land was my great-great-grandfather’s, bought with his own wages after the emancipation. He was a butcher, not a farmer, but he kept the land planted every year for his kids to harvest. By hand, of course. Said he didn’t want them to forget where they came from. Said he wanted to make sure they had a physical connection to their past. Anyway, when he died, he passed the land and the tradition on to his kids, and my great-grandfather and great uncles did the same with their families. To this day, my dad plants every spring and my brother and I harvest every fall. It’s a small plot. Not nearly as big as the one my dad and his brothers and sisters picked, but still, it’s enough to get your muscles burning.” She holds out her hands, and I can make out scars on her fingertips. “My cousins are secretly plotting to sell their portion of the land once it’s our time, but who knows? I might join the Black Cotton movement.”

  “Black Cotton?” I ask.

  “Yeah, there’s this amazing fifth-generation cotton farmer here in North Carolina who started this company, Black Cotton, as a way for other black, small-acreage cotton farmers to sustain profitability. But they don’t sell the cotton to the clothing industry; they sell it as décor, like in bouquets and stuff.” She narrows her eyes at me. “Have you ever seen real cotton before? Like still on the stalk?”

  I shake my head.

  “Most people haven’t,” she says, smiling. “It’s actually quite beautiful. Maybe you’d like to help us with the harvest in the fall and you can see it for yourself?”

  That Alice is willing to share this part of herself with me fills my farmer heart to overflowing. “I’d love that,” I tell her.

  Smiling satisfactorily to herself, Mom backs out of the room. “I guess it’s a good thing Alice asked about our farm back in Iowa,” she says, revealing the origin of their conversation. “Kinda cool you both know a thing or two about agriculture.”

  There’s a tug. The pull of an invisible connection strengthening the bond between us. I wonder how many threads it will take to seal our friendship and how many connections we’ll discover as the days go by. Surely there are others.

  I wonder how many threads run between me and Zander, tying us to one another across the miles. Hundreds? Thousands? And I wonder how long it will take for them to dissolve once our lives are no longer intertwined as they once were.

  “You found a chessboard,” Alice says, startling me from my thoughts. For a moment, I’d forgotten I was still holding it.

  “Yeah, and it’s an old one so we can do whatever you want with it.”

  She unfolds the board on the table and pulls a black Sharpie from her bag, dividing the board into four equal segments, bisecting it across the middle in both directions. “It’s a coordinate plane,” she says.

  My eyes widen with understanding. “So, this one’s the X-axis and this one’s the Y-axis,” I say pointing at the lines she’s drawn.

  “Exactly,” she confirms, gathering the handful of pawns I’ve dumped on the table. “And we’re going to use these chess pieces to plot the points.”

  We continue through our assignment in this way, physically plotting the shapes on the plane then plugging the coordinates into the distance formula for each mark. It’s slow work but after half-an-hour, it’s beginning to make sense.

  “The shape isn’t changing in size, it’s just changing position,” I say.

  “Yes. The formula gives the translation.”

  “So, this one is…” I pause, drumming the eraser of my pencil against the table. “(x -6, y 3)?”

  I’m overcome by a sense of relief at completing the assignment and even more relieved I came to the correct conclusions on my own. “Yes. You’ve totally got it,” she tells me.

  She glances around the room, landing on the microwave clock over the stove. “It’s getting late,” she says. “I promised Foster I’d be home in time to read with him before bed. We’re halfway through the third Harry Potter. My mom had two fits and a hemorrhage when she found out I was reading it to him, but I convinced her the series isn’t of the devil.” She rolls her eyes, chucking her belongings into her bag before heading toward the front door. “Moms, right?”

  “Right,” I agree, the tug of another thread gathering between us. A thread I hope is one of many more to come.

  chapter 10

  Stenos and Strippers

  Friday, January 18

  Cecilia slides our plates of lasagna and string beans across the serving counter to Leonetta and me, and as the aroma wafts upward, I’m thankful, as I am every day, I’m no longer stuck eating standard lunch fare. Leonetta is pleased by how willingly I’ve taken to Cecilia’s cooking and teases it’s all part of her master plan to assimilate me into a true southern belle, but I’m just happy I don’t have to eat limp, greasy fries anymore. We turn the corner from the line to the seating area and are discouraged to find our usual seats are occupied.

  “A bunch of teams must be leaving school early today because of away games. Our shift always ends up being mad overcrowded on those days,” Leonetta explains, scanning the aisles for other options.

  We’re still shuffling aimlessly around the perimeter when I spot Alice and Summer laughing together in the center of the room. There are two seats across from them, and I signal to Leonetta to follow me. Shimmying in their direct
ion among the minefield of backpacks while praying I don’t tip anything off my tray onto someone’s head, I’m still distracted by the segregation of the lunchroom. Black kids with the black kids. Latino kids with the Latino kids. White kids with the white kids. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of skin color being so tied to making kids who they are. Being such a huge part of their identities, like belonging to an exclusive team or a club. Back in Iowa, white was the default setting for everything, and I never gave my skin color a second thought. But it’s hard not to think about it here, and I can’t help but wonder if Leonetta has ever not had to think about race.

  Race doesn’t appear to be an issue for Alice and Summer’s friendship, though, with their heads nearly touching as they share chips from the same bag of Lays.

  “Can we sit with you?” I ask, approaching from the opposite side of the table.

  Alice looks up from their notebook and smiles. “Of course,” she says.

  As Leonetta and I set down our trays, it’s clear we’ve interrupted them. I’m hesitant to say anything, but Leonetta speaks right up. “Whatcha doing?” she asks, taking her first bite of lasagna.

  Alice and Summer glance at one another, an unspoken dialogue between them to determine whether to include us in whatever they’re discussing. Only a second passes before Alice slides a spiral-bound steno across the table, carefully avoiding our lunches. The wire is across the top of the notebook, and it’s opened to a page in the back. Along the top of the sheet, I recognize Alice’s handwriting. It says, ‘Eleven Reasons to Never Date a Private.’ Below, there are seven completed bullet points and four blank spaces.