The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  As I hopped on my bike, Ashley zipped out of the driveway and sped by in the Camry, failing to stop completely at the stop sign up ahead. I imagined that inside the car she was checking her lip gloss in the rearview mirror.

  “She could at least offer us a ride,” Ryan complained as we started pedaling. In mid-August the air was still heavy with monsoon moisture and crushing heat. I felt sweat instantly beading up on my brow, and I could hear Ryan’s heavy breath as we began to pedal hard up the hill. I wondered what would happen if he stopped breathing, if he just ceased to be. The possibility terrified me, sank into my chest, hard and terrible like a rock.

  “We don’t want to go with her anyway.”

  “We don’t?”

  “She has to go pick up Mr. September.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes. Austin White was Ashley’s very new boyfriend and also the cocaptain of the baseball team. Ryan and I were betting they’d be broken up by the end of September, which is how Ryan had thought of the nickname. He said it was even funnier if you knew anything about baseball (which I didn’t), because there was some famous player who was called Mr. October.

  Austin was supposedly very good, and Ashley had taken a new interest in baseball. She’d sit there in front of the TV at night, squinting at the plays. “Well, what does that mean?”

  My mother would shake her head. “Oh, who cares?” she’d say. “Ashley, what’s gotten into you? This, over some boy?”

  “He’s not just some boy, Mom.” Her eyes got this sort of dreamy, faraway sheen to them, but I didn’t think it was love. Austin was tall and muscular with blond hair and a tanned face, and I thought Ashley was counting on the fact that they’d still be dating in the spring and then she would have a chance at being crowned queen of the spring formal.

  “You should tell your mom,” Ryan said. He knew about my mother’s rule that Ashley was not allowed to drive anyone else except for me.

  I shrugged. “It’s not worth it.” I thought about what Ashley had said the night before, that she wasn’t going to admit to knowing me. And the truth was, I’d rather be riding my bike, sweating with Ryan, than sitting in the cool, uncomfortable silence of the car with her.

  The high school was much larger than our middle school and strangely menacing. You had to walk up a wide row of cement steps to even get into the school. I counted them the first time up. Twenty. Twenty long steps that led to a seemingly ominous set of double doors. People rushed past, bumping into us as if they didn’t even see us, calling out to friends, hugging each other, screaming. I thought about my dad’s fact, that without gravity there were no tears, that emotion itself became void, and I wondered if that could be true in a place like this too, a place that was large enough to swallow you whole without anybody even noticing.

  The school was so big that it was a challenge just to find where my classes were. I had Algebra 2 first, then social studies. Third period, just before lunch, I had biology, and when I walked into the room, I was thrilled to see Ryan already sitting there.

  He got a big, goofy grin on his face when he saw me, and I slid into the seat next to him.

  “Thank God,” I whispered.

  On the downside, our teacher, Mr. Finkelstein, talked in a monotone and droned on and on about how we were going to have to dissect things, starting with a frog first semester and a pig in the spring. “Cool,” Ryan whispered to me. I made a face at him.

  After lunch I had Spanish with a crotchety old lady who refused to speak a word of English, even on the first day, so I had no idea what she was saying, and then I had PE with a very manly looking woman who seemed really into field hockey. Ugh.

  Last period was advanced English, and I could tell I was going to like it right away. My teacher, Mrs. Connor, seemed really cool. She was short, with a high, dramatic voice and little spectacles, and I felt a little like I was watching some sort of theater production when she stood in front of the class, because she was so lively and jumped around a lot. “Poetry is a shadow,” she yelled out to us. She wore this big red floppy hat with a feather in it, something that made her look like some movie star from the 1940s. I loved her inherent kookiness, something I was sure my father would’ve appreciated, a story for his book.

  On the bike ride home, Ryan untucked his shirt as we rode, and he laughed wildly. “Freedom,” he yelled to me. “Ahh, freedom.”

  I laughed. But I imagined how the days were going to drag on and on and on, and how long it would be until we got a break again.

  I also felt a little disappointed, because in my head I’d been imagining high school to be this grand, glorious place with tons of new and interesting people. But in reality, it seemed just like junior high, only big enough that now I was invisible.

  “I’ll race you to the wash,” Ryan called out as he sped up to pass me.

  I stood up to gain some speed, and even though sweat was falling into my eyes, I pedaled harder to catch him.

  At the beginning of the second week, Mr. Finkelstein pushed us right into things by dropping the plastic bags containing the dead frogs on our lab tables. “Take good care of him,” he told us all as he stood in front of the room and wrung his hands together. “He’s your one and only.”

  I made a face at Ryan. It was weird and creepy that this guy was telling us to take care of something that was already dead and that we were planning on mutilating, which dropped biology into my second-worst class, just ahead of PE and possibly tied with Spanish.

  Luckily, we got to pick our lab partners, so Ryan and I paired up, and he said he didn’t mind wielding the scalpel. “Come here, little guy.” Ryan rolled him over in the tray almost tenderly before making the first cut.

  “Don’t talk to him like that,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, like he’s your pet or something.”

  Ryan shrugged. “He needs a name.” He held up the frog so the dead little face was staring at me. I turned away.

  “How about Kermit?” Not entirely creative but the first thing that popped into my head for a frog.

  He laughed. “Then in the spring we’ll have Miss Piggy.”

  “Or Mr. Piggy, depending on what we get.”

  “Okay, Kermit,” Ryan said. “Sorry about this.” He held up the scalpel; I didn’t watch as he made the first cut.

  The day after we started on the frog, a new girl joined us in bio. “Class,” Mr. Finkelstein droned. I looked up, the world blurry and swimming through my lab goggles. “Let’s all welcome Courtney Whitman, shall we?”

  We all mumbled hi and turned our attention back to our frogs. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t pay too much attention to her at first.

  Chapter 3

  Before my father died, my mother hadn’t worked. For a few weeks after his death, my mother spent nights sitting at the kitchen table poring over all the bills. There was a bill for some huge sum of money from the agency that had sent us Annette, which my mother grumbled about not being able to pay. I suddenly wondered how we were going to live, where we were going to get money. “Are we going to move?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “Why would you say that, Melissa?”

  “I don’t know.” I was thinking about Jessica Snyder, who’d been my good friend in fourth grade. Her father had lost his job, and then three months later they’d moved out of their house to go live with her aunt in Phoenix. We only had my grandma Harry, who had been in an assisted-living facility and had recently moved into the nursing-home part because her Alzheimer’s was getting worse. My mother’s sister, Julie, lived with her husband in Pennsylvania. They were both sort of stuffy sociology professors, and I knew it was cold there, so I hoped we weren’t going to go live with her.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do, sweetie. This wasn’t in my plan, you know.” She laughed, but it was a high-pitched kind of laugh that sounded like it could turn into crying at any moment. “You just don’t plan for this. Not really.” She paused. “We’ll get the life-insurance mon
ey, but that will only go so far. And I haven’t had a job since your sister was born, in well, my God, that’s been nearly sixteen years.” She stood up and walked toward the sliding glass door that led out to our tiny backyard, which was filled with crushed rock, cacti, and a small irrigated square of grass. “Where does the time go anyway?” she mused.

  Usually my mother had perfect posture and a wide smile that showed off her completely straight, white, tiny teeth. I had what my mother called horse teeth, big and square, inherited from my father’s side of the family. So I always tried to smile with my mouth closed.

  She walked away from the door, and she smoothed back my hair. “Don’t you worry, sweetie. I’ll get it all figured out.”

  My mother had been a teenage beauty queen. Or I guess the truth was she’d been first runner-up in a lot of beauty pageants, but she won one. She was Queen of the Rodeo in 1986. She has the picture of herself, sitting proud atop a horse, her long black hair flowing past her shoulders, a sparkly tiara on her head, and a sash over a pink dress. The picture is hanging in her bedroom, right next to her dresser.

  She told us once that right before they took that picture the horse tried to throw her, and she ended up falling in the dirt. “But did I cry?” She shook her head. “No, girls. I brushed myself off and got right back on that horse, and see, look here, you wouldn’t even know it, would you?”

  The day after my mother and I had our talk, she went out and got a job washing hair at a salon. After a few weeks she decided to go to beauty school and get her degree.

  When she was in beauty school, she always wanted to practice on Ashley and me. I was the guinea pig, the one she experimented on when she didn’t know what she was doing yet, not really, anyway. I hated having her tug at my hair, having her cut it into some new style. I didn’t like seeing a new person when I looked in the mirror, seeing the unfamiliar shape of my face, with slightly uneven shorter layers. My cheeks were too fat and my nose a little too big. I had the same jet-black hair as my mother and Ashley, but while theirs was straight and shiny, mine had a little bit of a frizzy wave to it.

  After one terrible, oddly layered cut, I refused to help her out. “Oh, come on, Melissa,” my mother would say, tugging at the ends of my crooked hair. “Let me fix it up.”

  I shook my head. “It’s fine. Just leave it.”

  Ashley rolled her eyes. “She doesn’t even care about her hair. Seriously, Melissa. Someday, you’ll grow up and want to look pretty.”

  Just before I started high school, my mother got a job as an assistant stylist at a salon called Belleza, which she told me meant “beauty” in some other language. It was a very upscale place, and the people who went there had money, which my mother said meant she would get really good tips.

  But now, for the first time, the house was empty after school. My mother didn’t get home until around seven, when she’d stumble in wearing her black dress and heels, pop some frozen dinners in the microwave, and sit down on the couch and rub her ankles.

  Usually Ashley would drive Mr. September home after baseball practice (I’d heard a rumor that he’d crashed his own car over the summer and his parents hadn’t gotten him a new one yet). She’d hang out with him at his house for a while, since both his parents worked late and, as she’d mentioned, giving me a snide look, he didn’t have a younger sister. As if it were my fault that I had nowhere else to go.

  But I was glad she didn’t bring him here. I’d walked by the two of them at school a few times. Austin would have Ashley pinned against his locker, and they’d be kissing so furiously that it looked like he was about to suck her face off. I couldn’t imagine that that was really love.

  If Ryan’s father was at work, he’d come over and hang out with me, which was the same thing we’d done in junior high school too, only then my mom had been home most of the time, and she’d brought us snacks of fresh-baked cookies and apple slices. Now, as we lay on the floor of the den and watched TV, we had only stale potato chips to munch on.

  Ryan had grown taller than me over the summer, and as we stretched out on the floor, tumbling over couch pillows, I’d been noticing how long his legs were getting, how it seemed possible he could outgrow the room, that he would all at once be too big to hang out on the floor with me.

  But when he started to cough and wheeze, and he pulled his inhaler out of his shorts pocket and sucked on it in one rapid puff, he was also still that little boy from down the street.

  One afternoon in the beginning of September, as we were sitting there on the floor in the den watching some lady scream obscenities at the man who may or may not have been the father of her child, Ryan suddenly said, “What do you think about Courtney?”

  “Courtney?” I thought he was talking about the lady on TV at first, and I hadn’t known her name was Courtney, so I was thinking, wow, he must really be paying attention to this garbage, whereas I was more zoning out and decompressing from a long day.

  “You know, Courtney Whitman. From biology.”

  Yes, then I did know. In the few weeks since she’d joined our class, I’d heard that Courtney Whitman had just moved to our school from San Diego, and she was what my father would’ve called a total Valley Girl. Long blond hair and perky blue eyes and tall and tanned and really big-chested. I was still struggling to fill out my A cup. My mother said I was either just a late bloomer in this department or I took after my grandma Harry, who always had really small boobs. “She’s okay,” I said. “Why?”

  “I dunno.” He shrugged.

  I nudged him. “You like her?” His face turned bright red, and he stuffed a handful of chips in his mouth. Then he shrugged. “You do like her.”

  “Just forget it,” he said. “Forget I ever said anything.” But I couldn’t. Because Ryan didn’t like girls like Courtney Whitman, and Courtney Whitman didn’t like guys like Ryan. Or did she? I took a good hard look at him. Straight white teeth (now that the braces were gone), tall, lanky and tan, sandy blond hair that he gelled up just a little bit. “Hey,” he finally said, and I realized I’d been staring just a little too closely. “Wanna go ride in the wash? My dad has to work late.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, whatever. Let’s go.”

  I got back around five, and the house was still quiet. Ashley usually paraded in about thirty minutes before my mother. She didn’t tell my mom that she spent that much time with Austin, and I didn’t either. Though we both knew I could hold it over her head if there was something I really wanted from her.

  I sat on the couch and watched TV by myself for a while, flipping channels through various boring news reports. Then I went upstairs to my room and decided I would flip through my dad’s journal to try to find something to pick me up. I had to read through a few pages of my dad’s messy, sprawling handwriting until I found something that made me laugh. “The longest recorded flight of the chicken: 13 seconds.” I tried to imagine the chicken, squawking and squealing as it tried to make it off the ground, and then I thought about the poor sap who actually went out with the stopwatch and tried to record the thing, and for some reason that made me giggle.

  My mom was in a good mood when she came home. I heard her singing to herself. “Did you have a good day, sweetie?” She blew me an air kiss.

  “Yeah. It was fine.”

  “Where’s your sister?”

  I shrugged. “Probably in her room.” I hadn’t heard her come in, but it’s not like she announced herself when she did.

  “Well, go see if you can find her. I want to talk to you girls.”

  I do not like that line. I remembered when my father had said it, just before we left for Philadelphia. I want to talk to you girls. We’re going to take a trip east for a while, a few months. That was when I knew he was really, really sick, that it was more serious than he’d let on.

  “Ashley,” I called down the hallway. “Mom’s home.”

  She opened her bedroom door. She had the phone up to her ear, and she pointed at it as if to say, Shut up, can’t you s
ee I’m doing something?

  “She wants to talk to us,” I said, enunciating each word carefully as if I were talking to some sort of idiot.

  Ashley sighed, long and deep and melodramatic. I rolled my eyes. “I have to call you back,” she said. “The imp is here.” The imp. That’s what she called me to her friends. I hated when she called me that, though I never would let her know that it bothered me. I thought it made me sound incredibly small and incredibly ugly.

  I walked back toward the kitchen without her. “She’s coming,” I said to my mom as I plopped down at the table. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sweetie. I hadn’t really thought about it yet.” She opened the freezer door. “There’s still some Swansons left.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I had become seriously sick of salty, frozen fried chicken and mashed potatoes. But I didn’t have it in me to make her feel bad about it.

  Ashley walked in and sat in the seat next to me. “Hi, sweetie,” my mom said. Ashley smiled sweetly at her, then turned and made a face at me when my mother turned around to shut the freezer door.

  “That is so not attractive,” I whispered to her, wondering how Mr. September would feel about her if he saw her like that, her tiny little features all scrunched up like a rabbit. Not so kissable now.

  “Look who’s talking. Nice hair.” I’d put my hair up in a ponytail when I was riding my bike, and I could tell that wisps had flown out everywhere, all the layers still a little uneven from when my mom had practiced on me. I reached up to try to smooth it out.

  “Now, girls,” my mother was saying, “I have something I need to tell you.”

  “Spill,” Ashley said. “I have to call Austin back in ten minutes.”

  I rolled my eyes, though neither one of them was looking at me.

  “I don’t quite know how to say this.” She looked at me. Then at Ashley. Then back at me.