The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  I sighed, did the same, and got out of the car.

  Kevin had already picked out horses for us. “Don’t worry, girls,” he said. “These are my old grannies. Very calm for beginners.”

  My horse’s name was Daffodil, which didn’t suit her at all because she was a dark brown color and sort of moody-looking. She looked about as annoyed by the whole situation as I felt. Ashley’s horse was named Prancer. Prancer had a jet-black coat and looked a little saggy under the burden of age and work, but you could tell that she must’ve been really beautiful once.

  Kevin said that for today, we were just going to get acquainted with the horses, and then next time we could really start to learn to ride. Ashley and I exchanged looks, but neither of us had the guts to tell him this was a one-shot deal.

  Ashley went first, and Kevin helped her get up on the saddle. I watched him lead the two of them around the ring. Ashley looked pretty on the horse, as if she were made to do something like this, like one of those refined English people who rode their horses in shows or something. Her ponytail bounced against her back, and her face shone in the sunlight, and just before she got off I thought I saw her smiling, which made me really annoyed with her. She was actually enjoying this.

  “Okay,” Kevin said. “Your turn, Melissa.”

  I petted Daffodil lightly on her back and she gave me a dirty look and grunted, sort of unhappily. “I don’t know if I’m ready to sit on her yet,” I said, thinking to myself, If I could just get out of it for today, then I wouldn’t ever have to do it.

  “Don’t be such a wuss,” Ashley said, and I shot her a dirty look.

  “It’s okay.” Kevin put his hand on my shoulder. I tried to shrug it away discreetly, by bending down and pretending to fix my shoe. “You can’t rush it. Everyone moves at their own pace.” Ashley stamped her foot in the dirt. Then she glared at me. “Well, that’s enough for today then, okay? Next week we’ll see if Melissa wants to give it a try.”

  He gave us each a little pat on the top of our heads, as if we were horses, and then he turned and walked back inside the house.

  “Baby.” Ashley gave me a little push.

  “Bitch.” I pushed back.

  Ashley didn’t say a word to me the whole way home, and when we pulled into the driveway she announced, “I need to take a shower. I smell like horse.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t going to fight her for the shower. I didn’t notice a smell, and besides, I didn’t have anywhere important to go anyway.

  I saw Ryan was outside, walking away from his mailbox, so I got out of the car and waved. He started walking toward me. “Where’s Courtney?” I asked.

  “I dunno. She had to do something with her mom. Spa day or something.”

  I wondered if they were going to Belleza, where my mom was at work, and I hoped not. My mom had never met Courtney, but the thought of her styling Courtney’s hair annoyed me for some reason. “Ashley and I were riding horses,” I said, which sort of hid the truth of the matter, that I’d been too scared to actually ride.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. My mom’s boyfriend has a ranch.” It was strange that I hadn’t told him any of this, because we used to tell each other everything at the moment that it happened.

  “The Hair?”

  I thought for a minute. “Actually, we should call him the Cowboy.”

  He shook his head. “The Cowboy. Seriously.” He paused. “So how was the riding?”

  “Well.” I tried to look like I was searching for the perfect words to sum up the experience. “It was kind of like riding a bike,” I lied, “only higher up and a little bumpier.”

  “Yeah, I went riding once. When I was really little and my parents were still together, we went on vacation to this ranch in Montana. And they put me on one of those real little horses. What are they called?”

  “A pony?” I guessed, though the amount I knew about horses could seriously fit on my pinkie finger.

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s right, I guess.” He got this weird smile on his face, like he was remembering what it was like for his whole family to be together, and it was something he hadn’t thought about in a long time, but now that he did it made him really happy. A good memory of his mother, not like the later stuff, the stuff that usually haunted him in the middle of the night.

  I thought about the fact that Courtney had cheated on him in San Diego and that he had no idea, and a part of me wanted to tell him, but the other part of me didn’t want to burst his little bubble. Before I could decide, he interrupted me. “Hey, you know, we haven’t ridden in the wash in ages.”

  I nodded. “I know. You wanna go now?”

  “Let me put this stuff in the house and I’ll get my bike,” he said.

  It was a perfect February afternoon in the desert. The air was dry and crisp and just a little cool, but the sun was warm and beat down on us from the rich, deep blue sky. I took my sweater off when we got to the wash, and the sun felt amazing against my bare arms. I thought about the fact that Aunt Julie was back in Pennsylvania. She’d sent me an email last week telling me that they’d gotten six inches of snow and ice, and she’d had to shovel her car out of a parking spot on campus. At the end of the email she’d written, “Younger sisters rule, and don’t you forget it!” which had made me laugh because it was so the opposite of true, at least in our case. Now I wondered, feeling the warm air on my skin, why anyone would leave this place for cold and snow and ice and digging their car out with a shovel.

  Ryan and I kept a steady pace as we rode. We kept riding until our development ended on one side of the wash and Courtney’s ended on the other, and we were just surrounded by that bare patch of desert on either side before we hit the railroad tracks.

  Then Ryan stopped pedaling, and I skidded to a stop behind him. “You okay?” I asked, worried for a second that he’d forgotten his inhaler.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I just wanted to stop for a minute and look around.” He laid his bike down and started walking toward the side of the wash where we normally found the most interesting junk.

  I put my hand in my pocket and felt the smooth piece of glass. I’d put it in there that morning for luck, or maybe just because a small part of me felt I needed to take something that was partly my dad’s with me to spend time with Kevin. “Do you remember that glass you found the night my father died?” I asked him. I took it out of my pocket and held it to the light, so all the little rainbows started breaking and bending in the rays of the sun.

  “I can’t believe you still have that,” he said.

  “I never told you, but I showed it to my dad when I got home that night. And then he told me that it takes glass a million years to decay. And that was it. The last thing he ever said to me.” I bit my tongue to try to hold back tears. It wasn’t like me to get so emotional, but the morning with Kevin had set something going in my mind, the fear that I would have to spend the rest of my life going back home to a place that smelled like horses, with a man who wasn’t and never could be anything like my father.

  “That’s really cool,” Ryan said. “A million years.” He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “You know the last thing my mother ever said to me was ‘Clean your room.’ I was seven.” He paused. “Of course, it’s not the same thing. She’s still alive. I guess.”

  I never thought about the fact that Ryan’s mother was alive and out there somewhere. I’d never met her, and in all our years of being friends, he’d barely even talked about her. “Do you ever think about trying to find her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. No way.” He paused. “I mean she should want to find me, right?”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “What about you?” He asked. “Did you figure out another way to find that woman you were looking for?” I shook my head. I thought about reminding him that he had offered to help, but we were standing close now and looking each other straight in the eyes, which, for some reason, made me want to stop talking.


  I never really noticed Ryan’s eyes before, how nice they were. They were this deep blue color that made me think of Lake Mead, bright and sparkling in the sun. He was looking at my eyes too. His face was close enough to mine that I could feel his breathing, not raspy and asthmatic now, but quiet and even. I had this strange feeling that he was about to kiss me.

  Then it was as if he remembered where he was and who he was with, because he shook his head a little bit as if waking up from a strange dream, and he took a step back. I stuffed the piece of glass back in my pocket and shuffled my feet, not wanting to look directly at him, not wanting to see it in his face that he was embarrassed or ashamed or annoyed.

  “I need to get back,” he said, and hopped on his bike. “I’m supposed to meet Courtney at four.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 3:55. He was going to be late. He’d forgotten about her for a while, a thought that left me feeling strangely satisfied.

  Chapter 15

  Courtney and Ryan decided to name their pig Miss Piggy, even though they were already pretty sure it was a boy. “We have to stick with the whole theme,” Ryan said, and I could tell Courtney couldn’t care less what the pig was called as long as she didn’t have to touch the thing. Jeffrey asked me if I wanted to name our pig, and I lied and said no, because I really didn’t want to do anything with him. But in my head, I secretly named it Wilbur, like the pig in Charlotte’s Web, because I thought his face looked all sad, like he’d known he was going to die and there was nothing he could’ve done to stop it.

  At least Jeffrey didn’t mind doing all the work, and he didn’t even complain when I just copied all his answers from his worksheets without even asking, so I guess it could’ve been much worse.

  I emailed Aunt Julie all about the pig. At first, when I sat down to write to her, I thought about asking her about Sally Bedford. She knew so much about my mother’s past—maybe she would know about this too. But after I wrote it all down, I felt weird having it in writing, proof of my inability to stop obsessing over my father’s life. So I wrote about dissecting the pig instead, as if it were the strangest and most interesting thing I had to report in my life at the moment. In response she wrote, “VEGAN IS A WAY OF LIFE,” in all caps, like she was shouting it at me across three thousand miles. I wasn’t exactly sure what a vegan was and how it was different from a vegetarian, so I asked my mom.

  “Aunt Julie doesn’t eat any animal products,” she said. “No cheese or eggs or anything that comes from an animal.”

  I made a face. I could not picture my life without cheese, when I’d literally subsisted half the year on Cheez Whiz. And I thought it was a little weird that she emailed that to me. It’s not like I was planning on eating Wilbur or anything. In fact, since we’d started the dissection, I’d kind of sworn off pork altogether, so in a way, I could see where Aunt Julie was coming from.

  Ashley said she thought being a vegan was cool, and she was going to try it.

  “Oh, sweetie, no,” my mom said. “You have to eat more than rabbit food. You’re already so thin.”

  Ashley shook her head and sighed. “Look at my stomach.”

  There was nothing there. It was flat, like a wall, like the pavement, not even an extra little ounce of skin. But I knew what this was really about. Ashley had gotten the application for her most important pageant in the mail yesterday. If she won this one, she’d qualify for the state pageant. And Ashley had never done better than place second before. “You’re not going to win that pageant if you look like you just got off the plane from Ethiopia,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She had her hand on her hip, and she hung her head to the side and glared at me. I shrugged.

  “Girls, no one is going to get malnourished in this house.” My mother stamped her foot down. “No one is becoming a vegan on my watch.”

  Ashley shot me a dirty look, as if this were all my fault. I smiled at her and said, “I could totally have a steak for dinner. Couldn’t you, Mom?”

  “Hmm. Well, I guess we could go out.” She paused. “I could call Kevin. See if he wants to join us.”

  How had that happened? We’d gone from a normal conversation to having dinner with Kevin, all in the span of thirty seconds. “I have a lot of homework,” I lied. I had nothing, except for some poetry I was supposed to read for English and wasn’t planning on actually reading.

  “So do I,” Ashley said, which was definitely a lie because I knew for a fact that she did all of her homework during her social studies class last period, where all the teacher did was show boring movies with the lights on day in and day out.

  “Well, maybe another night then. Maybe Saturday after your riding lessons.”

  Ashley and I exchanged glances. We’d told her it would only be one time, but maybe she hadn’t been listening. It was funny with our mother, how sometimes she had a tendency of only hearing what she wanted to hear. It was like that when my father first got sick, when they gave him some ridiculous odds of five-year survival like 10 percent or something, and my mother said, Well, Tom, that means 10 percent of people live longer than that, as if the other 90 percent never even crossed her mind.

  “Kevin told me how much fun you girls had, and it made me so happy.” She squeezed both of us, one in each arm, pulling us close to her. “I can’t even tell you how much this means to me. You girls are so great. Really, truly. I have the best children in the world.”

  So there were riding lessons, every Saturday afternoon.

  Ashley and I drove up to Dusty Meadows at one o’clock and stayed for an hour. Ashley and Prancer were becoming the best of friends. It was always like Ashley to take a bad situation and make it good, kind of like my mother, because you would never know from the way she acted that she didn’t want to be there, that she would run into the shower the second we got home complaining that the stench of horse had followed her.

  No, my sister was learning to ride Prancer like velvet. Her riding became smooth and elegant and sleek and looked like something she’d been doing her whole life. At first Kevin walked beside her in a ring, and then eventually he stood on the other side of the fence and watched her and called out things to her that she came to understand.

  With me and Daffodil it was a different story altogether. We made no attempts to try and like each other. I gave her a dirty look, and she flicked her tail in the air and sneered at me. After three weeks, Kevin finally pushed me to get on her, and I did, if only to shut him up.

  When I sat on the top of the saddle, I was uncomfortable and I felt like I was up way too high to balance. “You need to trust her,” Kevin said.

  I shook my head. “I can’t.” I tried to maneuver myself down, and when he reached out his hand to help, I took it. It was harder than I thought it would be to get down from a horse, and back on the ground I felt wobbly, like I was going to throw up.

  “That was a start,” Kevin said.

  Ashley rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Melissa.” She looked to Kevin to back her up. But he didn’t say anything at all.

  Finally, he said, “Everybody moves at their own pace. All right, girls?”

  Chapter 16

  In the middle of March, Desert Crest High went into an uproar. The week before spring break, tickets for the spring formal went on sale, and people started pairing up and breaking up and getting dates and ditching dates. Everywhere I went, there seemed to be this constant buzz of who was going with whom and who wasn’t going at all.

  It was a no-brainer that Austin asked Ashley, and Ryan asked Courtney. I was a little bit surprised when I heard that Max Healy had asked the Nose, not because I really thought he might actually ask me, but because I thought what Ashley had said about him and the Nose having something together had been an outright lie.

  I just assumed that I wouldn’t be going, and I thought I was okay with it until Courtney asked me to go dress shopping with her. Courtney and I hadn’t hung out alone since that day she’d told me about making out with Mark in S
an Diego, so I was a little surprised that she asked at all.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Come on, Meliss. I really need your help. My mom’s going to give me her credit card, and she’ll drop us at the mall, and we can get whatever dresses we want.”

  She asked me in the middle of biology when Ryan and Jeffrey were busy digging through the pig. It was hard to see her eyes through the safety goggles, so I couldn’t tell how serious she was about wanting me to go. “Well, I don’t think I’m even going to the stupid dance,” I said.

  Jeffrey put down the scalpel and pulled his goggles up over his head. “I’d like to take you to the dance, Melissa.”

  I was caught so off guard by his invitation that I didn’t even know what to say at first. Courtney started laughing and I kicked her under the table. “It’s all right,” I finally said. “I don’t really want to go.”

  “Well,” he said, pulling the goggles back down, “if you want to go, I’m available.”

  I felt a little bad because the truth was, I did want to go to the dance, only not with him, and then I felt bad for the way everyone treated him, for the way I’d ignored him, ceased to recognize that he was even a person with real feelings or whatever, so I added, “It’s not you, Jeffrey. I just don’t do dances, okay?”

  He smiled at me, his big, thick nerdy smile, braces shooting out over chapped lips.

  “But you’ll still go with me to the mall, right, Meliss?”

  I said I would, just to change the subject. Just to shut her up.

  On Saturday, Courtney and her mom picked me up at nine, and I promised my mom that I would be back in time to go to Kevin’s ranch with Ashley. I have to say, I felt a little grateful for the lessons, that they gave me a reason why I could spend only three hours at the mall with Courtney instead of the entire day.