The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  Ashley needed two dresses. One for the spring formal and one for the pageant, and she currently required a size 00, which is apparently incredibly hard to find. My mom tried to convince her to try on some size 0s and 2s with the promise that she would take them in, which Ashley wasn’t too happy about, but she finally caved once she saw how minimal her selection was otherwise.

  I was trying on dresses in size 2, which Ashley looked at in disdain but that my mother said most other girls would kill to wear. But I didn’t care all that much about sizes the way Ashley did.

  I tried on about ten dresses that all made me look too flat chested and straight hipped, until I found this one I really liked. It was a dark shade of pink and it was knee length and flowy so it didn’t emphasize my hips. And it had this really nice, straight neckline that didn’t emphasize my lack of boobs. It had this cute little cap sleeve that even Ashley thought was nice. “Oh, that is definitely the one,” my mother said. I twirled around, and I felt oddly and imminently beautiful, as if the dress had the ability to transform me into something or someone else. In it, I could be the pretty girl, the pageant queen.

  “Yeah, now you just need a guy,” Ashley muttered under her breath so I heard her, but I didn’t think my mom did because she didn’t say anything.

  I went back into the dressing room and took it off without looking at myself in the mirror again. I probably was never going to get to wear it anyway.

  Ashley and my mother spent the rest of the week shopping, and Ashley ended up with two amazing size-0 dresses that my mother had to take in at the waist: a black short, shimmery one for the formal and a long dark green sequiny one for the pageant.

  I put my dress in the back of my closet and promised myself that I wasn’t going to take it out and try it on or even look at it.

  Chapter 18

  The week after spring break was pure chaos at our school as people buzzed about the formal. We got to vote for who the king and queen of the dance would be, and Ashley, Austin, and Max were all in the running. I would never tell Ashley, but I turned my ballot in having only voted for Max.

  Some of the popular people coupled and uncoupled and then coupled again, making it kind of confusing who was going with whom, but Ashley and Austin and Max and the Nose all remained together, and I remained dateless.

  My mother bugged Ashley about it nightly at dinner, to which Ashley kept replying, “I’m trying, all right? These things take time.” And then she’d kick my shin so hard under the table that I had bruises to show for it.

  Until something very terrible, stunning, and—might I add—divinely miraculous happened the Thursday before the dance.

  Ashley broke down in tears as she heard the news on the phone. I’d wandered into her bedroom and saw her crying, and my first thought was that Austin had broken up with her. “Get out,” she whispered, and motioned at me with her hand, but I pretended not to notice and sat down on her bed and picked up a magazine.

  A minute later she was off the phone and blowing her nose into a Kleenex. “Jeez, what is it?” I said, thinking this was an awful lot of crying over a boy. And then I thought, Well, at least I’m not going to be the only one sitting at home on the night of the formal.

  “It’s Lexie,” Ashley sobbed.

  “Lexie?”

  Then in very un-Ashley-like fashion, she broke down and told me everything. Apparently, for the past week the Nose had not been feeling well. She had a sore throat and swollen glands and a fever, so her mother took her to the doctor. This afternoon the doctor called to tell her she had mono, and she was absolutely, under no circumstances to leave the house for one entire week.

  “No formal,” I whispered. But in my head, I was thinking that Max, Max Healy, with the shiny red pickup truck and soft voice and strong hands, was suddenly dateless.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ashley said. “No. There’s no way.” She shook her head. “And don’t you dare tell Mom.”

  Three hours later, as I sat at my desk trying to write an essay on the importance of rhyme scheme, Ashley barged into my room. “Okay,” she said. “Don’t ask me why. But Max wants you to go with him.”

  “You asked Max to take me?” I was completely stunned. I’d never thought that Ashley would actually do what my mother had asked and find me a real, genuine, amazing date.

  She shook her head. “He called and asked if you already had a date. And I told him you would go.” She paused. “So don’t act like an idiot. And don’t embarrass me. And don’t screw this up.”

  Right then it occurred to me for the first time that the Nose was sick, and that she and Max had been dating, and I didn’t know all that much about mono, but I knew it was pretty serious. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t be a jerk. You already have the stupid dress, and you know you want to go with him.”

  “Well, I don’t want to catch mono,” I said.

  She laughed. “You’re not going to be kissing him or anything. That’s how you catch mono, stupid.”

  I nodded. “I know that,” I said, even though I was a little skeptical that that was the only way you could catch it. And I felt a little annoyed that she thought I definitely wouldn’t be kissing him, even though I also knew she was probably right.

  “I’m going to go tell Mom.” She shook her head. “It’s going to make her day.”

  She left and I took a deep breath. I was going with Max. I was going with Max.

  I imagined how I would look, walking into the dance on his arm, in my gorgeous new pink dress, how Courtney would stare at me with her mouth open and Ryan would just look a little annoyed, and how I would ignore both of them because I’d be so involved with Max that I wouldn’t even be able to take the time to smile or wave.

  Not only did it make my mother’s day, but my aunt Julie’s too. Just back from Greece, she sounded as if she were positively glowing, ready to burst right through the phone. “I hear you have a gorgeous date.” She giggled to me from three thousand miles away, sounding much more like my mother than her usual self. I was guessing that her trip with Uncle Frank had gone well, and it occurred to me the way a guy could change you, just like that. I wondered if that would ever happen to me. She stopped giggling, and she cleared her throat. “Now, you know about using protection, right?”

  “Aunt Julie!” I yelled, much louder than I meant to, so my mother shot me a look from the other room. I lowered my voice. “It’s just a dance. Not even really a date.” It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t also been so embarrassing, considering what Ashley had said to me earlier.

  Aunt Julie laughed. “Well, it never hurts to ask.” She paused. “Oh, I’m so happy for you, Melissa. I want pictures. Lots of pictures. Promise.”

  After we hung up I remembered that I’d been wanting to ask her about Sally, but I pushed the thought into the back of my mind. I was going to the dance. With Max Healy. And I promised myself that, for once, I was going to live in the moment and enjoy it.

  The next morning, as I chained my bike to the rack, I heard Max calling out my name. “Hey, Melissa.” I looked up and waved, and suddenly I felt self-conscious about how I looked. I tried to smooth my hair down a little bit at the top of my ponytail. “Hey, thanks for saying you’d go with me, at the last minute and all.”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, like it was no big deal.

  “We’re going to have a great time.” He winked, and he tugged on the bottom of my ponytail gently before he ran up the steps. “I’ll pick you up at seven, all right?”

  I nodded. And I couldn’t find a way to wipe the smile off my face, even if I’d wanted to.

  That day after school, the day before the dance, Ashley and I had to go to our weekly horse-riding lesson. Since we were going to be getting ready for the dance the next afternoon, we wouldn’t be able to go at our normal time, so my mom decided she’d leave work early on Friday, go over there with us and watch, and then we could all go out to dinner afterward.

 
; This made me a little nervous because I was pretty sure that Kevin hadn’t told my mother that I’d barely even sat on top of Daffodil, and I knew she would be expecting something more of me, a trot around the ring or something. “Can’t we just skip this week?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Ashley sighed. “I’m not going out to dinner smelling like horse.”

  “Seriously. What is wrong with you girls? Kevin is really excited to show you off. So I don’t want to hear another word of complaining.”

  The three of us rode up to Dusty Meadows a little before four o’clock. We’d still have almost another two hours until it got dark, and I felt my heart drumming in my chest, my stomach churning. I didn’t want to have to ride. It wasn’t fair. What if the horse threw me? It would be just my luck to die on the night before my date with Max. Just the kind of thing this twisted universe would have in store for me.

  When we got out of the car, Kevin gave my mom a big hug and a short kiss on the lips, like the kind of kiss I’d seen her share with my dad probably a million times. And then I didn’t care if he was nice, if he had a gentle voice. I hated him.

  “Hey, girls.” Kevin waved. We both waved back, and Ashley leaned over and whispered to me, “What a dick.” I nodded, though we both knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t.

  Once we got closer to the horses, Ashley put on her smiley, perky pageant face, and I heard her calling out to my mom. “You have to meet Prancer. She is such a sweetheart.” I rolled my eyes at no one.

  Kevin hung back behind Ashley and my mother and waited for me to catch up. “You gonna try a little ride today, Melissa?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  “Well, Daffodil and I had a little talk, and she promised to go easy on you.”

  “Uh yeah. Okay,” I said. “Maybe.” But in my mind, I was thinking, No way.

  “We’ll let Ashley go first, okay?”

  I nodded.

  Kevin walked Prancer into the ring and Ashley mounted her there. Then he and my mother stood back behind the fence and watched her ride. Kevin had his arm around my mother’s waist and she leaned into him, putting her hip against his, her head on his shoulder, so I started to feel a little sick, and I tried not to watch.

  I sat in my normal spot by Daffodil and petted her back a little bit. “Sorry, girl,” I said. “I don’t think it’s happening with us today.” I walked around to her front and tried to look her in the eye. Her eyes were yellow and teary and reminded me of the way Grandma Harry’s eyes had looked after her cataract surgery. “You don’t like this any more than I do. Do you, Daffy?”

  She made a little snorting sound. I reached up my hand to let her sniff me, and she nipped at it a little as if she wanted to bite it off. “Oww,” I said. “You stupid horse.”

  A horrifying sound cut through the air like a glass shattering on a floor, sudden and irreversible. It was this primal animal noise, like the howl of a wild and crazed coyote that we heard sometimes late at night in the dark, heated pit of summer. Only this noise was longer and higher, and then it was followed by a terrifying thud, the sound of something breaking, like a tree that had been cracked with an ax. Someone screaming: Ashley or my mother or both.

  I turned around, and I saw Prancer running wildly around the ring. Alone. I didn’t see Ashley at first, until I ran closer, toward the ring, and then I saw her there. A lifeless-looking heap in the middle of the ring, like a rag doll Prancer had tossed aside.

  For a minute it seemed like everything stopped, like the world had been turned on mute and slow motion, because no one moved and the screaming stopped, and then Kevin was running into the ring and carrying Ashley out over his shoulder.

  “Don’t move her,” my mother started screaming. “Don’t move her.”

  “The horse,” Kevin said, calm and steady and quieter. “I have to get her away from the horse.”

  And then, as if she’d finally gotten her voice back, Ashley started screaming. “My face. Oh my God. My face.” I could see her for the first time and her face was covered in blood, and she was hideous-looking. I gasped and held my hands to my mouth.

  “We have to get her to the hospital,” Kevin said. “I’ll drive.”

  “No.” My mother shook her head. “I’ll take her.”

  “Cynthia. You’re shaking.” He sounded stern and entirely in control. “I’m driving.”

  Kevin laid Ashley down in the backseat of the cab part of the pickup, and he helped my mother climb up front. “Keep her calm,” he whispered to me as he opened the door to the back for me. “And try to keep her still.”

  I sat down next to her, but I tried not to look at her. She’s going to be fine. I kept saying it in my head, over and over again. She’s going to be fine.

  “This is all my fault,” my mother said. “I made them take these lessons. What have I done? What have I done?”

  Kevin put his hand on my mother’s leg and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear.

  Ashley whimpered, not so much like a cry or scream but more like the noise a sick dog might make. It reminded me of this thing I’d seen on TV once, of this puppy that had gotten shot in the leg and couldn’t figure out how to run away. “You’ll be okay,” I whispered. I reached out for her hand and held it, and she squeezed my hand so tightly that I thought it would break.

  “If I die,” she whispered, “you can have my room.”

  “You’re not going to die.” I tried to make it sound like I really, truly believed it. “And besides, I don’t want your stupid room anyway.”

  At the hospital my mother and Ashley went back to see the doctor together while I waited with Kevin on cold blue chairs in the waiting room of the ER. We didn’t say anything for a while, maybe an hour or so, and I wondered why it was taking so long, how serious it all was, and when my mother was going to come back out to tell me.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, how Ashley had fallen, but I guessed it was either one of two things: Maybe Ashley had done something stupid that she hadn’t really known how to do in an attempt to show off for my mother. Or maybe Kevin had stopped watching as carefully as he should’ve been because he was paying attention to my mother instead. So in a way, my mother had been right; it had probably been her fault.

  Kevin had this annoying habit of drumming his fingers on an end table right next to him, and the noise was driving me absolutely insane, so finally I said, “Do you mind?” It came out a little ruder than I meant it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he stopped. I noticed he started twisting his hands together instead, so it was silent but just as annoying. A few minutes later he said, “Your mother’s never going to forgive me. Is she?”

  I shook my head. Kevin had broken her perfect Ashley, taken her beautiful daughter’s face and smashed it. Right then it occurred to me that the dance was tomorrow and the pageant was next week, and I absolutely knew that Kevin was right, that there was no coming back from this for him. I almost felt a little bad for him. “Maybe if it had been me,” I whispered.

  He shook his head. “No way. Absolutely not.” He sounded so convinced that I almost believed him.

  Here are some things I learned immediately when my mother and Ashley walked back into the ER waiting room: The face and head bleed a lot. A broken nose does not require an overnight hospital stay, nor does a badly sprained ankle. If your two front teeth get knocked out, they can be replaced with very realistic-looking fake ones, only not right away.

  In other words, Ashley looked uglier than all hell, but she was going to be completely fine. Eventually.

  Her nose was bandaged, her ankle wrapped in a splint. My mom held on to a pair of crutches that I assumed Ashley would need, but for now she was slowly hopping. She also had a huge welt on her forehead that would later become this massive yellow-and-purple bruise. One of her front top teeth was gone, and the other one had broken right in half, so she looked like some sort of homeless crack-addicted witch who’d gotten in a fight with a hockey player.
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  And, apparently, she had yet to see a mirror.

  “Am I hideous?” she whispered to me. “I’m hideous, aren’t I?” I thought she was crying, but it was hard to tell because her face was so red and bruised.

  “Well…” I said, trying to think of how to put it.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “Why did this happen to me? Why do bad things always happen to me?”

  I had to bite my tongue because in my head, Ashley was the beholder of a perfect life, to whom bad things never happened. Perfect boyfriend, perfect, beautiful body. Perfect friends. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. And then it hit me, and oddly, it was one of the first times it ever hit me this way, that my dad was her dad, our dad. That his getting sick, our months in Philadelphia, his death, all of that had happened to her, too. “It’s okay, Ash,” I said. “You’re still beautiful.”

  “You’re such a little liar,” she said, but she leaned on me to support her as we walked out of the hospital.

  Chapter 19

  The next morning I woke up to the sound of Ashley screaming. My mother and I both ran out of our rooms. “What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “Where does it hurt?”

  But Ashley was standing in the hallway bathroom, looking at her face in the mirror.

  “Oh, sweetie,” my mom said. “It will heal. It will all heal.”

  “I can’t go to the dance like this.”

  “I’m sure Austin will understand,” my mother said.

  “No.” Ashley shook her head. “He won’t.” She sat down on top of the toilet. “He’ll just find some other pretty girl and go with her.”

  My mother walked into the bathroom and put her arms around Ashley. “Sweetie, not if he really loves you he won’t. If a little bit of bruising is going to scare him off, then he’s not worth it anyway.”

  But I knew that Ashley was right, that Austin probably was going to dump her, because that’s how it was at our school. I couldn’t imagine Ashley hanging on to Austin’s arm the way she looked right now.