The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  It hadn’t really occurred to me until then that Ashley wouldn’t go to the dance, that she wouldn’t technically even be able to dance with her busted ankle, and that she would stay home and nurse her broken face while I would be the one to put on my dress and get my hair done and go out. I felt terrible that I was just a little bit excited about this prospect. “Why don’t you call Austin and let him know what happened?” my mother said.

  “No way,” Ashley said. “We are not telling anyone that I fell off a freakin’ horse. Okay?”

  My mother looked at me. I shrugged, and we both nodded. “Well, we’re going to have to tell them something, sweetie.”

  “We’ll say it was a car accident,” Ashley said. “Yes, that’s good. That’s what we’ll say.” She wasn’t thinking about the fact that her car was perfectly intact, while she looked completely battered and broken, but maybe no one else would either. Why would they have any reason to question her? “And I mean it, Melissa. You don’t tell anyone, not even any of your little friends, okay?”

  I nodded, but the truth was, I really didn’t have any little friends to tell, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Max. Oh God. Max. Just the thought that I was going to the dance with him later caused butterflies to jump in my stomach, and I felt completely unprepared. Ashley’s accident had shaken me because it showed me I was right about not wanting to get on Daffodil all those weeks. The world was an entirely dangerous and fragile place, where one minute you could be beautiful and the next you could literally be broken.

  All night last night I’d dreamed of Ashley falling off the horse, the sounds it made, the awful howl and then the crack of her face against the ground. In my dream I kept hearing the sounds, but I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t move. I really wanted to help her, but I just couldn’t do it.

  Ashley stood up from the toilet, glanced again in the mirror, and said, “Oh God. Oh shit.” My mother stroked her hair and didn’t even yell at her for cursing.

  Ashley went into her room and closed the door to call Austin, so I didn’t get to hear what she said, but she came back out a few minutes later, demanding ice cream.

  “Ice cream?” My mother sounded surprised. Ashley hadn’t eaten ice cream in probably two years. “I’m not sure we have any.”

  “Well,” Ashley said, “can’t you go out and get some? I’m starving and my mouth hurts.”

  My mom stuck her head in the fridge. “How about some yogurt?” she offered.

  “No.” Ashley shook her head. “Ice cream. And not the low-fat kind either, the real fattening, creamy kind, and chocolate. Yes, definitely chocolate.”

  My mother stood there with her hands on her hips, looking perplexed. After a few minutes she said, “Okay. If that’s what you really want. I’ll run to the store and pick some up. Are you sure you’ll be all right here? Melissa, you’ll help her out?”

  I nodded. My mother picked up her keys and went into the garage still shaking her head.

  I sat down at the kitchen table next to Ashley. “I can’t believe you’re going to eat something that might make you fat,” I said. I, of course, ate ice cream all the time without thinking twice about it. That’s why there’d been none in the freezer. I’d finished it a few days earlier and hadn’t asked my mom to buy more yet.

  “Yeah,” Ashley said. “Well, I might as well. I don’t think I’ll need to fit into those dresses anytime soon.”

  “What did Austin say?”

  “None of your business.” She kicked me under the table with her good foot, as if it were a punishment for even asking, for even caring.

  “Oww.” I rubbed my shin.

  “Who would ever believe it?” She sighed. “You’re going to the dance with Max Healy, and I’m not even going at all.”

  I was about to offer to stay home with her, but then I changed my mind because I was afraid she might take me up on it, and I didn’t actually want to stay home. I was looking forward to walking into the dance on Max’s arm, to having every other girl at school stare at me, even Courtney, or especially Courtney. Because just once, I wanted to know what it felt like. So instead I said, “You could still go.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Melissa.”

  Just as I was about to ignore my mother’s orders to take care of her and say something mean, the doorbell rang. I jumped up. “I’ll get it.”

  There, standing on the front porch, was Mr. September, looking a little forlorn in a pair of workout pants and a shirt. His hair was uncombed and not gelled like it normally was. I wasn’t sure if I should open the door, if Ashley would kill me if I let him in the house. But then he rang the bell again. And again.

  “My God, Melissa. Just open the door already,” Ashley cried from the kitchen. So I did.

  “Hey,” I said, and gave Austin a little wave.

  He brushed past me into the house, as if he hadn’t even seen me standing there. “Ash,” he called out. “Ash, where are you?”

  I heard something fall in the kitchen, and I wasn’t sure if Ashley had dropped something by accident or if she’d thrown it when she heard his voice. I ran past him and yelled as loud as I could, “Ashley, Austin’s here,” just to try to give her a warning, but it wasn’t enough. Austin was in the kitchen before Ashley could get out.

  I didn’t think he saw her, I mean, really saw her at first, because he ran and hugged her and kept saying, “Ash. Oh my God. Ash.” And then he let her out of the hug and stood back. She had her head tilted a little to the side and she was staring at the ground, but I knew she was going to have to look up and meet his eyes eventually.

  Finally, he touched her chin, and she turned and looked up slowly. Austin gasped, his horror all too present in the noise he made, in the way he contorted his face. He put his thumb on her cheek and touched her nose softly. “Does it hurt?” he asked quietly.

  It wasn’t what I’d expected from him. I’d expected him to run, to freak out, to break up with her on the spot, but it hit me, standing there, that I knew nothing about him, nothing at all, and that maybe he was a perfectly nice guy who actually was in love my sister, despite the fact that he was a jock with a big ego.

  I think Ashley was shocked too, because it took her a minute to answer. “A little,” she finally said. “They gave me some Percocet for the pain.”

  He nodded. “You’re going to be okay though, right? I mean you scared the shit out of me when you called.”

  She nodded. “You’ll go to the dance without me tonight, okay? Take someone else if you want.” It wasn’t like Ashley to be selfless, to think about anybody else at all, so I knew she didn’t really mean it, that this was a test.

  “No way. I’m not going anywhere without you.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Oww,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “What if you win for king,” she asked, “and you’re not even there?”

  “So what?” He pulled her into a hug again. “So the hell what?”

  She stood there in his arms, not saying anything for a minute or two. Finally, she said, “Okay. Okay.”

  I was starting to feel like an intruder, and I felt a little bad, so I tiptoed quietly toward my bedroom. It was strange, thinking about Ashley in a real bona fide relationship, where this guy, this really gorgeous, seemingly sincere, possibly future minor-league baseball-player guy actually cared about her, maybe even loved her. And for the first time, I felt a little jealous, felt like that’s what I wanted. I wondered what it would feel like to have someone love you so much that they wouldn’t even care that you were broken, that you were instantly ugly and smashed.

  I felt a little bad that I’d been so quick to judge Austin. By calling him Mr. September I hadn’t even given him a chance to be someone real. So I decided right then and there that I would stop. That from now on, even in my head, I would only call him Austin.

  Austin spent most of the day hanging out on the couch with Ashley, eating ice cream. “Isn’t that nice?” My mother shook her head, so
I didn’t feel like I was the only one who was surprised by Austin’s reaction. “What a sweet boy.”

  After Ashley fell asleep, Austin stood up and tiptoed toward the front door. “I’ll be back later to check on her, Mrs. McAllister,” he said to my mother.

  She pulled him into a quick impromptu hug and patted him on the back. “Thank you, Austin,” she said. “Thank you.” He looked a little confused and maybe even embarrassed, and he just sort of shrugged and went for the door. After he left, my mother turned to me and said, “Looks like your sister picked a good one after all.” She shook her head again. “Who woulda thought, a baseball player?” She got this funny little smile on her face, like she’d just thought of a secret that I knew she wouldn’t want to share with me, and I cleared my throat a little to remind her I was still standing there. “Go take a shower,” she said. “I’m going to set everything up in my room so we don’t disturb your sister.”

  “Set what up?”

  “My stuff, to do your hair, for the dance.” She paused. “I don’t care what happened. You’re still going to this dance, Melissa. And you’re going to be beautiful.”

  I took a long shower, and I tried to think of witty things that I could say to Max. I was sure he was going to ask me about Ashley’s accident, so I tried to frame this story in my mind, the version Ashley wanted people to know. I realized I should probably ask her what she’d told Austin, so we could keep our story straight. How weird. The two of us in cahoots. Like we were actual friends or something.

  I had this brief moment where I thought about Courtney’s red dress and the way her eyes had looked, all lit up and kind of mean at the same time, as she told me that this was going to be her special night with Ryan. I started to feel a little sick to my stomach again.

  When I got out of the shower, I had this urge to pick up the phone and call him, to tell him not to do it, that Courtney wasn’t really worthy of him, no matter what she looked like. And I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened last night with the Cowboy and the horse throwing Ashley and the way her face was bleeding and bruised. He would’ve been the one person to whom I would’ve told the truth and trusted with it completely. It was hard not to have that anymore, and I missed him in this oddly similar way to the way I missed my father.

  But I was going to the dance. With Max. And I needed to get beautiful. So I put on a pair of sweatpants and went into my mother’s bedroom.

  I couldn’t remember another time when my mother had tried to make me beautiful, just the two of us. There were the times when she’d practiced on my hair under Ashley’s watchful eye or when I’d lie on her bed and watch her do Ashley’s hair and makeup for a pageant. But it had never been just us, my mom and me, with me being the sole object of her beautification skills.

  Last year was the first year Ashley had gone to the spring formal. The year before, my father was still in a hospice bed in the living room, and Ashley had been a freshman, a size 6 and not yet in a beauty pageant. No one had asked her to the dance.

  Last year she’d gone with some guy who was friends with the Nose’s older brother, who was a senior at the time. I’d lain on the bed and watched my mother pull Ashley’s hair up in a French twist and make her eyes look dramatic with the green eye pencil. My mother had turned to me and smiled. “Maybe next year you’ll go to the dance.”

  “She’s only going to be a freshman,” Ashley said, rolling her eyes, as if just because she hadn’t gone as a freshman, there was no way I would either. Because let’s face it: Even before she’d become popular, Ashley had still been a heck of a lot more beautiful than I was.

  “How do you think we should do it?” My mother picked up my hair in her hands, and I felt like she was talking more to herself than to me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever you think.” This was my mother’s area of expertise, and despite a few lousy haircuts a year back, I decided I should trust her now.

  She clapped her hands together and did a little jump in the air. “Oh I know. We’ll curl it and put it half up.” She pulled half of my hair back, so I could kind of see what she was talking about.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She set to work with the hair dryer and then the curling iron, and I watched in her mirror as I was transformed into this other person. Someone with bouncy curls.

  When she was finished with my hair, she did my makeup. I felt her layering it on, foundation and powder and blush and eyeliner and eye shadow and lip liner and lipstick and lip gloss. I’d never felt so covered, so hidden, as I did in the makeup. I felt just a little uncomfortable, because the girl staring back at me in the mirror looked like someone I’d never seen before, someone I couldn’t even recognize.

  “Oh you look stunning.” My mom stood back and admired her work. “Oh, Melissa honey, look at you.”

  There I was, looking like a pageant girl, looking like a girly girl, looking maybe even just a little bit beautiful.

  After I got my dress on and my mother found me a pair of silver heels in Ashley’s closet, I was ready to go. “Let me get some pictures,” my mom said, “to send to Aunt Julie.”

  When she got the camera out, Ashley stumbled off the couch, took a look at me, and then did a double take. “Oh my God,” she said. She stared at me so hard that I wasn’t sure if she was about to punch me or hug me. But then she said, “You really are a McAllister girl, aren’t you?”

  “Doesn’t she clean up nice?” My mother was just absolutely beaming. It seemed like her eyes were about to pop out of her head, and that was the funniest thing about all of this. I liked seeing my mother all excited over me like she normally was about Ashley. I didn’t really even care that much what I looked like, but my mother’s reaction was worth savoring. I knew it was something I’d put away and take out again, the look on her face as she looked at me, as if she saw me for the first time as something truly spectacular.

  “I’m going to bed,” Ashley said, and she started to limp down the hallway. Then she stopped and turned around. “Have fun,” she said. “And remember every single thing that happens so you can tell me tomorrow.”

  I nodded. It might have been the nicest thing Ashley had ever said to me.

  Max arrived promptly at seven with a beautiful wrist corsage of white and yellow roses. “Wow, you look amazing,” he said as soon as I opened the door. He was staring pretty intensely, so I started to feel a little embarrassed.

  “Thanks,” I finally said. “You look pretty good yourself.” And he did. He had on a dark suit with a gray tie, and the suit fit him really well and made him look even more handsome than usual. As soon as he stepped in, I noticed that he smelled really good too, cinnamony and foresty all at once.

  I didn’t even know that we were supposed to get a flower for him to pin to his suit, but my mother had taken care of it, and she pulled his out of the fridge, one solitary white rose with a pin. It was as if there were some secret white-rose code that no one had told me about.

  “I’ll pin it for you,” my mom said, and she did it quickly and efficiently, as if she’d done it hundreds of other times before.

  “Thank you, Mrs. McAllister,” Max said. I could tell by the way my mother smiled back at him that she thought he was adorable. It didn’t seem to matter that this was a last-minute thing, that I was only the Nose’s mono replacement. Because right here, right in this moment, it seemed that Max and I were this thing, this actual couple getting ready to go to a dance.

  Walking up the steps to Desert Crest High School with my arm linked through Max’s was different from any other time I’d ever walked up those steps before. I knew it was something I’d never forget, that I’d think about it every other time I’d walk up those steps for the next three years.

  It was as if I could literally feel people’s eyes on me, feel them watching our every move, and not in a bad way like they were making fun of me or something, but like I was Cinderella walking up the steps in a fairy tale with a prince. I wondered if that’s how A
shley felt when she was in pageants, if that’s why she liked them so much.

  The gymnasium had been entirely transformed for the dance. I knew there had been some committee that Ashley and the Nose had volunteered on to try to make this dump of a room look beautiful, and somehow they’d pulled it off. The entire ceiling was covered in pink and white and purple balloons that looked like tiny clouds, and there were balloons hanging on the walls too, probably thousands of them. So, except for the faint smell of old sneaker, you could forget that this was the same place where you had mandatory PE class and played dodgeball with the idiots who really cared about winning those kinds of stupid games.

  One of the first people I saw when we walked in was Mr. Finkelstein, standing by a table of soda cups. It surprised me that he was chaperoning, but I decided he must get paid extra for it or something, because he looked even less interested in the dance than he did in our biology class. He sort of caught my eye for a second and gave a little nod, but he had this funny look on his face, as if he were thinking, Now how did she get to look like that?

  A slow song came on, and Max said, “Should we dance?”

  I nodded, and he led me to the middle of the floor, right in the spot where everyone could see us. If I’d chosen, I’d have danced on the fringe, right at the edge, but with Max I could already tell it was all or nothing. And he liked to choose the all.

  I’d never danced with a boy other than my father before, but this was entirely different. I let Max put his arms around me, and I leaned into him. His smell was intoxicating, something that made me want to lean in even closer, so I put my head against his chest.

  “You know,” he said, “Lexie and I aren’t dating.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t known that.

  “I mean, I guess she likes me or something, which is why I asked her to the dance in the first place.” He paused. “But I’m glad I’m here with you instead.”