I tried to imagine these young, beautiful people jumping on a train like this one and riding so far away from home that when they got off they couldn’t even recognize the landscape, the entire world around them, as if they’d taken a trip from a lush Tennessee valley to the moon: dry desert canyons and tall brown peaks, and dry, dry air that was sometimes hot enough to stab you.
I wondered what it felt like, to be so in love that nothing else mattered, not the time or the place or anything else.
Then from behind me someone said, “Hey.” I jumped and nearly toppled over on my bike. I turned and found myself staring right at Ryan. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I stared at him for a moment, and I tried to decide whether his face looked tight and worried or whether he was just tired and a little red from riding so hard. “I guess we both had the same idea,” I finally said.
The words I’d said to him the night before still resonated in my brain, and I realized how stupid they’d sounded, how stupid they were. I should’ve stayed out of it and never said anything to him at all about Courtney, because I missed everything about him: being his friend, riding our bikes, calling people by their silly nicknames, and laughing over stupid dissections. And most of all, I just missed him, Ryan, this person who’d been a part of my life for so long that I couldn’t really even remember the before, the part where my father was healthy and I’d gone to birthday parties and gone swimming in Kelly Jamison’s pool. But that was the thing about my tragic flaw, being impulsive, not thinking before you said things. Some things were impossible to take back.
We stood there and watched the train together until it passed, maybe five minutes or so. Without the roar of the train it was almost unbearably quiet.
Ryan kicked his foot in the dust, so it swirled up a little in our faces and made him cough. And just to break the silence I finally said, “Fun dance last night, huh?”
He nodded. “I guess your sister was pretty mad about not being there, since she won for queen and all.”
I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know if she knows yet. I didn’t tell her.”
He laughed. “Serves her right. All those mornings she drove past us on the way to school and never stopped to give us a ride.” He shook his head. “Sorry. That wasn’t nice, right? I mean with her car accident and all.”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded too vigorously, trying to keep the part about the horse in my head, even though it was just dying to burst right out of me. In my mind I was thinking, So what did you and Courtney do when you left so early? Where did you go? What happened? But I didn’t want to know. Not any of it. Not really.
“So you like this Max guy?”
I shrugged. “Of course. What’s not to like?”
He didn’t answer. He kicked his foot in the dust a little more, and then I guessed he uncovered something because he leaned down to pick it up. “Look at this.” He held it up so I could see it. It was another piece of rainbow glass, just like the one he’d found the night my father died. It was in a different shape, more of an oval, but it had definitely come from the same piece, from the same maker.
I thought about the fact that my dad said that glass could live for a million years, and I knew, right then, that this other piece had been there that night too, two years ago, but we just hadn’t uncovered it yet. “Here,” he said. “You take it.”
“No.” I shook my head. “This one’s yours. I keep mine for good luck. You should have one too.”
He dusted it off a little more with his hands and put it in the pocket of his jeans. “How long did you say glass lives for?”
“A million years.” For some reason I thought about the way relationships were a little like glass, oh so precarious and fragile and vulnerable to breaking with the slightest wrong move—a cancerous cell, a tumble from a horse, a dance with a cheerleader. But even after they shattered, in a way they stayed with you forever, made you a part of who you are and who you always would be.
“I can’t believe it’s been two years.”
“Next month,” I said.
He nodded. “I know. I remember. April twenty-sixth.”
The fact that he remembered, just that one date, that one tiny detail, made me want to lean over and hug him and hold on to him for a while and not let go. Because no one else knew that about me, that this was the date my world actually ended or this new crazy world of mine began or however you wanted to look at it. I was more a glass-half-empty person myself.
“You ever figure out who that woman was?” he asked. I shook my head. “You still want to?”
I nodded. I’d put her in the back of my mind with the rest of the craziness swirling around in it, but I did still want to know who she was, know something real about my father. “I just don’t know if I’ll actually ever be able to find her,” I said. And that was what I’d come to realize, that there was only so much you could do to find a person, and then maybe you just had to let it go.
“You’ll find her,” he said, sounding sure. “I know you will.”
Ryan got on his bike and started pedaling, and I got on mine and we rode next to each other. We rode and rode in parallel lines, just the way we always used to, until we got to our development, and he stopped to walk his bike up the side.
Just as he was about to walk up the hill, he turned and looked at me. “I’m going to break up with Courtney,” he said.
“Oh?” But I felt like I was about to roll back down the hill because it wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. I wondered if it was because of what I’d said, but I didn’t have the guts to ask.
“It’s just not working out. Nothing against her. Deep down we’re not the same, you know?”
And then I knew what had happened after the dance. Courtney had planned their special night without telling him, and he hadn’t been ready for it. Sure, Ryan liked her, but serious relationships scared him. And who could blame him? If my mom had run off with the gardener, I might’ve been the same way. “You’re going to break her heart, you know,” I said, which was a strange thing for me to say, considering I’d been rooting for them to break up all along. But it was true. Despite what I thought about Courtney now, I knew that in her own way she really, really liked him.
“I know.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“Gee thanks.”
I shrugged. But we both knew it was the truth. Courtney was beautiful. Courtney was resourceful. She’d have a new boyfriend in no time.
When I got home, I lay down on my bed and thought about Ryan breaking Courtney’s heart and then what Ryan had said about Sally, about how he thought I’d be able to find her. How could he be so sure, anyway? It was annoying, the way he’d dropped out of my life for a few months and then popped back in, thinking he could actually understand anything that was going on.
I heard a knock at the door, and my mother opened it without waiting for me to answer. “Here.” She held out the phone. “Aunt Julie wants to talk to you.” I nodded and took the phone without directly looking at her. She blew me a kiss and left without closing the door, so I stood up and closed it myself.
“So,” Aunt Julie said, “tell me everything. How was it?”
“It was nice,” I said, trying to muster up some fresh enthusiasm.
“Oh. I bet it was.” She sighed, as if she were almost living vicariously through me, revisiting those high-school years, those dances she wished she’d gone to instead of studying.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course. What is it?”
“And you won’t say anything to my mom?”
She hesitated for a second before she agreed.
“It’s about my father,” I said. She was silent, so I kept going. “This woman he knew. Sally Bedford. My grandmother mentioned something about her, and I think she used to work with him at Charles and Large.”
“Oh, Melissa,” she said. “Sweetie, it’s been nearly two years.”
“I know. I k
now,” I said. “But I want to know.” I paused. “What he was really like, you know?”
“Well, I’ll tell you this: I have no idea who Sally Bedford is. But there is no way your father ever cheated on your mother, if that’s what you’re asking. Absolutely no way.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” But that didn’t really make me feel better. How could you possibly know something like that from three thousand miles away?
Chapter 21
The next morning Ashley begged my mother to let her stay home from school. “Everything still hurts so much,” she whined, but I think my mother knew the truth, that Ashley was afraid to go to school looking the way she did.
“You’re going to have to go back sometime,” my mother said.
“Tomorrow,” Ashley said. “If I’m feeling better.”
“Okay. Tomorrow,” my mother agreed, though tomorrow would end up being nearly a week, until most of the swelling and bruising had faded and our dentist put in some temporary bunny teeth until the new ones could be put in permanently.
I walked outside to get my bike, and I saw Max leaning against his truck, which was parked in the street in front of our house. “Need a ride?” he asked.
“Sure.” I smiled. He opened the door and helped me up. He went around to the driver’s side and got in. Just as he turned the key in the ignition, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye in the side mirror: Ryan riding his bike toward my house.
For the first time in months he’d come to ride to school with me. I thought briefly about asking Max to wait for him, to offer him a ride. It’s not that I owed it to him or anything, after all the times he’d ditched me, but I felt a little bad making him bike up the hill, when I knew how awful his allergies were this time of year.
But I kept my mouth shut and let Max drive away. Once Max sped up, Ryan got smaller and smaller in the mirror, until he was nothing more than a tiny dot.
“You’re not mad, are you?” Max asked.
I realized I’d been watching Ryan and hadn’t said anything. “Oh no,” I said. “Just tired. Monday morning and all.”
“Good. Because I didn’t know if you’d be mad that I’d told Lexie that we were together.” He paused. “I mean I only said it because she was bugging me about coming over to visit her and about the dance, and I just wanted to shut her up for once, you know?”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. “Are we?” I asked. “Together?” It sounded stupider out in the open than it had in my head.
He stopped at the stop sign, took his eyes off the road, and smiled at me. “Do you want to be?”
“Maybe,” I said, and after I said it I realized I should’ve said yes, yes, yes. But “maybe” was the truth, was what I was really feeling.
“I’ll take that,” he said. “How about a date then, on Friday night?” He pulled into the parking lot of the school and turned off the engine.
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. I thought about how Ashley was going to freak out when she heard about this, which made me smile a little bit.
He was already out of the truck before I thought about the fact that he hadn’t said whether or not he wanted us to be a couple, but for some reason it felt like he’d already decided.
Max and I walked up the steps together and then parted ways in the front hallway after he offered to give me a ride home from school. He went off toward Austin and some of the other guys on the baseball team that I didn’t really know but had heard Ashley talk about.
It was the Nose’s first day back, and she looked a little lonely wandering to her locker without Ashley stuck to her side. She also still looked sick, and she had these deep, black circles under her eyes. Once I saw her, my own throat started to hurt a little bit again.
She turned and caught my eye for a second and glared at me with this look of pure and intense hatred, not like the glares that Ashley gave me but the kind of glare that came from a person who was secretly making a voodoo doll of you and wanting to burn you on a stake. I smiled back.
I walked toward my locker, and I should’ve been walking on air, but I felt a little down. I thought about Ryan pedaling all alone and it made me sad. Maybe I could ask Max to give both of us a ride home, and I knew that he absolutely would, but I also knew that I wasn’t really going to ask him, that putting them in the same place at the same time would make things weird for all of us.
As soon as he walked into the biology lab, Ryan went and grabbed his pig and carried her over to my and Jeffrey’s table. Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “What? Trouble in paradise?”
“Shh,” I said. “Be quiet.”
Courtney walked in a minute later, took one look at us, looked away quickly, and then walked over to Jack and Joe Beiderman’s table—identical twins who were sort of quiet and a little bit on the geeky side. They obviously were not going to mind if Courtney copied off of them if it meant she was also going to stand there with them for an hour a day.
“You can’t just ditch her,” I whispered to Ryan.
He shot me a look. “Don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?”
If Mr. Finkelstein had been paying attention, he might’ve noticed that there were now two tables of three and one empty table, but as usual, he wasn’t. Or even if he was, he didn’t care enough to say anything.
We were less than two months away from the end of the year and almost done with these poor pigs at this point. I was hoping I would pass second semester because I’d barely paid a bit of attention to pig parts, and I’d been letting Jeffrey stand there every day with his scalpel and this weird grin on his face. It had crossed my mind that if I didn’t pass, I’d have to take biology again next year, nine more months of smelling embalming fluids and wearing latex gloves and tight goggles, and I told myself that I would study like a crazy woman for the final exam and hope for the best.
But I still couldn’t bring myself to do more than watch, and by watch I mean that I stared at Jeffrey’s hands as they moved inside our pig and let my mind wander to some other place. I felt a little annoyed with Ryan because, really, he had lousy timing. Why did he need to pick now to stop ignoring me, just when Max seemed to actually like me? It didn’t seem fair that when I’d needed him as a friend he hadn’t been there, and now I had to feel bad for leaving him behind.
“Hey,” Ryan whispered to me across the table of pigs. I took my eyes off of Jeffrey’s hands and looked at him. It was hard to tell what he was thinking with his eyes behind those thick, blurry goggles. “Wanna hang out after school?”
I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew Max was going to drive me home, and then what if he wanted to hang out? There would be no way to turn Max down, and I probably wouldn’t even want to. So finally, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll call you when I get home.”
I thought he’d be annoyed at my answer, but I don’t think he was, because he kept talking. “I asked my dad about how we could find her, whatever her name was, the woman you’re looking for.”
“Sally,” I said, but I was wondering how his dad would know what to do. He was only a Border Patrol agent, not FBI or anything. “Well, she’s not an illegal immigrant,” I said. At least, I didn’t think she was.
“I know that.” He sliced into the pig almost ferociously, and for some reason I thought about how sad it was that we were cutting this thing away, piece by piece, system by system, heart and lungs and liver and kidneys, until there would be nothing left. The carcass would be dead and completely empty and rotting, and it made me shudder. “My dad knows how to find people.”
I bit my lip to keep from saying, Well, if that’s true, how come he hasn’t found your mother? But I also knew that maybe he didn’t want to find her. And besides, it was a rotten thing to even think, and I was glad I’d been able to catch it before it had escaped my mouth unchecked.
My dad had known how to read people, how to make them open up to him and tell him stuff they’d never told anyone else. But that was a different thing entirely.
&
nbsp; “There’s this website,” he said, still slicing into the pig like it was nothing, like he didn’t even notice he was doing it anymore.
“You should be a doctor,” I said.
“What?” He looked up.
“You could be a surgeon or something.”
He ignored me. “This site is free, and you can find people. Where they live and their numbers.”
“She’s unlisted,” I said. “I already checked.”
He shook his head. “My dad said everyone’s on there. It’s all from the public records. Driver’s licenses and house deeds and stuff.”
I didn’t necessarily want his help anymore. But I wasn’t sure I had another option at this point. “Why do you care so much anyway?” I sighed.
“Just let me help you, okay?” He put the scalpel down and pulled his goggles up, so I could see his eyes, round and blue and fierce and determined.
Max drove me home after school and parked in front of my house. He got out of the truck with me and we stood by the porch for a minute. I felt like he was going to kiss me again, and I felt embarrassed that it was broad daylight and all my neighbors might be watching, so before he could move in I said, “You wanna take a walk or something?”
“Okay.” He shrugged.
I put my stuff in the house, and I didn’t see Ashley, so I figured she was in her room. Part of me wanted her to know that Max was here and we were taking a walk together, so I tried to make a lot of noise in the kitchen as I threw my backpack down. But she still didn’t come out, so I gave up and went back outside.
Max and I walked down the street, past Ryan’s house, and I knew he wasn’t home yet because his bike wasn’t in its usual spot outside. Then we cut down the hill to the wash.
Once we got down there, we stood in the center for a minute, and we looked around, at all the houses off to both sides and this wide-open space in the middle. It had been a long time since I’d just stood in the middle here. Usually I was riding my bike as fast and as furiously as I could.
The Life of Glass Page 17