The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  For once I got to ride shotgun, and Ashley, who’d gotten in the truck with the help of Max, was in the back, which made me feel a little bit better. Still, I kept turning around and glaring at her the whole ride.

  When we got to school, the three of us walked up the steps together. Well, Max and I walked and Ashley hopped, a sight that I found both hysterical and a little sad. Though she could get around without the crutches, she still had trouble putting weight on her left ankle.

  Max gave me a quick kiss on the cheek when we walked inside, and he was off to meet his friends. Ashley and I stood just inside the entrance of the school. It was the closest she’d ever stood to me at school, the most she’d ever acknowledged having a sister, but I think she was afraid, literally, to show her face, for people to see her looking this way.

  “It’ll be okay.” I nudged her, but she didn’t respond. She just limped off toward her locker. I noticed that Austin wasn’t waiting for her there; in fact, I didn’t see him around anywhere, which was sort of odd. This was the first time all year that I’d seen Ashley at school by herself, Austin-free, and she looked like this whole different person all battered and bruised and alone. I almost felt a little sorry for her.

  By lunchtime it had become very clear why Austin wasn’t there. The whole school was buzzing with it, not just because Austin was popular but also because he was so good at baseball and the championships were coming up.

  Max found me before lunch and whispered the news to me quickly on his way to class. Austin wasn’t in school because Austin had caught mono.

  It didn’t take long for me to put two and two together, that it was not Max the Nose had been in love with and making out with—it had been Austin all along.

  And so the week that Ashley lost her beauty, her face, her glorious dance as queen of the spring formal, her chance to get to the Miss Arizona pageant, she also lost her boyfriend, her best friend, and—dare I say?—her dignity.

  “Not bad,” Ryan said to me in biology. “Mr. September made it all the way to April. If only we had known. Mr. April has kind of a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  I smiled, even though it was horrible and mean, and deep down I felt sorry for Ashley. But as I thought about the eyes she shot at me when she acted like a know-it-all and insisted that the Nose had been making out with Max, I couldn’t help it. “This is not her month, is it?” I hadn’t really thought about it before I said it; it just sort of slipped out. Then I thought about the fact that April was the month our father had died, and it just seemed sort of unlucky and horrible all around.

  Mrs. Connor had been telling us something about T. S. Eliot’s interpretation of Keats yesterday, and she spouted off, “April is the cruelest month.” She’d pulled her big, black floppy hat down dramatically over her eyes as she said it. We’d all looked at her sort of dumbly, waiting to see if she’d fallen off the deep end or something. “Oh never mind.” She waved her hand in the air. “You’re too young for my T. S. Eliot jokes. If you stick with it, maybe you’ll read The Waste Land in twelfth-grade AP. That’s the first line.” She laughed. So not funny.

  But just now that line popped into my head. I thought about the beautiful, cool starlit nights in the desert in April and the warm, sunny days, and the way that death had taken my father, and Ashley had been broken, and suddenly I worried that something terrible was about to befall me.

  In English we moved on to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As Mrs. Connor passed the day’s poem down the rows she said, “Ah, Elizabeth and Robert. What an amazing love story.” She was still wearing the black floppy hat that she’d had on yesterday, but today she’d lifted the flaps up so we could see her face, which I noticed looked even more illuminated than usual.

  I stopped doodling in my notebook and looked over at the poem in front of me. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Mrs. Connor shouted out the first line and jumped in front of the room. Her hat fell back down over her eyes. “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”

  “Oh”—Mrs. Connor sucked in her breath and closed her eyes—“imagine it, guys and gals: a love that consumes you so much that you can write something this stunning.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood most of it. But I didn’t think I loved Max to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, whatever the heck that meant.

  “And here is something you should all know about Elizabeth,” Mrs. Connor said. She was always doing this, trying to tell us something interesting about the poet, more than just the biographical stuff you would normally read in books. My father would’ve loved her. “The last word she ever uttered was the word beautiful. She was on her deathbed, and her husband, Robert, asked her how she was feeling. That’s what she said in response: ‘beautiful.’” She said the word softly, so it hung in the air for a minute before she said anything else.

  I thought about my dad’s last words to me, maybe to anyone, and I wondered what he would’ve said if I’d have asked him how he was feeling. Beautiful seemed like the perfect last thing to say, poetic even, and I wondered if she’d felt that way because her true love was sitting with her, if that’s what real love did for you, made you feel beautiful in spite of everything.

  Ashley had called my mother in the middle of the day to pick her up. She’d said her face and her ankle were killing her, and she couldn’t concentrate, but I knew what it really was. She couldn’t take the stares, the whispers. And really, I didn’t blame her.

  By the time I got home, she was already waiting for me in my bedroom. She was lying on my bed with a box of tissues, crying her eyes out. I was tempted to tell her to get up, to keep her gross mono germs to herself, in her own bed, but I just didn’t have the heart, even though I resolved that I was going to switch my pillowcase before I went to sleep.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a bitch.”

  Ashley had never apologized to me before, for anything, so the only thing I could think to muster in response was, “Well, yeah. You sorta are.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that to you about Max.” She paused to blow her nose. “I mean some of the guys are like that, but not Max.” She blew her nose again, and I was wondering how she could be blowing so much since it was still broken, but I didn’t ask. “Lexie just wanted you to think that Max didn’t really like you, and I’m such an idiot. I went along with her.”

  I sat down next to her. A part of me wanted to kick her as hard as I could, and another part of me wanted to hug her. But I just sat there and did nothing.

  “Max really likes you, you know. And he’s a good guy. You’re lucky, Melissa.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, until she said, in almost a whisper, “I was always so jealous of you.”

  “Me?” I didn’t know what she would have to be jealous of when she was the one who was gorgeous and popular and an almost beauty queen.

  “You can always just do your own thing, and you never care what anyone else thinks of you. You’re so much like Dad.”

  “I am?” It wasn’t fair that I’d been too young to remember him healthy, to really remember him, not just a few chance conversations and an evening of stargazing, but him, the person that he was, every single day.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Dad never followed anyone else’s rules. Mom used to yell at him for driving too fast and just doing what he pleased whenever he wanted to, even if no one else agreed with him. I remember when he got sick, he told me there was no way he was going to die. He just wasn’t going to let himself. And he really believed that, even when Dr. Singh told him it wasn’t true.”

  “I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “I wish I’d been older.”

  “I wish I could be more like him,” she said.

  “But you’re you. You’re beautiful.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You will be again.”

  “But what does it matter?” She started crying again. “It
’ll be too late to do pageants, and all my friends will be laughing at me over this whole Austin thing.”

  “So.” I shrugged. “You’ll get new friends.”

  She laughed. “It’s so easy for you. You’re funny and smart, and what do I have?”

  “You’re funny and smart,” I said, though I couldn’t think of a single joke Ashley had ever cracked. “And besides, I’m totally going to fail biology,” I said.

  “Oh shut up. You are not.”

  I lay back so I was lying next to her and our shoulders were touching. We both were staring at the ceiling, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars that our dad had glued up there before he got sick, and I thought about that night I’d lain out on the grass with him and he’d told me that his favorite star was not the brightest. “Dad would’ve been really proud of you,” I said.

  She leaned her broken face on my shoulder, and the two of us just stayed there for a while, not saying another word.

  The next night both Ashley and my mother helped me get ready for my date with Max. My mother curled my hair again, and Ashley picked out a really cute short-sleeved pink sweater from her closet for me to wear. Then she said she was going to lie down. “Are you all right?” my mother asked her. “You still don’t seem like yourself, honey.”

  She shook her head.

  “The pageant,” I whispered, because I had just remembered. Tonight was the night. Ashley should’ve been downtown right now, taping her butt into her dress and layering foundation on her face, but instead she was here with us.

  “Oh my goodness,” my mother said. “That reminds me.” She ran into the kitchen, and then came back with an envelope, which she handed to Ashley. “Here,” she said.

  “What’s this?” Ashley took the envelope and looked through it for a minute. Then she jumped up and squealed. “Ow,” she said as she landed too hard on her ankle. “Ow.” Then she squealed again and hugged my mother.

  Ashley took the paper out of the envelope and waved it in my face. It was her entry into the premier set of pageants, which began with the first one in August, plenty of time for her to heal, to become beautiful all over again. It was the pageant circuit with the most scholarship money and the prettiest, most-elite girls, the one Ashley had always begged my mother to let her enter in the past.

  “I thought you said this was too expensive?” Ashley said.

  My mother shrugged. “I’ve picked up a few more clients lately at the salon, so we can swing it this year.” She paused. “And besides, you deserve it, honey.”

  After I got all dressed and ready, I went into my room and stared at myself in the mirror. I was that other girl again, the pretty one with the made-up face and the bouncy, bouncy curls. I stood sideways and checked out my profile. In this sweater you couldn’t even tell how small my boobs were, and the pink was soft and feminine and pretty.

  I had butterflies in my stomach thinking about my date with Max, which was strange because we’d been spending time together all week. But I’d never been on a real date with a boy before, except for the dance, which wasn’t really a real date, because he’d only sort of asked me at the last minute.

  I heard a tapping at my window, and I jumped. Not now, Ryan. But I had no choice but to go and open the window for him anyway. He climbed in and looked at me, really looked at me. He stared long enough that I felt my face turning red. “What?” I finally said.

  “Have you called her yet?”

  I shook my head. I’d been so worried about everything with Max that I hadn’t really been thinking about Sally.

  He nodded. “I knew it.”

  “Why do you care so much anyway?” I paused. “I’m going to call her, all right?” And I was, at some point. It was funny how now that I knew exactly how and where to find her, I’d sort of lost my nerve to actually do it.

  “Let’s go right now. We can bike to her house.”

  “I have a date,” I said.

  “Oh.” Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw his face drop, when I said the word date. It annoyed me, because he didn’t have the right to do that, to judge or be angry or whatever, not after he’d ditched me for Courtney for months.

  He stared at me for another moment and then started to say something but changed his mind.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Never mind.”

  “Say it.”

  He started to climb out the window, then stopped and turned back. “It’s just, you look really nice. That’s all.” He jumped down and started running down the street toward his house.

  The movie Max and I went to see was the action movie he’d been telling me about on the ride home the other day. I tried really hard to seem interested, but I just couldn’t focus. Right away there was some big fight scene that just made me want to stop watching. And in my head I couldn’t stop thinking about Ryan, about the way his face had looked as he’d looked at me, sort of surprised and thrilled all at the same time.

  After about twenty minutes, Max reached over and put his arm around me, and then he leaned in and started kissing me. I kissed him back. He put his tongue in my mouth—not in this gentle, nice sort of way, but in this way where I felt like he was shoving it down my throat and I was going to have to cough. It was my first French kiss, and I hated it. Sort of slimy and aggressive, and I could not understand why people liked it.

  I was trying to think of a polite way to get his tongue out of my mouth when I felt his hand inching toward my breast. I shifted a little to move his hand and hoped he’d get the hint. But he moved it right back. I squirmed a little more, and then he made a sudden move to put his hand under my shirt. I pulled away. “What’s wrong?” he whispered. In the background, in the movie, there was a building exploding and people running and screaming, and it would’ve almost been something funny if it had been happening to someone else.

  “Let’s just watch the movie,” I whispered back.

  He laughed and started kissing me. And he put his hand right back under my shirt again, until I felt it on my stomach. His hand felt cold as it pressed against my skin just above my belly button. I reached my hand down and moved his hand out of my shirt again. But he put it right back. “Come on,” I whispered. “Don’t.”

  “Why not?” He kissed my ear and whispered, “I love that you’re so new at this.”

  And then I knew it, absolutely, for sure. I didn’t love him. Maybe I didn’t even like him. So he was Max Healy. So every girl at school was in love with him. So what.

  Maybe he wasn’t trying to sleep with me just because I was a freshman, but still, it seemed like his idea of a date was feeling me up in the middle of an action movie. And if that’s what a date with him was, then I was okay with not having any more, ever.

  “Can you take me home?” I asked.

  “What? Now? Are you kidding?” I shook my head, and he had this look of disbelief on his face, which then turned into a frown of annoyance.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll walk.” I stood up and walked out of the movie theater, and I was sure that he wasn’t going to follow me.

  On the walk home I thought about what an idiot I’d been to think that I would’ve wanted a guy that every other girl wanted. If there was one thing I’d learned from my dad, it was to embrace the fact that I was different, that I wasn’t like everyone else. “You’re not a sheep,” he used to say.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t follow the herd. You do your own thing.”

  And I always had, until this year. Until I met Courtney. Until Ryan ditched me. Until a part of me got so jealous that I just wanted to be beautiful and popular like Ashley because I thought that would solve everything. I thought about what Courtney had said when I’d told her about Max liking her in the beginning of the year. And she’d been right. All he’d wanted to do was get his hands up my shirt all along. Maybe it took a girl like Courtney to really understand a guy like Max.

  I thought about Ryan’s face as he’d stood in my room earlier in
the night, and I knew I had to see him. Right now. As I got closer to my street, I started running. My feet were killing me in a pair of Ashley’s sandals, but I didn’t stop. I ran and I ran. And I ran.

  When I got to Ryan’s house, I was completely out of breath. I stood in his driveway for a second with my head between my knees, trying to keep my breath going. I wondered how fast my ribs were moving now.

  His father’s car was in the driveway, but I didn’t see Ryan’s bike parked in its normal spot, so I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

  His father opened the door, and he was wearing his Border Patrol uniform, so I was guessing he’d just gotten home or he was just about to go out. He nodded at me. “Hello, Melissa. It’s been a while.” He had such a stern voice, and he was tall and looked very stately in his uniform. So the opposite of my father.

  “Do you know where Ryan is?”

  He nodded again. “He told me he went out to get something. For you, actually.”

  It hit me. Ryan had gone to find Sally by himself. My first reaction was to be angry, because what right did he have to find someone that was mine to find? But I wasn’t all angry. This little part of me felt grateful that he cared enough to do it. Maybe this was his way of apologizing, after all. “Thank you.” I waved and started running back toward my house.

  I didn’t go inside because I didn’t want to explain to my mother or Ashley what had happened, and besides, I knew my mother would never let me get on my bike now, in the dark.

  I pulled my bike out from the side of the house as quietly as I could, and I walked it down the street past my next-door neighbor’s house. Then I hopped on and started riding.

  The night was slightly cool, and the wind whipped through my hair, pulling the curls back behind my shoulders. It was a little harder than usual to pedal in Ashley’s sandals, but I didn’t care. Though I was riding toward Sally’s house, it wasn’t her I wanted to see.

  This strange feeling came over me as I rode, this overwhelming sense of warmth and elation. All the anger I’d had for Ryan was gone. The world in which he’d ignored me and ditched me for Courtney felt very, very far away.