Yesterday

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  “You don’t even know my name,” I say.

  He blinks, reclining back against the wall. “Of course I know your name, Freya.”

  I wasn’t the one to tell him and the mix of uncertainty and curiosity I’m feeling comes out sounding blunter than I mean it to. “Well, I don’t know yours.”

  The guy’s mouth falls open for a split second before he clamps it shut again. “Okay, it looks like I’m doing this really badly,” he says. “I’m Seth—Seth Hardy. If you talk to Nicolette in your history class she’ll tell you I’m an okay guy. She’s Corey’s girlfriend. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find a way to talk to you and I thought the party could be a good place for us to get to know each other better.”

  I exhale slowly, multiple thoughts coursing through my brain at the same time. My father’s gone forever. I don’t understand this place. I’m starving. Something’s missing here … something aside from my dad, something I can’t put my finger on. And do I actually want to go to this party with Seth or not? From my place in the fog I can’t tell, but he was the first person at school who was nice to me. It could be that going to a party with him would be like watching TV—a decent way of distracting myself.

  “I have to ask my mom,” I tell him.

  “Cool.” Seth nods, his grin returning and his hazel eyes twinkling. “Tell her you’re going with a bunch of people if that helps. I can bring Nicolette with me when I pick you up.”

  He says that like I’ve already agreed, which irritates me a bit, but I walk back to Derrick and Christine without contradicting him. The two of them glance guiltily up at me as though they’ve been talking about me behind my back since the moment I disappeared. “Seth Hardy likes you,” Christine intones. “Prepare to be popular.”

  I roll my eyes at her and chomp into one of my cookies. Who says I want to be popular? I just don’t want to sit alone in the cafeteria.

  It’s not long before lunch is over but two periods later Christine and I have math together. I get there first and snag the desk next to hers just like I did yesterday so it looks like it’s mine for the duration of the semester. Our teacher, Ms. Megeney, has feathered Princess Diana hair and is wearing a blouse with an ultra-ruffled collar that flaps like a wing whenever she moves. The second I see it I know Christine will have something funny to say about the blouse. I keep watching the door, expecting her to zoom into class with her head down at any minute, but it never happens. The entire period goes by and Christine never shows.

  I feel a momentary buzz of concern in my stomach that I can’t explain (she’s probably just cutting class and forgot to mention it). Since I don’t have Christine’s phone number there’s no way for me to check on her or pass on the math homework. I don’t see her again until the next morning on my way to homeroom—a vision in black elbowing her way through a group of slow-moving students in the hallway.

  “Hey,” she says tonelessly as she emerges from the crowd.

  “Hi.” I balance my books against my hip. “You missed Ms. Megeney’s blouse yesterday. It was the star of math class.”

  Christine nods vacantly, like she’d completely forgotten about the existence of math class. “Sorry I missed it.” I watch her jaw harden and it’s the strangest thing but I feel as if I know approximately what she’s going to say before her mouth can form the words. “The guidance counselor, um, pulled me out of history class to tell me my mom was in the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” I repeat. Although logically I couldn’t have had any inkling, I’d swear the idea was already in my head. “Is she okay?”

  Christine nods but her eyes are anxious. “Yeah, she’s fine. It was nothing serious. She’s already back at home.” Maybe it’s Christine’s tone that suggests the final part of her answer is true, at least. Though I’ve never been to her house I can vaguely imagine her mother there, like the pictures you form in your head when you read a novel. Not a face or anything, just a bathrobe and slippers, a hazy image of feet moving slowly across a carpeted floor.

  I hover around for another few seconds to see whether Christine’s going to tell me more. At the very last second, as I’m turning on my heel to leave, she calls, “Wait. Maybe we should swap phone numbers, in case we ever need them.”

  We print out our respective numbers on paper Christine tears from her binder. She tucks mine into her pencil case before turning her back on me.

  Clearly Christine’s done talking and as I walk away I’m back to wondering how I knew she’d say her mom had been in the hospital. It has to be some kind of brain hiccup, like déjà vu. I couldn’t have really known beforehand. My brain must’ve only tricked itself into believing it did for a moment. The more I think about it the more absurd the idea that my mind could’ve raced ahead of Christine’s words seems.

  The main thing is that her mom’s okay and by lunch Christine seems back to her regular self. She and Derrick bug me about the party (which I still haven’t asked my mom about) but pretend they’re joking. I act disinterested, which isn’t hard, but when I slide Christine’s Smiths tape into my stereo later that night and lie on my bed listening to lead singer Morrissey’s special brand of acute misery, my head hurts with such a vengeance that I think I’m going to be sick.

  I roll onto my back, hanging my head over the side of the bed as Morrissey sings, “So you go, and you stand on your own and you leave on your own.…”

  On your own.

  Alone. It’s how I always feel lately. Alone or out of place. And now it seems a song understands me better than anyone on the planet does. “How Soon Is Now?” is the saddest, most painful thing I’ve heard. Worse than the day my father died. Like an infection that will never heal.

  Crippling loneliness. The certainty that you don’t belong. The suspicion that maybe you never will. I hang my head and wait for a stream of sickness that doesn’t come, feeling ancient as I listen to the rest of “How Soon Is Now?”—ancient and empty—and then I slink downstairs and bury my head in my mother’s shoulder as she stands at the kitchen counter chopping carrots. She swivels to fold me into her arms, rocking me wordlessly for what could never be long enough.

  I pull away first. Both our eyes are a messy pink because she misses my father too. Only whatever’s wrong with me isn’t just about my father. My tears now aren’t solely for him but I can’t say that to my mother.

  “Your grandfather’s coming for dinner on Saturday,” my mom says, sniffling back the rest of her sadness.

  Saturday. The night of Corey’s party. I’d nearly forgotten to talk to my mom about it for the second night in a row and when I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay with me going I’m honestly not sure whether I want her to say yes or not.

  Just before dinner on Saturday my grandfather asks many of the questions about the party that my mom forgot to pin me down on earlier and I have to call Seth to get Corey’s phone number and address to hand over to her. “What class did you say you share with the girl you’re going to the party with tonight?” my grandfather pries as we sit at the kitchen table, him occupying my father’s spot.

  This is another detail my mother may have honed in on if she were feeling better but there’s a lot on her mind. Sometimes I think the constant support of her friend Nancy and my grandfather are the only things really holding her together. That should make me more patient with my grandfather’s questions and it probably would if I’d grown up around him, but aside from the last few weeks my memories of him are sparse.

  I frown at my mom directly across from me, wishing she’d make him stop, and then plunge my fork into my lasagna. “History,” I mumble. If my mom knew there was a guy involved she might have wanted to meet him. I made things easy for all of us by leaving that part out.

  My grandfather scratches the end of his nose and scrunches up his eyebrows. “Do you know many of the other kids who will be there?” he cross-examines.

  Mom lays her right hand on her father’s arm. “It’s okay, Dad. Freya will be fine. She knows she can call me if s
he needs to and you’ll be home by midnight, right?” Midnight was my party curfew in Auckland and Mom turns to me for confirmation.

  “For sure.” I bob my head, grateful for her intervention. “If not earlier.”

  “I don’t think I want to go to parties when I’m older,” my sister claims, her eyes sullen and both her elbows on the table exactly like they’re not supposed to be. “Teenage parties always look dumb.”

  “That’s just from the movies and TV you’ve seen.” Annoyance creeps into my voice because Olivia has a habit of saying stupid things just to get a reaction. “You’ve never been to a real teenage party so how can you have a clue what they’re like?”

  My grandfather laughs and when I shift my gaze to him to figure out why, he remarks, “Typical sibling rivalry—one says left and the other says right.”

  My head twinges right behind my eyes and I set down my fork and rub my forehead with two fingers. I haven’t woken up with a headache since Wednesday but the pains still come and go. They make me want to shut my eyes and hide out in the dark. Crawl backwards out of existence to whatever came before.

  Crazy, Freya. Who the hell thinks things like that? Only people who need to be on serious amounts of medication.

  “You still getting those headaches, Freya?” my grandfather asks. “Maybe Doctor Byrne should have another look at you.”

  Doctor Byrne is the Toronto physician my grandfather set my family up with when the three of us came home with a nasty flu. He drove out to suburban Brampton to make a house call for us because he’s also a close friend of my grandfather. My grandfather wants us to become Doctor Byrne’s permanent patients, despite him working out of the city. Ever since we got back he’s been stressing that he has absolute faith in Doctor Byrne and that we’d never find a better physician.

  “You okay, hon?” my mom asks, worry in her eyes.

  The pain’s disappeared with the same swiftness it arrived and I let my hand fall away from my forehead. “I’m all right. It’s probably just a little eyestrain. They dumped a lot of homework on us this week.” I shovel another forkful of lasagna between my lips because the hunger, like the headaches, is a constant in my life. The tip of an iceberg that I’m trying to ignore.

  After dinner Olivia and I do the dishes and then I go upstairs to shower and get ready for the party. It’s almost nine-thirty when Nicolette knocks at my front door. I drag her inside to introduce her to my mother and soon we’re hurrying out to Seth’s car, Nicolette climbing into the backseat so I can sit next to Seth.

  They have two bottles of rum in the trunk and when the three of us get out of the car at Corey’s house Seth lights a cigarette and hands me one of the bottles to carry. Then he opens Corey’s front door without knocking and Nicolette strides past us into the house, looking for her boyfriend. Some kids I vaguely recognize from school, and many I don’t, are sprawled out on the living room furniture while a swarm of others dance in the middle of the room to the sounds of Prince’s “1999.” Seth leads me along the hall and into the kitchen where a second crowd is standing around drinking out of paper cups. We deposit the rum on the kitchen counter and then Seth cups his hand around my ear so I can hear him over the sound of the music. “I forgot to tell you to bring your skates,” he says. “Corey’s got a rink out back.”

  “A rink?” I repeat.

  “Yeah.” Seth points to the sliding door at the back of the kitchen. I lope over to it, Seth a step behind me, and peer into the backyard, which, sure enough, sports an ice rink of about thirty-by-forty feet. Six guys are playing hockey in their jeans and coats, flying over the ice. Several summer folding chairs (three of them occupied by girls cheering on the game and another few empty) wind around the rink.

  I haven’t been skating since I can’t remember when and I turn my back to the sliding door and say, “That’s okay. I don’t think I know how to skate anyway.”

  “Don’t think you know, huh?” Seth smiles wide enough for me to see his braces. “You’d think that’d be the kind of thing you’d know about yourself.”

  He’s teasing, trying to be cute, but he’s also right. I should know whether I can skate and I don’t. There’s a blank space in my mind where that info should be, just like the blank about Alison’s favorite band.

  Seth and I are standing close together so we don’t have to shout to compete against the music and he plants a hand on my waist and leans in nearer still to kiss me. He tastes like spearmint gum and smoke and the feel of his mouth on mine is warm but unfamiliar. For the life of me I can’t compare Seth’s kiss to Shane’s. Tonight feels like the very first time I was ever kissed.

  How can that be? Shane and I kissed tons of times during our two months together. At the local swimming pool, crammed in the backseat of his car, curled up on my parents’ couch. Not to mention the few stray kisses I had with other boys at parties before I met Shane and after we split up.

  As Seth and I ease apart, Nicolette interrupts my thoughts by approaching with Corey in tow to introduce him. Before I know it she’s leading me around to meet people with names like Sheri, Lisa, Denise, Tonya, Ron, Mike, Terry, Jennifer and Justin and shortly after that I’m sipping rum and Coke from a paper cup and standing behind Nicolette in the line for the upstairs bathroom, with no clue what’s become of Seth.

  “I think he’s playing hockey,” Nicolette tells me, which makes me grin dazedly because I hadn’t realized that I’d wondered about him out loud.

  “Wow,” she says, giggling, “your alcohol tolerance is worse than mine.”

  I don’t remember drinking before.

  I don’t remember skating.

  I don’t remember my best friend’s favorite band.

  I don’t remember what it felt like to kiss my ex-boyfriend on the mouth.

  And I’m still smiling at Nicolette because it’s so stupidly ridiculous, trying to lose myself in sitcoms, paper cups and a jock guy with braces. As though any of those things can really help me. If it was that easy to make me feel normal again I wouldn’t need to be here.

  Once I get out of the bathroom Nicolette’s gone. I spend a couple of minutes searching for her and then another couple of minutes staring out the sliding glass door at Seth charging around the ice in pursuit of the puck. A tower of paper cups is stacked on the kitchen counter next to the alcohol and I pour myself another rum and Coke (is it my third or fourth?) and wander into the living room. Paul Young’s singing “Everything Must Change.” I sway to the music, fighting the sadness welling up inside me.

  Why does everything have to change? And when was the last time I felt connected to the things around me?

  “Hey, gorgeous,” a voice sings into my right ear. I swivel towards the voice, expecting to stare into Seth’s hazel eyes.

  But there’s some other guy standing next to me, eyeing me up from head to toe. He’s taller than Seth and wearing a T-shirt that shows off sizeable biceps. “I’m Matt,” he says. “What’s your name?”

  “Freya,” I drawl, the alcohol in partial control of my voice.

  “Fray-ya,” he pronounces, nodding after the fact. “Do you want to dance with me, Fray-ya? It looks like you like this song.” Matt steps closer to me, sliding his hand around my waist to guide me into the middle of the room, where the other dancers are.

  I take a single step forward, my defense mechanisms working slower than usual because of the alcohol too, before stopping to pry his hand from my waist. “I’m here with someone,” I tell him.

  “Figures.” Matt frowns, his arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  I guess not. Truthfully, if I didn’t feel so adrift maybe I’d be sort of flattered. While it’s weird to have people I don’t know staring at me in class it pumps up my ego to have guys chase after me for a change. I don’t know how to account for it, but maybe I don’t one hundred percent hate it all the time.

  I spot Nicolette edging her way through the crowd towards me as Matt’s slinking away. She bum
ps my hip and exclaims, “There you are! Come dance with us.” By “us” she means herself and three of the girls she introduced me to earlier.

  We whirl in time to the music, our arms in the air and the crowd feeling like they’re closing in on us, making me hot and a little dizzy until the other strange feelings catch up with me and begin to take over. I consider weaving through the crowd and out to the rink to make Seth kiss me again, just to stop them. But it doesn’t matter how much I dance or how many times I kiss Seth Hardy—I know the feelings will always catch up.

  I don’t belong here. I’m not like the people around me. Each and every memory I have of dancing with friends in muggy rooms, giggling as we point out cute boys, flirting in dark corners with the ones we might like enough to kiss, is paper-thin, with no emotional weight or dimension to it. Strip back the surface and I’m a blank slate. It’s as though I’ve never in my whole life felt at home anywhere.

  I take an unsteady step back, easing my way out of the circle of dancers and into the front hall where I spy two girls in bright eye shadow and skintight jeans making a beeline for the door. One of them has bloodshot eyes, like she’s recovering from a crying jag. “Dave’s an asshole,” the other girl claims with a vehemence that sends a globule of spit soaring from her mouth. “We should key his car.”

  “Wait!” I call, striding forward to intercept them. “Are you leaving? Can you give me a ride home?”

  The sad girl’s chin wobbles. It’s her friend who answers me. “We can give you a ride—as long as you don’t care if we key the shit out of someone’s car first.”

  I don’t care at all. This place and every person in it feel twenty times realer than the majority of my memories but regardless, nothing that happens here tonight feels as though it has anything to do with me.