The Bermudez Triangle

by Maureen Johnson

  “You’ll be awesome,” Mel said. “You’re the best.”

  “I wish you could be there. I’m kind of freaked out.”

  Mel smiled. Her pale skin was bright pink in the cold. Avery heard the door open, and soon her mom appeared outside. She came over to them and squatted down in front of Mel, then put her hands on Mel’s knees. “If you need a place to go,” she said, “you just come over. Anytime. You don’t even have to call.”

  “Thanks,” Mel said. Her voice was thick.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Avery asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  “I will.”

  Avery’s mom stood and took Avery lightly by the arm. Even though she didn’t want to leave Mel, she knew it was time—this discussion, in some form or another, had been on its way for years. Mel was going to square off with her mom, and she had to do that on her own. Avery watched her, even as she backed up to the car and as they pulled away. She also noticed something else. Mel didn’t seem that small anymore.

  Mel sat on the lawn for a while after Avery and her family left, listening to her parents fighting inside the house. Strangely, this noise comforted her. It reminded her of being little. Some of her earliest memories were of hearing arguments in other rooms. She just thought it was the noise families made, no more significant than the mumblings from the TV or the grinding of the garbage disposal. It was only after her mother left and the house became fight-free that Mel realized how much she missed the sound.

  Her mother came out after a while.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m not playing around with this, Mel. Come back inside.”

  “You don’t live here,” Mel said, a few loose tears dribbling down her face. “You can’t make me.”

  “Are you angry at me, Mel?” she asked, her voice low. “Is that what this is about?”

  “Why do you think this is about you?”

  “Fine. Talk to your father.”

  Her mother got into her car and left. When she was down the street, Mel got up and went inside. Her father was still in the living room.

  “You look cold,” he said.

  “I am”

  She sat down next to him on the sofa. He wrapped her in the fleece throw they kept over the back of the couch and rubbed her arms to get her warm.

  “I’m sorry,” Mel said.

  It probably sounded like she was apologizing for being gay. That wasn’t it. She was apologizing for her mother and for making something in his life that he took for granted suddenly foreign.

  “Your mom did have a point,” he said. “It’s going to make things hard.”

  “Faking the rest of my life would be harder.”

  He considered this.

  “I know that this makes no sense to you,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to change anything between us.”

  “Mel, you know I’m going to love you no matter what, right?” her father said, pulling her close for an embrace.

  Mel couldn’t have felt more grateful.

  “What about Mom?” she said, tears coming to her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about her. She’s just mad that this is one situation she can’t control.”

  “I think she hates me,” Mel cried. And this really seemed true.

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s just … Don’t worry about her.”

  Mel’s father kept her in his arms real tight, and they sat like that together for a long time.

  41

  Saint Patrick’s Day weekend at P. J. Mortimer’s was greeted with the kind of frenzy that only accompanied things like flash floods. Special staff meetings were held and memos were distributed making it clear that this was a Very Big Deal and that all of Saratoga was going to descend on Mortimer’s to get their jig on. It was all hands on deck; no one could call in sick. More green food was introduced—spinach pasta, split pea soup, mint ice cream. They had even tried putting some green dye in the onion blossom batter, but this just made the onions look moldy and mossy. Even really drunk people wouldn’t eat them when the batch of testers was offered free at the bar.

  On Saturday night Parker stood in the corner during the shift meeting. His brow was furrowed, and he put all of his concentration into drawing little zigzags on the frosted window.

  In the middle of her family trauma Mel had heard what had happened between Parker and Nina but hadn’t really been able to say or do anything about it in the last two days.

  Parker took his order pad from his pocket and opened it and clapped it shut several times. He refused to look Mel in the eye.

  As it turned out, there was a good crowd and a decent hour-long wait, but there definitely wasn’t enough business to justify the fact that they had one server for every two tables. This just overcrowded the pantry, and everyone kept bumping into one another in the doorway. Throughout the shift Mel tried to catch Parker’s eye, but he kept his focus turned away. She finally ended up standing next to him as she waited for the bartender to give her a tray full of Paddy’s Frozen Peppermint Patties and Parker was dully waiting for a few Guinnesses.

  “My dad found out,” she said quietly. “About me.”

  This, at least, caught his attention.

  “Whoa. How’d that happen?” he asked.

  “Pretty much the same way you did.” No point in mentioning Nina’s role in all of this.

  Parker’s eyes flicked back and forth between the sets of bar taps before settling on Mel.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “It was kind of hard. My dad told my mom. My mom told Avery’s parents. They all had a big meeting, tried to do an intervention on us.”

  “Jesus. When did all of this happen?”

  “He found out on Thursday.”

  “Thursday?” Parker laughed. “Well, that was a banner night for both of us.”

  “It’s probably better this way.”

  “Are they mad?”

  “My mom called yesterday and told me she made me an appointment to go to a psychologist,” Mel said. “But my dad has been good. I don’t think he really understands it, but he’s not going to throw me out or anything.”

  They leaned against the edge of the bar and looked down into the tiny pools of beer and icy slush that were all over the rubber mat that covered the servers’ pickup area. Parker flicked a beer cap with his finger, and it flew behind the bar and bounced off a bottle.

  “I screwed up,” he said. “Bad.”

  “Oh, Park.” Mel wished her friends weren’t going through all this.

  “And then, because that wasn’t enough,” he went on, “I got a credit card and bought a metric shitload of DVDs so that she could pick the one she wanted to watch. I was going to return the rest. But the credit card company noticed that the first purchase seemed weird, and fraud protection flagged my card and put a hold on it. So now I might not be able to return them on time, and I’ll have to pay four hundred bucks. Which is just perfect, don’t you think?”

  The birthday jig alarm went off. Julie, Avery’s replacement on the keyboard (not that she was anywhere nearly as good as Avery), took her position, and the army of servers descended on the unsuspecting victim. Parker and Mel looked at each other and then quietly stepped away from the bar and slipped through the glut of servers who came forward to stomp around the doomed birthday person’s table. They went right to the pantry and out the service door.

  Once outside, they stood coatless in the cold, peering at the massive pile of cartons that preparations for the holiday had generated. They meditated on the garbage and their respective problems for a while; then Mel’s mind drifted back to Avery. She was so relieved that Avery wasn’t “a problem” anymore. Now Avery felt like Avery, her best friend. She’d said that she was nervous about her audition and that she’d wished Mel could be there. If things were how they used to be, Mel probably would have been. In fact, all three members of the Triangle would probab
ly have made a trip of it.

  She looked up at Parker suddenly.

  “Avery went to New York today,” Mel said. “She has her big audition in the morning.”

  “Hooray.” Parker said flatly.

  “I want to go, and I want you to come with me.”

  “To her audition? What, do you want to sabotage it or something?”

  “I’d like to cheer her on.”

  “What page of the script are you on?” Parker asked. “I think I just walked into a very special episode of Seventh Heaven.”

  “I’m serious,” Mel said.

  “Well, in Reality Land, where I live, I work tomorrow.”

  “Call in.”

  “I would, but I can’t, now that I have this massive credit card bill to pay. Also, Nina hates me now. Also, Avery’s the one who broke up with you, so why are you chasing her to New York to support her? Also, also, also.” He started picking Guinness pins from his suspenders and throwing them angrily across the lot, timing each of his also’s with the hollow ping as they hit the Dumpster.

  “Avery said she wanted me there.”

  “She dumped you.”

  “She’s still Avery.”

  “Avery, the girl who decided to make somebody else give you the news that you two were over. You were crying for like two months. Do you and Nina like to date people who don’t call you? Is that like a big turn-on or something? Why didn’t someone tell me that’s all I had to do?”

  “She’s been my friend my whole life. She stuck up for me the other night. We stuck up for each other.”

  “Okay.” He sighed. “I give. There was sticking. You want to do the rah-rahs for Avery, fine. But why would I go?”

  “Because you’re our friend. Because you like Nina.”

  “Who probably never wants to see me again.”

  “Look,” Mel said firmly. “Do you want to figure it out, or do you just want to complain about it forever? Come with me. Talk to her.”

  Parker ran his hand through his hair, then paced over to the Dumpster, retrieved his pins from the ground, and reattached them to his suspenders. Mel could see his lips moving. He was mumbling to himself, trying to figure out what to do. After a few moments of this, he came back over.

  “If you can find a way to convince her to spend hours with me in the car, I’ll go,” he said. “But she won’t. I’m telling you, she won’t.

  “If I promise you I can do it, will you take off and come with us?”

  “If you can do that, then I’ll do anything you want, because that means you have magical powers.”

  “Be at my house at eight-thirty. Park down the street.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the door.

  “Now you’re scaring me,” he said, finally smiling in the way he usually did. “You’re getting all tough and mastermindy.”

  “I know,” Mel said, flushing with pride. “I think I’m a butch.”

  “I always think that when I see your sparkly T-shirts.”

  “It’s not the clothes,” Mel said, moving him away from the door to go back inside. “It’s the attitude.”

  42

  Why am I doing this? Nina thought as she pulled into Mel’s driveway at nine on Sunday morning.

  Of course she knew why she was doing this. She had just outed Mel and potentially ruined her life, so if Mel wanted to go to New York to reunite with the girl who dumped her, then Nina was going to drive her. She was going to do whatever Mel wanted her to do for the rest of her life because what she’d done was the kind of thing you can’t really make up for with a chai and an e-card.

  But it was still a really, really bad idea. One, because as much as she missed Avery—and she did miss Avery—Avery had done a lot of really wrong things. And two, it was about to snow. Seriously snow. The forecast was calling for about a foot, and the only way she’d been able to go out at all was by telling her mom that she was spending the day at school and attending a com-pletely fictitious faculty-student curriculum panel, promising that she’d walk home if the roads were bad. She foresaw some serious stopping and sliding and cleaning off of windows. They’d probably only make it an hour down the highway.

  Mel came out, bundled in her heavy green winter coat and green-and-white mittens and hat. She had a duffel bag slung over her tiny shoulder. And behind her was Parker. Mel got into the car as if nothing strange was going on at all. Parker climbed into the back without a word.

  “Okay,” Mel said cheerfully. “So, I’ve packed stuff for the trip. Maps and directions, snacks, some CDs. I even made a thermos of hot chocolate. See?”

  She held up a silver workman’s thermos like it was a trophy.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Nina asked. “Outside, please?”

  They got out of the car and walked to the end of the driveway.

  “Why is Parker here?” Nina asked.

  “I thought it would be good to have a guy along,” Mel said innocently. “If we have to push or if we have trouble parking or something.”

  “God, Mel.” Nina let out an exasperated sigh.

  “If I get one favor, ever, I’m asking for it now.”

  Nina could have easily pointed out that many people would consider driving four hours through a blizzard to be a favor, but again, she was in no position to argue.

  “Okay,” Nina said, throwing up her hands. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it all the way.”

  Since she was never famous for her conversational ability, Mel was at a loss to fill the deafening silence that filled the car as they drove. She tried a few times to get something going, but Nina was intent on her driving, and Parker refused to say a word. So Mel spent most of the time looking out at the heavy snow sky and the bleak view of bare trees and road. About an hour in, the snow began to fall. The first few minutes brought flurries, but these soon became wet, heavy flakes, blanking out the horizon.

  Nina tried to keep going, but it was almost impossible for her to see, even with the windshield wipers at full blast. The snow blanketed the other windows, making the inside of the car dark and close and even more quiet. Nina was becoming visibly upset at the worsening conditions. She shifted down and went even slower, but other cars were losing grip and fishtailing. A rest stop finally came into sight. She eased the car off the road and drove into the parking lot, which was already full of people who seemed to have the same idea. Parker opened his door.

  “Anybody want anything?” he asked unenthusiastically.

  Both Mel and Nina shook their heads. Parker got out and headed into the service plaza. Mel turned to Nina, who stretched her arms out and held them stiff against the steering wheel.

  “Neen,” Mel said, “maybe just try to …”

  “He doesn’t want to talk.”

  They watched Parker hastily making his way into the plaza. She couldn’t really disagree with Nina on that one. He wasn’t even trying.

  “I need to stretch,” Nina said.

  Nina opened her door and got out, leaving Mel sitting in the car alone. Mel watched Nina wrap her arms around herself tightly and walk up the sidewalk. The snow caught in the tips of her hair, giving it a strange white frosting.

  This plan was horrible, Mel realized. This was why Nina had always been the planner. Throwing two people together in a car, forcing them to drive to New York together wasn’t fun—it was stressful. And now she was going to get them all stranded or killed.

  Nothing to do now but wait it out a bit. Hopefully Avery would still be in New York by the time they got there. Of course, they’d probably miss her completely, and since she didn’t have a cell phone, they’d never be able to find her. This whole trip would be a huge exercise in pointlessness.

  Sighing, she decided to go inside and at least make another attempt with Parker. Or maybe she would just hide in the bathroom and try not to cause any more problems. That was probably the wiser move. She opened her door and stepped out into a good inch of sticky snow. Nina turned and started
to run over to her.

  “Mel …” she cried.

  Mel shut the door and hurried toward her, hoping that she’d changed her mind, that she was going to try to talk to Parker again. But Nina just looked horrified and stared at her car.

  It took Mel a moment to realize that she probably should have turned off the car and removed the keys from the ignition before she’d gotten out.

  43

  At nine on Sunday morning, Avery walked up the wide stone steps of the Albertson Music Building on Eighth Street. She hadn’t been sure what to wear, so she’d ended up putting on standard art student gear: black pants, black turtleneck. These were actually her P. J. Mortimer’s pants she was wearing. Though she’d washed them since then, they still retained the faintest odor of hamburger, ketchup, and industrial cleanser.

  Once inside, she was given a folder of admissions information and brochures by a student guide and sent upstairs to wait for her audition. She sat on the floor with her coffee and reviewed her music, even though there was no point. It had to be in her head and in her hands by now. She’d played each song hundreds of times. Looking at the notation only confused the issue.

  She put the music back in her bag and stared at the wall. There was a bulletin board there, overflowing with posters for chamber music recitals, summer institutes, choir performances, and music festivals. A soprano was doing her scales somewhere down the hall, and Avery listened in amazement as she nailed a high A with perfect clarity and roundness, then easily ran back down the scale.

  Across from her, a girl in a long black skirt with a shock of blond hair wrapped in a red scarf was sitting with her eyes closed and smiling to herself. She swayed back and forth and beat out a complicated rhythm on the floor with a flat hand.

  Some of us don’t need stereos, Avery thought. Truthfully, Avery could be like that too: Sometimes she could hear music that clearly in her own mind. But she disliked public displays that made it clear that she heard fully audible noises—and occasionally voices—inside her head.