The Space Between Us

by Jessica Martinez

  “Oh, I get it now!” she said. “You’re embarrassed. You’d rather go to a new school completely alone than with me.”

  “Exactly!”

  I stared hard into her face. She didn’t look grey like she had for the last few months, the sunken skin below her eyes had filled out, and the acne had cleared. After three months of looking terrible, she’d morphed from sickly to beautiful again. Her yellow hair shone gold in the moonlight.

  Maybe Charly wouldn’t be an embarrassment at all. Maybe she’d be adorable, lovable, effervescent Charly again. Maybe that would be worse.

  “What did Bree do to earn your undying love?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “She’s not our mother.”

  “I know that.”

  “She didn’t even know her,” I continued. “She’s nothing like her.”

  “But you don’t know that!”

  I sucked in two lungs’ worth of air, ready to fire back, before realizing I had no rebuttal. I did know that. Deep in my gut I knew my mother would’ve been the one person in the universe to care about me right now. And Bree didn’t. When I looked at Bree, talked to Bree, thought about Bree, I just knew my mother was nothing like her.

  “Bree was ten when she died,” I said. “Five when Mom moved away. They’re only half sis—”

  “I know!”

  But I could hear the lie in the way her voice shook. Knowing and feeling aren’t the same thing.

  Chapter 12

  It snowed all Sunday, fat, wet flakes, so thick the world beyond the window was just a curtain of lace.

  My first blizzard. That was a pretty good excuse for not going to church. According to Bree, the roads would be slippery. Grandma wouldn’t want us dying at the expense of one Sunday’s worth of worship. Bree did say I could borrow her car, but I didn’t want to owe her anything.

  Instead, Charly dragged me out to explore Banff in the afternoon while Bree was at the library studying. We wandered around in the snowstorm until I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes or face. It was misery, not that Charly would admit it. Admitting it would have required her to say more than two words to me, which she wasn’t doing. We spent most of our time in gift shops, pretending to be fascinated with stuffed animals dressed up like Royal Canadian Mounted Police and maple leaf coasters, just so we didn’t have to be outside.

  At an ice cream shop around the corner from Bree’s, we actually pretended to deliberate over flavors just so we could be inside. “How does this place stay open?” I asked through chattering teeth. The shop was warm, but I still couldn’t stop shivering. “This is like selling hot chocolate on the beach.”

  Charly shrugged and tossed her mini sample spoon in the garbage.

  “Your lips are blue,” I said. “We’re going home.”

  She didn’t argue.

  “Banff one, Mercer sisters zero,” I said as the bell over the door jingled.

  “Thanks for coming!” called the lady behind the counter.

  • • •

  “Will there still be school tomorrow?” I asked Bree when she reappeared at seven with pad thai and spring rolls.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just thought there might be a snow day or something.”

  She laughed. “Snow day. That’s cute. So American.”

  “That smells so good! Pad thai is my favorite,” Charly said, taking the stool beside me, suddenly alive after her day of sulking. She’d had Thai food once before in Tallahassee. Once.

  “Eat up.” Bree put bowls in front of us and started scooping spoonfuls of oily noodles into them.

  The pad thai smelled like man sweat. “I just had a bowl of cereal. I’m tired. I think I’m going to go to bed.”

  Nobody objected.

  I lay in bed and stared out into the star-studded blackness beyond the window. The noise was impossible to ignore—not loud but grating. The giggling. The shh-ing. The trying to be quiet, then forgetting midway through a story and erupting into hyena cackles. For all her cute-as-a-button-ness, Bree had a laugh that reminded me of the noise Charly had made that time she shredded her fingertips on the cheese grater.

  Tonight Charly’s laugh was worse, though. She’d spent the entire day refusing to talk to me, but now she was sunshine personified. Apparently cute-as-a-button Bree brought out the sweet-as-pie Charly. They were perfect for each other.

  I closed my eyes and pictured Banff Public High. Bree had pointed it out from the car on our way back from Calgary yesterday. It looked small and stark and unforgiving.

  I’d already had thirteen first days of school, and I’d choreographed every detail of all of them: wardrobe down to hair accessories and underwear; backpack contents from backup calculator to emergency tampon; color-coded schedule for the whole day, including time allotted for a longer-than-usual hair conditioning treatment, a slower-than-usual walk from the parking lot to my first class, and an extended post-lunch makeup check.

  Charly mocked, but I ignored her. Uncomfortable underwear, a broken calculator, or frizzy hair could put a serious damper on a first day, and first days meant something. Or at least they used to.

  What mattered about tomorrow? Not my classes. I just had to pass. I’d wasted far too many years earning perfect grades to get into Columbia, and the thought of that huge chunk of my life squandered stung. A thousand paper cuts and a thousand lemons. That was one of Savannah’s favorite phrases. I’d never had a first day without Savannah.

  I wasn’t too late to apply other places—University of Miami, Florida State, University of Central Florida—but even starting to fill out the applications turned out to be acute torture, so I gave up. I’d get to it later.

  I didn’t belong at any of those schools. The one place I thought I belonged had already decided I was wrong.

  As for tomorrow, friends didn’t matter either. My real friends were a thousand miles away and I wasn’t fooling myself about anybody I would meet tomorrow. Last-semester seniors didn’t waste time on new girls, and I didn’t really feel like wasting my time on them.

  New girl. I’d never been that before, but I’d spent the last few weeks stewing over it. In Tremonton new girls got ignored unless they were gorgeous like Luciana, in which case they were drooled over by the guys and hated by the girls. They were mostly just alone. I’d accepted the fact that that’d be me: walking alone, studying alone, eating alone. But now Charly would be there.

  A wave of something sweet and rancid rolled through me. Relief and dread weren’t supposed to combine like this. Maybe I was getting the stomach flu.

  The synthesized American Idol theme blared from below.

  Then, “She sucked,” from Bree.

  “Agreed,” Charly said.

  “We should be on that show.”

  “I know.”

  I put a pillow over my head. I had no clue what I was going to wear tomorrow and my backpack wasn’t packed. I didn’t even know what time we had to leave to get to school on time. And it didn’t matter.

  • • •

  It was still snowing in the morning.

  We sat in Bree’s car, shivering, watching flakes fall as she scraped the ice off her windows. White flakes on a black sky, like chalk on a brand-new chalkboard. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t so horrifically cold, and if my body didn’t ache from clenching.

  It was still snowing as I trudged up the icy steps of Banff Public High School behind Charly and Bree, still snowing as I stood in the principal’s office, staring out her window. Still dark too. I could barely see the row of town houses across the street, and I couldn’t see the mountains at all, but I could feel them pushing in on the air around me.

  The principal walked in. Dr. Ashton was a leathery woman in a white pantsuit. Apparently the tanning booth industry was alive and well in Canada. She greeted us with a cigarette-stained smile and sour breath.

  “How are you doing, dear?” she asked, giving Bree a hug. Then she pointed to chairs. “Sit,” she comm
anded.

  We sat.

  “Sorry I’m late. There is a whole gaggle of brats out there wanting to talk to me about something or other. Diploma exam grievances, schedule grievances, missing rugby equipment grievances, premenstrual grievances, who knows.” She put a pair of cat-eye bifocals on her nose, then pulled two pieces of paper from a binder. “Behold, your schedules,” she said, handing one to each of us. “Don’t worry about being able to find your classes. This building is too small to get lost in. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  I pictured her hiding in a stairwell, chain-smoking, shuddering at the thought of being found by teenagers. I hadn’t planned on liking this woman.

  “If you’d like, I can have one of the students show you where each room is, but to be honest, unless you’re complete idiots, you shouldn’t have a hard time.”

  “No,” I said quickly, picturing the social misfits who volunteered for the tour guide assignment back at Primrose. “No, thank you.”

  She looked from me to Charly, then back to me again.

  “Good choice. We’re having a short assembly this morning, and from there you’ll go straight to your first classes.”

  I looked at my schedule. First period was photography, followed by something called CALM. That’d better be an acronym for something and not some New Agey meditation class being shouted at me by my schedule. “What’s CALM?”

  “Career and Life Management. It’s a required course for an Alberta high school diploma. Don’t even try to wriggle out of it. Many have tried, none have succeeded. And you,” she said, turning to Charly, “you’re the pregnant one?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Charly flinch. She’d never had to say yes to that question aloud. She didn’t have time to before Dr. Ashton barreled on. “You’re meeting with Ms. Lee, the guidance counselor, after lunch.”

  “Um,” Charly said, picking at a little rip in the upholstery of her chair with her index finger. “Why? I mean, too late for the safe sex lecture, right?”

  Dr. Ashton raised one eyebrow. “I’ll say.”

  “I don’t do well with guidance in general.”

  “You’ll be seeing Ms. Lee regularly,” Dr. Ashton continued, “on the off chance that pregnancy is more than just a physical condition.”

  Charly’s finger was digging into the stuffing of the chair now. I resisted the urge to pull her hand away.

  “Stop destroying my piece-of-crap furniture,” Dr. Ashton said, squinting over her bifocals at Charly’s hand. “Have you thought about when you want to tell the other students?”

  Charly put her hands in her lap. Of course not.

  “You don’t look pregnant yet, and you’re . . . three months?”

  She just sat there.

  “Four,” I said.

  Dr. Ashton swiveled her head to me, blinked, then swiveled back to Charly. “Theoretically, you could keep it a secret for another couple of months under baggy clothes, but I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. From what Bree’s told me, you’ve been playing that game for too long.”

  I stared at Charly’s face, willing her to look at me. If she’d just look, she’d see my eyes screaming, Bail, Charly! Go home! Curl up on the couch and hide until this is over! But she wouldn’t.

  “It’s not my decision, but I’d recommend you tell people why you’re here,” Dr. Ashton continued, wiggling a pencil between her two fingers like she wished it was a noxious, tar-packed cancer stick. “It’ll be a relief, and it’ll take the pressure off later. You won’t be wondering how and when to explain, you won’t be wondering if people suspect why you look like you swallowed a basketball.”

  I turned my glare to her. Did she honestly think Hello, my name is Charly, and I’m knocked up was a good opener? Why not just make her wear a scarlet letter? And while she’s at it, a T-shirt for me saying I’m with preggers.

  Dr. Ashton was tapping the pencil on the rim of her mug now. Maybe she wasn’t just hopped up on coffee and nicotine. Maybe it was crack.

  “Either way,” Dr. Ashton said, “you’ll need someone to talk about things with, which is why you’ve got a standing appointment with Ms. Lee.”

  “She has people to talk about things with,” I blurted out.

  Dr. Ashton did the swivel-head-and-blink again. Bree gave me a subtle shake of her head.

  “I realize that,” Dr. Ashton continued slowly, like I was mentally disabled or something. “And she’s lucky to have a support system.” Then back at Charly, “But you might need someone besides your sister and your aunt.”

  Bree. She’d done this. I looked at her but she was gazing at Dr. Ashton, nodding like an audience member on those TV evangelist shows. Any moment now she’d shout Amen!

  Charly, meanwhile, looked like she was about to become roadkill, and it was hard to feel sorry for her. Why hadn’t she thought about what going to school here meant? Obviously, she had issues with thinking things through, but I’d told her she didn’t want to do this.

  She’d been caught up imagining meeting cool people on her great Canadian adventure. Just a little push in the wrong direction from surrogate-mother-of-the-year Bree, and now here Charly was with her bugged-out eyes and sinking shoulders, realizing this wasn’t going to be summer camp or even winter camp. This was going to be hell.

  Something glittered in the window and I looked up. Crystal daggers framed the top edge. Real icicles. They looked just like the plastic ones Grandma strung up every Christmas. The sky had lightened to an inky blue. At this rate we’d see daylight by noon.

  “Okay,” Charly said.

  “Okay, you’ll talk to the guidance counselor?” Bree asked.

  “Okay, I’ll tell people.”

  I kept my eyes on the icicles. No need to look at Dr. Ashton or Bree; the smugness rolling off them reeked almost as much as the nicotine seeping from Dr. Ashton’s pores. But they could be smug. Neither of them would be cleaning up the devastation when Charly was completely humiliated and ostracized. For them this was just stadium seating at a really depressing movie.

  • • •

  Bree left after the meeting. Charly and I followed Dr. Ashton into the empty gymnasium.

  “Brace yourselves for impact,” Dr. Ashton said, and motioned to a couple of chairs.

  We sat and watched as the BPHS student body, all 163 of them, filed in.

  They didn’t look like Primrose students, but I couldn’t say exactly why that was. I wanted there to be one salient reason, some kind of generalization to guide my future generalizations, but all my observations just contradicted each other.

  At first the girls seemed more glam—jewelry, heeled boots, runway outfits—but then a big group of granolas settled in the left-middle section. They looked like they’d rather eat makeup than wear it.

  Maybe it was their hair. It was just less in every way: shorter, less teased, less bleached, less curled. I was suddenly aware of how long mine was. I had to be the only person with hair that went past my shoulder blades, although a few of those granolas had messy buns hiding hair of indeterminable length.

  Where were the cheerleader types? I thought of Savannah, with her perfectly hot-rollered ponytail and hair bows, and felt a pang of homesickness.

  “Is it just me, or is everyone wearing black?” Charly whispered in my ear.

  “It’s just you,” I whispered back. But maybe there was less color.

  As for the guys, they weren’t so foreign. The universal high school guy prototype: all dorks, some just more so than others.

  A handful of teachers clumped together in the back, where they could nurse their coffee mugs and glance warily at Dr. Ashton from a safe distance.

  Nobody pretended to be friendly. Nobody smiled. Some of them stared at us with lukewarm curiosity as they walked in—hmm, new people, I almost care, except I don’t—then turned back to their friends.

  It didn’t really matter, though. These people could’ve been exact copies of the students at Primrose, and it wouldn’t have made me more permanent or
Charly’s pregnancy less defining.

  Dr. Ashton stood up front and spoke into a completely unnecessary microphone for a crowd this small.

  “Welcome back,” she said, panning the audience, waiting for the talking to die down. “I can’t tell you how much I missed you kids over the break. Longest two weeks of my life, as usual. You all look thrilled to see me too.”

  Somebody coughed. The apathy in the room was too thick for groans.

  Dr. Ashton launched into a halfhearted motivational speech, covering a bunch of totally unrelated topics: New Year’s resolutions, how to access results of something called diploma exams online, less skipping school to go skiing, carbon footprint awareness. And then at the end she threw Charly and me into the mix.

  “As you all probably noticed walking in, we have two new students.” She gave us a wave and the sea of heads turned our direction. I kept my eyes on Dr. Ashton. “They’re from the States, so keep the anti-American tirades to a minimum when they’re around. Amelia is in grade twelve—Amelia, stand up—”

  I stood, silently cursing her.

  “—and Charly is in grade eleven.”

  Charly stood too.

  “They’ll be here for the rest of the year, so please try to make them feel welcome. Or at least resist the urge to make fun of their adorable little accents. Girls, sit.”

  We sat. Up until that point I had respected the sarcasm, the deadpan humor, the unwillingness to pretend the students liked her and vice versa, but that was over. Now I had to hate her.

  The rest of our day unfolded with a predictable degree of doom. I found my classes, none of which had assigned seats, which meant I was surrounded by people who actually liked each other and wished they’d arrived sooner so they didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t right there in their midst.

  Everyone was polite, and a couple of people were even friendly, but in a brittle way. Like their Canadian consciences were forcing them to be welcoming, but they were secretly wishing I’d never been born.

  “This is purgatory,” Charly said over lunch. We were sitting just the two of us at one end of the table closest to the exit, eating the roast beef sandwiches Bree had surprised us with this morning. I’d have to find a way to tell her how much I hated mayo.