“Why? Is this another date?” Tori asked.
“Yes. Robert Scott, six-three. Date one.”
“I’ll log it on my date list. By the way, what happened to Jay Young?”
“He was never on your list,” I reminded her, then waved at Robert who had just come in.
“Cool shirt,” he said when we sat down in one of the booths.
I was wearing a T-shirt that Chloe had given me for Christmas. It was bright red with bold black printing on the front.
Yes, I am tall.
6’¾”. Yes, really.
No, I don’t play basketball.
No, I’m not a model.
The weather’s great up here.
I’m so glad we had this conversation.
“Yeah. So, shall we order some drinks?”
I had a sense of déjà vu because of the other guys I’d been here with, but I’d learned my lesson and was determined that this time would be different.
As soon as Robert had his Coke and I had my chocolate shake, I said, “Look, I want to be completely up front with you. This is a date. I mean it’s definitely a date, but …”
“Yeah?” He sounded wary.
“Full disclosure: I’m only doing it for a bet, not because I’m wildly infatuated with you or anything.”
Amazingly, he looked relieved. Had I scared him so much earlier with my strong-arm tactics?
“A bet?”
I nodded toward where Tori and Steve stood observing us, and explained the terms of the wager.
“I just don’t want there to be any misunderstandings or hurt feelings,” I ended. “I mean, no offense or anything, but I don’t expect to fall in love with you.”
I didn’t want to fall in love with anyone ever again.
Robert gave a deep sigh and smiled. “You don’t know how happy that makes me feel.”
“Thanks,” I said, sarcastically.
“No, no — I don’t mean it like that. I’m sure you’re a great person and all. And you’re pretty, and obviously your” — he circled his hands over his chest area — “are a real hit. But I’m not attracted to you, either.”
“That should make things easier, I guess. Though why would you want to date someone you’re not into?”
“I think we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.” A cunning look had come over his face.
“I can’t afford to pay you,” I said at once.
“I’m not talking about money.” He sounded offended. “I’ll be your boyfriend for three dates and the prom, and you’ll be my cover. It’ll be a win-win.”
“Back up there — I’ll be your what?”
Robert leaned across the table and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”
~ 48 ~
“Rob,” I said, “I think it’s fair to say I could keep secrets for the Olympic team.”
“Because no one can find out, Peyton. No one!”
“I promise.” I crossed my heart.
He still appeared wary. “Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me a secret of yours. A big one.”
“No way!” was my first reaction.
“It’s only fair. That way we’ll each have something on the other. Mutually assured destruction.”
Could I do it?
“You go first,” I said.
“You go first,” he said.
Which was harder — trusting another person, or going through my life hiding my secrets, being isolated by them?
“Together,” I said, before I could think better of it. “On the count on three. One, two —”
“I’m gay!” he said, just as I said, “My mother’s a hoarder!”
“Your mother’s a whore?” he said, shocked.
“A hoarder,” I enunciated. “She collects crap.”
“Oh. I’m seen them on TV. Jeez.”
“So, you’re gay?”
“I’m not so much the black sheep of my family as the rainbow-colored one. My parents are not the open, accepting sort. If my father found out, he’d disown me. And the guys on the football team would so not be cool with it. I don’t need my life to be any harder than it is, Peyton. Can you understand that?”
“I really can, more than you know.”
“I’m staying comfortably in the closet.”
I laughed, shook my head. Rob didn’t belong in his family either. He was hiding a massive secret, too. Just like me, he wasn’t comfortable in his skin. Were we all like this? Did we all feel like freaks?
“And nobody knows?” I asked. “Apart from me, now.”
“Someone knows. One guy.”
“I hope for your sake it’s not Tim.”
“Why?” he said, looking nervous.
“Never tell him anything you don’t want made public, trust me on this one,” I said and added bitterly, “He’d blab on what happens in fight club.”
He nodded. “Do we have a deal then? We’ll do our three dates and the prom — my folks will be happy, suspicions will be put to rest, and you’ll win the wager.”
“Done!” I shook his hand. This had turned out better than I could have hoped. My dates were set, and I wouldn’t have to lie or pretend. A sudden worry popped into my head.
“And you’ll definitely be here for prom? You won’t be in Switzerland or anything?”
“Why would I be in Switzerland?”
“The God particle,” I said darkly.
“You’re a little kooky, you know that? But I like it. At least these dates won’t be completely boring.”
I wasn’t listening. The money was in the bag — or as good as — and I was already dreaming of fashion school.
I ran all the way home, elated. New York, here I come!
I emptied the mailbox on my way in and scrambled up my ladder, feeling better than I had in the longest time. I was already planning my shopping agenda for the next day — Debois Textiles first, for the luscious black velvet I’d spotted in their racks, and then Buttons and Bling for most of the accessorizing details, including a pair of vintage-style brass-studded epaulettes.
I sorted through the mail, dropped the junk directly into the trash can, and set aside a letter to forward to Dad — ten years on, we still got some of his mail here. A postcard from the blood bank reminded me that it was time to part with another pint. I entered the date into my phone’s calendar and tossed the card, thinking of the bloodred satin I wanted for my formal jacket’s inner lining.
The last letter, in a buff-colored envelope, bore the Maryland state seal in the top corner. As soon as I saw that, even before I noticed the pink overdue stamp in the opposite corner, my stomach turned, and dread — as cold and heavy as a rain-soaked cloak — settled on me. This couldn’t be good.
I tore open the letter with shaking hands, and my panicked gaze skimmed over the printed pages inside. Refuse area, county property tax, state property tax, water qual protect — most of it was unintelligible, but three phrases printed in bold were clear enough, even for me: total amount due, late payment penalty, and due by date.
A scream of unrestrained fury and anguish ripped from the core of me. And another.
A minute later, my mother was banging on my door.
“Peyton! Peyton, are you all right?”
I unlocked the door and flung it open.
She was white-faced with shock. “What’s the matter?”
“You!” I snarled. “You’re what’s the matter!”
I shoved the property taxes bill at her and stepped back, seriously scared I would hit her if I stayed too close.
She stared down at the bill. “Oh dear,” she whispered.
“Another bill you didn’t pay. There’s a late-payment penalty due on this one, too.”
She pinched her lips together.
“And I’m betting the reason you didn’t pay is because you maxed out your credit cards on Black Friday. That’s about right, isn’t it?” I accused. “I’ll have to withdraw all the money out of my college savings —
money that I’ve worked years for — to pay this. Because if I don’t, we’ll lose the house. And then what, huh? Then what?”
“Peyton, I’m sure we can make another plan to pay it somehow,” she said. Her fingers folded the bill into a tiny square, as if by making it physically smaller, she could ignore its significance more easily. “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.”
I swore viciously. “This is not a molehill. It is a mountain! A mountain of debt. A mountain of stuff.”
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, hard, as if I could shake the illness and the idiocy out of her. The bill fell to the floor — a tiny white square big enough to obliterate my dreams.
“Let go of me,” my mother gasped, wrenching herself out of my grasp.
“If only I could. But I’m stuck with you, stuck to you. New York! Who was I kidding?”
We were both crying now. I strode across my room and flung myself on my bed. “The two of us are trapped together in the middle of this refuse dump, and I’ll never get out, never get away, never be able to live my own life. We’re both buried here — this place is a tomb and I’m like the guardian of the dead.”
“I am not dead.”
“You’re not alive!”
“And you’re not my guardian, I’m yours,” she said. She was beginning to look angry — something I hadn’t seen in a while. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m the mother here.”
“Don’t make me laugh. I wanted a mother. I needed a mother. But instead I got a house full of crap.”
“Peyton, I love you — you must know that. I love you more than anything.”
“More than your possessions? More than your grief?” I challenged, but my white-hot anger was fading now, extinguished by a rising wave of despair. I sighed. What was the point of hurting her? It wouldn’t change anything. In a resigned voice, I said, “Maybe you do. Maybe I just can’t see it because of the wall of stuff between us.”
“I’m truly, deeply sorry.”
My mother was actually acknowledging some responsibility?
She walked over to the pile of designs with their wallpaper garments on my desk. “I so much wanted you to follow your passion.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen now. There’ll be about fifty-seven cents left in my account once I pay that bill. And without money to buy fabric, I can’t make up my sample portfolio. And without that, there’s no hope of a scholarship. So, no college for me, not this year. But hey, there’s always ‘one day’, isn’t there?”
Mom pulled a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. My irritation began rising again. I didn’t have any energy left to feel sympathy for her sadness. I was too full of my own.
“Please just go,” I said.
She moved to the door, giving my designs one last look.
“Wait!” I said.
The look of hope in her eyes as she spun around nearly killed me. There’s no hope, Mom, don’t you get it?
“Take these.” I shoved my stack of giant fashion designs into her arms. “Chuck them on a pile somewhere. I think I saw a few inches of open space in the basement.”
~ 49 ~
I hadn’t gone fetal when Jay and I ended — I wasn’t the sort of girl to curl up and die — but I’d been miserable. I was still sad. And angry, though I wasn’t sure who I was madder at — Jay for stripping me publicly, albeit accidentally, and dumping me, or myself for keeping the secrets I should have trusted him with. We’d had something so good and, between us, we’d blown it.
I missed him. I missed his funny impersonations, our discussions on movies and acting, our good morning and good night texts, and sharing the best and worst parts of my day with him after school. And I really missed how I’d felt when I was with him: beautiful, normal-sized, precious.
I buried myself in schoolwork to keep from wallowing in self-pity. School was school, same as it ever was. Or rather, the same as it had been before Jay and I had gotten together.
Tim apologized to me for spilling the beans. “I’m sorry man, I was just so buzzed,” he said as we left history class on the second Monday in January.
“You were more than buzzed.”
“Okay, okay, so I was shit-faced.”
“That’s no excuse. You screwed things up for me. I’m still pissed at you.”
“I said I was sorry, what more do you want, dude?”
“You know, Tim, if you used your brain more and recreational substances less, I reckon you could start a very profitable private-eye business when you leave school.”
Tim looked impressed at the suggestion for just a moment, then he gave me a mournful-puppy look and asked, “So do you forgive me?”
“Whatever.”
He grinned. “When do I get the second history paper?”
“Um, try never.”
“What? You owe me, P.”
I muttered a curse under my breath. This guy was a piece of work.
“What’s that you said?” he asked.
“Two words. One finger,” I replied, with a matching gesture.
The Boobgate furor finally died down when our principal failed to return to school on the first of February. Rumors buzzed through the school — he’d been arrested for embezzling school funds, he’d run away to Las Vegas with his mistress, he’d been killed in a drive-by shooting — and the formal announcement that he’d retired for health reasons was generally believed to be a cover-up.
“People don’t care about the real story, not when it’s boring or uncomfortable. They want dirt, not truth,” said Chloe sagely.
I felt sorry for Principal Perez, but I was selfishly glad to no longer be the center of attention at Longford High.
Valentine’s Day was tough. A day’s exposure to other people’s romantic bliss only reinforced how much I missed Jay. Zack spent half of our math class showing me all the Valentines cards he’d received and hitting on all the girls in class, including me. Brooke’s boyfriend filled the hallway near my locker with a gazillion helium-filled red balloons which resisted my irritated attempts to swat them away.
“Stop being such a love-Grinch,” Chloe said, gazing upwards at the bobbing mass of red. “I think it’s romantic.”
Easy for her say — she wasn’t suffering from a bad bout of cynicism brought on by crushed dreams of love. Also, she was too short to have the dangling ribbons tickle her face. I took a compass out of my pencil case and stabbed an explosive path through the balloons to my locker. The bangs made a few people duck, and Brooke yelled at me, but I thought I saw a smile flit across Jay’s face as the balloons showered pink confetti on everyone beneath.
I was still brushing the odd mocking speck of confetti from my coat when I walked up the path to our house that afternoon and saw something beside the front door — presumably my mother’s latest online purchase.
Strangely, things had been a bit better between my mother and me in the month that followed our massive fight. Chloe said this was because I’d gotten everything off my chest. I thought it might be because I’d given up any hope of things improving. I’d surrendered to the undeniable truth that I couldn’t change her. Without hope, there was no disappointment, and without disappointment, there was a lot less hostility and resentment.
I might have been imagining it, but I thought she’d changed, too. She’d stopped playing the pity card, was keeping her hair clean and brushed, and it had been a good few weeks since I’d come home from school to find an online delivery waiting on the front step.
Which was why what was waiting beside the front door today was a surprise. Except that it wasn’t a purchase. It was a big black trash bag, and it was full. Hardly daring to hope, I unfastened the ties and peered inside. It was stuffed with newspapers, some of the rotten trash from the kitchen, and the broken red umbrella. Wow.
I hauled the bag to the sidewalk for the next day’s trash collection and was about to head around to my side of the house when my curiosity got the better of me. I unlocked and opened the
front door and took a quick peek. A narrow pathway, mostly free of junk, stretched between the front door and the bottom of the stairs.
Holy cow. My mother had actually cleared a few yards through the clutter. Stunned, I immediately put a lid on my rising excitement. We’d been here before. Every few years, my mother resolved to “get organized” and made a start on tackling the mess. But she only ever started. She never followed through.
No hope means no disappointment, I reminded myself as I took my usual route to my room.
I’d given up hope of going to fashion school that year, but I was determined to try again the following year. Jim had baulked when I’d asked him to take me on full-time for the summer — “You need to go to college, Peyton” — but he’d eventually come around. I was a good worker, and he liked me better than Steve or Tori.
Those two asshats hit new heights of obnoxiousness as February ended. I took this to mean that they were getting seriously worried about losing the bet, because my requisite three dates with Rob were locked, loaded and logged. We’d agreed not to bother with any more dates with the exception of prom. He was a nice enough guy, but we didn’t have much in common.
When I’d tried telling him about my plans to study fashion design on our last date, he’d informed me, “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m interested in fashion, you know.”
When he’d tried to tell me all about the football team’s latest tactics and triumphs, I’d come back with, “Just because I’m tall doesn’t mean I’m interested in sports, you know.”
I had learned a few things about him, though. He was addicted to onion rings; he planned to study Information Science and invent the “app of the decade” so he could retire rich by the age of twenty-five; and he was madly in love with a guy whose name he refused to mention. I’d tried to winkle the information out of him during our last date.
“Is he at Longford High?”
“Yes.”
“Do I know him?”
“Yes.”
“Is he a senior?”
The Law of Tall Girls Page 26