by Hadley Dyer
“Bill calls him sometimes,” I said, watching him try on ladies’ hats in the next aisle over. “He says it’s . . .”
“Awkward.”
“Yup.”
Which was surprising, if nothing new, because Sid was so fun and animated in person. Lisa’s favorite thing in the world used to be when we’d reenact Andy Garcia’s love scenes with Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III, Sid emoting like hell, me channeling a block of Swiss cheese. But get him on the phone and he’d keep drifting off, like he couldn’t focus on you if you weren’t in front of him.
“This made a lot more sense before he moved,” Nat said.
“What do you mean?”
“Before it was two guys, two girls—”
“Three girls.”
“You’re a boy-girl hybrid, so you cancel yourself out. Now it’s one guy, two girls, and you. Sid’s gone, you and Lisa aren’t talking, and even if you were, you can’t hang out with Keith when Joshua and the Face are around, and how’s that going to work? What if Sid leaving was the beginning of the end?”
“The end of what?”
“Us. Our group. What if we only worked when we were all together?”
“Stop it,” Bill said, marching into our aisle. He’d gotten himself done up in a Jackie O. pillbox hat, a faux Chanel jacket, and Minnie Mouse gloves, and he looked positively stricken, clutching his pearl-encrusted collar.
“Okay,” Nat said. “Don’t get your pearls in a knot. I’m just saying—”
“Stop it!” He started blowing in her face, sending her wispy white bangs flying.
“You stop it!”
Bill took off his pillbox hat and dumped it in the bin beside him. “I can’t lose my best buddy, my girlfriend, and my whole damn group.”
“Wait, Tracy dumped you again?” Nat said.
“Well, no. I dumped her.”
“Dumped her how?”
“You want the transcript?”
“But you never break up with her,” I said. “Ever.”
“So, yeah, the thing is . . . The thing is she said I was spending all my time running between you girls, and something about taking her for granted, and something-something you have to choose, so I chose.”
“You chose us?”
He nodded.
“You chose us,” Nat echoed.
“And Lisa.” He gave me a meaningful look.
“And Lisa,” I said. “I’ll fix it—promise. I mean, with just you two losers, how would I know if I should get this green shirt or that green shirt?”
“Neither of those shirts is green,” Nat said. She retrieved the hat from the bin and perched it on her head. “So, Bill, maybe we could, uh, study together some time? You know, since my study partner moved away.”
To put this into context: Nat and Sid could be competitive about grades, and spent hours together cramming for tests and talking smack about how lazy Bill was because he didn’t have to work at all to get straight As. Which meant that Nat was making an excuse to hang out with Bill in his time of need, and, as my mother would put it, for once she turned over the hem to hide the stitching.
“Sure,” he said. “We could do that. Just as friends?”
“Get over yourself. Someone’s got to keep an eye on you. Now that Sid’s gone, there’s one less person to stop you from getting back together with your ex–T. rex.”
Thirteen
I said I would fix it, and I meant it.
As usual, Nat had located a raw nerve and pressed her finger on it. Maybe we only worked as a five, and even if we could work as a four, what was going to bring us back together? Bill and Nat had made it sound like it had to be me, but I hoped they’d had the same conversation with Lisa. One of us just had to make the first move.
Our school held eight hundred kids, from seventh grade up, smaller schools feeding into it like tributaries. There were those who could walk down its hallways in a resplendent burnt-orange satin blouse with puffed sleeves and a little tie at the collar and have their stock rise with every laugh, and there were those who could not. Not to brag, but I was in the first group, so I had my icebreaker, found in one of the bins at Pierre’s.
I also had a large slab of my mother’s famous gingerbread that she let me take as a pick-me-up for Bill, but when I dropped into the seat in front of his in homeroom, he was already covered in crumbs from Nat’s mother’s famous date squares. “If I knew how much nicer mothers are to the dumpers than the dumpees,” he said, mouth full, “I’d have broken up with Tracy a long time ago.”
I’d learned the dangers of slagging Tracy off when it might be a matter of seconds before Bill got back together with her, so I handed him the Tupperware container and said, “Whatcha wearing, cowboy?”
His shirt had pivoted from Bryan Adams to the Lone Ranger.
“Lisa.” He tore a page out of his binder and used it as a napkin. “She took me shopping last night after I got back from shopping with you guys. Hope she finds that thing you have on as funny as you think she will because I can’t keep doubling up on all this girl stuff.”
“So far everyone else does.”
We had Miss Aker for homeroom, followed by English during first period. Lisa arrived a few minutes after the buzzer, flustered and waving a permission slip. She slid into a desk a few seats behind me and didn’t look my way.
Miss Aker—she of the prematurely white hair, long dresses, and practical socks ’n’ sneakers—said, “Now that you’re here, I can share our news. I’m delighted to tell everyone that Lisa has been chosen as the director of this year’s school play.” Spattered applause. “We thank the two other applicants for their efforts. Lisa, perhaps you could share your proposal and the changes to the production this year.”
Lisa stood up, already turning pink because she was allergic to public speaking. That’s when she noticed me and my shirt. Her mouth went slack, like her brain couldn’t compute what she was seeing, and then she seemed annoyed, as though I’d distracted her on purpose. She gave her head a shake, centered herself again. “So I went to see this theater troupe in the city, and it got me thinking about the different ways you could adapt a classic poem like ‘Evangeline.’ At first I was like, As a musical? Then I was like, No, with movement and acrobatics and miming—”
“And puppets and black light and kids from the short bus!” Doug said.
Miss Aker pointed to the door. “Office. It’s the nineties, Doug.”
No one but Miss Aker heard what Lisa said after that. Space needed to be gazed into; elastics weren’t pinging themselves. Lisa really did need someone to be the heavy. She also clearly needed someone to tell her that giving Longfellow’s “Evangeline” a circus vibe was a bad idea.
“. . . Jennifer P. will do costumes, Jennifer C. will do makeup, and Christina Veinot is the stage manager. Christina suggested it would be good to have an even split of juniors and seniors working on the play this year, and Miss Aker and I agreed.”
She did not agree. I could see it in the way she sat down again, eyes forward to avoid making eye contact with anyone. Tradition dictated that the Elevens ran the Christmas talent show and only did small production tasks and supporting parts in the play, graduating to bigger jobs in senior year. Lisa had paid her dues and so had all the other seniors who wanted to work on the play. Now she’d given half of it over to the Elevens, just because Christina had told her to.
Bill gave my back a can-you-believe-it jab.
“Onward!” Miss Aker shouted over the buzzer for first period. “To begin, I have a special poem that I’d like to share. It was written a long time ago by a local poet, someone who prefers to remain anonymous.”
“Is this person in the room at this moment?” Mike asked.
“I cannot reveal the author, but it’s a terrific example of confessional poetry.”
No one was buying the secret-author thing. Miss Aker used the same poem every year and always presented it with the same little speech. Rumor was she had a suitcase full of reject
ion letters from literary magazines.
“Mike, start us off. Read the first stanza, please.”
It was about two boys who hung out constantly. They raced all over town on their bikes, turned grass blades into reed instruments, shared a crush on the same girl, and wept together when they came upon a dead dog on the bank of a creek. But when they turned thirteen, they suddenly stopped being friends, the reason buried like a bone.
I liked it, in spite of Bill’s second, harder jab. It was plainly put, to the point. I didn’t understand writing something that had to be translated into real talk, especially since it seemed like no one ever agreed on the meaning. The only poet I’d gotten into was Sylvia Plath, whose poems were often savage and almost always interesting, even if you didn’t know what she was on about half the time.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise—
The beads of hot metal fly
“Who here has been friends for a long time?” Miss Aker said.
Bill practically shouted, “George and Lisa!”
I turned around to glare at him. He gave his cowboy collar a smug little tug, and I vowed he’d soon be rolled in a rug. (Who says I’m not a poet?)
“Perfect. Let’s hear a few memories of your friendship, girls, see if we could mine them. Lisa, what’s your earliest memory of George?”
After an uncomfortable pause, Lisa said, “Probably that time she blew a gasket in kindergarten because the teacher couldn’t find her Minnie Mouse hat.”
It was a minor fit, and not her earliest memory of me. The earliest, for both of us, was a skating recital of “The Farmer in the Dell.” Lisa played the Black Cat. I played the Cheese. At five, I was so small that my parents worried I had a growth disorder, but I could skate well for my age. I was the Cheese, le grand fromage de la dell! I skated frontward, I skated backward, I wiggled my yellow-costumed behind adorably. Then the Brown Cow ran me down and I fell. The audience went, Awww. Because of course the littlest one couldn’t stay on her feet. I knew I looked like a baby, and was grateful when the Black Cat with the luminous blond lashes and orange curls bubbling out of her hood laughed heartily, like I’d done it to be funny, and watched me get up all by myself. Years later I asked why she didn’t help and she said, “Because you didn’t want me to,” as though that would have been obvious to anyone but her.
“We once snuck down to the basement to watch Nightmare on Elm Street on the VCR,” I said. “She started sleeping in her parents’ bed after that.”
“How old were you?” Miss Aker asked. “Nine? Ten?”
“Fourteen.”
“George swallowed a marble because she wouldn’t admit she’d thought it was candy.”
“Lisa throws up if she runs through deep snow.”
“George thought a harbinger was an eating disorder.”
“Lisa laughed so hard she thought she’d peed her pants, but she hadn’t.” The laughter that had been bouncing around the classroom died down. “There was this big brown dot on the back of her pants, though.”
Lisa’s face as the room erupted.
It would have been kinder to smack her. How could I hit her so hard where it hurt? Because she’d gotten me into a corner is how, and being willing to say anything, if not everything, was how I fought my way out of corners. She’d said it herself. Except usually I wasn’t fighting my own fight. Usually, I was protecting the person I’d just knocked out.
“Okay! Very revealing and extremely regrettable!” said Miss Aker. “So let’s move on. I want you to partner up, pull your desks together, and brainstorm a poem based on your shared memories. Lisa and George, you should have different partners since you’ve . . . purged yours already. Who would like to partner with George?”
Four guys were on their feet at the same time—Bill, Derek, Jeremy, and Mike. Bill stared down the others.
“Told you,” he said as I turned my desk around. “You’re the girl all the guys want to get.”
“Especially now that I’ve gone from ungettable to notorious slut. So why am I partnering with you, if I could have any guy I want?”
He flexed his biceps, strong-man-style. “I’ve got muscles.” He said it like musculls. “I just look soft because of the Dorito layer on top. Anyway, hardly anyone buys that story about you and the East Riverview guys. It sounds too convenient, that they all happen to go to a different school.”
“Life’s a bad writer, buddy.”
That was as far as we could get before the weight of what had happened fully settled. I glanced over at Lisa working with Shelley-with-an-E, the yearbook editor. She had her back to me.
“I didn’t think one fight would screw things up this badly,” I said.
“It didn’t.” Bill reached under his desk for the Tupperware container with the breakup cake. “But it’s good and broken now.”
Fourteen
Dad was asleep in his recliner, still wearing the jogging pants he’d slept in the night before. I dumped my knapsack onto the carpet next to his prosthetic and myself onto the velour chesterfield beside him.
We were broken, Lisa and me. Good and broken, Bill had said. As in, broken up. She’d already asked Nat if she could get some stuff from me, like a sweater and a mixtape one of her exes made her. She wanted me to know we were done.
I’d never had a breakup with a boy before, let alone a best friend, and didn’t know all the rules and procedures. Crying was usually part of it, but I was too stunned to cry. Not calling was also important, that I’d learned from magazines and my friends, and it seemed to be true whether you were a dumper or a dumpee. You had to let the other person come to you, and if they didn’t, so be it. Calling always, always made it worse. Except it wasn’t clear how both people not phoning was going to get you anywhere. Was that the point? To keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you would be able to stay friends? And what was the friends’ version of staying friends?
I was sure that if I called Lisa, she wouldn’t pick up, not only because she understood the rules better than I did, but because she was really, really mad. I was mad too. She’d started that fight in front of the whole class. She had, not me. Still. It was crazy to want to make it so final so fast. I stared at the stucco ceiling, knowing that I was seconds away from calling because I was lousy at doing nothing; the kid whose mother had to duct-tape mittens on my hands to stop me from scratching when I had hives.
Dad stirred in his chair. “Hey-o! That’s a shirt,” he said at the sight of my orange top. “Did you see the message on the pad in the kitchen?”
I sat up. “Lisa?”
“No, your boyfriend.”
It was Rupert Fraser, wanting to know if I’d like to help out around the house and farm as Mum had suggested, only he offered to pay me. “Six dollars an hour,” he said when I called him back. “Up to fifteen hours a week, let’s say. Less if you like.”
I couldn’t flatter myself that Francis had decided he wanted to hang out, but where else would Rupert have gotten the idea to hire me? Then Rupert said, “Mick will be working a lot of long hours.”
“You call him Mick?”
“What do you call him?”
“He introduced himself as Francis.”
Sort of.
“Hoity-toity. I’ve been thinking you’d be good company for an old man while he’s gone. Though I got to warn you, I can be quite a handful. . . .”
So the idea was that Francis and I would dodge each other. Fine. Rupert was offering more than the heritage society paid me, and that would make up for my lighthouse hours going down now that it was the off-season. The more hours I worked, the less likely it would be that I’d end up at Noel, and the less time I’d have to think about why that would be even worse than I’d originally thought.
I went over to Ironwood Farm after school the next afternoon, feeling sullen and sooky in my nonvictory of having gone all day without trying to talk to Lisa or accidentally-on-purpose catching her eye. She made it too easy, acting all sunny and
chatty and working the hallway like a minister’s wife at the Christmas tea. In the milk lineup, she threw her head back and laughed so hard at something Bill said that he took an involuntary step back. Even though I knew she was putting it on—just like I was pretending it was totally normal for me to be hanging out at the skateboarders’ table—it still sucked that she wanted everyone to think she didn’t care. Like juggling at a funeral, except the body was still warm.
I couldn’t get to the farm fast enough. Mindless labor, money in my pocket, and a legitimate excuse to tell Bill and Nat that it was cool if they wanted to go to the basketball game with Lisa because look at me already moving on to new things. I was so relieved to have somewhere to go, until I crossed the threshold of the house.
Francis wasn’t kidding: it was filthy. Cobwebs, clutter, torn linoleum. As I did a tour around, checking inside and under things, I could see where he’d started tackling it. The kitchen counters gleamed against the stained wallpaper. The ancient stove top was as clean as it was going to get, but the oven was crusted over.
“Now, seeing this from the outside, you’d think this house smells like a pig farm, but it don’t, right?” Rupert said.
I’d smelled a house like this before. There was a bona fide cat lady in town who had at least fifty semiferal cats, and I rang her doorbell on a dare from Lisa when I was eight. I glimpsed floors so worn that they had actual holes in them, and the smell of mildew and unwashed old person and unwashed clothes seemed to be carried on the dust floating from the ghostly layers that covered every surface. That house had undernotes of cat pee, whereas this one had the earthier scent of pig manure.
“It’s a tad poinky,” I said, though I couldn’t see any poo piles. Maybe Rupert was tracking it in on his shoes.
But underneath the grime, the house seemed like it had been at one time a comfortable, welcoming place. The furniture was faded but colorful. In the living room, a formal red chesterfield that looked like it was from the first half of the century was kitty-cornered with a green one that was straight from a 1970s basement bong room. Old family portraits and hooked rugs hung on the walls with randomly tacked up album covers, mostly bluegrass and Celtic folk music. Suncatchers hung in most of the windows.