For a second, or maybe less, I wondered why Will was suddenly so interested in Chantal. Maybe his torture tactics were his way of saying “I liked you all along.”
Chantal
Tantrum.
The television numbs my pain. Maybe TV viewing could be my solo summer project. I flip through the channels: soap opera, soap opera, game show, news about a war, old movie, gardening, cop show, cop show, building, redecorating. I think I’m hungry. One smushed cupcake remains in the plastic cello case, the silver balls askew. The chocolate crumbs that litter my chest provide more evidence that I am not allergic to cupcakes. I need to develop some sort of aversion, though, or I’ll be shopping for a one-piece bathing suit with a skirt attached to it by the end of the summer.
A few hours of TV might successfully blur the image of Parker and Jillian. How she sucked in her stomach, swept the hair from her face, blushed when he said, “Hey.” Will looked my direction a few times as if he thought I would suddenly welcome attention from someone who has always taunted me.
Blood pulses in my head, acute, dangerous. I’m like my mother; I want to keep things inside until I can’t bear it. I can’t. I want to do something, like smash a hole in a wall, kick in a door—hurt myself. Or maybe, swear.
“Shit,” I yell.
“Damn.”
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
It feels phony, like words filtered through a swimming pool of Jell-O. The words become squiggly, laughable. Me. This would be hilarious for anyone but me.
Damn.
My life plan is a series of photos: next year, my valedictorian picture will be on the front page of the newspaper, in color, with the red of my lip gloss an exact match of the red graduation robe (this is important, according to Jillian). Four years after that, it will be a Harvard hat and tassel in crimson. By the time I’m thirty, it will be a picture of Jillian and me in front of the United Nations in New York. We’ll be doing important work in the most exciting city on the planet. (She picked the city and I picked the job—neurosurgeons committed to world health.) I can’t live in New York without Jillian. She is my GPS.
Damn.
“Get your life together,” I yell out loud, to myself, I guess.
I am able to move my right pointer finger.
“Screw Will.”
My wrist flickers.
“Screw Parker.”
I create a fist, open it.
“Jillian is my friend.”
My arm moves. I have achieved flexibility.
The TV kitchen is painted a light gray and pastel blue, visual pain relief. Ceramic bowls sparkle with precisely measured ingredients. I reach for the final cupcake, free it from its paper liner. Let the taste of chocolate soothe me. The woman on TV with dark flowing hair and a British accent is in love with her blue bowls. Or cooking. Her hands float over the bowls, grip them delicately as she pours the contents into her mixing bowl. Caresses butter, sugar, and vanilla with her white spatula.
“Baking is one of the sheer delights of being alive,” she says. “A chocolate cake is a sensual delight of chocolate that melts in one’s mouth and infuses the soul with happiness.”
The woman, I’m sure now, is obsessed with food, maybe even more than I am with grades. With my future.
The woman giggles, a deep throaty sound, as she pours the mixture into three cake pans, tells me the oven temperature, the way to test for doneness. How can anyone love to cook that much? My mother complains that it’s a chore designed to keep women tied to the home, but I know that it’s because she hates any mess and she’s terrified of ingesting more than twelve hundred calories per day. I suspect her figure is one of the reasons I’m an only child.
“One taste of this fudgy delectable and your guests will swoon. It’s that perfect.”
I wonder if I’ll find any organic dark chocolate bars in my mother’s secret stash. I start at the cupboard above the refrigerator.
The memory of Jillian’s face, her sharp blue eyes observing me, judging me, appears on the cupboard doors. I open the cupboard and her voice pipes up, “Come on, Chantal, it’s not a big deal. They only want to sit here.”
I dig for chocolate behind spices and boxes of salt and cornstarch. Maybe my mother hides her treats in a different place each time hoping she’ll forget where she hid them.
I imagine what I looked like, my towel and sunscreen clutched to my chest, covering my one-piece as if I was afraid I was going to be attacked. Scared. Pathetic.
Damn.
Behind the bag of wild rice, I find the chocolate bar. It’s mocha flavored and I don’t drink coffee, but I’m still happy for the treasure. I unwrap the chocolate, admire the perfectly lined-up squares.
I remember, now, how I heard Jillian’s voice call my name, more than once.
Breathe.
I break off two squares of cocoa, fat, and sugar, and slip them onto my tongue, trying to imitate the dark-haired woman on TV, letting my taste buds do their job on the brown molecules that dissipate, dissolve. This. Is. Relief. At least for the next six ounces.
Jillian
Choices.
Now I push my bike along our street. The chain fell off after I left Chantal’s house. Chantal says she’s giving me her old bike, which is five years newer than mine, when she gets a new one. That’s the least of what might not happen now.
Chantal wouldn’t even come to the door when I knocked. I could hear the television blaring. I looked in the window and saw her on the couch, but she ignored me. I tried to walk in, but she’d locked the door.
It’s 86 degrees outside and I’m pushing my bike. If it had been any other day, I’d have taken her bike and left mine in its place—she would know why and she wouldn’t care, not at all. If her mom complained that I was always borrowing her stuff, she’d say, “She’s my sister.”
Girls like Chantal know they can have whatever they want and can be whatever they want to be. They come from families with two parents who work, where the parents believe their happiness is dependent on the success of their children. Girls like Chantal aren’t allowed to fall or fail.
Girls like me are different.
Girls like me know that wishing on our birthday candles will not result in the delivery of a horse, that lists for Santa should be short and that most conversations our mothers start begin, “I need you to help me.” Girls like me know that our parents are never going to come to our rescue, no matter how much we hope.
I’m pushing the piece of crap that Dad 2 rescued from the landfill. He replaced the brakes and the front wheel and told me I was worth his time to fix it up. Dad 2 put in lots of time; he cleaned the house and took the triplets to hockey. He’s the one who started calling them the Hat Trick, referring to when a hockey player scores three goals in one game. “I got myself a Hat Trick,” Dad 2 said the night the boys were born as he handed me a cigar. “Now, save that until you’re older. And don’t tell your mother I gave it to you.”
When the twins were born he took parental leave from the railroad to take care of them. But when his nine months were up he didn’t go back to work as a brakeman. He decided he’d worked as a union man since he was seventeen and he needed a life. My mom threw him out once she realized the life he wanted was smoking pot all day long. She says she told him he could come back if he was clean and had a job. Dad 2 said things were so screwed he couldn’t live with us anymore. He moved to Vancouver. I wonder if he ever runs into Dad 1 there.
Our street is downtown now. We had to move from Columbia once Dad 2 wasn’t making any money. It’s okay. The houses are close together, but we live on a dead end, so the boys have a place to set up their hockey nets. It makes it easier to babysit a set of seven-year-old triplets, almost-three-year-old twins, and a one-year-old. Chantal and I chill under the tree and read or do our projects while the boys run around with hockey sticks and eat popsicles. Chantal says the time between diaper changes is great. But everyone’s favorite part of
the summer is the end, when we put on our summer project performance. Despite the boys booing our flatland synchronized swimming last year, they loved watching us, being part of something that felt like a real family thing, minus the parents. We made lemonade and cookies and we had music, and those flippers and our nose plugs. I couldn’t breathe, I was laughing so hard.
I remember the look on Chantal’s face right before she ran away. Then I remember the way Parker looked at me, the way no one else has, and I wonder if I was imagining it. “Maybe we can go for ice cream tomorrow,” he said when he met me at the bottom of the hill as I was getting on my bike. I told him I’d have to take the boys with me because I was babysitting. “No problem,” he said.
But it is a problem. What happens when he finds out who I really am?
Parker
Keeping Score.
“Dude. You’re serious? You’re going to her house tomorrow? And taking her baby posse out for ice cream?” Will holds out his fist.
I make sure we’re alone before I pound it. “You got a man challenge, you gotta send a man to do it.” I watch Will as the words register. The comment is fresh meat for a starving piranha.
“Dude.” Will throws his towel at my head but I catch it, throw it back at him. “Don’t go thinking you got one up on me. We handicapped this one, remember?” As predicted. If he wasn’t my best friend he’d probably say he wanted to kick my ass.
“Right. When I’m winning it’s all about luck.” I click the automatic unlock on my key. The Mustang clicks in response. “Who remembered Cranium? Brilliant. Say it, Will. Brilliant.”
“Whatever.” Will opens the passenger side door. “I’m laying it out there. It’s going to be harder for me to kiss my target than it is for you. Not that I’m bitching. ‘With the greatest effort comes the greatest reward.’”
I tune out Will as I slide the key in the ignition. Jillian in the bikini. It’s like I never really saw her until today. And, damn, she’s fit.
“Dude, are you listening to me?” Will interrupts my private movie. “You know who said that, don’t you?”
Sometimes I’d like Will to shut up. “Said what?”
“‘With the greatest effort comes the greatest reward.’”
“Gandhi.”
“Shit, no. Mario Andretti, man.”
The engine growls when I start it up. Satisfaction. “Andretti?”
Will nods his head, turns up the volume, and the car rumbles with hip-hop.
“Yes you can. Yes you can,” Will shouts to the radio. He lowers the window, and hangs his arm outside. I think he’s making the Mario Andretti thing up because Will’s like that. Meh.
Even if I get Chantal to the party, and Will works his magic, I know I’m definitely ahead on this challenge.
Sunroof open. Radio on. I wonder if kissing Jillian will be much different than kissing Annelise.
I check my reflection in the rearview mirror—hair, sunglasses, and a smile.
“No kidding,” Will says. “That was funny.”
He thinks he knows what I’m thinking.
“Damn.” He slaps the side of the car for effect. “That Chantal can run.”
Chantal
Hope.
As my chocolate euphoria crashed and my dejection descended a million times deeper than Cinderella’s, I Googled “British TV chef” until I found her. Nigella Lawson. Despite the absence of magic wands or spells, I knew minutes later that Nigella was my virtual savior.
It was the episode of “Totally Chocolate Chip Cookies” that convinced me that she had been waiting for me.
Nigella: (Close-up of her concerned face with those killer eyebrows and hair that’s a little out of control.) You’ve probably guessed that was a sobbing girlfriend on the phone.
How does she know?
Nigella: A small bit of tea and sympathy is required.
I love Earl Grey. With milk. And a shot of vanilla syrup.
Nigella: But I think an express batch of chocolate chip cookies will administer all the comfort that’s required. (Her voice as smooth and husky as a full moon in September.)
Therapeutic baking. Of course. I don’t have to eat it to feel better, I just have to create it. Like being a mother to myself.
Jillian
Home.
I push my bike though the mess in our front yard. The toy cars Dad 2 picked up at a garage sale, the hockey sticks Dad 3 complains about taping, the goalie nets that lean sideways, and the hockey padding that reeks.
I hear the boys although I can’t see them when I walk in the house. They must be in their rooms on time-out or put-yourselves-to-bed duty. All I want is a glass of ice water and a fan blowing on me, but I have to face Mom first, without revealing that Chantal’s mad at me or that I have made consistent eye contact with Parker.
I realize, when I see them from across the room, that I didn’t need to worry about them picking up on anything I was thinking. Mom and Dad 3 are at separate ends of the couch. Kid toys litter the space between them. They each have a short glass with a single ice cube. It’s Thursday and Mom is cutting loose.
“Jillian,” she says. “I thought you’d be home at dinner. Had to do it all myself.” She takes a drink, her hand moving sloppily toward her mouth, the glass dipping, slipping, before it reaches the arm of the couch again. It’s clear this isn’t a routine Thursday night.
I remind her that today was the last day of school and the first day of summer holidays and I went out to the lake, like always. My nerves twitch. “What did you eat?”
“Tacos,” Dad 3 says. “Again.”
“Everyone eats tacos. That’s the important thing.” Mom picks between her front teeth with her pinky nail. “And hamburger is cheap.”
I wait for the conversation to continue or end, and subject myself to watching Mom and Dad 3 exchange slanted glares. Something is going down.
“Well, I … uh … need to go to bed.” And get out of this room. “I’m on kid duty tomorrow, right?” I know Mom is working this weekend and Dad 3 spends his days off with “the boys,” but he means the guys from work. Maybe only one of the six boys sleeping upstairs is his, but the Hat Trick and Double Minor think they belong to him, too. The only men Mom seems to marry are the ones who love their man friends as much as they love her.
“About that.” Dad 3 leans forward, and I notice, again, how ugly facial hair is—bushy eyebrows, mustache, beard stubble. I don’t share my mother’s taste in men and I see that as a positive sign for my future. Dad 3 drains his drink, wipes his lips with the back of his hand. “I’m heading out of town … for … a while. And you’ll need to be helping your mother out a bit more.”
Not again. The tone of his words, too familiar, carries all his apologies: I always liked you, thought you were such a good kid, you’ve got a real promising future, if you ever need anything you can call me. I stare at Mom. How can she pick the same guy over and over?
“He’s visiting his brother.” Mom shrugs as if the end result of his talk doesn’t matter.
“In Vancouver, right?” I force myself to keep my voice steady, keep eye contact.
Mom lasts exactly three heartbeats before she drains her glass.
Dad 3 goes on about how he’s going to do the electrical and the plumbing on some house for his brother. “He’s flipping it. You know what that is, don’t you?” His energy increases as he talks about his freedom. “You buy low, fix it up, and sell high.” He doesn’t realize how ironic his words are, how he’s not impressing me, how anything worthwhile he’s done in the past two years is shit now, how when Chantal asks me about Dad 3, I’ll tell her the asshole left.
I walk past the couch, up the six stairs that lead to our bedrooms.
“Jillian,” he calls. “Jillian.”
“Let her go,” my mom says. “I told you she wouldn’t understand.”
I undress and pull my old T-shirt over my head, all thoughts of the past few hours gone. I climb into bed and squish my body against the wall. I kn
ow Mom will be camping out on the other half of my bed tonight.
Chantal
Chocolate Chip Hope.
The world is full of words.
“These wonders are quite good at mopping up tears,” Nigella says as she melts the chocolate for her chocolate chocolate chip cookies.
I watched an hour of her videos before I decided to make them. I wrote out the list of ingredients and biked to the grocery store. The money came from my savings account—money my parents award me for great grades. I’ve been saving for a long time, waiting for a reason to spend it. My mother would choke on her coffee if she knew I was spending her reward money on fat and sugar. Muffins are the only thing I’ve ever baked with my mother, and only for school bake sales or to give away at Christmas. But I can do this on my own. I’m good at following directions.
We don’t have a mixer—my mother says doing it by hand burns more calories—so I cream the butter with the brown sugar and white sugar the way my mother taught me, with a wooden spoon. I measure out flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt into a bowl. I add vanilla, then the melted chocolate into the butter mixture. An egg and the flour mixture landslide on top of the creamed butter and I stir with the wooden spoon. The surprise ingredient is two packages of chocolate chips. Thankfully, my mother is working. Probably until late.
I drop the batter onto the cookie sheet and eighteen minutes later, I have my first batch of what Nigella calls “top-class comfort.”
I hope the cookies will be the words I don’t know how to say to Jillian. This is what I think as I pedal my bike to her house the next day with a shoebox of Totally Chocolate Chip Cookies in my bike basket. One taste will make her cry with gratitude, Nigella assures.
I’m hoping the pound of chocolate chips, a molten lake of chocolate, butter, and sugar will prove I’m a loyal friend and will say, I’m sorry I’m unchangeable and a lifelong nerd. Even if the guys are a mistake, my friendship with Jillian is more important. At about twenty chocolate chips per cookie, it cost me three A’s to make them, but Nigella says she doesn’t put a price on alleviating human suffering. I can’t, either.
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