The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  Cody Chandler, a guy with freckles and red hair, says he is a wide receiver and that he gets psyched for games by “gettin’ all up in my crunk” with his teammates. That he has “Lil Wayne, 2Pac, Fiddy Cen’, and, of course, my man Snoop,” on his iPod. After every answer Cody, who wants to be gangsta but looks like the Lucky Charms leprechaun, asks, “Ya feel me?”

  Typical wigger jock.

  Cody and Colt? Why would parents give these names to babies if they didn’t want to program them to be football players? I should not be puzzling over this question, because, while I am daydreaming, Tyler breaks away and jogs over, pulling his helmet off as he comes. His hair is dark with sweat. My heart hammers. I don’t need to worry. Even though I am close enough that I get hit with a drop of his sweat when he shakes his head, he takes absolutely zero notice of me.

  Cargo Pants is all hectic as he announces, “It’s the man of the hour himself, returning all-state QB, Tyler Moldenhauer. Tyler, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?”

  Tyler leans his head to the side and smiles into the camera. “What do you want to know?”

  Tyler Moldenhauer has dimples.

  Actually, only one. On the right side. That isn’t surprising. What is is something I hadn’t noticed in my postpuke delirium: Tyler Moldenhauer has country teeth. Like Miss O’Day, my third-grade teacher who told us that hers were all mottled from growing up in the country and drinking well water. Also, Tyler’s teeth are crooked. Not horribly crooked, kind of cute-crooked, but crooked enough that any parents who could have afforded it would have put him in braces. My teeth were not as crooked as his are, and Mom, who couldn’t afford it, and reminded me constantly of what it was costing her to get the inside of my mouth sliced to ribbons with metal wires, got me to the ortho.

  “Tell us what your goals are for the team this year.”

  Tyler is wearing his shoulder pads over his jersey like some kind of exoskeleton. “We need to keep the same record as last year. Need to get deeper into the play-offs than we got last year. Actually, that is not a goal. That is what we are going to accomplish.”

  Unlike the other boys, Tyler doesn’t try to sound ghetto. He picks his words carefully. He works to sound smart and well-spoken.

  “Can you tell us about some of the colleges that are scouting you?”

  “No.”

  The way Tyler says “no”—not mad, just final, not open to debate—makes me understand why everyone looks to him to tell them what to do. I wonder what my father would think of Tyler. I imagine Tyler promising him that he’d have his daughter home by curfew. My father shaking his hand in a way that made it unnecessary for him to say, “You’d better. Or else.”

  Cargo Pants apologizes, “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Look …” Tyler pauses, puts his hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder, leans in, asks, “What did you say your name was, son?”

  Son? It is such an oddly grandfatherly thing for Tyler to say to someone only slightly younger than he is. The oddest thing about it, though, is that he sounds completely natural saying it. Like it would fit perfectly if he pulled out a knife and started teaching Cargo Pants how to whittle.

  “Paul. Paul Harbaugh.”

  “OK, Paul, here’s the deal for this year. This team has all the talent in the world. Talent is not a question. We have to crank up the discipline, study our routes, and execute, and we will go to state. We will be the hammer and not the nail. End of story.” He sticks his hand out. Paul fumbles with the mic, shakes it. “OK, Paul, good job on the interview. Good talking to you. I need to get back to my boys.”

  Tyler pats Paul Harbaugh on the back in a way that both signals the interview is over and edges him out of the way. The instant Paul leaves, Tyler steps forward toward me.

  “Hey, Pink Puke, you’re lookin’ better. But you should definitely not be in the sun.” He nods toward Shupe. “Obviously, no one’s got your back. That dee bag’d just let you die out here.” Still facing me, he walks backward, toward the field. “You staying hydrated?”

  I raise my bottle of water.

  “OK, you drink those fluids, girl. That heatstroke—”

  “It was just exhaustion. Heat exhaustion.”

  Heat exhaustion, really? That is really what I yell at him?

  “Either way. That is serious shit. People die behind that shit.”

  I hold the bottle up and pretend to chug it. I ignore his dimple and see only the spotted, crooked teeth. They make me believe that Tyler Moldenhauer is just an ordinary boy.

  He points at me, turns, and runs back to the team.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  Scared and lost, Aubrey turns from me.

  “Please, sweetie. Tell me what’s wrong. Whatever it is, we can—”

  EEEEEEEEEEE!

  The smoke alarm shrieks.

  The scared child disappears and, as if the black smoke pouring off the stove and the ear-piercing shriek were occurring in some galaxy far, far away and have nothing at all to do with her and her life here on earth, Aubrey observes, “Your thing is burning.”

  I turn off the stove, use my shoe to bang on the smoke detector mounted on the ceiling until the alarm stops. Mickey Mouse is charcoal. Egg and Teflon fused into a blackened crust. I toss the ruined frying pan into the trash. The charred and smoking pan immediately melts a hole through the plastic can and fills the kitchen with the odor of poached polyvinyls.

  I fling open the front door to wave the smoke out and hear the rumble of Tyler’s truck approaching. This is a rare appearance; they usually arrange for him to pick her up a few blocks away or whatever else it takes for him to never actually set foot in this house. A topic that has been the subject of more than one fight. Among the many lame excuses Aubrey has given me for why Tyler can’t come in and pick her up like a decent person is that he has some kind of social anxiety disorder and meeting new people terrifies him.

  Pretzels, who’s managed to sleep through the fight and the screeching alarm, is roused by either the sound of Tyler’s truck or the waves of hostility pouring off me. She rises shakily from her spot on the kitchen rug, totters over to where I stand at the open door, and looses a few barks that sound like a garbage disposal chewing through a tennis ball.

  An anthem more pop than country and western throbbing from the truck, Tyler barrels into the driveway, cuts the engine, and brays along with the stirring finale, “Gimme that girl lovin’ up on me!”

  Ah, the enormity of the cultural divide contained within the bad grammar, the folksy anti-intellectualism, the paternalistic macho swagger of the one line that a privileged suburban jock pretending to be country chooses to sing. Why couldn’t Aubrey have brought home one of those vegan, tattooed boys in the skinny black jeans who love bands with arty, non sequitur names?

  The song ends. Tyler presses the brim of the cap hugging his head into an even tighter semicircle, plucks the Oakley wraparounds off his head, and settles them over his ridiculously blue eyes.

  Social anxiety, my ass.

  But I say nothing. If biting my tongue and walking on eggshells is the price to free my daughter from this redneck Romeo, I will pay it.

  Pretzels gives a growl more mucoid than menacing; then, her work done, she lumbers back into the kitchen and flops, exhausted, onto her rug, sighing loudly at the imposition.

  Stopping only to scoop lip glosses back into her purse and snatch up her apron, Aubrey hurries past. I grab her arm. “Aubrey, I want you back here the instant lunch is over so that, as soon as I finish class, we can blast to the bank. Okay? Got it? This is nonnegotiable.”

  “Okay! Okay! I already told you I would. What do you want? My name signed in blood? If that’s how little you trust me, why don’t you …” She pauses, then names the thing that she’s been angling for for months. “Just throw me out!” She yanks away from my grip and runs out the door like the doomed heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles rushing to meet Angel Clare at Stonehenge.


  I yell after her, “Don’t make me have to drag you out of that …! That …! That mobile food conveyance vehicle! Because if I have to, I will!”

  Aubrey’s aggrieved stomping turns into an airborne dance the moment she slips beyond my reach. She has a sanctuary and she is running to it. Wafting across what remains of the lawn I can’t afford to water, her feet don’t seem to touch the ground once. From her first baby steps, Aubrey had helium in her bones, springing through life like a gazelle. I never understood how such a light-footed creature could have issued from my leaden body. For a fraction of a second, I allow myself to enjoy the only comfort she still offers me, her beauty. I cling to it just the way I did when she was a colicky baby howling out her jerky screams as her tongue clicked spastically in her open mouth. Babies—silky, sweet-smelling babies. They must have been a cavewoman’s first luxury goods.

  Tyler opens the door of his truck and gathers Aubrey into his arms, the rescuing hero. My daughter puts her arms around Tyler’s neck, hiking the Nike shorts up even farther, just in case she’s left anything at all to the neighbors’ imaginations. The sweethearts grin into each other’s faces, delirious about being the punch line of their own secret joke.

  The uncontrollable “replay” button in my mind activates, and Aubrey’s entire life as it would have been with a father passes before my eyes, a father who would storm out at this very second, snatch his daughter from the clutches of this marauding male, make her “put some clothes on” and go to the bank with her mother. Right this minute. That father does not materialize and Tyler hauls Aubrey into the truck.

  At graduation in May, I’d overheard a mom observing Tyler’s and Aubrey’s mutual gorgeousness whisper to her friend, “God, imagine the children they’d have.” I remember that comment and, for a fraction of a second, the regret machine stops and time freezes in the present, right now, as it actually is.

  Both Tyler’s and Aubrey’s faces are framed by circles of white shoe polish drawn on the front windshield with their names and “Sexy Seniors!” written above the circles. Sitting in that truck, with shoe-polish halos encircling their heads, they look like Mary and Joseph. A jolt of panic squeezes my heart as I allow the fear I’ve been denying to surface: that the only thing missing from their Holy Family tableau is the Baby Jesus himself, standing between the haloed couple. Just an ignorant little redneck baby who would utterly destroy my daughter’s life and condemn her to live in this miserable suburban wasteland forever.

  God, if I’d only been able to nip this romance in the bud. If I’d even only known when it started.

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

  I am completely and unequivocally into football territory. Paige Winslow and Madison Chaffee, sitting on the aluminum bleachers five feet away, don’t notice me.

  In world history last year, we studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Figge explained what de-Stalinization was, how leaders like Stalin would be expunged from the country’s history so completely that their faces were literally erased from photos. That’s what Paige and Madison have done to me: They’ve de-Stalinized me. I still remember when we all played together at the pool, diving under for plastic rings, riding together on field trips to Pioneer Farm, but they don’t. Friendship with me turned out to be the kind of embarrassing accident that happened when you were little, before everyone found their place in the social hierarchy.

  They assume that I hate them. That I am deeply jealous and want to be them, but that since I never will be, I’ve channeled my envy into scorn and hatred. It is a valid assumption and generally true. But wrong in my case. I don’t want to be them any more than I want to be one of Twyla’s burnout buds. I don’t think my life is tragic and that it would be golden if I was popular. I just think they are exactly who they were raised to be since their parents named them Paige and Madison and it is irrelevant if I hate them or want to be them.

  I smile and shrug. Paige and Madison have no idea what I am shrugging about any more than I would understand them if they shrugged at me. It would just be a chance to huddle with my friends and get that delicious feeling that comes from whispering about someone who is not like you with someone who is like you. I understand. I truly do. I would like whispering with someone who is like me. But no one is.

  I think it is because my sizzle doesn’t match anyone else’s. I want something to happen so bad that it sizzles inside of me. It never stops, but it also never fits any of the choices presented. Maybe because there is only one you are ever allowed to talk about: college.

  “Which schools are you thinking about?” everyone asks, like they are taking each other’s temperatures, seeing whose sizzle matches theirs. But, even when I try, I can’t make myself care about colleges. About next year. Not when there is so much to pay attention to right now.

  At the end of practice, the players all get in a circle, bump fists, yell, “Pirate Power!” and run to the locker room. Paige stands up on the bleachers and calls out, “Tyler! Ty-Mo! Are we studying after school today?”

  Tyler turns, yells back, “Yeah, sure! I’ll meet you at your car!”

  The instant Tyler’s back faces her, Paige bites her knuckle like she wants to eat her entire arm. Or Tyler Moldenhauer. Madison fans herself to show that she agrees that Tyler is unbearably hot.

  Tyler pivots back around. Paige yanks her hand out of her mouth; he yells, “I’m starving!”

  Paige answers, “I’ll pick up tacos, OK?”

  Before he can say anything else, Tyler’s glance hits me. I hold up my water bottle and wave it at him to show that I’m drinking fluids like he told me to. He doesn’t acknowledge me in any way other than a pause of half a second before he looks back at Paige and yells, “Cool!”

  Half a second is exactly long enough for me to be sure that he has seen me and that he could care less.

  12:12 A.M. SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

  =Why did you leave us?

  =Aubrey, hi. Wow, I’ve been waiting for that bomb. Trying to figure out what I’d say. I used to know the answer. I used to know all the answers. But I don’t anymore. Not to that. Not to anything. That’s a long conversation that probably can’t/shouldn’t be done inside a tiny chat bubble.

  =Yeah. OK. GTG.

  =Aubrey, don’t run off. I want to answer that question. Just … I’d like it to be in person.

  =And I’m sure that will be real soon. Aren’t you, like, supposed to get excommunicated for even talking to me?

  =They would not be happy about it.

  =So I don’t see a big in-person meeting happening anytime soon.

  =Aubrey, remember this: I loved you from the first second of your life.

  I loved you from the first second of your life.

  Big freaking lot of good that did me.

  I close the page without saying good-bye or GTG and think about unfriending him. But why? So I can join Mom in pretending that I haven’t spent most of the past sixteen years thinking about him? Oh, except, unlike Mom, I would then have two people that I can pretend I am not thinking about. Two people who, according to her, I am supposed to hate and must erase from my consciousness.

  It’s impossible to make yourself not think about someone. Who’s one of the top three figures everyone knows from Russian history? Maybe Rasputin. Maybe Catherine the Great. But, for sure, everyone knows Joseph Stalin.

  De-Stalinization. Didn’t even work for Stalin.

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

  After the Water Bottle Incident, I move as far from the football practice field as I can get, all the way back to the band sidelines. Back to where T.M. will never see me again.

  Shupe does see me, though, and asks, “Where are your notes, Lightsey? If you’re not marching and not memorizing the new drills, I can’t give you credit.”

  Though I already know that I am never going back, it still surprises me when I hear myself say, “That’s OK, Shupey-Doo. I’m dropping band.”

  I am also surprised at how easy it is to walk away and leave three years behin
d as if they had never happened. I didn’t think that I was the kind of person who could do that.

  But it turns out that I am. Turns out that I am a lot of things that no one, especially not me, thought I was.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  Aubrey is pregnant.

  Stupid as it sounds for someone who spends every day with women who either are or just were pregnant, the thought of my daughter knocked up never crossed my mind, since I have been hammering birth control into her since she lost her baby teeth. Still, what else would explain why her sullenness has escalated so dramatically recently?

  I run to Aubrey’s room. It is even more freakishly neat than usual. Stark, actually, since over the course of the summer she has moved so many of her clothes to Tyler’s. All her books are arranged according to when she acquired them. Amelia Bedelia at the very beginning and those Twilight books at the end. I notice that she hasn’t bought the last book in the series and my pulse races even faster; this lack of interest in an unconsummated love affair is an ominous sign. I’m not a fool. I know that there has been consummation. Far too much consummation. I knew that from the first night she failed to come home.

  What I want to find are signs that all this consummation has been controlled. A nice, empty pill dispenser, a diaphragm would be great. What I really don’t want to find is a white plastic stick with a pink positive sign on it. Mostly I’m doing what I did when I sniffed at the new odors clinging to Aubrey: gathering evidence from an uncooperative witness.

  Tiny bottles of hand sanitizer gleam at various spots around the room. What clothes remain in her closet all hang in the same direction. The shoes she’s left behind are boxed up in perfect rows on the shelf above her clothes. Peeking down at me from a shelf beside her bed are her My Little Ponies, with their squat bodies and pastel manes, that I recall her occasionally rearranging long after most girls her age had abandoned ponies and morphed from cuddly pre-teen puppies into aloof, disdainful adolescent cats whose fondest hope was that their parents would leave their credit cards in a neat pile before signing on for an extended tour aboard a nuclear submarine. Listening to the other moms moan about how their daughters had mutated overnight from sweet, submissive girls into snarly tramps who hated them and wanted to wear little junior-miss stripper outfits was part of the reason I thought I was a parenting genius.