The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  Eventually, of course, the “whatevers” and eye rolling, gasping, and utter exasperation began. I thought I’d nipped the problem in the bud by telling her, “Look, let’s save us both a lot of time. Just end every statement you direct toward me with the words ‘you asshole,’ because that is exactly what you’re saying to me.”

  I now look back on that time fondly because, although the “whatevs” did start, we were still connected. There would be entire weekends of truce when we would watch a complete season of Project Runway or shop for new tops for her together. Since Tyler Moldenhauer, however, Aubrey hasn’t been connected to anyone but him.

  Resting on the pillow of her neatly made bed is BeeBee, Aubrey’s favorite Puffalump. BeeBee was once a Pretty Hair Purple. Pretty Hair Purple BeeBee is gray now, all the stuffing from her head has shifted into her lumpy legs, and her braids are dull, fuzzy ropes. BeeBee was a present from the last Christmas that Martin and Aubrey and I spent together sixteen years ago.

  I put my nose to the bedraggled toy and a bit of wisdom I’d stumbled across in my Googling last night flits through my mind: “Your kid will always come back.” Yes, I know she’ll come back, I now want to tell that blithe poster, but will she ever come back as a newborn with breath that smells like caramel? A four-year-old who sits in my lap through whole movies so she can bury her face in my chest at the scary parts? A ten-year-old eager to explain to me in dazzling detail why Sailor Moon must search for the fabled Moon Princess? A two-year-old who tries to say “baby” and it comes out “BeeBee”?

  A couple of poster-size collages trace her romance with Tyler through homecoming, prom, winter formal, and formals that I never even learned the names of. In the next-to-last photo, they’re holding their maroon polyester graduation robes open to reveal that they’re wearing nothing except bathing suits underneath. The last photo was taken at a graduation party given by their friends. Well, his friends, really; I didn’t recognize any of the sports-capped chuckleheads or spaghetti-strapped hoochies holding up cups of beer caught in mid-slosh and grinning drunken grins at the camera. Tyler—wayward curls of dark hair flipping out beneath the weathered cap hugging his head, the torn-away sleeves of his snap-button Western shirt showing off arms still pumped up with football muscles—has Aubrey slung over his shoulder and is carrying her away, off toward the dark beyond the flash.

  I shift to alternate-universe mode and imagine how our lives would have turned out if we’d never left Sycamore Heights, the vibrant, diverse neighborhood in the city we abandoned so that we could send our child to the best schools within driving distance of Martin’s job. Would Martin and I still be together? What if I’d never gotten pregnant? Life without Aubrey is the one parallel universe I am incapable of imagining. All I know is that had we not left Sycamore Heights, Tyler Moldenhauer would never have entered the picture.

  I check under the bed. Her clarinet case is shoved far off in a back corner. I pull it out and hold the instrument, stroke the keys worn smooth by her fingers. There is another box hidden so far under the bed that I have to get the broom to drag it out. I promise myself that I will take a quick peek, then slam it shut if I don’t see what I’m looking for. I blur my eyes a bit so that if it is love letters, naked photos, I won’t absorb any details.

  I don’t know why I am surprised to find the Book of Palms, a scrapbook with all the photos of her father I could gather. I run my hand over the big album. I’d pasted the title on myself using peel-off gold letters in a swirly font, hoping to underline the joke aspect of the name I’d given this volume. I wanted Aubrey to know about her father. But not to take any of it too seriously. She was such a quiet, solemn child, I didn’t want her absent father to become a dark, intense issue.

  I open the book and there is the first photo of his palm, frozen by the flash from a paparazzo’s camera, shielding the face of a celebrity. I first saw it on a dreary, cold Monday in February fourteen years ago. I was in the checkout line at the grocery. It was sleeting outside and almost dark at six in the evening. Aubrey was four and cranky from getting her MMR vaccine and from a too-long day at day care. All the days were too long back then when I was scrambling to get my business started. Aubrey wouldn’t stop fussing and whining even with black drool running down her face from the bag of Oreos I’d opened and stuck in her hands to keep her quiet. I felt achy and chilled, knew I had a cold coming on, and couldn’t afford to cancel any visits with the few patients I had. All I wanted was to pay for the milk, juice, eggs, apples, and bread in my cart, go home, throw something together for dinner, unload and reload the dishwasher, pack lunches, and try to be in bed before I dropped in my tracks.

  And then Aubrey threw the open package of Oreos on the floor and lunged for the box of Twix bars next to us in the checkout aisle, knocking those to the floor as well. I was on my hands and knees picking up candy bars and Oreos when I first came face-to-palm with Martin, now going by his bizarre new name, Stokely Blizzard, on the cover of the National Enquirer, sticking his hand out to shield the celebrity he was shepherding. The caption read, “Next! Honcho Stokely Blizzard wards off photographers as former sitcom star Lissa Doone exits a three-month stay at Ramparts, Next’s! exclusive rehab clinic.”

  I bought the tabloid and started a photo album. Every few months I’d add another clipping. It was from them that I learned that Next sued any publication that didn’t capitalize their name and include the trademarked exclamation point. That their lawyers were so ferocious they’d even battled off a lawsuit brought by Scientology that claimed Next had stolen much of their theology and most of their biggest adherents. And that “the church” christened the ultraelite converts like Martin, who’d surrendered all their worldly possessions and enlisted for “ninety-nine lifetimes,” with names that combined their mother’s maiden name with their favorite meteorological phenomenon. Hence Stokely Blizzard. It was like figuring out what your porn-star name would be except with weather instead of pets.

  As I’d told Dori, the fact that Next bordered on the farcical actually made losing Martin to it harder. So, no, Next would be getting no exclamation points from me.

  At first the “stars” that Martin counseled and was photographed with were has-beens—pinwheel-eyed drug burnouts; sex addicts trying to look ashamed; duckbilled, eternally surprised plastic-surgery casualties. All of them caught in the act of rebuilding their careers with steel beams forged in the Next crucible.

  After a few years of counseling and guarding has-beens and never-weres, Martin moved up to shielding the faces of currently working, B-minus-list actors on the make looking to move up. Or solid B-listers, maybe even a few A-minuses who were slipping off the list after a string of bombs. Actors appeared to be the ideal candidates for Next. These were people who dreamed of the chance to be whoever someone told them they needed to be. Hopefully the person doing the telling would be a director with a closetful of Oscars. But if Spielberg or Scorsese didn’t materialize, Next was always there, ready to tell the world’s most insecure humans precisely who they needed to be. And what Next told them all to be was a Nextarian.

  Gradually the hidden faces behind Martin’s palm came to belong to celebrities who were seriously worth protecting: solid box-office earners, leads in popular television series, musicians with platinum albums. Finally, he and his palm protected the faces of some of the hottest stars in the world.

  As if association with celebrities that blistering could ignite any chunk of matter they came into contact with, Martin himself eventually became a paparazzi target. I knew he had arrived the day I saw someone else’s palm, some other Next underling, shielding his face. Apparently Martin had risen high enough in Next that he required his own Swiss Guard stiff-arming the press and hiding him from view. It had been years since I’d come across a clear shot of his face.

  So I collected the photos and made the Book of Palms for Aubrey, hoping that the fact that she shared genes with a father who could sell tabloids would register on some level. But mostly the palm
photos confused her. By middle school, her only comment when a new one appeared was, “Weird.”

  By that time, she had cut her ties with the fairy-winged Twyla and told everyone that I was “a pediatric nurse.” Like Dori said, Aubrey wanted to fit in, so I just stopped adding photos. Then she stopped mentioning him altogether, and, taking my cue from her, I did the same.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 2009

  My mom thinks I am insane for working in the attendance office for a fourth year. But attendance is like band. It is a place to be. Also, I like what you find out when you’re an aide. Such as who has an appointment every week with the orthodontist or the speech therapist. Also who has to go to AA meetings or check in with their probation officer. And, since I work fifth period, right after “B” lunch, and hand out tardy slips, I know who spends lunch getting high or having sex. It is a closed campus except for seniors with permission, so theoretically nothing like that can happen. But, as Twyla used to say, “That’s why God invented bathrooms.” And, in her case, Dumpsters, and prop rooms, and cars with tinted windshields. But then, Twyla was not ever what you’d call discreet.

  Thinking about Twyla makes my heart hurt. I remember this one time in seventh grade when she called me up late Friday and asked if I would help her TP her house. Her own house. Twyla had gotten too weird for me by that time. She’d started cutting herself, and talked not about the tattoos she was planning to get, but the sleeves of tattoos she was planning to get. But even if we had still been friends, I wouldn’t have helped her. It made me too sad to think about anyone sneaking into her own front yard and throwing toilet paper around so that it would look like her friends or, even more ridiculous, her boyfriend had wrapped her house. But Twyla went ahead and did it all by herself.

  Most parents, the second they saw all that toilet paper drooping out of their trees, would have gotten their kid out of bed in the middle of the night to clean it up. Not Twyla’s mom. Not Dori. She was probably proud of the streamers of toilet paper hanging down from the tall sycamore trees. Probably thought it was a bold declaration of the slob-queen housecleaning style she and my mom bonded over. As if the warped card table left out from a garage sale she’d had months ago, and the deflated husk of an ancient wading pool, and the acrylic painting she’d taped over a broken-out windowpane weren’t enough clues. So the Charmin was just left there to blow in the breeze all weekend.

  Sunday night, it rained.

  Monday, after school, I did what I always did and waited until the very last minute to get on the bus. Then I acted all distracted, and pretended that I was trying to find something in my backpack and that I didn’t see Twyla, sitting all the way in the back, waving wildly at me. I grabbed the first open seat as close to the front as I could manage. We always passed Twyla’s house on the way home. That day, though, before we even reached her house, a murmur passed through the bus and kids moved over to the windows on the side that faced it.

  The rain the night before had made the toilet paper clump together into lumps of gray papier-mâché. Someone—I didn’t turn around to see who—yelled out, “Hey, Twyla, nice job on the wrapping!”

  Everyone laughed. They all knew. Or just made the obvious guess that Twyla had wrapped her own house. I laughed with them. I had to. If I hadn’t everyone would have assumed that I had helped Twyla. That I was still her friend. That night was the first time I unlatched the screen on my window and sneaked out of the house. I took the long pole with the hook on the end of it that Mom used to clean the fan in the great room with me, went over to Twyla’s house, and cleared off as much of the TP as I could reach.

  I get the same cringing, burning-with-shame feeling I had on the bus passing Twyla’s house when I think about how I’d held up my little bottle of water and waved it at Tyler like it was some secret lover’s signal. It was clear from the way he’d looked right through me that if he’d ever given me a second thought, it was, “What is the deal with that sketchy stalker girl?”

  Who cared, though, really? I wanted to get out of band and he helped me do that. That’s all that is important. That’s all I really care about.

  It’s Friday. Friday is a big day for the Jims ’n’ Jays crowd—the noontime equivalent of the Wake ’n’ Bake morning tardies—named in honor of their lunch favorites, Slim Jims and joints. Miles Kropp, a guy I’d written lots of slips for, meandered in. We always acted like we didn’t know each other, even though he’d been part of Twyla’s stoner-emo-goth group since sixth grade. His eyes, rimmed in thick black liner, are rabid-bat red. He stands on the other side of the attendance counter, not saying a word.

  “Do you need a tardy slip?” I finally ask.

  “Hu-u-u-h?” He makes a big deal out of slurring the word and saying it real slow.

  I write his name at the top of the slip, the last one on my pad, and ask, “Reason for tardiness?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’ll just say ‘personal.’ ”

  “Yeah. Right. Cool. Per-suh-nul.” He says it in a dreamy, sleepy way. “Like I’m a null person.” His giggle reminds me of Twyla. So does the way he is proud of himself, just like Twyla always was when she was high and expected me to be shocked and outraged but secretly impressed and jealous.

  He leaves and the office is empty. Miss Olivia hasn’t gotten back from lunch yet. When she does, she’ll listen to all the attendance messages, then send me out to pick up the kids whose parents have called in asking for them to be excused for doctor’s appointments or to talk to the reps visiting from colleges. Today it is Hendrix and Carnegie Mellon.

  I need more tardy slips and am almost out of permissions, so I go to Miss Olivia’s desk. I am the only one she allows near her desk, since it contains the precious slips that she keeps under lock and key. Miss Olivia is obsessed with making sure that no student ever sneaks out of so much as one class. She still talks about a senior two years ago who’d managed to steal her pad of slips and get three of his friends out of class before she traced the stolen slips and got him suspended. For a week.

  Miss Olivia’s desk is covered with her massive collection of turtle knickknacks and photos. In the largest of the framed photos she is with her ex-husband and their baby daughter. Her daughter, who is in her early thirties now, has a pink bow taped to the top of her bald head. The ex has one of those eighties haircuts with no sideburns that make it look like the top of his hair isn’t attached, like it is just a hair cloud floating around his head. He looks happy and proud and filled with love. Next to that one is a picture of Miss Olivia’s daughter in a graduation gown with a mortarboard loosely pinned onto her big, curly hair. Miss Olivia stands beside her with the same hair. The father is not in the picture.

  Not in the picture.

  I guess that’s where the expression comes from.

  In the most recent photo, Miss Olivia is holding her asthmatic Chihuahua, Elvis, next to her face and making him wave at the camera. Her hair is thin and flat, the way it grew in after the chemo.

  Since she is a giant Pirates football fan, Miss Olivia has a team photo tacked to her wall. But she especially worships Tyler and has a close-up of him pasted in the center of a red football that she cut out of construction paper. I am staring at it when a voice behind me says, “Pink Puke, so this is where you hang out.”

  I turn. Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.

  Tyler Moldenhauer is at the counter.

  My brain cannot absorb this information. It shorts out and refuses to send signals to my mouth to make it form words or even to my legs to order them to get me up off my butt and walk to the counter.

  “I wondered where you disappeared to.” He leans down and rests his head on the back of his hands, folded on top of the counter. “You work here or are you just stealing turtles?”

  “What? Oh.” I glance down at Miss Olivia’s turtle paperweights, turtle Beanie Babies, turtle figurines, turtle paper-clip holder, and turtle mouse pad and snort something that is meant to be a laugh but comes out like I might be about to barf
again.

  “What are you doin’?” he drawls. While I consider and discard a thousand equally stupid responses, he hoists himself up onto the counter, swings his legs around as smoothly as an Olympic gymnast, and dismounts on my side of the counter. He leans in next to me to study Miss Olivia’s turtle herd and says, “I detect a theme here.”

  Sadly, the nerd section of my brain unfreezes before any of the cooler parts and I jump up, babbling, “Why are you even here? The athletic faculty handles all sports absences. You can’t be back here.”

  “I can’t? Seems I am, though.” He picks up a sneering turtle with a sign around its neck that reads YOU WANT IT WHEN? “This one here has got to be my favorite.”

  “That area is off-limits to students!” The top half of Miss Olivia’s body appears at the counter. Tyler’s back is to her, so she can’t see who is with me. “What is he doing back there?”

  Tyler doesn’t turn around. He makes the grumpy turtle sniff his thumb, then fall in love with the nail. I ignore him as he puts Miss Olivia’s turtle on the back of his hand and makes it hump his thumb.

  “He’s from the district office,” I say. “He’s fixing your hard drive.”

  His back still to Miss Olivia, Tyler drawls in a surprisingly realistic hillbilly accent, “Yes’m, your hard drive has to be recalibrated.” His improv is good except that he is patting Miss Olivia’s fax machine instead of her external hard drive.