by Sarah Bird
I have my hand on the door handle. I want to be simple. I want to be the one simple thing in his life, but I can’t not ask. “Not that it matters one way or another. I mean, I seriously don’t care. But, just for curiosity, why are you hanging out with me?”
He faces me, turns the engine off. “I don’t know. You’re fun. I liked it when you busted me for macking on you.”
“You mean when you were all, ‘Hey, baby, I’m Tyler Moldenhauer,’ that time at the attendance counter?”
“Yeah. You treated me like such a creeper. That cracked me up. In fact, the first thing I ever heard you say cracked me up.”
“You mean, after I puked on you?”
“Oh, that was hilarious too. No doubt. But, no, before that. The first time I noticed you I was like, What is different in this picture? Oh right, one girl doesn’t have a giant feather protruding from the side of her head. Then that band director dude—”
“Shupe.”
“Yeah, that dee bag. Such a jarhead wannabe. He is yelling at you that ‘it’s Semper Fi!’ and you come back at him in this total Parris Island DI voice, ‘Not Semper I, sir!’ That cracked me up. And he completely did not get it. No one on the team got it. I got it.”
“So I didn’t have to puke on you to get you to notice me?”
“Hells to the no.” He goes into his skeevy playboy act. “I had my eye on you, girl.”
I play-flirt back at him, purring, “Mmm. Tell me more, my fine playa manwhore.” It is exactly like being with Javier, the gay kid who was my only real friend last summer at Lark Hill. We loved to pretend in front of the other counselors that I had a giant crush on him and no idea that he was gay. It was fun to mess with them, to have some designated representative come over to me and whisper, “We’re worried about you, Aubrey. You do know that Javier is gay, don’t you?” Then I’d pretend to be shocked and in mad love denial and say, “Gay? No! My Javier is not gay! He’s just theatrical!”
I play-slap at Tyler, just like I used to do with Javier, and he jokes back, “How could I resist. You were like the palest person I had ever seen. What did you do all summer? Sleep in a coffin? I thought you were an albino. And that was so sexy.”
“You did not just call me an albino!” I windmill a flurry of bunny pats onto his chest. It is like slapping a saddle.
He raises his hands in front of his chest and I slap at those. “I just had to see those white-rat red eyes up close. Find out what lab you escaped from.”
I accelerate my attack. He squeezes his eyes shut and squeals. It seems irrelevant whether he is gay or not and I kiss him.
Tyler’s eyes spring open. For a fraction of a second, I think he is going to kiss me back. But he doesn’t and I want to blurt out that I know he is gay and I didn’t expect him to kiss me and let’s just pretend I didn’t do that.
He drops his arms. “You are a nice person, A to the J.”
“Nice! That is such an insult. Nice is the most boring thing anyone can be.”
“No, believe me. Nice is not an insult.”
“Well, I’m not that nice.”
“Yeah, you are. You’re so nice that you don’t even know how nice you are, which is why I better make you leave right now.”
I walk home in a state that ping-pongs between ecstasy and utter humiliation. Inside the house Mom ambushes me and asks, “Why don’t you bring Shaniqua over here sometime?”
“Oh, she has to babysit. She’s got two little sisters who fight all the time. And a brother who’s got dyslexia.”
“Bring them all over. Give me a time. I won’t schedule any consultations and I’ll help her watch the little ones.”
“Mom, you always do this.”
“Do what?”
“Try to take my friends over.”
I see the same question going through her mind that is going through mine: What friends? Knowing that she would never actually say the words, I escape before she can figure out another way to grill me.
I am all the way in my room, closing the door, when she yells out, “Peninsula sent you something! It’s from the housing office!” Her voice startles me. I’d already forgotten that she was there. And I haven’t thought once about Peninsula since our trip. I pretend I didn’t hear her, shut and lock the door, and go back to remembering how Tyler’s lips felt on mine.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Thinking of how Martin and Aubrey have been plotting behind my back does me in. I dig out Aubrey’s pink boom box from elementary school, find her favorite CD—the sound track from Toy Story 2—select “When She Loved Me,” hit “play,” then “repeat.” I am gravid with grief and this song is the Pitocin I need to deliver. As Sarah McLachlan sings in her aching mezzosoprano, “When somebody loved me …” I bury my face in Aubrey’s pillow just the way I imagined I’d do after she’d left for college to build a bright future and I was missing her. Except that now she’s gone from my life and there is no college, no building of a bright future, to comfort me.
She is just gone and my “next” seems empty indeed.
The first time I heard “When She Loved Me,” Aubrey was sitting on my lap because movies on big screens scared and overwhelmed her. She tolerated the frantic action adventures of all the boy toys—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head—but she came to life when Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl doll appeared on-screen. I felt her grow lighter on my lap as she strained toward the screen, drawn into the tale of how Jessie the doll had once been loved by a little girl, Emily. As the years passed, though, Emily grew up, dolls were replaced by nail polish, and Jessie, crumpled and lonely beneath Emily’s bed, was forgotten. I’d thought it was adorable when, after the movie, Aubrey had rushed from the car to her room, found BeeBee, whom she’d been neglecting, and spent the next hour brushing the Puffalump’s purple hair, fastening it with tiny plastic barrettes, talking to the doll the entire time.
I was so certain that I would remember every adorable thing that she’d said that day that I didn’t write it down. And now I can’t recall a single word.
When somebody loved me.
Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl’s song washes over me, the lyrics like a horoscope, a fortune cookie I opened years ago and should have paid more attention to. I agree wholeheartedly with Jessie as she sings about how everything was beautiful when Emily loved her and she had the power to dry her tears. When Jessie the doll sings that every hour she spent with Emily lives within her heart, but that now she is left alone, waiting for the day when Emily would say again that she would always love her, it is my song.
Feeling deeply, satisfyingly sorry for myself is a luxury that I’ve had no time to indulge for the past sixteen years. I am snuggling in to enjoy it when I suddenly switch from grieving about Aubrey abandoning me to remembering when my own mother had the power to dry my tears. When had I abandoned her? When she became ill? When I hit puberty? When my grandmother appeared with her more vibrant version of life? If my mother hadn’t died, would we both have ridden out adolescence until the day when I returned and said that I would always love her?
When Jessie sings about how she stayed the same, but Emily began to drift away, “she,” the one drifting away, becomes Martin. But I am still Jessie and everyone I have ever loved has drifted away and a cartoon movie about discarded toys has become the template of my entire life and I am just going to blubber about it for a while.
I gather Aubrey’s pillow—still smelling like her special “volumizing” conditioner—BeeBee, and Pretzels into my arms and hug them to me. As I am noticing that one part of my bouquet of loss needs a bath and a visit to the vet to get her teeth cleaned, thin shafts of reflected light stream in from the window and play across the wall.
I release pillow, pooch, and Puffalump, and peek outside to trace the source of this heavenly host–esque illumination just as an extraordinary and extraordinarily silent vehicle pulls up to the front curb. The car is silver, stately, and opulent. It looks as out of place on this street as a brontosaurus. Though I�
�ve never actually seen one, I identify this car immediately: a Bentley. I am equally certain that I know only one person on earth who might be driving such a vehicle: Martin.
NOVEMBER 9, 2009
The practice field is a different place beneath a gray sky with a freezing wind knifing across it. I try to time it so that I’ll appear on the field right as practice finishes, but I am early. The players wear long-sleeved, stretchy shirts under their uniforms. Most wear gloves. Tyler’s hands are bare.
The metal bleacher under my butt feels like a plank of ice as I sit there waiting for some version of the moment when Ashton Kutcher jumps out and everyone cackles about me getting Punk’d. Madison, Paige, and the rest of them are all huddled beneath a blanket together at the other end of the bleachers, hoods of their North Face jackets pulled up like a row of little monks.
The players run up and down the field. They slam into one another. They grunt. Their hard plastic pads clack together. They weave around the field even more like ants than the band kids, all trying to pick up the scent of a trail. It is random chaos, a minor distraction from watching Tyler.
Coach Hines whistles, yells, “All right, y’all huddle up, now! Huddle up!”
They end their meeting with everyone piling hands together, do a tick-tock-the-game-is-locked, clap, and head for the locker room.
Madison yells to Tyler in a singsongy, babyish voice, “Ty-Mo, I already finished your assignment in English. Wanna come to Paige’s house and I can print it out?”
I think of Madison’s perfect 800 on the SAT math section. I guess math geniuses don’t always sound smart.
Tyler pulls his helmet off. His hair is flattened against his head with sweat. He shakes it out and shoots Madison the Dimple. He doesn’t even look my way.
Did I imagine the person he was at the quarry? Did I hallucinate him asking me to come here?
The team manager hands him a towel and takes his helmet. He wipes his face and walks toward the bleachers. By the time he reaches us, he still hasn’t looked at me once and I’ve concluded that he’s a psychopath who set this all up just for the fun of torturing me.
“Madison, thanks, you’re a sweetheart. But I’m good. I think my girl A.J.’s got me covered.” He tilts his chin my way. “Paige, Madison, you all know A.J., don’t you?”
There is a fraction of a second’s pause. Enough time for me to study Paige Winslow’s and Madison Chaffee’s faces to see if they are in on the joke. They aren’t. Instead they deal gracefully with whatever reversal of the laws of physics has allowed me to enter their gravitational field.
The team manager takes Tyler’s used towel.
“Madison, you want to give A.J. my homework?”
Madison nods her head, probably to help the process of me going from utterly invisible to being a fully formed object capable of stimulating the rods and cones in her retina. “Not a prob.”
When Tyler leaves for the locker room, the girls turn away from me. Not in a mean way. Just a sort of been-there way. No doubt they figure that I am some epic skeeze bag who is doing things to Tyler that require the limberness of a Ukranian gymnast and the morals of a bonobo monkey. That there have been others like me before and there will be others like me after.
Madison pulls some papers out of her zip-up notebook and brings them to me. I want to tell her that I am as baffled as she is and that, no doubt, Tyler will return to their planet very soon. But she seems so genuinely friendly when she says, “Don’t write too neat. That’s a giveaway,” that I just nod and take the papers.
Some might say that Tyler Moldenhauer is just using me to be his gay cover-up. But so what? I’m just using Tyler Moldenhauer too. To be happy.
NOVEMBER 9, 2009
Which character do you think is the most important in Animal Farm?”
Tyler, lying on his back on the red vinyl padding of his weight bench, ignores the question. We’ve gotten into a groove over the past week. I refused to straight-up do his homework for him like Madison and the other girls before me had, so we do it together during his after-practice workouts. He explained that, with all the workouts Coach demanded on top of the program he’d designed for himself, he could either spend time with me or do homework. And he’d rather spend time with me.
Which is why I am with him in Coach Hines’s garage. All the times I’ve come over, I’ve never actually been inside the house. Or seen Coach Hines. Or his wife. I hear his giant dogs barking a lot but I haven’t even seen them. Tyler lives in the garage. It’s his choice. He has a room inside Coach’s gigantic house, but he likes it better in the garage. On his own. Coach likes it better too.
Most of the space on the polished concrete floor is taken up with weight equipment. A single bed with an orange sleeping bag flung across it is pushed up against the far wall. Clothes, mostly shirts and jeans, hang in dry cleaner’s bags from nails hammered into the walls. It is surprisingly neat for a garage where a football player lives.
I want to know why Tyler is living with Coach, but the answer to that question involves his mom and dad and lots of other unsimple issues that he obviously wants to avoid. Like why he is really hanging out with me.
I know that it isn’t homework. There are so many girls who’d do it for him that I can’t even seriously consider that he is interested in me only for that. Besides which, Coach Hines has a list of “tutors,” fan girls willing to do homework for any player who can’t recruit his own volunteers. Tyler’s choosing me to do his work for him is a strange honor in his world.
“So which character do you think is most important in Animal Farm?” I repeat, trying to remember whether I’d read Animal Farm in seventh or eighth grade. I do recall, though, that, even then, the study questions had been about the political allusions and the dangers of groupthink, not which character was “most important.”
As Tyler considers Animal Farm, he is gritting his teeth, quivering, and hoisting barbells up and down. I wonder if his face looks like that—almost a grimace, lost in what his body is doing—when he makes love. What it would look like making love to me.
“And ten!” The clang of the barbells as Tyler sets them down on the holder above his head jolts me out of my ridiculous daydream. I refuse to be that girl with an impossible crush on a gay guy.
Tyler is wearing a gray sweatshirt with the arms cut out. He sits up. Sweat streams down his face. He sticks his hands under the sweatshirt and lifts it to wipe off his face. His abs belong on a movie screen. Maybe I would be that girl.
“OK, most important character in Animal Farm? I’d have to say the horse.”
“Boxer? Yeah, I can see that. He is certainly the one willing to sacrifice the most for the good of the group.”
“There’s no i in teamwork.” He grins, picks up a dumbbell, and starts doing curls. His biceps swell up, then flatten like a speeded-up film of a python swallowing a pig.
As he works out, I read him the next question: “ ‘Is Animal Farm set in (a) wartime Germany, (b) a desert island, (c) a farm?’ ”
“Is that a trick question?”
“No, just incredibly stupid.”
“Uh, I’m going to solve the puzzle, Pat: (c) farm.”
“Farm it is! Bringing your total today to seventeen dollars! Next question: ‘In the end, the pigs become like (a) robots, (b) humans, (c) dogs.’ Is this a joke?”
“No, it’s just ‘keep the jocks in school as long as they’re winning games and keep collecting the money from the state for every day all the morons show up.’ You know how it works.”
I do. In spite of Miss Olivia’s personal obsession with tracking down a few kids here and there who ditch, the whole attendance office is mostly about proving how many kids are in school so that Parkhaven High can get paid by the state. Or else that the kids who are absent are at doctors’ offices or something else that is excused and the state will pay for. That and crowd control. Attendance is also mostly about crowd control.
Tyler finishes ten reps, then pauses, waiting for t
he next question. Without thinking, I ask, “Here’s a question with no wrong answer. Seriously, you’ll get an A for whatever you say.”
He starts in on the next set. Watching his muscles bulge up and down, he nods my way. “Shoot.”
“Are you attracted to me? In any way? I mean, is there any bi possibility? And, seriously, it really is not an issue if you’re not.”
Tyler stops and holds the weight half up for so long that his arm starts quivering and I deeply regret my question.
“Forget that I asked that. I love hanging out with you. And it’s way less complicated that you’re not. You know. Interested. In me. That way.” I have to physically press my finger against my lips to make myself stop babbling.
Tyler puts the weight down, pulls up his sweatshirt to wipe his face, and flashes his perfect abs again. This time, though, he keeps his head lowered, buried in the sweatshirt. His back and shoulders quiver, trembling a little bit. Alarm shoots through me, and I don’t know what to do. I would give anything not to have opened my big, fat mouth. Not to have made his being gay such a gigantic issue.
“God, Ty,” I say, my voice squealy from embarrassment. “I was only kidding.” I play-slap at him. “Come on, girlfriend.”
He still doesn’t answer.
“Tyler, it’s fine. I am cool with all forms of alternative sexuality.”
He lifts his head then, and I see that the trembling is from laughing. “All forms, huh?” He looks at me like a dad whose little kid has just said something cute.
“Well, you know. Not bestiality.”
“Damn! And I was just about to introduce you to my girlfriend, Bossie.”
He sees that I am embarrassed.
“Hey, Aubrey Julie, come on. I was just kidding. I like that you’re the way you are. That’s why I want it to be different with us.”
“ ‘Different’? Different how?”
He reaches out, almost touches me, stops himself, and picks up a weight instead.