“Whatever,” she said as we squeezed between the classroom door at the same time. She took a seat across the room from me.
I was the first to finish my exam, as always. I handed the booklet to my teacher and paced the halls until Decker finished his test, as always. Janna found me before Decker finished. “So, we’re friends, right?”
“Right,” I said.
But I must’ve hesitated a little too much, or else she was also mentally assessing just how friendly we actually were, because she added, “You kissed my brother. We’re practically related now.” Wicked grin, just like Carson’s.
I covered my face with my hands. “Can we maybe not talk about that?”
“Gladly.” Then she nodded once, as if solidifying our friendship. “But as your friend, I need to tell you something.”
I hoped her other acts of friendship wouldn’t be mortifying. “That guy on Saturday. You know him?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I didn’t. But now I do I guess.”
She stepped closer, totally invading my personal space, her hand on my arm again. I could feel the cold of her fingers through my shirt. “There wasn’t any article, Delaney.”
“What?” The snow turned to sleet, pelting the windows in the front lobby, echoing down the halls.
“The newspaper article about you. There wasn’t any. You know how I intern at The Ledger? It was my idea to write something up about you, but I couldn’t. Your parents didn’t give permission. And because of your age, we couldn’t print your name. So nothing ran. And if nothing ran in the local paper, nothing ran in the bigger ones.”
“Okay,” I said, desperately trying to process the information.
“He doesn’t know you from the paper,” she said again.
And then someone’s arms snaked around my shoulders and covered my eyes, and I jumped.
“God, Decker, you scared me to death,”
“Hyperbole,” he said, throwing an arm over my shoulders. “Remember that for your English exam.”
And then Carson popped in beside Janna. “You’re coming Friday, right?”
“I’ll try,” I said. Decker dropped his arm.
My parents were in high spirits that night. They’d been feeding me sleeping pills for three nights, and I’d been pretending to take them. They beamed at each other over the dinner table and asked me about exams, like everything was normal. They smiled at each other when I spoke, like they were extra proud of themselves. Like they believed they had successfully drugged the crazy right out of me. Like Unpredictable was a disease and they had cured it.
I had asked to go to the winter break party last year, too. Mom had launched into a tirade about underage drinking and the health risks associated with driving drunk on ice. Like maybe she would’ve stocked our car with alcohol if only we’d lived in Florida. As long as it wasn’t hurricane season.
I didn’t insult her intelligence by claiming there wouldn’t be alcohol or that I wouldn’t drink. My academic situation already predisposed me to the bottom of the social ladder. I wasn’t going to be the smart girl who refused to drink at a place that people only went to for drinking.
I asked with a forkful of buttery mashed potatoes in my mouth. I hoped that maybe they wouldn’t understand me and say okay to whatever they thought I was asking. In short, I was hoping for some serious miscommunication. My plan failed.
Mom stopped beaming. “We talked about this before,” she said. “And after all you’ve been through recently on top of all my previous reasons, which still stand, by the way . . .”
“You can go,” Dad said as he stabbed at a piece of steak.
Mom dropped her fork. “Kitchen. Now.” She spoke through her teeth. They really didn’t need to go to another room. It’s not like I couldn’t hear them through the thin door. And it’s not like they even pretended to whisper.
“It’s not safe.” Mom spoke each word in a staccato burst.
“The worst that can happen already happened, Joanne.”
“No, it didn’t. She could’ve died.”
Quietly, Dad said, “We thought she did.”
Nobody spoke for a few moments. Then Mom said, “I already lost her once.”
“There are other ways you can lose her and you know it.
She’s seventeen. How old were you the last time you spoke to your parents?”
Mom only ever mentioned her parents in the negative. She inherited bad eyesight from her father and cavity-prone teeth from her mother. She never told me who gave her the hazel eyes or the dimple in her left cheek, both of which I inherited. They were long dead and I never knew them. I couldn’t believe Dad played that card.
They came back into the dining room and resumed eating. “You can go,” Dad said again. “This steak is delicious.”
I stared at them. “Why did you stop talking to your parents, Mom?”
Mom shot Dad a look and threw her napkin on the table. She excused herself and started scrubbing pots in the next room.
Dad shook his head at me. “Anyone can have kids,” he said. “Anyone.”
Ceramic and glass banged against one another as Mom loaded the dishwasher in record speed. “At least they’re dead,” I said.
Dad put down his fork and wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “They’re not dead, Delaney.”
“But she says—”
“She says they’re dead to her.”
A piece of steak went down the wrong way, and I coughed and gagged into my napkin, like I was choking on the information.
Dad stood up to bring his plate into the kitchen, but first he grabbed my wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “I can already see the wheels in your head spinning. Leave it alone.”
My brain scrambled to make room for the existence of these people. Grandparents I’d never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.
Kind of like me.
Chapter 7
The next few days passed in the comfort of the expected. Studying and exams and Decker and no twitching hands or itching brain or excursions down the street in the middle of the night. Maybe I was healed. Maybe all I needed was time. Maybe I needed to immerse myself fully in my life and stop thinking about dying. Or resurrected grandparents.
So on Thursday when exams were done and Decker came over, I had plans to keep busy.
“I have a project for us,” I said.
Decker looked out the window at the falling snow. “Is this like the project where we had to categorize the different types of snow like the Eskimos?”
“Not at all. And it wasn’t like the Eskimos. It was my own original idea. I didn’t know someone else tried it first.”
He turned back to my bookshelf. “So, is it like when we had to alphabetize your books and then the kitchen pantry?”
“I think the food was your idea.”
“I was really, really bored.”
“Well anyway, I have a plan to finish all our required reading for next semester over the break.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s a really lame plan.”
“It’s a great plan. We’ll save so much time in the spring.”
“You’re forgetting a major point. I don’t do required reading.”
When we were ten, he took pictures of every heap of snow and taped them into a loose-leaf notebook. He wrote descriptions under each image. I, on the other hand, collected samples in Mason jars and stored them in the freezer. By the next day, they all looked the same. When we were thirteen, we alphabetized the contents of my parents’ cabinets. I ordered by brand name: Campbell, Kellogg, Kraft. He categorized and subcategorized for content: soup, chicken noodle; soup, minestrone; soup, split pea.
He’d do it. I knew he’d do it. It was all a matter of what I’d have to give. “I’ll do your math homework for a month.”
He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked. “Sold.”
“You’re cheap,” I said as I scanned my bookshelf.
“Joke’s on you. I would’ve done it anyway.”
I handed him Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Decker’s eyes widened. “Never mind, joke’s on me. This is a joke right?”
I sat on my bed and leaned back on the pillow, watching the planets circle my head. “Better get started,” I said.
Decker fanned the pages. “This is, like, twelve hundred pages!”
“Like I said, better get started.”
Decker propped his legs on my bed and crossed his feet at my waist. I hung an arm over his ankles, and he started to read.
He uncrossed and recrossed his feet sometime during the first section and said, “So, Carson.” And it took me a second to realize he wasn’t reading anymore.
“Hmm?”
“Carson. I can’t believe you like him.”
I sat up, folded my legs, and picked at my fingernails. “I never said that.”
Decker dropped his feet to the floor. “So then what the hell were you doing with him on my couch?”
I examined my fingernails very, very closely. Decker and I were skilled avoiders of uncomfortable conversations. I was irritated that he was bringing this up, weeks later, a lifetime after the fact. But it was the truth, I didn’t like Carson. Or not in the way he thought. But nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Nobody had ever made me feel like I was something to be desired or someone worthy of pursuing. So when he smiled at me and cocked his head to the side and wrapped an arm around my lower back and pulled me close, I didn’t push him away.
Decker was my best friend, but he was also a guy. And there were some things impossible to explain to him. Which is why I said, “You wouldn’t understand.”
Decker slapped Les Misérables facedown on my desk, breaking the spine. “No, I understand perfectly.” He stood up, stretched his arms over his head, and turned for the door.
“You’re driving me tomorrow, right?”
“Driving you where?”
“To the party.”
“You’re going to the party? Because Carson asked you to go?”
“Because I want to go,” I said.
He didn’t answer, but I knew he wouldn’t leave without me. In fact, I was reasonably sure that after Falcon Lake, he would never leave me again.
Dad took me Christmas shopping that night. He drove the thirty minutes to the nearest mall, took several twenty dollar bills from his wallet, and settled onto a wooden bench outside a department store.
I wove through the congestion of people and vendors and Christmas decorations. Traffic slowed to a near standstill in the center atrium, where someone had seen fit to create an enormous snow-globe replica of the North Pole. Children and adults filed into the dome, awaiting visits with Santa, as wisps of cotton fell around them in makeshift snow.
What a waste. Maybe this would’ve been a good idea in a climate of perpetual summer. But here? We had the real thing. I ducked into the nearest store to recuperate from the push of the crowd. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon the perfect gift for Decker.
New purchase in tow, I took a deep breath and exited the store. I stuck close to the walls and was only bumped a few times before slipping into a gadget store for Dad. I got him some sort of calculator/clock/word-of-the-day display. Totally impractical, but it’d look cute on his desk.
Now armed with two bags, I jutted out my elbows and prepared to cross the center of the atrium. A line of kids clung to the outside of the dome, their faces pressed against the plastic in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Man in Red. I shuddered as I thought about all the germs spackling the dome and unconsciously took a step backward. I tripped over a stray foot and fell onto my butt. Nobody helped me up. Jerks.
I pulled myself upright and barrelled my way to the women’s clothing store, illiciting a few choice words from the people I knocked into.
I was still mumbling to myself in the rear of the store when I heard the unmistakable perkiness that was Tara. “Somebody’s not in the Christmas spirit,” she said. Tara stood flanked by two equally primped girlfriends. “Buying me a new sweater?” she asked. My face must’ve dropped, because Tara put her arm around my shoulders. “Just kidding! Man, Delaney, lighten up.”
“I’m sorry, I was going to. I am going to. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“No problem. Hey, are you and Decker, you know, together?”
“No.” I didn’t like where this was going. She was pressed so close and everything about her—her soap, her shampoo, her laundry detergent—smelled so good. Even to me, and I hated her. In theory at least. Guys must fall for her on scent alone.
“Then today’s your lucky day. We’ll call it even.” I got the distinct feeling that I had traded something away that I didn’t want to part with. I stiffened my back and stepped out of her semi-embrace. I looked through a stack of lime green sweaters on the display in front of us and purposely pulled out a sweater a size too big for Tara.
“Here,” I said, handing her the sweater and counting out the cash.
She laughed, threw the shirt down on the shelf, and handed back the money. Then she spun on her heel and left. I was so flustered that I bought the ridiculous green sweater for Mom and called it a day.
I took a deep breath to calm my nerves and felt it. A faint tug, like I’d felt in the hospital, leading me back in Dad’s direction. I closed my eyes and let it guide me. I brushed people aside. Their noises and scents and bags rolled off of me as the tug sharpened. Like tunnel vision of the senses. As I got closer to where I’d left Dad, the tugging increased to a pull. It pulled me almost directly to his bench. He wasn’t alone.
“Done,” I said when I reached him.
“That was fast.”
I shrugged. “Too many people to enjoy shopping.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, shooting a glace at the man next to him. Age spots covered the old man’s face and his labored breathing carried over the noise from the crowd. A second person could’ve easily fit inside his sagging skin. His cane rested across his lap and encroached on Dad’s territory. A red ribbon wound down its length so it looked like a candy cane. His bony fingers clasped at the cane loosely.
When Dad stood up, the cane slid off the old man’s lap and rolled across the floor. I jumped backward when the man reached his hand out in our direction, but Dad worked with the elderly a lot, so he wasn’t awkward and uncomfortable around them like me. Dad stooped over, picked up the cane, and handed it back to the man. He nodded his thanks and retreated into the corner, his thin bones folding up like wooden slats.
The old man’s breath caught in his throat, and he started coughing into the open air, spewing germs and phlegm and the sharp scent of medicine in my direction. I backed away rapidly, one arm blocking my face, until my legs collided with a bench across the aisle.
“Hey, Delaney.” I looked down to my left. Troy sat on the bench, slouched low, legs sprawled out in front of him. His face was partially hidden behind his brown hair and the gray hood of his sweatshirt, but his blue eyes peered out at me. He smiled, that same crooked smile.
Then Dad came over, and Troy rose to his feet. He removed his arms from the pocket of his sweatshirt, pushed his hood back, and brushed the hair out of his face. He rocked back and forth on his heels beside me.
“Delaney, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
He wasn’t my friend. I didn’t know exactly what he was. Not quite a stranger. An acquaintance? But Janna said he hadn’t read about me in the paper. A nosy townie? It’s not like there was anyone left in our small town who hadn’t heard about my accident. Why bother with the specifics? “Dad, this is Troy. Troy, my dad.” Troy stuck his hand out and Dad took it. They did that firm man handshake for a few seconds and stepped back again.
Then there was this empty silence—a hole in the noisy crowd. Troy watched me, Dad watched Troy watching me, and I watched Dad watching Troy watching me. I cleared my throat and said, “It’s getting late.”
“So, I’ll see you later,” Troy said. He settled back on the bench, eyeing the man with the festive cane. Dad placed a hand on my back and began to lead me through the crowd, against the pull. Behind me, Troy said, “You get it, right?”
I craned my neck around Dad’s torso and asked, “Get what?” But the path to Troy was blocked by frantic shoppers. The people and the floor and the plastic bags absorbed my question and stomped and rustled in reply.
Decker didn’t come over Friday morning. Not Friday afternoon, either. And he didn’t pick up his cell. Mom left for the grocery store with strict instructions on what I was permitted to do (take a shower, watch television, fold my laundry) and what I was not permitted to do (touch the stove, leave the house). I tried reading on my own, but the headaches started after three and a half pages. By the time I heard the garage door open, I was anxious for something to do.
Mom set a paper bag on the counter and smiled at me. “Unload?”
“Sure.” This was something we did together all the time. A custom, I guess. Sounds small and trite, but right then it was calming, normalizing. I wondered if Mom used to do this with her mother. If they had their own customs. If Mom’s memories weren’t all bad.
I pulled the bread and the cans from the bags and arranged them in the pantry. And all the while, I tried to imagine Mom at my age. I wondered why she cut ties with her parents. Did they drug her to sleep? Think she was hallucinating? Accuse her of murder? Doubtful.
No, I thought as I slammed a glass jar onto the countertop, that was just me. I spun around and clipped the tomato sauce with the back of my hand, knocking it off the counter. I dove to catch it, but it smashed against the tile before I could get there, spraying glass across the floor and sauce across my face. Mom slid to the floor in front of me, knees on the glass, beige pants stained dark red, and gripped my face in her hands.
“It’s just sauce,” I said. Mom used the sleeve of her blouse to wipe away chunks of tomato and specks of oregano. She searched my face for damage with her eyes and her fingertips. Then, finding none, she pushed away from me. She stood up and looked at the mess on the floor, on her clothes, on my face.
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