Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  “Oh, for God’s sake, obviously, Kevin. Put it on the kitchen counter. I’ll be gone seven to midnight. Please make sure you’re gone before I get back.”

  She heard him take a long breath on the other end of the line. A long steady breath. Nothing rattled him. Or if it did, he wasn’t about to show it. It was one thing that made him a good attorney.

  It also made him a particularly crappy ex-boyfriend.

  “Do you want the coffeemaker?”

  Surprise. “No.”

  “What about the bread machine?”

  The bread machine! With everything that was happening, she hadn’t even remembered they had one, but he was going through a mental inventory of everything they had together, no matter how inconsequential.

  “You can have it,” she said, though she wanted to keep it.

  “How about the DVD—”

  “Take whatever you want!” You asshole. “Just leave the key when you’re through. And never ever call me again.”

  Living well probably was the best revenge. But looking good came in a really close second. And since Allie didn’t have the option to go with the former at the moment, she decided to do her damnedest to achieve the latter.

  She already had the new makeup. Now she needed to do a serious upheaval from the basics up.

  First, she needed to bathe. To exfoliate. To condition.

  In short, to do everything she could for the foundation she had to build on.

  She turned the shower on to a nice, steamy temperature, and got in, wincing at first when the hot water touched her skin. But soon it was soothing, pounding down on her tense muscles.

  She had a huge assortment of shampoos and conditioners to choose from. Kevin used to joke that she was a shampoo whore. It wasn’t so funny now. Anyway, she settled on Pantene’s Ice Shine shampoo and let it sit while she used Basin’s slightly-too-expensive-at-twenty-five-bucks salt scrub all over her body to smooth, exfoliate, and leave a shimmering and slightly dangerous (for the shower floor) sheen of moisturizing oil on her skin.

  Then she got out, went to her sink, and took out an old packet of St. Ives soothing face mask. She couldn’t tell what kind it was anymore—too many other products had spilled over the name and something acidic had evidently bled the letters—but it smelled like cucumber.

  More important, it didn’t sting. Allie was ultra-aware of that kind of thing right now. She knew that anything she put on or in her . . . self . . . could create a reaction.

  So she put the face mask on, then slathered Hi-Protein Hair Repair conditioner onto her hair.

  Then . . . she waited.

  Everything was supposed to take a mere twenty minutes to perform miracles, but when you couldn’t lean back or lie down, for fear of getting gooey products all over your sofa or sheets or clothes, twenty minutes could pass like hours.

  So she decided to take out her nail polish set and do a pedicure. No sense in doing a manicure tonight. She was too nervous; she would inevitably scratch all the polish off her nails and end up looking like a mess.

  Limiting the polish to her toes seemed like a good idea, and she even had the perfect peep-toe sling-back Carfagnis to wear, so that was perfect.

  If only she had the perfect outfit to go with them.

  There were plenty of dress pants in her closet, and various tops that she could pair with them, but with varying results. For instance, the black Chico’s pants went with almost everything . . . except for the midnight blue, gold, and different black Anne Klein top she had, the one with the more flattering sweetheart neck. If the Chico’s made her ass look smaller and the Anne Klein top made her shoulders and bust and—please, God—her arms look smaller, which one was the better choice?

  Together they were a cacophony, so there was no doubt about that particular combination.

  The question was, which illusional reduction was more important to her?

  Eventually she decided on the top. It was better to be a big-assed girl than a linebacker, and anyway people were more likely to look at your face, hair, and torso than your hips.

  At least she thought that made sense.

  So she went to the shower, rinsed her face, rinsed her hair, tried to rinse that man right out of her hair, and then dried her over-saturated body with Egyptian cotton towels.

  She looked in the mirror.

  Disappointment.

  These rituals used to make a difference. She could remember being young, and considerably more fresh faced, and using the apricot scrubs and Mudd masks and coming out of the shower looking pink and glowy.

  Now she looked blotchy.

  She toyed with the idea of canceling, again, but that would just be ridiculous. Not even with a friend as easygoing as Noah could she reveal herself to be that much of a flake.

  Fortunately, she had her new makeup. And it was better stuff, probably up to the challenge.

  It only took fifteen minutes or so, but she emerged from the bathroom with Dior lashes, MAC eyelids, Bare Minerals cheeks, and Nars lips, and, frankly, she felt fairly good about it.

  Good enough to go for a little while. A little while. She’d get dressed, go, endure an hour or so, and come home to watch reruns of Seinfeld.

  In just a few hours all of this would be over.

  The Acela Express train didn’t feel very express today, Olivia thought, looking out the window as Wilmington, Delaware, passed in a blur of old buildings, graffiti, and spindly weeds growing by the train tracks.

  Since it was Saturday, there wasn’t a huge crowd of people on board, fortunately, but even without all the stops the weekday Metroliner made between New York and D.C. the trip seemed to take forever.

  She leafed through an issue of Vanity Fair but couldn’t concentrate on the articles.

  She was not looking forward to the reunion. True, it hadn’t been up to her to move away from Potomac when she and her mother did, halfway through her senior year, but by the time everything happened and they fled, she could not have been more happy to go.

  Afterward there had been time to think. On the long drive to California there had been time to think. In fact, there had been a lot to try to work through in the ensuing years, but regret at leaving Maryland, or the impulse to return, had never crossed her mind.

  It might be the one move in her life that she was certain had been the right move.

  Now she was going back, and for the worst of all reasons: an event designed exclusively to see people and places that would remind her of the most painful time in her life.

  Why on earth had she said yes to this?

  She couldn’t blame Noah. He wouldn’t have remembered those last terrible weeks before she went; at least he wouldn’t remember them with the clarity she remembered them with. For him, this was a high school reunion, somewhat melancholy, somewhat fun.

  Nothing more.

  But, damn it, Olivia knew what it would feel like to go back. It would be melancholy and dark and sinister and familiar and unfamiliar. It would be altogether disorienting.

  And she should have known better than to agree.

  Was there something else going on deep in her subconscious? Was it morbid curiosity drawing her back? Some deep Oprahesque need to face her past and purge it from her present?

  Maybe.

  Then again, maybe this was just going to be an exercise in misery.

  Wilmington disappeared behind the train and suddenly the tracks were rattling over the unexpected appearance of rural America—green grass, green trees, red barns, and blue lakes. Nondistinct, generic nature, soothing in its greens and blues.

  The train barreled on toward her past.

  Noah would be there, she knew. Obviously.

  But what about Allie?

  Once, she would have thought the prospect of seeing Allie after a number of years apart would have been a wonderful one.

  Then, after that, she would have imagined dreading it. Hating her. Avoiding her.

  But all of that had been ages ago and never would she
have imagined having strongly contrasting feelings about it twenty years later. She had always imagined “nearly forty” as being synonymous with “peace of mind” and “knowing who you are and where you’re going” and, especially, “not even remembering the crap that happened in high school.”

  Turned out that wasn’t true. As much as Olivia had accomplished in the interim—and it had been a long road—she never quite forgot the stupid teenage angst.

  Yet now she was going to come face-to-face with at least some of it.

  She set her magazine down in her lap and leaned her head back against the hard headrest, turning to watch the scenery and clear her mind.

  Or so she hoped.

  With no building or development on it, the landscape outside her window had probably looked exactly like this twenty years ago. It didn’t matter. It would have been exactly the same.

  In her melancholy mood, she couldn’t help it, she had to remember; she had to ask herself where she was twenty years ago. Before the world had blown up in her face.

  Before everything had changed.

  Five

  Eighth Grade

  You can try hard or you can try soft.

  Soft will get him every time.

  —ad for Love’s Baby Soft

  “Did you see the new boy?” Allie asked excitedly, throwing her book bag down by the hall table. “Oh, my God, it’s so hot in here.” She fanned herself with her hand.

  It was the second-to-last week of school—a terrible time for a new student to be starting—and it was as hot and sticky as August. Unfortunately, Allie’s dad was too cheap to run the air conditioner unless it was a dire emergency, so inside the house it felt like a sauna.

  “I just saw him from far away.” Olivia threw her book bag on top of Allie’s, her books falling heavily and slipping out. She’d pick them up later. There was no hurry to tidy up, like there would have been at her house. She liked it that way. “Is he cute?”

  “Ooh.” Allie feigned a faint over the edge of the sofa and onto the soft cushions. “He is so cute. I swear he looks like he could be Clark Brandon’s brother. Dark hair, light blue eyes, this perfect nose, and, oh my God, he’s got the greatest mouth. His lips aren’t too thin but they also aren’t too big and girly.”

  “I hear he came from somewhere in the South.” Olivia sat on the sofa next to where Allie was still lying. “Bet he’s got a cool accent. Sort of like the guys on The Dukes of Hazzard.”

  “He does! But they’re not as cute.”

  Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know. I like older guys.”

  Allie sat up and grinned. “G-ross.”

  “Well, not that much older.”

  “Those guys on The Dukes of Hazzard are totally that much older. They’re like thirty.”

  Olivia shrugged. She would not be swayed from her John Schneider and Tom Wopat love. She had the Daisy Duke cutoffs to prove it, though they were stashed in the back of her closet and she would never, ever wear them out in public, even if her mother would let her.

  Which she wouldn’t.

  “Want a Steak-Umm sandwich?” Allie went into the kitchen. Like she needed to ask. They had Steak-Umm and cheese sandwiches, like, daily.

  Olivia looked back at her from the sofa. “Yum!”

  Allie went to the stove and put a big silver pan down, then she took the Steak-Umm box from the freezer and pulled three flattened pieces off. Two for her, one for Olivia, who always wanted just one piece of bread and one Steak-Umm. “I hear the new guy’s name’s Noel,” she said, as the meat started to sizzle around the edges of the pan.

  Olivia shook her head. “Noah. Like in the Bible.”

  “Really? Like Noah’s ark?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “Hm. That’s a weird name.” Allie considered this as she picked up the TV remote from the counter, where her mother probably had it while she was watching As the World Turns and preparing dinner. She pushed the on button. It made a heavy kachunk sound and the TV sprang to life. “I wonder if he likes animals.”

  After a thoughtful pause, Olivia said, “It would be weird if he didn’t.”

  “It would, wouldn’t it?” Allie watched Dinah Shore for a moment, interviewing Burt Reynolds. “I think they’re going out.”

  “Who?”

  She gestured at the TV. “Dinah Shore and Burt Reynolds.”

  Olivia wrinkled her nose and looked more closely at the TV. “No way. He’s like a thousand years younger than she is.”

  “So? You’d go out with a guy a thousand years older than you, you just said so.” She went back to the stove to check on the Steak-Umms.

  “He’s kind of short.”

  “Burt Reynolds?”

  “No, Noah.”

  “Oh. I know.” Allie turned the meat over and sprinkled some Season-All over it. “Why are the cute guys always so short?”

  “They grow slower. Or later. I think that’s it, they grow later than girls do.”

  “Maybe.” She set bread on plates, added a slice of Kraft American cheese to each slice of bread, then got a spatula out and lifted the greasy meat onto the bread before fanning herself with the spatula. “But you know, Phil Crans’s brother? He’s, like, a junior at Churchill and he’s shorter than me.”

  “But you’re tall.”

  Allie snorted and folded Olivia’s sandwich in half the way she liked it. “Not that tall. Anyway, he’s like four feet tall. He never grew past a certain point.” She gave Olivia a knowing look. “This Noah kid could be the same way.”

  Olivia grimaced, although privately she thought Noah was pretty cute just as he was and maybe it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t get much taller. Then again, she wasn’t as tall as Allie so things like that bothered her less.

  “Anyway.” Allie assembled her sandwich and took a bite as she walked back over to the sofa. “He’s one to keep an eye on. Trust me, he’s gonna be a fox.”

  It turned out to be easy for Olivia to keep an eye on Noah, at least during fifth period, because he sat directly across from her during Mr. Horner’s geography class.

  When he asked her if she wanted to be partners during study time, she was surprised but flattered.

  “Sure,” she said, and as they walked over to the table in the corner by the open window to study for tomorrow’s quiz, she decided that he was just the right height for her.

  “I hate this class,” Noah said as he plunked his books onto the table. “Mr. Horner is so lame.”

  “Yeah.” She agreed, even though she was terrified of getting caught and being sent to the principal’s office.

  Noah was worth that chance.

  She put her books down more quietly than he had and sat down. It smelled like pencils and old textbooks.

  “He’s worked here since, like, the sixties,” she went on, looking down at the table while she spoke so that the teacher wouldn’t see her lips moving. “Or before.” Someone had written LYNARD SKYNARD RULES on the table in heavy black pencil. Probably Peter Ford; he was always talking about Lynyrd Skynyrd and he was the only person she could think of, off the top of her head, who would be interested enough to write it down but dumb enough to spell it wrong.

  “I bet he’s been here longer than that,” Noah said. “He probably doesn’t even know Hawaii is a state.”

  They laughed and immediately got barked at by Mr. Horner, which, of course, made them laugh even more, if quieter.

  “So you’re friends with that blond girl, right?” Noah said after a while. “Allison?”

  Olivia got an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Allie,” she corrected, as if Allison had been completely off the mark. “Yes. Why?” She took a pencil sharpener out of her bag and turned her pencil in it.

  “She’s cute.” He gave a one-shoulder shrug.

  “I guess.” She kept turning the pencil. The shavings were coming out onto the desk. It smelled like wood.

  “So is she going out with anyone?”

  It was on the tip of he
r tongue to say we don’t really “go out” at this school, but that was patently untrue and he’d find out soon enough and think she was a liar. Plus, if she made out like she didn’t want to go out with anyone, he’d never ask her out.

  So she said, “I don’t know. She sort of likes Brian Poska.” Strictly speaking, it was true. Allie had told her she’d danced with Brian at Outdoor Ed two years ago and she’d had half a crush on him for the rest of the year. Olivia hadn’t been here then, but she couldn’t say for sure that Allie didn’t still harbor lingering feelings for Brian.

  But she knew she didn’t dislike him, so by default she had to like him.

  “Oh, that guy.” Obviously, Noah had noticed that Brian was one of the few kids who had hit a growth spurt. He was almost six feet tall and some people said he already shaved.

  A lot of the boys looked at him with envy.

  “Yeah, they’ve known each other, like, forever.” Olivia nodded, cementing the idea that, yes, Allie and Brian were really really close. “It’s hard to bust up something like that.” The tip of the pencil she was sharpening got so sharp it broke and she had to start over.

  “Is that the kind of guy she usually likes?”

  “What, tall?” Ugh. She could have slapped herself for that. She hadn’t meant to say it, she was just looking for something undeniably different from Noah, but she didn’t mean to insult him. “I mean, he’s so tall it’s weird.”

  Noah looked at her funny and she knew she’d gone around the bend with this one.

  “At least for me,” she added, and the pencil broke again. She gave up and threw them both down.

  “We better study before Horner decides to give us a pop quiz now as punishment for talking,” Noah said, not quite meeting her eye.

  “No kidding.” She gave a laugh, though she’d never heard of a pop quiz as punishment in the entire year and a half she’d gone to school here. “He’s such a jerk.”

  Noah nodded his agreement and opened his book to the pages Mr. Horner had written on the board.

  They didn’t talk for the rest of the period and later, when they passed each other in the hall, Noah gave a nod but Olivia couldn’t help noticing he still looked a little embarrassed.