by Chris Cannon
The next day at school, I ignored Delia and Zoe when I saw them in the hall, thereby restoring the balance of the universe. And then it was time for art class, and the world spun off its axis again. Delia looked like she was trying out for a part in a play. Her eyeliner was ridiculous. “What’s with the makeup?” I asked, knowing it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words slipped out of my mouth.
“Just thought I’d try a new look.”
“Why?” Why did anyone think they needed to draw sparkly purple lines around their eyes? And not just around her eyes, but out to her temples like some sort of mask. And her lips were the same color purple. It was strange but oddly sexy. I couldn’t stop staring at her.
“Why not?” She shrugged. “Sometimes you have to try something before you know if you like it or not.”
I wondered if her purple lips might be something I wanted to try. Son of a…this was not a path I needed to go down. Not with Delia.
She ducked her head. “Thanks for texting Zoe last night.”
I turned away and grabbed the sketch pad from my backpack. “No big deal.” My plan for the rest of class was to avoid eye contact. I’d pay attention to my drawing and ignore the sexy purple sparkles.
…
Delia
Jack had turned out to be a decent human being, which threw off my worldview by about 180 degrees. Then again, what did I know? I’d thought Aiden liked me and wanted a relationship. Wrong. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t dwell on this unhappy discovery, but I would give myself a few days to pout about it. Then I’d move on and find another guy. A guy who wasn’t afraid to be seen with a girl who had hot pink hair.
The whole Aiden debacle had taught me one thing. I’d let the next boyfriend candidate, whoever he might be, make the first move. If I’d never kissed Aiden, I never would have been under the impression that he liked me as more than a friend. Maybe he just kissed me back to be polite.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
Focus on drawing. That’s what I should do…like Jack was. He was totally into whatever he was working on, so I took a moment to study him. Funny how he looked so different to me now. If I didn’t know him, I’d classify him as a hottie, but since I did know him and classified him as almost-family, I couldn’t put him in that category. It’s not like he’d ever be interested in me. Not that I was interested in him…because even if he was cute and nice and no longer a jerk, he was still off-limits. End of story. Zoe’s family was there for me more than my own. Not that it was my parents’ faults. Food and shelter weren’t free, but I wished one of them would get a job with regular hours. Right now, if I had an emergency, my first phone call would be to Zoe’s grandma, because I knew she was home during the day and would drop whatever she was doing to help me. So no matter how attractive I thought Jack was, I could never act on it. Because when we broke up, not if, but when—because couples in high school always break up—I’d lose my best friend and my family. And that wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
Time to think of something else. I decided to sketch some clothes. Right now I wished I had some sort of emotional armor to protect me from the disappointment I felt over Aiden friend-zoning me and the strange discovery that if Jack wasn’t Zoe’s brother, I might flirt with him. As I sat there wondering when my life had turned into fodder for a sitcom, I drew a quilted leather bomber jacket fashioned after a knight’s armor. Not that I knew how to work with leather, but some day I would. Given enough cash to buy supplies and a few instructional YouTube videos, I could create anything.
When the bell rang dismissing class, Jack almost ran from the room. Was he going to meet someone? I hadn’t seen him with a girlfriend, but that didn’t mean anything. He probably wouldn’t hang out with a girl at school or hold her hand in the hallway. He didn’t seem like the sentimental type.
Zoe waited for me by my car after school. “Want to go get coffee somewhere?”
“Let’s go to The Art of Tea.” The tea-shop-turned-artist’s-studio was one of my favorite places. People donated leftover art supplies, and anyone could paint or draw whatever they wanted. Maybe there’d be a cool group project I could work on.
“I’ll meet you there.”
Raspberry tea in hand, Zoe and I sat at a table by the bay window.
“What are you going to paint?” Zoe asked.
I checked the wall of partially finished paintings and noticed one with blue and green waves. It looked like someone was trying to draw the ocean but had forgotten the beach. “I see what I want.” Before I could walk across the room and grab the painting, a man with a white goatee snatched it off the wall.
An old Rolling Stones’s song that my mom liked played tauntingly in my brain. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” My subconscious was hilarious. Fine. “Maybe I should start something new.”
Zoe sipped her tea while I sorted through the different blank canvases or canvases someone had painted over. A canvas which had been painted all black caught my attention.
When I returned to the table, Zoe was crocheting one of her awkward scarves. She never looked at patterns or counted her stitches, so the end product was always a bit misshapen. She didn’t care, and the scarves still kept your neck warm, so it worked for her.
I placed the black canvas on the easel and dipped my brush in gray. Without a plan, I started painting lines that curved and turned back on themselves, going nowhere.
“Is that a metaphor for how you feel about Aiden?” Zoe asked.
The back and forth twisting lines did remind me of all the speculating I’d done over whether Aiden liked me, the highs and lows of our not-quite-a-relationship status. It could also represent my strange new realizations about Jack, but Zoe didn’t need to know about that. “I guess so.”
“I asked Grant who Aiden had dated in the past, and he said Aiden normally hangs out with girls for a while, but he’s never really referred to any of them as his girlfriend.”
“Aiden’s a player? Seriously?”
“No. Not like that.” Zoe stopped crocheting to pick a snarl out of her yarn. “Maybe he’s just terminally shy or maybe since he’s male and therefore not fully emotionally evolved, he doesn’t understand how relationships are supposed to work.”
By their senior year, most guys have had at least one girlfriend.
“Maybe his shy geek-guy personality is just a ruse to get girls to come on to him,” I said. “That way he doesn’t have to do any of the work.”
“I doubt that. The boy is seriously awkward. When I made him come to Betty’s with us, he muttered under his breath the whole drive over. It sounded like he was practicing what he might say to you.”
“He didn’t have much to say to me today.” At lunch, we normally chatted about stuff. Today he’d been quiet, too quiet, like he was thinking about something.
“Grant said Aiden was kind of out of it today. I think he had a fight with his dad last night.”
I set my paintbrush down and sipped my tea. “My first instinct is to call and see if he’s okay, but that’s not really my job, is it?”
“As a friend, it could be your job,” Zoe said.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to play that part yet. I’ll get there eventually, but first I need to get over this angry, rejected, why-the-hell-doesn’t-he-want-to-kiss-me feeling.”
“And I know how to help you get over that feeling. We just need to find a single guy who you think is cute.”
I’d already found one. One that could never work. Anyway, I didn’t need a guy in my life. “Honestly, I don’t want to go searching for a guy. If I meet someone, that’s fine, but right now I’m going to concentrate on me. I need to work on something I can sell at the Christmas Flea Market. Your grandma offering to share her table is a big deal. You have to reserve those things more than a year in advance. I don’t want to let her down.”
“I can’t bake my cookies until the day before, so I can help you with whatever you want.
”
“Let’s brainstorm.” I sat down at the table and hugged the mug of tea to my chest, inhaling the raspberry-scented steam. “I could make cards or paper ornaments.”
“You could make cool gift bags. Just buy the solid-colored bags and draw on them.”
“People throw those away. I hate to think of spending hours on something that would end up in the trash the day after Christmas.”
“People throw cards away, too,” Zoe pointed out.
“Then I guess I’m making some kind of ornament.”
“We could buy solid-colored glass or plastic ornaments, and you could paint on those.”
“I like it. And just to keep from worrying about breaking them, I say we go with the shatterproof kind. I could draw on them with paint pens.” Having something to focus on made me feel better.
…
Jack
Friday after school, all I wanted to do was to take a nap and then go hang out at Trevor’s. I was about to doze off in my room when loud laughter drifted up from the kitchen below. I liked my room because it was bigger than Zoe’s, but being over the kitchen wasn’t always great. The sound came right through the heating vents. I’d never told anyone I could hear most of what people said if they were sitting at the kitchen table, because sometimes it came in handy. Right now, it meant I could hear Delia and Zoe talking about some stupid Christmas ornaments they were painting.
I put my pillow over my head, trying to muffle the sound. It worked, but the feeling that I might suffocate didn’t promote restful sleep. I flung the pillow to the floor and sat up. Why couldn’t Zoe go hang out at Delia’s house? Was that too much to ask?
Giving up on a nap, I headed downstairs.
“Someone looks crabby,” Delia commented as I walked into the kitchen.
“Someone was trying to take a nap until you guys started talking non-stop.” I poured myself a glass of milk and turned my back to them as I drank it.
“You should get some noise-canceling headphones,” Delia said.
“Or you guys could hang out at your house.” I put my empty glass in the sink. “I swear sometimes it’s like you live here. And now you’re at Betty’s, and we’re stuck together in art. In case you didn’t realize it, a little of your personality goes a long way.”
Delia sucked in a breath and looked at me with impossibly large brown eyes, and then she looked down at the ornament she was painting.
Damn it. “This is the part where you’re supposed to yell back at me and tell me I’m a jerk,” I reminded her.
Delia didn’t look up. She just drew swirling lines on the ornament. I might have heard her sniffle.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
She glanced up at me. “That is a very good question. Right now my only response is, ‘Go to hell.’ I’ll get back to you about the rest of the answer when I figure it out.”
“See,” I said. “That’s how you’re supposed to act.” Walking out of the kitchen, I felt better about our relationship. I’d insulted her; she’d told me off. The balance of the universe had been restored.
On the drive to Trevor’s house, the image of Delia with those big brown eyes, looking like she was about to cry, chipped away at my good state of mind. I wasn’t the reason she was upset. Someone else had ticked her off, and I had been caught in the fallout. I had nothing to feel bad about. It probably had something to do with that Aiden guy she liked. It was Friday night. The guy probably hadn’t asked her out and she was ticked off. Before the night was over, she’d probably be making plans to blow up his car.
Trevor sat in a lawn chair by the bonfire out back. He had four hot dogs in a roaster he was holding over the fire. Fat dripped off the meat and sizzled in the flames, making my stomach growl.
“I call dibs on two of those.” I sat in a chair next to him.
“Sorry,” Trevor said. “Two are for me. Rocky has dibs on one, and you can have the one that’s left.”
Rocky had his head on the arm of Trevor’s chair with his eyes locked on the hot dogs.
“I see what you mean.” I reached over and patted Rocky’s head. “I won’t try to steal your dinner.”
“Good thing,” Trevor said. “This is one vicious attack dog. He’ll take your arm off.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Only if you’re trying to pull food from his mouth.”
When the hot dogs were done, I ate one and then put four more on the roaster. Trevor cut Rocky’s hot dog in pieces and put it on a paper plate in the grass.
I watched as Rocky gobbled up the meat and then started chewing the plate. “The plate’s not food,” I told him.
“Rocky, give it.” Trevor held out his hand.
The dog hung his head and looked at Trevor with big sad eyes.
“You’re not in trouble, dude, but you can’t eat the plate.” Trevor pulled the plate from his mouth or what was left of it.
“Make sure you shut the door to your bedroom before you go to sleep tonight,” I said.
“Nah. He sleeps with me.” Trevor patted Rocky. “And we have a deal. He can throw up anywhere but my room. Right, boy?”
Rocky barked.
“If I got a dog, do you think he’d be as good as Rocky?”
“Nope. He’s one of a kind.” Trevor scratched the dog’s ears. “But you should get a dog. You’re dog people. Rocky says so.”
“Maybe now that my mom’s feeling better, I could get a dog.” Having someone who’d be happy to see me every time I came home would be nice.
Chapter Six
Delia
“Good thing we bought the shatterproof ornaments,” I said.
“Why?” Zoe asked.
“When I throw them at your brother, they won’t break. And they’re probably more aerodynamic, so I’ll be able to aim better.”
Zoe finished painting ivy on a silver bell. “If Jack wasn’t a jerk, we wouldn’t recognize him.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “At work he’s polite to everyone, and in art class he isn’t bad. It’s just here at home that he’s an aggressive jackass.”
Zoe set her ornament down. “It’s funny you should say that. At school he does seem like a decent guy, but at home he’s a tool.”
“So what’s here that makes him so crabby?” I asked. “I mean the answer could be me, but I’m around him at two other places where he’s okay.”
“What do you two look so serious about?” Zoe’s grandmother came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of white wine.
“Jack,” Zoe said. “He’s decent at school and at work, but he’s so crabby at home. Why do you think that is?”
She sipped her wine and leaned against the counter. “I don’t know. Maybe because he’s the only male. I think that’s hard on him sometimes.”
Well, crap.
“I never thought about it like that,” Zoe said. “And I kind of feel like a jerk for not thinking about it. I still have you and Mom, but he doesn’t have Dad or Grandpa.”
“He does spend a lot of time over at Trevor’s,” her grandmother said. “Not that it would make up for the loss, but it has to help a little bit.”
“Maybe Jack’s right,” I said. “We should hang out at my house more often to give him some space.”
“Do you think that would help?” Zoe asked her grandmother.
“I don’t know. You could try it and see.” Her grandmother headed back into the living room.
“Why don’t we hang out more at my house?” I never really thought about it. When we were younger with my parents working odd shifts, I had stayed at Zoe’s out of necessity. My mom had offered to pay Zoe’s grandma for taking care of me, but her grandmother had refused. Now that we were older, it didn’t really matter whether my parents were home or not.
Zoe held the ornament she’d been working on up to the light, inspecting her work. “Maybe we don’t hang out there because we always end up baking something, and by we, I mean me, and I know what ingredients are here.”
/> “Because your grandmother stocks the house with enough food to withstand the zombie apocalypse and my mom only grocery shops at random intervals and buys whatever she’s in the mood for?” The only staples you could count on being stocked at my house were Pop-Tarts and protein bars because my parents needed portable food. “The answer is simple. When you pack your clothes, you can pack the ingredients for whatever you want to bake.”
Zoe gave me the side-eye. “Do you remember the last time someone used the oven at your house?”
“Now that you mention it, I think my mom’s using it as storage for the pots and pans, but the Crock-Pot gets regular workouts. Can you bake cookies in that?”
“No…but I’ve seen recipes for lava cakes in Crock-Pots.”
“And we have a plan. Next time we spend the night, you’ll stay over at my house and we’ll make lava cake.”
Zoe set her ornament down on the table. “Speaking of cake.” She stood and went to the counter and plugged in the Kitchen-Aid mixer. “What sounds good?”
I continued painting as she dug out ingredients. “You know my rule. Any flavor of cake works as long as the icing is chocolate.”
“I’m thinking chocolate butter cream frosting on vanilla cake.”
“Yum.” My phone rang. Aiden’s name flashed on the screen. What did he want? Only one way to find out. “Hello?”
“This is going to sound weird, but I need to talk to someone, and you’re the first person I thought of.”
My heart beat faster. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes and no. Grant said you and Zoe were hanging out at her place. Can I come over?”
“Hold on.” I told Zoe about Aiden’s weird request.
“Couldn’t hurt to see what he wants,” Zoe said.
So I gave Aiden directions to Zoe’s house and then compulsively checked the time on my phone every ten minutes. Forty minutes later, I slumped in my seat. “Shouldn’t he have been here by now?”
“Depends on where he was when he called. Did he say?”