When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  Jo had snarked that I was as flat as a tack and I had told her she sounded like Melissa. “Are you going to spread rumors about me and Simon Caster?” I had asked.

  We had stopped talking for three days and fourteen hours and twenty-five minutes, which was when she admitted that she had been taping her breasts for three months.

  We ended up asking her dad about the training bra together. You know what they say about safety in numbers.

  “What are you in training for?” he had asked.

  “Big boobs,” I had responded.

  Deb ended up buying the bra for Jo, which she had to hide from her dad, washing it in the bathroom sink and drying it in her cupboard.

  As I walked around the corner of the art block, I collided with the defensive tackle on our football team. At least, I thought it was the defensive tackle, because it was like being hit by a wrecking ball, but then a hand closed around my arm, holding me up, and I realized that if it were a jock he would have let me fall.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, glancing up.

  “Lillie?” It was Tom. His forehead was creased with concern. “Are you OK?”

  I pushed past him and broke into a half-run, suddenly needing to get away from school – from Jo, Tom and Green Grove altogether.

  From Green Grove with Love. Yeah, right.

  Deb was working at the Tree of Life, so I went home and drew a bath, dissolving three bags of lavender in the water before pulling down the blind and lighting a candle. I looked for my dancers in the flame, but instead I saw two figures pushing and pulling each other, wrestling, fighting, until they merged into one. Then the figure was gone and all I could see was a flame.

  For the first time in my life I wished I had learned meditation from Deb. I thought of how relaxed she looked as she performed yoga in the morning, chanting “Om.” She had told me the sound of om represents the four states of the Supreme Being.

  The four states of Tom, I thought miserably.

  I sank down into the water until it reached my chin, letting the warmth wash over me.

  “Ommmmmmmmmm,” I said, and then spluttered and choked as water entered my mouth.

  Once I had recovered from my near drowning, I let myself slide into the bath until I was floating with my face above water, but my ears below. My knees were tucked up tight given the small dimensions of our tub.

  “Ommmmmmmmmm,” I said. I could hear the sound loud and clear in my head, like it was echoing within my skull. I repeated it over and over.

  Suddenly I felt a hand grip my throat and I was pushed under the water. I screamed, bubbles coming from my mouth and nose as I thrashed in the tub, sloshing water over the sides. The water went cold, as if a bag of ice had been poured into the bath and then as suddenly as it had happened my neck was released. I sat upright in alarm, water coursing from my hair and ears. The bathroom was empty. It had been another hallucination.

  The door flew open. It was Deb.

  “Lillie! Thank the Great Goddess. The school called and said you had cut class. I checked the Duck-In Diner…” She trailed off and put a hand on her chest. “I was calling you and calling you.”

  “I was under the water,” I said in a daze.

  “Are you OK?” She sat down on the toilet lid. “Why did you ditch school?”

  I have to say that was one of the perks of having a hippie as a mother. Most parents would be yelling at their kids, grounding them for a century, etc., but Deb was a firm believer in sick days. She called them Mental Health Days and took them regularly herself from the Tree of Life.

  “I had a fight with Jo,” I said and then burst into tears.

  “Oh, Lillie. Let me make you a hot drink. It will calm you down.”

  And that was the downside. I ended up spending the evening having homeopathic remedies shoved down my throat until I smelled of mugwort and peppermint.

  14

  The next morning I got to school an hour and a half before the bell. It was either that or lay in bed staring at the ceiling like a corpse in an open casket, thinking about my life going to hell. At least I could finish developing my photos from the weekend, tick that off my to-do list. And I mean that literally. I was a to-do list kind of girl. Told you I used to be organized.

  When the first bell rang I made a beeline for my locker, where I was relieved to see Jackson waiting for me instead of Tom. The two were like apples and oranges. Jackson was an open book, easy to read, his thoughts were there on the page in black and white. Tom, on the other hand, was like a locked diary.

  “Load me up,” Jackson said, as I pulled a stack of photography books from my locker. He pushed up the sleeves of his sweater and stuck out his arms. “Five hours of weights a week,” he said with a wink, as if I had commented on his bulging biceps.

  “Thanks,” I said, piling the books on one by one.

  He gave a melodramatic grunt as I loaded the last book. “No. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting me throw out these books. Finally.” He turned towards the trashcan.

  I laughed and made a grab for them, rescuing a book about my favorite photographers, the Geldings, which the girls had bought for my eleventh birthday.

  “What?” Jackson asked, lifting the rest of them above his head. “Did you think I was carrying them to class?”

  I thumped him with the book.

  “Ow. OK. OK. Kidding!”

  “Hilarious.”

  As we walked to class Jackson asked if I was going to the Masquerade Ball next week. Flyers advertising the ball were wrapped around every pole and trashcan in school. The Dance Committee had stopped short of stapling them to our foreheads. Just.

  “Yep.”

  “And Jo and Sylv?”

  “Yep.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to ask me to the ball, but then we rounded a corner and passed Blake and Melissa, who took a few steps to her left to sideswipe me with her oversized handbag.

  “Hey!” Jackson said.

  “Yes?” Blake asked, muscling up to him.

  Jackson stood his ground.

  “Go on,” Melissa said with a curled lip. “Stick up for your loser girlfriend.”

  “Forget it, Jackson,” I said, tugging on the back of his T-shirt. This was not about him. This was about Tom. I felt like telling Melissa that Tom was no longer an option for me. That no one in Green Grove was an option for him. He wanted to be on his own.

  Jackson and Blake continued to square-off until Melissa called off the dogs. “A word of advice,” she said, as if she was about to give me a tip on blow-drying. “Watch your step,” she warned, before click-clacking down the corridor in a swirl of fuchsia, Blake at her heels.

  “Sorry,” Jackson said, as we continued to class.

  “For Blake being a meathead, or Melissa being a bitch?”

  He laughed and then looked at me sideways. “She called you my girlfriend.”

  “Loser girlfriend,” I corrected and we both laughed.

  When I showed Jackson my photos of Rose Hill, he flicked through them with a puckered mouth.

  When he got to the photo of Tom he tossed it to the side, letting it slide across the desk until it balanced on the lip, like a seesaw. “What about the sand hills instead of Rose Hill? Or the National Park?”

  I snatched the photo before it toppled to the ground. “I thought you said James Bond would love Rose Hill.”

  “I said James Bond would love Green Grove,” Jackson corrected. “And I have it on good authority that Rose Hill is technically in the Open Valley.”

  I laughed and then flipped through the pages of his sketchbook. “Are you sure? These sketches could have got us an A.” I held up a drawing of the banister, which detailed the carvings along its side. I noticed a family crest among them. I had to smile to myself that Tom had a family crest. What a jerk.

  “You mean an A plus,” Jackson said with a wink. It seemed his ego had been successfully stroked. “Fine. How about we line up a second dat
e to Rose Hill?”

  I should have said no, given he had come close to killing me on our first “date”, but my heart fluttered at the thought of returning to Rose Hill. I also had a soft spot for Jackson. His constant chatter, which had grated on me in the car, was a good pick-me-up. And he made me laugh. A good belly laugh, not the schoolgirl giggles I had around Tom.

  “This weekend? Saturday?”

  “Saturday,” I confirmed. I should have at least hesitated or consulted my schedule before I answered. I looked like I had no life. But this was Green Grove.

  I was walking to the driveway to meet Sylv – Jo had track – when I heard my name. I turned and saw Tom.

  “You made up with him?” he asked.

  “With who?”

  “Jackson.” He spat out his name and took a step forward, closing the gap between us. “Lillie, he could have killed you!”

  I shook my head. “He made a mistake.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Tom said through clenched teeth.

  I lifted my chin. “And we can all be forgiven.”

  “What about a murderer?” he asked, his eyes flashing like lightning. “Would you forgive a murderer?”

  I hesitated. “A murderer?”

  Tom stared at me for a moment, as if waking up from a dream.

  I stepped towards him, causing him to take one step backwards and then another and another. “If you can be friends with Melissa then I can be friends with Jackson,” I said. “If you recall it was you who wanted to be by yourself, not me.”

  “I have to be by myself,” he said. “It has nothing to do with what I want.”

  “I suppose it has something to do with the girl in the photo then?” I asked. She had been playing on my mind since I had heard about his broken heart. He had probably moved halfway across the world to teach her a lesson. He was rich enough to do whatever he wanted. “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “What?” His eyes flared up again, but this time it was with alarm.

  “Your bag was open. The photo was sticking out,” I explained. “I saw it for like a second.” I sounded like such a snoop.

  The color was sucked from his eyes until they became like glass. “The girl in the photo…” he said in a controlled voice “…is dead.”

  This final word hung in the small space between us, like a curtain. I suddenly realized that I was the ass for bringing up his dead girlfriend.

  “Tom,” I started, but he jammed his hands in his pockets and turned to stalk across the quad.

  Meanwhile, Melissa stood at the entrance to the cafeteria, giving me a look that could have killed a thousand girls in a thousand photos.

  15

  Tom skipped school the next day and the next and the next. Each morning I went to my locker with bated breath, ready to say sorry.

  Maybe next week, I consoled myself.

  On Saturday the time for my second “date” with Jackson came and went. I watched the clock, telling myself he would turn up before the second hand reached the twelve and then before it reached the eight.

  I texted him and then called him twelve minutes later. I got his voicemail. “Jackson? Lillie here. Where are you? Call me.”

  Maybe I had the wrong day. Did he say Saturday or Sunday? I thought back to the conversation, but it was tangled up in my ball of twine, like so many of my other memories. I seemed to have one memory of him saying Saturday and another of him saying Sunday.

  My cell rang. It was Sylv.

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “The cops arrested Jackson.”

  “What? When?”

  “Like two hours ago.”

  There was a knock at the door. I poked my head into the hallway and saw two police officers through the window.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?”

  I hung up and walked up the hallway with small steps as if I were walking to the gas chamber.

  “Lillie Hart?” the shorter cop asked when I opened the door.

  I nodded.

  “We need you to come down to the station. We have to ask you a few questions.” He held up his notebook, as if we were playing charades.

  “Is your mom home?” the taller one asked. His nametag read “Officer Davidson”.

  “Am I being arrested?”

  Officer Davidson smiled. “No.”

  “Not yet,” the smaller one corrected.

  Good cop. Bad cop. I swallowed a laugh.

  They let me call Deb. She must have sprinted from Tree of Life, because she was breathless when she arrived at the station. She grabbed my shoulders and scanned me from head to toe as if I had been in a car accident that afternoon, instead of last weekend.

  “Relax,” I muttered.

  “Relax? You could have been killed!” She sounded like Tom.

  Tom. I suddenly realized he had turned in Jackson, which made him the ass again.

  The interview took about twenty minutes. I played it down, telling the cops there had been miles between us and the train, passing it off as a near collision.

  The smaller officer called me out. “We saw the damage to the vehicle. It was inches from being a write-off.”

  “And a fatality,” Officer Davidson added, making me think of my dream with the alternate ending.

  I hid my shiver with a shrug. What was this, the Spanish Inquisition?

  Officer Davidson closed his notebook. “Jackson has explained that you were an innocent party. We just needed your account of the incident. Thank you.”

  “What will happen to Jackson?” I asked as we all stood.

  “It will be decided by the court,” the smaller officer said, pushing in his chair with a screech.

  Jackson was sitting on a bench near the front entrance, waiting for his parents, who were signing paperwork. I bet his mother thought her therapy was as nuts as I did now.

  “Jackson, are you OK?”

  His eyes were red, but he nodded. “Fine,” he lied. “I have a court date in a couple of weeks.” He shuffled his feet on the linoleum. “I guess I still have a few enemies in Green Grove.”

  Just one, I thought. Tom.

  Deb was like a witch doctor on steroids that afternoon. She put together a bag of protection stones – amethyst, serpentine, citrine and whatever else she could find in the house, including a jade ornament that she scooped out of the fish tank – and told me to hang it around my neck with a worn piece of leather.

  “I need to add agate,” she said, pouring boiling water into a teapot and pulling on the cozy. “I can pick up a few stones from the store on Monday.” She let the tea-leaves steep, before pouring me a cup. “Are you going to put on the necklace?”

  “No.” I was suddenly overcome with PMS, as in pain-in-the-ass mother syndrome. “I am not putting on the necklace,” I told her. “I am not drinking the tea. And I am not praying to the goddess of complete and utter stupidity!” I stood up from the kitchen table and my chair toppled against the wall. “How about being a mother instead of a nutcase for two seconds? Ground me! Lecture me! Make me wash the dishes for a week!”

  “But we have a dishwasher,” Deb said stupidly.

  I grabbed my camera from the breakfast counter, before racing down the hallway, my hair flying out behind me and my face as hot as a road in the middle of summer.

  I marched down the street, my hands clenching and releasing as I thought about Tom. His face came to mind, but I blurred it immediately. This was not the time to think about how his cheekbones looked like they had been chiseled by Michelangelo. Instead I thought about the apology that had been on the tip of my tongue these past couple of days. Now he was the one who needed to apologize, both to me and to Jackson.

  I walked until the soles of my feet ached as much as my head. I had covered at least fifteen blocks, walking up and down the intersecting streets. The sun was setting, spreading its golden rays over Green Grove. It was blinding and I put a hand in front of my eyes to shield them, squinting throug
h my fingers.

  I was at the railroad crossing. I could see tire marks on the road where the hatchback had spun out of control. I crouched and raised my camera, but as I took the first shot I heard the thud-thud of a vehicle crossing the tracks and stood up in alarm, not wanting to be run down. The vehicle slowed and I realized I was looking at a sleek black SUV. Tom.

  I turned and half-walked, half-ran into the woods beside the road. I heard him pull up, his tires crunching the loose gravel. A door opened and then slammed shut.

  “Lillie.”

  The sound of his voice, smooth but husky, made my heart speed up, but it slowed down when I remembered Jackson, who was going to have to go to court because of Tom. I picked up the pace, heading down an old cattle trail.

  Tom continued to call out to me, but I pushed through branches, the trail becoming thinner and the woods thicker. I was alarmed to hear him following me and my mind went to my nightmares, but I could not remember having been killed on a cattle trail. I suddenly hit a dead end. I slapped at the branches like a toddler throwing a tantrum, before growing up and turning to face Tom.

  The dust had been kicked up and floated in the air around me, looking like glitter in the last rays of daylight. I squared my shoulders, as he walked through the golden haze.

  “You were in the middle of the road,” he said breathlessly.

  I looked at my sneakers, my hair falling in front of my face.

  “Lillie.” He drew back my curtain and I looked up into his flawless face. No. Not flawless. There was the scar. My scar.

  I reached up as if in a trance and then withdrew my hand when he trembled beneath my touch. “Sorry.”

  He closed his eyes. “No,” he whispered as he shook his head. “I am sorry.”

  I frowned, having expected at least another three weeks of him being hot and cold before I got my apology.

  “I should have told you the truth when I arrived in Green Grove,” he continued.

  I cocked my head as I realized his apology was not related to Jackson. I watched as he took a deep breath, as if preparing to plunge into deep water.