by Cheryl Klam
After my sister leaves for school, I check my e-mail. I have been hoping that Simon might contact me just to ask how I’m feeling, or maybe just to tell me that he’s reconsidered his ultimatum. But there’s nothing. In the past few days I’ve pretty much alternated from feeling furious (why did he even give me an ultimatum and how come he didn’t feel this way about me before my accident) to sad (what am I going to do without my best friend?). The truth of the matter is that I really need Simon right now. And I do not appreciate him bagging out on me in the middle of my crisis.
For the umpteenth time I attempt to write him an e-mail.
Dear Simon,
I think this is really unfair.
Scratch that. After all, it’s not like he dumped me out of the blue because he couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. He dumped me because he cared about me more than I cared about him. Well, maybe not more, but in a different way. Perhaps I needed to show him some compassion. Especially since I of all people understand what it’s like to care about someone who doesn’t feel the same way about you.
Dear Simon,
I really do love you. But I just don’t think we’re meant for
I stop. How can I tell my best friend that I’m not attracted to him? And why did he have to go and get attracted to me in the first place?
Dear Simon,
I find it very interesting that you were never ever interested in meromantically before my accident and now, a little more than a month after you first saw me with my new face, you have given me an ultimatum, i.e.: If I don’t go out with you, you will have nothing more to do with me. Well, let me tell you that…
Suddenly, my computer dings and I see I have a message—from Drew. My hands begin to shake. I click on his name and his message fills the screen.
Lucy says you’re still sick. What’s wrong?
I don’t answer him. I can’t. Just him inquiring about my health is enough to make my heart ache all over again. No matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out how he could have asked my sister out on a date and then come over here and act as if nothing had transpired between him and Lucy at all.
I’m in bed (still wearing my pajamas) when Lucy gets home at four. I finished my Captain Ahab diorama yesterday and although I’ve had more than enough time to catch up on my schoolwork this afternoon, I haven’t done anything expect try on my once too-snug jeans to see if my Lucy diet is working (it is) and watch TV.
“You don’t look so good,” she says. “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
“I’m fine,” I say, blowing my nose again.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay home with you?”
“I’m sure.”
Lucy fluffs my pillows and sits on the bed with me and watches MTV. In spite of everything, it feels good to be with her. We used to hang out all the time, and it’s nice to experience something familiar after all these weeks of strangeness.
My sister seems to feel the same way and even kisses my forehead before she goes into the bathroom to get ready for her party. She comes out with her hair sleek and silky and wearing a cream-colored off-the-shoulders shirt and her dry-clean-only jeans. Lucy always looks good, but tonight she looks especially drop-dead gorgeous.
“Well?” she asks, giving me a little spin. “Do you think this will be enough to get me an invitation to the fall festival?”
Instead of responding, I blow my nose and nod.
I’m watching Trauma: Life in the ER and a doctor is just about to pull a live insect out of a woman’s scalp when the doorbell rings. Because it’s nearly eight o’clock and has been dark for over an hour, I grab the baseball bat my dad keeps behind his bedroom door just in case he has to whack any intruders. I remember what he has always said when Lucy and I have had to stay home alone: NEVER EVER OPEN THE DOOR FOR SOMEONE YOU DON’T KNOW.
But it’s not a stranger waiting outside the door. It’s Drew. Once again my heart feels as though it’s about to explode.
I put down the bat and open the door. Drew’s wearing his leather bomber jacket with a black T-shirt and jeans that are fraying around the pockets. His thick black hair looks as if he combed it with his fingers, and he’s holding a bouquet of daises in his hand. “In the mood for some baseball?” he jokes, nodding toward the bat.
I glance at the flowers and swallow hard when I realize that these are for my sister. I have spent a lot of time over the past few days imagining what I’d say to Drew when I finally saw him again. Right now I’m torn between “What’s your deal, anyway?” and “What kind of games are you playing?” But it comes out:
“Lucy’s already at the party.”
Drew’s grin is the same as the one he flashed in the car on the way to the comic book store—he knows something I don’t again.
“I stopped by to see you,” Drew says, holding up the flowers.
I look at the bouquet and then back at him. “Those are for me?”
He nods. “Can I come in? I won’t stay long.”
“Okay,” I squeak, pushing the door open. I suddenly realize I’m wearing the same hoodie I’ve had on for the past few days and I’m still in my gross pajamas, the ones I got for Christmas two years ago that have little monkeys eating bananas all over them and a hole in the butt. I haven’t showered or brushed my hair or teeth in three days, either.
“I’ll be right back.” Holding on to the butt of my pajamas, I turn and race upstairs. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt and pull my hair back in a ponytail. I flick on some mascara and brush my teeth until they’re sparkling.
When I get back downstairs, Drew is sitting on the couch, holding my daisies and watching me walk toward him. Although neither of us say anything, I can feel this electricity charging the air. I know I’m not imagining it, because Drew stands up and looks at me with such intensity that I can almost predict what he’s going to do next.
“Do you have a vase?” he asks.
Okay. Didn’t predict that.
“Sure,” I say as I turn and walk into the kitchen. Drew follows close behind. I reach under the sink and pull out one of Mom’s big crystal vases. I’m about to take the daisies from him when I notice that he’s staring at my nose.
“Do you have the flu or something?”
I instinctively lick the top of my lip and realize that it’s wet. Damn. “No,” I say quickly, grabbing a tissue off the table. “I just didn’t take my nose spray.” I rush upstairs and give myself a double dose. Fortunately, it works almost immediately and lasts for almost twelve hours.
By the time I get back to the kitchen, Drew has already filled the vase with water and put the flowers inside.
“All better,” I say, pointing to my now wiped-so-clean-it’s-red nose. We stare at each other and the electricity finds us once again. I glance from his eyes to his lips and feel my body trembling. “Thanks for the flowers. I love yellow. It’s my favorite color.”
Drew takes a couple steps toward me, reaches out, and runs his hand down my arm lightly. “You’re welcome.”
I grab on to the back of the chair to hold myself up.
He must misread this reaction of mine because he backs off and shifts gears on me. “So…how’s that diorama coming?”
I don’t answer him. I’m too busy thinking about what a miracle it is that he’s here and that he brought me yellow flowers. What happened to his big plans with my sister?
“The one you were working on the other day. Remember? I almost cut off my finger,” he teases, holding up his hand and pointing to a Big Bird Band-Aid.
“How could I forget,” I say, instinctually reaching out to touch it. The minute our fingers make contact a charge rips through me. But there’s this worried look in his eyes and I’m scared that I’m not misreading it. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a party with Lucy?” I ask, stepping away from him.
“No. I mean, I told her I might stop by, but that’s it.” Wait, he didn’t ask my sister out on a date? Why did Lucy tell me he did? Then something awful dawns on me. Perh
aps she intentionally lied about Drew asking her out so she could keep me away from him. As terrible as that sounds, at the moment, none of it really seems to matter. I feel as if a major load has been taken off my shoulders. Drew didn’t ask Lucy out! Drew is here with ME!
“Anyway, when Bill told me you were sick, I decided to come over and check up on you.”
“Bill? Bill who?”
“Bill Williams. He’s a sophomore.”
“I’ve never even met him. How would he know I was sick?”
“When the prettiest girl in school is sick,” Drew says, “people notice.”
“That’s what he said?” I ask as my face grows warm.
“No. I did.”
My face burst into flames as I give him a little grin and stare at my feet.
“So are you hungry?” he asks. “I can make you dinner if you’d like.”
“You cook?” I can’t exactly envision Drew in an apron, stirring a steaming kettle on a hot stove.
“Well, I can make ratatouille,” Drew says, taking my hand.
My breath catches in my throat. Even though I kind of feel like I did when I was in the finals of the fifth-grade spelling bee and was asked to spell myrrh, I’m determined not to let my fear get the best of me, like I did before.
“Do you like ratatouille?”
I am looking at my hand in his and about to melt onto the linoleum. “I hate it,” I whisper almost seductively.
Drew laughs. “I’ll just have to make something else. Anything you want.”
As if holding on to my hand wasn’t enough to make me faint, he pulls me in closer so I’m standing only inches away from him. I’m so startled by this that I blurt out the word spaghetti.
Ugh. Every toddler’s favorite food.
But Drew doesn’t care. “Spaghetti it is,” he says, and then he kisses my hand.
My heart stops beating and my head is spinning. Drew puts my hand to his cheek and his skin is incredibly warm. He leans in and I’m totally paralyzed, but with sheer joy, not fear. It’s as though everything up until this moment in time has been scripted to a fault, and with one improvised action, the story will need a different ending.
Megan Fletcher, ugly duckling techie turned beautiful swan actress, will ride off into the sunset with the hero.
Drew gently presses his lips to mine, kissing me softly and slowly. My pulse is racing when he sticks his tongue in my mouth just a little bit. Before now, I would’ve thought that touching someone else’s tongue with mine was right up there with scraping the gum off from underneath my desk and sticking it in my mouth, but it’s not that at all. It feels…unbelievable. In fact, I want to swallow him whole. Drew’s kiss is getting hungrier, too. My chest is pressed up against his and his hands are going up the back of my T-shirt. Then they travel south toward my rear when I hear it.
Click.
Through the fog it hits me: It’s a key in a lock. Which can only mean one thing: someone’s home. With all the strength of a superhero, I push Drew off me. He topples over into the stove, stunned and surprised.
I hear footsteps storming through the living room and within seconds, Lucy is standing in the kitchen. “Drew? What are you doing here?”
“He just stopped by to see how I was feeling,” I say in a high-pitch voice.
It makes me sound guilty of something, I’m just not sure what anymore.
“Oh?” Lucy says, narrowing her eyes at him.
“What are you doing home?” I say to Lucy. Surprisingly, this question almost comes out as an accusation.
“I was worried about you,” she replies sternly, looking as though she’d like to strangle me and dump my body in the Chesapeake. “I’m surprised to see you out of bed.”
Now that I see the rage in her eyes, I feel like the wind has been sucked right out of my lungs. “Right, I should, well, get back in it.” I turn toward Drew. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“Oh,” he says, clearly surprised by his sudden dismissal.
“Um, sure.”
Lucy crosses her arms but doesn’t move. She’s just standing there, glaring at me.
“Well, good night,” I say as I run back up the stairs, leaving Drew and Lucy alone. I turn off the bedroom light and crawl back into bed, still wearing my clothes. I can hear Lucy saying “so long” to Drew, then padding up the stairs.
“He brought you flowers?” she asks, flipping on the overhead light.
Half of me wants to defend myself and rip into Lucy for misleading me about her “date” with Drew. The other half wants to apologize. But for what? Getting what I want? Being happy for the first time in my life? For being (according to Drew at least) the prettiest girl in school?
But instead I say nothing.
Lucy just shakes her head in disgust and walks into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
The shower turns on and I hear a muffled noise. I get out of bed and creep out of the room, pausing at the closed bathroom door. I stand still, listening to Lucy cry in the shower. It’s clear from the level of her devastation that maybe she really did like Drew. And she had come home to find him with someone she never thought she’d have to fight with for any boy.
Her sister. Her beautiful sister.
I’ve never made Lucy so upset before and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do next. It’s totally unnerving, especially since Lucy has always seemed so strong, so capable of not only taking care of herself, but me as well. She has saved my neck so many times. Ten years ago, when we were playing dolls in our backyard and Warren Gumbar, a neighborhood bully at least four years older than me, started calling me werewolf girl, barking and howling at me through the fence. Even though he was twice Lucy’s size and all the kids at school were terrified of him, Lucy grabbed a branch and jammed it right at him, right through the fence.
And what about freshman year, when Angie Rembleaux wrote Megan Fletcher is the ugliest dog EVER inside all the bathroom stalls on the second floor and the very next day Lucy made her apologize and then wipe it all off by hand? It seems like there were a million instances just like that, and even though I really don’t want to be thinking about them right now because they only make me feel worse, they’re all fast-forwarding through my mind at the speed of light.
When Lucy comes out of the bathroom, I’ve relived sixteen years of her saving my ass and am sitting on the hallway floor, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. I open my mouth to say something, I’m still not sure what, but Lucy snaps before I can speak.
“How could you do this to me?!”
And with that, all of my sympathy and guilt morph into an anger that rivals my sister’s.
“For once, Lucy, this isn’t about you!” I shout.
I’m not even sure what I mean by that. But I know it’s enough to drive Lucy away.
She storms into our room and grabs her pillow. “I was so excited for this year, Megan. I thought it was going to be great for both of us. But I never would have guessed that you’d turn on me.”
After that dramatic statement, Lucy makes her grand exit and seeks shelter in our parents’ bedroom.
As for me, I go into the bathroom, stare at my undoubtedly pretty face in the mirror, and think about what would have happened with Drew if my sister hadn’t come home.
twenty-two
vomitory (noun): an auditorium entrance or exit that emerges through banked seating from below.
I’m awake half the night, thinking about Drew and Lucy and my parents and Simon and George and Catherine and people at school I barely know. My mind has never been this cluttered and I can’t help but believe that my new face is to blame.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, though, because when I sit up in bed, light is spilling through the curtains. I’m not surprised to see that the door to my parents’ room is wide open and the bed already made. I hear a noise in the kitchen and I take a deep breath as I steady myself against the railing, mentally preparing myself for the fireworks. But as I walk downstairs the
smell of coffee hits me right between the eyes. There’s only person who drinks coffee in this house: my mom.
I burst into the kitchen and fly into her arms, almost tackling her to the ground. “When did you get home?”
“A couple hours ago.”
Maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but the sight of me doesn’t seem to be making her delirious with happiness. And she has been gone for three days, definitely long enough for some delirium. This can only mean one thing: “I take it you saw Lucy?”
She nods. “She was sleeping in my bed.”
“Look, Mom, I know what Lucy thinks, but I didn’t invite Drew over here last night. In fact, he had sent me an e-mail earlier in the day and I didn’t even respond.”
My mom looks perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
Hold everything. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“She just said that she’s been having trouble sleeping and so she stayed up and fell asleep in front of the TV.”
It hits me that Lucy may have been trying to protect me, like she used to when we were little, and my eyes fill with tears. Suddenly, I’m spilling my guts to my mom, starting with the most recent events and working my way backward.
At the end of my story, my mother sighs. “So Lucy thinks you purposefully came in between her and this boy Drew?”
I nod, miserable.
My mom gives me a sympathetic smile. “You look tired,” she says. “Do you want some tea?”
I hug my knees to my chest and nod again. My mom fills a mug with water and pops it in the microwave.
“So are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Interested in Drew?”
Even though I know Mom’s not the type to point an accusatory finger, I still feel defensive. “Well, I liked him first,” I say quickly. “In fact, from the moment I saw him. Lucy never even paid any attention to him until she found out he was directing the spring musical.”
“Come on, now,” Mom says.
“It’s true!” I say emphatically, like I’m trying to convince my mother that Drew belongs with me. “I know him a lot better than Lucy does. I know that he likes Batman and has two little sisters and carries a dictionary around.”