Don't Ever Change
Page 22
“I don’t think so,” I say. “You should win!”
“Now I know how much you like me.”
“It’s just that I have so many other awards to win,” I say, tugging a little on his shirt.
“You’ve already got the Junior Nazi Whistle-Blower Award,” he says.
I hide my face behind my hands. “Steven thought I was going to be great, remember? Great, great, great.”
“You are great,” Foster says, “but you’re also Eva.”
“Shit,” I say, and we laugh. “Oh! I know what I need!”
“What?”
“A toothbrush.”
Foster leads the way over to the mouth-care aisle, and at first it’s just rows of picks and flosses and whiteners and gels and washes. We start combing through the options, and soon I’m thinking more about my teeth than I ever have, and how I guess I’ve always hated my teeth, or at least never felt any positive emotions toward them, but now I’m being forced to assess minute preferences for hundreds of teeth-related products. My whole life I’ve just used whatever toothbrush and toothpaste has been given to me by my mother or dentist and never thought twice about it. But starting this fall I’ll have to buy my own toothbrushes, my own shampoo and deodorant, my own everything.
“Well, what kind of toothbrush do you like?” Foster asks.
“What kinds are there? Mine was always just like regular, with a regular handle.”
“There’re a lot of choices,” Foster says. “Like what about the coarseness of the bristles? There’s hard and soft and medium and also sensitive, which is different from regular soft, and also extra-medium.”
There are rows atop tiers atop columns atop pyramids of toothbrush options. I reach for a straight-handle brush with a purplish sparkly color that reminds me of my old one, but it’s hanging within a galaxy of other handle styles: flex-y necked, travel-size, cartoon tie-ins, sports teams, ones with a plastic pick on the end. I realize I’m concentrating so hard I’m chewing on my knuckles.
Foster starts pulling down one of every type to show me. He even grabs an electric toothbrush, which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never seen before.
“What?” he says, shocked. “How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know!”
“They’re kind of expensive, but look, they rotate and vibrate and you can just replace the head when it gets old. You don’t have to buy the base again.”
“How do you know when you need to replace the head?”
“It probably says on the instructions.”
“Ugh, I can’t decide,” I say.
“The store’s open twenty-four hours.”
“This is the weirdest date in the world.”
“Why’s it so weird?”
“Because we’re at CVS, and now you can see how, I don’t know, like, inept I am.”
“It’s the best date,” Foster says. “Hey, relax, Eva.”
“Yeah, okay.” I try to seem light, but I feel heavy.
“Come on, don’t cry.”
“I’m not,” I say, but I touch my cheek and it’s wet, so maybe I am.
I close my eyes for a second and breathe. I picture a zero. Then I picture a one, a two, a three, and a four. I stop at five and visualize myself inside the number, sitting at the bottom of the dip, my legs dangling off. I don’t need Courtney’s zero protecting me, creating a barrier between my body and the world, because I have my own number—the five—and the loop of the five is open, it never closes.
I can enter it, and just as easily, I can leave it. There’s a beginning and an end. Even though nothing holds me in, nothing holds me back either.
I can choose any of these toothbrushes!
The idea suddenly overwhelms me with happiness, making me cry more, but these are happy tears, because I can see myself inside the five and Foster inside with me.
“I want to kiss you,” I say.
“Here?”
“Yes!”
“Let’s go outside,” he says. “We can go in my car.”
“No,” I say, “Here, now.” I grab his collar, pull him close.
But he pulls back.
“You might never see me again,” I say.
“Eva,” he says, and touches my face, my neck. “I’ll see you in Boston. At Tufts.”
I have a true, crazy Eureka Moment. That’s what he meant in his stupid cryptic text weeks ago, And ill be tuff: Tufts University, just outside Boston, only a few subway stops away.
“Tufts,” I say. “Tufts!” I scream. I jump up and down, then stop myself. “But wait, stories don’t end like this. It’s too neat, too perfect.”
“So what?”
Impulsively I grab a polka-dotted toothbrush, hold it tight against my chest.
“Is that the one you want?” Foster asks.
“I want you to clean my teeth with your tongue,” I say.
“Very . . . forward,” he says, laughing, and then I’m Frenching Foster, over and over.
Forward’s the only way.
63.
THE ROUSH SOLUTION
MY MOTHER PROPOSES we all go to Whole Foods on one of my final nights at home so she can spend hundreds of dollars on a lavish family meal.
“It’s our last dinner all together, as a family,” she says.
“Technically Eva’s got a few more days, Mom,” Courtney says.
“Yeah, Mom, you can dial it back,” I tell her.
“What do you girls always say?” my father asks. “‘Save the drama for your mama’?”
So we drive to the store and fill an entire shopping cart with glamorous groceries.
“Anything you see that you want, throw it in!” my mother keeps saying. “You’re gonna miss all this pampering!”
I grab a nine-dollar pack of gluten-free muffins and throw them in the cart.
“Maybe I’ll be gluten-free now too,” I say.
“Oy, Boston,” she says, “you can have her!”
Later, over by the olive oil, I notice Mr. Roush. He looks sheepish and polite, like a teacher glad to be done with summer school, so I don’t want to bother him. I try to maneuver around him and hurry down the aisle, but he sees me and calls my name. “Eva!” he says again, and then I stop. “Were you not going to say hello?”
“I’m just acting weird,” I tell him, and he smiles.
“There’s that Kramer candidness, that honesty. I’ll miss having it this year.”
I shrug, give him a look.
“Oh,” he says, “you’re not happy with me for submitting your story for that award.”
“No, I’m happy,” I say. “I’m grateful.”
“Grateful?” Mr. Roush asks, impressed.
“And guess what else?” I say. “I don’t know anything.”
Mr. Roush laughs. “What does that mean?”
“On the last day of school you said I should ask myself, ‘What do I know?’ Remember?”
“Mostly,” he says.
“Well, I thought about it, I asked myself, and I realized it’s nothing. Pretty much nothing.”
Mr. Roush sets his basket down, places a bottle of olive oil he’s holding back on the shelf. He looks at me with saddened, sorry eyes.
“That wasn’t at all what I meant, Eva.”
“No, I know that,” I say, though I’m not sure if I do.
“Have you been writing this summer?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Not a single word.”
“Congratulations!” he says, enthused.
“What? But I wanted to redo my story, fix it, you know?”
“But you went out and lived. You experienced. That’s how you add to what you know.”
“I got fired,” I tell him.
“That’s good!”
“It sucked,” I say. “It was painful.”
“That’s even better!”
“The whole summer was kind of painful, actually,” I say, laughing.
“That’s a sign, Eva,” he says. “A sign you’re a
real writer.”
That’s the sign I’ve been waiting for. And now, maybe, it’s time to write—about me, and about all of this.
64.
NOT ALWAYS
COURTNEY’S OFFICIALLY NOT going to Amsterdam. She’s not getting her own apartment either. She’s not going anywhere.
“Don’t feel bad for me,” she says, but I do.
We’re lying on her bed, facing one another, in the dark. It’s night. Courtney was supposed to go to a party, but she changed her mind.
“I was never going to go,” she says, but the way she says it I can’t tell if she means Amsterdam or the party.
“Yes, you were,” I say. “You go—that’s your thing.”
“I don’t have a thing.”
“You’re a fountain of things. You’re totally defined.”
“I don’t want to be defined. Being defined is very Eva.”
“Okay, but you represent something, and that something is Going.”
“That’s you now,” she says.
Virgo. Vegan. Writer. I guess I can add a word to my list.
“I pictured the zero,” I tell her.
“What zero?”
“Your zero, Courtney, the ring around you.”
“The hollow ring.” She shakes her head, remembering. “You know, you don’t need everyone’s advice as much as you think you do.”
“I need your advice, though. Always.”
“Well, this time I don’t have any,” she says.
“I’ll just recycle then.”
Courtney rolls onto her back. “So what are you going to write about next?”
“Whores,” I say.
“Ah, okay then, maybe I do have some advice,” Courtney says.
“Can I give you advice, Courtney?” I stand, turn on her bedroom light. I want to tell her that she should go to that party, go see her friends right now. I want to say that it’s just Amsterdam; it’s just one city; there are a million cities you can go to. And when you go, there you’ll be.
It’s Courtney’s advice—I just want to give it back to her.
65.
THOROUGH
THE NIGHT BEFORE I leave, my mother helps me finish packing the very last of my clothes. She’s always been a champion packer. She can fold shirts until they’re so compact they look like trim linen napkins. She can ball socks into a perfect sphere, round as a tennis ball. She can also stack sweaters, roll scarves so they don’t wrinkle, and bundle jeans into flat little denim bricks to maximize luggage space.
My mother forgets nothing. She packs toiletries in separate plastic Baggies, so if anything spills, no clothes get ruined. She has different packing strategies for different types of luggage. For square-shaped traditional suitcases, she lines the bottom with shoes and layers clothing on top; for duffel bags, she positions the shoes around the sides like a wall to protect the rest of the contents.
And my mother knows everything there is to know about weather. She checks the forecast for her destination city daily for weeks leading up to a flight. She’s been following the highs and lows for Boston since June.
She hasn’t forgotten school supplies either. My mother’s filled a whole corner of my room with zippered pouches full of pens and colored pencils and Scotch tape and extra binders and even a mini stapler with mini staples already loaded inside.
She’s so committed and thorough that I start to forget it’s me who’s leaving and not her. I lie back on my bed, hypnotized by her assembly line, watching the master at work, and I listen to her talk—occasionally about Boston but mostly about folding methods—and eventually my eyes close.
And then my mind floats, and I imagine my mother folding me up into a compact, little form, instead of my clothes. My mother folding me up so small that I stay stuck in that position, and by the time they finally unfold me the plane’s already taken off, it’s landed in Boston, everyone’s learned all their lessons, made all their memories, and now they’re on their way back home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREVER THANK YOU to Tara Weikum and Ann Behar, my counselors, guiding and cheering me on.
Please don’t ever, ever change, Jen. Stay the exact same, Katie.
Walk through all the open doors with me, Jillian.
Matt, the undisputed camp champ, who literally helps me dye.
Kim, let’s make everything together, okay?
Elizabeth, endless gratitude, my favorite second chance.
Rachel, I think I just end up with you.
Mom, it’s true, you’re the best at folding and the best at holding, too.
Ben, all the toast, we can have all of it.
And Britt, my DB, what can I say, what can I write, that isn’t perfect until you’ve fixed it?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo Courtesy M. Beth Bloom
M. BETH BLOOM is a novelist and a screenwriter. Her fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and Dave Eggers’s Best American Nonrequired Reading series. She is also the author of Drain You. M. Beth lives in Los Angeles.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY M. BETH BLOOM
Drain You
Don’t Ever Change
CREDITS
Cover art © 2015 by Wendy MacNaughton
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
DON’T EVER CHANGE. Copyright © 2015 by M. Beth Bloom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloom, M. Beth, date
Don’t ever change / M. Beth Bloom. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Aspiring author Eva takes to heart the words of her high school English teacher and spends the summer before she goes away to college trying to figure out just what she knows and enjoying new experiences that she can draw from in her writing.
ISBN 978-0-06-203688-9 (hardcover)
EPub Edition © June 2015 ISBN 9780062036896
[1. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. Camp counselors—Fiction. 3. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 4. Authorship—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Do not ever change.
PZ7.B62294Don 2015 2014034849
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
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15 16 17 18 19 PC/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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