The Way I Used to Be

by Amber Smith

  I lie down on the couch after, not even bothering to take my coat off.

  I close my eyes.

  The next thing I know, my mom is leaning over me, touching my forehead with the back of her hand. “She sick?” I hear Dad ask as he tosses his keys down on the kitchen table.

  “Edy?” Mom puts her freezing hands on my cheeks—it feels so good. “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

  “I guess so,” I mumble.

  “Well, let’s get your coat off, here.” She puts her arm around my back to help me up. And I wish more than anything that she would just hug me right now. But she pulls my arms out of my coat instead.

  “I threw up,” I tell her.

  “Did you eat something weird today?” she asks.

  “No.” In fact, I didn’t eat anything today. I was too busy trying to figure out that Cameron guy during lunch break to actually eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I packed for myself.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She stands and looks down at me like she really is. “Why don’t you go get in your pajamas, and I’ll make you some soup, okay?”

  “Okay,” I answer.

  I go into my room to get changed, careful not to stare too hard at the fading gray bruises that still line my thighs. Careful not to dwell too long on the bruises on my hip bones and ribs. They’ll be gone soon, anyway. I pull on my pajama bottoms and button the matching flannel shirt all the way up to my neck to hide the remnants of bruises still on my collarbone.

  “Chicken noodle?” Mom calls out from the kitchen as I take my seat at the table.

  Before I can answer, she sets a cup of steaming tea down in front of me.

  I don’t actually feel like soup at all, chicken noodle or any other kind. But she has this big smile on her face, like the kind she would always get running around after Caelin. I think she must like having someone to take care of, something concrete to do for me.

  “Yeah, chicken noodle,” I agree, in spite of my churning stomach.

  “Okay. You drink that,” she tells me, pointing at the tea.

  I nod.

  Dad sits down at the table across from me. Making his hands a tent, he says, “Yep. Some kinda bug going around, I guess.”

  If only I were sick all the time, things might feel a little more normal around here.

  THE NEXT WEEK WE sit with our brown-bagged lunches at the table I reserved in the back of the library. Mara takes the seat directly next to Cameron, instead of me. His arm accidentally brushes against hers, and I watch as she turns slightly toward him. I can tell from here he’s not actually into her. And that makes me feel too good.

  “So, Lunch-Break Book Club is a democracy,” Miss Sullivan begins as she wheels a book cart over to the table. “I pulled a number of books that we have at least six copies of in the library. I think the way to start is for each of us to pick a book that we’d like to read and then we can put it to a vote. Sound good?”

  We all nod and begin combing through the rows of books. We finally make our way back to our seats with our books.

  Cameron looks across the table at my selection. “Anne Frank? Excellent choice.”

  “I know, I picked it.”

  I look at his: Brave New World.

  “My favorite,” he explains.

  “I’ve never read that,” Mara tells him.

  “Oh, it’s really good. It’s about this guy . . . ,” he begins, moving in closer to her. Everyone starts listening to him, but all I want to do is pick the book up and hit him over the head with it. Why does he keep trying to take over my book club?

  “Well, then, we might as well start there,” Miss Sullivan says. “All those in favor of Brave New World, show of hands?”

  I refuse to raise my hand. But all the others shoot up. They wait for me to join, looking at me like maybe I just didn’t get how cool it was when Cameron was talking about it.

  “Veto.” I have to restrain myself from shouting it at him.

  “Why?” Cameron asks, a hint of a laugh in his voice.

  I feel my face flush. I open my mouth, not knowing what I’m going to say next. “Because.” I pause. “Because everyone knows we’re all going to have to read that in English when we’re seniors.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s true,” Stephen agrees quietly, withdrawing his arm. I want to high-five him, but I just smile. He smiles back shyly, before he looks down at his famous bologna sandwich, dog-earing a corner of his napkin.

  “So what? Wasn’t Anne Frank summer reading?” Mara asks. I can hardly believe it—she’s taking his side.

  “Yeah, what’s the difference?” Cameron asks, the two of them against me.

  “It was summer reading,” I start, trying to come up with any reason other than I hate you and I can’t let you win. “But the difference is we never got to actually discuss it in class or anything. And we should’ve.”

  “But we haven’t read Brave New World yet,” Hair Chewer adds. “This way, we’ll be prepared when we do have to read it senior year.”

  “That’s true,” Catholic Schoolgirl agrees.

  “Well, I think that’s idiotic.” The words just roll off my tongue like the most natural thing in the world. I shut my mouth quickly, but it’s too late.

  Mara lets her mouth drop open like she can’t believe I just said that. And then her face gets all scrunched up in that way that makes her look exactly like her mother. I honestly can’t believe I just said that either.

  “All right, guys, it’s not that serious,” Miss Sullivan intercedes. “Majority rules. So, we’ll start with Mr. Huxley’s Brave New World.” Then she squeezes my shoulder gently and whispers, “I promise you’ll enjoy it, Eden.”

  Everyone looks at me like I’m the biggest jerk in the world.

  Mara takes a deep breath as we leave the library.

  I look at her face, studying me.

  “I know, I know—I don’t know what happened, Mara,” I admit. “Was that really bad?” I whisper.

  “Kind of.” She winces. “Are you okay?”

  I nod.

  “Are you sure you’re not still sick from last week? ’Cause you’re acting really weird.”

  “I guess not.”

  It’s unnervingly quiet between us as we make our way to our lockers.

  “Hey, can we do something this weekend?” I finally ask her. “Just us?” I clarify, thinking I really need to just tell her what happened with Kevin. Need to tell someone. And soon. Before I explode.

  “I can’t. I’m with my dad this weekend. Remember, we’re going to get my contacts?”

  So, it will have to wait.

  AFTER SCHOOL THE NEXT day the halls are flooded with people trying to get the hell out. I was on my way to band practice, Mara walking alongside me, talking enough for the both of us—filling in the spaces I was leaving empty. I feel like I’ve gone off somewhere else, like I’ve just sort of slipped into this other realm. A world that’s a lot like the real world, except slightly slower. This alternate reality where I’m not quite in my body, not quite in my mind, either—it’s this place where all I do is think about one thing and one thing only.

  “Black,” Mara declares with finality. “No, red. I don’t know. What do you think?” she asks, holding a strand of brunette hair up in front of her face. “I think black. Definitely,” she answers. “I know my mom will flip out,” she says, as if I had brought it up. “Well, I don’t care. I just need a change.”

  “Another change?” I ask, but she doesn’t hear me over the lockers clanging and the voices shouting, or maybe it’s just that I’m not talking loud enough.

  “Oh—did I tell you my dad wants me to meet his new girlfriend this weekend?” She says it as if she just remembered, as if she hadn’t told me twenty times already. “Can you believe that?” She says “girlfriend” like it’s this impossibility, like a unicorn or a dragon or something.

  I know she’s been having a hard time with it all—her parents getting divorced, her dad moving out, her
mom getting crazier, and now this alleged girlfriend. I know I need to at least make an attempt to be the best friend I was only a month ago. I shake my head in what I hope looks like disbelief.

  “Edy,” she says. “You can come over after school today, if you want.”

  I manage a smile. But that’s about all I can manage.

  “You can help me pick a color. We could do your hair too!” she shouts.

  I shrug. I try to stay close to the wall as we walk. Lately it feels like my skin, just like my mind, has been turned inside out. Like I’m raw and exposed, and it almost hurts to even be brushed up against. I hug my clarinet case to my chest to make myself smaller, to be my armor.

  That’s when I see him, this guy running down the hall, toward us. Number 12, it says on his stupid, pretentious varsity jacket. I have a distinct sinking feeling in my stomach as I watch him gaining speed, weaving between bodies like he’s on the basketball court and not in the hallway. I hear someone shout his name and something about being late and how the coach will make him do laps. He turns his head and looks behind him, laughing as he starts to yell something back. I see that he’s not looking ahead, that he’s about to collide into me. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

  I could see it happening before it happened.

  And then it does. Crassshhh: him into me, my shoulder into the wall, clarinet case into my stomach so hard my body keels over involuntarily. It jolts me back into reality. Time rushes ahead, my brain and body overloaded in only an instant. Hunched forward, my abdomen aching like I’d just been stabbed, I stare at my dirty no-name Kmart sneakers. Number 12 grabs my forearm. It feels like his fingers are burning holes through my shirt. I hear his voice, muffled, in the background of my mind, saying “Oh shit—shit, I’m sorry—are you okay?”

  But I can’t listen all the way because I seem to have only one thought. Just this: Fucking die fucking asshole fucking kill you fucking die, die, die.

  I don’t quite know what to do with this thought. Surely it can’t be mine. But how can I explain those words? They’re on my tongue, about to spill right out into the open air. And I’ve never said such words out loud, to or about another human being, yet there they are. In fact, I can’t think of any other words in the entire English language; my complete vocabulary is suddenly composed of nothing more than an endless string of obscenities punctuated with expletives.

  As he stands there in front of me and I stand in front of him clutching my stomach, he looks at my outfit and my glasses and my stupid hair, but not at me. “Sorry,” he repeats, and when I still don’t respond, he adds, “I didn’t see you.” He enunciates his words precisely, as if he truly believes I might be deaf.

  He repeats them, those four words: “I. Didn’t. See. You.” Each word like a match striking against that thin, sandpapery strip on the back of a matchbook, failing one, two, three, four times.

  Let him say just one more word.

  “Ohh-kaay?” he says slowly.

  Lit. On fire. My God, I burn.

  It’s something new, this feeling. Not anger, not sadness, not embarrassment. It burns up everything inside of me, every thought, every memory, every feeling I ever had, and fills itself in the space left vacant.

  Rage. In this moment, I am nothing but pure rage.

  I watch him pick my clarinet case up off the floor. He holds it out to me. My hands shake as I take it from him. Carefully, I hug it against my torso again, this time for a very different reason. Because everything in my brain and body is telling me to beat him with it, to hit him repeatedly with the hard black plastic case.

  I hear Mara saying, “I think she’s hurt. You should watch where you’re going!” And then to me, “Are you all right, Edy?”

  Only, I can’t answer her, either, because the gory scene of this basketball player’s death is reeling through my mind, and it is truly terrifying. Because I’m not supposed to be capable of thoughts like that, I’m not built that way. But I feel it tingling in my bones and skin and blood—something barbaric, something animal.

  I force my feet to start walking. If I don’t move, I’m afraid I might do something crazy, something really bad, and if I open my mouth, I’ll say those horrible words. After a second I hear his feet running again, away from me. He should be running; in fact, they should all be running. I’m dangerous, criminally dangerous.

  Mara catches up with me and speaks the one word that says it all: “Asshole.” Then she looks over her shoulder and adds, “Although, I wouldn’t mind if he crashed into me a little. Just sayin’. ”

  I look at her and feel the corners of my mouth pull upward, and it almost hurts, but in a different way than my stomach. It hurts like it’s the first time I’ve smiled in my whole life. She laughs, and then touches my shoulder gently. “Are you really okay?” I nod, even though I’m not sure if I am—if I ever will be.

  “IT’S TIME,” MARA DECLARES as we sit in the middle of her bedroom floor. I just finished cutting a big wad of pink bubble gum out of her hair that someone had stuck in at some point during the day. It had hardened beyond the point of peanut butter and careful untangling.

  The debate has been going on for months now.

  “So, red,” I confirm, as we stare at the box of hair color standing upright in the space between us. I didn’t say anything when she stopped showing up to band practice, or when she started sneaking cigarettes from her mom’s purse, but I have to say something now, before it’s too late. “Mara, you realize that’s really, really red?” I ask, looking at the girl on the box.

  “Cranberry,” she corrects, picking the box up gently with both hands, studying the picture. “Do you think you could cut it short like this girl’s?” she asks me. “I’m so sick of having long hair—it’s like I’m inviting them to throw things in it.”

  It’s true; she’s had the same long brown hair falling to the middle of her back ever since I can remember. “Are you sure it has to be right now?” I double-check. “’Cause if you wait just three more weeks, it’ll be summer, and then if it doesn’t turn out, you’ll have time to—”

  “No,” she interrupts. “That’s all the more reason it has to be tonight—I can’t go through this for another year. I can’t go through this for three more weeks. I can’t go through this shit for another day!” she almost shouts.

  “But what if—”

  “Edy, stop. You’re supposed to be helping me.”

  “I am, I just—do you really think coloring your hair is going to change anything?”

  “Yes—it’s going to change me.” She rips open the lid on the box and starts pulling out the contents one by one.

  “Why right now, though—did something else happen besides the gum?” It was the question I had been waiting for her to ask me for months.

  “Like anything else needs to happen? It’s been years of this—every single day—stupid names, gum in the hair, ‘loser’ signs stuck on my back. Can only be expected to take so much,” she says, her voice getting chopped up by the tears she tries to hold in.

  “I know.” And I do know. I get it. She gets it. It has to happen, and I understand why.

  “Well, let’s do it then,” she says, holding the scissors out to me.

  I take the scissors from her like a good friend.

  “You realize I have no idea what I’m doing, right?” I ask her as strands of hair begin to fall to the floor.

  “It’s okay, I trust you,” she says, closing her eyes.

  “No, don’t,” I say with a laugh.

  She smiles.

  “Can I ask you something and you’ll promise not to get mad?” I begin cautiously.

  She opens her eyes and looks at me.

  “This isn’t about Cameron, is it? Because he should like you the way you are. I mean, if you’re doing this so he’ll be interested, or so he’ll think you’re cooler, that’s not—”

  But she stops me. “Edy, no.” She’s calm, not mad at all. She talks quietly, explaining, “Yes, I like him, but
I’m not trying to be like him. I’m just trying to be like me. Like the real me. If that makes any sense at all,” she says, laughing.

  I don’t even need to think about it—I know exactly how she feels. “It makes sense, Mara.”

  “Good.” And then she closes her eyes again, like me cutting and coloring her hair is the most relaxing thing in the world. It’s quiet for a while.

  “Can I ask you something else?” I finally say, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not coming back to band, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Thought so.”

  She turns around to look at me. “Sorry, Edy. It’s just not me anymore; I’m interested in other things now.”

  “It’s okay, I was just missing my stand partner is all.” I try to make light of it, but it really does make me sad. “You know they’re gonna stick me with that smelly girl who’s always messing up, right?” I tell her as I start mixing the hair color.

  She laughs. “I’m sorry. Just hold your breath!”

  “I kind of need to breathe in order to play!”

  “True,” she admits, still smiling.

  I start brushing the mixture into her hair in sections, trying to be as neat as possible. “So, what other interests?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’ll start taking art classes next year. And I know what you’re gonna say, but it’s not about Cameron. But becoming friends with him, it’s just made me realize I want to try new things.”

  I’ve never known Mara to be interested in art. “Well, that’s cool.” I kind of mean it too. Because I can’t think of anything in the world that I’m interested in anymore.

  “Do I look tough?” she asks once we’ve finished, giving herself dirty looks in the mirror.

  I study her reflection too. “You look . . . like a completely different person,” I tell her, consumed equally with admiration and jealousy. She walks past me over to the window and cracks it open. Then she pulls out a cigarette and a lighter from the rhinestone-studded jewelry box in her desk drawer, watching herself closely in the mirror as she brings it up to her demetallized mouth. “I look mean, don’t I?” she asks. “I look like a bitch,” she says slowly, her smile perfectly straight.