Love Edy

by Shewanda Pugh

  “It’s only . . . ” Chloe’s voice drifted alongside her gaze. Edy followed it to a pack of girls. Aimee the redhead, Sandra Jacobs and Eva Meadows. Sandra lifted a hand and waved, before the three erupted in giggles.

  A match lit under Edy, engulfing her in an unreasonable fury.

  She was there for them. She was one of them. No matter how many days they rode to school together, Chloe Castillo was one of them. Edy wouldn’t forget it again. Not ever.

  She ripped Chloe’s headband from her hair, heard the audible tear, and tossed the hairpiece to the floor. It in were thin strands of dark locks.

  “Learn your place,” Edy said. “You’re Lawrence’s skank; not one of us. We don’t have to humor you when you talk.”

  Edy slammed her locker and strode off, pushing past Chloe on her way to class.

  ~~~

  At lunch, Edy took her seat with Wyatt, gaze boring into the three girls first to arrive at the “it” table. Aimee, Sandra and Eva. They sat huddled together with Caesar salad on each plate, talking without the slightest flicker of hunger. When Sandra looked up and saw her, she gave a little wave of fingers meant to annoy. Aimee followed it by puckering up her lips. That’s right, Edy remembered, she’d been eager to brag about tasting Hassan. Maybe she’d be interested in a fork buried right through those lips. Edy sighed. So much for pacifism.

  Hassan, Lawrence and Kyle arrived as a set, went for the lunch line, came away with double helpings and sat with the girls. All three went erect at the sight of their cattle, with Sandra going so far as to tease her curls with fingers.

  “I called you last night,” Wyatt said. “I was concerned when you didn’t respond.”

  Edy blinked. Tried to think of something to say. “I wasn’t available,” seemed snarky, yet it was all she could come up with. She turned to her food. Nothing special that day, just twice warmed butter chicken, leftovers because of Rani’s headache the night before.

  “I have a class with him,” Wyatt said.

  Edy looked up. “Who?”

  “Him,” he nodded in the direction behind Edy.

  She turned to see Hassan approaching with his tray. Back at the “it” table, Lawrence, Kyle and the twins gathered their things.

  A mass exodus, Edy realized with a twist of a smile. A mass exodus for her, she wanted to tell the queens of primping.

  Except, not quite.

  The twins dropped down on either side of Edy, while Hassan and Lawrence sat down to bookend Wyatt.

  “Edy,” Hassan said without looking at her. “Could you excuse us for a second?”

  She half expected a camera crew to appear and taunt her with jeers. “I will not,” was what she said.

  The twins sighed as if exhaling from a single pair of lungs. No doubt, they’d elected Hassan to deliver this idea that she should get lost.

  “You move,” Mason said in her ear. “Or this gets real embarrassing for your boyfriend. You know, with us dragging him to privacy and all.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Edy snatched her lunch bag and stood, scanning a still life of what should have been a bustling cafeteria. Every pair of eyes watched, thirsty for drama and banking on it.

  Then Edy realized it. The one place open, the one place she could sit was the “it” table. She dropped down next to Chloe, never bothering to look up.

  “Edy—” Chloe said.

  “Please,” Edy said. “This day has already exhausted me, and there’s still detention to look forward to.”

  And that she’d slept almost none the night before.

  ~~~

  Across the aisle, at the table Edy used to occupy, Wyatt looked from one Dyson brother to the next, before settling on Hassan. An irrational swell of claustrophobia threatened to swallow Wyatt.

  “Where’d you come from?” Hassan said.

  Wyatt dropped his gaze. He knew boys like this, guys with easy looks and hulking muscles, who took failure as a personal challenge. His failure to answer would be seen as motivation to get an answer. Wyatt wasn’t keen on motivating them.

  “Rhode Island,” Wyatt said. “Chaterdee, Rhode Island. You probably never heard of it.”

  “Why’d you come here?” Hassan said.

  Not why he’d moved, but why Wyatt had come there specifically. A subtle but powerful difference that had Wyatt giving Hassan a closer look. He’d heard of him, of course, and not just because Edy led up his fan club. Football titan extraordinaire, drool extractor of girls, and smart enough to manage an advanced placement class or three.

  “My dad wanted to move here. That’s all,” Wyatt said. He didn’t look up to see if the answer took.

  “And that scene with Sandra? What was that about?” Matt said.

  Wyatt shrugged, feeling like a turtle shoved into its shell. “Nothing. Just a misunderstanding.”

  “I don’t like you,” Hassan said. “And I damned sure don’t like the way you look at Edy.” He looked him over, jaw tightened with thinly veiled contempt. “If you think this is over, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  It occurred to Wyatt that while the twins were older, bigger, and presumably the alphas of their group, Hassan stood at the head of this expedition.

  Hassan was the one to watch.

  ~~~

  Detention ran long for Edy and Chloe and short for the boys, who had the excuse of practice for a winning team to get them out. By the time Edy had been freed, ballet practice had begun and there was no way she could put a respectable face to that sort of tardiness. She decided to walk home. Why Chloe joined her in those stupid heels, Edy would never understand.

  Except, understanding came with the next breath.

  It used to happen all the time in middle school. Girls cozying up in the hopes of catching an eye from one of the boys—Matt, Mason, Hassan, Lawrence. Sweet smiles and lukewarm compliments, all made as they looked elsewhere. Just as Edy got ready to tell her she wouldn’t be used, Wyatt came tearing out of the school, closing the half block they’d crossed quick.

  Cold winds slapped his cheeks red and left his blond hair flapping in the wind.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  Edy raised a brow. “Since school let out?” She shot a look at Chloe. Her face stayed smooth as marble.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t answer your cell.”

  Edy started off again. “No phones in detention.”

  “Ah,” Wyatt said and fell in step.

  The three headed for the end of the street, with Chloe’s heels as sound and sure as their steps.

  Edy looked at her. “How are you doing that?” She nodded toward her feet.

  Chloe shrugged. “I could show you sometime.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Edy said.

  Who said she needed heels and makeup and all that other silly stuff? Once a year she pressed into it, pressed into because it made her father happy. Even if it felt absurd.

  “I think Edy looks great the way she is. She doesn’t have to try as hard as the rest of you,” Wyatt said.

  Chloe shot him an acidic look.

  “And I thought the boys would’ve straightened you out about that,” she said.

  Edy jumped in. “About what?”

  Chloe picked up selective hearing.

  “About what?” Edy pressed and put a hand on Wyatt’s arm.

  She thought she saw him flinch.

  “Nothing. It’s just your—whatever they are—set a few boundaries.” Wyatt smirked. “For some reason, they don’t seem too impressed with me.”

  Edy snorted. If those standards worked both ways, then the boys find themselves in scant company indeed.

  “You really should watch it, Edy,” Chloe said. “You’ll have people thinking you’d never be friends with someone like me when we both know better.”

  Edy dropped Wyatt’s arm, which she didn’t realize she’d still been holding, and forged ahead of the pack. If that dimwitted cow wanted to bring up the past, she could do it to him. As far as she
was concerned, they had never been friends, they had only been childhood playmates for a spell, and then Chloe had decided in the sixth grade that pretty girls should unite, or whatever. She promptly forgot Edy. And Edy forgot her, end of story.

  So Edy was content to leave their story right there.

  Seven

  Two weeks past their ice cream dinner at Max Brenner’s and four since depositing underwear on Edy’s feet, Wyatt had become Edy’s faithful escort to six-days-a-week practice sessions. Each night, he faded to the back, bewitched by every bend and bow, every leap and private smile she fed him.

  Enraptured. Inescapably so.

  Her friends could do nothing about it. These moments were his alone. With them perpetually at practice, they could never intervene, never intercept. Ballet was Wyatt’s to have.

  He sat on a pale pink bench at the back of the studio and extended fingers across the thin leather cushion. A wisp of white ran from knuckle to wrist and back again, old scarring from waking his mother prematurely from a night terror. On the opposite side, a valley of furious pink ran parallel to his palm’s life line, remnants of another mother-father fight, also rendered unknowingly. He ceased to exist when they fought, which meant mostly that he ceased to exist.

  Half a dozen dancers, all female, extended onto a barre before him, bodies lithe, supple, stretching without hesitation. Each was thin and serious-looking, in leotards of black or white, hair pulled into prim buns, emphasizing an assortment of tight mouths. Only Edy varied from the scheme, hair burgeoning like a fountain, skin warm—rich brown near pale pink, mouth full, pouty, playfully coy.

  Once, as a boy, Wyatt saw an ebony butterfly at the place where the waters of Bishop Cove met Swan Point Cemetery. It was the day of his grandmother’s funeral, his mother’s mother, and as far as he had been concerned, they couldn’t put her in the dirt fast enough. Wyatt had stood, wedged between a theatrical red-eyed mother and a father still reeking of last night’s whiskey, when the butterfly fluttered upwards before him, drawing his attention with its beauty, singularity, and mystique. Gaze pinned, Wyatt had followed, hypnotically at first, frantically next, sliding on mud, gripping at scrub, never daring to look away. Never had he seen the flutter of black silk and never had he seen a butterfly in winter. When Wyatt had reached it, his hands and pants were caked in filth. He’d extended a hand, brushed it, and gasped in horror, remembering that butterflies were supposed to die if touched. To hurt a thing so beautiful had to earn God’s wrath. It had stuttered through the air, dropping once, twice, and then soaring for the heavens.

  Wyatt’s dad had snatched him from the water’s edge and smacked him upside the head, asking if he meant to ruin the old lady’s sendoff. Later, in secret, his father admitted to wishing he’d gotten up the nerve to do something, at the very least write an “F— you” on the casket and fertilize the soil with his waste.

  The black butterfly’s image stayed with Wyatt. When he mentioned it to his father, he called it a moth. His mother hadn’t even seen it. No matter, Wyatt knew better than them both. He always knew better than them both.

  ~~~

  The sun had long since set when Edy and Wyatt stepped out of the ballet studio. A chill seized the air, sawing to the bone as they walked. She zipped her goose parka up and yanked the fur-lined hood to her brow before giving Wyatt a grieved look. His polyester-lined trench coat stood as a pitiful first and last defense against an arctic New England winter well underway.

  “You know, we’re still considered children,” Edy hissed. “If I told my mom—”

  “Don’t.”

  They fell into an awkward silence after a now familiar conversation.

  He hated for her to see him like that, cold, and needing something basic. It made him seem weak, piteous, not a thing to be desired. He decided to redirect.

  “You were beautiful today,” Wyatt said. “And you always stand out. They’re nowhere near your caliber.”

  Edy snorted. “That’s because I belong in advanced classes. Mom’s still warming to the idea. Rani’s pressing it, so it should happen any day now.”

  Rani Pradhan. The jock’s mother. It seemed she came up nearly as much as Hassan. The thought gave him another.

  “You speak Hindi?”

  “And Punjabi.”

  He imagined the hours she must’ve spent in the Pradhan household to learn their languages. “It must’ve taken forever for him to teach you.”

  Edy spasmed. “For starters, my Hindi’s better than Hassan’s. The first word I ever said was dada and the second was duppar. Hassan had two dozen English words before he even gave another language a try. An omen, Rani says.”

  Duppar. For some reason, he suspected he wouldn’t like the meaning, but had to ask anyway.

  “Cake,” Edy said.

  Cake. As in what Hassan called her.

  “You always talk as if the two of you live together,” Wyatt said. He heard the envy in his voice and buried it.

  Edy shrugged it off.

  “So . . . he’s like a brother then?” Wyatt tried again.

  She paused. Considered. “No. Not really.”

  Wyatt glanced at the Phelps home, a towering lemon-colored dollhouse, accentuated with hints of pearl. He scowled when the front door opened.

  Hassan. That guy again. The guy who kept busy enough for his lifelong friend to feel slighted, but nonetheless had a knack for finding her in Wyatt’s company anyway.

  “I speak English, Punjabi, and Hindi,” Edy said. “And all of them better than him.”

  She nodded toward the sturdy ninth grader emerging from her home, a guy who should’ve been promoted to the tenth off size alone. When their gazes met, Wyatt offered something of a disarming smile. It wasn’t returned.

  “No argument from me,” Hassan said and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He’d wrapped a hand around her forearm to do it, and pressed lips to a place near her temple. Wyatt wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and whether he knew that Wyatt envied him more in that moment than in any single one on the field.

  He kept his lips there too long. But if anyone seemed to notice, no one cared.

  Except Wyatt.

  “How goes it, Slim?” Hassan said when he parted from her.

  “What?” Wyatt blinked.

  “He asked how you were doing,” Edy said.

  “Oh. Fine. Just returning from ballet with Edy.”

  Hassan raised a brow. “Yeah? Sit in often?”

  That wasn’t the question, of course. There was a conversation within a conversation here that Edy wouldn’t be able to sense.

  “I do actually,” Wyatt said. “Why? Did you?”

  Nothing.

  But then he saw it: a ripple beneath otherwise calm waters. A flicker of menace dissolved in an instant.

  “Let’s go, Edy. I’ve got three hours before I hit the gym with the Dysons. That’s enough for a movie.”

  Hassan placed an arm around Edy’s shoulders and steered her toward the house. Wyatt couldn’t help but notice the easy way she turned for his touch.

  But then she stopped.

  “I’ll give you a call later on, Wyatt. We can do homework later or something,” Edy said.

  Hassan stopped, every muscle in his back and arms rendered taunt as a bowstring. When they started off again, Wyatt couldn’t keep the grin from his face.

  ~~~

  Hassan slipped onto the back porch of the Phelps’ house just in time to see Edy kneel, a bowl of milk in one hand, two open cans of tuna in the other. They were perched on the cusp of November, with the vibrant shimmers of autumn already having dwindled to a listless frozen winter. Edy bunched the fabric of a wool coat together to shield herself from the brisk breeze. Just as she made it to the porch, a gray shorthair cat curled out from under the stairs and bounded up to meet her. A mangy black cat followed on its heels, and after that, two more, both striped steel and white. The last of the bunch had a back paw out of sync and nursed it on a tentative climb up, the l
ast in a procession of strays.

  Edy went for the hurt one first, scooping him into her arms. She plucked a choice chunk of white tuna and held it under the cat’s nose. Tiny teeth tore the chunk in two before it disappeared from sight altogether. When he was done, Edy dug out another, larger piece, and carried him over to the milk.

  For their entire lives, Edy’s mother had been screaming about the strays. Once, she’d threatened to drown them. Hassan knew, not because he’d been there, but because Edy had run to him, crying and threatening to run away. He’d been ready to run with her then. He’d run with her now.

  “Ready for ballet?” Hassan said, trying to unhinge the old memory with a shake of his head.

  “You’re here to walk me?” Edy sounded surprised.

  “As soon as you’re ready,” Hassan said. He shifted, suddenly hyper-aware of his body’s breath, movements, and proximity to her. Seeing her with the strays, remembering her coming to him like that . . . He cleared his throat and looked away. “Do you need another minute with the cats or something?”

  “I’m ready,” she said. “It’s just . . .Wyatt’s agreed to walk me.” She shot a look at her house, past her house.

  Wyatt.

  Hassan couldn’t help but wonder what else he had offered to do. “I’m here now,” he said. “So, there’s really no need.”

  Edy dropped her gaze. She returned to her cats, picking up an empty can of albacore and running a finger along the inside before offering her findings to a weak cat that licked from her finger.

  “It’s alright,” Edy said. “He likes it. He enjoys walking me and he enjoys sitting in on the lessons.”

  “For two and a half hours?” Hassan said, deadpan.

  “Yes!”

  “Yeah, right,” he snapped.

  She stood. Gentleness washed away as her jaw set and hands clenched, giving her a ferociousness that likened her to her mother.

  “Is it really so hard? To imagine someone with me when it isn’t their duty?”

  “Edy—”

  He took a step forward and the cats scattered. They knew only her, trusted only her.