by Trish Cook
“I’m glad to hear that, Neilly,” he said. “Your mom and I have been pretty worried about how hard you two took the news.…”
Dec and I shared a look and a nod.
“I think we’re cool now,” I said, almost believing it.
“Maybe,” Dec added.
“So you know what I think we should do to celebrate maybe not hating it here once we get settled in?” I didn’t even wait for an answer. “Have the most kickass Halloween party ever.”
The dark clouds broke up, and Dec actually smiled. With his teeth showing and everything. “Now you’re talkin’. Maybe my friend Ulf’s band could even play!”
“Well then, kids,” Dec’s dad said. “Let’s get moving. Halloween is just around the corner.”
By the time Monday night rolled around, I was still totally exhausted from hauling and unpacking all those boxes. Youth group was the last place I was interested in going. Really, my bed was the only thing calling my name.
But Dec insisted. “I cannot watch those two play goo-goo eyes for another second this week,” he said, referring to our very-much-visibly-in-love parents. “You gotta get me out of here for at least a couple of hours.”
And so I dragged my butt into the shower, got dressed, dried my hair, and went for a totally-adorable-without-trying-too-hard kind of look. Downstairs, Dec was waiting for me.
Giving me the most bewildered look ever.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“I guess I’m still getting used to the fact that we’re living together now,” he told me.
“Ooo-kay,” I said. “Let’s not make this weirder than it already is. We are going to youth group now, and I’m driving, since your permit doesn’t allow you out after dark unless a parent is in the car with you. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Once we got there, I realized I probably should’ve just stayed at home. Nothing Aunt Sarah was saying about our unique gifts and talents, trusting in them, and not keeping them a secret from the world was sinking in. It was all just a big huge blahblahblah, no offense to Aunt Sarah.
Plus, Griffin wasn’t anywhere to be found, and even though that should’ve made it easier for me to concentrate, it just made it harder. I couldn’t help wondering if he was off teaching ESL again or just plain old avoiding me. And then when he finally did slide into the packed room five minutes late and smiled at me, I couldn’t stop obsessing over whether it had been a friendly smile or just a cordial one.
The first sentence Aunt Sarah said that actually registered with me was this: “So, here’s a surprise. I’m not going to be blindfolding you guys in pairs this time.”
I should have been relieved—that meant no awkward one-on-one time with Griffin. But instead, I found myself kind of disappointed. Because I guess I’d kind of been looking forward to some awkward one-on-one time with him.
Then Aunt Sarah added, “Tonight you’re actually going to meet the person you’ve been partnered up with over the past few weeks. And you’re going to take a big leap of faith, trusting him or her with your thoughts face-to-face. The topic is this: your proudest moment and your biggest regret, and how these relate to the special gifts given to you by your Higher Power.”
Now she was talkin’.
“Sooooooo,” Griffin said once we’d sat down.
“Sooooooo.”
“We meet again.”
“That we do.” I was totally grinning at him by this point.
“Want me to start?” he asked, matching my smile with an even bigger one of his own.
While that would’ve been easier, I was slowly gathering my Nerves of Steely Neilly to be used in a kinder, gentler manner than I usually do. “No, let me,” I said, getting serious. “My biggest regret, at least lately, is being so harsh on you without even knowing you. It was really unfair and mean of me, and I’m really sorry.”
“I already told you. Forgiven. You know my theory.”
“I know, but it’s still really nice of you. I’ve been holding on to so many grudges for so long, not forgiving even the people closest to me, and you don’t know me from a hole in the wall, yet you’re willing to give me a break. It’s, like, I can’t believe what a good person you are.”
“Here’s the thing, Neilly,” he said softly. “I haven’t always been such a good person. One of my biggest regrets is actually what a fuckup I used to be.”
“Really? In what way?”
Griffin took a deep breath and dove in. “When my parents announced they were getting divorced, and then my mom took a nosedive, I was enough of a wreck—”
“I was just completely pissed off,” I interrupted.
“And then when people found out why—”
“Were they just as brutal to you as they were to me?” I asked, wondering why I’d never realized what an ally I could’ve had in Griffin this whole time. I mean, we’d been through the same stuff. Things no one else could begin to understand.
“Yeah, it really sucked. I was trying to take care of things at home, getting in fights a lot at school, and lots of my so-called friends wouldn’t even talk to me. So I started hanging around with kind of a rough crowd, got a Mohawk and dyed it blue, smoked pot all the time, drank in between classes…I don’t know. I was just a mess.”
“I dealt with it by shutting everyone out except my best friend, Lulu,” I said. “I wouldn’t hang out with anyone else. For a while, I wouldn’t even go out on weekends because I just couldn’t deal with what kids were saying. On the plus side, my grades got even better than they already were.…”
Griffin nodded. “So there I was. My mom was completely depressed, I’d stopped talking to my dad, and then my girlfriend Camilla broke up with me—she’d been kind of my rock up until then, but she couldn’t deal with a guy who could barely communicate with her anymore because he was so wrecked all the time. I’d never felt so alone in my life, so I went ballistic, punching in a row of lockers until my hand was bloody and I’d broken two bones. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why all these shitty things were happening to me. Now, of course, I can see how I was responsible for a lot of what went down.…”
“You can’t beat yourself up over the past,” I told him.
“I try not to anymore,” he said. “Because the thing is, all those things I regret doing also led me to the things I am proud of doing now. My mom gave me a choice after the locker incident: go on a service trip or to a wilderness program for the summer. I picked the service trip and ended up working at a comedor—kind of like a soup kitchen—for little kids in Argentina. There were close to a hundred kids there every day, and my job was to play with them. That’s it. Just play. These kids lived in houses made of scraps of stuff their parents had found lying around, and lots of them were abused, or from broken homes, or were, like, one of ten siblings. And all they wanted was some love and affection, so I gave as much as I could. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only did I have so much more material stuff than these kids, but I also still had two parents who loved me more than anything in the world, regardless of whether they were divorced and my dad and your dad were together. And since then, I don’t know…all the anger—it just kind of fell away. At the end of the summer, I came back here, fixed up my relationship with my dad, and started teaching ESL after school so I could keep going with the work I’d started in Argentina.”
My mouth was pretty much hanging open by this point. Griffin was quite possibly the coolest guy I’d ever met. “So what happened to the blue Mohawk?”
He ran his hands through his awesome, choppy rock-star ’do. “It scared the kids, so I dyed it back to my natural color and grew it out.”
“And what about Camilla? Did you guys ever get back together?”
“Nope. But we’re kinda getting to be friends again, so that’s a good thing.”
“How’d you manage that one?” I asked, peeking across the room at Dec and Chante
lle. They still looked entirely uncomfortable, like they were barely speaking.
“Time, mostly, to show her how much I’d changed,” he said. “Well, that, plus I wrote her a kickass love song.”
I imagined it must’ve sounded totally like a We the Kings tune. And that he’d sung it to her while staring deeply into her eyes. “Well, all I can say is, she’s one lucky girl,” I told him.
My life was getting more complicated than ever. But in a good way this time.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DECLAN
I FREAKING HATED SARAH. “OH, LET’S RECONNECT with our awkwardness and blahblahblah!” Chantelle would barely even look at me, much less speak to me.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not like that.”
Long pause. Interesting. The nonresponse appeared to be a way to say bullshit without actually saying it. I filed that away for possible future use. In the meantime, I fell back on my usual bad strategy: babbling.
“I mean. Look. I’ve been at community service, where I met this really cool vegan metal guy—wow, that sounded kind of gay, I mean, actually homosexual gay, not gay like stupid gay, not that I think gay is stupid, I mean, not with my family, not to mention my extended family. Right? I mean, so Neilly’s dad is marrying a dude here—Roger is his name. Huge guy. Did that sound gay? Homosexual gay? Anyway, so, right, it’s been a little bit of a stressful time in my life, you know, and that guy, Sam, well, we totally made up at community service, when I saved him from bullies by saying he was my boyfriend. Wow, that sounded gay again, didn’t it? Okay. What I mean is this: I’m not a violent guy. It’s not me, you know? I mean, yeah, it’s something I did, but it’s not who I am. I’m not proud of it. I’m actually pretty ashamed. I’m also totally ashamed that you were there when I had my first and only walk on the psycho side, because, yeah, you know, I wanted you to think I was dangerous in an alluring way, not in a cross-the-street-to-get-away-from-me way. You know?”
Chantelle still said nothing. I was pretty sure I saw her suppressing a smile the third time I thought I was sounding gay, though.
“Well, maybe you don’t, because probably you have more common sense than I do, not to mention the fact that you probably don’t have jocks riding you all the time—wow, that sounded unintentionally sexual. I meant riding in the sense of taunting, which—”
“Do you really think I don’t have people taunting me?”
“Well, I mean, you’re, like…you’re not…why would they?”
“Oh my God, you’re serious, and that’s actually kind of sweet.”
Sweet. I was so in. Babbling didn’t work, so I was into listening now.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m, like, the only nonwhite face in the entire school. I mean, there are the normal, annoying, but ultimately harmless things, like the girls who can’t stop asking me about my hair, the girls from the basketball team who keep asking me to try out, and a surprising number of girls who want to know if I’ve got an older brother—don’t know what that’s about—but anyway, there’s all that stuff, the way everybody looks at me whenever anything black is mentioned in English class, like, Hey, Chantelle, you want to read ‘Still I Rise’ for us? You’re the black one, after all! I freaking hate Maya Angelou!”
“Oh. I guess I never—”
“And the stupid guys who just happen to be singing ‘Brown Sugar’ every time I walk by? Do you think that doesn’t make me want to kick someone until they die?”
“Well, I guess it probably would—”
“But I don’t. That’s the difference, Declan. My mom made it really clear to me from the time I could walk that the first time a guy raises his hand to you is the last.”
“Well, technically, it was a foot, and I raised it to Sam, but—”
“I don’t care, Declan. If you get violent when you’re stressed out, how am I supposed to know what direction that violence is going to be aimed in next time?”
“Uh.” It was a damn good argument. “I guess you can’t.”
And that was pretty much it until Neilly drove me home, blahblahing the whole time about what an interesting guy Griffin was and obviously not thinking what I was thinking about—which was pulling the car over and making out just because we could.
The French, as Dad never tires of telling me, have a name for this: l’esprit de l’escalier—the spirit of the staircase. It’s not a creepy transparent lady floating on stairs like they show on that ghost photographs show on TV, it’s when you think of the perfect thing to say as you’re walking down the steps after the argument.
Or, in my case, when your hot stepsister is driving you home. She was all happy about Griff, as she had started calling him, and I was pissed about that. The girl who understood and forgave me didn’t even see me, and the girl who saw me didn’t forgive or understand me. So I texted this to Chantelle: If you wait for someone perfect you’re gonna have a long wait.
Mean, I guess, but with the memory of her out-arguing me ringing in my mind, and Neilly buzzing in my ear about another guy, I was feeling pissed. Which, I suppose, kind of illustrated Chantelle’s point. And yet, I got this in return: If I wait for some one better than you it wont be long.
I laughed aloud, and Neilly looked hurt. “What? I mean, I’m sorry, but Sam and I have a history—”
“I’m sorry, it wasn’t what you said. Chantelle just busted me. I think I’m in love. I sent her a nasty message because I was pissed about her basically saying I was an unredeemable psycho, and she just texted me back and totally busted me!”
Neilly looked at me. “And you’re happy about this why?”
“Did you miss the part about how she texted me back?”
She smiled. “Gotcha. Abuse is better than neglect—is that the theory you’re working on?”
“Hey, I’ve seen movies. I watch TV. I know hostile banter is just a cover for attraction.”
“Uh, sometimes it’s just hostility.”
“Don’t wreck my good mood, okay?”
“Okay. But so, what should I do? Should I listen to whatever Sam has to say? Or just keep blowing him off?”
“Forget him. You’ve got a hot guy right under your roof.”
“Ew, no offense, but I don’t think your dad is hot, and anyway, he’s marrying my mom.”
“Gross! I wasn’t talking about my dad!”
“I know. Just busting on you.”
Hey. Is that the kind of thing that masks attraction?
The exchange of text messages did not lead to a more general thaw with Chantelle. She still pretty much ignored me and just walked around looking hot. There was only this one single bright spot, and it was bright only as much as something that reveals the depth of my classmates’ idiocy and cruelty can be.
So we were walking out of math class, and my ears were slightly more attuned to this since Monday, and I actually heard two morons going, “Deaw-de-ne-ne-neaaawww!” which was their attempt to sing the guitar part from the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” which I had looked up the lyrics to, and, I mean, really, I can’t believe Dad frets about death metal lyrics with that racist crap floating around.
I really had no desire to engage with the idiots, and I probably wouldn’t have, except that I was kind of staring at Chantelle’s butt at the time, because that’s what I do when she is walking in front of me, and I noticed, up above her butt, that her shoulders tensed up. I thought about her wanting to kick somebody until they died, and how crappy it was to be picked on for just being who you are. And I did something stupid.
I got loud. First, I feigned a fit of hysterics until everyone in the hall was staring at me. I pointed at the two idiots, laughing really loudly and obnoxiously, and managed to choke out, “Oh…they’re singing ‘Brown Sugar’! Get it? ’Cause she’s black! Ha! Oh, that’s good stuff, guys. Funny …” Smiling, I wiped away imaginary tears, and the morons, as I’d hoped, turned their attention to me.
“Shut up, Columbine. What, are you tappin’ that?”
“Nah, your mom keeps me pretty busy,” I replied, and I know this is where the fist hits the face, and I really hoped Chantelle was watching me not square off to fight, just standing there like Gandhi offering nonviolent resistance. (Yes, I did study this stuff in social studies, and I know that it’s supposed to involve brotherly love and not sarcasm and “yo mama” jokes, but, hey, one step at a time.)
I braced myself for the impact, and then something funny happened. Nobody hit me. I opened my eyes and found myself staring at Sam’s back.
“Cool it, guys,” he said. “Chill out.”
“But Columbine—”
“Gary. It’s been a year. That joke was never funny, and it hasn’t gotten any funnier. And neither has the ‘Brown Sugar’ thing. Come on, man, we’ve got a game on Saturday. Don’t get suspended for this.”
“Whatever,” said Idiot No. 1, apparently named Gary, and he walked away. Idiot No. 2, apparently too much of a follower even to have a name, quickly followed. Sam turned around, smiled, said, “Now we’re even, boyfriend,” and walked away.
My phone vibrated, and I got this from Chantelle: Thx.
Well, it was something.
I sat down with Dad and Carmen and told them that I was really, officially going vegan, that after learning all this factory farm stuff, I really couldn’t see myself eating animal products. (Also, I was hoping that even if Chantelle wasn’t impressed by the rejection of violence that my vegan diet implies, there might be hot vegan girls around who see meat eating as a deal breaker, which would, of course, improve my odds tremendously.)
Dad sighed. “I—I’m not trying to be unsupportive here, but, what will you eat? Salad?”
“Actually, Ulf sent me all kinds of recipes, and there are cookbooks, and—”
Carmen jumped in. “Dec, I’ll spring for the cookbooks if you help me do the cooking.”
“Uh…okay.” So the next day Carmen came home with a bunch of vegan cookbooks, and before I knew it, we were cooking all kinds of stuff, mostly Asian dishes, since those are pretty low in dairy to begin with, but also some stuff with silken tofu and nutritional yeast.