Lucky Girl

by Amanda Maciel

  “Whenever I see someone less fortunate than I

  And let’s face it, who isn’t less fortunate than I?”

  I stare at Olivia and feel my jaw drop open. She’s in her cheerleading uniform because it’s Homecoming week, and every day is wall-to-wall pep crap. But otherwise, you’d never know she was even in high school. Her voice is strong and confident, her face expressive without being cheesy. She sounds amazing.

  By the time she sings the word “Pop-u-lar!” I find myself smiling, and I know Ryan must be practically fainting with relief. Olivia always has some kind of role in the student productions here, but this year she’s obviously turned into a star. The lyrics are funny, and she really sells them. After a while I wonder if she’s still wearing her uniform on purpose, since it makes the whole thing even funnier.

  I’m so focused on watching her that I don’t realize I should get backstage before the song ends. So then it’s over, with a big flourish from Olivia, and she’s turning and walking right toward me, and I’m just standing there like an idiot. Smiling like an idiot, too.

  “Enjoy the show?” she sneers.

  “You were great,” I say, just before she can breeze past me in her little cloud of flippy-skirted triumph.

  “Psshh. Right.”

  “No, hang on.”

  She glares at me and for a second I consider snapping something bitchy at her.

  But I’m tired of having an enemy. Now that I have someone I really need to avoid in the hallways, school is feeling way too small and spiky.

  “Really. You were the best audition all day. By far.”

  The faintest hint of confusion crosses Olivia’s face, and then when she smirks again, it’s almost friendly.

  “Well, that’s not really saying much, is it?”

  I smirk back. And when she turns and keeps walking, I feel like . . . I don’t know.

  Like maybe girls aren’t so hard to get along with, after all.

  I don’t know if I can make it this wknd.

  Ok

  I’m sorry

  I know. It’s ok.

  The screen glows at me, too bright in the dark room. Too insensitive to how hard this is.

  Soon.

  It’s so much and not nearly enough. But I can be strong. I have to be—this isn’t a hookup at a party. This is a real relationship.

  I’ll be here.

  There’s a long pause. Then: You’re incredible.

  “No, I’m not!” I whisper to the screen. “I’m dying! Come back now!”

  But what I type is: Aw, shucks.

  Then we send about a hundred smiley faces and hearts and even some flowers back and forth. It starts getting silly after that—weird hand symbols, cats, row after row of just pine trees—and I’m laughing in the dark, by myself. I don’t tell him about how I made an appointment to talk to Mrs. Walsh tomorrow, and Mom is going with me. About how school is kind of great and completely awful depending on whether I’m in the theater or the hallways or the art room, which feels so empty without him.

  Alex would listen if I wanted to talk. But I think I’m saving my energy for whatever I’ll have to tell Mrs. Walsh. And for now, it’s enough that I don’t feel alone.

  Maybe he feels the same way, because he doesn’t explain how he’s able to not be at school for so long, if he’s doing homework out there or what. After some more silly exchanges, he says goodnight. We don’t even bring up Homecoming again.

  I get it now, why Alex was so quiet when he came to Midcity. Sometimes you have bigger things on your mind. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about the people around you, it just means you’re thinking.

  I click off my phone and pad out of my room to the bathroom. Ayla’s brushing her teeth, but the door is open. I join her at the other sink and pick up the makeup remover.

  “What’re you laughing about?” she asks around her toothbrush.

  I shrug. “Nothing. Just, you know. Alex.”

  She raises her eyebrows in the mirror at me, then leans down to spit. “Alex Goode?”

  “Yeah. You know we’re friends.”

  “I thought he was back in Iowa, though.”

  “Well, Ayla, there’s this magical thing they’ve invented called phones, and people are able to communicate across vast stretches of space—”

  She reaches over and punches my arm—not softly—and I stop talking to laugh.

  “You’re a dork,” she says.

  “Well, let’s not get carried away. What about you? How’s Henry?”

  She gets the floss out of the cabinet. It always amazes me that my sister actually flosses her teeth. She seriously has to be the only almost-thirteen-year-old in the world who does.

  “He’s okay.”

  “Are you going to the Halloween dance with him?”

  She sighs like I’m killing her with all my stupid questions, but I know better because I’ve been there—what would really kill her is not talking about it.

  “Everybody goes in groups,” she says.

  “What about your birthday?”

  “What about it?”

  I lean forward, hitting my head lightly against the edge of the sink in frustration. “You have to give me a break, kid,” I groan. Standing back up, I finish wiping off my eye makeup, throw away the cloth, and ignore her rolling her eyes at me in the mirror.

  “Mom said I can only invite three people,” she finally says.

  “So? One of them could be Henry, right?”

  “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be a sleepover.”

  I lean my hip against the counter, crossing my arms over my tank top. “Or you could go out, maybe to the movies and out for pizza. That way, it could be a bigger group, and if you still want to have a sleepover, just a couple of girls could come home with you afterward. Right? And if everyone gets dropped off at the mall, you guys can hang out for a while without parents all over you.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “That’s maybe genius.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. Being alone with boys is kind of my specialty.”

  The words are out of my mouth before I remember that I’m not sure how I feel about that specialty of mine anymore . . . but then again.

  It’s not your fault Cory is a shithead.

  Yeah. Maybe that.

  “But you know,” I say as Ayla rinses her mouth and grabs the towel behind me. I’ve never noticed that she dries her face the same way I do. What a weird thing to run in the family. “I always try to spend my birthdays with Maddie or Maddie and Ryan. I’m sure Henry is great, but boys come and go. And it’s kind of nice being able to look back and remember how your friends were always there. Better memories.”

  Ayla shrugs. “But friends come and go sometimes, too.”

  “Yeah. But not the right ones.”

  She watches me for a minute without saying anything, then asks, “Why are you being so nice to me lately?”

  “I’m always nice,” I joke, but then I really stop to think about it. “Maybe it’s because of the storm and everything.”

  “What, like, life is short, so stop driving your little sister crazy?”

  “You’re still crazy, though, so I guess it didn’t work. . . .”

  I jump out of the way before she can punch me in the arm again. She scowls and puts the towel back on the hook.

  “I don’t know why, Ay. Why’ve you been so cranky all the time?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know.”

  I push off from the counter and wrap my arms around her shoulders. She stiffens up and gives me a look in the mirror, but I hang on. “Hey, I didn’t mean it. I know why you’re cranky—I’m the mean one, remember? We’re just sisters. And teenagers. All teenagers are supposed to be nutjobs. It’s like a law or something.”

  To my surprise, she keeps standing there for a minute before she pushes away.

  “Thanks for the idea,” she says. “For my birthday.”

  “No problem.”

  “But maybe it’ll just be a fri
ends thing. Like you said.” She shrugs again and then she squeezes past me and leaves the bathroom.

  I brush my teeth, skip the flossing like a normal person, then go back to my room and crawl under the covers. In the dark, the headlights of passing cars move the stripes of my blinds across the ceiling, then the wall, then out of sight. I think about what Mom said about worrying about me every day. She must feel the same about Ayla. She won’t want Ayla going on any kind of date this year, not even with a science nerd, not even in a group.

  But I wish she wasn’t so worried. Obviously I mostly wish she didn’t have to be—just the thought of anyone grabbing Ayla the way Cory grabbed me, even the times I liked being grabbed, makes me want to stab someone. But I also want Ayla to see how much fun it is to go out with a boy like Henry. Or whoever. To feel good about that—to feel all that self-confidence and equality that Dave’s always telling us we deserve. Mom thinks we deserve it, too, but I don’t know. Maybe all her worrying just pushes us away even harder.

  I wish there was something I could actually do that would help me, help Ayla. Help everybody. Even Cory, maybe. There’s still a tiny part of me that feels like he might’ve been confused, that night at Gabe’s house. Not that it makes it okay, I know that. But still. What if I could really explain it to him? What if he didn’t actually mean to hurt me?

  But if that was true, wouldn’t he have apologized?

  Either way I hate being left with this hopeless feeling, like there’s no way to make anything better. Like he’s a monster and that’s it, I was lucky to get away from the monster, lucky that he’s left me alone since that night.

  That word again: lucky. Like the storm.

  At least before the storm, though, we got a warning.

  My thoughts are fast-forwarding too quickly and I roll onto my side, pulling the blanket over my head. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Any of it.

  I have friends. I have a house with a roof and running water and electricity. And I have two tickets to Homecoming. Just in case.

  26

  “MY EYESHADOW LOOKS stupid. Is it too late to start over?”

  “Yes. Let me see—you look great!” I take Maddie’s shoulders and turn her to face the mirror again. “Look at yourself.”

  We both stare, side by side in front of her long bathroom counter, at the hour of meticulous hairstyling and makeup application we’ve just finished. It’s taken me so long to get my curls blown out that my arms hurt, but I have to say, we both look flawless. Maddie has a long braid over one shoulder and a thin headband with tiny fake diamonds. It looks like she has stars on her head.

  “I guess we should put on actual clothes now,” she says, smiling. We’re both in oversized button-down shirts, our dresses lying on her bed in her room behind us.

  “I’m sorry I’m your date,” I say for the fifteenth time. “At least I got you a corsage.”

  “You did? But I didn’t get you anything!”

  “It’s a wristlet. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.”

  She sticks out her tongue at me. “You’re a cornball, you know that?”

  I walk toward my dress, calling over my shoulder, “I thought about a giant balloon bouquet, but I know you’re too cool for that kind of thing.”

  “Shut yer piehole, Fuller.”

  We stare down at our dresses. “I can’t believe we’re ahead of schedule,” I say.

  “I think you not having a real date created a rift in the space-time continuum.”

  I look at Maddie. “I’m sorry, the what?”

  She laughs. “I don’t know. I think it’s a saying?” She perches on the bed near her pillows, out of the way of the dresses.

  I tug at the hem of my shirt. “Mads, my mom and I talked to Mrs. Walsh.”

  “What? Oh my God! Why didn’t you tell me? I wanted to go!” Maddie sort of half lurches across the bed, but stops before she touches me. Suddenly she seems unsure.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, even though I do know—I just hate talking about this. “She said I could press charges, but it would basically be my word against Cory’s. And Midcity doesn’t have a policy for, you know. Off-campus assault.”

  Maddie frowns.

  “I know.”

  “So that’s it? Just, like, get a lawyer or nothing?”

  “Well, she wants to petition for better sex ed, and she thinks I could help.” I sigh, circling the bed so I can sit on the other set of pillows. “Remember freshman year?”

  “You mean the assembly where they told us if we had premarital sex we were going to get knocked up or die of an STI? That one?”

  I snort. “Yeah. Well, Mrs. Walsh says the boys get a different one. I mean, I knew it was different—they talk about their penises or whatever—but they don’t get the whole thing about not drinking, and the no-sex thing is shorter.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She’s super pissed about it. I guess there are other girls at school, ones who’ve had similar things happen to them, and if we all get together . . .” I trail off, realizing that I shouldn’t tell Maddie who the other girls are. I can’t tell her the most surprising thing that happened at the meeting: Mrs. Walsh telling us that Olivia is a student coordinator for an anonymous support group at church, and I can contact her if I want to go.

  It made me feel a lot better and a lot worse, knowing that someone like Olivia is working through something bad, too.

  Maddie’s silent for a while, and I’m sure she’s thinking all the things I thought about when I was sitting in Mrs. Walsh’s office next to my mom. How it all seems like a lot of work for something that could be totally pointless. How I have to do what I can, obviously—but I can’t do much.

  “It has to get better somehow, right?” Maddie says. I guess she’s not feeling as hopeless as I do after all. “At least this is a plan.”

  “Yeah.” I lean over and put my head on Maddie’s shoulder, only worrying about my hair a little bit. “Thanks.”

  “And my mom’s a lawyer, remember. If you want to talk to her,” she says. I feel her body get kind of tense as she starts to say something else. “Rosie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me what happened? You know, that night? I know I was mad, and we’d all been drinking, but . . .”

  I don’t move. She’s still, too, waiting.

  “We already talked about this.”

  “Yeah, but not really. That day you came over to my house, you know? We talked about Cory. And me. But I didn’t really ask if you were okay, and I’ve been wondering . . .” She spins the ring on her right hand, the ruby birthstone band she brings out on special occasions. “I was thinking maybe that was why you didn’t tell me right away. Because you knew I’d make it all about me.”

  I sit up in surprise, and we look at each other.

  “It was about you,” I say.

  Her eyebrows dip even lower, like what I’ve said has caused her physical pain. “No, see, that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter that Cory was dating me or whatever. Something bad happened to you.”

  “Mads, I—”

  “Wait, just listen to me. I’m sorry that happened to you. And I’m sorry I didn’t say that sooner.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Maddie. I’m sorry I . . .” I look down at the bed, the intricate flower pattern on Maddie’s duvet cover swimming, twisting, blurring. “I’m sorry it happened to me, too.”

  A new kind of weight settles into the middle of my chest. Not the crushing heaviness of the secret, the truth of that night, but something different—the fact that I’m different. The fact that Cory made me different, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m one of those girls now. One of those girls that something bad happened to.

  I don’t want to be one of those girls. I want the fact that he stopped, that I’m actually okay—I want that to be the end of it.

  But it’s not. I’m not that lucky.

/>   “It’s going to be okay,” Maddie says softly.

  I want to believe her. In some ways, it’s already a lot more okay than it was. I have Maddie back; I never lost Ryan. Alex—I don’t know. He’s far away and it’s still new, but this thing between us feels real. And there’s my mom, going to Mrs. Walsh with me and doing a bunch of research on therapists, even if I don’t want to talk about this anymore. . . . My mom has been great.

  Maddie reaches over and takes my hands in hers. Her fingers are cool, soft. She squeezes.

  I’d give anything to go back. To undo all of it, or to make it what I really wanted it to be—Cory mistaking me for Maddie or just not understanding. In the back of my mind I’m always replaying it, over and over, imagining him letting go of me while the lights were still off. Imagining what it would have felt like to push and have the weight of his body lift. What it would feel like to be strong enough. Stronger.

  “Come on,” Maddie says, shaking my hands a little. “We don’t have to be sad about this all the time. Let’s go out and enjoy your night of freedom.”

  I look up at her. I’m not crying, but my eyes are hot. Tired.

  She leans over and rests her forehead on mine. “I’m with you, okay? School board, school dances, whatever. You’re not alone.”

  I nod. It’s true—I’m not alone.

  Maddie’s flowy, cream-colored dress practically glows. And even better, it’s as bohemian as the clothes she was wearing when she got back from Spain—the new style that suddenly feels more like her than anything else. The neckline is gathered and it has little puffed cap sleeves, and around the waist a ribbon crisscrosses her rib cage flatteringly.

  “You look like a Shakespearean lady,” I say. “We don’t exactly match, do we?” I’m in the bandage dress. It’s tight but that’s good—it holds me together.

  She shakes her head, but not like she’s disagreeing. “Your dress is hot. We should be going somewhere way more glamorous than a stupid school dance. We should be sneaking into a club or something.”