I don’t remember too much from that night, but I recall my head flopped forward against her car’s dashboard when she was trying to strap me up. Maybe the whack of impact woke me for a second, cleared my mind. “Do you hate yourself enough yet?” she asked me, but not in a mean way, and then gently settled me back into the cradle of the passenger seat. I felt, for the first time in months, safe. Maybe even loved. Nothing brings two girls together like a violent murder, right?
As it turns out, Lindsey’s intervention was well timed, in that 1) I woke up with salsa in my ears, 2) Jared is almost certainly a man-whore, and 3) drinking my way to oblivion never actually got me there.
I’m not at all into Jared now. Or probably even then. Plus, over the summer, he grew a scraggly goatee sort of thing. And got a skull-and-crossbones tongue stud. Seriously, yuck.
Now that I have to share a tennis court with him, I’m hoping he’s forgotten the whole tongue and salsa thing.
“’Sup?” Jared says, nudging my elbow as we walk to the courts.
“’Sup?” I echo.
He hangs back then, a half-step behind me, and I know he is looking at my butt. Smooth.
“Doubles,” Mark says, way too eager. “Me and Charlie against you guys?”
I suck at tennis, and I’m pretty sure Jared sucks, too. Meanwhile Mark is on the school team. Not sure about Charlie.
I shrug. Jared gives a cocky nod. We take our places on the court. Jared has the ball and gets in serving position; I go up front. Charlie stands catty-corner from me, across the net, while Mark plays backcourt.
When Jared serves the ball, it goes high, and the “Jared sucks at tennis” theory is confirmed. Mark could have run down to the corner store, grabbed a bag of beef jerky, and made it back in time to slam the ball low and fast across our net. I dash for the return but swing at empty air. The ball whizzes past me and hits Jared in what must be, judging from his howl, boy parts.
“Holy MOTHER!” He holds himself, dancing around in a sort of painful hoochie-coochie move.
“Ooooh.” Mark cringes.
“What’s up, JJ?” Coach Flanagan barks from two courts over. He jogs over to assess the damage, pats Jared on the shoulder, and tells him to “walk it off.”
“Give him a few minutes,” Flanagan tells us, then jogs back to the group he’d been supervising, which consists of Amanda Wells and two girls named Allison—all from the girls’ soccer team.
Mark bounces the ball. Twitchy. Eager to get back in the game.
Charlie stretches. I stretch.
He bends. I bend.
I realize I’m mirroring him, and I start to feel awkward about it, so when he bounces on the balls of his feet, I intentionally do the opposite. Only as I squat down, I realize that looks awkward, too. So then I stop doing anything and try just to stand there. Normal. One hand by my side, one on my hip.
He gives me a little smile, like he knows what’s going on in my head. Which of course he can’t. Right?
There’s something different about him today. Maybe it was that poem. Reading it, writing it? Something. He seems livelier, more here. And I feel inexplicably glad about it.
“So, you good?” Mark calls to Jared, who is limping along the back line of the court, still semi-hunched. “Man up! Let’s get this party started.”
Jared straightens. Grimaces. “Whose serve is it?” he asks, his voice tight with pain.
“Mine,” Mark calls.
I send Jared a “sorry” glance. I wish I could tell him there’s no need for him to act all tough. It doesn’t matter to me, and he’s not impressing anyone else either. But that’s not the kind of thing you say out loud. At least not to a guy.
Instead, I ask Mark, “What’s the rush?”
“Is there a problem?”
“What’s. The. Rush?”
“JJ’s good,” Mark says, though Jared clearly is not. It kind of makes me want to kick Mark in the gonads and see how good he is about it.
Jared hobbles over to his position on court.
“Give him a few minutes,” Charlie says to Mark. “Come on, dude.”
Mark gives Charlie a surprised quirk of the eyebrows. And I can see why. For the past year, Charlie has been stumbling around like a zombie, and Mark has been there for every stumble, propping him up, spoon-feeding him brains. And now here Charlie is telling Mark what to do.
“Yeah, okay,” Mark says. He walks over to the fence, his back to us, tossing the ball in the air and catching it as he goes.
I grin at Charlie. Not the wide-eyed Charlie from before, exactly, but not the sleepwalker from last week either. Someone in between. He almost grins back.
What Love Is
The good thing about having gym last period is the showers. I actually have five minutes to take one.
When I get to the parking lot, my ponytail is still wetting my neck, and I smell like lavender.
Lindsey leans against the hood of my VW, chewing gum. Mrs. Barrow’s transmission went out in her Chrysler, so for the last two days she’s been driving Lindsey’s Toyota to get her back and forth to her job downtown. Which means I’ve been giving Lindsey a ride to and from school.
“Hey, beautiful,” I say. “What’s up?”
Lindsey’s legs seem extra long today, maybe because her skirt seems extra short. Definitely more than an index card above the knee, which is school regulation. But adults always cut her slack. It’s that whole wise-beyond-her-years thing she has going for her. Since she was fifteen, she’s carried two part-time jobs—night cashier at the Big Lots and teachers’ helper at the Baptist after-school program. Lindsey stretches her gum from her mouth like pulled taffy, rolls it into a wad between her fingers, then plops it back in and keeps chewing.
She tugs my wet hair. “Aren’t you cold?”
“No, Mother.” I shrug Lindsey’s hand off my neck and eye her skirt. “Aren’t you?”
She does a twirl. “It’s the price of looking fabulous.”
“You’re in a mood.”
“Robert asked me out!”
“Linds!” I give the perfunctory squeal. “It’s about time!”
“He was real smooth about it. He asked me if I’d be at the game this Friday, and then said maybe he’d catch me after.”
That doesn’t sound like much of a date to me. It sounds, in fact, like an offer to be his third-string plan for a hookup. A distinct possibility from what I know of Robert Leuger. Not that I know much. He was sweet and clueless enough in middle school, the kind of kid you’d share your peanut butter sandwich with because he lost his lunch, but he had some sort of freaky growth spurt the summer of our ninth-grade year, and started lifting weights or something, because now he struts the halls of Midland High, a football deity, ripped and blond and breaking hearts.
Lindsey has been drooling over him since he winked at her after the first pep rally of the year, and now she’s taking what was probably a random comment from him like it’s some kind of contract. She’s super excited, though, so I put on my poker face and duck into the car.
“What?” she asks me when I pull out of the parking lot.
“What what?” I say.
“It’s all over your face.”
“My skin?” I tease, turning onto the main road. “Yeah, I generally leave it there.”
But I know what she’s saying—that she can tell I’m not convinced about the whole Robert thing. So much for my poker career.
“Really,” she says. “What?”
“It’s just,” I say, “you have to be careful with guys like—”
“It’s Robert,” she says. “Robert. He’s not one of those—”
“I know, Robert’s great. But he might be looking for a hookup and you—”
“I’m what?”
“Well, you’re the best person I know at telling everyone else what to do—”
“Wha—?”
“No, not like that,” I cut in quickly. “Good advice. You give everyone really good advice. But you don�
�t have your head on straight when it comes to that guy. It’s like you can’t hear your own sense. What is it you always say? ‘Think it through.’ Well, that’s what you need. You need some distance.’”
She crosses her arms. The radio fills the silence between us. An 80s power ballad. I walk down that road… alone, girl… alone. And there at the end, I find what you left. Who’s to blame?
“Because that’s what love is all about, being distant and logical.” Her sarcasm thrums like an out-of-tune guitar.
“Is that what love is?” I ask, serious, but then I start to sing full throttle with the song, “Is that my heart? Is that my heart on the road in the rain?”
She shoves my knee, but gently enough that it doesn’t screw with my driving. “Jerk.”
“Sorry.” I let out a little laugh. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“That makes two of us,” she says, and I can tell she’s already forgiven me.
Lost Twins
“Maroon or silver?” Lindsey holds up a dark red T-shirt in one hand and a silver tank top in the other.
“The shiny one?” I guess.
“This is not a test,” Lindsey says. She tosses the maroon tee on the floor of her closet and slips the tank top over her head.
“Yeah.” I take another look at her. “Definitely that. It brings out the sparkle in your eyes.”
She bats her lashes at me. “Toss me my mascara,” she says.
I take the tube from the table beside her bed and throw it. It hits her in the forehead and bounces to the floor. “Ow.” She bends down to pick up the mascara, rubbing her head. “Remind me never to play softball with you.”
I stick out my tongue and lean back on her pillows.
“So what are you going to wear?” she asks me.
I look down at the jeans and pale-green T-shirt I already have on. “Jeans,” I say. “T-shirt.”
She checks the clock on her phone. “There’s time for us to swing by your house if you want to change. Or you could borrow something—”
“Come on.” I turn over on my side and watch her poke a dangly sea-glass earring through her left lobe. “It’s a football game, not a fashion show.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. And it’s too cold for that skirt. Or is it a belt?”
Lindsey wiggles her rump.
“I think you might be sending Robert the wrong idea.”
“Maybe it’s the right idea.” She gives me a wicked grin.
“Okay. Just don’t get your heart all wrapped around him. Promise me,” I say. “For your own good.”
“All right. I promise.”
But I can tell she’s lying.
“Anyway,” she goes on, “what’s with you? You didn’t go all Mama Bear when I was seeing Eddie.”
“You didn’t care about Eddie. Eddie was just a—whatever. Someone to make out with.”
“Ouch. Poor Eddie.”
“Ouch, but true.”
“Maybe that’s what you need. Someone to make out with,” she teases. “It would get you off my back.”
As I drive to the stadium, Lindsey rolls her window down. The air is oddly warm for late September, and things smell wrong. More earthy rot than crisp leaves.
Instead of sitting in the stands, we find a spot on the grassy hillside near a goalpost. From here, we can see the little bucket of our lives. On the left side in maroon and silver, the people from our school, all the ones we scribble and eat and yawn and gossip and pee with every day. Then, on the right, a mirrored universe in blue and gold. A mirrored universe that has arrived here tonight for the express purpose of beating our butts in some stupid manly game that requires helmets and swearing and sweat.
I wonder if our doppelgangers are out there, too, just across the field. I spy big, blond Maria Madison in her short maroon skirt with her silver pom-poms and wonder if the big blond girl in the short blue skirt with the gold pom-poms on the opposite side is her secret identical other.
If so, where’s my lost twin?
She and I must have parted ways over a year ago. As far as I know, she never stood over the casket of a mangled dead girl, certain it could have been her inside. So wherever Twin Me is and whatever she’s doing, she’s not quite me anymore.
And ironically enough, neither am I.
“Hey, you in there?” Lindsey asks, waving her palm in front of my face. “Whatcha thinking?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Everything.”
“Philosopher,” she says, then squeals. “Ooh! There’s Robert!”
The band has started to play and our team rushes on the field, breaking through a big paper banner that reads SPARTANS! in hand-painted letters.
From this distance and in his uniform, Robert is unrecognizable. We know, though, that he is number twenty-nine. “Lucky twenty-nine,” he says, whatever that means.
Luck isn’t with him tonight, though. I don’t know much about football, but even I can tell that what happens on that field isn’t good. Dropped balls are skittering across the turf like runaway jumping beans. Boys are piling up on other boys. There’s the whack of helmet on helmet and the ooof of shoulder to gut.
By the fourth quarter, the scoreboard reads 7–32 in favor of Chilton when the sky crackles and a few drops of rain plop down. With a sizzle, the sky flares. The lights in the stadium surge.
A ref blows his whistle, calling the players off the field. People stand. Some put on ponchos and sit back down. Others make a run for the covered underbelly of the stadium. Lindsey looks up and a fat raindrop splashes her eye. She wipes it, smearing her mascara down her cheek.
“Come on.” She pulls us both up, and together, as the rain starts to pour, we run toward an opening in the cement flank of the home stands.
We lean against the archway, out of the rain, but soaked, shivering. Lindsey’s top is like something from a wet T-shirt contest. I look down. Mine is not much better. Even though we’re away from the crowd, I fold my arms over my chest, covering my nipples the best I can.
The rain starts to come in slants and we step back, deeper into the stands.
“Let’s get some coffee,” Lindsey says.
“Hot chocolate,” I say.
She grins. “Hot chocolate!”
Fifteen minutes later, we sip our drinks, which are closer to warm brown water than melted chocolate, but whatever. “Sorry,” I say.
“For what? You didn’t know the line was going to be so long.” She takes a sip. “And you didn’t brew this god-awful stuff.”
“Not that,” I say. “I mean for the game. I know how excited you were to see Robert play.”
“Oh!” She laughs. “Nah, I’m good.” She wags her eyebrows. “The sooner the game officially ends, the sooner we start with the post-game activities.”
“Ah,” I say. “Well, this isn’t letting up. They’ve got to call it, right? So what’s next?”
“Robert said he’d text me when he’s free,” she says. “You can go on. His truck is here. I saw it in the parking lot.”
“I thought the players had to ride the bus.”
“Not seniors.”
I consider leaving. I’m already soaked, so running the rest of the way to my car isn’t going to make much difference. But I tell her I’ll wait.
“I don’t want to get wet,” I joke.
After a few more minutes, a voice on the loudspeaker calls the game and the crowd thins. People make their way through the parking lot in zigzags, avoiding puddles, getting drenched.
Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Thirty. Lindsey checks her phone for the millionth time, but the only message she gets is from her sister, Veronica, telling her to pick up toilet paper on the way home. The rain putters to a stop.
The stadium is pretty much empty now. It’s just us, the old Lions Club guys who run the concessions stands, and the stadium staff.
“You gals all right?” a gray-haired lady wheeling a mop bucket asks.
“We’re good,” I say. “
We’re waiting for someone.”
“The gates are closed, sweetheart. Nobody can get in.”
“One of the players,” I say. “He’s probably showering or something.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “The buses have already left.”
I look at Lindsey. Her bangs hang in limp coils over her forehead, and the smeared mascara has dried to her cheek.
“Let’s wait outside,” she says.
“Sure,” I say, and we head out.
The parking lot is mostly bare, dark and wet.
“Where’d Robert park?” I ask.
Lindsey points to an empty quadrant of the lot. No truck. No nothing. Light from the lampposts makes yellow streaks on the dark pavement.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “We must have missed him,” I say.
Under my arm, Lindsey’s shoulders start to vibrate, like she’s trying unsuccessfully to hold something in.
“Hey, hey,” I say and turn to hug her. Her tears follow the same silent path down her cheek that the rain had, this time washing the mascara away.
Red
The first time I saw Charlie Hunt, we were ten. He was wearing a red baseball cap and running across the school yard after Mrs. Domingo’s sandy-furred mutt.
“Catch ’im for me, honey, can you catch my Harvey?” Mrs. Domingo called in a voice that was both high and gravelly. She stood in her bathrobe at the end of her front walk and swatted at the air. Her house, a white bungalow with slate-blue shutters, sat across the street from the elementary school, and her mangy little dog was always breaking out. “Harvey! Here, Harvey!” she called. I later learned the kids had renamed the dog Humpty because of his doggish compulsion to hump random people’s legs.
Charlie was wiry then. He hadn’t yet hit his growth spurt, and his legs were gangly as he sprinted across the field. I was new to fourth grade. It was October when we moved here, so everyone knew everyone except me. Our teacher, Mr. Brewster, a sad man who wore fuzzy sweaters, had given me one of those fat, log-like Tootsie Rolls when we broke for recess. He’d done it out of pity, but to me it still tasted sweet. I had shoved the entire candy into my too-small mouth, and the brown juice running down my chin turned icy in the air.
How She Died, How I Lived Page 4