Please stop, Emily thought.
When she reached him, he handed her the stapled pages and said, “Nicely done. If I gave out A-plusses, this would’ve earned one.”
Emily’s voice, when she first started reading, sounded okay. Smooth and amplified. But soon, as she stood there realizing everyone was watching and listening and wondering what on earth had garnered such praise from Johnson, her larynx began to vibrate.
She tried not to hear whispering. A snicker. Tried not to think about Trix out in the city somewhere, leaving blue lipstick marks on cigarettes and … other things. Tried not to wonder if Ryan was wishing he were still with Jessie Turner.
There was a small part of Emily that was proud of her play, yes. She’d worked hard on it and liked that Johnson recognized this. It made her feel smart. But mostly she wanted to not be in front of the class, in that moment, giving their judgmental souls her words.
By the time she finished, her breath was coming in long puffs and sweat dotted her upper lip. She took her seat, fanning herself with her paper.
“Can anyone tell me what was so astonishing about Ms. Lucas’s work?” Mr. Johnson asked.
Shut. Up.
No one raised his or her hand or spoke up.
“Two girls are waiting for the phone to ring. Presumably for a boy to call. Their conversation, typical of a conversation between teenagers, goes nowhere,” Johnson says. A few kids chuckle. “Yet you can see them trying to figure out their place in the world, in the universe, just by reading this round and round dialogue. Good work, Ms. Lucas,” he said.
“Thank you,” Emily mumbled, relieved to be back behind her desk.
She slouched down in her seat and stuffed the paper into her notebook. It wasn’t that she was ungrateful to have gotten a good grade. She just wasn’t in the mood to have been singled out.
She was never in the mood to be singled out.
35. A Disappointment to Everyone
FIONA’S STUBBY FINGERS were greasy from fake popcorn butter. She wiped them on a paper towel and rubbed her forehead. “What am I gonna do with you?” she wailed.
Trix sat on the one living room chair. Rodney wasn’t there, for once. He was out applying for a job at a tire shop. “Nothing,” Trix said. “As usual.”
Her mother looked at Trix from under her still-shiny hand. “Oh, so that’s what this was about? You’re trying to get my attention?”
Trix wrapped a coppery curl around her pinky. She considered this. Had she done it to get her mother’s attention? Her father’s? Emily’s?
She didn’t think so. She’d just gotten carried away with Marjorie.
“And in the school bathroom?” her mother hissed. “Good God, Trixie. What were you thinking?”
That was the point. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been living and feeling. She shrugged. And then she did something unthinkable. She pulled out her pack of cigarettes and lit one up right in front of Fiona.
Mouth hanging open, her mother stood and sputtered. “You put that out right now. What’s wrong with you? That could kill me! And you. You know what those things have done to my lungs.”
Trix just looked at her mom and took a drag.
“You put that out or you put yourself out. You hear me? I will not have a smoker living under this roof!”
Standing, cigarette hanging from between her lips, Trix went into her bedroom and threw some clothes, makeup, and her sketchbook into a small suitcase she owned but never used. She grabbed David’s cardboard box and some dry food. He was outside, so she went to find him.
Her mother stuck her head out the door. “Where are you going?”
Around her cigarette, Trix yelled back, “I don’t know yet.” She called for David, shook his food around in the box so he’d hear it.
“Don’t get more mixed up with that awful girl who got you into this trouble.”
“How do you know it wasn’t me who got her into trouble?”
Her mom began to cry then. “Put out that cigarette and get back in here.”
But it was too late. Trix realized she couldn’t stay, couldn’t watch her mother continue to go through men like tissues. She didn’t want to live in a trailer on Aurora anymore. She didn’t especially want to be the girl who hosted a rainbow party in the school bathroom either. But that sort of life seemed to be her destiny for now.
She did squash the cigarette butt out under her boot. “I can’t,” she said.
Trix saw David then, sitting on the corner of someone else’s stoop and licking his front paw. She strode over and scooped him up. He purred as she stuffed him into his box.
She walked away to the sound of her mom weeping, the rush of traffic, and the mews of David, wondering where they were going.
About a half mile down Aurora, after enduring catcalls and honks, she sidelined into the parking lot of a carpet remnant store and opened her crappy cell phone to call her dad. Her phone battery, though, was dead. Damn!
Shoving the phone back into her pocket, she continued to the nearest bus stop and waited. She poked her fingers into David’s box and tried to comfort him.
She got on the first bus that showed up and calculated how to get down to Beacon Hill where her dad lived. It would take two transfers. Fine. She had nothing but time.
Earbuds in, cat box on her lap, and mind numbed, she rode through the early evening hoping that when she got to her dad’s place he wouldn’t turn her away.
36. Nonparent #2
HE LIVED ON one side of a ramshackle duplex. Where a lawn should be there was a patch of dirt and a sagging, three-legged carport covering his truck. Trix had been there a few times before. It always smelled like weed and mildew.
She knocked three times, worried he wouldn’t be there even though his truck was, or that he’d have passed out on the couch, and trying to decide if she’d sit on the concrete steps to wait for him or go find somewhere else to hang out. Finally, though, the door swung inward and her dad stood there wearing jeans with no shirt, his hair twist-tied back, as usual.
“Huh?” he said, clearly out of it.
“I need to stay here for a few days,” Trix said.
“Whaddya mean a few days?”
She pushed past him, set her stuff down, and opened the windows. “Mom kicked me out.” This was an exaggeration, she knew. But she needed her dad’s sympathy so he’d let her stay. “God almighty it reeks in here.”
He let the door close and followed her in. Clumsily, he pushed a stack of papers off a torn, plaid couch and offered her a place to sit.
Still standing, she crossed her arms over her chest. David meowed, wanting out of his box. She freed him and her dad chortled. “That damn cat again?”
“He’s sweet. And he does all his business outside, remember? He’s no trouble at all. Swear.”
Her dad shook his head and buried his face in his hands like he couldn’t believe his bad luck to be saddled with his teenage daughter and her fleabag pet. “Why’d your mother kick you out?” His words were slurred and his eyes glassy. She hated seeing him like this. He looked like a moron, trying to pretend he was some stoner kid, when really he was just a pathetic middle-aged man who’d never grown up.
“You really want to know?” Trix asked. She felt her determination leave, replaced by deep exhaustion. She scooped up David and sat on the cracked coffee table, sighing. “I got suspended from school.”
“For what?” Her dad took her spot on the couch.
“For being slutty.”
This made him cackle. “What do they care what you do off school grounds?”
“It was on school grounds.”
He looked at her, his eyes seeming to clear some.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Okay?” She couldn’t come right out and say how contrite she was or how cheap she felt. She had to keep the badass wall up. Because otherwise … well, she couldn’t think about what would happen otherwise.
Leaning forward and pointing at her, he said, “Don’t you go ge
ttin’ yourself knocked up, ruin your whole life.”
She wasn’t about to let that happen and she told him so.
He glowered as if he didn’t believe her. “Like mother, like daughter,” he said.
“No!” Trix barked. But beneath her rebellious facade, she knew. She could end up just like Fiona. Sure, maybe Fiona’s clothes hadn’t been as cool and maybe her artistic talent had gone neglected after having kids, but deep down, weren’t Trix and her mother more alike than Trix wanted to admit? “I will not be her. Ever.”
“Then you need to get yourself on a different track, girly,” her dad said.
He went into the kitchen, grabbed two beers out of the fridge, and handed her one. He lay down on the couch and turned his head sideways to take long draws from his bottle. He belched, and repeated, “You need to get yourself on a different track.” Then he closed his eyes.
“I’m trying Dad. I’m working and saving, okay?”
“Saving for what? Whiskey sours at the Buckaroo?” he slurred.
“A sewing machine. So I can make my designs and get them out there. Designing clothes is all I’ve ever wanted and I thought you knew that!”
Her dad grunted, then began to snore.
Trix chewed her lips in frustration. She threw a ratty afghan over him, turned the TV on low and sat with David, watching until she, too, fell asleep.
37. Friendship Mashup
EMILY HAD BEEN reduced to rolling her jeans so it looked like she actually wanted them short. One day in early November, she folded up the hems a couple times, threw on a charcoal gray sweater and red scarf and waved shyly at Ryan when she saw him in school.
“Hey Bean,” he said, distracted by a broken zipper on his backpack.
“Hey.” She remembered a day she’d come into school when he’d pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and said, “You,” as he gazed into her eyes.
This was nothing like that. He seemed different. Flustered. His eyes were red and dull. Stubble dotted his jaw. A big coffee stain was splattered across one sleeve.
He glanced down the corridor, then looked sheepish. “I have to finish a report before first period starts.”
“No sweat,” she said. “Lunch?”
“Aw, wish I could. I have to make up lab time in McD’s.” Which was shorthand for Mr. McDouglas, a chemistry teacher everyone loved because of his tough yet fair way of instructing. “Maybe we can study tonight.”
“Okay,” she said too quickly.
“I just have to check something first though. Let me get back to you.”
She watched him turn and move away.
Just then, Trix’s new friend Marjorie sidled up and said, “You should pick on someone your own height.”
Emily died a little inside as Ryan caught the criticism, turned and stopped. She waved him away and pivoted so her back was to him.
Trix was nowhere to be found. If she had been there and siding with Emily, she would’ve come up with something like, “You should pick on someone with your own IQ.” But Trix was not there and definitely not on Emily’s side.
“I thought you were suspended,” Emily said.
Marjorie lowered her voice and her eyelids and murmured, “That was last week. Freak.”
Emily couldn’t contain her anger. “You’re the one with the black lipstick and bullring in your nose, and I’m the freak?”
Marjorie slowly raised her foot behind her, then kicked a nearby locker with her platform boot. The chaos in the hallway rendered her kick soundless, but still, Emily jumped.
After Marjorie sauntered away, Emily escaped to the bathroom and flattened herself against the tile wall’s heater vent.
She thought she was blessedly alone, until she heard a voice ask, “Getting warm?” It was Kennedy, the third Farkette, applying lip gloss and looking at Emily in the mirror.
Emily did not need a run-in with one of them. Not then. She said, “I guess.”
Kennedy tossed her gloss into a pocket of her tote bag. She came over and stood right in front of Emily “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about April and Vanessa. The way they treat you and Trix. I’m not a part of that. Just FYI.”
Right. Emily didn’t trust Kennedy. Kennedy was trying to lure her in by creating a false sense of security. She’d be nice to Emily, get her to let her guard down, and then the Farkettes would pounce in some sort of humiliating way. They’d tackle her and write Jolly Green Giant across her forehead in lipstick or take and circulate video of Emily in the locker room.
“Okayyy,” Emily said warily. Wanting Kennedy to leave, she rifled through her backpack to make herself look busy.
But Kennedy had decided to hang around, seemed ready to talk more. “So, you and Ryan McElvoy, huh?”
Kennedy was gorgeous with long black hair and faintly Filipino features. Today she wore tights, tall boots, and a baggy dress. She stood with her hands in her pockets.
“Yes,” Emily said. Why did everyone find that so hard to believe? But then, she sometimes found it hard to believe, to relax into it and enjoy the ride. Especially the last few days when it had become clear that something was super off with him.
“Hmm.”
The bell rang, an echoey trill that never failed to launch Emily right out of her skin.
“So obnoxious,” Kennedy muttered. Then, to Emily, “So you’ll remember what I said, right? I am not April or Vanessa.”
Emily couldn’t stop what slithered from her mouth next, like a long snake impossible to gulp down. “Why are you friends with them?”
Kennedy shrugged. “Because they’re nice when you get to know them. Which is to say, they’re just as insecure and lonely as the rest of us. They just don’t hide it as well.” She then gathered her tote bag, slung it over her shoulders and, with a small wave, left the bathroom.
Lagging a few minutes behind, Emily thought about what Kennedy had said. April and Vanessa seemed the least insecure, lonely people she could imagine. But then, from all the anti-bullying assemblies the school loved to hold, she knew that insecurity was what usually drove meanness. Hence, Trix’s recent crappy treatment of her.
Emily proceeded through the rest of her day, trying not to think about Marjorie and their little confrontation first thing that morning.
After school she glimpsed Trix. She was crossing 15th, smoking, and talking animatedly with Marjorie. They stepped up onto the curb in tandem and laughed about something.
Emily’s chest clenched. And she knew her heart was just an organ, just a pumping muscle, but it felt, truly felt, like it had squeezed into a hard, hurting fist.
38. Weary
TRIX WAS TIRED of Emily’s wounded gaze, like she was trying to look inside her, to figure her out. Trix didn’t know what the big mystery was. All Emily had to do was turn her scrutiny toward her annoyingly sane life, maybe listen to how she talked to Trix as if she were some loser always making the wrong choices.
Trix left school that Friday without bothering to get books from her locker. She went out into the overcast afternoon where she scanned the throngs for Marjorie.
It was Emily who came through the doors, though, without her boy toy for once. “Hey,” she said to Trix. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Oh yeah?” Trix tapped ash off the end of her cigarette and tried not to meet Emily’s eyes.
“Can we talk?”
“I don’t see the point.”
“You don’t see the point?” Emily hoisted her backpack further up her shoulder. “We’re best friends, or we were, and we’re not even speaking. I miss you, Trix.”
I miss you too, Trix thought. Then chastised herself. What was there to miss? They had nothing in common anymore. Keep the wall up. Keep the wall up. But even as she chanted this over and over in her head, a lump the size of a robin’s egg rose in her throat. She had to get rid of Emily or she was going to cry. And if she started crying, she didn’t know that she could stop. Besides, Marjorie would be out any minute.
“I don’t have
anything to say to you,” she said, making her eyes white hot lasers of cruelty. “Okay? Nothing. Now leave me alone.”
Emily stepped back as if she’d been slapped. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”
“Exactly.”
Just then Marjorie burst forth with Isaac and her gang of hoodlums. She gave Emily a hearty sneer, which Trix thought was a little much, then pulled Trix away.
“We’re going to shoot BBs at fishing boats,” she crowed.
As Trix was dragged down the sidewalk, she took one last look at Emily, who stood hunched with Ryan now. He rubbed her back and said something into her ear.
The ants started in behind Trix’s knees this time, skittering relentlessly over her calves and around her heels. The tickle of their dainty feet was excruciating.
She’d get drunk that night, she decided. So drunk and numb she wouldn’t be able to feel the tiny bodies traipsing across her skin. “Do you have anything?” she asked Marjorie. Shorthand, of course, for anything illegal, anything fun.
Marjorie sucked hard on her cigarette. “Don’t I always?”
39. The Stepmom Conundrum
EMILY COULDN’T STOP thinking about emailing her mom. Her real mom who lived as an artist in Bisbee, Arizona with a possible new husband.
She typed several drafts of what she wanted to say, deleting it all and starting again. She fretted. What if her mom never responded? What if she told Emily she had no interest and to please leave her alone? Or worse, what if she wrote back, Who are you?
Frustrated, she wandered down to the family room. She watched a celebrity gossip show while Melissa played with a new pedometer she’d just gotten online. Melissa walked around the room, looked at the digital display, took several more steps, did a few lunges, then punched buttons.
Just after a story about Michelle Williams and Matilda, Emily hit mute on the remote and said, “Is it, like, totally odd being a stepmom?”
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