“Oh. How are the Whitmires? Are they going to the big game later?”
“Yeah. They’re fine. Trying to cook in Amelia’s apartment kitchen.”
I was really glad we decided to eat at the hotel because a steady stream of people came by to talk to Dad, and I think it kept his mind off his broken heart for a little while. At some point, a screen dropped down along the back wall and the UW game came on. People seemed to be staying put; in fact, most of the men began dragging their chairs over to form theater seating around the television. It appeared we were here for the duration, because Dad busied himself helping arrange things and then he dropped into a seat to watch the game. I kind of thought this might happen so I’d brought a book. I headed out to the lobby and found a soft chair with an ottoman right next to the huge fireplace. Families came in and out, stopping by the fire to talk and hug goodbye. Little kids ran around, playing chase, and tormenting their parents. The whole scene just looked and sounded like a perfect Thanksgiving. I tried not to focus on the fact that I was here without Wyatt. And that Mom was alone in Pittsburgh. And that Dad buried himself in work to keep from missing her so much.
Of course, I was jealous of these complete families. I closed my eyes and listened to them talk and I imagined that it was us. That the little brother and sister running around teasing each other were actually me and Wyatt. That the mom who snuggled under her husband’s shoulder with her feet up on the coffee table was my mom. That the husband who stared at her like he didn’t see anyone else was my dad. Like we’d gone back in time…before that horrible day messed up everything. And we were happy and blissfully naïve about the future. For a while, we could believe that this was the way it would always be.
To: [email protected]
Dad and I ate turkey at the hotel today. It tasted a lot like the school cafeteria. Did you eat with Catherine and David? Did you even miss us? I don’t know what’s going on with you anymore. I doubt you’ll read this so it doesn’t much matter if say that I’m really pissed at you right now. Why do you get to disappear and live in denial while Dad and I have to deal? I hope you find what you’re looking for soon so you can come home.
Meg
P.S. I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t really mean any of that.
School started again on Monday at a furious pace. Teachers seemed to believe we had to learn the entire curriculum before Christmas break. The little free time I had to see Henry would now be consumed by school projects. Work was just as hectic for me with all the holiday shoppers.
This had been an extraordinarily weird week at school. Football season ended abruptly when the team lost an early play-off game, and the players were taking their disappointment out on Thanett and anyone else close and weak enough to grab. Most of them had come to school with hangovers several days this week. Apparently, they were picked to win state this year, so they were bitter. I’d witnessed more fights in the hall in the last couple of days than I’ve seen in my entire school career. The tension was making me antsy and I found myself hanging back, out of groups, so I could keep an eye on the situation. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Finally the last bell rang on Friday and I breathed a sigh of relief. I could go to work and be around books and the peaceful people who loved books. The halls emptied out completely within five minutes, so I felt like I was in a horror movie by the time I made it to my locker. Being the new student, I had the misfortune of being given a locker next to the football locker room. The hall reeked constantly of sweat and other things that I couldn’t place, and I had to put up with Grayson finding reasons to rub up against me, and pollute perfectly good breathing air.
I decided for some reason that today would be a great day to clean out my locker. I pulled the green plastic trash can close to me and started reading through papers and throwing things away. About fifteen minutes into my cleaning frenzy, I heard laughter coming from the locker room. It was that laughter that only happens when a group of testosterone junkies gets together to do something totally sophomoric. I didn’t think much about it until I very clearly heard Thanett’s voice. It was unmistakable, of course, because of his CP.
At first I thought he might be telling a story, a joke, which made them laugh. But there was something not quite right. I knew Thanett well enough now to know the moods of his speech patterns, and this was a mood I hadn’t heard since my first day at Chapin High.
I put my ear to the door and heard Grayson say something to Thanett. Thanett argued, and did a pretty good job of standing up for himself, but then I heard a crash, like a bench had been turned over, then shuffling and a struggle.
In the quiet after, I found myself counting the seconds of silence…one…two…three…. If I didn’t hear anything by the time I got to five, I was going to have to go in there. When I whispered four, I heard a terrible, low moan that made my blood freeze. Then Thanett cried out, and I heard cruel laughter. Just as I steeled my nerve to open the door, Grayson pulled it open, sucking my hair into the vacuum created.
I put my head down and got ready to charge, but before I could move, an enormous, sweaty hand pressed into my chest and pushed me back.
“Hey, Thanett, your babysitter’s here to pick you up,” Grayson said with a laugh. “This room’s for men, Meg. You might see something you’ve never seen before.”
“What did you do to him? I could hear you, and you won’t get away with this, Grayson.”
“We didn’t do anything to Thanett. He’s just hanging out, helping us put up equipment, Meg.”
“I don’t believe you. I heard him!”
“See for yourself, darlin’.”
He opened the door wider and I saw Thanett sitting on a bench. He managed a small smile for me. “I’m fine, Meg,” he said. “We were just goofing off.”
I looked him over and saw that he was bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow. Someone had given him a towel but the blood was still flowing pretty freely.
“Thanett,” I whispered. “We need to go right now.”
Grayson pulled me roughly into the humid room and let the door slam behind us. I looked wildly around, counting the number of possible offenders in the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of their coach, and craning my neck to see if the door that just slammed shut was the only way out. The hair on my arms stood at attention almost painfully.
“You’ve got the wrong impression of me, Meg. I’m really sorry about that, because I’d love to get to know you better. I think we could be really good friends.”
“I don’t think so, Grayson. Pay attention. You are a moron.”
Grayson clicked his tongue at me. “A mouth that pretty shouldn’t insult people,” he drawled.
I inched away from him toward the door, but he grabbed my arm and somehow twisted it behind my back. I shouldn’t have underestimated his strength. I shouldn’t have called him a moron.
I heard Thanett stifle a moan. “Grayson, come on, man. Let her go. You’re gonna hurt her.”
“I would never hurt Meg,” Grayson answered, feigning innocence.
He leaned heavily into my back and crushed the breath out of me. This must have been his most effective move on a date. Thanett tried to get up but someone pushed him down onto the bench again.
“Meg, isn’t Henry waiting for you outside?” Thanett asked, hoping for help that just wasn’t coming. “He’ll be looking for you any minute.”
“What would Henry say if he walked in right now?” Grayson breathed. “He works a lot, doesn’t he? Is he actually even dating you? I’m way more available than he is.”
He laughed and touched my cheek and then spun me around and tried to kiss me. He still had my arms in his vice grip so there was nothing I could do but press my lips together and move my head from side to side. Grayson pulled his head back and watched me, amused.
Uncle David told me once that our thoughts are just whiffs of chemicals that combine in a miraculous way to form feelings and emotions—seems like a dangerous accident waiting to happen. A certain combinat
ion will create arousal. Another combination, just infinitesimally different, will create disgust. Right now, my chemicals were playing home movies. I know that’s weird. I think my brain was pulling up a memory of another time I was in way over my head. I pushed against Grayson with all I had, but I was remembering the time I took my mom’s razor from her bathtub and locked myself in my bathroom. I was twelve. I wasn’t planning to kill myself. I just wanted to shave my legs.
Cari Schoen, a girl at school, had noticed the hair on my legs that day and had called attention to it in math class. I hadn’t noticed it until she said something. My mom had always told me, “Don’t start shaving until you’re absolutely sure you want to be a slave to that for the rest of your life.” So shaving didn’t hold the cachet for me that it did for other girls. I filled my tub with warm water, got in and got busy with the razor, a cheap white and orange disposable. I’m sure if Mom had known I was ready, she would have bought me a nice, safe razor and spent an hour teaching me how to soften my skin first, and how to shave the delicate underneath places. Two seconds in, I sliced sideways through the tender skin under my knee. The cut, a good inch long, bled like nothing I’d ever seen before. The water in the tub turned a deep shade of red, and I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I was a hemophiliac. The sight of it, and the fear that now I was going to get busted in the worst way, made me sick. I stumbled out of the tub, held a towel to my leg, and vomited in the toilet.
When I realized the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding without proper medical attention, I pulled on my robe and stepped quietly out into the hall. Wyatt was there…doing push-ups outside his bedroom door.
He saw my face and knew something was up. “What’s wrong, Meg?”
“You promise you won’t tell Mom?”
“I promise. What’d you do in there?”
“I tried to shave my legs and I cut myself really bad. I don’t know how to make it stop bleeding.”
I cried and Wyatt sighed heavily.
“Keep the towel on it and go in your room. Don’t sit on your bed. Stay on the wood floor. I’ll be right there.”
He pushed up to stand in one graceful movement and strolled down the hall quietly to our parents’ bathroom.
In a few minutes, true to his word, Wyatt quietly came in and shut my door. He held gauze and tape and an assortment of bandages. I stretched my leg out for him to inspect it and he cleaned and bandaged it.
“Better wear jeans for a while if you don’t want her to know.”
“Okay.”
“Meg, you know you’ve got to take it slow until you learn how to do it, right? You can watch me shave tomorrow morning if you want.”
“Okay.”
Grayson’s voice pulled me back into the moment. He talked to his friends while maintaining his grip on me. I wondered how long this could possibly last, when suddenly he ran his finger across my jaw-line, the way Henry does, and that was more than I could bear.
I elbowed him in the stomach as hard as I could. It caught him off guard and he loosened his hold on my arm enough that I was able to pull my arms loose. I pushed him back as hard as I could and squeezed away from the locker and toward Thanett. I hadn’t even had time to get my feet properly under me before I saw that Grayson had shoved one of his enormous feet in my way. I tripped, and because I was moving so fast, I sort of took a flying, out-of-control, perfectly ironic, leap toward the army bunker window. My forehead connected with the small pane of glass.
Unfortunately for me, the window was already cracked, which as we’ve discussed before, meant a higher probability that this glass would shatter.
I heard it before I felt it—that unmistakable sound that I’ve spent so much time thinking about and hearing in my mind. When I finally felt it, it struck me how familiar the pain was. It was the same slicing burn that I felt every single minute for months after Wyatt died. It didn’t scare me because I knew it so well. I knew to surrender to it rather than fight. So I relaxed and finished my flight through the glass until the concrete wall caught my shoulder and bounced me back into the room and onto the floor.
Relief flooded me when it was over and I sat upright. I felt my arms and my head and my chest. I was still together. I was still complete. I didn’t break. It was just the window. I looked up and saw Thanett’s sickened, horrified face as he moved to kneel next to me. I heard the others shifting around me, staring, and I tasted the metallic warmth of blood. I waited to faint but I never did.
“God, Meg, have you always been such a spaz?” Grayson mumbled. “You’re worse than Thanett.”
Then, in the ultimate show of character, they turned and walked out of their smelly locker room. Spineless goons.
When the door clicked closed, Thanett went into triage mode. He jumped up and moved as quickly as his body would allow, bringing me a wet towel. When he dropped down next to me, I realized he was crying. The cold towel he pressed to my face stung like crazy; I winced and pulled away.
“Meg, you’ve got splinters of glass in your skin. We need to get you to the hospital. They’re going to have to pull them out. You’ll probably need stitches or something.”
“Look who’s talking,” I said as I watched a small river of blood snake down Thanett’s face and drip on his shirt. “Thanett, where’d you get that shirt?”
He glanced down and smirked at his shirt that said I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS.
“My cousin in Chicago found it online and mailed it to me. Appropriate, huh?”
“Yeah, tell him I need one, too, apparently.”
I jumped up and found a mirror. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. I did have a few small shards of glass in my cheek and a larger one in my forehead, but they weren’t deep.
“You know where the first aid kit is, right, Thanett?”
“Yeah, it’s right over here, but you really should let a professional do that.”
“I just want to pull the glass out. It’s hurting. Then I’ll let someone look at it.”
Thanett handed me the first aid kit and I dug around until I found a sealed package of forceps. I peeled it open and got to work on my left cheek. The glass was so loosely embedded that it practically fell out when I touched it with the forceps. My forehead was a little trickier because the splinter of glass was larger and it had worked its way upwards under my skin. I rocked it back and forth for a second, loosening it, and then I pulled. I checked it to make sure it was as intact as it should be. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Thanett shuddering as he watched me.
My cuts could have been so much worse, so I felt relieved. Maybe I wouldn’t need stitches. I found sterile cleansing pads and gauze and did my best to hold the cuts closed while I bandaged them.
Then I made Thanett sit down on a bench and I worked on his cut.
“How did you get this?”
“The short version? I hit my head on the corner of the bench when Shawn pulled both my feet out from under me. They love that I can’t react quickly enough with my arms to stop a fall. Ah, the fun of high school, eh?”
“Thanett, do I even have to say that I forbid you from seeing them ever again?”
He smiled at my feeble attempt to lighten the tension, and reached up and tousled my hair.
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Meg. You’re the absolute last person I wanted to see when that door opened. No offense.”
I realized suddenly how embarrassing this must be for him—how emasculating to have a girl witness his humiliation. It’s got to be like getting caught with your pants down around your ankles. I forced back the tender urge I felt to hold him and just cry. I put a butterfly bandage on his cut and then surveyed the broken glass on the floor.
If it hadn’t just cut lines through my face, I would think it was sort of pretty. Some of the glass pieces were smeared with my blood, and they looked like the beginnings of stained glass. The larger shards were lying on the concrete floor and the sun came in at just the right angle to reflect off them. I
t had sort of a prism effect, throwing little rainbows around on the legs of the wooden benches. Thanett caught me staring at the glass.
“Are you thinking how lucky you were? How any of those bigger pieces could have pierced your carotid?”
I laughed. “Not exactly. I’m thinking that glass is deceptive.”
He sighed. “You never say what I expect you to say. Let’s get out of here.”
I put my arm through his and we walked down the hall and out of the building—leaving the mess behind us. The janitor would have the shock of his life. We were the walking wounded, survivors of the timeless battle between good and evil, and we’d lived to fight another day.
“Wanna ride to the hospital?” I asked. “Or should we call Annie?”
“If it’s not too much of an imposition, I think I’ll ride with you and pass on the call to Annie,” he said with a wry laugh.
“Do you have your insurance card?”
We both climbed in the Jeep and dug our cards out of our wallets. We drove to the little local ER together, instead of to Wind River Books. The triage nurse asked if we had been attacked and wanted to file a police report. We considered it for a second, our eyes met, and wordlessly we agreed not to call the police. “No, it was just an accident,” I said, with more certainty than I felt.
They cleaned my cuts with a strong astringent that burned and made nerves jump all the way down to my feet. And they used longer forceps to dig around for glass I might’ve missed. I ended up needing two stitches in my forehead but the cuts in my cheek were only superficial and should heal without any scars at all.
Thanett needed five stitches, and when we met up again in the waiting room, we compared our injuries. I drove us to the bookstore and parked. We both sighed, dreading the inevitable panic that Annie would feel when she saw us.
Thanett squeezed my hand. “Might as well get this over with. You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to. I can make an excuse for you.”
Glass Girl Page 16