Someone I Wanted to Be

by Aurelia Wills

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Got anything vegan?”

  We went into the kitchenette. I pulled open the pink cupboard doors, which I suddenly realized were brown and sticky around the handles, and pushed around some boxes and cans, the blue cylinder of salt I’d labeled NaCl in first semester chemistry, and a bag of potato chip crumbs.

  “What’s that?” said Anita. She reached for the decorated mayonnaise jar full of change and tiny fortunes.

  “My mom’s hope jar. Don’t ask.”

  I had to get her to step out so I could open the refrigerator. There was some milk, lettuce going black around the edges, and a dried-up pork chop on a plate. I checked the freezer — there was a half a can of orange juice concentrate sprinkled with crumbs. “I forgot — we’re going shopping tonight. I thought we had waffles. Do you want a bowl of cereal? I could make some Kool-Aid.”

  “I’m fine.” She turned off the light.

  I bumped into her as we stepped around the kitchen table into the living room. Anita did a twirl by the couch, and all the fringy things on her jacket swirled around her.

  I said, “I don’t want to be mean and that leather jacket is cool, but do you think you should wear the same thing every day? People say stuff.”

  She said, “Whatever, Leah. You don’t think the lemmings like it? This jacket is vintage seventies. It’s leather, but it was my mom’s, so I can’t throw it out.”

  She came to the door of my tiny room and acted as if a cardboard bookshelf and boxes of clothes were just what you’d expect to find in a teenage girl’s bedroom.

  “It’s kind of a dungeon.” I opened the blue polka-dot curtains so we’d have some light, saw the spiderwebs, garbage, and black bars, and closed them again.

  She sat on the end of my bed — which was, in fact, just a squishy mattress on a metal frame — and looked at the two newspaper photos of Damien Rogers playing basketball that I’d taped to the wall. After a minute, she said, “He looks very athletic.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s Damien Rogers. He goes to Arapahoe. He’s kind of a friend — more like an acquaintance, I guess — but he’s a super-nice guy and I thought those were really good pictures.”

  “Ah.” Anita lifted my laptop off the floor. “Can I check my e-mail?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t have Internet. It’s just for writing papers.”

  I had the laptop and an iPod that Cindy bought at the EZPAWN for my fifteenth birthday, but no Internet. It was like an online party I wasn’t invited to. In the library or whenever I could borrow Kristy’s or Corinne’s phone, I checked to see what Damien Rogers’s had posted. He constantly shared stats from his games and was tagged in pictures from parties. He always had a different girl under his arm. He wasn’t serious about any of them.

  “Me neither. It sucks,” Anita said.

  “Yeah.” I sat at the top of my bed on the pillow. “But you kind of get used to it.”

  “True.” She smiled and set the computer back on the floor. She pulled Oh, the Places You’ll Go! off my bookshelf. “I love Dr. Seuss,” she said.

  I leaned against the wall and opened an old Glamour I’d pulled out of someone’s garbage. “God, I’m fat.”

  “Shut up! Don’t talk about yourself like that.” Anita flipped through one of the picture books. “I’d love to live there.” She pointed at a tiny crooked house hanging off a precipice. “Where’s your mom?” she asked.

  “Work.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He died when I was two.”

  “Oh. Sorry. My mom died six years ago. She went back to Mexico to visit my grandma. Car wreck.”

  “God, that’s so sad.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at me, shrugged, and gave me a sad, crooked smile. “Her name was Fabiola.”

  “What a cool name.”

  “I think so.” She set down the book and tightened the laces of her knockoff Keds.

  “My dad died in a car wreck, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I pretended to read. Anita put back the book and pulled out The Sneetches. My Dr. Seuss collection was the closest thing to a family Bible that Cindy and I had. My best memory of childhood was of Cindy scrunched up on a little stool reading Hop on Pop while I sat in the bathtub and played with a yellow rubber porcupine.

  Anita and I both had parents who died in car wrecks. It’s like we were sisters somehow. Her mom and my dad were in car-crash heaven together. I was staring at pictures of “Dos and Don’ts” in the magazine when my phone vibrated. It was Kurt King. I let it go. A few minutes later, it vibrated again.

  Anita stared at me over the top of the book. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “Uh . . . it’s just this guy who calls a lot.”

  “Is he good-looking?”

  “Extremely good-looking.”

  She snatched the phone and flipped it open. “Hello,” she said. “This is Tanya. . . . Tanya. . . . As matter of fact, I am Russian. . . . Oh, really? Ashley? No. . . .”

  I grabbed the phone and turned to the wall. I said, “Hey, Kurt,” in a slightly modified Kristy voice.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Pretty good.” I ran my finger down a crack in the green wall.

  “Who’s your friend? Is she as beautiful as you?”

  “Yeah. She has black hair, though.” I picked paint off the wall, and it crumbled onto my blanket.

  “Ashley, I have a question for you. What’s your favorite color, sweetheart?”

  “Blue.”

  “And how’s your mama doing?”

  “She’s really sick. She’s doing pretty bad.”

  “Sorry about that, sweetheart. You call me anytime. When can I see you?”

  “Sometime. I’ve got to go now.”

  I shut the phone. Anita had closed the book. She looked at me carefully. She said, “Your voice sounds stupid when you talk like that, and that dude sounds like he’s thirty.”

  Thursday night, after we shopped at Safeway, Cindy made me sit with her in the car. Things were worse at Kristy’s house, and Cindy wanted to tell me about it. We sat in her white Grand Marquis with the smashed bumper as the orange-and-green sky faded behind the apartment building.

  “I know you’re having problems with Kristy.” Cindy studied the backs of her hands and picked at her nails. “I’ve never really cared for that girl. She’s been terribly, terribly spoiled. But her mother is a lovely woman. I just feel awful about what’s happening to her. I feel like we should do something.”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw open the car door and run as fast and far as I could. Everything about Cindy — the droning sound of her voice, the way she jammed her tongue under her upper lip, how she smelled like cherry fluoride treatment — made me feel like I had chemicals sizzling through my veins.

  “What are we supposed to do? Make them a pot of macaroni and cheese? Bake them a cake? They don’t eat that stuff ! They eat spelt bread and organic vegetables. There’s nothing we can do. They don’t want anything from us. Don’t you get it, Cindy? Kristy hates me.”

  “Leah!” Cindy crossed her arms and tightened her lips. “First of all, I am not Cindy to you. I am your mother. Be respectful! Second, you do not understand the situation. You’re all wrapped up in your petty squabble. Connie Baker is dying. Do you know what that does to a family? Well, I do. I do! I’ve been there.”

  Of course! I had stepped on sacred ground, Cindy’s tragedy, the dying of her husband, the great disaster. It was Cindy’s trump card. Except Paul Lobermeir hadn’t died of cancer; he’d died “instantly” in a car crash. Cindy’s mom and dad had both died of cancer within two years of her graduating from high school. She thought she’d been saved by Paul, but then he croaked, too.

  I had only been two years old. After the funeral and the four months she spent either in bed or in the bath
tub while I sat in a playpen, Cindy went back to work and worked two or three jobs while I was at the babysitter’s, and she didn’t have a new coat for ten years because she was buying me shoes and paying for my six-month dental checkups. I could recite that story as easily as Hop on Pop. The shabby peacoat with big plastic buttons still hung like a phantom in her closet.

  “You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to raise a child alone.” Cindy’s voice in the dark car was like an echo from another day, an echo from a thousand other days when she’d said the same words in exactly the same way. YOU have NO IDEA how HARD it’s been for ME to raise a CHILD ALONE.

  How many days had I been alive now? I started to do the math inside my head.

  “Connie had another operation. There’s nothing left they can take out.” Cindy glared like she hated me as she described how horribly and slowly Kristy’s mother was dying.

  She finished with her death lecture and swallowed loudly. It was dark outside now. We sat in the glow from the streetlight. Something, maybe defrosting fish sticks, rustled in the grocery bag. There was no oxygen inside the Grand Marquis.

  Cindy hung on to the steering wheel, stared out the windshield, and waited for me to hug her and tell her how much I loved her and how much I appreciated how hard she worked, though there was no way I could ever comprehend how difficult it had been . . . blah, blah, blah. Her mouth was bunched up like the end of a balloon.

  And I did love her, but that was hidden beneath all the chaos and explosions going on inside. I blew a bubble and popped it with my tongue. I pulled down the visor so the little light came on, swabbed on lip gloss, and smiled at myself.

  Cindy made a gurgling noise as if she were being strangled. She yanked at the seat belt until it finally unbuckled. She climbed out of the car, slammed the door, then limped to the building entrance — her bunion was killing her.

  When I came in with the bags of groceries, Cindy was in her room with the door shut. I put the groceries away and turned on the oven. I boiled water for macaroni and cheese, put some fish sticks in the oven, and made an iceberg-lettuce salad.

  Anita called. “I just had a breakthrough moment in my art.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m finally getting the hang of chiaroscuro. I did this new drawing of a man’s face half in shadow . . .”

  When I got off the phone with Anita, I started to sing. I didn’t mind making Cindy dinner. Someday soon, I’d leave her far, far behind, and she would be all alone and would have to bake her own fish sticks.

  I knocked on Cindy’s door to tell her that dinner was ready, as if she couldn’t smell it. She didn’t answer. I tried the knob, but she’d locked herself in.

  I left her plate on the counter and sat down to eat by myself. I inspected each soggy fish stick before putting it in my mouth, then washed my plate. Cindy had taped a magazine picture of a flowery meadow over the sink. The picture was faded and water-spotted, and the edge was torn.

  I went into my room, closed my curtains, and sat on my bed with a stack of old magazines. I read advice columns and an article about a girl who’d lost her legs in a car accident but adjusted and had even more success in life. I read an article about a girl who had a giant tumor growing out of her forehead. The doctors were going to remove it when she finished her growth spurt. Other than the tumor, she was beautiful and happy. A picture showed her on a field surrounded by twenty-five preppy friends.

  Cindy came out of her room.

  She was wearing her quilted pink robe with the tiny bow at the throat. Her hair was rumpled as if she’d been sleeping. She didn’t even glance at the dinner plate I’d left for her. She took the wedding wineglass out of the cupboard and filled it with ice and Chardonnay from the box in the refrigerator.

  She took a long swallow, then toddled to the bathroom and returned with her plastic basket of manicure supplies. She backed up to the couch, dropped onto it, and turned on the TV. She flipped the channels until she found Dancing with the Stars. A week before, I tried to get her to watch a PBS special about an inner-city emergency room. She said, “Are you kidding me? It reminds me of work. I need escape!”

  She picked up the glass, held it to her face, and gulped the wine. She set the empty glass down on the coffee table. She wet a cotton ball and rubbed polish remover onto her thumbnail. The smell of chemicals drifted into my room. Every night she did the same thing.

  Cindy looked so small curled on the corner of the couch. She propped her foot on the pillow, looked up from her nails, and squinted at the TV screen. “It’s the little luxuries that keep me going,” she always said. “In my profession, I can’t have long nails or wear bright polish, but I like to keep them pretty.”

  And Cindy wasn’t an alcoholic if she just drank Chardonnay on ice, and she wasn’t an alcoholic no matter how many times she refilled her wineglass because the wine came in a box, so there weren’t empty bottles all over the apartment.

  I dumped the textbooks out of my backpack onto my bed. The books felt like they weighed ten pounds each and had black numbers scrawled on their dirty edges. I tipped the chemistry book open to page 127. The corner of the page had dirty creases, and a dried yellow blot on page 126 looked like vomit. Divide the mass . . . its molar mass . . . the number of moles of solute. The words and formulas were gibberish; reading the text was like crawling through a thornbush. My brain already hurt from my life.

  I put the books back in my backpack and crawled under the blankets. I stuck in my earbuds and put Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are” on replay.

  Bruno Mars. Sweetest man in the entire world. Five feet five inches tall, one inch taller than me. He’d been a chubby kid and didn’t judge. He loved chunky girls. He had the most beautiful voice, and he could dance.

  I listened to Bruno and read The Lorax for the thousandth time. An hour later, I cracked open my door, then stepped into the living room. Cindy was snoring, her chin trembling. I pulled on my hoodie and slipped out of the apartment.

  I walked fast, hood pulled up, head down, hands in pockets. Just moving, invisible and nameless, dreaming through the chilly black night. I jumped over cracks in the sidewalk.

  Two blocks from 7-Eleven, a black car slid up to the curb. I jogged to the corner and waited for a truck to pass so I could run across the street. The black car pulled up and blocked me. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, girl.”

  My breathing tightened. The eyes, the cheekbones, the mouth, the hair in the dark car. Kurt King stared like he knew me, like he didn’t know me. I was Ashley. I was Leah. I shyly tugged down my hood.

  “I met you before, didn’t I? Yeah! You — you’re Ashley’s friend.” He smiled, real slow. His eyes and teeth shone in the streetlight.

  The night with the soft wind, the lights, was like a huge room full of darkness and stars. I was Ashley and not Ashley.

  “What are you doin’ out here?”

  “I don’t know. Just walking.”

  “Uh-huh. Just walking.” He nodded along with a song. He didn’t recognize my normal voice.

  “So,” he said. “You just go out walking late at night, huh?”

  The engine hummed; the radio played low. He sat in his car and tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel in time to the music. He was wearing a black Metallica T-shirt, no jacket. A dragon with fangs, bat wings, and a snake tail wrapped around the curve of his muscle. I stood on the sidewalk and looked into his dark window. No rush, no hurry. Me and Kurt King.

  “Come on. Let me give you a lift. It’s no good for a girl to be out walking alone this time of night.” He leaned across the seat and pushed open the door.

  And there he was, waiting with his car door open for me. I got in and pulled the door closed. It wasn’t real. I was dreaming. I hadn’t even said a word. Had I said a word? Had I even spoken? I said, “OK.”

  Kurt King shifted into gear, and the car pulled away from the curb. The car’s black interior was lit up in the green glow from the dash.

  “So, how you
been?” He turned the music up, then down again. He rolled the steering wheel under the palm of his hand. “Let’s just drive around for a while. It’s a beautiful night.”

  The beautiful cool night blew in. I tipped my face into it. A song I loved came on the radio. Kid Cudi. This would end any minute. That’s what my heart told me as it knocked in my chest: this wasn’t real; it wouldn’t last. Warm air from the vents blew against my knees.

  He turned into Woodland Way, the neighborhood above the junior high. Spruce Street, Aspen Avenue, Scrub Oak Boulevard, Yucca Street. Kids lived either here or at Mountain View Estates or, if they were poor, down off of Tenth like me. I knew where almost everyone lived — people I hated, people I’d never spoken to. I wanted someone from school to see me pass by in the black car. They would think, Was that Leah Lobermeir?

  Kurt King drove straight up Pine Avenue toward the mountain. He pulled to a stop in front of a ranch house. He turned off the engine and then the headlights.

  The house was small, brick, with a big picture window. It was the ranch house where the junior high gym teacher Mr. Zimmerman used to live. Even though I wasn’t on a team, Mr. Zimmerman would talk to me. He’d say, “Leah Lobermeir, you get prettier by the day and brainier by the hour. I can spot a smart girl a mile away.” His house had been egged dozens of times, and kids threw baloney on his truck so that baloney-sized circles of paint peeled off. Halfway through eighth grade, Mr. Zimmerman quit and moved to Arizona.

  We sat in the dark car in front of Mr. Zimmerman’s old house. No lights were on. The big window looked gray and sad and empty. A loud commercial for a car dealership came on the radio. Kurt King turned it off.

  He lit a cigarette in his cupped hand. The end of the cigarette sizzled. He shook the match, threw it out the window, and stretched his arm across the back of my seat. His hand dropped onto my shoulder and then began to work its way through the thick hair at the nape of my neck. I’d never had someone else’s hand in my hair, ever. The roots of my hair felt electrified. I was rigid. “Jesus, girl, you got a lot of hair. Honey, where’s Ashley tonight?”