Mom starts rearranging vanity photos. The kissing one. Buster. Mom and some model friends when they were my age—all bangs and lipstick and cheekbones. Standing, she slides the kiss picture across the counter. “You are beautiful, honey. It’s Lindsay’s loss that she can’t see it. Once you start making friends at school”—a knowing glance in my direction, like she’s so sure this is exactly what I have been doing with all my spare time, making friends—“you could meet a new girl, somebody you’ll like even better. Lindsay will be so jealous.” She smooches the top of my head.
I don’t point out that finding your own kid beautiful is a biological imperative—it doesn’t make me any less of a platypus. Once she leaves, I stick the photo back to the mirror. My phone buzzes. I forgot I slipped it into my pajama shorts.
KODA ROSE!!!!!
hmu? Pls???
haven’t heard from u in forever
I almost check to make sure my microphone isn’t on. How did Lindsay know I was talking about her?
Hey! sorry
busy with hw and stuff
u sure?
I feel like ur avoiding me
Avoiding her? That night, I had a plan, every word lined up about how I’d had feelings for Lindsay—not just feelings, but a massive, pulsing, electric crush—since before I knew what that meant, since ninth freaking grade. But then she said that thing about other girls, and I froze. She was going to reject me. I’d never been more sure of anything, except for when I told her I was gay. I couldn’t survive rejection. Not now, not ever, but especially not right then. Lindsay was so incredible, the waves so loud. Their roars filled my ears.
Eventually, she brought Peter up. He was being a dick again.
Now I scrutinize the picture of Mom and me, trying to measure that little girl against this new half-molted Koda who can’t be honest with her mom or best friend, either. When my phone starts ringing—Lindsay, demanding to FaceTime—I abandon it on my dresser.
I’d tell Mom all of this if I thought she could help me. But Mom, as supportive as she is, doesn’t give the greatest girl advice. Friends get boyfriends, Koda. That’s part of life. Sometimes I worry I will never tell Lindsay how I feel. What if this isn’t the sort of thing you need a mom for? What if that one person is the father you don’t know, and my one opportunity to do just that—to not only know him, but step into his carefree world—I have completely, irrevocably blown? It’s just so hopeless. Like that night with Lindsay, salt and sand and her hair stinging my lips. A thousand ways to drown, and not one involving the ocean.
CHAPTER 10
LINDSAY TEXTS AGAIN THE NEXT morning.
She and Peter broke up.
She calls me sobbing. I have to huddle in a locker room shower for privacy, but basically, they went to a party over the weekend, and Peter disappeared for like an hour. She just found out he was in a bedroom upstairs, making out with another girl.
“God,” I tell her once the sobs dry up. “I’m so sorry.”
“He’s an asshole, Koda. I hate him.” She sniffles. It’s just after eight a.m. in California, which means she should be at school. Or is at school? I’m afraid to ask. She swore to me, after she got busted, that it’d be the last time she ditched. “I should’ve listened to you when you said he was bad news.”
I don’t remember saying that. Thinking it, obviously, but… sometimes my face does get a little ahead of me. I clear my throat, try to sound consoling. “You can move on from this. Find somebody better.”
She breaks down all over again. “But I want Peter…” Afterward she apologizes for not asking what’s new with me. “I keep forgetting to tell you,” she says, her voice still rubbery from crying, “but I saw your magazine photos.” She giggles. “Was the lipstick your idea?”
She means the black stuff. Poison Ivy. I close my eyes and remember Makeup Lady, coming at me with a bullet-shaped tube. The tug and itch.
“Yeah,” I lie.
“Whoa, really? It looks amazing! So… daring. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that side of you. I love it.”
I mumble thank you, and she says she has to go. I stay in the stall a while longer, glowing atomic red.
* * *
When Mom texts saying we should do something fun tonight, I assume she means dinner. Not hitting up health food stores in a trendy downtown corner of the city I immediately hate, searching for a cereal that resembles rabbit turds.
“My God.” Mom pushes her hair back, then continues sifting through boxes, crouched low to avoid mooning the entire breakfast aisle. “I don’t see the seven-grain anywhere. Do you?”
This store is the same as the five others we’ve ransacked on our quest. Skinny aisles with skyscraper shelves, the lighting faintly post-apocalyptic. I pull a lock of hair forward, hunting for split ends. “No.”
Sifting resumes. I close my eyes. In my head, Lindsay giggles and says, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that side of you! Almost worse than no comment at all. Worse than hearing her tell me I’d find a girl in New York, which, except for that time she put her head on my shoulder after swim practice and joked, Why can’t you be a boy? ranks as my most demoralizing Lindsay interaction to date. And now she’s broken up with Peter. And loves me in black lipstick, the side it apparently brings out in me that I didn’t know existed. A color I never would have chosen myself.
“Aha!” Mom hauls herself up by my belt loop, dumping the cereal box into the caddy we grabbed at the entrance. “Got it. Now—quinoa. Go.” Bullet points again. I follow her to the next aisle, wheeling the caddy carefully behind me.
The grain aisle has a cat. Two cats, spooning on a bag of rice. Mom freezes. Her hand jerks to her throat.
“I’ve got this,” I say.
Her eyebrows flutter with gratitude. Like she’ll go into full anaphylaxis right here. “Make sure you get the—”
“I will.”
She whips out her planner, which is basically a cross-section of her brain, red ink and stickies hemorrhaging all over the place. “Get black. We need it for protein bars—”
“Mom, I know. It’s freaking quinoa.” I just want to pet the cats.
A hard look emphasizes the importance of my mission. Then she clacks away.
I sink immediately to my knees. “Hi there.” The cats don’t acknowledge me, a purring bundle, but when I scratch one on her bony noggin, she leans in for more. Calico. That’s how I know she’s female. “You’re very”—I struggle for an adjective that isn’t cute or pretty—“patchy.” The purring intensifies. Drool slips from her mouth and onto the bag. I keep scratching, not thinking about Lindsay, or Peter, or my father. Blank. That’s how I’m going to be from now on. The burst of a flashbulb. A page where nobody’s written a word.
Soon the calico starts wiping her drool on me. Knees aching, I grab the quinoa, then search for Mom, who, predictably, is nowhere. Not with dairy substitutes, or hydroponic herbs, or individually packaged servings of nuts. Annoyed, I head up front and stake myself by the checkout line. Old habit. Eventually, she’ll come clacking up with a mystery fruit, some toxin-purging wonder she’d been wanting to try. Until then, it’s me and the checkout boy, the half-hearted look he slides me before returning to his phone. If I had the guts, I’d snap, Well, I don’t like guys anyway, so. Tabloids leer. I avoid the shouty headlines and decontaminate, picking cat fur off my coat. Knowing Lindsay, she’ll be back with Peter by tonight. So it’s not my fault for letting this chance slip away. The fact that right now, 3:25, California time, Lindsay is probably waiting for Peter to pick her up in his Audi, toeing pebbles off the sidewalk in front of our school. If I was there, maybe I would say something—the words I couldn’t form at the beach fizzing on my tongue already. But I’m not there. She told me, I want Peter! You can’t be blamed for accepting an inevitability.
The blankness is working. It looks good on me, better than the lipstick. I study my reflection to be sure, staring at myself in the store’s dusty plate-glass windows. Mom doesn’t know that Lindsay
and Peter broke up yet. I don’t think I’ll tell her. She’ll want me to do something nice for her. Flowers. Or worse, a grand gesture, like my life is a movie, and Lindsay just needs convincing. Part of me worries she’s right. Another part, the teensiest sliver, still wonders what my father would say.
I shake my head, canceling the thought entirely. I’ve got to stop with him. Have to stop gazing at myself like this. Street light’s pretty anemic here, but enough filters down for me to catch faces floating by. Most are neutral. A couple of scowls. Some smiles. Everybody looks cold. And then—
Something inside me recognizes her before my eyes do. I can’t say how, only this time, there’s no second-guessing. She’s one-of-a-kind. Her own species. Blood rushes to my head. This electric hum.
“Koda?” Mom appears, lugging the caddy. “Almost done. Did you get the—what’s wrong? Where are you going?”
I don’t know. But I call, “Back in a sec! Don’t worry!” with quinoa rattling, flung behind me. Outside there are as many people in my way as bags of garbage. I can barely see around my own breath, but I hurry, and now I’m right behind her, at the sweaty mouth of the subway. Her dreads sway as she starts down the steps.
“Sadie?”
She stiffens. Turns.
No sunglasses tonight. Too dark, which might be why, when she realizes what’s happening—that I’m happening, again—her eyes don’t seem so LP huge. They flicker. A spasm of disbelief.
“Are you stalking me?” she demands.
A giggle squirts past my lips.
The subway steps seem narrow. Sadie eases back onto the sidewalk to let people pass, and because she doesn’t tell me not to, I edge with her beneath the neon glow of a sushi restaurant. The OPEN sign flashes: pink, red, orange, back to pink, and I flinch, unsure what to do next. No, I should say. I’m not stalking you. I want to take back that giggle. But I can’t.
And maybe I am stalking her, a little.
“I was at the health food place,” I say quickly. It’s a funny night, raw and wet. Our breath pillows in front of us. “I saw you out the window. What are you doing here?”
Her eyes widen. Shit. Was that rude? I didn’t mean to be rude. This is just beyond weird. Sadie scratches her head, clearly thinking the same. “My label’s got offices here in the East Village,” she says.
“Label. You mean… record label?”
She blinks, like, What else? and wiggles her fingers at me. “I use their piano?”
Somewhere down the block, a store blasts music. Staticky Christmas carols. Sadie turns red. Orange. Pink. I look away, hiding my disappointment.
Suspicion confirmed: Sadie Pasquale has no time for my problems. She’s a musician. A rock star, no matter what Mom says about her days in the spotlight being over. And being blank means not caring. Not needing anybody anymore. Except…
Do-overs don’t happen for me very often. Some days, I doubt one with Lindsay ever will. But I’ve known Sadie five seconds, and I’m positive she and my father would never say anything, to anyone, that they didn’t mean. I don’t think I totally grasped that at first. Now, neon flickering, this ache in my chest, I understand exactly what I’m chasing. Exactly what a second chance means.
Watching me, Sadie parts her lips. An almost smile. The humming surges back.
“Could my father play piano too?” I venture.
She smirks. A stupid question. I know he was a genius. Still, I figure it’s best to start small.
“Of course he couldn’t,” she says.
Two men in suits exit the sushi restaurant, pushing us apart, but when we step back together, our gazes tangle. This time, neither of us looks away.
“Really?”
She ignores me. “This your hobby? Accosting people?”
Frankly, my real hobbies are more embarrassing—if the past week has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t tell her about fin whales, or the six generations of mutant flies I bred in the lab at my old school. Even swimming seems terminally pathetic compared to her accomplishments. So I shrug. “It’s a coincidence. Well—the first time, on Saturday, that was on purpose.”
She tilts her head, and a dread brushes her cheek. “What purpose?”
My teeth settle deeper into my lip. Something’s different about her tonight. Her hands aren’t jittering. She hasn’t reached for a cigarette once, even though I can see the outline of the pack in her pocket. Head tilted, she gives me this look. Curious? Mocking?
Another couple enters the restaurant, forcing us back apart, and with a jolt I remember Mom. Sticking around to explain myself would mean making her wait. Possibly raising all kinds of suspicions, which is the last thing I need. Even so, I can’t seem to pull myself away. Back to normal size, Sadie’s eyes kind of remind me of the chocolate chips Mom tosses into her quinoa bars. Semi-sweet.
My father couldn’t play piano.
How else was he like me?
“Can I have your number?” I blurt.
Her mouth bends.
“I can’t. Explain. I mean, there’s just so much happening, but if you… maybe if I had a way of getting in touch that wasn’t, you know, an ambush?”
A thousand thoughts I can’t decipher spill over her face. Please.
“Frosty the Snowman” starts playing.
Sadie, please. If she says no, I’ll die. The lights twitch.
Red.
Orange.
Pink.
Sadie plunges a hand into her pocket and twists my palm up with the other. She chomps off a cap—her pen red, like a teacher’s—and I don’t realize what role my hand plays in this equation until she starts writing. Couldn’t we have texted each other our numbers?
I hold my breath, trying not to squirm as the ballpoint scrapes across my lifeline.
She says, “Have your people call my people. We’ll do lunch.”
“Lunch?” I hesitate. Like her need to demonstrate how pianos work wasn’t testament enough to my eternal unworthiness. “I could do that… but… a late one? I have school.”
Sadie laughs. Not the gritty chuckle from before, but huge, head thrown back. I pull my hand away.
It’s confusing. She is, but totally isn’t, the same person I met last weekend. We say goodbye—I say goodbye, spluttering—and she turns to go into the subway. “Bye,” I repeat, thinking she didn’t hear, and she flings a hand up. Rings flash in the yellowish light.
Mom’s just finishing at the checkout when I burst in gasping, spitting hair from my lips. “Sorry!” Plastic SHOP LOCAL bags wait at the end of the conveyor. I grab two, but of course she won’t let me off that easily. Her eyebrows prick, demanding an explanation. “It was nobody. A girl from school. She lives around here. In the East Village.” That’s what Sadie called it, right? As Mom reaches for the remaining bags, I smile, tucking my hand against my hip.
In the car, I sit up front, head swimming from Sadie, and Driver’s crappy cologne. I got her number. Sadie Pasquale’s actual number. Heat roaring, Mom instructing, “Eighty-Ninth and Second, please,” I risk a peek. Ones and sevens stagger across my palm.
I snap a secret pic, in case I sweat them off.
CHAPTER 11
WE DO GO OUT TO dinner. This little Peruvian place that Mom insists on. It’s so dim I read the menu twice before finding empanadas, but Mom seems unperturbed by the murkiness, a creature perfectly adapted to life by candle-light. She orders chili chicken but spends most of the meal nudging it around her plate.
She got a phone call from her boss the moment we arrived, but I bolted to scrub my hands and missed most of the details. When I crept back to our table, sucking my stomach in to avoid knocking everything over, she had the phone braced against her ear, saying, “Yes, yes, of course. Tomorrow, we’ll—of course.” Now she makes an effort to seem unbothered, lifting her chardonnay as she says, “So tell me about this friend, honey.”
Beneath the table, two sets of knees jostle for primacy. I steer mine surreptitiously away, nibbling an empanada and wishing I ha
dn’t said anything to Mom back at the health food store. Or that I could at least be a better liar.
“What’s her name?” Mom prompts.
The napkin is paper. I tear a tiny piece off in my lap. “Um.”
Her smile widens. No escape.
“Sarah,” I relent. Technically not a lie. “Her name is Sarah.”
Mom’s cheeks crease with her grin. If both parents have dimples, the odds of their kids getting them are 50 percent. “Sarah,” she repeats. “That’s great. It’s—it’s really wonderful, Koda. I’m so glad that…” She rubs a finger up and down the stem of her glass. “I’m glad one of us is starting to fit in.”
I shove my mouth full of beef.
The restaurant is tiny. Intimate, I guess, with half a dozen small square tables arranged beyond the bar. To our right, a woman eats rice alone, absorbed in a magazine that isn’t The Magazine. On the left, an awkward date, the boy telling the girl she has incredible hair, incredible eyes. I’m not sure how long anyone’s been here, if they recognize me or not. We’ll find out when the blogs update. The notion zaps my appetite. Fork lowered, I drift. Our waters get refilled. Flames wiggle. Then I realize I’m being a downer, and that’s probably not what Mom had in mind when she suggested dinner. So I raise my water glass and whisper, “Mom, your tonsils are incredible.” She laughs so big you can almost see them.
Once the waiter’s walking off with Mom’s Amex, she shifts closer, the red curtain of her hair tumbling down between us. “So does this mean things are finally looking up at school?”
I nod. My smile’s starting to itch, but Mom matches it, rubbing my back with her cool, dry hand.
“I’m so relieved.” Her hand glides on, and I don’t tell her stop. It feels good, even though she’s making the burpy pressure in my chest even worse. My father couldn’t play piano. Of course he couldn’t. Why did Sadie say it like that? What would she have done if I’d confessed I couldn’t play either—couldn’t play any instrument, for that matter? Maybe she’d be surprised, or disappointed, or confused. Maybe she wouldn’t care at all.
The Mythic Koda Rose Page 7