by Carrie Jones
I go in, kneel on the floor beside her, pull her hair out of her face and fix her ponytail. “Emmie, I don’t want to go.”
She wipes her face with the back of her hand. She grabs her car keys, which were abandoned on the floor. “I know.”
Her tone tells me I have no choice.
I careen out of the room. My heart falls lower and lower with every step I take.
Her mom meets me in the hall. I don’t know when she got home. I don’t know how much she’s heard. I can’t even look at her in her mother eyes. She grabs me by the shoulders and says, “Emily’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
I swallow. “She’s in pain.”
Em’s mom drops her hands. She nods and her eyes are empty pots waiting on the stove for something to fill them. But nothing does. “Go get some sleep. I’ll take care of her.”
I give her a quick hug. She’s built just like Em. She’s all hip and bone.
Then I struggle down the hall and let myself out the door. I do not wave because it is not goodbye.
I take off as fast as I can, just will my legs into supergirl mode because I want to get away, get away, now, fast.
Emmie was right. I am scared. I am selfish. But she wasn’t all right. It wasn’t just Dylan being gay that made me scared, that made me want to figure people out. It was Eddie too. When Eddie grabbed me in the hall that day, when his eyes went mean and hard, and when his hands became my enemy, that threw me. Neither Dylan nor Eddie were who they were supposed to be.
It’s hard to trust people after that.
It’s hard not to analyze people after that.
It’s hard to live after all that.
But I have to try.
Tom isn’t back yet. I can’t believe I beat him back. Maybe Shawn called. Maybe he’s over there helping Mr. I’m So Not a Supportive Boyfriend to deal.
I wheel my bike into the garage, glance across the street at Eddie’s house. There aren’t any lights on there, but it’s still daylight. It’s almost June. The days get longer and longer. The sun stretches out, shining its hot light on all our flaws, all the cracks in the road, in our selves.
I run across the street and right up to the window of Eddie’s room. I cup my hands and try to stare inside.
When we were little we’d bounce a big, red ball across our driveways. We’d eat brownies together. He’d play at my house all the time, eat dinner, beat me at Go Fish. Then we kind of drifted away. I’m not sure why. I guess it doesn’t matter. Em would say it doesn’t matter.
I try to stare into Eddie’s room beyond his dark green curtains. I can’t see anything, but even if I could, I doubt it would make me understand.
The past is as much of a mystery as the present. It is as unavailable as the future. Nothing you do can get back people who are lost. Nothing you do can make change any more understandable. You have to accept it. I don’t want to. But I do.
I will never have a father.
I will never not worry about having seizures.
I will never be comfortable with Eddie again, never be with him alone and not be just a little bit frightened, never not remember his hands on my throat.
I will never be friends with Mimi again.
I will never love Dylan the way I once loved Dylan.
I will never have a best friend Emily who didn’t get pregnant her last year of high school.
This is the list I make inside my head. I do not like it. I do not like this list. It’s all about me. I’m selfish. I’m human. I hate that.
Tears start flowing down my face. I can’t stop them. They just run and run and run.
I don’t know how I can help Emmie. I don’t know.
The front door of Eddie’s house opens and I jump, think about running across the street. But I don’t. I’m frozen, stupid looking.
“Belle?” he asks.
“I was staring in your room,” I say, wiping at my eyes. “I could probably get arrested for that. I think it’s trespassing or peeping tomness or something. You’d think I would have learned that in law class, but I didn’t, for some stupid reason he never actually taught us whether … ”
I stop rambling.
He walks towards me. “You okay?”
I shake my head.
He starts to reach out his arms to hug me, but I step back. I can’t help it. He puts his hands in his pockets and leans against his house.
“Do you think I’m a coward?” I ask him.
“You wouldn’t be talking to me if you were.”
“People are saying you do heroin. I think that’s shit.”
His eyes close up. Each word seems an effort. “People make up rumors, they try to explain things, to make sense.”
He shrugs, scratches at the side of his nose. “Nobody could figure out why I did what I did to you, so they make shit up.”
We both cringe. A chipmunk scampers across Eddie’s driveway, stops in the middle of the road, looks both ways and then bounds to my lawn. The wind gusts, and blows my hair against my face. I pull it out of the way.
“I’m always trying to explain things,” I say. “I make lists and stuff, try to organize everything. And it can’t be, life can’t be organized.”
He watches me. I watch him. I bend down and pick up some grass, split the blade into three pieces and then try to braid it. It’s not long enough though. I let it dangle from my fingers. The wind takes it away.
Finally I say, “Thanks for helping out when I had the seizure.”
“I thought Tom was going to kill me.”
“He probably wanted to,” I say. “He’s like that. Remember when we were little, and you always used to try to save me?”
He watches my grass braid blow into the culvert. It’ll sink there, get muddy, ruined. “Yeah.”
“I miss that.”
“Me too.”
“I wish you could save me now,” I tell him. My voice breaks. “I wish you could save me.”
He takes a step forward but stops, afraid, I guess. We are both afraid of who we are.
“Save you from what, Belle?”
“Everything.”
He nods.
I risk it. “Do you think it’s stupid if I sometimes miss my dad, even though I never knew him or anything?”
“No.”
He grabs his forearms with his hands, rubs them like he’s cold. “Sometimes I miss my dad, and he’s still here, you know?”
“That’s not stupid either.”
We both shift our weight at exactly the same time. The wind gusts against us like it’s pushing us forward, but neither of us, neither of us have any clue where it is we’re supposed to go.
I leave Eddie. He’s waiting for his dad to come home. His dad is using Eddie’s truck again and is supposed to bring back pizza. He’s running late. Eddie’s eyes wear worries about whether or not his dad will be sober. If we were placing bets, both of us would bet that he won’t be. He is that late.
Kind of like Tom.
Gabriel and Muffin keep me company on the couch, waiting for Tom to show up.
He’s turned off the stove like the good son of a police chief. He’s left his book bag in the middle of the floor where everyone can trip over it. There’s duct tape all over it. He’s written out little sayings on the pieces, which is so cute. I don’t know why he does this. I will not try to figure it out, or organize it, but I like it. I like that he does it. I touch the smooth-rough pieces of tape, the words he’s written.
“April is the cruelest month” —T. S. Eliot.
Eliot was wrong about that one. It’s May.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions!” —Shakespeare.
I hate Shakespeare.
I put Tom’s bo
ok bag back down. Em’s been acting like the Energizer bunny just hopping on and on, moving on batteries, moving on automatic, and she’s finally stopped. She’s no longer just going and going. She’s stopped.
So, I do a Belle thing, a true Belle thing. I make a list.
What I Want to Do with Emily’s Baby:
Hug it.
Not change its diaper.
Buy it really cute onesie pajamas, those baby clothes things made out of really soft cotton that have the little feet built in.
Buy a Fisher Price guitar.
Teach said baby to play said guitar.
Read it Goodnight Moon.
Not change its diaper ever.
Really. Have you ever seen green liquid baby poo? It’s absolutely vile.
Love it. Love the baby and smell his/her baby powder smell (after Em’s changed the diaper).
Then I do another true Belle thing, I pick up Gabriel. It really doesn’t matter who people think I am:
Belle who dates Tom but hasn’t had sex yet.
Belle who is popular.
Belle who has a gay ex-boyfriend that she had sex with all the time.
Belle who is best friends with Emily.
Belle whose dad died in the first Iraq war.
Em was right. I spend too much time worrying about who people are, afraid I’ll be wrong about them.
I will always be wrong about them and they’ll always be wrong about me.
That’s okay.
That’s just how this crappy world works, and it’s kind of beautiful that way. There’s nothing wrong with always discovering new things about people, is there? Even if it’s yourself. Even if it’s that you’re a coward.
I am Belle who plays Gabriel. My fingers glide over Gabriel’s strings. I close my eyes and play, just fooling around, making things up. The sound is too edgy though, too many tremble notes, too many tremble notes. The harmonic notes are stronger than the fundamental notes and it sounds raspy.
I am not in the mood for raspy music, so I stop, go back to the chords, basic progressions, deep and rich and full. That’s the core of music. The base. The relationships between the notes are there, strong and ready.
I play them.
The phone rings. I grab it.
“Belle, I’m so sorry,” Tom’s voice comes through. He pauses. I know what he’ll say, I can hear it in him already and everything inside of me curls into itself, closing, worried, hurting. “I went to Shawn’s. Did you know? About Emily? Was that what was going on? Why you’re so stressed?”
“I knew,” I whisper.
A tree branch hits the window, like the wind is mad at me, trying to knock some sense into me. I am so jealous of the wind, of how it never stops moving, it goes and it goes.
I swallow and ask, “Are you mad?”
“Mad?”
“Because I didn’t tell you?”
Because I still want to risk it, to have sex?
Another pause. I touch the hole where the sound echoes inside of Gabriel. My heart seems frozen in my chest, a big blob of motionless dough.
“No, I’m not mad.”
The light bulb in the stairway flickers. Neither of us talk for a second, maybe because we know this will be all we talk about later, Tom and me. All of Eastbrook, talking and talking like we can get to the essence of it, figure it out. It’s part of being human. We are all human. I have to remember that it’s okay to be human. It’s okay to be human. It’s okay to be stuck sometimes. And it’s even okay to have to rip up the duct tape sayings we’ve got stuck on our hands and to pull up the little hairs beneath it, to feel the pain.
He starts talking again. “And then I stopped off at home. My mom’s freaking out because Shawn’s mom talked to her … So, she’s all, ‘Are you having sex? Are you using protection? You don’t want to make the same mistakes we did, young man.’”
“Oh God.”
“I’ll be there soon, okay?”
He is sweetness and stability. I don’t care if I deserve him or not, I’m just glad I got him.
“Your mom’s still letting you come?”
“I’m not telling her where I’m going.”
“Oh. Okay.”
When we hang up, I imagine Em holding the baby in her arms, silently moving back and forth on her long, naked feet, rocking the baby to sleep. Shawn puts his arms around both of them. I imagine them singing a lullaby.
“Things could be okay,” I tell Muffin. “They could.”
It is a lie a cat would never believe. She turns around and sticks her butt in the air.
“Okay, if Shawn is going to be an ass, then I’ll take care of her,” I say.
I imagine us taking turns feeding the baby at night, taking turns going to classes. One of us would have to transfer, because Em’s not going to the same college, but that’s okay. It would be worth it, tiring, but worth it. Right?
Oh God, it’ll be so much work.
Muffin leans her head against my hip and snuggles in. Her paws knead the fabric of the couch. I start playing again.
The music is slow, soft. I don’t know how it comes from my fingers. It just comes. It fills the house with its quiet noise. Sirens sound in the distance. I wait and wait for Tom to come. I play and play a lullaby song. Maybe I’ll make it a present for Em and Shawn’s baby. It will be my first lullaby.
I keep playing my guitar. This is what I do, and that’s okay. No matter what happens, who people turn out to be, I have this. This and my lists.
I strum. I practice my chords, all in the right progression. It sounds good, just me and my guitar.
It’s like a ritual, that no one else has to be a part of, something I can control, and feel good about. Me.
I play.
But, it’s not enough. Playing is not enough. I grab some scissors from the kitchen cabinet and cut off a piece of duct tape, take a marker and write: Do not forsake me.
Still not enough.
So I cut off another piece and write in big block letters: I WILL NOT BE FORSAKEN.
I stick them on the fridge, like they’re magnets. But they aren’t. They’re just words.
Then I make up one more list on some sheet music, writing in tiny letters between empty staff lines.
Things I Am Right Now
I am an Emily fan even though she’s mad at me and I will continue to be an Emily fan and keep being her friend.
I am sort of popular and that’s okay.
I am a person who sometimes has seizures and that’s okay, too.
I am a person who does not think sex is evil.
I am a person who is really glad she isn’t pregnant.
I am a girl who plays a mean guitar.
I am a fan of boys who wear duct tape.
I am a person who realizes that forgiveness is not the same as trust and that it’s okay to forgive someone like Eddie and not trust him. It doesn’t make you a victim. It doesn’t make you anything.
I am Belle Philbrick.
I am me.
This is a fine list, I think.
© Doug Jones
About the Author
Carrie Jones likes Skinny Cow fudgicles and potatoes. She does not know how to spell fudgicles. This has not prevented her from writing books. She lives with her cute family in Maine. She has a large, skinny white dog and a fat cat. Both like fudgicles. Only the cat likes potatoes. This may be a reason for the kitty’s weight problem (Shh . . . don’t tell). Carrie has always liked cowboy hats but has never owned one. This is a very wrong thing. She graduated from Vermont College’s MFA program for writing. She has edited newspapers and poetry journals and has won awards from the Maine Press Association and also been awarded the Martin Dibner Fellowship as well
as a Maine Literary Award. She is still not sure why.
This is a book about love and friendship and I have been really lucky with love and friends.
So when writing a book about love and friendships, it’s good to acknowledge the cool people who have supported you.
How to do this? Oh, thank them in list fashion, of course.
Thanks to Emily Ciciotte and Doug Jones. You two are angels, only without wings, or harps or anything like that, but you know what I mean.
Thanks to Jennifer Osborn for always letting me rant, for eating lunch with me, for being a cool reporter chick and the best grown-up friend ever. Understand, here, that I use the term “grown-up” loosely.
Thanks to Jackie Shriver. You were the best high school friend ever and such an inspiration for this book. May the Parallel Zone continue on! Thanks for finding me again. I missed you and Imaginary Land.
Thanks to Dottie Vachon and Alice Dow. Alice, you have saved my butt SOOOO many times. Dottie, you have kept me sane. I owe you both a lot of flowers. And to Mary McGuire for always making basketball games a lot more fun.
When it comes to butt-saving, Doris Bunker Rzasa has to be the ultimate. Doris, you are wise and funny. You’ve called out rescue teams for me (Really! She did! It involved a dog, a knee injury, cool hospital maintenance guys, and deep woods) and helped me in every way possible. I love you.
Thanks to Alison Jones, Kayla Gelinas, and Norah and Phoebe Clark for being the best relatives and readers possible. You four have already made the universe a kinder, brighter place.
Thanks to Maggie and Sarah Rausch for being the ultimate fan girls, for making me believe in writing, and for telling me the term Eye Orgasm. Thanks to Devyn Burton for being the ultimate cool fan boy/writer. You are always there. FTW!!!
Thanks to Melissa Love for making duct tape roses. Tom would be proud.
And when you talk about roses, you’ve got to thank Ellen for this amazing cover. I am drooling. You are incredibly gifted, Ellen. And so are you, Sandy Sullivan. Thanks for joining us on this journey and trying to keep it all straight. Thanks to Brian Farrey, super blogger and way cool publicist man. You are so graceful to put up with me. I owe you.