“It’s not New Mexico,” I said. “Stuff happened.”
“Where are you?”
“Tulsa. Oklahoma.”
“Damn, that’s kind of awesome.” He laughed, without any humor in it. “That’s . . . a lot.”
“I know, it’s too far. I’ll figure out something else.”
“Cassie, wait,” he said.
I waited.
“Don’t figure out something else, not yet. Just—can you sit tight where you are without being totally homeless?”
“I can put a motel room on my credit card.”
“Okay. Well. We’re so far behind schedule on
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad,
a few days more won’t make a difference. Stay put, I’ll be there when I can.”
My throat was too tight for me to speak. I hung up, and then, because I figured my parents would be at work, I called home and left a message on the machine saying not to worry, because I was okay, and I was having a bit of an emergency but it was already being resolved. That’s it. I couldn’t tell them anything else, not yet.
I found a used bookstore and bought a mystery novel with my ten-dollar bill; I spent most of the rest of the day reading it in one spot or another, wandering around whenever I got restless or too self-conscious. In the evening, I checked back into my motel, and at some point I drifted off to sleep.
The tinny ringing of “Für Elise” from my cell phone woke me up. I blinked, staring at the clock radio: 2:14. In the morning.
I fumbled for the phone, not really awake enough to check the caller ID or realize why anyone would be calling me.
“What?”
“Where in Tulsa?”
I finally managed to get my brain working right for long enough to give Ollie directions.
“Check out and wait outside. I’ll be by in a sec.” I heard weary impatience, frustration, and I was cringing on the inside by the time I got down. Looking at the red-eyed guy at the desk who checked me out, I felt like the whole world had decided to be mad at me.
I sat down on the steps outside, perking up at every headlight that flashed by, and then suddenly one turned into the parking lot, and blared a horn.
Oliver’s Buick was ancient, and humongous, and cared for with meticulous precision—it was how the three of us always got to school in the rain, even after Julia had her own car. I would’ve known it anywhere. Only—I didn’t expect there to be anyone in it but him. And yet the back door opened, and Amy came out, and pushed me into the middle backseat. It was the only seat still open.
Lissa was driving, and Ollie was in the front seat beside her. Amy and Jon sandwiched me in the backseat.
It was almost three a.m., and there wasn’t a chorus of squealing and hellos and what’s going ons. It was just Jon and Amy on either side of me, quiet, with their shoulders up against mine. And Jon reached over and put his hand over mine; and then Amy did too.
“We’ve been driving shifts,” Amy said in a whisper. “Eleven hours. We only went
kind of
over the speed limit, not really really over.”
“Thank you,” I said. Like that would cover it. Like it would come anywhere close to covering it. But what else was there to say, at three in the morning?
I sat there in the darkness, with their skin close to me, and I felt lifted up and wrapped with kindness. And very small, because I didn’t at all deserve this, but small the way a mouse in its den is small: warm and safe and protected.
NOW
I
n the morning I was in the garage, putting air in my tires, when Heather’s car rolled by and honked at me. I climbed in without a second thought and put my face up to the air vent blowing cold air at me. Even the recycled air felt good on such a gray, humid, muggy morning, the kind of morning that would’ve had me rushing to the bathroom before class to brush out my hair and towel off sweat.
And then I felt Heather staring at me.
“What was that?” I asked. “Last night—”
“Brahms, Intermezzo. It’s what you want to play if you’re not much good, because it sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. And also, it’s not very fast, which is good because I’ve hardly picked up my clarinet in the last year. It’s surprising how muscle memory sticks with you. Okay. Shutting up now.”
She spent a few minutes fiddling with the air-conditioning, the radio, and finally started driving.
“So I said I was going to think about this. And what I thought, in the end, was that for so long I just wanted a do-over with you. A second chance to start sixth grade by walking over to your table in the cafeteria and asking if I could sit down. And I got it, somehow, and I don’t know how or why, but if I throw away this chance I know I won’t get another one. And that’s not acceptable to me. So—I hope you’re not mad that I had to think about it, and that I’m making myself be a little bit logical. It’s not romantic. But stupidity never did anybody any favors.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I
liked
logic, and there was something sweet in her carefulness. “I don’t think I could ask for anything better than music outside my window in the middle of the night.”
We pulled into an empty parking lot. The dashboard clock said 7:03, twenty-seven minutes before first period.
The sun had risen, but the sky still had the pale, deathly color of too-early-in-the-morning. Heather stretched out, slung her purple backpack over one shoulder, and grabbed my hand as we walked inside.
“Library?”
“Library,” Heather answered. I moved half a step behind her, acutely aware all of a sudden both of the warmth of her hand and the emptiness of the hallways. But shadows roamed here and there, the teachers and athletes and the band people who came early and stayed late, and their footsteps nearly made me jump out of my skin.
Even though there was no reason to be secretive.
What, I was going to surprise the three percent of the school who hadn’t already decided I was gay? I was going to hear snide comments from the people who already considered me fair game for snide comments? I’d had time to get used to this.
So it was okay. It had me on my toes, but it was definitely okay.
Watching Heather, I wondered if the same thing was going through her head. This had to be new for her too, but she seemed so certain. How long had she been waiting, to be able to hold someone’s hand in the hallway?
She ducked her head into the library, glanced here and there, and paced purposefully through the shelves. Slow and graceful, like she was in character as a ninja princess even now.
She turned a corner and we were in a nook where no one could see us. Books on two sides, and a vast picture window overlooking the swampy creek side where kids would go to smoke pot at lunch.
She bent over the books, running her hands over the spines, and I crouched down to see what she was looking at.
She was looking at me.
I glanced away, because I was anxious and because I was looking for a book—one that should be right there—and then she leaned in and kissed me. On my neck, just below my ear. I breathed in the smell of her hair, lemon and rosewood, sweet and dark.
Wow.
My anxiety and bewilderment and confusion blew out of my head and there was nothing but that wow, her smell, and the touch of her skin on my skin.
And she smiled just a little, and looked away, and picked a paperback from the shelf.
“This one, I think. No?”
“No. This one.” A dull green book, perhaps forty years old and beaten by the years. At one time or another I’d read most of the dating advice books in the library, trying to figure out what I was missing. Judging by this one, I wasn’t missing much.
She glanced at the cover, opened to a random page. And started reading it to me, until she cracked up halfway through and handed it to me. “According to this, I’m not a girl.”
“Yeah, me neither. So that makes us . . .”
“Gay men?”
As we were giggling, a girl showed up around the corner with a cart of books and gave us a withering stare.
I put my head down like I’d been caught in the middle of something wrong, but Heather just smiled back, all demure innocence, and started toward the door. Inwardly I marveled: This was a girl who’d survived three years of Catholic school. How had she learned to be many things at once, and not let it break her?
Heather had passed notes to me in English class since the start of the school year, to make fun of nearly everything we were studying—not like most of my class-mates who thought that novels and poetry were stupid by definition, but like her standards were way too high for this class.
That morning she passed me a tiny triangle of paper, elaborately folded in some pattern I couldn’t fathom, and I started unfolding it under my desk.
“Miss Meyer,” Dr. Vesper said. He was a small and elderly man who sometimes looked like he was about to die, and sometimes looked like he already had. “Would you care to share that with the rest of the class?”
I looked at the poem in my hand, which I hadn’t even had a chance to read yet, and said, “Actually, I would.”
And I stood up and started to read aloud, hoping desperately that it wasn’t anything we’d both get in trouble for. I looked to Heather for help, but she just had her hand over her face and an expression somewhere between horror and embarrassment and delight.
“You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
“However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.”
I got to this point and stopped reading. I wanted to sit down. It was too much for me to take in.
“Would you care to
explain
this, Miss Meyer?”
I shook my head, because I couldn’t explain it, and I felt stupid because I couldn’t explain it. But I didn’t need to explain it; I just wanted to listen to it right now, and read it over in my head. I slid back into my seat.
“Anyone else?”
Heather had stuck her hand up into the air and was waving it around like a little kid who really, really wanted to get called on.
“Miss Galloway?”
I didn’t want her to explain it. Not now. I wanted to go back into the library and sit in front of the picture window and listen, there, to what she had to say.
“Poems are not for explaining,” she said, her tone as bored and faintly scornful as his. “They are for pretty girls to read aloud. Everyone knows that. Can we get back to Hawthorne now?”
And we did—but I spent that period and the next one letting those words tumble around in my head, still dazed at the thought that the words were for me.
“Billy Collins,” she said at lunchtime. For a change we didn’t sit over by Jon and Ollie and the others, but on the other side of the campus, perched on tall boulders with one flat stone between us for our thermoses and sandwiches.
“I don’t think I really got it,” I said. I had read it three times all the way through by then. “But it was interesting.”
“I wasn’t being facetious or anything, what I said before. Poems aren’t for understanding or explaining, not if they’re any good.”
That was good enough for me.
And really, everything in all the world was good enough for me until after the end of eighth period, at my locker, when I was sorting through my books to figure out which ones I needed for homework and which ones I could leave at school—and I noticed Gwen standing there.
Gwen had always picked on me with utter apathy. Like, if she couldn’t find any of her friends to gossip with, and if her boyfriend wasn’t around, and if she didn’t have any interesting plans for the day, she might go find me out of force of habit and see if I was having a bad hair day.
So I saw her there, and I didn’t see her. And really, it didn’t matter. What was gonna bring me down today?
“You really didn’t waste any time, did you?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. Didn’t care either. I turned back to my locker, pretending to look in my assignment book.
She took a step closer to me and pointedly looked inside—at the pictures stuck in the door, with me and Julia waving at the camera from a Ferris wheel, the two of us in our bathing suits at the water park, Julia in her prom dress after we’d gone shopping for it—that one was the last picture I had from before she died. The accident was just a couple weeks before prom, and I had had to call and cancel the limo because Ollie couldn’t do it.
“I mean, it makes sense. When you’ve got a straight girl to pine for, you shut up and pretend that you don’t, and now that she’s gone you can finally get a life. But you sure didn’t wait for her corpse to cool.”
I bit down on my lip so hard it hurt. Not that I was biting back words—but hearing it made my face tense up, violently.
“What the hell makes it your business?”
“Everyone is going to think it’s their business. You should know that.”
“What do you want me to do, announce it over the PA system?”
She shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
She walked off. Mission accomplished. It hit me in the gut.
Didn’t wait for her corpse to cool.
God.
I’d been through this. I wasn’t being disloyal to a dead straight girl who’d never so much as kissed my forehead.
But when the environmental science teacher drew a smiley face on my essay, when I tried to stand up for myself in military history, I wasn’t thinking anymore,
I wish Julia could still be around to see this, I wish I could tell her
. I was thinking that I wanted to tell Heather.
So Gwen was right, or she was wrong, and I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t change the shame, and the hurt.