“Jesus. I might have figured out a way to make myself feel better that didn’t involve telling you way too much about my personal life.”
“What do you think I’m going to do? Spread rumors about you?” I did turn to her then. Her face was so still, it might have been etched in glass. “I know what that feels like. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
“I didn’t say any of this accidentally. Give me a break. I’ve lived for long enough to be very careful about what I say and who I say it to. I do know when to shut up.”
And you said it anyway, why?
As a bargaining chip laid out on the table. As a peace offering. Or just to make me feel sorry for her when she didn’t deserve it.
She edged up to me and brushed against my arm. “Is your hand okay?”
“Only a flesh wound.”
She left me alone while I bandaged it up and tried to think.
“Me?” I finally said. “Out of all the girls in the school—”
“All the girls in the eighth grade.”
“Me. Me?”
“It’s not as if you’re not pretty, you know,” Heather said. Her eyes were on me then; bright, and intent, and asking something.
“I never said I wasn’t.” I didn’t think of myself as pretty though. Or ugly either. I didn’t think that I could be put on that scale. It’s like one of those kōans where the answer only highlights the absurdity of the question. Does a dog have Buddha nature?
“If I say something, will you get mad at me?”
I knew better than to say no.
“No,” I said.
“It didn’t matter what I said, it didn’t matter what rumors I spread or whether I snickered at you in the hallways. Which, like, I really and truly know I shouldn’t have done. People would’ve made some assumptions about you.”
“I know.”
“The only thing that would’ve changed, if I’d been nicer to you, is that they’d have made the same assumptions about me. And I wasn’t ready for that, I wasn’t even ready to admit it to myself. I couldn’t have endured it. You, though—you acted as if you didn’t care what anybody else thought about you.”
“But I did care,” I said. “Between the things I wasn’t allowed to do, and the things I didn’t know how to do, I could never have been inconspicuous and popular like you. I wished I could be, but I didn’t see that I had any choice except to stumble forward until I stopped caring. Or looked like I stopped caring.”
“I’m not saying it’s
right,
you know? And I’m not saying it makes any sense that some people draw lines between musicals or flannel or haircuts and who you want to make out with. God knows if shoe shopping and makeup could ungay a person, I’d have had an easier time of things.”
Heather gave me a sideways sort of smile, like we had shared a dozen painful experiences, like we could understand each other. I wanted to run away and yell, We don’t share that, we don’t understand each other, go back and be the Heather that I thought you were.
But she put her hand gently over the place where I had bandaged my palm, and she said, “I
am
sorry. I wish I could take it all back. But I can’t.”
I looked at her like if I kept it up for long enough she would say “Just kidding” and smirk at me. No—she looked earnest, with shards of hope in her eyes, and I knew that she’d tried to give me whatever it would take to start to mend things. Her secrets, her past, the things that hurt her when she poked at them.
And I could almost believe her. I had learned a few things by now about weakness and dishonor.
“It’s not okay yet.”
I don’t know why I said
yet,
but it was out there, like a promise that someday that would change.
“I didn’t think it would be.”
THEN
I
counted money, counted days, counted emergencies and possibilities and contingencies, and then somehow I was certain. I was certain, even though I was terrified.
When I came home Dad was in the garage, going through old boxes. I put my bike up on the stand and got out my tool set to adjust the derailleurs. If I was carrying that much weight I’d need to make sure the gears shifted right.
And it gave me something to do while I was making up my mind to say something.
“You remember this?” Dad said softly.
I turned around and saw a piece of green paper, folded in half, printed up into a playbill. The clip art was atrocious, but the spelling wasn’t bad, considering.
“That’s from when we did the vampire play, in fifth grade.” Not an official school play or anything like that, just me and Jon and Julia being silly with some vampire fangs we found at the dollar store after Halloween. But it was the kind of silliness that takes itself seriously enough to put a lot of time and effort into printing up a playbill.
Things used to be a lot simpler.
“We were supposed to go to California,” I said. “Me and Julia.”
“I was thinking,” Dad said. “After your finals are over, we could take a vacation. Go up to New York, maybe. Or Toronto.”
“Sounds good,” I said, and for a minute it did sound good because he understood that I needed to be somewhere else right now, and he knew better than to suggest California. But I had to say what I was thinking about.
“I thought maybe I might still go to California,” I said.
“By yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“My bike,” I said.
Somewhere between cycling to school and to Julia’s house and to the grocery store for a snack or a magazine, I fell in love with the wind in my face and the sun on the backs of my hands. On the bike, I was swift and strong, invulnerable. When I wanted to be carried far away from everyone at school, my bike carried me. And when I started to outgrow my pink bike from middle school with the basket and the streamers on it, I wanted a real bike, a grown-up bike.
I’d found it in the racks at the bike store. A touring bike, a twenty-one-speed Bianchi, lighter than a mountain bike and sturdier than a racer. Perfect for going forever. It spent five months on layaway while I saved my allowances and did chores—and then my parents shocked me with it on my fifteenth birthday. I did my first metric century on that bike, all sixty-two miles of it. My first real hundred-mile century too. “It’s built for long distances, and bike camping, and I’ve got it tuned up nice.”
Dad didn’t say anything for a bit. He kept shuffling through a stack of old papers.
“You sound like you’ve thought this through.”
“For about an hour and a half,” I gulped out. “Which is okay, because I still have to finish school and buy supplies, and I have plenty of time to change my mind, but I thought, if it’s hopeless I’d better know right now.” He was looking at me, worried and skeptical, as I tried to make my case all in a single breath. “I’ve been bicycle camping before. Even when it was flash flooding and I couldn’t make it home in time, even that one time I got lost and didn’t get myself turned in the right direction for hours. I’m a good enough bike mechanic to fix just about everything on my bike well enough to get to the next town, and I’ve got enough saved up for meals and repairs and hotels sometimes if it’s raining. And—in the seventies, there was this kid who decided that he was going to sail around the world by himself. And he did. It was in
National Geographic
or something.”
He shook his head. “You and Julia. You always had such huge ideas. And even when there wasn’t a chance in the world that you could pull it off, you didn’t care.” He looked at the old dog-eared playbill again before putting it back in the box. “It doesn’t always work like that. When you fall, you can fall hard. And there won’t be anyone to pick you up, out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know that I’m going to be changing flat tires in the pouring rain, and subsisting on freeze-dried reconstituted meat-related product, and sleeping in the grass?”
He sighed. “I never wanted to be one of those parents who kept their kids from roaming around the neighborhood unsupervised and figuring things out for themselves. But it was a lot easier to think you could fend for yourself before Julia—”
My first instinct was to pull out all the statistics I knew about safety and fatalities per hour or per mile. But it wouldn’t have made any difference.
“I was lying,” I said. “When I said I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I have. I think that this is what I need to do. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Dad pushed his glasses up along his nose and frowned. My parents were Quakers, and beyond being pacifists, and not allowing makeup and cable TV, this was what they believed in. When the Spirit tells you to do something, you had better be listening. Even if it seems crazy, even if it seems dangerous, you had better be prepared to take a step outside what is safe and sane.
I didn’t believe that God told some guy, however many thousands of years ago, “Hey, build a ginormous boat in this desert over here.” I liked it as a story, though, because it seemed like the kind of thing God ought to say. There were crazy stupid things that needed to get done, or should have gotten done, or turned out to be wonderful when they did get done. And maybe, if God ever did tell people what to do, it was to stick up for these crazy stupid things that no one in their right mind would ever do otherwise.
Things had shifted in the hour and a half I’d been thinking about this. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to work on their play, and it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to have to deal with Heather and Oliver. I imagined the long flat yellow fields out on the road, where the sky is enormous and you feel like you could go on forever, and I wanted that like I wanted air or water. I wanted to be swallowed up in that great expanse of nothingness. I wanted to devote myself to a purpose.
I looked up, and Dad was looking out of the garage, toward the great expanse of suburb. “I know, okay? Me needing to do this doesn’t mean anything. Everything’s a matter of life or death to someone whether it’s going to the party on Friday or being allowed to stay out past curfew. And just because I think this is different, it doesn’t mean it actually is.”
Now he looked at me. “But it is different,” he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder and I just nodded because I didn’t trust myself to say anything without starting to cry.
“Have you talked to your mother?”
I shook my head.
“She was talking to Sheila a few nights ago.” Julia’s mother. “She was saying that she didn’t know what to do with Julia’s ashes. She thought that Julia would have wanted to go so much further.”
Sure. Her parents were always putting away money for summer camp, or college, or a piano that was halfway in tune, and there wasn’t much left over for big vacations. That was why Julia had wanted California, to get as far away as she possibly could, just for once.
“We know how much she meant to you,” Dad said. He waited for a moment.
And that was when I dared to let myself hope.
I spent the whole weekend talking to my parents, and Julia’s mom, and starting to assemble a list of everything I would need to do and everything I would need to take with me. I kept telling myself that I could change my mind about leaving. But I already knew that I wouldn’t.
And I didn’t know how to tell Oliver.
The next day he’d said he was sorry. He brought me sushi from the organic grocery store a few blocks away, and I said that it was all right. But it wasn’t. We both knew that.
I didn’t come to eat lunch under the oak tree with Oliver and the rest of them anymore. I didn’t go to their meetings. I kept my head down, and I did my finals, and I didn’t tell any of them that I was leaving until there was no chance of salvaging anything.
Oliver called me the night before I left, when I was out at the grocery store to pick up some dried blueberries to put in with my trail mix, and I never called him back.
I just left.
NOW
T
he thing that kept bothering me over the weekend was how Heather had declared me to be not not pretty. On the list of things that I was, I could’ve put urban-planning radical, and cyclist, and good at math and physics, and pacifist and Quaker and a ton of other things, but any word about how I looked would have gone right at the bottom. It was not on my radar. So as I took my usual look in the mirror just to make sure that my hair was straightish and I didn’t have anything in my teeth—I frowned and stared at my own eyes. At first I saw what I always saw: dust-blond hair down somewhere between my ears and my shoulders. A squarish face. Two eyes and a nose approximately where they were supposed to be. But I kept staring, as if to answer that question: What had she seen in me that I didn’t see?
Sometimes if you stare at a word for long enough, wondering if you’ve spelled it right, the word starts looking completely mysterious to you. Like there’s something wrong with it. Like it doesn’t even mean what you thought it meant.
I had a moment of strangeness like that. I couldn’t even tell that it was me there.
That’s not me. I’m younger than that. That girl looks strong—that girl looks like she knows what she’s doing.
Maybe that was the me that I had become, changing flat tires in the rain, sleeping in culverts and in deserted fields. And then I smiled at myself, really smiled, not a posing-for-a-picture smile. I was this person who was tough and mature and knew what she was doing, even when she had no clue. And I was also not not pretty.
Monday came. I didn’t notice Heather’s car in the parking lot, but I started working on the big cardboard castle I was building for the last act without paying much attention to that; it was only as the hours passed that it started seeming really strange to me that Heather wasn’t there.
I went up from the basement, not really looking for her, but just looking around.
There were people onstage, but it was just Oliver and Lissa, blocking out some of the sword fighting—someone was squealing, but it wasn’t from there.