Authors: S. Stevens
Tags: #General, #Fiction
One depressing Saturday in November, when drizzling clouds threatened to crush us from above and even the air looked dreary, Adrienne called my cell repeatedly until I answered. Her usually perky voice sounded as dejected as the weather.
“We’re having problems with some of the music editing for the show, especially cutting a huge piece out of ‘That Smell’. Ben keeps trying but you can always hear the break and it sounds crappy. We could really use Alex’s help. Plus, we still need a kick-ass song for the vampire fight at the end, and Alex knows all that cool, angry music. Can you get him to help us?”
“Huh? Why are you asking me? Jocelyn should be able to handle that, like she handles everything else about Alex.” Bitter didn’t become me but I couldn’t help my tone of voice.
“They broke up.” My heart pinged. “He broke up with her, so she doesn’t want to talk to him, and she doesn’t think he’ll say yes if she asks him for help.”
I wasn’t biting. “Okay, so someone else in CDC can ask. You don’t need me.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t he edit on your computer? You have all the software and everything.”
That was true. Alex’s computer was a piece of junk, with no audio or video editing packages. But he was a whiz with those programs. When he and I made videos, he handled most of the technical stuff.
“Adrienne, you don’t really think Alex is going to waltz right on over here and sit down at the computer in my bedroom for the first time in months and spend hours, away from his beloved sports I might add, fixing problems for CDC. That is so not happening, on so many levels I can’t even count them all.”
She was silent for so long I checked the phone screen to see if we’d lost our connection.
“I guess you’re right,” she finally said. “Maybe we can find someone else’s system to use.”
After we hung up, irritation pulsed through me. Honestly, why did she do that? She knew Alex was a sore spot for me. Maybe she thought I would reach out to him for the sake of CDC. Maybe she thought I would be excited that he was single again. Maybe she had no idea what she was talking about.
After Adrienne’s call shifted my mood from depressed to irritable, I couldn’t pull myself back. I was so angry at having nothing. I also knew that, for once, I really was being overly dramatic. I had my family, a few good friends, and everybody was healthy. We had enough money, my parents had good jobs, I had my dog. I had no right to complain. But without CDC, I had nowhere to pour my energy. I played the piano and read more to fill in the hours, but nothing gave me the jolt or the buzz of the theatre.
My sour mood pervaded everything, including my driving lessons and conversations at the dinner table. Saturday night, my mother reached her wits’ end with me.
She put down her fork and looked at me pointedly. “Sadie, is something wrong?”
I shrugged and gave the universal teenage grunt that means “maybe yes, maybe no.”
“You don’t seem like yourself lately.” She pulled out the crowbar to pry something, anything, out of me. “I know you miss CDC, and Alex, and Jesse. But is something else bothering you? Something specific? Something you want to talk about?” She passed the squash to my father, motioning him to take seconds.
“No, Mom, I’m fine.” I said.
She studied me like she was mentally peeling back layers of my skin for inspection.
“John said your grades are slipping.”
Unfair – my father was releasing privileged information. Report cards weren’t out yet. I glared at him but he was suddenly too fascinated by his plate to look up. The top of his salt-and-pepper head said nothing.
“I would think that with all your extra time, schoolwork would not be a problem.”
I’d had the same thought myself, but thinking didn’t make it so.
My father decided to be a part of the conversation after all, stepping in with an official teacher bulletin. “Sadie, you’ve worked very hard the past two years, and it’s paid off. Don’t let one bad semester ruin your transcript for college applications.”
I knew they were right. I gave the universal grunt again, trying to give it a conciliatory overtone. Mom made a hmph noise in reply, which I hoped signaled the subject was closed.
“Well, anyway, you just don’t seem like yourself to me,” she said again.
My irritation at everything – her refusal to stop grilling me, my inability to focus on schoolwork, Lucey being promised the role of Bella -- spilled over.
“What does that even mean?” I challenged her. “‘I don’t seem like myself.’ I don’t even know what myself is. I mean, I barely know what—or who, I am.”
My outburst triggered her sympathetic look, when her eyebrows go up and in. “Oh, honey, we all go through phases of uncertainty like that. Don’t worry too much. You’ll find yourself someday.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, my voice rising. “I’m not trying to ‘find myself’. Maybe I don’t want to be found. Don’t try to peg me into a certain hole right now. Maybe I just want to exist. Then I couldn’t ‘not be myself’ because I’d have no preconceived self that I’m not being.” I shook my head and lowered my voice. “I’m sixteen. I’m not even supposed to know who I am yet.”
“Wow. Profound,” Dad joked.
“Don’t make fun,” Mom cautioned, staring at her husband. “She’s right, you know. Think back to when we were kids. We tried on personalities like new shoes. I seem to remember you experimenting with a rocker phase and a tree-hugger phase before you settled on the academic persona that’s served you so well over the years.” Dad turned pink. “And the thing is, you don’t outgrow it – this trying on different personalities. We’re all still playing roles. I play a partner in a PR firm all day long. My co-workers and staff have no idea that when I come home, I put on cargo pants and listen to the Sex Pistols. I’m not lying about who I am at work. It’s just a different aspect of my personality.”
“I had no idea I was married to Sybil,” my father deadpanned.
“John, please,” Mom pleaded, but I snickered, feeling a little better after letting off some steam. “Sweetie, the important thing is to be true to yourself.”
“And if you can’t be true to yourself--” my father paused, suggesting he was the source of my thespian gene, “then be true to your school!”
(Cue music.)
“Be true to your school, yeah, yeah.” Dad broke into the chorus of the classic Beach Boys song, sucking me in with his dancing silverware. I only knew three lines but Dad kept going and Mom joined in. Yeah, they may have been fun once. Now, I guess they filled the role of aging parents just fine.
That night around eleven as I sat in my room lame and loveless, Adrienne texted. “Nigel news,” she wrote.
“What?” I texted back, suddenly in a chatting mood. Unlike discussions of Alex, which I tried to avoid, dirt on Nigel was fair game. After all, we’d only have him for a year. We had to get our exchange student’s worth of gossip.
“Tom saw Nigel and two old people at Bertucci’s at the mall tonight. His parents probably – they had accents,” she texted.
“???”
“Nigel looked all clean cut, not his usual grunge.”
“Again I say ???”
“His hair was slick not spiky, no leather jacket, no punk shirt.”
I couldn’t type fast enough. “Really? What was he wearing?”
“Ready? Chinos and a sweater!”
I tried to picture sexy, smooth Nigel as a prep. I probably wouldn’t have crushed on him if it weren’t for the punk-rock attitude and clothes.
“Did Tom talk to him?” I punched in.
“Tried to catch his eye. Nigel wouldn’t look,” Adrienne answered.
“Hahaha. Glad you told me.”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one suffering from an identity crisis.
16: Hari-kari
M
Y WEARY EXISTENCE slithered into Sunday. Heeding my parents for once, I went back over my homework and double-checked everything. Okay, actually it was less about pleasing my parents and more about having too much time on my hands. But it had the added benefit of contributing to parental happiness.
I was still at the small desk in my bedroom when music slipped through my window from Alex’s living room. He cranked the volume and the music crashed into my room. He was either showing off for some friends or working out some angst. It was head-banging music. I wondered if I could convince my father to put up a fence or a tall hedge or some other sound barrier between the two yards.
I stood up to gather the force necessary to push my old window all the way shut, so not even the half-inch gap at the bottom would admit the obnoxious music. Instead, I found myself with my forehead against the cool glass, eyes closed, listening to the song. The band was Three Days Grace. Alex loved them. I liked them a lot too, but I didn’t know them as well as he did. I remembered the last time he and I listened to Three Days Grace, sitting on the hammock in my back yard, sharing an iPod.
The happy memory was pushed aside as fight images formed in my head, choreographed to the song’s chorus. I recognized the fighters – the vampires James and Edward. It was perfect. CDC needed that song. My instinct was to shout over to Alex and ask him the song name and CD, but I didn’t dare to, plus he wouldn’t have heard me over the thumping music. Texting him would be too weird after all these weeks of not talking. He probably wouldn’t answer anyway. Still, this idea was too good to let go. I pulled up Adrienne’s cell phone number and entered a text.
“Call Alex and get the name of that song. It’s perfect for the Twilight fight scene.” Send. Hurry, Adrienne, it’s almost over. After an eternity, my phone buzzed.
“What song?” Adrienne texted back.
“The one he’s listening to now. Wait it just ended.”
“OK, I’ll ask.”
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed again – another text from Adrienne.
“He said its riot by 3 days grace from one-x.”
I stared at the message. My first communication with Alex since the day after Nick’s party in September. And we’d helped CDC even though we weren’t in it. And we’d done it together, like the old days. I felt ridiculously giddy. I took a deep breath as though I were about to speak and texted Adrienne back: “Did he say anything else?”
“He said good idea.”
“Tell him I said good luck at the playoff game Tuesday.”
“SADIE!!! TELL HIM YOURSELF!!!!!! Love you.”
*
L
UCEY WAS OUT SICK Wednesday. Generally, this was cause for celebration. But whispers in the hallways suggested something serious was wrong with her.
In the restroom after fourth period, Adrienne and I got the scoop. We were safely tucked into stalls around the corner from the sinks and mirrors when Jocelyn and Kristina came in. (After a few years of doing shows with them, I recognized their voices instantly.)
“She puked on the bus yesterday. It was so gross,” Kristina said as the restroom door swung shut with a muffled bang.
“Now that you mention it, she did look green all day. I thought it was her poor choice of clothes. I’ve told her a hundred times that lime green doesn’t work with her skin tone,” Jocelyn said. An image of Lucey as Elphaba in
Wicked
– green skin and all – flashed through my mind.
“Jocelyn, forget her wardrobe. Focus. Don’t you see what’s going on? She was sick last week too, remember?” Kristina was toying with Jocelyn. She had dirt but was making Jocelyn work to get it. “Even a stomach virus doesn’t last that long.”
“So, what does? Does she have cancer or something?”
“Jocelyn. Lucey,” she paused, “is pregnant!”
Something clattered to the floor – probably a tube of lip gloss.
I suppressed a surprised laugh, staying frozen on the toilet seat. Adrienne waved her hand at me under the divider between the stalls in silent communication.
“Seriously? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t she tell me?” Jocelyn sounded hurt. “And are you sure, or are you guessing?”
“I’m sure. She owned up to it on the phone last night.” Kristina’s tone switched from town gossip to concerned friend. “And we have to be there for her, Jos, this is going to be a hard time for her.”
“Oh, of course we will!” Jocelyn matched Kristina’s concern. “She’d do the same for us, after all.” After a few seconds of silent commiseration, Jocelyn returned to gossip mode. “But wait—who’s the father? Is it Nigel? It has to be, right?”
“You would think, but maybe we don’t know as much about Lucey as we thought, because she won’t say, can you believe that? Why wouldn’t she say? I mean, everyone knew she and Nigel were sleeping together, right? By not telling, she’s making it sound like she was sleeping around.”
“Yeah, if she’s not saying, maybe it is someone else. She seems to spend a lot of time talking to Alex since we broke up. Do you think--” My heart froze to match the rest of my body.
“Alex? I don’t think so. He’s too goody-two-shoes, like you always said,” Kristina said.
“Maybe it’s Nick Jones. They dated once.” Jocelyn was revving up now. “Or Eric Hayes or Billy Jackson.” I closed my eyes and waited for her to finish a roll call of the junior and senior classes. Kristina vetoed every name for one reason or another.