How to Save a Life (8 page)

Just as I’m working myself up to a purifying, private cry, I hear the driver’s door open, and sense someone drop into the seat. I knew it. Rigorous habit. He starts the car and turns on the heat and pulls forward while I consider making my presence known, and then it’s kind of too late. Though I am tempted to bitch at him for pulling forward out of the parking space, which drives me crazy because it drove my dad crazy. “You’re supposed to back out,” Dad would say. “That’s what the rules are, and that’s what all the cars around you expect, and you should always try to behave predictably when driving.” He was a great driver. Mr. Highway Safety. And it’s not fair that he died in a car accident. I wonder if he’s out there and knows how it happened. Maybe he’s lecturing the old lady—also dead—who got disoriented by a bright beam of morning sun, crossed the median, and hit him at freeway speed.

Don’t think about that, Jill
. Think about:

How out of it Dylan is. If he weren’t, he’d check the backseat to see what’s up with the oddly shaped blanket hump. Can’t he, like,
sense
that he’s not alone? Now I’m afraid if I say something, he’ll be startled and veer into oncoming traffic. I mentally follow the stops and turns—yes, definitely pho. It’s almost funny how oblivious he is. I imagine all the ways I could reveal myself, from throwing back the blanket and yelling “Surprise!” to snaking out a hand to rest on his neck. It strikes me as hilarious. Or awful. I’m on the edge, teetering between laughing like a maniac and bursting into scary, heaving sobs. A laugh or a sob rises in my throat when I imagine Dylan’s reaction to finding me; I clamp my lips shut, hard, trying not to shake. Tears squeeze out of my eyes. I think I’m crying. I don’t know.

The car comes to a stop. Dylan jerks the parking brake up, and the door opens and closes. I feel the blast of cold air. Finally, I let out a sob-laugh and sit up, relieved to be breathing without the filter of the blanket. Two more sobs. Definitely sobs.
Shake it off, Jill
. I don’t need to be acting a fool in front of Dylan right now. I need to show him I’m sane and stable and ready to be human.

After a few minutes of deep inhaling, exhaling, I get out of the car and walk to one end of the street and then back, oh so casually entering the restaurant. Dylan is in a small booth, already sipping hot tea while he looks at his phone.

“Oh, hey,” I say, acting surprised. Badly.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen him straight on like this, outside of the classrooms and hallways of school. He’s so beautiful. He’s got on a smudge of black eyeliner and has a new bleached streak in his dark hair, but he’s not wearing his lip ring, the one I like to tug lightly with my teeth when we kiss.

“What are you doing here, Jill?”

It’s not quite the hello I’d hoped for.

“Just one?” the waiter asks, handing me a menu.

“Um…” Dylan is going to make me ask what I couldn’t ask Cinders and Laurel. “Can I sit with you?”

“If you want.” He puts away his phone. A good sign, like he’s willing to pay attention to me.

I sit, order a bowl of my favorite pho and a hot tea.

“Did you follow me here?” he asks, staring at me over his teacup.

“No.”
As if. “I really wanted some soup. You think you’re the only one that can come here? You own this place now?”

He laughs. It’s a beautiful sound. “Jill, you are so full of shit. You think I didn’t see you sitting in my backseat before I even got into the car?”

I smile. “I wondered what the hell was wrong with you that you didn’t notice.”

“It’s a little creepy.”

“I almost thought you weren’t going to come. But I know you and winter and Tuesdays and pho.”

He shrugs. “What can I say? Pho is rock.”

Dylan has this whole rating system for everything—food, bands, clothes, teachers, movies, cars, songs, life events—based on the game rock-paper-scissors. Whatever is the utmost in awesomeness, whatever is profoundly good, whatever is right and true, is rock. Because rock, though it can be beat (or “hidden,” as Dylan prefers to say) by paper, can never be destroyed.

I wonder what would happen if I bumped my knee against his under the table, or touched his arm. I wonder whose job it is to make the first move. I wonder if I even want that.

“I didn’t mean to be creepy,” I say, keeping my limbs to myself. “I was waiting for you and it was freezing and I knew the blanket was in there. Then I was going to say something but didn’t think it was safe to scare you while you were driving.” Remembering something Dylan once said about how I never say I’m sorry, that I make excuses instead—true—I add, “Sorry.”

The waiter sets two steaming bowls of beef broth on the table, along with plates of noodles and limes and bean sprouts and thinly sliced meat. We quietly go through the ritual of unwrapping and breaking apart our wooden chopsticks, rubbing them together to smooth out any splinters. We move items from the plates into our bowls. I lean my head over mine, inhaling the fragrant steam and closing my eyes for a second. I make a wish. A pho wish. I wish for Dylan to speak to me as if I’m a person he might still like a little bit. I don’t need for him to love and adore me. Only to tolerate, be my friend.

Maybe the best way to encourage that to happen is to talk about something somewhat neutral, at least as it pertains to our relationship.

“Remember how my mom is adopting that baby?”

“Pretty sure I’m not going to forget that.”

“The mother, the pregnant girl, got here yesterday.”

That gets his attention. He sets his chopsticks down. “Oh, man. I didn’t realize that was happening
now
. Wasn’t it only, like, six weeks ago or something your mom told you?”

“Yeah. It’s happening.”

“It must be crazy. To realize it’s for real and everything.”

“Totally crazy.”

“I want to meet her.”

“You do?”

He picks up his chopsticks, slurps noodles. “Yeah, I mean, it’s a big deal. And even with, you know, the way everything is, I still kind of feel like part of the family? If that’s okay.”

Yes, I know the way everything is. “It’s okay. It’s good.”

This is going so well. So unbelievably perfect. I barrel ahead. “My mom took her to the doctor this morning. To check everything out. This girl, she’s from another planet, I’m telling you.”

“Yeah?” He takes a bite of bean sprouts.

“Sniffer of leather. Eater of the worst kind of junk food. Lover of tabloid magazines.”

“She’s our age, right? And she’s only staying there a little while. You can handle it.”

“Seriously, Dylan, she’s
weird
.” I drop a slice of beef into my broth; now I’m on a roll. “Not much going on upstairs. Her big ambition was to go to Pancake Universe.”

Dylan pushes his lower lip out and nods. “Uh-huh. And how long have you known her? Like, a total of five waking hours or something?”

His tone has totally changed. So I change mine, too. “Are you saying I don’t have the right to judge?”

“No. And even if I were saying that, I know it wouldn’t stop you. I’m just saying maybe you should think about how she feels. She’s probably scared as hell. She probably needs a friend. Not everyone was born independent like you.”

Well. What am I supposed to say to that?

He picks up his bowl and drinks, then sets it down. “Wow. Have I rendered you speechless?”

“Ha,” I say weakly, and it’s all I’ve got. So I’m independent. The way my dad raised me to be. No daughter of his would ever be stuck on the side of the road in the dark flagging down potential rapists to help with a flat. He opened my first checking account with me when I was twelve and taught me how to make a budget and balance my account using a spreadsheet. He taught me not only how to drive but how to drive in snow, on ice, off road, in a flood. I know how to change my oil and brake pads; I understand the wonders of compounding interest; I’m in charge of keeping the smoke alarms and heating filters fresh in our house; I can load and clean guns and shoot them if I have to; and I know how to drop a man with an elbow strike to the face.

Okay, I also know that’s not what Dylan means. He’s talking about emotional independence. It’s not like I chose it. I want to say,
When someone
you
love and depend on emotionally dies, get back to me
.

New subject needed. Maybe telling him about my encounter with Ravi, a.k.a. R.J. Desai, loss control associate, will get him interested in my life again.

“Do you remember a guy from—”

“Jill, I gotta get back to school.” He puts money on the table and stands. Just enough to pay for his lunch and tip. I get up, too, and immediately realize I’ve left my messenger bag in my locker. Fantastic.

“Can I borrow, like… seven dollars?” Miss Independent, that’s me.

Dylan is fixing his jeans so that they rest exactly right on his hips. “What if I don’t have it? What are you going to do?”

“Do you have it?”

“What if I don’t?”

“
Do
you?”

He takes his money from the table and goes up to the register to pay both our checks with his debit card. Five minutes ago, he was one of the family. Now we’re… the way we are. I stand by the door trying to look as if it doesn’t bother me. When he comes back, he says, “You need a ride back to school, too.”

“No I don’t,” I say instantly, and just as instantly regret it. Why can’t I simply say yes to him? What am I proving, except that I still don’t know how to concede that, like anyone else, I don’t want to be spinning off into the universe all alone? That sometimes I’m wrong, that sometimes I screw up, that sometimes I require mercy. From friends. From my mom, my dad. That right now I want Dylan’s most of all. Even with all of these brilliant, self-aware insights, I push open the door of the restaurant and say, “I don’t need anything.”

Mandy

It’s not my fault about the peanut butter. Robin
wants
me to eat things like peanut butter on apple slices for a snack, instead of cupcakes or hot chocolate. Their peanut butter isn’t even that good; they get it from the health food store, and if you leave it out too long, it gets oily.

Jill’s standing between me and the TV. “Why’d you stick the empty jar back in the fridge? Put it on the counter so we know we’re out. Or write it on the list by the phone.”

I’ve been here only two days. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to know where they keep the grocery list. At Kent’s we didn’t even have a list. If there wasn’t food, he yelled about it and my mother went to the store.

“I think there’s enough, if you scrape the sides, to put on a cracker?” I try to see in the space between her arm and body what’s happening on the talk show that just started.

“No, there isn’t.” She walks over to the couch where I’m stretched out with my feet up, and holds the jar in front of my face with the lid off to show me. The smell makes me hungry again. “Where’s my mom?”

“She had a meeting. She said to tell you she left a note in your room.”

Still holding the peanut butter jar, Jill stomps upstairs. This morning after Jill left for school, Robin sat by me on the couch and said, “About Jill…”

I propped myself up and paid attention.

“You have to understand,” Robin said, “that I sort of dropped this on her out of the blue. So I can’t totally blame her for not knowing how to handle it. I’d hoped she’d come around by now.” She said to give her time, that Jill’s actually a nice, caring person who hides it well. I said, “How much time?”

Robin smiled and then stopped smiling and said that she wished she knew, that she’d been waiting a long time herself for Jill to come back.

On Monday night, I was up in my room and in bed before Jill got home from work, and I didn’t wake up until after she was gone in the morning, but there were magazines for me on the kitchen table. From her. So I had something to read at breakfast while Robin read her paper. That was nice. Then yesterday was the doctor, and when Jill got home from school and found out everything about the baby really being a girl and not being due for seven more weeks, she didn’t hide that she was mad about that, and hasn’t said very much to me since.

It doesn’t look like that’s going to change today.

The guest on the talk show is a bra expert, and women from the audience come down and get measured and everyone needs a bigger cup size than they thought and I don’t know why, but they don’t seem happy about it. I’ve always had the right size. In fifth grade, I got home from school one afternoon and I’d taken off my sweater because it was late spring and I wanted to feel the air on my arms. My mother saw me in my T-shirt and pulled me into my room—actually it was half my room and half Gary’s office—and lifted my shirt. We went straight out to get me fitted. “Why didn’t you say something, Amanda?” she asked me on the way to the store. “I hope you haven’t been running around like that in front of Gary.” Gary was her boyfriend that year. What I remember about him is a necklace with a real gold nugget on the chain, and the smell of Chinese tea. He drank it all the time because the antioxidants balanced out his smoking, he said.