Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (3 page)

“Do I—do I have to order food?” the girl asked. And when I looked at her again, her blue eyes were starting to swim.

God, I was such a bully. “No, you don’t have to. You can just have your tea,” I said, giving up.

She sat up straighter in the booth and managed to look me in the eye. “No, I would actually like a piece of pie. How much is the pecan?”

“It’s a bargain at two fifty. The others are two bucks.”

She thought it over. “Okay, I’ll have a piece of apple pie.”

I winked my smart-ass waitress wink. “Good choice. Everybody loves Sophie Schifferdecker’s apple pie.”

The girl nodded and picked up her book again. Just shy, I decided. Pitifully shy. Amazing she has the nerve to go out and sit in a restaurant by herself. I felt kind of bad about pushing her to order the pie. It occurred to me that she could be on scholarship—even at Harvard, not everybody was rich. I set the pie in front of her and decided not to get mad if she left me a crappy tip.

I sipped my coffee behind the counter and glanced at a copy of the
Boston Globe
that someone had left in a booth. I kept having the feeling that Pale Girl was looking at me, but
I didn’t turn around to check. Then a bunch of customers came in and I forgot about her. Around four-thirty I realized she was still there.

“You want anything else?” I said, walking over to her booth. “More tea?”

She blushed. “Oh, no thanks. I guess I should leave.”

I shrugged. “The dinner rush won’t start for another hour—you can hang out, if you want to.”

“Thanks.” She ran her fingers through a headful of messy rusty curls.

“So,” I said, “you a freshman?” Waitresses at the Mug are
supposed
to be nosy.

“A freshman? You think I’m a
freshman
?” She looked at me as if I’d slapped her.

“Hey, I’m just guessing. You’re not?”

“No! I’m a senior.”

I would never have thought that. “So, your last year at Harvard, huh?”

She blinked a few times. “I don’t go to Harvard.”

“Oh, sorry. It’s just that a lot of the students who come in here do.”

A light went on behind her eyes. “Oh, you thought I was a
Harvard
freshman! I get it. No, I’m in high school. I go to Cambridge Rindge and Latin.”

“Really?” I sank down in the booth across from her without really realizing it. “We almost never get any high-school kids in here. They all hang out in the pit by the T station in nice weather, or at Bertucci’s if they’re hungry.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. I’m new here. I don’t know many kids.”

“You had to change schools your senior year? That’s rough. Did your parents move here for jobs or something?”

She smiled but didn’t say anything for a minute. Obviously I was prying, which I normally don’t do, but there was something kind of interesting about this girl, and I felt like I’d almost figured out the puzzle.

“My parents are still back in Indiana, where I grew up. I’m living with my older sister now. She went to Harvard, but she graduated last year. She works for an architect.”

Pale Girl picked up her teacup and pretended to sip from it, though I knew the contents had disappeared a long time ago. What was she not saying? I looked at her clipped, unvarnished fingernails, the bashful smile that vanished as quickly as it appeared, her uniform of invisibility—were these clues?

And then I knew. Of course. That’s why she’d been studying me all week. Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Was my gaydar on the fritz?

“Did your parents make you move out?” I asked.

She blushed again, knowing I’d figured it out. “Not exactly, but they were pretty upset about the whole thing, so my sister suggested I come out here and stay with her. It seemed like a good idea.”

I nodded, hoping to keep her talking.

“I like it here pretty much—I mean the kids aren’t mean to me or anything. I just don’t know anybody very well. And Lindsay, my sister, doesn’t get home from work until after six o’clock, and I hate sitting around her apartment by myself, you know? I mean, it’s small, and it just doesn’t feel like it belongs to me yet.”

“So you decided to hang out here in the afternoon.”

“I came in on Monday, and I saw you, and it seemed like . . . well, you know, I thought maybe—”

“That I was a lesbian too,” I said.

She nodded.

“Well, I don’t hide it. My name is Marisol,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Marisol Guzman.”

“Lee O’Brien,” she said, hesitantly shaking my hand with only slightly more gusto than Damon the gorilla had a few hours before. We’d have to work on that.

“Welcome home, Lee O’Brien,” I said.

It had taken me only moments to decide to befriend Lee. Maybe it was some latent social-worker instinct I’d picked up from my mother, I wasn’t sure, but I was practically smacking my lips over the opportunity to help this baby dyke learn how to live in her new world. She needed somebody like me who was older (okay, only by a year), who’d been out longer (going on two), and was pretty much fearless about taking on the world (a trait I’d had forever, thank you very much).

It was only later, after Lee had hung around the Mug (eating a smuggled cheeseburger) until I finished work, and then followed me back to my apartment, where we’d walked in on Birdie and Damon howling over
Sex and the City
reruns and tossing popcorn kernels to the dog, that I wondered if picking up a stray of my own was such a good idea after all.

I
WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY NERVOUS
Saturday morning. Normally, I’m a little
over
confident—at least that’s what my father says. He thinks it wouldn’t hurt me to “have a little humility.” It’s not like I think I’m good at everything. It’s just that when I
am
good at something, I’m
really
good at it. So, should I pretend not to be? I don’t think so.

Anyway, I’d signed up for Writing Your First Novel, an eight-week Saturday morning course at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and this time I was sweating just a little bit. Could I actually write an entire novel? All I’d been able to do so far was jot down some ideas I thought might somehow hang together. Plus, I was likely to be the youngest person in the class. Usually adults took these courses, hence the name of the place, and I still didn’t quite consider myself one of those.

The class met in a room in the colonial house on Brattle Street that had been home to the Center for decades. It had been dwarfed over the years by the mega buildings that surrounded it where posh chain stores sold expensive cookware and chic furniture, but like the Mug the house was a revered leftover from another era.

I arrived early because I couldn’t sleep anyway; anger gives me insomnia. The night before, Damon had been monosyllabic as long as Lee was around (which was not long, as I was all talked out), but once she left and I went to bed, he crawled back out of his shell. He and Birdie were up half the night telling each other their entire life stories right outside my bedroom door. When I yelled at them to shut up, Birdie yelled back that he was sorry; then I heard him stage-whisper to Damon that I had PMS.

“With Marisol that means Pissy Mood Syndrome,” he said, laughing.

“No,” I shouted back. “It means Pass My Shotgun!”

But they were bonding, and nothing I said could stop them. When I got up at eight, after a few hours of restless sleep, they were passed out in the living room, Damon curled up on the ancient couch Birdie’s mother had given us and Birdie spread out on the dirty red rug he’d rescued from a Dumpster. I banged around in the kitchen while I made coffee and toasted a bagel, but unfortunately they weren’t disturbed.

The class didn’t start until ten, so I got another coffee at the Mug and sat in a corner of the kitchen reading some Elizabeth Bishop poems while Sophie rolled out pie dough, her biceps bulging like Paul Bunyan’s.

“Whatcha reading?” she asked. But when I told her I was reading poetry, she wrinkled her nose. “Too rich for my blood,” she said, shaking her head. Whatever that meant.

I was getting fidgety by nine thirty, so I walked over to the Center to wait there. I was sort of hoping the teacher
might arrive early, because brownnosing comes naturally to me, and I wouldn’t have minded getting a jump on the other students. Not that I’m a grade grubber—these classes didn’t give grades anyway. I just liked standing out from the crowd, which was usually not too difficult.

The course was being taught by somebody named Edward Deakins, who was listed in the catalog thus:
Edward Deakins has an MFA from Columbia University. He has three published novels:
The Mermaid’s Stepson, Honk If You Love Me,
and
Fishing for Elephants in Tahiti.

I’d never heard of Edward Deakins or any of his books, but he’d published three novels, so I figured he must know something about how to write one.

As expected, I was the first student to arrive. There was a long rectangular table in the classroom, which made it impossible to sit in the front row, my usual ass-kissing choice. Edward Deakins might decide to sit at either end of the table, and if I chose wrong, I’d be far away from him. My only option seemed to be sitting in the middle of one of the long sides; at least that way I’d be close enough to catch his attention. I chose the side across from the doorway so I could make eye contact when he came in.

No sooner had I pulled my chair to the table than the second person arrived. I looked up, smiling (in case he looked teacherish) and ready to introduce myself. But that was not necessary, because the second person to arrive already knew me.

It was Gio, aka John Galardi, Jr., writer of the zine
Bananafish
. The guy who’d sought me out after reading my zine,
Escape Velocity
, and then asked me to his prom last
spring so we could goof on it, or so I thought. The first boy (and I hoped the last) to say he loved me. Gio, whom I had not seen or spoken to in four months.

“What are you doing here?” he said, gawking at me from the doorway.

“Me? What are
you
doing here?” His hair was a little shorter than it had been, which made his dark eyes seem even bigger and deeper than they had before.

“I’m signed up for this class. I thought you’d be in California by now.”

Of course he did. “I decided to defer Stanford for a year. I’ve got a job and I’m, well, I’m trying to write a novel.”

He walked into the room then and took a seat across the table from me. “Really? You’re writing a novel?”

“Aren’t you? This is a novel-writing class.”

“I know, but I just signed up for it because it was the only Saturday morning writing class they offered. You know, I like to have a reason to get out of my dad’s apartment as early as possible.”

“I remember.” In truth I was really happy to see Gio again. I actually had this urge to run around the table and give him a big hug so he knew I wasn’t mad at him anymore, but I was afraid he’d misconstrue things again. The last time I’d seen him it had seemed like friendship wasn’t going to be an option, which was too bad, because we had a lot in common, Gio and me. Right down to the fact that the first person we’d each let ourselves fall in love with had hurt us badly. Unfortunately, I’d been the person who hurt Gio. So, even though it was totally not my fault, there was a tiny twinge of
guilt working its way into my soul as I looked into his face.

“So, do you want me to drop the course?” he asked, his eyebrows knitting over his deep-set eyes.

“No, of course not. I mean, it’s your right to be here as much as mine.”

“I know, but if it’s going to be too weird . . .” He looked away, not finishing the sentence.

I took a deep breath and blew it out, loudly. “Listen, I’m not mad at you. I was pretty freaked out after what happened last spring, but I’m not mad. I wish we could figure out a way to be friends again, but maybe you’re still mad at me.”

“I was never
mad
at you, Marisol. I was, you know . . . hurt.” He looked away.

“I know, and I’m sorry about that. But you don’t have to run away whenever you see me. I mean, we can talk to each other, can’t we?”

He nodded. “I guess so. I’d like to. I miss having somebody to talk to about writing. That’s mostly why I took this class.”

I let a smile creep out. What the hell. “Me too. So, are you still writing
Bananafish
?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s a new issue. How about you?”

I shook my head. “Not this summer. I’ve been working at the Mug and trying to come up with an idea for a novel. Have you kept up with that zine-writer girl from the Cape? What was her name, Diana something?”

Gio stared at me, trying, I thought, to figure out what my question meant. Like maybe I hoped he had a new girlfriend or something. Well, hell, he
should
have one—he was a good-looking
guy, tall, dark, and skinny as a rock star—and it seemed to me Diana had fallen for him the minute she laid eyes on him.

“Diana Crabtree,” he said, finally. “But she goes by Diana Tree.”

“Oh, right, Diana Tree.”

“I saw her a few times over the summer. She comes up to Boston now and then and spends the weekend with me at my dad’s. But, you know, we’re just friends.”

I nodded. “Must make your Dad happy, though.”

He laughed at that and so did I. I knew he was remembering the night we’d gone to an Ani DiFranco concert together, and then, because I’d missed the last train back to Cambridge, I’d spent the night at his dad’s apartment, me in Gio’s bed and Gio on the floor. We’d managed to have a really good conversation, and I felt close to him that night. Then the next morning his Dad assumed that I was his girlfriend and our sleepover had been something else entirely. It was pretty funny.

“Who knows what he thinks? My dad and I speak very little. He’s still pissed off at me for not being his clone.”

I nodded.

“What about you and . . . June?” he asked, looking down at the pen that was scribbling circles on the back cover of his notebook.