Perfect Glass (A Young Adult Novel (sequel to Glass Girl)) (10 page)

Before John could call me out as a coward, I rushed into my memorized list of excuses, topped by the fact that I planned to surrender my visa for the leverage that would give Quiet Waters. I could pick up a three-month tourist card when I returned.

John stayed absolutely silent while I talked. He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his feet, leaning his weight on his elbows. When I finally shut up, his head fell back and he adjusted his cap brim so he could look up at the sky. John could do intense like no one I’d ever known. Kate said it was the brooder in him that first got to her.

“Kate mention anything about her pregnancy to you?”

“No, why?” My question came out more like a demand. “What’s going on?”

“She doesn’t want me to tell you. She doesn’t want your family to worry.”

My brain was going to explode if I heard one more piece of crappy news. I stared into space and concentrated on moving air. I wanted to go home so badly that I didn’t want to hear any reason to stay.

“Look at those stars,” John said, releasing a breath. “You can only see them when it’s really dark. That beauty, that mysterious miracle of stars is right there all the time, but we don’t even see it…don’t even think about it until it’s dark.”

I stared at his profile, waiting for the point I knew would come.

“It’s dark right now, Henry.” He turned to meet my gaze. “Things are dark here. Look up, man. Please, look up.”

He moved to stand, choosing to ignore what I’d said about leaving. In fact, he didn’t look at me at all. Just walked away. He did pause for a minute, to tug an envelope from his back pocket and toss it toward me. “Your mail.”

Then he walked into the dorm where his wife and his bed beckoned.

I recognized Meg’s swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture.

A picture of Meg holding a picture of me.

The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot.

meg

“H
old still, Meg, you’re dripping blood on my car seats.”

I reached behind the passenger seat of Tennyson’s car, looking for the white sheet she’d thrown in for mopping up bodily fluids. Quinn, sitting in the backseat, read my mind and handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.” He leaned forward, pulling a corner of the sheet up to wipe a small stream of blood off my neck. “You okay?”

“Never better.” I tucked the sheet around myself and covered as much of the car’s dingy upholstery as possible.

“Tennyson…this is a Ralph Lauren sheet. Does your mom know you took this?”

“You should see her linen closet. She’s got, like, fifty-eight sets of the same sheets in different colors. She’s an addict.” Tennyson checked her rearview and gunned the Sentra.

We were traveling at a high rate of speed on a little farm-to-market road outside of town. I was bleeding profusely from a head wound, which Tennyson had spent two hours creating in her bedroom. She’d downloaded a video by a Hollywood makeup artist who specialized in extreme zombie gore.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” I’d been saying this, mostly to myself, all day. “How do we know UW will even watch the video?”

“Oh, they’ll watch. Are you kidding? Two teen girls voluntarily dying on screen to warn others? It’s edgy.” She looked at me sideways. “And please stop calling it UW. There’s no double-u involved. It’s UDub.”

“That’s in Seattle,” I said. “The older UDub.”

“But we’re the cooler UDub.”

“I think you should call the video ‘Driving While Intexticated,’” Quinn said. He’d been Captain Helpful since coming up with the idea for this video cure-all to get me into the writing program. He’d started brainstorming as soon as the dust-up with Jo Russell ended in the police station. He said this was the creative trifecta—screenwriting, set design, and filmmaking.

“Intexticated—I completely love that,” Tennyson said. “I wish I’d thought of it.” She caught Quinn’s gaze in the rearview and stuck her tongue out at him. “We’re moving your application from the Maybe pile to the Freaking Yes pile of applications,” she said. “And, bonus, you never have to see the crazy artist again. You’re welcome.”

The landscape began to flatten out. Wyoming could be breathtaking one minute and almost ugly the next, but all of it reminded me of Henry. Here, where it was so flat, Henry would ride his horse, Ben, like an outlaw.

“See those big pines in the distance?” Tennyson said. “That’s where we’re going. Dylan already smashed a truck into a tree.”

“Really? Dylan wrecked a truck for me?” I batted my eyelashes at her. “No one’s ever done that before.”

“No, nerd, not really. He drove the old farm truck from the stable and parked it close to a tree. It looks crashy enough. See?” She looked down at her phone, thumbed through texts, and held it out to me, smiling. The speedometer never went under seventy.

I stared at her with my mouth open. “Do you realize you just did exactly what we’re pretending killed us?” I took the phone from her and pointed at the windshield. “Eyes on the road, T.”

“Okay, Mom.”

The picture showed the old rusty truck from the stable up against a pine. Dylan had raised the right front tire by parking on a large boulder, and he’d propped the hood open at a strange angle. It did look like a wreck.

I held the phone up for Quinn to see and he smiled. He had an expensive HD camcorder in his hand and, when I smiled back at him, he raised the camera and zoomed in on my face. I shut my eyes.

We closed in on the crash site and the scene couldn’t have been more perfect. Dylan had spun wheels and thrown mud everywhere. The truck was covered, but the effect was spot-on—it looked like a truck that had rolled off the highway and crashed into a tree without slowing down. Fatalities would be believable.

Dylan leaned against the crashed truck’s tailgate, hands in his jacket pockets, watching Tennyson turn in and stop. He looked at her like she was his next meal and he was starved. That look made me miss Henry more than ever.

“We’re here to work,” I said under my breath. “You can keep your hands off each other for an hour, right?”

“For you, maybe.”

Dylan pushed off from the truck and started a slow swagger to Tennyson’s side of the car. His lopsided grin looked like a private conversation meant for her. She smiled back. “Or maybe not. He’s been out of town.”

“Hey, baby,” he said when he opened her car door.

“You big mud bug.” She walked into his arms. “He took me mudding on our first date, Meg.”

“No wonder you’re still together.” I smiled at Quinn, who chuckled.

Quinn and I let them get reacquainted while I dug around in my bag for the script, and he scoped out the best places to frame shots, so he could get the whole video done without cuts. None of us wanted to hang around in the cold for longer than necessary.

When everyone was in place, Quinn gave me final instructions. I’d memorized my lines and, when he looked at me with melty, hopeful eyes and mouthed, “Action,” I started from the beginning.

Already made-up to look dead, I stared at the camera and said the words I’d written about texting, but my heart murmured what I knew about losing Wyatt. I walked backward and concentrated on controlling my trembling.

Quinn followed me, staying tight on my face. Together we rewound time as I pleaded with my peers to turn off their phones when they get behind the wheel. I said I wanted us to live because so many people would miss us if we were gone.

This was a message in which I completely believed.

I opened the driver’s side door and slid into the truck. Dylan had wrecked the inside by putting spare parts in odd places. Tennyson was slumped over in the passenger seat. She looked so realistically dead that I got emotional. The air in the truck cab felt thick and sad.

Quinn zoomed in on my phone on the floorboard, still lit with the text that had done us in—
Almost home. I love u.

Then, without saying a word, Tennyson and I began cleaning up in front of the camera. Quinn filmed while she used makeup remover to gently wash my head trauma away. Then I washed hers away. Like it had never existed. We had agreed to stay quiet through this part of the video. I hadn’t expected our hands to shake.

We worked together to clear the debris out of the truck cab and then we hopped out and closed the hood. We were quiet, slow, and deliberate. He filmed us starting the truck, rolling it off the boulder, and backing it carefully down the shoulder to get back on the highway.

Later, during editing, I would add my narration. I would snap the chalk line connecting “It’ll never happen to me” to “Actually, I could be next.” I would finally kiss my application goodbye, forwarding it with all my hopes to [email protected].

The experience left me feeling raw, like I understood something other people didn’t. I’d confronted this before—the fragility of life and the complicated miracle of waking up every morning. I think Quinn was feeling it, too. I drove him home in the old farm truck because Tennyson and Dylan wanted some alone time. He stayed quiet all the way to town, his camera resting on his knee.

When I parked behind his car, he didn’t budge. I cleared my throat. He did, too.

“That was perfect, Meg.”

“I hope so. It has to be.”

“No, the video will be incredible. But I mean…the day. The whole day. I really felt something.”

I felt his gaze on my face. “Yeah.”

“You’ve lost somebody, haven’t you?” he said.

“Yes.” I bit my lip and stared out the driver’s side window.

“You don’t have to tell me. But, if you ever need to talk….”

“Thank you.” I shifted in my seat and glanced at him. “I think you’ve got a film career ahead of you. I see dark, jumpy, film noir in your future IMDb entry.”

His face came alive. “Will you be my starlet?”

“I’ll never be good enough for one of your movies.” We laughed, covering awkward moments.

“I’ll put what I filmed today on a USB drive and drop it by your house tomorrow. I can help you edit, if you want.”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Editing video’s about the only time I do know what I’m doing.” He turned toward me. It seemed like the truck cab ceiling and walls became heavy fabric I needed to hold up. It pushed down on my shoulders and I lifted my arms, stretching, trying to keep from being swallowed up.

“I’d better get home,” I said.

“Okay.” Quinn was barely breathing. His hands, which usually moved constantly, stilled in his lap. “How come when I’m with you, all I can think about is when I’ll get to see you again? I already miss you.”

“I don’t know.” I shifted and stared at the truck’s old radio.

“You don’t know?”

“Are you mocking me?” I raised my head to look him in the eyes. This felt like all the times I’d been teased by older guys, Wyatt’s friends, who knew how to push my buttons. But Quinn looked as perplexed as I felt.

He laughed, just a whisper of air. “Why would I mock you?”

“I should get home,” I said. “Thanks again for helping.”

“It wasn’t a problem.” He shook his head and reached for the door handle. “It’s why I came up with the video idea in the first place.”

He spoke so quickly that I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. There was no time to clarify, though, because as soon as he’d said it, he climbed out of the truck, hunching over and blowing on his hands to warm them.

For the first time in a long time, I imagined I heard Wyatt’s voice. This time he was chiding, “Be careful, Meg.” Quinn reached his car and turned to wave.

On the main street through Chapin, tourists and locals crowded together on the uneven sidewalks, piling into rock shops and stores that sold North Face gear. I was thinking about the times Henry had walked me down this street, showing me his favorite places, buying me taffy and rock candy, when I saw something that made me stop in the middle of the road and park quickly in an empty space.

Jo Russell had claimed an area on the narrow sidewalk with her easel. The crowds had parted in the middle to navigate around her. She was bundled from head to toe in black—a long black coat, black scarf and hat, black boots. She scowled at people and wielded her brush like a weapon if they stopped to look at her canvas.

From my parking space, I could see her painting. I knew, from watching my mom paint my entire life, that paintings began with ghosts, ephemeral and unformed. Each pass of the brush over an area revealed structure an untrained eye would never see. To the uninitiated, it seems the artist is pulling the image out of the canvas. To those who know, it’s obvious the artist sees the painting fully realized. Her hand masterfully traces what her heart has already seen.

What Jo’s heart saw was the boy from the painting in the studio behind her house. The same boy who’d been running in that painting was standing completely still on the sidewalk in downtown Chapin—at least on Jo’s canvas. She’d fixed him there, larger than life, framed by the old businesses that faded perfectly into the vanishing point at the top of the canvas. It was beautiful. It was love.

And as if she felt me watching, she turned and saw me in the old truck. She didn’t frown. She didn’t make a rude gesture. She just nodded once and turned back to her easel. But the image of her stubborn tears burned on in my mind long after.

I’ve lost someone.

Jo has lost someone.

henry

I
felt in my carry-on for the wad of gnarled metal I’d bought for Meg. It was easier to keep walking if I kept my head down and held onto that metal. It represented the part of Nicaragua that had crushed me most. The painting Meg’s mom had done for me was tucked under my other arm, a constant reminder of why I’d made the long journey home.

Denver’s airport, with the well-dressed travelers and the free, clean water everywhere, was a shock to my system. I paid an insane amount of money for a small rental car to get to Chapin because I didn’t have the guts to call my family. I felt misunderstood already and I hadn’t even tried to explain my sudden homecoming. I finally drove into town around dusk.