Someone I Wanted to Be (8 page)

I knocked on Cindy’s door to tell her that dinner was ready, as if she couldn’t smell it. She didn’t answer. I tried the knob, but she’d locked herself in.

I left her plate on the counter and sat down to eat by myself. I inspected each soggy fish stick before putting it in my mouth, then washed my plate. Cindy had taped a magazine picture of a flowery meadow over the sink. The picture was faded and water-spotted, and the edge was torn.

I went into my room, closed my curtains, and sat on my bed with a stack of old magazines. I read advice columns and an article about a girl who’d lost her legs in a car accident but adjusted and had even more success in life. I read an article about a girl who had a giant tumor growing out of her forehead. The doctors were going to remove it when she finished her growth spurt. Other than the tumor, she was beautiful and happy. A picture showed her on a field surrounded by twenty-five preppy friends.

Cindy came out of her room.

She was wearing her quilted pink robe with the tiny bow at the throat. Her hair was rumpled as if she’d been sleeping. She didn’t even glance at the dinner plate I’d left for her. She took the wedding wineglass out of the cupboard and filled it with ice and Chardonnay from the box in the refrigerator.

She took a long swallow, then toddled to the bathroom and returned with her plastic basket of manicure supplies. She backed up to the couch, dropped onto it, and turned on the TV. She flipped the channels until she found
Dancing with the Stars.
A week before, I tried to get her to watch a PBS special about an inner-city emergency room. She said, “Are you kidding me? It reminds me of work. I need escape!”

She picked up the glass, held it to her face, and gulped the wine. She set the empty glass down on the coffee table. She wet a cotton ball and rubbed polish remover onto her thumbnail. The smell of chemicals drifted into my room. Every night she did the same thing.

Cindy looked so small curled on the corner of the couch. She propped her foot on the pillow, looked up from her nails, and squinted at the TV screen. “It’s the little luxuries that keep me going,” she always said. “In my profession, I can’t have long nails or wear bright polish, but I like to keep them pretty.”

And Cindy wasn’t an alcoholic if she just drank Chardonnay on ice, and she wasn’t an alcoholic no matter how many times she refilled her wineglass because the wine came in a box, so there weren’t empty bottles all over the apartment.

I dumped the textbooks out of my backpack onto my bed. The books felt like they weighed ten pounds each and had black numbers scrawled on their dirty edges. I tipped the chemistry book open to page 127. The corner of the page had dirty creases, and a dried yellow blot on page 126 looked like vomit.
Divide the mass . . . its molar mass . . . the number of moles of solute.
The words and formulas were gibberish; reading the text was like crawling through a thornbush. My brain already hurt from my life.

I put the books back in my backpack and crawled under the blankets. I stuck in my earbuds and put Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are” on replay.

Bruno Mars. Sweetest man in the entire world. Five feet five inches tall, one inch taller than me. He’d been a chubby kid and didn’t judge. He loved chunky girls. He had the most beautiful voice, and he could dance.

I listened to Bruno and read
The Lorax
for the thousandth time. An hour later, I cracked open my door, then stepped into the living room. Cindy was snoring, her chin trembling. I pulled on my hoodie and slipped out of the apartment.

I walked fast, hood pulled up, head down, hands in pockets. Just moving, invisible and nameless, dreaming through the chilly black night. I jumped over cracks in the sidewalk.

Two blocks from 7-Eleven, a black car slid up to the curb. I jogged to the corner and waited for a truck to pass so I could run across the street. The black car pulled up and blocked me. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, girl.”

My breathing tightened. The eyes, the cheekbones, the mouth, the hair in the dark car. Kurt King stared like he knew me, like he didn’t know me. I was Ashley. I was Leah. I shyly tugged down my hood.

“I met you before, didn’t I? Yeah! You — you’re Ashley’s friend.” He smiled, real slow. His eyes and teeth shone in the streetlight.

The night with the soft wind, the lights, was like a huge room full of darkness and stars. I was Ashley and not Ashley.

“What are you doin’ out here?”

“I don’t know. Just walking.”

“Uh-huh. Just walking.” He nodded along with a song. He didn’t recognize my normal voice.

“So,” he said. “You just go out walking late at night, huh?”

The engine hummed; the radio played low. He sat in his car and tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel in time to the music. He was wearing a black Metallica T-shirt, no jacket. A dragon with fangs, bat wings, and a snake tail wrapped around the curve of his muscle. I stood on the sidewalk and looked into his dark window. No rush, no hurry. Me and Kurt King.

“Come on. Let me give you a lift. It’s no good for a girl to be out walking alone this time of night.” He leaned across the seat and pushed open the door.

And there he was, waiting with his car door open for me. I got in and pulled the door closed. It wasn’t real. I was dreaming. I hadn’t even said a word. Had I said a word? Had I even spoken? I said, “OK.”

Kurt King shifted into gear, and the car pulled away from the curb. The car’s black interior was lit up in the green glow from the dash.

“So, how you been?” He turned the music up, then down again. He rolled the steering wheel under the palm of his hand. “Let’s just drive around for a while. It’s a beautiful night.”

The beautiful cool night blew in. I tipped my face into it. A song I loved came on the radio. Kid Cudi. This would end any minute. That’s what my heart told me as it knocked in my chest: this wasn’t real; it wouldn’t last. Warm air from the vents blew against my knees.

He turned into Woodland Way, the neighborhood above the junior high. Spruce Street, Aspen Avenue, Scrub Oak Boulevard, Yucca Street. Kids lived either here or at Mountain View Estates or, if they were poor, down off of Tenth like me. I knew where almost everyone lived — people I hated, people I’d never spoken to. I wanted someone from school to see me pass by in the black car. They would think,
Was that Leah Lobermeir?

Kurt King drove straight up Pine Avenue toward the mountain. He pulled to a stop in front of a ranch house. He turned off the engine and then the headlights.

The house was small, brick, with a big picture window. It was the ranch house where the junior high gym teacher Mr. Zimmerman used to live. Even though I wasn’t on a team, Mr. Zimmerman would talk to me. He’d say, “Leah Lobermeir, you get prettier by the day and brainier by the hour. I can spot a smart girl a mile away.” His house had been egged dozens of times, and kids threw baloney on his truck so that baloney-sized circles of paint peeled off. Halfway through eighth grade, Mr. Zimmerman quit and moved to Arizona.

We sat in the dark car in front of Mr. Zimmerman’s old house. No lights were on. The big window looked gray and sad and empty. A loud commercial for a car dealership came on the radio. Kurt King turned it off.

He lit a cigarette in his cupped hand. The end of the cigarette sizzled. He shook the match, threw it out the window, and stretched his arm across the back of my seat. His hand dropped onto my shoulder and then began to work its way through the thick hair at the nape of my neck. I’d never had someone else’s hand in my hair, ever. The roots of my hair felt electrified. I was rigid. “Jesus, girl, you got a lot of hair. Honey, where’s Ashley tonight?”

His hand in my hair and the name Ashley tangled together. He twisted my hair around his fingers. I couldn’t speak.

A police cruiser slowed as it passed. Kurt King watched it. He pulled his hand out of my hair and lifted his arm off me. He reached down and started the engine. “Let’s head out.” He moved slowly, delicately, as if trying not to wake someone. He held his cigarette between his teeth and steered with both hands. “We’ll just go on a little drive. Shit. Cop’s still watching. . . .” He slowed at a stop sign.

Beyond the stop sign, the houses ended and the hills were covered with scrub oak. Pine Avenue turned into a dirt road that wound up into the mountains. The summer before, I’d gone to a keg party up there with Kristy. She went off with a guy and ditched me, and I was stranded with people I didn’t know. She finally came back, completely wasted and hanging on a different guy. I rode back with them even though they were really drunk, and it was terrifying because there are sharp turns on that mountain road where you can’t see what’s coming. . . .

I opened my car door and jumped out.

“What the fuck,” he said.

“Bye. I’m sorry. I got to go. . . .” I waved like an idiot, pulled up my hood, and ran down the sidewalk toward Mr. Zimmerman’s house.

He did a U-Turn and passed me, slowly, but I had my hood up and was Leah again. I didn’t look. By the time the sound of his engine faded away, it was a dream.

The next afternoon, when he called, he said, “Guess what, Ashley? I seen your friend. The one, she’s got thick dark hair.”

“Oh, yeah? What do you think of her?” said the Kristy voice.

“She’s all right. Big girl. Not as pretty as you, of course. . . .”

I started giggling, kind of hysterically. I laughed so hard, I was crying.

Cindy stuck her head into my room. “Who are you talking to?”

My phone had died.

It was Monday, the first of May. Anita and I had planned to meet early in front of my building and walk to school together. The craggy mountain stretched threateningly up through the smog into the pale-blue sky, but the air felt fresh. Little plants were growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk.

Anita and I had now been friends for two weeks. It was one of those cases where you and someone else are instantly friends — there’s no doubt, no mistaking it. My phone was out of minutes, I had no money, and Cindy was keeping her purse in her room. For two days, I’d been just Leah, not Ashley. I spent the whole weekend in bed reading Roald Dahl.

Anita and I walked along Tenth Avenue and discussed our future careers. She was now pretty certain that she wanted to be an anime illustrator. Acting and screenwriting were both too risky. She kept having major breakthroughs in her art.

“I could totally see you as a doctor,” she said. “Not a dermatologist, for sure. All those skin conditions are gross. Maybe a family doctor? You’d get to see a lot of different —”

Kristy’s red Civic pulled to the curb ahead of us.

Anita and I stopped walking. Kristy’s car whined back to where we stood in front of EZPAWN. The black metal grate was still locked over the glass door.

Kristy leaned over Corinne’s lap and smiled at me, not at Anita. Her eyes were blank and blue as the morning sky. “Hey, Leah! Hop in. Leah, come on! I’ve got to tell you something.”

Corinne, whose eyes had glazed over the day before when she passed me in the hallway, smiled sweetly and showed her dimples.

Fruity perfume poured out of the car. K103 was playing on the radio. Both Kristy and Corinne were wearing short-sleeved sweaters and tight jeans. Their hair looked shiny, and they had put on matching rose-colored blush and lip gloss.

I stood there stupidly. Anita stood beside me. Her face was locked into a weird frown. She pressed the giant guide to drawing manga against her chest.

I actually considered saying, “Can Anita come, too?” but one glance at her fringy leather jacket, the studs going up her ear, and her chewed, black-polished fingertips pinching the spine of her book killed that idea. Her black eyeliner curled up the outside corners of her eyes.
I’m sorry, Anita.
It was a silent little prayer.

“I’ve got to talk to Kristy. See you later, OK?” I said to her chin.

“You’re going with Yertle?” she whispered. I pulled open the back door to Kristy’s car and threw myself in. Kristy hit the gas and we sped away.

It was a sickening kind of relief to be back in Kristy’s car. I didn’t return her smile in the rearview mirror. She started whistling “Teenage Dream.” I pictured Anita walking alone in her leather jacket, hanging on to her book like it was a life preserver, her face tight and serious.