The Everafter (9 page)

age 15

They’re my favorite pair of earrings…made from old watch parts. No one else I know has a pair like them. But one of my ears has become so infected that turning my head hurts, so I take the earrings out. I wish I had a convenient pocket to put them in.

The doctor pulls the bandage away from the ulcer on Mrs. Simpson’s calf. The sight of it…

My earring makes an unscheduled landing on the white-gray tile of the exam room floor, and the contents of my stomach are about to proceed to the nearest exit.

A few minutes ago, the doctor said, “You girls should give us some privacy.” Now I understand
why.
One patient is enough. Cleaning up after us won’t exactly make anyone’s day around here.

But here we are anyway because Mrs. Simpson’s reply to the doctor was, “My daughter can stay. Can’t you, Sandra?”

So we stayed.

Unfortunately.

I swallow extra hard—several times—hoping to keep all previously ingested substances proceeding in an orderly fashion on their journey through the digestive track.

Why did Sandra’s mom encourage us to stay?

I glance at Sandra. She looks…stressed. No…
distressed
would be a better word. She wants to take her mother’s pain away. A powerful force of will emanates from Sandra’s eyes, an unexpected strength at odds with the soft green of her irises. She believes she can heal her mother through willpower.

I’m pretty sure she
can’t.
That would bring the force of Sandra’s will up against her mother’s. And Mrs. Simpson doesn’t intend to get better.

That sounds cynical, I know, but I think it’s true. Having an ulcer that mysteriously
won’t
heal no matter what the doctors do…returning to the doctor’s office every week…all the attention…yeah, this is so Mrs. Simpson’s
thing. She definitely gets off on it. Apparently, the ulcer’s been bad for a while now, but in the last few days, infection has set in…wonder how
that
happened. Has she been doing any of the things the doctors have told her will help? Or is she hoping this ulcer will become bad enough that she’ll need that skin-graft surgery she keeps mentioning? And, gee, won’t that just be
such
a risk to her life? To hear Mrs. Simpson talk about it, you’d think it would be. I’m sure she’ll need the entire universe to revolve around her for a good year after that.

And Sandra doesn’t see how badly her mother
wants
to be sick.

So there she is, all sympathy, trying to will away her mother’s ulcer, and I’m the only one her force of will is working on. My eyes are magnetically drawn to the same location Sandra’s are gazing—the ulcer.

It’s as large as my fist. It’s mostly raw and bloody-looking—except for where the infection has started to set in. That’s whitish, and it’s oozing pus.

Suppurating.

I remember reading that word once in a book about a wounded Civil War soldier. I wondered at the time who in their right mind would ever use that word.

I glance up at Mrs. Simpson’s face and see an expression that terrifies me…the pure joy on her face is evil. She’s
glad
to see Sandra suffering for her.

And the word
suppurating
flashes in my mind again. It’s the perfect word to describe this thing on Mrs. Simpson’s leg.

And the perfect word to describe her soul.

“I’ll be in the waiting room,” I tell Sandra, then stomp out of the exam room.

The earring I dropped just doesn’t matter anymore.

age 17

Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia…

The best ice cream in the world.

But I still can’t eat it. There’s a walnut stuck in my throat. I can’t swallow around it, and yet I won’t allow myself to cry because Kristen’s trying so hard to make me feel better. I stab at the ice cream with a teaspoon, making little half-moon indentations in it.

“C’mon, Maddy,” Kristen says. “I’m sure it’s going to be okay.”

Yeah. No matter how this turns out, her life won’t
change at all. It’ll be just fine for her. Me? Oh, crap. That walnut in my throat just got even bigger.

I can’t stand the sight of the ice cream anymore. Besides, the whole world-around-me-getting-blurry thing is making me feel more and more like crying, so I set the ice cream down on the picnic table behind me. “Don’t let me forget to take that home,” I manage to choke out of my tight throat. Thank God for something mundane I can talk about. That makes it a little easier to elude the tears trying to escape. “Mom will kill me if I leave that spoon here.” As Kristen and I were leaving for the park, pints of ice cream in hand, there was Mom trailing along like a magnet attached to the spoons, warning us, “We’re getting low on teaspoons. Don’t you dare lose those. I mean it. Wait! I’ll get you plastic spoons instead.”

We were so out of there before she could get back with the stupid plastic spoons.

“Oh, screw Mom,” Kristen says. It comes out in this completely offhand way, like she’s announcing that Mom will be home from work on time today. It cracks me up.

But the laughter that wants to escape seems trapped behind the tears, and suddenly it’s
all
gurgling up to the surface. Tears, sobs, laughter.

Oh, gross! It’s just way too much for my body, and now there’s snot trying to explode from my nose.

Kristen to the rescue with a fast move for the napkin.
She holds it out to me, and I blow my nose. Well, kind of. Kristen’s trying to hug me, so the blowing thing’s not working too well. I’ve never really known before how important balance is to successfully blowing the nose.

“Everything will be fine. I’m sure it’s just your imagination.”

Gee, so much for comforting me, Big Sis. Telling me I imagined all this? When I saw with my very own perfectly functional eyes that Gabe was walking along with his arm around Dana’s shoulders? Now
there’s
a way to totally infuriate me. “I saw them, Kristen, and it was
not
my imagination. They were walking along together and he had his
arm
around her
shoulders
. There’s no mistaking that. Or what it means.”

“Yes, there is, Maddy. You’ve always been especially good at taking what’s right in front of you and drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Remember that pregnant woman at the store when you were little?”

Way unfair. Sisters aren’t supposed to remind you of things that happened when you were, like, four years old. “Oh, come on…” I start to say, but it’s already too late. She’s off and running with that memory.

“Remember? You saw this pregnant woman standing in line, and you said, ‘Look, Mommy. That woman has a watermelon under her shirt.’ Then when Mom tried to explain to you that the woman had a baby in her stomach,
you wanted to know why anyone would want a baby watermelon under her shirt.” She’s laughing so hard that I can’t help smiling a little myself.

But I resent it.

“That’s when Mom decided to buy that funny book for us that was all about how babies were made. A little late for me. But at least you stopped asking about watermelons under women’s shirts.”

I remain unconvinced. She can tell. When she starts in on her next memory, I wish I had just gone along with her and said, “Sure, I’m an idiot. Gabe with his arm around Dana is obviously no big deal.” But since I didn’t, I have to sit through Kristen’s next attempt to convince me that I suck at drawing the right conclusions from circumstances.

“And then there’s that time you stole a candy bar from Walgreens. As soon as we got out to the van, some police car went by with its sirens and lights going. You thought he was coming for you, so you threw yourself at Mom and surrendered the candy bar while begging her not to let the police take you away to jail.”

“This isn’t the same thing at
all
. I’m not four anymore.”

“I’ve got bad news for you: Seventeen and in love isn’t any smarter.”

This from someone who’s been happily married for all of a year. Could she be any more condescending? I’m about to tell her that, but my cell phone starts playing “Für Elise.”

“Aren’t you going to get that?” Kristen asks when—duh—it becomes obvious that I’m
not.
What if it’s Gabe? I just can’t talk to him right now.

The phone keeps beeping out Beethoven. Then stops.

Then starts again.

“For God’s sake, Maddy. Answer it.”

“No.”

She digs around in my purse and pulls it out. “It’s Gabe. Answer it.”

Hello?! Who does she think I’m trying to
avoid
right now—Santa Claus? Kristen’s managed to tick me off so much in the last few minutes that I’m not crying anymore.

She rolls her eyes at me—as if
I’m
the one being unreasonable here?—and answers the phone herself. I can only hear half the conversation, but Kristen’s not dumb. She figures out how to let me in on the other half.

“Sandra told you you’re in trouble?…You really are…Yeah, she saw you with your arm around—what’s her name? Dana?…I know you’re crazy about my sister and she’s being an ass…Of course she’s jumping to conclusions….”

Enough is enough. I grab the phone from Kristen, who—I hate it when she does this—grins at me knowingly.

She walks away to give us some privacy as I say into the phone, “Okay, I’m here.”

Gabe jumps straight to the explanation. Smart guy. He’s got seconds before I hang up on him. “Maddy, chill out. I
swear, what you saw didn’t mean anything. Dana just got accepted to an acting program that she’s been trying to get into for two years. It means she’ll get to go to Europe this summer. I was just congratulating her.”

This
is supposed to make me feel better? I swear Dana is evil. She has it in for me, has ever since I started going out with Gabe. She’s definitely still in love with him. And she does all these little things to get back at me. Every time I walk down the hall with Sandra and pass her and her friends, this nasty laughter breaks out. She also drew a disgusting caricature of me (how unfair can it be that she has all this artistic talent she uses to hurt people?) and hung it on my locker. It was a
totally
disgusting drawing. I blush every time I even think about it. I ripped the picture off my locker, but there Dana was, standing just a few lockers down, smugly smiling at me. On top of that, I’ve been getting these strange prank phone calls. They must be coming from her. No one else hates me enough to call and then hang up on me. Thank God she only has my home phone number and can’t do the same thing to me on my cell.

So why, exactly, should I be happy that Dana the Demon can get my boyfriend to physically congratulate her? And exactly why should I be reassured that she’s becoming an even better actress? It’s hard enough to get Gabe to understand how awful she treats me at school. She puts on a completely different persona around him. She becomes gee-I’m-such-
a-sweet-girl-who’s-dealing-so-well-with-our-breakup-let’s-continue-to-be-best-friends-forever. And he believes her. Well, mostly. He says he knows she can be mean sometimes, but he also claims that underneath all that she’s a nice girl.

Right.

Rottweiler nice.

I can’t even tell Gabe how I feel about Dana because he just doesn’t get it. I guess that makes me feel even worse about the whole thing because I think that’s the
only
thing about my feelings that he doesn’t understand.

So how, exactly, am I supposed to react to this hey-isn’t-it-great-that-you’ve-just-misinterpreted-the-whole-situation news?

Stymied, I opt for silence.

“Maddy?”

Still opting for silence.

“Maddy?”

My throat is killing me now. I’m going to start crying again. I don’t want Gabe to know it, so I hit
END
and set the phone on the picnic table.

Ten seconds later, “Für Elise” starts up again. I let the song run for a second, and then I just can’t bear the pain I know I’m causing Gabe, so I open it.

“Why’d you do that?” he asks. He sounds hurt, not angry.

“I was going to cry. Still am. Didn’t want you to know.”
And then, there it is…all those mortifying tears.

“Madison, c’mon. I love
you
. We’ve been going out now for a year. In all that time, I’ve never once thought about going back to Dana. If I had, you’d know it. I’d be with her. But I’m not, am I? I’m with you. And that’s where I want to stay.”

Ohmygod. Now there’s a torrent of tears. Somehow I’m feeling both better and worse. Better because I know he’s right. Worse because I’ve been stupid.

“Where are you, Maddy? I want to come be with you.”

“I’m…at…the…p-park…near…m-my house.”

“Stay put. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“No,” I say. “Let’s meet…at Kristen’s house.” I know she’ll give us whatever privacy we need.

“All right,” he agrees.

I flip the phone closed again, then walk off toward the merry-go-round, where Kristen is waiting for me.

age 11

Sandra stands up too suddenly. Her coat sleeve is under my tray, and as she tries to pull it out, the whole tray starts to flip. My plate slides across the tray, hitting the raised lip and coming to an abrupt stop.

The peas on top of it, though, continue their journey. They roll right off the plate and onto the table. Some travel as far as the table edge and then take a suicidal plunge to the floor.

Who can resist squashing underfoot one of the most despicable foods known to humankind? Don’t get me
wrong. I don’t have anything against peas, actually. I don’t even mind the taste of them.

But school peas? Those are an entirely different thing. They’re always overcooked and mushy, and if that’s not bad enough, they taste like a metal can that’s been boiled.

So there’s no way Sandra and I are going to resist the urge to smoosh them. We’re immediately in a mad scramble to stomp on my peas. It’s sort of like playing a video game…see it, stomp it…see it, stomp it…see it—

Are there any adults watching? Nope? Then stomp some more.

We both aim for the same pea, and my foot lands on top of hers. “Ouch!” I say.

Which is funny, because I’m the one who stomped on her. Isn’t she the one who’s supposed to have the hurt foot? We crack up and then start shushing each other.

Which makes me laugh even harder, because she accidentally spits on me when she’s making the
shh
sound.

“Dis
gust
ing,” I say, pulling away from her and knocking my chocolate milk off the table.

Which is hilarious, because now Sandra has a poop-colored splash on her shirtsleeve. She’s trying to say something, but she’s laughing so hard she can’t get any words out.

Which is the funniest thing yet because…well, because
every
thing is funny right now. This is what I love
about having Sandra as my best friend. My stomach hurts, my cheeks ache, I think I’m going to pee my pants, and there’s nothing I want to do more than keep killing myself with laughter this way.

Uh-oh. We’ve shown up on the GPS of one of the lunch supervisors: TROUBLE AT TABLE 4. She’s on her way over here.

Still giggling, Sandra starts mopping up chocolate milk with a napkin. I launch myself under the table and start trying to herd in the peas.

I hit my head on the table.

Which is funny, because…gosh, who even knows?

“What are you two doing?” the lunch supervisor demands.

“Uh…cleaning up?” Sandra says.

“You’d better be. It’s a mess over here.”

“We are,” I assure her through my laughter.

“And stop giggling. You’ll just make more of a mess.” She glares at us as she moves off.

“Gee,” I say after she’s out of earshot, “who put the lemon juice in her Cheerios this morning?”

Now we’re almost choking on our giggles.

Until I see Tammy Havers looking over at us…wistfully. She’s sitting at another table with some other girls. But the look she gives me makes me feel guilty. I can tell Tammy misses eating lunch with me this year.

I have nothing against her, I just want to sit with Sandra. It’s really our only chance to have best-friend time together. We wouldn’t be able to laugh together this way if there were other people around.

But I know that Tammy feels shut out. And I know that I
should
invite her to eat lunch with Sandra and me more often.

“Do you have all the peas picked up?” Sandra asks me. “Let’s go play basketball until class starts.”

“All except the ones that are squashed. And I’m
not
picking those up.”

“Really, Madison,” Sandra says in her best Ms. Henderson voice. Ms. Henderson is our math teacher, and she doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. But Sandra figured out on the third day of school how to imitate Ms. Henderson’s voice. She’s good at it. “And who will clean up after you? Do you think others were put on this Earth to clean up your messes?”

“No, Ms. Henderson,” I say. “But I’m still not picking them up. They’re disgusting. Give me detention if you want,” I fire over my shoulder as I head toward the gym. I can feel Tammy watching me as I go.