The lights blinked on and off, the ten-minute warning. He slipped on his backpack, passed Skye hunched in a desk cubby, her thick hair veiling her face. He watched as she picked the metal security strip from a magazine, stuck it under the desk. He tugged her sleeve and she jumped.
“Matty, don’t do that. You scared the stink out of me.”
Sorry
, he wrote.
You hiding out?
“Yeah. You?”
He nodded.
What are you reading?
“Nothing. The newspaper.” She shuffled the gray pages over the latest issue of
Seventeen
.
Want to get some ice cream? My treat.
“I’m kinda . . . not really eating ice cream right now.”
You rather go home?
“Okay, well, maybe a pop. Let me just put this back.”
She kept the magazine hidden beneath the newspaper and disappeared into the stacks for a minute. When she emerged, he saw the outline of a rectangle beneath her thin yellow T-shirt, the silhouette of a woman, the word
Maybelline
. He stood too close to her as they left, his stomach nearly against her back, so the librarian wouldn’t see it, too.
They walked to Phil’s Steak n’ Bake, Skye scuffing her heels through the gravel.
New shoes?
Matthew asked. She wasn’t wearing her usual canvas tennis shoes, the black ones covered in pink hearts and top-hatted skulls. These were light blue with pointed toes and fat white soles.
“I found them in the back of Ma’s closet. I’m going for the granny look. You like?”
Crazy.
“That’s me.”
The small restaurant, decked out in Old West style, was fairly busy for a Tuesday. Some locals, some travelers who pulled off the highway for food or toilet, and some families from the KOA down the road. They sat, and Skye pulled the magazine from her back. He flipped the page in his pad, but she snatched his pen. “Don’t start.”
He ordered a sundae, she a Sprite with two scoops of chocolate ice cream floating in it. She drank from three straws and paged through
Seventeen
. They didn’t talk, weren’t there for talking. Skye tore several uneven circles from the magazine and sucked up the foam at the bottom of her mug. He paid at the register, and someone bumped him.
“Hey, Matt. Long time no see,” Jared Whalen said.
Matthew took a pen from beside the credit card machine and scribbled on the napkin,
Busy, busy.
“I hear you,” Jared said, stuck his finger through a hole at the hem of his dingy T-shirt. “Well, I don’t hear you. But I, you know, get you. It. What you said. I mean, wrote.”
Relax. It’s all good.
“I know, Matt. Sorry. I think I must be fried from the sun.” He’d rolled the bottom of his shirt into a fat sausage of fabric while he spoke, eyes flickering toward Skye, and then back to his nervous fingers. “Mr. Hoogendoorn hired me on for harvest.”
You leave for college soon, right?
“End of August.” The women behind the counter gave Jared two styrofoam containers. “Wouldn’t have made it without you. You know that.”
Nah. I’m not the only nerd around.
Matthew had tutored Jared in occupational math and chemistry last year, a favor for Skye. When she’d asked him, he protested a bit, wondering if her boyfriend might do better with a tutor who could actually explain concepts to him verbally. Skye batted away his worries. “He asked if you would do it,” she said. “He likes you.”
I like pie. That doesn’t mean it should help me with my math homework.
“Like you’d ever need help. Seriously. You know how shy he is. Come on. Just do it for me.”
That had been early October. By December, Skye had broken up with Jared. Matthew knew none of the details, except that Jared was clearly heartbroken, and Skye hadn’t seemed too happy about it, either. He asked Jared if he’d feel more comfortable with another tutor. “Only if you would,” he said.
So Matthew had spent every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon writing out equations and diagrams, and word problems asking for the width of a river if the length of line segment AC and angle ACB are known. Jared muddled through with C-pluses and made it into college—first in his family—for his mother.
“She’s convinced the land killed my pops,” Jared had said. “I think I’ll find my way back to a farm, though. I’m not the desk-sitting type.” Matthew had agreed; winter wheat filled Jared’s veins, and that wouldn’t disappear after a couple of years of lecture halls and frat houses.
Jared now picked up his food and tried one last time to make eye contact with Skye. She buried her head deeper into the magazine. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you around. Tell your cousin I said hey.”
Matthew returned to the table. Skye was leafing through his notebook. He held out his hand.
“Nope. Not until you tell me about this.” She tapped the heart he’d doodled on the inside front cover, the one with the
E
inside it. “Who is she?”
Matthew flared his nostrils, snapped, pointed to the pad. She tore out a page, gave it to him.
I could just buy a new one.
“Yeah, but you want to tell me.”
He grinned at her, wrote,
Ellie Holt.
“Are you serious? She’s a brain.”
I know.
“She’s not that pretty.”
Yes she is.
“She’s not. She has a mustache.”
He rolled his eyes, blew a long puff of air through his lips, felt them vibrate with sound.
“She does. All the kids call her Stache.”
You’re worse than Jaylyn.
“How can you even say that?” She slung the pad at him. “You
are
a retard.”
He shouldn’t have, did it only to be hurtful because she made fun of Ellie. He knew she hated being compared to her sister and, really, they couldn’t have been less alike.
Jaylyn was tall and beautiful and thin with youth, though Matthew could imagine her looking like her mother in another decade, with an extra twenty pounds of life clinging to her hips. But now, today, that didn’t matter. Jaylyn strutted through the dusty streets of Beck County, expecting all eyes on her, and they were.
In another place, a place where not everyone lived paycheck to paycheck or harvest to harvest, Jaylyn might not have been considered much more than pretty white trash. But there was no preppy, rich in-crowd in Beck County, not like in those teen movies Sienna begged Jaylyn to bring home from the grocery; everyone smelled like sweat and farm, wore clothes from JCPenney or Wal-Mart, or hand-me-downs. So popularity depended less on money and more on beauty. And Jaylyn had that in abundance.
Skye could never keep up. She was her father’s daughter, heavy all over, from hands to hair to gait. She could have been pretty, but she worked to be the anti-Jaylyn, letting her hair obscure her face and her dark, oversized clothes hide the rest of her.
Sorry,
he wrote.
“Whatever.”
Really.
“Well, I shouldn’t have insulted your girlfriend.”
She’s not my girlfriend.
He dragged the cap of his pen through a blob of hot fudge he had spilled on the table, swirling the dark goo.
You see Jared come in?
“Hard to miss.”
He liked you. Still does.
“Old news. I’m so over it.”
You won’t tell me what happened with you guys?
“Nothing happened. I was just done. Learned from the best, right?”
He looked at the clock on the wall, the second hand jerking up a second, then twitching back a half, up and back, up and back. It’s
nearly seven. We should go. Walk or hitch?
“Hitch, definitely.” She touched his arm. “I won’t tell anyone about Ellie.”
I know.
“No you don’t. But I promise anyway.”
The apartment glowed with one hidden light—the hallway light, oozing into the living room—and the television. The blinds were closed. Lacie and Sienna hugged their knees on the couch, skin blue in the cartoon glow, dark eyes dancing with yellow Sponge Bob irises. Heather sat in the dining area on a plastic lawn chair, feet propped on another, cigarette twined in her fingers.
“Nice of you to grace us with your presence,” she said, took a long draw; the ash burned orange, then died. “Not like we needed anything from you tonight.”
“We were at the library,” Skye said.
Heather snuffed out the butt on her dinner plate, lit another. “I don’t need this garbage from you, too, Skye.”
“It’s the truth.”
Heather turned to look at Matthew. He nodded.
“Dirk’s gone.” Smoke leaked from Heather’s nose, between her teeth.
“For how long this time?” Skye asked.
Heather ignored her. “I’m going to bed. Get over here and kiss me good-night.”
Lacie skipped into the dining area, knocking the ashtray off the plastic chair while throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. Heather pulled the girl off by the strap of her tank top, said something; Lacie’s head flopped forward.
“I mean it. I better not find this mess in the morning,” Heather said. She looked at Sienna. “You can’t get your lazy self off the couch to say good-night?”
“ ’Night,” Sienna said.
“See how I jump for you when you want something.” Heather turned down the narrow hallway, and Skye followed. Matthew felt two doors slam through his feet.
He found the spray cleaner from beneath the sink and gave a handful of paper towels to Lacie. He squirted the floor and she wiped, then he took her into the bathroom for a shower, her limbs dingy with the day’s play. She dug around the laundry basket, finding a mismatched pajama top and bottom, put them on. He combed her waist-length hair, and she danced and stomped as he wiggled the plastic teeth through the snarls. She finally turned and said, “Matty, you’re hurting me.”
He tried to reply, “Sorry,” but didn’t know how it came out. Lacie seemed satisfied with whatever sound he’d made, and let him finish untangling her wet knots.
“Can I sleep out with you tonight?” she asked.
Matthew caught himself before he sighed, and nodded instead. She didn’t ask often, but when she did, it meant the floor for him. Tonight wasn’t exactly a night he wanted to give up the couch. He went into the living room and pressed the Off button for the television.
“Hey,” Sienna said.
He pointed down the hall.
“Ma didn’t say I had to go to bed yet.”
He bent his arm and whipped his index finger toward the hallway again. “Fine,” she said, and shoved Lacie into the wall on the way by.
Matthew covered the couch with a sheet and tucked Lacie into it, covered her with another. Then he found a sleeping bag in the closet and unrolled it onto the floor, lay down. Lacie’s foot hung over his head. He grabbed it, tickled the bottom. She jerked it back up on the cushion, and he wished he could hear her giggle.
Benjamin called his mother.
Usually she phoned him, once a week on Sundays; he made sterile conversation with her and his father—What’s going on at the university? At church? How is this neighbor or that colleague?
—
fulfilling his obligation as a son. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to speak to them, but it took effort to act as if he was holding it together. Today something inside him remembered his Band-Aided knees and the
gharge
—fried, sweet pumpkin bread—she had made for him while he lay in bed with the chicken pox, and he realized he desperately wanted to feel that security again.
She answered on the third ring.
“
Aai
, hi.”
“Benjamin. I am surprised to hear you. Happy, yes. But something is wrong?”
“No, no. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I have much blessings.”
“And how’s
Ba
?”
“Good. Busy. You can come see us soon? I know he will like that much.”
“I’ll have to check with Abbi.”
“If it is too much with that baby, we will come to you.”
“I said I’d check with Abbi, see if she’s up for taking a trip,” he said, his words craggy.
Silence.
“Okay, I’m going now,” he said. “I’ll let you know about the visit in a couple days.”
“Benjamin . . . give our love to Abbi.”
“I will.”
He had to admit, both his parents had accepted Abbi into their family more easily than he had expected. Sangita gave her a
mangala
sutra
, the traditional Indian wedding necklace. Harish invited her to live with them during Benjamin’s deployment. Both did whatever they could—whatever they were capable of, given their personalities—to make her feel welcome.
They had met Abbi several times when he had first begun dating her. He brought her to church and Sunday lunch, and afterward they would joke together about seeing his parents’ heads explode if they ever married. But as the relationship became more serious, Benjamin stopped bringing her around; he didn’t want his parents to see that Abbi had gotten inside him.
He proposed to her the night before his graduation, and after the ceremony his parents took both of them to dinner. And then he told them about the impending marriage, how he and Abbi planned a quick double ceremony at the courthouse with Stephen and Lauren. Neither reacted, except to offer congratulations. But the next day his father asked to speak with him and, without emotion or pretense, asked simply if Benjamin had considered “all facets of the equation.”
“Facets of the equation? Come on,
Baba
. This is love, not chemistry.”
“A marriage is more than fleeting feelings, which can come and go. If you do not know this, you will have difficulties.”
“You just want me to have you find me a proper Indian girl? A nice mail-order bride, like Aai?”
“Benjamin, you misjudge us. If Abbi is whom you will marry, we will support you. But do not be so naïve to think your mother and I cannot understand what you feel because we not so American as you.”