I forget to explain to her about brain freeze, and it soon becomes obvious she has one because she scrunches her face up and closes her eyes. It makes me laugh.
So maybe she’s kind of annoying, but at least she’s also sort of amusing. With Nicole constantly ditching me, I’ve been hanging out alone all the time, which just makes it too depressing to go out to eat or to a movie. I’d rather rip off my toenails with a pair of pliers or organize my closet than go to a movie theater alone.
The waitress comes back and pulls out her notepad. “Have you decided what you’ll have?”
I smile at her. Here’s to hoping my Italian is real and not something I made up.
“Ciao, cosa mi consiglierebbe?”
I can see the slight change in the waitress. She obviously respects my mad skills at speaking Italian because she stands a little straighter, and her smile becomes a touch more genuine.
“Un piatto di gnochi con mozarela fresca è il risotto ai carciofi è ottimo.”
I purse my lips. Nicole had been bragging about her risotto a few days ago. Might as well try it.
“Mi sembra fantastico, allora prendo il risotto e per lei invece, gli gnocchi.”
Hopefully Ann will like the gnocchi.
“Qualunche l’antipasto?”
Ha. Appetizers. As if I’m trying to blow every dollar I ever made.
“Non grazie.”
She nods and takes the black-leather menus from us and then disappears in the direction of the kitchen.
“When did you learn Italian?” Ann asks.
“I’ve always known Italian,” I say, picking up my fork and drawing circles on the white linen tablecloth.
“No you didn’t. I would remember.”
I sigh, resisting the urge to stab myself with my fork. “It was a wish.”
“Why would you wish to know Italian?”
“Lots of people wish to know foreign languages.”
“Why not just wish to go to Italy?”
I drop my fork and pick up my napkin. It’s folded up to look like a weird little triangle. I concentrate on unwrapping it and laying it out on my lap, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles. “My dad moved there. I thought if I knew Italian, he’d let me come visit. I didn’t just want to
go
there, I wanted him to
want
me there.”
“Oh,” she says, her voice quiet. I look up at her, half expecting to see a look of pity, but there is none. “I don’t really remember him,” she says.
“He left a year after my mom gave you to me.” I pause. “Sorry, that sounds weird.”
She shrugs. “No weirder than this,” she says, gesturing to her body.
“True.”
“So what was he like?”
I stare down at my napkin again. There’s a piece of lint stuck to it, and I flick it off. It lands on the buttery-yellow tiles beneath my sneaker-clad foot. “Tall. Dark hair. Your typical Italian look and an accent to boot. I used to wish I had inherited his accent somehow. Sometimes my brother will say a word or two and it reminds me of him. He’s brilliant, though. Really well educated, loved to read. He’d fall asleep in the den with a book propped up on his chest. Sometimes he’d read to me.”
“Why’d he leave?”
I don’t have a good answer, so I just twist my napkin around in my hands, waiting for something to come to mind, but nothing does. “I don’t know. I mean, one minute he’s there and the next he’s just,
not
. I bet he never looked back, either. It didn’t make sense then and it still doesn’t. I don’t see how he can just leave us and never see us again.”
Ann doesn’t say anything to fill the silence, so I do. “I don’t think any of us has ever figured out how to fill the gap. It’s like we’re a table and one day someone cut off one of the legs, but none of us has moved to help hold things up, you know? Like we’re waiting for him to come back and level it all out again. And nobody ever talks about him. Not my mom, and definitely not Chase. I feel like I’m the only person who even remembers he exists.”
I feel myself getting a little choked up, so I take a long sip of ice water. The waitress walks up and sets down the bread sticks and salad, and Ann quickly rips into the warm, buttery bread. I feel sort of bad when I realize that I haven’t even offered her any food until now. She’s been alive for, like, a day and a half. I wonder if she ate any gumballs while sitting in the garden shed.
Then again, I’m not sure anyone else would have thought of feeding her either, right? Maybe that’s because she’s supposed to be a doll. Not a live girl sitting across the table from me, loudly smacking her lips as her cheeks bulge like a chipmunk’s.
She realizes I’m staring and freezes, her mouth hanging open, a hunk of bread only halfway past her lips.
“It’s impolite to chew with your mouth open,” I say. “And your elbows shouldn’t be on the table.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?” she asks, still showing off the half-chewed food as she picks up her elbows and sticks them out at odd angles, like a chicken.
“Rest your forearm on the table. If you’re not eating, put your hands in your lap. And also, don’t chew and talk.”
Okay, what am I, the etiquette Nazi?
She chews with gusto and as soon as she swallows the mouthful, she says, “Thanks!”
Like I’ve just offered to spit shine her shoes or something.
She picks up the tongs and puts a giant pile of salad on her plate and then chases a crouton around with her fork. “So, why don’t you ever call him?”
“Who?”
“Your dad.”
“Oh. Um, no thanks.”
“Why not?”
I stuff a giant forkful of lettuce in my mouth to give myself some time to think. But even after I’ve swallowed it, I don’t have a good excuse. “I shouldn’t have to. He’s the one who left.”
“Yeah, but—”
A movement catches my eye and I lean out of the booth a little bit to get a better look.
Oh, snap.
Ben and Nicole have walked in and are being escorted to a booth in the corner. Nicole is wearing a dress I’ve never seen before, this pretty black halter top with a dusty-pink ribbon around the empire waistline, and a pair of matching pink heels.
Does she always do this? Dress like a girly-girl princess when I’m not around? Or at least when she’s on dates?
Where’d her Converse and jeans go? Does Mama Tortini’s really warrant getting
that
dressed up?
Ben, apparently, doesn’t think so. He’s wearing his usual loose-fitted jeans with sneakers and a bright-red shirt with some kind of blue graphic splashed across the shoulder. Even from thirty feet away, I can make out the line of his pecs and his shoulders. Boy fills out a T-shirt, that’s for sure.
I shrink down into the smooth leather seat so I can just see the edge of their table, but I can’t see them and they won’t notice me.
“What’s wrong?” Ann leans way outside the booth and cranes her neck to see what I’m staring at.
“Ann! Stop that!” I hiss.
She jerks back so fast the table jumps, and her water glass starts to tip back and forth. Her hand shoots out to catch it, but instead she knocks it over and it pours across the table and slides onto my lap, soaking through my jeans.
I clamp down on my lips to keep from crying out and snatch the napkins off the table and start blotting the water off of my jeans.
Ann is just sitting there, wide eyed, her frizzed-out red hair sticking out at odd angles, her horrible blue dress rumpled and askew.
Goose bumps are popping up all over my legs and arms as the ice water seeps through the denim. Why did I think this was going to work?
I find the waitress and ask her to switch our dinners to takeout and then pay the bill as we wait. When the food arrives, I slide out of the booth and head for the back door. I’m only a few steps in the right direction when I realize that my shadow is no longer following me. She’s heading toward the front door.
I cover the distance between us in seconds and grab her wrist and then yank so hard I think I must dislocate her shoulder. She cries out and nearly loses her balance, but I don’t wait for her as I keep propelling her out the back entrance.
We make it outside before Ben and Nicole have a chance to see what the commotion is about.
“Sheesh,” Ann says, rubbing her wrist. “What was that for?”
“Nicole was there with Ben.”
She just gives me a blank look, her pretty green eyes staring straight at me.
Her eyes really are her best feature. Maybe with better clothes, non-frizzed hair, and about a thousand years of etiquette lessons, she’d be sort of pretty.
“Nicole is my best friend.”
Ann looks back at the restaurant. “That’s how you act around your best friend?”
“She was with Ben!”
“And?”
“And Ben is her boyfriend!”
“And?”
I throw up my hands and want to scream. “You don’t get it. Ben is . . . he’s . . . well, he’s Ben.”
“I fail to see the problem.”
“I can’t be around them at the same time. It makes me nauseous.”
Ann shrugs. “You sure are weird.”
“As if you’re not. You’re a doll!”
“Weren’t you a doll once?”
I snicker. “Of course not!”
“Not an actual doll. But you dressed as one. In the
Nutcracker
.”
My foggy memory slowly clears. “Oh . . . you mean ballet. I don’t do that anymore.”
“Why not? You love it. You spend hours upon hours practicing.”
“
Spent.
I was ten. Of course I loved it.”
“Does ballet not exist for sixteen-year-olds?” She looks at me wide eyed, completely serious. “That is so sad!”
I snicker. She’s very dramatic. “No, it does.”
“So why do you not participate?”
“I don’t know! Ballet is stupid!”
Ann clucks her tongue. “My, you’ve changed.”
“I would hope so. When I was ten, my most fervent wish was for you!”
She gives me a look that tells me in an instant I’ve hurt her feelings.
I swallow. “Look, it’s not that I don’t like you. It’s just that I’m not that girl anymore. People grow up. They stop playing with Barbies and start . . . ” My voice trails off. I’m not sure where I’d intended to go.
“Hiding from their best friend?”
She really is too clever for a doll.
We make it to my car, and Ann rounds the passenger side. I look at her over the roof, shielding my eyes from the setting autumn sun. “Look, there’s nothing to talk about here. I’m not the ten-year-old you once knew. And you’re not a doll, either. So let’s just pretend
that
”—I point at the restaurant—“didn’t happen. And stop asking so many questions, okay? Maybe I didn’t live in a box for the last five years, but it doesn’t mean I know any more than you do.”
I climb into my seat and buckle my seat belt, then wait for Ann to do the same. She clicks it into place and then reclines her seat until it’s practically flat, putting her feet on the dashboard and staring up at the sunroof. I try not to grimace at the dirt that she’s grinding into the plastic dash. “So if you’re not into ballet anymore . . . what are you into?”
I shrug and turn the key, backing carefully out of the parking stall. How do you explain to a doll that people don’t like the same things for their whole life? That we grow out of Raggedy Ann and My Little Pony?
“Snow White?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“What about those black fuzzy-velvet posters? You used to get one of those every week and your whole room was covered in—”
“No,” I say. God, I remember that. I had every poster they made, painstakingly colored with the markers they supplied. My rooms were practically wallpapered in unicorns and puppies and baseball scenes and meadows and rainbows.
“Karaoke?”
I snicker. I used to have epic dance parties in my bedroom, blasting ridiculous pop music, singing into my hairbrush. Ann and her plush friends served as my audience. “My musical tastes changed. They’re not quite so suitable for . . . singing.”
“Do you at least like ice cream?” she asks.
“Of course.
Some
things don’t change.”
“I don’t see why so many things do.”
“Ann, really. I was a kid then. A really stupid one. I’m much wiser now.”
“But you smiled more then.”
“Argh! This conversation is so over. You totally don’t get it.”
Ann turns her attention back to the clouds passing above. “No, I don’t.”
17
THAT NIGHT,
I learn that Ann is a bed hog. I thought I would be nice and share my big queen-sized bed with her instead of making her sleep on the Berber. I’ve done that a time or two, and that carpet is
not
cushy at all. So I took a sleeping bag out of the hall closet for her and then folded my blankets in half for me, and when I fell asleep last night, she was near the wall, while I was comfortably snuggled up with my pillow. It’s not yet dawn, but I can’t sleep any longer. I am dangling off the edge of the bed, my pillow having been mercilessly shoved off, my blankets robbed by Ann.
I roll out of bed and move to my desk to dig through my bag, pulling out my binder.
I flip to the back, where I’ve stashed the picture of Ben. In the dim moonlight coming from the open curtains, I can just make out his face.
I lean over, my chin resting on my fist, and stare at the outline of his body, at the contrast between his dark hoodie and the sparkle coming off the water behind him.
He’s achingly perfect.
There’s no one in the world as amazing as he is.
I sigh, simultaneously wanting to toss the picture in the trash
and
laminate it for safekeeping. Then I shove it back into my binder. I could spend the next hour staring at him, but it’s not going to change the facts.
I go to the bed and slide one of the blankets off Ann, and then I curl up on the floor and stare at the ceiling. I drift off a time or two but not for long, because I find myself watching as the room slowly gets lighter. When I can’t tolerate it any longer, I sit up and look at her.