37 Things I Love (In No Particular Order) (3 page)

*   *   *

WHEN I EXIT ALF,
Colin’s waiting. I cross the grass to the bench where he’s sitting, his head bent over his U.S. government textbook.

“Only losers hang out at the nursing home,” I say.

Colin slaps the book shut. “Oh, this is a nursing home? Shit. I came to audition for
American Idol
.”

“Seriously, what are you doing here?”

He holds up his textbook. “Some truths are self-evident.”

I snort. “Not that self-evident, apparently, or that book would be a lot thinner. What, you couldn’t think of a better place to read up on checks and balances?”

“Thought you could use some moral support.”

Did I mention I love this kid?

I open my arms and spin around. “What, am I, like, wearing a banner that reads ‘lonely, pathetic, and desperate’?”

“Actually, it just says ‘pathetic’ right now, but I can order you a new one.”

I shoot him a withering look. “Wow, I’m feeling so supported.”

Colin jumps up and scrambles my ponytail. It’s the kind of touch that makes it super clear that we are just friends and only ever will be, but at the same time makes me wonder what it would be like to have someone I could be more than friends with.

I body check him, throwing my whole weight behind it and nearly toppling him over. I am shortish, but not small. He circles round and headbutts my backpack. This goes on for a few minutes, until we’re both laughing and gasping for breath.

Colin snags the package of Goldfish crackers from my pocket and polishes them off. “This is not going to cut it,” he says. “Let’s get food.”

“I want a milk shake.” Let Mom wonder where I am a little longer.

But first I have to know if he said anything to Abby. “Um, about earlier.… Did you tell her?”

Colin looks honestly dismayed. “What do you take me for?”

“Just checking. Thanks.”

Sighing slightly, Colin slings an arm around my shoulders and leads me away from ALF.

5

Warm Chocolate Chip Cookies

For that one second when you bite into their tasty, melty, gooey goodness … nothing hurts.

THE COOKIES ARE WAITING
when I get home. Six of them. Arranged on a neat little plate.

“Was your bus running late?” Mom says as I dig in.

I plow through two cookies before replying. “What, you want me to lie to you now?”

“I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Mom does that thing with her hands that means she wishes she had a cigarette—something to take the edge off. It’s a little flutter of her fingers as they move from item to item on the table, but nothing’s what they are searching for. She quit smoking two years ago because I asked her to.

She quit once before, while she was pregnant with me. She told me she’d done it for me once, and she’d do it for me again. I think maybe it was a lot to ask, this time around. Considering all that she has to deal with.

I down two more cookies. Her hand flutters. At times like this, I see her in a different way—almost like not my mom. I see her young and restless, looking for something to burn. I wish I could have known her as a teenager. Someone I could relate to. Be honest with.

She takes a cookie and nibbles its edges.

“I’m not sorry,” I say. “At least he understands me. Anyway, what do you care?”

“He doesn’t understand anything, Ellis.”

This is such a tired old fight that it has no impact left.

“You don’t know him like I do anymore,” I blurt. “You never visit him.”

Mom brushes her fingertips along her hairline from ear to ear. “I want you to talk to someone,” she says. “I made an appointment.”

“I’m not going to any more doctors.” I can’t abide another stuffed-shirt know-it-all who wants to dig inside my head. It’s futile.

I liberate the last cookie. Warm. Soft. Perfect.

“Honey.” Mom gives me the look.

I look back. “Mo-om.”

She clears away the cookie plate. It clatters into the sink. “She’s different from the others, I think. I saw her yesterday. I’ve met her a couple of times, actually. I think you’ll like her.”

“I’m going to my room now.” I slide off my stool.

“I worry about you, you know.” Her words, light as air, float after me down the hallway.

*   *   *

AT TIMES LIKE THIS,
I leave the door open, just to see if Mom will come in. Just to see how far she’ll press the issue. It’s never very far.

Mom stays in the living room all evening, while I sit at my desk doing my homework.

I get good grades. Straight A’s, actually. I’m sixth in my class, as of now. I don’t think of myself as really smart or anything, but I work hard. I have to do something to occupy my mind, so it might as well be something productive. Dad was valedictorian of his high school class, Mom told me once, so I always make sure to tell him how I’m doing in school. I know he’s proud of me.

That’s one of the things the last shrink never got about me—how I can do well in school and still be a total wreck. I guess he thinks that messed-up people aren’t usually academically inclined, but I like to bust the mold.

After a while, I lie on my bed listening to Mom get ready for work. She runs the shower and listens to ABBA while she does her makeup. I catalog her mood by the CD she chooses. ABBA means she’s feeling hopeless and needs to be cheered up.

There’s been a lot of ABBA lately.

I want to roll over and tuck my head under the pillow so I can’t hear her worry. So I can pretend that I’m all alone. But it’s the two of us, always. I can’t forget about her.

I hear the off-and-on rush of the faucets. The zipping and unzipping of makeup pouches. The hum of the hair dryer. The whisper of drawers. The scratch of hangers sliding along the rod. The hiss of a licked thumb on the hot iron.

Mom appears in the doorway pressed and dressed. She looks nice. Professional. I wonder for the millionth time why it matters what she wears. No one can see her.

“I’m leaving,” she says. “Good night.”

“Okay, Mom.”

*   *   *

I ALWAYS SAY
I won’t go to the new doctors, but I always end up going. I don’t know why. Mom’s wrong about it helping. One time, though, one of the shrinks had me close my eyes and make a safe place in my mind. It’s a meditation thing that apparently lots of people are into. Whatever. I tried to make a joke of it, but in the end I actually liked it.

We never went back, because I told Mom he was creepy (he was), but the place I made … it follows me. I slide into it sometimes, by accident mostly, when I can’t handle myself, my thoughts, the world. It’s quiet there. The air is filled with small-feathered birds. Their wings flit against me. My skin grows damp with dew that smells clean and perfect.

In my quiet place, there’s no such thing as sleep. I stay wide awake, and the sky swirls in sweet pastel hues. Days stretch on into infinity, and the silence is so beautiful and deep, I cannot even carry one thought in my head.

When Mom’s gone, the whole house falls into perfect stillness. The walls breathe a sigh of relief, for no longer having to contain us both. They fold around me, a cocoon woven of all the things unspoken. I walk through the rooms, appreciating the air, the space, the silence, pushing any still-hanging words out of my path.

The world is out. I am in. It’s my quiet place come to life.

6

Mrs. Scottie

When she holds you, you know it’ll be all right in the end.

AT PRECISELY
TEN THIRTY
P.M.,
the front door clatters open. My respite is over.

“Hello-o!” Mrs. Scottie calls. Slippered footsteps travel the hall. She appears in the living room, clad head to toe in flannel, clutching her plastic bucket of yarn. “Ellis, dear, it has been a whale of a day.”

“Hi, Mrs. Scottie. What’s new?” I sit up on the sofa, putting the TV on mute.

She plants herself in the recliner with a graceless flop and digs into her yarn. Wads of blue, black, gray come out in a knot. Her fingers untangle the strands.

“Three rubbers in, do you know what that old bat Lillian Wattlesford said to me?”

I giggle. I can’t help it. I know she’s talking about her bridge game, but hearing Mrs. Scottie say “rubbers” will never not be funny.

Mrs. Scottie frowns, peering at me over her spectacles. (“We drink out of glasses, Ellis, dear. We see out of spectacles.”)

“No,” she says. “No, on second thought, I mustn’t corrupt your young ears.”

“My ears are old enough.”

“Umm-humm,” she says, extracting two long thin needles.

Mrs. Scottie comes over every night at bedtime. Technically, she lives next door, but on the nights Mom works, Mrs. Scottie stays in our spare room.

I tell Mom all the time that I’m old enough now to go to sleep without someone watching. She smiles and says, “That’s true.” But Mrs. Scottie still comes over.

“And how was your day?” Mrs. Scottie says, though I’m dying to know what that old bat Lillian Wattlesford said.

I lie quiet for a moment.

“No rubbers at all,” I quip finally, grinning.

Mrs. Scottie click-clacks away at her knitting. “As it should be, dear. As it should be.”

*   *   *

AT MIDNIGHT,
I go to my room. Mrs. Scottie’s relaxed my proper bedtime, since she knows I’ll work myself up if I have to lie in bed too long before I’m actually tired.

I click on the radio, which I keep set to Mom’s station. She’s talking now. That’s all the show is about. Her talking. She plays a little music from time to time, real soothing stuff that calms people down, but it is her voice that listeners tune in for.

People all over the city fall asleep to the sound of Mom’s voice. So many letters came in when she dropped from six nights a week to five that now the station replays her old recorded shows on the weekend.

I leave the door ajar because Mrs. Scottie is out there, even though I pretend not to be soothed by the click of her knitting needles in the living room.

I snuggle down beneath my comforter, but Mom’s voice is my blanket. Tonight she’s talking about loss. The ache and the emptiness. The screams and the weightless fury. The part of you that never really believes.

The mellow, drawn-out sadness of her words leaves me with a bit of a chill. It happens this way sometimes. I wait it out, until the words blur together into the simple noise of her, and at last I grow warm.

I wonder if she knows I listen. If she is ever talking just to me.

*   *   *

MRS. SCOTTIE POKES
her head in the door to check if I’m sleeping. I relax my jaw and make slits of my eyelids.

Slippered feet cross my bedroom floor. With a familiar quiet sigh, she turns off my bedside lamp. The tiny night-light in the corner grows brighter.

She stands for a moment, leaning over me. Her breath smells of butterscotch candy. When she pulls back and slips away, I celebrate my minuscule achievement with a twitching of my toes.

I never know if she’s really fooled.

7

Abby

For better or worse, my best friend.

WHEN ABBY CALLS
the next evening, I’m lying on my bed with my feet in the air, waiting to see if they will get pale in addition to tingling as all the blood drains away. My phone rings, and my experiment is ruined.

I roll toward my desk. The little screen glows
ABBY
.

I can pretend I’m not around, but then she’ll just call the house. Answering is inevitable.

“Hi.”

“Dude. What gives?”

I roll back into legs-up position, like a flailing insect on the kitchen floor.

“Are you mad?” Abby says into the silence.

“Kinda.”

“What’d I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.” Long pause. “Well, do you want to come over?”

Why?
is what I want to say. But this is what we do. “I guess.”

“Okay. Come soon,” she says and hangs up.

I clap the phone shut and chuck it toward my backpack. It’s Friday night. I shouldn’t spend it caging myself in my bedroom.

I jam a pair of sweats and a baggy T-shirt into my bag. I throw in a couple DVDs, all cheesy-ass comedies where nobody gets sick or dies. I slam the desk drawer hard enough that the broken heart pinned to my bulletin board jumps on its chain. Mine is
ST NDS
. Abby’s is
BE FRIE
. I kind of like her half better, which is dumb.

We don’t wear the necklaces anymore, because we’re too old and too cool for that stuff, but I kept mine. It’s supposed to be a forever thing.

*   *   *

“I’M SPENDING THE NIGHT
at Abby’s,” I say, bounding into the kitchen. I plant my butt on the table, stretching my feet so their tips rest up on the counter next to where Mom is reading a recipe.

She peers at me over her shoulder, then opens her mouth, I’m sure to tell me I’m not going anywhere. But she says nothing. Instead, Mom nips at my toes with her knuckles.

This is one of the moments when I remember that our relationship is a flawed and fragile thing.

“If it’s okay with you,” I add, in a semipathetic mumble.

“Go ahead,” she says. “Have her mother call me, please. And don’t forget to tell Mrs. Scottie.”

*   *   *

MRS. SCOTTIE’S HOUSE
smells like malted milk. Always has and probably always will. Mind you, I’ve never seen her drink a malted, but that’s just the way it is.

I step onto the porch we share and knock on her door, knowing full well she’ll be out. Mrs. Scottie is always home when I need her and never around when I don’t. It’s weird. (This is not even an exaggeration—it’s scientific fact. For nine months I kept the statistics.) She does rummy on Mondays, bingo on Tuesdays, and bridge on Thursdays, each with a different group of friends. I think it’s canasta on Friday. Wednesdays she gets her hair done.

I scribble a note to her and leave it pinned between the screen door and the jamb:

Staying at Abby’s tonight.