A Little Friendly Advice (6 page)

“Hello,” he says.

“How many of these have you given out tonight?” I ask. I can feel myself blushing.

“Two.” He grins. “I like to make friends.”

“Sorry, but I can’t really see you having many friends here.” I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb. The other guys from Fisher Prep have congealed into tidy groups of similarities, like weight class or bad haircut. This boy doesn’t fit the scene. And that definitely works in his favor.

“You’re right,” he tells me. Then he pulls me toward the back door.

“Wait. My friends are leaving.” I try to pull free, but he’s holding my hand too tight. My feet feel light and clumsy, and I bobble behind him like a balloon full of week-old helium.

“C’mon! We’ll wait for them outside. Besides, I want you to meet someone.”

The night is dark and dense in Teddy’s manicured backyard. We waft through a cloud of smokers that congregate near the back door. One of them is Katherine. I beam my smile in her direction. She watches me through her long final drag, flicks the butt away, and goes back inside looking very unhappy. I guess she really does want to get out of here. I realize I’m squeezing this boy’s hand in a hot, very sweaty vise grip. I let my hand slip free, but he catches my pinkie and links it with his.

I follow this boy down a slate path that leads toward Teddy’s pool house. Automatic floodlights click on and guide our way. The sounds of bad music grow fainter with every step. I actually relax a little.

In the corner, Teddy’s golden retriever lies near his doghouse, his silver chain linked to a twisted, carved topiary. When he was a puppy, Teddy would parade him hourly around our block. Now the dog is ancient, its sandy coat flecked with white hair. Nevertheless, the dog is happy to have some company. He struggles to his feet to greet us, but ultimately opts to sit and wait instead. His wagging tail sweeps aside fallen leaves from a triangle of grass.

The boy pats the dog on the head and draws me closer. He pushes back some fur. Another white
HELLO
button is pinned to the dog’s collar.

“Wow. Making friends with the dog. We’ve established that this party sucks, but that’s a new low.”

“Tell me about it. Thank God you came along.” He takes off his cap and brushes a hand through his messy, matted hair. It looks crazy choppy, like he cut it himself with those plastic scissors made for little kids. “I’m Charlie.”

I smile. “What? No cute button for that, Charlie?” Now
this
feels like flirting. I think.

There’s a garden bench against the pool house. We sit, and the motion lights slowly click off one by one, blacking out the path by which we came. My insides flutter.

“So are you going to tell me your name?”

Oh, right. “Ruby.”

“How do you know Teddy?”

The last light over our heads clicks off and blankets us in darkness. It takes a few seconds before I can make out Charlie’s shape, even though he’s sitting really close to me. “I used to live a few houses down the street.”

“Wait — so you don’t live in Akron anymore?”

I shake my head. “I do. I just moved off this block a few years ago.”

“Yeah? Why?”

I press Charlie’s
HELLO
button into my palm until it hurts more than the answer to his question. I turn to look back at the smokers, but my eyes are still adjusting to the dark and I can’t make out anything in the distance.

“Okay …” Charlie leans over to tie his sneaker and gives me a much needed break from his stare. “I can sense you’re skeptical. You think I’m a meathead like all these other guys. Well, let me explain why I am at this lame party.”

Charlie justifies his presence here. I concentrate extra hard on everything he says, trying to ice out the thoughts heating up in my brain. He goes to Fisher Prep with Teddy, but he doesn’t feel like he fits in there for strikingly obvious reasons. Still, a kid has to have friends. He hates Akron, but his parents moved here this summer so his dad could start a new job.

“Rubber?” I ask.

“No,” Charlie recoils at what he perceives to be an insult. “He’s an art professor at Kent State. We used to live in Pittsburgh when he taught at Carnegie-Mellon. Pittsburgh was so awesome. Home of Heinz ketchup, best ketchup in the world.”

Even in the dim light, I can tell his red cheeks are getting redder by the second, and I wonder if it’s because I keep staring. Or if it’s some kind of medical condition. Or if it’s because he likes me. I should be excited. Why am I not excited?

“Ruby,” he says.

I look down and see the glint of foil in his hands. A stick of gum. It might be Make-out Gum, the way he’s leaning toward me really slow. But I don’t want to jinx it. I’ll just take the piece, chew, and see what happens.

Only, the wind picks up and my hand freezes in midair. My eyes have finally adjusted fully to the darkness. Now I can see things in the yard around us. Teddy’s big crescent-shaped pool, a stack of plastic lounge chairs, a tall fence, and beyond that …

“Ruby, what’s wrong?” Charlie asks, pulling back from me just the littlest bit.

I couldn’t explain it if I wanted to, how the sight of my old house makes my body wind tighter and tighter until I’m convinced all my muscles and tendons and ligaments are seconds away from snapping. Most of the neighborhood looked unfamiliar during our ride to the party. Probably because I make it a point to completely avoid this side of town. But the orange treetop in the front yard is still the tallest one on the block. And it looks just like the tree I photographed this morning. Could that have been why I wanted to take that picture? The fall leaves are as electric as they were when I used to stare out my old bedroom window. I can see that window, too. The light is on, because someone else lives there now.

“Ruby, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say, even though a tear rolls down my cheek. I wipe it away as discreetly as I can and shift my body until Charlie’s head blocks the view of my house behind him. “Seriously,” I say. “What were we talking about?” All I can think about is my dad. All I can smell are his cigars. “Let’s talk about whatever we were just talking about, okay? Please just say something.”

Charlie turns his head and looks over his shoulder, then back at me, totally confused.

He probably thinks I’m crazy. He’s probably right. Another couple of tears drip free, though I beg them to stay put. I try to say something, I don’t even know what, but my throat closes off in a way that feels frighteningly familiar. It’s not the house. It’s everything else, all at once, crushing me. Everything I was hoping to escape tonight, forever. Charlie puts his gum back into his pocket. When he ducks his head, my old house appears behind him again, this time impossibly close. Like it picked itself up and moved a few feet closer. Like it’s chasing me.

The dog gets up and shuffles away from us because our petting has become lazy. His movement clicks on a bright floodlight overhead, illuminating our stage. The background disappears in stark blackness, and my eyes squint to allow my pupils time to adjust.

“Ruby! We’re leaving!” Beth calls from nearby.

I try to say sorry as I stand up, but I don’t know if he hears me. Then I run into the blackness, gripping Beth’s voice, letting the wind dry my eyes along the way. Charlie calls after me, but I don’t stop. Even though running seems to do me no good at all these days.

It started a few months after he’d left.

Beth had a trundle bed, which was awesome for sleepovers. I never had to slum it in a sleeping bag on the floor, or spoon myself next to her and wrestle all night for covers. This bed was designated for me, the best friend, and I used it a lot — spending the night at least once every weekend and even a few times during the week, when I was particularly depressed and Mom didn’t know what to do with me. Beth’s home was my sanctuary then — always crowded with her two sisters and forever the right temperature of warm, the kind that made me drowsy.

That night was perfect. We’d gone bowling with her family and ate so much pizza we nearly barfed. Then Beth and I rented a bunch of our favorite movies, and Mr. Miller brought up a TV and VCR and set it up on her dresser for us. While we watched, we counted coins from the big bottle full of Miller family spare change. Beth’s mom wanted to get it to the bank and said we were allowed to keep half of however much we counted and rolled. My hands smelled sharp and metallic, and no matter how much I scrubbed them, I couldn’t wash away the smell. But I didn’t even care. I fell asleep completely content and twenty-seven dollars richer.

It shouldn’t have happened, not on a night as nice as that one.

It wasn’t a typical nightmare either. I wasn’t being chased by a serial killer. I didn’t have to escape a fire. For the most part, everything was fine. Our house, our family. Mom, Dad, and I putting together a puzzle in the living room.

But when my dad couldn’t find a particular puzzle piece from the pile, one with an edge, he suddenly got angry. He stood up and began grabbing his records from the living room shelf, while Mom kept on looking for pieces like everything was fine. I started to get worried, nervous. She handed me a puzzle piece and told me everything was going to be fine. So I forgot about Dad and started looking for an empty spot on the board.

The dream Ruby had no idea what was coming. And the dreamer Ruby, floating somewhere in the air like a ghost, unable to speak or communicate in any way, could do nothing to warn her of what was about to happen.

I woke up screaming.

Beth leapt out of bed and crouched next to me, asking what happened. Her hand touched my shoulder and she looked at her wet palm quizzically. I was completely soaked with sweat, and my legs were shaking so bad it made the sheet waver.

Beth gave me a fresh nightgown to wear. Not a crappy one, but her second-best one, with the tiny pink and blue hearts and the lace trim. I got changed in a dark corner while she pushed the trundle back underneath her mattress. She wouldn’t let me sleep on it, no matter how I insisted. Instead, she scooted to the very edge of her twin bed and patted the empty space next to her until I lay back down.

Sweat sticks the stray hairs of my ponytail to the sides of my face as my ears search my bedroom for sounds. I’m wrinkled and warm, still dressed in last night’s clothes, my left arm branded with the basket-weave impression of my scarf. I tell myself it’s fine. I’m dreaming. That was absolutely not the crackle of driveway gravel.

But that doesn’t satisfy me for more than a second or two. I have to check, to make sure.

I roll out of bed and race to the window in one sloppy movement. I warn myself that he won’t be outside, but I still fling it open. My panting slows as I search our driveway for nonexistent tire tracks and crane my head out the window to seek imaginary red taillights.

I shiver in the cold. I am in bad shape.

By the time I reached Maria’s car last night, my tears had dried. With my well-rehearsed smile, no one was the wiser that I’d been straddling hysterics mere moments before. Even though I told myself not to, I turned and looked for Charlie, but saw he’d gone. I guess that’s to be expected when a strange girl cries and runs away from you when you try to kiss her.

Bypassing friendly arguments over whose turn it was, I slid into the Period Seat, cracked the window, and concentrated on the white noise of air rushing past as Maria flirted with the speed limit. Exhaustion diluted my sadness into something I could swallow. I didn’t want to have any dreams that night. Only thick, black sleep.

But I wasn’t that lucky.

Now, after one last look down my quiet street, I pace the perimeter of my room and let consciousness catch up with me. I’m tired of being held hostage on trips down memory lane. It’s not like I’m willingly reflecting on my painful past, like Beth warned me against. I’m being completely hijacked. And I have no idea what to do to make it stop.

I just want to go back to how it was before he came. When everything was so in the past that it almost could have happened to someone else.

Part of me doesn’t want to bother Beth about how I’m feeling. I mean, this is well-worn territory between us, and I doubt she could say something comforting to me that she hasn’t already told me a million times before. The thing is, when friends ask you what’s wrong, there’s this part of them that doesn’t really want to know the answer. Especially if they’ve seen you upset before over the same thing, again and again and again.

They’ll usually give you some kind of wisdom the first time, and repeat it four or five times more, if you’re lucky. I guess I’m mega-lucky, because I’ve heard it, on and off, for six years. But after a while, you hit a wall. If you’ve been given a strategy to deal with your problem, it’s time to deal with the problem already. If you don’t, if you avoid changing things, it kind of becomes your own fault when they don’t get better. And people will just shrug their shoulders and say patronizing things like
Are you really surprised?
or
I told you this would happen
. And then they stop feeling sorry for you.

Last night already felt kind of weird like that between me and Beth. Like because I didn’t hook up with Teddy, it means I’m hell-bent on screwing myself over. Like because I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, I haven’t been listening to her at all.

My cordless phone chirps alive. I follow the sound and narrow in on the stubby rubber antenna poking out from under a stack of Polaroids on my nightstand. The stack is topped by a sky-blue Post-it note.

I take the photos in one hand and the phone in the other and crash back onto my bed.

“Hello?” The smell of my own morning breath makes me wince.

“Morning, sleeeeepyhead,” Beth singsongs though a sea of static — a by-product of her crappy cell phone and our even crappier cordless.

“Hey!” I perk up at the sound of her voice. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Creepy,” she says and laughs.

I am so glad to hear that laugh. It means that the tension of last night is forgotten and things between us are okay. “Have you eaten?” I wedge the receiver between the side of my head and my shoulder and flip through the photos. Mom, Beth, Katherine, Maria. I tentatively flip to the next one. Jim looks ghostly, framed in our front doorway, with sallow skin against the night sky, an expressionless face, mouth slightly agape. There’s a blur over the collar of his flannel coat. I tilt the photo underneath a ray of sunlight. The mark is a slender almond-shaped fingerprint. My mother’s. I don’t want to think about her lingering over his face. So I shuffle him quickly to the bottom.

“Nope. Have you?”

“No. And I’m totally starving. Let’s go to Dodie’s. My treat.” My stomach growls at the thought of a mountain of extra-crispy home fries drizzled with ketchup.

“Rain check on that. Maria’s picking us up to go Halloween-costume shopping in a half hour. I’ll be over in about five minutes. With breakfast.” She rings her bike bell three times for me.

“Awesome.” My throat tightens, pleading for me to stop there, but I force myself to keep talking. After all, Beth is my best friend. Even if it frustrated her, she’d want to know if I wasn’t okay. “Ride like the wind, all right? Because I’d like to talk to you before everyone gets here.”

“Why? Did something happen?” Her words drip out cautiously.

“Nah. Just wanted your opinion on this thing,” I say casually, as if debating over two flavors of ice cream. “Listen, I’m gonna jump in the shower, so go ahead and let yourself in.”

“I’m on my way.” Wind whips against her phone as she pedals faster.

I hang up and reach around to my back pocket. Charlie’s portrait is bent and crinkled from a night’s worth of sleep in my jeans. The tragedy of us makes him even cuter, if that’s possible. I thread his
HELLO
button through the white frame border, put him at the very top, and slide the whole stack underneath my pillow.

The leg hair I avoided yesterday prickles up when I strip. Our bathroom is always chilly, because my mom mandates the window be open a crack to keep mildew from spotting the ceiling. I crank the hot water and pull the razor though the thick cream in long, confident ankle-to-thigh avenues. I brush my teeth, comb all the knots out of my long dark hair, pair some clean clothes Mom left folded in the laundry basket with my forever dirty Levi’s, and bound downstairs. I don’t know why, but just thinking about talking to Beth is making me feel better than I have in days.

I greet her before I walk into the kitchen, but she’s not waiting for me like she should be. The clock over the sink reads 10:45
A.M
. — it’s been about twenty minutes since we hung up the phone and Maria would be arriving in another ten. Our tiny kitchen feels cavernous.

I fetch the cordless and dial Beth’s cell, planning to tease her with some defective Akron-made-bike-tire joke in case she got a flat on her way over. A muffled rendition of the “Peanuts” theme song trickles in from the living room. Beth’s ring tone. I follow it past the couch and over to the window, where I peek out the blinds.

Beth’s rusty ten-speed is up on its kickstand next to our holly bush. She’s sitting hunched over on my front stoop with her head down, curls dribbling over her striped sweater and into her face. Between her curtain of hair and the angle I’m at, I can’t tell if she’s sleeping or crying or fraying the thin spots on her jeans with her fingernails. The twinkling lights from her cell phone glow out of her back pocket until my unanswered call goes to voice mail. I do not leave a message.

I pull the door open quietly so I won’t scare her. A triangular flock of birds headed south screeches above us and gives me away.

She leaps up and spins around, both of her hands diving deep into her back pockets. “Geez, Ruby!” she gasps, as if I were spying on her or something.

“Are you okay?” I say, stepping outside. The sun is bright, but the air is still crisp and cold. “I just called you but you didn’t answer.”

Beth rocks back and forth on her heels and tips her head back in a casual stretch. “You did? I’m sorry. I guess I zoned out. Anyhow, I rang your doorbell a few times, but you were still in the shower.”

I bend over the metal railing and reach up around the corner of the awning, pawing the sandpapery shingles. “Why didn’t you use the spare key?” We’ve always hidden a spare to our house. Beth uses it often. The jagged edge of metal ribs my fingertip and I produce a gold key in the palm of my hand.

Beth takes the key and examines it in the light like the Giant Eagle cashiers do to twenty-dollar bills. “Huh. Must have missed it. Your arms are way longer than mine, remember.” She tucks the key back in its hiding place and sashays past me into the house toting a white paper bag. The buttery deliciousness of fresh Leetch’s raspberry jelly donuts wafts behind her. I follow her inside.

Beth drops the bag on the kitchen table. The grease bleeds translucent polka dots. I sink into a seat and hear the
whoosh whoosh whoosh
of her shaking up a quart of orange juice behind me. She pours us each a glass.

“Thanks, Mom,” I joke, and try to toss it back with one swallow. A blob of pulp rolls down my thermal. Beth hands me a wet paper towel and sits quietly as I dab the spots.

When I look up from my shirt, Beth’s staring off blankly out the kitchen window. I know I made my topic of conversation sound trivial over the phone, and I guess her lack of urgency is my own fault. I start talking, but not about what’s on my mind, exactly. I suddenly feel like I have to warm up to that conversation.

“Is there anything special you want for your birthday? I’m stumped on what to get you.” I dig inside the bag for a donut. It feels heavy and warm in my hand.

Beth grabs one and chomps into it, spraying a puff of powdered sugar into the air. Then she reclines against the counter. “I don’t know. How about you take a special picture for me or something homemade like that,” she says through bites. A little jelly trickles out the corner of her mouth and she catches it with her tongue.

She smiles when she realizes I’ve been watching her. But it’s not her normal toothy variety. This one is long and thin and taut. I drop my chin to my chest. When Beth’s paying attention, she can read me like a book. And it’s finally hit her that something’s wrong.

“You heard from him again,” she whispers.

I shake my head. “No. You’re right. He’s probably long gone, off to who knows where by now.” It’s crazy. I wonder if he even knows how much he’s messed up my life after his stupid five-minute visit. Probably not.

Beth stares down at the remainder of her donut and then takes her last bites with a pensive look. “Okay. Is this about last night? Because I’m really sorry if I pushed you too hard with Teddy. You know I was just trying to take your mind off things. I had good intentions.” She wrings her hands.

I meet her face and force a smile. “No, I don’t care about that. It was a good plan. Just the wrong boy.”

“What about that other guy? The one Katherine saw you talking to outside.”

“Yeah,” I say wistfully. “I screwed that up.” My body temperature ignites. Just say it. “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. Because I think maybe there’s something to what you said in the gym.”

Beth shakes her head slowly. “What do you mean? What did I say?”

I take a deep breath. And then a deeper one. “That I have a phobia about hooking up. But I think it’s bigger than that.” My mouth feels sticky. Each syllable requires incredible effort. “I think I’ve still got major problems.”

The wrinkles in Beth’s forehead smooth out and her head drops slightly to the left. “Ruby, I didn’t really mean what I said …”

“I know. I know you were only kidding. But I think there might be some truth in it, unfortunately.” Before I can stop myself, I pour out the story of last night. Of seeing my old house again and completely freaking out. How I’m the only one of our friends who’s never hooked up before. How I’m so afraid I’m going to end up alone like my mother. How I don’t even know what it was that sent my dad away, and now I’ll never know what it was that brought him back. How I’ve been inundated with flashbacks, forgotten memories of him leaving that are billowing up inside my brain, hurting me all over again.

Her bottom lip starts to quiver.

“Beth —” I say, with a desperate laugh to keep her from crying. I absolutely hate it when Beth cries.

She leans over the table and her tears pitter-patter onto the empty paper bag. When she looks up at me, her face is flush and wet. “I feel so guilty.” Her chest heaves up and down with jagged breaths.

“Why would you feel guilty?”

Her eyes are red and frightened, like a rabbit. “Because I’m a bad friend.”

“That’s crazy,” I say, sliding my chair next to hers. “Without you, I wouldn’t have gotten through all this in the first place. Lord knows my mom had no idea what to do with me, and those hokey school counselors only wanted me to recount every stupid little detail about all the terrible stuff I was feeling. Those were the worst hours of my life. But you always found a way to distract me.”

She tips her head back and smiles, though the tears keep falling in fat splashes. “Remember how we made that voodoo doll out of your dad’s old sock and stuck him with pins from my dad’s toolbox?” She laughs, and a little bubble of snot sprouts at the edge of her nostril. “That’s some nontraditional therapy right there.”

“Or how we’d make potions out of hair spray and cough syrup and Tilex to poison him with if he ever came back?” Seriously. We’d dump the entire contents of her medicine cabinet into a jelly jar and leave it to bake in a sunny patch on the side of her garage for months.

“Or that fake report card I made when you did that oral report on the Underground Railroad in Mrs. Loughlin’s class?”

I smile. The faded piece of blue construction paper with the red letter
A
that Beth slipped into my backpack. I hadn’t spoken in class for about a year and it was becoming a real problem. I had weekly appointments with the guidance counselor, which I hated more than anything. There was even some talk of putting me on medication. Beth told me that the sooner I could show everyone I was better, the less I’d have to deal with the people who wanted me to rehash my sad feelings all the time. She was so proud of me for standing up in front of the whole class and speaking as loud and steady as I could. I remember seeing Mrs. Loughlin’s jaw drop in surprise, as well as a bunch of the other kids who thought I was mute or something. Beth gave me two big thumbs up from behind her workbook. It was like she was the only one there.