A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (6 page)

I was stingy-eyed with the shock that he’d actually say it out loud, but I wiped my face with the back of my hand and bit my lip and kept staring up at him.

“Maybe she felt sorry for you because you didn’t have any other friends, and maybe she was flattered by you hanging around like a lovesick puppy, but you can’t mistake that for real friendship.”

He turned away sharply. “And I’m not flattered that you wanted to fuck my girlfriend.”

I took it like a slap, biting the inside of my cheek. One second more and I would’ve shoved him; but Lissa was already between us. “Time out, time out, time out.”

Jon pulled me out down the hallway, and the door slammed shut. I ran, but he ran to keep up with me.

“Why are you the one who’s going after me?” I snapped. “Is it like some gay person thing?”

“It’s because if I stayed back there with Oliver, I’d have to beat him up.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “Get on it.”

“Cassie,
calm down
.” He sighed. “No, never mind. Get pissed off. You’ve got that right. But he didn’t mean it, and you know that.”

“Don’t apologize for him.”

“I’m not!” Jon said. “I’m just saying.”

“Well, don’t.” I brought the back of my hand up against my cheek again and realized that I had stopped crying. This was the story of my life since middle school. I knew how to deal by now.

“I’ll kick his ass if he doesn’t apologize. Cut him some slack, though, just for now. It’s not such a good time for him.”

“It’s not party time for any of us! I don’t see why he gets more slack than me just because they were having sex.”

“You’re right,” he said, and was quiet.

We were both quiet for several minutes. “You’ll kick his ass for me?” I barely managed to smile.

“Maybe not. I could put superglue on him in his sleep, though.”

“That works.”

I could breathe again. I was not some pathetic friendless creature, if I had Jon.

I pulled myself up onto a table and sat there, swinging my legs in the air. Not calm, not yet, but cooling down.

“Hey,” I said, “can I ask you a question I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know the answer to?”

“Shoot.”

“Was Ollie really, actually . . . jealous? Of us?”

“Kind of,” Jon said. “In the sense that he was jealous when he wasn’t Julia’s first, second, and third priority, yeah. But he wasn’t worried about you putting the moves on her.”

“Oh?” I said as noncommittally as possible.

He was very slow to answer, and when he finally said something, it was, “Well, um, it’s just . . .”

“It’s just I wouldn’t know how to put the moves on someone if I had a color diagram and an instruction booklet.”

Jon grinned at me. “I wouldn’t go that far. You’re good with color diagrams.”

“It’s not fair. You keep your hair short and admit to liking math and don’t wear makeup—which, by the way, I am not allowed to do—and don’t take an interest in fashion—which, by the way, I am also not allowed to do—and you make it to sixteen years old without ever having had a boyfriend, or even getting kissed, and everybody decides that you’re a lesbian. Even if Heather Galloway had never told everybody that I was.”

“Lissa says that homophobia is a tool the patriarchy uses to scare straight people into gender conformity,” he deadpanned.

I blinked.

“Yeah, well, Lissa paints her nails, and wears more skirts than I do.”

Still, he didn’t ask. He had more sense than that, and maybe he’d been through too much of life to ask what I had been asking myself since I first discovered that everyone had reached that consensus without asking me.

Because, here was the thing. There was not and had never been a single boy who I really found attractive in an I-want-to-take-off-your-pants-now kind of way. Not in school, not among one-hit-wonder boy-bands and movie stars. I listened to other girls fawning over this one or that one and I just didn’t get it. But there wasn’t a single girl either. So clearly there was something terribly wrong with me, and I was probably only attracted to Mongolians or something. I probably wouldn’t even make it to cat lady status when I got old. Guinea pig woman, maybe.

Except there was Julia, and I still had no idea what to think about Julia.

I had never let myself think about that too long, or too deeply. She had Ollie, and she was happy that way, and I was happy that way, and it didn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Except that there was a time I wanted to hold her hand, and didn’t, because I couldn’t risk someone thinking it meant something. I couldn’t risk that it might mean something.

Maybe I needed to risk it.

As we sat beside each other in silence, swinging our legs off the same long metal table, I was starting to hatch a plan.

T
hings did not magically revert to Okay between Heather and me. There was no Okay to revert to. Even in third grade when I had just moved from the wilds of downtown Chicago, we’d already been standing on separate sides of the divide between the nerds and the popular kids. Which means that she wrinkled her nose at Lissa when she brought plantains and spicy beans and rice for her lunch, and she ignored Amy as being totally beneath her notice, and even when they were assigned to work together on a project, she’d done all the work because, in her words, it wasn’t a project about how totally hot the elves in
Lord of the Rings
were.

She obviously wasn’t in the same place as she used to be. She never joined in when someone started debating which one of the Birds of Prey was the best, but she didn’t roll her eyes. She even sat next to Lissa at lunch and demanded a taste of her okra etouffee. But she listened to music that was too hip for me and picked out her outfits too carefully. She was still over there, somewhere.

But I found that I didn’t mind, so much, sitting quietly downstairs with her. We took turns choosing CDs. I was making miniature crossbows and catapults, and figuring out how to hide a full-size sword inside a wall (not to mention all the little throwing stars—I figured out that I could reappropriate the spring-return doohickey inside retractable dog leashes, so that you could pull them right out of the wall and have them fly back toward it again). Meanwhile, Heather was sewing costumes. So she stared at her work and I stared at my work—but when we couldn’t stare at our own work anymore, we stared at each other like two scorpions trapped in a mason jar.

“Tell me something,” she said as I pulled out the CD that had just finished to pick a different one.

“Something?”

“Something green.” Heather brushed back the hair from her face for the hundredth time, hair that fell back again as soon as she bent her head down to her work.

“Green.”

“Like something about the trees. Or the grass.”

I let my mind fall back to when I was pedaling across the state. “It’s not the grass that’s green. By June it’s already starting to get bleached pale, and then into yellow, and into brown. There are the trees in Missouri—and, oh. There’s the Gemini man. You seen that?”

“Don’t think so.”

“You’d remember. Over in Wilmington—it’s not so far, but it’s not a place you’d go to if you didn’t have some reason to go there. It’s this guy who’s maybe twenty-five feet high, and he looks kind of like an astronaut. He’s dressed in this hideous green jumpsuit, and he’s got this welder mask thing on his head, and a rocket in his hands. It is just about the greenest thing I’ve ever seen. Right in the middle of this nobody town.” I brushed some sandpaper over the wood I’d been working at, trying to think of the next thing to say. “I’d been on the road for an hour and a half, and I was thinking, oh, great, just three hundred more of those and I’ll be in California, and—why was I doing this anyway? And then I come upon this guy by the road, and I think, fifty years ago, some people thought it would be a good idea to do this. And they did it. And now we have a giant green guy by the roadside. Like a monument to perseverance in the face of absurdity. I don’t know why, but it made me think it would be a good idea to keep going.”

“Was it?”

If it had been Jon, or even Ollie, I might have been able to come up with a satisfactory answer to that. But they knew. They’d been there too. I just shrugged.

“I don’t think I could’ve done that. Not even for those legs.”

I glanced down at my legs, which still bore a scab from where the bike had fallen on me, and some faint scratches from when I’d scraped them through the thorny brush, and which were furry and unshaven, and I didn’t say anything. It seemed like it might be a compliment. It seemed like it might be two compliments. But this was Heather, who always said “Can I ask you a question?” or “I’m not saying this to be mean or anything,” when she wasn’t asking a question, and was saying it to be mean.

“Tell me something quiet.”

She smirked, and pointed upstairs. The saxophonist and the bassist were trying out the melody line from “Vengeance Is Mine,” not really getting the rhythm right yet, but they certainly were being enthusiastic about it.

I thought for a while, and then I told her: “I don’t know if I ever got any quiet. You could wake up at three thirty, four thirty, thinking that you’d be awake before anything else alive, but even then you could hear the cars and the trucks whizzing down the highway, flashing their headlights in your eyes, and you’d dream downtrodden truckers and unfair labor practices, or exhausted families en route from an old home to a hopeful new one. It wasn’t the cars that were loud, but my mind that was never ever quiet.”

“You weren’t scared? Just—out there by the side of the road?”

I thought about all the times I’d been scared, and I didn’t have the right words. Not for her. I breathed in, breathed out.

“It’s your turn. Tell me something.”

“Something what?”

“Something scared.”

“Ouch!” Heather said with a dramatic wince. “Well, I guess I had that coming.” She got out of the bony chair where she’d been sitting and lay down on the cement, rolling up her dress-in-progress for a pillow. Maybe because the ceiling was the best place to look when there wasn’t any safe place for your eyes to go.

Me, I moved on, measuring things out to sixteenths of inches and repeating my measurements. That calmed me. It took me to a world where you could be assured that as long as you followed the directions conscientiously, things would come out all right, and there wasn’t any ambiguity about what you were allowed to do and what you weren’t allowed to do. That was much more comforting than anything that existed out here in the real world. Finally, I started chiseling out a wedge in the honey-colored wood as Heather started to talk.

“It wasn’t a big school, so everybody knew everybody, and I had some classes with Gianna. We said hi to each other in the halls, but we were more like acquaintances than real friends. By then I was out to my parents and my friends if I thought they could keep a secret—some people, you know, they love you to pieces but they’ll tell all your secrets to the
other
people they love to pieces. It was almost starting to be all right. I could accept me, and my parents could accept me, and everyone else could accept me as long as I was inconspicuous and didn’t make any waves. I thought that I could just live a nice quiet high school life, no drama, no romance, until I went off to college. It would be so much easier, as long as I kept my stories straight. And—and then suddenly I noticed the way that Gianna smiled at me like she wanted me to give her a pat on the head. And how she’d glance up at me for a second and then glance down again real quick as soon as I even started to meet her gaze. And then I figured out what was going on, and she figured out that I’d figured out, and by that time it was like—when you’re in a foreign country, and you bump into someone who speaks English too, and then you find out you grew up in the same hometown. There wasn’t even any stopping to think about whether it was a good idea or a bad idea.

“But that’s not the point,” Heather continued. “The first time I really noticed, we got put on opposite sides of a class debate, and—it wasn’t a big deal or anything, we just tried to argue our points passionately. But after class she ran up to me to make sure there weren’t any hard feelings. She kept saying please, and I’m sorry, and please, and I’m sorry. And it hit me, how scared of me she was. It made something connect, in my head—because that was exactly how scared I used to be when it came to you.”

My concentration slipped, and the chisel slid, across the wood and into my hand, nicking a long scratch across my palm. Blood welled up to the surface. I ran to get the first aid kit, and while I was standing on my toes looking in one of the cupboards, she kept talking. She was looking at me with her eyes wide and her face pale, and she didn’t even stop talking. It was as if she didn’t trust herself to keep going if she stopped.

“So, I used to have this really hopeless crush on you. And it took me a while to figure that out, and I didn’t deal with it well when I was still trying to figure it out, and once I did figure it out I dealt with it worse. I was mad, and I didn’t even know who to be mad at, so—”

“I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”

I poured iodine onto a cotton ball and held it against my hand, willing myself not to flinch against the hard sting. I kept my back turned to Heather, my face turned away.

“You’re not supposed to do anything.” Her voice rose an octave to a harsh, angry squeak. “If you don’t care that’s fine, and if you don’t understand that’s fine, and I guess—I wanted you to know that I know that I was a pretty poor excuse for a human being back then. And I knew it then too, even if I didn’t know how to fight my way out of it.”

I couldn’t bear to look at her; all my anger burst forth in a wave that didn’t give me time to think about it. If she was trying to apologize, if she was trying to explain herself, that didn’t matter. I couldn’t see it through the haze in front of me. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair for you to take the worst year of my life and turn around and say that I don’t even get to have it to myself, it’s about you and your own pain, and about making yourself feel better.”