Arizona Allspice (41 page)

“Are you going to end up working for them again once you’re able to?”

“I want to keep that option open. They told me I could take some desk work now until I improve. Filling out paper work for hours on end? I was assigned work like that when the factory put me on probation. That sort of work is punishment. Soon as I’m strong enough to do some real work, then hopefully they’ll take me back.”

“Did they mention anything about Manny?”

“They definitely want Manny to come back. He’s the smartest guy in the entire factory, I swear.” Elaine smiles proudly. “What about you, Elaine? Taking care of your dad used to be your job. How do you want to fill your days now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…,” she swallows the sadness in her voice and begins her sentence on a lighter note, with a smile. “Maybe I’ll just go off and write stunning articles for the big time magazine that will hire me. Then I will, of course, strike up some fame and sell millions of books by word-of-mouth alone. Simple enough,” she jokes. Her sarcasm prods at my insides. She downplays her abilities and it actually hurts me.

“You really could.”

 She seems offended by my statement. She looks away and runs her fingers over the moist condensation on the outside of her glass. She recoils inwardly, as if what I said was a polite lie, as if it was a friendly remark and not the honest-to-God truth. “Your stories are so awesome, Elaine.” Her gaze drags up to my face. “Manny bragged about you so much, I had to read it for myself. And it was every bit as good as he described it to be.”

Tears began to brim at her sweet brown eyes. She’s moved by my flattery.

“I can’t believe he did that,” she utters. Her words feel like steel marbles in my stomach: cold, heavy, tumbling. She wasn’t supposed to be upset. She was supposed to be proud of herself and good to herself, like how she told me to be. In shock, my voice just gets louder as if the volume will distract her from feeling betrayed.

“I couldn’t keep listening to you say that! I don’t get
how
you don’t see what I see! God, Elaine! Lines from your stories are etched into my memory. From some soccer jock like me, okay, maybe it’s not a compliment that I like it. You know what? No. Honestly, I love them. It’s like there’ll be nothing interesting for me to read if it ain’t written by you.”

She nods with glistening eyes. “I loved your stuff, too.” She takes a sip from her glass and pushes her chair back from the table as my mind staggers.

“What are you saying?” I get up from my seat as she races to the door. “Elaine?”

“Stop following me,” she orders as I trail very close behind her.

“Tell me what you mean.”

“Stop following me!”

“What do you mean?”

I almost step onto her toes when she halts in the front doorway and faces me, but she doesn’t look at me. She places her hands onto both of my shoulders and the warmth of them seeps through the fabric of my shirt and onto my skin. Her gaze is directed somewhere below my chin. “Joey, please. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” Though I am even more confused, I don’t know what else to do, so I obey. I watch her from inside the doorway as she runs the dirt trail and disappears in the direction of her house. I wait there, framed by the army green screened door, standing on legs still griping at me about the therapy exercises I did this afternoon.  

******

“Is something wrong?” Uncle Frank asks as I run past him and Miss Amelia sitting on the couch. I continue running. “No!” I call from my bedroom, “I forgot something!” I pull open the bottom drawer of my night table and find the journal under my photo album. I jog past them again, interrupting their movie. I feel their eyes on me as I leave the house as quickly as I came. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take Joey lying to me and lying to himself anymore. All that stuff about loving my stories…He saw everything about me through rose tinted glasses. He loved it because he lohe cared about me. I can’t believe he read my journal. He read my private words, my personal feelings, my thoughts as metaphors, my life in allegory without my consent. Perfect. I know what I have to do now.

I see the light outline of Joey’s white t-shirt behind the dark screen of the door. He sees me coming and steps outside, meeting me out in the yard. It’s not really a yard. No one has a yard here. There’s only brown dirt and gravel barely distinguishable from the dirt road. I inhale deeply to compose myself. I stop my hands from shaking, my lips from trembling and my head from lowering. His eyes don’t even fall to the journal in my hand because he’s searching my eyes for the truth. I give it to him.

“
Here.
” I hold the book out to him.

“Is that…?” he swallows the end of his sentence.

“Yes.”

 He takes the black journal from my hand with a gentle tug. His fingers grasp nervously at the silky hair at the nape of his neck. He just keeps staring down at his journal in his hand, knowing what it means for us, but not wanting to admit it. “Did you read this?” His eyes are somewhat wide. Not widened from surprise, widened as though for the first time he’s trying to see me for what I am beyond the haze of affection that has been clouding his vision. My heart races at the thought of him hating me, but my conscience feels freed of the lies and the pressure I’ve been dealing with the past two weeks.

“I read it in the hospital. I was your pretend girlfriend at the time, so your mom gave it to me to read aloud to you while you were sleeping. No big deal,” I explain casually.

“No big deal?” he repeats while shaking his head. I shrug in response. He turns away. I watch his back, the muscles there tense, as he walks away from me. The sound of ripping paper strikes my ears. The jagged half of a page tossed over Joey’s shoulder floats atop the slight breeze and flutters towards me. I grasp the discarded paper midair and run to stop him. If I knew he would destroy his journal I would never have handed it back to him.

“Hey!” A chunk of his journal, about five pages thick, falls quickly from his hand to the ground. Joey continues walking up the stairs, leaving the pages to lie in the dirt. I scoop up the papers angrily. I scan the page on top and I see my mom mentioned. He is ripping up the memory of my mother and it is making me just as angry as he is right now. “I don’t think you want to do that! Joey!” I reach him and pull at his arm. “Joey, calm down!” At my hand making contact with his upper arm he reflexively yanks his arm away, so when he turns around to me his fist is drawn. “What?” I lift my chin. “You gonna bust my lip again?”

 He glares and then drops his arm. “I can’t believe you,” he growls and keeps climbing the steps. I stay at the bottom of the steps and watch him open his front door.

“Believe it!” I yell back. “You read my journal and I read yours! We’re even!”

He whips around to face me and punctuates his sentences with an accusing jab from his pointer finger. “No we’re not! We’re not! I can’t believe how, how
callous
you are. I read your fiction, you read my truth, and all you can say is ‘no big deal’? Your answer to my feelings is a shrug? I don’t know why I ever…” He clips the sentence off and sets his stormy eyes at some random low cloud beyond me.

“Joey, what am I supposed to say? Thank you for having a crush on me? I have no idea what to say to make anything any better other than the truth. The truth is I don’t know why you ever liked me either.” That got him to look at me. “
Here.
” I hold the pieces of his journal out to him. “Put these back in your journal.” Slowly he walks down the steps. He takes the pages and tucks them into the book. “If you’re going to end up destroying the thing or burning it or something I’d rather you just give it back to me,” I say. When I see that notorious fire ignite behind his cool blue eyes again, I flinch inwardly.

“You actually
want
my journal?
For what?
To be some pathetic keepsake?
What the hell do you need this for when you don’t even care?”

“I never said I didn’t care.”

“But you never said that you did.” A curious glint in his eyes, he steps closer. “Do you?” Suddenly the warm whisper of air as he speaks grazes the corner of my mouth. His body, his eyes, his lips are so close to me it feels like I am trapped in his searing aura. He could kiss me. Instead he asks again, more demanding, “Do you?” It’s not in my power to speak. I can’t even think of what to say. “Being a tease,” his eyes narrow, “is very unattractive.” Humiliated, I take a shaky step backward. His dark, satisfied expression adds to my embarrassment. My blood pressure has soared. Even as the angry pain crawls through me, I remain speechless. Finally, I raise my hand. An inch and a half from his nose I flip him off.

“You too!” he shouts as I disappear. Home, I make it quietly to my bedroom without raising the suspicions of Uncle Frank and Joey’s mom who are cuddling in the living room.

I’m trapped in a box. My bedroom, my house, my neighborhood, my town are all imprisonments. Ironically, I never felt this trapped when I was being attacked on all fronts during freshman year of high school. Maybe it’s because I had my family to lean on and a scholarship to U of A to look forward to. Today there are no prospects. I no longer have college plans, a boyfriend, a mother, a brother, a father, and now I no longer have a friend. I should be an expert on how to lose everything. Every single relationship I have falls apart and the common denominator of each one is clear. I’m coming to terms with this fate, this theme in my life. It’s the reason I complied with the realization that it was the right time to tell Joey the truth.

 Beneath my acceptance of the situation with him, a small part of me grieves. It had to fall apart today? Why? Why couldn’t I have had one
more good
day with him?  But, the truth needed to be told. He called me callous. Well, I don’t sugar coat the truth. I didn’t like it when the truth was hidden from me. When I found out my father was sick, initially I wasted a whole lot of emotional energy dealing with why no one ever told me and why I hadn’t seen the truth myself, rather than using that energy to deal with my new reality. I wanted Joey to have the whole truth. That way he wouldn’t waste energy on me. He could concentrate on someone he was actually compatible with. He’s a good guy. He’s a great friend. I’ll miss that. Anyway, it won’t be long before it’s the right place, the right time, and he’s with the right girl.

******

Denise falls back onto her pillow, laughing. “That was the worst kiss I’ve ever gotten,” she sighs, then chuckles. I wipe the remaining cherry lip gloss off of my lips with the back of my hand and wipe it onto my blue soccer shorts. It tasted more like oil than a cherry. I chuckle as well. I’m remembering that joke Elaine said when we went to that restaurant. The joke where she implied I was clean of any contagions seeing as I never did anything intimate with Denise. I guess I won’t be sharing any root beer floats with her again, but that was determined hours before this kiss. Denise’s lips tasted cold and slippery, not sweet and warm, and I didn’t feel anything. Elaine kissed me on the cheek and it was like an electric storm was inside my body. I squeeze my eyes shut as uneasiness tingles in my stomach. I’m not supposed to be thinking about her. That was the reason I came here. I called Denise and she agreed to have me over. When I arrived and we lay talking in her soft bed with pillows and sheets in endless shades of pink, she told me that she wished Manny was home.

“Why?” I asked. I studied her face. Impossibly long lashes fan out around her exotic eyes. Her lips are, of course, painted pink and as always their artificial sheen reflect all glimmers of light. Rich caramel skin covers her from her toes to her neck and then, covered in that powder that girls use, her face is too many shades lighter. It makes her skin seem lifeless, unreal, resembling a cappuccino colored porcelain doll.  I realized I had never seen Denise without makeup on. Anytime I came to her rescue at some ridiculous hour of the night her eyes were dramatically lined and her lips carefully glossed. Maybe she sleeps with it on.