Don't Touch (21 page)

“Drew!” Mandy squeals.

“I'm not trying to be crass,” he says as if offended. Drew plays the southern gentleman well. “I just find it unbelievable that someone as charming as Caddie's mother would have trouble in the love department.”

“Well, aren't you the sweetest?” Mom says, and offers him another ginger ale.

Jordan parks himself by Drew and they talk trucks while Mom and Mandy catch up. I'm superfluous, which is fine by me. My brain's not even here—it's calculating distances between my skin and theirs, projecting potential threats and how I'll answer them. If Mom spills her drink on me and tries to help me wipe it off, I'll grab the dishrag before she can use a paper towel, which might soak through and cause an accidental touch.

Somewhere, I know these are people who love me, here to celebrate my birthday, but the most alert, plugged-in part of me sees them as accidents waiting to happen, last straws.

I'm getting worse.

“We got lost, like, eight times!” Livia says when she and Hank arrive half an hour late. The roads around here wind in strange directions to accommodate the hills, the street lamps are spread far apart, and the signs aren't always helpful. Sometimes it feels like they're
trying
to deter strangers from visiting.

Some part of me is glad they made it—I'd started to wonder if they'd blown me off—but more of me is troubled by new bodies in the room. I wouldn't mind it if everybody got lost and gave up, but eventually everyone makes it.

Even Peter.

Of all of them, he was the one I felt least sure would come, but he arrives with Oscar. Like Drew, they shake Mom's hand and call her “ma'am.”

Oscar even brings me a present—something oblong and messily wrapped in Christmas paper. “Sorry,” he says. “It's all I could find.” Knowing Oscar, the shape makes me nervous, but it's just an eclair from a nice bakery in Crestline.

“Thanks,” I say.

And he says, “My pleasure. Consider it an apology for my assholery.”

He pops a grin at Peter, who smiles. Maybe they talked about Project A-hole, or maybe Oscar's sharper than Peter gives him credit for. I wonder if they talked about me, about the failed “date.”

Peter makes eye contact with me, and maybe I'm making things up, but his smile seems rueful. Peter's “present” to me was only a few weeks ago. It felt like the start of something, but it didn't last.

It's started getting chilly at night, but it's still nice enough to sit on the back porch without coats. We leave the porch lights off and instead light the lanterns and candles. The earthy scent of damp leaves and crisp air, the flames, the whiff of smoke from a neighbor's chimney, remind me of campfires at Tannehill State Park. Dad would always pick a campsite by the stream, so we could hear the water rushing by as we slept.

A pang seizes me, and I press it down. I have company.

Hank, Livia, and Oscar squeeze onto the cushioned bench facing the woods, and Peter and I sit with our backs to the wood railing, leaving plenty of space between us. Mandy and Drew take Mom and Dad's rocking chairs, hands clasped so their arms form a “V”. It's sweet, but it gives me another pang.

As soon as Mom's out of sight, Drew offers to spike our sodas with a big plastic bottle of Beam from his backpack, but Mandy shoves it back in and says, “Caddie's mom isn't crazy like mine. She'd kick us out for that.”

Livia teaches a game with teams where we try to make each other guess the names of celebrities. When we count off, Peter ends up on my team and the whole time we're playing, I can't keep from trying to read him, to see if he's saved any feeling for me or if I've put an end to that for good.

Dad calls in the middle of the game. Mom sticks her head out the back door to let me know, and I say, “Tell him I'm busy.”

I feel Peter looking at me, but I resist the impulse to meet his eyes.

As things wind down, Peter seems to glance my way more often, and Mandy keeps looking back and forth between us. When Hank and Livia call it a night, Peter pulls another soda from the cooler.

Mandy tells Drew and Oscar she wants to show them this “really cool” portrait of a cow that hangs over the fireplace in the living room. It's Mom's great-granddad's national prize-winning Black Angus cow, Black-Eyed Susan.

Mandy isn't the most subtle. She says, “Peter, you stay and keep Caddie company.”

“Do some things I'd do,” Drew says as he goes.

Peter and I sit, not exactly in silence, but close. The summer tree frogs have quieted, but the crickets are still at it, and off in the woods, critters with a stunted sense of self-preservation rustle loudly in the undergrowth.

Finally, Peter says, “How have you been?”

“Okay.”

“You didn't want to talk to your dad.” I feel his eyes on me, but I don't meet them.

“Nope.”

After that respectable exchange, we once again slip into silence.

“It sucks,” he says, breaking it again.

“What does? I mean, I know a lot of things do, but what in particular?”

“Well, it sucks that you can't talk to your dad. I've been there, and that's no fun for anyone. But I meant, more than that, it sucks that things are like this between you and me. I didn't mean to make things awkward.”

“You didn't,” I say. I shift to look at him. He's tucked up his knees and hunched over, picking at a splinter of wood from the railing.

“Yeah, but if I hadn't tried . . . If I'd left it friendly . . .”

“I can be shy.”

“I know.”

“I don't mean to be.”

Peter moves so he's facing me. The flicker of the candles gives his face a honey glow. “You don't have to apologize,” he says. “You've got a lot going on right now.”

“But that isn't an excuse,” I say. “I think maybe I'm afraid of starting something. I'm always afraid something bad's about to happen.”

It's the closest I've come to admitting my fears to anyone. “Maybe we need to get to know each other better,” I say, “before we try anything . . .
more
, you know?”

It sounds like something a normal girl might ask for. It sounds so reasonable, even I believe it for a moment—that given enough time, I might be able to let the fear go.

“Yeah?” Peter says, smiling. “I'd like that.”

His words inspire a heady mix of feeling. There's fear in there, but warmer feelings too, like hope.

When the other three come back, it's like the weather's changed. Before, the crisp in the air felt like a warning. Now, it's possibility—newly raked leaves to be jumped in, fresh-chopped wood for a bonfire, an empty jack-o'-lantern waiting to be filled. We're still standing on the edge of something, but for tonight at least, I can hope that if the ground beneath us crumbles, we might be falling into something good.

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The feeling lingers for almost a week, and it's like when I first arrived at the academy—fun. Peter and I plot our Halloween flash mob—he's decided the participants should be called “conspirators” like we're pulling some fabulous con. Oscar tries to teach Hank some stage combat, and Hank decks him by accident, leading to the world's biggest pity party. Drew and I cram for our English midterm together before first period, causing Mandy to fall all over herself at the friend-boyfriend teamwork. Livia teaches Mandy and me to read tarot cards—mine say I'm learning how to cope with change. Maybe that's just Livia telling me what she thinks I need to hear, but it feels nice.

I don't call Dad and he doesn't call me, and I've decided that's best, for now anyway. My life is my life. I shouldn't have to feel bad all the time because of him.

Don't touch
hovers, but it's background noise.

Until Friday, when Nadia tells us it's time that we learned about listening.

Oscar whispers, “I know how to listen.”

“You don't,” says Nadia, “or you wouldn't be talking right now. We're going to start an exercise called repetition. Find a partner, and . . . Well, here, let's have Caddie and Livia try.”

The class forms a circle around us onstage, and Nadia gestures that we should sit down in the middle, facing each other.

“Livia, you'll be observing, and Caddie, you're repeating. When you see something in Caddie, Livia, say it, that's all. You might say, ‘You're stiff,' or, ‘You touched your knee,' or, ‘You're happy.' Whatever feels true to you in the moment. Caddie, you repeat after Livia. So, if she says, ‘You're happy' you reply with, ‘I'm happy,' first-person. Make sense?”

“When do we stop?” I ask.

Nadia smiles sideways. “Just keep going until I ask you to stop. It won't hurt . . . much.”

Livia sits facing me and immediately breaks into giggles. I smile back.

“That's a change,” Nadia says. “So, say what you see.”

Livia tilts her head and starts in, “Okay, um, you're smiling.”

“I'm smiling.”

“If you don't see anything new,” Nadia says, “keep repeating that until you do.”

“You're smiling,” Livia says.

“I'm smiling.”

“Um. You're nervous.”

True enough. “I'm nervous.” And, weirdly, saying it makes me feel it even more.

“You look sad.”

“I look sad.” It feels strange to have her see that—too close, in a way. “But I don't feel sad,” I lie.

“This isn't about what you feel,” Nadia says. “It's about what Livia sees. Just repeat.”

“Sorry,” Livia says to me.

“No need to be sorry,” Nadia says. “You're just saying what you see.”

“Okay,” Livia starts in again. “You look sad.”

“I look sad.”

Nadia says, “Say it like you believe it: not ‘You look sad,' ‘You are sad.'”

“You're sad,” Livia says.

“I'm sad.”

“Oh, you're so sad.”

She reaches toward my shoulder, to comfort me?

“I like that you're following your impulse,” Nadia says. Livia smiles.

But I've shrugged away.

“You don't want me to touch you,” Livia says.

“I don't want you to touch me.”

“You don't want me to touch you.”

“I don't want you to touch me.” My heart beats too hard. Does Peter hear it, the words and the heartbeat, and think of that day?

Livia looks a little hurt. “You're weird,” she says, smiling, and that breaks the tension.

“I'm weird.” True enough.

“Pot meet kettle,” Mandy says, and Nadia shushes her.

Livia smiles at Mandy but stays focused on me. “You look, um . . . upset.”

“I look upset.”

“Less like you're reporting,” Nadia corrects Livia. “Just say it: ‘You're upset.'”

“Okay. You're upset.”

“I'm upset.”

Maybe I sound too upset, because Livia jumps to something less awkward. “You're . . . wearing a blue shirt.”

“I'm wearing a blue shirt.”

“Boring,” says Nadia, and we all laugh.

“You're smiling again.”

“You're . . . I'm smiling again.”

“All right, you see how it goes,” Nadia says. “Find new partners, you two.”

Mandy waves for me to join her. When I sit across from her, she whispers, “I have a surprise for you in rehearsal. We're doing some physical improv to work on my scene.”

Mandy's scene. The scene Mandy's directing for Bard. She told me about it when I was in a fog after the divorce announcement. I'd almost forgotten.

“I convinced Nadia to let me do an experimental memory thing. So that you and Peter can kiss!”

“What? Why?”

“She agreed to let me put in a kissing scene!”

“But there's no kissing in the play.”

“We're adding it!”

Nadia circles near us, and Mandy stops whispering.

“You're freaked out,” Mandy says.

“I'm freaked out.”

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“I wish you had told me sooner,” I say in the hall between class and rehearsal.

“She didn't okay it until this afternoon,” Mandy says. “I thought you'd be excited.”

“Well, I'm not.”

“You want to kiss him, right?”

“I don't know! I'm still trying to figure things out, and this makes it harder.” A cluster of dancers go by and I lower my voice. “Even if I
did
want to kiss him, I don't want us to
have
to, in front of people onstage.”

“Okay, okay.” Mandy's regrouping. “I get that. I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about it like that. I was thinking—KISS! Kiss equals good!”

“Can you change it?”

“It's just a stage kiss. It doesn't have to
mean
anything.”

“That's what makes it so horribly awkward. Mandy, you have to change it!”

“I don't know. Nadia says I'm thinking like a director. She thinks the Bard judges will love it.”

I want to crawl into the air ducts and live there.

“Can we at least try it out?” Mandy says. “I mean, at first I was just thinking, how can I get Caddie and Peter to kiss, but the more I thought about it, the more it makes sense for the play. I'm kind of in love with the idea.”

“Well, I'm not. And I'm the one who has to do it.”

“You're in a play, Caddie. Think how physical your audition was.”

“No, I know.” She thinks because she's assistant director she can coach me into shape.

“Do you even want to play Ophelia?” she asks. “Because I think you're lucky to have the part, and if it were me, I'd be doing everything I could to play it better, not trying to come up with ways to get out of rehearsal.”