Fade Out (11 page)

“What’s going on?” I say finally. “With you and Jackson, I mean.”

I’ve just finished tracing out the shape of a Saharan elephant on the glass case. I decide to give it a little friend and begin tracing a giraffe.

Elissa shrugs. She tries her usual smile, but it doesn’t stick. Then all of a sudden she lets out a breath and says, “I have no idea. You thought that was weird too, huh?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “Like,
so
weird.”

“I swear he said he had off on Monday nights. You believe me, right?”

I nod. I do believe her.

“It’s not like he’s the only projectionist who works at the Little Art,” she says. “There’s some old guy who comes in too, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Larry.”

“I know he said Monday,” Elissa repeats. “And now he’s acting like he never said it. It’s like he’s hiding something, don’t you think?”

“What?” I say. “What could he be hiding? What do you think it is, what?”

(Think I sound nervous? That’s ’cause I so am.)

Elissa lets out a heavy sigh. “I have absolutely no idea,” she says.

I realize that she has no clue about the girl in the polka-dot tights, none. Elissa is blindfolded in the darkest part of the theater. And here I am, I could pull off that blindfold. I could hit the lights. I could open my mouth. I could…

So why don’t I? I guess I just need to be sure.

I start tracing a new animal on the glass case. The animal has a long, lean body, and a tail, and sharp claws. It’s a great big cat—a panther, maybe.

“Remember when you and Maya used to come here all the time and just hang out?” Elissa says.

It’s such an abrupt change of subject—maybe she doesn’t want to talk about Jackson anymore. Maybe she doesn’t want to know.

“Yeah.” I give the animal spots—it’s now a leopard.

“You guys used to be in here every weekend, I swear,” she says.

Maya’s a sore subject. She hasn’t called in more days than I’m going to count. I made at least three comments on her page online and I can’t remember the last time she made a comment on mine.

And the thing is, she only moved to Poughkeepsie a few months ago. How can she have this whole other life in so short a time and I’m still moping around in mine?

“It was so sad that she had to move,” Elissa continues. “Do you know I was at her house babysitting her brother I think the week before she left?”

“Yeah?” I say.

“She was so upset. She said she’d have to find a new best friend in her new school. She said she’d miss you so much.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“Why? Because you two were so close. Of course she’d miss you.”

“No, I mean why does she have to find a new best friend?
I
didn’t.”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe it’s lonely to be in a new place and not have someone to talk to?” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t have to be a
best
friend,” she adds. “Just a friend.”

Is that a hint? Well, I’m not taking it.

What I’m going to do is go all Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
: I don’t need anyone or anything. That’s what I want people to think. I want to turn my shoulder and walk out of the room and not look back, no matter how desperate I am to keep looking.

“Whatever happened to Taylor?” Elissa says. Another change of subject.

“She’s around. I saw her the other day. She broke one of my toes.”

“She did what?”

“Joking.”

“You two used to be in here all the time too, remember?”

“That’s ancient history,” I say.

I’m not sure where she’s going with this. Is she trying to say there’s no difference between Maya and Taylor? That I should just flit from one to the other like best friends grow on trees? Well, I know this is Shanosha, and we do have a massive amount of trees, but best friends are a once-in-forever kind of thing. You can’t just forget them when they’re gone.

Besides, just because Maya’s down in Poughkeepsie doesn’t mean she’s vanished for good. She might be too busy to chat online, or send me a text, or leave me a message, or any other kind of human communication, but she still exists. I just wish she’d call sometime.

“Hey, Dani,” Elissa says softly. I look up. She points down at the glass case, where a trail of chocolate has destroyed the giraffe. Not to mention the mudslide of ice cream that found its way to the front of my shirt. “You’re dripping,” she says.

10
Glue Poisoning

I
stand in the street, covered in chocolate,
going over my options. The movie will be starting soon, but if I run home—almost ten minutes each way—I may miss the beginning. My mom’s newspaper office is just one block away. She might have an extra shirt there that I can borrow. She also might give me a hard time about eating ice cream for breakfast. That’s a chance I’ll have to take.

When I walk in, my mom’s preoccupied with some girl. They’re talking all serious near the window, their backs to the
room. I notice that my mom has her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She’s so up in this girl’s business, she doesn’t even notice her own flesh and blood standing here in dire need of attention, not to mention a clean shirt.

I clear my throat.

My mom turns around. “Danielle!” she says. She looks guilty. I don’t get it until I take a closer look at the girl.

Taylor.

I think there’s some unwritten rule that once you stop being friends with someone you can’t hang with their mom. If not, there should be.

“Sorry,” Taylor says to me. I wonder if she has any idea what she’s apologizing for. She slips out from under my mom’s arm and stands up. My mom stands beside her.

“Oh, Danielle, is that your new shirt?” my mom says, her eyes alighting at last on my reason for coming up to her office.

“Wow, what happened?” says Taylor.

“It’s
chocolate
,” I say.

“It sure is,” Mom says.

My shirt, which happens to be bright yellow, a color that sets off chocolate really well, is obviously ruined. I want to get it off as soon as possible. But when I ask my mom if she has an
extra shirt, she says she doesn’t—I’ll have to go back home to get one. And I just lost precious minutes by taking a detour up here to check.

“What are you doing eating ice cream this early anyway?” Mom says.

Quick, I need a diversion.

So I change the subject to my old standby—movies. “
The Big Sleep
is playing today,” I say. “Bogie’s in it, you know.”

Mom doesn’t look too impressed. I have a feeling she won’t forget the ice cream.

“I have a shirt you could borrow,” Taylor speaks up. “I was going to go tubing later and change into it after, but… You can have it if you want.”

“Since when do you go tubing?” I say. The Taylor I knew didn’t even like to get her hair wet, let alone dunk herself in the river and go hurtling down the muddy rapids.

“Since when do you like
Bogie
?” she challenges me.

I guess a lot has changed in the year we’ve been apart.

“You two should go tubing together!” my mom says.

“I am not going tubing,” I say. But… “But I’ll take your shirt,” I tell Taylor.

She smiles and whips it out of her bag. It’s black, which
is great. But on the front is a fuzzy iron-on of a tiger head. It’s geeky beyond belief, and I can say that, even if I was the one drawing jungle animals on the ice-cream case just minutes before.

“Is there something wrong with it?” Taylor says.

“No…” I flat-out lie.

“Just tell me,” Taylor says. “You don’t like the tiger?”

“You know how I feel about iron-ons.”

“Then wear it inside out.”

“Good idea, I will,” I say, and stomp off to the bathroom.

Inside, I change quickly and then stand very still to listen. I am positive they’re talking about me. Just when I have my ear suctioned against the wood of the door, someone knocks in that exact spot and busts open my eardrum.

“Ow!” I yell involuntarily. “Who is it?”

“Your mother.”

I open the door a crack.

“That wasn’t very nice,” she says quietly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Let me in,” she says. I roll my eyes and open the door so she can squeeze into the small bathroom with me. She closes the door behind her and then gives me this look. You know, the
look
.
“Taylor offered you the shirt off her back,” she says. “You didn’t have to insult her by saying you’d wear it inside out.”

“She told me to!” I say.

My mom just shakes her head.

“Sorry,” I mutter. Though, in my defense, the shirt was in Taylor’s bag, not on her back. And also? I think I should get points for doing Taylor a favor and letting her know how lame her shirt is.

Mom does not agree. “You should tell Taylor you’re sorry, not me. And…” Her eyes settle on the shirt I now have on inside out.

She doesn’t have to say it. I quickly remove the shirt and put it on right side out. With that iron-on tiger head snarling out to the world.

The drama with the shirt almost made me forget what my mom was doing snuggling up to Taylor when I came in. “Why’s she here anyway?” I ask.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Mom says.

I lean up against the sink, waiting.

“She spent most of July at her grandma’s house and now she’s back. And the summer’s so quiet… and she hasn’t had much to do…. And so she came by to ask, well, if the newspaper needed an intern.”

I wrinkle my nose. I’ve heard of interns. They work all day for free at jobs other people do for money. They don’t get to sit around and watch movies whenever they want or eat ice cream whenever they want or hang out on rooftops pretending to get suntans. What a thing to volunteer for in the middle of summer. Taylor’s become even weirder than I realized.

“Which gave me an idea,” my mom says. “About what
you
could do with the rest of your summer.”

I look at her without a single thought in my head. Nothing’s coming. Really.

She claps her hands, then announces, “You could both be interns!”

Now I’m positive: My mom is not well. Mentally. She was haunted by water bottles and buried under boxes of tissues and now, when she’s finally gotten herself together out in public, she’s decided to force her only daughter to slave away making her photocopies and licking her stamps. I could get heatstroke, or glue poisoning.

“What do you think?” says the crazy woman otherwise known as my mother.

“You don’t mean…” I start and can’t finish. I point at
myself. Or, more directly, I point at the velvety tiger head, stabbing my thumb into its left eye, where my heart is.

She cannot seriously be saying I should spend the rest of my summer at the newspaper office. It’s not like I could possibly learn anything here. We’re not talking about a big-city paper. We’re talking about a paper for a town with nothing happening and no one in it. Shanosha, New York: Look for it on a map. You’ll find Albany, but it’s south of that. You’ll see Poughkeepsie, but it’s north of that. On your map will be Kingston and then Woodstock, but it’s west of them. Go too far west and you’ll hit the state of Pennsylvania. So where is it? you’ll ask. And to that I say:
Exactly.

That’s not to say my mom’s job isn’t important. It is. Even though
The Shanosha Scoop
reports on who’s having a yard sale and whose dog ran away and here’s her photo and
Look! We dressed her up as a princess for Halloween, have you seen her?
I’m proud of my mom for what she does. But that does not mean I want to do it.

“Mom,” I say, “I’ve got better things to do.” I open the door and slip out.

Taylor’s waiting at a desk. Her smile falters when she sees me.

Mom follows me. “What things do you have to do?” she says.

“There are
things
going on right now”—I give Taylor a
once-over, decide she can’t be trusted—“
things
I can’t talk about here. Things about
people we know
.”

“It could be fun,” Mom says, ignoring what I just said. “We could find something you’re interested in. For example, Taylor here wants to be a writer.”

Taylor blushes, as if my mom said her dream in life was to be a rodeo clown or a gym teacher. Taylor used to be my best friend, sure, but I don’t think I ever knew she officially wanted to
be
something. I guess that happened this past year too.

“So are you going to write stuff for the paper?” I ask Taylor.

She nods. She looks nervous, like I’ll make fun of her. I have no idea where she’d get an idea like that.

“And?” I say. “What are you going to write about?”

So quietly I can barely hear she says, “Your mom said I could do a movie review.”

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“No,” she says, but it sounds like a question. Like she’s asking me for permission.

As she should.

I’ve never seen Taylor in the Little Art, not once. She doesn’t know the ins and outs of the self-serve popcorn machine. She doesn’t know what seats not to sit on in the theater—and there
are many. She doesn’t know about Orson Welles or Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman or Rita Hayworth.

“Who’s your favorite movie star?” I ask. It’s a test.

Taylor blinks, considers. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t have one.”

Test failed. I turn to my mom. “Mom, this is so not fair and you know it.”

“Does this mean that you
do
want to be an intern?” my mom asks, a hint of a smile on her face, as if she planned it this way all along.

“Yeah, so do you want to do the movie review with me?” Taylor asks. “I was thinking we could watch whatever’s playing at the Little Art and then write it at my house, you know, after. You could sleep over.”

“I don’t know….” I say.

“That’s a great idea!” my mom says.

I consider. Taylor’s house is outside of town, up this winding dirt road back behind the elementary school. It’s even more secluded than my house, and going there was fun when I was a kid, and made for some scary sleepovers, but there’s something about staying at Taylor’s house that freaks me out. It’s her parents. Her perfectly nice, perfectly happy parents. All two of them.