Fade Out (9 page)

I know something. The name of the girl. But I’m not yet
ready to reveal that to Austin. I’d like to get all the information I can out of him first.

“How long has she been calling?” I ask.

“Weeks.”

“Weeks! This has been going on for weeks and you didn’t tell me?”

“I don’t have to tell you everything,” he says, all defensive. He picks up a book from off my floor and flips through it. It’s not like he wants to read it—he’s just doing it to bother me. “I thought you’d be interested because of that girl you said you saw. In the projection booth. Do you think it was her, the one who’s calling?”

Yes, of course that’s what I think. But I tell him what Jackson told me. “I asked him about that. He said it was just some delivery girl. He ordered pizza.” I shrug. “I guess that could be true,” I add. “I guess he could have ordered a pizza….”

I don’t say that I
want
it to be true. I want there to be some reasonable explanation for the visit, for the phone calls, for everything. Once one person you trust up and lies, you don’t want to have to go through it again with someone else. Once you see one person hurt, you wouldn’t wish it on anyone—especially not someone as sweet as Elissa.

But Austin’s not buying it. “Pizza? That’s impossible,” he says.

“You can’t say that. It’s
possible
. Who’s to say he didn’t want a pizza? You said yourself you left the lobby to go to the bathroom. So the pizza-delivery girl could have slipped by when you weren’t looking….”

Austin shakes his head. “I’m telling you, Dani, there is no way Jackson ordered a pizza.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because,”
he says. “Because Jackson doesn’t eat pizza.”

“Who doesn’t eat pizza?” I burst out.

“People who are seriously lactose intolerant,” he shoots back. “It runs in the family.” Then he coughs, as if for effect.

I don’t know what to say to that.

“Anyway,” Austin says, “so the girl called this weekend. I told Jackson to come get the phone. He was really annoyed and said why can’t people call his cell phone. So I said, I don’t know maybe because your cell phone doesn’t work in the theater and that’s why you have to use the walkie-talkies like I’ve been telling you and…”

He sees the look on my face and gets on with it.

“So I gave him the phone and left him alone. Then I
heard him yelling. When I came back he’d punched a hole in the wall.”

“No,” I say. “He wouldn’t do that. I don’t believe it.”

Austin says, like it doesn’t matter if I believe it or not, “Then go see for yourself.” He starts picking through the stuff I dropped on my floor: a tube of lip gloss, a comb, my broken iPod headphones.

I don’t say anything at first. I’m thinking. I’m thinking how, if this were a movie, Jackson would be in deep trouble right about now.

In the movie, the detective and her irritating sidekick would be talking in their dark office. “We’ve got him,” they’d say, gathering up enough evidence to break the case wide open.

And across town the suspect would be crossing a street, but he’d get all paranoid. He’d run and hide in an alley. He’d be concealing his left hand in his pocket. The knuckles would be bandaged up, like he just punched a hole through a wall.

Only, in the movie the suspect wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, someone like Jackson. He wouldn’t be the guy with cool taste in movies. The guy who rides the red bike around town. The guy who listens when you talk. Who looks at you like you matter. The guy who’s dating your babysitter, so you probably shouldn’t
be thinking such things. No movie would do a thing like that.

“What are you thinking?” Austin says.

“I’m thinking when are you going to stop touching my stuff and leave my room?”

“Okay,” Austin says, dropping one of my pens. “I thought you’d like to know, that’s all. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave.” He says this and stands up, waiting for me to give the definitive answer.

“Austin,”
I say. “Leave.”

I have my back turned when he finally goes. I wait a good minute before heading downstairs to make sure he’s gone. There’s no sign of him out the windows. I don’t see his bike on the road.

“Was Austin going to stay for dinner?” my mom asks. She appears behind me, standing by the banister, looking distracted.

“Of course not,” I say, horrified. Then I see my mom’s face. I see it, like, really see it, for the first time since she picked me up at Dad’s. She’s not okay.

Gently, I lead her away from the stairs and into the living room. We sit on the couch. It’s getting dark, and I have to turn the lamp on. We have the whole house to ourselves for another night. Outside, the chirps of crickets have begun, and a car
drives by every once in a while, but beneath that? It’s called quiet. It’s what happens when you live in Shanosha where no one wants to be. All of a sudden it feels so lonely. Almost like it would have been nice to have someone over for dinner.

“What’s for dinner?” I ask my mom.

At first I don’t know if she heard me. She’s staring into space. Then I realize she’s not staring at nothing. She’s looking at a water bottle that somehow found its way onto the mantel over the fireplace. The bottle’s hidden behind a vase. Someone must have set the bottle there temporarily and forgotten about it.

“That’s your father’s,” she says.

“It’s a bottle of water,” I say. It could be anybody’s.

“It’s his,” she insists. “From when he lived here. From when he used to go mountain-biking.” She takes a breath. “On Saturdays.”

Now we’re both staring at it. It’s half-full. I realize that the spit mixed up inside the bottle could very well be my dad’s. He did bring water bottles with him when he went riding on weekends. The bike hasn’t been in the garage for months, but the bottle could have been here the whole time. Who knows how long we’d been in and out of this room, sitting on this couch, watching that TV, with that soggy old water up there collecting algae.

Maybe. Or someone else—who knows, even me—left the bottle up there last week and my mom’s making a huge big deal out of nothing.

“I’m going to put it in the recycling,” I tell her, getting to my feet.

“No,” she says. “I’ll clean it up.” But she makes no move to clean it up. She just sits there, staring at it, like she’s practicing her telekinesis and wants to make it do a few loop-the-loops through the room first.

I don’t have the heart to argue, so I sit back down.

“He told you, I take it,” she says. “He told you he’s marrying Cheryl.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. And I wait. I wait for her to say how awful that is. How if I don’t want to go to the wedding I totally don’t have to go to the wedding.

Only, she doesn’t say anything like that. She says nothing. Nothing at all.

It’s Sunday night. I’m afraid my mom could stay here on the couch till morning, staring at the mantel. Maybe the weekend was just as hard on her as it was on me.

Still, she’ll have to pull herself together. She has work tomorrow. Also, I’m hungry and it’s time for dinner.

“Mom,” I say. “Dinner, remember? What’re we having?”

“I don’t know, Dani. I’m sorry, I forgot about it. Did you say Austin’s staying?”

“He went home,” I say softly.

“That’s right,” she says.

I’m not sure what to do. Should I throw the water bottle out the window? Dump it over her head and hope it shocks her off the couch and into the kitchen? Is that cruel?

No, wait… what I should do is be the one to make dinner. Running through my mind are the things I can cook by myself: scrambled eggs on toast, instant oatmeal, macaroni and cheese from a box. Not too much else.

“Mom?” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Wait here.” In the kitchen I discover there’s no mac ’n’ cheese and only one egg, and the idea of feeding my mom strawberries-and-cream instant oatmeal by the spoonful seems too pitiful to face.

I return to the living room and tell her, “I think we should get pizza.”

“Good idea,” she says. “There’s money in my purse.”

The only restaurant in all of Shanosha that delivers is Pie-
in-the-Sky, the one pizza joint in town. You could say I’m being a good daughter, making sure my mom gets off the couch and has something to eat. Sure, go ahead, say that. But you and I both know it’s really selfish. I’m calling Pie-in-the-Sky for two reasons:

(1) Hello, I am
starving
.

And (2) I want to know if they have a delivery girl working there. A girl who’s been known to wear polka-dot tights.

“Pie-in-the-Sky,” a high-pitched but utterly bored voice answers. “If you want delivery it’ll be at least forty-five minutes. If that’s too long, just hang up now.”

It’s a girl’s voice. My heart jumps in my throat. Or else my throat swallows up my heart. Either way, I have a spaz moment and there’s some trouble getting my order out.

“Hello?” the bored voice says. Then, “Whatever. I’m hanging up.”

I panic so I just blurt out that I want a delivery and I don’t care how long it takes and oh, by the way, what are you wearing?

“What did you just say?” says the voice.

“Sorry. Do we know each other, like, have we met before?”

“Duh, I can’t see who you are, so how would I know that?”

I tell her who I am, plus my address and phone number,
seeing as she’ll need that for the delivery, and then I ask: “Are you the girl who delivers the pizzas?”

The voice on the phone sounds offended. “I am
not
a girl. Why does everyone keep thinking that, jeez!”

Then it dawns on me. “Who is this?”

“It’s Tommy, jeez. What kind of pizza do you want or what?”

Tommy. That’s the little kid behind the counter. He’s maybe eight or nine. Either this town’s got a major problem with child-labor laws or his parents own the place and they let him answer the phone. Well, it’s not my fault he sounds like a girl.

I give him my order (pepperoni and peppers, I’m curious) and before he can hang up I ask if there’s a girl who delivers the pizzas for Pie-in-the-Sky.

And he says, “What girl? Joe will be there in forty-five minutes or less with your pizza,” and that’s that.

So here I am. No closer to explaining away the girl in the polka-dot tights and just now remembering I don’t really even like peppers.

“You didn’t just order peppers, did you?” my mom says from the doorway. “I thought you hated peppers.”

“‘Hate’ is a strong word, Mom,” I tell her. “I’m trying to give peppers a chance. I’m trying to be mature.”

“Really?” my mom says, raising an eyebrow. She’s got the start of a smile on her face—which is reason alone to suck down a few peppers, people. “You’re trying to be mature now?”

(Is she thinking of the time I “ran away” in protest so I wouldn’t have to go to my dad’s? Is she thinking of the time she asked me to stay put in the car and I took off after the imaginary kitten?)

“Yes,” I say. I grab two plates from the cabinet even though it’ll be almost an hour before we can even use them. “So how do you think I’m doing?”

“I think you have a ways to go,” she says, then sighs. “But don’t we all.”

8
Some Things You Might Not Know

H
ere are some things you might not know
about Rita Hayworth. Sure, a lot of people know she started off as a dancer, and that Rita Hayworth wasn’t even her real name (it was Margarita Cansino before the movie people made her change it), but there’s more.

She was shy. Like, really shy. You wouldn’t expect a movie star famous all over the globe to want to stay home instead of go out to parties, but Rita did. She was glamorous on the outside, but inside she was maybe just like you. Or me.

She had trouble with love. She got married and divorced, married and divorced, like five times. One time she married a prince, but even that didn’t work out.

When she died, of Alzheimer’s, she didn’t know who she was. That’s the disease where you forget the people you know and the things you once did. That makes me sad, to think Rita didn’t know how incredible she was.

Here are some things you might not know about my mom. Right now, all you know is that she cries a lot, and her face looks like a hot-pink balloon when she does, and she’s so sensitive, bottles of water can turn her to stone. But she’s also funny. She makes me laugh when she’s not blowing her nose into a wad of tissues. And she’s smart—she wouldn’t be managing editor of the town paper if she wasn’t.

Her favorite color is blue, that pale turquoise-y blue you can notice in the sky sometimes on a real nice day if you live in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure what the name of it is. Anyway, a lot of stuff around our house is that color blue. Our mailbox is that color blue. The kitchen cabinets are that color blue. The plates we eat our pizza on are that color blue.

So when my mom is doing okay—picking the peppers off her pepperoni pizza and sticking them on the edge of her blue
plate—I tell her that her house is so much prettier than Cheryl’s house. I tell her I love her blue curtains and I love her blue candlesticks and I love the blue rug by the door where we wipe off the mud from our shoes. It’s the perfect color, I tell her, that muddy rug.

I’m on a roll, but she stops me.

“Dani, you don’t have to say all that.”

So maybe I’m being too nice. But she needs that right now, don’t you think? If you look at her a certain way—like sideways, and while squinting, and if the kitchen lights were a touch dimmer, and if she had her hair up, and lipstick on even though she hardly ever wears lipstick—she might look almost exactly like Rita Hayworth. Almost exactly.

The phone rings and it’s my brother, Casey. He tells Mom about soccer camp and I listen to her end of the conversation, picking at my peppers instead of eating them.

“He wants to talk to you,” Mom says at last.

I take the cordless and step out of the room for some privacy.

“How’s she doing?” he asks. That’s the first thing he’s said to me in weeks.

“Fine,” I say, “I guess.”

“Are you taking good care of her? Are you trying not to be a brat?”