Goodbye Stranger (3 page)

There’s no one home. You go straight to your room, shut the door, and stand looking at the bed you made two hours ago, when the apartment was full of voices and the smell of toast and news on the radio and the wet warmth that floated out from the hall bathroom where your sister had showered for too long.

You put your feet in the middle of the rug. You lie down neatly on your bed.

The whole world is hot lava.

TEN THOUSAND STEPS

Madame Lawrence spoke only French in class. On the first day, Bridge raised her hand and said, “Excuse me, but we don’t understand anything you’re saying. We don’t speak French yet.” She smiled, a little embarrassed for Madame Lawrence, who’d missed something so obvious.

“En Français, s’il vous plaît,”
Madame Lawrence said gently.

“What?” Bridge said.

“She wants you to say it in French,” Tab told Bridge quietly over her shoulder. She sat three rows ahead.

“How can I say it in French if I don’t speak French?” Bridge said in English. “If I knew French, I wouldn’t be taking French to begin with.”

She was careful not to look at Tab when she said this.

“En Français,”
Madame Lawrence said, a little less gently.

The words didn’t come in French. When she tried to speak in French, Bridge felt as if someone had sewn her mouth closed, which made her angry. And when she was angry she couldn’t learn because there were too many angry words in her head. So the French homework wasn’t so easy either.

—

At Emily’s third soccer game, Bridge and Tab stood together in a drizzling rain.

“You’re still wearing the ears,” Tab said.

“I decided to wear them until Halloween,” Bridge said.

After the game, Bridge bought two Kit Kats, one of which she dropped on her father’s desk at the Bean Bar on her way home. He was out, but he’d know the Kit Kat was from her.

There was a new girl behind the counter. She didn’t seem at all curious about why Bridge felt free to walk into the tiny office next to the bathrooms.

“Hi,” Bridge said on her way out.

“Hi,” the girl said. “I’m Adrienne.” She held out her hand, and Bridge reached out to shake.

“You work here,” Bridge said.

“Yes,” Adrienne agreed.

Bridge blushed. “I meant—”

“Are you Bridge, by any chance? You look like your dad.”

“Thanks.” Bridge realized how that sounded, blushed again. “I mean—”

Adrienne smiled. “No, that’s right. It was a compliment. He’s super-cute, as far as dads go. You should see
my
dad. What is he, anyway, an Arab?”

“He’s Armenian. Armenian American.”

“Armenian?” She nodded. “Cool. I don’t even know where that is.”

“Well, he was born in California,” Bridge said. “What happened to Mark?”

“Beats me,” Adrienne said. “I guess he quit. My lucky day.”

—

“Mark quit the Bean Bar,” Bridge told her brother, Jamie, when she got home.

“Yeah, bummer.” Jamie was sitting on the edge of his bed, fiddling with something on his wrist. “I liked Mark. He always gave me a doughnut. A
first-day
doughnut.” Their dad was more generous with the day-old baked goods.

“There’s a new one,” Bridge said. “Adrienne.”

“I know.” The thing he was fiddling with began to beep.

“What is that?”

“A pedometer. It counts your steps.”

“What for?”

“A contest.”

“Seriously? Another one?”

Jamie met Bridge’s eyes. “I’m going to beat him this time.”

Him
was Alex, who lived on the top floor of their building. He was in tenth grade, like Jamie, and they were sort of friends, sort of enemies. “Frenemies,” Em called it.

“Nah,” Jamie said when Bridge told him that. “Frenemies is a middle-school thing.”

“Okay, so what do you call it in high school?”

“I guess now he’s my…” Jamie thought, and then smiled. “He’s my nemesis.”

Alex was always suggesting some kind of competition, and Jamie was always losing. So far he’d forfeited a brand-new
Call of Duty
game, a vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt he’d bought at the flea market, and a baseball signed by Mariano Rivera. Bridge wondered what Jamie had left that Alex would even want. She scanned her brother’s room: books, old art projects, a few binders of ordinary baseball cards, and his action figure of Hermey the elf. Jamie wouldn’t bet his laptop, would he? Their parents would lose their minds.

“So what’s the contest?” she said.

“Alex and I are going to walk ten thousand steps every day.
Exactly
ten thousand steps.” He tapped his wrist. “This thingy counts every step, and then at midnight it downloads so we can check each other’s numbers. First one who goes over or under ten thousand loses.”

“What’d you bet him this time?”

“It doesn’t matter. Because I’m not going to lose.”

“Mom and Dad won’t let you bet your laptop.”

“I didn’t bet my laptop.”

“Not Hermey!” She grabbed the plastic elf from Jamie’s bookcase and rubbed his yellow hair protectively. He was a character from the Rudolph Christmas special. They watched it every year. Rudolph was a reindeer misfit because of his glowing red nose, and Hermey was an elf misfit because he didn’t like making toys. He wanted to be a dentist.

Jamie smiled. “I would never let Alex have Hermey.”

“So what’d you bet?” Bridge said, walking Hermey’s pointy boots along the edge of Jamie’s bed.

“I told you. It doesn’t matter.”

Bridge didn’t have to ask what Jamie was trying to win back from Alex. She knew it was the Rolling Stones T-shirt.

DEMENTED

Emily was leaning against her locker and smiling at her phone.

“What’s funny?” Bridge asked.

“More texts,” Emily said, holding out her phone.

Tab snatched it. “Ew. What is that?”

Emily grabbed the phone back and studied the screen. “It’s not
ew,
” she said. “It’s a knee.”

“
Whose
knee?”

“Somebody’s.”

“That eighth grader?”

“His name is Patrick. And it turns out half of JV soccer is in love with him.”

“Even the boys?” Tab said.

“Probably,” Em said.

“Are you wearing eye makeup?” Bridge said.

“A little,” Em admitted. “What do you think?”

Bridge tilted her head. “I don’t know yet. I have to get used to it.”

“Wait, look.” Em waved her phone at them. “
This
one’s cute. I promise.”

“What is that?” Tab asked. “Your elbow?”

“No, doofus!” Em’s voice dropped. “It’s his ankle. Cute, right?”

Bridge rotated the phone, trying to make out an ankle. “Why did he send you a picture of his ankle? And his knee?”

“Because! Remember? My foot?”

“So you sent him a picture of your foot and he sent you one of his ankle?”

“Yeah.” Em smiled.

“The set of all people who send pictures of their leg parts,” Bridge said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m guessing it’s a small set. Maybe just the two of you.”

“A set of two,” Em said.

“Get that dreamy look off your face,” Tab said. “You’re being…manipulated!”

“I am not!”

“Let me guess. Now he wants a picture of
your
knee, right?”

“So?”

“The Berperson says that women are treated like objects and we don’t even know it.”

“The Berperson! Give me a break. She’s a wacko.”

“She is not!”

The Berperson was Tab’s English teacher. Her name was Ms. Berman, but on the first day of school she had instructed the class that this year they were going to be detectives, looking for the “hidden messages” in language. Then she had written her own name on the board, crossed out the
man,
and written
person
over it. “Call me Ms. Berperson!” she said. But everyone called her the Berperson instead.

Em used her thumb to flip back and forth between her Patrick photos: ankle, knee, ankle, knee. “Seriously, you guys, what should I send back? Should I do, like, my shin?” She hesitated. “That might be really ugly.”

“Why don’t you and Patrick actually
talk
to each other?” Tab said.

Em looked up. “Are you demented? And say what?”

VALENTINE’S DAY

You gather up the cat and try to make her snuggle the way she does early in the morning, when she purrs like a lawn mower and rubs the side of her face against your cheek. But she’s having none of it and hops off the bed.

You put your headphones on and pull your sweatshirt hood up over them.

Head hug,
you think. It’s something Gina does—squeezes your head to her body with one arm, yells “Head hug!” and then cracks up.

You listen to one of your mom’s old French songs—she’s always loading her music onto your playlist by accident. You pretend to mind, but don’t. Her songs remind you of being little, when she played them loud and said how they were about life going by too fast.

Life was anything but fast, in your opinion. If it went any more slowly, time would probably start to run backward.

You walk around the house with your hood pulled tight and stop in front of your dad’s cactuses.
Cacti.
They look soft and fuzzy, but you know if you touch them, tiny spikes will get stuck in your fingers, hurt like crazy, and be impossible to get out. So you just look at them, standing with your hands in your hoodie pockets.

The phone scares the heck out of you. You don’t answer it. After five rings, the machine picks up. It’s the school. A recording.

“This is a reminder that when your child is going to be absent from high school, a call is required by nine a.m…. ”

Oh
no.
Will school call your mom or dad at work? If so, they’ll both come running. Correction: they’ll try your cell, they’ll freak completely out, they’ll imagine that you’re dead in a ditch, and then they’ll come running.

You don’t want them to come running. You want a day alone. One day.

But you don’t want them to think you’re dead in a ditch.

Do they even have ditches in New York City?

Suddenly you want something to eat. Toast, you think.

—

Your cell phone rings before you can get the bread out of the bag. You look without touching while it vibrates on the kitchen counter: your mom’s work number. You drop two slices into the toaster and let it go to voice mail.

As soon as your cell goes quiet, the house phone rings. You listen to your mom’s voice on the machine. She says your name and sounds worried. Listening, you reflect that you are probably the worst person on the planet. But this is not exactly news.

Your mom’s office is all the way downtown, forty minutes away at least, and your dad’s is even farther. You figure you have a little time. Then you’ll have to go somewhere. You’ll text one of them, though. To say you aren’t in a ditch.

Sixty seconds later, someone is knocking at the door. Your brain slows down as your heart rocks out through your ears. Then a voice is calling your name. You recognize it: your neighbor. The one who feeds the cat when your family’s away. Your mom must have called her.

The doorknob rattles. Good thing you locked the door. You stand perfectly still on the old floorboards. One good squeak could give you away.

Your toast pops, and your head snaps toward it as if there might be a sniper in the pantry. Stay calm, you tell yourself: she’ll go back to her apartment in a second. You’ll butter your toast and make a plan.

Then you hear it—the sound of a key in the lock.

She has keys!

You sprint toward your room, think again, and pivot on one foot.

You know where to hide.

HUMAN ON THE MOON

Bridge’s first English assignment of the year had been a one-page essay about “something of interest.” And now, weeks later, they all had to “exchange papers with a neighbor” for “peer editing,” which was embarrassing.

She traded with Sherm Russo, who sat to her left, and watched his eyes go straight to the Martian with the red circle around it and the teacher’s threat about taking off points.

Sherm’s paper was about the supermoon. A supermoon, it said, was a full moon that comes closer than usual to Earth. Bridge had assumed that the moon was always the same distance from Earth. Didn’t it go just around in a circle, like a ball on a string?

She put that question in the margin.

“Actually,” Sherm said, reading over her shoulder, “it’s an elliptical orbit. So sometimes it’s closer and sometimes it’s farther away.”

“Oh, right,” Bridge said. “I forgot.” She erased her question, tilting her head so that her hair fell like a dark curtain between them.

“I like your Martian,” Sherm said.

“Thanks.” She pushed his paper across the desk. “Here you go. I can’t really find any mistakes or anything.”

“Oh.” His neck turned pink. She looked at her paper and saw that he’d been busy marking it up. He had made some sort of correction on almost every line.

“Just some punctuation and stuff,” he said, sliding it over to her.

—

“Can you believe this?” Bridge said at lunch. “He wrote all over it!”

“He did you a favor,” Tab said, scanning the paper. “Your grammar needs work.”

Em squinted through the cafeteria windows. “Crap. It’s raining.”

“I haven’t even told you the dumbest part,” Bridge said. “The dumbest part is that
then
he tells me that he doesn’t believe anyone ever actually landed on the moon!”

“Oh, neither does my dad,” Em said.

“Are you serious?”

Em nodded. “He says the government made it all up. But he might be joking. Sometimes I can’t tell with my dad.”

“What about Neil Armstrong?” Bridge said. “What about ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’?”

Tab slapped the table. “Notice the ‘man’?
Man
kind? Why didn’t he say
human
kind?”

“There she goes again,” Em said.