Gotcha (23 page)

“Why not?” I still don’t really get that. Especially from Mariah, who loved the idea of dressing like a princess.

She hesitates and blushes. Then she studies the foam in the bottom of her cup. “So many friendships ruined because of that game. It just won’t be the same.”

The silence becomes incredibly awkward. I study the bottom of my cup too, but finally decide to ask the question that can’t be ignored any longer. “Why did you guys pick me up tonight?”

Neither of them says anything for a moment. Then Mariah speaks. “We’ve decided we need to put the game behind us before the year is over and everyone has moved on.” She looks directly at me. “We don’t want to
remember our grad year this way. It’s our last chance to make things right.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“We’re not sure,” she says. “But we’ve got to start by talking about it.”

So we sit for another minute, still not talking. I try to lighten the mood. “How about a healing circle, the kind the Tlingit people do?” I tease, recalling the project that the two of us worked on together.

Mariah smiles back at me. “Wouldn’t that be hilarious? All two hundred plus of us in a circle, passing the talking stick and getting everything off our chests.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Joel asks.

Mariah explains. “In the Tlingit culture, everyone who is affected by a crime is brought together and sits in a circle.”

I’m impressed that she remembers this. It was covered in my part of the project.

“They have a stick,” she continues, “and only the person holding the stick can talk. Each person gets a chance to speak, and you only get a second chance after everyone has had a turn.”

“The point of it,” I add, “is that the victim gets to tell the person who harmed them how it felt, and the person who did the harm gets to explain why they did it. In our system, everyone is protected from one another by lawyers. In the Tlingit way, more understanding and healing supposedly occurs.”

Joel is nodding. “I can see that. When you have to look directly in the eyes of someone you’ve hurt, you start to really understand what you’ve done.”

I look at Joel, not believing that he could ever hurt anyone.

“I think it’s a great idea,” he adds.

“What is?” Mariah asks.

“The healing circle.”

“But there’s way too many of us,” Mariah says, laughing.

“But we could start right here, with just us.”

Mariah and I study him, wondering if he’s serious. His eyes have lost their twinkle, so apparently he is. Then Mariah looks at me, her head tipped.

“Could we wait until Paige and Tanysha can join us?” I ask, panicky. Clearly I’m the one who’s going to get dumped on here.

“You can have another one with them,” Joel says. “I think we should have our own, right now, while we’re here together.”

Mariah and I look at each other. Her eyebrows arch. “Well?” she asks me.

I shrug. “Okay.” I must be nuts. “But we need a talking stick.”

Joel grabs a knife lying on the table in the next booth. “Here it is.”

“I said
stick
, Joel, not weapon.”

“It will do,” he says, clearly impatient to get on with this. “Who goes first?”

Mariah and I look at each other. “I don’t remember that part,” she says. “The person with the knife, I mean stick, I guess.”

Joel nods, grasps the knife, point up, and rests his fists on the table. He thinks about what he’s going to say and then clears his throat. He talks directly to the knife. “I’d like to tell Katie how it felt to be betrayed by her.” He pauses, and I hold my breath, waiting for his words. “It totally sucked.” I let my breath escape. “I thought things were going really well between us,” he continues, “and me and Mariah would’ve done anything to help her out, but instead of trusting us, she turned to Warren, who was not her friend. She pushed me away again, after promising not to. I couldn’t forgive her for that.”

My face burns. Joel’s right about how this works. I do totally get what I did and how he felt.

Mariah places her hand over Joel’s and says gently, “Joel, I think you’re supposed to speak directly to Katie, not to the talking stick.”

He nods, briefly makes eye contact with me and passes the knife to Mariah. “I was finished anyway,” he says.

I slump down in the booth, feeling terrible. I wish I could change what I did, but I can’t. A lump develops in my throat. I look around the coffee shop to see who might be watching our little healing circle, but no one is paying any attention to us.

“Katie, you and I have been friends for a long time,” Mariah says, holding the knife out in front of her. “I always...
admired and respected you. You were, like, so cool. Brainy, but not weird brainy, you know? You fit in everywhere. Then I watched as you became unraveled by a stupid game. You set up Joel and snubbed me for Warren. I couldn’t believe you’d do those things. You didn’t seem like the same person to me anymore, and now I don’t know how to be with you.” Mariah places the knife on the table, takes a ragged breath and wipes a tear off her cheek. Joel puts his arm around her shoulder and gives her a squeeze. She presses her face into his arm.

The lump in my throat has a stranglehold, but I pick up the knife and wait until I’m composed enough to speak. “First of all,” I say, “I wish we’d done this in a more private place.”

Joel and Mariah both smile a bit, and Mariah wipes away some more tears. “Too late now,” Joel says. He rubs Mariah’s arm. I wish it was mine.

I collect my thoughts and try swallowing the lump. “When I look back on that final night of the game, it’s like looking into the hazy distance. Nothing is clear. You’ve got to know that I loved you both for being there for me, but at the same time, it was me that was suspended from school, and me that wasn’t going to graduate if something didn’t happen. And of course, things were even worse than you knew then. I’d lost the money, and I was...I was hurting real bad from what my dad had done to me.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I close my eyes and continue. “When Warren called, I guess...
I guess I just fell apart and told him the truth. Not about my dad, but about losing the money, which I couldn’t tell you about because I didn’t want you to hate me. I didn’t care what Warren thought of me. When he assured me that he’d make me win, I latched on to that promise. It was like a life ring, and I was drowning. I had nothing else. I figured you’d understand once the game was over, which was going to be that night anyway.”

I feel hands clasp around mine, and I open my eyes. Mariah and Joel are both squeezing my hand, which is still clutching the stupid knife. I let the tears flow. “If you guys could have seen what they did to Warren, how they did it...”

I let go of the knife and drop my head to the table.

A moment later I feel a body slide into the booth beside me. A hand is rubbing my back. I look up and see Mariah there. She gives me a hug. Across the table, a throat clears. Joel is holding the knife again.

“If I’d known what you were going through with your dad,” Joel says, “I...things would have been so different. And believe me, Katie, I would never have hated you for what you did.” He shakes his head. “We do things for our parents. I’m sorry we haven’t talked about this before...all that time wasted.” He puts the knife down.

I reach for it one last time. “I couldn’t talk about it.”

He nods and picks up the knife again. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “Katie, can we start again?”

“The healing circle?” I ask, horrified.

“No, silly. Us. You and me. And no Gotcha game.”

Our eyes meet and hold, comfortably, for the first time all evening. I nod and smile and let Mariah rub my back.

As I slip into my new shoes and check my reflection in the mirror, I notice that I can still feel twinges in my ankle, especially with these heels, but the healing is almost complete. It’s the night of the valedictory ceremony, and the robe will come off later. I’ll be wearing my new dress under it, and even without Paige’s help I think I’ve found one that suits me perfectly. It’s ivory, with a halter top, a snug body and a hem cut in a jagged pattern. Mom helped me choose it, and I was surprised that she had such good taste. It didn’t even cost a fortune.

After the formal part of the evening is over, a bunch of us are coming back here to celebrate. Mom has promised to stay in her room. I smile, thinking of our conversation this afternoon when I caught her making cookies for my party.

“Mom! We agreed. No more junk food in the house.”

“But, Katie,” she argued, “there is only healthy stuff in these. Cross my heart.”

That’s when I noticed the new blouse she was wearing. “More new clothes?” I ask.

“Yep, celebrating another five pounds gone. Forever.”

“Way to go, Mom!” I try to give her a high five, but she grabs my arm and pulls me into an embrace.

I still find it awkward to hug her, but I’m trying. The morning after the Warren incident, after Fetterly left, we had a screaming match that probably echoed the fights she used to have with my dad. It started when she accused me of being weak, like him.

“What are you talking about?” I’d asked.

“That stupid game! You didn’t have the courage to say, ‘No, I’m not playing.’ And then you gave your father the money when you knew damn well it was wrong.”

“You’re just as weak,” I said, wanting to hurt her back.

“Really. How?”

“Just look at you.”

She stared at me.

“You never go anywhere, do anything. You just make cookies and eat.”

We screamed at each other some more before she stomped out of the living room, but I noticed she didn’t go to the kitchen as usual. After pausing in the hall, she turned and went out the front door.

There was an icy silence between us for the next few days until, one night, she finally spoke. We were eating dinner, each of us with a section of the newspaper opened in front of us. It was the last day of my suspension, and the wall between us felt like a tower of cement. At some point during dinner I noticed she was no longer reading but staring at me. I glanced up.

“Katie, whatever happened to us?” she asked. Her eyes were welling with tears.

I was stunned. It’s not like her to get all emotional with me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean...” She thought about it, choosing her words carefully. “When you were just a little girl...we had so much fun, right here at the kitchen table, creating stuff with play dough that we’d made from flour and food coloring, or...or we’d be in the sandbox, building castles. You’d putter alongside me in the garden, your hair a mass of ringlets around your head. You never stopped chattering, asking me questions about everything, from bugs to where babies come from.”

I was sent spinning back to a time long forgotten. I saw her in that oversized apron she wore for gardening, with gaping pockets for her gloves and small gardening tools. In the spring I loved digging holes with a spade, and she’d gently place her seedlings in them. After carefully packing the soil around the delicate roots, I’d fill my small watering can and sprinkle the baby plants. All summer we watched them grow. We were a team.

Then Dad lost his job and Mom went back to work.

“I was mad at you for leaving me,” I said, suddenly remembering the pain of being abandoned.

“Yes, you were.” She nodded.

More memories came flooding back. How I hated waking up and finding only Dad home. He didn’t understand that I wanted my egg soft and the toast cut in wedges so I could dip them in the mushy yolk. “Dippy eggs” Mom called them. And he wouldn’t wait until my favorite
TV
show was over before we left the house to do chores or go
on an excursion. He thought
TV
was bad for me. I hated him for that.

“You’d punish me when I got home,” Mom said, her elbow on the table and her head resting in her hand. “You’d either throw a tantrum, kicking and hitting me, or you’d give me the silent treatment. I never knew what to expect.”

I nodded, sitting back in my chair, trying to recall the turning point when Dad and I became pals and set up our own routines. Then Mom became the enemy.

“The other day you said that I never do
anything
,” Mom said, changing the subject. “What is it you think I should be doing?”

I was embarrassed, thinking of that conversation, but I made some suggestions. “You know, walking, yoga, bike riding, Pilates.” I thought of the things that Paige’s mom was always doing. “You could take night classes. Maybe you could join a book club.”

She thought about that. “Can you think of something we could do together?”

“Well,” I considered it. “I’ve always wanted to try Tae Kwon Do.”

She laughed. “Can you see me trying to kick anything? I’d fall over.”

I laughed too. She was right. “Then why don’t we start with yoga and see where we go from there.”

She thought about that, and I saw a spark in her eyes for the first time in a long while. She looked...pretty. “It’s a deal. I’ll check into classes.”

We sat in comfortable silence for a few moments, the cement tower a jumble of rocks and dust at our feet. I didn’t understand what had just happened between us, but it was a relief, anyway. I felt like I was attached to a conveyor belt, and it was slowly but surely dragging me back up that water chute, bit by bit. Or maybe it was just a ladder that I had to climb, one rung at a time.

“Katie?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about your dad. I...I just didn’t know how.”

I nodded. “I miss him.”

She sighed. “I do too.”

We stand in the hallway, in alphabetical order according to our last names, waiting to be marched into the theater for the valedictory ceremony. Everyone is chatting nervously. I get goose bumps just looking around at my fellow grads, some of whom I’ve known since kindergarten. It’s hard to believe we’re here, finally, wearing our matching robes and caps.

I spot Paige, about ten people ahead of me. We make eye contact but she quickly looks away. She agreed to come to one last grad council meeting with Warren and me, but she won’t accept my apologies. I’ve come to accept that. I don’t need someone so unforgiving in my life. I realize that it was my dad who brought us together in the first place in
an attempt to help me overcome my shyness, and it’s my dad’s behavior that finally tore us apart. Maybe, left to our own devices, we wouldn’t have been drawn to each other in the first place.