Other Words for Love (19 page)

She had hit a nerve, and it hurt. “Figure what out?” I asked as an aura crawled into my eye.

“That you’re boring. That you’re dull and boring and
average
in every possible way.”

I was speechless. Maybe I should have shrugged it off. But I thought that it might be true, that I might be even less than average, and I fought back tears.

“You can’t stand it that I finally have someone,” I said after a moment, choking out the words as my throat closed up. “I never had a boyfriend, and I only had one friend, but you had everything … and that made you feel like you were better than me.”

She tossed her hair. “I
am
better than you.”

I couldn’t talk anymore. My eyes were stinging and my face was burning. I rushed outside, past Tina, who was spraying shrubbery with her hose.

“Bye, Ari,” she said, but I didn’t say anything back.

I walked all the way home to Flatbush. I was exhausted by the time I opened my front door. I smelled potatoes roasting and Mom came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel.

“You’re home early,” she said.

I thought I might faint. Mom looked distorted, like a reflection in a carnival mirror. “I’m done with Summer, Mom. And don’t call Jeff about it.”

She stared at me for a moment. “All right, Ariadne,” she said finally.

The phone rang and it was Blake. He said he couldn’t wait to see me at Evelyn and Patrick’s Labor Day barbecue next week. After I hung up the phone, I sealed Leigh’s bracelet in an envelope, wrote her Brentwood address on the front, tossed my
#1 FRIEND
charm and my cedar box filled with art supplies in the trash, and fell asleep on my embroidered roses.

eighteen

On
the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, I got dressed for my last day at Creative Colors while Dad showered for work and Mom shopped at Pathmark. I was on my hands and knees, trying to find a pair of matching shoes in my closet, when the phone rang. There was a pile of shoes around me and I didn’t feel like answering the phone, but I ran to the kitchen anyway and picked up the receiver.

I heard a raspy voice, and it surprised me. “Hi, Ari,” Leigh said as I leaned against the dishwasher, nervously wrapping the phone cord around my finger. “I’m only calling because I got the bracelet. It was in the mail yesterday.”

That was the only reason she was calling. I supposed I shouldn’t expect anything more. And I imagined that she was going to hide the bracelet in a chest or a drawer and never look at it again until she was ready. She might wait for years and years, until she was married and had children, and one day she’d take it out to show her teenage daughter and say something like,
This was from a boy I used to know. He was very special to me but that was so long ago
.

“Good,” I said. The tip of my finger was turning red so I loosened the cord. “I’m glad.”

“Who found it?” she asked.

“Summer.” That was all I said. It was enough that Summer and I were done forever and that the
#1 FRIEND
charm had been taken away by a garbage truck. Even though I’d threatened otherwise, I had decided not to tell Blake about the bracelet. He might inform his father that Summer was a thief and a liar, and his father might fire Tina. For her sake, I didn’t want that to happen. She worked so hard to uphold her reputation.

“I also got your note,” Leigh said.

I remembered my
I’m Sorry
card with the dumb cat and the daisy. I expected her to say more, to say she’d forgiven me, but she didn’t. And the flat, unfriendly voice she’d been using left me feeling very awkward. “Good,” I said again. “So … do you like California?”

“It’s okay so far. Some of my neighbors are our age, and they’re much nicer than most people I knew in New York,” she said, and I guessed I was one of those not-nice New Yorkers. Then she started talking about another neighbor, a guy our age from Vermont who’d moved the same week she had. “We’re exploring Los Angeles together. He’s a friend.”

From the way she talked about him, I thought he might become more than a friend. She sounded happy all of a sudden and that made me happy, even though she was probably still mad at me and she cut our conversation short. I was glad that I’d gotten the bracelet back to her.

A few minutes later, I went outside into a sunny day. I walked to Creative Colors, past girls drawing hopscotch boards on cement. By the time I reached work, my muscles ached and I was tired even though I’d slept for nine hours the night before. I had no idea what was wrong with me. I wondered if I was seriously out of shape or if I was getting sick.

“Will you be back next year?” Adam asked.

It was the end of the day. We’d had a farewell-to-summer party—Dunkin’ Donuts, and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups that I couldn’t drink because my throat was sore. Adam was looking at me, his handsome face filled with hope, and he made me sad.

“Sure,” I said, and my voice cracked.

He smiled. “What are you doing for Labor Day, Ari? Seeing your boyfriend?”

My boyfriend. He remembered. And he spoke without a stutter. It made me think that my work with Adam had actually done him good—that maybe all the painting had repaired his neurons or whatever was wrong inside his head. Maybe he was better off because of me. Believing that made me happy again.

Blake was on time for Evelyn and Patrick’s Labor Day barbecue. He even brought an autographed Red Sox baseball for Kieran. When the sun began to set, I fell asleep on his shoulder as we cuddled together on a wicker patio sofa that Evelyn had ordered from Sears.

“Ari,” he said, shaking me.

I opened my eyes. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep, and Blake looked worried. My hair stuck to the perspiration on my forehead and he pushed it away, asking why I hadn’t eaten a thing all day.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “And my throat hurts.”

“Then you should see a doctor.”

“I don’t want to. Tongue depressors make me gag.”

“Baby,” he said teasingly. “And speaking of doctors … I have something to show you.”

He led me to the front of the house, where his car was parked at the curb. We climbed in and he took a piece of paper out of the glove compartment.

It was covered with words from Sex Ed
—chlamydia
and
gonorrhea
and
HIV
, plus a few others that my teacher had neglected to mention. They were listed on a chart and each one had a very good word next to it
—negative
.

“Did they stab you with a big needle?” I asked, scanning the chart, wondering which one of those filthy diseases Del had caught underneath his skylight. I despised needles and blood tests because I always ended up getting stuck at least five times.
Bad veins
, the nurses and phlebotomists always muttered while they turned my arm into swiss cheese.

“Needles don’t bother me. And I’m not trying to pressure you with this, Ari. I just don’t want you to worry about anything.”

I smiled, folded the paper, and put it back in the glove compartment. “I’m not worried,” I said, and he leaned over to kiss me but I covered my mouth. “Don’t, Blake. You’ll get sick.”

“I don’t care.”

Later we went back to the sofa and watched Kieran and his friends skid on the Slip ’n Slide. I kept wondering about Del and I couldn’t stop myself from whispering, “Which one of those diseases did your brother have?”

Blake’s eyes widened. “Where did you get
that
from?”

I shrugged. “A little bird told me.”

“Yeah … a little bird with red hair, I bet.”

He didn’t answer my question. I looked around the backyard at Patrick barbecuing hamburgers and Evelyn gossiping with her housewife friends until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I asked again.

“Ari,” Blake said. “It isn’t nice to talk about that.”

Nice, nice,
nice
, why did everything have to be so nice? “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

He sighed before whispering in my ear. “Syphilis,” he said.

I gasped, remembering everything I’d learned in school about syphilis, like how it made people go blind. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being blind. “That’s a bad one, isn’t it?”

“It’s only bad if it doesn’t get treated. Anyway … this isn’t a polite topic of conversation, so let’s drop it. My blabbermouth cousin never should’ve mentioned it to you. I talked to her last night, actually. She said you found her bracelet.”

“Summer did,” I said. “Summer and I aren’t friends anymore, by the way.”

“Really? I thought you two went way back.”

An unexpected sadness rushed over me. We do go way back, I thought. But she’s not the person I thought she was, and now you’re my only friend. “These things happen,” I said, then changed the subject because I didn’t want to think about Summer. I just wanted to put my head on Blake’s shoulder and pretend that this was my very own Sears sofa in my Park Slope backyard and that the giggly kids on the Slip ’n Slide belonged to us.

I felt strange the next morning. I was light-headed and warm, and even though my sore throat was gone and my empty stomach rumbled, I had no interest in Mom’s blueberry waffles or her fruit salad with the made-from-scratch whipped cream.

“Eat something, Ariadne,” Mom said.

She was standing beside the kitchen table, wearing her
Kiss the Cook
apron and a smile. Dad sat across from me with his eyes on
Newsday
and his fork moving from his waffle to his mouth, and I told Mom I wasn’t hungry but I shouldn’t have. She looked disappointed and I didn’t blame her—she had woken up at the crack of dawn to make this first-day-of-school,
It’s the most important meal of the day
breakfast for me.

Then she got worried. “You’re not sick, are you? You’re very pale.”

I was always very pale, but I was definitely sick. Still, I didn’t want to see a doctor who would poke me with needles and drain my blood into glass tubes.

“I’m just excited,” I said. I had no idea where that had come from. It was as if my body had been inhabited by a clever spirit who knew the right thing to say.

“Of course you are,” Mom said. “I’m excited too. I mean, it’s your last year of high school and college will be here before you know it.”

I didn’t think about college that morning. I rode the subway alone, feeling really tired. And I thought about Blake, especially when I spotted Summer at the other end of the hall while I was walking to homeroom.

She was chatting with a group of girls and she looked blurry. She laughed and I wondered if she was laughing at me, if she was telling her friends about that weird Ari Mitchell, who was suffering from a serious case of limerence and believed she was in love with a guy she hadn’t even slept with yet.

But I wanted to sleep with him. I thought about Blake all day, through homeroom and Calculus II, and while I read meticulously typed syllabi that were hot from the copy machine. I thought about him on the subway that took me back to Brooklyn and when the walk from the train station to my house seemed so long that I wasn’t sure I’d make it.

Then I conked out on my bed. Dad was at work and Mom was at a faculty meeting that would keep her away for hours. When I woke up, the house was so quiet I could hear the freezer making ice cubes.

I stared at the ceiling, listening to ice fall into a plastic container. I didn’t feel tired anymore—I felt beyond tired, sort of spacey and giddy. I got up, went to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror at a reflection that wasn’t pale. My cheeks were ruddy and I probably had a fever, but I didn’t feel sick. I looked reasonably pretty, and that made me decide to freshen up and go to Manhattan so I could surprise Blake at Ellis & Hummel.

I made my plans behind the shower curtain. I lathered my hair and watched water bead on a stomach that was disturbingly concave from lack of food. It didn’t matter; I would eat later, someplace in the city with Blake, and afterward we would go to a nice hotel or to the penthouse if Mr. Ellis wasn’t home. Then I would give Blake what he’d been so patient for, what I could do now because his tests were negative and he loved me and that made it okay.

I left the house an hour later. It was cloudy and a scorching wind blew through my hair, and Saint Anne seemed immersed in a radiant peace. I walked past her, rode the subway to Manhattan, and reached the Empire State Building at five o’clock, when swarms of people were flooding out of the lobby. The Catering by Tina van was parked on the street.

Tina didn’t notice me because she was busy loading the van with chafing dishes. But Summer noticed. She looked through me as if I was nobody, as if she’d forgotten elementary school and junior high and my birthday dinners, and I pretended it didn’t hurt. I turned away, rode the elevator to Ellis & Hummel, and filled my mind with Blake instead of Summer.

I asked for him at the front desk, where a gum-chewing receptionist pointed toward a conference room with glass doors. I saw Blake inside, standing with Mr. Ellis and a few other men beside a long polished table. Mr. Ellis kept smacking Blake’s shoulder and jokingly grabbing him in a chokehold, as if Blake was a first-place trophy or a prize racehorse that he wanted to show off.

Blake saw me. He waved me over and broke away from his father; then we stood by the doors inside the conference room while Mr. Ellis filled the other men’s glasses with liquor. I heard them talking, something about a “gentlemen’s club,” and the rest of the men laughed when Mr. Ellis said, “We’re all gentlemen, aren’t we?”

“What are you doing here?” Blake asked.

He was happy to see me. He smelled of aftershave. The darkness of his suit coaxed out the blue in his eyes, and just the sound of his voice gave me a warm shudder.

“I thought we could …,” I began, not sure how to finish.
I thought we could spend some time together. I thought we could have a romantic dinner. I thought we could go to your apartment and have passionate sex until the sun rises in the morning
.

But I didn’t say any of that because Mr. Ellis was suddenly beside us and so were the other men, and Mr. Ellis introduced me to them as “my boy’s little girlfriend.”

“This is Ari …,” he started, and looked at Blake for help.

“Mitchell, Daddy,” Blake said. “Ari Mitchell.”

I knew it. I knew he didn’t remember my last name. And being called Blake’s little girlfriend didn’t exactly boost my self-esteem. A little girlfriend, a little crush—why did everybody have to take something that seemed so big and squash it into a tiny speck of nothing?

“Of course,” Mr. Ellis said, summoning his charming smile. “Forgive me, Ari. I’m getting close to fifty and the memory’s the first thing to go.”

Everybody laughed. Mr. Ellis put his son in another chokehold, rubbed his knuckles against Blake’s scalp, and told him not to take too long. He and the other men would be waiting in the lobby.