Places No One Knows (15 page)

“You can't wear that,” Autumn says.

The meet was essentially a disaster.

I finished fourth overall. My time would have been better if my feet didn't feel like they were being deconstructed with a boning knife. Autumn didn't come remotely close to placing.

Now, we're at Flora/Fauna in the mall and I'm facing my reflection in a floor-length satin travesty.

This is the fourth store we've been to, and with each failed expedition, I'm becoming more and more acclimated to the idea that Autumn has
ideas
about clothes. Thanks to her messy hair and her tendency toward T-shirts, I never considered that she might actually be fashionable, but her general apathy does not extend to the world outside of school. When it comes to formal dresses, Autumn is full of opinions.

My reflection gives her a hard, exasperated look.

She just stares back and counts off on her fingers. “Let us first consider the areas into which we must inquire. One—who are you? Two—no. Three—seriously,
who are you?
Four—take it off.”

“It's because of the corsages,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “They're these really gaudy orchid arrangements. I need something to go with fuchsia.”

“I don't care. You are fighting every principle of color theory to accommodate a twenty-dollar flower with a safety pin through it. I'm not standing by while you humiliate yourself in that dress.”

I shuffle into the changing room and shimmy out of the dress. The fabric is cool and slimy, and if I have to keep it on for one more second, I won't be able to resist the urge to claw it off my body.

When I come back out, the store is exactly as I left it. It has not miraculously burned down.

I yank a stretchy pink sheath off the rack and hold it up, already knowing there's no way I'd ever put it on. “Feelings on this one?”

Autumn is standing by Winter Outerwear with something dark draped over her arm. “I have a feeling it would look vaguely pornographic. Anyway, I've already got everything you need. It's here when you're ready, just waiting for you to set aside your wicked ways and come to Jesus.”

The dress she presents me with is black, sleeveless, with a high boatneck in the front and an open back, just like she said. It looks nothing like anything Maribeth has ever dog-eared in a magazine, but as soon as I put it on, I know I'll never be able to consider anything else.

I look like me, but better. Waverly distilled. My shoulders are precise and square, my back a smooth expanse—not too hard and not too soft, but just right.

Autumn smiles her Petal Pink smile, the smile of someone who has mastered the art of choosing lip color.

“There,” she says sweetly, tenderly. “Isn't that better?”

Maribeth has come up next to her, holding a yellow satin train wreck I can only assume was meant for me. “It's kind of…plain,” she says, giving me a worried little frown.

Autumn reaches over, sweeping my hair back from my forehead and examining the effect. “Is that another way of saying it doesn't make Waverly look like a demented figure skater with a glitter fetish? Because yeah, that is totally true.”

Maribeth opens her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed and she eyes me with well-meaning distress, but her concern is slipping. For just a second, I can see the annoyance underneath.

She doesn't argue, though, because we both read the same article on rhetoric and brain activity for our civics project in ninth grade—outright disagreement provokes a threat response, and once that happens, you've lost your ability to persuade.

I change out of the dress and take it up to the register.

Once it's paid for and safely wrapped in tissue, I turn my attention back to Autumn. After all, someone needs to keep her from running amok or terrorizing the locals or brushing carelessly against Maribeth.

I follow her through the clearance section as she picks her way among fields of polyester and red price tags.

“Why are you even here?” Palmer says, coming up behind us. “If you're not going to try anything on?”

Autumn gives her a complacent look. “Think of it as a public service. Anyway, I'm making mine.”

This kind of dorky DIY enthusiasm would ordinarily elicit an exchange of pitying glances, but Autumn has already proven herself gifted in the poster board arts, at least. Even Maribeth looks mildly impressed.

She leans on the clearance rack, fiddling with her necklace. “Well, what does it
look
like?”

Autumn smiles and turns away. “It's a secret.”

I can tell they're dying to bully her into telling them more. Palmer and Maribeth do not believe in secrets among girls. Even the dirtiest, most sordid secrets are well-known facts when you get right down to it.

But Kendry comes out of the dressing room just then, in a catastrophe of rhinestones and fine, interwoven straps. “How much does this show?”

Autumn tilts her head, considering. “Everything. Well, wait—are we talking about abstract concepts, like taste and dignity? 'Cause yeah, I don't see that. But like, your boobs.”

Kendry freezes in the crosshairs of the three-way mirror, arms clapped across her chest. I'm expecting some sort of blowout, but she's already in retreat, unzipping the dress, struggling out of it.

Palmer turns, flapping at Autumn with an aggressively patterned minidress. “What is
wrong
with you? God, you're a Gila monster!”

Autumn shrugs and does a lazy half turn—almost a dance move—hands raised above her head. “If she didn't want to hear she was hanging out everywhere, she shouldn't ask for other people's opinions when she's hanging out everywhere.”

The look on her face should be chiseled on a Renaissance Madonna.

After the miserable parade of dresses, Kendry and Palmer head off to the outlet shops to look for shoes, and Autumn disappears to whatever magical land she inhabits when she's not playing student council with me, but Maribeth and I walk down to the food court.

I'm in the mood for some companionable silence, but she wants to discuss AP chemistry and dinner plans for homecoming and Palmer's latest conquest and subsequent breakup. Nothing is different between us, nothing has changed. I should feel flattered that she'd rather talk to me about these things than anyone else.

“Logan was pointless, anyway,” she tells me, playing with her hair.

She speaks with authority, as though Palmer is no different from her, or from me, as though our needs and wants are identical. As though I have any opinion on any of Palmer's short-lived ex-boyfriends.

“He wasn't for us,” Maribeth says gravely, and I know she's referring to the gaping discrepancy between the admirable goals of student government and the less admirable goals of boys who start on varsity lacrosse. Or maybe just his tendency to adjust his crotch in public.

She must see the disconnect somewhere in my face. She leans closer, pitching her voice conspiratorially low. “So, what's Autumn's dress like?”

“I don't know. She didn't take me into her confidence.”

“Oh, I thought you guys were like best friends now.” She says it coolly, like she actually believes that friends are something you can acquire or exchange. That you can only have one at a time. That I could somehow just replace her with a stranger.

I look away and drink my smoothie, acutely aware that I'd rather be sitting in the food court drinking smoothies with Autumn. “No. We're on cross-country together, is all.”

Maribeth nods, staring off toward the freestanding sunglasses shack and the herd of kids shrieking in the playland. Then she puts her hand on my arm and opens her eyes wide. “Well, are you at least going to tell me about your wild night of passion?”

“What are you talking about?”

“
Waverly,
you have a hickey! You should see your face right now. It is the face of wantonness and secrets! There is no
way
that you haven't been giving your android love to CJ, okay?”

I let my straw fall mid-sip. And I nod.

It's a stupid lie. An outrageous one, but
yes
is still exponentially less problematic than
no.

If Maribeth decides to investigate, I'll be outed in a second, but I don't really think that will happen. She won't confront CJ directly—it would strike her as indecent. More likely she'll gossip about me to Hunter when they go to the movies together or meet for study sessions, or whatever it is they do.

Except that Hunter probably doesn't care much about hormonal head cases sucking on each other's necks when it's not him doing the sucking.

Except that Autumn is rapidly taking over Maribeth's life, and that includes hijacking her boyfriend.

Most of the time, I'm starving. In class, and at school, and late at night after everyone else is asleep. At lunch or Justin's house, I finish things other people don't want. Then I sit down at the table and it disappears completely.

Until my dad got sick, we never really did family meals. Now, every night is this brutal sit-down dinner, with cloth napkins and the kind of conversation that is basically guaranteed to not end well.

When he asks how school was, I don't even look up. His voice is flat.

“Why can't you be nice?” my mom says. “Why can't we have a normal meal for once?”

He taps his fork on the edge of his plate, like he's just doing it because he feels like it, but his hands are shaking. Some days, the nerves stuff isn't bad, and some days it is. Those days, everything else is worse too. “Because, in case you hadn't noticed,
honey,
the only way we ever know what's going on is to cross-examine him.”

I wait for one of them to tell the truth—that they only focus on me so they don't have to focus on anything important. I know I'm supposed to be grateful. Our whole neighborhood is full of kids whose parents are total deadbeats, or who left them, the way Ollie's mom did, but mine aren't like that. With them, it's just this gross, messy despair that never goes away. It oozes out and fills the room. I can feel it getting all over me.

“Shane.” Her voice gets high-pitched, and her chin starts to tremble. “Can't we just drop it and enjoy this? Please?”

I already know he's not going to apologize. He won't say something nice or change the subject. Instead, he'll shut down, dig in farther. He'll stare across the table at her like he's nowhere, and she'll be trying not to cry, her face red and her eyes full of tears, and I'll sit there, looking at my plate. I can feel it in my throat and it's like I can't swallow.

When I was little, I was the safe ground between them. They always argued, but they didn't like to do it in front of me. Even now, if I'm in the room with them, sometimes it stops things from turning into a complete nightmare.

And sometimes it doesn't.

It takes less than two minutes for the fight to get ugly. It's about me and high utility bills and Annie and Chowder and the car. It's about nothing and everything—all the little, stupid things that logical, grown-up people never fight about. Who left the milk on the wrong shelf in the refrigerator, who forgot to get the mail.

They never ask any of the real things, why the new immune suppressants aren't really working. What to do now. Whether it's stopped being intermittent and is officially chronic yet. Why they keep pretending they can stand being in the same room. Who has stopped loving who.

She spent two hours making dinner, like that might make up for the fact that he's been stuck at home for almost three weeks now. She keeps messing with the serving dishes, moving them around like it's possible to fix whatever parts of him are broken if she can just put things in the right order.

She leans across the table, reaching for my arm, but not touching it. “Mars, you're not eating.”

“I'm not hungry,” I say, even though I pretty much devoured lunch, and the rest of Ollie's pizza, and it wasn't even close to enough.

“Are you getting sick again?”

But even
sick
is like a dirty word. I can feel it taking up space in the kitchen. After this awful, empty silence that goes on forever, I get up from the table and scrape my plate, which is more than half full, and then she starts crying.

I shut myself in my room, which is small and dark and a shithole, but better than when I shared it with Justin. There's not much to do, so I get out my homework.

Out in the living room, the show goes on and on, like if they can stay focused on the little things, they won't have to remember that once, for no reason either of them can remember, they loved each other.

I scoot closer to my desk and open my English book. We just started a new unit—Literature of the Depression. I only get a few pages in before I have to stop. The introduction is full of pictures, kids whose whole lives were ruined by the dust bowl. Their faces are blank and sunburned, but their eyes scorch into me like they hate the guy with the camera. Like they can see me watching them.

It's too much to deal with. Like reading out loud in elementary school, feeling my voice getting hoarse and thick because a forest burned down or a dog died, and my teacher saying it's okay, keep going, it's just a story. Of not being allowed to stop.

Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, Annie told me that other people didn't feel things the same way I did. They don't get a stomachache from watching the news or feel like crying when other people are sad.

She said, “I don't know if you know this, but people are kind of numb, I think. They mostly think about themselves, even when they don't mean to.”

Before, I'd always thought I was just like everyone else, only everyone else was better at ignoring it—that they were doing something where they turned it off, and I was just some sad abnormal failure, because I couldn't.

When Annie told me I wasn't normal, I was relieved. It meant that I was broken, but at least I wasn't failing. Then I started smoking pot all the time, and the nice thing about that was, I didn't have to feel anything if I didn't want to.

I need to finish the chapter for English. I need to stop being here. Out in the living room, things are stupid like always.

I put on my headphones and turn the volume up as loud as it goes.