Positively Beautiful (30 page)

“Hey.”

Chaz looks back over his shoulder again. It seems like he's ignoring Jason, but I don't think he's even registered him. He's focused on me. “She's in the bathroom, and I … uh … wanted to talk to you about something.”

“If you want me to be the maid of honor at the wedding, you probably need to talk to Trina first,” I say, beeping my remote at the car to unlock it.

“What? Wait. No.” His face turns red. “It
is
about Trina though. She's bummed the two of you aren't friends anymore. I mean, she cries about it.” His face squinches up. The thought of Trina in distress is that bad for him.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I really don't want her to feel bad.”

His face clears. “Yeah? That's great. You'll talk to her?”

“What? No. I mean …” I trail off. What on earth can I say to Trina?

She cries about it …

Because of me?

“I don't know,” I say. I don't want to talk to Trina. I don't know what I'd say.

“Awesome!” Chaz begins backing away. Our conversation is over, and he wants to make sure I don't grab him from behind.

“Chaz,” I say, figuring I'll start with him and see how it goes.

“Yeah?” He turns, halfway, so he's in a position to make a quick escape if necessary.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I really am.”

He nods and darts off.

Jason is shaking his head as I turn back toward him. “Is there always this much drama in Erin's world?” he asks.

“You caught me on a good day,” I say.

In December, I'm late to Creative Writing, but I stop by the restroom to fix my hair, which has escaped its scrunchie and is bouncing enthusiastically into my face. I'm in a good mood, because it's the last day of school before winter break and I'm making all A's except one freaking B in calculus, which I'm pretty sure I can pull up. Things have settled down to almost normal over the past couple of months. Well, as normal as things can be when my best friend and I are still not talking, I'm still not allowed to fly, and I'm a walking cancer case waiting to happen. But normal in that Mom's feeling like her old self and school is school and there's no trips to the chemo or radiation wards in our future. When I was in the middle of all that, it was like I was in a little dark box with no way out, but now that I'm past it, well, it was only six months of our lives. Mom has told me that we're in a wait-and-see mode, but
I know, I just
know
that the cancer is gone and that everything is finally going to be okay.

Perspective. I guess that's what Jason's been telling me; it's how you look at things.

I hear something, and I stop in the middle of putting my hair back into a ponytail.

I hear it again, and it's a toilet flushing on the other side of the big restroom, hidden from where I'm standing in front of the mirror.

Okay, someone flushed the toilet. No big deal.

But as I finish taming my hair into the scrunchie, I hear the toilet flush five more times. Then six. Then seven.

Something must be wrong with it.

I grab my backpack and hear the noises. Animal sounds, like something's in pain.

I'm late but somehow I can't leave it alone. Curiosity and the stupid cat and all that.

Moving quietly, I walk around the bank of sinks and poke my head past the tile wall. One of the stall doors is closed, and I see feet underneath. As I stand there, the toilet flushes two more times. Now I can hear someone crying. And talking.

“You want to text? Try texting me
now
,” I hear someone say, the words thick with tears.

I recognize the voice. I need to leave, I need to get out of here, but somehow I can't move.

The toilet flushes again, and then two more times in quick succession. Then the door jerks open and Faith comes out. She doesn't see me at first. She stands at the sink and takes
deep breaths, staring at herself in the mirror. She's stopped crying, but her face is a mess, swollen and red, and she has raccoon eyes from her smeared mascara.

The door to the stall swings back and forth, and I see a smartphone in a pink case in the toilet.

Her phone. That's what Faith was trying to flush.

I wonder if she and Michael are fighting. But as far as the school grapevine goes, they broke up spectacularly at Dino's the night I saw them there with Jason. I've seen Michael in the halls, and he's always alone. He's been a loner for a while now, but this year he seems more
aggressively
alone. Like he's on a mission to be alone. He hasn't said a word to me, but a couple of times I've felt his gaze on me, dark and tingly.

Faith takes a deep, trembling breath, pulls a makeup bag out of her purse, and starts applying cover-up in quick, deft strokes.

I take a step backward, with every intention of making a break for the door, but Faith looks up and sees me. Her face twists, and for once she doesn't look cute. She looks like a little girl who just found out her puppy died. We stare at each other for a moment without speaking.

“Do you need me to …” I trail off. What, am I going to ask if she needs a hug?

“Just go away,” she says, “you stupid dork. Go away.”

Okay, fine.

I leave, but I feel unsettled the rest of the day.

After school, I'm parked at the airport again, surfing the BRCA websites. Stew comes out and gives me an indecipherable look, and then I watch him go back inside, my heart breaking a little. I still haven't heard from the FAA; I'm still grounded; Tweety Bird still sits broken and alone beside the hangar. Mom says that the FAA is dragging their feet with Stew as well, and that he still doesn't know if he will be able to keep his instructor certificate.

My phone rings and Jason says, “I'm watching the Godzilla of the heron family high-stepping his way through the shallows. I wish you could be here to see it.”

“Are you on the island?”

“Yeah. I dropped off a charter and decided to come for a little while. Then I started thinking about you. What are you doing?”

“Wallowing,” I say. “It's cloudy and nasty here.”

“It's beautiful and sunny here,” he says, his voice full of laughter. “Aren't you glad you're coming to visit?”

“Yes,” I say, and my voice vibrates with my need to be away from here, to be
anywhere
else but here.

“Bad day?”

“Uh … It's hard to explain. I caught Faith crying in the bathroom today, and seeing her like that … it made me realize that I have
no
idea what is going on with Trina. I'm such a coward, but I just haven't been able to talk to her. And I
need
to.”

“What's stopping you?” I hear something in the background, the sound of splashing water, and my heart smiles a little when I realize I know what it is: a fish jumping high and crashing down into the water in a spectacular belly flop.

I hesitate. “I guess … I'm afraid we'll end up hurting each other more. I don't want that.”
It's the easiest thing in the world to hurt the ones we love.
“I wish I had a time machine to go back to before, when everything was still okay.”

“But then you wouldn't have met me,” Jason says. “I don't mean that in an aren't-I-great way or anything. I just mean that bad things happen, and sometimes they make way for good things. Change isn't always bad, you know?”

“As a rule it is,” I say, staring at Tweety Bird, solitary and broken.

“There's my glass-half-empty girl,” Jason says.

We hang up a few minutes later and I stare at the browning leaves dancing across the parking lot. They're already dead and don't even know it.

I pull up in Trina's driveway and sit in my car for a while. I know she's home. Retro, her old green Saab, sits in the driveway.

I need to get out.

I need to go talk to her.

But somehow I can't.

Eventually, she comes out to me. She's barefoot, even though it's about sixty degrees, and she's wearing a T-shirt and sweats with Big Bird on the butt. She dresses almost normal now, and I realize I miss her outfits. For the longest time I was embarrassed about the extravagant costumes she would wear to school, to the mall, everywhere. She looks like everyone else now. Maybe that's what she really wanted all along. To feel normal, to feel like everybody else.

She comes up to the passenger window and I roll it down.

“You scoping the joint?” she asks.

“Don't have to. I figure if I wait here long enough Chipper will bring me all your valuables.” Their dog Chipper is notoriously friendly.

We don't speak for a long moment, and then she opens the door and gets in, wrapping her arms around herself. I turn up the heat.

“What's up?” She looks at me and I force myself to look back at her. Her hair is its actual color for once and is smoothed back into a blond ponytail. She's got a tattoo on her upper bicep,
Chaz
, all loopy and flowery. Goofy girl. What is she going to do if they break up? But she's talked about getting a tattoo for the longest time, and I always swore I'd go with her and hold her hand.
Dorkster Twins activate.

I wonder if Chaz held her hand while she got it done.

“I wanted to say … I wanted to say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I'm sorry for kissing Chaz. I'm sorry for yelling at you last year. I'm sorry for us not being friends.”

She looks away, out the front windshield. “I'm sorry too,” she says. “I should never have told everybody about your mom. And I'm sorry we're not friends.”

We don't say anything for a while.

Then, “How is she?” she asks, looking at me.

“She's done with treatment. Things are good. She's thinking about getting her breast reconstructed, but she's not really all that into it. She says she's fine going uni-tit.”

We both smile, and then it fades away.

She puts her hand on the door handle. “I'm glad. So … see you around?”

“Sure. I'll see you around.”

She gets out and goes inside without looking back.

I sit for a moment longer and then back out of her driveway.

The bridge isn't there yet, but the tiniest spiderweb of tentative hope spans the abyss.

Maybe it will be strong enough.

Aunt Jill arrives the next day with four-year-old Malcolm to spend a few days with us before Christmas. Malcolm, whom I haven't seen since he was two, is an unstoppable ball of energy, bouncing from room to room. I babysit him Saturday night, to let Mom and Jill go out by themselves, and the only way I can get him to sleep is to lie with him in the big guest bed.

After I tell him story after story, he finally lies quietly. He blinks owlishly at me and purses his lips, blowing imaginary bubbles in my direction. He pats my hand and I realize I'm absentmindedly rubbing my breasts. They are black and blue. I can't seem to stop pinching and probing at them, searching for a lump. The thought that something alien and malignant could be growing inside of me feels like fingernails scratching down the blackboard surface of my brain. I can't stop thinking about it.

“Boo-boo?” Malcolm asks, patting my breast.

“I don't know,” I say. “That's the problem.”

Do I really want to live the rest of my life waiting for a lump to show up?

No.

No, I don't.