Someone I Wanted to Be (6 page)

“No.”

Cindy crossed her arms and walked over to catch the last five minutes of the talk show. When the commercial came on, she turned to me. “Honey, you’ve got to eat something. . . .” Then she saw the empty bag and wrappers, the bottles, and the big plastic cup of melting ice.

“Are you eating this crap again? I told you, no junk food on weekdays! God Almighty, Leah, you’re going to get diabetes. That’s the last thing we need.” She picked up one of the plastic bottles and shook it at me. “Do you know what this stuff does to your teeth? I’m fed up with you! You’re going to end up as big as a whale.”

I covered my head with the velour pillow and breathed my own hot oxygen-depleted air. Cindy had bought the pillow at a garage sale and it smelled like cat pee.

“Please leave me alone. I beg you. I had kind of a horrible day,” I said from beneath the pee pillow.

“Leah, do you think I want to spend my life” — a really loud commercial came on —“worn out from this constant battle? I give up! I’m turning it over to you. It’s in your hands. I can’t save you from yourself. . . . Damn it, Leah! You used half my ice!”

I pulled the pillow off my head, got off the couch, and walked down the short hallway to my room. I shut the door and threw myself down on the dirty sheets and ratty blankets.

I woke up in fuzzy darkness. My phone said it was nine thirty. My mouth was dry, sticky, and sour. Bacteria foamed on my teeth. I pulled off my jeans, crawled back into bed, and called Corinne.

She answered right away. “I thought you’d call earlier.”

“I fell asleep. What is Kristy’s problem? I had to walk to school and got detention.”

“Sorry, Leah. After she picked me up, she drove straight to school. I go, ‘Kristy, what about Leah? Is she sick?’ She says, ‘She’s sick, all right.’ Then I was kind of confused, but after second period, Kristy told me. Saturday night, when you stayed over, her dad told you that her mom had to go to the hospital. She just got out today. Kristy was pissed that you didn’t wait and ask if her mom was OK. You just left.”

I felt sick; I had just left. “I texted her twenty times Sunday. She never texted back. I didn’t know how bad it was when I left. Kristy was asleep. Her dad was asleep. He said they were just making a quick trip to the emergency room. What’s wrong with her mom?”

Corinne said, “She had to have blood transfusions or something — I don’t know. I feel really bad, Leah, but I can’t abandon Kristy. I need to be there for her because of her mom. She tweeted something kind of mean about you, but I’ll get her to delete it.”

Corinne hung up. I got out of bed and opened my door a crack. Cindy was asleep on the couch with her wineglass clutched under her chin. I pulled on my jeans and my shoes, then crept out of my room and tiptoed around her, turning off the TV and slowly detaching the glass from her hand. I covered her with the pink-and-blue blanket. She looked like she was getting a cold — her nostrils were flaky and red.

I locked the apartment door behind me and jogged down the hall and up the stairs. I pushed through the glass entryway door and was free in the cool black night. I’d gotten in the habit of walking in the dark after Cindy passed out.

When I walked in the night, I felt like I was flying. I walked so fast, it was like being a bird gliding over clouds or a fish cutting through dark water. I dodged car lights because if it was the cops, they’d bust me for breaking curfew. If I heard footsteps or saw someone coming toward me, I hid behind a tree or bush in case it was a rapist. I was a kid again. I was playing hide-and-seek with the whole world.

Vargas Avenue was silent, its ugliness transformed into shadows, silvery light, the silhouettes of mysterious people behind yellow-lit shades. The streetlights looked like burning matches sticking out of the sidewalks.

Corinne lived six blocks over from Kristy. Every light in her split-level house was blazing. Corinne’s stepdad sat at the kitchen table drinking beer; her mom was on the laptop. The buzz-cut heads of Corinne’s brothers bobbed through. Derrick, the stepdad, stood up and opened the refrigerator.

The light was off in Corinne’s room, but there was a shifting blue glow. “I hope you’re feeling bad,” I whispered. “I hope you’re feeling some guilt.”

Farther down Rocky Mountain Lane, the houses got bigger and had skylights and huge windows facing the mountain. Every house had a trampoline and a tree house with a rainbow roof in the fenced backyard. The houses were lit up like department stores and were stuffed with matching furniture, potted plants, throw pillows, silver refrigerators, vases of dried vines. The women in the department-store houses all had weird geometrical haircuts and the men wore bike shorts. The people lay sacked out in front of their giant TVs. They were wiped out from working at the office park or their two-hour commute back from Denver.

Kristy’s Civic and her dad’s Suburban were parked side by side on the swept black driveway. The grass was cut and edged. The windows were lit from inside by a soft glow as if from firelight.

I sat on the grass next to a piney shrub, lit a cigarette, and stared at Kristy Baker’s perfect house.

All week, Kristy and Corinne blew me off. I sat in study hall with Carl Lancaster. We silently read about acids and bases and practiced molar conversions, then I’d hand him my notebook and he’d check my answers, and I’d check his. We quizzed each other. I got a B+ on the test. Outside of study hall and chemistry, we didn’t talk.

Kurt King called every day, sometimes twice. Usually I answered, but sometimes I was too tired to be Ashley and just listened to his messages. I was like a fish that had been hooked; I felt a constant tug to check my phone, to listen to his voice again and again. When we talked, it was always the same. He’d say, “When can I see you?”

I’d say, “It’s complicated. I have a boyfriend.”

“Forget your boyfriend.”

“But I kind of love him. . . .”

I’d always wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend. Kurt King felt like my boyfriend. It was complicated. . . .

It was like trying on clothes that you love but can’t afford, clothes that are totally inappropriate. I did that once with Corinne. When we were fourteen, her mom took us shopping in Denver. Corinne and I rode the escalator to the second floor of Macy’s and tried on silvery two-hundred-dollar shirts. We made faces at ourselves and laughed like donkeys, though we were both half-serious about how beautiful we looked. The saleswoman stood outside the dressing room and rapped on the door. “How can I help you, girls?”

Kurt King wanted Ashley. “Girl, you are so beautiful,” he said. “I think I’m fallin’ in love. . . .” But he was talking to me.

I was the girl on the phone, and the girl trying to pull on too-tight size-fourteen jeans, and the beautiful girl in my head, and the girl who got a B+ on her test and was going to be a doctor, and the girl staring at a cracked puke-green ceiling as the refrigerator door opened and wine gushed out of the spigot into the wedding wineglass. Like a girl in a funhouse full of mirrors, but all the faces looking back were different.

In the school hallways, Kristy walked past me as if I didn’t exist. She and Victoria were always shrieking over something. Corinne went along with big sad eyes. Groups of boys, if they were bored, called me Mack Truck, Beached Whale, and the old standby, Fat-Ass. I floated away from it all and thought about what Kurt King had said to me the night before. He said, “I think about you all day, every day.”

At lunch, I sat with the girl in the leather jacket again. Anita Sotelo.

Anita’s eyes were tea-colored with stars of darker brown. Her left eye would squint and her mouth would open a little when she was confronted with stupidity. She had the calmness of an adult. She was skinny and always wore a black jacket and tight black jeans with black Keds knockoffs. She constantly combed her bangs back with her fingers. Sometimes she wore scarves wrapped around her head. She had Screamo band stickers all over her notebooks.

Anita was into manga and anime, and once, freshman year, she came to school dressed as a Japanese schoolgirl. Her friends Iris and Maria seemed to find that perfectly normal. Though there was something incredibly normal about Anita, in spite of her weird habits and appearance.

Iris and Maria both wore eyeliner and string bracelets on their tiny wrists. Iris had blond roots and a face like a cat’s. Maria had sharp canines, looked like a Mexican Katy Perry, and sometimes came to school with a furry tail pinned to the back of her jeans. Maria and Iris finished each other’s sentences and became silent and rigid if anyone popular came within two feet of them. They were obsessed with the TV show
My Little Pony.

If I thought about it, I could not believe that I was sitting at this table. I had joined the nerd herd.

Anita picked a carrot off my tray, chewed it, and stared at me. “Why did you even hang around that chick Kristy Baker?”

I took a bite of the mushy chicken-particle sandwich and pretended to give her question some thought. “We’ve been hanging out since seventh grade. . . . We’re old friends, I guess. I really love her mom and dad. They are both super sweet. Her mom has breast cancer.”

I couldn’t explain to Anita that hanging around Kristy was an addiction, sort of like smoking. Kristy had a normal teenage life. Her room was interior-decorated. She had a mom and a dad who adored her. She was skinny, and boys loved her and her long blond hair. It wasn’t my life, but I could be near it. I could be inside the circle, even if I was on the very outside.

Anita raised her eyebrows. “Sad about her mom.” She drew a person with spiky black hair on the back cover of her notebook. She tipped back her head and stuck the pencil between her teeth — the pencil was deeply indented with chew marks.

“Kristy Baker is still an incredible bitch,” she said cheerfully, then set back to work on her drawing. “She’s horrible! You’re friends with the meanest girl I’ve ever met, and we’ve moved nine times and I’ve met thousands of people. . . .”

Iris and Maria cackled about a message Iris had gotten on her phone. Probably something to do with hair dye or anime or
My Little Pony
fan fiction. It made me sad how they hunched over their lunches, squinting over their shoulders like they were about to be attacked.

Anita looked at Iris’s message, smiled, and returned to her drawing.

“I’m going to either be a screenwriter, an actor, or an anime illustrator,” she said out of nowhere. She didn’t even look up to see if I was listening. “What about you?”

“I want to be a doctor.” It came out in a whisper.

“A what?”

“A doctor.”

“What kind?” She kept drawing.

“Possibly an obstetrician or maybe an oncologist, but that would be really sad. I have no idea, actually. I haven’t . . .”

“Have you wanted to be a doctor for a long time?”

“Yeah, I always wanted to, but like six months ago, I decided to actually try and do it. I have to get a good grade in chemistry if I want to go to med school. . . .”

Anita lifted her face and stared at me. She grabbed my wrist. “That is so cool. That is so, so cool. You got to do it.”

Anita was the first person I’d ever told that I wanted to be a doctor. She acted as if it was possible, real, like the most obvious thing I could do. I felt happy, like bells were ringing inside of me. “When I was in middle school, I always read this book called
Human Diseases and Conditions
during study hall. I used to watch this doctor show with my mom. We watched every episode twice. And since I was eleven, I’ve gotten my checkups from this woman doctor, and she’s really nice and smart, and she always tells me I remind her of herself when she was my age. I read some books about being a doctor I borrowed from Mr. Calvino, and I just knew that’s what I wanted to do. But I’ve got to get a good grade in chemistry.”

Anita shrugged, dipped her head. “Yeah? So? You got to just do it. Get Carl Lancaster to help you. He’s really good at chemistry.”

Anita acted like this was all very workable and doable, and if I just put the time in, it would definitely happen. I would be a doctor.

“You think I could actually do it?”