Someone Like You (7 page)

“Like hell,” she said.

I smiled. “I got out of it, thank God. But you won't believe who I talked to in the Guidance office.”

“Who?”

A loud booing noise went up at the Coke machine, drowning us out, and someone was sent to find the janitor. It always broke at least once each day, causing a minor mutiny. I waited until the crowd had calmed down, walking off jangling their change, before I said, “Macon Faulkner.”

“Really?” She opened her backpack, rummaging through to find something. “How's he doing?”

“He was already in trouble, I think.”

“Not surprising.” She put her drink down. “God, I feel so rotten all of a sudden. Like just bad.”

“Sick?”

“Kind of.” She pulled out a bottle of Advil, popped the top, and took two. “It's probably just my well-documented aversion to school.”

“Probably.” I watched her as she leaned back against the brick wall, closing her eyes. In the sun her hair was a deep red, almost unreal, with brighter streaks running through it.

“But anyway,” I said, “it was so weird. He just sat right next to me, just like that, and started talking my ear off. Like he knew me.”

“He does know you.”

“Yeah, but only from that one day of the funeral. Before then we'd never even been introduced.”

“So? This is a small town, Halley. Everyone knows everyone.”

“It was just weird,” I said again, replaying it in my head, from the poking on my shoulder to him saying my name as he walked away, grinning. “I don't know.”

“Well,” she said slowly, reaching behind her head to pull her hair up in a ponytail, “maybe he likes you.”

“Oh, stop it.” My face started burning again.

“You never know. You shouldn't always assume it's so impossible.”

The bell rang and I finished off my Coke, tossing it in the recycling bin beside me. “On to third period.”

“Ugh. Oceanography.” She put on her backpack. “What about you?”

“I have—” I started, but someone tapped my shoulder, then was gone as I turned around, the classic fake-out. I turned back to Scarlett and saw Macon over her shoulder, on his way to the gym.

“Come on,” he yelled across the now-empty courtyard to me. “Don't want to be late for P.E.”

“—P.E.,” I finished sheepishly, feeling the burn of a new blush on my face. “I better go.”

Scarlett just looked at me, shaking her head, like she already knew something I didn't. “Watch out,” she said quietly, pulling her backpack over her shoulders.

“For what?” I said.

“You know,” she said, and her face was so sad, watching me. Then she shook her head, smiling, and started to walk away. “Just be careful. Of P.E. and all that.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering if she had visions of me being nailed by errant Wiffle balls or blinded by flying badminton birdies, or if it was only just Macon, and everything he reminded her of, that made her so sad. “I will,” I said.

She waved and walked off, up the hill to the Sciences building, and I turned and went the other way, pushing open the gym doors to that smell of mildew and Ben-Gay and sweaty mats, where Macon Faulkner was waiting for me.

 

P.E. became the most important fifty minutes of my life. Regardless of illness, national disaster, or even death, I would have shown up for third period, in my white socks and blue shorts, ready at the bell. Macon missed occasionally, and those days I was miserable, swatting around my volleyball halfheartedly and watching the clock. But the days he was there, P.E. was the best thing I had going.

Of course I acted like I hated it completely, because it was worse than being a Band geek to actually like P.E. But I was the only one in the girls' locker room who didn't complain loudly as we dressed out at 10:30 A.M. for another day of volleyball basics. All I had to do was walk out of the dressing room, nonchalant, acting like I was still half-asleep and too out of it to notice Macon, who was usually over by the water fountain in nonregulation tennis shoes and no socks (for which he got a minus-five each day of class). I'd sit a few feet over from him, wave, and pretend I wasn't expecting him to slide the few feet across the floor to sit beside me, which he always did. Always. Usually those few minutes before Coach Van Leek got organized with his clipboard were the best part of my day, every day. With a few variations, they went something like this:

I lived for this.

Macon was not in school to Get an Education or Prepare for College. It was just a necessary evil, tempered by junk food and perpetual tardies. Half the time he showed up looking like he'd just rolled out of bed, and he was forever getting yelled at by Coach for sneaking food into P.E.: Cokes slipped in his backpack, Atomic Fireballs and Twinkles stuffed in his pockets. He was the master of the forged excuse.

“Faulkner,” Coach would bark when Macon showed up, ten minutes late, with no socks and half a Zinger sticking out of his mouth, “you'd best have a note.”

“Right here,” Macon would say cheerfully, drawing one out of his pocket. We'd all watch attentively as Coach scrutinized it. Macon never looked worried. He failed all of P.E.'s notoriously easy quizzes, but he could copy any signature perfectly on the first try. It was a gift.

“It's all in the wrist,” he'd tell me as he excused himself for another funeral or doctor's appointment with a flourish of his mother's name. I kept waiting for him to get caught. But it never happened.

He didn't seem to have a curfew; all I knew about his mom was that she didn't dot her is. I didn't even know where he lived. Macon was wild, different, and when I was with him, caught up in it all, I could play along like I was, too. He told me about parties where the cops always came, or road trips he up and took in the middle of the night, no planning, to the beach or D.C., just because he felt like it. He showed up on Mondays with wild stories, T-shirts of bands I'd never heard of, smeared entry stamps from one club or another on the back of his hands. He dropped names and places I'd never heard, but I nodded, committing them to memory and repeating them back to Scarlett as if I knew them all myself, had been there or seen that. Something in him, about him, with his easy loping walk and sly smile, his past secret and mysterious while mine was all laid out and clear, actually documented, intrigued me beyond belief.

Scarlett, of course, just shook her head and smiled as she listened to me prattle on, detailing every word and gesture of our inane sock-and-volleyball conversations. And she sat by without saying anything whenever he didn't show up and I sulked at lunch, picking at my sandwich and saying it wasn't like I liked him anyway. And sometimes, I'd look up at her and see that same sad look on her face, as if Michael Sherwood had suddenly reared up from wherever she'd carefully placed him, reminding her of the beginning of summer when she was the one with all the stories to tell.

Meanwhile, all through September, things were happening. My father's radio show on T104 had gotten an overhaul and format change over the summer and was suddenly The Station to Listen To. In the morning I heard his voice coming from cars in the parking lot or at traffic lights or even at the Zip Mart where Scarlett and I stopped before school for Cokes and gas. My father, making jokes and razzing callers and playing all the music I listened to, the soundtrack to every move I made. Brian
in the Morning!
the billboard out by the mall said;
He's better than
Wheaties! My father thought this was hysterical, even better than A
Neighborhood
of
Fiends,
and my mother
accused
him of always taking the long way home just to look at it. His was the voice I heard no matter where I went, inseparable from my life away from our house. It was somewhat unsettling that listening to my
father
was suddenly cool.

The worst was when he talked about me. I was in the Zip Mart before school one day, and of course they had T104 on; people were calling in sharing their most embarrassing moments. About half my school was buying cigarettes and cookies and candy bars, that early morning sugar and nicotine rush. I was at the head of the line when I heard my name.

“Yeah, I remember when my daughter Halley was about five,” my father said. “Man, this is like the funniest thing I ever saw. We were at this neighborhood cookout, and my wife and I...”

Already my face was turning red. I could feel my temperature jump about ten degrees with each word he said. The clerk, of course, picked this moment to change the register tape. I was stuck.

“So we're standing there talking to some neighbors, right next to this huge mud puddle; it had been raining for a few days and everything was still kind of squishy, you know? Anyway, Halley yells out to me, ‘Hey, Dad, look!' So my wife and I look over and here she comes, running like little kids do, all crooked and sideways, you know?”

“Damn,” the clerk said, hitting the register tape with his fist. It wasn't going in. I was in hell.

“And I swear,” my father went on, now chuckling, “I was thinking as she got closer and closer to that mud puddle,
Man, she's going in.
I could see it coming.”

Behind me somebody tittered. My stomach turned in on itself.

“And she hits the edge of that puddle, still running, and her feet just—they just flew out from under her.” Now my father dissolved in laughter, along with, oh, about a thousand commuters and office workers all over the tri-county area. “I mean, she skidded on her butt, all the way across that puddle, bumping along with this completely shocked look on her face, until she, like, landed right at out feet. Covered in mud. And we're all trying not to laugh, God help us. It was the funniest thing I think I have ever seen.
Ever.”

“That'll be one-oh-nine,” the clerk said to me suddenly. I threw my dollar and some change at him, pushing past all the grinning faces out to the car, where Scarlett was waiting.

“Oh, man,” she said as I slid in. “How embarrassed are
you
right now?”

“Shut up,” I said. All day I had to listen to the mud jokes and have people nudge me and giggle. Macon christened me Muddy Britches. It was the worst.

“I'm sorry,” my father said to me, first thing that night. I ignored him, walking up the stairs. “I really, really am. It just kind of came out, Halley. Really.”

“Brian,” my mother said. “I think you should just keep Halley's life off limits. Okay?”

This from the woman who wrote about me in two books. My parents both made their livings humiliating me.

“I know, I know,” he said, but he was smiling. “It was just so
funny,
though. Wasn't it?” He giggled, then tried to straighten up. “Right?”

“Real funny,” I said. “Hysterical.”

This was just one example of how my parents were suddenly, that fall, making me crazy. It wasn't just the statewide shame on the radio, either. It was something I couldn't put my finger on or define clearly, but a whole mishmash of words and incidents, all rolling quickly and building, like a snowball down a hill, to gather strength and bulk to flatten me. It wasn't what they said, or even just the looks they exchanged when they asked me how school was that day and I just mumbled fine with my mouth full, glancing wistfully over at Scarlett's, where I was sure she was eating alone, in front of the TV, without having to answer to anyone. There had been a time, once, when my mother would have been the first I'd tell about Macon Faulkner, and what P.E. had become to me. But now I only saw her rigid neck, the tight, thin line of her lips as she sat across from me, reminding me to do my homework, no I couldn't go to Scarlett's it was a school night, don't forget to do the dishes and take the trash out. All things she'd said to me for years. Only now they all seemed loaded with something else, something that fell between us on the table, blocking any further conversation.

I knew my mother wouldn't understand about Macon Faulkner. He was the furthest I could get from her, Noah Vaughn, and the perfect daughter I'd been in that Grand Canyon picture. This world I was in now, of high school and my love affair with P.E., with Michael Sherwood gone, had no place for my mother or what she represented. It was like one of those tests where they ask what thing doesn't belong in this group: an apple, a banana, a pear, a tractor. There wasn't anything she could do about it. My mother, for all her efforts, was that tractor.

Macon finally asked me out on October 18 at 11:27 A.M. It was a monumental moment, a flashbulb memory. I hadn't had a lot of incredible events in my life, and I intended to remember every detail of this one.

It was a Friday, the day of our badminton quiz. After I handed in my paper, I pulled out my English notebook and started to do my vocabulary, at the same time keeping a close eye on Macon as he chewed his pencil, stared at the ceiling and struggled with the five short questions of the same test Coach had been giving out for the last fifteen years.

A few minutes later he got up to hand in his test, sticking his pencil behind his ear as he passed me. I braced myself, reading the same vocab word,
feuilleton,
over and over again, like a spell, trying to draw him over to talk to me.
Feuilleton, feuilleton,
as he handed his test to Coach, then stretched his arms over his head and started back toward me, taking his time.
Feuilleton, feuilleton,
as he got closer and closer, then grinned as he passed me, heading back to where he'd been sitting.
Feuilleton, feuilleton,
I kept thinking hopelessly, the word swimming in front of my eyes. And then finally, on the
last feuilleton,
the sound of his notebook sliding up next to me, and him plopping down beside it. And just like that, I felt that goofy third-period P.E. rush, like the planets had suddenly aligned and everything was okay for the next fifteen minutes while I had him all to myself.