Spectacle (A Young Adult Novel) (16 page)

Her dad grunted, then began to snore.

Trix chewed her lips in frustration. She threw a ratty afghan over him, turned the TV on low and sat with David, watching until she, too, fell asleep.

37. Friendship Mashup

E
MILY HAD BEEN
reduced to rolling her jeans so it looked like she actually wanted them short. One day in early November, she folded up the hems a couple times, threw on a charcoal gray sweater and red scarf and waved shyly at Ryan when she saw him in school.

“Hey Bean,” he said, distracted by a broken zipper on his backpack.

“Hey.” She remembered a day she’d come into school when he’d pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and said, “You,” as he gazed into her eyes.

This was nothing like that. He seemed different. Flustered. His eyes were red and dull. Stubble dotted his jaw. A big coffee stain was splattered across one sleeve.

He glanced down the corridor, then looked sheepish. “I have to finish a report before first period starts.”

“No sweat,” she said. “Lunch?”

“Aw, wish I could. I have to make up lab time in McD’s.” Which was shorthand for Mr. McDouglas, a chemistry teacher everyone loved because of his tough yet fair way of instructing. “Maybe we can study tonight.”

“Okay,” she said too quickly.

“I just have to check something first though. Let me get back to you.”

She watched him turn and move away.

Just then, Trix’s new friend Marjorie sidled up and said, “You should pick on someone your own height.”

Emily died a little inside as Ryan caught the criticism, turned and stopped. She waved him away and pivoted so her back was to him.

Trix was nowhere to be found. If she had been there and siding with Emily, she would’ve come up with something like, “You should pick on someone with your own IQ.” But Trix was not there and definitely not on Emily’s side.

“I thought you were suspended,” Emily said.

Marjorie lowered her voice and her eyelids and murmured, “That was last week. Freak.”

Emily couldn’t contain her anger. “You’re the one with the black lipstick and bullring in your nose, and I’m the freak?”

Marjorie slowly raised her foot behind her, then kicked a nearby locker with her platform boot. The chaos in the hallway rendered her kick soundless, but still, Emily jumped.

After Marjorie sauntered away, Emily escaped to the bathroom and flattened herself against the tile wall’s heater vent.

She thought she was blessedly alone, until she heard a voice ask, “Getting warm?” It was Kennedy, the third Farkette, applying lip gloss and looking at Emily in the mirror.

Emily did not need a run-in with one of them. Not then. She said, “I guess.”

Kennedy tossed her gloss into a pocket of her tote bag. She came over and stood right in front of Emily “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about April and Vanessa. The way they treat you and Trix. I’m not a part of that. Just FYI.”

Right. Emily didn’t trust Kennedy. Kennedy was trying to lure her in by creating a false sense of security. She’d be nice to Emily, get her to let her guard down, and then the Farkettes would pounce in some sort of humiliating way. They’d tackle her and write Jolly Green Giant across her forehead in lipstick or take and circulate video of Emily in the locker room.

“Okayyy,” Emily said warily. Wanting Kennedy to leave, she rifled through her backpack to make herself look busy.

But Kennedy had decided to hang around, seemed ready to talk more. “So, you and Ryan McElvoy, huh?”

Kennedy was gorgeous with long black hair and faintly Filipino features. Today she wore tights, tall boots, and a baggy dress. She stood with her hands in her pockets.

“Yes,” Emily said. Why did everyone find that so hard to believe? But then, she sometimes found it hard to believe, to relax into it and enjoy the ride. Especially the last few days when it had become clear that something was super off with him.

“Hmm.”

The bell rang, an echoey trill that never failed to launch Emily right out of her skin.

“So obnoxious,” Kennedy muttered. Then, to Emily, “So you’ll remember what I said, right? I am not April or Vanessa.”

Emily couldn’t stop what slithered from her mouth next, like a long snake impossible to gulp down. “Why are you friends with them?”

Kennedy shrugged. “Because they’re nice when you get to know them. Which is to say, they’re just as insecure and lonely as the rest of us. They just don’t hide it as well.” She then gathered her tote bag, slung it over her shoulders and, with a small wave, left the bathroom.

Lagging a few minutes behind, Emily thought about what Kennedy had said. April and Vanessa seemed the least insecure, lonely people she could imagine. But then, from all the anti-bullying assemblies the school loved to hold, she knew that insecurity was what usually drove meanness. Hence, Trix’s recent crappy treatment of her.

Emily proceeded through the rest of her day, trying not to think about Marjorie and their little confrontation first thing that morning.

After school she glimpsed Trix. She was crossing 15th, smoking, and talking animatedly with Marjorie. They stepped up onto the curb in tandem and laughed about something.

Emily’s chest clenched. And she knew her heart was just an organ, just a pumping muscle, but it felt, truly felt, like it had squeezed into a hard, hurting fist.

38. Weary

T
RIX WAS TIRED
of Emily’s wounded gaze, like she was trying to look inside her, to figure her out. Trix didn’t know what the big mystery was. All Emily had to do was turn her scrutiny toward her annoyingly sane life, maybe listen to how she talked to Trix as if she were some loser always making the wrong choices.

Trix left school that Friday without bothering to get books from her locker. She went out into the overcast afternoon where she scanned the throngs for Marjorie.

It was Emily who came through the doors, though, without her boy toy for once. “Hey,” she said to Trix. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh yeah?” Trix tapped ash off the end of her cigarette and tried not to meet Emily’s eyes.

“Can we talk?”

“I don’t see the point.”

“You don’t see the point?” Emily hoisted her backpack further up her shoulder. “We’re best friends, or we were, and we’re not even speaking. I miss you, Trix.”

I miss you too
, Trix thought. Then chastised herself. What was there to miss? They had nothing in common anymore.
Keep the wall up. Keep the wall up
. But even as she chanted this over and over in her head, a lump the size of a robin’s egg rose in her throat. She had to get rid of Emily or she was going to cry. And if she started crying, she didn’t know that she could stop. Besides, Marjorie would be out any minute.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” she said, making her eyes white hot lasers of cruelty. “Okay? Nothing. Now leave me alone.”

Emily stepped back as if she’d been slapped. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

“Exactly.”

Just then Marjorie burst forth with Isaac and her gang of hoodlums. She gave Emily a hearty sneer, which Trix thought was a little much, then pulled Trix away.

“We’re going to shoot BBs at fishing boats,” she crowed.

As Trix was dragged down the sidewalk, she took one last look at Emily, who stood hunched with Ryan now. He rubbed her back and said something into her ear.

The ants started in behind Trix’s knees this time, skittering relentlessly over her calves and around her heels. The tickle of their dainty feet was excruciating.

She’d get drunk that night, she decided. So drunk and numb she wouldn’t be able to feel the tiny bodies traipsing across her skin. “Do you have anything?” she asked Marjorie. Shorthand, of course, for anything illegal, anything fun.

Marjorie sucked hard on her cigarette. “Don’t I always?”

39. The Stepmom Conundrum

E
MILY COULDN’T STOP
thinking about emailing her mom. Her real mom who lived as an artist in Bisbee, Arizona with a possible new husband.

She typed several drafts of what she wanted to say, deleting it all and starting again. She fretted. What if her mom never responded? What if she told Emily she had no interest and to please leave her alone? Or worse, what if she wrote back,
Who are you
?

Frustrated, she wandered down to the family room. She watched a celebrity gossip show while Melissa played with a new pedometer she’d just gotten online. Melissa walked around the room, looked at the digital display, took several more steps, did a few lunges, then punched buttons.

Just after a story about Michelle Williams and Matilda, Emily hit mute on the remote and said, “Is it, like, totally odd being a stepmom?”

Melissa stopped, looked up from her new toy and said, “What? You’re asking me a question? About myself and my feelings?”

“I am.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. So, is it?”

“Totally weird? I don’t know. In the beginning it was an adjustment for sure. But one I was willing to make because I love your dad. And, of course, I’ve come to love you and Kristen.”

Emily felt she was expected to tell Melissa she loved her back, but the words caught in her throat like a gristled hunk of beef. Did she? Love Melissa? She’d always seen her as sort of an interloper. A makeshift replacement for a real mom. Love had never seemed to enter the equation. At least not for Emily.

Melissa continued, “I mean, your dad and I have been married ten years now. I’ve gotten used to my role here, I think.”

Emily nodded and ran her finger up and down an outside seam of her old jeans. “Did you ever want kids of your own?” she asked.

At that, Melissa’s eyes flitted away and she resumed tapping at her pedometer. “Well, yeah,” she said. “Sometimes.”

“How many would you have wanted?”

“Two. A boy and a girl,” she said so quickly that it was obvious she often thought about children of her own.

“But my dad doesn’t want more.”

“I think … he’s too wounded … by what your mom did. He’ll never trust me enough to have a child with me.”

Emily said, “But he married you!”

“It’s not the same,” Melissa insisted. She headed toward the kitchen. “I need a snack. Do you want some yogurt sprinkled with flax seeds and wheat germ?” She waggled her eyebrows, knowing her offer was not at all tempting to Emily.

“I’d rather have a cream puff.”

“On your own time,” Melissa said, and was gone.

The TV still blared. Emily half watched it. Half thought about what Melissa said. About what she’d given up to marry Emily’s grumpy, old dad. She wondered what Melissa saw in him, what mysterious quality he possessed that persuaded her to give up her dream of kids. Because there was no way having two stepdaughters—ungrateful little kids who grew into surly teenagers—could replace making your own babies.

Emily thought about her mother again and how she’d had what Melissa wanted, but had thrown it all away.

40. Gym Hell

F
ARK’S KNEES RESTED
on her elbows, butt pointing toward the ceiling. Her face red, she said, “This is a tripod, people.” Then, defying gravity, she straightened her legs until she was doing a full on headstand. She stayed that way for a minute or two, long enough for her shirt to slip down toward her chin, exposing half moons of her no-nonsense beige bra.

When she flipped back upright, the blood drained from her face and she yelled, “Everyone take a spot along the wall.”

The guys and girls were in PE together that day, though, Ryan, thankfully, didn’t take this particular class.

Still, the entire perimeter of the gym was filled with juniors, and each person got about eight inches of space along the concrete block wall.

Emily began to sweat. She couldn’t do this. She didn’t know how to move her long body that way.

“Okay, everyone on their knees!” Fark said and chuckled. “Now, head down on the floor, do the tripod.”

So everyone did. Everyone, that was, except Emily and a handful of obese kids like Brenna Toast and Andrew Colmilker, who didn’t even pretend to try, but just sat, picking at their fingernails. Fark usually ignored them, figuring they were too far-gone to be worth her trouble.

But she noticed Emily struggling, like a daddy longlegs that’d been flipped on its back. Her limbs wouldn’t cooperate. Everyone, every upside down person in the room, could see Emily flailing.

Trix was there somewhere, along the west wall. Doing what Fark said for once.

Fark walked toward Emily, her sneakers soundless over the polished wood floor. “Your center of balance is too high,” she sniped.

Standing, Emily glared at her.
No shit, Sherlock
, she wanted to say. Instead she focused on breathing. What did Fark expect Emily to do about her too-high center of balance?

The gym was quiet, everyone on their heads.

“You need to get your butt up in the air,” Fark commanded. “Try again.”

But Emily knew she couldn’t, knew she wouldn’t bend herself into that vulnerable position with Fark looming over her, snapping instructions.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Then you may as well go get dressed,” Fark spit.

“Fine.” Emily strode across the gym and down the rubber-lined stairs. She changed in the locker room and wandered the quiet hallways, finding her way to a side door and darting out into the cloudy afternoon. It was only one thirty and darkness already loomed.

Walking south on 15th, Emily hopped a bus going downtown. It was good to be there, smashed against the window, warm, the burr of the engine calming her.

She got off in Belltown and walked to Shutter Joe, early for her shift but doubting Thomas would mind.

Putting on her apron and signing her time card, she set about the task of washing stainless steel pitchers and coffee cups. “The glamorous life of a Seattle barista,” Thomas said as he passed with a tub full of more dirty dishes.