Spectacle (A Young Adult Novel) (7 page)

Emily called to her, waved at her. But her mother didn’t notice.

As Emily ran toward her, her mother vanished and reappeared further out in the field. A mirage she couldn’t reach.

When Emily woke, she was moaning quietly, buried under her covers.

How could she be motherless? How could her mom have painted stars on their car and left her two daughters and husband? And where was she now? Was she even alive?

It took a while for the intensity of the dream to clear.

Emily thought of Trix and her sporadic dad who showed up once every few months to take her for a ride in his truck or to dinner at Red Robin. But at least he came around. At least she knew what he looked like and could ask him questions and see the hazel flecks in his eyes.

Getting out of bed, Emily tiptoed into Kristen’s room.

Her sister slept on her stomach with one arm thrown over the side of the bed, fingers grazing the carpet. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail and she breathed quietly.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Emily watched Kristen. Her room was, not surprisingly, different from Emily’s. Messier, but, at the same time, sparse. Clothes, jerseys, and sneakers lay over her bed’s footboard, and across the floor.

Kristen’s dresser top was mostly bare, sporting just a softball trophy looped with rubber bracelets. A wilted gerbera daisy hung over the edge of a murky glass of water. A physics textbook laid open.

Rain pattered on the roof. Emily was actually glad for it. Glad for the excuse to stay in. She knew that soon all their days would be overcast and wet, but, after a sunny Pacific Northwest summer, she was ready. The weather matched her mood.

“Krissy,” she stage whispered. “Krissy.”

Kristen stirred, turning her head toward the wall.

Emily heard the front door open and close and knew it was Melissa, heading out for her morning run.

She hissed her sister’s name again.

This time, Kristen, in a gravelly voice, responded, “What?”

“I had a dream about Mom.”

Kristen lifted her head and looked at Emily. Less irritated and more sympathetic, she said, “Really? What was she doing?”

“She was in a field, picking flowers. And humming. I couldn’t get to her, no matter how fast I ran.” It sounded dumb, voicing it. But Emily knew Kristen would understand better than anyone.

Kristen said, “I’ve had that dream. Except she was at a gas station, filling her tank and buying Doritos and I was locked in the bathroom. The door had a window. I could see her and I was pounding to get out. But she never heard.”

Emily shivered. She liked her own version of the dream better. “God,” she said.

“I know.”

Kristen’s room smelled like dirty laundry.

“Do you think about her much?” Emily asked. “I mean when you’re awake.”

Kristen considered this for a minute then flopped back onto her pillow and gazed at the ceiling. “Sometimes. I try not to.”

“I have been lately. More than usual.”

“I wonder why.”

A bird yodeled from outside Kristen’s window. The house hummed—appliances and digital clocks and heaters.

Kristen said, “Did you know that Mom’s dad was, like, six eight?”

“I knew he was tallish, but … really?” Emily said. “I wish I remembered him.” Both of her mom’s parents had died too young. In their fifties, she thought.

They had no photos of them, not even a dusty Polaroid.

The few pictures they had of their mom were taken in the early nineties. The jeans were high waisted and tapered at the ankles. The hair was still big, left over from the previous decade. And their mom’s face looked squinched and forlorn.

In one shot, she rested her chin on the top of Kristen’s head and looked into the camera, her eyes swimming in tears.

In another, she sat at a picnic table with their dad, his arm draped over her thigh as he studied her profile. But she stared at something outside the frame of the picture. Maybe, in her mind, she was already on the road.

13. Hassled

T
RIX WIPED SWEAT
from her forehead and took off the ink-covered smock she wore for her job at the textile-dyeing plant, Frederick Hui. She stuffed the smock into her locker, bought a vending machine soda and sat on the hard wooden bench that served as break room seating. She usually put in about 20 hours a week. Which was the only way she got any spending money for clothes, music, and other necessities. She also had to buy several bags of groceries a month to supplement the meager junk her mom stocked the cupboards with (namely, lots of microwave popcorn). What was left over went into her sewing machine fund.

Luckily, schoolwork came easily for Trix. She had a memory like a Venus flytrap. Except that instead of grabbing and quickly digesting bugs she swallowed facts whole and never let them go. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to pull off her job plus any sort of social life.

Still, even with her nifty brain, Frederick Hui was a lot of work, and Trix, in that moment, felt overwhelmed. She was tired. Sometimes it seemed she’d lived a long life already, full of regrets and angst and hurt feelings.

She took a long drag from her soda. She had ten minutes before she had to get back to her shift.

Originally, she’d taken the job because she wanted to do something related to fashion. And at sixteen during a recession, dyeing fabric was the closest she could get. Someday, she told herself, she’d work with the same fabrics she dyed. She’d drape them over models’ bodies, gathering here, stitching there. Just thinking about the possibility excited her.

As she imagined her future, Aaron, a guy in his twenties who always had a toothpick in his mouth, came into the break room. He didn’t bother to remove his smock. Instead he sprawled out on another hard bench and groaned.

Over the top of her soda can, Trix watched him.

“How old are you?” he asked without looking at her.

“Thirty.”

He laughed. “Seriously.”

She told him her real age.

“Get out,” he said. “You’re still young. Don’t get sucked into this place. It’s a velvet coffin. A dang velvet coffin. They make it seem all nice and cushy and then they trap you with the money and bonuses and you can’t never get out.”

Trix thought “nice and cushy” was pushing it. Just look at the barren break room. The money was pretty good though. She made more than most of her friends who worked at cafés or shops.

“I’m okay,” she said.

He poked his ever-present toothpick around his molars. “Are you?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t about to tell Aaron how thrashed she felt. How she wanted to take her next paycheck and get a nice hotel room with thick walls and a squishy bed and sleep for 24 hours. Maybe she’d take David with her, feed him straight tuna out of a silver dish.

She thought of Emily and how she got to sleep in a place like that every night. She had a big, mod bedroom done in plum and lime, lush carpeting, and a bathroom with a Jacuzzi. You wouldn’t be able to feel an earthquake in that place. Much less a car rumbling past.

Aaron raised himself up and asked for a sip of her soda.

“Get your own,” she said. The last thing she wanted was his cooties all over her can.

“But I only want one drink. And you have a whole 16 ounces. I can see the condensation there on the side. It’s making me all thirsty.”

“Do you want to borrow a buck?” she said, getting irritated.

“No, not really,” he came to her bench and sat down next to her. His eyes had gone glassy.

A bad feeling rose up in Trix. She tried to scooch back on the bench, but found she was at the very end.

Aaron leaned in closer. “Just a little sip,” he said and licked his lips. He reached out, but instead of taking the soda, he rubbed Trix’s denim-clad thigh and moved his hand between her legs. She went to jerk away, but he held her down, leg pinned to the bench.

“I’m so bored here,” he said. “Just give me a little sip. Just a little sugar to help get me through.”

She held her soda can over his crotch and dumped out the contents.

“What the hell?” he cried, jumping up and swiping at his pants. “Now I look like I pissed myself!”

“You’re lucky I don’t report you for sexual harassment, you asshat!” Her heart thumped hard, but she did her best to look cool. She couldn’t let him see that he’d freaked her out.

“Christ, don’t,” he said to her, his eyes now clear and desperate. “I need this job.”

“Get out of here,” she said in a low steady voice. “If you ever come near me again or I hear of you pulling this crap on anyone else, I’ll pour a lot more than soda on your dick. And I’ll make it my personal mission to get you canned.”

He emitted an animal-like cry of frustration. “I didn’t mean nothin’. God! What a bitch!” he yelled. But he left.

Trix got up slowly. She kicked the empty can so it rang against the metal lockers. Why did this stuff happen to her? Nothing so shady would ever happen to Emily. Did Trix put out a vibe that said,
White trash! Hurt me. I’m used to it
?

Grinding her teeth, she went into the bathroom, peed, and splashed her face with steaming hot water. She put her smock on and went out onto the floor again, the smell of chemicals and sound of whirring, clacking machinery greeting her.

She wanted a new life. She was sick of this one. All she needed was a plan, some way to transport herself out of the doldrums she was stuck in and to an existence with a little more sparkle.

14. If I Could Chat with Anyone, It Would Be You

O
NLINE SHOPPING FOR
jeans didn’t really work. Not in Emily’s opinion anyway. She needed to try the jeans on. Look at her butt in a three-way mirror. See if they clung to her just enough, but not too much.

That morning she was at one of the household’s two computers (there was Melissa’s laptop, which she had taken over, and a full Mac upstairs in a small loft just off the stairway landing). She browsed sites she knew sold extra long jeans and put the clothes on virtual models, but, when it came down to it, she couldn’t submit the order.

She clicked over to her Facebook page. She didn’t log on everyday. The updates were mundane, the cliquishness like an extension of school, right there in the kitchen.

But Facebook was necessary. If not for Facebook, she’d be completely clueless at school, listening to other kids talk about links or videos she didn’t understand because she hadn’t checked her news feed.

This time she saw she had two friend requests waiting.

The first was from a girl, Julia Noma, who’d gone to Whitman Junior High with Emily, but then had moved to Wyoming.
Accept.

The second … and her heart started thumping faster … was from Ryan.

She squeezed her eyes closed and told herself,
Big deal. Big deal. So he wants to be your Facebook friend. He’s probably friends with everybody.

She went to his profile page. Three hundred and eighty-two friends. Of course.

Favorite movies:
Napoleon Dynamite, The Bourne Trilogy, School of Rock, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Okay, so he had decent taste in flicks.

Favorite music: (
Please no rap, no rap, no rap
, she thought.) Cake. White Stripes. Beck. Coldplay. Death Cab for Cutie.

Favorite books:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, Anything Nick Hornby,
Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers.

She sat back in her chair. So much of what he liked was what she liked. God.

She read his favorite quote: “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.” –Leo Tolstoy.

Emily quickly looked to see if Trix was online. She wasn’t.

She wrote her an email:
Ryan just friended me on FB!!

Then she deleted it. She didn’t want Trix to know that Ryan’s friend request was important to her. She didn’t want to give Trix reasons for not-so-covert glances at school or the possible slippage of Trix’s tongue.

She was just about to log out of Facebook when the chat window opened. And there was Ryan’s photo—a black and white shot of him holding skis—next to his name.

She read:
Emily, my new friend. Thank you.

She typed back:
How could I not?

Ryan:
You could’ve refused.

Emily:
Why would I?

Ryan:
You could’ve sent me a personal message that said,
‘
I’m not friending you, lameass.’

Emily:
If u were, in fact, a lameass I might have.

Ryan:
So your opinion of me is one notch above lameass?

Emily:
Maybe a notch.

Ryan:
Relief.

There was a long pause, where Emily reread their exchange.

Emily:
What are u up to today?

Ryan:
I just helped my dad fix the garage door. Now I’m drinking lemonade and looking for new music on iTunes.

Emily:
Bon Iver?

Ryan:
I’ll check it out. What about u? U finish that homework for Johnson’s class?

The dark thought that maybe Ryan was trolling for homework help struck her and she recoiled from the screen. People more or less knew what kind of grades everyone else earned. So, he probably had a good idea that Emily was up there near the top of the heap.

She didn’t want that to be true, that he was using her. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Emily:
Theater of the Absurd assignment? No. But it shouldn’t take too long. U?

Ryan:
Did it Friday afternoon. H8 having that stuff hanging over my head.

Emily:
I know what you mean. Yet, I let it hang. Am lazy.

Ryan:
I find that hard to believe.

Emily:
It’s true.

Ryan:
Okay, gotta split. A bunch of us r going to Myrtle Edwards Park. You know, before the weather turns to complete crap.