Speechless (14 page)

I apparently don’t have a say in the matter, because he starts fixing it before I can communicate any affirmative answer. That’s okay; my stomach is actually rumbling with hunger and the delicious smells of his cooking only make it growl louder. By the time he serves me the bowl, I’m all but salivating.

Dex watches me like a hawk as I lift the spoon to my mouth and take my first tentative bite. I’ve never had goulash; it tastes similar to beef stew, except better, thick and warm and a little spicy. I grab a pen from my bag and scribble on a napkin.

I want you to feed me forever!

I slide it across the counter to him, and he laughs as he reads it.

“I’ll take that as a stamp of approval.” He grins. He turns to Asha and says, “I like this girl. She can stay.”

day eight

I’m almost feeling good when I get to school on Monday. Refreshed. Rejuvenated. I park my car in the student lot and walk toward the school with a little swing in my step.

And then I run into Derek and Lowell.

They’re both standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking straight at me. I freeze for a moment. No one else is around. No one to witness whatever is about to happen. I hate the helpless feeling that crawls its way into my stomach.

As I come up to them, I veer to the right, trying to walk past, but Lowell steps in front of me, blocks my path.

“Hey,” he says, and when I keep walking, more sharply,
“Hey.”

I stop and look at him. I try not to let it show the way my heart is beating, fast and hard, like it’s trying to free itself from my chest.

“What’s that?” Lowell cocks his head to one side, gaze sliding down to the whiteboard tucked under my arm, and before I can jerk back, he reaches out and snatches it from me. “Hey, Derek, catch.”

He throws it over my head to Derek. I lunge for it, but Derek jumps back, holding it out of reach and laughing at my attempt.

“Oh, what do we have here?” Derek says. He snaps the marker from its holder and scribbles on the surface. When he flashes the board for me to see, I’m met with the ugly words
STUPID WHORE,
made even uglier by his harsh scrawl. The same scrawl I’ve seen on my locker. “I think you should wear this around your neck or something. Like, as a sign. Give us all some fair warning.”

I know I can’t force him to give it back.

I know I can’t show a reaction in front of them, because that will only egg them on.

I do the only thing I can think of. The one thing I know will piss them off the most.

I smile.

They both stare at me like I’ve been sent from some alien planet, which is how I know I’ve thrown them for a loop. It’s the smallest of victories, but still a victory, nonetheless. Derek tosses the whiteboard carelessly, sending it skittering across the sidewalk.

“Whoops,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm.

Lowell gives one last glare and mumbles, “Fucking freak.”

He hocks some spit at me. Thankfully his aim is terrible, and the spit only makes contact with the toe of my shoe. They both laugh like it’s the most hilarious thing ever and head into the building. Assholes.

I gather the whiteboard off the pavement and rub the spit off my shoe in some snow, my body shaking from a combination of intense relief and the cold air. Angry tears build behind my eyes, but I blink them back, trying to shake the feeling off. But I can’t. This vow was supposed to be about making things less complicated, to stop myself from doing something stupid, to show everyone how much I don’t need them. It was about me deciding that if I can’t have their forgiveness or their respect, I won’t give them anything. All it’s done is made me an easy target.

I’m going to get Derek and Lowell back for this. I haven’t figured out exactly how, yet, but I have plenty of time to plot my revenge. They’ll never see it coming, because they don’t expect me to fight back. Well, they have no idea who they’re dealing with. I’m Chelsea freaking Knot.

* * *

While Derek and Lowell may not have tired of giving me a hard time yet, the good news is Mrs. Finch seems to have resigned herself to my silence.

After class, I stand at her desk, fully prepared for my customary sentencing. Instead of pulling out her detention slips, though, she has the study guide I turned in today in her hands.

“This is very good work, Chelsea,” she tells me, and it’s enough to bowl me over. She tosses the guide onto a stack of papers and looks at me over the tops of her glasses. “I believe you read the novel. Truly a first.”

The truth is, she’s not wrong. Usually I just skim the pages and Wikipedia the book summaries. I mean, you can find anything online. A lot of teachers aren’t Net-savvy enough to figure that out.

“You have some very…
strong
feelings,” she says.

That’s probably a reference to the two paragraph rant I did on how much I hate reading about dead puppies, and how much it sucks that the only female character in the book is, of course, a temptress who leads to the two main guys’ downfall. Sexist much, Mr. Steinbeck?

“But your criticism stems from an understanding of the material,” she goes on. “And it’s a marked improvement from your past work. So I have to concede that if this…vow of silence of yours is strengthening your focus as a student, it isn’t fair of me to punish you.”

Wow. No more detentions? As much as I’ll miss sitting in that tiny windowless room every day, I’ll find it in me to persevere. Somehow.

“Don’t think I’ll be letting you slack off from now on,” Mrs. Finch warns me. “I expect to see more work of this caliber. You understand?”

I nod fervently. I am so willing to let myself be blackmailed into doing my homework if it means I get my freedom back.

And there’s a definite novelty to knowing what my teachers are talking about instead of just zoning out as usual. Like, in geometry, I actually understood the equations Mr. Callihan wrote on the overhead projector. Okay, not all of them, but some. And I even took notes. Detailed ones! Asha is a saint. She really is.

This is what I tell—well, not tell, but write to—Sam while Ms. Kinsey pontificates on the technique behind charcoal shading. He looks at my sketchpad and laughs, and when he takes my pencil, his fingers cover mine for a moment.

yeah she’s pretty awesome

Awesome x awesome. Awesome2

awesome3

Awesome99999999

awesomeinfinity

What is the square root of awesome?

√awesome = asha

You should be the one tutoring me.

maybe in home ec

Sewing? I already know how to do that.

cooking

Asha said she’d teach me to knit.

tuna melts and scarves. you’d be set for life
.

You’d really show me how to make a tuna melt?

if you want. coming to rosie’s tonite?

Depends. Am I welcome?

sure

What about Andy?

i talked to him

AND?????

& he’s cool

Liar.

o.k. you’re not gonna be best friends anytime soon. but he won’t punch you in the face or anything. promise. maybe you could talk to him?

…are you kidding?

nevermind

* * *

Sam’s suggestion for me to talk to Andy sticks with me for the rest of the day. I know he probably didn’t mean it literally, but it makes me wonder about what, exactly, it will take for me to talk again. I know I can’t stay silent forever, but the longer I don’t speak, the less inclined I am to start. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Sam is right. Andy deserves an explanation. An apology.
Something
.

I momentarily consider approaching him when I walk into Rosie’s, but the place is a madhouse. There’s a line of people waiting to be seated, and before I even get to the counter, Dex leans across it and yells, “Asha, we need you, stat!” Which strikes me as kind of funny, like we’re in a hospital emergency room or something. But Dex’s face is totally serious.

“Monday nights are always crazy,” Asha explains as she pops behind the counter. “The dinner menu’s half off.”

“Lou’s on section two. Need you to start seating,” Dex says.

Asha grabs a bunch of menus and hurries toward the greeter stand. “On it!”

“You.” Dex points a pair of tongs at me. “I need you on dish duty.”

I stare at him with wide eyes. Me? Seriously?

“Seriously,” he says. “Andy’ll show you what to do.”

Andy, in the middle of setting a plate of home fries on the counter, stops dead in his tracks. “What?
Dex,
I’m—”

“Whatever you’re doing, it can wait five minutes. Now
go.
”

Dex is really not kidding around. I shrug off my jacket and hang it with my messenger bag on the coatrack before I scoot into the kitchen, up to the big industrial sink. There are dirty pans and dishes and cups stacked all around it, waiting to be cleaned. Andy leans against the sink and irritably blows hair out of his face.

“This—” he starts, grabbing the hose “—is the power spray. It should get anything off of anything, and anything it somehow misses, you use that.” He points to a ratty scrub brush sitting on the sink’s edge. “Spray everything down until it gets all the crap off it. Set the nozzle to Light when you’re doing glass, ’cause this sucker’s strong. When you’re done, throw as much as you can in here.” He pauses to yank open the dishwasher. “It’s a sanitizer. Crank the dial back, and the cycle will last maybe a minute or so. Then you put all the clean dishes on the racks, and when they’re dry, stack ’em with the rest. If you don’t know where something goes, feel free to bother Sam. Not me. Got it?”

Spray, scrub, cycle, dry, stack, don’t bother Andy. I think I can remember that much.

I spend the next two hours on dish duty. Every time I clear the sink, Asha and Lou come by and unload a million more dirty bowls and pans and cups for me to handle, and whenever I do manage to get ahead, I go out and help them bus tables. It’s mindless work, but it keeps me busy, and it gives me a better vantage point from which to watch everyone else. Whenever I stack dishes on the drying rack, I get a glimpse of Sam at the grill, stirring and flipping and frying. He’s so into it.

It’s kind of hot.

I don’t know where that thought comes from, but before I let it go any further, I rush back to the sink just as Lou bursts through the swinging door with an armful of messy bowls.

“Chili, chili, chili.” She sighs as she dumps them next to the sink. “Everyone wants the goddamn chili tonight.”

Even all frazzled, Lou still looks as if she just stepped out of a pin-up calendar, like Bettie Page or something. If Bettie Page wore hot-pink sneakers, that is.

She brushes her thick bangs out of her eyes and looks at me. “You okay? Your face is kind of red.”

I just shrug in response. Not like I’m champing at the bit to explain that I don’t know if it’s the steam or Sam’s vaguely erotic cooking expertise causing my cheeks to feel like they’re on fire.

The worst of the dinner rush ends around nine o’clock. I start putting away the last of the dried dishes when I discover some kind of sifting bowl that I’m not sure where to put away, so I walk up to Sam, who is sponging down the counter, and tap him on the shoulder.

“Colander,” he says, pointing to the bowl. He opens up a cupboard over my head. “That goes here.”

I stand on my tiptoes, trying to shove it in to no avail. Sam gently takes it from me and slides it into the cupboard space. His whole body presses against my back for a moment, arm brushing mine, and my breath catches.

“There we go,” he says softly. He closes the cupboard but doesn’t move back right away.

“I need, like, eight million cigarettes,” Lou moans. The sound of her voice startles me, and I quickly duck under Sam’s arm and hurry out to the front. Dex and Andy refill and swap out the condiment bottles while Asha sits on top of the counter, legs dangling. It would seem inappropriate, except there are no customers left except this old guy in the corner booth, eating a plate of scrambled eggs with coffee. Breakfast at night. People are weird.

“I thought you quit,” Dex says to Lou.

“It’s a process.” She comes up to him and links her arm through his, leans her cheek on his shoulder. “Besides, I deserve a relapse. Tonight was
brutal.
”

“Yeah, but it’ll be fun to count the drawer,” he points out. Lou rolls her eyes.

Asha kicks her heels lightly against the counter. “Chelsea really helped. It would have been way worse without her,” she says, and I shoot a surprised look her way, a little embarrassed.

“I noticed,” Dex says, and then to me, “Thanks for jumping in.”

“You pretty much saved my life,” agrees Lou. “Or at least my sanity, if nothing else. Too bad we can’t have you around all the time.”

Dex twirls the ketchup bottle around in his hand, considering. “Maybe we can.”

Wait—what?

“What do you say?” he asks me. “Want to be our new dish girl?”

The thing is, I
do
like this place and everyone who works here—well, okay, so maybe things are kind of complicated when it comes to Andy—and they all know about the no-speaking deal, so obviously it isn’t a concern. It really shouldn’t be, since as far as I can tell, the duties of a dish girl don’t require much verbal communication, anyway. And maybe it would convince my parents that I’m not only sane but responsible. That I’m displaying maturity. Something they’re always saying is oh so important and that I’m oh so lacking.