The Beginning of After (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

W
e live in troubled times, to be sure.

What the hell was that? It had just come out, and now that it was on my computer screen it only made me want to slap myself.

I’d come home straight from school on Wednesday to work on my essay, the clock counting down the final thirty-six hours until I had to submit my application to Yale. Really, I had backed myself further into a corner by deciding I wouldn’t mention my family in any way.

The weekend with David, the afternoon with Mr. Kaufman. I couldn’t process any of it into something I could write about.

Nana kept coming into the den with a can of Pledge and a rag, pretending to dust, but I knew she was checking up on me. She’d already found out that straight-up asking “How’s it going?” did not get a good response.

The blank computer screen was taunting me, the blinking cursor daring me to think up something meaningful and honest.

Suddenly, there was a noise from upstairs.

Bump. Clang.

A low screech, and then a loud bark.

In about two seconds I ran from the den, my heart pounding, afraid of what I’d find.

Sure enough, Toby’s door was open. Masher crouched on the floor with his tail thumping, only his body visible because he’d jammed his head underneath the bed. Bits of fur floated through the air.

“Masher!” I yelled. Another screech and now a hiss from under the bed. He barked in response, and it wasn’t his usual bark. This one was from the gut, all primal.

I clapped my hands twice and called his name again, with no results. Then I dropped to the ground and reached under the bed until I felt his collar, and tugged hard. He whined, and I knew I was probably hurting him.

After dragging Masher out of the room, I shut the door, making sure the doorknob clicked.

“Bad dog!” I shouted.

“Forget to close the door all the way?” called Nana from downstairs, like she’d been waiting for that exact thing to happen.

“I’ve got it under control!” I called back.

I turned to Masher, who looked at me with irritation. I’d denied him some basic dog right.

“You can’t just do that!” I yelled, swatting his muzzle lightly with the back of my hand. “This is not your house!” I took another breath and blurted out, “You’re here because your owner is a crazy loser who doesn’t know what he’s doing with his life!”

Now he seemed bemused, like he knew better and I should too.

Did David teach you that look, or the other way around?

I grabbed Masher’s collar again and pulled him into the bathroom, which I knew he hated. The toilet ran nonstop, and he always barked at the sound of it. I closed the door and went to check on the cats.

None of them were hurt, but Lucky seemed nervous. I lay down on Toby’s bed and she hopped up onto the end of it, looking at me quizzically from above my toes.

“I know,” I said to her. “I know.”

Her eyes narrowed into smiling slits, and I realized she hadn’t been nervous for herself or her kittens. She’d been nervous for me, what with all my yelling.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. She stepped onto my leg and walked up the length of my body, not losing her balance for an instant, and poked her head into my armpit.

I stayed there for a while, petting her, and then it came to me.

I would write my essay about the cats and Dr. B and Eve and the different ways something could be hurt and healed, and what I’d learned from that. I didn’t have to mention my family outright, but they would be there, between the lines. So I went downstairs and sat at the computer.

Lucky the cat is blinking at me with trusting yellow eyes.

The rest of it came out so fast, I had a draft before dinner.

Almost as if he’d known what had happened with Masher, that night David answered my email.

Keep in touch.

I suddenly realized how annoying that expression was. Like,
Now it’s
your
job to stay in contact with
me. It said,
I’m really just too lazy.

I started to write back, to
keep in touch
, but decided I’d be lazy as well.

On Thursday morning I woke up early, did a final pass on my essay, and submitted my application to Yale online with more than twelve hours to spare. Hopefully somewhere my father was saying,
That’s my girl
.

I gave myself a few minutes to feel relieved and proud, then for the tenth time, reread the text Joe had sent me.

sry i mizd u at d dance, hope ur ok.

It had been days and I still hadn’t seen him. I could have done the safe thing and texted him back, but I wanted to talk in real time, live. No backspace key.

I’d visited Mr. Kaufman. I’d finished my college application. I felt kind of invincible.

“Laurel!” Joe said when I called, sounding surprised in a good way.

“Thanks for your message. I’m sorry I missed you that night.”

“Me too,” he said. Then silence. He got stuck so easily with me now.

God, Joe! Talk to me! I’m just Laurel!

“I’ve done a couple of sketches,” I continued. “I’d like to show them to you so I know if I’m on the right track.”

“I’m sure you are, but yeah, let’s get together.” He paused, but I didn’t jump in. I’d done my part and it was his turn. “After school today? Are you working this afternoon? I don’t have to be at the theater until four thirty, and I usually go to the coffee place to do some homework first.”

“I usually show up at four, but I can be a little late. I’ll see you then!” And I hung up, trying not to think of David in the woods, but of Joe. Joe at the dance, dressed like a glorious freak as two different superheroes. In pieces of whatever costumes he could put together at the last minute because he’d decided to come looking for me.

I arrived at the coffee place before Joe and got my chai, then picked a sunny table in the front corner. My sketch pad was tiny compared to his; I preferred to draw out my scenery small first, so I could decide what the important elements were, then let it grow in my head to the point where I had to move to the large canvas.

When Joe walked in, we smiled easily at each other, and I just thought,
Yes
.

Here was someone who was talented and smart, sweet and sensitive. Undamaged. Normal.

I showed him a few of the sketches I’d done over the weekend, and he held up his caricatures next to them to see how well they fit. Two of them looked pretty cool. One was a little off, so I made some notes about how to fix that.

Joe glanced at the clock, so I said, “Do you need to get some homework done? I can take off.”

“I’ll do it on my break,” he answered quickly, shaking his head. “Here, I’ll walk you over to the vet’s.”

On our way down the sidewalk that would lead us to Ashland, Joe was quiet, and the comfortable feeling between us was gone. When we reached the hospital parking lot, he stopped and turned to me.

“Listen, Meg told me that you left the Halloween dance with David Kaufman. She seemed pretty upset about that.”

Well, yes. Clearly. So upset that she felt the need to tell Joe out of spite.

“Was that okay?” Joe continued. “I mean, it’s none of my business. But the last time he showed up at a party, things did not—”

“Go well?” I interrupted him, raising one eyebrow. “No, they didn’t.”

Joe laughed nervously.

“Things are fine now,” I said, and shrugged. “We’re taking care of his dog, some of his stuff. As a favor.” Using the word
we
made it seem more neighborly, less complicated.

I knew what Joe was asking. Was there anything going on between David Kaufman and me? There was no way I could answer that question.

The way Joe smiled now, relieved and protective, made me realize how much he really did like me. And how being with him made me feel the most like
myself
that I had in months.

But I had a question of my own. “Speaking of prom night . . .” I paused to take a deep breath, not looking at him. “When you invited me to the prom. Was that . . . was that something somebody set you up to do?”

Joe frowned, confused. “Like who?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Meg . . .” When I said it out loud it sounded so small and stupid, and I wished I hadn’t said it. “You have to understand that I would think about that. At the time, I didn’t want to know the answer. But now I do.”

Joe looked at me for just a second and had to flick his eyes away to some far corner of the sky. “No, nobody set me up to do that. But I will tell you that if what happened . . . your parents . . . if that hadn’t happened, I probably never would have gotten the nerve.” He paused, then looked at me briefly again. “I know that’s messed up. But I wanted to. I’d wanted to for a while.”

But inside, I started to feel so mad. If he’d just had the guts to ask me out when he first wanted to, maybe this part would have been long over by the time the accident happened. And maybe we could have been strong enough together—why wouldn’t we have been?—to survive those first hellish months afterward.

“You should have gotten up the nerve,” I finally said, trying to spin it with a smile.

“I know. I just kept telling myself I had time.”

“Life is short, Joe.”

A painful look crossed his face. After a few long seconds, he simply said, “You’ll be late for work, and I should get going.”

He bent toward me and tilted his head a bit to glance at me sideways, almost in admiration. Again, that halfway moment when something could happen. That now familiar feeling of
More! More!

Suddenly, I was just so sick of it.

When Joe started to wrap his loose, lazy hug around me to say good-bye, I turned my face up and kissed him square on the mouth. Too quickly, like I’d smacked him. His lips weren’t ready and felt stiff, formal. They weren’t the lips I remembered, but then again, there had been other lips since. Was it that hard to keep track?

Joe turned red and sputtered, “Whoa.”

Then he smiled. So maybe these lips would stick around.

“I’ll see you soon,” I just said, then walked as fast as I could into work.

Chapter Twenty-eight

T
wo weeks went by. Fortunately, I had midterms to study for and my other college applications to start, and didn’t have time to be obsessed with much else. For instance, Joe sending me a text message every afternoon with a proposed superhero identity for one of the teachers.

margulis = algeBrawn!

(Mr. Margulis in the math department was huge and a former bodybuilder.)

It seemed like his way of keeping the status quo, of reserving his spot for something.

At Ashland, Eve set out a straw cornucopia filled with turkey-shaped chocolates on the front desk, and I strung up a
HAPPY THANKS GIVING
banner on the wall. I used the wrong kind of tape and the next day it fell down and got chewed up by a dog. Eve didn’t say a thing about it; she just went out and bought another. So it was, now that she knew about my family. She had become less bossy but less friendly, too; we never went to lunch or even talked about ourselves anymore.

“The first holiday season since the accident will be a tough one, Laurel,” said Suzie. We were down to once-weekly visits. “Let’s talk about strategies.”

So we talked, about trying yoga and me possibly going to some weekend camp for grieving teens. She asked me to start a list in my journal titled “Thanksgiving: Things I’m Thankful For,” and encouraged me to write anything that came to mind over the next few weeks.

I hadn’t told her about my visit to Mr. Kaufman or about smack-kissing Joe. The truth was, I was getting tired of talking about myself. Suzie knew it too. Our sessions were starting to end early, because we’d reach the point of me just shrugging and giving her one-word answers, and she’d say, “That’s enough for today.”

The email caught me unexpectedly on a Saturday, when I was just doing a quick check before heading out to meet Joe at the library.

I started pulling together some phrases in my head to answer him with. Something witty and cute. A joke about minibars? Or beer bottles filled with cloudy hotel water?

But when I read it again, and then again, I realized the email was not asking for an answer. It was just there. A record of where he’d been, like dropped bread crumbs along a trail. So I just let it be, thinking that maybe there would come a time when I’d need to follow those bread crumbs to find him.

And I had Joe to think about today.

The library had scheduled our art show—I felt okay calling it
ours
now—for the second week in December. It was going to be eight pieces hanging downstairs in the community room, where they held story hour and Pilates for Seniors and the book club my mom used to go to.

Joe and I planned to meet there, during a one-hour gap when nothing was going on, to go over sketches once more before committing to ink and paint. “This way, we can see how they might work in the space,” he’d said. But really, it was just a square underground room with white walls and fluorescent lighting. I knew he’d suggested the location because it was neutral territory. Private enough so that nobody would be watching us, and public enough so that certain touching-type things were just not an option.

“Howdy,” Joe said as I came down the stairs to the community room with my sketch pad under one arm. I’d finally gotten a large one like his.

I flashed on how David always began his emails with simply “laurel,” without even a comma or proper capitalization. There was no “howdy” in David’s universe.

Joe was standing with Ms. Folsom, the head librarian, who’d invited Joe to show his artwork. Now, suddenly, I realized that she was his neighbor. It was one of those useless, small-town facts I’d always known but stored away until now, when it explained why Joe was doing all this.

“Hi, Laurel,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I was so happy to hear that you guys are collaborating on this project. We can’t wait to see the results!”

Her eyes danced a bit, and I wondered if my involvement was some kind of extra selling point for her. Maybe she thought people would be more interested in coming to see the art if they knew half of it was by
Laurel Meisner
.

“Thanks,” was all I said.

“I’ll leave you two to work . . . let me know if you need anything!” She patted Joe on the shoulder but not me, and moved past us back up the stairs.

“Good day so far?” said Joe, holding out his hand to take my sketch pad from me. I handed it to him but noticed him cringing a bit. “I’m sorry,” he added. “That sounded like a therapist or something. I was just, you know . . .”

I wondered if there would ever be a time when he’d be able to just talk to me, without worrying that it would come out strange, without his words getting snagged on the Tree of Unfinished Sentences.

“Don’t worry about it. You could never sound anything like my therapist.”

He raised his eyebrows involuntarily.
Oops!
I’d just told him I saw a therapist. As if he didn’t already think I was some fragile Christmas ornament you had to hang up high on the tree so it was less likely to get knocked off.

“Can we put our stuff over there?” I diverted, pointing to a table at the front of the room.

We went through our sketches for the eight pieces. His drawings made me laugh, especially TurboSenior, who looked not unlike Joe himself, and fortunately a couple of my backgrounds cracked him up right back. For the Incredible Sulk—a goth girl with a sour expression doing a karate kick—I’d drawn a frilly pink and green bedroom.

With Joe being so tall, I kept feeling his breath on my neck, smelling of spearmint gum. I was careful not to turn to look at him when I knew his face was close. I couldn’t take the uncertainty of another near-moment.

“I think it’s safe to take this to the next level,” said Joe when we were done.

Now I let myself look straight at him, surprised.
This?
Did he mean,
us
?

“Ink and paint,” he stammered, realizing.

“I’m ready if you are,” I said as lightly as I could.

I heard Joe swallow hard and looked up again.
Don’t be afraid
, I thought loudly, and wondered if I was saying it to myself, or to him.

“There isn’t going to be some chic gallery opening or anything like that,” he said. “But my parents want to bring in some sparkling cider and cheese and crackers on the first night. I thought it would be fun for us to be here, you know, together.”

Joe nervously bit his lower lip. We’d already made out and then I’d kiss-tackled him. Why did this have to be so hard? This was like baking cookies from a premade mix, not from scratch. All the hard work was already done.

“I mean, I’d pick you up, and take you home after,” he finally said.

I smiled at him, saying nothing.

“Like a date,” he added with a smile back at me, then we both took the deep breaths we needed.

When I got home, there was a stack of unassembled cardboard moving boxes sitting outside the front door.

“Nana?” I called, walking into the house.

“Can you grab some of those boxes?” she said, coming down the stairs to meet me. “I had them delivered, but I need your help carrying them in and putting them together.”

After I brought them inside, I watched Nana as she examined the boxes, waiting for her to provide more information. But it seemed like she wanted me to ask.

“What are they for?” I finally said.

“Coats,” she replied matter-of-factly. “You know I do that every year, up in Johnstown. We collect old coats during the holidays and distribute them at the Rescue Mission.”

“Oh, right.”

“So I thought we’d do the same here.” She paused, and swallowed. “With your father’s. And your mother’s. She had so many.” I didn’t say anything, so she also added, “I found a foster children’s group that will gladly take your brother’s.”

Nana went straight to the front closet, opened it, and started rummaging around. “You can keep anything of your mother’s that you want, of course. You should. Some of it was expensive, and it would look nice on you.” She pulled out a long brown cashmere coat that Mom often wore into the city and handed it to me. “Like this one.”

I took it silently, the fabric collapsing into my hands. I raised it to my face and inhaled.

Musty, but laced with flowers and some kind of sweet spice, like cinnamon.

“I don’t think I can do this, Nana,” I said.

She was holding one of Toby’s down parkas, petting it. “I don’t know if I can either, sweetie. That’s why we should do it together and do it fast, before I change my mind.”

“Just the coats?”

“Just the coats. For now.”

I nodded, biting my lip as the tears came burning through, and laid the cashmere coat on the dining room table.

I said, “This will be the Keep pile.”