The View from the Top (11 page)

He looked back at the cantaloupe brains.

Yes, they were going to be sorry.

When Matt got to Anabelle's house, her dad was lying in a half-full kiddie pool reading the paper.

“Hey, Karl,” Matt said, trying to hide his post-run wheezing. “Anabelle home?”

Karl jolted up, the bottom half of his paper dipping into the shallow water. “Matt!” he cried, messily folding the unwieldy pages. “Long time no see! Yeah, she's up in her room practicing. Go on in!”

“She by herself?”

“Yeah, the girls are out with Marnie.” Karl lifted the brim of his sweat-stained, sun-bleached Normal baseball cap and faked a menacing look. “But I'm not budging, so don't you go trying anything.”

“I won't.” He really wouldn't. Anabelle had never felt comfortable messing around in her room. She said it was too weird to do stuff right near where her sisters slept. And aside from that, her place was so small and old you could hear every little creak no matter where you were in the house.

Matt climbed the stairs, relieved to know Anabelle was home. And alone.

He found her sitting on her perfectly made bed under her poster of Thelonious Monk in a kids' wagon. She was hunched over the keyboard with big bulky headphones plugged into a Walkman—who used a Walkman anymore?—wearing that baggy red hoodie of hers, the one she'd stolen from her dad. When she saw Matt she stopped playing and pulled off the headphones. But she didn't come to greet him. No hugs. Just a quick “Hi.”

Well, no hugs from him then, either. Matt sat down on the corner of the bed. “What're you playing?” he asked.

“It's Schubert,” she said. “Piano Trio in B-flat.”

“Anabelle,” he said, scooting closer to her on the bed.

“When—” No, he couldn't just ask her when she was going to start being honest with him. When she was going to come clean about whatever the hell was going on with Jonah. If he just accused her, she'd never open up.
You've gotta
lead up to it, he told himself.

“When what?” she asked, her eyes getting squinty.

“When are you going to start playing meaningful stuff?” It was unrelated to Jonah, but something he'd wanted to bring up with her for a long time.

“What're you talking about?” She swallowed hard. “This is meaningful. To me, it is.”

“But I mean, when are you going to start composing? Making your own music?” He hit one of the black keys sharply and she flinched. “That's why I got you this thing.”

“I don't know,” she said, shutting off the keyboard. “I'm not really interested in that.” She held up the Walkman. “When I figure out stuff, I almost feel like I did create it.”

“But it's like if I copied a Van Gogh, instead of trying to be the next Van Gogh. You could be the next Van Gogh, too, but for piano.” He could tell he was making her feel bad. But in a way, he felt that she deserved it. Because even though she wasn't with Jonah right now, she'd definitely been all over him lately. And was probably out late doing God-knows-what with him last night. And that was not how a girlfriend should behave with her boyfriend's best friend.

Anabelle inhaled so hard he could hear her nose whistling. She looked out her window, then back at him, then up at the ceiling, then out the window again. She got up and shot over to her sisters' beds and curled up on the bottom bunk, hugging an enormous pink stuffed rabbit—one of the many animals Anabelle's dad bragged about winning for her at balloon darts when she was a kid. She buried her face in the bunny's matted fur and started to sob. “I think we should maybe...”

“Speak up,” he said, raising his hand to his ear. “You think we should maybe what?”

She pulled the rabbit away from her lips and looked him dead in the eye. “Maybe break up, Matt. Okay? Was that loud enough for you?”

Wait, wait, wait. Break up?
Break up?
This wasn't supposed to happen. He was supposed to get mad at her; she was supposed to apologize. And then things were supposed to get back to the way they were. They weren't supposed to end. And even if they did, it wasn't supposed to be her dumping
him.
Back when they'd started dating, he could've had his pick of girls, but she was nobody—a loner. Now, just because some other dude was paying attention to her, she thought she was better than him?

He tried to make his voice steady, calm. Calm enough to make her see that he could be rational, that breaking up was not the answer. “You have to tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened,” she insisted, tears rolling down the sides of her nose.

“If you're saying you want to split up, something definitely happened.”

Anabelle squeezed the rabbit against her chest and sniffled. “You wouldn't understand.”

“I'll kick his ass.” Matt rose to his feet and slammed his foot into the bed frame. “I swear to God.” He didn't really intend to fight Jonah—Jonah was bigger and would probably beat Matt. But he liked that when he said it, it sounded like he meant it. Like he was a guy who could actually pull off that kind of thing.

“Don't,” Anabelle said, now full-on crying. “Please.”

“Then tell me.” Matt sat back down beside her and she pulled back slightly.
Wow, she's afraid of me,
he thought. Good, maybe she'd quit whatever was going on with Jonah.

“All that happened,” she said, staring him down with her red-rimmed eyes, “is Jonah and I snuck into one of the McMansion pools.”

“I knew it,” he snapped.

“Lexi was there, too,” she added quickly. “The three of us went.”

“And...?”

“And nothing. We swam, someone came out of the house, we left.”

“Then what? Lexi says you never came back.”

“Well... yeah.” Anabelle backed slowly into the pile of stuffed animals in the corner behind her. “Lexi took off,” she said. “And Jonah and I hung out on the beach for a while talking. Just talking, that was it.”

“And that's what convinced you you should dump me?”

“No. It's actually something I've been thinking about. Maybe talking to Jonah helped me to see things more clearly. But I promise, I'm not dumping you for him. It's not like that.”

“You're attracted to him, though.”

“No.” She said it so emphatically it had to be a lie.

“Come on, admit it. It's obvious.”

“Okay, yeah, if that's what you want to hear, I think he's good-looking and all that. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. Everyone does.” She was clenching and unclenching her fists. Her knuckles were white. Four white mountain peaks. Plus the sad thumb knuckle, all low and rounded and off on its own. “Matt, I wouldn't be doing this if it was just about having a fling with someone else,” she said, looking down at her feet. Her toes were curled under. They had knuckles, too.
There should really be a poem about knuckles,
he thought.
How they're a reflection of our emotions.
“It's about you and me,” she continued. “And I can't do it anymore.”

She burst out crying again. Hard. There was heaving and wailing and snotty snorting. “This is the hardest thing in the world I've ever had to do. Can't you see that?”

The crying was either a manipulative way to cover for cheating on him, or she was telling the truth about Jonah. The way she was bawling right now, he kind of believed her. But still, even if nothing physical had happened, Matt couldn't help feeling like Jonah must've said something to make her want to end things. Why else would she suddenly decide to do this? There had to be more to it than what she was telling him. In one way or another, there had been a betrayal.

“You know what?” he said. “People don't cry like this. They don't cry like this unless someone died.” He realized as he said it that he was repeating something his father had told him during the divorce. It was something that had just made him cry harder, and it had the same effect on Anabelle.

God, this was a mess. He needed a drink. A hit. Lots of hits. How had things gotten this bad? Did they really have to break up? He didn't want to. He wanted to tell her he was sorry. For whatever he had done. For getting her so worked up. He couldn't imagine life without her.

He wrapped his arms around her shaking shoulders, pulled her head to his chest, rubbed his fingers against the ridge on the back of her skull the way she liked. He felt her muscles relax a bit. “You really want to break up?” he asked.

She nodded and barely audibly said, “I think so.”

“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

“Probably not.”

“It's just, it's a big decision. One we shouldn't make so quickly.” Matt looked her in the eye, wiped away her tears with his thumbs. “Look, I know I'm an asshole sometimes. I can work on that.”

He offered her the bottom of his shirt to blow her nose into. The snot came out all clear and a little bubbly. He told himself to remember later to cut out that bit of the fabric once it had crusted up and use it in a collage.

“This sucks,” she said. “I don't know what to do.”

Good, it sounded like her mind wasn't totally made up. He had to get out of this room, though. Someplace where he wasn't being watched by teddy bears and figurines and other cute little-girl things. “Can we, like, go for a walk or something?” he asked.

They didn't say a word to each other as they walked. But there was no need to say anything; they both knew they were heading toward the cemetery. The little one on the hill with eroding headstones so old they were slanting into the earth at odd angles. It was the place they'd first kissed. Where they'd made snow angels. Where he'd read to her from William Blake, e. e. cummings, and his favorite, Charles Bukowski. And on days when he was feeling brave, he'd lay her head in his lap and read to her from his notebook. He wished he had a poem for her right now about why she shouldn't leave him.

The sky had clouded over into a Rothko-esque slate-blue color field, saturating the graveyard with prestorm hues: the green of the grass, the white of the birch trunks, the yellow of the dandelions. As Anabelle and Matt silently climbed the hill, he picked a dandelion bouquet for her, and when they reached the top, he presented the flowering weeds to her with both hands, in the same pose as the sculpture he'd made on her jewelry box. He hoped she'd get the reference.

As she took the dandelions, she gave a knowing smile. A sad smile, but knowing nonetheless.

They sat down on their favorite bench in the shade of a few trees, their papery bark peeling like pencil shavings. Thunder grumbled in the distance.

“I don't know what to say,” Anabelle said, tying the stem of one dandelion around the head of another.

“We don't have to end this,” Matt told her. “We can make it work.”

“How, Matt?” She added another flower to the chain.

“How will we make it work when we're in different states?”

“We won't see each other as much as we do now, but we'll visit.”

“I'll probably have lots of homework. It'll be hard.”

“I can drive out and see you. It's only like ten hours or something.”

“But I might have so much work that I won't be able to spend much time with you. And then you'll feel bad.” Anabelle tightened the knot on the next stem, and in the process popped the head off the last dandelion. “And you'll take it out on me.”

She was making him feel like such a monster. Didn't she get that his anger over not showing him enough appreciation, his jealousy over Jonah, was all about how deeply he loved her? Wasn't that obvious? “I just wanted to prove that people can do it,” he said.