Very in Pieces (26 page)

He is right. I've been struggling with this unit, though I ascribed the problem to everything else going on in my life. He looks over my shoulder at what I am writing. “See, you're off to a bad start.”

He explains the problem to me with his hand flat on my notebook. I stare at the veins in his hand, the torn cuticle on his ring finger. Maybe Christian doesn't make me as happy or excited as Dominic does, but he also doesn't make me as angry. And he is here. He is always right here.

“You're not listening,” he says.

It's true; all of his words passed me by. “Sorry.”

“Things, I mean, with you, your things—” It is unlike Christian to be so bumbling.

“There's a lot going on,” I say. I do not want to tell him, do not want to break the spell and jump forward in time.

“I'm still— You can still talk to me.”

“I know.”

He pushes his book away, but I still stare at the pages. I don't want to talk to him about whatever Ramona is doing in her room. I don't want to talk about the dark side of my mother that flashed up when she saw Ramona's work. I can't talk about
Nonnie. I don't want to talk at all.

“I'd rather just sit here doing homework. I'd rather things be normal.”

“Normal.” The word seems to get stuck on his lips.

“Normal,” I confirm.

“I can do that.”

And that's why I love him. Except that is the whole problem: I don't love him. Not the right kind of love anyway. It's the way a person loves their first puppy, but of course that is something I could never tell him, even though at this moment that straightforward relationship is the most valuable one in my life.

Straightforward until I confuse it.

I try to focus on what he is telling me, but all I can do is look at his skin. I know how soft his forearms are, and how rough his palms. It's my fault. I blamed him, but it is my fault we stopped being physical. I stopped seeing him like this, noticing every detail. I reach out and brush my hand against his, like I did in the beginning when everything was new and every touch mattered because the touches could still be counted.

Nonnie and Mom, they always seemed so glamorous, but their glamour was just that—a magician's trick. It was as flimsy and frail as a fairy house made of sticks. I can't live that way. I don't have the mind to create that magical glamour of a world. I don't have the stamina.

Well, Very. I suppose I was just like you.

And so I will stay myself. I will build my house of sturdier
things, of numbers and college acceptances. I will not be that girl made otherworldly by an artist's hand. I am the girl in Christian's sketch, eyes down, concentrating. That is me. To be otherwise is pretending. This haircut is pretending. Dominic is pretending.

I turn my head so I am looking at his face. Yes, it is just like at the beginning, when every bit of him triggered one of my senses. I lean forward, my head tilted. Our lips brush, and then he rocks back.

“I'm sorry,” he says quickly.

“No, I . . . I shouldn't have.”

“It's just too soon.”

“I never meant to hurt you,” I tell him.

“I know. But you did.”

He can't look at me. I look down, too. His hand is off of my notebook. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I never should have come.”

“No, look, it's nothing. It doesn't matter.”

Each word stings more.

He goes on, “Let's just focus on the chemistry. You want a distraction, right? To not think about your problems? So let's just get this set done.”

“I have to go.”

“Very.”

“I have to go,” I repeat while I shove my things into my bag.

“Very—”

“She's dead, Christian.”

He doesn't say anything else, but I feel his eyes on me as I run up the stairs: his stupid, stupid girl running away again.

iv.

Dominic was always the one trying to get my attention, but now I'm the one throwing rocks up at his bedroom window. I hope it's his window. There's a light on and I can see a computer screen glowing. A moment later there's a face behind the glass. He sees me, gives a wave, then disappears. A moment later he's outside in an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey back,” he replies. “Are you okay?”

I nod.

“I heard about your grandmother. Britta told me. I tried calling, but—”

“I know.”

“Let's get away from here. My mom has the place on lockdown since she found out I was skipping school.”

We hold hands as he leads me through his neighborhood. I shouldn't be holding his hand, considering why I've come to see him.

All the houses are dark, though each seems to have its porch light on, winking through the oak and maple leaves. We round a corner toward the old soccer fields. There's a small playground there. Just a couple of slides and a swing set. He sits on the bottom of the wide metal slide and leans back to look at the sky. There's room enough for me beside him, but I don't sit down.

“I know it's late,” I say.

“Hey, you can show up under my window anytime.” That wolf grin, the not-really-him grin, is there. “You know I've
always wanted to fool around in this playground.”

“I'm sorry about the other day. The sex.”

“You're sorry we had sex?” He lifts his head to try to see me better in the dark.

“You asked me what it meant. What it meant to me. And I couldn't tell you. I didn't know. I shouldn't've had sex with you if I didn't know.”

“Hey, Very, things aren't always so simple.” He reaches out toward me, but I stay rooted.

“But I know now. I know I can't be with you.”

A bat careens across the night sky.

“Can't or won't?” He sits up.

Sometimes it's easier to tell someone the lie he believes rather than the truth. Dominic told me that himself. So I don't tell him that I'm confused and that I still don't know if I can trust him. I don't tell him that I want everything and nothing from him. Instead I say: “You were right about me. Mostly.”

“What part was I mostly right about?”

“I thought I could handle this—the ways we are different, who we each are—but I can't.”

He draws his eyebrows together. “Is that so?”

“I just thought you deserved to know you didn't do anything wrong.”

“It's not me, it's you?”

I look toward the swings, which hang still and straight as anchors. “Yes. It's me and my hang-ups.”

“Look, I know we come from different groups, but it doesn't matter.”

“Dominic, I—”

“I can be an ass, I know that. Trust me, I know that. And if that's why you don't want to be with me, then I guess I can accept that. But if it's because of what everyone else thinks of me—”

What everyone else thinks of him: that he's a screwup, a bad seed, dangerous. He is and is not these things, but that's not what's keeping me from him. But that's what he thinks, and therefore what he will accept. “I wish it were different.”

“Then make it different.”

“I have to go. I just wanted to tell you. I'm sorry.” And then once more, as if repeating it will make it stick: “I'm sorry.”

I leave him sitting on the edge of the slide. I hope he looks up at the stars. The clouds are passing over them, shifting and changing, and it's just like the ocean's movement that he loves so much.
Our Ocean.
Maybe there wasn't a specific someone. Maybe he was just looking for someone to share it with.

v.

I fall asleep on the sofa with the red afghan over my face, spider-webbing the world around me. When I wake it is morning, and Ramona stands beside the couch. “Are you going to school?”

“Where's Mom?” I ask.

“Asleep upstairs.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I heard her come in last night. After you.”

I tug the afghan down off of my face. “I'm sick. Take the bus.”

She shrugs and goes out the door. Whether or not she goes to school I have no idea.

I lace my fingers through the holes of the afghan as my mother had done the night before. Who made it, I wonder. Certainly not my mom or Nonnie. Nonnie said she'd learned how to knit for that poem, but never very well. I couldn't imagine either Mom or Nonnie buying it, though.

Ramona could make an afghan. She'd just sit down and do it like it was nothing.

And then she'd probably rip it up.

I want to fall back asleep, but I can't.

I turn my head and see the bar cart. There are crystal decanters with different-colored liquids at various levels. Mom likes the clear stuff, gin and vodka. Nonnie prefers the browns. It has never before occurred to me that this is unusual knowledge for a girl to have about her family.

Cocktails in the afternoon. Parties all the time. But Mom has just been hiding, building up this wall of a perfect life, when inside she is atrophying. And Nonnie is . . . Nonnie was. Nonnie is gone.

I wish my mind would stop its whirling.

I could get drunk. It would be a balancing act. Tipsy might be okay. It could lighten my mood, perhaps. But if I push it too far in the state I'm in, I'll surely end up morose, and might make a terrible decision like calling Christian. Or worse, Dominic. I'm letting go of that false life, the one Mom and Nonnie
were trying to write for me. So no drink for me, no moment of forgetting.

I walk to my parents' room, knock softly, and get no response. Using both hands, I push the door open. Mom is spread diagonally across the bed. Dad is already gone for the day, back to his office to work on his book, as if nothing at home has changed. Maybe he is reworking his résumé, cruising college sites for job listings. Maybe he is having office hours with that Kaitlin girl. I close the door as gently as I can.

Unlike Ramona, I call the school.

“We really need to hear it from the parent, Very,” the attendance secretary tells me.

“My mom's still asleep. She's really struggling with . . . things. I wanted to call before first period.”

She pauses. “Okay, just this once. You've never been in any trouble.”

I hang up before she can ask if Ramona will be out, too.

I don't know what to do next. I've never skipped school before. I don't want to stay home, I know that much. Mom will wake up eventually, and I'll have to talk to her. Only I have no idea what to say.

So I put on sneakers and head out through the garage, where I walk past Nonnie's car and instead pick up this creaky bike of hers. It's an old-fashioned kind, like the one the witch rides in
The Wizard of Oz
, before you know she's the witch, with a wicker basket and everything. I take off toward town. Most of Essex is just beginning to rise. There are kids waiting for the
school bus. The air is warm, but fall is here. I breathe in deeply and smell it.

I ride through campus into town. At an intersection I watch all the people walking by. Students in their ratty jeans and fleece jackets. Professors dress the same, only they wear khakis. Everyone looks like they are from the L.L.Bean catalog, and I wonder if they even realize how much the same they look.

I swerve among the acorns in my path like it is some sort of obstacle course, letting my weight steer the bike toward Main Street. I park the bike in a rack and now I'm just standing on Main Street watching the people go by.

I can smell the food from Ruby's and realize I'm hungry. Inside, I take a seat at the counter, where I order a muffin from an older woman with orange hair. Not bad orange, but clearly dyed. It's poofy and doesn't move when she does. Yet despite all its orange poofiness, it actually seems to suit her.

The only other person at the counter is an older man with a trucker-style baseball cap and an old down vest. The waitresses all wear polyester pants, polo shirts, and ruffled aprons. Most of them are old, but there is one younger girl bustling around in the back room. I bet she hates those polyester pants.

“Here's your muffin, hon.”

I turn around and there is the orange-haired lady, smiling at me and holding the muffin. As she puts it down she says, “You're Veronica Woodruff, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I say, and then add an unusual-for-me “ma'am.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your grandmother. She was
a nice lady. Used to get frappes in here some Fridays with her students. Or alone. We've got a postcard,” she says. She takes a few steps over to the counter and grabs a postcard off a small spinning rack. It's a picture of the town from above and it says, “Essex Is Woodruff Country.”

“It actually sells pretty well. You can have that one if you want. On the house.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

I pick at the bottom of my muffin; I like to save the sugary tops for last.

“I went to high school with your mother.”

“Really?” The woman looks a good ten years older than my mom. And not just because my mom looks so young: this woman looks ten years older than my mom's thirty-nine years. I check her name tag: Allison.

“Uh-huh. You look just like her, hon. That's how I knew who you were. The spitting image except not as splashy.”

Not as splashy.
Somehow I know this is meant to be a compliment.

“I voted for her for prom queen. Some of the girls wouldn't. They said it didn't make sense to vote for someone so new, but I knew they were just jealous. Anyway, she was always nice to me. And she was pretty. And popular. Pretty, popular, and nice—that seems like the perfect combination for prom queen to me.”

Allison and the man look at me, so I agree.

“She didn't win,” Allison says. “I don't think she even went to the prom.”

“So you knew her?” I ask. “My grandmother?”

“Oh sure, both of us did, me and Henry,” Allison tells me. “She used to scribble ideas on napkins and then ball them up and throw them away.”