Watch Me Disappear (24 page)

“Nice driving,” she said, as I stepped out of the car. “I expected you to be more of a grandma behind the wheel.”

On the last Thursday in February, Maura wants to get a new outfit for the weekend. Apparently she and Jason have big plans. I wonder what that means, since all they ever do is sit at Jason’s house, drinking, smoking pot, and making out. Sometimes they order pizza or Jason asks Maura to take him to the drive thru at McDonald’s.

“You know Jason’s life is just so different from mine,” Maura says, looking through racks of dresses at Forever 21. “When I suggested we go out this weekend, you know, on a real date, he was totally baffled. It’s not like he and his mom ever go out to a nice restaurant, and he’s never really had a girlfriend before.”

I wonder if Jason thinks of Maura as a girlfriend.

“This is cute,” I say, holding up a plaid shirt dress.

“What, like for a farmer?” Maura says. “I’m thinking more along these lines.” She pulls out a black and silver tube that looked more like a small scarf than a dress. “I could wear a cute shrug and my knee-high boots,” she says.

“Right,” I say, trying to imagine sitting down in such a tiny scrap of fabric.

“So anyway,” she continues, “he has no idea, like, how to treat a woman.”

The word “woman” in this context actually makes me laugh, but Maura just ignores me.

“It’s occurred to me that the best course of action is to show him what a girl likes,” Maura says.

The comment sounds dirty, but I know she means that she wants him to take her out on dates and show her off. She wants him to be her boyfriend in public, not just her bed buddy in private. I think she’d be better off looking for someone who wants the same thing she does, because I’m pretty sure Jason likes their current arrangement just fine.

“I have reservations at Angelo’s and I thought after we could walk down to Café Paradiso for dessert. It’ll be really romantic.”

“You’ll be cold,” I say, eyeing the dress again.

Maura shakes her head. “Then he’ll have to keep me warm, won’t he?”

*          *          *

Friday afternoon, Missy catches up with me at the end of physics. I am trying to race out the door, but I’m not quite fast enough.

“Hey,” she says, sneaking up beside me, my short legs no match for her long ones. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” I say, keeping my head down, walking pointlessly fast.

“Let’s hang out. We can go see a movie,” she says.

I don’t answer.

“Lizzie,” she says, stepping in front of me so that I have to stop. She grabs my arm and moves to the side of the hall against the lockers, out of the way of people rushing or dawdling to their next classes. “I’m so sorry that I’ve been so busy lately. I’ve left you a few messages, but I guess maybe your parents haven’t given your phone back yet?” I had told her weeks ago that I lost phone privileges, but I never bothered to tell her when I got it back.

She stands there, her big green eyes looking searchingly at me, apologizing for not seeing me, when all the while, I have been avoiding her. She probably really has been busy between indoor track, the insane amounts of work teachers are piling on us in an attempt to keep us from senior slide, and, of course, the love of her life—Paul. Maybe she really hasn’t noticed that I’ve been avoiding her. For a smart girl, she can be pretty dense.

“Yeah, I’ve been busy, too,” I say.

“I thought you were coming to study group this week for sure. I mean, we have a test Monday,” she says, biting her lip.

“I had to get the car home,” I lie.

“Oh.”

“I gotta go,” I say, stepping around her into the middle of the hallway, which is now mostly empty. I pause and look over at her. She has her lips pressed together in a look of confusion and disappointment. “Call me, though,” I add. She smiles and I head up the steps.

*          *          *

Saturday night I drive myself to Missy’s house. Right before I leave my house, I consider putting the charm bracelet on. I dig it out of my closet and look at it, then I shove it right back into the closet.

As it turns out, her parents have plans for the evening, which means Missy has to stay home to babysit. She promises it will be fun anyway. She has it all figured out. We’ll order wings from some pizza place, rent a couple of movies, and maybe bake cookies. She doesn’t suggest I sleep over.

We play with the baby for a while, but before too long, Lucas is yawning in that adorable baby way, and Missy picks him up and gets him ready for bed. I stay downstairs, waiting for the pizza delivery guy, nervous for the first time since we met to hang out alone with Missy.

The food arrives and we sit on the couch, hunched over the coffee table, eating and half watching
Entertainment News
. Though we sit only a few feet apart, it feels as if there’s a chasm between us. Missy makes small talk about the stories on TV, and that is as painful as the silence—even the night we met, we never needed any kind of small talk.

The moment I had been hoping to avoid comes after we eat. We go to the kitchen to load up the dishwasher. Missy puts the plates away and then starts taking out the ingredients for cookies. Cookies—like the wings we just scarfed down—are not a part of my diet as prescribed by Maura, but that isn’t the worst of it.

“You know, Lizzie,” she says, plopping the flour canister on the counter. “I’m worried about you.”

I can’t even bring myself to look at her.

“It’s just, you know,” she says, brushing a stray hair from her forehead, “I know you’ve been hanging around with Maura a lot, and—” She pauses, looking at me for a moment and then looking away. “I know you don’t care what Paul thinks, but he knows Maura pretty well.” So she and Paul have discussed this, have discussed me. I wonder where Paul is at the moment and why they aren’t spending Saturday night together. Maybe they plotted this heart-to-heart. Maybe Missy knew all along her parents weren’t going to be home, that we were just going to sit around her house, and that she’d be able to talk to me, privately, about things she knew I didn’t want to talk about. Then again, I remind myself, Paul doesn’t care about me at all.

“Maybe I’m wrong about Maura,” she says slowly. “I might have just gotten a bad first impression. But I don’t think so,” she says, talking more quickly now, “because Paul has known her for years, and he feels the same way.” She looks at me, waiting for some kind of response. I don’t have one.

“I know I haven’t had a lot of free time, and I haven’t been a great friend, but you don’t have to hang around people like
her
.”

“So what,” I say, “I’m supposed to go through life with one and only one friend, and when she’s too busy, I’m supposed to sit home alone?”

“No! It’s not like that. Of course I want you to have other friends. I just think,” she pauses again, picking her words, “you could do better.”

“Do you think we could skip the cookies?” I say. “I’m not hungry.”

“What? Oh!” Missy looks at the butter, flour, chocolate chips she set out. “Sure, yeah.” She puts things away.

“Do you remember at the battle of the bands, when Paul was the one who came forward to claim Maura from the drunken mess she’d created?” I say.

“Sure.”

“If he disliked her so much, why did he do that?”

“Because that’s Paul,” Missy says. “Because he’s too nice to just stand by.” Her voice has taken on a defensive edge.

“Right,” I say, thinking about just how nice Paul can be when he wants something.

“Look,” Missy says, “Paul knows her and understands her. It’s not like he hates her, or anything, but, it’s just, he thinks she’s, you know, unstable.”

“Well, she’s been really nice to me.”

“Good. I’m glad. I mean, if she’s being a good friend to you, then I’m glad.”

I trace circles on the countertop with my finger, waiting to see if she has more to say or if we are done with this miserable conversation.

“
Pretty in Pink
?” Missy says, putting the butter back in the fridge, and heading back to the living room.

“Who’s in that?” I ask, trying to remember if I’ve seen it before.

“Oh my God,” Missy says. “Tell me you’ve seen it! Molly Ringwald! All the brat-pack movies are my mom’s faves.”

“Oh.”

We are only a few minutes into the movie when my phone starts buzzing. I grab it off the coffee table and look at the screen. Maura. She is supposed to be on her big date. I glance at Missy.

“Be right back,” I say, flipping open my phone and scooting out into the front room. “What’s up?” I ask quietly.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Missy’s.”

“I need you,” Maura says. Her voice is high and shaky.

“Aren’t you with Jason?”

“Yeah, but…” she breaks off and I hear her gulp down a sob. “My car…”

“What happened?”

“Jason was driving,” she says, hiccupping, “and he went too fast around a curve.”

“Are you okay?” I say, trying to stay calm, wondering why she’s talking to me and not, say, the police or her parents.

“I’m okay, but he blew a tire,” she says sniffling. “He hit the curb.”

“How fast was he going?” And whatever possessed you to let him drive your car, I wonder.

“I don’t know,” she moans. “What should I do?”

“Don’t you have a spare?”

“Yeah,” she says, blowing her nose.

“So, tell him to change it.”

“He doesn’t know how.” She starts crying again.

In my experience, there are few things tough guys like Jason like more than fixing cars, so I am pretty surprised he doesn’t know how to change a tire. My father insisted I learn—it was one of the few lessons he gave me to prepare me for getting my license. I’m not sure I can actually change a tire on the side of a road, but I have done it in the driveway, with my dad’s help. “Call AAA,” I say.

“Should I?”

“You have it, right?” I say.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, where are you?”

She tells me the address. It isn’t far from Missy’s house.

“Can you please just come here?” she asks, pathetically.

“Gimme a few minutes,” I say, hanging up the phone.

I turn around to see Missy standing in the doorway. “Everything ok?” she asks.

“It’s, uh,” I stall, trying to think of a good lie. “It’s my dad. He had a little accident.”

“Is he ok?” she asks, looking unconvinced.

“Yeah,” I say, moving past her into the family room to get my shoes and sweater. “But the car,” I say my voice trailing off. “My mom needs me to come home.”

“Of course,” Missy says. She picks up my bag from the floor and hands it to me and we walk out to the hall, where she gets my coat from the closet. I look at her as I turn to close the door behind me. Her eyes are brimming with tears. My lie is an invisible wall between us. We both know it’s there and we know now that any effort to break through it is futile. “Call me,” she says. I just nod and turn around.

Chapter 17

They had pulled the car into the dirt at the side of the road along a stand of trees. Maura is inside the car, which is running. She’d freeze waiting outside. Jason sits on the front bumper smoking a cigarette.

Maura gets out of the car and the smell of alcohol hits me the minute she throws her skinny arms around my neck.

“Are you drunk?” I ask, pulling away from her, wondering why I had defended her not an hour ago to Missy.

“They totally just served us without even blinking,” Maura says. Instead of sounding sorry, she seems pleased that she passed for twenty-one.

“Both of you?” I ask.

“We just split a bottle of wine,” she says. “It’s not like we’re drunk.”

Maybe Jason can handle a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, but Maura—I know how little she’s been eating, because I know how little I’ve been eating. It suddenly makes sense why she let Jason drive the car in the first place.

“So you know how to change this bitch?” Jason says, dropping his cigarette stub and coming around the side of the car.

I look down at the ground. It has been warm the past few days and so instead of a hard, frozen shoulder, Maura’s car is sitting in mud. My jeans are relatively new and spotlessly clean. I do not want to change the tire, and even if I wanted to, how would I explain my filthy clothing to my mother? “I can walk you through it,” I say, looking him in the eye.

He just crosses his arms and spits out of the side of his mouth.

“You blew the tire. You can change it,” I say, wondering again why I left the home of the best friend I’ve ever had to deal with this nonsense.

“Lizzie,” Maura says, stepping toward me. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “Please.”

She’s so pathetic I wonder how I was ever intimidated by her.

“Jason can do it,” I say, “or you can call your parents, but I am not going to kneel down in the mud to fix this.” The feminist in me bristles. I’m not a girly girl, and I am acting like I’m too prim to change a tire, like I need a man to do it (although I’d hesitate to call Jason a man), but I’m not going to be a pushover who does Maura’s bidding whenever she calls. If she wants to be my friend, then she needs to know my limits.

Maura turns to Jason. We both wait, our breath hanging in the air in white clouds between us.

“Screw it,” he says. I open the trunk and reveal the donut and tools. In the end, I’m not sure I could have changed the tire. I don’t know if I could have loosened the nuts. But Jason, if nothing else, is strong. It takes no time at all. Both of them must feel like incompetent morons for needing me to come help them.

When he’s finished, Jason walks to the driver’s side and gets in.

“Are you kidding me?” I say. “He just blew your tire driving like an asshole. Are you seriously going to let him drive?”

“I can’t drive,” Maura whines. “What if I get pulled over?”

We stand there for a minute. “Well how are you going to get home from Jason’s if you can’t drive?”

“I’ll wait,” she says. “You know, until I sober up.”

Yeah, right, I think. There is no way she is going to hang out at Jason’s and sober up. Being at his house means more drinking.