Why Can't I Be You (4 page)

I
stood in the
lobby, holding the earring gently in my palm, trying not to crush it, while I looked around for Myra. Blue dress. Dark hair. Thick bangs. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I walked into a banquet room to look for her.

I’m just going to give her the earring and go, I thought. Without the mess of mascara on my face, she’ll realize I’m not really her long-lost friend. No one looks that much like another person.

The room was empty. Across the back wall a big banner read, “Welcome Home Wildcats! Mount Si Class of 1999 Reunion,” and posters that looked like blown-up pages of a yearbook hung on every other wall. I’d graduated a year after them, but my class reunion was two years ago. Who has a thirteen-year reunion?

Someone had gone through with thick, bright markers, like the ones that are supposed to smell like berries, but really just smell like toilet cleaner, and drawn doodles on all the posters. Hearts, stars, unicorns, and big red
W
s that I supposed were for “Wildcats” littered the pages, and the reunion status of each student was scribbled underneath their name in round, balloon-like high school script: “attending,” “not attending,” “out of contact.”

I found Myra on the first poster. Her last name was Aberly. “Attending! Yay!” was written under her name, along with a goofy smiley face with bangs like hers. There were four Heathers before I even got to the
G
s, so I had no idea who Myra called from my room.

Morgan, I thought. That was the name Myra had said on the phone. Jessie Morgan. I followed the posters across the walls, through Collier and Finley, Kapovi and Linden. The pictures could have been from my high school. Flannel shirts and scrunchies, black choker necklaces. Every other girl had Rachel’s haircut from
Friends
, and only one or two of them actually had the hair for it.

Finally, I found Jessica Elizabeth Morgan. And she did look like me. It was eerie. Her hair was lighter and slightly orange, and her eyes were a funny color—brown but with a weird greenish tinge. Fake contacts maybe, or bad color balance in the photo. But she had the same smile, the same apple cheeks I’d had in high school, which, thankfully, turned into actual cheekbones as I aged. She even shared the slightly too big ears that I never did quite grow into and had the same light freckles across her nose, which was larger than mine but absolutely adorable. Her nose gave her character, and I hoped, even though I had no idea who she was or where she was, this Jessie Morgan girl never got the nose job she’d so desperately wanted. I hoped, wherever she was, she was happy and had someone to love her and wouldn’t ever feel the humiliation of getting dumped at the airport.

She was wearing a black top or dress with spaghetti straps. One of the straps had fallen off her shoulder, and I was thankful that the photo was cropped before it revealed exactly how much cleavage she was showing the camera. Underneath the picture, next to her name, was written “out of contact,” with a big pouty face next to it. Someone had crossed that out and written “ATTENDING!!!!” in bright red ink that was still fresh and smelled, indeed, like those big fat fruit markers. Myra must have just written it, and my heart broke for her when I thought about confessing that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan. I reached out and touched the picture of Jessie.

“God! Remember us with the Sun-In?” Myra called from across the room as she walked over to me. “We were, like, addicted to that stuff.” She put her arm around my shoulder. “Of course, I was scared Grammie would find out, so I just had that one streak you could only see when I wore a ponytail.”

I hadn’t been allowed to use Sun-In as a kid. My mother would have flipped. But I remembered when Angela Nathans spilled an entire bottle of it on the bus on our seventh-grade overnight trip to Philadelphia. Right at the beginning of the trip. When the bus got hot, it got worse, so every time we left—to see the Liberty Bell or Valley Forge—we came back to a bus full of baked Sun-In.

“I’ll never forget that smell,” I said.

“I know! Me either,” Myra said, laughing. “It still smells the same.” She stepped away to smooth down the corner of the poster. “You’re going to think I’m a freak, but every once in a while I take a whiff from the bottle when I see it at the drugstore.” She looked up and stared at my face. I was positive she would realize that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan, but she just smiled. “It reminds me of you and me and Karen.” She looked away for a second. “I never thought I’d see you again,” she said, and let out a little gasp or a sob or something—I couldn’t tell what because her head was turned.

“I found your earring,” I said, holding out my hand to her. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I needed to get out of there. I couldn’t pretend to be someone Myra had been missing for thirteen years, or however long it had been since Jessie Morgan left.

Myra reached up to her ear. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “That would have sucked! They were Grammie’s.” She took the earring from me and skillfully stuck it back in her earlobe. “She died last year.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Myra smiled. “Remember how we used to go over to her house after school, and she’d always have frozen Thin Mints and those little plastic barrel bottles of orange drink?”

I laughed. “I remember those bottles! The stuff inside always tasted the same, no matter what the color was.” I don’t know why I wasn’t telling Myra the truth. It was awful of me. It was fraud. But it felt so familiar to talk with her, to reminisce about things, even if we really weren’t talking about the very same memories.

“Your eyes look so different without those green contacts,” Myra said, studying my face. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to find me out or not. “No one had the heart to tell you that they didn’t make your eyes look green. They just made them look weird.”

I remembered how desperately I wanted blue contacts when I was a kid. My mom told me my eyes were too dark for them anyway. Where was Jessie’s mom? How come no one told her she couldn’t drink sugar water or spray chemicals in her hair or wear colored contacts? I wondered what it must have been like to be Jessie Morgan.

“We should go,” Myra said. “Or we’ll hit traffic.”

I knew it was wrong, but instead of confessing to Myra that I was actually Jenny Shaw, I said, “I guess I don’t have to call shotgun if it’s just you and me, right?” Back in high school I never bothered to call shotgun—I was usually just happy to be invited along for the ride on the rare occasion that one of our neighbors offered to drive me home from school—but I’d wanted to shout it. The word always stuck in my throat like a big lump. I’d spent most of my high school social interactions with that same kind of lump in my throat, tears just about to spring up in my eyes.

“Ha!” Myra said. “Remember that? You and Karen used to fight!” She grabbed her purse from behind a plant in the corner of the room. “I’ll finish setting things up when we get back.”

“I can help,” I said automatically, like the part of my brain that was supposed to think before it let me talk had been completely disabled.

“O
h my God!
You know what I have?” Myra said, after we got into her rusty old Honda. She reached up to pull a disk out of the CD sleeve attached to her visor.

“What?” I asked, as I buckled myself in to the passenger seat. The buckle took a few tries, and there were crumbs and little bits of gravel in the upholstery. It felt familiar. Like my car. No matter how hard I tried to keep it clean, my car always ended up filled with random dirt and cereal-bar wrappers.

“This!” She shoved the disc into the CD player. The opening chords of “Bust a Move” thumped through the car’s ancient speakers. “Bust it!” Myra shouted, laughing. “Oh, come on! Don’t pretend like you don’t still love this song!”

“‘Love’ is kind of a strong word,” I said, laughing, “but I do remember most of the words.”

Myra bounced around in her seat while she drove, stumbling over the words as she sang along. She was so comfortable with me, and even though I knew it was because she thought I was someone else, her level of comfort made me feel comfortable. When the song got to the part about Harry and his brother Larry, I chimed in with Myra until our singing degraded into a fit of giggles.

The song ended, and we fell into a lull of looking out the window. It must have been a mix CD. The next song was that weird one by Crash Test Dummies. I hadn’t heard it in years. The fog had cleared and there was a mountain on the horizon where I hadn’t even imagined a mountain would be.

“So, he really dumped you at the airport,” Myra said.

“Yeah,” I said, watching for more surprise mountains as we got closer to a giant Tully’s sign at the edge of the city. “There’s someone else.”

“But you’re Jessie
Effing
Morgan,” Myra said, adamantly. “Doesn’t he know that?”

“Apparently not,” I said. I bit at the tough skin on the side of my fingernail without thinking about it. It was a bad habit, but I almost never did it in front of other people.

“I’m sorry. I won’t make you talk about it,” Myra said.

“It’s fine,” I said, sliding my hands under my thighs. “It’s not like pretending it didn’t happen is going to make it go away.” I shouldn’t do this, I thought. I shouldn’t use this girl to work out my problems. But I couldn’t stop myself. “The thing is—I’m not sure I know who I am without Deagan. I never wanted to be one of those girls, you know? The kind who plans her whole life around some guy.”

“But you thought he was so much more than some guy,” Myra said, waving her right hand around enthusiastically. “I know. I’ve been there.” She sighed. “Remember John Hayes?”

“No,” I said, forgetting completely that I was supposed to be Jessie Morgan.

“Yeah, I guess maybe you wouldn’t. We didn’t really get to be friends with him until after you left. But, oh my God, the summer after graduation, I fell so hard. I gave up a scholarship to the Fashion Institute in New York for that boy. I went to school here instead.” She shook her head. “He said all the things I wanted to hear, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do know!”

“He said he wanted to marry me. We got engaged. I had a ring. And then right before junior year, he said he was bored. He decided he was going to transfer to Fairleigh Dickinson, and he moved to New Jersey without me, like he wasn’t even leaving anything behind.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I told him I’d try to transfer, so I could move with him. And he said—get this—he said, ‘I think things have run their course.’”

“What an ass!” I said. “Run their course? What is it with guys and their stupid breakup statements?” I told her about Deagan and his exploratory mission.

Myra laughed. “Don’t they realize that the stupid shit they say when they dump us will live in our heads for all eternity?”

“They must be completely oblivious,” I said. She was right too. For the rest of my life, whenever I thought about Deagan, all the memories I had of us would be replaced by the image of him in bed with Faye, wearing a pith helmet, exploring.

“I can practically still hear it. ‘I think things have run their course.’ Like I was all chewed up and ready to be spat out.”

I wondered why Jessie Morgan wouldn’t know anything about Myra and John—why she left Mount Si right after graduation. She didn’t even stay for the summer. And if they were such good friends, why didn’t Myra call to tell Jessie about her heartbreak?

“He’s coming to the reunion,” Myra said, her voice wobbling. “He’s bringing his wife. I mean, I know I should be over it. It was a long time ago now, but whenever I think about having to see him, I just get angry.” She wiped the corner of her eye with her sleeve. “I gave up too much for him. And then, of course, he came home for the next two summers, and I was stupid enough to think, both times, that it would last longer than just the summer. Like he’d actually stay for me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I thought about how I would feel when I got back to Rochester, running into Deagan and Faye at Wegmans. Seeing them out at the Lilac Festival, holding hands and sharing a funnel cake. I felt the dread in my stomach. Everything about me, all my friends except Luanne, revolved around being Deagan’s girlfriend, and I felt so incredibly stupid for letting that happen.

“And I can’t act like it still stings all this time later,” Myra said. “That would be completely pathetic.”

“Maybe he’s bald,” I said. “Or fat. Or smelly.”

Myra laughed.

“Maybe his wife is bald and smelly too,” I said. “And, hey, she married him. That’s far more humiliating than getting dumped by him, right?”

“Thank God you’re here.” She looked over at me and smiled. She had the nicest smile. Her eyes sparkled and her dark red lipstick framed her perfectly white teeth. One of her incisors was crooked, but even that looked like a stylistic decision on her part. “I’ll simply be too busy with my dear old friends to bother with John. Even Fish has promised to completely ignore him.”

“Fish?” I wished I had studied the yearbook pictures in the reception room better. Although I was sure I would have remembered seeing a picture of someone named Fish. It had to be a nickname. I tried to remember if I’d seen Fish written in marker or a drawing of a fish next to any of the pictures, but I couldn’t.

“Oh my God! He’s going to die when he sees you. I’m not telling him you’re here. I told Heather, of course, but I think we’ll surprise Fish.” She had the hugest grin. “Ah! Thank you so much for being here, Jessie. I mean, I know you’re not here just for me, just so I have the full group to face John with—but what a relief, you know?”

“It’ll be fine. And you look fantastic,” I said to her, for lack of anything else to say. “Isn’t that the best revenge?”

“Yes,” Myra said. “Plus, I still have all my hair.” She lifted her arm and sniffed her pit. “And I’m not smelly either.”