Yesterday (3 page)

Derrick’s expression shifts from slightly sheepish to incredulous. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Freya?”

My eyes dart to my cable-knit sweater and then my jeans and casual winter boots. Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?

“You look like a model,” he adds. “You must get guys staring wherever you go.”

Derrick’s not kidding but his explanation comes as a shock. I know Shane considered me pretty but it’s not like I had guys lining up at my door to ask me out in New Zealand. I’ve always been the kind of girl who blended into the crowd.

I take a sweeping look around the room, eyeing up the other girls in my class. Maybe I’m better looking than a few of them—I don’t have braces, acne, or frizzy hair—but I’m nothing special. As I’m scanning the room, thinking this over, my gaze collides with a dark-haired guy’s in the row ahead of me. Caught, he fixates on Mr. Payne talking about worksheets and quizzes at the front of the room.

A similar scene plays out during history class last period. Guys staring. Some girls too. Most of them avoid my eyes when I zero in on theirs but a couple of the boys are bold
enough to smile at me. It’s bizarre to have this attention out of nowhere; I’d feel out of place enough without it but now, more than anything, I don’t want to stand out.

I look exactly the same as I did when we left New Zealand two and a half weeks ago—it doesn’t make sense for people to see me differently—and as soon as I’m home again I track snow into the hallway, tugging off my coat, gloves and scarf as I approach the mirrored sliding closet door. Olivia, already back from school, has the TV on in the other room and I hear a siren wailing and pretend cops shouting as I focus on the image in the mirror.

Of course I know what I look like. Slim. Just shy of five foot nine. Dirty-blond hair. Fair skin. Straight teeth. No scars. The mirror doesn’t reflect anything other than my usual self.

“What’re you doing?” my sister asks, coming up behind me.

“Nothing. I thought I had something in my eye.” I lean closer to the closet, pulling one of my eyelids down and scrutinizing my eyeball like I’m searching for a stray lash or speck of dust. “It must be gone.”

I twirl around to study Olivia. I never noticed how flawless she is compared to other people, like she won the genetic lottery. Symmetrical, blemish-free, each part of her body in perfect proportion to the rest. Her hair’s dark and curly where mine is light and straight and her skin tone’s closer to olive than ivory. Even her eyes are darker than mine—navy
blue to my pale aqua. You probably wouldn’t guess we were sisters if you didn’t know us. We really don’t resemble each other much.

I don’t know why it should come as a surprise to me that Olivia and I don’t have the same hair or eyes. Why does my entire life suddenly feel so alien to me? Can my father’s death really account for all of that?

“
Laverne and Shirley’s
going to start in a second,” Olivia says, like she’s offering the best news either of us will hear today.

A smile jumps to my lips, despite my confusion. My sister and I have both transformed into absolute TV addicts since being back in North America. But that’s one thing I’m actually not worried about. The television stops me from thinking, blocks out my sadness and the feelings of strangeness that cling to this new life in Canada. Could it be that I need to stop fighting the strangeness and simply surrender? What would my father advise if he were here?

I know the answer to that one as well my own name.

He’d say, “Trust me, Freya. This is for the best.”

And maybe being home is what’s right, even if I don’t feel that yet.
Give it time
, I tell myself.
You just lost your father and moved across the globe. Disorientation is normal. Stop thinking so much and just let things be
. I’m not as convinced by my own words as I want to be but I follow my little sister into the family room, curl up in an armchair and give in to the higher power of television.

B
y Tuesday my teachers are already assigning hours of homework and by Wednesday I half expect to find myself sitting alone at lunch because while Christine and Derrick are two of a kind I’m more like an unnecessary third (and broken) wheel. But they’re too nice to try to get rid of me, despite our pronounced differences. Maybe they sense that although I don’t fit in with them I don’t really fit in with anyone else at school either. Not the preppy kids, not the jocks, not the metalheads (Derrick’s word), not the honor-roll kids and not even the nerds.

As I approach the cafeteria I wonder if I should plop myself down at some other random table and release Christine and Derrick from what they likely see as an obligation, but that would feel like giving up. As if I’m prepared to spend every lunch hour of the semester alone, no one to gossip with or bitch about my classes to. Just sitting hunched over my food solo, the object of silent stares.

In some ways that would be easier. I wouldn’t have to pretend to anyone at school that I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong place. But what’s the point of being here if I don’t speak to anyone? In the end I think it would just make me feel even more lost.

Listening to Christine try to educate me on the merits of new wave music is better than sitting across from an empty chair and I gladly take the handful of tapes (by The Cure, The Smiths and Depeche Mode) she lends me in the hopes that they’ll improve my musical taste. As I’m shoving her tapes into my purse with one hand and holding my chicken burger with the other, Derrick asks where I lived before. I guess he’s trying to get to know me, find some common frame of reference, but it’s not a good subject for me and I give him a severely condensed account of my family history. “We were in Auckland, New Zealand, where my dad was working. He was killed in a gas explosion on the way home from work.”

The story’s more involved than that but the more I say the greater the likelihood that my throat will close up around the words. A somewhat longer version of events goes like this: A woman my father worked with was having car trouble that afternoon and my father helped her out by dropping her off at home. It was my dad’s tragic luck to be pulling into her driveway when a gas leak inside her house caused an explosion. The newspaper said the sky lit up and the whole house collapsed in the blink of an eye. The car was destroyed in the blast too, my father and the woman from his office along with it.

The bottom line is that my dad went to work one morning as usual but never came back and for several seconds Christine and Derrick are too stunned to say anything. I can’t stop blinking into the silence, my mind hanging on those golden days at the beach in Valencia with my father years ago: swimming on my dad’s back, building worlds in the sand with him and stopping for gelato breaks to help fight the heat. I’d never seen ice cream melt so fast. It poured down between my fingers like a glass of milk. My father’s too. Watching the ice cream landslide made us laugh as we lapped at our gelatos, struggling to beat the sun.

The sense of loss drills deeper inside me. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again.

“I’m so sorry,” Christine says finally, her lips twitching as she frowns. “I had no idea.”

“No one does.” I put down my chicken burger and fiddle with the zipper on my purse. “And I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“
Of course
,” Derrick murmurs with such sympathy that I’m afraid he might tear up. “Changing topics—uh … what’s with the tenth-grade field trip to the museum next week? The museum’s something you do in fifth grade.”

“Better than spending the day here, though, isn’t it?” Christine says. “I’d rather stare at dinosaur bones and mummies than sit in math class.”

I nod in agreement. My diminished attention span won’t matter on a field trip.

After wolfing down the rest of my chicken burger and
fries I have to go back to the lunch counter to buy chocolate chip cookies to carry me through the next couple of hours. Christine, who is on the pudgy side, shakes her head at me when I return to the table with the cookies. “How can you stuff your face like that all the time and stay as skinny as you are?”

Even with Derrick having mentioned my appearance two days ago, I’m taken aback by her comment. “Bulimia,” I quip after a brief pause.

Christine’s eyes pop like I’ve dropped a second dark surprise in her lap. She tosses her head back, relieved laughter spilling from her lips as she realizes I’m not serious. It’s just then that the blond guy who showed me to my homeroom and locker on Monday grazes my shoulder. “Hey, can I talk to you a second?” he asks.

My eyes seek out Christine’s—she looks as quizzical as I feel—before I face the guy again and tell him yes. I can’t imagine what we have to talk about but I squeeze out from my space at the table and follow him to the noisiest corner of the cafeteria where Derrick and Christine have told me that the jocks sit. I already recognize some key members of the different cliques thanks to Derrick and Christine. They’re not the only tenth-grade new wavers at school but for some reason they don’t seem to speak to most of the others.

The blond guy stops and stands with one arm against the wall, smiling at me. I guess Derrick and Christine would characterize him as a jock but I don’t even know whether he plays sports.

“I stopped by your locker this morning but you weren’t around,” he says, right hand slipping casually into the front pocket of his jeans. “So, how’s it going?” He stares at the spot we left behind, Derrick and Christine’s location across the room. “What are they like?”

I shrug, thinking about my cookies, wishing I’d brought them with me. “What are
you
like?” I ask, meaning who is he to question me about Derrick and Christine when I hardly know him but he takes it in a different way, like I’m flirting.

“We should hang out sometime so you can find out.” His blond bangs flop forward as he tilts his head. “There’s this party thing my friend Corey’s having on Saturday night.” He pushes off the wall and taps a finger to his lips. “Want to go with me?” He squints at me with his mouth closed and in that second he does look sort of interesting—kind of intense.

“You don’t even know my name,” I say.

He blinks, reclining back against the wall. “Of course I know your name, Freya.”

I wasn’t the one to tell him and the mix of uncertainty and curiosity I’m feeling comes out sounding blunter than I mean it to. “Well, I don’t know yours.”

The guy’s mouth falls open for a split second before he clamps it shut again. “Okay, it looks like I’m doing this really badly,” he says. “I’m Seth—Seth Hardy. If you talk to Nicolette in your history class she’ll tell you I’m an okay guy. She’s Corey’s girlfriend. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find a way to talk to you and I thought the party could be a good place for us to get to know each other better.”

I exhale slowly, multiple thoughts coursing through my brain at the same time. My father’s gone forever. I don’t understand this place. I’m starving. Something’s missing here … something aside from my dad, something I can’t put my finger on. And do I actually want to go to this party with Seth or not? From my place in the fog I can’t tell, but he was the first person at school who was nice to me. It could be that going to a party with him would be like watching TV—a decent way of distracting myself.

“I have to ask my mom,” I tell him.

“Cool.” Seth nods, his grin returning and his hazel eyes twinkling. “Tell her you’re going with a bunch of people if that helps. I can bring Nicolette with me when I pick you up.”

He says that like I’ve already agreed, which irritates me a bit, but I walk back to Derrick and Christine without contradicting him. The two of them glance guiltily up at me as though they’ve been talking about me behind my back since the moment I disappeared. “Seth Hardy likes you,” Christine intones. “
Prepare to be popular.”

I roll my eyes at her and chomp into one of my cookies. Who says I want to be popular? I just don’t want to sit alone in the cafeteria.

It’s not long before lunch is over but two periods later Christine and I have math together. I get there first and snag the desk next to hers just like I did yesterday so it looks like it’s mine for the duration of the semester. Our teacher, Ms. Megeney, has feathered Princess Diana hair and is wearing
a blouse with an ultra-ruffled collar that flaps like a wing whenever she moves. The second I see it I know Christine will have something funny to say about the blouse. I keep watching the door, expecting her to zoom into class with her head down at any minute, but it never happens. The entire period goes by and Christine never shows.

I feel a momentary buzz of concern in my stomach that I can’t explain (she’s probably just cutting class and forgot to mention it). Since I don’t have Christine’s phone number there’s no way for me to check on her or pass on the math homework. I don’t see her again until the next morning on my way to homeroom—a vision in black elbowing her way through a group of slow-moving students in the hallway.

“Hey,” she says tonelessly as she emerges from the crowd.

“Hi.” I balance my books against my hip. “You missed Ms. Megeney’s blouse yesterday. It was the star of math class.”

Christine nods vacantly, like she’d completely forgotten about the existence of math class. “Sorry I missed it.” I watch her jaw harden and it’s the strangest thing but I feel as if I know approximately what she’s going to say before her mouth can form the words. “The guidance counselor, um, pulled me out of history class to tell me my mom was in the hospital.”

“The hospital?” I repeat. Although logically I couldn’t have had any inkling, I’d swear the idea was already in my head. “Is she okay?”

Christine nods but her eyes are anxious. “Yeah, she’s
fine. It was nothing serious. She’s already back at home.” Maybe it’s Christine’s tone that suggests the final part of her answer is true, at least. Though I’ve never been to her house I can vaguely imagine her mother there, like the pictures you form in your head when you read a novel. Not a face or anything, just a bathrobe and slippers, a hazy image of feet moving slowly across a carpeted floor.