Yesterday (4 page)

The main thing is that her mom’s okay and by lunch Christine seems back to her regular self. She and Derrick bug me about the party (which I still haven’t asked my mom about) but pretend they’re joking. I act disinterested, which isn’t hard, but when I slide Christine’s Smiths tape into my stereo later that night and lie on my bed listening to lead singer Morrissey’s special brand of acute misery, my head hurts with such a vengeance that I think I’m going to be sick.

I roll onto my back, hanging my head over the side of the bed as Morrissey sings, “So you go, and you stand on your own and you leave on your own… .”

On your own.

Alone.
It’s how I always feel lately. Alone or out of place.

And now it seems a song understands me better than anyone on the planet does. “How Soon Is Now?” is the saddest, most painful thing I’ve heard. Worse than the day my father died. Like an infection that will never heal.

Crippling loneliness. The certainty that you don’t belong.

The suspicion that maybe you never will. I hang my head and wait for a stream of sickness that doesn’t come, feeling ancient as I listen to the rest of “How Soon Is Now?”— ancient and empty— and then I slink downstairs and bury my head in my mother’s shoulder as she stands at the kitchen counter chopping carrots. She swivels to fold me into her arms, rocking me wordlessly for what could never be long enough.

I pull away fi rst. Both our eyes are a messy pink because she misses my father too. Only whatever’s wrong with me isn’t just about my father. My tears now aren’t solely for him but I can’t say that to my mother.

“Your grandfather’s coming for dinner on Saturday,” my mom says, sniffl ing back the rest of her sadness.

Saturday.
The night of Corey’s party. I’d nearly forgotten to talk to my mom about it for the second night in a row and when I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay with me going I’m honestly not sure whether I want her to say yes or not.

Just before dinner on Saturday my grandfather asks many of the questions about the party that my mom forgot to pin me down on earlier and I have to call Seth to get Corey’s phone number and address to hand over to her. “What class did you say you share with the girl you’re going to the party with tonight?” my grandfather pries as we sit at the kitchen table, him occupying my father’s spot.

This is another detail my mother may have honed in on if she were feeling better but there’s a lot on her mind.

Sometimes I think the constant support of her friend Nancy and my grandfather are the only things really holding her together. That should make me more patient with my grandfather’s questions and it probably would if I’d grown up around him, but aside from the last few weeks my memories of him are sparse.

I frown at my mom directly across from me, wishing she’d make him stop, and then plunge my fork into my la sagna. “History,” I mumble. If my mom knew there was a guy involved she might have wanted to meet him. I made things easy for all of us by leaving that part out.

My grandfather scratches the end of his nose and scrunches up his eyebrows. “Do you know many of the other kids who will be there?” he cross-examines.

Mom lays her right hand on her father’s arm. “It’s okay, Dad. Freya will be fi ne. She knows she can call me if she needs to and you’ll be home by midnight, right?” Midnight was my party curfew in Auckland and Mom turns to me for confi rmation.

“For sure.” I bob my head, grateful for her intervention.

“If not earlier.”

“I don’t think I want to go to parties when I’m older,”

my sister claims, her eyes sullen and both her elbows on the table exactly like they’re not supposed to be. “Teenage parties always look dumb.”

“That’s just from the movies and TV you’ve seen.”

Annoyance creeps into my voice because Olivia has a habit of saying stupid things just to get a reaction. “You’ve never been to a real teenage party so how can you have a clue what they’re like?”

My grandfather laughs and when I shift my gaze to him to fi gure out why, he remarks, “Typical sibling rivalry— one says left and the other says right.”

My head twinges right behind my eyes and I set down my fork and rub my forehead with two fi ngers. I haven’t woken up with a headache since Wednesday but the pains still come and go. They make me want to shut my eyes and hide out in the dark. Crawl backwards out of existence to whatever came before.

Crazy, Freya. Who the hell thinks things like that? Only people who need to be on serious amounts of medication.

“You still getting those headaches, Freya?” my grand father asks. “Maybe Doctor Byrne should have another look at you.”

Doctor Byrne is the Toronto physician my grandfather set my family up with when the three of us came home with a nasty fl u. He drove out to suburban Brampton to make a house call for us because he’s also a close friend of my grandfather. My grandfather wants us to become Doctor Byrne’s permanent patients, despite him working out of the city. Ever since we got back he’s been stressing that he has absolute faith in Doctor Byrne and that we’d never fi nd a better physician.

“You okay, hon?” my mom asks, worry in her eyes.

The pain’s disappeared with the same swiftness it arrived and I let my hand fall away from my forehead. “I’m all right. It’s probably just a little eyestrain. They dumped a lot of homework on us this week.” I shovel another forkful of lasagna between my lips because the hunger, like the headaches, is a constant in my life. The tip of an iceberg that I’m trying to ignore.

After dinner Olivia and I do the dishes and then I go upstairs to shower and get ready for the party. It’s almost nine-thirty when Nicolette knocks at my front door. I drag her inside to introduce her to my mother and soon we’re hurrying out to Seth’s car, Nicolette climbing into the backseat so I can sit next to Seth.

They have two bottles of rum in the trunk and when the three of us get out of the car at Corey’s house Seth lights a cigarette and hands me one of the bottles to carry. Then he opens Corey’s front door without knocking and Nicolette strides past us into the house, looking for her boyfriend.

Some kids I vaguely recognize from school, and many I don’t, are sprawled out on the living room furniture while a swarm of others dance in the middle of the room to the sounds of Prince’s “1999.” Seth leads me along the hall and into the kitchen where a second crowd is standing around drinking out of paper cups. We deposit the rum on the kitchen counter and then Seth cups his hand around my ear so I can hear him over the sound of the music. “I forgot to tell you to bring your skates,” he says. “Corey’s got a rink out back.”

“A rink?” I repeat.

“Yeah.” Seth points to the sliding door at the back of the kitchen. I lope over to it, Seth a step behind me, and peer into the backyard, which, sure enough, sports an ice rink of about thirty-by- forty feet. Six guys are playing hockey in their jeans and coats, fl ying over the ice. Several summer folding chairs (three of them occupied by girls cheering on the game and another few empty) wind around the rink.

I haven’t been skating since I can’t remember when and I turn my back to the sliding door and say, “That’s okay. I don’t think I know how to skate anyway.”

“Don’t
think
you know, huh?” Seth smiles wide enough for me to see his braces. “You’d think that’d be the kind of thing you’d know about yourself.”

He’s teasing, trying to be cute, but he’s also right. I should know whether I can skate and I don’t. There’s a blank space in my mind where that info should be, just like the blank about Alison’s favorite band.

Seth and I are standing close together so we don’t have to shout to compete against the music and he plants a hand on my waist and leans in nearer still to kiss me. He tastes like spearmint gum and smoke and the feel of his mouth on mine is warm but unfamiliar. For the life of me I can’t compare Seth’s kiss to Shane’s. Tonight feels like the very fi rst time I was ever kissed.

How
can
that
be?
Shane and I kissed tons of times during our two months together. At the local swimming pool, crammed in the backseat of his car, curled up on my parents’

couch. Not to mention the few stray kisses I had with other boys at parties before I met Shane and after we split up.

As Seth and I ease apart, Nicolette interrupts my thoughts by approaching with Corey in tow to introduce him. Before I know it she’s leading me around to meet people with names like Sheri, Lisa, Denise, Tonya, Ron, Mike, Terry, Jennifer and Justin and shortly after that I’m sipping rum and Coke from a paper cup and standing behind Nicolette in the line for the upstairs bathroom, with no clue what’s become of Seth.

“I think he’s playing hockey,” Nicolette tells me, which makes me grin dazedly because I hadn’t realized that I’d wondered about him out loud.

“Wow,” she says, giggling, “your alcohol tolerance is worse than mine.”

I don’t remember drinking before.

I don’t remember skating.

I don’t remember my best friend’s favorite band.

I don’t remember what it felt like to kiss my ex-boyfriend on the mouth.

And I’m still smiling at Nicolette because it’s so stupidly ridiculous, trying to lose myself in sitcoms, paper cups and a jock guy with braces. As though any of those things can really help me. If it was that easy to make me feel normal again I wouldn’t need to be here.

Once I get out of the bathroom Nicolette’s gone. I spend a couple of minutes searching for her and then another couple of minutes staring out the sliding glass door at Seth charg-ing around the ice in pursuit of the puck. A tower of paper cups is stacked on the kitchen counter next to the alcohol and I pour myself another rum and Coke (is it my third or fourth?) and wander into the living room. Paul Young’s singing “Everything Must Change.” I sway to the music, fi ghting the sadness welling up inside me.

Why does everything have to change? And when was the last time I felt connected to the things around me?

“Hey, gorgeous,” a voice sings into my right ear. I swivel towards the voice, expecting to stare into Seth’s hazel eyes.

But there’s some other guy standing next to me, eyeing me up from head to toe. He’s taller than Seth and wearing a T-shirt that shows off sizeable biceps. “I’m Matt,” he says.

“What’s your name?”

“Freya,” I drawl, the alcohol in partial control of my voice.

“Fray-ya,” he pronounces, nodding after the fact. “Do you want to dance with me, Fray-ya? It looks like you like this song.” Matt steps closer to me, sliding his hand around my waist to guide me into the middle of the room, where the other dancers are.

I take a single step forward, my defense mechanisms working slower than usual because of the alcohol too, before stopping to pry his hand from my waist. “I’m here with someone,” I tell him.

“Figures.” Matt frowns, his arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

I guess not. Truthfully, if I didn’t feel so adrift maybe I’d be sort of fl attered. While it’s weird to have people I don’t know staring at me in class it pumps up my ego to have guys chase after me for a change. I don’t know how to account for it, but maybe I don’t one hundred percent hate it all the time.

I spot Nicolette edging her way through the crowd towards me as Matt’s slinking away. She bumps my hip and exclaims, “There you are! Come dance with us.” By “us” she means herself and three of the girls she introduced me to earlier.

We whirl in time to the music, our arms in the air and the crowd feeling like they’re closing in on us, making me hot and a little dizzy until the other strange feelings catch up with me and begin to take over. I consider weaving through the crowd and out to the rink to make Seth kiss me again, just to stop them. But it doesn’t matter how much I dance or how many times I kiss Seth Hardy— I know the feelings will always catch up.

I
don’t belong here.
I’m not like the people around me.

Each and every memory I have of dancing with friends in muggy rooms, giggling as we point out cute boys, fl irting in dark corners with the ones we might like enough to kiss, is paper-thin, with no emotional weight or dimension to it.

Strip back the surface and I’m a blank slate. It’s as though I’ve never in my whole life felt at home
anywhere.

I take an unsteady step back, easing my way out of the circle of dancers and into the front hall where I spy two girls in bright eye shadow and skintight jeans making a beeline for the door. One of them has bloodshot eyes, like she’s recovering from a crying jag. “Dave’s an asshole,” the other girl claims with a vehemence that sends a globule of spit soaring from her mouth. “We should key his car.”

“Wait!” I call, striding forward to intercept them. “Are you leaving? Can you give me a ride home?”

The sad girl’s chin wobbles. It’s her friend who answers me. “We can give you a ride— as long as you don’t care if we key the shit out of someone’s car fi rst.”

I don’t care at all. This place and every person in it feel twenty times realer than the majority of my memories but regardless, nothing that happens here tonight feels as though it has anything to do with me.

I arrive home early, with the taste of bubblegum in my mouth (the sad girl gave me a piece to hide alcohol breath).

My mom’s lying on the couch waiting for me and wanting to talk about the party. I mention the dancing and the guys playing hockey on the ice rink and say it was okay but that I miss my old friends.

This feels like what I should say. I can’t tell her how most of the things that happened before we returned to Canada feel hazy and that the things that have happened since don’t seem right either. I don’t want that to be true.

My father doesn’t feel vague or blurry the way New Zealand, Alison and Shane do. His image is as vivid in my mind as my mother’s is. He has the kind of face that turns to stone when he’s angry, thinking that he’s not betraying any sign of emotion. When I was younger I used to hate seeing that blank expression aimed at me because I knew it meant he was supremely displeased. He wasn’t the type to shout— he rarely raised his voice— but having my father mad at you felt a little like losing a sunny day. And when my dad was happy the world seemed like a better place. If he were here with us now, would I still feel lost? Would I remember everything the way I should?