A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (17 page)

“This is going to happen!”

“This is going to happen!”

It wasn’t just because of her; it was that this was the first time I had really felt in a good way—not just in a terrified panicky way—that we were going to do this play, that it was really going to work, that nothing would go horribly wrong and we could get to that place where the months of hard work and the splinters and the late nights vanished, and you were left with the raw energy of having created something that didn’t exist before. We bounced up and down, and smiled stupidly at each other, and Heather twirled around on the concrete in her socks, and—

It wasn’t my idea. I don’t think it was hers either—it just happened, my lips against her lips and her hand around my neck.

I heard footsteps upstairs and leaped back, and we stood frozen, staring at each other as if neither one of us had the slightest clue about what to do next.

A door slammed. Someone called out, “I was just leaving, bye!”

I looked at my feet.

“I should go,” Heather said. She glanced down at her wrist like she was checking the time, but she didn’t have a watch on.

“Are we going to talk about this?”

The corners of her mouth tensed up. “Nothing happened. Forget about it.”

“But don’t you think—” I forced my voice back down. Even though we were alone. Even if we wouldn’t be overheard.

“I finally feel like I have a friend again,” Heather continued. “I don’t want things to get awkward between us.”

“And the way to keep things from getting awkward is to stop talking about them.”

Heather looked at me just long enough to show a tight-lipped smile. “We’re trying to save Julia’s play. And that is what we’re going to do. Everything else can wait until we’ve got that part figured out.”

“You’re right.” I smiled too hard, artificially. But the ground shifted under me. She understood this strange crusade. She fought for it. She made it impossible for me to keep quiet forever about how much I liked her.

I
could not sleep.

It was a better bed than I had had for weeks, except for the few times I’d let myself splurge on a motel, but my mind was whirling too fast for me to do anything but stare up at the ceiling and count very fast sheep. Sheep on methamphetamines.

In the morning, I rode over to Pedal Power to ask about the sign in the window. To see if they wouldn’t mind some temporary help, just for a couple of days, so that I could save up a little more money for my rapidly dwindling funds.

The manager was a hippieish-looking guy whose hair had almost faded to white, but remained tied in a short ponytail.

“I’m traveling,” I explained, “but I might be hanging around here for a while. That bike out there? I’ve been from Chicago to here on it. This one hasn’t given me too much trouble. I’ve just had to change flat tires and tighten cables and adjust the derailleurs a little. But my last one was used, and I had to figure out how to fix the brakes, true a wheel, adjust the fit after I grew an inch. And put streamers on the handlebars, of course. I know what I’m doing.”

This is how I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon putting bikes together.

That kept my hands busy while leaving my head free to try to work through everything.

I needed the money, if I was going to keep going. No matter how I tried to keep my expenses down, there was only so long I could eat on babysitting money, and I was coming to the end of it too fast. I still had a long way to go, and any number of emergencies might come up between here and California. And there was Maggie, and I didn’t want to leave just yet because I liked her, and I wanted to wait just a little and see what happened.

But it made me nervous too. This wasn’t part of the plan. I couldn’t let myself get off course.

It was just for a day or two. That wouldn’t set me back far.

After I was done, I went over to the Market to see Maggie again, and I told her about my new job. “Which is just a temporary thing,” I hurried to add. “A couple days.”

“All right then,” she said tentatively. “Mi futon es su futon.”

And that was how things were.

I’d seen the people I knew lose their heads for love before. Lissa acknowledged, when pressed on it, that staring at the back of someone’s head was not the most efficient way to tell someone that you liked them, but didn’t actually seem able to put it into practice. Jon would drop out of our lives for a week or two at a time and completely lose the ability to talk about anything but the object of his affection. Most of all there was Julia, who had relayed to me every conversation she had with Ollie, so that we could divine whether he liked her or LIKE liked her or what, and so that I could squeal with her. I wanted that with a strange, distant ache—and I didn’t want it. Didn’t want to act like I’d been hit in the head with a box of bricks, didn’t want to stop caring about everything outside our little dyad, didn’t want to care that much and hurt that much.

Well. Box of bricks, meet Cassandra. I wish that I could say that I deliberately decided to risk the things I knew weren’t wise. That was what I’d said to Maggie, and what I wanted to believe was true. But all it was, was this: For the first time in months I felt
okay
, I no longer felt untethered from the whole world, and I didn’t want it to end. Even as I was counting up the days—seven days, eight, nine—and thinking that I must be pushing my schedule, I did not know what else to do.

Everything seemed so new, and everything seemed so temporary, like I had to memorize all that I wouldn’t see again. But the ordinary rhythms of one day after another made it seem long, and when the TV shows repeated themselves and I realized a week had passed, I didn’t know whether to think that was longer than it seemed or shorter.

The linoleum in the kitchen was cracked and the Laundromat served two-dollar beers on Tuesdays, and it still seemed like fantastic luxury to me. I had long scalding showers every morning. I stayed up late watching bad TV, woke at noon, and didn’t get dressed until I had to go to work. Maggie brought ripe peaches from the Market, and purple tomatoes, and big dark grapes, after weeks of energy bars and fast-food value meals. And everywhere I went, I smiled in secret.

I felt decadent and dissolute and bad, and I loved every minute. Of course, it was all ridiculous. I felt all abuzz with mischief and sex and drugs when we were doing nothing more than sneaking cans of PBR and kissing on the futon.

How I loved being ridiculous.

“Silly girl,” Maggie said, and ruffled my hair. And I
was
silly. But I couldn’t tell her why, couldn’t tell her that this was my first time gone head over heels for anyone, my first time out on dates. It was my first time seeing someone’s chest rise and fall in a darkened room since Julia had stayed over at my house in March.

I still had the bottle of orange nail polish she’d accidentally left there.

I’d forgotten about that nail polish for weeks. But that Thursday night, when Maggie was working a late shift at the Market, I started digging through my things, looking for it and not finding it, pulling out compartments inside compartments. I had to find it. I could see her, in my mind, bending over my hand and brushing the polish onto my nails. No, that wasn’t that last time she’d stayed over at my house—it was other times, when we were younger and not a bit self-conscious, and nail polish was still on that boundary between the things we were allowed and the things that were still just a bit too grown-up. I suddenly felt so far from that person I used to be, and lost, and frightened.

Finally my fingers fastened on to the little glass bottle, so cold and smooth on my skin.

I stared at it for a few moments just to be sure. Then I got some toilet paper from the bathroom, and spread out my fingers, and started carefully painting each nail in turn.

This was something I’d done only a couple of times before, and I always forgot it wasn’t as easy as it looked. I kept getting bits of orange on the skin around my fingernails, the tender places I used to nibble when I got nervous. I just managed two slightly messy layers before I got annoyed with the whole thing and decided to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich and check my e-mail on Maggie’s laptop.

I didn’t expect anything. But there it was, from Oliver, who hadn’t sent a word to me in all the weeks I’d been on the road. I stared at it, imagining all the terrible things that could be there, until finally I managed to click on it.

 

 

It was just that little thing. Eight sentences, no grand emotions or dramatic speeches. But I looked away. I shut down the computer. It was something I couldn’t face.

I didn’t know why he kept trying to get in touch with me, calling me before I left, calling me on the road, this e-mail now. He wasn’t sorry about anything, didn’t admit that he’d done anything wrong, so what was this? Trying to get an apology out of me, or just a compulsion to pick at wounds that had barely scabbed over?

I wasn’t sorry about it anyway.

He didn’t have any right to Julia’s ashes.

I didn’t take them from him. Not exactly. But there was a beginning of a plan, an agreement that whenever Julia’s mom decided what to do with her ashes, me and Jon and Oliver would be included in that. When I rode my bike over to her house and told her about what I was going to do, and that I wanted to take Julia’s ashes with me, and she said that it was all right—that whole time, I knew exactly what I was taking away from Oliver.

When he found out, he stopped speaking to me at school. And I wasn’t even sorry. So how could he write to me like this, carefully emotionless, faking worry?

You must be in New Mexico by now
. If I’d kept going, where
would
I be by now? Oklahoma at least, maybe New Mexico, maybe even Arizona and it didn’t matter anyway. It was just lines drawn on a map, but it was something bigger than that too. And I had stayed in this town for so many days now promising myself that I would leave.

The door creaked open, and I started. Like I’d been caught doing something wrong.

“I feel like ice cream. There’s a good late-night place in the next town over,” Maggie announced. “We can drop off our clothes at the Laundromat, go, and get back with enough time to put them in the dryer.”

“Sure,” I said. I was eager and cheerful and hungry for ice cream—like that dog who was limping over to press her head up against Maggie’s pants. But suddenly I felt annoyed with myself, for all the times “Hey, let’s—” turned into “Sure” without me thinking it through any further than that.

It’s not that she pressured me. Even though she’d said she wasn’t going to take responsibility, she treated me like a little young delicate thing. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or reassured by that, so I settled for sleeping chastely nestled in her arms.

I just wanted to be who she wanted me to be, and do what she wanted me to do, because it was better than being miserable and trying not to think about Julia. But I wanted to say no too. Just to prove that I could.

Still, I couldn’t say no to ice cream for no good reason, and after already saying yes. So we drove to the next town over, and we got ice cream cones, mint with strawberries and chocolate chips mixed in.

“You painted your nails,” Maggie said.

“Yeah.” I curled my fingers around—why? It was too late to hide it, or be embarrassed about it, and there was nothing to be embarrassed about anyway. “I mean, I know it’s messy, I don’t really know how.”

“I like the color.”

It was not an orange I’d ever have chosen myself, but I liked it too, because Julia was bold enough to wear bright orange nail polish and pull it off. I wanted to remember that about her.

We were quiet as we drove back to the Laundromat. And when I sat down beside her, watching our clothes spin around in the big dryer, I realized it was the third time I’d been here. That was just because I’d packed light, with as few clothes as I could get away with, and not caring until now if I wore a shirt three days in a row. But still, Oliver had e-mailed me, expecting me to be in New Mexico—

“I probably should get going soon,” I said. It didn’t mean anything. I’d said it so many times now. It was what I said when I didn’t know what to say.

There was a made-for-TV killer-insect movie on the Laundromat TV, and three kids were shrieking at each other chasing around the narrow aisles.

I always started summer vacation with a thousand different passions and ambitions, and then one day I felt like sleeping in, and another day there was something good on TV, and suddenly it would be halfway through August without me having accomplished anything.

I saw what was happening. But I wasn’t doing anything about it, and the little squeak of shame inside me somehow made it even harder for me to do anything about it, because I had to look at it before I could do anything.

And I liked it this way.

It wasn’t so hard all the time.

“I’m not stopping you,” she said, which is what she always said. Kindly, without any judgment in it.

“Yeah, but you’re not—”

Before I could finish, she frowned, and drew away from me. I looked around like mad for some way to erase the last minute. The nothing that I’d said was too much. “Never mind.”

“Would you be happier if I threw you out or something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I could see a scowl pulling at the corners of her lips, I could see her trying not to get angry, or at least not to sound angry.

“I’m not doing anything to keep you here. You can’t care that much, you barely know me.”