For Ever (3 page)

“Hi!”

My heart leaps into my throat before I
realize the voice behind me must have been directed at someone
else. If there’s one thing worse than answering someone’s unspoken
question, it’s waving back at someone only to realize the person
was waving at somebody else. But just to be sure, I turn slightly
in my chair and see a girl standing directly behind me. She’s
average height, like me, with wavy, light-brown hair. Her brown
eyes shift to the left when I make eye contact.

“Um, hey. You just started here, right?” she
asks.

I nod cautiously.

Stupid bet. I’m going to kill
Josh
.

I’m about to ask who Josh is when I remember
she never said anything out loud. I smile and try not to look like
I’m scanning her brainwaves.

“I’m Wren.”

Okay, weird name
.

Her thoughts are streaming a mile-a-minute,
so all I can tell for sure is that she made a bet with a friend
that she would come talk to me, the new girl.

“I’m Ashley. Um, so hey, you want to come eat
with us?”

“Sure. … Thanks.”

Gathering my stuff, I follow her. From my
mental snooping, I didn’t get the feeling that she was anything
like the girls from the bathroom. And her invitation, other than
the bet, seems friendly enough. As we walk, she points toward a
group of four kids sitting several tables over. They’re staring at
us. A girl with long, jet-black hair and an olive complexion
sitting across from a tall boy with dirty-blond hair, and another
shorter more muscular boy with dark, close-cut hair next to a girl
with shoulder-length pinkish-red hair.

I swallow when we reach the table.

“This is Wren,” Ashley says, smirking at the
boy with light hair.

I lift my hand and try to smile like I mean
it.

“Hey.”

My pulse is too loud in my ears. It isn’t
helping that every time I look someone in the eye the hum of
internal thoughts overwhelms me. All I’m getting is a blur—a
running together of words and images. I block it out as best I can
and smile harder, refocusing on Ashley’s introductions. The guys,
Josh and Marcus, and the girls, Lindsay and Taylor. They seem
friendly enough, Josh a little more so. He’s the one who bet Ashley
that she wouldn’t come to my table.

I study him quickly before looking away
again. With wide, blue eyes, he’s good looking in what my mom calls
a Midwestern way, meaning he would fit well in one of those movies
or shows where a bunch of pretty, wholesome kids are always
breaking into song. It’s also quite clear—to me at least—that
Taylor, the girl with dark hair, has a major crush on him. She’s
pretty, and the fact that he seems unaware of her worship makes me
wonder if he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.

“So where’d you move from?” Lindsay, the
redheaded girl, asks.

“L.A.” I pause. “Sort of. Topanga. It’s kind
of in the mountains between Santa Monica and the San Fernando
Valley. It’s really small.”

Topanga doesn’t have the name recognition of
Malibu, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, or the Pacific Palisades, though
I had heard that some famous people had houses in the canyon,
probably because Topanga doesn’t feel like L.A. It has an isolated
quality that draws a random population, from hippies and drifters
to actors and music moguls.

“Did you go to any clubs in Hollywood?”
Marcus asks.

I swallow, feeling like a cut-rate Southern
Californian. Was I supposed to be hitting all-ages clubs on
Thursday nights? The closest I had gotten to nightlife was going to
the movies at Third Street Promenade.

“Not really. Santa Monica sometimes. No
clubs, though.”

After a minute or two everyone else settles
into separate conversations about people and things I know nothing
about, and I begin to relax. Ashley occasionally stops to try to
fill me in. I smile, indebted to her—bet or not—for inviting me to
sit with them. Within another ten minutes, I feel comfortably
invisible—until I catch eyes with Josh. He smiles again, which just
makes me think of how things had been before we moved, and how
there had been a certain comfort in the anonymity of going
unnoticed most of the time.

Sharp, bitter laughter snaps me out of my
musing. I stiffen, and my eyes dart around the table to each of my
seatmates. Then, replaying the voice in my head, I realize that
inside my head
is where it came from—which is impossible. I
have never, not once, been able to pick up anything from someone
without direct eye contact. Taking my napkin, I begin to tear it
into little pieces as I try to squash my paranoia. Maybe it was my
imagination. I swallow, but my throat is dry. That, or I’m going
crazy. Wild imagination or insanity—neither option is comforting. I
stay quiet and listen very carefully, but to my relief, I don’t
hear a single other disembodied voice for the rest of lunch. When
the bell rings, I follow Ashley to the hall.

“Thanks for inviting me to sit with you
guys,” I say.

“No problem. Didn’t want you turning into
Ever.”

She smiles at some joke I’ve never heard, and
I cock my head, waiting for her to clue me in. Instead, she reaches
out for my schedule.

“Cool, we have first together,” she says.

I blink. I had forgotten to even look at
first period since I didn’t have to deal with it today.

“Which class is that?”

“Art with Mr. Gideon. Oh,
yeah
. Just
wait till tomorrow morning. … You’ll die when you see him.”

“The teacher?” I laugh.

When I raise an eyebrow, Ashley just giggles
and shakes her head.

“See you tomorrow!”

Distracted, I wave and then start searching
for my fifth period class. I pause to confirm what Ashley just
said. Yep. I have Art first period. The vice principal must have
decided to give me one “easy” class instead of PE. There’s only one
problem: I can’t even draw a stick figure.

The rest of the day is fairly uncomplicated.
My teachers don’t expect anything of me, and nobody else notices my
presence. Besides, English and History were my favorite classes at
Pali, so it’s nice to finish the day with them. It turns out that
Josh and I have English together with Mrs. Rose, so I end up
sitting next to him. But to be safe, I avoid excessive eye
contact.

At the final bell, I use the map to get back
to the main office. It takes Mrs. Heinz so long to find a copy of
the bus routes that I reach the school entrance just in time to see
the bus pulling away. That’s when I see my mom getting out of her
car and leaning over the roof. She starts to wave wildly at me, and
I can tell she’s only seconds away from sticking her fingers in her
mouth and whistling so loudly that the entire student body will
turn and look. I rush toward her and raise my hand to signal that
I’ve seen her.

The first thing on my weekend agenda will be
to look for a car. My only requirement is that the price tag
doesn’t drain my entire savings account, which was recently
subsidized by a generous check from my father, guilt money that
arrived in the mail just before he and his new wife had their baby.
Then again, the term generous is debatable. When his regional
advertising firm merged with a larger one, he got a promotion that
enabled him to buy a house in a suburb on the fringes of Laguna
Beach.

I don’t fit with his new life. Not that I had
tried.

When I get to my mom’s car, I see someone
waving from the student parking lot. It’s Josh. I wave and smile,
which causes my mom to crane her neck, clearly in search of proof
that her daughter is not a complete recluse.

“So, how’d it go?” Her eyes are gleaming with
anticipation.

I shut the car door and raise my hands to my
throat in mock horror.

“Like
Lord of the Flies
. I thought
they were going to eat me alive. Oregonians are total savages.”

“Ha. Ha.” She smirks and pulls away from the
curb. “I see you made a new friend.”

I nod in a way that I hope won’t incite an
interrogation. Right now I’m not up for any conversation that might
involve questions like:
Do you
like
him, like
him?

“Josh. We have English together.”

She smiles again.

“Well, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I wince before I can stop myself.

“What?”

For the record, I don’t do well with
surprises—lately they haven’t been good.

“You’re gonna love it. Trust me.”

When she looks over at me, I cheat, catching
a glimpse of paint cans. We stop off at the store to pick up
sandwiches on the way to the house, which is on a quiet, dead-end
street lined with almost identical homes. Some of our new neighbors
are scrupulous about their tiny lawns. Others, not so much. I
remember my mom saying before we moved that it was a good thing
that rental prices were so much cheaper in Oregon than they were in
Southern California.

From the end of our block, you can see
stretches of farmland in the distance. Beyond that, there are some
rolling hills that my mom says are part of the Coast Range.
Apparently during summertime you can see the sun set over those
hills, but I can’t imagine it. Every evening so far, the weak
daylight simply vanishes into the gloom. Then, five minutes later,
it’s pitch dark. Without a definitive sunset to separate them, the
days have already started to run together.

Taking the grocery bag, I look up at the dark
gray house with white trim that I can’t quite get myself to think
of as home. There are two bedrooms, one bathroom, rust stains in
the sinks, weathered floorboards, and creaky stairs. My room faces
the street and has a window that lets in a little daylight, or at
least whatever makes it through the clouds. Any source of light is
a good thing, because the residents that lived in the house before
us painted the walls a shade of gray that had threatened to crush
my soul the minute I entered the room.

I watch as my mom turns the key in the front
door. She pushes, frowns, and then pushes again with a little more
force. The door still doesn’t budge. She sighs.

“I guess the wood is warped. … On three?”

I nod.

“One, two, and
three
!”

We throw our shoulders against the wood, and
the door pops open so abruptly that we both stumble inside at the
exact same time. I cough at the smell. It’s worse than it was
before I went to school, like sour milk. There’s newspaper
everywhere, blue tape adhering it to the floors. And paint
cans.

“You like it?” my mom urges.

The smell of paint, or the hopefulness in her
voice, makes my eyes burn. I force myself to smile.

“It’s great! How’d you do all this? It must
have taken all day.”

“I had some help,” she says brightly.

I raise an eyebrow. My mom, the extrovert.
What happened to me?

“Jack Hannigan, our next-door neighbor. He
came by and offered to help. Ex-Air Force. Very handy.”

I think of the man I had seen out walking in
the rain yesterday. Close to eighty years old. Bright, intelligent
blue eyes. Wisps of silver hair. Surprisingly fit for an
octogenarian.

“You haven’t seen the best part yet,” she
says.

She grabs my elbow and propels me up the
squeaky staircase, steering me to the left at the tiny landing. The
door to my room is freshly painted. Walking ahead of me, she pushes
it open, waving her arms with flourish. The walls are lavender, and
there’s a new mint-green comforter and matching sheets sitting on
the twin bed we picked up over the weekend. Next to the bedding,
there’s an open shoebox with a pair of utilitarian boots. I pick
one up and hold it to the bottom of my foot.

“There was a great sale at the sporting goods
store in the shopping center. I saw them in your size, so I had to
get them.”

My feet would make Cinderella’s look
gargantuan. I can wear a size six, but a five-and-a-half usually
fits better. As a result, shoes in my size are impossible to find,
unless they’re pink with Velcro.

I grab her in a hug.

“Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.”

“And one more thing!”

She breaks away and rushes to the corner of
the room, tugging at a paint-stained sheet to reveal a beautiful
antique writing desk. I run my hand over the dark wood finish, the
carved flowers etched into the grain.

“Wow—where did you get this?”

My eyes narrow. It looks expensive. Too
expensive.

“You like it? Jack had it in his garage, and
he said you were welcome to use it. He refinished it himself.”

I shake my head.

“The neighbor? Mom, I can’t take this. I’ve
barely seen the guy.”

“You worry too much. You can thank him the
next time you see him. We’ll have him over for dinner.”

She pats me on the head. Then she leaves me
standing in the middle of the room. The stairs creak, and soon I
hear the first track of her favorite Leonard Cohen album drifting
from the living room. A wave of exhaustion hits me. It feels like
I’ve been awake for days.

And I kind of have been.

Every night since we arrived three days ago,
I’ve spent more time listening to the rain on the roof than I’ve
spent asleep. I swipe at my cheeks. I don’t even know why I’m
crying, and I don’t want to think about it too much, or I might
remember.

On my second day of school I get to campus
before anyone else. I only accomplished this by bribing my mom with
a huge pot of coffee. She yawns and waves as I jump out of the
car.

The sun has barely risen, and the air outside
is frigid. But when I step through the front doors of Springview
High School, it’s like I’ve entered the tropics. Passing the
darkened administrative offices, I shed another layer of clothing.
I discovered yesterday that Mr. Chernoff’s office is the last
iceberg amidst global warming. Most of my classes were muggy and
overheated, an unsettling contrast to the freezing rain
outside.