Future Perfect (21 page)

W
hen I walk through the front door I drop my suitcase on the foyer bench and run upstairs like I am being chased. Jolene's door is closed and I'm glad. I round the corner and head up the second set of stairs. I can see my grandmother sitting at her desk, a pen in her hand and her calendar open. I stand at the door but she doesn't look up. I say, “My interviewer said I'm an incredible candidate and deserve all the success in the world.”

She finally glances up from her planner. She's wearing her reading glasses, which I've never liked. They make her look like a stranger. “That reminds me,” she says, “I've spoken to the head of the bariatric surgery department at Stanford. They just need your blood work. They're confident they can get you on the schedule within a few weeks. Though I thought perhaps we should arrange for the holiday break so that you don't miss quite so much school.” She makes a note on a scrap of paper at her elbow, and she's
smiling. “Good news all around, don't you think?”

I open my mouth, but I don't have any air to talk with. It feels like the real world has come crashing back into place. I can't remember why I was so happy.

She pulls off her glasses and puts her arm out. “Come here, darling. I'm pleased to see you. I'm so glad it went well.”

She stands, putting her arms around me and patting my back, once, twice. She's warm and she smells like my grandmother. I sag against her, in the circle of her arms and her smile and the cadence of her hands. She squeezes me, and then detaches herself and seats herself again, looking me over. “You don't look worse for the wear,” she says to me.

“I talked to the interviewer about weight-loss surgery,” I say.

She looks pleased. “Ah, good! I'm sure they were interested to hear that.” She turns back to her desk.

“I decided I'm not going to get it,” I say.

“I'm sorry, darling?” she says, not looking up. She's gone back to her calendar.

I can't say it again. Not yet. I have time. I just have to figure out what to say. “I'm going to go unpack,” I say. “And take a shower.”

“We'll order something tonight,” she says. “Whatever you'd like.”

“I'll make empanadas,” I say, and she glances back at me sharply.

“If you'd like,” she says, and when she flicks the page sharply I know I'm dismissed.

Instead I say, “Laura stayed,” and she looks up, annoyed.

“Stayed where?” my grandmother says.

“On the East Coast,” I say. “She didn't fly back with me.”

“Why on earth would she do that?” she says, turning around in her chair.

“She wasn't ready to come home,” I say.

My grandmother shakes her head. “That girl is going to come to a bad end. She is smart, savvy, and has a great deal of potential. But she just runs wild. She's lucky she's attractive.”

“She's good at being herself,” I say.

She smiles at me. “I'm glad she's having her adventures rather farther away than will get you in trouble.” She sighs. “She's a bad example.”

“She's not—” I start to stay, but Grandmother interrupts.

“Go find Jolene and tell her everything. She could use good news.”

I find Jolene in the backyard, lying in the grass spread-eagle with her hair fanned out around her. She's floating in a sea of green.

“You look like a mermaid,” I call from the deck, and she cranes her head around.

“I feel like one,” she says. She sits up as I shuffle through the too-long grass and sit next to her. I bump my arm into hers.

“So how was Harvard?” she says.

“I didn't even go look at it,” I say, plucking a blade of grass and tearing it down the center. “I sat in a Starbucks.”

“That doesn't seem very logical,” she says.

I shrug. “I didn't want to look at it. I was afraid I'd—if all this doesn't work I don't want to have anything to miss.” I pause and correct myself. “Anything more to miss.” I add, “Also it was really cold.”

Jolene laughs at that. I've torn the blades into tiny pieces. I drop them in my lap.

“Laura is going to go stay with her mom,” I say. “And Brandon kissed me.”

“Oh,” she says, startled. She examines my face.

“Why would he do that?” I say.

“Maybe he wishes he were more like you. Or Laura.”

“Laura doesn't want to kiss me,” I say.

“I mean that he wishes he could do what he wants. Without worrying what other people think. So are you going to—”

“No,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“I'm glad,” she says.

A sandpiper hoots. “What about you?”

“My parents are coming to get me,” she says. She puts her chin on her knee.

“Do you want them to?”

She shakes her head. “They were screaming on the phone at
Clara for ten minutes and finally she hung up on them. And they called me to tell me they were coming to get me before I could make an irretrievable mistake.”

“What mistake?”

She gives me a sidelong glance. “They think that your grandmother is scheduling surgery for everyone in the house.”

“Where did they get that idea?” I say, and I can hear the cords of tension twanging in my voice.

Jolene sighs. “I have no idea.”

“This small fucking town,” I say, and I find myself standing and pacing.

She looks up at me with a small smile on her face, her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her legs.

“I'm safe here,” she says. “In a small town where we know how people will react. Where we can handle what anyone says. We're safe.”

“Except from our parents,” I say.

“Except from them,” she says. She pauses. “I think they could understand. If I could figure out a way to explain it to them.”

“That's not your job,” I say.

“I would like to be able to do what they want,” she says suddenly. “A part of me wishes that. It would be so easy to just give in.”

“It would be a lie,” I say to her. I ignore the flashback to my grandmother's office. My hesitation.

“Yes,” she says. “I know.” She reclines back on the grass with her arms above her head. She is glowing pale in the light that's fading, brighter than everything around her. “I'm not going with them,” she says. “I may be here for a long time.” Her voice is as quiet as ever, that same gentle cadence, and her face is calm. She knows such a different Clara than I do—my grandmother has taken her in, smoothed her anxieties away, held her hand, and accepted her wholly. The thought is a stone lodged in my throat.

There's banging in the house, and voices. “I think they've arrived,” I say.

She pulls herself to her feet and squeezes my hand.

“Do you need me to go with you?” I say.

“I'm okay,” she says. “It'll be fine.”

I believe her when she says that, and watch her pick her way through the grass, back to the house where lights are starting to come on in every room, which means my father is home too. The lights switch on in the kitchen just as Jolene reaches the patio door, and my father opens it for her. I can hear them talking in low voices, and Jolene shakes her head, slips by him. He looks up and spots me standing in the grass.

“Ashley!” he calls. “Ashley, what the hell is going on?” He leaps down the steps with a couple of jumps and is striding through the grass to me. He looks grim and confused all at once, like he is not sure what is happening and he really isn't digging it.

“Jolene's parents want her to go home,” I say.

“I got that part,” he says. “Jolene's parents are saying something about surgery. That you're getting surgery. What the hell do they mean that you're getting surgery?” His voice is getting louder with every word. I don't think I've ever seen him this emotional.

“I'm—” I pause. I had never even considered telling my father about any of this. He would have laughed and made a joke about how he'll be leaving me in stitches and he would go back to his romance novel, his feet propped up on the arm of the couch.

But instead he's here glaring at me now.

“What are they talking about?” he says. “Are you sick? Are you hurt? Are you doing—Is there something you need to tell me? Why do
they
know about this and
your father
is just now finding out, Ashley?” His words make me think, for the briefest moment, of Hector. My father has my shoulders in his hands now and I don't think he realizes he's shaking me gently with every word.

I push him off. “They're talking about weight-loss surgery,” I say, with my arms crossed over my chest. He looks confused. “To lose weight. Gastric bypass. Like celebrities do.”

“Weight-loss surgery,” he says. “You're getting weight-loss surgery?”

I just look at him. I am not interested in offering him relief.

He runs his hand through his hair, looks at the house. “You
weren't going to tell me. You were just never going to mention you were going to get this surgery to lose weight.”

I shrug, look over at the house. There is no yelling yet. I wonder if they are letting Jolene talk.

He turns and walks away from me, stomping across the lawn, leaving a trail of flattened grass behind him. “Goddammit,” he says, lifting his foot and examining it. He's stepped on one of Soto's toys.

“You forgot to mow the lawn again,” I say, and he turns with the toy in his hand. “I always remind you and you never remember.”

“Not now, Ashley,” he says, and tosses the toy away, turns back to the house.

“They're still talking,” I call. “Let them talk.”

“They can talk for as long as they want,” he says. “I'm going to speak to your grandmother.”

He's off across the lawn. “My interview went well, thanks for asking,” I say, but he's already gone.

All the lamps in the house cast rectangles of light scattered across the overgrown lawn. Jolene comes to find me, the dogs following behind her in an orderly fashion. Toby flings himself into my lap, his nails scratching at my shirt, jumping up and squirming and bouncing back onto the grass and running laps around me like he
can't believe his luck, just finding me out here. Annabelle Lee has wandered off, but Soto sits calmly, her tongue hanging out. Soto is always relaxed.

“What happened?” I say. I can't see her face very well, but I see her shake her head.

“Everyone is gone,” she says. “They all left.”

“Together?” I say. “Are they forming a bowling team?”

She laughs. “No,” she says. She sits down next to my other side, and Toby swarms into her lap. “Shh,” she says to him, but he doesn't like to hear that. He wiggles out of her arms and races off barking into the dark, his little yap echoing under the trees.

“Are you staying?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. She exhales. She looks just like she did when she was seven. Soft cheeks and sad eyes. Shattered heart.

“Let's go swimming,” I say, and stand up, hold out my hand to her. Her face is a soft blur in the dark. I can tell she's staring at me, deciding how serious I am. The air smells like salt and wind and pine and I close my eyes for a moment so I can smell it better.

“Yes,” she says. I open my eyes. She lets me pull her up.

We wind down along the narrow path through the trees, the ground changing from soft dirt littered with dead leaves to shifting sand. We stop at the edge and kick our shoes off the way we always do, the way we always will. There is no moon. It looks like the ocean is a stretch of black glass that goes on forever and
we are racing toward it, our feet digging into the sand but it can't slow us down until we're splashing into the water, splashing and then wading and then throwing ourselves headlong, letting the water catch us and lift us up off our feet and carry us away.

T
he main office is dark because Principle Simons does not approve of overhead lights anywhere near her personal space. On the front counter there's a desk lamp that looks like the kind my grandmother collects, with a floral stained-glass shade that is pretty but blocks out most of the light. A slightly brighter lamp sits on Quincy's desk, but he is still hunching over to look at the papers he's shuffling through. I feel like I should pull out a flare to signal my entrance, but he looks up when I come in, the light glinting off the lenses of his enormous black-rimmed glasses.

“Absence slip,” he says as he pushes his chair out from his desk. He prides himself on being able to tell what every student is coming in for with just a glance. “Legit,” he says, looking me over. “Ponytail, tired eyes, skin color is off—”

“Quincy, how can you even tell in this light?” I say, putting my hand on my cheek.

He shrugs. “I know what you look like. And you've been
sick.” He holds his hand out, palm up, for me to slap my weird old-fashioned slip on it like we're high-fiving.

“No,” I say. “Just tired.” I dig it out of my bag and hand it over.

“Oh sure, sure. Stress is the worst,” he says. He squints at the slip. “Oh, right, you were scheduled to be out. For your interview! I heard that went well.”

I sigh. “She said she looks forward to watching my career,” I say, holding on to the strap of my bag. I want to lean on the counter but I stay upright.

“That's good, right? There's no implied ‘crash and burn' at the end of the sentence. Of course there isn't. You're a rock star. And your
thing
, when is that going to happen?”

I shrug. “I don't know. I haven't been accepted yet.” I think I'm too tired to feel anxious about that.

His eyes get big, and he leans forward. “Accepted? You have to apply for permission? You're kidding me!”

I pause and look at him. I say, “I don't think we're talking about the same thing here.”

He waves his hand. “The gastric thing,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “Right. That. Who told you?” I try to sound casual but my voice is lifting up a bit at the end. I reach out my hand and carefully place it flat down on the counter. It is cool marble and I concentrate on the feeling against my palm.

“Hmm, Principle Simons, probably?” He lifts his shoulders,
tilts his head to the side, hands palm up. “Who knows? But,” he continues. “It's pretty exciting, isn't it? You're going to want to do it before college starts in the fall.”

“That's my grandmother's plan,” I say. The bells for first period chime and I back away from the desk. “Okay, I have to go,” I say.

“Have a good day!” he says, waving the permission slip at me. “Get some sleep!”

And when I'm back in the hall and my classmates are streaming around me I realize I'm not imagining it. They are actually looking at me as they talk and their voices get lower when I come close and then the bright cheerfulness of an ordinary day snaps back into place with
hello Ashley, hi Ashley, hey Ashley!
, and the question that lingers at the back of their throats is jostled aside by all the other small talk I wave off.

It's out. In the days since I left, it burst and started to spread like poison and this time Laura's not here to menace the chatter into silence. It's an intravenous overdose of humiliation coursing through me and I am shaking. I start walking faster, pull out my phone and frown at it like I'm looking at something important. The screen is blurry because my hands are trembling. I weave through the crowd and pretend I don't hear anyone calling my name and that I don't know that they're talking about me, all of them. Everyone has eyes. Everyone knows I'm fat. I have spent so long making sure that it mattered as little to them as it did to me,
playing by the rules, and it still wasn't good enough.

I should have told my grandmother. I should have shut this down before all hell broke loose and went rampaging through school. I should have known this town was too small to let anyone really keep a secret. I should have known.

There are the double doors to the parking lot and I see my car pulled up under the shade of the sunflower bush because I got here early. But there is a surge of
fuck that
. I'm not running. I turn left and start heading to Calculus instead. Then Brandon is rushing toward me, his hand outstretched.

“Hey,” he says. He pulls his arm back before he touches me, and he's looking at me so seriously again, I think it's actual worry. “Hey,” he says. “It wasn't me.”

People are eyeing us while they pass in the hallway.

I say, “Are you still expecting me to thank you?”

“Look, I'm just saying—”

“I know it wasn't you,” I say abruptly. “I think you probably wouldn't lie.”

“Only probably?” he says, with a weak little grin.

“I'm not going to talk about it right now,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. “But I hope that—”

“I'm late,” I say, and push around him.

A text comes up on my phone ten minutes later.

I HOPE EVERYTHING IS OKAY.
Brandon.

I leave it unread. I lift my phone a few times to reply, but
I keep setting it back down until finally I shove it under my textbook.

In third period my phone goes off with the text chime again.

WHAT THE HELL R U THINKING??
from Laura. Brandon must have related the news.

NOT TRUE,
I text back. She replies with a line of question marks and I turn my phone off.

In fourth period, I turn my phone back on to text Jolene.

DON'T WANT TO GO TO LUNCH

NOT HUNGRY?

PEOPLE

NOT HUNGRY FOR PEOPLE??

YES

COME TO LUNCH I AM HERE

Jolene has a table in the corner near a window. She's unpacking her lunch bag, pulling out hummus and crackers and pretzels and cheese and an apple. I sit with my back to the tall glass walls, facing the rest of the room, but I keep my eyes on Jolene as she keeps pulling food out of the bag.

“I was hungry this morning,” she says, when she sees I'm watching her.

“Everyone has heard that I'm so fat I need weight-loss surgery,” I say. “How did this happen?”

She shakes her head. “Don't know. No one has asked me directly. But . . .” She nods at Morgan, who's sitting on a table at
the other side of the room, laughing at something Oliver from the swim team is saying to her. He's got his hand on her bare thigh and she's not breaking his fingers off so I guess she's okay about breaking up with Brandon.

“How would
she
know?” I say, watching them. Then I remember Morgan in Guidance last week, digging for info. She must be so delighted she turned out to be right.

I see Hector weaving between seats, holding his full tray up over his head with one hand. When he sees me, he smiles big, and then looks away fast like he didn't mean to. When he glances back, I smile back at him. I pull out the chair next to me. He cocks his head and smiles again, then turns toward our table.

“I wanted to call you,” he says. His hair has gotten way too long in just a couple of weeks, and he is tanned dark. His mom is probably mad about that. He must be skateboarding again. He's looking at me like he's trying to catalog that all my parts are present, intact, and accounted for. “But I deleted your number off my phone because I was afraid I'd call you.”

I laugh at that. I want to reach out and touch his wrist. I want to say,
Thank you for all the good things you thought about me. Thank you for believing I really was the person I wanted to be.

“You don't have it memorized?” Jolene says.

“Why would I memorize a phone number?” Hector says. He picks up his vegetarian sloppy joe and demolishes half of it in one bite.

“Don't talk with your mouth full,” I say automatically, because I know him.

He pretends to be wounded, clutching his chest but keeps chewing. When he swallows he says abruptly, “Is it true?” He looks genuinely upset. He's watching me with wrinkles in his forehead as I work out a way to explain it all, and then his face goes suddenly sad and resigned. “It
is
true.”

“No!” I say. “It's just complicated.”

He nods and swallows, draws a line with his finger in the sauce on his plate. “Well. I know you've had a crush on him forever so I guess it's not surprising.”

It takes me a moment to realize what he's saying. And then I laugh and I can't stop. I cover my mouth with both hands. Hector seems bewildered. I try to talk but all I can do is just shake my head and giggle.

Jolene is smiling at me and leans over to correct Hector, I think, but then her smile drops. She says, “Did you want to talk to Morgan? Because she's coming over here.”

Hector stands up. I say, “Sit down, Hector. Please.”

Her mother probably loves her,
I remind myself as Morgan stops short at our table.

“So you're going to be all skinny for Harvard,” she says. “Weight-loss surgery. Aren't you so embarrassed?”

But now I can't imagine why her mother would love her.

“Why should she be embarrassed?” Hector says. He has a
smear of sloppy joe grease on his chin. I hand him a napkin but he just holds it.

“Uh, because she's so fat she needs to get surgery,” Morgan says. She says the word
fat
like a whip crack, and I wait for it to lash against me. But it misses. It sounds ridiculous outside my head. She says it again. “Sad, fat people—so desperate to be normal.”

“Ashley isn't sad,” Jolene says.

“Maybe when you're a normal girl Brandon will actually like you instead of feeling sorry for you.”

A click of a puzzle piece. My giggles bubble up again. “Are you—
threatened
by me, Morgan?”

She tosses her head like she's in a soap opera. “Hardly. I'm embarrassed for you.”

And that means nothing at all to me. It is absolutely unimportant, what she thinks.

“You know, it's a little uncomfortable the way you're obsessed with my weight. And whether I get weight-loss surgery. And whether I care if anyone else knows my grandmother wants me to get weight-loss surgery.”

“Oh, it's your grandmother's idea!” she says triumphantly, her hands on her hips.

“Yes.” I sigh. “Yes, it's my grandmother's idea.” My voice is getting louder. I stand up. “My grandmother decided I needed it.” I put my foot up on the chair and pull myself up. Jolene pops up to hold me steady. I'm yelling now. “My grandmother
thinks it would be a great idea for me to have weight-loss surgery, everybody!” I spread my arms wide. Kids I've known my whole life almost are turning around in their seats. “Do you want me to have weight-loss surgery, everybody?” They're glancing at each other. “I don't care! Do you care? No? I don't blame you! Thank you for your time!”

“You're going to break the chair if you're not careful,” Morgan says.

“Oh my god, Morgan, just go away,” I say. I jump down, plop down in my seat, and take one of Jolene's carrots and I don't watch Morgan walk away and I don't look at the rest of the room. I don't want to know who is staring, or talking.

“Are you going to do it?” Hector finally says. He's still got the grease on his chin.

“Napkin,” I say.

He dabs at his face.

“No,” I say finally. “I'm not going to do it. But my grandmother is still scheduling it.”

“You haven't told Clara?” Jolene says.

I look at him, and glance over at Jolene. They're both looking at me very seriously.

“I will,” I say finally.