Notes from the Blender (14 page)

SOMETHING ABOUT GRIFFIN’S STORY, HIS TAKING A
completely shitty, out-of-control situation and turning it into something great, made a big impression on me. Like, if he could change what he’d become—which was a pretty hurt and pissed-off person—then surely there was hope for me as well. Maybe I didn’t have to be so defensive about everything anymore. Maybe I could just put down the armor, not worry so much about getting hurt all the time, and just be myself.

I decided to test out my theory the morning of the Halloween party.

I found
mi madre
in the nursery, stenciling cutesy little yellow ducks in red raincoats onto the pale green walls. I stuck my head in the doorway. “Need help?”

This made her impossibly suspicious. “You need money for more haunted house decorations?” she countered.

“Can’t I just do something nice for you without having an ulterior motive?”

She eyed me, looking for the catch. “You could, but that’s not your normal MO these days. So what’s up, honey? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Seriously, I only wanted to see if you wanted some help with Junior’s digs. That’s it.”

“Why?” she finally asked, putting down her paints and brushes.

I shrugged. “I guess I feel bad about what a hard time I’ve been giving you lately.”

This got her attention even more than my offer of help, no strings attached. “Thank you, Neilly,” she said. “And let me apologize, too, while we’re at it. No parent wants to think their choices have caused their children pain, but it happens. And I do blame myself for a lot of our problems lately.”

Tears stung the corners of my eyes. “Mom, my being a bitch to you isn’t your fault.”

“No, but your being put through the ringer at school after your dad and I got separated…that certainly wasn’t your fault. Your learning about Thomas and me in such an awkward way wasn’t your fault, either. Not to mention finding out I was pregnant through Dec …”

So she really knew—and understood—how hard it had all been on me. This was a revelation in itself. Guess you can’t hide as much as you think from dear old Mom. “It’s okay, Mom. Really.”

“I appreciate your saying that, Neilly.”

“And I appreciate
you
,” I told her. “Even though sometimes it might not seem like it, I do appreciate everything you do for me.”

“Thanks,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“And thanks for the offer, but I think this is a one-woman job,” she said, shooing me out of the room. “I’ll take you up on it next time.”

When I got back to my room, I saw that Sam had given up on unanswered texts and had moved on to voice mail.
Took him long enough
, I thought. Lulu had jumped on that train almost immediately, and look where we were now: total BFFs again. Yet Sam and I still hadn’t said a word since the big breakup.

I stared at the screen for a few seconds, debating whether I should listen to what he had to say at all, before I finally clicked onto the message:

“Hey, Neilly. I take it you’re still mad at me, and I don’t blame you. But I want you to know how sorry I am for screwing things up between us, and how much I miss you. And if it’s okay, I’d really like to talk to you at the party tonight. I mean, your party tonight. I mean, you know what I mean. Okay, see you later, babe. I love you.”

It was sweet and infuriating and confusing all at the same time. Sweet because he was finally saying all the things he should’ve just said in the first place. Infuriating because it sounded like he assumed he was already back in my good graces, what with the “babe” and the “I love you” at the end of the message. And confusing because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about that or how I felt about him at the moment.

With my mind still in a jumble of confusion, I decided to go see how Dec, the decorating committee, was doing. He’d had some completely rad ideas about how to make our Halloween party the most kickass bash of the year, with a blood-guts-’n’ gore fest that started in the attic and didn’t stop until you got to hell (aka, the basement). It was the total pièce de résistance, a writhing sea of dismembered ghouls concocted out of dry ice, red goo made from borax, water, food coloring, and who knows what else.

I was so happy with the final product—and so hopped up on too many vanilla lattes—that I just couldn’t contain my excitement. Dec was leaning against the back of the living room couch, admiring a particularly gruesome graveyard scene, when I went charging at him at full speed. “Thanks, bro! This is the coolest thing in the whole world!”

Though I had intended to send only Dec flying over the top of the couch, I misjudged my overly caffeinated strength and ended up going with him. We both landed with a plop on the other side, me on top of him, which must’ve hurt because he got all red in the face and his eyes practically bulged out of his head.

I found it all pretty hilarious. “Uh, sorry. I kind of only meant to knock you over—gently, of course—not knock the wind out of you,” I said, cackling like one of our homemade attic-asylum inmates.

“No problem,” Dec said, staring up at me with a dazed look in his eyes. “Hey, Neilly? Can I tell you something?”

He sounded so serious that he stopped my hysterics dead in their tracks. To make things even more uncomfortable, I’d just noticed there was something digging into my thigh. And even though I was 99.99 percent sure it was the hammer Dec had used to nail all the “lost souls” to our basement walls, I couldn’t be positive. I was getting kind of worried that maybe he was thinking of nailing
me
with whatever it was.

So I extricated myself from the couch, stood up, and changed the subject as fast as I could. “Let me guess. You need to tell me I have something in between my teeth?”

A big, long, awkward silence. Then, finally, “Uh, yeah. Exactly.”

Crisis averted. I ran my tongue along my front teeth and gave Dec an exaggerated smile. He gave me a thumbs-up, and suddenly everything was back to normal.

“You know, you wouldn’t have this problem if you weren’t sneaking dead cow meat with my dad all the time,” he told me. “I mean, with the exception of broccoli, veggies are very friendly to dental hygiene.”

“Thanks for the 411.” I had no intention of changing my diet to include only the beets and roots and tofu blobs he and my mom ate now. Their cooking made the house smell like farts and dirt all the time—which was maybe okay for the blood-guts-’n’-gore Halloween party, but so not acceptable on a regular basis. “I better go floss and brush before people start getting here. ’Cause, you know, I might be getting some tonight.”

“Serious?”

“Not a chance. How about you? You got any hot, vegan metal chicks coming to our little shindig?”

Dec grinned at me. “Hundreds of ’em, actually. I don’t know how I’m going to juggle them all.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” I said, wishing I could find him a real girlfriend to replace all the imaginary metal babes who seemed to inhabit his video games and imagination.

The rest of the night went by in a rush. Dec and I got into our costumes—I was a baby, complete with footie pajamas and a big pacifier; Dec was some kind of dead thing—and from there, the doorbell started ringing like crazy, and people just kept streaming in. Everyone loved how cool the decorations were, and I made sure they knew it was all Dec’s doing.

I was in hell—otherwise known as the basement—listening to Ulf’s band when they launched into an uncharacteristically mellow song. All of a sudden, no more screaming, an actual melody line, and lyrics you could really understand. I mean, the volume level had decreased so much that I could even make out conversation behind me.

“May I have this dance?”

I turned around to see Dec of the Dead holding his arms out to me.

“Sure thing,” I said, and we started sort of shuffling around the room in circles. I made sure there was plenty of space between our bodies, just in case I’d been right about the hammer that maybe hadn’t been a hammer at all.

“Having fun?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yup. You kick ass, bro.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely. There’s no way this party ever would’ve been as cool without you.”

And then it was like his feet got stuck to the ground, and we stopped dancing. “I’m really glad to hear that, Neilly, because I feel the same way—”

Once again, whatever he had to say seemed serious. And once again, he didn’t get a chance to spit it out because Griffin tapped him on the shoulder midsentence. “Mind if I cut in?”

“Oh…uh…sure,” Dec said, his face clouding over into a scowl again. I felt bad that he hadn’t gotten to tell me whatever was on his mind.

But the bad feeling quickly fell away as Griffin, who was wearing black skinny jeans, a
WHERE THE WILD KINGS ARE
hoodie, and yellow low-top Converse gathered me into what was essentially a movable hug.

“What are you supposed to be?” I asked, my heart beating even louder and faster than when I’d been in total caffeine overload that afternoon.

Griffin let his head rest on top of mine. “Travis, the lead singer from We the Kings. Everyone says I look like him, so I figured I’d take advantage of the resemblance. Plus, I’m kind of lazy about costumes.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, holding up the big-ass pacifier as proof.

And then we just kind of spun around and around. It was this great, suspended moment in time, which ended only because the band kicked into heavy death metal overdrive again. Moment over. Oh, well. At least Dec looked happy again, head banging away up at the front of the stage.

“Want to go grab some punch?” Griffin yelled over the noise.

“Sure,” I yelled back.

So he grabbed my hand and led me out of the dance floor turned mosh pit.

We were still holding hands, even after we’d made our way upstairs to the living room, where all the food was set up. And I was thinking about never letting go, not even to fill up a punch cup, when we ran smack into Sam.

He stared at me, then at Griffin, then at our intertwined fingers, and did that puffing-his-chest-out/glaring thing that had always worked so well on the kids who were busting on me about my dad. Being on the receiving end of it, though, I just thought it made him look kind of ridiculous.

“Hey, Neilly,” Sam said.

“Hey,” I said, reluctantly letting my hand drop from Griffin’s. “Uh, Sam, this is Griffin, my soon-to-be stepbrother.”

Sam looked confused. “I thought the heavy metal guy was your stepbrother.”

“Yeah, he is, too,” I tried to explain. “Griffin is Roger’s son. You know…my dad’s…um…fiancé?”

“About that, Neilly,” he said. “I’d be honored to take you to your dad’s ceremony, just like you asked me to.”

Griffin took my stunned silence as an excuse to extricate himself from the awkward situation. “Nice meeting you, man. I guess I’ll see you at the wedding,” he said to Sam. Then he touched my arm and said, “Neilly, I’m going back downstairs to check out the band’s next set. Talk to you later, okay?”

I could only nod and watch him walk away. Damn, he had a cute butt.

“So what do you say, Neilly?” Sam asked, interrupting my lascivious thoughts about Griffin.

I turned my full attention to him and stuck my hands on my hips. “Why should I let you take me anywhere after what you did?”

“I know what I did was wrong, babe,” he said. “I let all the shit my friends and my parents were throwing around get the best of me, and I’m not proud of caving like that. I guess I just thought I could get them off my back, show them what a man I was, by hooking up with someone else.”

What flawed logic—like being an immoral person would make other people respect you more. “What kind of a man screws over someone he supposedly cares about?”

Sam shrugged. “I mean, a total asshole, I guess. But I was just so sick of them calling me a pussy-whipped fag. Neilly, I’m really sorry, and if it makes any difference, I totally realized none of that matters. What matters is that I love you, and I don’t care what anyone else says about that, or us, or your dad. I just want to be with you.”