Revealed (13 page)

As the week passed, I realized I was slipping back into my pre-Amanda, pre–Callie and Nia life, as if being friends with them was a summer vacation that had come to an end. I ran into Charlie, the drummer for Girl Like Me, in the hall on Friday at lunch, and he slapped me on the back and said, “Where have you been, man?”

I didn't know what to tell him.
I've been with my friends?
But were Callie and Nia even my friends anymore?
I've been with my fellow guides.

Sure, Hal. Hare Krishna much?

I ended up just shrugging. “Around.”

Somehow I was walking with him toward the cafeteria as he talked. “Dude, you missed the worst practice last week. Brian's mom was all, ‘You're too loud,' and Brian's all, ‘It's a band, Mom,' and she's all, ‘Well, be a quieter band.'” He shook his head with amazement at Brian's mom's failure to appreciate classic rock. “She made us turn off the amp. It's like we're Girl Like Me unplugged.”

I couldn't really focus on what he was saying, but luckily talking to Charlie doesn't require active listening. The guy could have a fulfilling conversation with a tablecloth.

“Yeah,” I said, not sure if it was a total non sequitur.

“Seriously messed up, right?” We'd reached the cafeteria and Charlie crossed the threshold. Only when he'd actually been talking to thin air for a few steps did he turn around to see where I was.

“You eating?”

It was just after noon, and the cafeteria was filling up. I looked around, but neither Callie nor Nia was there. Simultaneously relieved and disappointed, I just shook my head. “Nah, I've gotta do some stuff in the art room.”

Charlie nodded. “Later, Picasso.”

“Later,” I said to his back. As Charlie was swallowed up by the lunchtime crowd, I wondered if I should just follow him. Have lunch with the guys in the band, talk about music, what we should play for the talent show, fight about whether U2 is one of the greatest bands in the history of music or entirely overrated. It was something I would have done a few months ago, just hung out with people who weren't exactly friends but were close enough.

Before Amanda came along, close enough had been fine.

So why wasn't it now?

“G
od, I
hate
this song.” I pressed my hands to my ears to prove my commitment to silencing every note of “Silly Love Songs,” which was blasting over the speakers at Aqua.

Amanda took a sip of her espresso. “It is a pretty bad song.” She was wearing a ladder of black rubber bracelets on her arm and a short, blond, asymmetrical wig. Whenever my mom has to do some household chore she hates, like vacuuming or cleaning out the fridge, she always blasts old-school Madonna CDs, so I got the reference.

I loved talking about the Beatles with Amanda, and now I leaned across the table with enthusiasm. “You know why it's a bad song? Because Paul McCartney is a crap songwriter.”

To indicate her disagreement, Amanda raised her right eyebrow. “‘Revolution,' ‘Dear Prudence,' ‘Rocky Raccoon.' Shall I continue?” Given her agreement that the song sucked, I was surprised by her defense of Paul McCartney.

I waved away her list. “John Lennon wrote every one of those.”

“Lennon/McCartney,” she corrected. “Read the album cover.”

“John Lennon's being man enough to share the credit for those songs with Paul McCartney doesn't make Paul McCartney a decent songwriter. Exhibit A: Wings.”

“When they were young, they'd go to parties and just stand in the corner writing songs together.” Amanda smiled at the image in her head.

I snorted. “You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a transcript of those conversations. ‘Hey, Paul, could you try not to write the cheesiest lyrics ever?' ‘Sorry, mate, don't think I can do that.'”

“‘Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.'” She swirled her spoon around the sides of her cup.

I remained thoroughly unconvinced. “I hate Paul McCartney.” When she reraised her eyebrow at what I'd said, I backed off. Slightly. “Okay, I hate the post-Beatles Paul McCartney. Happy?”

Her smile was sad and she shook her head. “You can't hate Paul. Hating Paul is the same as hating John.”

What she'd just said was so outrageous I nearly choked on my hot chocolate. “Hating John?! Are you seriously accusing me of hating John?!”

“Friendships like theirs . . .” Amanda linked her ring-laden fingers together to illustrate her point. “They were each changed forever by the other.”

“It's too bad Paul wasn't changed a little more. Maybe then his post-Beatles music wouldn't be such garbage.”

Still looking at her hands, Amanda spoke slowly. “Maybe it wasn't like that. Maybe John sucked all the genius out of Paul. Maybe Paul grieved so deeply for the end of the Beatles that he never recovered. Or maybe John kept Paul honest and Yoko kept John honest.” She shot me a look, knowing I could never resist an opportunity to trash Yoko Ono. “The point is, there'd be no John without Paul. Friends—real friends—they create you as profoundly as your parents.”

I felt some of the fight going out of me. “So what you're saying is I don't get to hate Paul anymore?”

“John said it, not me,” Amanda pointed out. “Now, let me hear you say it.”

And for the first time in our friendship, I was the one who quoted something to her. “‘Love is the answer.'”

As she raised her cup, I raised mine and we toasted the late, great Lennon by singing the end of the musical line together. “‘And you know that for sure.'”

Was that the problem? Had I been changed forever by these friendships? Was I never going to be able to go back to being the Hal I'd been before I knew these people?

Riding home from school on Friday, the watch Amanda had given me in one pocket and my silent cell phone in the other, I felt more sympathy for Paul McCartney than I'd ever dreamed possible. So he'd become a cheesy pop singer after the death of his best friend, so what? At least he didn't spend the rest of his life lying around doing nothing or coming up with bizarre conspiracy theories about John's death.

If only I could say the same thing about myself.

Saturday morning, my dad and I went for a long run, just the two of us. He asked me all about school and the band and what I was painting. All week, I'd kind of been lying in wait, hoping for a chance with him alone. Now I figured I'd let him get all questioned out and then demand to know what he'd meant by his “be careful” from the other night, but when we made the turn onto Briar Lane, my mom and Cornelia were waiting for us at the car.

“You guys are so slow! We've been waiting here forever.” Cornelia was standing with her back against the car.

My mom's window was down and she was waving to us. “Who wants to go out for some really un-nutritious pancakes instead of finishing his healthy run?”

“I'd say we've earned us some pancakes,” answered my dad, almost gratefully, then Mom added, “Followed by lattes at Just Desserts.”

“Awesome,” said Dad.

“Awesome
Anna
,” winked my mom.

I rolled my eyes. Before you could say,
Tell me what you know, Dad
, we were sitting in the back of the car and headed to Rosie's Diner. Much as I wanted to talk to him, amazing Just Desserts lattes (served by Anna, who really is the world's coolest waitress even if my mom thinks so, too) was at least some consolation for the interruption.

I wasn't alone with him for the rest of the day, and at five he left for a business trip to Toronto. Lying on my bed after we'd hugged good-bye, I kept replaying our conversation.
If I could protect you from every bad thing in the world, I would.
I groaned and rolled onto my back. Naturally my dad didn't know anything. A girl was missing. The vice principal of my school had recently been attacked in his office. Of
course
my dad would tell me to be careful. My thinking his telling me to be careful had something to do with some kind of inside information about Amanda was just one more indication that I was slowly, quietly losing my mind.

“Hal?” My mom pushed open the door to my room as she knocked, which I'd finally accepted was as close as she was ever going to come to knocking
before
entering. Seeing me lying on my bed in my running clothes, she crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“What? I went with Dad. You
saw
me.” My mom's refusing to let me go for a run by myself was probably not helping my state of mind.

She didn't relax her stance. “Nobody put you under house arrest, mister. I just don't think it's polite to go to the show dressed like that.”

“What show?”

“What do you mean ‘what show'?” She stepped into the room and I could see she was dressed in a pair of nice pants and a long sweater, a bright necklace of plastic beads around her neck. “The show you've been working so hard on. I
told
you we were all going to see it Saturday night.”

Had my mom told me we were going to
As You Like It
tonight? It wasn't like I'd exactly been focused on every word she spoke at dinner the past few nights, what with trying to figure out everything from how I was going to get Callie and Nia to forgive me to whether or not they, my sister, my parents, and basically everyone I loved was in mortal danger. So, yes, it was possible I could have missed a simple declarative sentence such as,
We are going out as a family Saturday night.

My mom was still looking at me, eyebrows raised. “Are you at least going to put on a shirt?”

It wasn't like I had anything else to do.

“Something nice,” she said as she walked out of my room. “You know it—”

“Shows respect for the performers,” we finished together. I'd only been hearing her utter that sentence every time my family went to a concert, play, or dance performance all my conscious life.

“Well, it does,” she said, and she pulled my door shut behind her.

Even before we went inside, I could see that the Endeavor lobby was packed with families waiting to go into the auditorium, but of course when we stepped through the front doors, the very first person we saw was Callie's dad. He looked better than he'd looked the last time when I saw him picking up Callie in his truck. He and my mom started chatting and a few minutes later the Riveras were standing next to us. As usual, they were elegantly dressed and managed to give off more of a movie-star vibe than an Endeavor-parent one. Mrs. Rivera started asking my mom if she might be interested in volunteering for some book sale and I almost laughed—was there any cause my mom
wasn't
interested in volunteering for?

I knew the girls were busy with costumes backstage, but I found myself half looking around for them and feeling lonelier than I'd ever remembered feeling.

Cisco Rivera came over with his date and shook my hand. He asked how my painting was going and if there'd been any opportunities that came my way because of the national art contest I'd won. No wonder Cisco was so popular—how did a guy as cool and busy as he was remember that some random freshman who'd been over at his house once had won an art contest months ago?! I was so amazed he remembered my winning that when he introduced me to his date, I didn't register her name. A second later someone called out, “Hey, Cisco,” and within seconds, he'd disappeared into a small crowd of people.

It was like watching the mayor of Endeavor chatting with his constituents.

Cisco's date had long dark hair, and as Cisco high-fived a couple of his friends from the soccer team, she gave me a little what-can-you-do-with-a-popular-guy-like-that shrug. I smiled back at her, wondering if I should ask her what her name was again or just hope I could dodge the fact that I hadn't heard it the first time, and as we looked at each other, I suddenly got the weirdest flash that I knew her from somewhere.

Was she an actress? Had I seen her in something like a sitcom or movie?

“You go to Endeavor?” she asked.

I nodded. “How do you know Cisco?” Maybe her answer would help explain this feeling.

“We met in D.C.,” she explained. “I go to college there, and Cisco was on a school soccer thing.” I realized it was crazy for me to think I knew her. Probably she just reminded me of one of the models in the J.Crew catalogs that seemed to arrive at our house hourly.

The lights dimmed, then came back up, and two girls dressed as courtiers came through the lobby ringing small gold bells.

“Come find your seats. Seats please.” The girls made their way through the crowd, which quickly began to thin now that the auditorium doors were open. Normally I would have been annoyed by how my mom put her arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the theater like I was the same age as Cornelia, but tonight I was just lonely enough not to mind her steering me to a seat.

She squeezed my hand as we sat down. “Oh, Hal, it's beautiful.” The scrim, lit from behind, seemed to be an opaque wall of dense foliage. I'd wanted to give the audience the impression that they were staring down a corridor of trees in a forest, and I guess I'd succeeded. The truth was, I couldn't really judge if it was any good or not and I didn't really care. The better the show, the better Heidi Bragg was going to look. If there were a way I could have erased every leaf I'd drawn over the past week, returning the Forest of Arden to its prehistoric pre-Hal look, I'd have done so with pleasure.

The house lights dimmed, the scrim rose, and when the stage lights came up, we were in the interior of a nobleman's house.

“As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion / bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, / and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my sadness.” The guy playing Orlando was actually named Adam, which had been its own inside joke for the cast every time he'd made this speech. Tonight, though, the guy playing Adam and the one playing Oliver managed to get through the scene without cracking themselves up.