Someone I Wanted to Be
Read Someone I Wanted to Be Online
Authors: Aurelia Wills
I talked to myself all the time. I pretended someone was listening and interested in my favorite color, what music I liked, and what I thought of Kristy. I told this listener, pulling thoughts and feelings out of the tangled mess inside me as I lay on my bed in my little room with puke-green walls decorated with posters of Bruno Mars, kittens, and puppies. Splotches of red dust grew on my window. Behind the yellowed glass were thick black bars and a window well full of garbage, dead leaves, and spiders.
I twirled the matchbook between my fingers. I opened the cover, smelled the peppery matches, and studied the name Kurt King and the number written inside in red ballpoint. His writing was small, tight, and jagged like lightning strokes. As he’d handed it to me, he’d said, “Tell her to call me.”
I opened my phone and slowly pushed in the numbers, then held it to my cheek and stared up at a basket of black kittens with tiny pink tongues. I listened to the phone ring and waited in a cloud of nothingness, paper kittens, and an endless ringing. Then it stopped and a man with a hoarse voice said, “Yeah?”
The phone felt like a little bomb.
“Who is this?” he said.
Corinne and I went to Kristy’s to get ready. Kristy’s house had silky beige carpet like cocker spaniel fur. Seedpods and dried grass stuck out of a brown jug, and a shellacked wooden cross hung over the gas fireplace. Orange light shone through the smudged picture window that looked out on a cedar fence. Beyond the fence were the roofs of a hundred houses, every single house with a mountain view.
Kristy’s dad sat in his recliner with his thick fingers curled under his chin. He tilted his head and stared dreamily at a cooking show on the flat-screen TV. He’d taken off his work clothes and wore a ribbed undershirt that stretched over his big soft belly. He was always tired — he worked at some job in the office park by the mall. “Kristy, Pastor Steve is coming in twenty minutes. Do you want to come in and pray with us?”
“Um, Dad, I think we’ll be gone by then. Sorry!” said Kristy, widening her eyes at Corinne.
Mrs. Baker hung on to the kitchen counter with both hands. She was wearing her footed toddler PJs with the zipper up the front. She looked like a giant baby chicken with a few tufts of gray hair like wilted feathers. “Girls, can I get you juice? We have flaxseed cookies.”
Kristy rolled her eyes. “Mom, those cookies are disgusting.” She shook out her hair, pressed her head against Corinne’s, and whispered something. They ran laughing down the hallway.
Mrs. Baker wobbled over and put her arm around my waist. “How’s my girl?”
“Oh, you know, I’m OK. What about you?” Her arm felt like a little branch, her hand like a leaf. She was the sickest person I’d ever known.
Mrs. Baker, this medicine will make you feel very sick for a few weeks, but afterward you will completely recover,
I imagined telling her. I wanted to be a doctor but hadn’t told anyone.
“Don’t you worry about me.” She weakly squeezed me with her leaf hand. Her eyes were so bright in that gray skinny face.
“Leah, get your big butt down here!”
Mrs. Baker wrinkled her forehead and raised her eyebrows, or the skin where her eyebrows used to be. I could suddenly smell the cold, sharp medicines. She shook her almost-bald head. “She’s a pistol.”
“See you later, Mrs. Baker.”
She squeezed my shoulder with her little trembling hand. “You call me Mom.”
The walls of the hallway were covered with framed photographs of Kristy. Eight-by-ten school portraits in wooden frames, a baby Kristy surrounded by floating toys and bubbles in a blue bath, Kristy doing the splits in a leotard before she quit gymnastics, Kristy on her dad’s shoulders at Disneyland, the towers of the Magic Kingdom glowing in the weird black light behind them. Her dad, squashed beneath her, grinned and hung on to her ankles while she stuck out her chin and bared her teeth.
Kristy slammed her bedroom door shut behind me, then slid down it until she sat cross-legged on the carpet. She pulled her hair out from behind her and patted it like it was a pet. “Damn, those people wear me out. God! I can’t believe my dad asked me to pray with them.” She flipped open her laptop.
Corinne and I sat at the foot of her twin beds. Kristy’s parents had given her the master bedroom. The floor was covered in soft pink carpet. The comforters, curtains, and the skirt around the vanity were all done in matching fabric — a white background filled with fat roses. Kristy had taped up pictures of models and a giant poster of Lil Wayne, though she didn’t even listen to his music. Kristy’s nose almost touched the computer screen. She typed something super fast and laughed.
Corinne pulled off her shoes and squinted at her toenails. “I don’t mean to be rude, but there’s something different about your mom’s face.”
I said, “God, Corinne, rude. Just rude.” I would never have said anything.
“Her eyebrows fell off. Chemo.” Kristy’s eyes darted back and forth as she scrolled down the screen.
“Oh. Wow,” Corinne said, and we both solemnly nodded. As a doctor, I would have to get used to this stuff.
Kristy looked up. She raised her own white eyebrow and dug her pinkie into the corner of her eye. She smiled savagely. “She’s so skinny now, her butt’s all wrinkled.”
I felt a little sick at the thought. The waistband of my jeans was cutting into my stomach.
Kristy uncrossed her ankles and jumped to her feet. “I get first shower.” She always got first shower in her pink-carpeted bathroom. Even the toilet lid had a fuzzy pink cover.
Corinne pulled the laptop over. She brought up a picture of her and Kristy with their heads tilted, mouths open, fingers pointing at their chins — gangsters. She rolled onto her back and yelled, “Kristy, that night was so awesome!”
I picked up an old
Seventeen.
On the cover was a picture of a girl with big shiny eyes and long shining hair and long skinny legs like flower stems. A girl like a flower, but flowers couldn’t talk. Flowers were quiet like me. The girl on the cover looked so happy, as if being perfect was all it took.
Kristy turned on the water, ripped the shower curtain down the pole, and started screeching a Beyoncé song.
Kristy was my girl — we’d been friends since junior high — but something white-hot like hatred for her ran through me like a nerve. Except for her mom being sick, she had a life like in a magazine. Her parents were still married, and they adored her. They bought her diamond earrings for her thirteenth birthday and a barely used red Civic when she turned sixteen. She lived in a house with ten huge rooms. It was practically a mansion. She had everything you could possibly want, but she still wanted more.
Kristy was beautiful, though she wasn’t even pretty if you dissected her. She had squinty eyes with stubby white lashes and wore so much mascara that it clumped and flaked onto her cheeks. When she smiled, shiny pink gums showed above her teeth. She’d gotten her invisible braces off the year before.
She had a little face the size of a saucer, but her nose was substantial, a full-grown Italian-lady nose. She claimed to have a deviated septum, which would require a nose job when she turned eighteen. I could do a scarily good imitation of her whiny voice.