Spectacle (A Young Adult Novel) (10 page)

She wondered where it was now.

Her heart beating faster, she clicked the link to go to Artists’ profiles.

And there Marilyn was. In full color with a thin, drawn face, long, gray hair, bright eyes not quite focused on the camera, and the same high cheekbones as Emily and Kristen.

Emily jumped up, ran to her sister’s room, and pounded on the door. No answer. Then she remembered Kristen’s basketball game at Roosevelt.

“Oh my God,” she muttered to herself. “Oh my God.”

She sat back down to read Marilyn Wozniak’s blurb:

“Marilyn Wozniak was born in 1962 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied at The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington. Since 2002, her art has been exhibited in several local galleries, as well as at Bernardo Kling in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

When she’s not painting, she can be found in her garden, canning tomatoes, or reading in a hammock.”

Oh
, Emily thought.
Isn’t that nice? Canning tomatoes. Reading in a hammock. What about helping raise the two daughters you gave birth to almost twenty years ago. What about them?

“I hate you,” she said to the ceiling. “I hate you.”

She stared at her mom’s picture. “I hate you.”

Marilyn was a lanky woman. Even though the photo only showed the top half of her, you could tell.

Emily tried to imagine her dad with this Marilyn Wozniak and found she couldn’t. As much as she hated to admit it, Melissa suited him well with her petite build and lust for fitness and health food. She was slowly converting him over to eating granola, rejecting red meat, and walking a few miles most nights.

What had Emily’s father been like with her mother? More artistic? More free-spirited?

It was hard to picture her dad that way, with his perfectly creased Dockers, button-down oxfords, and bitter lines framing his thin lips.

In any case.
Mother of God
. Emily’d just found her mom. The woman of few snapshots and sparse memories. The woman who’d found it necessary to paint a celestial scene on the station wagon before leaving in it forever. The woman in whose uterus Emily had lived for the first nine months of her existence. The woman who’d missed her birthdays and taking Emily to get her ears pierced and teaching her how to make scrambled eggs.

After all these years of not knowing if Marilyn was alive or dead.

Mother of freaking God.

Her mom was the first thing Emily thought of when she woke up the next morning. Marilyn. An artist in Bisbee, Arizona. Alive and seemingly well.

A chilly breeze blew in through the slender exposed strip of metal screen. Emily clenched the cotton jersey sheet in her hands and curved her body inward.

Anger and hope created a terrible steaming crater in her stomach. What should she do with her new information? Should she try to get in touch? Should she share it with Kristen or would it just upset her? Should she sit on the revelation and try not to think about it too much, try to go on with her life?

What was a 16-year-old girl supposed to do with such news?

Resentment flared, blotting out her excitement. Her mother put her in this situation. A situation she would’ve foreseen if she’d had any long-sightedness at all. Of course one or both of her daughters would try to find her someday. She couldn’t have predicted the Internet, of course, but there were other methods, even that many years ago. Snail mail, for crying out loud. Phone calls.

The means didn’t really matter, though. The fact was, Emily had located Marilyn and now she didn’t, for the life of her, know what to do with that intelligence.

21. Shaky Alliance

“
R
YAN
M
C
E
LVOY?
H
E’S
a snooze. A boring prep.”

“Really?” Trix said. “You think of him as preppy?”

“He’s on the Stanford train, believe me. A total vanilla,” Marjorie said.

They walked down the railroad tracks that snaked along the ship canal where fishing boats docked. It made Trix stupidly happy to hear Ryan described as a “total vanilla.”

For once, her skin was calm as water on a still day, not at all itchy. She smoked her cigarette and tramped along, a salty breeze in her face.

They passed a homeless man pushing, through the mud, a grocery cart full of empty cans, a dirty sleeping bag, a bent bike wheel.

“You don’t like McElvoy, do you?” Marjorie asked, kicking a beer bottle hard against a metal rail. It shattered and she laughed.

“No,” Trix said. “Hell, no. But I think Emily does.”

“Yeti?”

Irritation flared in Trix’s gut. She and Emily weren’t on the best terms right then, but it didn’t mean Trix wanted people trashing her. “Her name’s Emily.”

“Oh, whoa! Didn’t mean to diss your friend. She’s vanilla too, by the way.”

Emily wasn’t, actually, vanilla. But she could be on the pious side.

Trix and Marjorie wandered down to the canal’s edge and tossed their cigarette butts in. The water was greasy with oil and reflected the huge hulls of fishing boats that would soon be sailing up to Alaska.

“Who do you like?” Trix asked.

“Everyone,” Marjorie said. “And no one. Which is to say, I’ll sleep with anyone, but no one gets to have my heart.”

Sad, Trix thought. But it was what she liked about Marjorie, too. There was something inaccessible about her. Something that could not be tamed.

“Ever?”

“Never.”

Trix felt like a marshmallow compared to Marjorie. She knew she seemed tough on the outside, but her trampiness and anger hid the goo between her ribs.

“You’re one of a kind, Marjorie King.”

Marjorie laughed—a loud, joyous rumble. “I know.”

They each lit new cigarettes and walked the steel rails of the tracks, balancing like little kids on beams, with their arms out. They slipped and laughed and got back up, both happy to have found someone to relate to. Neither knowing yet that this new friendship was going to take them places they shouldn’t be treading.

22. Flying Solo

O
NE EVENING, A
few days before Halloween, Emily’s dad and Melissa sat the girls down in the living room and announced they were going to Vancouver for the weekend. “A getaway we badly need,” Melissa said.

A getaway from what?
Emily wanted to ask
. All you do is hang around drinking smoothies and green tea and playing on your computer.
But, instead, Emily said, “That sounds nice.”

“We trust we can leave you girls here alone for three nights,” Bob Lucas boomed.

Kristen was replacing the laces on a pair of sneakers. “Of course.”

Emily chimed in, “We’ll only throw a couple of parties. With no more than three kegs each. Promise!”

Raising his eyebrows and shaking his head, her dad said, “We’ll be calling every night.”

She wondered if her dad had ever gone on weekend trips with her mom. Over to the Gorge or up into the mountains or the coast. Driving the famous getaway station wagon.

“We’ll be good,” Kristen said.

“As usual,” Emily added.

“If anything comes up, you can always call Claudia,” Melissa said. Claudia was a scarily fit, sixty-something woman who lived a couple blocks away. She was tan and sinewy, with pure white hair she wore pulled back into a high ponytail. Melissa sometimes ran with her.

“We’ll have our cells, too,” their dad reminded them.

Once the paranoid adults were satisfied they’d adequately prepared Emily and Kristen and secured the premises, they slipped from the room.

Emily and Kristen gave each other sidelong glances, trying not to break into huge smiles.

“Party!” Trix loud-whispered between their classroom desks. She’d barely spoken to Emily in the past week, but when Emily announced her news, Trix had to make her case.

“No way,” Emily said.

“Oh c’mon. When are you gonna get this chance again? Just a small one. Like, 50 people.”

The room was cold, the sleeves of Emily’s shirt too thin and too short. She could feel the desk’s cool Formica under her arms.

She sensed Ryan three rows behind her. She could be in a stadium with thousands of people and she’d always know his coordinates in relation to hers.

She said, “You can’t control how many people come to those things. Besides, no.” Emily would be killed if her dad found out.

“You’re wasting your opportunity. Big house. No parents. God. If only I could be so lucky.”

It was then that Johnson came into the room.

Emily allowed herself one glance backward. Ryan’s eyes were locked on her.

She whipped around toward the front, her heart pounding so hard she didn’t know how she’d focus on what Mr. Johnson was saying, hoping, as she always did, that her intestines didn’t make some horrible noise during that hour.

Thankfully, she was able to keep her body quiet and even take a few notes during class.

Mr. Johnson announced the Theater of the Absurd plays were due Monday and informed the class that some people would be reading theirs aloud.

As Emily got up to leave, there was a tug at her arm. It was Ryan. “I hear you and Kristen are flying solo this weekend.”

They were in the hallway by then, a million kids zipping past. It smelled like cafeteria pizza.

“What? You already heard?” Emily said, biting her lip.

“You gonna go crazy?” He pushed his brown hair off his forehead and readjusted his backpack.

She realized as she stood there that their height difference was negligible if she slouched. This made her happy. She brushed away Melissa’s voice in her head that hissed,
No one looks good stooped over
.

“Nah,” Emily said, suddenly wishing she were planning to go a little crazy.

“Bummer. I’d like to see what Emily Lucas does with no supervision.” A few people glanced at them, sizing up what this interaction between Ryan and Emily meant. Trix slid past, her eyebrows pulled inward, her lips curled in distaste.

The thought came to Emily in a flash, quicker than a droplet of water falling from faucet to sink:
Trix is jealous.

Emily looked away quickly and focused on the boy in front of her.

“Oh, it’s … ” she faltered, trying to think of something clever to say, distracted by the fury in Trix’s eyes. “It wouldn’t be pretty. And anyway, I can’t. The Theater of the Absurd project? I know you’re done, but I haven’t even started.”
Brilliant, Einstein
. Her excuse was homework. She might as well wear a t-shirt that said, “World’s biggest dork.” Maybe she’d go to CafePress.com and have one made up.

He said, “Write it tonight.”

She shrugged, knowing she’d totally blown the conversation.

As they moved apart, toward their separate classes, Ryan said, “You’ll change your mind.”

That night, Emily sat down on her bed and pried off her boots, painfully aware that she had to finish her Theater of the Absurd play but wanting only to stare at the ceiling and think about her conversation with Ryan.

She let herself lay there for a few minutes, breathing in, breathing out. There were so many better things she could’ve said than what had actually come out of her mouth. Clever, witty non sequiturs that would’ve reeled Ryan in like a docile trout.

Then her mind began to flip through a half dozen scenarios during which she might run into him that weekend. A small get-together, maybe? On the lawn, no one allowed inside. No. No. She couldn’t. A game—wasn’t there football or something Saturday night? A meal—burgers at Dick’s. A walk along the beach—or would it be too cold?

Finally, heaving herself off the bed and going to the computer out on the landing, she started typing a first act about two girls waiting for a phone call from a boy.

The assignment sucked her in and the next time she looked up at the monitor’s clock, she saw an hour and a half had passed. She was just finishing the third page when Melissa trotted up the stairs. Cleaning her cell phone with a Clorox wipe, she said, “Hey. I’d rather Trix not come over while we’re gone.”

Emily stretched and twisted around to crack her back. “Why not?”

“Your dad and I don’t … completely … trust her.” Melissa must’ve seen Emily’s hackles rising, because she said, “I know she’s a good friend of yours. But, if you’re going to hang out, could you just meet her somewhere else?”

“God,” she said. “I never knew you didn’t like my friends.” Truthfully, she probably wouldn’t have seen Trix anyway. Trix had been either working or hanging out with creepy Marjorie King every time Emily tried to reach out.

Melissa tossed the wipe into a trash can, her phone dangling from one hand. “It’s not that we don’t like her. We just don’t think she has a good head on her shoulders like you do.”

Emily thought “good head on your shoulders” was dumb phraseology. It always made her think of some neckless mutant. Maybe with one eye and no ears. She asked Melissa, “And do you ever think for yourself? Or is it all
We
?”

Melissa lowered her chin and raised her brows.

“Sorry,” Emily said. “It’s fine. I’ll just spend the weekend alone.”

Sighing, Melissa said, “C’mon, Em.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll suspend my social life while you’re gallivanting around Canada.”

“Oh, the drama,” Melissa said.

Emily watched her move down the hall, petite frame swaying, black hair grazing her shoulders.

Gag.

She grabbed a bag of Fritos and a Diet Coke from a plastic grocery sack she kept stashed in her room, then went back to work, diving into her play with a vengeance. It wasn’t even about the grade. Writing the assignment was offering her some sort of release, some way to channel all the stuff about Marilyn Wozniak. And also Ryan, Sam, and Trix. As if tiny lightning bolts of petulance and anxiety and anticipation were shooting from her fingertips and appearing onscreen.

And under it all ran the ticker that always accompanied her work:
Would this have made Marilyn proud? If she had a chance to read it, would it make her want to come back?