The Life of Glass (11 page)

I never really noticed Ryan’s eyes before, how nice they were. They were this deep blue color that made me think of Lake Mead, bright and sparkling in the sun. He was looking at my eyes too. His face was close enough to mine that I could feel his breathing, not raspy and asthmatic now, but quiet and even. I had this strange feeling that he was about to kiss me.

Then it was as if he remembered where he was and who he was with, because he shook his head a little bit
as if waking up from a strange dream, and he took a step back. I stuffed the piece of glass back in my pocket and shuffled my feet, not wanting to look directly at him, not wanting to see it in his face that he was embarrassed or ashamed or annoyed.

“I need to get back,” he said, and hopped on his bike. “I’m supposed to meet Courtney at four.”

I looked at my watch. It was 3:55. He was going to be late. He’d forgotten about her for a while, a thought that left me feeling strangely satisfied.

Courtney and Ryan
decided to name their pig Miss Piggy, even though they were already pretty sure it was a boy. “We have to stick with the whole theme,” Ryan said, and I could tell Courtney couldn’t care less what the pig was called as long as she didn’t have to touch the thing. Jeffrey asked me if I wanted to name our pig, and I lied and said no, because I really didn’t want to do anything with him. But in my head, I secretly named it Wilbur, like the pig in
Charlotte’s Web
, because I thought his face looked all sad, like he’d known he was going to die and there was nothing he could’ve done to stop it.

At least Jeffrey didn’t mind doing all the work, and he
didn’t even complain when I just copied all his answers from his worksheets without even asking, so I guess it could’ve been much worse.

I emailed Aunt Julie all about the pig. At first, when I sat down to write to her, I thought about asking her about Sally Bedford. She knew so much about my mother’s past—maybe she would know about this too. But after I wrote it all down, I felt weird having it in writing, proof of my inability to stop obsessing over my father’s life. So I wrote about dissecting the pig instead, as if it were the strangest and most interesting thing I had to report in my life at the moment. In response she wrote, “VEGAN IS A WAY OF LIFE,” in all caps, like she was shouting it at me across three thousand miles. I wasn’t exactly sure what a vegan was and how it was different from a vegetarian, so I asked my mom.

“Aunt Julie doesn’t eat any animal products,” she said. “No cheese or eggs or anything that comes from an animal.”

I made a face. I could not picture my life without cheese, when I’d literally subsisted half the year on Cheez Whiz. And I thought it was a little weird that she emailed that to me. It’s not like I was planning on eating Wilbur or anything. In fact, since we’d started the dissection, I’d
kind of sworn off pork altogether, so in a way, I could see where Aunt Julie was coming from.

Ashley said she thought being a vegan was cool, and she was going to try it.

“Oh, sweetie, no,” my mom said. “You have to eat more than rabbit food. You’re already so thin.”

Ashley shook her head and sighed. “Look at my stomach.”

There was nothing there. It was flat, like a wall, like the pavement, not even an extra little ounce of skin. But I knew what this was really about. Ashley had gotten the application for her most important pageant in the mail yesterday. If she won this one, she’d qualify for the state pageant. And Ashley had never done better than place second before. “You’re not going to win that pageant if you look like you just got off the plane from Ethiopia,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She had her hand on her hip, and she hung her head to the side and glared at me. I shrugged.

“Girls, no one is going to get malnourished in this house.” My mother stamped her foot down. “No one is becoming a vegan on my watch.”

Ashley shot me a dirty look, as if this were all my
fault. I smiled at her and said, “I could totally have a steak for dinner. Couldn’t you, Mom?”

“Hmm. Well, I guess we could go out.” She paused. “I could call Kevin. See if he wants to join us.”

How had that happened? We’d gone from a normal conversation to having dinner with Kevin, all in the span of thirty seconds. “I have a lot of homework,” I lied. I had nothing, except for some poetry I was supposed to read for English and wasn’t planning on actually reading.

“So do I,” Ashley said, which was definitely a lie because I knew for a fact that she did all of her homework during her social studies class last period, where all the teacher did was show boring movies with the lights on day in and day out.

“Well, maybe another night then. Maybe Saturday after your riding lessons.”

Ashley and I exchanged glances. We’d told her it would only be one time, but maybe she hadn’t been listening. It was funny with our mother, how sometimes she had a tendency of only hearing what she wanted to hear. It was like that when my father first got sick, when they gave him some ridiculous odds of five-year survival like 10 percent or something, and my mother said, Well, Tom, that means 10 percent of people live longer than
that, as if the other 90 percent never even crossed her mind.

“Kevin told me how much fun you girls had, and it made me so happy.” She squeezed both of us, one in each arm, pulling us close to her. “I can’t even tell you how much this means to me. You girls are so great. Really, truly. I have the best children in the world.”

So there were riding lessons, every Saturday afternoon.

Ashley and I drove up to Dusty Meadows at one o’clock and stayed for an hour. Ashley and Prancer were becoming the best of friends. It was always like Ashley to take a bad situation and make it good, kind of like my mother, because you would never know from the way she acted that she didn’t want to be there, that she would run into the shower the second we got home complaining that the stench of horse had followed her.

No, my sister was learning to ride Prancer like velvet. Her riding became smooth and elegant and sleek and looked like something she’d been doing her whole life. At first Kevin walked beside her in a ring, and then eventually he stood on the other side of the fence and watched her and called out things to her that she came to understand.

With me and Daffodil it was a different story altogether. We made no attempts to try and like each other. I gave her a dirty look, and she flicked her tail in the air and sneered at me. After three weeks, Kevin finally pushed me to get on her, and I did, if only to shut him up.

When I sat on the top of the saddle, I was uncomfortable and I felt like I was up way too high to balance. “You need to trust her,” Kevin said.

I shook my head. “I can’t.” I tried to maneuver myself down, and when he reached out his hand to help, I took it. It was harder than I thought it would be to get down from a horse, and back on the ground I felt wobbly, like I was going to throw up.

“That was a start,” Kevin said.

Ashley rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Melissa.” She looked to Kevin to back her up. But he didn’t say anything at all.

Finally, he said, “Everybody moves at their own pace. All right, girls?”

In the middle
of March, Desert Crest High went into an uproar. The week before spring break, tickets for the spring formal went on sale, and people started pairing up and breaking up and getting dates and ditching dates. Everywhere I went, there seemed to be this constant buzz of who was going with whom and who wasn’t going at all.

It was a no-brainer that Austin asked Ashley, and Ryan asked Courtney. I was a little bit surprised when I heard that Max Healy had asked the Nose, not because I really thought he might actually ask me, but because I thought what Ashley had said about him and the Nose
having something together had been an outright lie.

I just assumed that I wouldn’t be going, and I thought I was okay with it until Courtney asked me to go dress shopping with her. Courtney and I hadn’t hung out alone since that day she’d told me about making out with Mark in San Diego, so I was a little surprised that she asked at all.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Come on, Meliss. I really need your help. My mom’s going to give me her credit card, and she’ll drop us at the mall, and we can get whatever dresses we want.”

She asked me in the middle of biology when Ryan and Jeffrey were busy digging through the pig. It was hard to see her eyes through the safety goggles, so I couldn’t tell how serious she was about wanting me to go. “Well, I don’t think I’m even going to the stupid dance,” I said.

Jeffrey put down the scalpel and pulled his goggles up over his head. “I’d like to take you to the dance, Melissa.”

I was caught so off guard by his invitation that I didn’t even know what to say at first. Courtney started laughing and I kicked her under the table. “It’s all right,” I finally said. “I don’t really want to go.”

“Well,” he said, pulling the goggles back down, “if
you want to go, I’m available.”

I felt a little bad because the truth was, I did want to go to the dance, only not with him, and then I felt bad for the way everyone treated him, for the way I’d ignored him, ceased to recognize that he was even a person with real feelings or whatever, so I added, “It’s not you, Jeffrey. I just don’t do dances, okay?”

He smiled at me, his big, thick nerdy smile, braces shooting out over chapped lips.

“But you’ll still go with me to the mall, right, Meliss?”

I said I would, just to change the subject. Just to shut her up.

On Saturday, Courtney and her mom picked me up at nine, and I promised my mom that I would be back in time to go to Kevin’s ranch with Ashley. I have to say, I felt a little grateful for the lessons, that they gave me a reason why I could spend only three hours at the mall with Courtney instead of the entire day.

It was the first time I’d ever met Courtney’s mother, but I was not surprised that she looked exactly like Courtney, only a little bit older. Not even that much older really, and I wondered if she’d had some plastic surgery. Ashley
said that’s what everyone in California did.

Courtney’s mother dropped us off at the mall and promised to be back at twelve to get me home in time. Since she was a realtor she was always showing houses, and today was no exception. I thought it was a little sad that she didn’t want to come look for dresses with us. My mother always took Ashley to find dresses for the spring formal, and they invited me to come along, though I never had. This would be my first official dress-shopping experience.

Courtney started listing off what she was looking for as soon as we got into the mall. Strapless. Not black. Maybe navy or red or green. Empire waist. Above the knee. I found myself smiling and nodding but only half listening. I was sure she would look great in anything. And besides, I couldn’t get myself all excited about it anyway.

She dragged me to Dillard’s first, which is the most expensive store in the mall. My mother and Ashley hardly ever went there unless the store was having some kind of great sale (which it wasn’t). And it surprised me that Courtney didn’t even look at the price tags as she pulled dresses off the rack that she wanted to try on.

I played the role of clothes rack and enthusiastic
nodder as she piled dress after dress in my arms, and once I was probably holding about fifteen and felt like I was about to fall over, I finally said, “Can we go try these on?”

She looked at me and laughed. “Oh, Meliss, I’m sorry. I got so caught up, I didn’t realize.”

I offered to wait outside the dressing room, but Courtney insisted that I come in with her. So we went into the big handicapped-accessible room at the end, and I sat on the little chair in the corner.

I tried not to watch as she slipped out of her jeans and shirt, but I couldn’t help but notice. She had on a lacy black bra with matching underwear, and she looked like someone who could model in a Victoria’s Secret catalog or something. Tiny little waist, curvy hips, and perfect breasts. It was hard to believe that she was the same age as I was, that she’d already grown into her figure and wore it comfortably, while I was still waiting for mine to materialize. Maybe it never would. Maybe I was going to be skinny and hipless and boobless forever. My mother said that some women were just built that way, like sticks and boards. I sighed.

“What? Don’t you like it?” She already had the first dress on, a red shiny strapless one that would’ve looked
ridiculous on me but of course looked perfect on her.

“It’s great,” I said.

“Do you think?” She turned around. “I think it makes my butt look big.”

There was absolutely nothing about it that made her butt look big. “Not at all,” I said.

“Oh you’re just being nice. Tell me the truth.”

“I swear. It’s beautiful.”

She sighed. “Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.”

“What?”

“Keats.” She laughed. “Come on. Be brutal.”

In my head I thought, You’re a slut, and you don’t deserve Ryan. And it annoyed me that she also had to be smart, that she couldn’t be beautiful and ditzy but had to be beautiful and quoting Keats at the same time. But what I said was, “I really do like it.”

“Hmm.” She stuck out her butt and turned around and tried to check it out in the mirror. “I can’t decide. This can go in the ‘maybe’ pile.”

The “maybe” pile turned out to be my lap, and as Courtney tried on dress after dress, the pile on my lap grew to seven. The problem was, Courtney looked good in everything. She must have one of those body types that designers had in mind, because everything fit her,
but in every single one she found some little flaw: Her boobs looked too small or too big; her stomach stuck out funny; or her shoulders looked flat. I couldn’t see any of it. To me she just looked absolutely stunning in each and every one. Disgusting.

Finally, I said, “You should just pick one. You look good in all of them.”

“But Meliss, I want it to be perfect. This is going to be our special night. You know.” She looked directly at me and smiled this little smile she had when she was about to do something that she knew might get her in trouble. It was the same look she gave me in biology just before she’d go to cheat on the test and copy Ryan’s answers.

I did know exactly what she meant, and it made me feel sick, right in the pit of my stomach. Then I wanted to punch her. I wanted to yell her stupid truth-and-beauty line back in her face and tell her she was hideous and a liar. I wanted to stand up and throw all seven dresses on her and run, and run so fast that I could run all the way to Ryan’s house and tell him who Courtney really was, because now it was entirely clear to me that I didn’t really even like Courtney. She may have been all shiny and pretty, nail polish and glitter, but underneath, as my father might’ve put it, she was a bad egg.

But Courtney, as usual, was completely oblivious to all of it, and when I looked at her again she was smiling and in the first red dress. “I think I’ll go with this one. You like it, right?”

I nodded sort of dumbly, afraid to say anything to her because this anger I felt for her was horrible and was welling up inside of me ready to explode, and I wanted to hold it in and use it to give me the courage to tell Ryan what I knew.

I got home around 12:30, and even though I knew we had to leave for Kevin’s ranch, I told Ashley I was going to find Ryan.

“No way,” she said. “I am not going to horse-shit hell alone.” She tugged on the end of my ponytail. “You can go find your boyfriend when we get back.”

“He is not my boyfriend,” I sneered at her, and in my mind I had this picture of Courtney in her perfect red dress, hanging all over him.

By the time we got back from Kevin’s, it was nearly dinnertime, but I hopped on my bike and rode straight over to Ryan’s anyway. All afternoon I’d been building my resolve, trying to rehearse this conversation in my head
where I would tell him about Courtney and Mark, and he would thank me, and call her right away and break things off. And then he might say, Well, I already have the tickets to the dance, Mel, so we could go if you want to….

I’d sat next to Daffodil and petted her back while she grunted as Ashley rode Prancer around the arena. She was starting to look like a pro, and I was thinking that if the whole beauty-pageant thing didn’t work out, she could probably enter horse shows or something, but I didn’t dare say that to her.

I felt my heart beating quickly, the blood pumping fast and steady through my veins, as I rode to Ryan’s. I was nervous and scared and excited and joyous all at the same time.

Ryan’s father’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I put my bike down by the porch and rang the doorbell. Once. Then twice.

And then he opened the door.

He stood there rubbing his eyes. His sandy blond hair was sticking up in the back and he had on jeans and a white T-shirt and no shoes. “Oh hey, Mel.” He yawned. I pushed my way past him into the house. “Hey, what time is it?”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t expected small talk, normal
conversation, and I was itching to say what I had to say. I looked at my watch. “Four thirty.”

“Oh, crap. I’m supposed to be at Courtney’s at four thirty.” He ran into the powder room and threw his head under the sink, then tried to comb his hair with his hands.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Can’t it wait, Mel? I’m already late as it is.”

“No.” I grabbed his arm. “No. It can’t wait.”

He stopped what he was doing, and he looked at me. There was water dripping from his hair down his face, so it almost looked like he was crying, as if a cascade of tears kept flowing like a river down his cheeks. And with his hair wet he looked like that boy I knew in elementary school, the one who’d had an asthma attack in the middle of a fourth-grade math lesson and had fallen out of his chair to the floor, causing Mrs. Tracey to scream.

“You found that woman you were looking for?” he asked.

“What? No.” I shook my head.
No thanks to you,
I added silently. But suddenly I wished that’s what it was, all I had to say to him, because oddly it seemed like that would’ve been less scary than this. I wondered briefly about what my grandmother thought Sally had done to my father, and
if it was worse than what Courtney had done to him. “Sit down,” I said. He listened and sat on top of the toilet lid, while I went and leaned against the sink.

“Courtney cheated on you.” I blurted it out. I’d meant to ease into it, to try to soften it, but in the moment it erupted out of me, encased in this fear that if I didn’t just say it I never would, that I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell him. He didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “When she went to see her dad over Christmas in San Diego, she made out with her old boyfriend, Mark.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, and I felt this oddly smug sense of satisfaction. “Mel. I mean, I just don’t believe it.”

“I know,” I said.

“No, I mean you. This is exactly what Courtney said would happen.” The words rang in my ears, hard and heavy, like an annoying song that was being blared out of speakers way too loud, so at first I thought I’d misunderstood. “She said that you were jealous of us. That you were going to try to tear us apart. And I kept telling her she was wrong. But really, Mel, she’s been so nice to you. How could you?”

I’d underestimated Courtney. Maybe she’d made out with Mark and maybe she hadn’t, but maybe she’d set me up by telling me. Maybe she’d wanted me to tell Ryan
because she was the one who was jealous, the one who couldn’t stand the two of us being friends. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

He stood up. “I think we’re done,” he said, running his fingers through his wet hair.

I knew he was right, that we were, but I wanted him to take it back, wanted him to reach out and give me a hug, or try to make me laugh, or ask me if I wanted to ride with him. But these things had all just disappeared in a matter of minutes, gone up in smoke heavy enough to transform the sky from something beautiful, brilliant, sunny, into something dark and dirty.

I let myself out. And when I got on my bike and started riding, I felt the tears rolling down my face, slow at first, then faster. I couldn’t even wipe them away as I rode, so I just let them keep coming, blurring up my vision, as I pushed my bike faster and faster.

I was riding toward Grandma Harry, because I knew that even though she couldn’t always remember everything, she was kind and loving and always happy to see me, and in some small way, that made me feel better about myself.

The thing was, the person I really wanted was my father. He was always great at giving advice or making me
feel better for whatever reason. My mother had a way of brushing me off, whereas my father always listened completely and really seemed to take in what I was saying.

Right before he got sick, I auditioned to be in the fourth-grade play. It was some silly play about Sandra Day O’Connor and how she was the first woman on the Supreme Court, and I was sure I was going to get the role of her, the lead. I’d practiced the lines in front of my mirror for weeks, and my dad bought me this book about her life so I could study up and “get in character.”

Well, it turns out, I didn’t get the lead. I got the part of “Woman #4,” which basically meant I had one line, and I was part of this crowd of people who watched Sandra walk by.