The Life of Glass (12 page)

“Oh, sweetie,” my mom had said. “Don’t feel bad. Not everyone can be the star.”

But my dad had taken me outside that night and lay down on the patch of grass in the backyard with me and said, “Look up at the sky with me, Melon.”

I did, and there were stars everywhere, the way it always was, bright and clear and sparkling with constellations that I couldn’t remember the names of. “So what?” I’d said.

“Point to your favorite star.” I looked for a moment
and then pointed to the brightest and the biggest one I could find.

“You see my favorite?” he said. “It’s that one, back there, the one that you can just barely see.”

“Why?”

“The bright ones are just the closest ones, the ones we can see more easily. But that doesn’t make them spectacular. That star I pointed to looks magnificent in a telescope, much better than the other ones.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, skeptical.

“Because,” he said, “I’ve seen it before, and it’s absolutely stunning.” He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Sometimes people just aren’t willing to take the time to look beyond the things that are bright and big and shiny. You know what I mean, Melon?”

I didn’t. Not really. But in a way, I did. I knew he was saying something about the play and how I wasn’t all shiny and beautiful like Gwen Birch, who’d gotten the lead, or even Ashley, who had been thinking about entering a Junior Miss pageant that year. But that didn’t mean that, underneath it all, I wasn’t just as good as they were.

But my dad wasn’t here now, and I couldn’t even imagine what he might say to make me feel better about the fact that I’d just lost my best friend, that I was utterly
and entirely friendless and that my social life consisted of Jeffrey’s quiet and nerdy adoration of me and my Saturday afternoon dates with Daffodil. Utterly pathetic.

I stopped in the public restroom in the lobby and splashed some cold water on my face, so Grandma Harry wouldn’t be able to tell I’d been crying. Then I walked toward her room.

I watched her from the hallway for a minute. She was eating what looked like chocolate pudding and staring at the TV. It sounded like the nightly news. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and combed it with my fingers, and then I took a deep breath and walked in.

She looked up, a little startled, and held the pudding up, as if she were about to throw it at me. “It’s you,” she sneered. “What is it? What do you want? I thought I told you not to bother me anymore.”

“Grandma it’s me, Melissa,” I said, fighting back fresh tears, because it was clear from her eyes that she didn’t recognize me, that I was not her granddaughter but some other person, someone she didn’t like. My mother had told us that this was a possibility, that sometimes her disease progressed in a way that would make her forget people, that when the memory ruptured, sometimes it started as a slow fissure, like when a tiny stone first hits a glass
windshield. But then it kept on going, expanding, until it was a massive gaping crack, so bad that you couldn’t even see the road to drive anymore.

She put down her pudding. But she said, “Well, I don’t know any Melissa. You must have the wrong room then.” She turned back to the TV.

I should’ve let it go, but I couldn’t, because I thought if I pushed her to, she would remember, so I gave her what I thought was just a little mental nudge. “I’m Tom’s daughter. Tom and Cynthia’s daughter.”

She narrowed her eyes a little bit, looked me up and down. “Liar,” she spat at me. And then she picked up the pudding and threw it. I ducked and it missed and hit the wall. But the noise stunned me, like a firecracker had just exploded, right there, by my feet.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I backed out of her room slowly, and then once I hit the hallway, I started running as fast as I could.

It was dark outside when I got back on my bike and started riding. I knew if my mom knew I was riding in the street in the dark, she’d be mad. She always made me promise I wouldn’t, ever since the time a boy in Ashley’s grade had been hit by a car and killed a few years back.

But I wasn’t about to call her. She was probably out with Kevin anyway, and Ashley was out with Austin. So I rode my bike, slowly, in the bike lane, trying my best to watch out for cars. I wondered what it might feel like to get hit, if it would all be over too quickly for me to really know what had happened, or if the flight through the air off the bike would create a lull in my head, as if in slow motion, graceful and terrifying all at once, until I hit the ground with a thud.

I heard a honk, and it scared me enough to make me lose my balance and almost topple off, and then a truck pulled off to the side of the road. “Melissa McAllister, that you?” I recognized the voice, so I stopped and turned, and there, hanging his head out the window of a red pickup was Max Healy. “Need a ride?” he asked.

I was about to say no because Max made me nervous under normal circumstances, and right now I was a wreck, in no mood for any sort of company. But before I could answer either way, Max was out of the truck and asking if he could pick up my bike to throw it in the back, and I had no choice but to let him.

I’d never driven with anyone else from school other than Ashley, but Max was a more careful driver. I noticed that he stopped slowly and seemed very observant and
cautious at stop signs, not exactly what I would’ve expected from someone as popular as he was—someone who drove around in a big shiny truck.

“So what are you doing out all alone on your bike at night?” Max asked as soon as he started driving.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Yeah? I’m a good listener.”

There was no way I was about to recount the embarrassing events of the afternoon to Max, so I just said, “I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s all right.”

“Sure,” he said. “So where can I drop you?”

“My house, if that’s okay.”

I knew it was Saturday night and he was probably going out. “I’m sorry if I ruined your plans,” I said. “I mean you’re probably on your way to go out with the No—I mean, Lexie.”

He laughed. “What do you call her?”

“The Nose,” I said quietly.

He laughed again. “Why?”

I realized he probably didn’t know about her nose job, that maybe I only knew because she was Ashley’s best friend, but it didn’t stop me from blurting it out anyway.

“Oh seriously? That’s funny. I mean, her nose isn’t even that nice or anything.”

The truth was, it wasn’t. It was kind of small and awkward-looking on her face, so I always thought that maybe the plastic surgeon had given her the wrong one, like it was the nose meant for a supermodel or something, but the rest of her face was only just sort of average-looking. “Don’t tell her what I said though. Please.” I knew Ashley would kill me if she knew about this or if she even knew that I called her the Nose in the first place.

“Your secret’s safe with me.” He said it all seriously like it was actually some big, real secret and then he laughed again. He cleared his throat. “So tell me then, Melissa, what’s a beautiful girl like you doing all by herself on a Saturday night?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. No one had ever called me beautiful before. I was always the sister of the beautiful girl or, back in junior high, the smart one or the funny one or the friend of the beautiful girl. And I wondered if he really meant it. I thought about what Courtney said, that all guys like Max wanted to do was get their hands up your shirt, and then I thought immediately that she must not know what she was talking about because a) she’d probably been trying to sabotage me anyway, and b) my size-A-cup boobs probably weren’t exactly what Max would have in mind.

Max pulled up in front of my house and stopped the truck. I unhooked my seat belt. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“Sure. Anytime. Let me help you with your bike.” We both got out and he reached in and pulled the bike out with one hand, smooth and easy in a way that made him look entirely strong and heroic.

He put the bike in my driveway with the kickstand down, and then he came and stood right next to me. I put my hands in my jean pockets and shuffled my feet a little. “Thanks again,” I said.

He leaned in and gave me a quick hug, but I wasn’t expecting it so it sort of knocked me a little off balance for a second. When he let go, he hopped in the truck and sped away.

I stood there in my driveway for a few minutes, the feel of his hug still hanging on my body in a way that made me tingle.

My father was
pretty fond of the thing Newton said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He had it scrawled in the front of his journal as one of his favorite quotes, and he used to tell it to Ashley and me all the time, every time we’d do something we weren’t supposed to or fight too much, and he always, always reminded me of this when I did things without thinking about them first. “In other words, Melon,” he’d say, “there are consequences for everything.” I wondered if this had been true for him, if, for whatever had happened between him and Sally, there had been consequences.

I thought about this on Monday in biology, when Courtney, grinning from ear to ear, walked right up to Mr. Finkelstein and announced that she and Ryan were going to change lab tables. “Yeah okay,” I heard him say, because really, I doubted he knew where any of us regularly sat, and I doubted that he cared. She turned and looked at me all smug and smiley, and I wanted to punch her in the face.

I tried to think of something really obnoxious to say, but the best I could come up with was that her butt actually did look fat in the red dress she bought, which of course, it actually didn’t, so that didn’t get me very far. And I kept my mouth shut.

When Ryan walked in, Courtney waved to him from the other side of the room and said, “Hey, Ry, we’re over here now.” He kept his eyes on her the whole time, not even looking in my direction once.

“Well, that’s an interesting development.” Jeffrey laughed. I glared at him. “I mean, everything okay?”

“It’s complicated.” I sighed because there was no way I was going to get into it with him.

Jeffrey shrugged. “It was only a matter of time, I guess. Everyone knows you’re in love with him.”

I glared at him again, and I had the urge to shake him,
to tell him to lose the nerd glasses and whiny voice and the chapped lips, and then maybe he could have a human conversation with me. “I am not in love with him,” I said, but for some reason I thought about my aunt Julie and my uncle Frank, and I wondered what their story was. And then I added, “Aren’t you supposed to be dissecting something?” I felt a little shaken by what Jeffrey said, but then I told myself to forget about it. What did Jeffrey know about love anyway?

In English we were reading Shakespearean love sonnets. I knew they were supposed to be all great, being that they were by Shakespeare and everything, but most of them just didn’t really make much sense to me. He had such a roundabout way of saying things. I wished he could’ve just come out and said it.

Mrs. Connor was wearing a purple glimmery shawl and she’d wrapped her hair around her head in a braid. “Now who can tell me what Will meant when he said, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’?”

We all sat there silently, and I thought about the fact that Will hadn’t lived in the desert, where a summer’s day was painfully hot, not something you would want to
compare love to, or at least I didn’t think you would.

I started thinking about Jeffrey’s comment from earlier in the day, that I was in love with Ryan. Would I compare Ryan to a summer’s day? Not exactly.

Then Mrs. Connor asked us to look at the end of the poem, the part where he wrote, “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Maybe Mrs. Connor could see it in my eyes that I knew exactly what he meant, right away, because she called on me to give my interpretation. “He’s saying that the poem will keep his love alive,” I said. I felt the eyes of the class on me, staring at me, as if I’d betrayed them by understanding the poem so quickly, so I added, “Or something like that.”

“Very nice, Miss McAllister.” She waved the end of her shawl at me.

I thought about my dad’s journal, the way his words, his writing, kept him alive for me.

After school, I noticed Ryan had chained his bike on the other set of racks on the other side of the steps, and I saw him and Courtney standing by the wall over there kissing. It was as if Courtney had eyes in the back of her head, because as soon as I looked in their direction, she
turned around, shot me a quick—and dare I say, evil—smile, and then went back to kissing him. I rolled my eyes at no one, hopped on my bike, and rode it home.

I was surprised when Ashley came in a few minutes later. She slammed the front door behind her, and I heard her running down the hall to her room. I grabbed my jar of Cheez Whiz from the microwave and walked down the hallway after her while eating the cheese with my finger.

She had her door closed, so I knocked. She opened it and just stuck her head out. “What is it, Melissa? I’m not in the mood right now.”

“You’re home early.” I stuck my finger in the jar and licked off more cheese.

“God, you’re disgusting. Can’t you eat like a human being?”

I ignored her. “How come you’re not with Austin?”

She ignored me. “Hey, what’s the deal with you and Ryan, anyway? Courtney told Lexie in PE that you were, like, all over him the other day or something.”

“There’s no deal,” I said. “There’s nothing.” The thought of Courtney telling everyone that I was some kind of creep who couldn’t keep my hands off her boyfriend really burned me. I thought about what kind of
rumor I could spread about her. And my first thought popped out. “Courtney’s boobs are totally fake,” I lied.

“Really?” Ashley opened the door a little wider. “How do you know?”

“She told me. Her mom bought them for her as a present when they moved out here. To make her feel better about the divorce and all.”

Ashley moved to sit on the bed, and I and the jar of Cheez Whiz followed her. “Interesting. No wonder why they always look so perfect.” She stood up and looked at her profile in the mirror. “God, I need a boob job.”

“No you don’t.” Ashley’s boobs were average sized and normal-looking, and she could wear nice V-neck shirts and they looked fine, not like me. “If anyone does, I do.”

She ignored me. “Do you think Mom will let me get one, if I win this pageant? With the money, I mean.”

I shook my head. There was no way in hell my mother was letting Ashley get a boob job. She hadn’t caved on the nose job, even though Ashley had argued for weeks about that one. “She’ll probably make you put it away for college.”

She sighed. “Well, it will be my money. I should be able to do what I want with it.”

I supposed she had a point, but there was still no way it was going to happen.

Her phone rang, and she said, “Oh that’s Lexie. Get out, okay? I need to talk to her.”

I took my time getting up from the bed and walking out, so I heard Ashley say, “You will never guess who has fake boobs.”

And that was the first thing all day that made me smile.

My aunt Julie called a few days later and announced that she and Uncle Frank were going to Greece for their college’s spring break.

“Ooh, Greece,” I heard my mother say. “Sounds romantic, Jules.” That made me think that whatever problems my aunt and uncle were having, they were working them out. I knew it was wrong of me, but I was a little disappointed. In the back of my head I’d been thinking that if Aunt Julie and Uncle Frank got divorced, she might move back here permanently. And this was a prospect that excited me, even though I knew it was probably something that would make my aunt Julie miserable.

“So who are you going to this dance with?” Aunt
Julie asked when my mother handed the phone over to me.

“No one. I’m not going.”

“What about your friend? What was his name?”

I didn’t answer her. “Ashley’s going,” I said.

She sighed. “When I was your age, I was always too busy trying to be smart to go to dances. I didn’t realize you could do both, you know, do well in school and have fun.”

I didn’t clarify that I wasn’t too busy being smart as of late, and that my biology grade was barely teetering on the edge of a C, or that the reason that I wasn’t going was because no one, save the nerdiest boy at school, had even asked. “So if you didn’t go to dances,” I said, “how did you and Uncle Frank end up together?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “It was pretty simple, really. We knew each other in high school, and we both got into Penn. So there we were, three thousand miles away from home, not knowing anyone else.” She sighed. “And we were both a little lonely at first.”

I had expected some grand and romantic story, and this one was turning out to be a little pathetic. “When did you realize that you were madly in love?” I asked, hoping she would just skip to the good part.

She laughed. “Oh, honey, I don’t know. I’m a little more practical than that. You know, sometimes you just get used to being with a person, and then it seems harder to stop than to just keep on being with them.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, like I knew exactly what she was talking about. But it didn’t seem like that was really love.

My mother took a few days off from the salon over our spring break so she and Ashley could go shopping and get ready for the spring formal and the pageant, which was exactly a week after the formal.

“There is so much to do,” my mother said, scribbling a list for herself on a paper napkin. She looked flushed and hurried and excited all at once, and I wished briefly that I could enter a pageant, that she could get that excited over something I was doing.

Ashley was in the bathroom giving herself an apricot facial, trying to bring out the glow in her skin, and I was thinking about the fact that I had absolutely nothing planned for the whole week, save trying to figure out another way to find Sally. But I was sort of at a loss. The best idea I’d had lately was to save my lunch money for the rest of the year and then try to hire a private detective
in the summer. I knew it was a ridiculous notion, pathetic even, but it was all I had at the moment, other than to ask Aunt Julie the next time I talked to her.

“Can I come with you guys to the mall?” I asked my mom. She looked up, surprised, and I knew it was because I’d never wanted to go with them before. But I’d reached a new level of boredom and desperation. “Maybe you could drop me off at the bookstore,” I said.

“Of course.” She paused. “Don’t you have any plans with Ryan?”

I shook my head and thought about whether I should tell her the truth or not. Finally, I said. “We’re not really friends anymore.”

“You’re not? Well, when did this happen?”

I shrugged, and I felt close to tears. Before I could stop it, the whole story came pouring out of me, every terrible second, right down to the last part about me lying about Courtney getting a boob job.

I was waiting for her to brush me off and tell me it wasn’t a big deal or that I’d get over it. But she didn’t say anything. She reached out and pulled me into a hug and held me really tightly against her. “Melissa,” she whispered into my hair. “Oh, sweetie.” And then she said, “Boys are idiots.”

“Not all of them,” I whispered. “Not Dad.”

She shook her head. “Your dad had his moments. That’s for sure.” The way she said it, completely naked and honest and quiet, made me wonder for the first time if Ryan had been right, if Sally Bedford had been someone my father had been having an affair with. But I quickly shook the thought out of my head. Not him. No way. I silently vowed that I would figure out some way to keep looking for her, to figure out exactly who she was, if only to prove Ryan wrong.

She stood up. “Ashley,” she called. “Ashley, come in here for a sec.”

Ashley walked in wearing an old shirt, her face covered in apricot junk, her hair piled messily on top of her head. It was interesting the way these supposed beauty rituals made you look incredibly ugly while you were doing them, and I had to suppress the urge to laugh at her. “What is it?” She sounded annoyed.

“You need to get your sister a date for this dance.”

She looked like she’d just been hit in the stomach with a soccer ball or something, as if the wind had been knocked right out of her. I was about to protest, to say I didn’t need a date, that I didn’t even want to go. But I was enjoying Ashley’s sense of shock too much, so I kept
my mouth shut. “Well, what do you expect me to do?” she finally said. “It’s not my fault if no one wants to go with her.”

That last part was not entirely true, but there was no way I was telling them about Jeffrey’s offer to take me.

“You have a lot of friends,” my mother said. “You must know someone.” Ashley shook her head. “Just try. For me.”

“Okay. Whatever.” Ashley shot me a dirty look, which looked especially evil, layered in globs of apricot. And we both knew that she wouldn’t, that she was only saying it to appease my mother.

“And you, Miss Melissa, you are going dress shopping with us today.”

“I am?”

“We are going to find you a fabulous dress for this dance. Both of you,” she said. She put one arm around Ashley and the other arm around me, and squeezed us both to her. “Oh, I just love you girls so much,” she said.

So I ended up back at the mall, dress shopping again.

I didn’t have a list of qualifications. I didn’t have a color in mind. I wanted something that looked good on me. In other words, something that gave me the
appearance of having a real body.

Ashley needed two dresses. One for the spring formal and one for the pageant, and she currently required a size 00, which is apparently incredibly hard to find. My mom tried to convince her to try on some size 0s and 2s with the promise that she would take them in, which Ashley wasn’t too happy about, but she finally caved once she saw how minimal her selection was otherwise.

I was trying on dresses in size 2, which Ashley looked at in disdain but that my mother said most other girls would kill to wear. But I didn’t care all that much about sizes the way Ashley did.

I tried on about ten dresses that all made me look too flat chested and straight hipped, until I found this one I really liked. It was a dark shade of pink and it was knee length and flowy so it didn’t emphasize my hips. And it had this really nice, straight neckline that didn’t emphasize my lack of boobs. It had this cute little cap sleeve that even Ashley thought was nice. “Oh, that is definitely the one,” my mother said. I twirled around, and I felt oddly and imminently beautiful, as if the dress had the ability to transform me into something or someone else. In it, I could be the pretty girl, the pageant queen.