The Life of Glass (15 page)

“Doesn’t she clean up nice?” My mother was just absolutely beaming. It seemed like her eyes were about to pop out of her head, and that was the funniest thing about all of this. I liked seeing my mother all excited over
me like she normally was about Ashley. I didn’t really even care that much what I looked like, but my mother’s reaction was worth savoring. I knew it was something I’d put away and take out again, the look on her face as she looked at me, as if she saw me for the first time as something truly spectacular.

“I’m going to bed,” Ashley said, and she started to limp down the hallway. Then she stopped and turned around. “Have fun,” she said. “And remember every single thing that happens so you can tell me tomorrow.”

I nodded. It might have been the nicest thing Ashley had ever said to me.

Max arrived promptly at seven with a beautiful wrist corsage of white and yellow roses. “Wow, you look amazing,” he said as soon as I opened the door. He was staring pretty intensely, so I started to feel a little embarrassed.

“Thanks,” I finally said. “You look pretty good yourself.” And he did. He had on a dark suit with a gray tie, and the suit fit him really well and made him look even more handsome than usual. As soon as he stepped in, I noticed that he smelled really good too, cinnamony and foresty all at once.

I didn’t even know that we were supposed to get a
flower for him to pin to his suit, but my mother had taken care of it, and she pulled his out of the fridge, one solitary white rose with a pin. It was as if there were some secret white-rose code that no one had told me about.

“I’ll pin it for you,” my mom said, and she did it quickly and efficiently, as if she’d done it hundreds of other times before.

“Thank you, Mrs. McAllister,” Max said. I could tell by the way my mother smiled back at him that she thought he was adorable. It didn’t seem to matter that this was a last-minute thing, that I was only the Nose’s mono replacement. Because right here, right in this moment, it seemed that Max and I were this thing, this actual couple getting ready to go to a dance.

Walking up the steps to Desert Crest High School with my arm linked through Max’s was different from any other time I’d ever walked up those steps before. I knew it was something I’d never forget, that I’d think about it every other time I’d walk up those steps for the next three years.

It was as if I could literally feel people’s eyes on me, feel them watching our every move, and not in a bad way like they were making fun of me or something, but like I
was Cinderella walking up the steps in a fairy tale with a prince. I wondered if that’s how Ashley felt when she was in pageants, if that’s why she liked them so much.

The gymnasium had been entirely transformed for the dance. I knew there had been some committee that Ashley and the Nose had volunteered on to try to make this dump of a room look beautiful, and somehow they’d pulled it off. The entire ceiling was covered in pink and white and purple balloons that looked like tiny clouds, and there were balloons hanging on the walls too, probably thousands of them. So, except for the faint smell of old sneaker, you could forget that this was the same place where you had mandatory PE class and played dodgeball with the idiots who really cared about winning those kinds of stupid games.

One of the first people I saw when we walked in was Mr. Finkelstein, standing by a table of soda cups. It surprised me that he was chaperoning, but I decided he must get paid extra for it or something, because he looked even less interested in the dance than he did in our biology class. He sort of caught my eye for a second and gave a little nod, but he had this funny look on his face, as if he were thinking, Now how did she get to look like that?

A slow song came on, and Max said, “Should we dance?”

I nodded, and he led me to the middle of the floor, right in the spot where everyone could see us. If I’d chosen, I’d have danced on the fringe, right at the edge, but with Max I could already tell it was all or nothing. And he liked to choose the all.

I’d never danced with a boy other than my father before, but this was entirely different. I let Max put his arms around me, and I leaned into him. His smell was intoxicating, something that made me want to lean in even closer, so I put my head against his chest.

“You know,” he said, “Lexie and I aren’t dating.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t known that.

“I mean, I guess she likes me or something, which is why I asked her to the dance in the first place.” He paused. “But I’m glad I’m here with you instead.”

There was something surreal about all of it, his voice, his body, his smell. I couldn’t believe that I was actually here, that this was me, dancing with Max Healy. The Max Healy. And that he was telling me, or at least I thought he was, that he liked me.

Just as it was finally about to sink in, when I was beginning to actually enjoy myself, I saw a glint of red
out of the corner of my eye, saw the blond hair, heard the distinct, annoying laugh. Courtney.

She looked beautiful in the red dress we’d chosen, not even a hint of fat butt. Slim and slender and model perfect. Her normally straight hair was curly and looped on top of her head, and she was leaning on Ryan the way a certain kind of large and venomous snake envelopes and chokes its prey. She saw me, and she gave a little wave. So I waved back.

Ryan turned around to look at me, and I tried to catch his eye for a moment, but he was staring at me with this strange sense of awe on his face, as if he didn’t even recognize me with pretty hair and layers of makeup. Courtney pulled his face toward hers and started kissing him passionately on the mouth, so I stopped looking and put my head against Max’s chest again. It was a perfectly nice, muscular, great-smelling chest, but I still couldn’t get the image of Ryan, of the way he’d looked at me, out of my head. I wondered what he smelled like, if he’d borrowed some of his dad’s cologne for the dance or if it was just his normal and reassuring Ivory-soap-and-Pert-shampoo smell.

“You’re a million miles away,” Max said.

“No.” I took my head off his chest and looked at him.
His eyes were deep and brown and a little crinkly in the corners, and they were kind and interesting. “No,” I said again. “I’m here. I am definitely right here.”

“You are.”

The song ended, but we stayed there dancing for a minute longer, through the first part of a fast song. Max pulled back first and offered to get us some sodas. “Okay.” I nodded.

He left, and I was still in the middle of the dance floor by myself, not quite sure what to do. I saw Ryan standing alone off on the other side of the gym, and I made a quick decision to walk over and say hi. I told myself that I had nothing to lose, that I was being the bigger person—and besides, I was at the dance with Max, and that gave me this new sort of confidence I’d never had before.

Ryan looked incredibly handsome in a blue suit. The only other time I’d ever seen him in a suit was at my dad’s funeral, and the suit had been too big on him then, had made him look like this scrawny little boy all dressed up in a man’s clothing. But this suit fit him, made him look smart and tall and strong.

“Hey.” I nodded at him.

“Hey.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, and he leaned back against a wall of balloons.

“Careful, you might pop something,” I said. I thought about how stupid that sounded and I wanted to take it back, to say something smart and witty and insightful instead, but nothing else came to me.

“So Max Healy.” He shook his head. “Not what I would’ve expected. But interesting.”

“I’m just…” I started to tell the truth—that I was only the Nose’s mono replacement—but then I didn’t because I wanted him to think that Max had asked me first, that he wanted only me, entirely. So I said, “I’m just not what you expect anymore, I guess.”

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“Hey, Ashley broke her nose and smashed her face up pretty bad last night.” I blurted it out because I was dying to tell someone the truth, dying for someone to notice that I was here, beautiful, and she wasn’t.

“Shit,” he said. “No way. What happened?”

“Car accident,” I lied, because I wasn’t sure how much I could trust him anymore, and if he told Courtney and she told the Nose in PE, Ashley would outright kill me, and then it wouldn’t matter how great I looked or if Max liked me or not.

I looked at my feet, at the way they sparkled prettily in the silver shoes, and I clicked my heels together three
times just like Dorothy did in
The Wizard of Oz
. Then I closed my eyes and wished I could go back to that day when Courtney asked me if it was okay with me if she dated Ryan, and I wished I’d just said no and that I’d gotten Ashley to set her up with someone else instead.

“There’s your date,” Ryan said. I turned around and saw Max walking toward us with two cups of soda in his hands.

What I did next, I did entirely without thinking through, just spoke from my heart without running it by my head first. “I just want you to know,” I said, “that I was telling the truth. About Courtney, okay?”

“Melissa, don’t—”

“I swear it,” I said. “On my father’s grave.”

I turned around quickly before I could see his face, smiled at Max, and walked toward him.

Max and I danced a few more songs, and I watched as Ryan and Courtney walked out in the middle of one of them. I leaned against Max’s chest and tried not to imagine Ryan kissing her, pulling at her pretty red dress until it came off, until he saw her entire Victoria’s Secret body. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to erase the mental image, but it was still there, hanging around
in my brain like some scene from a horror movie that I couldn’t get rid of, that just kept terrifying me over and over again.

We stopped dancing when our principal, Mr. Forrester, stood up by the microphone in the front to announce the winners for king and queen. In a way, it was kind of like Ashley’s pageants, everyone all dressed up and made up and waiting to see who would win, who was the most beautiful, the most popular.

Max squeezed my shoulder, and I thought he sucked in his breath a little bit. It was almost sweet, the way this was so important to him, but I couldn’t relate. I never understood why people wanted to win these things, like the beauty contests. I mean, who really cared if anybody voted for you or not? What was it all going to mean in twenty years anyway? It’s not like being Queen of the Rodeo had ever gotten my mom anywhere.

And the winners were—drumroll, please!—Ashley McAllister and Austin White.

Everyone was quiet as they searched the crowd, and it hit me that it might have been the first time all night that Ashley’s presence was missed. I tried to soak it up for her so I could tell her about it. All the looks on the girls’ faces as they arched and stretched to see her, what she
was wearing and what her hair looked like. And some of their eyes fell on me and looked a little confused. Who’s that girl who kind of looks like Ashley? And I didn’t know Ashley even had a sister, they were whispering.

I leaned over and whispered to Max, “Sorry you didn’t win. I voted for you.” But before he could answer, I heard people clapping, and I looked up.

There with a black suit, gelled hair, and a swagger was Austin, walking up through the crowd and waving. Mr. Forrester put a crown on his head, and he walked off the stage and grabbed a girl to dance with. Not the queen of the formal. Not my sister. Not even an Ashley look-alike. But a cheerleader I knew Ashley hated because, as she’d told my mother on more than one occasion, the girl was a total boyfriend snatcher and slut and she wanted Austin.

I hated him, all his sweet talk to Ashley, his promises that he wasn’t going to go anywhere without her, the way he’d sucked my mother into to this big fake lie of the person he pretended to be. I knew Ashley could do much better.

When the song was over, Austin and the cheerleader brushed past me and Max on their way toward the door. Austin looked at me briefly, shooting me a warning look
with his eyes as if to say, Don’t you dare tell her. And even if you do, she will never believe you.

I was feeling a little down after I saw Austin, and I knew Max could tell that something was bothering me because he kept asking me if I was okay. But I didn’t want to tell him the truth, because I knew he and Austin were friends, and I didn’t know him well enough to know how much I could trust him.

It was silly that Austin didn’t think he was going to get caught. Even if I didn’t tell Ashley, someone else was bound to. I couldn’t imagine that Austin could convince every single one of her friends not to say anything to her. But maybe he didn’t even care. Maybe, despite all his promises, my sister meant absolutely nothing to him. And that’s what got me the most. The way a person could act one way and be someone totally different on the inside.

“You ready to go?” Max asked a few minutes later. There was technically an hour of the dance left, but people had started trickling out pretty dramatically after Austin’s dance. It surprised me that it seemed to be the cool thing to leave the dance early.

Max and I drove the short way to my house in silence.
Not an awkward silence but a calm, sort of a contemplative one. He turned the radio on, but he didn’t turn it up too loud, so the music was soft and made the inside of his truck feel mellow.

When we got to my house, he got out of the truck and helped me down, and he walked me up to the front door. Before I could step on the porch, he reached down for my hand, and he turned and looked right at me. “Thanks for going with me. On such short notice.”

“Of course,” I said. I nodded kind of dumbly, and I started to feel a little nervous because his face was so close to mine that I could feel him breathing.

“I had a nice time,” he whispered.

“Me too,” I said. I knew it instinctively, that he was about to kiss me, though how exactly I knew I wasn’t sure, because no one had ever kissed me before. But I just knew, and I wondered if it was this instinct that women are born with, whether they are beautiful like Ashley or just normal like me.

I was so busy thinking about it that I almost missed it. So it felt like I hadn’t seen it coming at all, because suddenly his lips were on mine, and in my head I was thinking, Oh God. He’s kissing me. He’s actually kissing me. I was thinking so hard that I was hardly feeling. His
lips were warm, and they pressed up against mine, and I pressed back, and I waited for fireworks, for tingling, for a numbness in my head or my heart. But then, just like that, it was over.