The Life of Glass (16 page)

He pulled back, and he smiled. “You are absolutely beautiful, Melissa McAllister.”

I smiled, and then I turned and ran inside the house.

My mother ran to the door as soon as I closed it, but I wished she hadn’t because I needed a moment to figure it out. To decompress. Max Healy had just kissed me. He’d told me I was beautiful. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of it.

“Sweetie,” my mom said, and I could tell from her face, her voice, that something was wrong.

“What is it?” I said. “Is Ashley okay?” I pictured Austin and the cheerleader twirling around on the dance floor, but I didn’t know how she could’ve found out about it already.

“Yes,” she said. “She’s sleeping.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“Nothing.” She pulled me close to her in a hug. “Did you have a nice time?”

“I did,” I said. “It was fun.” And it had been fun. The dancing and twirling, the eyes watching me, the good
night kiss. It was all something like a fairy tale, all very Cinderella at the ball, every little girl’s dream.

But for some reason I still felt this sinking, this heaviness in my heart. I didn’t understand it, how I could be beautiful and have had a perfect night, and I didn’t feel elated. I didn’t feel like jumping in the air and shouting. I wanted to go into my room and get undressed and wash the makeup off my face, crawl under my covers, and go to sleep.

“That’s nice, sweetie.” Her voice and her eyes were sad, and I wondered if it had hit her about Kevin all at once, that things would never be the same with them.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

She nodded. “Kevin sent flowers,” she said. “Roses. Beautiful, beautiful purple roses.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t know if she was looking for advice or approval or what, so I kept my mouth shut. Finally, she said, “You look tired. Why don’t you go to bed, and we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

I nodded and thought that maybe she was right, that maybe the dull, blank heaviness I felt, that we both were feeling, was just exhaustion.

I went into my room and took my dad’s journal off my desk, and I flipped the pages until I found it, my
absolute favorite love story, the one I’d modeled all my own after.

The morning after
the dance, the first thing I thought about was Max’s kiss and then in the next second I thought about Ryan and Courtney and their so-called special night and I pulled the pillow over my head and groaned.

I heard the phone ring somewhere in the distance, but I drifted back off to sleep, until Ashley limped into my room, nearly tearing the door off its hinges, she opened it so hard.

I sat up, and seeing her was still a surprise. The bruises on her face were more purple today, and the swelling was even worse than it had been yesterday. “Hi,” I said.

“What the hell?”

“Good morning to you, too.” I flopped back down under the covers. She ripped them off quickly, trying to inflict pain, the way you might tear off a Band-Aid from a cut.

“Max called Lexie and told him you two are, like, a couple now or something.”

I sat up. “A couple?” The thought that Max had actually said that made me incredibly excited and nervous and a little bit annoyed all at the same time. “We’re not a couple,” I said. She glared at me. I went back under the covers until she pinched the fleshy part of my thigh, hard, hard enough to leave a big red mark.

“Oww. Stop it.” I rubbed my leg. “He kissed me, okay? Just one kiss. No big deal.” Lie. Lie. Lie. It was a big deal. My first kiss. And this was Max Healy we were talking about, the guy every girl in school wanted to be kissing. But I wasn’t about to admit any of this to her.

“You are so going to get mono,” she said, and she had what I thought was a smirk on her face, though it was a little hard to tell with all the bruising. I knew she was only saying it because she knew it would get at me, because for once, maybe, she was even a little bit jealous of me.

But still I felt this little bit of fear creep up inside my stomach like some wild variation on butterflies. “Max told me he doesn’t even like Lexie,” I said, my only means of fighting back to try and attack the Nose.

“Don’t be stupid, Melissa.” She laughed. “Do you really think a guy has to like you to make out with you?” She held up her two forefingers in a cross, and said, “Well, stay away from me, all right? The last thing I need is your mono germs.” Which made absolutely no sense, because I was sure she’d spent more time with the Nose than with me, anyway.

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be kissing you,” I retorted.

She folded her arms across her chest and spun on her good foot to leave.

I could’ve called after her and told her all about the dance, about her winning, or about Austin and the cheerleader. But I decided not to.

After I got out of bed and took a shower and got dressed, I decided that I needed some time and some space to clear my head. So I snuck out my window and hopped on my bike. I wasn’t in the mood to tell my mother all about the dance or have Ashley sneer at me or see my
mother’s purple roses stewing in a vase on the kitchen counter—thus the old escape route.

As I started riding, I thought I felt a little scratchiness in my throat. I wondered what the incubation period for mono was. I decided I’d look it up online when I got back. But maybe it was the warmer spring air, or the mesquite pollen that made Ryan wheeze this time of year. Even in the morning, the air was already thick and heavy with it.

I rode for a while, just letting my feet pedal me where they wanted to go, letting my hair blow back behind me, whipping around in the wind. I didn’t consciously decide to go ride in the wash, but that’s where I ended up, riding down the long, low stretch of desert alone, riding fast and furious and hard, until I could barely breathe and I thought my lungs were going to explode out of my chest.

I rode all the way to the train tracks, and I stopped when I got there to watch the yellow-and-black Union Pacific railway train glide by. I thought about my great-grandparents, Mitch and Carolina, whom I’d supposedly met a few times as a baby but had no memory of.

I tried to imagine these young, beautiful people jumping on a train like this one and riding so far away from home that when they got off they couldn’t even recognize the landscape, the entire world around them, as
if they’d taken a trip from a lush Tennessee valley to the moon: dry desert canyons and tall brown peaks, and dry, dry air that was sometimes hot enough to stab you.

I wondered what it felt like, to be so in love that nothing else mattered, not the time or the place or anything else.

Then from behind me someone said, “Hey.” I jumped and nearly toppled over on my bike. I turned and found myself staring right at Ryan. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I stared at him for a moment, and I tried to decide whether his face looked tight and worried or whether he was just tired and a little red from riding so hard. “I guess we both had the same idea,” I finally said.

The words I’d said to him the night before still resonated in my brain, and I realized how stupid they’d sounded, how stupid they were. I should’ve stayed out of it and never said anything to him at all about Courtney, because I missed everything about him: being his friend, riding our bikes, calling people by their silly nicknames, and laughing over stupid dissections. And most of all, I just missed him, Ryan, this person who’d been a part of my life for so long that I couldn’t really even remember the before, the part where my father was healthy and I’d
gone to birthday parties and gone swimming in Kelly Jamison’s pool. But that was the thing about my tragic flaw, being impulsive, not thinking before you said things. Some things were impossible to take back.

We stood there and watched the train together until it passed, maybe five minutes or so. Without the roar of the train it was almost unbearably quiet.

Ryan kicked his foot in the dust, so it swirled up a little in our faces and made him cough. And just to break the silence I finally said, “Fun dance last night, huh?”

He nodded. “I guess your sister was pretty mad about not being there, since she won for queen and all.”

I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know if she knows yet. I didn’t tell her.”

He laughed. “Serves her right. All those mornings she drove past us on the way to school and never stopped to give us a ride.” He shook his head. “Sorry. That wasn’t nice, right? I mean with her car accident and all.”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded too vigorously, trying to keep the part about the horse in my head, even though it was just dying to burst right out of me. In my mind I was thinking, So what did you and Courtney do when you left so early? Where did you go? What happened? But I didn’t want to know. Not any of it. Not really.

“So you like this Max guy?”

I shrugged. “Of course. What’s not to like?”

He didn’t answer. He kicked his foot in the dust a little more, and then I guessed he uncovered something because he leaned down to pick it up. “Look at this.” He held it up so I could see it. It was another piece of rainbow glass, just like the one he’d found the night my father died. It was in a different shape, more of an oval, but it had definitely come from the same piece, from the same maker.

I thought about the fact that my dad said that glass could live for a million years, and I knew, right then, that this other piece had been there that night too, two years ago, but we just hadn’t uncovered it yet. “Here,” he said. “You take it.”

“No.” I shook my head. “This one’s yours. I keep mine for good luck. You should have one too.”

He dusted it off a little more with his hands and put it in the pocket of his jeans. “How long did you say glass lives for?”

“A million years.” For some reason I thought about the way relationships were a little like glass, oh so precarious and fragile and vulnerable to breaking with the slightest wrong move—a cancerous cell, a tumble from a horse, a
dance with a cheerleader. But even after they shattered, in a way they stayed with you forever, made you a part of who you are and who you always would be.

“I can’t believe it’s been two years.”

“Next month,” I said.

He nodded. “I know. I remember. April twenty-sixth.”

The fact that he remembered, just that one date, that one tiny detail, made me want to lean over and hug him and hold on to him for a while and not let go. Because no one else knew that about me, that this was the date my world actually ended or this new crazy world of mine began or however you wanted to look at it. I was more a glass-half-empty person myself.

“You ever figure out who that woman was?” he asked. I shook my head. “You still want to?”

I nodded. I’d put her in the back of my mind with the rest of the craziness swirling around in it, but I did still want to know who she was, know something real about my father. “I just don’t know if I’ll actually ever be able to find her,” I said. And that was what I’d come to realize, that there was only so much you could do to find a person, and then maybe you just had to let it go.

“You’ll find her,” he said, sounding sure. “I know you will.”

Ryan got on his bike and started pedaling, and I got on mine and we rode next to each other. We rode and rode in parallel lines, just the way we always used to, until we got to our development, and he stopped to walk his bike up the side.

Just as he was about to walk up the hill, he turned and looked at me. “I’m going to break up with Courtney,” he said.

“Oh?” But I felt like I was about to roll back down the hill because it wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. I wondered if it was because of what I’d said, but I didn’t have the guts to ask.

“It’s just not working out. Nothing against her. Deep down we’re not the same, you know?”

And then I knew what had happened after the dance. Courtney had planned their special night without telling him, and he hadn’t been ready for it. Sure, Ryan liked her, but serious relationships scared him. And who could blame him? If my mom had run off with the gardener, I might’ve been the same way. “You’re going to break her heart, you know,” I said, which was a strange thing for me to say, considering I’d been rooting for them to break up all along. But it was true. Despite what I thought about Courtney now, I knew that in her
own way she really, really liked him.

“I know.”

“She’ll get over it.”

“Gee thanks.”

I shrugged. But we both knew it was the truth. Courtney was beautiful. Courtney was resourceful. She’d have a new boyfriend in no time.

When I got home, I lay down on my bed and thought about Ryan breaking Courtney’s heart and then what Ryan had said about Sally, about how he thought I’d be able to find her. How could he be so sure, anyway? It was annoying, the way he’d dropped out of my life for a few months and then popped back in, thinking he could actually understand anything that was going on.

I heard a knock at the door, and my mother opened it without waiting for me to answer. “Here.” She held out the phone. “Aunt Julie wants to talk to you.” I nodded and took the phone without directly looking at her. She blew me a kiss and left without closing the door, so I stood up and closed it myself.

“So,” Aunt Julie said, “tell me everything. How was it?”

“It was nice,” I said, trying to muster up some fresh enthusiasm.

“Oh. I bet it was.” She sighed, as if she were almost living vicariously through me, revisiting those high-school years, those dances she wished she’d gone to instead of studying.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Of course. What is it?”

“And you won’t say anything to my mom?”

She hesitated for a second before she agreed.

“It’s about my father,” I said. She was silent, so I kept going. “This woman he knew. Sally Bedford. My grandmother mentioned something about her, and I think she used to work with him at Charles and Large.”

“Oh, Melissa,” she said. “Sweetie, it’s been nearly two years.”

“I know. I know,” I said. “But I want to know.” I paused. “What he was really like, you know?”

“Well, I’ll tell you this: I have no idea who Sally Bedford is. But there is no way your father ever cheated on your mother, if that’s what you’re asking. Absolutely no way.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” But that didn’t really make me feel better. How could you possibly know something like that from three thousand miles away?