The Life of Glass (17 page)

The next morning
Ashley begged my mother to let her stay home from school. “Everything still hurts so much,” she whined, but I think my mother knew the truth, that Ashley was afraid to go to school looking the way she did.

“You’re going to have to go back sometime,” my mother said.

“Tomorrow,” Ashley said. “If I’m feeling better.”

“Okay. Tomorrow,” my mother agreed, though tomorrow would end up being nearly a week, until most of the swelling and bruising had faded and our dentist put in some temporary bunny teeth until the new ones could be put in permanently.

I walked outside to get my bike, and I saw Max leaning against his truck, which was parked in the street in front of our house. “Need a ride?” he asked.

“Sure.” I smiled. He opened the door and helped me up. He went around to the driver’s side and got in. Just as he turned the key in the ignition, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye in the side mirror: Ryan riding his bike toward my house.

For the first time in months he’d come to ride to school with me. I thought briefly about asking Max to wait for him, to offer him a ride. It’s not that I owed it to him or anything, after all the times he’d ditched me, but I felt a little bad making him bike up the hill, when I knew how awful his allergies were this time of year.

But I kept my mouth shut and let Max drive away. Once Max sped up, Ryan got smaller and smaller in the mirror, until he was nothing more than a tiny dot.

“You’re not mad, are you?” Max asked.

I realized I’d been watching Ryan and hadn’t said anything. “Oh no,” I said. “Just tired. Monday morning and all.”

“Good. Because I didn’t know if you’d be mad that I’d told Lexie that we were together.” He paused. “I mean I only said it because she was bugging me about coming
over to visit her and about the dance, and I just wanted to shut her up for once, you know?”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. “Are we?” I asked. “Together?” It sounded stupider out in the open than it had in my head.

He stopped at the stop sign, took his eyes off the road, and smiled at me. “Do you want to be?”

“Maybe,” I said, and after I said it I realized I should’ve said yes, yes, yes. But “maybe” was the truth, was what I was really feeling.

“I’ll take that,” he said. “How about a date then, on Friday night?” He pulled into the parking lot of the school and turned off the engine.

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. I thought about how Ashley was going to freak out when she heard about this, which made me smile a little bit.

He was already out of the truck before I thought about the fact that he hadn’t said whether or not
he
wanted us to be a couple, but for some reason it felt like he’d already decided.

Max and I walked up the steps together and then parted ways in the front hallway after he offered to give me a ride home from school. He went off toward Austin and some of the other guys on the baseball
team that I didn’t really know but had heard Ashley talk about.

It was the Nose’s first day back, and she looked a little lonely wandering to her locker without Ashley stuck to her side. She also still looked sick, and she had these deep, black circles under her eyes. Once I saw her, my own throat started to hurt a little bit again.

She turned and caught my eye for a second and glared at me with this look of pure and intense hatred, not like the glares that Ashley gave me but the kind of glare that came from a person who was secretly making a voodoo doll of you and wanting to burn you on a stake. I smiled back.

I walked toward my locker, and I should’ve been walking on air, but I felt a little down. I thought about Ryan pedaling all alone and it made me sad. Maybe I could ask Max to give both of us a ride home, and I knew that he absolutely would, but I also knew that I wasn’t really going to ask him, that putting them in the same place at the same time would make things weird for all of us.

As soon as he walked into the biology lab, Ryan went and grabbed his pig and carried her over to my and Jeffrey’s
table. Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “What? Trouble in paradise?”

“Shh,” I said. “Be quiet.”

Courtney walked in a minute later, took one look at us, looked away quickly, and then walked over to Jack and Joe Beiderman’s table—identical twins who were sort of quiet and a little bit on the geeky side. They obviously were not going to mind if Courtney copied off of them if it meant she was also going to stand there with them for an hour a day.

“You can’t just ditch her,” I whispered to Ryan.

He shot me a look. “Don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?”

If Mr. Finkelstein had been paying attention, he might’ve noticed that there were now two tables of three and one empty table, but as usual, he wasn’t. Or even if he was, he didn’t care enough to say anything.

We were less than two months away from the end of the year and almost done with these poor pigs at this point. I was hoping I would pass second semester because I’d barely paid a bit of attention to pig parts, and I’d been letting Jeffrey stand there every day with his scalpel and this weird grin on his face. It had crossed my mind that if I didn’t pass, I’d have to take biology again next year,
nine more months of smelling embalming fluids and wearing latex gloves and tight goggles, and I told myself that I would study like a crazy woman for the final exam and hope for the best.

But I still couldn’t bring myself to do more than watch, and by watch I mean that I stared at Jeffrey’s hands as they moved inside our pig and let my mind wander to some other place. I felt a little annoyed with Ryan because, really, he had lousy timing. Why did he need to pick now to stop ignoring me, just when Max seemed to actually like me? It didn’t seem fair that when I’d needed him as a friend he hadn’t been there, and now I had to feel bad for leaving him behind.

“Hey,” Ryan whispered to me across the table of pigs. I took my eyes off of Jeffrey’s hands and looked at him. It was hard to tell what he was thinking with his eyes behind those thick, blurry goggles. “Wanna hang out after school?”

I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew Max was going to drive me home, and then what if he wanted to hang out? There would be no way to turn Max down, and I probably wouldn’t even want to. So finally, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll call you when I get home.”

I thought he’d be annoyed at my answer, but I don’t think he was, because he kept talking. “I asked my dad about how we could find her, whatever her name was, the woman you’re looking for.”

“Sally,” I said, but I was wondering how his dad would know what to do. He was only a Border Patrol agent, not FBI or anything. “Well, she’s not an illegal immigrant,” I said. At least, I didn’t think she was.

“I know that.” He sliced into the pig almost ferociously, and for some reason I thought about how sad it was that we were cutting this thing away, piece by piece, system by system, heart and lungs and liver and kidneys, until there would be nothing left. The carcass would be dead and completely empty and rotting, and it made me shudder. “My dad knows how to find people.”

I bit my lip to keep from saying, Well, if that’s true, how come he hasn’t found your mother? But I also knew that maybe he didn’t want to find her. And besides, it was a rotten thing to even think, and I was glad I’d been able to catch it before it had escaped my mouth unchecked.

My dad had known how to read people, how to make them open up to him and tell him stuff they’d never told anyone else. But that was a different thing entirely.

“There’s this website,” he said, still slicing into the
pig like it was nothing, like he didn’t even notice he was doing it anymore.

“You should be a doctor,” I said.

“What?” He looked up.

“You could be a surgeon or something.”

He ignored me. “This site is free, and you can find people. Where they live and their numbers.”

“She’s unlisted,” I said. “I already checked.”

He shook his head. “My dad said everyone’s on there. It’s all from the public records. Driver’s licenses and house deeds and stuff.”

I didn’t necessarily want his help anymore. But I wasn’t sure I had another option at this point. “Why do you care so much anyway?” I sighed.

“Just let me help you, okay?” He put the scalpel down and pulled his goggles up, so I could see his eyes, round and blue and fierce and determined.

Max drove me home after school and parked in front of my house. He got out of the truck with me and we stood by the porch for a minute. I felt like he was going to kiss me again, and I felt embarrassed that it was broad daylight and all my neighbors might be watching, so before he could move in I said, “You wanna take
a walk or something?”

“Okay.” He shrugged.

I put my stuff in the house, and I didn’t see Ashley, so I figured she was in her room. Part of me wanted her to know that Max was here and we were taking a walk together, so I tried to make a lot of noise in the kitchen as I threw my backpack down. But she still didn’t come out, so I gave up and went back outside.

Max and I walked down the street, past Ryan’s house, and I knew he wasn’t home yet because his bike wasn’t in its usual spot outside. Then we cut down the hill to the wash.

Once we got down there, we stood in the center for a minute, and we looked around, at all the houses off to both sides and this wide-open space in the middle. It had been a long time since I’d just stood in the middle here. Usually I was riding my bike as fast and as furiously as I could.

“You realize that we’re standing in the middle of a river,” I said. “That if we lived in some different place other than the desert there’d be water rushing through this.”

He shrugged. “Well, when it rains a lot in the summer, it is like a river sometimes,” he said.

“But doesn’t it make you feel small, make you feel
like there’s this whole big world and you’re just one tiny person?”

“Well, no.” He laughed. “Not really. It’s just lots of dust and sagebrush and trash.” He kicked an old beer can as if to emphasize his point.

I thought about the water, the power of the river, the way every other summer or so someone tried to swim in it and ended up drowning. What made me feel small was the knowledge that people could just disappear. In an instant. They could be here one night telling you some random fact about glass. And then the next morning they could be gone. Forever. But I just sort of nodded and murmured in agreement anyway.

Max reached down and grabbed my hand, and he started walking. We didn’t say anything else for a while, which was okay with me.

It was nice to hold his hand at first, but then my hand started to feel sweaty and a little sticky, and I wanted to pull away. I didn’t want to offend him though, so I kept holding on. Finally, Max stopped walking, and he let go of my hand. He turned and faced me, and he put his thumb on my cheek. “You’re so interesting, Melissa. You’re not like all the other girls.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
I thought about all the other times that I’d wished I could’ve been like Ashley or the Nose or Courtney just because it would’ve made my life infinitely easier to be beautiful and girly and popular. For the first time, standing right there with Max, I almost felt glad that I wasn’t them.

He leaned in to kiss me, and his lips were soft and warm and nice, so I kissed him back.

When he stopped kissing me, he kept his face close, and I could see every inch of it. These beautiful brown eyes and this charming smile, and I felt a little starstruck.

I couldn’t believe it. This guy actually liked me.

After dinner I sat at my desk, and tried to do my homework. But it was hard to concentrate. I was thinking about Max and the fact that he liked that I was different. So maybe I wasn’t the most beautiful girl, but that was okay.

Ashley hobbled in without even knocking and went and flopped on my bed.

“Don’t lean on my pillow,” I said, pretending to be deep into my homework. “You might get mono germs.”

She ignored me. “Did Austin go to the dance?” she asked.

I looked up. Her face still looked horrible, even though some of the swelling had gone down. I felt just a little guilty that I hadn’t mentioned it to her before. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Dammit.” She flopped back against my pillow. I thought that maybe she was going to cry, but it was hard to tell with her face being so banged up.

“You can do better,” I said.

She sat up. “What, like Max?” She laughed. “Don’t be so stupid, Melissa. He’s not really in love with you or anything.”

I thought about the way he’d kissed me in the wash, and I was sure she was wrong. “You don’t know everything,” I said. “You’re not always right.”

“And you are?” She laughed again. “You don’t know the first thing about a guy like him.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

She stood up from the bed and limped toward the door. “You’re smart—you figure it out.”

I was still sitting there trying to figure out what Ashley was talking about when I heard a tapping at the window. I remembered that I’d forgotten to call Ryan when I got home.

I stood up and opened the window, and he climbed in and lay down on my bed. I thought about warning him against mono germs, but then I didn’t. I didn’t want to tell him about kissing Max, and besides, I didn’t think he could really get mono just from sitting in my bed.

“Get on your computer,” he said. “I’ll tell you this website, and we’ll find her.”

I stared at him, waiting for something, for an apology. I wanted him to say he was sorry for being a jerk, an idiot, a complete and total ass.
Mel, I should’ve listened to you. You were right. I’ll never let a pretty girl come between us again
.

Finally, he said, “You can’t stay mad at me forever.”

I shrugged. Well, I could if I wanted to. But then I looked at him. His eyes were sort of lost and sad, and he looked really tired. And his breathing was heavy and ragged. Still, I didn’t know if we could go back to the way things were before, if I could really, truly forgive and forget.