The Life of Glass (18 page)

We were both quiet for a few minutes, and then he said, “Why don’t we at least look her up, and find her number and where she lives?”

“Okay,” I said, because I knew he wasn’t going to leave until I did it, and even though I was still mad, I also
still wanted to find Sally.

Ryan gave me the name of the site, and I typed her name in. All her information came up on the screen, a phone number and an address that wasn’t too far from here. I was amazed at the way it was all there instantaneously, at my fingertips, but I tried not to let Ryan see how impressed I was.

“Let’s call her,” Ryan said. His voice was thick and asthmatic and excited.

I thought about the way he’d looked at me in his bathroom that day when I’d told him about Courtney, his hair dripping wet and his eyes dark and angry. I had the sudden urge to kick him the way Ashley always did to me, to tell him to drop the excitement, because he’d lost the right to have it. But all I said was, “It’s late.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I get it. I’ll go.” He stared at me for a minute, as if he wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure how to say it, and then he climbed out the window. I heard him drop to the ground, a quick crunchy thud in the rocks.

I picked up the phone and cradled it in my hand for a minute. I started to dial the number, then hung up. It was already after nine, I reasoned, my heart beating like a drum in my chest. One more day wouldn’t hurt.

The next day
at school, I spent the majority of the day alternating between pondering what I might say to Sally Bedford on the phone and what Ashley had meant when she said that I didn’t really know anything about Max.

I thought mostly of Max, except in biology when Ryan prodded me about Sally.

Ryan elbowed me with his left arm as he cut into the pig brain with his right. The ease with which he could now dissect amazed me just a little bit. “Well?” he asked. “What did she say?” He sounded like a little kid on Christmas morning, as if he was just about to burst, waiting to find out the details.

“I didn’t call her,” I said. “It was too late.”

“It wasn’t that late,” he said. I glared at him, so he said, “Yeah, you were probably smart to wait.”

“I’m going to call her later,” I said.

He tilted his head to the side, and I could tell, even behind the goggles, that he was shooting me a quizzical look, as if he didn’t quite believe me.

In English Mrs. Connor droned on and on about Keats. And I thought about how Courtney had quoted him in the dressing room. Could something really be beautiful and true at the same time? Was it possible that Max was good-looking and also the real thing?

“Miss McAllister?” Mrs. Conner said. “Miss McAllister.”

“Uhh.” I looked up, but I had no idea what she’d asked me or what poem she’d been discussing. I shrugged and she frowned at me. She had this way of looking oddly disappointed the way my father might have, as if she were telling me that she’d been expecting more of me.

When I went out to meet Max in the parking lot after school, I nearly ran straight into Courtney. She was rushing down the steps, like she was in an awful big hurry to get somewhere, and I was kind of going slowly, deep in thought, still thinking about the difference between
truth and beauty and whether they were actually linked or two separate things. “Oh sorry,” she said. She looked up, saw it was me, and smiled. “Oh hey, Meliss.”

Just like that. No hard feelings. No mean looks.

She stared at me, and I felt like I had to say something, so I said, “Sorry about you and Ryan.” Lie. Lie. Lie. But I smiled anyway. I was about to say that I’d just been thinking about her, but then I decided against it. I didn’t feel like explaining.

She shrugged. “Yeah. It happens, I guess.” She sounded all nonchalant, like she didn’t even care that much, and like she didn’t blame me, which surprised me in a way. “So you and Max, huh?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

She laughed. “Well, don’t knock yourself out with the excitement or anything.”

“I am excited,” I said, forcing a smile.

She sighed. “You don’t have to pretend with me.” She paused. “Everyone knows that you and Ryan want each other anyway.”

I felt my face turning bright red. “No way. We’re just friends.” And right now we were barely that.

“Oh come on, Meliss. I’m not mad, okay? I saw the way he was looking at you at the dance. It’s just the way it
is. I get it.” She leaned in and gave me a quick and forceful hug, which I didn’t return. But she didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve gotta run. Paco has obedience school in thirty minutes.” She started running through the parking lot, but she stopped after a few steps and turned and yelled out behind her, “Call me.”

I was positive that I was never going to call her again.

Max told me all about some baseball thing the whole way home, but I wasn’t really listening. I kept thinking about what Courtney had said, that everyone thought that Ryan and I liked each other, and I wondered if that was true. I didn’t think anyone else at our school would’ve even noticed us aside from her, and I knew deep down that she was just jealous. Still, there was something about what she said that made me feel a little uneasy and itchy all over. Or maybe it was just that I was starting to develop a mono rash that I’d read about online.

I turned my brain off for a minute and caught something Max was saying about some action movie he wanted to see on Friday night. “Oh yeah, sure. Whatever,” I said, though I honestly hated action movies. I was more of a romantic-comedy girl myself.

Max shook his head. “You’re so laid-back, Melissa. Most girls are so high-strung and prissy.”

Laid-back was not the term I would’ve used to describe myself. Most of the time I felt tight and twisted in knots like a contortionist, worrying about all the terrible things that might happen to me and I wondered who this girl was that Max could see and no one else could.

When he got to my house, he leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. “I’ve gotta run,” he said. “I’m meeting the guys.”

I nodded, and I slid out of the car, feeling oddly free.

Ashley was lying on her bed talking on the phone, probably to the Nose because she was complaining about what a jerk Austin was and how he wasn’t even a good kisser.

I flopped down on the bed next to her, and I put my head on her pillow. She kicked at my ankles with her good foot, but I didn’t budge. I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t leaving her room until she told me what she meant about Max. I couldn’t waste another entire day of my life worrying about it, because if I did, I might not even be able to pass ninth grade. Then I’d have a heck of a lot more to worry about.

Finally, she sighed really loud, an exaggerated sigh
for the Nose’s benefit. “I have to call you back,” she said. “The freakin’ imp will not leave me alone.”

I hadn’t heard her call me that in a while, but it still stung, every time.

She hung up the phone. “What do you want?”

“Tell me what you meant about Max,” I said. “Or I’m telling everyone about the horse.”

She gasped. “You wouldn’t dare.”

She was right, I probably wouldn’t. I still felt really bad for her about her face and the dance and the pageant and everything. But I nodded. “I would.”

She sat up and pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and I saw her face was looking a little better. The bruises were yellower than yesterday, and I figured, once she got her teeth fixed up, that eventually you wouldn’t even be able to tell. “The senior guys on the team always go after the freshmen,” she said. “They even keep a count of who can get the most freshmen to sleep with them before the end of the year. Austin isn’t like that.”

“So what?” I tried to brush her off. “Max isn’t either.”

“Isn’t he?” She smirked a little, and I knew she took satisfaction in the fact that I was such an out-of-it little imp that I’d never even thought that Max might be using
me. “Anyway,” she said. “What other reason could he possibly have for ditching Lexie for you? You don’t actually think he likes you, do you?”

“Shut up.” I kicked her, hard, and I had to fight back tears that were welling up and stinging my eyes.

I got off her bed and ran into my room and slammed the door behind me.

There were no answers in my dad’s journal, no stories that could make me feel better about this. His stories were about amazing people, people in love, things you would never believe or even dream. But they did not tell you what to do when your heart felt like it was being crushed, when your head felt like it was going to explode, when the most popular boy at school either sincerely liked you or just wanted to sleep with you so he could brag to his friends. They did not tell you what it meant for your best friend to look at you in a way that his girlfriend, well, ex-girlfriend, noticed.

I picked up the journal and threw it against the wall. “Useless,” I muttered. Utterly and completely useless.

But then I wondered, even if my dad were here, if this would be the kind of stuff I would’ve asked him about, because it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a girl could
tell her father. Not that my father was just any father, so who knows, maybe he would’ve had all the answers.

I got into bed and lay there for a while, and I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew my mom was knocking on my door and it was already dark outside. “Melissa,” she called through the door. “Everything okay? Can I come in?”

“Yes,” I said. “Come in.” My voice was thick and my throat felt scratchy, and in the back of my head this little mono alarm went off.

She opened the door. “You didn’t come out for dinner. I was worried.” That was me. Always the eater. My dad used to joke that I would have to be dead to miss a meal. Ha ha. Hysterical now.

“I’m not that hungry,” I said.

She came in and put her hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel hot, sweetie.”

“Just a bad day,” I said.

She sat on the edge of my bed. “You want to talk about it?” I did. But I didn’t. My mother and I didn’t talk. When I told her things, she offered me generic words of consolation or told me to stop worrying, and I never ever felt better. “How are things with you and this Max guy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think he likes me.” But the little voice in my head said,
Or does he?

“And what about you?” my mother asked. “Do you like him?”

“Everybody likes him,” I said.

She nodded. “Sweetie, you should trust yourself more.” There she was with her generic nonhelpful advice.

“I know,” I said, but who knew what that meant anyway. “It’s just, how do you know if you love someone?” I asked her.

She stood up and pulled her hair back into a ponytail with her hand the same way Ashley always did. She walked over to the window, and it seemed like she was looking for something outside. “You just know,” she said. “You just feel it. Everywhere. All over.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Well”—she thought for a minute—“with your father, it was like wind. Like this strong gust came and swirled me up around into the air until I was so dizzy that I couldn’t even breathe.”

“What about with Kevin?”

“Oh, sweetie.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I love that man.”

I thought about the way she’d looked at the purple roses that he’d sent, the way she’d closed her eyes and held them up to her nose as if searching for a piece of him in there, and I knew that she did. I wanted to tell her that it was just an accident, that it wasn’t his fault. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to actually defend him, even if deep down I knew that he was a really nice guy and he, cowboy boots and all, genuinely cared about my mother.

I was also positive that, despite what she said, she really did love him, which felt like another reason to keep my mouth shut.

Here’s something I
learned from my father’s journal: When glass breaks, the cracks move at a speed greater than three thousand miles per hour. All you had to do was drop it on a hard floor, and it set off this reaction that came so quickly that you couldn’t take it back, even if you wanted to.

I wondered how fast bones splinter, how long it took for Ashley’s nose to break, for her teeth to crack in half. What I do know, is that from the moment it had happened, it took less than a week for the rest of her life to crumble, break, and shatter recklessly.

On Thursday afternoon my mother took Ashley to
get her transition bunny teeth put in at Dr. Langley’s office. And Friday morning was her first day back at school. My mother didn’t want her driving, even though it was her left ankle she’d sprained, because her face injuries were still so bad, and Ashley didn’t want to take the car yet because she was lying and telling everyone it was still being fixed. So my mother asked if Max would give us both a ride.

“No way.” I glared at Ashley.

“Melissa.” My mother sounded sterner than usual. “If it weren’t for Ashley, you wouldn’t even be getting a ride from Max. She asked him to take you to the dance, remember?”

Ashley smirked, and I was backed into a corner. So Max ended up taking both of us.

For once I got to ride shotgun, and Ashley, who’d gotten in the truck with the help of Max, was in the back, which made me feel a little bit better. Still, I kept turning around and glaring at her the whole ride.

When we got to school, the three of us walked up the steps together. Well, Max and I walked and Ashley hopped, a sight that I found both hysterical and a little sad. Though she could get around without the crutches, she still had trouble putting weight on her left ankle.

Max gave me a quick kiss on the cheek when we walked inside, and he was off to meet his friends. Ashley and I stood just inside the entrance of the school. It was the closest she’d ever stood to me at school, the most she’d ever acknowledged having a sister, but I think she was afraid, literally, to show her face, for people to see her looking this way.

“It’ll be okay.” I nudged her, but she didn’t respond. She just limped off toward her locker. I noticed that Austin wasn’t waiting for her there; in fact, I didn’t see him around anywhere, which was sort of odd. This was the first time all year that I’d seen Ashley at school by herself, Austin-free, and she looked like this whole different person all battered and bruised and alone. I almost felt a little sorry for her.

By lunchtime it had become very clear why Austin wasn’t there. The whole school was buzzing with it, not just because Austin was popular but also because he was so good at baseball and the championships were coming up.

Max found me before lunch and whispered the news to me quickly on his way to class. Austin wasn’t in school because Austin had caught mono.

It didn’t take long for me to put two and two
together, that it was not Max the Nose had been in love with and making out with—it had been Austin all along.

And so the week that Ashley lost her beauty, her face, her glorious dance as queen of the spring formal, her chance to get to the Miss Arizona pageant, she also lost her boyfriend, her best friend, and—dare I say?—her dignity.

“Not bad,” Ryan said to me in biology. “Mr. September made it all the way to April. If only we had known. Mr. April has kind of a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

I smiled, even though it was horrible and mean, and deep down I felt sorry for Ashley. But as I thought about the eyes she shot at me when she acted like a know-it-all and insisted that the Nose had been making out with Max, I couldn’t help it. “This is not her month, is it?” I hadn’t really thought about it before I said it; it just sort of slipped out. Then I thought about the fact that April was the month our father had died, and it just seemed sort of unlucky and horrible all around.

Mrs. Connor had been telling us something about T. S. Eliot’s interpretation of Keats yesterday, and she spouted off, “April is the cruelest month.” She’d pulled her big, black floppy hat down dramatically over her
eyes as she said it. We’d all looked at her sort of dumbly, waiting to see if she’d fallen off the deep end or something. “Oh never mind.” She waved her hand in the air. “You’re too young for my T. S. Eliot jokes. If you stick with it, maybe you’ll read
The Waste Land
in twelfth-grade AP. That’s the first line.” She laughed. So not funny.

But just now that line popped into my head. I thought about the beautiful, cool starlit nights in the desert in April and the warm, sunny days, and the way that death had taken my father, and Ashley had been broken, and suddenly I worried that something terrible was about to befall me.

In English we moved on to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As Mrs. Connor passed the day’s poem down the rows she said, “Ah, Elizabeth and Robert. What an amazing love story.” She was still wearing the black floppy hat that she’d had on yesterday, but today she’d lifted the flaps up so we could see her face, which I noticed looked even more illuminated than usual.

I stopped doodling in my notebook and looked over at the poem in front of me. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Mrs. Connor shouted out the first line
and jumped in front of the room. Her hat fell back down over her eyes. “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”

“Oh”—Mrs. Connor sucked in her breath and closed her eyes—“imagine it, guys and gals: a love that consumes you so much that you can write something this stunning.”

I wasn’t sure I understood most of it. But I didn’t think I loved Max to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, whatever the heck that meant.

“And here is something you should all know about Elizabeth,” Mrs. Connor said. She was always doing this, trying to tell us something interesting about the poet, more than just the biographical stuff you would normally read in books. My father would’ve loved her. “The last word she ever uttered was the word
beautiful
. She was on her deathbed, and her husband, Robert, asked her how she was feeling. That’s what she said in response: ‘beautiful.’” She said the word softly, so it hung in the air for a minute before she said anything else.

I thought about my dad’s last words to me, maybe to anyone, and I wondered what he would’ve said if I’d have asked him how he was feeling.
Beautiful
seemed
like the perfect last thing to say, poetic even, and I wondered if she’d felt that way because her true love was sitting with her, if that’s what real love did for you, made you feel beautiful in spite of everything.

Ashley had called my mother in the middle of the day to pick her up. She’d said her face and her ankle were killing her, and she couldn’t concentrate, but I knew what it really was. She couldn’t take the stares, the whispers. And really, I didn’t blame her.

By the time I got home, she was already waiting for me in my bedroom. She was lying on my bed with a box of tissues, crying her eyes out. I was tempted to tell her to get up, to keep her gross mono germs to herself, in her own bed, but I just didn’t have the heart, even though I resolved that I was going to switch my pillowcase before I went to sleep.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a bitch.”

Ashley had never apologized to me before, for anything, so the only thing I could think to muster in response was, “Well, yeah. You sorta are.”

“I shouldn’t have said that to you about Max.” She paused to blow her nose. “I mean some of the guys are like that, but not Max.” She blew her nose again, and
I was wondering how she could be blowing so much since it was still broken, but I didn’t ask. “Lexie just wanted you to think that Max didn’t really like you, and I’m such an idiot. I went along with her.”

I sat down next to her. A part of me wanted to kick her as hard as I could, and another part of me wanted to hug her. But I just sat there and did nothing.

“Max really likes you, you know. And he’s a good guy. You’re lucky, Melissa.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess.”

We sat there for a few minutes, until she said, in almost a whisper, “I was always so jealous of you.”

“Me?” I didn’t know what she would have to be jealous of when she was the one who was gorgeous and popular and an almost beauty queen.

“You can always just do your own thing, and you never care what anyone else thinks of you. You’re so much like Dad.”

“I am?” It wasn’t fair that I’d been too young to remember him healthy, to really remember him, not just a few chance conversations and an evening of stargazing, but him, the person that he was, every single day.

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Dad never followed anyone
else’s rules. Mom used to yell at him for driving too fast and just doing what he pleased whenever he wanted to, even if no one else agreed with him. I remember when he got sick, he told me there was no way he was going to die. He just wasn’t going to let himself. And he really believed that, even when Dr. Singh told him it wasn’t true.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “I wish I’d been older.”

“I wish I could be more like him,” she said.

“But you’re you. You’re beautiful.”

“Not anymore.”

“You will be again.”

“But what does it matter?” She started crying again. “It’ll be too late to do pageants, and all my friends will be laughing at me over this whole Austin thing.”

“So.” I shrugged. “You’ll get new friends.”

She laughed. “It’s so easy for you. You’re funny and smart, and what do I have?”

“You’re funny and smart,” I said, though I couldn’t think of a single joke Ashley had ever cracked. “And besides, I’m totally going to fail biology,” I said.

“Oh shut up. You are not.”

I lay back so I was lying next to her and our
shoulders were touching. We both were staring at the ceiling, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars that our dad had glued up there before he got sick, and I thought about that night I’d lain out on the grass with him and he’d told me that his favorite star was not the brightest. “Dad would’ve been really proud of you,” I said.

She leaned her broken face on my shoulder, and the two of us just stayed there for a while, not saying another word.

The next night both Ashley and my mother helped me get ready for my date with Max. My mother curled my hair again, and Ashley picked out a really cute short-sleeved pink sweater from her closet for me to wear. Then she said she was going to lie down. “Are you all right?” my mother asked her. “You still don’t seem like yourself, honey.”

She shook her head.

“The pageant,” I whispered, because I had just remembered. Tonight was the night. Ashley should’ve been downtown right now, taping her butt into her dress and layering foundation on her face, but instead she was here with us.

“Oh my goodness,” my mother said. “That reminds
me.” She ran into the kitchen, and then came back with an envelope, which she handed to Ashley. “Here,” she said.

“What’s this?” Ashley took the envelope and looked through it for a minute. Then she jumped up and squealed. “Ow,” she said as she landed too hard on her ankle. “Ow.” Then she squealed again and hugged my mother.

Ashley took the paper out of the envelope and waved it in my face. It was her entry into the premier set of pageants, which began with the first one in August, plenty of time for her to heal, to become beautiful all over again. It was the pageant circuit with the most scholarship money and the prettiest, most-elite girls, the one Ashley had always begged my mother to let her enter in the past.

“I thought you said this was too expensive?” Ashley said.

My mother shrugged. “I’ve picked up a few more clients lately at the salon, so we can swing it this year.” She paused. “And besides, you deserve it, honey.”

After I got all dressed and ready, I went into my room and stared at myself in the mirror. I was that other girl
again, the pretty one with the made-up face and the bouncy, bouncy curls. I stood sideways and checked out my profile. In this sweater you couldn’t even tell how small my boobs were, and the pink was soft and feminine and pretty.

I had butterflies in my stomach thinking about my date with Max, which was strange because we’d been spending time together all week. But I’d never been on a real date with a boy before, except for the dance, which wasn’t really a real date, because he’d only sort of asked me at the last minute.

I heard a tapping at my window, and I jumped.
Not now, Ryan.
But I had no choice but to go and open the window for him anyway. He climbed in and looked at me, really looked at me. He stared long enough that I felt my face turning red. “What?” I finally said.

“Have you called her yet?”

I shook my head. I’d been so worried about everything with Max that I hadn’t really been thinking about Sally.

He nodded. “I knew it.”

“Why do you care so much anyway?” I paused. “I’m going to call her, all right?” And I was, at some point. It was funny how now that I knew exactly how and where
to find her, I’d sort of lost my nerve to actually do it.

“Let’s go right now. We can bike to her house.”

“I have a date,” I said.

“Oh.” Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw his face drop, when I said the word
date
. It annoyed me, because he didn’t have the right to do that, to judge or be angry or whatever, not after he’d ditched me for Courtney for months.

He stared at me for another moment and then started to say something but changed his mind.

“What?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“Say it.”

He started to climb out the window, then stopped and turned back. “It’s just, you look really nice. That’s all.” He jumped down and started running down the street toward his house.

The movie Max and I went to see was the action movie he’d been telling me about on the ride home the other day. I tried really hard to seem interested, but I just couldn’t focus. Right away there was some big fight scene that just made me want to stop watching. And in my head I couldn’t stop thinking about Ryan, about
the way his face had looked as he’d looked at me, sort of surprised and thrilled all at the same time.