The Life of Glass (19 page)

After about twenty minutes, Max reached over and put his arm around me, and then he leaned in and started kissing me. I kissed him back. He put his tongue in my mouth—not in this gentle, nice sort of way, but in this way where I felt like he was shoving it down my throat and I was going to have to cough. It was my first French kiss, and I hated it. Sort of slimy and aggressive, and I could not understand why people liked it.

I was trying to think of a polite way to get his tongue out of my mouth when I felt his hand inching toward my breast. I shifted a little to move his hand and hoped he’d get the hint. But he moved it right back. I squirmed a little more, and then he made a sudden move to put his hand under my shirt. I pulled away. “What’s wrong?” he whispered. In the background, in the movie, there was a building exploding and people running and screaming, and it would’ve almost been something funny if it had been happening to someone else.

“Let’s just watch the movie,” I whispered back.

He laughed and started kissing me. And he put his hand right back under my shirt again, until I felt it on
my stomach. His hand felt cold as it pressed against my skin just above my belly button. I reached my hand down and moved his hand out of my shirt again. But he put it right back. “Come on,” I whispered. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” He kissed my ear and whispered, “I love that you’re so new at this.”

And then I knew it, absolutely, for sure. I didn’t love him. Maybe I didn’t even like him. So he was Max Healy. So every girl at school was in love with him. So what.

Maybe he wasn’t trying to sleep with me just because I was a freshman, but still, it seemed like his idea of a date was feeling me up in the middle of an action movie. And if that’s what a date with him was, then I was okay with not having any more, ever.

“Can you take me home?” I asked.

“What? Now? Are you kidding?” I shook my head, and he had this look of disbelief on his face, which then turned into a frown of annoyance.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll walk.” I stood up and walked out of the movie theater, and I was sure that he wasn’t going to follow me.

On the walk home I thought about what an idiot I’d been to think that I would’ve wanted a guy that every
other girl wanted. If there was one thing I’d learned from my dad, it was to embrace the fact that I was different, that I wasn’t like everyone else. “You’re not a sheep,” he used to say.

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t follow the herd. You do your own thing.”

And I always had, until this year. Until I met Courtney. Until Ryan ditched me. Until a part of me got so jealous that I just wanted to be beautiful and popular like Ashley because I thought that would solve everything. I thought about what Courtney had said when I’d told her about Max liking her in the beginning of the year. And she’d been right. All he’d wanted to do was get his hands up my shirt all along. Maybe it took a girl like Courtney to really understand a guy like Max.

I thought about Ryan’s face as he’d stood in my room earlier in the night, and I knew I had to see him. Right now. As I got closer to my street, I started running. My feet were killing me in a pair of Ashley’s sandals, but I didn’t stop. I ran and I ran. And I ran.

When I got to Ryan’s house, I was completely out of breath. I stood in his driveway for a second with my head between my knees, trying to keep my breath
going. I wondered how fast my ribs were moving now.

His father’s car was in the driveway, but I didn’t see Ryan’s bike parked in its normal spot, so I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

His father opened the door, and he was wearing his Border Patrol uniform, so I was guessing he’d just gotten home or he was just about to go out. He nodded at me. “Hello, Melissa. It’s been a while.” He had such a stern voice, and he was tall and looked very stately in his uniform. So the opposite of my father.

“Do you know where Ryan is?”

He nodded again. “He told me he went out to get something. For you, actually.”

It hit me. Ryan had gone to find Sally by himself. My first reaction was to be angry, because what right did he have to find someone that was mine to find? But I wasn’t all angry. This little part of me felt grateful that he cared enough to do it. Maybe this was his way of apologizing, after all. “Thank you.” I waved and started running back toward my house.

I didn’t go inside because I didn’t want to explain to my mother or Ashley what had happened, and besides, I knew my mother would never let me get on my bike now, in the dark.

I pulled my bike out from the side of the house as quietly as I could, and I walked it down the street past my next-door neighbor’s house. Then I hopped on and started riding.

The night was slightly cool, and the wind whipped through my hair, pulling the curls back behind my shoulders. It was a little harder than usual to pedal in Ashley’s sandals, but I didn’t care. Though I was riding toward Sally’s house, it wasn’t her I wanted to see.

This strange feeling came over me as I rode, this overwhelming sense of warmth and elation. All the anger I’d had for Ryan was gone. The world in which he’d ignored me and ditched me for Courtney felt very, very far away.

In its place there was this new world, one where he’d looked at me in my bedroom earlier in the evening in a way that no one else ever had looked at me before. And I absolutely knew it. Everyone had been right all along. I did want to be with him. Not just friends. I wanted him to look at me that way again. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to stand close enough to him to feel his breath on my face.

I pedaled so fast that my feet kept slipping off in clumsy motions that scraped the exposed skin. But I
hardly even felt the scrapes, just the wind in my hair as I flew down the street. My heart was thudding against my chest and I was breathing heavily.

I am not exactly sure what happened next.

There was a horn that was so loud that it shocked me, and there was a crunch and a thud. I flew through the air with this unbelievable grace, like a hummingbird flittering on a bird of paradise.

And then there was darkness.

There was a
lot of darkness.

I heard noises in the background, but they were hard to really place. It was like being in that dream where there’s something you know you really want, but you can’t make yourself move to get it.

I saw people in my head, but they were foggy and blurred: Ryan, Ashley’s broken face, my mother, my aunt Julie, even Courtney, some guy I didn’t recognize, and a bright light like a halo. I kept thinking I should open my eyes. But I couldn’t because I was tired. So very, very tired. Everything felt heavy and hard and long. And it just felt so good to sleep.

And then finally, I was able to open my eyes. The room was dark, and the furniture was sparse and shapeless against the black world. I had no idea where I was except there was a smell, the lemon Lysol scent and the vinegar that reminded me of Sunset Vistas and the hospital in Philadelphia. I was dead.

“Oh you’re awake.” This unfamiliar woman, whom I thought might be some sort of angel, was talking to me. Then I noticed her medical-center badge and her name tag.
NURSE JUANITA DIAZ
. I felt my ribs moving against my chest. I was breathing. I was alive. “I’ll get your mother. Okay, hon?”

She walked back into the hallway, and I tried to remember how I got here, what happened. I remembered Ashley being thrown from a horse, and I wondered if I had been thrown from one too. Had I been riding Daffodil? But then, slowly, in pieces, it started to come back to me: my date with Max, riding my bike on the dark street, the horn, and the sickening thud.

My mother ran into the room and crushed me in a hug. “Oh, Melissa. Oh, sweetie, you gave me such a scare. What were you thinking?”

Ryan.
But I didn’t say it out loud.

Ashley stood behind her, and her face was still bruised
and hideous, so I knew I couldn’t have been asleep for that long. “What happened?” I said.

“You got hit by a car, dumbass,” Ashley said.

“Ashley, shush.”

I couldn’t help but smile because I knew that Ashley was jealous. I’d stolen her injury spotlight. “At least I didn’t fall off a horse,” I said.

“Girls.” My mother reached down and pulled my hair out of my eyes—still curly. “Well, at least I know your brain’s still working.” She paused. “You have a concussion and a broken arm. They had to do surgery to set it. And you’re going to be in a cast for six weeks.”

I looked under the covers and was surprised to see she was right; there was a cast there. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“It will,” she said. “I think they gave you something for the pain.”

I noticed that I had an IV in my arm, and it reminded me instantly of my father in the hospice bed, in those last days, the morphine dripping down slowly into his arm.

“You were lucky,” my mom said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.” She kissed me on the head, then said, “I could just kill you for being so stupid.” She paused. “You girls. Both of you. Sixteen years without a broken bone, and then all of this. All at once. It’s too much.” Tears sprang
into her eyes, and she reached up quickly to wipe them away.

I knew she was right. I’d spent most of my life being worried about everything, every pain, every germ, that it might make me sick or kill me. For some reason I hadn’t been thinking about it at all when I rode my bike on the pitch-dark streets. I’d been thinking about Ryan. Maybe that was love.

I leaned back against the pillow and closed my eyes. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Three
A.M.
,” my mother said. Way too late to call Ryan. “Will you be okay if Ashley and I go home and get some rest?”

I nodded.

“We’ll be back first thing in the morning.” Ashley groaned, and my mother elbowed her. My mother leaned down and kissed me, and then they left me. In what might’ve been my deathbed.

I lay there awake for a while, just thinking about how lucky I was to be alive. I thought about the fact that it doesn’t matter how much you wonder about things or worry about them. If they’re going to happen to you, they will. According to Ashley, my dad really believed that his cancer wasn’t going to kill him, but in the end
there was nothing he could do to stop it. And somehow, I was hit by three thousand pounds of steel and I had only a broken arm and a concussion to show for it. Amazing.

I was discharged from the hospital around two o’clock the next afternoon, and though they were still giving me medication, my wrist started to ache and my head throbbed. I felt way worse than I did the night before, like I’d been hit by the proverbial bus, not a car.

Apparently the lady who’d hit me had run a red light, and the whole thing was her fault. This made my mother a little more angry at her and a little less angry at me, especially when she learned that the woman sent me flowers at the hospital. “The nerve,” my mother said. “If she thinks she can just buy us off with some flowers.”

“They’re not even nice,” Ashley sneered. “They’re carnations, for godsakes.”

“Well, I hope they throw the book at her,” my mother said.

I felt a little bad because I knew that I hadn’t really been watching, that I should’ve been paying more attention. “It was an accident,” I said, so quietly that I wasn’t sure if they heard me, because they both ignored my comment.

As soon as I got home, my mother set me up in bed with a tray of food, and I asked her to bring me the phone. “Don’t talk too long,” she said. “You need to rest.”

I nodded and didn’t tell her that I planned on telling Ryan to come over.

I called him, and I felt my heart beating faster. A broken arm and a concussion had done little to dull the excitement I’d felt last night as I’d raced toward him on my bike.

He picked up. “Come over,” I said. “Come in through my window.” I hung up without giving him a chance to answer.

Ten minutes later there was tapping. I pulled off the tray with one arm, struggled to stand, and limped toward the window.

“Jesus, Mel. What happened?” He reached up and touched the lump the size of a golf ball on my forehead.

“Ow.” I hadn’t known how tender it was before he touched it.

“You go on one date, and you look like this?”

I laughed. “I left in the middle of the movie, and then I came to look for you.”

“I know,” he said. “My dad told me.” He paused. “I was in the wash.”

“You were?” I shook my head, so I’d been riding in the wrong direction, all for nothing. I wondered what would’ve happened if I’d ended up at Sally’s house, and I wondered if the car that hit me was some kind of divine intervention, keeping me from ever getting there. Like God reaching his hand down or something and telling me not to find her. “Your dad said you went to find something for me.”

He nodded. “I did. I wanted it to be a surprise.” He paused. “I was looking in the wash for more glass, you know, from the same piece.”

I nodded. “I thought you’d gone to look for Sally,” I whispered.

“I wanted to make you something. I don’t know, a memorial or something for your dad.”

I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop the tears, even though they hurt my head.

“We can still go look for her together if you want.”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell him that wasn’t why I was crying, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to find Sally anymore, because maybe it didn’t even matter who she was. Maybe it was better remembering things the way I remembered them. Maybe I didn’t want to know anything else, anything that might tarnish the memories
and make my dad into some other person that I never really even knew at all.

Ryan put his thumbs on my cheeks and wiped away my tears. We stood there like that for a moment, my tears falling over his thumbs, the two of us staring into each other’s eyes. There was so much to say, and no way for me to possibly say it all and get it right.

So, without saying anything, without thinking it through, I stretched up and kissed him.

I kissed him softly, on the mouth, and I knew he was surprised because he didn’t move for a second. But then he kissed me back.

I wasn’t thinking about my concussion or my broken arm, or the fact that I hadn’t taken a shower since before I’d been hit by a car, flung in the dirty street, carried in an ambulance and operated on. I wasn’t thinking at all. Just feeling. His lips were warm, and when I kissed him, I felt this warmth in my chest, this energy that wanted to burst right out of me. And this feeling, this overwhelming electric sensation that he was the person I wanted to be with.

He pulled back. “What about Max?” he whispered.

I shrugged. “What about him?”

“I thought you liked him.”

I shook my head. “No.” I paused. “I think I just thought I should, you know?”

He touched my cast softly. “Aren’t you even going to tell me what happened?”

I didn’t want to, because I felt embarrassed and enormously stupid. But I blurted it all out anyway, leaving out the details about exactly why I’d left Max in the movie theater.

Ryan pulled me into a hug, and I put my head against his chest. His heart beat loud and strong in my ear, and for once his breath sounded even, not wheezy at all. “How are you feeling now?” he whispered into my hair.

“Beautiful,” I whispered back.

It was like it was something I’d always known but hadn’t known how to say until right that very moment.