The Life of Glass (4 page)

“Did you know I almost drowned?”

I shook my head. “I knew you fell in. That’s why you
never like to go swimming.”

“I just remember being under the water, and it was so cold and rushing up all over. And then it was very dark, black even. Dad pulled me out. I opened my eyes, and he was carrying me, and he was crying. Did you know that? The man was freakin’ crying. He loved me that much.”

I closed my eyes, and I could picture it. My dad’s round and serious face pulling Ashley from the water. But I had no memory of any of it. “Are you drunk?” I finally said.

“Get out.” She threw the pillow at me again, and this time it smashed me in the head.

I heard my mom stumble in a few minutes later. I listened carefully, relieved to hear only one set of shoes, one set of footsteps. She’d come in alone. I heard her pouring water into the kettle for tea, and I thought about getting out of bed and going to sit with her in the kitchen, but I didn’t really want to know, didn’t want to see it on her face, if she was starting to fall in love with him.

I’d written Courtney’s
number down on a Post-it on my desk after our walk, and the next morning, as I sat there trying to get my homework done, it was staring up at me. I wasn’t sure why I would call it. I didn’t want to be her friend; I didn’t necessarily even like her. But then as I looked at the number, it didn’t seem like it was an option not to call it.

It was after eleven and Ashley and my mother were both still in their beds. I’d already made a trip to the kitchen, spooned some peanut butter out of the jar, sat at the kitchen table, and sucked it down alone.

Before my father got sick, he used to cook us breakfast
on Sunday mornings. His specialty was French toast. He had this weird recipe where he’d put just a pinch of chili powder in with the cinnamon, something Grandma Harry had invented by accident when she once mixed up the two spices. It sounds terrible, but it was actually really, really good. My peanut butter on a spoon was no substitute.

When Courtney picked up, I said hi and I felt like an idiot. “It’s Melissa.”

“Hey, Meliss. What’s up?”

“Not much.” I tapped my pencil against the desk, realizing that I had absolutely nothing to say to her.

“I was just going to give myself a mani/pedi. Want to come over?”

“Okay. Sure,” I said.

Courtney lived across the wash from us, in a development of new two-story homes. My development was built in the seventies, so our houses were brick with flat roofs that had this odd slant to them, so they sometimes looked like they could sink right into the ground. We had short driveways with painted metal carports, and black wrought-iron security doors in the front.

But just across the wash, there was Courtney’s life, an
entirely different world. Big beige stucco houses with red tile roofs, long driveways, neat red rocks and trimmed shrubs out front. The houses in her neighborhood were much closer together than in mine, or maybe it just felt that way because they were so much bigger. Courtney lived just down the street from Austin and Ashley’s best friend, Lexie, so in a way, as I biked across the wash, it was as if I was entering Ashley’s world.

It was strange riding down the hill of the wash without Ryan. I hadn’t been down there without him in a long time, probably years, and I knew if he knew I was going to Courtney’s house he might be upset with me.

Courtney’s house was like all the others on the street, very tall and clean and modern-looking, and she had a big stained-wood door in the front. I knocked on the door a few times. I heard Paco barking but no human sounds. Then I rang the bell. I had this moment, standing there on the porch, when I wondered if this was all some big joke that Ashley had set up, that Courtney wasn’t actually home, that she didn’t really think we were friends. And I was about ready to turn around and get on my bike when Courtney finally opened the door. Maybe she noticed the bewildered look on my face, because she said, “My mom is out, and I had my music up really loud.” I
nodded. “Come on in. I already picked out a polish color that’ll look great with your skin.”

I followed her into the house, down a long slate-tiled hallway, up a plushly carpeted staircase, into her bedroom. Her room was three times the size of mine and looked like something from one of those design magazines my mother read and sometimes left in the bathroom. She had this big canopy bed in the center with a pink silky-looking comforter and tons of expensive-looking pillows, and her bed was so high off the ground that she had a little step stool to get up.

She must have noticed me gawking because she sighed and said, “It’s nice, isn’t it? My mother’s trying to buy me off so I don’t miss San Diego.”

“Do you? Miss it, I mean?”

She nodded. “Of course. This city is like, all dried up and in the middle of nowhere.” She sighed. “No offense.”

“Of course.” I nodded, though I had little to compare it to, because I’d lived here all my life, aside from my three-month stint in Philadelphia, which was mostly spent in a hotel and a hospital waiting room. The warm desert air, the sparse landscapes, the brown mountains that turned purple against pink-blue skies at sunset all
suddenly did seem a little dry and barren when I looked at the pictures of her in San Diego that she had all around the room—her at the beach with a bunch of other girls in tiny little bikinis, her standing in the driveway of what I assumed to be her old house, modest-looking with this patch of emerald grass out front.

“But I just hate being new at school. You know?”

I nodded.

“I had so many friends at my old school. I was voted most popular in the eighth-grade yearbook.”

I nodded again like I knew all about what she was talking about. I had the urge to tell her that being friends with me or dating Ryan was not going to win her any popularity contests at our school, but I kept my mouth shut. There was something about her, this room, that drew me in, that made me actually want to paint my toenails and fingernails, something I usually had no interest in.

“Here, look at this color.” She handed me a bottle of polish. Sugar Plum Fairy, a deep, rich purple. “What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” I said, though I had no opinion really.

“Take off your shoes,” she said. I sat on the floor and obeyed, unlacing my old, grungy sneakers, trying to
remember the last time I’d actually cut my toenails.

“Oooh, you have such nice feet,” she said. “You should wear sandals more often.”

“Do you think?” My feet looked sort of odd and calloused to me, but I wasn’t a good judge of those kinds of things.

“Definitely.” She held my foot in her lap and started painting carefully, with the hands of a skilled laborer who had done this a thousand times.

Two hours later I rode my bike back across the wash, with Sugar Plum Fairy nails as well as toenails, and I didn’t feel like the same person. Maybe what my mother and Ashley said about how wearing makeup could boost your spirits was true, because I felt a lot better than I had when I’d left my house.

I was in my own little world, so I didn’t even see Ryan out in front of his house at first. “Hey, Mel,” he called, and his voice broke into my little fantasy world where people lived in perfect pink bedrooms. I hit the brakes and skidded to a stop in front of him. “You were riding in the wash without me?”

I hesitated for a minute wondering whether to lie or tell the truth, and before I could really decide, a lie
popped out. “I was dropping off something for Ashley, at Mr. September’s house.”

“Why didn’t she do it herself?”

“She wasn’t feeling good.”

He frowned, gave me a kind of suspicious sideways look. “What happened to your nails?”

“I painted them. Do you like them?”

“I guess.” He shrugged, not nearly as convinced by the Sugar Plum Fairy as I’d been, which surprised me because I thought he’d be into that stuff, since he’d practically been drooling over Courtney in biology. I knew I would have to tell him about my friendship with her, but I wanted to keep it to myself for just a little bit longer.

“I have to go,” I said, because I realized that my mom might be worried, that if she’d woken up and found my mysterious note that said “at a friend’s house,” she might be wondering what was taking me so long and who this friend was. And Ashley might be proclaiming that I must have been abducted by aliens, because I didn’t have any real friends that she knew of.

“Wanna hang out later?” He called after me as I rode down the street.

“Sure,” I yelled behind me. I no longer felt annoyed with him. In a weird way, I almost felt giddy.

It was clear, as soon as I saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and sunglasses on, that she had been drinking the night before, that she had in fact drunk too much, and that seemed like a very, very bad sign.

Ashley must’ve gotten up right before I got home, because she was at the table too, in her pajamas, her hair uncombed and sticking sideways, a half-eaten slice of honeydew on a plate in front of her.

“There you are,” my mom said in what was probably meant to be her cheerful voice but came out all sort of muddled and groggy.

Ashley gasped. “You painted your nails!” She pretended to shiver. “Is it cold in here? Is hell freezing over?”

“Ashley, be nice.” My mother pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and picked up my hands to examine them more closely. “Nice color, sweetie.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Seriously.” Ashley looked annoyed that no one was paying attention to her. “Since when do you paint your nails, Melissa?”

“My friend Courtney did them.”

Ashley’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head, and I knew immediately that she knew which Courtney I meant. Yes, I thought smugly, the new Courtney, beautiful and mysterious, and she was mine. “Courtney Whitman?” I could tell she couldn’t believe it was true, even as she said it.

“Do you know her, sweetie?” my mom asked.

Ashley nodded. “Yeah, Max Healy is totally in love with her. Remember I was telling you?”

My mom had her sunglasses back on, so when she nodded, I couldn’t tell if she really did remember or if she was only pretending. Sometimes I wondered how much my mom really listened to all the gossip Ashley told her or if, like me, she couldn’t help but tune some of it out, let her mind wander to some other interesting and less-mundane place.

I knew who Max Healy was. Of course, everyone at my school knew who Max Healy was. He was one of Austin’s best friends and a superstar on the football and baseball teams.

This knowledge that he liked Courtney made me feel incredibly joyful, because there was no way she would want Ryan once she found out about Max. Any girl would want Max. Even I’d felt a little tingly when
I walked by him in the hallway once and he gave me a smile. Max was just that kind of special guy.

“
You’re
friends with Courtney.” Ashley shook her head.

“Jealous?” I said.

“Whatever.” She kicked my ankle hard under the table, so I retaliated by flicking her arm with one of my perfect Sugar Plum nails. “Oww. Melissa.”

“Girls.” My mother held on to her head. “Please.”

Ashley turned and stuck her tongue out at me as she pranced off to her room. “Real mature,” I called after her. But I could not wipe this crazy, silly grin off my face for the rest of the day.

The Monday morning
after I went to her house for the first time, Courtney sat out on the front steps of Desert Crest High waiting for me and Ryan to bike up. “Hey, guys.” She gave a little wave when she saw us coming.

“Is she waving to us?” Ryan said, the disbelief as thick and heavy as his asthmatic breath after coming up the hill.

“Yep. I do believe she is,” I said, sort of smugly.

She linked arms with me as we walked up those front steps, which gave me an entirely different feeling about the place. People were watching me. I felt their eyes. And not strange stares but interested ones, and this made me
hold my head up a little higher as I went to my locker.

Ryan trailed behind us, looking just a little lost at first, until Courtney stopped, touched his shoulder, and whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. That laugh cut me, just a little bit; it started a tiny pang of something shooting through my chest. But I was determined to ignore it. I couldn’t blame Ryan for being taken with her, when clearly, I was too.

In biology Courtney forced Jeffrey to join our lab table, so it really ended up being the three of us working on Kermit, while Jeffrey was left to have a go of it with his and Courtney’s frog on his own. “Hey, Courtney, don’t you want a turn to cut?” he kept saying and waving the scalpel in the air, sort of Jeffrey Dahmer–like.

“Ewww. I don’t think so.” She made a face at me, as if to say,
Is he not the most disgusting boy you’ve ever met?
And I rolled my eyes to commiserate, but deep down I felt just a little sorry for him.

I started hanging out at Courtney’s house after school, finding an odd sort of peace in her beautiful bedroom. I changed my nail color six times in three weeks, a fact that Ashley just could not get over, and my mother seemed a little proud of. She got this funny smile when she looked
at me, as if she were thinking, Hmmm, maybe this girl did get some of my DNA after all.

In this same time, I did not look in my dad’s journal at all. I had no new tidbits rolling around in my brain, nothing interesting to contemplate.

Instead there were other things: Courtney and I spent an entire afternoon trying to find the perfect shade of lipstick from her collection to match my skin tone. She finally decided on one with a reddish tint that tasted fruity, called Apple of My Eye, that she said really complemented my paler skin. “Here. Take it home with you,” she said.

“No, seriously. I can’t.”

“Go ahead.” She shoved the tube in my hand and closed my fingers around it. “It looks way better on you than it does on me anyway.”

Still, in my bedroom, in front of my own mirror, I thought it looked silly on me, as if I were a little kid trying to play dress-up, and I put it in my jewelry box and told myself I’d take it out for special occasions only.

Some days after school we’d spend an hour or so in Walgreens looking through the makeup and scented lotions and perfumes, and Courtney always swore she needed my opinion, even though, really, I had no idea
what I was talking about and usually just ended up agreeing with whatever she said.

“Which do you like better?” she’d ask, pouring a little tester of two lotions on her arms, one on each wrist. “The peach,” she’d answer herself. “Yes, definitely a little sexier.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what made peach so sexy, but I nodded and murmured in agreement. Courtney always had her mother’s credit card, so she could buy whatever she wanted and a lot of it, whereas I had some spare lunch-money change in my pocket that wouldn’t get me much more than a pack of gum.

The interesting thing about Courtney was that in addition to being incredibly beautiful, she was also really goofy. She liked to hang upside down from the bar in her gigantic closet, she knew how to knit and made all these cute little outfits for Paco, and though she was kind of an idiot in biology, she had this amazing memory for words and could quote from almost anything she’d ever read.

“Clothes make the man,” she’d said as she knitted, and then she put down her needles and pushed Paco’s ears toward his face so he had a funny little look. “Probably not what Twain meant.” She’d laughed.

She had me laughing one day as I was sitting on her
floor painting my toenails Heavenly Plum, and she was painting Paco’s toenails Perfect Peach, so I just blurted out what Ashley had told me, without really even thinking about it. “You know Max Healy is in love with you.”

She stopped painting Paco’s toenails for a moment, crinkled up her nose, and laughed. “Guys like Max are a dime a dozen.”

I froze, the nailbrush suspended in midair until I realized it was about to drip on her carpet and I quickly shoved it back into the bottle. “Why would you say that?”

“I dated a guy, Mark, just like him at my old school. And every time I went out with him, I swear all he wanted to do was grab my boobs.”

Courtney, unlike me, had very nice, perfect-looking boobs, and she wore a lot of V-neck shirts and bras that pushed them up and gave her a little bit of cleavage. “But Max is…Max.”

“I know. I know.” She paused. “But Ryan is so cute.” She sighed. “Do you think I even have a chance with him?”

I nodded and smiled, and I knew I was baring my horse teeth because it hurt to keep smiling. “Of course you do.”

“Will you get him to ask me out? Oh please, please, please, Meliss.”

I wasn’t quite sure how we’d gotten here, from me innocently telling her what Ashley had said about Max. But here we were, the moment I knew had been coming since the time Courtney and I had taken Paco around the block a few weeks earlier, even though I hadn’t quite let myself believe it. “Of course,” I said, still smiling. “Of course I’ll do that.”

She put Paco on the ground and leaned over and crushed me in a hug. “You’re the best, Meliss. You really are.”

It was dark by the time I rode across the wash; the Heavenly Plum on my nails seemed invisible, the way I felt riding my bike in the pitch black of the desert. I wondered how long I could put Courtney off, and whether it really mattered if I did or not. It seemed inevitable that she and Ryan were going to become a couple, and then they were going to spend all their time together and there would be no more manicures on Courtney’s floor, no more bike rides with Ryan.

Ashley was sitting at the kitchen table with a half-eaten bowl of ramen noodles when I walked in. “Let me see.” She grabbed my hands and examined the plum color
in the pale fluorescent light of the kitchen. “Not bad.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Out with Kevin.”

“Again?” If I was counting accurately, this was date number five, but I knew there could be others, times I didn’t even know about. I grabbed a spoon, sat down next to Ashley, and dug into her half-eaten soup. “It can’t last forever, right?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was quiet, so I could tell she honestly didn’t. And really, how much did it mean to her anyway? One more year and she’d be away at college, and then I’d be stuck here all by myself with my mom and some guy she was dating or, God forbid, even marrying. And it hit me, that when Ashley was gone, I might actually miss her.

“Courtney likes Ryan,” I blurted out, a confession.

“Oh.” It surprised me that she didn’t laugh or make fun of me, but still I didn’t want to look up, so I concentrated really hard on the soup.

The front door opened and my mom walked in. “Hi, girls.” She looked a little sad, maybe like she’d been crying, and her hair was messy and falling out of her ponytail. I looked at Ashley, who shrugged her shoulders. “I’m exhausted. I’m going straight to bed. Okay, girls?”

We nodded. “Good night,” Ashley said.

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “’Night.”

Ashley and I sat there quietly for a few minutes. I’d finished her soup and I was still hungry, but I didn’t feel like moving to find something else. “You know what you need?” she finally said.

“What?”

“A boyfriend. Something to make Ryan jealous.”

“I don’t want to make him jealous.”

She laughed. “Of course you do.” It amazed me how easy it was for her. “You know, if you let Mom fix your hair up and you wore a little more makeup and a push-up bra and…well, you wouldn’t be half bad.”

“Gee, thanks.” But what surprised me was that there was something in there that sounded like a promise.

After Ashley went to bed, I sat up for a while at my desk doing my homework. I thought about what Ashley had said, that I needed a boyfriend, and it was the first time I’d ever really thought about it. I mean, really thought about it. It’s not that I’d never been interested in a boy before.

There was this one guy I’d liked, Justin Mannor. Just before we’d left for Philadelphia, Kelly Jamison had her
first-ever boy-girl birthday party, and he’d been there. Kelly had told him that I liked him, and as we all played around in the pool, he came up behind me and covered my eyes with his hands, and whispered
Boo
. I jumped, but I felt all warm and tingly with him standing so close to me. But that was it: By the time we came back, he had another girlfriend, some girl named Tess who played field hockey and was all lean and muscular.

I’d never really seriously thought about dating, though, not exclusively anyway, the way Ashley was with Austin.

I pulled out a blank piece of paper and decided I’d make a list of boys at my school who I would want to date. I wrote Max Healy’s name at the top, because despite what Courtney said, any girl at my school would want to date him. But after that, I was stuck.

I heard a tap-tapping on the window, and I jumped and then panicked and tore up the piece of paper.

I went over to open the window and Ryan climbed in. “What’s up?” he said.

Though he’d climbed into my room this way probably a thousand times, this time I felt my heart beating, my palms beginning to sweat. “Not much.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “Math.”

He made a face and plopped down on my bed. He stretched out so far that his feet hung off the edge. He was so tall now that I bet he would’ve even been taller than my dad, who’d been no slouch at six feet.

“Do you wanna ride?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “If you want to.”

I didn’t really, but I didn’t feel like sitting here in my room with him either. If we started talking, I knew I would have to tell him about Courtney, that I would blurt it out the way I had with Ashley earlier, and I wanted to keep it to myself for as long as possible.

So I jumped out the window, and he followed behind me. I heard his footsteps, his thick breath as we ran to our bikes, hopped on, and started riding.

It was getting cooler at night now, and as we got down in the wash, I started to shiver. The cold, dry air bristled over me and brought goose bumps to my arms. I should’ve gotten a sweatshirt, but I wasn’t going to go back for it.

We rode together down the wash, our legs pumping harder, faster, until I was cold and sweating all at once, and I got that strange prickly sensation that I’d sometimes get right before I was about to vomit. When we got close to the railroad tracks we both stopped and hung on
to our handlebars to catch our breath.

Once we were still for a few minutes, I started shivering again. “You’re cold?” Ryan said.

“No,” I lied. “I’m fine.”

He sat up and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. “Here.” He handed it to me.

I shook my head. “No. I’m fine. Really. That’s okay.”

“You’re shaking, Mel. Take it.”

I didn’t think he was going to take no for answer, so I did.

After our fleeting moment at the kitchen table the night before, when I woke up the next morning, I almost expected things to be different with Ashley and me. But she didn’t offer to drive me to school. She didn’t say anything to me at all except when she frowned and said, “That’s what you’re wearing?”