The Life of Glass (9 page)

“He’s okay,” Ashley said.

“I am not learning to ride a horse,” I announced, as if it were the craziest and most barbaric idea in the world.

“Well, neither am I,” Ashley huffed.

My aunt inhaled on her cigarette deeply, then exhaled, a white puff of smoke clouding up around our heads. “I know it’s tough. But you should give him a chance. It means a lot to her.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “After our father died, your mother and I hated every guy that our mother brought home, and then she ended up dying all alone.” Her voice trailed off, and she looked off toward the sky, toward the rolling evening clouds.

My mother never ever talked about her own parents; all Ashley and I knew was that they were dead, and that they’d been that way since before we were born. I never knew that her father had died first or that her mother had been lonely, and in a way it made me feel a sadness for my mother that I hadn’t ever thought to feel before. “How did your father die?” I asked her.

“Melissa.” Ashley nudged me.

“No. It’s okay. Doesn’t your mother ever talk about it?” We shook our heads. “Well, she was older than me, so she would remember more. You should ask her sometime. He had a heart attack. It was all very quick. One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t. I was eight.”

I wondered how things would’ve been different for us if my dad had died suddenly rather than slowly, if it
would’ve made things better or worse. I wasn’t sure.

My aunt threw her cigarette to the ground and crushed it with her foot. She took some sweet floral-smelling perfume out of her purse and sprayed it on all of us. “We should go back in. Your mother will think we’ve fallen into the toilet.”

“Aunt Julie,” Ashley said, “thanks.”

She put an arm around each one of us and gave us both a hug at the same time. “You two have each other. And don’t you forget it. No matter what. You hold on to that.”

Just after Christmas,
Aunt Julie announced she was going to stay a whole other week and a half, until the end of our break. “Are you sure?” My mother looked at her through narrowed eyes, so I knew she knew something that Ashley and I didn’t. “Yes,” my aunt said. “It does me good to be back here.”

“Well, Kevin was serious about those lessons.” Though I barely knew her, I knew that there was no way in hell Julie was getting on a horse, but all she said to my mother was, “We’ll see how it goes, Cyn.”

I didn’t see Ryan again over break. As soon as Christmas was over, Courtney came back, and Ryan and his
father left to visit his grandmother in Texas.

Courtney called to ask me if I’d seen him. “I saw him the other day,” I said, leaving out all the details about our horrible bike ride. “He’s in Texas now.”

“Oh.” She sounded both surprised and annoyed, and it made me just a little bit happy to know that he hadn’t told her he was leaving.

“I’m sure he meant to tell you,” I said. “He always goes to Texas for New Year’s.”

“Well, that’s cool.” She sighed. “Okay. I’m totally bored now. We should hang out.”

I felt a little bit like a yo-yo, bouncing aimlessly back and forth between the two of them, but only when they wanted me to, only when they weren’t together. “I don’t know,” I lied. “I’m kinda busy. My aunt’s in town.”

“Oh come on, Meliss. Just come over and hang out for a little while.”

And I said yes. Because there was something about her that was utterly irresistible, that sucked me in and wouldn’t let go, and in a way, I could understand why Ryan was dating her.

So I hopped on my bike and rode across the wash. It was the first day I’d ridden since my long ride to Charles and
Large, and as soon as my feet spun the pedals I felt the aches in my calves, the muscles protesting being put back in use.

The first thing I noticed about Courtney was that she was incredibly tan, and I wondered if it was real or fake. I decided on fake because it had sort of an orangy glow to it at first, but in the light of her bedroom it looked entirely real, and her skin reminded me of a perfectly toasted marshmallow.

“How was San Diego?” I asked.

“Oh.” She sighed. “It was unbelievably fabulous.”

“That’s good.”

She stretched out on the floor and Paco jumped up on her stomach. I sat down next to her and started flipping through a fashion magazine, noticing how all the girls were even skinnier than Ashley and much taller, too, and they were wearing this dramatic eye makeup that I guessed would look clownlike on me.

“Meliss, can you keep a secret?” she asked.

I looked up. I nodded, but deep down I was thinking, well, it depended what kind of secret and who she wanted me to keep it from, though it seemed obvious that it would be Ryan.

“Mark and I made out on the beach.”

“Mark, the one who always grabbed your boobs?” I asked, incredulous. She giggled and I had this mental image of this big, muscular lifeguard-ish guy pushing his hands up under her shirt.

“It was just a one-time thing. For old times’ sake.”

“Why are you telling me?” Because it hit me, all at once, this crushing enormous weight that she’d just thrown on my chest, the burden of knowing something that I didn’t want to know and having to keep it to myself.

“Well, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

I nodded, but I was feeling a little skeptical.

“And besides. It was stupid. It didn’t mean anything.” She paused. “And we totally already dated before, so it doesn’t even count.”

I knew that it would count to Ryan. Ryan, who’d doubted people’s intentions since his mother ran off with the gardener; Ryan, who was supposedly my best friend; Ryan. “You know.” I stood up. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“But you just got here.”

“I have to meet my aunt,” I lied.

“Meliss, you won’t say anything, will you?”

I thought for a moment and then shook my head.
“No. Of course not,” I said, but I hadn’t yet decided if I would or not.

It was only a half lie that I was meeting my aunt, because she was there at the house when I got back, and so was Ashley. “We were waiting for you,” Aunt Julie said when I came in.

“For me?”

“Come on. I’m going to take you girls on a drive.”

We all hopped into Aunt Julie’s rental car, Ashley up front and me in the back, because that’s the way it always was. She was older, so she got to ride shotgun when there were three of us going anywhere. Aunt Julie rolled the window down and smoked, her hand hanging carelessly out of the car with the cigarette attached. She looked nothing like a professor; my image of her had always been all wrong, and Ryan’s nickname didn’t suit her at all.

Neither Ashley nor I asked where we were going, which was kind of strange, but since that night at the restaurant we both decided that we liked our aunt, that she was someone we could trust.

We drove for about ten minutes, then turned down a residential street of older, almost historic-looking
houses. The houses had trees so large in the front yards that they created a pool of shade in the sunny street, and the houses had almost a more East Coast Victorian look to them than the ones in our neighborhood.

Aunt Julie pulled up in front of a house and stopped. “Okay,” she said. “We’re here.”

“Where?” Ashley asked, and I nodded, though neither one of them was looking at me.

“You’ve never been here before, girls?” We shook our heads. “This is where your mother and I grew up.”

The house looked pleasant enough, though small and a bit overgrown with shrubs in the front. I tried to imagine my mother and Aunt Julie as kids, running around out front here, but the image didn’t come easily.

There was something about seeing a place out of my mother’s past that astounded me, that made me feel sad for her and annoyed with her all at once. Because I wished she’d shown us herself, before. “I lived here until I went to college,” Aunt Julie said. “And the first year when I was away, my mother died, and I never came back.” She paused, as if remembering something about the house that struck her as sort of odd. “Your mother was pregnant with you, Ashley, and at the end our mother was very sick. That’s why I went so far away to go to college.
To get away from her. I’m not good at taking care of people.” She paused. “But your mother, she’d come over here three, four times a day with groceries and stories and cleaning supplies.” She let her voice trail off, as if the memory were so clear to her she could almost taste it in a way.

“Why are you telling us all this?” Ashley finally said.

“Because,” she said. “It’s good to know what kind of person your mother is.”

It did not seem right that you could be both a beautiful person and a good person. In my head, they’d always been separate. My mother was clearly beautiful, as was Ashley. But my dad and me, we were the good ones.

I tried to picture my mother, pregnant and swollen and waddling around in the fiery desert summer with bags of groceries for her sick mother. It was a strange image, because I’d never really thought about her that way before, which seemed sort of dumb because she never complained about taking care of my father or helping Grandma Harry.

I went into Ashley’s room after Aunt Julie and my mother had both gone to bed. She was lying on her
bed, reading a book on beauty pageants my mother had bought her. I plopped down on the bed next to her. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, and then Ashley finally said, “We could learn to ride horses.”

I made a face, but deep down I knew she was right. “I will if you will,” I finally said.

“We just won’t tell anyone at school.”

I nodded, wondering if Mr. September would care if my sister hung out with a cowboy and started smelling like horse poop. “And we’ll just go one time. Just one lesson.”

“One lesson,” she repeated. “That’s all.”

The day school
started up again, Aunt Julie, true to her word, stuffed her three suitcases into her rental car and drove herself to the airport.

“Oh I wish you would stay longer, Jules.” My mother held on to her tightly, and they rocked each other back and forth, in the driveway, almost in a dance. “You’ll come back again, won’t you?”

“Of course,” she said, but it was hard to tell if she really would or not.

I, for one, was going to miss her, and I guessed Ashley might too. It was nice to have her around the house and to have her to talk to. She wrote her phone number
down on a scrap of paper and handed it to me before she left. “If you ever want to talk,” she said, “I’m only a phone call away.” She also promised to email us, but I didn’t think it would be the same.

So I was feeling a little sad as I rode my bike to school, alone. Ryan wasn’t waiting for me, and I figured he’d gone ahead and met Courtney, and of course Ashley had to pick up Mr. September.

I got to school a little early, and as I was chaining up my bike, I heard someone calling my name. I didn’t recognize the voice at first, so I was surprised when I looked up and saw Max Healy standing right there, right in front of me. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, but my heart was pounding hard in my chest.

“How was your break?”

“It was okay.” I shrugged, trying to act cool, and I willed myself to think of something funny or smart to say. But nothing came to me. Finally, I said, “How was your break?”

“Not bad.” He smiled. “Hey, a bunch of us are going to Jackson’s after school, if you want to come.” Jackson’s was this restaurant right down the road from Desert Crest High where they served pizza and ice cream and a lot of the popular kids went to hang out. I’d only been
there one time, when I was much younger, with my parents, after Ashley was in a play and we’d gone over afterward to get some ice cream.

“Seriously?” I said, which was an incredibly stupid thing to say, but it was what popped out. I was immediately cynical. Why would Max be inviting me?

He smiled and started walking up the steps to the school, and after the first few his walk turned into a run. When he got to the top he turned back and waved.

I was in such a daze that I didn’t notice that Ryan and Courtney had arrived until they were standing right in front of me. “Were you talking to Max?” Courtney asked, her voice thick with disbelief.

“Yeah.” I nodded.

“You’re friends with him now?” Ryan said.

“Well, why not?” I snapped. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “Guys like him are jerks.”

“Guys like him? What does that mean, anyway?” I picked up my school bag and started up the steps, breaking into a run halfway up, just the way Max had.

All day I debated whether or not I was really going to go to Jackson’s after school. Maybe Max had been kidding. Maybe it was all some big practical joke, and when
I showed up, everyone would start laughing and pointing and saying, Oh my God, look, it’s the imp. Or maybe not. Maybe he actually liked me.

I thought about it all through biology, as we picked our partners for the pig and I got stuck with Jeffrey. “Don’t worry, Meliss,” Courtney said as she clung to Ryan’s arm. “Nothing’s going to change. We’ll all still work at the same lab table.” Jeffrey rolled his eyes at me, but I pretended not to notice.

I even thought about it in English, tuning out Mrs. Connor as she talked about how we would spend the second half of the year entirely on poetry. Ugh.

When the bell rang, I jumped out of my seat, even though Mrs. Connor was in the middle of a sentence and most of the other people in the class stayed seated and let her finish.

As I walked outside, I saw Ashley and the Nose standing on the front steps, talking to Austin and some of his friends. Ashley looked right at me as I walked by, then quickly looked away. “Ashley,” I whispered, trying to get her to look at me with some recognition. “Ashley.” Nothing. “Ashley McAllister.” I said it loud enough so the group of them stopped talking. They turned and looked at me; the Nose giggled.

Ashley pushed her way through the bunch of them. “What?” she said through gritted teeth.

I pulled her away from her crowd a little bit so they weren’t all listening to me. “Max invited me to come to Jackson’s after school. Should I go? I don’t know what to do.” I was looking for some sisterly advice, though why I expected her to give me some, I couldn’t exactly say.

“Max. Max Healy?” The surprise in her voice was enough to make me smile. I nodded. Then she recovered. “Well, he was probably just trying to be nice. He probably felt bad for you or something. You totally look like a homeless girl in that outfit.” She was referring to the old worn-in jeans and the college sweatshirt that used to belong to my dad. “You know he likes Lexie, and she likes him.”

No, I didn’t know that Lexie, “the Nose,” had a thing for Max. But then, who didn’t? And I certainly hadn’t known that he liked her. “So?” I finally said.

“So do whatever you want,” she said. “But just don’t get all crazy in love with him or anything.”

Austin walked over and put a hand on Ashley’s shoulder. “You ready?” He kissed the back of her neck in a way that made her giggle and gave me the creeps. And I decided that I wasn’t going to go. But then I turned
toward the bike rack and saw Ryan and Courtney, leaning against the wall, their lips locked in a passionate kiss. I was going.

I decided to walk so I wouldn’t have to extricate my bike from the lovebirds, and besides, Jackson’s wasn’t far. Other people walked there in groups, with friends and boyfriends, but I went alone, just me, and I hoped Max would even remember that he’d invited me.

The front wall of Jackson’s was a huge glass window, and I stood there on the outside, looking through it, watching. Max was sitting at a table with a bunch of other guys I’d seen around school but didn’t really know that well. They were laughing, having a good time.

I heard Ashley’s giggle, and I looked up and saw her and Austin and the Nose run through the door. “Hey, Max,” I heard the Nose say.

I didn’t wait around to see what happened next. I walked back toward school to get my bike and ride home.