The Lucy Variations (16 page)

“What else?” he asked.

“Do you know Ryan Adams?”

“A little.”

“There’s this one song with a simple guitar intro and these two little drumbeats…or, wait.” She pulled out her phone, found the song, and played the first ten or fifteen seconds through the speaker.

He bent forwards to get his ear closer to her phone. “Nice.”

She stopped, overwhelmed with example after example that came to mind. Not only music, but also nature, food, and even though they were complicated, people. Like Carson, being so awesome to her today even though he’d been hurt, and Reyna and her willingness to show up wherever, whenever. People like Gus. People like Will.

“Why do people…we…why do we drag around like life is so awful?” Why did they forget that there was so much to love?

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I guess…because there’s also a lot that
is
awful. That’s the struggle of getting old. To make sure you don’t let what’s hard or painful or whatever obscure the beauty.”

“You’re not old,” Lucy said with a laugh.

“No. But I’m old
er
. Than I was. Than you.”

She looked at her Mega-Minty Mocha, which was turning into a lukewarm sludge of sugar and cream. “You’re lucky. Sixteen is hard.”

“I know. But you’ll get through it. We all do. Your mom, your grandfather. Me.”

“My grandfather was sixteen?”

“I’m not saying I’d put money on it, but the odds are in my favour.”

She smiled at him, thinking how lucky
she
, of all the people in the world, was to be sitting at this coffee shop right now with this person who made her feel so totally good.

He finished his coffee, put his glasses back on. “So. I like your list. When I’m feeling confused, creatively or generally, sometimes it’s because I don’t know what I care about. I forget, like you said. And I think if you can remember what you care about, or at least remember how it felt to care about
anything
, well, it helps. Keep thinking about that.”

“Okay.”

“And Lucy, Gus will come around.”

She nodded. She didn’t want him to go.

“All right.” He got up and put on his coat and smiled down at Lucy, the multicoloured Christmas lights around the cafe window framing his head, and she knew she’d passed from look to stare many seconds ago. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and lifted her hand in a wave. “Bye.”

“Talk to you soon, Luce.”

She walked home in a slight daze, emotional, light-headed. A menorah in a neighbour’s window was so pretty, it almost made her cry, and the rising moon in the dusk was just barely a sliver, a new moon, and she had to stop to marvel at it.

What is this?
she asked herself, putting her hand on her stomach.

She knew the Mr. Charles kind of feeling and the stalking-Joshua-Bell feeling and the crush-on-her-tutor Bennett feeling.

Joshua Bell was a stranger. Bennett was gay. Mr. Charles liked her and everything, but when she compared him to Will, she could see that no matter how many times Mr. C said “friends”, it all really boiled down to him being her favourite teacher, and her being the teacher’s pet.

This was not that.

When she got back from the coffee shop, she considered going straight to Gus to try to talk to him, but she wanted to be alone. Needed to. She spent a little time up in her room making attempts at homework. At one point her phone beeped a text message, and she lunged for it, thinking it could be Will.

Reyna.

Sick. Nastiness. Food poisoning or flu. Did I catch it from you?

Lucy replied:
Not that I know of. School tomorrow?

Reyna:
No way in hell.

They exchanged a couple more messages, then the smell of food drew Lucy down to the kitchen, where she found a note taped to the oven in Martin’s loopy, purple-inked script:

Eat it all. I do not have room for leftovers.

The downstairs felt hollow and deserted. “Dad?” she called up the stairs. She climbed up the first flight and repeated: “Dad?”

Then up the second.

“Hello? Gus?”

She paused at the door of his room. He rarely closed it all the way, as it was now. “Gus?” She knocked. “Can I come in?”

Very faintly she heard, “If you want.”

He was lying on his bed reading, and didn’t deign to look at her.

“Do you know where Dad is?” she asked.

“Racquetball.”

“Did you hear me calling?”

“Yes.”

“Were you planning to answer at any point?”

He didn’t say anything. It occurred to Lucy that this must be how her mom felt whenever she stood in Lucy’s doorway, trying to have a conversation Lucy didn’t want to have. She took a few more steps towards Gus. “Are you hungry? Dinner is ready.”

He didn’t say no. He didn’t turn any pages. Lucy got closer and took the book out of his hands. He sat up, lightning fast, and grabbed for it. “Don’t!”

She held it over her head. “Come down and eat dinner with me. Then you can have it back.”

“Give it, Lucy!”

But he stopped grabbing and sat there, a kind of hurt fury in his eyes. Still adorable, though, with his curls all dishevelled from bed-head. Lucy had to force herself not to touch them, which would surely piss him off even more.

“Come on,” she said. “Everyone’s gone. Just you and me.”

He stared at her for a good minute, and she no longer had the urge to cuddle him or ruffle his hair. Now she just felt scared, that Will was wrong, that he’d stay mad. She held out his book.

“Here. I’m sorry.”

Leaving her standing there with her arm outstretched, he got up and walked around her and out the door. “Only because I’m hungry,” he said.

She placed the book on his bed and followed him down.

“Why can’t we eat in the kitchen?” Gus asked, watching Lucy set the table.

“When have we ever had the whole dining room to ourselves? It’ll be like a celebration. The official end of Thanksgiving. Sit down; I’ll do everything.”

She got them each a glass of water. She served the food – a vegetable frittata – and toasted some baguette slices and put a ton of butter and garlic salt on them the way Gus liked and their mother rarely allowed. They ate, and through it all Gus didn’t say a word. When he finished his food, he put his napkin on the table and got up. He had to pass Lucy to get out of the dining room, and when he did she was ready. She grabbed his forearm.

“Gus.”

He didn’t jerk away but wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Did Will talk to you?”

He nodded, and Lucy dipped her head so that she could see his face. She realized he was close to tears, and her heart crumpled. She wanted to pull him into a hug but resisted, as it was clear he did not want to be hugged. Her fingers, around his arm, loosened into something more tender.

“I want to play again,” she said, her voice low. She knew it wasn’t about that, him being mad, but she also wanted him to understand this part of it. “For me. I think I want to go to music school. I’m not totally, totally sure, and I don’t want Mom or Grandpa to think this means whatever it is they’ll think it means.”

He looked at her. “You can’t have Will.”

Lucy let go of his arm. “It’s not—”

“I had Temnikova for six years. She wasn’t like Grace Chang. She wasn’t
nice.
”

“I know.” She tried to come up with words that would make him feel better, and fumbled. “I’m not doing anything official with Will and piano. We’re just…he’s giving me a small amount of advice, is all.” She said it with as little gravity as she possibly could, which wasn’t easy.

Gus frowned. “Don’t do anything to mess it up,” he said.

“Mess what up?” she asked, though she could guess.

“Me having Will.”

They both heard their father come in the front door, and Lucy stood to clear the table. “I won’t, Gus.” When her dad made it into the dining room, she asked, “Did you win?”

“Nope.” He grabbed the last piece of baguette from Lucy’s plate and crunched into it. “And why would you ask me that when you know I never win?”

“Belief in the possibility of change?”

He pushed his lower lip out and shrugged, as if considering the truth of that. Then he looked from Lucy to Gus and back to Lucy. “Everything okay here?”

They both nodded.

“Then why so serious!” As he said that, he grabbed Gus into an affectionate headlock. Normally, Gus liked to tussle with their dad, and they hadn’t done it much since they’d broken some Beck family heirloom in the hallway.

But now Gus said, “Don’t.”

Their dad took it as an encouragement to scuffle harder.

“Dad, don’t!” Gus repeated, and tore himself away, breathing hard. He whirled around and left; Lucy and her dad listened to his angry footsteps on the stairs.

Baffled, Lucy’s dad turned to her. “What’s going on?”

She shrugged.

“Please don’t tell me he’s turning into a teenager already.”

“I don’t think that’s it.” She added, “We saved you some food. It’s in the kitchen,” and made her own exit.

Later, up in her room, Lucy texted Will.

Gus is still mad.

She lay on her bed with the phone on a pillow next to her. Emotional again, the same as she was on the walk back from coffee. She didn’t want to mess things up for Gus any more than Gus did. But she did want this friendship with Will.

He reminded her of her grandma. Funny like her. Attentive. Not a fan of small talk – instead someone who wanted to discuss the important things, like how it felt to be alive.
Let the world talk about the weather
, she’d said once.
You and I will talk about you and I.

And of course there were things about Will that were decidedly not grandma-like.

She rolled over and closed her eyes.

She didn’t just want the friendship with him. She needed it.

Lucy overslept.

Shit
, she thought, when she realized Gus was at her door.
Why today?
Her mother and grandfather were coming back in the afternoon; she’d wanted to start over. To care about things again, like Will had said. Things such as being at school on time.

Gus helped her get her stuff together. “Thanks for waking me up,” she told him. Her retainer felt glued to the roof of her mouth; she took it out and tossed it into the case without rinsing it.

Gus watched and made a grossed-out face. “Dad made me.”

Lucy pulled on her socks. “Well, thanks anyway.”

Downstairs her father stood at the door, dressed and thumbing something into his phone, only slightly less displeased than her mother would have been. He expressed himself more efficiently, gesturing to the door with a pointed finger and saying, “Out. Now.”

He walked fast to the car, which he’d brought around to the front and double-parked. Gus jogged to catch up, his backpack bouncing on his shoulders, Lucy behind him. “Sorry,” she said to her dad. When they were all in the car and buckled in, Lucy leaned forwards from her spot in the back seat and said, “If I ever,
ever
do that again, leave without me, okay? I don’t want to make Gus late.”

She’d never thought to say that to her mom on any one of their many rushed mornings; the routine seemed written in stone. But nothing was, really.

“And what about
you
being late?” her dad asked.

“I guess that’s my problem.”

She could imagine how her mother would respond to that.
No, Lucy. It’s everyone’s problem, because it reflects on the family and disrespects Speare and the money we pay for you to go there.

Her dad said simply, “Fair enough.”

“When I get my licence, I can drive us. Right, Gus?”

She longed for him to turn his head and make eye contact. He stared out the window. “If you want.”

“Whatever is going on between you guys, we don’t need to see that tonight when Mom gets home, okay? Be the charming children I know you can be.”

“Charming,” Lucy said, glancing at her phone to see if Will had replied to her text from the night before. He hadn’t. “Got it.”

Outside Mr. Charles’s room, she braced herself to be given the boot again. She’d worked up an excuse-free apology. She’d throw herself on his mercy. But when she opened the door, he waved her in without comment.

The plan for the day, which he’d written, as always, on the whiteboard, was for the class to work in their usual groups to come up with some
Othello
-related hypotheses and criticisms. Lucy joined her group: Marissa Karadjian, Jacob Fleischacker, and Emily Steerman.

“I’ll take notes if you want, since I’m late,” Lucy said.

Marissa flipped through her
Othello
paperback. “Yeah, okay. Um, how about something related to what we were saying the other day about love and possession in the context of the culture back then? Like women as possessions or whatever?”

“Too obvious,” Jacob said.

“Fine.” Marissa closed her book. “You come up with a plan.”

Jacob and Emily brainstormed, and Lucy took notes until Mr. Charles appeared at her shoulder and told the group, “I need to borrow Lucy for a sec.”

She followed him out into the hall. Back in the day – okay, just a few weeks ago – she would have been ecstatic at a special class-time hall conference. This time she knew he was going to call her out on her lateness, maybe even ask her to leave his class permanently. But as soon as he turned around and held up what she realized was her paper, she knew it wasn’t about being late.

“I’m a little confused, Lucy.”

Whenever adults used that phrase, it didn’t go anywhere good. She waited for more.

“Is this all your own work?” he asked.

“Yeah. Well.” She shifted her weight and glanced away from him, a queasiness growing in her stomach as she thought about the fast paraphrasing she’d done when putting together the draft, the little bit of cut-and-paste from the Internet. “I mean…when doing research, you know, it’s easy to…it’s a draft.”

He looked down at the paper, flipped about two-thirds into it, and handed it to her. “Listen.” The tone of his voice changed. Softer, gentler. “I can understand, because of your feelings – I mean, how you look up to me and everything – maybe you thought if you put some of my ideas into your paper, it would make me—”

“Wait. What?” Lucy read the page.

Mr. Charles pointed to a paragraph. “This is from my grad-school thesis. Verbatim.”

Her hand flew to her mouth.
No
. “I…I did a little googling, but I swear I didn’t know that.” At the same instant, what he’d just said about her “feelings” sank in. The words on the page blurred, and she didn’t know if she was more embarrassed by her semi-accidental plagiarism or by him saying that. She didn’t want to double both humiliations by crying. “It’s out there on the Internet without your name on it. I would have noticed. So it’s probably been used a whole bunch of times.”

He sighed. “Great. Okay, but that doesn’t make it all right.”

“I
know
.”

“I’m giving you an incomplete on the draft. So the best grade you can get on the final paper is a B.” Then he touched her arm. “I’m sorry.”

She shoved the paper back at him. “Don’t be. It’s my fault. I’ll start over.”

“You don’t need to do that. Just fix the parts I marked.”

“And I don’t…” She shook her head. How could she have thought he didn’t
know
? Pumpkin bread and little notes on his desk and hanging around his classroom so much when she didn’t have to. It was all so obvious and pathetic. Was she being like that with Will? That even her ten-year-old brother knew something?
Don’t do anything to mess it up
, he’d said.

“I don’t feel very good.” Her voice trembled. “There’s something going around.”

Instead of returning to the class, she strode down the hall, towards the girls’ room.

“Let me at least write you a pass…” His words faded behind her.

She called her dad to come pick her up, claiming the same stomach bug Reyna had. Then she spent all the time she would have been at school writing a new draft of her paper and checking her phone for replies from Will. She wondered what he did during the day when he didn’t have Gus. Did Aruna work? Lucy suddenly had a million questions about them and their lives, wanted to know everything.

This was
not
a Mr. Charles situation, she’d decided. Will wasn’t her teacher and was really her friend, and a
good
friend at that. He knew her and her world and knew what she needed right now.

But she had to stop looking at her phone. She put it on vibrate and zipped it into her book bag.

She got in a solid hour of focus on her work, then checked her phone again. There was a reply from him, finally.

Sorry re Gus. It will get better. Call me for a sec? I have an invitation for you.

An invitation? He answered after half a ring. “Lucy, hiya. I thought you’d be at school.”

“I came home sick.”

“Too much Minty Mocha?”

“It’s…maybe.”

He paused. “Or are you that upset about Gus? Or something else?”

See? Friends. He knows me.
“Something else.”

“Want to talk about it? I mean, I’m on my way out, but if you want to tell me I can listen for a minute.”

“It’s okay.” She didn’t think she could explain about Mr. Charles without feeling stupid. “What’s the invitation?”

“We’re having a little get-together at our house this weekend. A sort of a party. We do it almost every Friday, actually. Musician friends. I think you’d like them. Totally different crowd from what you’re used to.”

“Oh.” She bit her thumbnail and stood to pace her room. “Why?”

“Why come to a party?”

“I mean why are you inviting me? Won’t it be all…people your age?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The old folks.”

“Ha-ha.”

“No, I know what you mean. I thought you could see normal people with non-celebrity lives in music. These are working musicians and teachers and people who do it for fun. Something new, right?”

A party. He was inviting her to a party. “Can Reyna come?” She wasn’t sure why she asked that. It wouldn’t be Reyna’s kind of thing, but the prospect of having her along felt like a comfort. Maybe it would be the kind of adventure that would bring them closer. Also it would solve transportation issues.

“If you want. I don’t know how much fun she’d have, but sure.”

“I’ll ask.”

He gave her his and Aruna’s address. They lived in Daly City, south of San Francisco. Lucy couldn’t picture Will and Aruna in a grey place like that. She’d assumed they lived somewhere hip, like Cole Valley or the Haight.

“I hope you’ll come,” he said.

When her dad checked later to see how she felt, she told him it must have been something she ate and that she felt fine now.

“I’m leaving for the airport in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “Do you want to ride with me?”

“Too much homework.”

He touched her forehead with the back of his hand, then cupped her cheek. “You made it a good Thanksgiving for me,
poulette
. Special. Hearing you play again. That made my year.”

She put her hand over his and pressed it against her face. They hadn’t talked about it since that night. She’d half-hoped the wine had made him forget, but now she was glad he remembered and had been thinking about it. “Did you tell Mom?” she asked.

“No.”

“I know I need to talk to her,” she said. She took her father’s hand from her face but held on to it, separating his fingers one by one as she spoke. “I’m going to. I’m not sure exactly when.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“And you contribute, Dad.”

“What?” He smiled, perplexed.

“Not just half the genes.”

He pulled her head to his chest. “I could have done better. Now you’re all grown up.”

Lucy put on a dress her mom had bought her a few months ago. It wasn’t so much Lucy’s style – a little too Young Professional for her. But her mom liked it, and Lucy wanted to show effort.

She looked in the closet mirror and thought, again,
Too much hair
. She should get it all cut off. Or at least half of it. Donate it to one of those cancer-wig charities. Only, she wanted it gone
immediately
, and she did have a fairly sharp pair of scissors in her bathroom drawer that she used for trimming her bangs. The idea caught hold, and she peeled off the dress to avoid covering it in hair.

Staring in the bathroom mirror, she wondered why anyone would want hair this long. She was always having to pick strands of it off her sweaters and clear it from the shower drain, and sometimes on a warm day it felt like a wool blanket against her neck.

She took up the scissors, knowing that Reyna would advise against this. Lucy wouldn’t be dumb; she did just an inch or two at a time, not one big dramatic “I’m a pixie now” chop, like so many celebrities did.

She got it up to her shoulders in something like a shaggy bob.

It didn’t look bad. It didn’t look
good
, either; she’d have to get it fixed. But it had the effect she wanted, which was: something different. Something to mark a change.

She put the dress her mother liked back on and realized it didn’t look right with this hair. In her closet she slid hanger after hanger across the rod – no, no, no, no. Then she hit the little group of items she’d held on to for Reyna. Not only the infamous red dress but several other things. That whole day – at Reyna’s house, the drive to Half Moon Bay – seemed far, far in the past.

Lucy’s black pencil skirt with a plum sweater would work. The high neckline of the sweater complemented the shorter hair. Her mother would choose heels, or maybe a low wedge, with this outfit, but Lucy put on textured tights and her flat brown boots. And earrings, dangly silver ones.

She was a different person than she’d been when her mom left the week before. Now she looked it.

It would still be a little while before they all returned from the airport. Lucy sat at her desk and put some finishing touches on her paper, including a short note of apology to Mr. Charles for being lazy with her research.
About what you said
, she added at first,
I wouldn’t call them feelings, at least I wouldn’t say

She backspaced over it all. The thing with trying to say you didn’t care was that saying it meant you did care. The appropriate weapon of not caring was silence. She kept the note formal, student to teacher.

A knock on her door. “Come in.”

Her heart leaped to see Gus. His eyes went wide when he saw her hair. “That’s short.”

“It’s not short. It’s medium-length.”

He got closer, right up to her chair. He circled her slowly, and she could feel his breath on her cheek and then on her newly exposed neck.

“It’s kind of medium-short.”

Lucy fought off a smile, because she didn’t know why this should make her smile, then didn’t know why she was fighting it, and grabbed Gus around the waist while she had him near. She hugged him rough and tight, the kind of hug he claimed to hate and always struggled against. Not this time, not much. He held on to her for a second.