Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend (23 page)

She comes into my room later and shuts off the light. She sits on the edge of my bed and smoothes my hair out of my face.

“Belle, I know you’re not really asleep,” she says.

I don’t answer, just keep my eyes shut.

“You know, Eastbrook is a small place, honey, and everybody knows everybody’s business and this whole Dylan thing is probably going to embarrass you for a bit, and hurt for awhile, but people will come around, honey. They won’t hold it against you, and Dylan . . . well, Dylan, they’ll come to accept him and love him again too. Really.”

People like Eddie Caron. I almost laugh.

I open my eyes. My mother’s face is shadowed in the dark of my room. Her breath smells like coffee. I keep my eyes open and wonder how I can love someone so sweet and so incredibly dumb. “People are mean, Mom,” I tell her. “People are really, really mean.”

The words hit her like fists and she tightens up, trying to escape the blows. Then her back solids up, her fingers turn to steel against my cheek. “No they aren’t, Belle. I know how this town helped me out when your daddy died. They’ll come through. I know they will.”

She kisses my forehead and leaves. She doesn’t slam my door, but I think she wants to. I can’t blame her.

I get up, stretch big and long, open my mouth, and think about singing. No sound comes out. My hand flutters up to my throat, grabbing it, like maybe that will some way, somehow make the words emerge into the darkness of my bedroom. Nothing.

My voice has vanished.

I trod over to the window, stub my toe on the nightstand, swear without making a sound since now I am soundless girl. Pulling up the shade, the outside word greets me with white crystals touching my window in patterns, patterns forming and overlapping with spikes and swirls, crystals as sparkling as diamonds. Jack Frost has visited over the night. That’s what my mom would always say back when I was little. She’d pull up the shade, smash open the curtains, and with a smiling voice say, “Wake up, sleepy head. Jack Frost was here!”

“Here?” I’d say and struggle up to sit, knocking over the legions of stuffed animals, but never Teddy, my one-legged bear.

“Here,” she’d say and come kiss the top of my head. “He came last night and he made you a picture.”

Tears make pools in my eyes and my fingers trace the patterns. Why I’m so sad, I don’t know. Jack Frost was here. He made me a picture and I can’t even tell him how beautiful it is. I am soundless.

I can hear my mom singing all the way down the hall. She’s massacring lyrics again. She’s singing that old Carly Simon song, “You’re So Vain.”

“I dreamed there were crowds in my potty, clowns in my potty,” she croons.

The right lyrics are, of course, clouds in my coffee.

I schlump into the kitchen anyway. My mom stops singing, turns around with her sleep hair all crazy in the back, and smiles at me. She’s got ready-made Postum in her hand and looks so sweet, like a movie mom. I smile at her and grab her hand, tugging her toward my bedroom.

“What, honey? What?” she asks me, but she doesn’t resist, just lets me pull her down the hall.

“I want to show you something,” I say, but no words come out.

“You’ve lost your voice?” She stops walking.

I nod and tug her hand. In my room I point at the window and the patterns of white lace, the images there, the magic.

“Oh,” she says, her voice like a little girl’s. “Jack Frost came.”

She touches the window with the end of her long fingernail. I smile big at her. She smiles back. When she passes my guitar, she plucks the low E-string and the sound of it resonates off the Jack Frost window and around the room.

“You should start playing again,” she says casually, as if it’s nothing important, as if trying to make music isn’t the hardest thing in the world.

Emily picks me up five minutes late. Her hair’s still wet from the shower and cranky plasters her face.

“I overslept,” she says, yawning.

I nod, grab her camera, and snap a picture of her. She gives me the finger.

She backs out of my driveway and my mom waves from the window and then grimaces, because Emily’s little red car has come two inches from smashing over our mailbox. My mom spent the last five minutes pacing, combing her hair, sipping her coffee, pacing some more and pretty much chanting, “She’s late. She’s late. Is that girl ever on time? She’s late. She’s late. You are going to get another tardy.”

Emily shifts into drive or forward or whatever it is that you shift cars into and peels down the road. I close my eyes and try not to imagine my mother’s face. Now, she’ll be praying
, Please don’t let them get in an accident. Please don’t let them get killed.

“I finished my applications last night,” Emily says. She yawns again. I catch it and play the yawn back to her. “So, I’m only a week behind you.”

I finished mine last week, signed, sealed, and mailed. Bates. Smith. Cornell. Trinity. A ragtag assortment of schools. Emily’s applying to Duke, Bucknell, Loyola, St. Joe’s. Neither of us is applying to U Maine. Neither of us has a safe school. I figure Smith is my safety, or close enough. I’m proud of Emily for getting it done. She tends to be a late-fee kind of person, the kind of person who leaves her library books in the car for months, because she keeps forgetting to return them, the kind of person the video store calls and leaves threatening messages because she’s had “She’s All That” for three months.

“I applied to Bates last minute,” Emily beams. “I’m really done, I swear.”

“Good,” I say, but my voice is barely a croaky whisper. I give her two big thumbs-up instead.

“Oh, you lost your voice,” Emily says. “You sound sexy.”

“Yeah, like a sexy frog,” I try to say.

Emily leans over to hear me. “What?”

“Yeah, like a sexy frog,” I repeat.

She holds up her hands, which should be on the steering wheel. “Don’t talk. Let me do the talking.”

She flashes me a wicked smile, rolls through the stop sign, and rushes right onto the Surry Road. A squirrel skitters out of her way.

“Well, I decided to apply to Bates, ’cause you guys all did,” she blushes, inhales, and gets ready. “I think that Shawn is really, really cute and that he maybe likes me, which is cool, you know, as long as it isn’t too hard on you with the whole Dylan deal and everything.”

She looks to me. I smile big like a Wal-Mart sticker so that she’ll continue. I’m not going to begrudge Emily any happiness, God knows she’s been the third wheel with Dylan and me for way too many things.

“So, it’s okay?” she asks.

I nod.

“So, we’re going to the dance on Friday and I know you don’t want to come but you have to come. You have to. I mean, I can’t ignore, like the fact that Dylan is gay and everything and you’ve been to every single dance with him and stuff. But . . . well, I mean, now’s the time for you to experience the boyfriendless high school angst that the rest of us have to deal with on a daily basis.”

“Angst?” I croak out.

“SAT word,” Emily blurts and we’re almost there. If it wasn’t so hard to talk, I’d tell her I know what angst means. Really. “Okay? So, it’s not like you’ll be standing up against the wall the whole time . . .”

I know she’s thinking about the infamous eighth grade dance where I either hid from Eddie Caron or squatted by the Coke machine for the entire time.

“And I mean you did kiss Tom yesterday, so I’m not even sure you can count as boyfriendless . . . although, it’s not like you guys are going out or anything. Although he is driving you to that German restaurant . . .”

Panic hits my stomach. I lean over.

“You okay?” she asks. “Are you sick sick or is it just your voice?”

I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me other than I’m scared to go to a stupid dance without Dylan holding my hand, making me not have to worry about slow dances and annoying guys with too-hot roaming hands and just letting myself go into the bang bang of the beat and the smooth moves of the music. That’s all gone now. That’s dead. And Tom . . . Tom’s kiss? Oh, God, that made me feel like I was on fire, in a very, very good way and the guilt of that is huge and just vibrates against my soul like a plucked E-string, low and grating.

“Will Dylan be there?” I ask Emily.

She takes a second to understand what I’ve said and then her eyebrows lift up. She turns into the parking lot. “With Bob? Oh my God, I don’t know. Do you think they’re that brave?”

I shrug.

“He did wear that pink triangle yesterday and buy those freaking condoms, in front of Dolly and everything,” Emily parks, barely missing the fender of a black pickup truck. She stares at me. “Oh, you poor baby. Your life sucks.”

Nodding, I unbuckle my seat belt and Emily pushes me out the door. “Now, haul your ass out of my car and run, ’cause we are both wicked late.”