Vibes (16 page)

After Dad leaves, I take a couple deep breaths before I can speak to Gusty calmly. "Sorry."

He waves his hand at the ground. "Hey, don't worry about it," he says, but I hear him thinking
real problems.

But maybe this isn't what he's thinking. Maybe I'm just remembering what Hildie said.

Somehow, when I'm with Gusty, I can't tell my thoughts from his.

I shake my head to clear it as we go into the house.

"Did you guys have fun?" Mom rushes from the kitchen, but stops when she sees Gusty with me. "Hi!" she says, surprised. She looks really disappointed as her eyes trail after the sound of Dad speeding off in Aunt Ann's car. She's wearing overalls and a tank top, and her big curly hair is pulled into a ponytail on top of her head. She's holding a spatula in one hand and a potholder in the other.

"What are you doing?" I ask her. I have rarely seen my mother interact with kitchen tools, so I'm a little destabilized.

"I thought I'd crack open one of our neglected cookbooks. Osso buco. My mom used to make it all the time." She musters a smile at Gusty. "I'm Serena."

He smiles at her shyly. I can tell by the way he won't totally look at her that he thinks she's pretty. I need an escape now, before another parent embarrasses me. Mom is standing in front of the sliding glass door, barring our way to the backyard, so I grab Gusty's T-shirt and lead him into the garage. I try to pull him through the back door, but he stops at Dad's old workbench. "What's this?" He points at the box Dad started for me.

"It's a jewelry box," I say.

Gusty's fingers travel over the carved letters on the lid that spell my name. "It's nice. Did you make it?"

I let go of his T-shirt even though I don't want to. "My dad did. It doesn't close right."

He taps on the warped lid, cocks his head. "That would be easy enough to fix."

"Yeah, that's what my dad said four years ago." I can't help the bitter tone in my voice.

Gusty looks at me. There's so much sympathy in his eyes that I have to turn my back on him and walk out the door to the yard. He notices too much. It makes me nervous.

We sit on our big wooden furniture that we never use. Gusty looks at our lawn, which is very spotty even though Mom pays a kid from down the street to take care of it. She pays him too much, if you ask me. "You have a nice house," Gusty says.

I shrug. "It keeps the rain off my head."

His eyes wander over the rickety wooden fence behind me. "So how's it going?"

"I'm okay."

"I mean with your dad."

"Oh. I don't know."

"Is it weird to see him after two whole years?"

"
Weird
isn't the word."

"If I were you, I'd be seriously pissed at him."

"Yeah," I say. I don't really want to talk about this and Gusty understands, because he pulls a piece of folded paper out of his hip pocket.

"Ready to get down to it, Kristi Carmichael?"

"I was born ready."

He hands me the paper, and I read our assignment.
Choose one of the negative traits you listed for last week's assignment and talk with your partner about its impact on your life. Then create a plan for how you will improve this aspect of your character.
I look at him over the edge of the paper. "Is this for real?"

"You don't like it?"

"It's not their business what my problems are."

"Well, I don't think you have to tell the faculty about your problems. You just have to tell me." He pulls a pencil stub out of his hip pocket, checks the point, and then pulls out his Swiss Army knife and opens a blade.

"You still have that?" I ask him.

He lifts his eyes to mine, his eyelashes fluttering. "You remember the day I showed it to you?"

I nod.

He stares at me absently before remembering why he pulled the knife out in the first place. With a few quick strokes his pencil is razor sharp, and he folds the knife back up. "Good as new," he says. He slips the knife back into his pocket and takes the paper from me. "I'll go first because I know exactly which of my traits I want to work on."

"Which is that?"

"My worst trait. The one trait that ruins my whole life." He hesitates, but then says heavily, with great seriousness, "I'm a coward."

"No you're not. And remember last time I wouldn't write it down for you because you already had ten."

"
I
wrote it down."

"I don't see how you're a coward."

"You don't?"

"No."

"Kristi, you—" he starts, but he seems suddenly incapable of making his voice work. He takes a deep breath and forces out the words: "You of all people should know I'm a coward."

"Why me of all people? What are you talking about?"

His face turns a dark red, and he says quietly, "Never mind."

I watch as he folds in on himself. The look of mortification on his face is the same one he had that day I came to his house all those years ago when I thought he was going to kiss me. The memory sends a sharp physical pain through me, and for a second I feel angry at him. "If you want to say you're a coward, say so. It's none of my business."

"Fine, I will," he says quietly, and writes it down on the piece of paper:
Gusty is a coward.

I watch, quietly, as he writes out a whole paragraph. With each word he sets down, his face gets redder and redder. Then suddenly he stands up, shoves the paper at me, and marches to the other end of the yard to wait while I read.

One day two years ago a girl came to my front door, and I wanted to kiss her and ask her to be my girlfriend, but I didn't. I chickened out. I haven't dated anyone since, partly because I'm too much of a coward, but mostly because I feel like I have unfinished business with this girl, and until I finish it, I can't do anything else.

I read it through twice to make sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, and then I look up at him.

He has turned toward me, one hand shoved into his pocket as always. He has his head down, as though looking directly at me would be painful.

First my hands start to shake, then my arms, and when I stand up and try to walk over to him, my legs shake. I take in breath to speak, but there aren't any words in my mind. I'm remembering that day when I thought he was going to kiss me and how badly I wanted it, and I'm plunged back into that time in my life when I was discovering things I had no words for.

I take a step toward Gusty, and he takes a step toward me. Then we stop. We're still across the yard from each other, but somehow there's less distance between us than ever, as if we are almost touching.

I smile at him, and he lets out a huge gush of air. I realize he has been holding his breath for a long time. This makes me laugh a little. He shakes his head, embarrassed, but he laughs at himself, too.

Any second now he's going to finish what we started two years ago on his front step. He's going to come over to me and put his arms around me, and he's going to kiss me. I know it as surely as I can see him standing there, looking at me.

Just looking.

He begins to take a step, but freezes when the doorbell rings.

When the doorbell rings, every bad feeling I've ever had in my life washes through me because I know who's at the door. Oh God, no.

I look at the sliding glass door, and I can hear Mom saying to someone, "She's in the backyard."

I see the whiteness of his outfit through the glare of the windowpane as slowly his image becomes more solid and sharp. And oh God. He's carrying flowers, and he's dressed up in a white sweater and white khakis and new white sneakers, and he's got a big smile on his face. He opens the sliding door, walks through it, closes it, and before I can open my mouth to stop him, he says, "Ready for our date?"

I turn and look at Gusty, who is staring at my feet, shaking his head barely perceptibly. Desperately I try to find his mind with my own, but all I get is an ice cube of shock.

"Gusty," I say, and Mallory turns to see him for the first time.

"Oh. Hi," Mallory says, utterly confused. He looks at the flowers he's holding.

I stare at Gusty, who rallies some kind of self-possession. "We were working on our character education assignment," he explains as he crosses the yard and snatches the paper out of my hand.

"I thought we could have spaghetti at Lou's. Or if you want, Chinese," Mallory says bravely. It is so obvious he interrupted something. It is so obvious that I forgot our date. Everything about everything is obvious to everyone.

Gusty clears his throat. "I guess we can finish your part on Monday," he says to me quietly, and brushes by Mallory on his way out. "Have fun," he tells him.

I can't even make myself say goodbye.

Lou's is the weirdest restaurant in our town, which is why everyone likes it. The décor revolves around one thing: the name Lou. Pictures of people named Lou cover the walls like wallpaper. Lou Reed, Lou Dobbs, Mary Lou Retton, Lou Gehrig, King Louis the Fourteenth, Emmylou Harris, Louis Gossett Junior, Lou Costello, Louis L'Amour, Lou Rawls, Louis Armstrong, and, my favorite, Luciano Pavarotti. If a customer comes up with the name of a famous Lou and his picture isn't on the wall, they get a free appetizer. But no one has ever been able to.

My favorite thing about Lou's restaurant is the fact that the owner's name is Fred. Don't bother asking why he named his restaurant Lou's. He'll just shrug and toss a basket of warm garlic bread at you. The bread is so good, you stop asking questions.

I hardly ever get to come to Lou's, but I can't enjoy it. Mallory is barely speaking and I can't even begin to think of a coherent conversation starter, so here we are, both doing impersonations of people who are utterly absorbed in the fascinating process cheese undergoes as it congeals.

"Don't you like Italian?" Mallory finally speaks, his fork halfway to his mouth. The question sounds like an accusation. I hear in the back of his mind the phrase
two-timing bitch.

I pick up my fork, which I have just set down, and lift a lasagna noodle to look at the filling underneath it. "This is really good. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with
you
." He stabs angrily at a meatball, and I know the charade is over. "Today you spent the afternoon with a guy who looks like he was carved by Michelangelo. There'd be something wrong with you if you
didn't
want to be with him."

"Mallory, I'm sorry—"

"But I'm hideous and you can't bear the sight of me," he says bitterly. He sets down his fork and stares angrily at a picture of Lou Ferrigno on the wall.

"You're not hideous."

"Flattery will get you everywhere," he says miserably.

"I didn't know this would happen."

"Why did you kiss me yesterday?" His eyes burn me like two hot coins.

I get a flash of him thinking about our kiss and what it had meant to him. It made him so happy. And now he's miserable, because of me.

And Gusty is miserable, too.

"Mallory, I wanted to see how it felt to kiss you. You know?"

"Because you have a fetish for infected pustules?"

"Because I like you and I wanted to see if it could work."

He shakes his head at me. I search his thoughts, but all I get is an acute ache right in the middle of his body, a terrible ache that he doesn't think he can ever soothe.

"Are you going out with him or what?"

"No."

"But he wants to, right?"

"I don't know. I think so."

"You don't know. You think so. Which is it?"

"I think he does, but we didn't really talk about it."

"Do you like hurting people?"

"Hey, I didn't know he liked me!"

"Are you trying to tell me you couldn't see he wanted you? The way he looked at you and hung around you? I saw it. Eva saw it. Hildie saw it and was totally horrified. Everyone saw it."

"I was confused." Gusty was always thinking how sick I was. How could I have known he wanted me?

"And yesterday I decided to try for you myself. I thought you could see beyond the surface in people. I thought you could see the real me under all this fucking infection!" He scratches at his red cheeks with all ten fingernails. My hand goes out to stop him from hurting himself, but he recoils. "I thought you said you'd go out with me because you wanted me instead of him."

"I didn't even know he was an option!"

"And you treat Jacob Flax like he's your little pet. If you don't like him you should let him go."

"
He
hangs around
me!
"

"Right, Kristi. You're a victim in all this," he sneers.

I feel so terrible, I can only stare at my lasagna. The cheese has become inert matter.

Mallory tosses a twenty onto the table and gets up to leave. I watch him slam through the front door of the restaurant and walk down the street toward his house.

Now that I'm alone, I remember that the restaurant is full of people. No one is talking, and everyone is pretending not to look at me. I can feel their thoughts as they zip by.
That poor boy. That girl is so selfish. How can she let him yell at her like that? Is her skirt made out of an inner tube?

Since it's impossible to slip between the noodles of my lasagna, I do the next best thing. I quietly leave.

There's no way this could be chance. To have so many things go wrong in one day must mean that there is a cabal of red-eared, sharp-toothed, halitosis-ridden demons having a great deal of fun at my expense. I must be at the center of a cosmos-wide conspiracy, because when I get home after my disastrous date with Mallory, I find Minnie Mouse's litter box on the front step.

The second I see the litter box I know what happened. I was so flustered when Mallory showed up I probably didn't close my bedroom door after I got dressed and totally forgot to padlock it. Naturally this is the night that Mom decided for the first time in fifteen years to make osso buco, which probably smelled so delicious to Minnie that she jumped up on the dining table and proceeded to lick the roast with her rough pink tongue right in front of Mom. I love Minnie, but she's a total pig.