Waiting (17 page)

Someone laughs as they hurry past us, and I pull him into a doorway, the classroom behind us unlit.

“What are you doing, London Castle?” Jesse says. He smiles, but his smile seems worried. Or his face. His face seems worried. Or nervous. Yes, nervous. And that’s sexy too.

I want to say, “I’m not sure, Jesse Fulton,” but instead I put my arms around his neck. I have to stand on tiptoe.

He’s thinner than Taylor, and he smells like clean laundry.

Does he wash his own clothes? Or does his mom? I rest my head on his chest, breathing deep, pressing close to him, hoping this acting on the metamorphosis means I will feel better inside.

For a second he stands there. Hesitant. Then he puts his arms around me. Just holds me. Just holds me. And when I kiss him, a long kiss, comparing his taste to Taylor’s, my hands gripping his shirt, he kisses me back.

The bell rings.

“Get a room,” someone says, and someone else says,

“Get some for me,” but they’re background noise that doesn’t matter.

My face is hot, my heart pounds.

“We’re going to be late,” Jesse says. He sounds breathless. Or off balance. The way I feel.

“Right,” I say, then turn and leave him standing there, and head to class.

I’ve become a
kissing addict. I think that’s it. The buzzy feeling. Burning lips. The foggy eyes. Maybe I could kiss every good-looking guy here at school. Maybe even the good-looking male teachers. The thought warms me and troubles me at the same time.

“That was weird,”
Jesse says when I get into the van.

We have only a moment together, and I want to run my hand over his face, but I sit down as though nothing has happened between us. I settle my short skirt around me like a fan. It’s the best purple color ever. Dark pinkish purple.

I give Jesse a bit of a look. Lili climbs up next to me and plops down with a sigh.

Then Lauren is in the car. I give
her
a sweet smile. An I-know-what-your-boyfriend-tastes-like smile.

“You didn’t wait,” she says to Jesse, and he looks at her, eyebrows raised, then glances at me. Her voice is a pout. Her whole face bugs me, but I look down at my skirt, think how pretty it is. Think how it’s the color of a butterfly and how I’m like a butterfly too, with all this evolving I’m doing.

“Why’d you look at her that way?” Lauren says.

“At who?” Jesse says.

No one says anything, then Lili speaks. “You have an active imagination, Suck Face.”

Am I a Suck Face?

Maybe. Maybe I am.

Gosh, I hope so.

Do I want to be? Yes, maybe I do.

“I
imagined
my boyfriend not meeting me at my locker?”

She’s mad. I don’t look to see. Now I stare at the window, keep my face straight, pet my skirt.

Jesse starts the van, and I stare out at the parking lot full of cars and students, look for Taylor’s old Toyota, think about my brother driving me to school, wish I had the nerve to kiss Jesse again and claim that name for myself. “Queen Suck Face.” Or something bigger. More powerful—like “Oprah Suck Face.”

That works for me.

I don’t want
to go home. I don’t. The closer we get to my place, the more my muscles tense up. Going home means maybe a stop to my mutation. I can’t even hear anyone’s words, just the sounds of their voices. I want to be here. Stay here. Stay where my friend tells me she loves me. Where I’m maybe “Oprah Suck Face.” Where two good-looking guys see me and want to be with me.

The sun rests in the sky at a slant.

“We’re here,” Lauren says. “London, get out.”

“Shut up, Queenie,” Lili says. She turns to me, her face bright. “I’ll call you, okay?”

“Okay,” I say, and when I get out of the van, I notice my skirt’s not as bright as it was.

I watch the van drive off. See Lili waving out the back window. I stand there.

Where to go?

I start walking. Leave my backpack hanging from the mailbox and move. The afternoon is cooling off. I’m glad for my short jacket but sorry for the short skirt. My legs are cold.

“Zach? Have you been watching over me? Have you seen me?”

What would he think?

Would he slap hands with me for this or tell me to treat his best friend better?

I stop in the middle of the dirt road. Close my eyes. I know what he’d say.

But, this is all his fault. Zach’s. If he wasn’t dead, I’d be making wedding plans with Taylor maybe. Or college plans.

I keep trudging along until I find myself in our orange grove—maybe right in the middle—where all the air smells tangy and the trees are tall enough to block the setting sun.

“Zach,” I say. I don’t feel him close, like I want to. “Don’t be mad at me, ’kay?”

There’s nothing but the sound of a mockingbird. The wind cools. The sky is blue. Clear.

I sit down, away from sandspurs, feel the sand beneath me, look at the raggedy trees.

I’ve grown raggedy like that. But at this moment, in this place, because of the change, I feel okay. The kisses behind me. The kisses that may wait for me. I like this.

“Maybe it was that kiss,” I say to Zach. And, “Maybe I could live out here until summer’s good and strong and then winter sets in again. Maybe. Mom would never notice if I left.”

And then this weird thing happens, and all at once I’m thinking about Rachel Bybee. It’s like I hear her voice, or see her picture, she’s that clear in my mind. For a moment I am stuck sitting there in the orange grove.

“Go.”

I hear that word. I do.

And the next thing I know, I’m up, on my feet, walking—then running—then out of there and down our sandy lane to home.

I call her
three times.

Her old cell phone number.

Over and over and over again.

But she doesn’t answer. Just says, “This is Rachel’s number. Leave a message if you want me to call you back.”

I don’t. Leave a message, I mean. Maybe I will soon.

The next time I call.

Rachel broke up
with Zach.

It was a teary separation.

No.

It was worse than teary.

It was horrible. Her parents waited for her in the car, engine running, tapping at the horn every minute or so for her to hurry on up.

Daddy and Mom stood behind Zach, arms crossed. I watched out through the screen door, hands clenched, teeth clenched. Crying with my brother and with Rachel Bybee when her father came and dragged her away.

That’s true.

Zach held on to her and then her daddy was there and my mom, and Daddy did nothing but look away as my brother ran after his girlfriend. (She didn’t want to go.)

I ran out on the porch, hoping I could change things, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t change anything. And Mom, she told me to shut up.

She said, “London, you shut the hell up. It’s better this way.”

Then the Bybees drove away. All the way up north.

And Rachel called two days later to say she wouldn’t
see Zach again. That she understood her momma and daddy’s feelings now and she had her own life to think of and that she was way too young to have a baby. Way too young.

And Zach, he died.

Killed himself three weeks later.

And it was me who found him first, Mom one step behind.

He was depressed.

You know how depressed he sometimes got.

Not always, but it happened, the sadness, like after that little village died or when he saw mangled bodies on the side of the road in another country or he watched something awful on TV.

Those kinds of things just wiped him out.

Daddy stopped his ministry abroad.

Daddy tried to pray his son better.

Daddy insisted Mom not homeschool us anymore.

But Zachy, he got sadder and sadder.

We came back for him. Here, to the United States, so he’d be safer.

Mom tried to hug it all away.

Tried to do things, special mom-and-son kinds of things.

Tried to cook it better. Read it better.

We didn’t know then how it would end up, or maybe we would have made lots of different changes earlier.

Like admitting we needed help.

Someone should have
made him get up after Rachel left should have stayed with him should have known it was going to happen.

They should have known.

I
should have.

I
should
have.

This is what I sometimes think when I’m alone. This is sometimes my prayer. My prayer for forgiveness from a brother who left me behind because I didn’t get it.

After he died,

after she heard,

Rachel Bybee called.

She had a new number. I didn’t answer and she left a message on my voice mail.

She was crying. Hard.

“I just found out,” she said. “I miss him so bad, London. I want to talk about him. Please. Call me and tell me what happened. My heart is breaking.”

By then my heart was already broken, so I never called her back.

I let my phone run out of battery and I wouldn’t have picked it up even if my cell always worked—not if there was a chance she could reach me. She was a part of this whole thing, right?

I lost count of the number of times she called.