Zarr, Sara - Sweethearts (2 page)

Matt. You're a liar. Jordana shook her head. No, he's not. My mom saw it on the news. Everybody knows. She looked around to the kids who were gathering around us now. Right? A few of them nodded. One said, Yeah. Ask Mrs. Jameson. We knew a long time ago, but she told us not to tell you because she knew you'd cry, like you always do. It would explain why he hadn't written to me. And he's going to hell, Matt said. The outer darkness. Forever. The world around me got fuzzy. The last thing I saw was the grainy image of Jordana pointing while she said, Watch out, everyone, Fattifer is going to faint. And I did. When I opened my eyes they were all standing around me, Matt laughing, Jordana curious, Gretchen looking a little bit frightened. My elbow had hit the ground hard. My knee was bleeding. I started to cry, in front of them all, and no one offered to help me up or asked if I was all right or went to get an adult. Finally the yard monitor came over to see what everyone was staring at. I remember looking up at him for help, and all he said was, "Wipe your nose," pulling me up by my hurt elbow and escorting me into the school building, where they asked and asked me what was wrong, but I couldn't talk. I cried uncontrollably until someone finally called my mother and she left work to pick me up. I asked her if it was true. She said, I'm sorry, Jennifer, and sat with me, rubbing my back and bringing me cookie dough ice cream. Nothing she could say or do or give me to eat made me feel any better. I told her I was never going to school again. I told her in the best words I could at the time that I couldn't imagine my life without Cameron Quick, without that one person who knew me, without the way he saw me and made me see myself. She said not to worry, I still had her. As if having her had anything to do with anything. I'd always had her, I wanted to say, and what good had it done me? She told me I could take two days off of school but no more, that I'd just have to try harder to make some new friends. I rolled away from her then and didn't say one more word about it. That night I held an imaginary funeral for Cameron in my mind, with giant bouquets of flowers and big cakes and piles of little sandwiches and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing. He rested, peaceful, in his coffin, hands folded in front of him. Then I closed the lid, because it hurt too much not to, and Cameron and all my memories of him were lowered into the ground. And somehow I knew that if I was going to survive, the person I was had to be buried with him. CHAPTER 2 BIRTHDAYS ARE HARD FOR ME, AND HAVE BEEN EVER SINCE my ninth. For obvious reasons. While other kids looked forward to the attention and the presents and the feeling of being one year closer to growing up, I always wished that October eighteenth could be wiped off the calendar, permanently. My seventeenth birthday was no exception. In the moments between waking up and opening my eyes, I forgot what day it was. I ran through my usual morning checklist: what I would wear, which books I needed to take to school, options for breakfast, possible hairstyles and time requirements for executing them. I didn't need to look at the clock on my nightstand to see what time it was -- I always woke up at the same time, my need for routine humming even at a cellular level. It would be six, give or take five minutes. I opened my eyes to double-check anyway; no point in taking a chance. Then I saw it -- a pink envelope resting against the clock, with my name in my mom's handwriting and her signature doodle of a smiley face inside a heart and hand-drawn birthday balloons. I turned my head and closed my eyes again. Life needed a fast-forward button. Because there were days you just didn't want to have to live through, not again, but they kept coming around and you were powerless to stop time or speed it up or do anything to keep from having to face it. I couldn't blame my mom for the card or the smiley face; she was just doing what mothers do. It's not like she knew what the day really meant to me. I'd never told. And anyway, things were different now. I was different. Eight years had gone by and Jennifer Harris was as dead as Cameron Quick. It had been relatively easy to kill her off. I'd learned to stop reacting to anything Jordana and Matt said or did, instead counting in my head or saying the Pledge of Allegiance backward to make my face blank (. . . all for justice and liberty with indivisible God. . .). I'd started to always make sure I had clean clothes for myself even if that meant going down to the scary apartment laundry room by myself at ten at night while Mom was in class or working. I used three extra sheets of fabric softener to make sure I smelled right. I practiced my speech therapy until there was no hint of my lisp -- Sam Simpson. Sam Simpson. Sam Simpson. When I was alone and bored and wanted to eat, just to chew something and have company, I switched from cookies and crackers to pickles, carrots, my fingernails, even little pieces of paper. I stopped stealing and only sometimes hid food. Right before seventh grade, my mom married Alan and we moved and I was in a new school district where there would be no Jordana. I changed my name to Jenna so that no one else could come up with Fattifer as a nickname, and so that I could stop hearing it in my head. The resurrected me, Jenna Vaughn, lived in a nice house in the Avenues and had friends and a loving stepfather and a wardrobe in a normal size. She smelled like vanilla spice body oil and kept her hair conditioned and her cuticles trimmed. Jenna Vaughn had made it. / had made it. It was my last year of high school and no one had ever found me out. I even had a boyfriend, Ethan, who picked me up for school every day and liked to snuggle and was only sometimes impatient with me. The problem was that Jennifer Harris didn't always cooperate, and there were still days I could hear her scratching at the coffin lid, particularly on her -- my -- birthday. Like my seventeenth. I got out of bed and gave myself a pep talk. It's just a day, I thought as I loaded my backpack with books in exactly the order I'd need them. Just a date. A box on the calendar. A page in TV Guide. It didn't have to mean anything I didn't want it to mean. There was this one night around eighth grade when I was up late doing toning exercises, and I saw a motivational speaker on TV who said that the past only had whatever power you gave it; life was what you made it and if you wanted something different from what you had, it was up to you to make it happen. That seemed right -- I'd made Jenna Vaughn happen, hadn't I? I reminded myself of that now. If I had the power to make myself into a new person, I could make my birthday into something new, too. That was easy to think. My body told me a different story as I did my hair. October eighteenth was a thing I could feel in my stomach and fingers and at the back of my neck, an all-over sort of feeling that convinced me the motivational speaker was wrong. Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you. Mom and Alan called me into the kitchen to blow out the candle in my birthday omelet. I knew they wanted a leisurely breakfast around the table, familial celebration, bonding, etc., but priority one was pulling myself together before school, before Ethan showed up. No one wants an anxious, depressed girlfriend -- especially not Ethan, who always preferred me when I was funny and in a good mood. And no one wants to hang around with a person who can't enjoy her birthday. I knew I was expected to be happy, happy, happy. Be happy, I thought. Just... be happy. I set my flattening iron down and smiled at myself in the mirror that hung over my dresser. I'd read in a magazine that the very act of smiling stimulates endorphins, which rush in and make you feel better even when you're faking it. I smiled harder and waited for the good feelings to kick in. There was a present on the front seat of Ethan's car, a Gap box tied with a white ribbon. "Happy birthday, Jenna," Ethan said, leaning over to kiss me, his lips cool from the iced chai he stopped for every morning. I opened the box and pulled out an orange sweater with a cream-colored stripe down the arms. "Thank you. I love it." "I know," he said, pulling away from the curb. 'That's what you said when you handed it to me at the store and told me to get it for your birthday." "I'm sorry," I said, holding the sweater in my lap. I knew he was just teasing, but I wanted to be the kind of person who could enjoy surprises. I wanted to be as spontaneous and free as everyone else seemed to be and not feel all the time like if I didn't follow some kind of specific map of daily life, disaster would be right there waiting. "I just... really liked it." "And wanted to make sure you got it," he said, smiling. "So basically you're greedy." "Basically." I laughed. He laughed. We were on course. One thing I'd learned during my transformation from Jennifer Harris to Jenna Vaughn was that given a choice between being around someone who cried easily and someone who laughed all the time, people always take the laugher. So I'd taught myself to say the funny things that popped into my head and laugh at all the jokes. I had them all fooled into believing I was normal and well-adjusted, a rock of sensibility who could always be counted on to have a positive attitude. We drove past Liberty Park and I pictured Ethan's car as a silver dot on the life map, zipping right along where it should. If you zoomed in you'd see that it was a cold and bright and fresh October day, the kind of day that, for most people, sang with a certain kind of hopefulness. I closed my eyes and willed myself into it, reminded myself that the girl in the car on the map in the hopeful day was me. "Jenna? Hello?" Ethan poked my thigh. "Did you hear what I just said? About the play-reading committee?" "You're meeting today after school and you can't give me a ride home. I know." "What's the matter?" He gave me his patented Ethan look, one eyebrow cocked over mocha eyes that were always half hidden by light brown hair. It was a look that made freshman girls swoon and still made my own stomach twist pleasantly. I flexed my endorphin-producing muscles into a smile. "Nothing." At school, he walked me to my locker, which Katy and Steph had decorated with peach-colored wrapping paper and gold ribbon. I projected a reasonable facsimile of surprised glee, even though Katy and Steph weren't actually there and couldn't see me. It would be good practice for later, when I knew everyone in homeroom would sing "Happy Birthday" and Mr. Moran would make me stand in front and get handshakes and hugs from a receiving line made up of the whole senior class -- all sixteen of us. We were the first graduating class of Jones Hall, a small charter school for kids who were too smart or too creative -- or too non-Mormon, even though no one ever said it -- to cope in the regular Salt Lake City schools. The birthday parade was one of the little traditions Mr. Moran had started with us our freshman year. I gathered up the cards from my locker and Ethan put his arm around my shoulders, bumping against me as he walked his bouncy walk in his signature red high-tops, hair flopping cutely over one side of his face. I experienced a moment of contentment then, the kind I'd have every so often when I felt completely like Jenna Vaughn and truly believed that she was me and I was her. Ethan and I were on our third month of official couplehood, which had started with an end-of-summer accidental date at the main library. "Hey, Jenna, what are you doing here?" "Checking out books, oddly enough." "Believe it or not, so am I!" It was hard to believe I had a boyfriend at all, let alone the kind of boyfriend other girls wanted. But he was mine; he'd picked me. Me, Jennifer Harris. Actually, he'd picked Jenna Vaughn. Ethan didn't know anything about the fat girl, the Cootie Twin, the loner and reject. The only person who had ever picked Jennifer Harris was Cameron Quick, and sometimes when I was with Ethan I felt the smallest twinge of guilt, like being with him was a betrayal. The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he'd done for me and what we'd been through together, even if that loyalty was to a ghost. By lunch, the work of being the birthday version of Jenna Vaughn started to wear on me. I'd been smiling all morning at the Happy Birthdays and the hugs and compliments while Jennifer Harris dogged me. I kept looking over my shoulder for I don't know what, and hearing Cameron's dad's voice: Where do you think you're going? "Jenna. J.V.? I asked what your parents got you." Katy was jiggling her legs the way she always did. It shook the whole table and drove us crazy, but we generally didn't say anything. All of us were at Jones for some kind of Issue, which made us pretty tolerant. For Katy, it was ADHD and some anger management stuff that we really tried not to tease her about. Steph had a learning disability that went undiagnosed until eighth grade, when she was already too far behind to catch up in a regular school; also she had a habit of "dating" every boy in school, which could cause problems. Ethan was some kind of creative genius and everything bored him. As for me, even after making some good progress in junior high, teachers complained I lived too much in my head instead of the real world and Mom thought the smaller class size at Jones would help me stay focused. I answered Katy; "Nothing yet." "What do you think they're going to get you?" "I don't know." I knew this would not be an acceptable answer to Katy, especially since I'd in no way tried to make it witty. She let her skinny, freckled arms fall on the table with an exasperated thwack. "Can't you take a guess?" "Katy," Steph said, "she just said she doesn't know. Maybe she wants to be surprised." Ethan laughed. "No. She definitely doesn't want to be surprised. She hates surprises." "Oh, yeah? I've got a surprise right here." Gil Guerrero leaped onto the cafeteria bench and began to belt out "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from The Sound of Music. Everyone turned and stared with slightly horrified and annoyed expressions -- Jones Hall might have been special, but it wasn't exactly the set of Fame. We were still in Utah, after all. I buried my head in my hands and laughed because that's what you're supposed to do when you are being affectionately humiliated by friends -- or so I'd observed in movies and TV. "Gil," Steph said, "is that really necessary?" I peeked through my fingers. Steph was licking frosting off a cupcake in her shamelessly sexy way, gazing up at Gil, who had stopped singing and was now staring at her. "And are you looking down my shirt?" she asked him. He
jumped down off the bench. "No." Steph changed the subject to the play-reading committee. With the attention safely off me, I tuned them out to eat my lunch: half a sandwich, a low- fat yogurt, and a small peanut butter cookie. I slid the cookie over to Ethan, guilty about the cheese in my omelet that morning. I'd spent too many hours hiking the hills of the Avenues, running up City Creek Canyon, and doing late-night crunches to let one pound of Fattifer back into my life. I smashed up the last quarter of my sandwich and stuffed it in my lunch bag. Even though the day was nearly half over and nothing bad had happened, it couldn't hurt to hurry it along. "Let's go to trig early," I told Katy. "Maybe we'll actually learn something." CHAPTER 3 WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING? I turn to see him, Cameron's dad. He is tall, a lot taller than my mom and most of the teachers at school, and has Cameron's big eyes. / recognize you, he says, studying me with a smile. You're Cam's little girlfriend. He's got a picture of you in his room. He sounds nicer now. Maybe he's just a regular dad, maybe what I heard him saying to Cameron before wasn't really mean, maybe it was like a joke. I don't know how fathers are. Mine's been gone since I was two years old. Maybe they are like this -- a little scary and big but mostly teasing. But then he says: / guess my little guy is a chubby chaser, huh? Well at least he's not a fairy. Tears come to my eyes and my face is hot. I pull the hem of my T-shirt down to cover the part of my stomach that always pokes out, white and lumpy. It's baby fat, my mom says, baby fat that is also on the tops of my knees and inside my thighs that rub together and under my chin. She says I'll grow out of it. I don't want to be here. It's only one step to the door. And then Cameron is standing there, behind his father, looking at me and I can't leave him. I can't leave him here alone. A noise startled me out of my daydream-slash-memory. It was someone coming home, either my mom or Alan. My breathing had gotten quicker; sweat prickled on my forehead. I sat up and pulled myself together so that when Alan knocked on my bedroom door I was ready to say, "Come in." He stuck his head in the room. "Hiya. I've got something for you out here." He stared, and came farther into the room. "If this is a good time. You look a little pale." "It's fine," I said, making my voice steady. "I guess I fell asleep or something." When I'd gotten home from school, my face hurt from smiling and there was a headache developing behind my left eye. Katy had given me a ride home since Steph and Ethan had play-reading committee, and she spent the whole time on a stream-of-consciousness rant on Jones Hall boys ("There aren't nearly enough of them . .. haven't you noticed the grossly imbalanced boy/girl ratio?") and the trouble with drugstore makeup ("It's hell being a redhead, Jenna, you don't know."). I'd nodded and laughed and added my opinion when she stopped to take a breath, but even in her advanced state of self-absorption she'd looked over at me at one point to say, "You don't seem like yourself today, you know." "I don't?" "Nope." I'd joked: "Who do I seem like?" "No one / know." My smile froze, but Katy didn't notice, moving on to her next topic while I sat in silence for the rest of the ride. Now, I got up and followed Alan into the kitchen, staying close to the wake of calmness that always surrounded him. He's like a walking security blanket -- quiet voice, softly curling gray hair, unassertive wire-rim glasses. I'm sure his general aura of safety had a lot, or everything, to do with why my mom accepted his proposal after only three dates. "Well." He turned to me. "I drove an old Ford Escort home from work today, instead of the Subaru." I waited for more. "You might be asking yourself why I would do that." He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. "This is your cue to ask me why I would do that." "Why," I said, playing along, "would you do that?" Tm so glad you asked!" He placed a key on the counter with a flourish. "It's yours." "What?" I had to take a second to drag my mind from Cameron's nine-year-old bedroom to my seventeen-year-old kitchen. "Don't get too excited. It's a hideous shade of green. But happy birthday." I picked up the key. This was a good surprise -- a good surprise was happening to me. I decided to take it as a sign that things were going to be different this year, and hugged Alan. "Thank you. Thank you!" I let him go. "It's from you and Mom?" "She knows about it. As of about an hour ago when I called to break the news." He sorted through the stack of mail on the counter. "One of the new adjuncts posted it on the intranet today and I thought I'd better snap it up before someone else did." "Thank you so, so much." "Why don't you drive it around the block before you go thanking me excessively. It might be a lemon." "If you insist." I ran outside and got behind the wheel. The car had the faintest smell of spilled coffee and a tear in the passenger seat fabric, but to me it was perfect. After fixing all the radio presets, I cruised down the hill a few blocks, then up again. I imagined driving it to Katy's later, then we'd pick up Steph and go out somewhere and stay late and make trouble and I'd be my Jenna Vaughn self and this would be my new birthday memory. At the corner of K Street and Fourth Avenue, I slowed down to let a pedestrian cross, a boy around my age. Maybe because he was so tall or maybe because of the way he walked -- with a determined leaning into the cold -- I couldn't take my eyes off him. His face was angled away from the car, and I got this strange urge to make him turn around so I could see it I pressed my hand to the horn, but no sound came out, which was a relief. What was I thinking, anyway, doing something weird and embarrassing like honking at a stranger? Just then my cell phone rang from the pocket of my jacket. I pulled the car over, saw it was Ethan, and answered. "Hi," I said, still watching the figure go down the street. "Guess what?" "What? You got all your trig homework done?" "No. Think more within the realm of possibility." "You got a tattoo?" "Ha. A car. I got a car." I told him all about the Escort, then asked how the play-reading committee had gone. "We picked The Odd Couple. The one with girls. I volunteered you to be the stage manager." The boy was almost to the corner of the next block. "Wait, stage manager?" "Yeah," he said. "It's something we can do together. It'll be fun. It's okay that I volunteered you, right?" "I just don't know if I'd be any good at it." I craned my neck to see the boy turn the corner at L Street and walk out of sight. "Anyway, I have to go. I was only supposed to drive around the block. My parents are taking me out to dinner." "Mmkay. Call me later? After dinner?" "Yeah." "Happy birthday again." I found myself driving down L, along Third, up M, zigzagging through the Avenues looking for the boy until my mom called wondering where I was and I headed back home. We ate at our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, where Mom and Alan discussed the likelihood that one of their tropical fish, Estella, had fin rot. Mom asked me about my day; I said it was fine, and told them about being sung to twice -- first in homeroom by everyone, then at lunch by Gil. I listened to myself spin a story of birthday fun, crazy friends, and meaningful presents. The person whose day I was describing had not spent the majority of it fighting a sense of impending doom. Mom gave me an envelope with two hundred dollars in it. "I was thinking clothes," she said. "You've kept yourself in such good shape, honey, you never dress that body of yours to show it off a little." "Mom . . ." She knew I hated to talk about the way I used to look, especially in front of anyone else, even Alan. "Sorry, sorry," she said, waving her hands. "Anyway, never mind clothes, because now you'll need all of that for gas money." Alan snorted. "We might need to take out a second mortgage for gas money." They drank wine, held hands. I didn't eat much. Mom's comment, even though it had been a compliment, had put the Jennifer Harris cloud back over my head. I stared out the restaurant window at the street. "Looking for someone?" Alan asked at one point, picking an olive off my plate. I shook my head. "I was thinking about going over to Katy's___" "You should," Mom said, nodding. "Take the car. Go crazy." "It's a school night." "It's your birthday." "I'm just saying. You made the rule." I pushed my plate away. "Maybe I will, though." I knew I wouldn't, knew that the whole idea of me and Katy and Steph and a wild night out was part of the story I'd made up and told my parents about the birthday girl and her fun day at school. The truth was we'd go home and I'd sit in my room and do my homework and try not to think too much about the past, and go to bed hoping to feel more like myself -- or, I should say, more like Jenna Vaughn -- in the morning. There was something in our mailbox when we got home. I saw it as we pulled up and the headlights skimmed over the porch for a second -- the very edge of a white envelope visible against the black metal of the box. Neither Mom nor Alan noticed; they were talking about making baklava and whether or not it was okay to use almonds instead of walnuts. A note from Ethan, I told myself, or maybe something extra from Katy or Steph for my birthday. Except I knew, even then, that it wasn't any of those things. Not that I knew what it was. But in more than three years of having the friends I did, there had never been a note in my mailbox. Text messages, yes. Or e-mails. Not letters in envelopes on porches. Which is why I didn't say anything about it as I went in the house with Mom and Alan. See, this is what I mean about me and my birthday. Any normal person would have been excited, grabbed the envelope, and ripped it open expecting to find something good. Not me. I sat there imagining all the bad or scary things it could be. It could have been something from my biological father, who I only knew as Don Harris and had not seen since age three. It could have been from someone who had known me as Jennifer Harris -- Matt Bradshaw, maybe -- reminding me who I really was and that I wasn't going to get away with this Jenna Vaughn business for much longer. Stalling, I got out my phone to call Ethan but ended up dialing Steph's number instead. "Hey," I said, sitting on my bed. "I got a car." "Yes! It's about time. When are you picking me up? Where are we going?" "You sound like my mom." "Really, Jenna, it is your birthday," Steph said. "Aren't you at least going to go surprise Ethan or something?" "I have too much homework." Steph kept talking while I thought about the envelope. Maybe it was something for my parents. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. "... reigning Miss Predictability," Steph said, "proudly representing the fine state of Utah." "My inability to be spontaneous is part of my charm." "It's true. You wouldn't be you otherwise." "Katy said ..." I stopped myself, and reached across my bed to close the window curtains. "Katy said what?" "That I didn't seem like myself today." "Katy says a lot of things you needn't pay attention to." She paused. "You were a little out of it, though." I wasn't sure what to say. The fact that I hadn't hidden myself as well as I thought made me nervous. But then, having friends who noticed when I acted out of the ordinary -- that was good, right? "J.V.?" Steph said. "Still there?" "Yeah. Birthdays are stressful for me," I said. "That's all." "Why? You get presents!" "This one time ..." I swallowed, hardly able to believe that I was considering telling. "One sec, potential hookup calling ..." Maybe I'd just say, / had a bad birthday once. I could say that I was at a friend's house, and his dad was mean and yelled at us. That was enough of an explanation, really, and it might help to say even that much. "I'm back," Steph said. "I told him I was in the middle of something and I'd call him later. Which I won't, then he'll call me and I'll pretend I forgot, and --" "Have you ever thought about just... being honest?" I was one to talk She laughed. "Oh, Jenna. How little you understand. Anyway, you were saying?" The moment, if there ever really was one, had gone. "Nothing. Just that birthdays involve a lot of attention and I'm glad it's over." "In Jenna's world, Attention Bad. I forgot." Her call-waiting clicked in again. "Ooh, I want to take this one. Go do your homework. See you tomorrow." "See you." I went out of my room, through the dark kitchen, and stood quietly where I could see into the living room. Mom and Alan were watching a nature show. They were on the couch, Mom's feet in Alan's lap, his hand absentmindedly petting her toes. I had an impulse to join them, to wedge myself in there and feel Alan on one side of me and Mom on the other and the TV in front of us and the solid wall of the house behind us. I'd like to fall asleep like that, hemmed in, and wake up and have a better day in front of me. Then Mom sat up and kissed Alan and I felt like a spy, and also a little grossed out, so I went back through the kitchen, through the front room, and, finally, out the door and into the cold dark. Our porch light had been out for weeks, giving the yard and the walkway an eerie sort of feeling, like anyone could be out there, watching. I pulled the envelope out of the mailbox quickly, stuck it in the pocket of my jeans, and went back to my room. Jennifer Harris. Is what it said on the envelope. Not Jenna Vaughn or J.V., like my friends sometimes called me. Jennifer Harris, a person I had not been for more than four years. How could whoever it was have found me with my new name? It's not like I'd sent a change of address to Jordana Bennett and Matt Bradshaw. The printing was neat, precise, the envelope a little lumpy like there was something in it. Even before I opened it, my mind was already racing ahead, gathering facts and retrieving memories and putting together bits of information into what I suddenly realized was the truth. It was like when you see a movie, a mystery, and you make assumptions based on what you see until the very end when you get one piece of information that makes you realize that everything you thought, everything you assumed, was wrong, and you wonder how you ever could have believed what you did. And the truth I came to as I opened the envelope was this: Cameron Quick was not dead. Or I should say, I had no proof that he was dead, and I never had. I had Matt Bradshaw and Jordana Bennett -- just kids, kids who hated me -- telling me a story. I had a mother saying I'm sorry, comforting me, then encouraging me to move on. My most convincing evidence was that I'd never heard anything from or about Cameron again, and I believed he would have contacted me if there was any way he could, but he hadn't. Until now. I knew it as I ripped