“Maybe it’s too soon. Sometimes trying to go out too early in the season can be a mistake,” my mother warns. She’s right—more often than not, at least one shanty ends up sinking every season. I’m no expert when it comes to ice fishing; over the years I’ve just overheard Dad and Uncle Tim argue the finer points of the best time to set out on the frozen lake. They usually fish late at night or early in the morning. Barry has been going with them since he was nine or ten, and even Peter started joining the outings last year, but I’ve never been asked to go.
“I know,” Dad tells her, standing up. “Don’t worry, we’ve done this before. I’ll give Tim a call.” He tucks the section of the paper under his arm as we hear an upstairs door slam shut and the bathtub beginning to fill with water. Dad rolls his eyes. “Glad to see she’s joining the land of the living before one.”
“Oh, stop it,” Mom snaps. “We’re actually going apartment hunting today.”
I stop swirling my last bite of pancake in the pool of syrup on my plate and sit straight up. “You are?”
Two weeks have passed since Halloween, and I have managed to arrange it so I am always going when Betsi is coming.
“Yes. Betsi is very insistent on finding her own place before the end of the month. She’s been working for a while now and seems to think she has enough saved up. Do you want to come with us?”
“No.”
“Why not? Betsi would love your opinion.”
“I don’t think so. I have a lot of homework.”
“Well, don’t forget you do have tomorrow off from school. You could always finish up then.” It’s parent-teacher-conference day tomorrow. Mom is scheduled to begin her rotations mid-morning. I’m golden except for math class—a C-minus on my quiz last week. I didn’t even pretend to try, passing in my paper full of blank spaces.
“That’s okay. I really do have a lot to do and I told Hannah I’d meet her at the library this afternoon.” It’s a lie but one I can make come true if I need to.
“I’m certainly not going to argue if my daughter insists on doing her homework.” Mom half smiles and stands up to clear the plates.
I can hear my father reading the weather report to Tim over the phone from the living room. “Why don’t we take a look at the shanty today? I can head over to your place in the afternoon. Is Barry around? He’s better at troubleshooting than either of us.” The bath water turns off upstairs as I hear Dad ask, “ThreeA.M. ? What the hell was he doing out at that hour?” There is another long pause, silent except for the faint sound of sloshing water. “Jesus. Look, Tim, if you want me to have a talk with him…Okay. I understand. I’ll be over in a few.”
Dad wanders back into the kitchen while Mom finishes rinsing our breakfast plates and loads them in the dishwasher. My father tops off his coffee mug and then turns to catch my eye.
“Presley, have you noticed anything peculiar about Barry?”
I fidget with my paper napkin, peeling the corners and piling the shreds on top of each other. “I don’t know what you mean.”
My mother shuts off the water and turns toward me as she dries her hands with a dish towel. “Is something wrong with Barry?” she asks both of us.
“Could be,” Dad says, and then gives Mom the “I’ll fill you in later” eyes, as though I am still a child. They used to spell out words so I wouldn’t take things “too literally.” The first time I heard my father use this phrase, I was only four and didn’t know what “literally” meant but assumed it had to do with the fact that I thought people meant what they said when they said it. Like when Betsi would announce with all the drama and flair of a Broadway star, “I’m so hungry, I could die,” I’d rush to the kitchen, scooting a chair toward the cabinets so I could climb up on the counter and reach for something to sustain her—a box of my favorite Goldfish crackers, a handful of Oreos, a jar of olives. Or when my mother tucked me in at night and told me, “I love you with all of my heart,” I thought the actual organ controlled whether or not you loved something. So one morning when I overheard Betsi sitting at our kitchen table telling my mom that she had a broken heart, I ran into the room crying, throwing myself onto Betsi’s lap, terrified that there was nothing I could do to fix or save her.
“Presley, do you know if anything is going on with Barry?” my father asks me again. Even Peter has put aside his foray into Moordoor with the Fellowship of the Ring to hear my answer.
“I—” As soon as my mouth opens, I hear the stopper from the tub being pulled and Betsi’s water slipping down the drain. “I don’t know. He seems fine to me.”
“Hmm. Well, let me know if you start to notice anything…out of the ordinary.”
Betsi’s door slams shut again, and her hair dryer is drowned out by the sounds of an Elvis song turned up just high enough to disturb all of us. Today it’s “Hard Headed Woman”; yesterday it was “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Her selection is always unpredictable, but it’s my cue: once the song starts, I have maybe a ten-minute window before she surfaces. I race to my room to gather the necessary real and fake props for my escape.
I started smoking the day after Halloween. I was surprised at how easy it was to buy my first pack of cigarettes. I figured my best bet was the Mobil gas station seven blocks from the school, because that was all they sold besides gas and a small selection of soda and beer. I practiced saying the word “Marlboro” in my head during the walk over, so by the time the clerk asked me, “What can I get you?” my answer rolled off my tongue as if I’d been smoking for centuries.
“Marlboro Lights.”
“Matches?” he asked.
It was that simple—no asking for an ID, no raising eyebrows, no throwing me out of the store. For a moment I thought about adding a six-pack of Stroh’s to the counter but decided not to press my luck.
For the past two weeks, I have been telling my parents that I am going to the library after school, or to Hannah’s, but what I usually do is climb to the top of the bleachers next to the football field to smoke. This is how I pass the time until Betsi gets off of work at 5:00P.M. , and then I kill some more in case she’s decided to come home long enough to dash inside, change her clothes, and head out again. Even though I never ask, my mother will often give me a report of Betsi’s whereabouts when I finally walk through the door, sprayed with perfume and chewing gum to cover up my own activities. Sometimes Betsi tells my mother she is going to a group meeting; sometimes she says she is catching up with a friend for dinner; sometimes she says nothing at all.
Regardless, Betsi always slips back into our house after everyone is asleep but me. When I hear her key in the door, I make my body flat as a piece of paper, daring myself not to move just in case she comes in to see if I am awake. Most of the time she retreats to her own room, but the last few nights I’ve heard her pause at my door, listening for any movement to indicate that I might still be even slightly awake.
I always hold my breath until she passes.
Because today is Sunday, the field is empty, with just a few runners taking leisurely jogs around the track. I settle into my usual spot at the farthest end, last row, sifting through my backpack past the books I haven’t opened in weeks until I find my headphones. Once I’ve slipped them over my ears, I start packing my cigarettes against the base of my palm—one of many things I learned to do by watching Betsi.
“Hey!” I hear the call right before I press play, but there’s no one around or in front of me. I shrug and light my cigarette.
“Hey! Presley! Down here.” I look between my feet and into the rafters below and see Barry’s best friend, Jack, standing alone underneath me.
“Oh. You.”
“What are you doing up there?”
“What are you doingdown there?”
“I’ll come up,” he says.
“No, don’t—” I start to say, but he’s already snaking his way out of the rafters and is heading up the ramp. I shrug and keep smoking, studying him as he gets closer to me. He looks like he ro
lled out of bed in the same clothes he slept in the night before—jeans, a well-worn T-shirt that might have saidDETROIT TIGERS at one point, a sloppy hooded sweatshirt.
“You need a jacket,” I snipe, exhaling. “It’s getting too cold outside. What were you doing down there, anyway?”
He says nothing but marches straight for me and suddenly snatches the lit cigarette from my hand. He tosses it back down into the rafters.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I glare at Jack, flicking the lighter in my hand.
“You don’t smoke.” He says it slowly, as if there’s no question that he is right, and carefully cups his hand over mine to disarm me. I wait for something else—a sarcastic barb, an insult—but he keeps his hand over mine. I can feel him looking at me, and I pull my hand back to the safety of my side.
“What could you possibly know?”
“I know enough, Presley. I know—about everything.”
Our eyes lock, telling each other the same secret. We sit side by side on the bleachers, watching two ladies trying to maintain a conversation while speed-walking on the track as cars pass behind them on the road beyond the field. We sit next to each other for hours without saying a word, but in my head I begin a million different sentences, only to erase them all before any escape my chapped lips. We sit like this, our knees barely touching, our bare hands shoved into our pockets. The sky turns into a cloak of dusk, full of fat gray clouds pregnant with snow but refusing to release even a few flakes, as if once it starts, it won’t know how to ever stop.
Finally, when the streetlights hum and buzz and begin to burn, Jack stands and reaches out to pull me up. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
“This is probably as far as I should go,” Jack says a block before we get to my house. It’s the first words spoken since we left the bleachers.
I nod and start to turn away but then spin back around and ask, “Do you know where Barry was last night?”
“Yes. He was with me.”
“He wasn’t—”
“No. I stayed with him to make sure he didn’t try to go to her. She asked him not to contact her for a while—or at least that’s what he told me. He’s not doing such a great job honoring that request. But I stay as late as I need to, especially if he’s drinking.”
“When is he drinking?” I ask.
“When is he not?” Jack returns.
“Did you ever see them together?”
“No. Not in that way. But I covered for him. A lot,” Jack admits.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because he loves her.” He says it as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world.
“They’re starting to ask questions—my dad, his dad. They know something is wrong.”
“You’re asking a lot of questions too.”
I blurt out, “I don’t know if I should tell,” then bite my lip, waiting for Jack’s permission or denial. We stand underneath the streetlights, quiet again. The air is biting now, and Jack zips his sweatshirt, pulling up his hood and yanking the strings around his head to make the covering as tight as possible.
Jack sighs. “Don’t do anything. Just…don’t say a word.”
Betsi’s Jeep is out front. I think about turning around and sprinting as fast as I can away from the house, maybe trying to find Jack again, but I’ve been gone too long and I don’t want my parents to start questioning me as well. I try to open the door quietly to sneak in, but I hear the TV on in the family room, the one place I have to pass through to get anywhere else in the house.
Betsi is the only person in the room, but she’s not watching TV. She’s following the moves of an aerobics instructor on a workout tape she has popped into the VCR. Her hair is just long enough for a short, squatty ponytail, and it looks like a fuzzy pom-pom bursting out from the base of her neck.
“Hey,” she calls without stopping her routine. “Your parents and Peter are out picking up pizza. But guess what, I think I found an apartment. It’s so cute I can’t wait for you to see it. It has a porch and a claw-foot bathtub and it’s only fifteen minutes from my job. The price is a little steep, but if I shuffle a few things around, I should be able to make it work…”
I fade away from her words, studying her body and trying to figure out just exactly what she is attempting to “work out.” Her body is even thinner now than it was back in the summer. Her collarbone juts out from her thin white tee, and the spandex leggings hang on her frame more like sweatpants. Even her sneezes have become anorexic, a series of short, quick flutters that come and go as she completes her last set of arm curls.
“These things always end up lasting longer than I think they’re going to,” she says, turning off the TV with the remote and taking a swig from a bottle of water.
“Why are you working out so late?” I ask.
“I dunno, I just have a lot of energy. I can’t wait for you to see the apartment. How about tomorrow?”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Why not? You have school off.”
“I just can’t,” I repeat, trying to walk out of the room.
“Hey. Where are you going? I thought we could hang out before your parents get back. It seems like we never see each other anymore. I have so much to tell you—big news.”
Her eyes light up. She barely takes a breath and continues. “Not just the apartment. I met someone—someone new. In my group. They say we shouldn’t date anyone who isn’t at least a year into the program, but, well, you know, you can’t help your feelings—”
Her monologue flips some sort of switch sitting inside the cavity of my chest, opening the tunnels and floodgates and passageways to allow all the words and phrases I had pushed down into deep crevices to finally submerge. They fall out of my mouth in a flood. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“Presley! What is wrong with you?”
“With me?” I laugh, but it is not my laugh. It’s short and sharp, and I jab her with it, trying to hit her ribs, her neck, her heart. The flood continues. “I saw you.”
“You saw me where?”
“On Halloween. I saw you outside—with Barry.”
Betsi’s face begins to fall as soon as she hears the accusation, her tight, tense, defensive eyes slowly melting into a blank stare. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t do anything,” Betsi insists. “It’s not what you think. I’m not what you think.”
“No,” I say. “You are not.” And this time, when I turn to leave the room, she doesn’t try and stop me.
The day Betsi taught me how to ride without training wheels was the first time I ever broke anything. Mom and Dad had bought me a new bike as a birthday present six months early, during the spring of third grade, so I could learn to ride and take advantage of the weather all summer long. They tricked me into believing I had to go clean out the garage, but when Dad rolled the door open, it was as if I had picked the grand-prize curtain during the last round ofLet’s Make a Deal.
The cherry bike was trimmed in white, with delicate plastic streamers fluttering off the end of each handle. The first thing I did before even taking it off its kickstand was braid the strings like pieces of hair, something else Betsi had shown me how to do. Back then I braided anything I could get my hands on—the blond tresses of my Barbies, the tassels on the chenille blankets thrown on the sofa, the cords hanging alongside the window blinds.
“You want to take it out for a spin?” my dad asked me.
“Yes! Now, now!” I begged.
“Okay, Pres. Let me just get my sweater,” Mom said, turning toward the house.
“No, I want to go with Betsi,” I said.
Betsi looked at my parents and shrugged. “Guess it’s pretty clear who Presley loves the best.” I followed her as she wheeled the bike down the driveway, telling my parents not to worry and that I was in good hands.
We decided to wheel the bike down to the park, where there were longer paths without interruption, perfect for cycling. I knew how to ride a bike, but only with
training wheels. This was the first time I would try and go completely solo, with nothing to rely on but my own sense of balance and determination.
“I’m going to hold on to the seat,” Betsi said, and when I started to protest, she added, “Just at first. Eventually I’m going to let go, but I’m not going to tell you when. Trust me, you won’t even know I’m gone.”
She was right—I was concentrating so hard on making it on my own, I didn’t look back, not once after I started pedaling. The dandelions sprinkled along each side of the pathway became a blur of yellow. The braided streamer on the right handlebar started loosening in the wind. Before I could stop myself, I reached out toward the fluttering pieces to try and fix them.
I fell just seconds later—and hard. Somehow I managed to nail both my knees and my left elbow on the way down, my wrist throbbing and clearly not okay, the bike tangled above me like a cage. My fall had managed to not only rip the streamers out of one handle but to create a cluster of scratches across that beautiful cherry-red finish.
Betsi rushed over to me, muttering, “Okay. Okay. Okay,” kneeling down next to me as I cried—not because of the pain but because of the damage I had done to the bike. “Don’t move. Don’t move your wrist at all, that looks like the worst of it. Um, okay. Let me think. Think, think, think.”
She rummaged through her purse and came up with a small bottle of nail polish, a mini packet of Kleenex, and her hard sunglasses case. She lined everything up next to us like a surgeon organizing her tools, swiftly taking the bandana out of her hair and adding it to the group of instruments. She guided my bad wrist toward her, delicately placing the base of it on top of the eyeglass case, wrapping the kerchief around just tight enough to hold the homemade splint in place. Betsi passed me the tissues so I could attend to my other scrapes with my good hand, then she turned her focus toward the bike, unscrewing the nail polish bottle to paint over the damage I had done. Amazingly enough, the color was a perfect match—or perfect enough—and by the time she was done, the bike looked no worse for the wear except for the missing streamers. Betsi took the cluster from my hand and the chewing gum from her mouth and used it as temporary glue.
The Girl I Wanted to Be: A Novel Page 9
