I’m halfway to her when Graham slides up to her locker and falls into his trademark lean. I bumble over my feet, slowing my pace so I won’t reach them too fast. I blink fast, wondering what I’m seeing. Isabel snaps her lock shut and laughs, making me even more confused. The two of them were acquaintances before, but this seems familiar. As if my slowly eroding relationships have forged new connections—ones that I’m clearly not a part of. Whatever sincerity I felt burns up in seconds, leaving me with bitter, charred betrayal.
Together, they walk in my direction. Isabel sees me first and measures her steps as Graham startles. After a beat, he says, “See ya, Isabel.”
He breaks away, and I immediately look down, unable to meet his eyes. He walks past me, stops, and backs up. “I didn’t have anything to do with the lemon thing, just so you know. And Rob isn’t my best friend either.” He leaves once again, creating a rush of air against my shoulder.
My face starts to break; I feel it crumbling inch by inch, and all the rubber bands trigger at once, snapping against my insides. Isabel remains frozen to the floor, her expression unreadable.
“You told him what I said? How could you do that?”
I turn around and go, because that’s what you do. You run and keep running, until there’s no one there anymore.
twenty-four
MY FIGHT WITH ISABEL changes everything.
I used to consider our time together as refueling points in my day—when I could drop some of my armor and allow her to deflect the worst of the flying knives. Their absence triggers crushing loneliness. School days are eons long, an unbearable slog through an endless battlefield. Gym is the worst part, because the threat level is so much higher with Chelsea lurking nearby—and simply because it’s gym.
A week into my Isabel exile, we’re starting a unit on soccer. I half listen while Coach Keets demonstrates the proper way to kick and receive a ball. When everyone stands and disperses, I blink, realizing we’re supposed to practice kicking drills. Pairs of girls link up around me before plucking a soccer ball from the net bag near the bleachers. The last one to stand, I glance at my options, which are in the negative.
“Who doesn't have a partner?” Coach yells. “Raise your hand.”
I expect to end up performing drills with her, the ultimate humiliation, since no one will partner with me. Before I can out myself, a hard nudge strikes the back of my knee. I whip around, on guard.
“Come on,” Chelsea says. “I’m your partner.”
I look at Coach Keets for help, because I’d rather take a bath in tarantulas than be Chelsea’s partner, but she’s across the gym now, immersed in demonstrating a pass to the first group of girls. When I turn back, Chelsea is already kicking a ball to an open space.
My mind works hard in the passing seconds. I scan the gym, but there aren’t any other loners; Coach will make me pair with Chelsea anyway. Resigned, I walk cautiously toward her. Before I can get into place, she kicks the ball with full force. It shoots past me and slams against the bleachers.
“Don’t just stand there,” she instructs. “Go fetch.”
Without a choice, I walk to where the ball has settled. As soon as I touch it with my fingertips, a whistle shrieks. “No hands! Feet only!” Coach bellows.
“Dictator,” I mutter. I drop the ball and kick it a few inches, then walk, kick, walk. A full minute passes before I return to Chelsea.
Her hands plant themselves on the hips of her mesh shorts. “I just aged a fucking century.”
I half-heartedly toe the ball toward her. It rolls between us and stops a few feet away.
Bad idea.
She gets a running start, sending the ball in a high arc past me. It skims the basketball championship banners before ricocheting against the bleachers for a second time. I see Isabel staring, but her head darts away when I catch her eye.
“Nice kicking!” Coach shouts.
When I return with the ball again, Chelsea smirks. This is her game—intimidation through sport.
We continue in the same vein for the next few minutes: she repeats her high-flying punts, and I answer with a pathetic tap, fueling her aggression. Each time, the ball sails closer to my head. I pray for Coach to signal the end of class before it ends up in my face. When she finally does, I abandon Chelsea and stalk toward the locker room. I’m so done.
Presenting my back to her is the stupidest choice ever. A second later, a hard whack belts me between the shoulder blades, and I sling forward, hands slapping the floor first, followed by my knees and stomach. My face hovers inches above the waxen boards as the ball that pelted me lazily rolls away. When the shock subsides and my vision clears, I see a set of sneakers running toward me.
“Lemon, are you alright?” Coach Keets touches my back. “Tell me where it hurts.”
I roll over, groaning as my freshly battered muscles contract. “Everywhere,” I reply.
She helps me sit up while the class forms a loose circle around us. The back of my neck prickles as I hear a few laughs, but it’s generally quiet as everyone just watches.
“Can you stand? Are you dizzy?” Coach hoists me up and holds me in place, hands on my non-existent biceps, in case I’m going to faint.
“I’m fine,” I say.
My eyes connect with Chelsea, whose broad smile only makes the pain worse. “Sorry,” she sneers. “Accident.”
Coach starts asking me more questions, but I don’t hear them. All the rage, the humiliation I’ve stuffed down on a daily basis for months explodes like a hot geyser. My mind separates from my body, and before I have any sort of mental processing about it, I hurtle toward Chelsea with flailing limbs. I’m not even sure what I plan on doing if I get to her, but when her expression switches from smug self-satisfaction to fear, everything disappears except rage and how good it’s going to feel to throttle her.
Just as I’m about to wrap my hand around her shiny chestnut braid—I even feel the strands brush against my palm—my torso snaps back without warning. Hurt flares like a blowtorch through my shoulders for a second time, only now, when I wrench my head around, it’s Coach Keets pinning my arms behind me. She’s got me in a full-on wrestling hold, and damn, she is strong.
“Let go,” I grunt.
“You need to calm yourself down,” she demands. “Now!”
I’ve never been so angry that I lost time and space, but as quick as it lights me up, it’s gone, dissipating into confusion. I don’t even know what happened. I didn’t consciously decide to fight Chelsea, and yet I’d launched myself at her like being shot out of a cannon.
Energy draining, I stop struggling against Coach Keets and her ridiculously powerful hands. She releases me, only to block me from Chelsea by pinning my back against the wall. An accusatory look blazes across her face, like I’m the violent bully, which is just downright insulting. She orders the class to the locker room. Isabel hangs back a moment but slowly follows the rest of the girls. Chelsea slaps me with one more devilish, triumphant smile before walking away.
“Stay,” Coach commands. “I need to call the office.”
As she walks toward the phone on the other side of the gym, I sink to the floor and consider the consequences of what I’ve just done.
Instigated another retaliation from Madeline: check. Proven I’m unstable to my entire gym class and, by the end of the day, the entire school: check. Ensured another lecture from Hawkins, which will result in him calling home: check.
My fate is sealed. Dad is going to kill me.
twenty-five
“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG with you, Lemon?”
Those are the first words my father says after Hawkins suspends me for pseudo attacking Chelsea. Even though she provoked it and I never actually laid a hand on her, I get a week out of school so I can think about the “ramifications of my actions” and the “zero-tolerance bullying policy.” Hawkins also lectured me on self-respect and how violence doesn’t solve anything. Which, of course, made me want to get violent all over
again.
After Dad collects me from the office and we trudge to the privacy of the car, it’s his turn to cut me down. I clutch my seat belt as he grits his teeth, finding the words.
“I don’t even know where to start,” he says when we’re out of the lot.
“I didn’t mean to do it.”
He guns the engine and sails through a yellow light. “I’m waiting for a real answer!”
“It was a mistake. An accident.”
“Always a mistake. Always another excuse. Nothing is ever your fault.”
I don’t volunteer anything more, since I’m wary of how much Hawkins told him—if he’d only clued him in on the almost fight, or if he told him about my locker too.
“You have absolutely no self-control. None.”
“Sorry,” I offer.
“Sorry doesn't cut it. Sorry is just something people say and don’t mean. Are you sorry I had to talk to Mr. Hawkins again? That he asked me why you aren’t more like Meg? If issues at home are contributing to all your troubles?”
Despite my resolve to keep my mouth shut, I can’t take it anymore. I have to know. “What kind of troubles?”
He actually growls. “This! The suspension! Are you even listening?”
Relieved, I blow out all the air I’ve been holding in. He doesn’t know about the lemon incident.
Then he says it again. “What the hell is wrong with you, Lemon?”
I can only shrug, because I truly don’t know.
He doesn’t speak for the rest of the drive home, as if I’ve baffled him into complete silence. I stare out the window as we pass strip mall after strip mall. The sun drops behind a cloud, and I find myself in the reflection of the glass, staring back. Two Lemons. One is me; the other was created by Madeline. She’s my evil twin, the girl who is out of control, who hijacked my body and lunged at Chelsea. I don’t know how to control her, or if it’s even possible anymore. Maybe she’s beginning to swallow me, the stronger of us waiting to take over so there’s only one. Her.
When we get home, I go straight to my room despite its current mid-renovation state. To deliver my punishment, Dad slaps a Post-it note to my door.
No car.
No phone.
No TV.
Until I say so.
Each sentence is underlined in thick red marker, as if I didn’t already comprehend he’s livid.
DESPITE DAD’S REACTION to my attempt at ripping Chelsea’s hair out, Mom is happy I don’t have school the following week. She wakes me up early every morning, and we set to work on reupholstering all the dining room chairs. It’s easy to get lost in the machinations of it. When focused on prying metal staples out of a seat, my thoughts don’t linger on what I’ve done or the retaliation waiting for me once I return to school. An ongoing drumbeat reverberates as soon as I open my eyes each morning, reminding me to stay on rhythm, move to the beat, or I’ll fall back into the thoughts I’m trying to avoid. Mom and I keep tempo. Distraction by demolition.
After finishing the chairs, we revisit my bedroom. Mom paints the walls and puts me in charge of my dressers. The slow, circular motions of the hand sander become hypnotic and immersive. The old, cracked paint scours away to reveal unblemished wood underneath. I work past dinner every night during my suspension week, finishing up the sanding, then rubbing clear sealant into the grain.
By Saturday, we’re close to the end. Mom focuses on the details, touching up the white trim around my room while I put my clothes back into drawers and the closet. As I fold and organize, I can’t help but sigh. My blissful week of anonymity is almost over.
“Lemon, are you okay?” Mom dips her paintbrush in the can and swipes it against the metal edge. “You seem so . . . sullen lately.”
I have to give her props for noticing amidst our reno fever.
“Do you not like your room, or is it something else?” Her voice squeaks at the “else” part, and I assume she means Meg.
“It’s nothing,” I reply. “Just going back to school on Monday, that’s all.”
She rolls off her knees and sits like a yogi. From the corner of my eye, I see her examine me, trying to reconcile the person before her to the girl who was suspended for fighting. She never asked about it, not once all week.
“If you’re stressed, we should go for a day at the salon.”
Salon days are something she did with Meg. It wasn’t that I was excluded exactly, but when I couldn’t relax because of all those people touching my hair and face, they stopped inviting me.
“You could get some layers and highlights maybe. Something to brighten up your color during winter.”
She’s really put a lot of thought into this. I imagine her awake at night, renovating my appearance along with our house.
Casually, she adds, “I have an appointment next Saturday. I made it for two people.”
All things considered, it isn’t a big deal. A couple hours in a chair, pretending I’m Meg to make Mom happy. It won’t kill me. But as I fold T-shirts and stack them neatly, I can’t shake a sense of foreboding. I wonder what she thinks of me, if she can even pin me with adjectives. Over the years, I assume she’s filled in the blanks somehow, with information culled from conversations we’ve had, which were few and far between, and leftover personality traits from when I was a kid. I doubt she knows very much about me, though it isn’t really her fault. Once it became obvious Meg was going to be the more interesting and exciting child, I hung in the background of our family. Except, now that Meg is gone, Mom’s salon day is just another example that the limelight has shifted, but I’m never going to live up to its shine.
Mom stops painting and waits for my response.
“I’ll think about it,” I finally reply.
After another hour, we’re done with my room. Mom stands near my bed, hands on her hips. “Well, I think it’s just beautiful.” She adjusts the silver clock on my nightstand, moving it an inch one way, then the other. “Another job well done, but tomorrow is a new day.”
I can’t hide my scowl. A new day isn’t all that enticing to me.
She fluffs a gray curtain and peeks out the window to the backyard below. “I was thinking about a summer project. Dig out all the bushes in the backyard and put in a pond. Wouldn’t that be nice? A pond with a weeping willow and a bench? Maybe some fish for the pond too . . . those orange koi.”
Instead of wistful dreaming, I see reality. The unforgiving summer sun lashing our necks. Digging up stubborn roots. Puffy blisters and Dad’s exasperation.
“That sounds like a big undertaking.”
“We’d probably need the entire summer, but we’ve got the time. I’ll show you the pavers I picked out for the path to the pond.”
Next she’ll want peacocks strolling the grounds.
“Maybe,” I say absently.
“Well, I’ll let you settle in.” She moves the clock once more before leaving.
Amidst the whisper of paint fumes, I collapse on my new pillows and soak in the solitude after weeks without having a space of my own. It’s different in here now. The smooth walls, the furniture and bedding. Random artsy objects strewn about. The photographs taped to the walls and stuck in my mirror are gone, and my books and charging cords and earphones are tucked away. It’s definitely Mom’s style, from the bird drawings beside the window to the pleated and pin-tucked cream duvet cover and the abstract painting of a daisy field over my bed.
Do I even like daisies?
Uneasiness curdles my stomach. I pluck a thread on my duvet, wishing I could rip each puckered stitch from its moorings. I feel as if I’m lying on a white, unpainted canvas. No one knows me anymore; I don’t know myself. Dad sees one very flawed version, Isabel sees another. Westmoore believes an entirely different story. At some point, between the time Aunt Vee said I was an unfolding mystery to now, I became stunted, trapped in a blank landscape filled with blank trees and a blank sky.
Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for Madeline to talk about me, for her f
ollowers to paint me in so many untrue ways. I have no interests to anchor me, no friends anymore to frame me as a human being with feelings and thoughts and emotions. Instead, I’ve become a two-dimensional character. Madeline and Chelsea, and all the others, they don’t know who I am because I don’t know who I am, which makes it that much easier for fake stories to stick. They’re able to mold my actions into a devious plot, to put words in my mouth.
That’s enough, but at the same time, a tide is barreling in. The tide of my mother. She’s coming for me, already trying to sweep me up and spit me out as another Meg.
As I look around my new room, I feel nothing about it, just ambivalence. It reminds me of a room in a catalog, devoid of personality, offering no evidence of life. And the thought isn’t comforting.
Blank used to feel safe; it used to be where I could relax. But I’m discovering that blank can also be incredibly dangerous.
twenty-six
ON SUNDAY MORNING, the landline rings. I let it be, since it’s mostly telemarketers. The ringing stops, but when it starts again a minute later, I worry that it’s Aunt Vee. I run downstairs, find the handset wedged in the couch, and press the talk button. Out of breath, I say, “Hello?”
After a pause, a familiar voice responds. “Lemon?”
I squeeze the phone to my ear—it isn’t my aunt. I sink to the cushion. “Meg? Is that—”
“Yeah. It’s me. Are you alone? Are Mom and Dad there?”
I’m talking to Meg! screams through my brain, but I manage to say, “They aren’t here. Where are you?”
“Why aren’t you answering your phone? I’ve been trying to call you for days, but it goes straight to voicemail.”
“I’m sort of grounded. Dad took it away.”
She sighs, and it’s loud through the speaker. “Typical Dad. Always blowing everything out of proportion.”
Lemon Lavender Is Not Fine Page 17
