by Sarah Dessen
“God, Caroline. Whose side are you on?”
“Yours! That’s why I’m helping you, can’t you see?” She sighed impatiently. “The phone thing is so basic, she’ll go to that right off. Don’t even try to make an excuse; there isn’t one. You can always find a phone. Always.”
I took in a mouthful of Listerine, then glared at her.
“Tears help,” she continued, leaning against the doorjamb and examining her fingernails, “but only if they’re real. The fake cry only makes her more angry. Basically, you just have to ride it out. She’s always really harsh at first, but once she starts talking she calms down.”
“I’m not going to cry,” I told her, spitting.
“And, oh, whatever you do,” she said, “don’t interrupt her. That’s, like, lethal.”
She’d barely finished this sentence when my mother’s voice came from the bottom of the stairs. “Macy?” she said. “Could you come down here, please.”
It wasn’t a question. I looked at Caroline, who was biting her lip, as if experiencing some sort of post-traumatic flashback.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Take a deep breath. Remember everything I told you. And now—” she put her hands on my shoulders, squeezing them as she turned me around—“go.”
I went. My mother who was waiting at the kitchen table, already dressed in her work clothes, did not look up until I sat down. Uh-oh, I thought. I put my hands on the table, folding them over each other in what I hoped was a submissive pose, and waited.
“I’m extremely disappointed in you,” she said, her voice level. “Extremely.”
I felt this. In my gut, which burned. In my palms, which were sweating. It was what I had worked to avoid for so long. Now it was crashing over me like a wave, and all I could do was swim up toward the surface and hope there was air there.
“Macy,” she said now, and I felt myself blinking, “What happened last night was unacceptable.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted, too early, but I couldn’t help it. I hated how my voice sounded, shaky, not like me. The night before I’d been so brave, ready to say all and everything. Now, all I could do was sit there.
“There are going to be some changes,” she said, her voice louder now. “I can’t count on you to make them, so I will.”
I wondered fleetingly if my sister was sitting on the steps, knees pulled to her chest, as I had been so many times, hearing her addressed this way.
“You will not be catering anymore. Period.”
I felt a “but” rising in my throat, then bit it back. Ride it out, Caroline had said, the worst is always first. And Delia was going to be out of commission for awhile anyway. “Okay,” I said.
“Instead,” she said, dropping her hand to the arm of her chair, “you’ll be working for me, at the model home, handing out brochures and greeting clients. Monday through Saturday, nine to five.”
Saturday? I thought. But of course. It was the busiest day, as far as walk-in traffic went. And all the better to keep me under her thumb. I took a breath, holding it in my mouth, then let it out.
“I don’t want you seeing your friends from catering,” she continued. “All of the issues I have with your behavior—staying out late, showing less concern about your commitments— began when you took that job.”
I kept looking at her, trying to remember everything I’d felt the night before, that sudden welling of emotion that had made me miss her so much. But each time I did, I just saw her steely, professional façade, and I wondered how I could have been so mistaken.
“From now until school starts, I want you in by eight every night,” she continued. “That way, we can be sure that you’ll be home and rested enough to focus on preparing for the school year.”
“Eight?” I said.
She leveled her gaze at me, and I saw my sister was right. Interruptions were lethal. “It could be seven,” she said. “If you’d prefer.”
I looked down at my hands, silent, shaking my head. All around us the house was so quiet, as if it, too, was just waiting for this to be over.
“You have half a summer left,” she said to me, as I studied my thumbnail, the tiny lines running along it. “It’s up to you how it goes. Do you understand?”
I nodded, again. When she didn’t say anything for a minute I looked up to see her watching me, waiting for a real answer. “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
“Good.” She pushed back her chair and stood up, smoothing her skirt. As she passed behind me, she said, “I’ll see you at the model home in an hour.”
I just sat there, listening to her heels clack across the kitchen, then go mute as she hit the carpet, heading to her office. I stayed in place as she gathered her briefcase, then called out a good-bye to Caroline as she left, the door shutting with a quiet thud behind her.
A few seconds later I heard my sister come down the stairs. “That,” she said, “was pretty bad.”
“I can’t see my friends,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”
“She’ll ease up,” she told me, glancing toward the door. She didn’t sound entirely convinced, though. “Hopefully.”
But she wouldn’t. I knew that already. My mother and I had an understanding: we worked together to be as much in control of our shared world as possible. I was supposed to be her other half, carrying my share of the weight. In the last few weeks, I’d tried to shed it, and doing so sent everything off kilter. So of course she would pull me tighter, keeping me in my place, because doing so meant she would always be sure, somehow, of her own.
I went up to my room and sat down on my bed, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood: a lawn mower, someone’s sprinkler whirring, kids riding their bikes in a nearby cul-de-sac. And then, later, the sound of footsteps coming down the sidewalk. I looked at my watch: it was 9:05. The footsteps approached, getting louder and louder, and then slowed as they passed my house. I peered under my shade, and sure enough, it was Wes. He was still moving, but slowly, as if maybe he was hoping I’d come out and join him, or at least wave hello. Maybe he might have even asked that question. But I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. I just sat there, as the rest of my summer began to sink in, and a second later, he picked up the pace and moved on.
Chapter Seventeen
It was Tuesday night, six-fifteen on the nose. My mother and I were having dinner and making conversation. Now that we worked together, this was even easier, since we always had something safe to talk about.
“I think we’re going to see a real upswing in the townhouse sales this week,” she said to me as she helped herself to more bread. She offered me the bowl, but I shook my head. “The interest has been higher lately, don’t you think?”
When my punishment had first started, I’d sulked openly, making sure my mother knew how much I disagreed with what she’d done to me. Pretty soon I’d figured out this didn’t help my case, though, so I’d progressed to the cold but polite stage, which meant I answered when addressed, but offered no more than the most basic of responses.
“There have been a lot of walk-ins,” I said.
“There really have.” She picked up her fork. “We’ll just have to see, I guess.”
By the time we finished eating, I’d have about an hour and a half before curfew. If I didn’t go out to yoga class or to the bookstore to browse and drink a mocha (basically the only two allowed options for my “free” time), I’d watch TV or get my clothes ready for work the next day, or just sit on my bed, the window open beside me, and study my SAT word book. It was weird how if I flipped back enough pages, I could see the way I’d carefully made notes, earlier in the summer, next to the harder words, or underlined their prefixes or suffixes neatly. I couldn’t even remember doing that now: it was like it was another person, some other girl.
Once, this had been the life I’d wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn’t believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again,
once, I’d never known anything else.
“Caroline should be coming into town again next week,” my mother said, putting her fork down and wiping her mouth with a napkin.
“Thursday, I think,” I replied.
“We’ll have to plan to have dinner, so we can all catch up.”
I took a sip of my water. “Sure.”
My mother had to know I was unhappy. But it didn’t matter: all she cared about was that I was her Macy again, the one she’d come to depend on, always within earshot or reach. I came to work early, sat up straight at my desk and endured the monotony of answering phones and greeting potential homebuyers with a smile on my face. After dinner, I spent my hour and a half of free time alone, doing accepted activities. When I came home afterwards, my mother would be waiting for me, sticking her head out of her office to verify that, yes, I was just where I was supposed to be. And I was. I was also miserable.
“This salad,” she said now, taking a sip from her wine glass, “is just wonderful.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “The chicken’s good, too.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Around us, the house was dark and quiet. Empty.
“Yes,” I said. “It really is.”
I missed Kristy. I missed Delia. But most of all, I missed Wes.
He’d called the first night of my punishment, my cell phone buzzing as I sat on my bed, contemplating the rest of my summer, which now seemed to stretch out ahead of me, endless and flat. I’d been feeling sorry for myself all day, but it really kicked into overdrive the minute I punched the TALK button and heard his voice.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Don’t ask.”
He did though, as I knew he would, just as I knew he would listen, making sympathetic noises, as I outlined my restrictive curfew and the very real possibility that I might not see him again, ever. I didn’t go so far as to tell him that he and everyone else from Wish were off limits, although I had a feeling he probably knew that, too.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “It could be worse.”
“How?”
The only noise was the buzzing of the line as he considered this. “Could be forever,” he said finally.
“It’s until the end of the summer,” I said. “It is forever.”
“Nah. It just seems like it now, because it’s the first day. You’ll see. It’ll go fast.”
This was easy for him to say. While my life had slowed to a near stop, Wes’s was now busier than ever. When he wasn’t working on sculptures to keep up with increasing demand, he was driving to garden art places to drop off pieces and take new orders. At night, he was working the job he’d taken delivering for A la Carte, a store that specialized in high-end, restaurant-quality dinner entrees brought right to your door. Most of our conversations lately had taken place while he was en route to one delivery or another. While I sat in my room, staring out the window, he was constantly in motion, crisscrossing town with bags of chicken parmigiana and shrimp scampi riding shotgun beside him. I was always happy to hear his voice. But it wasn’t the same.
We didn’t talk about our Truth game, other than to agree to keep it on hold until we got to see each other face to face. Sometimes, at night, when I sat out on my roof alone, I’d run over the questions and answers we’d traded back and forth in my head. For some weird reason, I was afraid I might forget them otherwise, like they were vocabulary words or something else I had to study to keep close at hand.
Kristy had been in touch as well, calling to extend invitations to come over and sunbathe, or go to parties (she knew I was grounded, but like “free time” for my mother, this was clearly a flexible term for her), or just to talk about her new boyfriend. His name was Baxter, and they’d met cute, when he stopped by the produce stand while she was sitting in for Stella one day. He’d talked to her for over an hour, then, besotted, bought an entire bushel of cucumbers. This was clearly extraordinary, or at least, notable, and now she was busy much of the time, too. That was the thing about being on the inside: the world was just going on, even when it seemed like time for you had stopped for good.
I was bored. Sad. Lonely. It was only a matter of time before I cracked.
I’d had a long day at the model home, stapling Welcome packets and listening to my mother give her sales spiel to six different prospective clients. It was the same thing I’d done the day before, and the day before that. Which was bad enough even before you factored in that I’d eat the same dinner (chicken and salad) with the same person (my mother) at the same time (six sharp), then fill the hours before bedtime the same way (yoga and studying). With all of this combined, the monotony hit lethal levels. So it was no wonder I was feeling totally hopeless and trapped, even before I went home and found an email from Jason.
Macy,
I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you, but I haven’t been sure what to say. I don’t know if your mom told you, but I came on the Fourth because my grandmother had a stroke, and she’s been deteriorating ever since. We’re very close, as you know, but even so dealing with this, and the very real possibility that she may not make it, has been harder for me than I expected. I was disappointed to hear that you quit the info desk, and while I have a few ideas on the subject, I’d like to know, in your own words, what it was that precipitated that decision.
That’s not really why I’m writing, however. I guess with everything that’s happening in my own family right now I feel like I’ve had some added insight into how things must have been for you in the last couple of years. I think I was hard on you about the info desk earlier this summer, and for that I apologize. I know I suggested that we be on a break until I return, but I hope that whatever happens we can at least stay in contact, and stay friends. I hope you’ll write back. I’d really like to hear from you.
I had read it twice, but it still didn’t really make sense. I’d thought that quitting the info desk would be the final proof he needed that I would never be the girl for him. Now, though, with the prospect of loss hovering over him, he seemed to think the opposite. If anyone understood, I could see him reasoning, with that even, cool logic, it was me. Right?
“No,” I said aloud. My mind was spinning. A week and a half earlier it had seemed like my life had changed for good. That I had changed it. But now it was all slipping away. I was back to being my mother’s daughter, and with this, it seemed maybe I could be Jason’s girlfriend, too. If I didn’t take action, somehow, by the fall everything that had happened with Wish, and with Wes, would be smoothed over, forgotten, no more than a dream. So that night, after I’d wiped the counters down and put away the leftovers, I picked up my yoga mat, told my mother I’d be back by eight, and broke her rules, driving off to Sweetbud Road.
I pulled in to the still signless road, and dodged the hole unthinkingly, glancing at the heart in hand as I passed it. I was looking at everything, surprised that it didn’t seem all that different until I realized it had only been about ten days since I’d last been there.
First I pulled into Wes’s driveway, but his truck was gone, the house dark. I walked around the side of the house to his workshop. There were more pieces than ever grouped in the yard: I saw angels, a few large whirligigs, and one piece that was medium sized, barely begun, with only the frame of a stick figure with some brackets attached to the back.
On my way to Kristy’s, I slowed down in front of Delia’s house, peering through the front window. I could see Pete walking with Avery in his arms, rocking her, and Delia beyond him, stirring something on the stove as Lucy sat at her feet, stacking blocks on top of each other. I knew she would have been happy to see me, but instead I just watched them for a second, feeling sort of sad. It was as if everything had closed up and grown over my absence, like I’d never been there at all.
When I pulled in the driveway of the doublewide, I could see the light of the TV through the window. As I got out of my car and started up the steps, Bert came out of the front door. He was
in khakis and a collared golf shirt that looked to be polyester, and he reeked of cologne. I actually smelled him before I saw him.
“Hey,” I said. I was trying not to wince. “You look nice.”
He smiled, obviously pleased. “Got a date,” he said, hooking his fingers in his pockets and leaning back on his heels. “Going out to dinner.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Who’s the girl?”
“Her name’s Lisa Jo. I met her at the Armageddon social. She’s, like, an expert on the Big Buzz. Last summer, she went out west with her dad and recorded evidence of it.”
“Really.” A female Bert. I couldn’t even imagine.
“Yup.” He hopped off the step and started down the walk. “See you later.”
“Bye,” I said, watching as he cut through the garden, down the winding path that led back to his house. “Have fun.”
I pulled open the doublewide door and called out a hello, then stepped inside. There was no answer, and I glanced down the hallway to Kristy’s room: the door was open, the light off. Looking the other way, I saw only Monica sitting on the couch, staring at the TV.
“Hey,” I said again, and she turned her head slightly, finally seeing me. “Where’s Kristy?”
“Out,” she replied.
“With Baxter?” She nodded. “Oh,” I said, crossing the room and sitting down on the ottoman in front of Stella’s chair. “I thought maybe she’d be in tonight.”
“Nope.”
It was just too damn ironic that, in desperately seeking conversation, I’d ended up with, of all people, Monica. What was even sadder was that I stayed where I was, making various stabs at it anyway.
“So,” I said, as she flipped channels, “what’s been going on?”
“Nothing.” She paused on a rap video, then moved on. “You?”
“I’ve been grounded,” I said, a bit too eagerly. “I mean, I still am grounded, technically. I’m not supposed to be here . . . but I got this email from my boyfriend, and it kind of flipped me out. It’s just . . . I feel like everything’s changing, you know?”
