I'll Be Here

by Autumn Doughton

Pizza.

  The big picture window with the glaring sun and the perfect street view.

  I stand up but then I have to sit down again because I don’t feel right. My face is hot. Brooke says something but it doesn’t register. I think she’s talking about Dustin and asking me a question but my brain is going in a different direction. I’m thinking about Alex and I’m wondering what he saw and of course it’s all a mess.

  “I should go,” I say and this time when I stand up I stay up on my feet.

  Brooke follows me to the door, her hand lingering in the crook of my elbow. I turn to her before I leave and I give her a hug and I wonder briefly if she notices the wetness brimming in my eyes or the way that my hands are trembling. She stands in the open doorway and watches me as I move down the front steps and over the lawn to where my car is parked. When I get to the car, I wave. She is leaning against the threshold of her flat house. She waves back.

  With a shaky breath I turn the ignition over pull out into the street. In front of me the world is wide and silent and I can see all around.

  Be obscure clearly.

  ~E.B. White

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I have bougainvilleas!” She throws open my bedroom door with this falsely cheerful, swaggering look on her face as if this exclamation should make sense to me.

  Blink.

  Blink.

  I roll over and try to block everything out, but my mother is in my room, twisting the window blinds to the open position. It’s far too bright. And loud! Mom is shuffling the papers on my desk and talking animatedly about flowering plants. Aaron is at her heels, chirping in excitement.

  Every so often—no one knows exactly what sets it off—my mother gets the gardening bug. She dons a straw hat and floral printed gloves especially for the occasion and sets about getting dirty, mucking up the earth, all in the name of “communing with nature.” Two years ago there was a plan to grow lavender and then to infuse it into soaps and candles to sell at a friend’s shop. Unfortunately, none of the plants grew.

  About this time last year, my mother (based on knowledge acquired from an undetermined origin) decided that our soil was perfect for vegetable growing. She enlisted Jake and me for two straight weekends to help her start the garden from seed. Four, ten by ten wooden garden boxes were built between the house and the back edge of the lot. We filled them with dirt and seeds and water and then we waited. We birthed exactly six ill-formed tomatoes, thirteen green pea pods and seven scraggly carrots from the season-long venture.

  Today, the entire family has been recruited. Aaron has been given a small shovel and the task of burying tiny seeds from a paper pouch into evenly spaced indentations in the earth. Jake is just outside the wooden garden plots planting the aforementioned bougainvilleas along the short retaining wall bordering our yard and the neighbor’s yard.

  Mom’s pants look like they’re made from a potato sack and I remember that she bought them from an online retailer during her all natural clothing kick. Jake has on the rubber sandals he normally wears for beach walking. We could be the poster family for an au naturale commune.

  I try not to remember that it’s Saturday. Prom Day. This week moved by in a strange sort of way for me. Some parts went so slowly that I would find myself spacing out into nothingness and when I came back to earth I’d have forgotten what I’d been doing. Like I’d stand in the kitchen for five minutes wondering why I had a fork in my hand before I remembered the food sitting on my plate growing steadily colder.

  Other parts of the week moved too quick for me to catch up and I would be barely able to breathe—my chest squeezing painfully like I’d run too fast for too long and was paying the price for it.

  Even my dreams were strange. I’d wake up sweaty, trying to grasp something real just beyond the plane of knowing. These moments shook me up so much that I couldn’t fall back asleep so I’d spend tedious hours in the dark thinking about Alex and what a mess I’d made.

  Laney tells me to call him and get it over with. Colleen suggests texting—a technique that she claims was invented by someone with a deep-seated fear of rejection.

  I have explicitly forbidden Laney from contacting him in any way and she looked at me with this sympathetic expression that made me want to barf, but she nodded her head.

  I’m sick.

  Alexlessness is a disease that I’ve acquired.

  I think about all the “I’m sorry’s” I’ve ever said in my whole life. I think about tying them up on a big balloon and sending them on a gust of wind to land at his dorm. But obviously that’s stupid.

  His charred words that night under the stars keep coming back to me. I’m not so good with jealousy.

  Yeah. And I’m not so good with life. So there.

  Alex hasn’t posted a thing online. I’ve spent hours stalking his profile page, waiting for some sort of update, refreshing my computer screen so often that it’s become a weird sort of tick. How sad is that?

  I am killing myself.

  My friends think I should just go to prom stag but I don’t want to. I want to be here. Well, not here here, on all fours in the dirt with a three-pronged gardening rake in my right hand and an assignment to “decimate the weed population.” What I mean is that I want to be alone—away from society. I’m not fit for human companionship. My family puts up with it because they are legally bound to me for another twenty days until my eighteenth birthday. And then they’ll probably hand me a sack on a stick and tell me to get the hell out of town.

  I’m miserable but the thing is that I want to be miserable. It’s kind of nice. Like a comfortable sweater that you put on around the house because it feels so good but wouldn’t want to be caught dead wearing it in public.

  “Did you get the northwest corner yet?

  I look up, blinking away a drop of salty sweat. “Ummm…. which way is northwest?”

  Mom is kneeling beside me. Her wide brimmed hat is bright green like a ginormous scoop of pistachio ice cream haloed around her face. She points.

  “Then, yes, I did that corner and I’m working my way in this direction towards the house.” My head sweeps the space.

  She nods and then she’s talking about trimming azaleas and whether or not this is the right light for zinnia and about planting milkweed to lure in butterflies. She turns to me smiling, and then the smile disappears.

  “Willow.” She says my name. Just my name.

  “Julie,” I say back with what my mother would call “a tone.”

  I dislike the way that she’s looking at me. I dislike the way that she turns back to the earth without another word but with this pursed up look on her face like I’ve intentionally hurt her. I dislike the feeling it unlodges in my stomach.

  I hold my breath waiting for her to say something, but she doesn’t. That would be too easy.

  “What.” I speak to the silence. It should have a question mark attached to it, but the word comes out of my mouth hard and wrong.

  Mom stops working. She sits back on her heels and looks at me from under the shade of the hat. Her garden tool catches a sparkle of sunshine and throws it back at me.

  “You must hate me,” she says, rolling back even farther on her feet. I think that she’ll stand up but she remains down in a crouch, her gloved fingers grazing the dirt.

  I’m stupefied. Numb really.

  I don’t know how to respond. My first impulse is to get up and run away, but I don’t move. I just go on kneeling in the moist dirt, my right hand wrapped around the rubberized handle of the hand rake.

  “Well, you must,” she continues as if I’ve spoken, lifting her face up toward the sky so that the shadows fall away from her features. Her eyes are wet.

  “Why else would you shut me out and treat me like an annoying gnat buzzing around your head? Should I have just died two years ago? Is that it? Would that have made you happy?”

  The words are daggers thrown at me from close proximity. They land in the dirt all around, caging me in. For a few m
oments, I stare down at my hands, my feet. I concentrate on the upturned earth and in particular a smallish earth worm blindly trying to burrow a tunnel back to safety.

  “Look at me, Willow.”

  Slowly, I meet my mother’s measuring gaze. I hate that she’s crying over me. I hate that I can’t talk to her anymore. I hate the tears that are slowly slipping down my cheeks right now. But I don’t hate her.

  “I don’t hate you,” I say, shaking my head.

  Mom wipes underneath her eyes and turns away to where Aaron and Jake have abandoned their duties and are throwing a ball back and forth instead.

  I want my mother to turn back to me so that I can see her face.

  I want to know what she’s thinking.

  I want to say, I’m sorry.

  I want to crawl into her lap and bury my head into her chest.

  I want her to hug me back and call me her little girl.

  I want her to kiss my forehead, just above my eyes and smooth my hair back away from face.

  I want her to tell me what to do about Alex.

  I want her to make all the hurt go away.

  I want cancer to eat up my yesterdays and let my tomorrows go.

  I want everything to be okay.

  I clear my throat. Her eyes flick to me.

  There’s always a way to begin. That’s what Alex said. And, isn’t that what Laney and I did? Found a new beginning.

  I take a deep breath, my throat flexing. “Alex saw me getting pizza with Dustin and now we’re not talking.”

  Mom waits a long time before saying anything. She seems barely surprised and I figure that she’s already spoken to Brooke and knows all of this but that’s not really the point of this conversation, is it? She blinks and wipes her cheeks. Her hands move again with purpose over the earth.

  “And?” She finally prompts me, her face shrouded in the hat’s shade.

  My shoulders sag with relief. I smack the rake to the ground, snagging it on a root. “And, Dustin wanted to get back together but I told him that I didn’t think that was such a great idea. But Alex saw us together and it’s all messed up and now I’m gardening with my mother when I should be getting ready for my prom so I guess that’s really the end of the story.”

  She raises her head. “That’s a pretty pathetic ending, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Well, what did Alex say when you explained that you turned Dustin down?”

  I shrug. “I wouldn’t know because like I said—we haven’t talked. He bailed on Friday and has yet to return my calls. He warned me that he was the jealous type and even though nothing happened with Dustin, I guess that seeing us together was just too much.”

  “How many times did you try to call him?”

  “Two I guess.”

  “Did you leave a message explaining that what he saw is not what he probably thinks he saw?”

  “Nooooo,” I put my rake down. “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  Now we’re staring at each other and I can feel my mother thinking.

  “So you’re telling me that you had a misunderstanding with the boy that you’ve liked since you were in middle school and you’re just going to let it fall apart without even trying?”

  A blush is starting at the base of my neck working its way up. “I didn’t say that—”

  “Willow, don’t let yourself be defeated so easily. This is just like the art thing. Here you are a little girl who draws and sees the world in beautiful snatches of lines and light,” she says and her eyes are dancing with water. The shadow of a cloud descends on her and her whole body takes on a blueish quality. Even the hat. “You loved art your whole life and wanted to build your life around it and you let one boy take that away from you.”

  “Mom, this isn’t about art or—”

  But she isn’t waiting for me. She ignores my unsure breathing and keeps going. “Let’s call this what it is Willow. This is you being afraid.” I try not to flinch at the familiarity of the words. It’s like déjà vu, but not totally because this is not a glistening sidewalk and those are not Alex’s lips moving. This is my mother and it is clear that I’ve been pretending all this time. She sees right through me.

  “Afraid of rejection, of failure, of cancer… Afraid of love.”

  What do you do when your own mother throws something so real and true in your face?

  What do you do when your body cracks open and everything inside of you is spilling out?

  What do you do when the blue sky flattens you to the earth?

  I don’t know, so I just go on looking—my lips numb and my eyeballs hurting.

  Mom’s face drops. “If I remember correctly, Alex is a Libra. Libras are particularly known for understanding and fairness.”

  She pulls a packet of seeds from the crocheted satchel on a braided strap that she’s been carrying around her waist and rips a strip off the top. She pours a little pile of dark seeds into the open palm of her hand.

  I feel weirdly confused, like I don’t know what just happened.

  I don’t cry even though I sort of feel like I might. There are definite tears in my eyes but somehow they never brim over. I think about Alex and I wish that he was a seed that I could hold in my hand and plant in this dirt and water and dazzle with sunshine and then pluck after he’s sprouted.

  ***

  So, I did end up going to prom. With a push from my mom, I called Wes Hardin in the early afternoon and asked him if he still wanted me to go as his date. He said yes and picked me up at six thirty in his grandfather’s Cadillac. Wes told me that I looked beautiful when I came out of my bedroom door. He had a wrist corsage of lilies for me and he seemed incredibly nervous as my mother took a series of pictures of him putting it over my hand.

  Even though Wes protested, I insisted on paying for my own ticket and dinner.

  Prom ended up being better than I thought it would be. I danced almost every slow song with Wes, but the rest of the time I just had fun with my friends.

  On Monday at lunch Laney and Colleen chortle about Ellie Grabove’s pink bubble dress that we all agree looked like an enlarged Barbie outfit. I ask them if they think that Melanie Cullum was wearing a hairpiece on top of her head or if they think that poof was real.

  Dizzy and Asher can’t add much to the conversation because they disappeared from the dance after the first song (presumably to have sex in the rented white limo). Lance is the only one that thinks that prom was only “so-so.” His date, a junior from Bayview with a dyed black fauxhawk, was wasted and ended up spending the second half of the night vomiting in a urinal. Classic.

  In an unexpected twist, Taylor Irwin was not inaugurated as reigning Queen of the senior class. That honor was reserved for Kathleen Osterman, a girl with a mild form of cerebral palsy who has a wheelchair and an aid that accompanies her to class. She didn’t campaign for the title and was a write-in on the ballot.

  Taylor took it hard and left the dance in a haze of light blue taffeta and drippy mascara, pulling Dustin in her wake.

  The other surprise is that long-shot Michael Donovan—Valedictorian and all-around nice guy—was chosen as Prom King.

  Whodathunkit.

  I don’t think I’ve ever liked my fellow classmates as much as I do right now.

  I run into Taylor as I’m walking to my last class of the day. If she’s still feeling the sting of not being made Prom Queen, she’s not showing it. She looks like a photo that’s been snipped from the page of a fashion magazine. Her honey blonde hair is blown out and drapes long and smooth over her shoulders. She’s wearing a thick black patent leather belt over a red short-sleeved tunic and leggings. Black wedges hug her narrow feet. I wonder if the fabric is itchy and I’m willing to bet that she’s sweating under all the material.

  I look down at the thin tee shirt dress and the patterned green tights that I borrowed from Colleen last week. Normally having Taylor see me like this when she looks like that would make me
feel small or like I’m a complete spaz who showed up to school wearing a garbage bag and a glittery headdress. But today I just keep walking because frankly, I like the tights and the dress is simply comfortable.

  This is what happens when our eyes meet and I smile: Taylor’s gaze slides away and she focuses on some interesting patch of air beyond me.

  That’s it.

  There’s no confrontation or nasty looks or bad feelings.

  I don’t feel upset anymore or distracted by her presence. Something is changing inside of me. Something is clearing up and Taylor Irwin and Dustin Rant have no part in it.

  I would feel really badly about killing you in a post-apocalyptic death match.

  ~Lance Everest (to Willow James)

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “You’re mom’s a baller.”

  I look around, momentarily confused. We’re sitting at one end of the reserved-for-special occasions dining room table. Stacks of papers and envelopes litter the surface. Mom is vibrating in and out of her seat answering questions, jotting things down on a notepad, placing stamped envelopes in the “ready” pile. Her hair is wrapped in a fringy scarf that’s tied in a loose loop at the nape of her neck. She catches me looking and smiles.

  I turn to Lance. “What do you mean?

  “I mean that she’s pretty fucking cool.”

  I must look skeptical because he chuckles.

  “Willow, my mom sits around the house eating those frosted animal cookies out of a giant bowl and complaining about her shows not coming on.” He says this last part dramatically and with a tiny bit of contempt as he peels the sticky paper off an envelope and hands it to me.

  I place an address sticker on it and slide it across the length of the table to my mom’s friend Deb. Deb stamps the envelope and places it in a box.

  Brooke is on Lance’s other side stuffing the envelopes with a pre-folded Xeroxed letter. She smiles at me when she catches me looking at her. Alex only came up once—when Deb ignorantly asked Brooke how he was doing. My ears burned with the heat of a thousand suns as I dumbly tried not to listen as Brooke said that he was doing fine and glad that the semester was almost over.