At six o’clock, Annie locked the door and we said goodbye. When I got to my Jeep, I found my dad there, leaning against the door.
“So?” he said, his hands raised like he was ready to conduct a choir or perform a big magic trick. This was his thing, though. His way of opening a conversation and then waiting, patiently, for the women in his life to fill in the blanks. To surprise him. Or to make him laugh. Or to give him instructions. He could take it all. Just don’t make him wait forever.
I was so glad to see him and to watch him return to one of his best go-to gestures, that I gave him a long hug.
He took my shoulders and held me away so he could see my face. “Am I hugging a high school dropout?”
“Not today,” I said. “Honestly, ninety-five percent of the day was fine. But the last five percent sucked enough to make me consider homeschooling.”
His shoulders dropped on a released breath. “Let’s talk about the five percent over dinner.”
He took my keys from me and opened the Jeep, leaning over to raise the lock on the passenger side. “Climb in, babe.”
I threw my backpack into the back and got into the passenger seat.
“Where’s Mom?” I said. “Where’s your truck?”
“She wasn’t feeling well.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and dropped his hands in his lap. “This might be the beginning of a new slide. I left work early to check on her and then walked over to meet you.”
A storm rolled through the Jeep. Quickly and without warning, we were soaked to the bone with worry and dread. Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn’t change who we were or what had happened.
We craved normalcy. Dinner in a restaurant, without Mom, could be normal. By tacit agreement, we spent the evening together discussing everything but her. Dad talked about the learning curve he faced at the hotel and I spoke of one boy with cerebral palsy and another who’d come back for me. I spoke of words that hurt and words that change everything. My dad understood.
Fierce and purposeful avoidance of the issues that kept my mom in bed and stopped her hand from painting had replaced the compulsive fretting that had carried us along for months.
When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel’s laundry facility, I interrupted. “Why haven’t you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom’s going to be better soon?”
He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn’t say, he and I would ride this out together. “I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.”
NINE
Dear Wyatt—
Did you see what happened in the hall? What should I have done? It was “Meg, paralyzed by school violence, take two.” I’m so sorry, Wyatt.
There’s a boy—Henry. He reminds me of you. All velvet and steel. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. Remember that part in The Quiet Man when Thornton refuses to fight over money and he’s got all this strength and resolve and passion simmering under the surface? That’s Henry.
Love,
Meg
TEN
Routine became my friend. We grew quite attached.
Every morning, I’d meet up with Tennyson, Sara, and Taylor, in the parking lot. The four of us shared a nearly identical schedule and they’d adopted me as their plus one. Lunch was covered, too, with the promise of a seat at a table that included Henry and Thanet. I had to work extra hard at keeping my fascination with Henry private, especially at lunch.
Mostly I stayed quiet and listened. The nice thing about these friends was that they were smart enough to know my reticence had purpose. They quickly dropped the questions about why I had no social media accounts. For a while, they told people I was in witness protection. They stopped that when they realized it could actually be true. For all they knew, I was Gianna Delvecchio from the Lower East Side with a dad who knew too much.
I still believed it would be best for everyone if I didn’t unpack my bloody baggage. Once they knew about Wyatt, things would be too awkward. I needed friends, not more people who felt sorry for me.
For more reasons than I was willing to admit, English became the best part of my day. Mr. Landmann was great entertainment. He loved to throw weird ideas out there and then let us figure out if he was serious or not. He ended every class by saying, “Say smart things and don’t make each others’ lives hell.”
I’d figured out by the second day of school that Henry was Mr. Landmann’s favorite. He answered the hard questions in class because he seemed to have worked through the hormone fog that sucked the brain right out of most guys. A lot about him didn’t fit in a high school classroom. I caught him staring at me sometimes and, even when I glanced up and met his eyes, he didn’t look away. It was very hard to breathe when he did that. And also…there was Brooke in Oklahoma to consider.
But something kept me turning toward him anyway. I liked to watch him when he talked. He smiled with one side of his mouth no matter what he was talking about, not in an arrogant way, but in a totally self-effacing way. I found myself inching closer to him in class or in the hall.
Tennyson noticed. She caught me looking a little too long once and she said, “Mm-hm. Another one bites the dust.”
One day at lunch, two of the missing links from the incident on the first day of school—Grayson and Shawn—came over and slapped Henry on the back. My stomach lurched just knowing they were that close to me.
“Hey, Hen,” Grayson said, with a wicked smile. “What do you hear from Brooke?”
Henry glanced up at him with a look that said he could tear Grayson apart in ten seconds if he kept up this line of questioning, even though Grayson was as tall as Henry and fifty pounds heavier. Grayson had that thick-necked look of a linebacker and shaggy blond hair hanging in his eyes and down on his collar. “Sloppy boys turn into sloppier men,” my mom used to say when Wyatt went too long between haircuts.
Grayson kept it up. “We’ve got a bet going about how well you got to know her this summer. So far, nobody’s bet against you, dude.”
Grayson’s eyes flickered over to Tennyson and me. Other guys gathered around and they were all snickering like ten-year-olds who’d found their dad’s Playboy under the bed.
“Didn’t your mother teach you manners, Grayson?” Henry said, quietly. Then he met Grayson’s stare and continued. “We’re having lunch here. And it’s called discretion, man. You should look it up; it might help you convince a nice girl to go out with you.”
These guys, who didn’t have ten brain cells between them, seemed to read something lewd from Henry’s answer. “I think that tells us what we wanted to know, Whitmire,” Grayson said with a grin.
Henry turned back to his food, his hands wrapped around the bench. Tennyson and I glanced at each other with eyebrows raised. “What was that?” I mouthed to Tennyson. She shrugged and shook her head. Whatever had just happened had a tragic effect on Henry’s mood.
I didn’t see Henry after lunch or at all until the next day in Mr. Landmann’s class. He seemed okay. Mr. Landmann passed around a dirty John Deere cap with names of poems on pieces of paper. The poem we drew would become our major project for the year. We had to write a twenty-page paper that analyzed the poem, the poet, and the historical context. Mr. Landmann meant business. Papers weren’t due until late March, but he made the assignment early, hoping that kids would actually work on it between other projects.
When the hat came to me, I reached in and felt the scraps of paper like they contained some clue. Finally I just took a breath, grabbed one on top, and unrolled it slowly. “Home Burial”—Robert Frost. I’d never read it, but I’d written about Frost before, and I felt comfortable that I’d drawn an easier poem. Other students groaned as they got Eliot or Ginsberg or Stevens.
“What’d you get, Meg?” Tennyson whispered.
“Frost.” I wanted to apologize; there was no way she got anyone easier.
“Lucky. I got ‘I Am Vertical.’ Sylvia Plath. Didn’t she kill herself?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Good poem, though. ‘But I would rather be horizontal.’”
“What?” Tennyson said.
“Nothing.” I shook my head and laughed. “Just…read the poem. It’s good.”
I glanced at Henry. He smiled and showed me his paper. It was Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son.” I showed him my paper and he rolled his eyes and nodded.
“Trade you,” he said.
“Not a chance. Frost is my favorite and my best.”
“I like Frost, too.” He rolled his paper up and tucked it in his pocket. “Hey, Meg, I’ve been thinking. I bet you’ve never been on a trail ride in the mountains. You should come out to our stables and let me take you into the foothills. The Owl Creek Range starts outside of town.”
“Really? How’s your hazard insurance? Because if there’s a way to get seriously hurt, I’ll find it, and we are a litigious family.”
He smiled crookedly. “I’ll make sure you sign a waiver. No, seriously, I won’t let anything happen to you.” He laughed softly. “We’re actually closing up for the season. We really do take tourists on trail rides. But the tourists are gone so it’ll just be you and me.”
Tennyson interrupted and put her arm around Henry. “You really should do that, Meg. It’s beautiful and if you don’t like the scenery, you can just watch Henry’s wranglers. They’re easy on the eyes.”
“Is there one in particular, Tennyson?” Henry said, ducking out from under her arm. “I could arrange a meeting.”
“Yeah, the one from Texas…what’s his name?”
“That would be Dylan. But he’s a nice guy and you’d break his heart. He dropped out of Texas A&M to come up here and saddle bum around with my horses year-round. Knowing your dad, I think you’d better be looking for a premed honors student.”
“Leave my dad out of this.”
Henry laughed, clearly amused by Tennyson. Maybe they had history no one had mentioned yet. “Anyway, Meg, think about it,” he said.
Later, as we were walking to our cars, Tennyson tore into me for details.
“Have you two been talking outside of school?” she said.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Well, it’s just weird, though, that he asked you to ride horses with him. I mean, that’s asking you out, right?”
“No.” I rolled my eyes, but inside, my heart fluttered with something like hope. “He’s a tour guide. You heard him. He’s probably hoping I’ll bring paying customers to him later.”
“He wasn’t using his tour guide voice, Meg. He was using his hot lover-boy voice.”
“I don’t know what conversation you were listening to. Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to go. I have to work.”
Tennyson laughed. “He didn’t give you a specific time. You can’t just say you have to work every day, every hour. Go ride horses with the boy. And what are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Nothing, with some television breaks.”
“Well, now you have specific plans.”
I crossed my arms and smiled. “I do? Are they legal?”
“Is camping legal? Because that’s where we’re taking you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me—and Taylor and Sara, of course.”
“Have you been camping before?” The thought of my Pittsburgh friends camping seemed absurd, but these girls were tougher.
“Meg, we grew up in Wyoming. Of course we’ve been camping. It’s a state law. You just bring really warm clothes and a sleeping bag and come to my house at five o’clock on Saturday.”
“I’ll have to tell my parents where we’ll be.”
“Just say it’s off Highway 789. There’s a little place there.”
“Okay. Sounds like fun.”
She bounced toward her car like a girl with more to do after this and more after that. Tennyson was part of this world in a way I was not. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I was the one with a firmer grasp on the possibilities and eventualities.
“Get some sleep tonight because you won’t sleep out in the woods.” She opened her car door and then said, “That is not a joke.”
***
On Saturday, I dug through boxes we hadn’t unpacked to find my old sleeping bag. I wasn’t sure it was exactly a camping quality sleeping bag—more of a sleepover quality bag. I picked off some old, stuck-on popcorn and remembered the last time I’d used it—Lydia Weller’s eighth-grade slumber party.
It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cutoff shorts. Their only goodbye was a glare that promised retribution if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.
I put on my mom’s warm long johns and Canning Mills sweats. I added my old ski jacket and found some ratty mittens.
When I came into the kitchen, Dad laughed. “Ready for a blizzard?”
“Ha ha. Tennyson said to wear something warm. Do I look ridiculous?”
“No. You look cute. So, it’s you and three other girls and you’ll be off 789, right? Do we know if this is a public camping area? Possibly staffed by armed security?” He arched an eyebrow hopefully.
“I’m sure it’s an area where she’s camped with her family before. Tennyson wouldn’t do anything stupid. She’s in all my AP classes. They grew up here, so this is like going to the mall in Pittsburgh for us.”
“Strange and unlikely comparison,” he said.
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.
He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.
I drove to Tennyson’s house on the newer side of town, next to the tiny, faux mall. Taylor and Sara laughed at my sleeping bag when I took it out of the trunk. I ignored them and helped Tennyson carry out bags.
“Shouldn’t we take my Jeep?” I said, thinking of its off-road capability.
“Do you have something against small Sentras?” Tennyson said. “Load it up, girl.”
I noticed we were putting in a bunch of snack food and sleeping bags for everyone. Lots of furry pillows were piled in, too. I didn’t see what I recognized as a tent.
Once we were on the move, we reached Highway 789 quickly. The rolling hills and grassland started to look an awful lot like pastureland. The cows watched us pass. We turned onto a private road with a gate, and Tennyson hopped out and pushed it open. Sara climbed into her seat and drove the car through while Tennyson shut and latched the gate.
I got a little worried that we weren’t supposed to be here. “So, whose property is this?”
“A good friend’s,” Tennyson said. “He lets us camp here.”
I caught Sara glancing sideways at Tennyson and they shared a slight smile. Taylor, in the backseat with me, grinned. I was being set up somehow. Were they driving me somewhere to sacrifice me as the only virgin they knew? I dug my fingernails into my hands to fight off my attacking nerves.
We drove down a narrow dirt road into an area full of cottonwood trees and aspens and parked on an open patch of dirt. We unloaded the car and carried everything under the trees. They unrolled their sleeping bags and laid their pillows down on the ground like they were in someone’s living room for a sleepover. They even fought over who got to lie next to whom. We were in seventh grade again, only now instead of the danger of stupid girl fights, we had the dang
er of bears.
I tried to work this out in my head. “Okay, guys, I’ve never been camping, but I know this is a little weird. Where’s the tent? We can’t just lie on the ground, can we? I mean there are things out here that we don’t really want to curl up with in a sleeping bag.”
Tennyson stared me down. “Meg, you’re a buzz kill. Help us find firewood and try to have some fun. Think of it as an episode of Survivor. We’re stranded in the wilderness and we’ve got to see if we’re plucky enough to make it, right? And maybe we’ll meet some half-naked male survivors who’ll take pity on us.”
I could tell I wasn’t going to win the argument, so I started looking for firewood. I felt like an idiot. I knew this wasn’t the way it goes. Once we’d dragged back a dozen large branches and broken them up, we arranged them into what looked like a decent campfire. Tennyson popped open a can of lighter fluid, soaked the wood down liberally, and lit a match. In an instant, we had fire.
“Look what I have ma-a-a-ade,” Tennyson screamed. No one laughed but me. “Ah, Cast Away guys,” she said. “It’s available today on Netflix!”
We jumped back to keep Tennyson’s creation from burning off our eyebrows. I had to give them credit—they did bring marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate to make s’mores. And they remembered hot dogs, but not buns. So we had dinner and dessert, with orange juice, which I think was actually supposed to be for breakfast, but it was all we had.
The wind blew gently. The pines whispered to us. The stars showed off and I found constellations without a chart for the first time in my life. The sliver of a crescent moon didn’t give us any light, so once the sun was down, it was implausibly dark.
In Pittsburgh, I never really saw true darkness. There were always lights on around us—blindingly bright at night. Mom used to bemoan that her children had never seen the stars. That’s not exactly true. We did vacation in areas where we could see them.
When the temperature dropped, we zipped up in our sleeping bags and huddled together next to the fire. No one thought to gather more firewood, though, and the fire died down to hot coals. We were too afraid to venture away where the wild things were so we suffered in silence.
Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) Page 6
