by Cara Malone
The moment Melody entered Jessie’s personal space, though, all of that changed. They hadn’t even kissed – their lips wisped by each other in an instant without touching – but already she felt more than she’d ever felt for Steve. She knew what people meant by the butterflies and the fireworks now, and her world erupted into vibrant color. It was like she’d been living in black and white and didn’t know any better until Melody introduced her to sensual blue and carnal red and graceful yellow. And rich chestnut brown, oh that chestnut brown.
At the end of the day, though, it didn’t matter.
Jessie might be awoken to the beautiful things in the world that she was missing, but nothing about her situation changed because of this revelation. It was like a sick joke that the universe played on her – there were a lot of those in her life. Pregnant at sixteen. Pregnant the first time she had sex. Figured out she was gay in the same moment she realized her life was tied inexorably to Steve. And now, fell in love with a girl she could never have.
The only thing Jessie could do to combat this was keep herself busy. This wasn’t hard given her schedule, but even working eighty hours a week wouldn’t have kept her mind from drifting back to Melody. She found herself thinking about her in all of the quiet moments of her day.
There were the lulls between customers while she was working the cash register at the grocery store. She liked her shifts at the diner better because they kept her mind more occupied. She had to take orders and attend to her customers and deliver food and bus her tables. There wasn’t a lot of time to sit around and think about the lunacy of pining for a girl she barely knew.
Cashiering, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly mentally taxing work, and it left her mind free to roam. Hell, that task required so little brain power that most of the time she could slip into a fully-formed fantasy world while her hands kept mechanically swiping canned goods across the scanner.
It was a bad idea to indulge these thoughts – Jessie knew the only thing she could accomplish with them was to dig herself even deeper into her desire for Melody. But after a few weeks of trying to fight it, her mind started subtly protesting. Jessie could never threaten Ellie’s peace by uprooting her world and going after Melody, but she also couldn’t stop herself from imagining how life might have turned out differently. What if she’d kissed Melody when they were alone together at the recital? What if she’d never agreed to go on a date with Steve at all? What was the harm in imagining it?
So one Tuesday morning when the store was particularly slow and she hadn’t seen a customer in fifteen minutes or more, Jessie let her guard down. She wondered if Melody ever shopped here – Lisbon wasn’t a big city, after all – and what she’d do if suddenly Melody stepped into her checkout line.
“Hi,” she’d say, giving Jessie a little smirk in the seductive way she had.
“Hey,” Jessie would respond, and in her fantasies every bit of the anxiety she felt when Melody was around melted away. She’d be confident and cool. “Come here often?”
“No,” Melody would say as she came closer, her eyes never moving from Jessie’s. “I just came to pick up one thing.”
“What’s that?” Jessie would ask, and Melody wouldn’t stop when she came to the credit card machine like her customers always did.
She’d keep walking, her eyes locked on Jessie’s and her hips swaying in a sultry way as she came around the end of the register and stepped into Jessie’s space. Their bodies would nearly touch – just a sliver of air between them – and Jessie would feel Melody’s breath, hot and peppermint-laced like it had been at the recital, as she whispered, “You.”
The rest of Jessie’s fantasy tended toward the explicit. On different days, depending on how voracious she was feeling, she’d pick Melody up and set her on top of the scanner, her register beeping with confusion as Jessie wrapped her arms around her and kissed those luscious lips passionately. Or they’d lay down on the belt, knocking all the little impulse buys – gum and mints and candy bars – to the floor as their bodies pressed together. Or Melody would simply drop to her knees and her fingers would reach for the button of Jessie’s khakis–
“Excuse me!”
This was usually how her fantasies ended, with a grumpy old man or a housewife bogged down with kids bringing her back to reality and the realization that a line had formed in front of her register. Jessie would blush furiously and hope to hell her face didn’t tell everyone exactly what she’d been thinking about, then she’d promise herself that she wouldn’t think about Melody again.
After a few weeks of this new reality, Jessie was starting to realize how empty that promise was.
When her grocery store shift came to a merciful end a little before dinner time one day, Jessie thought she’d make a quick run home to fix herself a peanut butter sandwich and see Ellie for twenty minutes or so before her shift at the diner started. She’d been pulling doubles for a couple of months, and she usually came home in the hour between her two jobs just to check in on everyone.
That day, though, the idea of looking Steve in the eyes so soon after she’d laid Melody down on the conveyor belt in her mind seemed impossible. The fantasy was too fresh and Jessie’s cheeks were even a little flushed. Jessie wanted to see Ellie – she’d be in bed by the time Jessie came home tonight – but the shame of what she’d been doing with Melody in her mind trumped this desire.
She climbed into her rusted-out Sebring at the back of the parking lot and the door swung noisily shut. Jessie spent two years babysitting and saving her birthday money to buy that car when she turned sixteen, and it had been an old rust bucket even back then. Now that she was twenty-two, it might qualify as an antique if it wasn’t composed almost entirely of duct tape and prayers. It still got her where she needed to go, though, and now she chugged her way down the street to McDonald’s.
It was frivolous to eat out when there was a perfectly good peanut butter sandwich waiting for her at home, especially when the whole reason she was killing herself with the double shifts was to save money for Ellie’s private lessons. But if she wasn’t going home she’d have to find something, and Jessie decided it was okay as long as she ordered off the dollar menu.
It wasn’t that she and Steve were destitute – they had two working vehicles, a roof over their heads, and all the sports channels Steve wanted. But every dime of Jessie’s two jobs and Steve’s factory position went into maintaining that kind of lifestyle.
She pulled up to the drive-through and a muffled voice said, “Welcome to McDonald’s, how can I help you?”
There was absolutely nothing welcoming about that monotonous voice. Maybe it was the ancient, tinny speaker playing tricks, but Jessie found that doubtful.
“Hi, can I get a McChicken and small fries, please?” Jessie called, and she always had to shout through the damn things just to be heard. She figured having orders screamed at them all day probably didn’t give the person on the other end of the speaker much reason to be jovial.
“Two dollars, next window.”
Jessie did as she was instructed, thinking that life could be worse. She could be the monotonous voice at the other end of the McDonald’s speaker, saying the phrase ‘next window’ about two hundred times a day.
Back in her carefree early teens, before Ellie – before the possibility of getting pregnant had even occurred to her – Jessie was just a regular kid with her life ahead of her. Jessie’s parents weren’t wealthy, but everyone thought she would go to college, maybe on a scholarship. People never asked her if she wanted to go, but rather where or for what.
But then she got knocked up, and everything changed.
Jessie knew a seventeen-year-old with a newborn and half of a high school education wasn’t the most coveted applicant in the job market, but she had no way of guessing just how hard it would be to find decent work without a diploma. Jessie tried to go back to school when Ellie was a baby, attending night school and studying in the brief moments when Ellie was asleep or othe
rwise occupied, but then came potty training and daycare costs and million other excuses to give up. She did, putting Ellie first. Even if she’d succeeded and earned her GED, she knew it would only qualify her to work a job with slightly more responsibility at the grocery store, or some repetitive, entry-level job in an office where she couldn’t afford the business casual wardrobe or take time off when Ellie got sick.
Decent jobs with full-time hours and benefits seemed forever out of her reach, but as she pulled up to the next window and saw the sullen face of the McDonald’s cashier, Jessie had to be thankful knowing that things could always be worse. She took her McChicken and fries and sat in the parking lot to eat and wait for her next shift to start, and she felt more determined than ever to keep Melody as a fantasy and nothing more. She had too much to lose.
CHAPTER 12
Their first apartment was nothing more than a spare room over a garage. Jessie found it in the classified ads while she was waiting for her final ultrasound before the baby came. She had to hold the paper at arm’s length just to turn the pages around her belly, and she’d been looking for apartments for weeks with no luck.
When she found this one, though, she thought it might work. Just over a hundred and fifty square feet, there was barely enough room to move around, but it was furnished, it had its own bathroom and a kitchenette, and at a hundred and fifty bucks a month, she and Steve could afford it.
The day they moved in was the day Jessie and Ellie were released from the hospital, and she had never been more terrified in her life. She cradled the squirming, softly crying bundle in her arms while Steve drove his old truck across town at five miles under the speed limit, looking over frequently to check on the two of them.
“This is it?” He asked as Jessie directed him to park on the street in front of the house.
He was still going to high school during the days and he’d taken a second shift job in the factory where his dad worked, so he never got to see the apartment before Jessie signed the lease, and she caught the disappointment in his voice as he sized it up from the street.
“It was all we can afford,” she said, not taking her eyes off Ellie’s tiny features. “We’ll make it a home.”
For the first time since she discovered that she was pregnant, Jessie found that she wanted to build a family with Ellie’s father. Sure, he’d never made her heart sing or made her see fireworks when they touched. In fact, they hadn’t touched much at all since the night Jessie got pregnant. But there was more to a family than sex, and looking into Ellie’s wide, curious eyes, Jessie wanted to do everything she could to make a home for her daughter.
Steve came around the truck and opened Jessie’s door, taking the baby in his arms. She grimaced as she hauled herself out of the truck– Ellie was only two days old and everything about Jessie’s seventeen-year-old body felt like it was about ninety-five today. She was grateful when Steve carried Ellie, and even more so when he held out his arm for Jessie to lean on as they hobbled together up to the house. There was an indoor stairwell, a necessity with an infant to think about – no icy metal stairs to fall down in the winter – and it took Jessie a good two or three minutes just to make it to the top.
When they got there, she unlocked the door and let it swing open, holding her breath in anticipation as Steve’s eyes swept over the small space.
“Home sweet home,” she said meekly, waiting for his reaction.
“Yeah,” he said, stepping into the space that would become their bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen for the next eighteen months before Jessie was able to start working and they finally saved enough money to rent a decent apartment. He looked down at his daughter in his arms and cooed, “What do you think of your new home, bug?”
Jessie stood in the doorway for a moment, resting her shoulder against the door frame and catching her breath from the climb. She smiled as she watched her new husband showing their infant daughter around the little room. This wasn’t the life she wanted – not by far – but it could have been a lot worse.
CHAPTER 13
Mary Beth’s was closed for the summer and Melody couldn’t imagine her boss being any more calm on vacation than she was at work – she pictured Mary Beth on an island somewhere in the Caribbean, going nuts and driving the hotel staff crazy with demands and questions.
Whether Mary Beth was relaxing or bothering the hell out of a cabana boy somewhere tropical, Melody found herself with a lot of time on her hands again. She’d gotten used to her schedule at the reception desk, and even though she was only working fifteen hours a week, it had given her a sense of purpose. She never would have admitted this to anyone except Dr. Riley, but it felt nice to have a reason to get dressed in something other than pajamas.
Now, though, she wiled away the days much the same way she had before her parents forced her into employment – in Andy’s basement. They smoked and snacked and watched television and bullshitted until it was time to go home and have dinner each evening, and Melody spent a fair amount of time thinking about Jessie.
She always breezed into the lobby so last-minute, ushering Ellie into the studio and barely stopping at the reception desk to she scribble her daughter’s name on the sign-in sheet, so Melody had no idea when she’d get her next opportunity to relive their little moment outside of the school. She just knew that she had to find a way. She found herself daydreaming on more than one occasion about the two of them alone at the desk, her hand lingering over Jessie’s as she passed her a pen to sign in, and then grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her over the counter to finally have that kiss.
By the time the school opened again in the middle of July, Melody had lived a thousand fantasy lives with Jessie, and even Andy was beginning to find her romanticism of their shared joint during the recital to be a bit obsessive.
“Try not to expect too much,” he warned her one night before classes started up again. “Maybe it didn’t mean anything to her.”
“It did,” Melody objected. “I could tell.”
She resisted the urge to make another wise-crack about Andy’s inexperience with women, especially considering the fact that Melody wasn’t much better off. She’d kissed a few girls in high school, and once during a pep rally, a girl from her science class pulled her under the bleachers and Melody found out what second base felt like, but since then her experience with women dwindled down to almost nothing. There just wasn’t time for anything except dance and sleep and more dance when she was in New York.
On Saturday morning, Melody reported to work feeling a lot more nervous than she’d ever felt standing behind the reception desk. It wasn’t the same kind of anxiety that bubbled up when her mother suggested she work at a dance school, or the panic that built in her chest when she stood in the wings of the Lisbon High School auditorium last month.
This was more like butterflies in her stomach, and clammy palms, and the kind of lovesickness you get when you know you’re about to see your crush after a long time apart.
She tried to keep herself occupied, but aside from welcoming everyone back to Mary Beth’s, reminding them about the sign-in sheet, and taking payments from new dancers, the majority of Melody’s morning was spent pushing away memories of all the fantasy kisses she’d shared with Jessie in her head. After a summer apart, a summer spent dreaming about the moment when they would reunite, it was hard to divorce reality from fantasy and remember that there had only been the build-up to a kiss, and that it was pretty quick at that.
It was just one moment, and it might not have meant anything, Melody reminded herself as she heard the door open and Ellie came dashing in.
“Miss Melody!” She shrieked excitedly, bounding across the lobby.
Even as Ellie came around the desk and Melody stooped down to give Ellie a quick hug, she could not subscribe to her own mantra. It was just a few minutes alone, but it meant something. Every time she shared a room with Jessie, her whole body felt electrified and her heart swelled and she craved Jessie’s
lips. It wasn’t nothing.
“Welcome back!” Melody exclaimed to Ellie, who seemed to have grown in the month since the recital. Melody was a little surprised to find that she was genuinely excited to see the girl, as well as her mother. “How was your break?”
“It was great,” Ellie said. “I practiced every day!”
“She sure did,” Jessie’s voice came over the counter, and Melody turned to face her.
A little part of her was afraid that when she looked at Jessie, all of the magic would fall away and the moment wouldn’t live up to the fantasy version that Melody had constructed over the past few weeks. She was afraid that Jessie wouldn’t be as mesmerizing as she remembered, or else Melody would find that she preferred the fantasy version she’d built instead of the real thing.
But there was no universe in which Jessie Cartwright in the flesh wasn’t the best possible reality. If anything, she looked better than she had a few months ago, the summer sun bringing color to her cheeks and making her red hair even more radiant than before, with little streaks of copper running through it. Melody bit her lip – she couldn’t help it – and a flash of desire ran unmistakably through Jessie’s eyes, too.
But then those mossy pools darkened and went flat. Melody watched as all the expression drained out of Jessie’s face, as if on purpose, and she pointed mechanically to the sign-in clipboard. “Same process as last year?”
“Umm, yeah,” Melody said.
She grabbed a pen from the desk and held it out to Jessie, ready to play out the fantasy that she’d dreamed so frequently over the summer. Maybe they couldn’t kiss right now – not with Ellie standing nearby – but Melody would enjoy the feeling of their fingers brushing over each other almost as much.
