by Sara Polsky
I look up from where I’m staring at the hole in my shoe, and James peers into my face. “Are you—”
“Thanks.” I cut him off and grab the plate out of his hand. I don’t even want to let him ask whatever he’s wondering about, whether I’m okay or if I’ve been crying or if I’ve ever owned a hairbrush. I remember the feeling of sitting next to him in Natalie’s car yesterday and very carefully don’t look at him again.
I’m sure he’ll give up if I don’t answer.
I wait, tense, watching Leila blot at her pizza with napkins to sop up the grease, until James picks up his own slice and bites into it. Now I can eat; I know question time is over.
We’re sitting on the floor of Leila’s room, poetry anthologies and pens and notebooks spread out in front of us. I haven’t been in this room since we were eleven, but it looks almost exactly the way it did then, the same gray carpet and deep purple quilt and wide white desk. The same lampshade we decorated with glitter and shapes cut out of pink and purple construction paper.
The same painting on the wall over the bed, right where Leila can see it from her desk, of two little girls in shorts and T-shirts, one wearing orange and the other pink, sitting back-to-back on a wide rock. They’re smiling at the painter.
My mother took forever to get the painting right, because Leila and I kept trying to make each other laugh. The rock got hotter and hotter in the sun, and we hated sitting still on it. But that’s part of what makes the painting work. We both look like we’re almost in motion, all our energy ready for the moment when we’re free to leap up and go play.
“All right, let’s do this,” Leila suddenly says next to me, pretending to sound tough.
I look around. In the time I’ve been staring at the painting, she’s finished her pizza, and James is on his second slice, or maybe his third. If this were yesterday, I might have teased him about it or made a comment to Natalie and Zach. But now it doesn’t feel right.
I have to stop thinking about what Natalie and Zach would do, because soon my mother will be home and it won’t matter. I won’t be able to hang out with them anymore.
Leila opens the anthology and runs her finger down the table of contents. I chew my pizza slowly to the sound of the book’s thin pages flipping.
“Stop me when I get to a poet you like,” Leila tells us.
She reads down the list of names. She pauses at a few that sound familiar, reads the first three or four lines of each poem, moves on. Once, James asks her to stop, but he shakes his head after only a few lines.
“Nah,” he says. “Too sappy. No romantic poems.”
See! I would tell Natalie if she were here. No romantic poems, so it’s not what you’re thinking.
I ignore the flash of disappointment in my stomach at that thought.
I finish my pizza and lie down on Leila’s floor, empty paper plate on my stomach. I can’t focus on anything Leila is reading. The words that drift over to me, about love and nightmares and rainstorms, are so much less real than any of the thoughts already filling my head. Those thoughts take turns parading across my mind like lines in a chorus. My mother, Dr. Choi, Natalie and Zach, the mother bear and her cubs on TV. Leila and my mother and me in the car. Aunt Cynthia, passing us department store bags with matching sundresses inside; Uncle John ruffling Leila’s hair. The sixth grade lunchroom, Leila’s and James’s tables already noisy and full, nobody offering me a space. James, following me down the hall.
My stomach hurts. I put my hand over it and hear a crinkling sound. Now my palm is on top of the greasy paper plate I already forgot was there. Yuck.
“Sophie?” I turn my head toward James’s voice. He and Leila are both looking at me. Leila keeps turning her mouth down, as if she’s trying not to laugh.
“What do you think about that one? It’s the only one we both like so far,” James says. He’s looking curious again, the way he did when I first walked into the room.
“I don’t know,” I answer, because I wasn’t listening to Leila read at all. I realize my hand is still on the plate and I shift, sending it sliding to the floor. It leaves tomato sauce and stringy melted cheese on my fingers. Gross.
Leila’s shoulders quiver.
And apparently that’s all it takes, because suddenly that angry-terrified feeling I had in the hospital elevator comes right back.
I sit up. When I put my hands on the floor to lean on, one of them lands on the pizza plate again. My cousin giggles.
I don’t think it’s funny.
I glare at her and fling the plate away from my hand, hard, like a Frisbee. Leila stops giggling.
“Does it really matter what I think?” I ask. My voice is even but my insides aren’t; they’re shaking again, like there’s a miniature person in my stomach jumping up and down on a trampoline. Neither Leila nor James answers me.
“I mean it,” I say. I glance at James, but really, I’m talking to Leila. “I wasn’t even in your group until Mr. Jackson put me there, and you weren’t happy about it. Do you really care what I think about the stupid project?”
Now they’re both staring at me.
Leila looks surprised, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging slightly open in a way that would make Uncle John tease her about catching flies. James is just watching, taking in everything that happens, not intervening between my cousin and me. The way he did in sixth grade when I stood behind the lunch table, waiting for someone to talk to me. A part of me wants to shout at him too.
Just say something, James.
Then, to my surprise, he does.
“Leila—” he starts in a tone that makes me think he’s actually about to take my side.
But the words are building up in my throat and, actually, I don’t want James to speak.
I want to speak.
I look at Leila. I’m glaring again, trying to ignore the stringy pizza cheese on my fingers.
“It doesn’t seem like you care what I think,” I tell her. My voice is louder now. I want to add when you blast your music and ignore me in the car. When you spend as much time out of the house as you possibly can. When you haven’t asked about my mother since that first morning after I got here. I don’t say those things. I’m afraid of what will happen, of what I’ll say next, once I let myself start.
All I say is “It seems like you haven’t cared much about what’s going on with me for—oh—the last five years.”
“Sophie, that’s not—” Leila finally tries to say something.
But I turn away from her and she stops. I stand up and retrieve my plate, crumple it in one hand, and toss it at Leila’s trashcan. As it lands with a thunk against the metal, solid and satisfying, I step over the pizza box and James’s backpack. I leave my book where it is on the floor. From the doorway, I look back at my cousin and say the last thing I need to let out.
“So why start caring now?”
Seventeen
I get up early the next morning and leave for school before Leila even comes downstairs. All through the long walk on our town’s quiet early morning sidewalks, then in the empty school hallways, I feel hollow, like someone’s used an ice cream scoop to remove my insides. There’s no more trampoline in my stomach, and only the dull echo of that chorus of thoughts in my head. I’m distantly amazed that my body is still walking to class, still opening and closing my locker, still changing into my gym clothes the way it does on any other day.
In second period math class, I’ve become the person Mr. Borakov calls on when no one else can figure out an answer to one of his questions. Usually I have the equation solved already, the answer scribbled in my notes.
But today when he scans the class, sees no hands up, and says, “Sophie?” I look at my notebook and realize I haven’t even written down the problem. I shake my head and look down at my desk. When the bell rings, I dash out of the room.
—
I know I can’t skip art again without a better excuse for Ms. Triste, but after English, where Mr. Jackson tries to coach us through analyzing a poem, I walk to eighth period as slowly as I can, taking a detour through the science hallway in case James tries to catch up with me.
I get to the art room just after the bell rings, and I grab an easel, looking anywhere but at Natalie’s seat as I set the easel up next to my chair. I’m working with watercolors, but I know within three minutes that I’m not painting well. I’m too tense and stiff, my feet stuck to one spot on the floor and my hand jabbing at the paper.
“Hey,” Natalie’s voice comes from somewhere near me.
I can see out of the corner of my eye that she’s standing next to my easel again. Some of the photos she took the other day are in her outstretched hand; I spot one of Zach laughing into the camera, holding the pan too high above the rusted stove. I don’t look at Natalie’s face, but she sounds uncertain, not quite sure what to say to me after I ran out of the pharmacy the other day.
I consider saying nothing, just acting like I didn’t hear her. She’ll eventually have to give up and turn back to her work.
But after a pause that’s a little too long, I decide to say hey back. My voice is dull. I don’t look up.
“Was everything okay the other day?” Natalie asks. “You ran out and then you weren’t at the car by the time I got there and your stuff was gone.”
I could come up with something to tell her. I didn’t feel well or I suddenly remembered that I had to be somewhere.
“Maybe we could do something tomorrow,” Natalie says. We could.
But no, I decide. It would be better—easier—not to have plans with Natalie ever again. Otherwise it will only be harder to get back to my old routine, my normal life, when my mother comes home.
As I try to figure out what to tell Natalie, I think of Kelly in the sixth grade cafeteria again, making that gesture to her friend while I stood right behind them, seeing everything.
Somewhere inside me, I must have some of the same meanness that made Kelly able to look at me and do that. Right?
“I can’t,” I tell Natalie, trying to make my voice flat, not apologetic at all. “Sorry.”
I can tell Natalie hears my tone. I look up and see her turn away from me. Her cheeks go red. She stares down at her photos so intently I’m pretty sure she’s not seeing them at all. I know that trick.
I’m sorry, I think at her. I can’t be the person you think I am. But of course she can’t read my mind.
If she could, she never would have wanted to be my friend in the first place.
—
I spend the rest of art dabbing my brush against the paper, creating shapeless watery blobs that look the way I feel, wishing it were any day but Thursday. Natalie and I are both supposed to work at Uncle John’s office this afternoon.
When the bell rings, I clean up faster than I ever have before and rush through the halls to my locker. I don’t need to pick up any books, but I stand there, locker door open, for at least five minutes. I drum my fingers against the metal and watch my neighbors grab their jackets and check their hair. I want to give Natalie a head start. I can walk to Uncle John’s office from here.
I’m walking away from the school when Natalie drives past me. I see her cell phone next to her ear and wonder whether she’s telling Zach what I said. I hope she isn’t. Then I remind myself it doesn’t matter. My brain cycles back and forth between those two thoughts—that I don’t want Natalie and Zach to hate me; that I don’t need to care what they think—for the entire walk to Uncle John’s office.
When I get there, I see Natalie stationed at a computer on the other side of the room. I don’t stop to see whether Claire wants me to help her.
I just cross straight to Uncle John’s office, half-nodding at the few people who greet me. Uncle John isn’t meeting with any clients, and I’m glad. I don’t know where I would have gone if there had been people in his office.
Without thinking too much about what I’m doing, I drop into a seat at Uncle John’s wooden table and dump my bag on the floor.
He looks up at the noise. “Hello, Sophie,” he says. “How was your day?”
Exactly what I wanted my mother to ask me yesterday.
Uncle John smiles, the same open smile from last time, when I thought he was only being friendly because the Carter family was here.
That smile is all it takes to make me feel like a terrible person.
A terrible person who reaches deep down for the meanest things she can think of to tell someone else—her mother, her cousin, her new friend—and then says those things to that person’s face.
A terrible person who wants her mother to stay in the hospital just so her life can be a little more like every-one else’s.
A terrible person who has felt relieved that, because her mother is in the hospital, she doesn’t have to spend so much time worrying about her every day. Even though her mother is in the hospital because she tried to kill herself.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” is what comes out of my mouth.
Uncle John blinks. He shifts in his chair, looking uncomfortable and confused. I drop my head and stare down at the table, feeling tears gathering at the corners of my eyes again. What is wrong with me? I’m not a person who cries.
“Sophie? Are you all right?”
Still staring at the table, I shake my head. Then shrug. Then nod. Then I shrug again.
“So that would be a no,” Uncle John says, and I let out a single dry, involuntary laugh. His hand waves a tissue under my nose, and I take it and dab at the corners of my eyes while trying to move as little as possible.
Then I give up and blow my nose loudly. It’s not like Uncle John doesn’t already know I’m upset.
“I don’t expect you to tell me what’s bothering you,” he says. I stare at the table some more.
“You’re just like your aunt that way,” he adds, and I’m so surprised, I finally look up. “Both of you are convinced no one else really wants to know what’s wrong and that you would be burdening them by telling, even when they ask you. Neither of you ever wants to clue other people in to what’s going on in your head.”
Me, just like Aunt Cynthia?
Uncle John stands up. “I mean that,” he says. “People wouldn’t ask if they didn’t really want to know.”
He walks over to the bookshelf and pulls a rolled up, rubber band–tied white bundle from the cluster against the shelves. When he comes back to the table, he smiles at me, more gently than before, almost as if he’s asking whether the smile is okay with me.
“But I know not to hold my breath for a confession,” he says. He shakes his head slightly, as if we mystify him, Aunt Cynthia and I.
He unrolls the sheets—not floor plans this time, but what looks like a diagram showing the elevations on one plot of land—and passes me books to weigh down the paper on my side of the table.
“Feel like doing some work?” he asks. I nod.
He hands me a notepad and pencil and explains what I’m looking at and what he needs me to do with it. I take careful notes, because I know I’m not focused enough to catch everything he’s saying.
For the rest of the afternoon, the two of us work in silence, sketching on opposite sides of the table. I try not to think about Natalie, who is probably sitting outside fuming at me as she edits her photos on the computer. Uncle John pretends not to notice all the times I reach over for the box of tissues.
Eighteen
By the time school ends on Friday, I’m exhausted.
I’m tired of ignoring Natalie—not that she’s tried to get my attention since yesterday. She spent art with her back to my easel, and she seemed to do a much better job of concentrating on her photos than I did on my painting.
I’m fed up with trying to avoid Leila and Jame
s, one of whom I seem to see in every hallway I walk through between classes. I’m tired of the horrible things I keep saying every time I open my mouth.
If I climbed into bed right now, I decide, I could sleep for a century. Or possibly longer. I could sleep the way my mother does in her hospital bed, with no awareness of the world around her.
But when I leave school, my feet don’t take me toward Aunt Cynthia’s, where I could nap all afternoon and no one would notice. They stride toward the hospital, and when my brain catches up, I realize I do want to see my mother. Not the mother I wished for a few days ago, the one who would sit me down with a snack after school and ask questions about my day, but my mother the way she actually is. The way she usually is in the afternoons, when I show up in her studio and she pulls me over to her easel to ask my opinion on her painting, or when she surprises me with a ride home from school.
The person she is completely apart from the moods that sometimes take over her life; the woman who can be so happy and in love with the world she makes it impossible not to be cheerful. The woman who always has time to explain an art technique I don’t know and can come up with a creative project that will take my mind off of anything I don’t want to think about.
As I walk, I remember the afternoon I came home from school and hurried down to my mother’s studio, upset because Leila hadn’t spoken to me in three or four days, since the beginning of sixth grade. It was longer than we’d gone without speaking since we were old enough to talk.
My mother put her paintbrush down and turned off her radio, not seeming to mind that I was interrupting her work.
“I’m sure Leila’s just trying to figure out middle school, sweetie,” she said when I told her what was going on. “It’s confusing, with so many new classes and new people, and you know it’s important to Leila to make a lot of friends.”
I nodded. That had always been more important to Leila than to me.
“I’m sure she’ll be herself again in a few days,” my mother said. She made it sound so reasonable it was impossible not to believe her.
