My Life as a Rhombus

by Varian Johnson

  “Then let’s back up a few chapters. I think if we reinforce your background in trig, you’ll do much better on your next test.”

  Nine problems, fifty-seven minutes, and one and a half cookie platters later (did you really expect me not to eat any of those cookies?), David walked into the room. Sarah didn’t even look up from the table. I, on the other hand, had to fight to keep my gaze glued to Sarah’s paper. My heart started beating even faster when I heard him approaching the table. He placed his hands on the back of my chair. I could feel his long, skinny fingers slightly graze my back. I swallowed hard, but still didn’t look up.

  “Use the cotangent function,” he said as his voice flowed over my shoulder and spilled onto the table. “It’ll make it simpler.”

  I studied Sarah’s paper. David was right, to a degree.

  “You could do that, Sarah,” I said, pointing toward her paper. “But look at your problem more closely. See if you can cancel some of the terms in the denominator and numerator.”

  Sarah gasped. “Wait a minute, I can cancel this, and this, and this,” she said, striking out terms with her pencil. “And then if I use this function … ”

  Sarah didn’t have to finish explaining the problem. She had already seen the answer in her mind and now was letting her fingers catch up.

  I finally glanced at David. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I noticed a small grin on his face.

  “Good job,” he said, although I didn’t know if he was talking to me or Sarah. “I’m taking the rest of the cookies.”

  He grabbed the remaining cookies and was out the door.

  “Don’t mind David,” Sarah said after he left the room. “Sometimes he forgets he’s only a year older than me. He thinks he knows everything.”

  “It sounds like he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to trigonometry.”

  “Don’t be fooled by the pretty jump shot,” she said. “David is a closet nerd. He knows trig like I know fashion.”

  “Then why don’t you get him to tutor you?”

  “I tried doing that, but David is a horrible tutor. Instead of teaching me concepts, he just gave me the answers. That works fine when you’re turning in homework, but unless David was going to take my exams for me, it wouldn’t have worked.”

  About twenty minutes later, David returned to the kitchen. He dropped the empty platter on the counter, but didn’t rush out of the room. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, wiping away invisible crumbs from the stovetop.

  “I don’t think Mom will make it home in time for dinner,” David said.

  “Good,” Sarah replied, without looking up from her book.

  For a few seconds, the air in that room was as stale and stiff as a two-month-old loaf of bread. I looked at my hand and pretended my fingernails were the most interesting things in the world.

  David sighed. “I’m going to order Chinese. Shrimp-fried rice okay?”

  “Make sure you get a few extra packets of soy sauce,” Sarah said, her pencil flying away on her paper.

  David nodded, and I expected him to leave again. Instead, he looked at me. “Do you want anything?”

  Sarah finally pulled her face from out of her book. “Didn’t you hear me? I said—”

  “I was talking to Rhonda, not you.” David walked to the table and took a seat across from me. “This is me and Sarah’s usual Saturday-night routine when we don’t have any plans. We order Chinese food and watch bad action movies. You’re welcome to stay—that is, unless you have other plans.”

  Sarah’s eyes were as wide as the platters the cookies had been served on. She gave off a small chuckle. “Yeah, why don’t you stay?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I have plans. I’m spending the night with my aunt.”

  “Too bad,” David said. “Maybe next time.”

  I felt my mouth break into a smile. “Yeah, maybe so.”

  David rose from his seat, circled the table, and rustled Sarah’s hair. Then he leaned over and planted a fat, wet, slobbery kiss on her forehead.

  “Stop it,” Sarah yelled. But as angry as she tried to sound, I could hear the laughter in her voice. “Just order the food, okay? Rhonda and I are almost done.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” he asked me, his eyes twinkling like Sarah’s.

  I wished more than anything that I could have cancelled my plans. I would have gladly stayed here with David (and Sarah, of course). But I had my own Saturday night plans to keep.

  “Sorry, but I can’t. Ask me again—maybe next time will be different.”

  He nodded one final time, and left the room.

  I glanced at Sarah. Her head was tilted to the side, and she had a goofy grin on her face. “Did my brother just ask you out?”

  “What?” It suddenly got very hot in the room. I took off my glasses and wiped the lenses. “What makes you think that?”

  “I have had countless people over here before, but you’re the only person he has ever invited to stay for dinner.” She leaned closer to me. “Plus, he’s been asking a lot of questions about you.”

  “He has?” I asked, my voice a little too giddy. I shook off my excitement. “I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s just being friendly.”

  “Friendly, my ass.” She let out a loud, bellowing laugh. “You have such a crush on him, don’t you?”

  My body temperature jumped up a few more degrees. “Of course not.”

  “Well, just between you and me, I think y’all would make a good couple. I’d rather see him with you than with those flaky chicks I hang out with at school. He needs a girl with some depth.”

  I began to laugh, but stopped when Sarah stood up. Maybe I was imagining it, but her jeans seemed tighter than usual.

  Sarah must have realized I was looking at her stomach. “Is it noticeable?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  She began closing her books. “I tried the ginger. It really does help a lot.” She rubbed her stomach. “I must be the only girl that gets morning sickness in the afternoon.”

  “I was the same way,” I said. “Have you decided what you’re going to do yet?”

  “No, not yet,” she replied. “What did you do? Did you keep it?”

  “No, I had—” I paused for a second, shaking my head. “No, I didn’t keep it.”

  Once again, a stale feeling crept into the room. I hurriedly gathered my stuff. “So I’ll see you next week, okay?” I said, my mouth going at full speed. I felt like I was going to catch on fire in there. I had to get out of that house.

  “Okay,” she said. “Hold on a second. Let me grab my coat and I’ll walk you out.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, already heading toward the door. “I can let myself out.”

  I wasn’t sure if Sarah said anything after that—I was moving too fast to listen. My stomach had tightened into a huge knot. I felt like I was the one with morning sickness.

  I bolted out of the house and ran to my car. It was only after I was safely strapped into the driver’s seat that I stopped shaking.

  Maybe morning sickness was contagious after all.

  Helen Cassidy wasn’t really my aunt, although you couldn’t tell her otherwise. She was Mom’s best friend from college, the yin to my mother’s yang. Dad didn’t care much for Helen, but he still encouraged me to spend time with her. He knew I needed some connection to Mom, and Helen was the best I had. My mother’s parents had died when I was young, and she was an only child.

  Helen’s home was the total opposite of the Gamble house. The front yard—if you could call a few blades of grass and clumps of red clay a yard—was littered with leaves, cigarette butts, and whatever other trash the wind blew onto it. Her house was a simple two-bedroom structure with just enough room f
or her and her cats. More times than not, I pictured myself living in that very same house with those very same cats one day.

  I unlocked the door and crept into the silent house. “Helen, are you home?”

  The only answer I received was the purr of the fat, orange tabby sitting in the middle of the kitchen.

  I threw my stuff on the table and made my way to the backyard. If she wasn’t in the house, the only other place Helen could be was in her work shed. That was where she created all of her masterpieces.

  Helen was an art teacher by day, a master sculptor by night. Every time I saw her, she was working on her “next big masterpiece”—the one that would make her rich and famous. The last time I was here, her big thing was miniature castles made from kitty litter. Unfortunately, she had to abandon that idea when one of the cats mistook Buckingham Palace for the bathroom.

  Sure enough, Helen was in the little shack, sanding down a piece of wood. She looked up long enough to acknowledge my presence, before focusing her attention back on her task.

  After spending a few more moments sanding down the wooden plank, she held it up. I could tell she had been sanding down the piece for a long time. Mountains of sawdust surrounded her. Helen blew a few remaining specks of sawdust off the plank, before promptly throwing the wood into the garbage.

  “Why did you trash that wood?” I asked.

  She pulled off her goggles and facemask, and brushed wisps of reddish-gray hair from her pale, freckled face. “Don’t need the wood,” she said. “I need the sawdust.”

  I didn’t even want to ask what she was working on.

  Helen grabbed a small brush and dustpan from her counter and swept up her precious sawdust. “How did it go over at Sarah’s house?”

  My mind went back to my hyperventilating episode in Sarah’s driveway. I smoothed my plaid skirt over my thighs. “It was okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  I nodded. “For a preppy girl, Sarah is very sweet. I really like tutoring her.”

  “Is she showing yet?”

  I shook my head. Helen was the only person I had told Sarah’s secret to. Helen did a great job of keeping my secrets, so I figured she could handle one more.

  “Was anyone else over there? Her mother, perhaps?”

  I felt hot again, but I didn’t feel sick, like before. Now, it felt like my face was ablaze.

  “No, just her.”

  Helen laughed. “I don’t know who is a worse liar, you or your mother.” She took off her work apron, exposing her pierced bellybutton. “You want to try that again?”

  “Her brother, David, was there.” I traced a path through a pile of gravel on her worktable with my index finger. “He asked me to stay for dinner.”

  She deposited her dust into a container already filled to the brim with sawdust. “You have a crush on him, don’t you?”

  I thought about lying again, but decided against it. “Yeah, I like him.”

  “Okay,” Helen said. “Let’s go eat.”

  I frowned and followed Helen into the house. As she scrubbed the dust and grime from her hands, I could feel the knots forming in my stomach. Still silent, she made her way to the kitchen. I trudged behind her, slumped into a chair at the table, and waited for her to speak. She just rummaged through the refrigerator without even looking in my direction.

  “Well, are you gonna give me a speech or not?” I finally asked.

  Helen glanced at a label on the back of a jar of Alfredo sauce. “And just what speech are you expecting to hear?”

  “You know, the ‘You Should Be Careful’ speech. Or the ‘You Shouldn’t Mess Around With A Guy Like That’ speech.”

  “Why should I give you a lecture like that?”

  I rose from the table and stood in front of my aunt. I wanted to look into her face, but I found myself staring at her linoleum floor. “You know why.”

  She lifted my face up with her hands and peered at me with soft green eyes. “Because the last rich boy you had a crush on ended up getting you pregnant?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Because of that.”

  I hated that word: pregnant. Most of the time, I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. Certainly, a girl that could say Euclidian plane, dodecahedron, and deltoidal trihexagonal tiling (my personal favorite) shouldn’t have any problems uttering a simple word like pregnant.

  “I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.” She pulled her hair into a ponytail and turned on the stove. “Just don’t lie to me about it, okay? It’s hard for me to be on your side when I feel like you’re sneaking behind my back.”

  While she started preparing the sauce, I grabbed an onion from the fridge. Probably the only perk of not having a boyfriend was that I could eat as many onions as I wanted. Before cutting into it, I peeled off the old, brown layers. “I’m just tutoring Sarah long enough so she can get her grades back up. A few weeks from now, neither she nor her brother will remember I exist.”

  “Stop exaggerating.” She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “So tell me about this David boy.”

  I knew my face was getting flushed—I could feel the heat radiating from my ears. There were so many things to say about David. He was smart, athletic, cute, charismatic …

  I shrugged. “He’s okay.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’ve only spoken to him a few times. What else do you expect me to say?”

  “So why didn’t you stay?”

  “Because I had plans with you.”

  She took the bits of chopped onion and dropped them into the Alfredo sauce. “You know, it’s okay for you to start going out again.”

  “I’m too busy. I need to focus on my studies.”

  Helen sprinkled a few dashes of thyme to the mixture. “Isn’t your prom coming up?”

  “In a few months.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Of course not.”

  Helen sighed. “Hand me the pasta out of the pantry, will you?”

  I grabbed the box of fettuccine, and made a mental note of the location of a bag of cheese puffs. If we didn’t start talking about something other than my social life pretty soon, those cheese puffs were living on borrowed time.

  “Has Sarah made any decisions yet about the baby?” she asked as I handed her the pasta.

  Okay, maybe I was better off talking about David.

  “No, not yet.”

  “And how far along is she?”

  “Almost eight weeks.”

  Helen looked out of the window. Although there was nothing but an old wooden fence with peeling white paint in front of her, it seemed like she was staring at something else. But what she was looking at, I didn’t know. Maybe she was looking at the life that could have been. My life that could have been.

  “You know you have to help her make a decision,” she said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I won’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do.” I could hear my voice getting louder as I spoke. “She has the right to make her own decisions.”

  “I’m not suggesting that you force her to do anything,” Helen replied. “But she’s got to make a choice, one way or the other. If she decides to have the baby, whether she gives it up for adoption or not, that’s fine. But if she doesn’t …” Helen let her words disappear into the steam rising from one of her pots. “It’s better if she decides now rather than later.”

  I was nine weeks along when I finally told someone about my pregnancy. Up until then, I had been too scared to admit it. But as I broke down and told Helen the news, she said all the right words and did all the right things to comfort me. And more importantly, she sat beside me and held my hand when I broke the news to Dad.

  It was three weeks later when Dad finally “encouraged” me to end m
y pregnancy. As caring and gentle as the doctor was, I still got sick to my stomach if I thought about the procedure too much.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Helen turned back toward me with a goofy grin on her face. “I saved some magazines for you. I had to hide all the dirty ones, though.” She winked. “I’ll finish up dinner and call you when it’s ready.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, thankful to finally end our conversation.

  I headed to the guest bedroom. After tiptoeing across a floor filled with cat toys and scratching posts, I slid into the closet. A stack of magazines sat on an old wooden trunk. I threw the magazines to the floor and pried open the lid. All of my paintings, sculptures, and art notebooks were as I had left them.

  When most people at school looked at me, they probably thought I was just a chubby girl that liked to solve differential equations. But thanks to my mother, I also had an artistic side. The story was, one day Mom came home to find I had cut all the pictures out of her art books and pasted them on the wall. Dad was supposed to be watching me, but he was too busy staring at the back of his eyelids. Mom didn’t punish me, though. She took photographs of my “masterpiece” and hung them on the refrigerator.

  Over the years, I had dabbled in watercolors, pottery, and even photography. But after Mom died, I started making collages again. In a weird way, I thought it gave me a connection to her. Helen was great about it, always finding old books and magazines for me to cut up. She even let me keep my stuff over at her house. The last thing I wanted was for Dad to see some of my artwork.

  I pulled my scrapbook of collages from the trunk and sat on the bed. I flipped through the scrapbook slowly, taking time to run my fingers over my work. Some of the artwork was almost seven years old, but I could still smell the glue on some of the pages. I got to the middle of the scrapbook and paused. There was a blank page. Well, almost blank. A big, fat, red “A” was plastered to the center of the page.

  Like I said before, I hated the p-word. But there were other words I hated even more.