It was the first time I’d ever met Courtney’s mother, but I was not surprised that she looked exactly like Courtney, only a little bit older. Not even that much older really, and I wondered if she’d had some plastic surgery. Ashley said that’s what everyone in California did.
Courtney’s mother dropped us off at the mall and promised to be back at twelve to get me home in time. Since she was a realtor she was always showing houses, and today was no exception. I thought it was a little sad that she didn’t want to come look for dresses with us. My mother always took Ashley to find dresses for the spring formal, and they invited me to come along, though I never had. This would be my first official dress-shopping experience.
Courtney started listing off what she was looking for as soon as we got into the mall. Strapless. Not black. Maybe navy or red or green. Empire waist. Above the knee. I found myself smiling and nodding but only half listening. I was sure she would look great in anything. And besides, I couldn’t get myself all excited about it anyway.
She dragged me to Dillard’s first, which is the most expensive store in the mall. My mother and Ashley hardly ever went there unless the store was having some kind of great sale (which it wasn’t). And it surprised me that Courtney didn’t even look at the price tags as she pulled dresses off the rack that she wanted to try on.
I played the role of clothes rack and enthusiastic nodder as she piled dress after dress in my arms, and once I was probably holding about fifteen and felt like I was about to fall over, I finally said, “Can we go try these on?”
She looked at me and laughed. “Oh, Meliss, I’m sorry. I got so caught up, I didn’t realize.”
I offered to wait outside the dressing room, but Courtney insisted that I come in with her. So we went into the big handicapped-accessible room at the end, and I sat on the little chair in the corner.
I tried not to watch as she slipped out of her jeans and shirt, but I couldn’t help but notice. She had on a lacy black bra with matching underwear, and she looked like someone who could model in a Victoria’s Secret catalog or something. Tiny little waist, curvy hips, and perfect breasts. It was hard to believe that she was the same age as I was, that she’d already grown into her figure and wore it comfortably, while I was still waiting for mine to materialize. Maybe it never would. Maybe I was going to be skinny and hipless and boobless forever. My mother said that some women were just built that way, like sticks and boards. I sighed.
“What? Don’t you like it?” She already had the first dress on, a red shiny strapless one that would’ve looked ridiculous on me but of course looked perfect on her.
“It’s great,” I said.
“Do you think?” She turned around. “I think it makes my butt look big.”
There was absolutely nothing about it that made her butt look big. “Not at all,” I said.
“Oh you’re just being nice. Tell me the truth.”
“I swear. It’s beautiful.”
She sighed. “Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.”
“What?”
“Keats.” She laughed. “Come on. Be brutal.”
In my head I thought, You’re a slut, and you don’t deserve Ryan. And it annoyed me that she also had to be smart, that she couldn’t be beautiful and ditzy but had to be beautiful and quoting Keats at the same time. But what I said was, “I really do like it.”
“Hmm.” She stuck out her butt and turned around and tried to check it out in the mirror. “I can’t decide. This can go in the ‘maybe’ pile.”
The “maybe” pile turned out to be my lap, and as Courtney tried on dress after dress, the pile on my lap grew to seven. The problem was, Courtney looked good in everything. She must have one of those body types that designers had in mind, because everything fit her, but in every single one she found some little flaw: Her boobs looked too small or too big; her stomach stuck out funny; or her shoulders looked flat. I couldn’t see any of it. To me she just looked absolutely stunning in each and every one. Disgusting.
Finally, I said, “You should just pick one. You look good in all of them.”
“But Meliss, I want it to be perfect. This is going to be our special night. You know.” She looked directly at me and smiled this little smile she had when she was about to do something that she knew might get her in trouble. It was the same look she gave me in biology just before she’d go to cheat on the test and copy Ryan’s answers.
I did know exactly what she meant, and it made me feel sick, right in the pit of my stomach. Then I wanted to punch her. I wanted to yell her stupid truth-and-beauty line back in her face and tell her she was hideous and a liar. I wanted to stand up and throw all seven dresses on her and run, and run so fast that I could run all the way to Ryan’s house and tell him who Courtney really was, because now it was entirely clear to me that I didn’t really even like Courtney. She may have been all shiny and pretty, nail polish and glitter, but underneath, as my father might’ve put it, she was a bad egg.
But Courtney, as usual, was completely oblivious to all of it, and when I looked at her again she was smiling and in the first red dress. “I think I’ll go with this one. You like it, right?”
I nodded sort of dumbly, afraid to say anything to her because this anger I felt for her was horrible and was welling up inside of me ready to explode, and I wanted to hold it in and use it to give me the courage to tell Ryan what I knew.
I got home around 12:30, and even though I knew we had to leave for Kevin’s ranch, I told Ashley I was going to find Ryan.
“No way,” she said. “I am not going to horse-shit hell alone.” She tugged on the end of my ponytail. “You can go find your boyfriend when we get back.”
“He is not my boyfriend,” I sneered at her, and in my mind I had this picture of Courtney in her perfect red dress, hanging all over him.
By the time we got back from Kevin’s, it was nearly dinnertime, but I hopped on my bike and rode straight over to Ryan’s anyway. All afternoon I’d been building my resolve, trying to rehearse this conversation in my head where I would tell him about Courtney and Mark, and he would thank me, and call her right away and break things off. And then he might say, Well, I already have the tickets to the dance, Mel, so we could go if you want to….
I’d sat next to Daffodil and petted her back while she grunted as Ashley rode Prancer around the arena. She was starting to look like a pro, and I was thinking that if the whole beauty-pageant thing didn’t work out, she could probably enter horse shows or something, but I didn’t dare say that to her.
I felt my heart beating quickly, the blood pumping fast and steady through my veins, as I rode to Ryan’s. I was nervous and scared and excited and joyous all at the same time.
Ryan’s father’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I put my bike down by the porch and rang the doorbell. Once. Then twice.
And then he opened the door.
He stood there rubbing his eyes. His sandy blond hair was sticking up in the back and he had on jeans and a white T-shirt and no shoes. “Oh hey, Mel.” He yawned. I pushed my way past him into the house. “Hey, what time is it?”
“I don’t know.” I hadn’t expected small talk, normal conversation, and I was itching to say what I had to say. I looked at my watch. “Four thirty.”
“Oh, crap. I’m supposed to be at Courtney’s at four thirty.” He ran into the powder room and threw his head under the sink, then tried to comb his hair with his hands.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Can’t it wait, Mel? I’m already late as it is.”
“No.” I grabbed his arm. “No. It can’t wait.”
He stopped what he was doing, and he looked at me. There was water dripping from his hair down his face, so it almost looked like he was crying, as if a cascade of tears kept flowing like a river down his cheeks. And with his hair wet he looked like that boy I knew in elementary school, the one who’d had an asthma attack in the middle of a fourth-grade math lesson and had fallen out of his
chair to the floor, causing Mrs. Tracey to scream.
“You found that woman you were looking for?” he asked.
“What? No.” I shook my head. No thanks to you, I added silently. But suddenly I wished that’s what it was, all I had to say to him, because oddly it seemed like that would’ve been less scary than this. I wondered briefly about what my grandmother thought Sally had done to my father, and if it was worse than what Courtney had done to him. “Sit down,” I said. He listened and sat on top of the toilet lid, while I went and leaned against the sink.
“Courtney cheated on you.” I blurted it out. I’d meant to ease into it, to try to soften it, but in the moment it erupted out of me, encased in this fear that if I didn’t just say it I never would, that I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell him. He didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “When she went to see her dad over Christmas in San Diego, she made out with her old boyfriend, Mark.”
“I can’t believe it,” he said, and I felt this oddly smug sense of satisfaction. “Mel. I mean, I just don’t believe it.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, I mean you. This is exactly what Courtney said would happen.” The words rang in my ears, hard and heavy, like an annoying song that was being blared out of speakers way too loud, so at first I thought I’d misunderstood. “She said that you were jealous of us. That you were going to try to tear us apart. And I kept telling her she was wrong. But really, Mel, she’s been so nice to you. How could you?”
I’d underestimated Courtney. Maybe she’d made out with Mark and maybe she hadn’t, but maybe she’d set me up by telling me. Maybe she’d wanted me to tell Ryan because she was the one who was jealous, the one who couldn’t stand the two of us being friends. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.
He stood up. “I think we’re done,” he said, running his fingers through his wet hair.
I knew he was right, that we were, but I wanted him to take it back, wanted him to reach out and give me a hug, or try to make me laugh, or ask me if I wanted to ride with him. But these things had all just disappeared in a matter of minutes, gone up in smoke heavy enough to transform the sky from something beautiful, brilliant, sunny, into something dark and dirty.
I let myself out. And when I got on my bike and started riding, I felt the tears rolling down my face, slow at first, then faster. I couldn’t even wipe them away as I rode, so I just let them keep coming, blurring up my vision, as I pushed my bike faster and faster.
I was riding toward Grandma Harry, because I knew that even though she couldn’t always remember everything, she was kind and loving and always happy to see me, and in some small way, that made me feel better about myself.
The thing was, the person I really wanted was my father. He was always great at giving advice or making me feel better for whatever reason. My mother had a way of brushing me off, whereas my father always listened completely and really seemed to take in what I was saying.
Right before he got sick, I auditioned to be in the fourth-grade play. It was some silly play about Sandra Day O’Connor and how she was the first woman on the Supreme Court, and I was sure I was going to get the role of her, the lead. I’d practiced the lines in front of my mirror for weeks, and my dad bought me this book about her life so I could study up and “get in character.”
Well, it turns out, I didn’t get the lead. I got the part of “Woman #4,” which basically meant I had one line, and I was part of this crowd of people who watched Sandra walk by.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mom had said. “Don’t feel bad. Not everyone can be the star.”
But my dad had taken me outside that night and lay down on the patch of grass in the backyard with me and said, “Look up at the sky with me, Melon.”
I did, and there were stars everywhere, the way it always was, bright and clear and sparkling with constellations that I couldn’t remember the names of. “So what?” I’d said.
“Point to your favorite star.” I looked for a moment and then pointed to the brightest and the biggest one I could find.
“You see my favorite?” he said. “It’s that one, back there, the one that you can just barely see.”
“Why?”
“The bright ones are just the closest ones, the ones we can see more easily. But that doesn’t make them spectacular. That star I pointed to looks magnificent in a telescope, much better than the other ones.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, skeptical.
“Because,” he said, “I’ve seen it before, and it’s absolutely stunning.” He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Sometimes people just aren’t willing to take the time to look beyond the things that are bright and big and shiny. You know what I mean, Melon?”
I didn’t. Not really. But in a way, I did. I knew he was saying something about the play and how I wasn’t all shiny and beautiful like Gwen Birch, who’d gotten the lead, or even Ashley, who had been thinking about entering a Junior Miss pageant that year. But that didn’t mean that, underneath it all, I wasn’t just as good as they were.
But my dad wasn’t here now, and I couldn’t even imagine what he might say to make me feel better about the fact that I’d just lost my best friend, that I was utterly and entirely friendless and that my social life consisted of Jeffrey’s quiet and nerdy adoration of me and my Saturday afternoon dates with Daffodil. Utterly pathetic.
I stopped in the public restroom in the lobby and splashed some cold water on my face, so Grandma Harry wouldn’t be able to tell I’d been crying. Then I walked toward her room.
I watched her from the hallway for a minute. She was eating what looked like chocolate pudding and staring at the TV. It sounded like the nightly news. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and combed it with my fingers, and then I took a deep breath and walked in.
She looked up, a little startled, and held the pudding up, as if she were about to throw it at me. “It’s you,” she sneered. “What is it? What do you want? I thought I told you not to bother me anymore.”
“Grandma it’s me, Melissa,” I said, fighting back fresh tears, because it was clear from her eyes that she didn’t recognize me, that I was not her granddaughter but some other person, someone she didn’t like. My mother had told us that this was a possibility, that sometimes her disease progressed in a way that would make her forget people, that when the memory ruptured, sometimes it started as a slow fissure, like when a tiny stone first hits a glass windshield. But then it kept on going, expanding, until it was a massive gaping crack, so bad that you couldn’t even see the road to drive anymore.
She put down her pudding. But she said, “Well, I don’t know any Melissa. You must have the wrong room then.” She turned back to the TV.
I should’ve let it go, but I couldn’t, because I thought if I pushed her to, she would remember, so I gave her what I thought was just a little mental nudge. “I’m Tom’s daughter. Tom and Cynthia’s daughter.”
She narrowed her eyes a little bit, looked me up and down. “Liar,” she spat at me. And then she picked up the pudding and threw it. I ducked and it missed and hit the wall. But the noise stunned me, like a firecracker had just exploded, right there, by my feet.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I backed out of her room slowly, and then once I hit the hallway, I started running as fast as I could.
It was dark outside when I got back on my bike and started riding. I knew if my mom knew I was riding in the street in the dark, she’d be mad. She always made me promise I wouldn’t, ever since the time a boy in Ashley’s grade had been hit by a car and killed a few years back.
But I wasn’t about to call her. She was probably out with Kevin anyway, and Ashley was out with Austin. So I rode my bike, slowly, in the bike lane, trying my best to watch out for cars. I wondered what it might feel like to get hit, if it would all be over too quickly for me to really know what had happened, or if the flight through the air off the bike would create a lull in my head, as if in slow motion, graceful and terrifyi
ng all at once, until I hit the ground with a thud.
I heard a honk, and it scared me enough to make me lose my balance and almost topple off, and then a truck pulled off to the side of the road. “Melissa McAllister, that you?” I recognized the voice, so I stopped and turned, and there, hanging his head out the window of a red pickup was Max Healy. “Need a ride?” he asked.
I was about to say no because Max made me nervous under normal circumstances, and right now I was a wreck, in no mood for any sort of company. But before I could answer either way, Max was out of the truck and asking if he could pick up my bike to throw it in the back, and I had no choice but to let him.
I’d never driven with anyone else from school other than Ashley, but Max was a more careful driver. I noticed that he stopped slowly and seemed very observant and cautious at stop signs, not exactly what I would’ve expected from someone as popular as he was—someone who drove around in a big shiny truck.
“So what are you doing out all alone on your bike at night?” Max asked as soon as he started driving.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Yeah? I’m a good listener.”
There was no way I was about to recount the embarrassing events of the afternoon to Max, so I just said, “I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” he said. “So where can I drop you?”
“My house, if that’s okay.”
I knew it was Saturday night and he was probably going out. “I’m sorry if I ruined your plans,” I said. “I mean you’re probably on your way to go out with the No—I mean, Lexie.”
He laughed. “What do you call her?”
“The Nose,” I said quietly.
He laughed again. “Why?”
I realized he probably didn’t know about her nose job, that maybe I only knew because she was Ashley’s best friend, but it didn’t stop me from blurting it out anyway.
“Oh seriously? That’s funny. I mean, her nose isn’t even that nice or anything.”
The Life of Glass Page 12
