There was something surreal about all of it, his voice, his body, his smell. I couldn’t believe that I was actually here, that this was me, dancing with Max Healy. The Max Healy. And that he was telling me, or at least I thought he was, that he liked me.
Just as it was finally about to sink in, when I was beginning to actually enjoy myself, I saw a glint of red out of the corner of my eye, saw the blond hair, heard the distinct, annoying laugh. Courtney.
She looked beautiful in the red dress we’d chosen, not even a hint of fat butt. Slim and slender and model perfect. Her normally straight hair was curly and looped on top of her head, and she was leaning on Ryan the way a certain kind of large and venomous snake envelopes and chokes its prey. She saw me, and she gave a little wave. So I waved back.
Ryan turned around to look at me, and I tried to catch his eye for a moment, but he was staring at me with this strange sense of awe on his face, as if he didn’t even recognize me with pretty hair and layers of makeup. Courtney pulled his face toward hers and started kissing him passionately on the mouth, so I stopped looking and put my head against Max’s chest again. It was a perfectly nice, muscular, great-smelling chest, but I still couldn’t get the image of Ryan, of the way he’d looked at me, out of my head. I wondered what he smelled like, if he’d borrowed some of his dad’s cologne for the dance or if it was just his normal and reassuring Ivory-soap-and-Pert-shampoo smell.
“You’re a million miles away,” Max said.
“No.” I took my head off his chest and looked at him. His eyes were deep and brown and a little crinkly in the corners, and they were kind and interesting. “No,” I said again. “I’m here. I am definitely right here.”
“You are.”
The song ended, but we stayed there dancing for a minute longer, through the first part of a fast song. Max pulled back first and offered to get us some sodas. “Okay.” I nodded.
He left, and I was still in the middle of the dance floor by myself, not quite sure what to do. I saw Ryan standing alone off on the other side of the gym, and I made a quick decision to walk over and say hi. I told myself that I had nothing to lose, that I was being the bigger person—and besides, I was at the dance with Max, and that gave me this new sort of confidence I’d never had before.
Ryan looked incredibly handsome in a blue suit. The only other time I’d ever seen him in a suit was at my dad’s funeral, and the suit had been too big on him then, had made him look like this scrawny little boy all dressed up in a man’s clothing. But this suit fit him, made him look smart and tall and strong.
“Hey.” I nodded at him.
“Hey.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, and he leaned back against a wall of balloons.
“Careful, you might pop something,” I said. I thought about how stupid that sounded and I wanted to take it back, to say something smart and witty and insightful instead, but nothing else came to me.
“So Max Healy.” He shook his head. “Not what I would’ve expected. But interesting.”
“I’m just…” I started to tell the truth—that I was only the Nose’s mono replacement—but then I didn’t because I wanted him to think that Max had asked me first, that he wanted only me, entirely. So I said, “I’m just not what you expect anymore, I guess.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“Hey, Ashley broke her nose and smashed her face up pretty bad last night.” I blurted it out because I was dying to tell someone the truth, dying for someone to notice that I was here, beautiful, and she wasn’t.
“Shit,” he said. “No way. What happened?”
“Car accident,” I lied, because I wasn’t sure how much I could trust him anymore, and if he told Courtney and she told the Nose in PE, Ashley would outright kill me, and then it wouldn’t matter how great I looked or if Max liked me or not.
I looked at my feet, at the way they sparkled prettily in the silver shoes, and I clicked my heels together three times just like Dorothy did in The Wizard of Oz. Then I closed my eyes and wished I could go back to that day when Courtney asked me if it was okay with me if she dated Ryan, and I wished I’d just said no and that I’d gotten Ashley to set her up with someone else instead.
“There’s your date,” Ryan said. I turned around and saw Max walking toward us with two cups of soda in his hands.
What I did next, I did entirely without thinking through, just spoke from my heart without running it by my head first. “I just want you to know,” I said, “that I was telling the truth. About Courtney, okay?”
“Melissa, don’t—”
“I swear it,” I said. “On my father’s grave.”
I turned around quickly before I could see his face, smiled at Max, and walked toward him.
Max and I danced a few more songs, and I watched as Ryan and Courtney walked out in the middle of one of them. I leaned against Max’s chest and tried not to imagine Ryan kissing her, pulling at her pretty red dress until it came off, until he saw her entire Victoria’s Secret body. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to erase the mental image, but it was still there, hanging around in my brain like some scene from a horror movie that I couldn’t get rid of, that just kept terrifying me over and over again.
We stopped dancing when our principal, Mr. Forrester, stood up by the microphone in the front to announce the winners for king and queen. In a way, it was kind of like Ashley’s pageants, everyone all dressed up and made up and waiting to see who would win, who was the most beautiful, the most popular.
Max squeezed my shoulder, and I thought he sucked in his breath a little bit. It was almost sweet, the way this was so important to him, but I couldn’t relate. I never understood why people wanted to win these things, like the beauty contests. I mean, who really cared if anybody voted for you or not? What was it all going to mean in twenty years anyway? It’s not like being Queen of the Rodeo had ever gotten my mom anywhere.
And the winners were—drumroll, please!—Ashley McAllister and Austin White.
Everyone was quiet as they searched the crowd, and it hit me that it might have been the first time all night that Ashley’s presence was missed. I tried to soak it up for her so I could tell her about it. All the looks on the girls’ faces as they arched and stretched to see her, what she was wearing and what her hair looked like. And some of their eyes fell on me and looked a little confused. Who’s that girl who kind of looks like Ashley? And I didn’t know Ashley even had a sister, they were whispering.
I leaned over and whispered to Max, “Sorry you didn’t win. I voted for you.” But before he could answer, I heard people clapping, and I looked up.
There with a black suit, gelled hair, and a swagger was Austin, walking up through the crowd and waving. Mr. Forrester put a crown on his head, and he walked off the stage and grabbed a girl to dance with. Not the queen of the formal. Not my sister. Not even an Ashley look-alike. But a cheerleader I knew Ashley hated because, as she’d told my mother on more than one occasion, the girl was a total boyfriend snatcher and slut and she wanted Austin.
I hated him, all his sweet talk to Ashley, his promises that he wasn’t going to go anywhere without her, the way he’d sucked my mother into to this big fake lie of the person he pretended to be. I knew Ashley could do much better.
When the song was over, Austin and the cheerleader brushed past me and Max on their way toward the door. Austin looked at me briefly, shooting me a warning look with his eyes as if to say, Don’t you dare tell her. And even if you do, she will never believe you.
I was feeling a little down after I saw Austin, and I knew Max could tell that something was bothering me because he kept asking me if I was okay. But I didn’t want to tell him the truth, because I knew he and Austin were friends, and I didn’t know him well enough to know how much I could trust him.
It was silly that Austin didn’t think he was going to get caught. Even if I didn’t tell Ashley, someone else was bound to. I couldn’t imagine that Austin could convince every single one of her friends not
to say anything to her. But maybe he didn’t even care. Maybe, despite all his promises, my sister meant absolutely nothing to him. And that’s what got me the most. The way a person could act one way and be someone totally different on the inside.
“You ready to go?” Max asked a few minutes later. There was technically an hour of the dance left, but people had started trickling out pretty dramatically after Austin’s dance. It surprised me that it seemed to be the cool thing to leave the dance early.
Max and I drove the short way to my house in silence. Not an awkward silence but a calm, sort of a contemplative one. He turned the radio on, but he didn’t turn it up too loud, so the music was soft and made the inside of his truck feel mellow.
When we got to my house, he got out of the truck and helped me down, and he walked me up to the front door. Before I could step on the porch, he reached down for my hand, and he turned and looked right at me. “Thanks for going with me. On such short notice.”
“Of course,” I said. I nodded kind of dumbly, and I started to feel a little nervous because his face was so close to mine that I could feel him breathing.
“I had a nice time,” he whispered.
“Me too,” I said. I knew it instinctively, that he was about to kiss me, though how exactly I knew I wasn’t sure, because no one had ever kissed me before. But I just knew, and I wondered if it was this instinct that women are born with, whether they are beautiful like Ashley or just normal like me.
I was so busy thinking about it that I almost missed it. So it felt like I hadn’t seen it coming at all, because suddenly his lips were on mine, and in my head I was thinking, Oh God. He’s kissing me. He’s actually kissing me. I was thinking so hard that I was hardly feeling. His lips were warm, and they pressed up against mine, and I pressed back, and I waited for fireworks, for tingling, for a numbness in my head or my heart. But then, just like that, it was over.
He pulled back, and he smiled. “You are absolutely beautiful, Melissa McAllister.”
I smiled, and then I turned and ran inside the house.
My mother ran to the door as soon as I closed it, but I wished she hadn’t because I needed a moment to figure it out. To decompress. Max Healy had just kissed me. He’d told me I was beautiful. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of it.
“Sweetie,” my mom said, and I could tell from her face, her voice, that something was wrong.
“What is it?” I said. “Is Ashley okay?” I pictured Austin and the cheerleader twirling around on the dance floor, but I didn’t know how she could’ve found out about it already.
“Yes,” she said. “She’s sleeping.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“Nothing.” She pulled me close to her in a hug. “Did you have a nice time?”
“I did,” I said. “It was fun.” And it had been fun. The dancing and twirling, the eyes watching me, the goodnight kiss. It was all something like a fairy tale, all very Cinderella at the ball, every little girl’s dream.
But for some reason I still felt this sinking, this heaviness in my heart. I didn’t understand it, how I could be beautiful and have had a perfect night, and I didn’t feel elated. I didn’t feel like jumping in the air and shouting. I wanted to go into my room and get undressed and wash the makeup off my face, crawl under my covers, and go to sleep.
“That’s nice, sweetie.” Her voice and her eyes were sad, and I wondered if it had hit her about Kevin all at once, that things would never be the same with them.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
She nodded. “Kevin sent flowers,” she said. “Roses. Beautiful, beautiful purple roses.” I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t know if she was looking for advice or approval or what, so I kept my mouth shut. Finally, she said, “You look tired. Why don’t you go to bed, and we’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
I nodded and thought that maybe she was right, that maybe the dull, blank heaviness I felt, that we both were feeling, was just exhaustion.
I went into my room and took my dad’s journal off my desk, and I flipped the pages until I found it, my absolute favorite love story, the one I’d modeled all my own after.
Mitch & Carolina
They met in June 1920, somewhere in a valley in east Tennessee. Carolina Caplain was a farmer’s daughter, and Mitch Robertson was a doctor’s son. Carolina was expected to marry and harvest corn. Mitch was expected to go to college, decide on a suitable profession, and marry a rich girl.
Mitch’s father took him to the farm to buy some fresh cheese, and while his father inspected the different kinds and the prices, Mitch wandered off a little and met Carolina, who was milking a cow. Somehow, he didn’t notice that she was covered in dirt and her hair was a mess, because all he noticed really were her eyes, deep green and piercing, and he couldn’t stop looking into them.
One night the next week, they snuck out and met in a cornfield owned by Carolina’s father, and they lay down in the towering stalks of corn and held hands and watched the stars go by.
They did this six weeks in a row, every Thursday.
And then, the next Thursday, they snuck out of the house again, got on a train, and ended up in Phoenix, which was as far as their money would take them.
They got married, and Mitch got a job working in a clothing store. Carolina got pregnant, and just before little baby Harriet arrived, they bought a small house on the edge of town.
In time, Harriet grew, and Mitch’s boss retired and sold him the clothing store, and then by the time Harriet was in high school he owned three. He worked really hard, and he made a lot of money. But still, every night he came home, he looked into his wife’s eyes and he fell in love with her all over again.
They were married for eighty-one years, until Mitch finally died first, at age one hundred. Carolina, who’d been an incredibly healthy if not spry ninety-nine-year-old, died in her sleep the next night. She just stopped breathing, for no apparent reason at all. (Well, other than the fact that she was absurdly old.) She died of a broken heart.
Now this, my father wrote of his grandparents, is love. This is 100 percent absolute love.
Chapter 20
The morning after the dance, the first thing I thought about was Max’s kiss and then in the next second I thought about Ryan and Courtney and their so-called special night and I pulled the pillow over my head and groaned.
I heard the phone ring somewhere in the distance, but I drifted back off to sleep, until Ashley limped into my room, nearly tearing the door off its hinges, she opened it so hard.
I sat up, and seeing her was still a surprise. The bruises on her face were more purple today, and the swelling was even worse than it had been yesterday. “Hi,” I said.
“What the hell?”
“Good morning to you, too.” I flopped back down under the covers. She ripped them off quickly, trying to inflict pain, the way you might tear off a Band-Aid from a cut.
“Max called Lexie and told him you two are, like, a couple now or something.”
I sat up. “A couple?” The thought that Max had actually said that made me incredibly excited and nervous and a little bit annoyed all at the same time. “We’re not a couple,” I said. She glared at me. I went back under the covers until she pinched the fleshy part of my thigh, hard, hard enough to leave a big red mark.
“Oww. Stop it.” I rubbed my leg. “He kissed me, okay? Just one kiss. No big deal.” Lie. Lie. Lie. It was a big deal. My first kiss. And this was Max Healy we were talking about, the guy every girl in school wanted to be kissing. But I wasn’t about to admit any of this to her.
“You are so going to get mono,” she said, and she had what I thought was a smirk on her face, though it was a little hard to tell with all the bruising. I knew she was only saying it because she knew it would get at me, because for once, maybe, she was even a little bit jealous of me.
But still I felt this little bit of fear creep up inside my stomach like some wild variation on butterflies. �
��Max told me he doesn’t even like Lexie,” I said, my only means of fighting back to try and attack the Nose.
“Don’t be stupid, Melissa.” She laughed. “Do you really think a guy has to like you to make out with you?” She held up her two forefingers in a cross, and said, “Well, stay away from me, all right? The last thing I need is your mono germs.” Which made absolutely no sense, because I was sure she’d spent more time with the Nose than with me, anyway.
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be kissing you,” I retorted.
She folded her arms across her chest and spun on her good foot to leave.
I could’ve called after her and told her all about the dance, about her winning, or about Austin and the cheerleader. But I decided not to.
After I got out of bed and took a shower and got dressed, I decided that I needed some time and some space to clear my head. So I snuck out my window and hopped on my bike. I wasn’t in the mood to tell my mother all about the dance or have Ashley sneer at me or see my mother’s purple roses stewing in a vase on the kitchen counter—thus the old escape route.
As I started riding, I thought I felt a little scratchiness in my throat. I wondered what the incubation period for mono was. I decided I’d look it up online when I got back. But maybe it was the warmer spring air, or the mesquite pollen that made Ryan wheeze this time of year. Even in the morning, the air was already thick and heavy with it.
I rode for a while, just letting my feet pedal me where they wanted to go, letting my hair blow back behind me, whipping around in the wind. I didn’t consciously decide to go ride in the wash, but that’s where I ended up, riding down the long, low stretch of desert alone, riding fast and furious and hard, until I could barely breathe and I thought my lungs were going to explode out of my chest.
I rode all the way to the train tracks, and I stopped when I got there to watch the yellow-and-black Union Pacific railway train glide by. I thought about my great-grandparents, Mitch and Carolina, whom I’d supposedly met a few times as a baby but had no memory of.
The Life of Glass Page 16
