I flipped through the yearbook first, slowly. In his senior picture my dad appeared nothing like I remembered him, so young and handsome, and he had this look on his face that reminded me of the way Ashley looked at school, very important and in charge. I learned my father had been a part of the pep band, the debate club, the National Honor Society, and the drama club. And there, right along with him in both debate and drama, was Sally Bedford.
She was thinner and younger-looking in these pictures than in the one I’d found on the internet, and she had a much cuter bob cut and smile here.
And then when I flipped toward the back of the book, there was a picture of her and my dad. They were sitting on a wall together. She was leaning into him with her head on his shoulder. He had his arm around her, and he looked as if he was laughing, as if there was this sense of joy bursting right out of him that he just couldn’t contain.
I traced my finger over his face and then over hers. And for some reason I thought about me and Ryan, about holding his hand as we walked up the steps to our school the first time as a couple, about the intense way my body had felt alive and the way everything else had faded, become background noise. Maybe that’s what Sally Bedford had done for my father.
There were also a few loose pictures of them at what looked like two different formal dances. Sally wore a red puffy-sleeved dress and hung on tightly to my father, who had on a tux with a matching red cummerbund. In another picture they matched in an emerald green.
I flipped through the yearbook a little more and read what Sally wrote to my father, and then I read the letters. When I was done, I put everything back into the box and put the lid back on, and then I went and sat at my desk with my journal, picked up a pen, and started writing, until the real and the imagined blurred together into something that was part truth, part fantasy, but all the same felt like an answer.
Sally Bedford and Tom McAllister
The first time Tom McAllister saw Sally Bedford, it was the first day of his junior year. She was sitting under a paloverde tree eating her lunch. Everyone else gathered on the school grounds in clumps, but not Sally. She was new to school, and she was sitting all alone. She looked up and caught him watching her, and she gave a little wave. He waved back, though he felt his face turning red, knowing he’d been caught staring.
He saw her again later that week at the first meeting of the debate club, and then later that month at the tryouts for Guys and Dolls. Each time she gave a little wave, and he nodded. Tom had no time for girls. He was worrying about his SATs and his grades and having enough diverse activities to get into a good college, with a scholarship.
Sally was a senior and a very talented singer and a dancer. She won the part of Miss Adelaide, the female lead. Tom had only joined drama because his mother thought it would look good on his college applications, and he landed a part in the chorus. He suspected that it was only because everyone who tried out was guaranteed a part, because the director asked him not to sing louder than a whisper.
Sally was small and a little mousy, shy and a little wilted like a flower in the Arizona summer sun. But onstage she was brilliant. Amazing. Tom watched her sing from the back of the stage, and her voice, clear and bright like wind chimes, gave him chills.
One day when her understudy was practicing, she came and sat next to him. “You’re always watching me,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m not,” Tom lied. He cleared his throat. “You’re very special.” He knew how weird it sounded as soon as it came it. “I mean talented,” he said. Yes, that had been what he’d meant, hadn’t it?
“Thank you,” she said. She stood up. “Are you busy this weekend?”
He wasn’t.
They went to see a movie. She drove because she had her own car and he didn’t. “I don’t know what kind of girl picks you up,” his mother said, shaking her head.
“The kind of girl who has a car.”
At the end of the night she pulled up in front of his house. She turned off the car. They stared at each other. Silence. They stared some more. Finally, he said, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”
She laughed, and she leaned in and kissed him.
For a year they were inseparable. Every weekend she drove them out on dates. They became debate partners. He helped her rehearse her lines. They went to the fall formal and the prom. They spent the summer at the community pool under the lofty shade of the cabana.
In August she left to go to college. “We’ll still stay together,” she said tearfully. “I’ll come home every weekend. I’ll write you every day.”
When she left, he felt like a part of him had been chipped away, like there was this empty, burning pit in his stomach—or at least that’s what he wrote in a letter he never sent her.
She called a few times, but after two weeks her calls stopped. She’d promised to come home for Labor Day weekend, but she didn’t show.
Tom spent the weekend in his bedroom with his blinds closed. “You can’t just lie in here and mope,” his mother said, trying to rustle him out of bed.
“I can,” he said, “and I will.”
And then she sent him a letter, A Dear Tom, This-is-never-going-to-work letter.
He went back to his bedroom every day after school, every weekend. He couldn’t imagine his life without her. He suddenly understood what it meant to have a broken heart, because his hurt, and it was hard for him to breathe without feeling like he was suffocating (at least that’s what he wrote in another letter he never sent). His mother told him there would be other girls, but he just shook his head.
He dropped out of drama and debate club. He let his mother fill out his college applications for him, but he was no longer interested in Stanford. He thought if he went to the same school as she did, he would find her and win her back. His mother, secretly, did not send this application in.
Life went on. He got into other colleges. He met his real soul mate, Cynthia. He got a job, got married, had children.
And then he got sick.
And in the in between, he and Sally ended up working at the same place. Maybe they talked again. Maybe she apologized. Maybe she asked for help with her taxes. Maybe they had lunch and laughed about old times.
Or maybe they didn’t.
I put my pencil down. This next part I didn’t know, but suddenly it didn’t seem to matter what else had happened. I was sure that when Grandma Harry had mentioned Sally, mentioned the terrible thing she’d done, that she was talking about the girl who had broken my father’s heart in high school, not the woman he may have talked to again all these years later.
And that was absolutely all I needed to know. All I wanted to know.
Chapter 26
And then it was summer again.
Somehow, I survived my freshman year, passed biology with the help of Ryan, and even finished with an A in English, poetry and all.
In June Ashley got her new permanent teeth put in, and they are perfect-looking and even whiter and shinier than her real ones. Once her nose was fixed up, she admitted that she liked it better than the old one. It was sort of like she got the nose job she always wanted. For free.
She was training for the premier pageant circuit my mother had signed her up for, and my mother even convinced her to join a gym to get into shape rather than resort to living on carrot sticks.
For about a month after school ended, we actually got along. We slept late in the mornings, and then we got up and watched All My Children together while we were still in our pj’s. We lounged around on the couch like two bums, and we talked trash about all the soap-opera actresses and who looked fat and who didn’t.
And then one day, in the middle of June, Austin stopped by. He and Ashley went to sit out on the back porch and talk. I tried to watch out the window of the family room, but I had no idea what they were saying. They looked serious and calm and not mad at each other. After a few minutes they both stood up, and they hugged.
Austin left out the back, and sh
e walked back in. Her face was bright red from sitting in the heat, and she went to get a glass of water. “What did he want?” I asked.
She shrugged. “He wanted to get back together with me.”
“Seriously?” I said. “You could have any guy you want.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I told him I just wanted to be friends.”
She smiled, and I felt a little triumphant for her.
A few weeks later Ashley met a new guy at the gym. He was a tennis player and a sophomore in college—something she didn’t tell my mother, but I overheard her tell Bobblehead on the phone.
It didn’t take her long to ditch All My Children for scanning ESPN for tennis matches, and I decided if there was one sport more boring to watch than baseball, it was tennis. But for some reason I sat with her and watched it anyway.
By the beginning of July, Kevin had stopped sending my mother flowers. It was something we’d all gotten used to, the weekly FTD delivery. But we also knew it couldn’t last forever.
“What, no flowers today?” my mother said when she got home from work. Ashley and I shook our heads, and my mother looked a little sad.
“You should call him,” I finally said.
My mother cocked her head to the side and put her hand on her hip. “You don’t even like him.”
“He’s okay,” I said.
“You should,” Ashley chimed in quietly. Maybe it was because she liked her new face even better than the old one that she forgave him, because it wasn’t like Ashley to be the bigger person.
“No, I can’t,” my mother said. “It’s been too long.” She paused. “Hasn’t it?”
I shrugged. Ashley shook her head.
My mother pulled us both into a hug and said, “Oh, my girls. You’re both getting so grown up, aren’t you?” She paused. “Ashley, one more year and you’ll be off to college, and then before I know it, Melissa, you’ll leave me too.”
Ashley walked into the family room, grabbed the cordless phone, and handed it to my mother.
Ryan and I can no longer ride our bikes in the wash, since I am still without a bike. But still, at night, after my mom and Ashley go to sleep, I climb out my bedroom window, jump down into the crushed rock and the garden of purple lantana my mother is working on, and walk down to Ryan’s house. Sometimes we hang out in his backyard and watch the stars. One night, as we are lying on the small patch of grass, I tell him the truth about Sally, how my father had dated her in high school, and then when she went away to college, how she left him, just like that.
Ryan squeezes my hand. “That’s never going to happen to us,” he whispers.
“No,” I agree. “It won’t.”
Then, when the summer rains come, in the beginning of July, we walk to the edge of the wash and watch the river run through it, rough and terrible and almost like rapids.
Just before the end of July, when we know the water will soon disappear and the wash will be ours again to ride (or walk) and scavenge as we please, Ryan tells me that he has an idea. “Bring your glass tomorrow night,” he says. So I do.
We stand there on the edge of the temporary river, and it feels like the edge of the world. “How long did you say this glass would last again?” he asks.
“A million years,” I say. Now that it’s been so long, it’s a struggle to remember my dad’s voice, exactly what it sounded like. But I think I can still remember how it sounded when he said that. A million years. The way he stretched it into something stunning, so much longer than any of us could imagine.
“At the count of three, let’s throw them in,” he says. “Let’s let the water carry them.”
I hesitate for a moment. “I don’t know if I’m ready,” I say.
Ryan takes my hand, the one that is not holding the piece of glass. “You are,” he says.
He counts. One. Two. Three.
I hold my hand out and let go, and I watch the glass fly through the air and land with a small, graceful plop in the water, like a tiny stone.
I wonder where it will end up, who else might find it. And how it might journey on and on and on for what feels like forever.
Ryan puts his arm around me, and we stand there and enjoy the water for a while because, before we know it, it will be gone.
acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my editors, Jill Santopolo, whose overwhelming support made writing this book a dream come true for me, and whose kind and smart suggestions always make my stories shine brighter, and Ruta Rimas, who nurtured this book through to publication and whose enthusiasm and support have been nothing short of amazing. Thank you to Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray for graciously taking me in and giving this book a home. And an enormous thanks to everyone else at HarperCollins who has worked so diligently on my behalf.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Jessica Regel, without whom, I am entirely sure, this book never would have existed. Thank you for your always sage advice and your tireless support. I am also grateful to everyone else at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency who works on my behalf—I feel so honored to be a part of your amazing group of authors.
A big thanks to Sarah Shealy and Barbara Fisch at Blue Slip Media for all the work they did in getting the word out about this book. You two are a publicity dream come true!
Thank you to my wonderful parents and sister, Alan, Ronna, and Rachel Cantor, always an incredible source of love and support in everything I do, and writing this book was no exception.
Thank you to my children and to my husband, Gregg Goldner, not only for giving me the time I needed to write this book but also for making my world an infinitely better place. And for being my relentless promoter and web designer, Gregg, I can’t thank you enough!
And to my loved ones who have suffered from cancer, you were in my head and my heart as Melissa’s story came to life.
About the Author
Jillian Cantor has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona, where she was a recipient of the national Jacob K. Javits fellowship. Her first novel, THE SEPTEMBER SISTERS, was called “memorable” and “startlingly real” by Publishers Weekly. She lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.
You can visit her online at: www.jilliancantor.com or www.thenovelgirls.blogspot.com
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Also by Jillian Cantor
The September Sisters
Credits
Jacket art © 2010 by Fancy Photography/Veer
Jacket design by Jennifer Rozbruch
Copyright
THE LIFE OF GLASS. Copyright © 2010 by Jillian Cantor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cantor, Jillian.
The life of glass / Jillian Cantor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“HarperTeen.”
Summary: Through her freshman year of high school, fourteen-year-old Melissa struggles to hold on to memories of her deceased father, to cope with her mother’s return to dating, to get along with her sister, and to sort out her feelings about her best friend, Ryan.
ISBN 978-0-06-168651-1
[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Single-parent families—Fiction. 6. Family life—Southwest, New—Fiction. 7. Southwest, New—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C173554Lif 2010 2009001758
[Fic]—dc22 CIP<
br />
AC
EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199198-1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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