Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  Taylor grimaces. “Like four shots of Jäger.”

  “Gross.”

  “Pretty much.” She sighs. “Are your parents home?”

  I shake my head; Taylor nods grimly. She juggles Steven’s limbs for a second, navigating him around the side table to get to the staircase. She only comes up to his shoulder.

  “What has an eye but can’t see?” he slurs cheerfully.

  “A needle, Steven,” I can hear Taylor saying as she drags him up the stairs. “I told you that one in second grade.”

  She comes back down a few minutes later, scooping her hair out from under the collar of her jacket and twisting it into a knot on the top of her head. It’s so thick it stays without a rubber band or a pin or anything, like she keeps it like that through sheer force of will. “Fucking hell,” she says, blowing out a breath, and I laugh.

  I’m expecting her to leave, but instead she plops down on the couch beside me, pulling the bowl of Lucky Charms over and picking out the last of the marshmallows. “How was your night?” she asks. She smells like cold air and beer.

  “Fine,” I tell her, wishing I’d done something to make me seem like a little less of a loser. “It was mostly, you know, this.” I gesture to the TV.

  “I love this show,” Taylor says, and we watch for a little while in silence. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together in what feels like forever. When I glance over, her eye makeup is migrating down her face a little, a smudge of jet-black liner just above her cheekbone. I want to reach out and rub it off with my thumb.

  “That’s better,” Taylor says, when the stylist cuts off all the dumpy woman’s hair. Then she looks at me. “I like your hair like that,” she says. “Have I said that to you already?”

  I smile. “Really?” It’s so short. It’s nineties boy hair, is what it is, floppy in the front like Devon Sawa and razored along my neck. I explained myself like six times to the Supercuts barber, and still he asked if I was sure. “My mom cried when I did it.”

  Taylor’s eyes widen. “Did she really?”

  I nod. “Not like, big theatrics or anything. But she went into the pantry for a really long time.”

  “Claudia,” Taylor says, which is my mom’s name. “Come on.” She pulls one knee up onto the sofa, tucking it under her and facing me head-on. Her own hair is still up in its tieless bun, curly and witchy and magic. “Well, I think it looks great.”

  I wonder for the first time if she’s drunk. “Really?” I ask, blatantly fishing now. “Not too much like Steven’s?”

  Taylor laughs. “Only if Steven was really girly looking and also maybe an elf.” She plucks another few marshmallows out of the bowl, hearts and moons and rainbows, then puts her hand down on the sofa cushion, so close that for a moment our pinkies brush. She takes just long enough to pull away that for a second I let myself wonder if maybe it’s on purpose. “He told me about your road test, by the way.”

  “Yeah,” I say, sinking back into the couch with my shoulders up around my ears. “It’s no big deal. I can take it again in January.”

  Taylor nods. “Well, I’m an expert parallel parker, for what it’s worth. I could teach you.”

  “Really?” I look at her for a moment, all apple cheeks and long, spiky eyelashes. If I kissed her, her tongue would taste like processed sugar.

  “Sure,” she says, standing up quick and steady—not drunk at all, then. “Come on.”

  “What, right now?” I glance down at my pajamas, a huge sweatshirt of my dad’s and flannel pants with holly berries on them. Every year, my mom gets us a pair to open up on Christmas Eve.

  Taylor shrugs. “Why not?”

  Why not. I give in, pulling on a pair of boots listing on their sides in the foyer, and we go out the front door and trudge around the side of the house. It’s started to snow, fat flakes sticking in Taylor’s hair. There’s only one other car parked on our street, a red Volvo down in front of the Fowlers’, and Taylor has me parallel park behind it half a dozen times, talking me through it with slow, precise instructions. She’s a good teacher, patient, not clutching her seat belt for dear life like my mom did the whole time I was learning.

  “See, you got it,” she says, ignoring the fact that it took me like seven full minutes to get close to the curb. “You’re better than I was, anyway. I had to take my road test four times.”

  I smile at that. “I remember.” She was a holy terror about it for weeks, functionally incapable of taking a joke, storming around our house slamming doors in a whirl of righteous indignation and hormones. My mom, a big believer in not disciplining other people’s kids, had to ask her to take it down a notch.

  “Can I ask you something?” Taylor pipes up suddenly, sitting back in the passenger seat, and there is a moment in which I nod but do not breathe. “Why did we stop hanging out?”

  Why did we . . . I shake my head. She’s got her face tipped toward me earnestly, waiting. “We’re hanging out right now,” I say.

  “No, I know,” Taylor says, waving my words away. “But the three of us used to hang out more, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah,” I say slowly. I think of pitching it like one of the riddles she and Steven are always telling: What has dark hair, bony wrists, and a miserable crush on her brother’s best friend and probable soul mate? “I guess we did.” We stopped right around the time Taylor finally passed her road test, actually, when she and Steven got old enough to start going to parties with booze and I got old enough to figure out that I didn’t want to be her.

  Taylor wrinkles her nose at me a little. “Well,” she continues, pitching her voice sort of theatrically. “There’s a New Year’s Eve party at Bodhi Powers’s house. If Steven isn’t still hungover by then, we’re going to go. You should come.”

  I think about that for a moment, about what it would look like. “Maybe,” I say finally.

  Taylor nods like I’ve already agreed. “Good,” she says, then reaches over and taps the steering wheel. “Go one more time.”

  Steven is indeed massively hungover the next morning. I take a perverse kind of pleasure in opening all his windows, freezing cold air whistling through the room and the bright morning sunlight reflecting off the snow outside. He groans and yanks a pillow over his face, throwing the other one at me blindly.

  “Need to puke?” I ask, taking pity as he suddenly lurches toward the edge of the bed. “I can get the barf bowl.”

  He waves me off, rubbing a hand through his messy hair. “Go downstairs and steal me a carb.”

  “They’re gonna know you’re messed up,” I say, but I do it anyway, swiping a sweater off his floor as I go, gray with a red Fair Isle pattern around the cuffs.

  “And stop stealing my shit!” Steven calls, but I’m already pulling it over my head.

  Downstairs, I select a banana and an English muffin, shoving it in the toaster oven as my mom wafts through the door with the morning paper. She’s probably been up for hours, running on the treadmill or sorting through the mail. Just the fact of her feels like a rebuke. “Hi there,” she says, cupping the back of my prickly head and tilting it down to kiss my forehead. “Did you leave a bowl of cereal out overnight?”

  Steven got drunk. “Sorry.”

  “It left a ring on the coffee table,” my mom adds. Then: “Is that Steven’s shirt?”

  “Sorry,” I hiss, shrugging out of her hold as the toaster oven dings. Sorry sorry sorry. I slam the muffin onto a plate and slather both halves with peanut butter and the fancy jam my dad always buys. It disappeared from the fridge the whole seven months my parents were separated last year, even though they were switching off who was living with us at the house. It was like my dad didn’t think it was his place to buy any more. Suddenly I’m mad about that too. Suddenly I’m so mad about all of it.

  My mom purses her lips. “Attitude,” she says mildly, and leaves me to my fuming.

  Upstairs, I plunk the plate down on Steven’s desk with a bang. “I’m not lying to them if you puke and they
ask me what’s up,” I warn, kicking at one of his socked feet.

  Steven lifts the pillow off his face, looking supremely unconcerned. “What are they gonna do, ground me?”

  He’s right, they definitely won’t. In eight months he’s going off to Columbia and our mom is quietly, desperately freaking out about it, like she’s feeling guilty for time lost during the separation but also, I think, like she’s afraid to be left alone with just me as her kid. And just like that I’m pissed at him too now, Steven and his self-satisfaction and his early decision and his easy life, swashbuckling his way through adolescence while the rest of us founder and drown.

  “You’re not an only child, you know,” I tell him, nastily and apropos of nothing. “I know you’re the favorite or whatever, but it’s not like they’re gonna have an empty nest.”

  Steven looks at me like I’m insane. “I’m not the favorite,” he says, sitting up and holding his head rather pathetically. “Mom is like, dying for you to be her friend again, you know that, right? She says it to me all the time.”

  I whirl on him. “She says it to you?” The idea of them talking about it just enrages me more, Rowena and her attitude and her situation. “What does she say?”

  Steven shrugs, preternaturally calm in a way that makes me want to deck him. “I don’t know, just what I said. That she misses you and wants you to like her again.”

  I shrug back, irate. “She’s the parent, isn’t she?” I snap at him. “She should try liking me first.”

  Steven opens his mouth, then reaches for the glass of water instead. I guess there isn’t anything to say.

  Steven doesn’t emerge from his room until past noon, shambling downstairs still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Subtle, Steven, I think, but true to form, my parents don’t seem to notice or care. We spend the day as a family, eating Christmas leftovers and doing a giant puzzle of the Lone Cypress. I sit at the kitchen table and put the finishing touches on the queen’s dress and train for Once Upon a Mattress, feeling like a spotlight is on me when my mom leans over my shoulder to watch. Gay girl still likes clothes, news at eleven.

  Still: “That’s beautiful, Ro,” she says quietly, touching the back of my neck with one cool hand, and I have to take a big gulp of orange juice to swallow down the weird lump in my throat.

  The next day I hike back out to Thomas Jefferson to sew up the design with Mariette Chen and another junior named Sarah Murray. “I love your style, Rowena,” Sarah says when I slough off my coat to reveal my big striped rugby shirt, which is how I know she doesn’t love it at all. “And your hair. I could never pull it off.”

  “Thanks,” I say awkwardly, just as Mariette says, “That’s dumb.”

  We both look at her.

  “Well, it is,” she says, shrugging. “No one ever says that about boys, you know? That they can’t pull off short hair. They all just do.”

  For the first time in my breathing life, I badly want to kiss someone who is not Taylor Lavoie.

  Steven picks me up at five o’clock, stomping through the linoleum hallways in his Converse and puffer coat to fetch me when I miss his text. Already he looks too old for this place. “Taylor says you gotta come to the party on Saturday,” he tells me, instead of hello. Sarah Murray is already giving him the eyeball, my pretty, dumb brother who never has to try.

  I snap a thread between my teeth, standing up and looking around for my coat. “Taylor says a lot of things,” I tell him once I’ve waved good-bye to the others, following him back down the hallway. “Probably she just wants someone to help carry you home when you pass out.”

  Steven flings himself elegantly against the push bar on the exit door. “I think she values you for more than your upper-body strength, Squish,” he says mildly, and for the billionth time I wonder if he knows how I feel about Taylor, the same way I know how he does. But that would mean Taylor knows too, so I stop wondering. “Just ask Mom and Dad, okay?”

  I do; it doesn’t go well. “I don’t know, Ro,” my mom says, frowning. She’s shredding up lettuce for a salad, lighter fare after two days of Christmas leftovers.

  “Steven is going.”

  “Steven is eighteen years old.”

  “Steven is seventeen and a half.” I feel hot all up and down my spine. The truth is, I was half-hoping she would do this—an easy out, political cover, “Sorry, Taylor, but my mom said no.” But now that she actually has, I’m furious.

  “Aw, Claud, let her go,” my dad calls from the living room. It should be nice to have backup, but instead I wish he hadn’t said anything it all; it still freaks me out when my parents present less than a united front on anything, even dinner reservations or what to watch on TV. It reminds me of right before the separation, of being caught in the middle: pick a side.

  “No, it’s fine,” I hear myself say, high and brittle like a wheeze. “I won’t go. I mean, at least if I’m here, you can make sure I’m not kissing a girl at midnight, right?”

  My mom opens her mouth. “Ro.”

  “No, no, seriously,” I say. “This works out for everyone. It’s perfect.” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hightail it out of the kitchen before I start sobbing.

  I stomp upstairs to my bedroom, slamming the door so hard that my rehearsal schedule flutters down off the bulletin board. I don’t bother to pick it up. After a few minutes my dad knocks on the door, pokes his head in.

  “Quite the performance,” he says. “You should be onstage instead of in the costume room.”

  I don’t bite. “She hates me,” I say to the ceiling. “She hates that I’m gay.”

  “That’s not true,” my dad says immediately. “Hey, uh-uh. She would run into a burning building for you, you know that.”

  “Do I?” I shoot back sulkily.

  My dad fixes me with a Look. “Yes, Rowena,” he says. “I think you do.” Then he sighs. “Teenage girls are supposed to hate their mothers,” he tells me after a moment. “Isn’t that a thing?”

  I snort, but it makes me smile. “Did you read that in a parenting book?” I ask.

  My dad rolls his eyes. “Anyway, she said to say you can go to the party,” he tells me, patting me on the shoulder. “If you want.”

  I sigh, look out the window at the pine trees. “Yeah,” I tell him. “I want.”

  New Year’s Eve, my mom orders a bunch of Chinese food for everybody, all of us camped out in front of the dried-out tree in the living room to eat and an old Law & Order on in the background. “Any word from Barnard?” my dad asks Taylor, while a couple of trench-coated detectives peer down at a mutilated body in Central Park.

  “Leave her alone,” my mom and I say at the same time, then stare at each other, surprised.

  “It’s okay,” Taylor says, but she smiles at me like thanks. I feel a pleased red flush creep up my neck.

  “She’s a shoo-in,” Steven says. “Probably didn’t even need to fill out the application.”

  Taylor shakes her head. “We’ll see,” she says softly, but there’s something about her tone that makes me think she knows Steven’s right. The two of them are sitting side by side on the floor with their ankles crossed; without taking her eyes off the screen, Taylor reaches over and steals a forkful of lo mein out of Steven’s bowl.

  I look across the room at them for a moment. Then I look back at the TV. Finally I pick up my phone and scroll through until I find Mariette’s number, press the button for a new text. Hey, I type, thumb moving quickly across the keypad before I can chicken out. You wanna come to a New Year’s party with me tonight?

  Thirty seconds later, my phone vibrates on the arm of the sofa. Sure, Mariette says, and I grin at the screen.

  When I look up, Taylor is watching me, quizzical. “What?” she mouths, tapping the tines of her fork against her bottom lip. When I shake my head, holding up the phone kind of sheepishly, she only shrugs.

  “I’m going to run home, change my clothes before we go,” she announces suddenly, scrambling up off the carpet. “
I’ll pick you kids up in a few.”

  When I come downstairs later that night, my mom is lying on the couch with a library book, a balsam-scented candle flickering on the coffee table beside her. It’s strange to see her in repose like that—when I think of her she’s always doing something, sliding earrings in on her way out the door or scrubbing hard at a day-old coffee stain on the kitchen counter. It occurs to me that maybe I haven’t really looked at her in a while.

  “You look nice,” she says, sitting up and marking her place with her index finger.

  “Thanks.” I’m wearing Steven’s jeans and the boots she got me for Christmas; I glance down at them, then back at her. “I really do like these a lot.”

  “I’m glad,” she says, and she sounds very careful. It’s me, I want to tell her. Come on, it’s just me. “Well,” she says finally, lifting her book a couple of inches and dropping it back into her lap again. “Have fun tonight, okay? Be good.”

  “Yup,” I tell her. “I will. Hey, Mom,” I blurt, before I can think better of it. “Do you maybe want to go to the museum one day before school starts?”

  Her eyes widen; she sets the book back down in her lap. “I’d love that,” she tells me, sounding almost heartbreakingly eager. Her smile takes up the whole bottom half of her face. “I—yeah, Ro. I’d love that. Just say the word.”

  The party is a rager out in one of the golf course developments, where the houses are built to look like they’re part of a quaint English village and the streets are named after characters from Robin Hood. I ditch my coat on Bodhi Powers’s little sister’s bed before going looking for Mariette. At first I think maybe she didn’t come after all, but after I do a couple of laps I find her standing by the fire pit in the backyard, where a scrum of football players is feeding supermarket firewood into the flames.

  “Hey,” I say, bumping her gently on the shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Kind of hiding?” Mariette confesses. She’s wearing a red wool cap pulled down over her ears, cheeks gone pink in the cold. It’s not a bad look. “I don’t actually know anybody.”