by Teresa Hill
I don’t know how to say this without coming off like some crazed stalker. It’s not like that, honestly. But I’ve watched her grow up. I’ve spent a lot of time … looking at her, because I’m a guy, and it’s impossible not to want to look at her.
She gets prettier every year, sometimes it seems like every damned day. She’s gorgeous and perfect, and she really doesn’t know it. It isn’t some stupid girl game she plays. She really doesn’t get it, how pretty she is.
I get lost in looking at her, and when I finally come back to myself, she’s staring at me, looking uneasy.
“So, are we okay?” she asks finally.
“Sure.” I shrug, thinking I should try again to talk to her about Tripp. She’s not mad at me right now. But I’m still all amped up about my mom. I’d need to be really calm for a conversation about her and Tripp. Even on my best days, that’s tough.
“Okay, I just wanted to say I’m sorry about what I said at the carnival,” she begins. “You know I didn’t mean it, right?”
“Didn’t mean what?” In that moment, I have no idea what she’s talking about. I’m still thinking about how to get her away from Tripp.
“The whole man-whore thing? I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said it. I know you’re not like that. I was mad.”
Oh. The man-whore thing? Yeah, that hurt. Not that I’d ever admit it to her.
And no way in hell am I talking to her about other girls I’ve been with. I’ve wanted all of them to be her. Sometimes I tried to close my eyes and pretend they were her, which is shitty of me. And I know I’ve hurt her, when she’s seen me with other girls at school. So, I figure she gets to call me anything she wants.
“Forget it,” I tell her.
She nods, says again, “I’m really sorry.”
I nod my head, too. Nothing I can say to make this better.
“Well, I left your cards on the breakfast bar and … a little present I got you. It’s more of a gag gift than a real one. I thought it might make you laugh.”
“What is it?” I ask, because I could use a good laugh. God, could I use one. And some time with her the way things used to be between us. Easy and fun and so good. Just being her friend — as hard as it was sometimes — was still really good.
“I’m not going to tell. I wrapped it, with Lizzie’s help. She insisted, so when you see it, just know I’m not that bad at wrapping gifts. I couldn’t say no to her.”
Hardly anyone can say no to Lizzie about anything, me included, which should make for a rotten kid, but Lizzie isn’t. She’s silly and loving and happy as could be, adored by all and she knows it.
“Okay, this I’ve got to see.” I head toward the breakfast bar. We use one corner of it as mail and message central. If you want to make sure someone else sees something, you put it there.
“You should know, Lizzie thought it was a terrible gift.”
“Really?”
Dana nods, looking embarrassed as I pick up the small package with four bows crammed onto it. Lizzie loves bows, and getting four on there is a good trick, because the package isn’t much bigger than a deck of cards.
I go for the Lizzie method of dealing with wrapping paper. I tear it open like I’m out to make the biggest mess I can, and when I uncover a set of SAT vocabulary flashcards, I laugh.
Dana wants a perfect score on the SAT. There’s a family betting pool on what her score will be, and I’m betting on her — a 1600. She isn’t uptight about it, the way so many kids are. She knows she can do it and is approaching the test the way an Olympic athlete would — practice, practice, practice.
But she knows how to make it fun, too. Last spring, she convinced about half of our class to start using SAT vocab words in otherwise normal text messages with each other. The deal was, stump somebody with a vocab word in a text, and you get a point. She collects all the words that stump anyone that week, and sends out the list, along with the points standings.
We’ve all slacked off a little over the summer, but I’m sure once school starts, we’ll be at it again. The words have gotten more and more obscure as the contest goes on. People have never spent so much time with dictionary apps, trying to trip each other up.
She, of course, is ahead in the points total.
I open the deck of cards to find a vocab word on one side, its definition on the other. I shuffle them like I would a poker deck, then fan them out in a big half-circle and offer them to her to pick one. She does and hands it to me.
“No way,” I say when I see the word.
Verklempt?
“That is not a word!” I insist, holding it up to her and covering the definition with my hand.
“Yes, it is.”
“It is not. You made it up to mess with me,” I say, to mess with her, to get her all worked up and tease her, make her laugh, the way I used to do.
“Look at those cards. They’re real. I couldn’t make a card that looks that real.”
“Then the whole deck is a gag gift. You said so yourself. Verklempt? What the hell?”
“I swear, it’s a word. I can’t believe you haven’t at least heard it. Stephen Colbert uses it all the time. He loves this word.”
See, the thing about her little game? People make shit up, too. If someone throws a fake word at you, and you think it’s real, you lose a point.
“It’s a gag deck,” I insist.
She pulls out her phone, swipes the screen a few times and then holds it up for me to see. It’s open to her dictionary app. The other thing about her little contest—if I say it’s not a word, and it is, I lose a point for that, too.
“What’s it gonna be?” she asks.
“Type it in,” I say, because I love to challenge her, to see her this way, so sure of herself, so insistent, sparkling with enthusiasm and energy. “Do you even remember what you made up? Want me to spell it for you?”
“I didn’t make it up, and I can spell it, I think. E-M-P-T?
“Yeah, that’s it.”
And then she grins as she holds her phone up in front of my face again.
There’s her ridiculous non-word, except apparently it’s real.
Verklempt, originally German for overcome with or choked on emotion.
The way I feel when I look at her, when I stare at her and try so hard not to let everything I feel for her show in my face. Who knew there was such a perfect word to describe that?
Verklempt.
I laugh so hard, because it’s that or go into some kind of primal scream against the world and all its unfairness. I’ll laugh or die trying right now.
She looks surprised and then very pleased with herself, because I am truly verklempt. How did she manage to pull that card, with its perfect word?
“Wait,” I say, trying to play this off, not be so over-the-top emotional, “I want to see your phone. I wouldn’t put it past you to have a gag dictionary app.”
“I do not!” she insists, and at least I made her smile. She doesn’t look like she’s going to cry anymore, doesn’t look like I’ve trampled all over her feelings.
“Give me the phone, Dana.”
“Get your own phone. Use your own dictionary app. You obviously don’t trust mine anyway.”
“I think I left it in the basement.”
But Julie’s laptop is open on the dining room table, and a few strokes of the keyboard, and there it is, search results for verklempt.
“Going to accuse me of making up a whole fake Internet, so you can find my fake word there?” she asks, looking so pleased with herself.
“Nerd,” I say, but she’s not offended. She grins. Sometimes, I give her a hard time about how smart she is, but she knows I’m really proud of her. The girl works harder than anybody I know.
“Five weeks until the first SAT fall test date. We need to step up our game. You can think of a better word to throw at me than nerd,” she says.
Fine. I’ll play her little game. “Ameliorate,” I say. “How can I ameliorate my harsh words t
o you?”
“Better.”
“I didn’t mean to disparage you.”
“I would hope not,” she says.
It’s almost impossible for me to stump her with a word, but I think of one I believe can do it. It stuck in my head because it made me think of her, of this little word game of hers, that I could say it to her maybe without her knowing, at least at first, what I was really saying.
It’s hard to act like I don’t want her, and it means I hurt her over and over again, and I hate that. I just don’t see a way around it. I owe her.
“I have to get in the shower. Zach and Julie are taking me to dinner. Meanwhile, I’m sorry for my lachrymose behavior.”
She frowns, her brow furrowing. “Lachry-what?”
I grin. “Lachrymose. Look it up, nerd-girl.”
She doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to admit I stumped her. “You made it up,” she says finally.
“Really?”
She nods, looking so confident.
“So, a point for me, and you lose one, which makes us even on this conversation,” I say. “Look my word up when you get home. I have to get upstairs.”
“Okay. Happy birthday, Peter.”
“Thanks.”
For a minute, I think she’s going to walk over to me and put her hands on me. I’m still not wearing a shirt, still all sweaty from my workout. I both fear and hope those soft hands of hers will land on my biceps, maybe even my chest, and she’ll lean into me a little bit and kiss me, on my cheek. A friend kiss. A little happy birthday kiss.
But she doesn’t.
It’s better this way, I know. Still, sometimes I’d give anything for a little taste of that sweet mouth of hers.
She smiles at me and leaves.
I rush upstairs, shower, dress. Later, as Zach, Julie and I are walking out the front door of the restaurant that night, there standing across the street is Sam, looking very pleased with himself. It takes me a minute to recognize that under the bright glow of the streetlight behind Sam is my truck. When I get closer, I see that it has not only a new black bed liner but also a brand new paint job. No more black paint faded to near-white in spots. Now it’s a shiny dark blue, and they’ve even had someone pull out the worst of the dents.
“Looks good, huh?” Sam says.
I nod. “It’s … It doesn’t even look like the same truck.”
I turn to Zach and Julie, puzzled.
“Julie and I did the bed liner,” Zach says. “The paint and the body work are from my mom and dad.”
“Sam?” I say, because it’s too much. All of it with this family, all they’ve done for me, has always been too much.
Sam shrugs, looking happy as hell. “Can’t have you driving around forever in something that looks like a piece of shit,” he says softly. “You’re eighteen, kid. Happy birthday.”
And I am fucking verklempt all over again.
* * *
8
Dana
I have a crazy rest of the day. As I leave Peter’s house, I get a call from my mom, who has to go to work. She does evaluations for people who might need to be admitted to a local psychiatric hospital, something that can happen at any time, day or night. She needs me to babysit and is on her way to pick me up.
My fingers are still shaky from seeing Peter. It felt like so much more was going on than anything we said to each other. I don’t have time to type in the word he used, to see its definition, before my mom picks me up.
She drops me off at our house. Inside, I find chaos. Tricia’s a pushover. Jamie and Lizzie don’t listen to her the way they do to me. I worry about how she’s going to handle them next year when I’m away at college. She’ll have to be a lot tougher if she’s going to help Mom the way I do.
Mom sees counseling patients part-time, but emergencies come along, like the one tonight, and add more to her work hours. Life with four kids would be too crazy if she worked full time, she says. Plus, she wants to be here with us. She says it’s the best her life could be — being able to work part-time and have more time with us. Which worries me, because it looks kind of crazy, juggling all of us and her job, plus everything else she does.
But she seems happy. I do what I can to make things easier for her. I adore Jamie and Lizzie and feel guilty most of the time about how annoying I find Tricia. Mom says we’ll grow out of it and be close one day, that I’ll even miss Tricia next year when I’m away at school. We’ll see.
I get everybody settled down and warm up something for dinner. Eventually, Dad gets home, and I’m free. Before I can look up Peter’s word, Becca calls.
“So, no birthday party for Peter?” she asks. “Really?”
“No, no party.”
“That’s seriously weird. Who turns down a birthday party? You always clean up, present-wise, when you have a party, especially with your family.”
“I know.”
“Did you figure out why?”
At first, I was afraid it was because of me. Him avoiding me, pushing me away even more than usual. We do this, me and Peter. This maddening back and forth thing. I get too close, and he backs away. It makes me crazy.
But this was clearly not because of me.
“It was about his mom. I feel so stupid. I didn’t even think of that. She’s been released again.” I don’t tell Becca that Peter thinks his mom’s here, watching him. “I didn’t know until today that she was out. He didn’t want to have a party because he was afraid she’d show up. I think things must have been worse than I realized when he lived with her.”
“Worse like … how?”
“I don’t know. Peter always tries to act like it wasn’t that bad, but then, he would downplay it. I’ve always thought it must have been chaotic, but today, I rang the doorbell twice, and he didn’t come to the door. When I tried the kitchen door, it was unlocked. I called out to him because … you know … when you walk into someone’s house, you do that. And when I finally found him sitting on the basement stairs, he wouldn’t even look at me.”
“Why?”
“I thought maybe things had gotten so bad between us he was hiding from me, so he didn’t have to see me or talk to me. I was so relieved when I realized it wasn’t that, I nearly cried.”
Becca sighs. “Dana—”
“I know. I have to stop obsessing about him. But this isn’t about him and me. I think when I rang the doorbell today, he was afraid it was his mom, because when I finally found him downstairs, he looked so …. ”
Scared, I realize now.
He looked scared. I hated that look on his face.
“Looked like what?” Becca asks.
“He couldn’t be scared — physically — of his mom, right?”
“No.”
Of course not. He’s six feet tall now, maybe more, and has muscles everywhere. If I hadn’t been so upset myself today, I would have been completely caught up in how he looked standing there with his shirt off, that killer definition to all the muscles in his chest and abs. I did notice. It was impossible not to. But it would have been worse if I hadn’t been so determined to figure out what was going on inside his head.
“So, if it’s not that, if he’s not scared of her physically, what could it be?” I say, trying to work it out in my own head.
“Ask your mom,” Becca says. “She’d know, right?”
“Probably. Aunt Julie would know everything, I think, and she would have told Zach, and I bet Zach would have told my mom.” They’re close, and Mom works with a lot of teenagers in her practice. If Zach is lost about how to handle Peter, he either goes to my mom or my granddad. “Mom had an emergency. If she has to admit someone to the hospital, it might be morning before she makes it home. I’ll start with Zach.”
“So, that’s it?” Becca asks. “You two didn’t talk about anything but his mom?”
“No, but … did I mention I interrupted his workout, and that he wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of running shorts?”
“No, you did
not. Did he catch you admiring what I’m sure is one fabulous-looking bod?”
“I tried not to be too obvious, but ... ”
I sigh helplessly, thinking about how he’s gone from having the body of a boy to one that’s so much more a man’s. I’ve watched it happen, but it still surprises me sometimes, how different his body is. Not just all the muscles. He even has a little scattering of hair that fans out across his chest, then narrows into a line down the center of his body before it disappears into the waistband of his shorts. I get hot and tingly all over, just thinking about it.
“I wonder what he’d do if I walked up to him and let my fingertips trace that line of hair down the center of his chest and abs.” I’ve imagined it. I’ve imagined doing so many things to him.
“Right.” Becca laughs. “You are so going down his happy trail.”
“I might. One day.” Would he look at me like I was crazy? Grab my hands and pull them off his body? That’s what I’m afraid of — putting him in a position where he has to make it inescapably clear he doesn’t want anything like that from me.
“I’m waiting for the day you get that brave,” Becca says. “I’ll be cheering you on.”
Yeah, one day.
Becca says she has to go, and I finally get to look up the word he used.
Lachrymose.
There it is.
It’s real. I’ve lost a point for doubting him.
And the definition slays me.
Tending to cause tears.
That’s what he was apologizing for. He knows everything between us has been strained lately, and that I was upset about something. Even while dealing with his own crap with his mother, the kind of problems I can’t even imagine — he still felt bad and wanted to tell me he was sorry.
I’m near tears again.
And once more, I’ve been a very bad friend to him. He said he’d be eighteen, and his mother would never again have any legal authority over him. That he was happy about that. I took it at face value, never thought to question it.
