by Sara Kocek
Levi and I exchanged an eye roll while Lennie laughed. Clearly, the assignment was going to take a while. It was only halfway through the period—when Mr. Murphy left the room to make photocopies of our homework—that I finally stole a glance behind me to see who had the misfortune of working with Olive. To my surprise, she hadn’t joined a group. She was sitting alone at her desk, scribbling in her ratty, red moleskin notebook. At the corner of her desk, on a loose-leaf page, sat a finished Venn diagram.
Lennie saw where I was looking and tapped me on the arm with her pencil. “She thinks she’s so smart,” she whispered. “Just because she finished first.”
John glanced up. “Who? Olive Garden?”
Hearing her name, Olive stopped writing at once.
“You know which state she is, right?” John said, not taking care to lower his voice. “Florida. Flat and skinny.”
Olive didn’t look up. She just tore out a page from her notebook and crumpled it in her fist. Then she tossed the wad of paper into her backpack, leaned over her notebook again, and started writing something else.
My group turned our attention back to the Venn diagram in Levi’s notebook. Only this time I shifted my chair so I could keep an eye on Olive. She kept scribbling away, occasionally tearing out pages, crumpling them, and throwing them into the open mouth of her backpack.
Except on the fourth time, she missed. The balled-up wad of paper bounced off the backpack and rolled a couple of feet away on the floor. In an instant, Lennie swooped down, grabbed it, and threw it at my lap. I felt my eyes snap toward Olive’s. She had dropped her pencil on her desk and was staring at me, her face white with rage.
Feeling spiteful, I dug my fingernails into the crumpled wad of paper and pulled it open. There, in her tidy, cramped cursive, were two sentences:
Your sadness came pawing at my door like a lost dog.
I thought we were the same.
Before I even finished reading, John Quincy snatched the page out of my hand and called loud enough for everyone to hear, “Hark! The poet speaks!”
A few people laughed as he read the two lines aloud with emphasis on the word pawing. When he finished, he crumpled the page and threw it back at Olive, whose hands shook as she got to her feet.
And then, right as Mr. Murphy came back with our homework—right as John took a bow and the hat fell off—she stormed out of the room.
At lunch I found out from the Slutty Nurses that Olive and John Quincy had history. Their rivalry dated back to fourth grade, when she tagged him once during a game of recess dodgeball. Later that afternoon, he and a couple of other boys crept up behind her during art class and glued three petri dishes to the butt of her jeans. When she caught on, she whipped around and punched them both three times in the face.
When Lennie told me that John had walked away from the incident with a bloody nose, I almost said, “Well, he deserved it.”
But Gretchen spoke up before I could. “I was so mad! She could have broken his nose.”
“I know,” said Emma. “She almost did.”
Olive was sitting at the far end of the cafeteria, across the table from a chubby girl with a cello—Jamie Pollock. Usually Jamie ate with the rest of the orchestra, but today she was sharing a bag of pretzels with Olive, who was leaning forward across the table, probably on a rant about something. Jamie was leaning back, eyebrows raised, as though Olive were pointing a blow-drier straight at her face.
“Guys, look at Jamie Pollock,” I said, pointing across the room. “I think she’s Olive Garden’s new victim.” It felt good to use the nickname. Weirdly good.
“Cheers to that!” said Gretchen, holding up her carton of milk. “She’s doing our work for us.” Lennie clinked her juice bottle with the milk carton, and everybody laughed.
It rained on Friday, the day Levi was supposed to take me out for ice cream. I worried all through seventh period that he was going to cancel on me—we were supposed to walk to TCBY, after all—but when I showed up at his locker at the end of the day, he handed me the bigger of two umbrellas and said, “Ready?”
“Ready,” I told him, zipping up my jacket. If he had asked me to marry him at that very moment, I probably would have said, Ready to that too. How many guys even brought one umbrella with them to school?
On the walk to TCBY, our sneakers got soaked. It was freezing outside, and I didn’t feel much like eating ice cream when we got there. But once Levi convinced me to take off my shoes and socks under our table, I started to warm up to the idea. Then he sat down across from me with two chocolate milkshakes and asked promptly, “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You looked like you were thinking about something sad.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “You were staring into space like your dog just got hit by a flying saucer—”
“I’m not sad!”
He laughed.
“I was just thinking about frozen yogurt.” I pulled my milkshake closer to me and unwrapped the straw sitting next to it on the table. When I stuck it through the plastic lid, it made a soft screeching sound, like a badly tuned violin.
Levi was still smiling. “Why on earth would you be thinking about frozen yogurt? It’s not as if we’re at TCBY…”
I laughed. “My mom used to order chocolate yogurt with chocolate sprinkles every time we came here.”
“Used to?”
“Yeah.” I unwrapped my straw. “She died when I was seven.”
His face went white.
“It’s OK,” I said. “You didn’t know.”
“We can go someplace else—”
“Don’t be silly.” I smiled to let him know it was fine.
“So you were thinking about something sad,” he said. “If you were thinking about that.”
“Not sad, exactly.” I looked out the window, at the ribbons of rain on the street. The wind was blowing ripples across them, and it reminded me of music. “More like nostalgic.”
“Nostalgia is sad.”
“Not always.”
“Reyna?” He leaned forward as though he wanted to tell me discreetly that I had something in my teeth. “Do you believe in God? Like a God that sits up in the clouds and watches everything we do and say?”
I’d been about to take the first sip of my milkshake, but I stopped, my lips hovering a few inches over the mouth of the straw. “What?”
Levi twirled his guitar pick necklace around his finger and looked down at the swirled pattern on the tabletop. “I’m writing a song called ‘The O in God,’” he said. “And you seem like somebody to talk to about it.”
I sat up straighter in my chair. “Because I believe in him?”
“So you do, then.”
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t you?”
He thought about it for a second. “Not really.”
“Oh.” I tucked down my chin and took a sip from my shake. It was startling, like a cold flower bursting in my mouth.
“I mean, I did,” he said. “I used to. I mean—I sometimes still do.”
I couldn’t quite figure out why were talking about God and not other things, like music we both liked. Not that I minded. It was just a little strange, that’s all. I had a feeling Abby and Jeremy, or whatever his name was, didn’t talk about God on their first date. They probably compared their iPod libraries.
“I thought you were trying to be religious,” I said, recalling our conversation in Gym. It was one of the things I liked about Levi.
“Yeah, trying.” Levi sucked in his cheeks as he sipped from his straw. “Besides, you don’t have to believe in God to practice the traditions.”
“I would,” I said. “I would have to believe.”
“This is going to sound stupid.” Levi let go of his straw. “But do you think ‘The O in God’ sounds too much like the Owen God?”
“Maybe a little,” I said.
“My little brother’s name is Owen.” Levi looked down
again at his shake. “And the song is about how he found a bird outside our house and took it inside because it had a broken wing. Only we have a cat too, and last night she found the bird…”
I swallowed my mouthful. “Did she—?”
“Yeah. She ate it.”
“That’s so sad.” I looked down at Levi’s hands. He was spinning his milkshake between his palms, a small trail of condensation from the plastic cup leaking onto the table.
“And so I was just thinking about where it went, you know? The bird?” He stopped spinning the milkshake. “Is there such a thing as bird heaven?”
“I guess if the bird didn’t sin,” I said. “Then it would go to bird heaven.”
“How can a bird sin?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Coveting its neighbor’s nest?”
Levi laughed and took another sip of his shake—straight from the cup this time, not out of the straw. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sorry if that was a weird thing to bring up.”
I wanted to say, Not at all. I wanted to keep talking as though our thoughts mattered; as though we might discoversomething together, like on those rabbit hole nights with Abby and Leah and Madison. I wanted to feel like we were different, but different in the same way—different together. I didn’t know how to say that, though. So I answered, “Only a little.”
He took his straw out of the milkshake and set it down on his napkin. “I just want you to know that you can talk to me about dead birds anytime you want.”
“Thanks,” I said. And I meant it too.
It has to be dark.
Why does it matter?
The moon has to be out.
What are you, a werewolf?
Let’s go now.
It’s freezing.
It looks like a smudge of chalk
What does?
The moon.
Let me get this straight. You want us to walk outside in the middle of the night, while it’s snowing, and lie down on the train tracks?
In a nutshell, yes.
And do what?
Read Sylvia Plath poems with a flashlight.
Olive, I take back everything I ever said about you.
What do you mean?
You are disturbed.
11.
On Sunday morning, I went dress shopping with Lucy. Not that it was my idea—she conned me into it. When she knocked on my door at nine in the morning, I didn’t want to get out of bed at all, but I gave in after she told me she needed help picking out something Dad would love. Only when we pulled up to the bridal boutique on Hope Street did I realize we were shopping for her wedding dress.
The bridal salon was empty when we walked in. Little bells chimed against the glass door, but nobody came to greet us. We walked around examining lace and satin gowns for a while before a chubby blond woman with a birthmark on her chin came out and asked which one of us was the bride.
Lucy wasn’t the only the one who needed a dress though. I had to pick out a maid-of-honor gown—something in lavender, her favorite color. It had to be tea-length, chiffon, with sleeves. Those were the rules. I found three dresses that qualified and dragged them to the fitting room at the back of the store.
Lucy plucked six wedding gowns from the showroom and brought all of them with her into the fitting room next to mine. The chubby owner of the store trailed after her, lifting the trains so they wouldn’t drag on the floor. Then she helped Lucy climb into the first one while I tried on one of the lavender dresses, which I could already tell from the rack was going to be too low-cut.
Lucy pulled aside the heavy curtain a moment later, just as I was zipping up. “What do you think?” she asked, beaming at me in a soft, feathery dress that matched her haircut.
“Nice,” I said.
“Not bad for the first one, right?” She did a little spin. “I don’t know about yours, though—I think it’s too low cut.”
I could’ve told her that myself, but I didn’t say anything. Instead we pulled the curtain shut between us and undressed.
“This is fun, isn’t it?” Lucy asked through the curtain. “Everything here is so pretty.”
“Mmm,” I said, searching for the zipper on the side of my dress. Fun wasn’t exactly the word I would have used for being tricked into a shopping trip with Lucy.
“Have you ever been to a wedding?”
“Not that I can remember.”
She laughed. “You’d remember.”
I found the hidden zipper, buried beneath a layer of lavender chiffon, but before I could extricate myself from the dress, Lucy asked something that sounded like, “Are you cited?”
“What?” I began bunching the fabric of my dress to pull it over my shoulders.
“I said, are you excited about the wedding?”
I paused with my arms halfway in the air, the dress over my head. “Oh—yeah.”
“Good! I am too.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to say anything sarcastic.
“Reyna?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“Well, I am,” I lied.
“Would you cheer up for my sake?”
I pulled off the dress and stared at myself in the mirror—at the frown lines around my mouth. I had absolutely zero interest in cheering up for the sake of a woman who wanted to forget my mom ever existed. It popped out before I could stop it: “No thanks.”
“Excuse me?”
I sighed. “Never mind.”
“Is something wrong, Reyna?” Below the curtain, I could see the taut tendons in her bony feet. “I’m just trying to include you. I want us to be a happy family. I’m trying.”
“I know,” I said. “Never mind.”
“If you have a problem, let’s talk about it.”
I stared at myself in the mirror but didn’t say anything.
“Is this about the car accident?” She wouldn’t let up. “Do you still think it was my fault? Is that why you’re putting me through this?”
I opened my mouth to repeat, “Never mind,” but what came out was: “Of course it was your fault. You ran the stop sign.”
Lucy inhaled sharply. “I know, and I’m sorry! I’ve already apologized a million times.”
I ignored her, gritting my teeth and keeping my eyes fixed carefully on my reflection in the mirror. I knew what would happen if I closed them. A hundred awful memories lurked there, and I could feel them waiting, jostling for my attention. Leah’s backyard. A Sunday afternoon in August. The smell of wet cement around the lip of a swimming pool. Leah’s mom, standing on the porch with a cordless phone. The look of horror on her face.
From the other side of the curtain, Lucy asked, “Have you ever stopped to consider things from my perspective, Reyna? How bad I felt after the accident?”
I shrugged but of course she couldn’t see me.
“Your father was in a coma with a fractured skull,” she went on. “And I was the one who had to break it to you. Do you know how hard that was for me?”
I let out the breath I had been holding. “It couldn’t have been too hard after six hours.”
“What are you talking about?” She slid off a strappy silver sandal, and I imagined her standing there half naked, the wedding gown crumpled at her waist. Hate flowered inside me, huge and grotesque.
“Six hours,” I said. “That’s how many hours between the time you got in the accident and the time you called me to tell me about it.”
“That’s why you hate me? Because I didn’t call sooner?”
“No.” I wanted to say, I hate you because you’re not my mom and you never will be. But Abby was right. It was easier to blame her for the car accident or for not calling me sooner or for just about anything else.
“I waited to call you until he was stabilized.” Lucy said. “It was for your own good, Reyna. I was thinking of you.”
I couldn’t answer. A memory was pulsing behind my eyes—the memory—the one buri
ed like a coffin beneath the others. It had been a chilly spring morning in March. Not a nice day, exactly, but a crisp one. Mom had dropped me off at school in the morning and never made it home. A drunk driver clipped her on the highway. Her car flipped over just once, but that was enough. When I got home from school, I found out from our next-door neighbor. I had a little pink lunch box with a Velcro flap on top, and it was the only soft thing I could find to wipe my nose against when I started to cry.
A train of shiny, white taffeta appeared in my fitting room for a second below the curtain and then disappeared as Lucy pulled it away. My chest felt like a room clouded with smoke, with nowhere left to breathe. I dropped the lavender dress on the floor and sat down next to it wearing only my underwear. Then I gulped in a big breath of air.
“Reyna?” Lucy stopped moving. “Are you crying?” I didn’t answer, so she started to pull open the curtain. “Reyna, we have to get to the bottom of this—”
“Stop!” I yelped. “I’m not dressed.”
She let go as I sucked in another deep, shuddering breath. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, I wondered if I was having a panic attack.
“You know what? Let’s go home.” Lucy’s voice came through the curtain softer than before. “I’ll make you some eggs and we can talk about what’s really bothering you.”
“It doesn’t matter how nice you are to me,” I burst out. “It doesn’t change the fact that you’re not my mom and you never will be.”
Lucy let the words hang in the air.
I couldn’t explain my hatred for Lucy, but it bubbled on my skin every morning when I woke up and made me into a person I wouldn’t like to be around. I knew I was being unfair—I knew she didn’t mean to cause the accident, I knew she wasn’t trying to replace my mom—but I couldn’t let it go. Dad got sick of hearing me say I was “just tired,” but I never felt like talking to him. Instead I spent my afternoons hanging out with Gretchen and the Slutty Nurses, who only made things worse. I didn’t realize it then, but they wanted something from me. Every heart on this planet holds a tiny bit of hate, like a bead of mercury, beautiful and dangerous. They were out to own mine.
