“Not for everyone though,” I protested. “There are people who have normal high school experiences. I bet Rush had a good time at that dance. I’m sure Lizzie did.”
“There’s no such thing as a normal high school experience, Thorny. You assume everyone else is happy all the time and living an ideal life. You don’t get that other people are pretending too.”
I finished my pizza and leaned back on the hood of the car to look at the stars. “Maybe. But it’s still easier for some people than it is for others.”
“Only for a while,” he said. “Look at Lizzie. She might have been a star in high school, but what then? Living in some shitty apartment, working as a waitress, and then one day disappearing. Her life peaked when everyone else’s was just getting started.”
“Unless she meant to disappear,” I said.
“What if she didn’t? What if she was killed? I know you don’t think she was, but she’s been missing for a long time without a trace.” Connor’s tone had turned serious. “You know how these things usually work out, Thorny.”
“I guess so.”
Connor lay down next to me. I thought he would keep trying to lecture me about Lizzie and then we’d argue, and then the night would be an even worse disaster. Instead, he looked up at the sky and said, “Do you know much about astronomy?”
“Not really.”
“Me either.”
“For a minute there, I thought we were going to have some cliché moment where you told me all about the stars,” I said, but I was happy he’d changed the conversation.
Connor laughed. “Not quite.”
“You could make up some stories about constellations, and I’ll pretend to believe them.”
“I’m an engineer, not a novelist.”
“Tell me something as an engineer then.”
He thought for a moment. “Want to hear a joke?”
I nodded.
“A woman asks her husband, an engineer, ‘Could you please go buy me a gallon of milk at the supermarket, and while you’re there, get some eggs?’ He never came home.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“I don’t get it.”
“Ah, well, while you’re there is an infinite loop. There’s no exit statement. So he’s forever at the supermarket getting… You know what? Never mind.”
I looked over at Connor. “You’re kind of a nerd, aren’t you?”
“Me? Look at what you’re wearing.”
I tried to keep a straight face, but that only lasted for about two seconds. I started laughing, and Connor did too.
And for a little while, that was enough to make me forget getting stood up.
• • •
It was late when Connor took me home. He insisted on walking me to the door, and I grabbed on to his arm as I stumbled up the driveway, my fancy shoes hurting my feet. I wondered how we would look to someone who didn’t know us. Like a couple coming back from a party, I guess. Like normal people.
We were a few feet from the porch steps when I saw Enzo sitting there in the dark, hunched over in his thrift-store suit.
I stopped abruptly and dropped my hand from Connor’s arm. “Enzo.”
“Hey.” He stood up and looked at Connor, then back to me. “Your brother said he didn’t know how long you’d be gone, but I waited anyway.”
Was I supposed to give him an award or something? Wow, Enzo, so great of you to wait around for a bit after totally ditching me.
“Did he tell you how long I waited?” I asked coolly.
“Yeah. He did.”
There was a long silence, and Connor stared at Enzo, and Enzo looked at me apologetically, and I just wanted to take off my shoes and change into comfortable clothes.
“Are you going to give me some sort of excuse?” I asked.
Enzo glanced at Connor. “You think you can give us a minute alone?”
“Ask Hawthorn, not me,” he said, and I was surprised by how annoyed he sounded.
Two sets of eyes stared at me. I felt like I was onstage, in the spotlight, and they were waiting for me to say my lines, only I couldn’t remember them.
“Uh, yeah, I guess that’s OK,” I finally said to Connor. “You don’t need to stick around.”
Connor hesitated. He looked like he had something to say but then thought better of it. He stuck his hands in his pockets and started to back away.
“OK. Well. Have a good night, Thorny.” He nodded curtly at Enzo, then took off toward his car.
The moment he left my side, I wanted to shout for him to come back. Or even better, I wanted to jump back in the passenger seat of his car and speed away from my house. My life. At the very least, I wanted to thank him for the pizza and for saving me from pathetically sitting on the porch like I had nothing better to do when Enzo showed up.
But I didn’t do any of those things, because acting so gushy would have embarrassed me, and besides, I had to deal with Enzo.
“Who was that?” Enzo asked.
“Why? Are you jealous?” I regretted it the second the words were out of my mouth, because he probably wasn’t jealous, just making conversation, and I sounded presumptuous, as if I was expecting him to get jealous over me, which was silly, given he’d totally ditched me earlier.
“You’re angry,” Enzo said.
“Well, yeah. You could have called. Or just not said you’d go to the dance with me in the first place.”
“I wanted to go to the dance. Really. I was planning on it. But then I was painting and lost track of time, and then I had to wait for the late bus.” He held up his hands in an I tried, but what can you do? gesture.
“You still could have called. I don’t care about the dance, but it wasn’t cool to leave me waiting like an idiot.”
“Looks like you found something else to do anyway,” Enzo said. I listened for bitterness in his tone and was disappointed there wasn’t any.
“This whole conversation is stupid. I’m going to bed now.”
I clumsily pushed past Enzo and up the porch steps, cursing myself again for wearing heels.
“Hawthorn, wait,” Enzo said as I opened the front door.
I turned back to him. Our eyes met. I held my breath, hoping that he could say something to magically fix the tension between us, to make me forget all about the dance.
“The, uh, the buses don’t run this late.”
“So?” I said. The buses were pretty much last on the list of things I cared about right then.
“Do you think you could give me a ride home?”
His request was so absurd that I thought he must be kidding. He wasn’t.
“No,” I said. Just no. No apology or explanation. It wasn’t the response that Enzo expected.
I went inside and shut the door behind me, feeling the tiniest bit of satisfaction.
Chapter 26
Howl
I used to think not being asked to dances made me a social outcast loser. That was before I’d been stood up for a dance. It was pretty much the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to me.
I was an idiot.
I should never have gotten my hopes up.
I shouldn’t have let myself think my friendship with Enzo was anything more than that.
A guy held my hand, and I decided it meant something, that he must like me, that there must be chemistry between us, that I must like him too, that a relationship was pending. Really, he’d just been scared.
I had turned into one of those stupid girls. A girl who obsessed over every little thing a guy did and thought it was all about her.
“Do you think I’m self-centered?” I asked Sundog.
He laughed. “Every teenager is self-centered.”
“Some of them don’t grow out of it,” I said, thinking about Enzo. Thinking about the pr
omises he couldn’t keep, because his stupid art was all that mattered to him.
I wondered if he’d ever stood up Lizzie.
What had she seen in him?
At first, I’d wanted to find Lizzie to prove that werewolves were real. I didn’t realize how many more questions I’d eventually have for her. If I could sit down and talk to her, just for an hour, my problems might be solved. If I knew what Lizzie really felt about Enzo, maybe I could figure out what I felt too.
The thing was, I had really wanted to go to the dance.
“Why couldn’t he just be on time?” I asked Sundog. “Is that really a lot to ask?”
“That all depends on the person. What’s simple to one person might be inherently challenging to someone else.”
“Are you saying it’s just too much for some people to be punctual? So, what, they just get a free pass?”
“It’s not the lack of punctuality that weighs on you; it’s what it means.”
I decided I’d gotten enough advice from Sundog for the day. I didn’t need him to remind me that Enzo was late because I wasn’t a person worth being on time for.
“At least I have you,” I told Timothy Leary, who was sleeping in my lap. “You’re always here for me.”
Sundog sighed. “Oh, Hawthorn.”
I looked at him, bracing myself for more bad news.
“The weather’s turning,” Sundog said. “We’ll be moving on soon.”
Of course they would be. If I’d taken time to think about it, I’d have realized it was getting too cold for them to sleep outside. But I’d gotten so used to having them in my backyard during the past two months, part of me felt like they were going to be there forever.
“Where will you go?”
“West. Nevada maybe. We haven’t been there for a while.”
“Nevada? What’s there besides casinos?” I asked.
“The Mojave Desert. You owe it to yourself to see it one day,” Sundog said.
I imagined Sundog sleeping in a teepee and skinning rattlesnakes and cracking open cacti for a few precious drops of water. I’d never been to the desert, but from what I’d seen in movies, it was a bleak, unforgiving place. It seemed too harsh for CJ, with his free association exercises, or Marigold, who offered light healing sessions in exchange for donations. The Mojave would suck the life from them. They’d wither in the desert, same as I’d wither in the Ohio snow.
“You’re, like, the only person I have to talk to anymore,” I told Sundog.
“You have yourself. You look to me for guidance when you already have the answers.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit here and talk to myself.”
“Don’t talk then. Paint. Dance. Write. Just don’t hold your feelings inside. The longer we let pain hide in our hearts, the more it turns to poison.”
In the time I’d known him, Sundog had never really made sense. But I was still going to miss him. He’d become a friend. Another friend who was ditching me.
I knew life was full of people coming and going. It was sad, but you dealt with it. You made new friends and moved on. Except for me. I only excelled at the part where you lost people.
• • •
The days after the dance were filled with awkward encounters.
I ran into Emily on the way to third period.
“Hey, I didn’t see you at the dance. Did you have a good time?”
“Actually, I didn’t end up going,” I said, feeling my face heat up.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “It’s just not really my thing. I thought I’d give it a shot but decided it was kind of a waste of time.”
I could tell from Emily’s expression that she didn’t believe me, not even a little bit.
Connor picked up Rush for some concert, and before they left, he asked me how I was doing and if the situation with Enzo had worked out OK. Like he thought I was super pathetic and would be all broken up about missing the dance. Which I wasn’t. Mostly. I tried laughing so he could see how trivial it was to be left sitting on the porch, how little I cared about homecoming or Enzo or any of it. It wasn’t Connor’s business anyway. Or Emily’s. Or anyone’s.
The other awkward thing had to do with the phone ringing. A lot.
Enzo kept calling, and I kept ignoring him. He left messages, and I deleted them.
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I didn’t want to think about Enzo at all. But to stop thinking about him, I had to stop thinking about Lizzie. So for the first time in months, I had nothing to think about at all.
The truth was, I couldn’t completely push Lizzie from my mind. One night when I was taking out the trash, I thought I heard a wolf howl, and my whole body tensed. I stood there—the lid to the trash can in one hand, the trash bag in the other.
I froze and listened, straining to hear. I shut my eyes to try to make my ears work better. The sound came again. Definitely a howl. Long and low and melancholy. It could have been dog, but it was different—more primal—than a dog’s howl. And there are no wolves in Ohio. It was Lizzie.
My heart pounded. My mouth went dry. I felt a shiver of excitement wind down my spine. In that moment, I was transported back to the abandoned house. Back to Enzo holding my hand and looking into my eyes while the world around us was super still and time sped up. When everything felt like magic.
I stood outside for a while, waiting to see if I would hear it again, but the night went back to making its normal sounds. Crickets chirped, and wind rustled dry leaves, and a voice drifted from my backyard where the hippies were gathered around their fire.
I threw away the trash bag and closed the lid, making sure it was shut tightly so the raccoons couldn’t get it. As I trudged back into the house, the world around me brightened. I looked up at the sky and saw that the moon had emerged from behind clouds.
No matter how much I vowed to push Lizzie from my mind, the moon always drew me back. My nightly reminder that regardless of what happened between Enzo and me, Lizzie Lovett was still out there. It the moon could talk, it would scold me for giving up.
That night, I tossed and turned while dreaming of being chased through the forest.
Chapter 27
Trick or Treat
Sometimes, when I’m upset with people, I pretend they don’t exist, because that’s easier than dealing with the problem. Then, eventually, I’ve pretended for so long that it sort of becomes true, and it’s like that person isn’t real to me anymore. Maybe that would have happened with Enzo after our fight. If things had gone a little differently, a few years down the line, someone might’ve said, Remember that guy, Enzo Calvetti? and I’d be like, Enzo who? and even though it might seem like I was faking, I wouldn’t be. It would for real take me a second to remember that—for a little while—he’d been important to me.
That didn’t happen though. I wanted to believe it was because there was something special about Enzo, but I probably just forgave him because he showed up at the diner on Halloween.
I was already feeling sorry for myself, which I’d mentioned to Vernon, like, eighteen times.
“Only because it’s my favorite holiday,” I said again.
Vernon didn’t get mad or tell me I was boring him. He was doing a Sudoku puzzle and pretty much ignoring me. Every once in a while, he’d start to bob his head up and down like a chicken, and I thought maybe that was his old-man version of indicating he agreed with everything I said.
“Do you know how many kids at my school don’t care about Halloween?” I asked, wiping down the counter for about the fifth time that hour. “But they still have parties to go to tonight. How is that fair?”
Vernon bobbed his head.
I threw down the dish rag and poured myself a cup of coffee. Last month, I’d started to drink my coffee black because that’s how Enzo drank it. He said anyone who used cream a
nd sugar probably didn’t like the taste of coffee, so what was the point of drinking it? I wanted him to think I was cool, that I was artsy like him, that I was a person who got coffee. So I swore off cream and sugar and tried not to wince at the bitterness when I took a sip, as if I were doing a shot of whiskey or something. That night, on Halloween, the bitterness tasted good. The coffee was too hot—it burned my throat all the way down, and that was good too.
Mr. Walczak was hardly ever around. He owned the Sunshine Café, but he didn’t know what it was like to spend all day there. That’s why he thought some ideas were good, even though they weren’t. Like the Halloween mix CD that we’d been playing all month. Really, it was just horror movie music, “Monster Mash,” and a few tracks of spooky sounds like chains rattling and owls hooting. The first time I heard it at the beginning of October, I thought it was kind of cool and festive, which was probably what Mr. Walczak intended. But when I realized there were only about ten songs on the CD, not even an hour of music, it lost its charm.
I felt like maybe, probably, I was about to go crazy.
Particularly when on Halloween, my favorite night, instead of doing something scary and fun and adventurous, I was working in a crappy diner, listening to stupid ghosts whooooing on repeat, drinking black coffee that I didn’t even like, and feeling pathetic and unappreciated in my hippie costume. The costume had been inspired by Sundog and put together mostly from my mom’s closet, except for the beads, which I’d borrowed from Marigold. Sundog had laughed when he saw my outfit, but not like he was making fun of me. He said soon enough, I’d be joining their prayer circle.
My hair was parted in the middle, and I was wearing Mom’s old jeans that were only a little too big and had patches sewn all over them. I had moccasins on my feet, because my mom said that’s pretty much all she wore when she was my age. They were real moccasins with leather bottoms, and I liked how silently I could creep around in them.
The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett Page 20
