by R. K. Ryals
I don’t know why he’s telling me this, and I shrug. His family is large and loud, the smell of food and the sound of laughter often wafting from their back patio.
“Anyway,” he continues, “your uncle owns the junkyard on Maple, right? I heard he takes scrap metal. There’s this old car my nonno, my grandfather, used to drive, and I was wondering if you knew what your uncle would pay for something like that.”
It all makes sense now. Kind of.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Depends, I think.”
He nods. “I might stop by sometime and ask.”
Absolutely not!
Dread curls like an angry, coiled snake in my stomach, and I find myself blurting, “No!” too quickly and too loudly, voice shrill with panic before recovering with a softer but no less firm and no less panicked, “He’s not home much! His office is at the junkyard. It’d be better if you went there.”
Undeterred, he moves toward the stairs. “We’ll see.” Throwing me a wave, he smiles, cheeks dimpling. “Better watch that butterfly.”
I’m crushing it in my hand, and I loosen my grip. Watching him go, I can’t help but think Greece feels very far away at the moment.
Lifting the butterfly, I make it fly, the paper wings fluttering. Pulling my arm back, I throw it. It doesn’t glide. It falls.
I leave it there.
“PAIR UP!” IN chemistry, Mrs. Pierson has us stand at the tables, her wrinkled fingers crooked at the room, her old voice cracking.
She laughs, and it sounds like a cackle, a witch placing a curse.
Nearing ninety, Barbara Pierson is far too old to be teaching school, but there isn’t a soul alive courageous enough to tell her that.
Last year before going away to college, my cousin, Naomi, told a group of freshmen Mrs. Pierson had a Frankenstein in her basement, the body parts taken from unruly students.
Being sliced and diced sounds way more appealing than group projects. I’m that kid, the one that either ends up alone or paired up with the odd man out.
There’s a tap on my shoulder, and I spin to find Matthew Moretti peering down into my face. “Partner?”
Tabitha Grey, a junior I’ve been sitting with since the beginning of the year, stares, stunned.
My lips part, but no words come out because I’m stunned, too.
I glance down at myself, at the thin long-sleeve shirt I’m wearing with the cracked words Mon Chèri in French on the front, which I think means ‘my darling’ but could possibly mean ‘shove it’ because it once belonged to my adorably bad ass, gothic-hippy-witty cousin.
Yep, I’m still the same old Reagan in the same hand-me-down clothes and knock off Nike tennis shoes.
“Hey, Moretti! You? Me?” Carl Pace shouts.
Matthew ignores him, his gaze on my lips. “Well?”
Tabitha bumps me from behind, and my head bobs. Matthew takes it as a yes.
“Awesome!” He takes the seat Tabitha vacates.
People are staring.
I’m dreaming … or something. “I should warn you that this is my worst subject,” I say quickly, sliding into the seat next to his. “In case you thought I was good at it or something.”
He watches my face. “I guess it’s a good thing this is my best subject then.” Giving my shoulder a gentle fist bump, he flashes a smile. “No worries, you buddied up.”
He’s cocky, and while that wouldn’t work for most people, it kind of does for him. His fairy godmother is an over-achiever.
My fingers play with a text book, folding and unfolding the corner of a page. Agitation wreaks havoc with my breathing, my stomach a bubbling cauldron of nerves. I’m sweating, and for the life of me, I can’t remember if I put on deodorant this morning.
Oh, please—I start to pray, but then stop because my relationship with God is kind of complicated.
My gaze flicks to Matthew’s smug profile. “What’s this about?” I ask abruptly. “You speaking to me at the gym? You partnering up with me now?”
He glances my way, and I’m startled by how old he looks compared to the other guys in our class, like his mother feeds him Miracle-Gro-laced eggs for breakfast. His rugged face is too cut to be considered pretty. Until he smiles. The dimples in his cheeks soften everything, dialing back the chiseled features. He’s the perfect happy medium. I vaguely remember a gangly, awkward boy a few years back who stumbled over his too big feet.
“What? You don’t talk to people?” he asks.
“Not much.”
His eyes laugh at me. “My grandmother goes to church with your aunt.”
As if that explains everything.
“Okay.” I’m saying that word a lot lately.
He shrugs, lips moving silently, his gaze falling to the table, deliberately avoiding me. No longer arrogant but hesitant. The change in him is instant, so starkly quick I know this is it, the part of the play where everything goes wrong because guys like Matthew Moretti don’t offer to partner up with social pariahs.
“So, your aunt hasn’t said anything to you about me?” he asks. “At all?”
Uh oh. “Was she supposed to?”
He thinks about this, taking a moment to scratch his temple before turning to look at me. “Okay, so it’s probably best to say it outright. You know, lay it all out there on the line? I may have been asked to, I don’t know, friend you. Keep an eye on you.” He drops the words like a collection of bombs, each of them bigger than the last, the missiles exploding on impact, tearing me apart.
His fingers tap the table’s scratched, black surface. “I don’t like admitting I’m scared of anyone, but you don’t cross my nonna.”
He says it like he’s making a joke, or trying to make up for his bluntness, as if I’m supposed to be amused by all of it.
This is me, not amused.
“What?” I shriek. Half the class looks up, and I lower my voice. “What do you … wait a … do you … I don’t ....”
I have lost the ability to speak. Not that I’m strong in that department to begin with, but usually I can at least finish a sentence.
My stomach hurts, and hurling becomes a scary, imminent possibility.
Aunt Trish? His grandmother? Matthew Moretti and me? Friends?
Evidently, I have also lost the ability to string more than a few words together in my head.
Why?
He fidgets, clearly uncomfortable, and the truth sucker punches me in the gut—hard, fast, and painful. “You know about my mother, don’t you?”
He coughs. “Everyone knows about your mother.”
My eyes burn, and I blink rapidly, horrified. Because the only thing worse than this guy knowing about my mom is crying. Now. In front of him. “No, not that …” He’s going to make me say it, and I can’t. Overwhelming emotion chokes me, damming up my throat. “Never mind.”
Matthew sneaks a peek at my face, his eyes sad. “I know about the choice your family made.”
Out of an entire school of people, they told Matthew Moretti? I’m having a nightmare.
Covering my face with my hands, I manage—somehow—not to scream. My fingers fall away. “Making friends isn’t going to make me feel better about sending my mother away. You can stop now, okay? I’m not a charity case.”
“Not until my nonna is satisfied.”
Again with the amusement, like I’m supposed to picture his grandmother as the world’s most terrifying wrestler when I happen to know, personally, she’s the smallest, most optimistic old woman I’ve ever met.
I begin to rethink his wittiness.
My fists clench. “Lie to her.”
He shudders, a smile playing on his lips. “You wouldn’t say that if you really knew her.”
“Whatever.” Sitting back, shoulders stiff, my eyes dart to his face, to the way he focuses on my lips, and suddenly, I’m angry. Really angry. “Stop staring at my mouth.”
Matthew drops his gaze. “Sorry … it’s habit.”
“Staring at my lips is habit?”
“Not just your lips. All lips.” He gestures at his ears. “I’m hearing impaired. I have hearing aids, but for a while my family couldn’t afford them, so I got good at reading lips.”
His confession floors me, stealing my anger, and I stare. “I didn’t know.”
Turning his head, he points at a small device tucked into his ear canal. “And here I thought it wasn’t a secret.” He smiles, flashing the devastating dimples. “It helps being good at basketball. Get good enough at something and people don’t notice things like that so much.”
All these years passing him in the halls, sharing classes with him, living down the street from him, and I’d had no idea.
“You haven’t told anyone, have you?” I ask, out of nowhere. “About my mom?”
Mrs. Pierson writes on the board, the room filling with soft chatter. The smell of chemicals and dry erase markers permeates the air, leaving a sour taste on the tongue. The wheeze-roaring warm air gushing at us from the room’s ancient heating system sounds like an allergy-ridden, sneezing dinosaur. It’s too hot in here. Mrs. Pierson isn’t just cold-natured, she’s a corpse that never gets warm, and I have the least favorable table in the room because it’s next to the heating vents.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Matthew murmurs, answering me.
“Because of your nonna?”
“No.” He pulls at the neck of his shirt, revealing smooth, muscular skin beneath. “I wouldn’t say anything because I’m not that kind of person.”
“We’ll see.” I pull a piece of paper out of my notebook, folding it. Anything to keep my hands busy.
“You don’t trust people, do you?” he asks softly.
“Nope.”
“Not even a little?”
“Not even a smidge.”
He rubs his chin, his fingers finding the stubble he missed while shaving. “That’s going to make it hard to be friends.”
Throwing him a look, I nudge him playfully with my shoulder, which surprises us both. Together, we glance around the room, seeing if anyone noticed. “No worries,” I tell him, repeating the words he said to me earlier. “You friended down.”
Mrs. Pierson turns, and it quiets the room. When she talks, it sounds like the principal over the loud speaker. Some words make it out of the box, other words get lost in space. No one listens because she’s basically repeating what she has on the board.
My fingers work the paper in my hands. Greece is gone now, long forgotten, and replaced with real things. Scary, angry, and nervous things.
It’s supposed to feel good when the school’s star basketball player tries being friendly. When you’re a punishment he’s being forced to endure, it feels like crap.
My mother’s world is safer.
FOUR
My mother’s world
India
MOM IS UPSTAIRS, laughing.
Tugging on a hideous turtleneck sweater, Aunt Trish flies into the front hall, fanning herself. “You’re back! Good! I’ve got to run to the grocery store. I need you to sit with your mama for a bit.”
My backpack hits the floor. I want to say something to her about Matthew, about everything, but she’s moving too fast, like a hummingbird, so quick I can barely keep up.
Aunt Trish brushes past me, stopping just long enough to stamp a swift kiss on my forehead, the door clicking shut behind her.
My gaze sweeps the hall—over the wood paneling, the gold-framed pictures of me and my cousin on the wall, and the leather furniture my uncle insisted on getting last Father’s Day—before sliding up the stairs.
Mom’s laughter rises, and my lips curve with it.
“Where are you today, Mom?” I ask, walking into her room.
I talk to her, not out loud, because she wouldn’t understand.
“I feel lost today.” My face grows hot. “Aunt Trish conspired with our neighbor—at church, mind you, because, obviously, this is big enough even heaven needs a front row seat—and set up a play date with one of the school’s star athletes. Who does that? It’s like I’m in kindergarten all over again when you told Mrs. Fetterman that I’d make a good friend for her daughter, Heather, because we both had an obsession with stuffed elephants.”
Mom stands in front of a full-length mirror propped against the wall, pressing a flower-shaped sticker to her forehead, between her eyes … completely unaware of my internal monologue. Paintings, drawings, and sketches cover the paneling. Maps and books are strewn over the floor. A small television rests on a desk, the screen on, the sound on mute. She’s been watching the Travel Channel.
“India!” she cries, handing me a book.
It’s a copy of A Tiger for Malgudi by R.K. Narayan. Mom loves books. All forms of literature really. From all over the world. That’s what’s so odd about my mother. It’s like her mind needs knowledge but resists reality.
Wrapped in a sheet, she twirls in the center of the room. She’s too thin, the circles under her eyes too dark.
Cupping her hands, she lifts them, reaching for the ceiling. “We’re in the middle of the street, my jewel, surrounded by cars and cows. Hindu temples, so colorful, like a watercolor painting, line the road.” Her forehead scrunches. “There’s trash there, too, piled up. Cars honk. Tricycle carts roll past, carrying passengers.” Her fingers touch her nose, eyes distant. “Curry spices, stagnant water, manure … do you smell it?” She touches her ears. “They’re beating on drums. Feet pound against the road. There’s chatter and laughter everywhere.”
Suddenly, I am there with her, standing in the middle of a foreign street, curry on my tongue, the sound of sizzling rice and children laughing beating against my ears.
“Read to me,” Mom insists.
Grabbing a pillow off of her bed, she turns slowly, hugging it, her cheek pressed to the soft fabric.
Flipping open the book, I find the bookmark she wedged between the pages, and I read, “There was a jungle superstition about how the tiger came to have stripes …”
Mom giggles, seeing the tiger where I see nothing. The words I read are music she dances to, around and around, back and forth, inside her jungle.
She startles me with, “You need a sari!” Pulling open her closet, she tugs a sheet out of the top, wraps it around my body, and grins. “Bright purple because you look good in purple.”
The book is forgotten, open on the floor where it’s fallen.
I dance with Mom on an Indian street and dream of tigers until she stops, glances at me, and says, “I’m tired now.”
We sit together on her bed.
She unmutes the television. “Did you travel today?”
Every day, she asks me this question. Usually, I evade it, changing the subject, because my aunt says I’m not supposed to encourage her delusions.
Today, I surprise myself. Today, I want to talk, to pretend like she does. “I went to Italy,” I whisper.
Why, oh why, did I say that?
Mom freezes, her face contorting with excitement. “Oh! Tell me!”
Tears threaten, the sudden, sad emotion overwhelming me, and I lean into her, breathing her in, the television murmuring across the room.
“It was beautiful.” My imagination isn’t as big as hers. “I met an Italian boy, and he was handsome. We danced.”
You can quit talking now, Reagan.
She clasps her hands to her heart. “In the Sistine Chapel under the paintings?”
In my head, I’m spinning in Matthew Moretti’s arms. He’s too tall for me, and he keeps staring at my lips.
Why am I thinking about him?
I nod, and she sighs.
“We’ll need to stamp your passport,” Mom tells me.
My gaze flies to her desk, to a bent piece of cardboard covered in stickers. “Can we do it later?”
She holds me close. “No tears today?” she asks.
“No tears, Mama.”
Her arms are home, even if her mind is halfway across the world, and in this moment, I think I’ve never been happ
ier.
“I’d like to meet this Italian boy,” Mom says suddenly, knocking me into reality.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Matthew, but something about the way he’d looked at me at school, the way he’d ignored people just to sit with me, keeps him there in my head. The way he acted was so unlike the last boy who’d really spoken to me, and not about me.
