by Beth Kephart
I had to take a running start to catch her. There wasn’t time to say what I was thinking.
six
The next day I waited for Riley to call. She didn’t.
I called her three times.
She didn’t answer.
seven
Two days later, Riley was, apparently, Riley. She had gotten to school before I had and pulled a beaded bracelet through the handle of my locker—beads like crystals, like little aquamarine chips that had been wired together in however many rows of five across. It was a Riley Special, fitted with a clasp. I put it on before I dialed my combo. Between third and fourth periods I saw her down the hall from me, caught inside a hurricane crowd. I raised my arm and the bracelet flashed. I’m sure I heard her laugh.
That afternoon I was hardly home when “You’re Beautiful” started singing. I threw my backpack down on the family room floor, then flew up the stairs, past Kev’s room and into my own. I said hello and flopped onto my bed. Riley said hi and I smiled.
“Great bracelet,” I told her.
“Yeah.” She was slightly out of breath.
“It’s not even my birthday, you goof. Or any other holiday that I remember.”
“I made the bracelet,” she said, “in anticipation of Juárez.”
“I should have guessed.”
“I’m making bunches.”
My thoughts tried to go where Riley’s had already been. “For the squatter girls?” I guessed.
“Won’t it be fab? They’ll be our hello-how-are-you presents.”
I got a picture in my head of all those crystals in the sun. Of Riley, swirled by a knot of girls, doling out fashion north-of-the-border style. Of Riley, thin as a sunbeam. “How many are you making?” I asked.
“As many as I can.” She seemed so pleased, so tipping close, again, to laughter.
“Mighty fine of you.”
“I’m that kind of fine person.”
“And generous.”
“My mom buys the beads. I just string them.”
“So, everything else is okay?” I asked. “You’re fine?” I thought maybe I could get her to talk about the mall—maybe I could lead her there, general questions tiptoeing toward the correct, specific ones; and yes, I know, I should have asked more, pressed harder about why her sweetness that day had suddenly gone sour. About what she’d seen in the mirror. About how she felt. About what the hell she was doing to herself. But Riley was acting like the old, regular Riley. Seemed so happy with her jewelry diplomacy plans that I let things be, pretended to believe her when she said, “Things could not be finer. And you?”
“Preparing myself for the afternoon onslaught.”
“The what?”
“Kev,” I said, “will be home in half an hour.”
“At least there’s noise in your house.”
“Noise?”
“The only noise here is my echo.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Wherever she goes to get Botoxed.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“Wherever he can make himself some real-fast Botox cash.”
“You can come over here, you know,” I said, though I had a paper to write, and Kev would be back any second, and Geoff was already in his room, the door to which he’d pinned with a sign: STAY OUT OF HERE, KEVIN. I’M SERIOUS. The afternoons were hardly ever mine, and Riley knew it, but still she was there on her phone, talking to my phone, hanging on. Suddenly there was something sad right there despite her seeming happiness—her sarcasm, which was her favorite cover.
I rolled off the bed and squinched my phone between my ear and shoulder. I started unpacking the books from my backpack. Stacking them up on my desk in a minitower, waiting for Riley to go on.
“Georgia?” she said at last, softly, as if worried someone beside me would hear.
“Yeah?”
“Sorry for being a jerk.”
“You’re not a jerk.”
“I am sometimes and so are you, but I want to tell you something.”
I stood straight up, balanced the phone on my shoulder. Walked toward the window and looked out upon the yard. I’m a jerk? I wanted to say, but I let it go; it wasn’t the time for off-topic tangents. “Anything, Riley. I’m listening.” I could see my reflection in the window glass. A little line of worry down my brow. I looked past me, to the sky, to the clouds, to a pack of blackbirds, all together like a gang. I looked until I didn’t see a thing.
“A couple of weeks ago I heard my mother on the phone. She didn’t know I was around, and she was talking about me. Like she does. You know how she does. She was sitting on that stool in the kitchen where she doesn’t cook a thing, with the phone up to her ear. She was going on and on about some shopping spree, and it was funny at first, so I was eavesdropping from the stairs. And then she started saying stuff that I didn’t want to hear, but I couldn’t move, and I sat there, listening.”
I closed my eyes so that I could picture everything—Riley’s mother in the spotless kitchen that’s big enough to feed a football team, Riley on the steps with her knees up to her chin. “What was she saying, Ri?”
“She was telling whomever that she couldn’t believe that she’d ended up with a daughter like me.”
“Couldn’t have, Riley, couldn’t have. I mean, that’s just not even—,” I started to say, but I knew Riley’s mother. I knew what a self-centered, self-congratulating Botox queen she could be. “You must have heard her wrong. There are five miles between your kitchen and those stairs, at least, for one thing.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my ears, Georgia. Plus it’s not even close to five miles.”
“Did she say—What else did she say? Was she referring to something specific?”
“She said I was average, Georgia. Average. Like that was worse than ugly.”
“You are not average, Riley. I swear to God.” All of a sudden I felt so mad inside, so big, hard-fisted angry. I felt like taking my bike and pumping the streets between my house and Riley’s—waiting for the Botox queen to show up at one of her million doors so that I could give her a piece of my mind.
“I don’t want to be average, Georgia.” Riley’s voice was unconvinced, and tiny.
“You aren’t. Not even slightly.”
“I didn’t tell her that I heard her, right? I didn’t want her to know? I didn’t want anyone to know, except—Georgia, I can’t get it out of my mind. I wake up, and it’s there every day. I walk around this house when my mother’s gone, and it’s like her words are here instead.” Riley said it as if someone like me had to give someone like her permission to walk right past her mother’s words.
“She probably didn’t mean it,” I said, lying because I had to, lying because that’s what you sometimes do for your best friend. “She was probably just talking the way she does, because it’s cool to her—the sound of her own voice—because she’s got so many friends like herself who live to be impressed. Or maybe she was drinking, Riley. Maybe—”
“It was five in the afternoon,” Riley interrupted. “My father wasn’t home. She wasn’t drinking, and I know she meant it. Think about it, Georgia: There she is, a perfect woman in a perfect house with a daughter she’s labeled average. Even my art, Georgia—that doesn’t count for her. An artist daughter is not what passes for cool on the Main Line. I don’t give her anything to boast about, and what is my mother without boasting material? What does she live for but that?”
“It’s sick and you know it, Riley.”
“It’s how she sees me.”
“It’s not how other people see you. Everybody I know wants to be your best friend.”
“Yeah, well. That job is filled.”
I felt my eyes fill up, my throat go hoarse. I didn’t have a fixing thing to say. “You’re a good person, Riley.”
“Except for when I am a jerk.”
“Yeah. But I still love you.”
Her voice was getting smaller. She was disappearing again, into he
rself. “My bracelets await me,” she said at last.
“They’re going to be so fabulous.”
“You’d better be wearing yours tomorrow.” She sniffed, and then she laughed; and that laugh was always the sign with us. That laugh was Move on, Don’t dwell, Think forward. That laugh was Please, don’t ask again.
“Wouldn’t think of doing elsewise,” I told her. And I meant it, forever and ever.
eight
My third panic attack happened during second period, April 3, sophomore year, right in the middle of AP English. Mr. Buzzby had written the last third of a poem called “Laundry” on the board, and I had been given the job of explicating the enjambed lines, of saying how they advance the poem, an assignment about which Mr. Buzzby seemed excessively proud. He called me up to the front of the room. He made me read aloud:
Two years gone and still your hand
lifts over the notes we sang to ease you
home. Winter, and the dark had fallen
through. Your future then
was the tricking back
past time. The smell of laundry
hung to dry. The strand
of pearls you dared to buy.
The day your mother
died. Your future was your sight,
which had gone before you,
and your words,
eclipsed now, too,
and your hand lifting over the notes we sang,
as if we might go with you, touched.
“How is the tension advanced by the incomplete syntax of the lines?” he asked. “How does the poem change speed and meaning upon the successive rejets?”
There are those who love to think out loud—the debate teamers, the Model UNers, most of the Young Democrats crowd. I respect that, even admire it, but I am not that kind of person. I’m the kind who raises her hand when she’s sure she’s right, after she’s had a couple of seconds to think. With his enjambment assignment, Mr. Buzzby had given me no time. He’d asked the question. I’d blinked. I felt the big bird’s wings start to flutter in my heart, my tongue stick like a boot deep in mud. I got hot and clammy and everything spun out, and nothing I could do got me on track. I just stood there looking like a blubbering fool while the whole classroom stared back.
“Great poem” is what I said, sitting down. Wanting to run, wanting to hide, so incredibly desperate to get out. There was a noose at my throat, and the rope kept tightening, and my heart kept banging, and I had no feeling in my arm, not a bit, and if someone had asked if they could help me, I wouldn’t have answered them. Everything’s closing in, I’d say, but they’d look around, they’d see the facts, they’d know that I was going crazy.
You can’t let people think you’re nuts. Not when you’re in high school.
For the next meeting at GoodWorks, my mother dropped me off at the curb so that she could get Kev to T-ball. Mrs. Marksmen, however, was not to be denied another round of turning up her perfect nose at bathroom and bunking scenarios. Riley sat at one end of the table, beside me. Her mother sat at the other, near Mack, as if she could leverage her beauty against his raw reports and make everything first-rate dainty in Juárez.
She so missed the point. She so didn’t know her only daughter. One daughter and no job. You’d have thought she could have gotten more right.
I watched her, I couldn’t help it. I thought about how bizarrely doppelgängerish Riley and her mother were—the same slivered nose, the same wide cheeks, the same model-worthy jaw. Riley’s mom had bleached her freckles. She’d had her forehead smoothed to silk by dried and purified botulinum toxin type A. She’d put everything she had into being beautiful, and Riley had committed exaggerations of her own—punching all those holes into her earlobe, striping her hair shades of neon sun and Mars red, painting her nails the color of some witch’s brew. And yet, a perfect stranger would identify them as family. In a couple of years they would be confused for sisters. That particular day, in early May, Riley was wearing an extra-large T-shirt over a pair of baggy jeans. Her mother wore a skin-tight camisole and a waist-hugging, flared Gypsy skirt.
“The point is this,” Mack was saying “We’re not just there to help. We’re there as emissaries of our country, exemplifying the best of America. Everything we do will be watched—what we wear, how we eat, how we are with one another, what we achieve, what we leave behind. Process is as important as outcomes here. The intangibles will weigh in against the facts.”
“So, and, like…” It was Jazzy, wild Jazzy, waving her hand, taking the stage. “What exactly will we be doing once we’re there? I mean, what seeds will we be planting?”
“Your question is my segue,” said Mack. He stood and walked to the light switch, darkened the room. He turned our attention to that part of the wall that was empty of transformation pictures as he flicked on the ancient projector. An aerial map of Anapra came into view. A couple of word slides on landscape and topography that described how Anapra, the squatters’ village at the edge of Juárez, slouched downward from some hills that were made of stone and crumbling to sand. Finally Mack got to Jazzy’s question, a smile on his sun-creased face.
“Right here,” he said, indicating the top of a hill with a pointer, “is a tiny community church, a community kitchen, the house where the community pastor and his family live, and also a soccer field, monkey bars. Between the buildings here”—he pointed—“is a narrow stretch of dry, white earth. It’s there that we’ll be putting up a bathroom.”
“We’re building a pastor’s bathroom?” the kid named Corey asked.
“It will be the community’s bathroom,” said Mack.
“The whole community?” asked Mrs. Marksmen, whose face, so frozen smooth, could not express the shock her voice emitted. Riley caught a glimpse of the frozen look too. I heard her drop one flip-flop. Disgust, maybe. Or shame.
“Two toilet stalls for men and two for women,” Mack explained. “A one-for-each shower on either side. Running water for people who have little to none. A place of dignity and well-being beneath a sweltering sun.” Mr. Buzzby would have called this oratory. Mack seemed delighted with himself—complete—and stopped.
“We’re building a bathroom?” Sophie repeated, not to verify but to question the logic.
“In two weeks?” asked Sam. Sam had, it was clear, recently blonded his hair. Bright shoots of it flew off his head like comet tails.
“We’ll be getting a bathroom facility under way,” Mack clarified, with the practiced patience that comes from doing who knows how much time in his profession. “We’ll level the land, pour the foundation, raise up the walls, hammer in a roof.”
“And what happens when we leave?” I wondered aloud.
“We’re planting seeds,” Mack said. “Remember? After we leave, we trust the community to carry the momentum forward.”
“Transformations,” Riley murmured.
“Yes.” Mack nodded. “Yes.”
“But where”—it was Corey again—“do we get what we need in a place like this? I mean, two-by-fours? Nail guns? Concrete mixers? Where is all that supposed to come from?”
Mack walked to the wall again, snapped on the light. He was ready for the question. He distributed the stack of papers that had been sitting there before him all along—architectural sketches, a series of lists, a page crowded with addresses and maps, health forms, permission forms, another list, this one a checklist. All you could hear for a time was the sound of paper rustling, the sound of sighs, whispers over sighs. The quietest person in the room was the biggest person in the room—a guy with a boulder for a head and with shoulders as wide as North America. He had these incredibly lovely eyes, and thick black hair that had fallen down across his face. I don’t think he moved so much as an eyelash. I looked at him, and then I looked down. The concrete would be hand mixed, I read. We’d each be bringing a hammer, a work apron, and gloves; we could forget about nail guns. A hardware store in El Paso would be providing the lumber, the cost of which was being covere
d by a sponsor. The pastor, who had helped to build a few buildings before, would oversee construction.
“Look.” Riley banged her elbow into mine. I registered the pain.
“What’s that?”
“So much for our Juárez trousseau.” She was pointing to a subsection on a page of lists titled “Attire.” Beneath the heading were instructions about drawstring scrubs and slogan-free Ts, shoes with closed toes, no heels. “How very special,” Riley muttered after I turned to glance at her.
“How not American,” I whispered back, but not softly enough, evidently, for Mack heard me.
“Georgia raises a key point here,” Mack announced, and all eyes went first to me before they trailed back up to him. I blushed. “When we’re guests in a place like Juárez, we dial ourselves down,” he said. “We project decency, and caring. No T-shirts advertising favorite rap artists or award-winning beer. No snug-fitting pants. No flashes of skin or of wealth. Wherever we go, we leave a mark. Wearing the right things is one of the ways we leave the right one.”
“You’re asking us to wear nurses’ pants?” Jazzy demanded.
“You’ll be grateful for the cotton in that heat,” Mack said.
“Happy for T-shirts?” Jazzy whined.
“Better than spandex.”
“And what about that heat?” Mrs. Marksmen asked in a tone that suggested that Mack should be doing something to fix it. “What about that?”
