“Or Paris,” Sylv said, flicking a spoonful of grits at Jo, who retaliated with a spoonful of syrup.
I put up my hands and stood up from the booth, deciding I would rather not wear my waffles, no matter what Sylv said about the latest fashion in Milan.
When we got to the end of the block, Sylv set off for West Green Grove, while Jo and I set off for North.
“Is everything OK?” I asked when it was just the two of us. “I mean, with your dad?”
Jo shrugged. “Yeah. Fine. I guess.” Her chin trembled and I suddenly felt sick to the stomach.
Jo was not the kind of girl to burst into tears at the drop of a hat. In fifth grade she had split her shorts from the crotch to the waistband on the jungle gym. Melissa and the Mutts had been there to point and laugh and catcall. If it had been me, I would have run home in a flood of tears, but Jo had continued to swing upside-down from the monkey bars until I handed her my sweater to tie around her waist. If Sylv had been there I think she would have used my sweater to strangle Melissa instead.
“He seems… sicker.” Her eyebrows furrowed under her mousey bangs. “He keeps forgetting stuff, like how to change his colostomy bag and that I have my license now.”
“What about his doctor? What does he say?”
“She,” Jo corrected and then shrugged. “He has a check-up next week.”
I nodded and we continued to walk, in silence except for the scuffing of our shoes on the sidewalk.
When we got to my house I ran inside for a bowl of leftovers for Jo and her dad.
When Deb came out to see her “second daughter”, Jo let her hold her for a moment, before taking a couple of steps backwards, out of our front yard and onto the sidewalk.
“You have a cracked aura, sweetheart,” Deb said, following her through the gate. “Do you want me to fix it?”
Jo shook her head. She believed in that mumbo-jumbo as much as I did.
“Your dad will be OK,” I said, as she turned to go. “Yeah?”
She smiled sadly and nodded. “Yeah.”
OK, OK, OK, I thought as I watched her walk down the street, as if the rule of repetition could cure cancer.
Because Deb had it in her mind that she wanted to fix an aura, I gave in and let her practice on me. At least it saved me from the pan pipe for a few minutes. She was into her second week of music lessons, courtesy of a couch surfer called Fawn. It sounded like the wind through our broken back window.
I sat on a footstool that Deb liked to tell visitors had been carved by a witch doctor in Peru, but I knew her friend Jordie had bought it at Venice Beach.
“Focus on your energy vortex,” she told me, placing her hands on my shoulders and closing her eyes.
“My what?” I asked.
“I can see a red light,” she murmured.
I closed my eyes and was surprised to see a red light as well, until I realized it was the lamplight through my eyelids.
Deb clucked her tongue. “Your aura has died.”
A sudden lump formed in my throat, as I thought of how many times I had died in my dreams and the chill filled my stomach for a moment, before I made myself tune back into her voice. She was telling me to visualize my aura spinning around, and moving up and down. It was starting to sound like an aerobics class.
I burst out laughing.
“You’re ruining the vibe,” Deb complained.
Just then, Fawn came in to announce the rye bread they were baking had risen. “What do I do now?”
“Take it out of the oven,” I said, rolling my eyes and wondering how guys like Fawn made it out of Elementary.
“How about we continue this later?” Deb asked.
“Sure.” I knew not to hold my breath for part two. I guessed that Reiki would be as short-lived as palm reading and basket weaving.
When I went to bed, I thought about setting my alarm ten minutes earlier to give myself time to get glammed up. Then I remembered my joke about the box of tampons and flopped back onto my pillow, thinking about Tom and how his eyebrows had furrowed at my comment.
Dumb, I thought, slapping my forehead with my palm.
I closed my eyes and recalled his profile – that chiseled brow, nose, cheeks and chin, and, of course, the scar.
Tom was on my mind as I drifted off and I wondered in that moment between wake and sleep if I could make myself dream about him, instead of about the man in the balaclava. But it turned out the man in the balaclava was ready and waiting.
In this dream, I was standing stock-still, my breath ragged from running. I was in a courtyard paved with the same uneven flagstones from my other dreams. A fountain was to my left, the man in the balaclava in front. He was moving towards me and I stumbled backwards, hemmed in by manicured hedges. My hands went to my stomach instinctively and I looked down, my eyes growing wide with wonderment. It was swollen, extended, as if I were pregnant.
“Tom!” I screamed. “Tom!”
4
It was two weeks before I processed the photos of Sylv. “I know, I know, tomorrow!” became my catchphrase.
You have to understand that Sylv wanted to be a model like Cinderella wanted to go to the ball. When we were in Elementary, Sylv and Melissa used to rope us into doing runway shows in my backyard. I had taken the photos and Jo had assembled the audience; family and friends, and whatever couch surfers had been staying with us at the time.
But while Sylv had been on my case about the photos, in the two weeks since school started there had been no close encounters of any kind between me and Tom. World History was the one class we had together, but he sat up front with Melissa. He had French with Sylv, but she said he sat on his own and had spoken once in his first week when the teacher called on him to answer a question.
“He got it wrong.”
“He seems smart in physics,” Jo offered.
His background had remained the subject of speculation and walking down the corridors was like downloading a podcast that broadcast news about him 24/7. Names of English boarding schools were thrown around like confetti and rumors ran rampant of someone knowing someone, who knew someone else, who may or may not have bumped into him pre-Green Grove.
There was a lot of giggling and fluttering of eyelashes from the freshman and sophomore girls whenever he was within a mile radius. A few of the senior girls had plucked up the courage to ask him out, but were turned down. I heard a few college girls had as well. But we juniors knew that Melissa had dibs on Tom. She hung onto his arm like a leech with a fake tan.
He sat with her at lunch on her table near the noticeboard, but while others would have kissed the bottom of their this-season pumps to sit with Melissa and the Mutts, Tom continued to look bored by them, and by Green Grove in general. He seemed to spend a lot of time staring at his lunch tray or at the ground. I heard a rumor he had not spoken more than a few words to Melissa.
I tried not to look at him, because when I did I remembered my dream and my hand went to my stomach. But it was like trying not to look at a brilliantly cut diamond.
I know what it sounds like: like Sylv had been pushed down my to-do list because I was otherwise occupied with Tom. But you can blame the man in the balaclava. I was jumping at shadows, as if my killer was going to pop out from behind the vault horse in the gymnasium or climb out from under a table in the cafeteria. A few of my dreams had been set in the darkroom too, which had turned this former heaven into a kind of hell and made me avoid it.
Deb had come within an inch of a black eye when she had woken me at the crack of dawn on Sunday. I had decided not to apologize when I heard her reason.
“OK! OK!” she had yelped, rubbing her jaw where my swing had connected. “Fawn and I will watch the sunrise on our own then.”
It made me wonder if my mother knew me at all. I mean, in what universe would I want to sit on the damp lawn in my pajamas and watch the sunrise with a guy who plays the pan pipe?
The next day I decided to bite the bullet and develop the film for Sy
lv. I walked down to the art block, which was buried at the back of the school, about a hundred yards from the main building.
“Like a fish in a barrel,” I whispered, closing the door on the outside world.
I told myself I was being silly as I placed the film into the developer, but my heart continued to thud as I rocked the tray, letting the soup slosh across the negatives. I tried not to think about how much the liquid looked like blood under the red light.
My silliness increased tenfold when I came back at lunch to do the prints. As I focused on the negative, I thought I could hear breathing other than my own. I froze, as rigid as an ice sculpture, and the sound stopped.
My ears were like antennae searching for a signal. I could hear a faucet dripping in the basin behind me and the light above my head hummed like an old refrigerator. I let out my own breath with a sudden whoosh, before returning to my print. Of course, that was when the sound started again.
It was about five or six minutes later, after I had checked under the tables and in the cupboard, that I put two and two together and realized the noise was the sound of the bellows on the antique enlarger as I turned the focus knob.
I switched to the second enlarger, in case the first was leaking light.
By the end of lunch, Sylv was hanging from every peg in the room and I could see her cleavage from every angle. I came back before sixth period and took down a few that had dried to show the girls.
I was running about five minutes late to class thanks to Sylv and her goal to be the next Gisele Bündchen, so I took a shortcut across the quad, which backed onto the cafeteria. It was littered with the remnants of lunch: wrappers, soda cans and half-eaten apples. A potato-chip bag blew across the concrete like a tumbleweed.
I pulled out my camera and connected the macro lens, deciding Mrs Baker and her moustache could wait a few more minutes in the name of photography.
I was crouching down, snapping some shots of a carpenter ant carrying a crumb and whispering to him, “Go right. No. Right. Fine. Left,” when a shadow made me jump out of my skin. The photos tucked under my arm dropped to the ground, fanning out on the concrete.
It was Tom.
I would have hit him over the head with my camera for giving me a cardiac arrest, but he was crouching down to pick up my photos.
“You should get your hand-eye coordination checked,” he said, as he straightened up.
“Excuse me?”
His accent was British, no doubt about it, with a hint of South African or maybe Australian. It was like hearing my favorite song on the radio, but again there were no memories to explain when, where, why and how I knew Tom.
“You took these?” he asked, flicking through the photos as if they were part of a public portfolio instead of my personal property. He paused on a photo I had taken of the lime-green cushion in my bedroom and made a “huh” sound, as if he had spotted a long lost friend in the frame. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I watched as he traced the cushion with his finger as if reminding himself of its pattern. He finally shook his head and then flicked to the next photo, which was of Sylv.
“There you are Tom!” a voice called out. Melissa. Great. “I thought you were going to make me sit alone in pre-calc,” she huffed. I know. Like Melissa would sit on her own when she had ninety-nine point nine per cent of the student body at her beck and call.
I smiled smugly, as Tom looked at Melissa like she was bubblegum on the bottom of his shoe.
He handed back the photos and, maybe it was all in my head, but he seemed to linger when our fingers touched. “Good, but over-exposed.”
“The photos or Sylv?” I joked automatically.
“Both.”
My smile was ironed out by his response, but then I saw the corners of his lips curve upwards. The transformation to his features was like throwing gasoline onto a bonfire, and I stood and stared until he allowed Melissa to pull him across the quad and through the doors of the cafeteria, like a parent being pulled into a toy store. He threw me one last look over his shoulder as he went and it could not have been further from his dead-behind-the-eyes look. I suddenly wondered whether our connection was one-sided after all.
“He liked the photos though, right?” Jo asked later when I recounted his words at the Duck-In Diner. “He said they were good.”
“Damn straight,” Sylv said loudly. She was showing off, seeking the attention of a booth of college guys. They were ogling her thighs, which were bare under another micro miniskirt, which she continued to wear day in and day out, even though it was now fall.
“He also said they were over-exposed,” I pointed out, still stinging about my over-the-top reaction to his smile and final look. I would not even rate a passing thought with Tom. Meanwhile, I was dreaming about having his baby. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. “I mean, who the hell does he think he is? Helmut Newton?” I continued.
“Helmut!” Sylv exclaimed, and slapped her thigh as she laughed. I heard the college guys guffaw, like it had been for their benefit. It had been, of course.
“I think you like him,” Jo said with a smirk.
“Who?”
“Tom. Who else?”
I flushed. “No way.”
“Yes way,” Jo teased. “You love him.”
“I hate him.”
“How can you hate him? You’ve spoken to him once.”
“Twice,” I corrected. “But he was too rude to respond the first time.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Sylv crowed.
We stared at her.
“What?”
“You just quoted Shakespeare,” Jo said.
“So?”
“So, those flashcards we made you are working.”
Jo and I had quizzed Sylv for two and a half hours at the weekend, because Mrs Baker was planning a pop quiz about Shakespearean lovers on Wednesday.
“Was Juliet the sun or the moon?”
“Who said, ‘The course of true love never runs smooth?’”
“Does love look with the eyes or the mind?”
Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.
“If you paid attention to Mrs Baker like you do Paul Gosling and Simon Caster we could be at the movies,” I had complained as we studied.
Instead, Sylv had spent the past two weeks flirting like a dime-store hooker with that pair of acne-covered sleazeballs. She played it up because Taylor “Greaseball” Blackwood sat next to them, not that he ever looked up from scribbling on his desk with a sharpie.
But Sylv was giving it away for free at the Duck-In Diner this afternoon, making rude gestures involving her tongue. The college guys returned the signals threefold.
Sylv withdrew her consent when the sexual sign language got too hot and heavy. “Home time,” she declared, standing up from the booth.
“Hey! Where are you going?” the college guys called out.
Sylv ignored them.
“I said, ‘Where are you going?’”
“You mean you ‘asked’ where are you going,” Jo threw over her shoulder as we walked through the doors, leaving them scratching their heads. She was a stickler when it came to grammar. Sylv said it was because she was in love with Mr Bailey, not with the language, but I think it was because she had her head stuck in a book all the time. She literally corrected the text as she went with a red pen, even library books. She had been banned from Green Grove Public Library for editing War and Peace.
Jo and I split from Sylv at the end of the block as usual, but as we walked down the street I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise, as if we were being watched. My mind went to the man in the balaclava.
I looked around and saw a man hosing his dead lawn a couple of houses back – nope, not him – and a woman pushing a pram towards Main Street – nuh-uh. A green car with a dent in its fender drove by, its engine groaning like a wounded beast. It was followed by a sleek black SUV that looked like it cost ten times the average wage in Green Grove.
“What a jerk,
” Jo commented. “That has to be Mr Hodges.”
I wrinkled my nose as I watched the Mercedes-Benz disappear around the corner, taking with it the adrenaline that had coursed through my body at the thought of the man in the balaclava. “An out-of-towner, I would say.”
“Speaking of out-of-towners. Tell me how you hate Tom again.”
I snorted. “You mean speaking of jerks.”
Jo guffawed. “Told you so.”
“What?”
“You like him. You want to have his babies.” She put her fingers in her ears and sang, “Lillie and Tom, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” childishly until we reached my front gate. “See you tomorrow,” she called out, before walking down the street with her ears still blocked.
I shook my head. Of course I thought Tom was good-looking. To say otherwise would be like saying summer in Green Grove was cold or Sylv was frigid, but I also thought he was an ass.
And I would have to be an ass to like him, I thought, thinking of those intense blue irises. The blood began to throb in my ears, as I remembered my dream where I was pregnant with his baby. Thud. Thud. Thud. Ass. Ass. Ass.
5
I was on the path that led to the courtyard. My clothes were damp with sweat and I knew without looking that you-know-who was hot on my heels.
I sped up, navigating the uneven flagstones in the dimming daylight until I suddenly tripped and fell forward. I heard a crunch as my cheek struck a rock.
The cold was like a wall of water and I woke in my bed, gasping for breath. I sat up and put a hand to my cheek, expecting to find a broken cheekbone. I was relieved when I realized it had been another dream, but then my tongue touched a chipped tooth.
I rolled out of bed and turned on my bedroom light. I lifted up my lip and surveyed my molars in the mirror. It was a small chip, but it was a chip nonetheless.
I dropped my lip and stared at myself in the mirror, realizing I had finally crossed the line between dreams and reality.
I thought about my chipped tooth all morning, touching it with my finger or tongue and checking it in the bathroom mirror. It was at the forefront of my mind until I saw Tom at his locker after third period, and then my mind was filled with thoughts about him instead.
When the World was Flat (and we were in love) Page 3
