I heard a vehicle pull up beside me, water fanning out from its wheels. For a moment, I thought it was Melissa and the Mutts back to rub it in, but then I saw it was a black SUV. The passenger door swung open and the driver shouted, “Get in!”
It could have been Charles Manson for all I cared at that moment. Hell, it could have been the man in the balaclava. I splashed through the puddles and climbed into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind me. A new car smell filled my nostrils. It had a leather interior. Nice. I saw the Mercedes-Benz logo and realized it was the jerk I had seen while walking home with Jo. I also realized it was worth more than twenty Mustangs.
“Thanks,” I breathed, looking at the driver.
It was Tom.
7
Einstein once said that God does not play dice. He believed the universe was ordered, the world predictable. But his contemporary, Nils Bohr, famously asked Einstein to “stop telling God what to do with his dice.”
It was a few months before I took an intense interest in Einstein and read this in the Green Grove Public Library, but I would have agreed with Bohr. God was a gambler. How else had I ended up in this SUV with Tom?
I flung open the door and slid out, putting one foot in the gutter. The water went up to my ankle, spilling over the rim of my ballet flat.
“Hey!” Tom shouted above the roar of the hailstones on the roof. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He reached across, his hand touching my forearm. I looked at it, absorbing the smoothness of his palm on my skin, before he withdrew it like I was on fire, instead of soaked through to my double-A bra.
I climbed back into my seat and slowly closed the door.
We sat in silence, except for the continual pounding of ice on metal, like the rat-tat-tat-tat of a machine gun. I cringed about the damage it would do to the expensive bodywork. Tom was looking straight ahead and I finally settled on staring out of the passenger window. Talk about awkward. But these storms came and went in a flash. A few more minutes and Tom could kick me to the curb. My heart sank at the thought.
“This will stop in a second!” I shouted.
“What?”
I winced. “I said, ‘The storm will be finished soon!’”
He looked at me with a frown and then shook his head.
I frowned as well. “The rain. It will…” I suddenly laughed, giving up.
Tom gave me an under-the-microscope look, as I turned back to the window with a half-smile on my face.
Sure enough, within a couple of minutes the hail had stopped and the rain had returned to a sprinkle.
“Your hood,” I said, nodding at the dents that were visible through the windshield.
He shrugged. “It can be fixed.” Of course, what were a few thousand dollars to a kid whose wardrobe looked like it cost the average wage in Green Grove? There was probably ten K and a bar of gold in the glove compartment.
I took a deep breath and was about to thank my host for his hospitality when he turned on the blinker.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
I thought about our weatherboard house with its peeling paint and yard overgrown with weeds. “I can walk.”
“I can drive.”
I sighed at his stubbornness. “Fine,” I said, deciding he could drop me at the corner. The house there was a modern brick home that belonged to Humpback Harding. I crossed my fingers she was playing bingo this afternoon. She was about seventy years old and had broken her back lifting patients out of bed when she was a nurse, which meant she walked around doubled-up like a folding chair.
Green Grove was nowhere near a metropolis; its grid of intersecting streets covered about fifty square miles, book-ended by the Open Valley on one side and the sand hills on the other. You could drive to my house in five minutes, but it seemed like five hours with Tom. For the next couple of minutes neither of us spoke, except for me to say, “Right at the roundabout” or “Next left.”
I occupied myself with taking off my wet cardigan. I was all elbows and thumbs, the wool clinging to my skin. It would have been a challenge for a contortionist. The shift in my weight made my jeans squelch on the seat. I shuffled my feet and my shoes squelched as well. My color rose from pink to red. It seemed that the more I tried not to make a sound, the more it happened. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. Oh. My. God.
I burst out laughing.
Tom looked at me like I had started singing at the top of my lungs.
“I think my cardigan shrank in the rain,” I explained.
There was no response; maybe a slight nod.
“When I was little I used to think sheep would shrink in the rain.” Oh no. Did I say that out loud? My face grew hot until it burned like a bonfire. I closed my eyes until my cheeks cooled.
When we stopped at the one red light in town, I turned to study Tom, who was looking through the windshield broodingly. My shoe squelched again and I cringed as I slid down into the seat.
Suddenly, Tom laughed.
I looked at him with wide eyes. It was a reluctant moment of mirth, but in that moment he was transformed, more so than by his smile of the previous day. The hard lines of his features softened and his white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel relaxed.
I stared at him, as if seeing an old friend.
The light turned green and Tom squared his jaw again as we drove on. “Sorry,” he muttered and it sounded like he was apologizing to himself for letting his guard down.
I studied him with a furrowed brow. “Do we know each other?” I asked, as he turned onto my street. “I mean, have we met before?” I stopped short of adding “besides in my dreams” in case he freaked.
His lips tightened and he turned the wheel with a sharp movement. “Here you are,” he said, pulling into the curb. He sat in silence, staring through the windshield with dark eyes.
“Thanks,” I said, picking up my bag and climbing out of the SUV. Tom continued to look ahead without so much as a nod in response.
I was standing on the sidewalk, watching him drive away, when I realized that I was in front of my house. A coincidence, I thought, as I watched his taillights disappear around the corner.
I wondered where he lived. It should have been common knowledge in a small town like Green Grove. It should also have been the talk of the town that he drove a Benz, but he had somehow managed to maintain his privacy on both counts in a town where the word “privacy” had long been erased from the dictionary.
I walked up the concrete path, which had dried within five minutes of the downpour, sucking the water into its porous surface. I bent down to move a snail into the garden before it got itself trodden on and suddenly realized Tom had sidestepped my question.
Of course the answer was “No.” A girl like me would remember meeting a guy like Tom, right? But then there was the scar on his chin. The cause of that scar was buried in my mind and I wondered if I could dig it out. I shook my head, knowing it sounded as strange as Deb and her talk about reincarnation. Or as strange as chipping your tooth in a dream.
I found my mother in the hallway, painting a mural on the wall. If I had to guess I would say it had a marine theme. Or maybe there had been a sale on blue paint.
“Your aura is glowing today,” she said, as I navigated the drop sheet. “Must be the Reiki from the other night.”
“Must be,” I said with a smile.
I called Jo again, but it went to voicemail. I thought about going to her house, but she had my number and at least five voicemail messages.
I drew myself a bath and sat in there for about an hour and a half, flipping through a stack of photography magazines and reheating the water as needed. I loved soaking in the tub for hours on end, until my fingers and toes wrinkled. It was like being in the darkroom at school; another world.
I hung a satchel of dried lavender from the faucet and let the water run through it, its scent making me sleepy. I lit a candle and watched the flame dance on its wick through half-closed eyes.
I thought I
could see two people in its heart, embracing, spinning, holding each other tightly. I thought about Tom and how it would feel to have his arms around me. I continued to watch the couple in the fire, telling their story in my mind. She was pregnant and they were celebrating the news. “A baby,” the rhythm of the flame told me and tears pricked my eyes. A baby. A baby. A baby.
Deb knocked on the door, bringing me back down to Earth. “Lillie? Fawn needs to use the bathroom.”
I climbed out of the tub, realizing the water was cold.
8
Another dream about the man in the balaclava. This time I saw his hands as he reached out to kill me. They were thin hands, bony and feminine with dark veins visible, like mine. The dream made me doubt he was Tom after all. And, for the first time, I began to seriously consider the possibility that the man in the balaclava was in fact a woman.
I woke with teeth chattering and stared up at my dream catcher, which I would have asked for a refund on had it not been homemade. I let my eyes roam the ceiling with its spider-web cracks and peeling paint hanging in strips as I thought about Tom. I thought about his laugh and it warmed me in the pre-dawn chill, but then I remembered the look on his face when the girls had joked about the love story-slash-porno. I groaned, burying myself under the covers. What an idiot. He probably thought I was running around telling my friends that I was in love with him and vice versa.
He did save me from being stoned to death by the heavens though, I reasoned, and my heart rose enough for me to uncover my head. I had to admit it was kind of chivalrous, like when he had picked up my photos. Or when he had picked up a certain bag for a certain bitch called Melissa, I thought reluctantly. I pulled the covers over my head again.
I stretched an arm out into the cool air to retrieve my cell from the bedside table, knocking over a photo frame and coming close to toppling a glass of water. The screen told me it was ten past five. No missed calls or voicemail messages from Jo. I hoped she was OK; her dad too. I was such a bad best friend. I should have gone to her house to check on them. Instead, I had been completely and utterly wrapped up in myself and Tom.
Because sleep was no longer an option, I threw back the covers and went to my desk where Jo had bundled my photos into categories.
I used to do that back when I was organized, I thought, furrowing my eyebrows, as if I could see into the past. Jo had not been kidding when she said I used to be tidy. I used to color-coordinate my wardrobe and scrub my locker with baking soda every quarter, but it was like the nightmares had messed with my ball of twine over the summer and my tidiness had been caught up in the tangled knots.
I chose the bundle with the sticky note that read, “Friends” and the subcategory “Elementary”. I liked looking at photos from those years. If I could go back to them I would in a heartbeat. It was a time before boys, before exams, before I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. Junior year was proving to be a bitch. They say senior year is a holiday in comparison.
I paused at a pic Deb had taken at a school nativity play when I was in fourth grade. Mr Green had asked for a photo, because he had been on the road and wanted to see Jo in her starring role as the back half of the donkey. I had been the front half. I smiled as I remembered how Jo had volunteered to take the rear end, even though the costume had been used every year since Christ was born and stank like dirty socks.
I suddenly had the strange sensation I was being watched. I looked up and caught a movement in the window. I stood up and drew back the sheer curtain. My bedroom was at the side of our house, overlooking a veggie patch, or rather a dirt patch – another project Deb had started, but not finished.
The yard was gray in the early morning sunlight. It was also empty.
It must have been a bird that caught my eye, or a cat. But the cold that settled in my stomach said otherwise.
Jo knocked on the front door at 8.15am as usual.
“I called you a thousand times yesterday,” I said, following her onto the sidewalk.
“I know.”
I waited for her to go on, but then I realized I would be waiting a while. “Is everything OK with your dad?” I asked, searching her face, which was bowed, as if we were walking against a strong headwind. Her freckles stood out against her pale skin, like flecks of brown paint on a white wall.
“They think he has a secondary cancer.”
“What does that mean?”
“A second cancer,” she said unhelpfully. There was another silence, before she changed the subject. “What did I miss yesterday?”
I thought of my ride home with Tom. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The school corridors were buzzing when we got there. The queen bee herself was spreading gossip like it was pollen about a new student that had flown into Green Grove overnight. “Fresh meat,” Melissa announced, as she walked past my locker where we had congregated. “Jackson Murphy.”
“Jack O’Lantern?” Jo asked. “He came back to Green Grove after all these years? He must be a glutton for punishment.” She smirked and looked at me to check that I had picked up her reference to him being overweight. I smiled, relieved she could joke after the news about her dad.
“I guess I am,” a voice said.
We turned and let out a collective squawk.
Jackson, at least I guessed it was Jackson, was leaning against a locker a few feet away. He was solid, but from what I could tell under his red hoodie it was muscle, not fat, these days. His grin showed us his adult teeth had come in, perfectly straight and brilliantly white. I wondered if they were porcelain veneers.
Jo colored until her skin matched her freckles.
Jackson was nowhere near as handsome as Tom, with features that instead seemed off-kilter: shaggy blond hair, wide-set eyes and a slightly skewed nose that looked like it had been broken. It brought him down a couple of notches on the hot-or-not meter, but gave him character.
Melissa was not into character though. “Welcome back to Green Grove,” she said without warmth, before returning to her hive.
“I see some things never change,” Jackson said with a laugh, his hazel eyes sparkling.
“And some things do,” Sylv observed, raising an eyebrow in appreciation.
The bell rang and everyone moved to their own lockers. As I turned to get my books Tom walked up to his locker, dropped his bag at his feet and busied himself with his combination.
Say something, I told myself, as I listened to him spin the dial. I opened my mouth and a small squeak slipped out. I bit my lip and then drew myself up to my full height. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Tom answered, without looking out from behind the metal door.
“Thanks again for the lift yesterday.”
He shoved a stack of books into his bag and stood upright, slamming his locker closed. “Don’t mention it,” he said with a gruffness that made it sound literal.
As he stooped again to pick up his bag, I glimpsed a crumpled photo, half-hidden beneath his books. It looked like a photo of Tom with a girl.
She was a brunette like me, but with golden streaks through her hair like wheat, not caramel. His arm was around her, pulling her close in an embrace. And he was laughing, easily, freely, naturally, which was less like the Tom I knew and more like the Tom I had seen for a split second in his SUV. It reminded me of his words when he had apologized for being rude. “It was unlike me.”
My heart plummeted to my feet, continuing until it got to Antarctica. Of course. It explained it all. He had a girlfriend back in England or Australia, who he was hung up on, and for all intents and purposes she was hung up on him as well. They probably poked each other on Facebook and Skyped for hours on end. My heart gave a twist. Fool. And another. Fool.
“Tom, we have Legal Studies,” Melissa declared, swooping in and grabbing him like a hawk would a field mouse. She looked over her shoulder as they walked down the corridor, giving me a look that said, “back off”.
I gave her a you-too-because-he-has-a-girlfriend look, bu
t I think it was lost in translation.
I had a double period of Art Studies, but it may as well have been Math. My feet dragged, the soles of my shoes scraping on the concrete as I walked, chanting the word “hate” in my mind. I hated Tom. I hated that he was messing with my mind. I hated his girlfriend too. And Melissa. I also hated Mr Hastings. And, of course, I hated Dirk, who had decided to attach himself to me at the hip during Art Studies.
“Lillie! I thought of a location to shoot our project. I mean, for you to shoot and me to sketch. I was thinking of the National Park. You know how there are those moss-covered trees? They kind of look like the homes of dryads. Dryads are tree-spirits, by the way. They protect forests and woodlands, but if they leave their tree they can die. Their name means ‘oak’ in Greek.”
“Uh-huh,” I said politely, as I took my seat, flanked by my new bestie, Dirk, and my new enemy, Kate. Kate glared at me from underneath eyelids blackened by a combination of eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara. Like Sylv, she was high on the dress code hit-list.
“We have a new student,” Mr Hastings said, with none of the pomp and circumstance such an announcement should hold in Green Grove.
Twenty-three pairs of eyes flew to the front of the classroom and to Jackson. His dimples told me that unlike Tom, he was a glass-half-full kind of guy. I was about two hundred and fifty per cent certain that coming back to Green Grove was going to turn that on its head.
Mr Hastings gave Jackson an overview of our major work, adding, “You can pair up with Lillie – our third wheel.”
Thanks for that last comment, I thought, as Jackson walked towards me, wearing a wide smile. The corners of my mouth moved upwards too, as I realized I had been rescued from the King of the Nerds and the Queen of the Emos.
“I think Kate would be into that – what did you call it? Death Knight? – you were telling me about last class,” I said to Dirk. His crestfallen expression lifted as he turned to Kate, whose purple-lined lips twitched into a small smile.
“Thank you,” I breathed to my knight in shining armor, as we sat down at another desk.
When the World was Flat (and we were in love) Page 5
