Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  “I am! So is my dad. I get it from him. Anyway, I’m hoping to get a scholarship to help pay for college. And then, well, if I’m not good enough to play professionally somewhere, I’ll become a coach. Oh, and I have twin brothers who are nine. Mostly they’re okay, but sometimes I want to strangle them.”

  “That’s the beauty of being an only child,” Cathy noted, and I thought, What is? Sometimes I think I’d like to have a sibling around to strangle!

  The girl to Hildy’s right was next. “I’m Becca, and I’m the math nerd,” she said, and she sounded proud about it. “I’m not saying I’m a genius or anything—”

  “Yes, she is!” That was Hildy. “She goes to math camp every summer.”

  Math camp, I thought. What’s that about? I mean, I’m okay in math, but I don’t like it. I just do it in class and walk away. Anyway, she doesn’t look like the old stereotype of a nerd. I mean, she wasn’t wearing thick glasses, though maybe she was wearing contacts, and she didn’t have bad skin or teeth. In fact, she kind of reminded me of this nun who taught at a Catholic school I had to go to once, only for about a semester. And no, not the old stereotype of a nun, all in black and wielding a stick for beating kids. I really liked Sister Martha. She had this gentleness about her, this sort of otherworldly, thoughtful thing going on, and the weird thing was that kids listened to her. Even though she spoke softly and was about ninety pounds soaking wet, everyone respected her. Maybe, I thought, Sister Martha was into math too, the kind that deals with theories of the universe.

  “I go to math camp so I can learn,” Becca insisted. “I know I’ll be a math major in college. After that, I have no idea. There are so many directions in which I can go. Maybe I’ll do the full academic thing, get my PhD and teach and publish articles and write books.”

  “Her mother’s an engineer,” Cathy added. “That’s where she gets it.”

  Becca turned to me. “My dad’s the stay-at-home parent. I’m the youngest of four. I don’t know what he’s going to do with himself when I go off to college!”

  “What did he do before?” I asked. I don’t know why I was interested.

  “Believe it or not, he was an executive at an ad firm in Boston, making a ton of money. But when my oldest sister came along, he chucked it all. Mom had no problem with that. She makes good money, and they both really liked the idea of a parent being at home. Anyway, I guess he could do some freelance ad work if he wanted to,” Becca went on. “But maybe he’ll finally go on those long cycling trips he’s been talking about for years.”

  One thing’s for sure, I thought, smiling vaguely at her, my father won’t be going on any long trips, cycling or otherwise, not for a very long time.

  “Your turn, Melissa,” Cathy announced.

  Melissa is super tall (it was easy to see that, even though she was sitting down), maybe almost six feet, and is seriously pretty in the kind of way that almost makes you uncomfortable. Well, makes me uncomfortable. Like, her looks are too good to be true or something. Anyway, she told me she wanted to go to FIT. “That’s the Fashion Institute of Technology,” she explained, before I could ask. The look on my face must have told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. And no surprise there, either, I thought. Melissa could easily make a living as a model if she wanted to.

  “It’s in New York,” she went on. “But if I can’t get into FIT, or if Mom and Dad can’t afford it, I’ll go to a regular college with a good art program. Either way, I’m going to work in fashion. I want to design, but I also really like to write. I’m starting up a style blog, but I haven’t come up with a really catchy name for it yet. The competition is fierce. There are soooo many style bloggers out there, but if you’re good enough, you can make a lot of money at it.”

  These girls, I thought, are exhausting me. They all have so much ambition and drive. How does that happen? Where do ambition and drive come from? Do they come from a sense of security? If you can trust someone older to be handling the day-to-day stuff for you—like paying the rent or the mortgage and making sure you have plenty to eat and not dragging you around from lousy apartment to lousier rental house, from substandard school to a school with metal detectors at each entrance—maybe then you have the luxury of dreaming and planning and actually envisioning your future. I wouldn’t know.

  “Cathy,” Becca said. “Last but not least.”

  “Well,” Cathy began briskly, “I’m definitely hoping I can get a soccer scholarship, not that I’m as good as you, Hildy. Still, any money will help, especially if I want to go somewhere other than YCC.” Cathy turned to me then. “Because my mom works there, I can get a tuition discount. You can too, Marni. But I think eventually I want to study early childhood development, which means I’ll need at least a master’s to get a good job.” Cathy laughed. “I’m gonna be in debt till I’m fifty!”

  “What are you into, Gemma?” Becca asked. “I mean, Marni. Sorry.”

  The question kind of embarrassed me. I mean, I like certain things, but I’ve never been into things. I guess we never had the money for me to get involved in a hobby. Hobbies cost money, don’t they? You have to buy equipment, like, I don’t know, a loom if you’re into weaving. And to collect things, like china dolls or old coins, must cost a lot. But maybe not having money is an excuse. Maybe, I thought, I’m just lazy and dull.

  When I didn’t answer immediately, Melissa said, “What’s your passion? What do you absolutely have to do or else you’ll go mad?”

  I was about to say, Nothing, when I thought about my drawing. But was that really a passion? I don’t know. Besides, my being “into” drawing isn’t something I want anyone to know right now. Maybe ever—who knows? The whole conversation was making me uneasy.

  Finally I shrugged and said, “I haven’t found my passion yet,” in as I-couldn’t-care-less a way as I could manage.

  “Nothing inspires you?” That was Melissa again.

  I thought of making a joke of some sort, but I couldn’t think of what sort, so I just shook my head.

  “So, what are you going to study in college?” Hildy asked. “I don’t think you have to declare a major until your junior year, but I’m not sure about that.”

  College? It wasn’t something I’d ever given any thought to. Honestly. I mean, I know I’m smart. I don’t know how smart I really am, because I don’t feel I’ve ever been around any seriously smart people, so I can’t compare. (Actually, Verity and Annie are probably the two smartest people I’ve ever known. There’s no point in denying it.) The idea of learning sounds good. But Dad never said anything to me about my going to college. Once, a long time ago, he told me he’d dropped out before finishing his degree because he didn’t need the degree to get work. It wasn’t until about two years ago, during one of those times when our cash was seriously low and we were eating Ramen noodles every night for about a week, that I began to think Dad’s dropping out of college might not have been such a smart thing to do. Of course, I said nothing.

  “Oh,” I finally said, again pretending a nonchalance I didn’t at all feel. “I’ll figure out something. Maybe I’m one of those late bloomers.”

  There was an awkward silence after that, and I knew every single one of those girls was thinking the same thing. That I was lost. That because I’d come from a “disadvantaged home” (I’d seen that phrase recently online), I’d been deprived of direction. That no one had been around to inspire or encourage me. And the really awful part was that they were right. Dad was a good father to a certain point. And after that, he just couldn’t cut it.

  I don’t like to be pitied. I was on the verge of saying something I’d probably regret—like, Why are you people even pretending to give a shit about me?—when Hildy suddenly said brightly, “Enough talk about the future. I want to know about something happening now.” She turned to Cathy and asked, “So, are you going to ditch Jason like you said you were?”

  My stomach dropped. This was a nightmare! I had no idea if Cathy had told her friends
about what had happened at her parents’ anniversary party. But Cathy shot me a quick smile and said, “Yeah. I’m tired of him. And he was beginning to push me to do stuff I’m so not going to do yet.”

  “You mean, have sex?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  Cathy looked mildly disconcerted. “Yes,” she said.

  “But sex is no big deal.” Stop talking, I told myself.

  “Then why do it?” Becca demanded. “I thought sex was supposed to be a big deal.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You have sex because it’s fun, that’s why.”

  Hildy frowned. “Snowboarding is fun too, but it’s not always good for you. You could break a leg if you’re not careful.”

  “So,” Melissa said. “You’ve had sex?”

  “Yeah. A few times.” That was a lie. It was a lot more than a few times, though honestly, not in the past few months.

  No one responded to that. And I was aware I was presenting myself as, I don’t know, colder, less feeling than I actually am. The truth is that I never enjoyed sex as much as I said I did. It was just a clichéd way of rebelling, I suppose, although I don’t really know what I was rebelling against; pretty much every kid I knew was having sex. It was the norm. I guess sex was more a way of, I don’t know, easing loneliness. Not that it always worked, and when it did work, it wasn’t for very long.

  You’ll have guessed by now that I’ve never actually had a real boyfriend, someone who I cared about and who cared about me.

  Not that I wouldn’t want a boyfriend someday, someone who really loves me, someone I can trust. If that’s even possible.

  “Anyway,” Melissa said forcefully, “the point is that no one, male or female, should be forced to do what they don’t want to do. There has to be consent, and not only because someone feels pressured to say yes.”

  “You’re right,” I said, hoping to make up a bit for the trouble I seemed to be causing without all that much desire to cause it. “It should always be a choice.”

  Things kind of wound down after that conversation, and at ten o’clock on the nose Hildy’s mother came by to take Hildy, Becca, and Melissa home. She seemed surprised to see me with the group and asked if I needed a ride home. Before I could reply—Verity had told me to call her, and I really didn’t want to be stuck in a car with three girls who I suspected didn’t like me all that much—Cathy said, “That’s okay, Mrs. Leonard. My mom’s taking Marni home.”

  Annie did drive me back to Birch Lane. (It’s too dangerous to ride a bike at night around here. It’s so dark, and the roads are very twisty.) Cathy came with us, and I thanked them both when I got out of the car. Still, I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting any more invitations to hang out with Cathy’s friends.

  That’s okay.

  Chapter 58

  I was really tired, but I just couldn’t fall asleep. I kept replaying the time at Cathy’s, remembering every word and every laugh and every time I felt like an alien. At least none of Cathy’s friends had asked me any stupid questions about how it felt finding out your name wasn’t really your name or meeting your mother for the first time at seventeen. Either Cathy had told them not to be idiots or they’re smart or sensitive enough to keep their mouths shut.

  Smart. Sensitive. Those girls are just so totally unlike the kids I used to hang out with, they’re almost a separate species. Seriously, I’d bet any money I had that not one of those girls has done anything more exciting or dangerous or against the law than crossing the street when the light is blinking or drinking milk that expired the day before. The guys in their crowd are probably just as bad—by which I mean good—but the only one I’ve met is Jason, Cathy’s soon to be ex-boyfriend, and there was a look in his eyes when I was coming on to him that made me think maybe he’s at least thought about doing something he’d have to keep a secret from his parents. There’s no way anyone could expect me to be friends with that group, assuming they’d want to be friends with me, and I’m pretty sure that after tonight, they don’t. I make them uncomfortable. I’m good at that, making people uncomfortable, though sometimes—and I’d never admit this out loud—I don’t know why I do it, set out to rub people the wrong way. Yeah, I like to be left alone mostly, but that can’t be the whole reason, can it? I mean, it’s a bit aggressive of me, isn’t it, to assume it’s okay to make a perfectly nice person feel bad.

  But it’s not hard to see that with Cathy and her friends, there is a lot of caring going on, if sometimes in a way that makes me, personally, nauseous, all that girly-girly oh my God, no way! squealing sort of bonding. Maybe those friendships won’t last much after high school, or maybe some of them will last a lifetime. Who knows? The point is, I guess, that in the here and now those girls—and maybe even some of the guys—really care about what happens to one another. They’ve got someone to turn to if they’re having a crappy day or whatever. They’ve got people to have fun with. Even I have to admit that’s probably a good thing.

  I wonder if Cathy is going to tell her mother I’ve had sex. Annie will tell Verity, I’m sure of that. Oh well. I don’t know why it should be a secret.

  The first time I had sex was when I was only fourteen. I know. Now it seems insane, but then . . . Anyway, it was pretty awful, as you might imagine, totally all about him, and I only did it because I’d had an insane crush on this guy for months, and when he finally noticed I was alive, I was so blown away by the attention he started to pay me that I lost what was left of my mind. Of course, once we’d done it—in the backseat of his car; how clichéd—he never bothered with me again.

  You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. I mean, I felt like such a complete loser; I swear it was the only time I’ve ever been seriously depressed in my life. You’d think I’d have waited around until someone who really liked me for me and not for what he could get came around, but how do you tell if a guy’s decent? I mean, they’re all full of lies, and even though I was always pretty street-smart, as the saying goes, I was still a kid. You know crap at fourteen and not much more at fifteen or sixteen, and I had no one older I could turn to for advice. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to Dad about guys. He probably would have dropped dead of a heart attack if I even mentioned the word dating, let alone sex. I’d learned the facts of life the way every other kid I knew had—from older kids. Needless to say, the information we got was bad all around.

  Anyway, after making another stupid decision, this time with a guy who swore he was into me and who even gave me a silver bracelet (which wasn’t silver after all) but who turned out to have a girlfriend who found out about his affair with me—if you can call five minutes on a bench behind the high school one night an affair—and who then threatened to cut me if I didn’t back off, I finally got the message. All guys, at least the ones I was likely to meet, were untrustworthy. That’s a nice way of saying they were shits, so if I wanted to have sex for whatever reason, and I did, sort of, then I was going to have to drop any expectations I was stupid enough to have had in the first place and just focus on getting out of it what I wanted.

  Momentary connection. Temporary attention. Oblivion for about thirty seconds. Whatever. No complications, at least of the emotional kind.

  But back to tonight. It’s not that I had a bad time at Cathy’s. No one was openly nasty. It’s just that it was pretty obvious I’m an outsider. Then again, I’ve always felt like an outsider, even when I was hanging out with the other outsiders!

  I wonder if I’ll ever feel like I belong.

  A lot of the kids I knew from school—from all the schools I went to over the years—got in trouble by doing stupid things, like stealing from the convenience store or spray painting private homes or knocking over every garbage can in a neighborhood on collection day. But I wasn’t stupid. I never stole. I never skipped school. Well, only once or twice. (I’m smart. Missing a few days here and there—without Dad knowing, of course—made no difference. I always got an A. And here’s the kind of schools I went to
. No one ever called Dad to ask where I was, was I home sick, had I been run over by a truck or something. No one ever bothered to care.)

  Anyway, about stealing, a few times over the years I wondered where we’d gotten the money for the flat-screen TV (not a very big one) or for the brand-new microwave Dad brought home once. But I never asked. I decided I didn’t want to know. The fact was that we always needed money or something that it could buy. I figured Dad did what he had to do, and as long as he didn’t get caught, well . . . And if he did get caught, it would be easier for me to lie to the police the less I knew.

  Like I said before, stealing was one thing I wasn’t stupid enough to do, but I did make some stupid decisions about other things, only some maybe weren’t that stupid, I guess. I mean, nothing bad ever happened to me because I smoked dope for the first time when I was thirteen and had my first beer at twelve. And both were easy for me to take or leave because I’m not an addict like my mother was. I mean, like I was told she was. Anyway, getting high is fun. That’s all. And you can’t have fun all the time, right? That’s just common sense. So it was all under control, and I was always careful.

  I wasn’t always so careful with sex. (Here I am, talking about sex again!) That’s where I made more than a stupid decision. I made a seriously bad decision. I was careless. The condom was old, and I didn’t even recognize the brand. I mean, the package was dirty. The guy, who was actually sort of a buddy of mine, must have had it in his pocket or whatever for years. I should have known there was a chance the condom was defective but okay, I’d had a few beers and let’s face it, booze doesn’t go well with good decision making. When my period was a day late, I freaked out. When it was two days late, I really freaked out. There was no way I could go to Dad and tell him I might be pregnant. No. Way. As far as he knew, I was still his innocent little girl. And yeah, I was a bit afraid of what he might do. Not to me but to my buddy (not that I would have told Dad his name). Honestly? I was a bit afraid of what Dad might do to himself.