Everyone turns to look at us, which is exactly what Seb and Dalia both want. Dalia because she wants it known that the hottest guy in our school has deigned to flirt with her. Seb because Dalia is mildly pretty and he wants to make Chloe jealous.
Chloe, meanwhile, looks thoroughly unshaken. She rubs her button nose with the top of her sleeve and bends over to examine her frog.
Seb’s smile shrinks. Our frog hangs limply from his fingers.
I take it from him and lay it faceup on the tray while Seb looks at Chloe.
“I can do it,” I offer, and my brain scolds me. I’m being one of those ass-kissers I despise, those girls who cater to Seb’s every wish. A people-pleaser like my dad. I shouldn’t feel sorry for Seb because his ex-girlfriend has moved on.
“It’s fine,” Seb mutters. I can see him willing himself not to notice Chloe. He grabs the scissors at the edge of the table and snips the edges of Kermit’s mouth, quickly and carelessly. Then he tosses the scissors back onto the table and looks at me, waiting.
I realize he expects me to read him the directions. I clear the fuzz from my throat and read. “Locate the tongue. Is it attached to the front or back of the mouth?”
Seb doesn’t hesitate to reach his finger inside the mouth and pull on the stretchy, lime-green tongue. “Front.”
He can touch a dead frog like it’s no big deal because normal people, like Seb, don’t make up crazy backstories about their lab experiments, or imagine a frog torn away from his wife and tadpole babies.
“Locate the maxillary teeth on the upper jaw,” I read, and he does. I label the teeth on the diagram in our packet. “The vomerine teeth are in the upper jaw.”
He opens the frog’s mouth wider, pausing briefly to show me the teeth so that I can mark them on the diagram.
I read, he finds, I write down our results. It makes sense for our roles to be defined this way. Seb is a man of action, while I’m someone who thinks and interprets. Also, I’m still grossed out by this entire procedure. It’s messed up for all of us to pretend that a room full of amphibian corpses is business-as-usual.
Around the room, partners talk, laugh, engage. Seb and I work in silence, talking only when we have to, and only about the lab instructions. I’m relieved not to have to make conversation, and at the same time I feel guilty that I don’t try. Like there’s something wrong with me for preferring the silence.
Once, when Harlow was beginning her whole-foods diet, she gave all our processed food to a homeless shelter and left Lily and me dehydrated kale chips for snacking.
I wouldn’t have eaten them at all if Lily hadn’t tried them first. She popped one into her mouth, and the leaf crackled between her teeth.
“Well?” I asked. I had picked one up and couldn’t bring myself to eat it yet.
“They’re actually really good.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious,” she said, and took another handful. Bits of kale flecked her lips, and she didn’t even care. “You want?”
“Hell no,” I said. “I don’t see why we all have to suffer for Harlow’s latest diet trend.”
Lily rolled her eyes, still crunching away. “I’d hardly call it suffering, An.”
“A life without Doritos is not a life worth living.”
“She’s trying to be healthy.”
“She’s trying to take away my joy.”
This brought on another eye roll. Lily had a habit of defending Harlow, which irked me, but I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Lily used to love Mom, and it felt like a betrayal for her to eat Harlow’s kale chips and not do me the courtesy of pretending to hate them.
I offered Lily the chip still in my hand, and she snatched it up.
“You’re not even gonna try one?” she asked.
“No.” I felt needlessly stubborn, but it was the principle of the thing. I was not going to support Harlow’s extremism, and I was certainly not going to give up my good old-fashioned unhealthy fried chips to make her happy.
Lily shook her head and brought the Tupperware container of kale chips up to my room while my stomach growled in disappointment. We sat on the rug, the Tupperware sitting between us, and compared the popular guys in our school to old boy-band archetypes. This was all before Lily dated one of them.
“Matt McKinley,” she said.
“The ugly one.”
“Oh, come on. There are no ugly ones.”
“Yes, there are,” I maintained. “Every boy band has that ugly member who made it into the band only because he could sing the high notes or whatever.”
It was horrible of me to say, but Matt McKinley is a horrible person, so I didn’t feel guilty. It felt good to laugh at him behind my closed bedroom door, because he laughs at everyone else out in the open.
“What about Seb?” she asked.
“Easy.” I pretended to get swoony. “The heartthrob.”
Seb and Chloe had just begun dating at that point. I remember because it was like the tabloids had come alive in the sophomore class. The two most beautiful people in our little world had finally gotten together, and the student body salivated over their coupled existence. Seb and Chloe even had their own set of shippers, a group of freshman girls who awarded them the unfortunate nickname of “Chleb.”
No girls were deluded enough to think they could take Seb away from Chloe, but they enjoyed trying. For them it was enough to get one of Seb’s smiles, because a Seb smile is different from an ordinary-person smile. “Cheeky,” Lily had described it once, and I couldn’t find a more fitting word.
“What about Colton?” Lily asked then, and only when I thought about it later did it dawn on me how she had offered his name so shyly.
Colton has a tattoo inching out of his shirtsleeve. He’d had only one girlfriend that I knew of, a college girl named Mia who wore gauge earrings and used to make out with him in the school parking lot.
“Colton is the bad boy,” I decided. Even then I had him pegged, but I didn’t realize the truth of it.
And even then Lily came to his defense. “But he’s sensitive. I think.”
“Oh, please,” I fired back, rolling my eyes. “He’s just good at pretending he is. And getting idiots to fall for it.”
She licked the salt from her lips, quiet for a moment. Then, in a smaller voice, “He said he liked my art project.”
“What?” I stared at her. “I didn’t know Colton was in your art class.”
“I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” she said.
“You have art with Colton and he complimented your project?”
“So?”
“So, I’ve never seen him talk to a plebeian before.”
“It’s not a big deal,” she said, but something told me it was, or she wouldn’t have brought it up.
Every time she said his name, a little smile hovered at her lips. I didn’t like it. Not just because Colton was an asshole but because it wasn’t fair that Lily was able to smile at things and I still couldn’t.
There was a weird silence between us, only for a moment, before Lily shook the tub of kale chips and said, “For the love of God, An, I can’t eat all of these myself.”
I took one, because eating a kale chip was more appealing than continuing our Colton conversation. The chip was crispy, and I could taste garlic and something that was not actual cheese but faintly cheesy.
It was good, and that made me irritable.
“Well?” Lily asked.
I made a face and lied. “Yuck.”
CHAPTER SIX
DAD AND HARLOW HAVE THEIR first wedding-related disagreement when Harlow brings up the venue. Dad wants a traditional church wedding, while Harlow wants a small, bohemian beach ceremony. When Harlow suggests that her friend Samsara officiate, Dad’s eye starts to twitch.
“Cariño,” he tries, “I think Samsara might be too much for my parents to handle.”
The four of us—Dad, Harlow, me, and Avery, are sprawled among our living room couches. Harlow is sitt
ing cross-legged with her laptop balanced on her knees. On her screen is an overwhelming Pinterest board littered with flowers and mason jars.
“Raf, she’s one of my best friends,” Harlow says. “Doesn’t it make sense for someone we know and love to marry us?”
“My parents have known Father Medina for thirty years.”
“I’ve never met Father Medina. And we’re not Catholic.”
“I am.”
“Oh, really?” Harlow sets her laptop aside. “When was the last time you went to church?”
I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been to church since Mom died. Once for her funeral, maybe one Christmas Mass, but the only Sunday ritual we consistently abide by is sleeping in. My church is my bed.
I have Mom and Dad’s wedding photo in my nightstand drawer. It used to sit on our entryway table, before Harlow moved in and added pieces of herself to the house. Mom and Dad got married in a church, and Mom wore a simple off-the-shoulder dress and a fluffy veil.
“Samsara is bald,” Dad replies, flicking the top of his full head of hair in contrast.
“So?” Harlow replies.
“Her actual name is Carrie!”
“That’s her given name, Raf. You know she legally changed her name last year.”
Dad massages the skin around his eyes. “How do you expect anyone to take our marriage seriously when your bald friend Carrie who now calls herself Samsara is performing the ceremony?”
“Raf . . .” Harlow scoots over to him and plants herself on his lap. She talks to him softly, in the dulcet tones she uses for her yoga videos. “We don’t have anything to prove. This wedding is for us.”
Her voice always has this magical effect on Dad. All the tension melts from his body, and he taps his forehead against hers. They look at each other, nose to nose, and I know without a doubt that they’re having a beach ceremony officiated by bald Carrie.
“Okay, ew,” I say, and they both laugh. Harlow slides off his lap.
“Girls,” she says to me and Avery. “We’re going dress shopping this weekend.”
If I had any kind of social life whatsoever, I could pretend I’m busy. Dress shopping means less time talking to Harris, and my weekend time with Harris is precious to me.
But I have no social life, and Harlow is well aware that I spend every weekend confined to my room.
“Yay!” Avery cries, pitching her skinny fist into the air.
“Analee?” Harlow looks at me. “You in?”
They gaze at me with almost identical bright-eyed faces, and I don’t want to be the dark stepchild who kills the fun.
“I’m there,” I say with labored enthusiasm. Harlow shows me and Avery all the wedding dress pictures she’s amassed, and each beaded white gown blurs into the next. After twenty minutes I excuse myself and spend the rest of the night fighting dragon spawn with Harris.
I’m in a mood when I walk into the classroom on Friday. Knowing that tomorrow will be without Harris, and an added crappy bonus of dress shopping and girly bonding with Harlow, turns me into a walking storm cloud.
I don’t mean to slam my folder down at the table and wake up a sleeping Seb. Or maybe I do.
He jolts, knuckles the sleep from his eyes. I’m beginning to think he’s got a slight case of narcolepsy.
“What?” he asks, peering around the room before settling his gaze on my scowling face. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing.” I pull on my goggles. There’s no way I’m telling Seb anything. He was allowed to be in a crappy mood about Chloe, so I figure I’m allowed my own dark day.
He doesn’t push me on my obvious lie, which I’m thankful for. Instead he puts on his own goggles and arms himself with a pair of scissors.
“I’m going in,” he announces. Today is the dreaded day we slice through Kermit’s stomach and play with his guts. I can’t help myself. I turn away.
The only way to stop myself from throwing up is to think ahead to how embarrassing it’ll be if I do. Lily will be horrified. Matt will never let me live it down. And Chloe . . . if Chloe has ever thrown up, it probably came out looking like a beautiful abstract painting. They would save the floor tile and hang it up in the Louvre if Chloe were to vomit.
“Analee?” Seb asks.
It’s the first time he’s ever said my name. And here’s the part that pisses me off: he knows how to say it! He can pronounce it better than Harlow, with the last syllable properly accented. Yet he never once corrected Matt on it.
“What,” I answer. I cut the word as short as possible.
“What’s your deal?”
My deal is that I have no interest in being Seb’s partner. My deal is that he never stood up for me in front of his dipshit friend. My deal is that I want to be home, bathed in the soft glowing light of my laptop.
And then there’s Kermit. Poor dead Kermit.
“It bums me out,” I mutter.
“The frog?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Only a heartless monster would ask that question. Isn’t the “why” of it obvious?
When I turn to look at Seb, he has the frog in his hand. He pries its mouth open with his fingers and squeezes it shut, over and over, open and shut, turning Kermit into a puppet. In a high-pitched squeak, Seb-as-Kermit says, “Save me, Analee, save me!”
“You’re an asshole.” I don’t say it in a cute flirty way like Dalia. I say it because Seb is being an asshole.
Seb, surprisingly, laughs at this. “And you’re a tight-ass.”
I bite back a response. I’m armed with a variety of furious comebacks, but they jam my throat, unwilling to come out.
Having had the last word, Seb gets back to work. He lowers the frog back down onto the tray and sticks needles into Kermit’s limbs to pin him down. I watch him, the way he squints his eyes while he works and presses his lips together in concentration. Looking at him is easier than looking at the frog.
He meets my gaze, and we face off, goggles to goggles. They look ridiculous on me, but somehow he looks like a high-fashion model. Life is not fair. “Here.” He slides the scissors across the table to me. “You try.”
I slide them right back over to him. “No, thanks. I’ll stick to reading the directions.”
“Suit yourself.” Seb picks up the scissors and aims them right at Kermit’s lower belly. He pauses, the blade tips pricking the skin, and he’s about to say something, when Chloe’s laugh drifts over to us from the back of the room.
It has a paralyzing effect on Seb. He freezes with the scissors split open, and he turns to look at Chloe and Matt giggling in the corner. Matt is whispering something into her ear, and she’s not pushing him away. She’s smiling.
Why am I not surprised that Matt is flirting with his friend’s ex-girlfriend? Could it be because he has no soul?
Without thinking, I take the scissors from Seb. I begin to cut along the frog’s midline like it’s made of rubber. There’s that annoying ache of pity again, right in the center of my chest, a butter knife poking my rib cage.
“You don’t have to—” Seb starts.
“It’s fine.”
It’s not bad if I think of the frog as a combination of body parts. Not Kermit. Sometimes I do it with myself, too. Like when a teacher asks me something in the middle of class and my face heats up and everyone’s waiting on my response but I can’t speak because my heart is spasming. I think, You are not Analee. You are a brain and muscles and bones thrown together at random.
“What the hell is that?” Seb asks when I lift the flaps of the body wall and pin them back. There are dozens of black dots inside the frog, like a mass of poppy seeds.
“Eggs,” I realize out loud. Kermit is a she.
So, of course, the body part trick doesn’t work anymore, just like it never actually works in real life.
“Sick,” Seb breathes. He momentarily forgets about the Chloe-Matt flirtation.
“You know what?” And I momentarily for
get I’m talking to Seb. “I’m fucking done. This is gross. We’re slicing up a pregnant frog and pretending that it’s not horrible. Isn’t this animal abuse? Are you telling me that there are no—”
I stop. Rants are common for me, but they’re usually done over the computer to Harris, or in person to Lily. Seb is staring at me like I’ve sprouted horns.
“Wow,” he says.
“What?”
“That’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk. Ever.”
He’s probably right. It sounds embarrassing when he says it out loud, though. There is nowhere to look but down at our unfinished dissection packet. I don’t want to see the frog eggs or Seb’s face.
I mumble, “Whatever.” My body feels like it’s shut down. I’m embarrassed that I spoke to him like that, that I forgot who he is. He is the type to date perfect girls and laugh at people and make fun of them for being unable to perform a stupid science experiment.
I wait. There’s no laughter. There’s silence, except for Seb fiddling with the forceps.
“I’ll take over,” he says finally. “You read.”
I feel him still watching me through his goggles while I read the directions out loud.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I STARTED MAKING LISTS WHEN mom was sick. My first one started as a laundry list of things that would help her during treatment.
1. Make sure she stays hydrated.
2. Bring her flan from La Vibora.
3. Keep my hands clean.
4. Load episodes of María la del Barrio onto the iPad.
5. Act like everything is okay, even when it isn’t.
Lists keep me grounded. They anchor my spiraling brain, give me something to focus on when life gets scary. The sicker Mom got, the more lists I created. And then when she died, I kept the lists going. They started as a way to help her feel better, but somehow they ended up helping me instead. I have an ever growing list of all the things I loved about Mom. Right now it’s at one hundred twenty-six items long.
Mom had her annoying habits too, but now that she’s gone, I miss every single one of them. There was the incessant sound of the nail clipper while she watched her telenovelas. The way she threw open the blinds every Saturday morning and announced it was time to clean my room. I even miss how whenever I gave her attitude, she would tell me the story of my birth in slow, torturous detail. CliffsNotes version: mucus plug, screaming, poop, and a bunch of other gross things.
Analee, in Real Life Page 3
