by Cyn Balog
When I emerge, wishing I weren’t so on edge, because I would have liked to slip one of the soaps into my purse, I see the group of girls tossing back another round of shots and talking. Erica is licking her lips and Terra has her fingers in her ears and is singing “Do-Re-Mi” again. Hell, are they talking about Wish again? I look up in time to see him throw a perfect bull’s-eye at the dartboard. He turns to me and smiles, oblivious to the horde of rabid she-wolves on the other side of the room who want to devour him.
Terra looks relieved when she sees me. She gets up and hands me another shot, then groans. “Ugh. He’s my cousin, after all.” I wonder if I can get away without doing this shot, but then she lifts another shot to mine and makes as if she’s clinking glasses. “Cheers.”
“Um, cheers,” I say, then let the shot slide down my throat. It’s getting easier, though feeling my feet is getting slightly harder. I look down. Still there. A little blurry, but still there. “So, um. They talk about Wish a lot, huh?”
She nods. “He’s a bigger topic of conversation than Edward Cullen.”
“Really?” I ask, more surprised that these girls read than anything else. No, they probably watched the movies.
“Yeah.” She sighs. “It wasn’t always this way, though.”
I turn to her. “What do you mean?”
“Before he left for California, he was this big goofball. And now look at him. If you told me five years ago that Wish would grow to be a sex symbol, I would have said you were out of your mind.” She shrugs. “Maybe there’s something in the water out there?”
I shrug back, but I know what she means. It’s good to hear someone else acknowledging it.
“Do you get sick of girls clawing each other to get to your guy?” she asks.
“A little.”
“You should get yourself a bodyguard. Do you know what kind of sick things girls will do for a guy?”
I hadn’t thought of it before, but tingles shoot up my back. Okay, maybe that’s because I’ve just consumed more alcohol in a ten-minute period than I ever had up until this party, and tingles are shooting everywhere, even to the tip of my nose. My extremities kind of feel like tingly mush. Wish is standing across the basement, and suddenly, it seems like he’s miles away, bathed in a halo of perfect light. Untouchable.
I’m going to retch.
His eyes meet mine a second before I turn and run. Back to the bathroom. The last thought that runs through my thick mind that isn’t pure gibberish is To hell with the five-minute rule. I’m never coming out.
25
“YOU DON’T DRINK VERY MUCH,” someone says.
Wish.
He’s holding back my hair as I gag into the toilet again. Something yellow and slimy coats the bowl. “You think?” I mumble.
I look up at him. Somehow, even though I know I look like hell, I manage to look him in the eye. I must still be drunk. He hoists his backside up onto the marble counter and grins. “You passed out before ten. I think that’s a record.”
“I’m so proud,” I moan. The buzz must be wearing off, because I remember I wore lots of mascara and run my finger over the tops of my cheeks. I pull it away and it’s black. Great. I must look like a rabid raccoon. If I want Wish to fall desperately in love with me, this is probably not the way to do it. I sink into the bath mat and wish it were thick and luxurious enough for me to get lost in.
He’s still grinning, and I can kind of see the goofy Wish who was left behind all those years ago. “Hey, don’t feel bad. Can’t say I would have fared much better.”
I swallow, and my tongue feels thick, like a sausage. “What, you mean …”
“I’m not much of a drinker. But the way you were downing them, I thought you were an old pro.”
I wonder what about little globs of lemon-colored goo tumbling down my chin said “old pro” to him. “Oh. No, I was just … I mean, I don’t …” He’s sitting there, as perfect as ever, patiently waiting for me to get my sentence out, while here I am, collapsed on the floor of a bathroom with my head in a toilet and all my Maybelline nowhere near where it’s supposed to be. My cute peach dress is all wrinkled and the front is damp and yellowy from my puke. Even my perfect feet look veined and purple and weird in this light. So I can’t help it: I crumble. “Don’t you see?” I moan. “I don’t ever go to parties. I’m a big fat loser!”
Now I can’t look at him anymore, so I focus on his feet, which are dangling right at my eye level. Despite that one toe hiding, his feet are perfect, too. I hear him laugh. “I’d always heard alcohol was a depressant.”
“I’m serious!” I snarl. “I don’t get it. You’ve gone blind or something. You’re … you’re …” I wave a hand in front of him as I gasp for air between the sobs I’m trying to fight off. “You. And I’m me.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“You’re … perfect. And I’m not.” I point out the door. “And any one of those girls out there would kill to be with you, in case you hadn’t noticed. Erica Dunleavy wants you so bad she drools every time she looks at you.”
His smile slowly melts away, and a rare look of concern dawns on his face.
I stop breathing like a woman in labor. Maybe he really is so thick that he hasn’t noticed, but even if this was a new revelation, it’s no reason to be concerned. Most guys, on learning that someone like Erica was interested in them, would probably drop to their knees and thank the heavens. “What?”
He shakes his head. “Nobody’s perfect,” he says, his voice strangely serious.
“Whatever. Still …”
“Look, don’t try to be like those girls,” he says. “They’re not you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not trying to be like any—”
“You know what I mean,” he says. And yeah, I do. He’s totally got my number. I’m a poser. But I have no idea how he can be so sensitive to my desperately trying to fit in when he doesn’t even notice the extra pounds of my flesh that are plain as day. He stands and puts his hand on the gilded doorknob. “What do you say I take you home now?”
I sigh. Changing the subject. Maybe he is doing so because he realizes that the sooner he can get rid of me, the sooner he can move on to someone who doesn’t have globs of yellow puke all over her. He opens the door a crack and I cringe. I can’t wait for the “Who would have thought she’d be a lightweight?” comments. I was hoping that I could climb through the bathroom window to freedom; however, we are in Terra’s basement and I am trapped like a rat.
He must sense my concern. “The coast is clear,” he says. “The party’s been over for hours.”
“What?”
“It’s almost morning. You blacked out.”
“Really?” That sounds like something Dough Reilly would do at her very first social event of high school. When he opens the door, the room is dark. I can make out a few discarded paper Jell-O shot containers on the coffee table and it smells a little like cigarette smoke, but all signs of human life have disappeared. Guess I decimated the five-minute rule.
We get into his truck and pull away from the house. There’s silence, and I can see him biting his lip in the reddish light of the rising sun. “What if I told you that—” His phone must be vibrating in his pocket, because he does a little dance in his seat and fishes it out, then looks at the display. He hands it to me. “The guards.”
I open the phone. “Mom?”
She yawns. “Did you forget you were supposed to be here to help Hans this morning?”
And I didn’t think it was possible for my stomach to feel any worse. I bet Evie went home and told her that I was drinking and puking. Like I need my mom yelling at me for the rest of the weekend. “I forgot.”
“That’s okay,” she says, her voice brightening. “Did you have fun?”
There she goes again, the only parent in the free world who wants her kid to be out at all hours of the night, engaging in unspeakable acts of debauchery. Still, I feel the need to explain myself. “U
m, yeah. We all just crashed here for the night, and—”
“Cool. Just remember you need to help me clean out the freezer on Sunday. You and Evie. Let her know.”
“Ev—?” I begin, but I catch myself. Evie isn’t home yet, either. “Sure.”
When I hang up, something immediately becomes clear to me. We’re heading over the bridge, about a minute from my house. I say, “Wait. We can’t go home. Did you see Evie?”
He raises his eyebrows. “She’s not at home?”
I shake my head. “Did she leave with Rick?”
He shrugs. “I was in the bathroom with you for the last few hours.”
He was? “Oh. Well. We’ve got to find her.”
He motions at the windshield. “Found.”
The bakery comes into view, and right away I see the showstopping red car. Hooray, I wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of going all the way back to the mainland to hang out on the perfectly manicured Rothman lawn, negotiating Evie’s release. No sooner has Evie slammed the door than the car speeds away. When we pull up, Evie is still staring after it, a deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face. Then she wraps her arms around her, turns, and totters behind the bakery, oblivious to us. “She’s so not a morning person,” I observe.
He isn’t paying attention. He throws the truck into neutral, jerks on the parking brake, and gives me a look like he has something important to say. But then he comes out with “You remember when we used to play hide-and-seek in the back of the bakery?”
I nod. “Uh-huh.” I wonder if this trip down memory lane is going somewhere.
“Remember when I locked myself in the back room and ate all those pastry shells and then, by the time you found me, I’d thrown up all over the flour sacks?”
I laugh. “Oh, yeah. That was the last time Mom ever let us play there. So?”
He just shrugs. “I’m the same guy.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I am,” he insists. “You put a piece of Spam in a Tootsie Roll package, it’s still Spam.”
I give him a look. “Yeah, but the difference is people will be way disappointed when they unwrap it.”
He looks out the windshield, up at the moon, which is softly fading into the lightening sky, and sighs. “Exactly.”
26
IN THE APARTMENT, Evie is sitting with her butt perched precariously on the edge of the living room sofa, staring at a six a.m. Saturday infomercial for some weird hair contraption that makes everyone who uses it, regardless of the previous state of her hair, look like the Bride of Frankenstein. She doesn’t turn when the screen door slams behind me. “Hey,” I say. “We have to clean out the freezer this weekend. Don’t forget.”
She doesn’t answer, just sighs dramatically.
Ooooh. Trouble in Rick Rothmanland. I’m sure he finally realized that Rick Rothmanland wasn’t big enough for the three of them: Rick, Evie, and Rick’s ego. Score.
“Did he dump you?”
When she turns, there’s a scowl on her face. “How could he have? We were never together in the first place.” She raises her shoulder. “Besides, I always knew he was a jerk. I told you that.”
“Oo-kay.”
“And I was the one who told him I wanted to go home.” She pouts. “So it’s true. You were the one in the bathroom all night?”
I am sure that whatever the whisperings were—about me in the bathroom, ripping to shreds the five-minute rule—I don’t want to know. “Um …”
“Wish was in there, too. Everyone was looking for him.”
I don’t bother to issue the correction: that all the girls were looking for him. “So?”
She raises her eyebrows. I’m about to ask her if Rick Rothman would spend a second of his precious time lifting her hair so she could puke, much less hours, when I catch her look. “So it was true? You guys were … doing it?”
“What?” I feel my face twisting. “No, I was …”
“You couldn’t have been puking. Terra said you only had one shot.”
“Three. I had three,” I bluster, holding out the front of my dress to show her the evidence. I guess maybe leading everyone to believe I have this big sexual history with Wish now has them all thinking I go after it everywhere I can get a free moment, like a wild baboon.
“They were, like, mostly Jell-O, though. You could barely taste the alcohol.” She wrinkles her nose.
I sigh and walk into my bedroom. It’s probably better to let everyone think I’m a tart. I see an envelope on my bed. It’s small, and “Gwendolyn Reilly” is chicken-scratched on the front in pencil. I pick it up and turn it over; it’s sealed. Still inspecting it, I walk to the living room. “Ev, who did this come from?”
She’s still watching the infomercial, but now she’s sprawled out on the couch, eyes drooping. “Dunno. It was on the floor of the kitchen this morning.”
I rip it open and see newsprint. I pull out a newspaper article, dread washing over me. Someone probably thought it would be funny to send me one of those “Gwen—thought you could use this!” notes, attached to an advertorial about some magic pill that will melt body fat. Reluctantly, I unfold it to read not I LOST SIX DRESS SIZES IN SIX DAYS! but SEA LEVEL UNEXPECTEDLY RISES.
I scan the page to the bottom, where something is scrawled in the same chicken scratch as on the envelope. I’m still expecting the fat joke, something like “Why, did you go for a swim?” Instead, it just says, “Thought you would find this interesting. —C”
Interesting? First of all, I think it’s totally presumptuous and pompous when someone signs a note with a single initial instead of his whole name. I mean, I could have a hundred acquaintances with C as the first initial of their names. As it happens, though, I don’t. I know only one “C.” Christian. And he is just the type to do something weird like this.
But why an article on the sea level? What does that have to do with anything? The only things we’ve ever discussed in any detail are his mother’s profession and my pathetic relationship with Wish. Like the sea level of Cellar Bay has anything to do with those. I read the first paragraph, hoping for some clue to the importance of this in my life.
CELLAR BAY—Experts say the sea level rose markedly yesterday, an average of 1.8 mm. The largest increase, of just over 3 mm, was reported near the New Jersey coastline. The island of Cellar Bay lost several yards of shoreline. This is of interest because though the sea level has been steadily rising, the previous increase has been at a rate of 1.8 mm per year. George Nichols, spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “The sea level rose only eight inches in all of the previous century, so obviously this is a troubling situation, and we will be watching this very carefully.”
Global warming. It’s a bitch. I scan the rest of the article with waning interest, wondering why Christian felt the need to bring this cheery news to me. What did I ever do to him?
The phone rings. It’s my mom, wanting me to help bring the trays to the front. I yawn a “Be right there.”
“You can take a nap as soon as the trays are set up,” she coos, obviously proud that I had a normal Friday night for once, instead of staying in with her and reorganizing our sock drawers. “I called Christian and he’s going to fill in for you. He’s such a sweetie.”
Oh, yeah, he’s a regular jelly donut.
My head is throbbing. I guess this is what a hangover is. I change out of my puke-stained dress and nearly topple over trying to throw on my sweat shorts, then head down the stairs and into the back of the bakery. I grab a tray of Linzer tortes, and as I’m making my way to the store, I see Christian tying on his apron and shaking the dreads out of his eyes. “Thanks for the gift,” I mutter as I pass him.
“I’m glad you think of it that way,” he shouts after me. “Because that’s what it is.”
I place the tray in the rack at the front of the store and return. “How does the water level rising have anything to do with—”
“Heard about that, huh?” a gravelly
voice cuts in. Hans, the baker, is standing in front of the machine that shoots fillings into pastries, holding two powdered donuts in his hands. “We might leave.”
I stare at Hans. Hans is shaped like an industrial-sized refrigerator. His hands are like cinder blocks. He should not be afraid of a little thing like the ocean.
Christian nods. “They may end up evacuating us anyway.”
I squint at them. Living on an island means occasionally having to boat out your front door, when a nor’easter makes the ocean swell and turns the streets into rivers. It just goes with the territory. We even have a permanent waterline on the brick facade outside the bakery, about two feet from the ground, from the last storm. Every year, when a bad storm is predicted, we’re told to evacuate to the high school on the mainland, but we never do. Like my mom says, “If I wanted to hang out in a high school gym for hours on end, I would have become a phys ed teacher.” Plus we’ve always been perfectly safe. “Overreact much?” I snort.
Hans and Christian just stare at me, faces grim. All I can think of is how awesome it would be if my name were Andersen.
“You don’t find it troubling?” Hans says with his heavy German accent.
“Please. People here like to scream ‘evacuate’ whenever it so much as drizzles. You are all a bunch of wusses.”
Hans turns to Christian and grumbles, “Did you see the ocean this morning? Never seen waves so big.”
Christian smirks. “All of this might be underwater in a few days.”
I wave them away. Hans has only been working with us for a couple of years, and Christian’s just some goober from “out west.” Nonlocals can be so paranoid. “It’s happened before.” I point to the black line on the wall. “This is where the water came up to inside. It was higher outside.”
Christian nods, then reaches up and points to a spot over both our heads. “Let’s see how brave you are when it gets this high.”
