by S. Massery
I let that action settle into me. Please, I pray, don’t let one of my cousins be doing something stupid like cocaine or making girls cry. Ignoring the knot forming in my stomach, I stride towards the girl and the open door. She flattens against the wall until I pass her, and then she flees toward the main stairs. I don’t have to guess that she is someone’s daughter, brought here to impress someone and wrangle her either a husband or a job. Her short black dress and dark makeup—a bit much for a summer party—spell out her intent: husband.
I pause in the open doorway. It isn’t a cousin in the bedroom, but someone I don’t immediately recognize: short dark hair, muscular, a crisp lavender shirt with a white bow tie. He sits on the bed, elbows on his knees and his hands holding up his head. A defeated position. The urge to back away slowly dances through me. But then, he looks up and pins me with a gaze. His head tilts to the side, like he doesn’t quite recognize me, either.
My eyes travel over his nose and his lips and his square jaw. My gaze settles on his eyes—dark blue like a pair of sapphires. Recognition jolts through me, an electric zap, quickly chased by confusion. Jared isn’t supposed to be here. He isn’t supposed to be anywhere near here, because he is supposed to be back at school, and I am mourning Avery and New York City.
I blink, and Avery’s face swims in front of mine. Don’t forget about me, he tells me in my dreams. I wish he had really said that.
The suffocating feeling creeps back. Jared still stares at me, looking a little more lost than he did before. And just as miserable. Maybe he doesn’t recognize me. The last I saw of him was three weeks before I started tenth grade, when he showed up on my doorstep to say goodbye. Off to boarding school, his parents had proclaimed. The Browns were strict, and Jared was decidedly unruly. He was kept away, even during the summers. My fearless leader was banished because of one incident, with a four-word declaration. That was six years ago.
He opens his mouth, but I hold up my hand to stop him. “Making girls cry at parties is in bad taste. Especially when a few words can get twisted around and ruin reputations. Go back downstairs. Or better, just leave.”
My legs decide to cooperate, then, and I walk as quickly as I can back to my room. I shut the door behind me with a soft click, leaning against it. It hurts to inhale. I wish, with all my might, that everything was different.
Everything.
That thought nearly unhinges me. I slide down the door until I am on the floor. Wrapping my arms around my legs, I let that thought wash over me. I wish I had more understanding parents. I wish I had less pressure. I wish I had kissed Avery more. I wish I had, at the very least, followed Avery. Gave him my phone number. Waited for him to come back.
The last one is a lie. I did wait, for almost an hour, but he didn’t return. I reread the same paragraph of my book over and over again, distracted by every twig snapping, every bird fluttering around in that damn maze. And then it was like I was possessed by a ghost. I couldn’t stop haunting those areas. Almost daily, I passed through the Culture Espresso, sat, and then fidgeted until I forced myself to leave. I took the long route past the ferry for Ellis Island. I trampled through the maze, memorizing the turns, only to feel lost at the center when he wasn’t there. Finally, around the end of August—a full two months since meeting him—I realized: Avery had left the city. And with it, me.
This damn dress still strangles me.
I claw at the back until I get the zipper down, pulling the top down until it pools around my waist. I kick off my heels while I’m at it, frenzied motions made more difficult by still sitting on the floor. Once free, I shakily exhale.
Life would be different if he and I had stayed in the same city. If he had come back after that phone call, picked up my hand, kissed it, and let us read our books in silence. Took me out to dinner, then a string of dinners, and then we would be dating. Easy.
But then I would have left New York, Chicago bound by the end of August, leaving him… where? To follow me to Chicago? To go wherever the wind blew? He struck me as the kind of man that followed his feet wherever they led. Whimsical, romantic, dire. Maybe not my perfect match for a relationship, or even within my comfort zone, and definitely hardwired to fail.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say aloud. It wouldn’t have worked, anyway.
That’s what I tell myself on repeat as I pick myself up off the floor.
“Charlie,” a voice says on the other side of my door. I step away as it inches open. “I’m coming in.” Jared slides through, closing it behind him. He leans against the door, blocking my escape. I’m not in any position to escape, though, so I take a few steps backward.
“Hi,” I mutter. I realize that I’m standing in my nude shift, but there’s nothing to do except pretend it isn’t happening.
“Are you okay?” He looks at me with concern. “Why is your dress off?”
I shake my head. “It was strangling me.”
He rolls his eyes. “You did love to deflect.”
“My mother taught me that.” I contemplate him when he doesn’t say anything. “Why—” But I can’t get any more words out. Why are you in my room? I want to ask, but I can’t. Why was that girl crying? I also want to ask. Why are you back home? And maybe, Why did you forget about me?
It’s been too long. There’s too much empty space between us.
He exhales. “I don’t know what to tell you, Charlie,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. I throw my hand toward the door. “Get out, then.”
He does.
My mother knocks on my door as I finish freshening my makeup in my bathroom. She peeks her head in, a small frown on her face. She is barely an inch shorter than me, and at least twenty-five pounds lighter. Plus, she somehow manages to never have a hair out of place. I missed those genes.
“Your dress, Charlotte?” The disappointment is evident in her voice.
Still, I meet her gaze in the mirror as I swipe on fresh lipstick. My new dress is the same base color as the first one—dark blue—with a wide scoop neck, and cut in an A-line style that flares out gracefully from my hips. It’s what I would have picked from the beginning, if I had a choice in the matter.
“Someone spilled a drink on the other one,” I tell her.
Her expression relaxes, shoulders lowering slightly. “You should be more careful,” she says. With that, my body seems to let go of the last bit of tension in it. But then, she ruins it. “Honey, you don’t have to lie. You found out about Jared, didn’t you?”
I shake my head, confused. Does she mean him and the girl in the bedroom?
She steps forward and, in a moment of rare affection, puts her hand on my shoulder. We look at each other through the mirror. Something stops us from directly facing the other. Sometimes love is easier when you don’t have to look at someone.
“He came with his family, as invited. I told you he might be back from the capital. But then this girl showed up…” She sniffs. It isn’t a sad sniff, either. It’s a someone screwed up sniff. “He got her pregnant.”
Oh.
I didn’t expect that.
The way the girl had swiped under her nose—clearly crying and not on drugs. Her other hand pressed against her stomach; it was indicative of something much more than just being upset. She looked young, too. Younger than me, and I haven’t even graduated college, yet. I had guessed her look correctly, though: she was husband hunting. But apparently it was Jared that made her show up, not a clever parent. Is she blackmailing Jared into marriage? Or was this the first time he had heard of her pregnancy, and he didn’t react the way she’d hoped? Why else would you ambush a guy at a party filled with influential people?
I want my mother to take her hand off me as much as I want her to hug me. She is doing this because she believes I will be upset. Her perfect match for me is suddenly unworthy, and it’s a slap in her face as much as she perceives it will be a slap in mine. I’m sure she is already taking Jared’s name off of the invitation for next year. From Mr. &
Mrs. Brown and Jared to, simply, Mr. & Mrs. Brown. Couldn’t have a scandalous man running around impregnating women.
The thought of having kids petrifies me. My hand floats over my stomach, but I can’t picture growing a baby inside of me. Mom always said she only needed two angel grandbabies. Dad never said anything about it, but his eyes glowed at Mom in an unfamiliar way when she talked of it. Plenty of time for that later, was how my mom would end the conversation, smiling. After all, I was barely twenty-one. There had to be an actual boyfriend, who then had to become a husband, before there could be any talk of babies. Or so I thought.
Apparently, Jared skipped a few steps.
“Ready to go back downstairs, Charlotte?”
I jerk. Mom’s hand has disappeared from my shoulder, and she is already out in my bedroom. She is probably looking for my dress, for evidence of a drink soiling it. I had thought ahead in that regard and poured water down the front, leaving it air-drying on the hook behind my door. She makes a noise in her throat, which I take to mean that she found it.
“Five minutes,” Mom says before the door clicks shut behind her.
I sag against the sink counter. Five minutes to get my shit together.
6
Past
I slammed the notebook closed mid-thought and squeezed my eyes shut. I tried to remember the day Jared told me he was moving back into his own house. Our true friendship began after his house burned down and my parents offered the two guest rooms to his family. I was nine.
I stared at ten-year-old Jared, who had just told me he was moving out.
“The house is done,” he declared. “Daddy toured it yesterday and said that it was ready.” He told me this after he had packed his little suitcase of clothes. There was a box of baubles and knickknacks he had collected while he lived with us sitting on the bed. This was his room. It was blue. There was a toy airplane on the dresser, and a helicopter—the blades actually spun—next to it. His stuff was always thrown around. Jeans on the floor, shirts on the chair in the corner, boxers everywhere. At nine, it was gross, but I wasn’t sure why. Cooties, probably.
His parents had the room down the hall, which had been my room before their house burned down. I was temporarily evicted, because his parents deserved the room with the private bathroom. Jared and I shared the one in the hallway.
He had been a pain in the butt in the beginning. He took my favorite chair at the dining table, drank all the orange juice, and burped out loud. I marveled at that, and the way his dad only gently reprimanded him with a quiet, “Manners, Jared.” His dad was always quiet, but in a nice way. If my dad got quiet, there was something dangerous brewing inside of him.
Also, if I were to belch like that, I would not be allowed to speak at the dinner table for a week.
“You’re leaving?” I asked. Somehow, I couldn’t quite fathom it. I’d thought he was going to stay forever. My eyes welled up with tears.
He dropped the suitcase and came over, awkwardly patting my shoulder. As I cried harder, he wrapped me in a bony hug. “It’s okay, Charlie, we’re still going to go on adventures together.” Charlie, because he was embarrassed hanging out with Charlotte, and referring to me as such would only dampen his rising social status.
I brightened, the tears momentarily abated. “When?” I breathed.
“Tonight. We can meet tonight, in your backyard.”
“Why not your backyard?” I asked.
He shook his head like I was a silly girl. “Because you’re nine. You’re not allowed to cross the street alone, remember?”
When we went back to school and everyone found out about the house fire, Jared’s popularity soared. At first, I watched from the sidelines. I didn’t have friends—I was the quiet nerd girl, after all—but I pretended to play with some of the girls at recess. I pretended I didn’t know that they were running away from me on purpose; I always ended up it.
One day, Jared jogged over. I was standing there, panting, as all the other girls giggled and bolted around in circles around me. I knew they were giggling at me, but I couldn’t catch them. They were all too fast. He stood there with me as I caught my breath, and, slowly, the girls stopped running.
Some of them kept touching their hair, and giggling at nothing. They seemed surprised, too, that the older, popular boy was paying attention to me.
He ignored them all, tugged on my hand, and said, “Come play with me.” He waited for me at the bus when school got out, as well, and sat next to me for the ride home.
That was the same routine almost every day, and I feared that, now that he was leaving, it would all be ending. Everyone would return to their regularly scheduled broadcast. I would return to being the invisible girl I used to be.
“Are things going to change?” I asked him as he went back to his suitcase.
“Us?” he asked. He was always on the same page as me.
I nodded.
“No, of course not, dummy. We’re best friends.”
I grinned at him. It turned out he was right. Nothing changed.
That night, I snuck out of my house and waited, huddled, on my back porch. It was October, and the nighttime air had a bite to it. There was one spot that was hidden from view of both the automatic porch light and my parents’ bedroom window. Waiting for him, I felt more alone than I ever had. It wasn’t a feeling that I was accustomed to; for all of my life, I had been surrounded by people.
“Charlie,” Jared whispered.
I jumped. He materialized out of the darkness. I stood and met him on the grass, grinning at him. He messed up my hair and started jogging toward the old tree in the far corner of my yard.
A simple platform had been built almost two years ago by some guys doing work for my parents. One of them spotted me playing by the tree, glanced around, and then walked over. He had spit out a quick question, Little girl, do you want a treehouse? I smiled at him, and he smiled back. My mother came out of the house, then, and yelled for me to get inside. I edged around the construction worker and went to my mother. She had palmed the back of my head, hugging me to her. Don’t go outside without me, she told me. I didn’t—I wasn’t allowed—but as soon as our roof was finished and the men left, I raced outside to find that platform built twenty feet in the air and some planks nailed into the trunk to help my ascent.
We climbed up and sat facing each other. Jared pulled a backpack off of his shoulders. From it, he pulled out a small flashlight, a blanket, and a jar of peanut butter with two spoons. “Storytime,” he said.
“I hope that’s smooth,” I said, pointing at the peanut butter.
He puffed his chest. “Only the best for you, my dear.” We burst out laughing, and I opened the jar while Jared spread the blanket over our shoulders. “Okay.” His voice dropped a bit. “Storytime,” he repeated. “A long time ago, a boy had a lot of things.”
I nodded. Yes, he did used to have a lot of things.
“The boy didn’t really care about much except his basketball and the cool shoes his mom had gotten him a few weeks ago. He liked to shoot hoops and play with his friends. He barely noticed the people around him, especially the girl with the boy’s name. Sure, she could hit like a boy, and she could run like a boy, but she was a girl with girly—Hey!”
He rubbed his arm where I had punched him.
“Anyway, she was really cool, but for a while the boy ignored her because she was a girl and he had friends that would’ve made fun of him for hanging with her.” He shrugged. “And then the boy’s house was stolen away by a fire breathing dragon. All he had left were the clothes on his back. But it wasn’t his other friends who rushed him on the leftover grass that didn’t burn. It was the girl who crushed him with a hug and told him it would be okay.” He sighed. I imagined, for a second, that he was picturing himself as an ice dragon, freezing the fire.
“That’s a good story,” I said. He stuck his finger in the peanut butter and scooped a glop of it into his mouth. “The boy would probably go on to be a dragon
hunter, don’t you think?”
His shoulder bumped into mine and he smiled. “Maybe. But until the boy was older he wouldn’t be able to do crap.” My eyes widened. “Don’t tell my mom I said crap.”
I licked the last of the peanut butter off of my spoon.
“I don’t want to close my eyes in the new house.”
He looked so lonely, even sitting next to me, that I threw my arms around his shoulders. I buried my face in his neck. “You’re not alone, Jared,” I whispered.
I heard him groan, but he didn’t try to dislodge me. “I see it burning, over and over again.”
I rubbed at his back the way my mom would when I cried. He exhaled, but it was shaky. “It’ll be okay. Your house isn’t going to burn down again.”
“I forgot to add, ‘and the boy realized what a true friend was.’”
I leaned away from him. “You’re nice.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
I punched him again, and he laughed.
We stayed there until it was too cold, and too late, to stay any longer. “You can sleep over,” I offered. He shrugged and glanced toward his new house.
“I’ll sleep over next time,” he said.
“Night, Jared.”
