Love, Heather

by Laurie Petrou

  Dee glares after him, then turns back to me. “Do we?”

  “What else are we going to do?”

  “The possibilities are endless. I don’t know about you, but I do not feel like going today.” She gestures at the sky, where the clouds have made themselves scarce, where the sun is shining like a big, gorgeous attention whore. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  I nod yeah, it is. But.

  “It’s up to you. But I’m not going to school.”

  I look at the school. That ugly beast, with its writhing insides, its sour, nauseous belly full of unhappy adolescence. I look back at the sky, with its infinite possibilities. It looks like it could just turn itself inside out like a giant piñata and rain candy all over us until we are buried—chocolate-smudged faces and happy toothaches. I look at Dee, who grins, and makes my heart heat up with some real, actual happiness. I reconsider.

  * * *

  Dee says she’ll wait on the big boulder outside the school. Me and Lottie’s rock.

  “You’d better get going if we’re doing this.”

  I hurry through the front doors as the bell rings. I have, scrunched up in my hand, a note that Dee just scribbled for me, using my back as a surface to write against. She folded it up and handed it to me, telling me to give it to my teacher.

  “What’s it say?” I asked her.

  “Says that you’re fed up and you’re taking a personal day.”

  I opened it.

  Please excuse Stevie from school today. She is spending the day with her father.

  She’d signed it with a pretty good estimation of my mom’s loopy Tiffany. It’s brilliant. For starters, the excuse of visiting with my dad is an ace in the hole. I mean, what teacher, let alone Pete, is going to deny a kid from a clearly broken home the chance to visit with her dad?

  The corridors are loud; it rings in my ears. I stride past my locker, not looking for Lottie, not caring, right into homeroom and zero in on Pete, who is at his desk rummaging through a bag. He sees me coming, and his face lights up.

  “Hi there, Stevie! How’s the morning going so far?”

  He seems so far away to me now. I never go to their house anymore; it feels like a different life, back when he was someone I would confide in, someone I could talk to and trust. Now he’s just my teacher.

  “Um, good.” I hand over the note. “I’m spending the day with my dad.” I look away. “Hope that’s all right with you,” I mumble. And I am hoping that he doesn’t run into my mom anywhere in town and mention this.

  He reads it and nods, a somber look on his face.

  “Of course, Stevie. I know how much you must be looking forward to that. Say hi for me.” He doesn’t even know when he’s being blatantly lied to. I can’t believe I used to think he got me, that he got anything.

  “Yeah, okay, I will,” I bullshit. “He doesn’t come around much, so we kind of have to jump on it when he does.”

  “That’s great. Make sure you catch up on what you miss from someone in the class.” Then he tells me to have a good day, and I don’t even feel a twinge of guilt when I walk right back out of there again. It just goes to show that even people who really know you well may not have any kind of bullshit radar. You could just spend your days lying your ass off to everyone.

  Dee is right. I am fed up.

  And so, when a group of senior-year Barbie clones gives me the once-over on my way out, I flip them not one, but two birds—ka-pow!—one in each hand. Boom. And then I slam open the front door, or at least I try to, but it’s one of those really heavy metal ones that takes forever to actually open, and so the moment is not actually that momentous.

  Dee stands up and I can’t help but smile.

  * * *

  We are winding our way through the suburban streets of my childhood. It is a warmish day, and the sun is in our faces, and I feel, even with everything—everything bad—pretty good. Not alone, anyway, and that’s something.

  I kick some pebbles. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Exploring,” she says, just like that. Decisive.

  I don’t say anything, but the silence isn’t awkward. We walk through the quiet streets, Dee with her hands jammed in her pockets, occasionally looking at me mischievously. I don’t tell her that I have never skipped school before, that I have never, in fact, “explored” and don’t even know what she means. I am buzzing with the newness and badness of this. These are streets I grew up on, but they suddenly seem fresh and different; I never see them during the weekday school hours.

  “What’s your mom like?” Dee says, out of nowhere.

  “How do you know my mom?” I ask, alarmed.

  “I’ve seen her around …” She pauses; then, “She’s pretty.”

  “I’m sure she’d love to hear that.”

  “You look like her, you know. Except”—she looks at my clothes—“you don’t dress at all the same.”

  I laugh. “Oh, you mean because I’m not vacuum-packed into my clothes?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She says. “I’ve never seen your dad, though. Is he not around?”

  I glare at her. “What is this, therapy?”

  She shrugs. “God, defensive. Why, do you need therapy?”

  “No, I just mean … No. Whatever.” I jump up to pull a leaf off a tree we’re passing under. “My dad left, okay? Why the hell do you want to know so much about my family?”

  “I like to watch people. See what makes them tick.” She looks over at me. “My mom took off, too. And my dad has a new girlfriend who could give two shits about me.”

  I pull the skin of the leaf away from the bones of it. It looks like a skeleton. “Sounds familiar.” I don’t know how to say that I miss my mom, but Dee nods like she knows, she knows exactly, and her hair bounces slowly around her face like a lazy forest in a breeze. She has the hair I’ve been trying to grow out and into, a style I’ve been trying to own. It is black and curly, and she does nothing with it from what I can tell, but it works. Same with her body and the way she holds herself: strong, relaxed. She’s got swagger, a kind of stomp that just seems to come so easily.

  “You hungry?” she asks.

  “Sure, but—”

  Dee looks behind us and quickly grabs me by the hand. Her touch feels like a current running up my arm as she pulls me between two houses. We lean against the brick wall of one of them, and then Dee walks toward the backyard. She peeks over the fence. Looks at me, eyebrows raised.

  “What?” I whisper frantically. “What are you doing?”

  She grins, oblivious to my concerns. “Come on. Let’s see if anyone here has something we can snack on.”

  The sun darts behind the only cloud up there like it’s trying to hide, too. My mind races, but while I’m trying to decide what to do, Dee has opened the gate and is looking under a mat by the back door. She holds up a key like a talisman, her face split by a wonderful, terrible smile.

  “Aha! People are so predictable.”

  And in that moment, those exact words, things begin to slide forward for me. Forward and fast and off course from where I was going in the first place. I can almost see my other self, what I would be doing, sitting in Pete’s class, looking out the window at the cloudless sky, looking at a squirrel, remembering Lottie and Paige and how things used to be—like there are two of me in that moment, but one of me chose a new life.

  People are so predictable.

  I follow Dee inside.

  The house is comfortable, cozy, decorated like a candy cottage with flowers and candles and little bowls of potpourri on the tables. I am afraid to touch anything, including the orange cat that has come over to me, winding itself around my legs as I stand frozen in fear. Can the police find fingerprints on a cat? Dee, meantime, is in the fridge, in the cupboards, humming to herself.

  “Relax,” she says, over her shoulder. “People have way more than they need. No one is ever going to know we were here.” She pockets an apple and a couple of small bags of pretzels and cook
ies and other things from a cupboard that, yes, in truth, appears to be overflowing with snacks.

  “Let’s look around.”

  And so we do, and the cat follows me, questioning my judgment, asking with its bitchy little face why I’m doing this, why I’ve abandoned reason. It jumps up on a bookshelf as we enter the living room, and I want to ask it if it’s ever had a best friend who snipped the whole communication thread, which was until then reliably woven into the fabric of its being, just because she suddenly had two amazing dads instead of one, just because there was a new girl with perfectly flippy hair. The cat looks away then and licks itself, which is an answer in itself.

  Dee pulls a framed photo off the shelf, and together we notice the same thing. A picture-perfect family with one very familiar face.

  “Hey … look who it is …”

  “Breanne,” I whisper fearfully, reverently, starting to get very uncomfortable. Shit. Now I remember why the house looked familiar. I saw Breanne once on my way home, coming in here. And it suddenly occurs to me that maybe this is a trap. Maybe this whole thing has been some way of luring me away from school, away from any form of protection. My blood runs cold, and I consider bolting. “What’s going on, Dee?” I say, edging backward. Who else is here? I wonder. Are they going to swarm me, kill me?

  But she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the photo. “Breanne.” She puts a finger to Breanne’s beautiful, evil face. “You know, I’ve never been a fan of hers.” She’s wiggles her eyebrows.

  I say nothing to this but look back at the door.

  “I don’t like this,” I murmur.

  Dee puts the picture down. “We’ll go. Don’t worry. But not yet. Not quite yet. I wanna look around upstairs.”

  I freeze, watching her. She moseys, hands in pockets, out of the room. I follow her a couple of steps, cautiously, at a distance, and see her climb the spiraling, entrance-hall staircase, feet making no noise on the cushy cream wall-to-wall carpet. All the time in the world. I look at the cat, which is poised, ears perked, knowing this is one step too far.

  I won’t go up Breanne’s stairs. I keep my eyes on the door. My body tensed.

  “What are you doing?” I yell.

  Silence.

  “Come down!”

  This girl is bad news.

  “I’m leaving now,” I shout, and even though I sound confident at the start of the sentence, I lose it by the end, barely muttering the now. But then I hear her close a door, and she’s bumping down the stairs at a hustle.

  “Okay,” she says gently, and touches my arm when she reaches the bottom. “I’m here.”

  “What the hell is this about?” I demand, practically running out of Breanne’s house. “Are you fucking with me?”

  She grins and nudges me with her arm and tells me to relax. We’re out of the house. Maybe it’s the relief or adrenaline, but I feel a charge of energy. Trouble. But the kind of trouble I gravitate toward, the kind that’s bold and fun and makes me momentarily forget everything that weighs me down. It makes my skin tighten and my eyes focus, like someone has blown cool air in my face and the dim fog I’ve been under is finally lifting. I am awake again and don’t really care about the risks, not now when we’re outside and the sun is shining down like a kiss. Not now.

  We walk down toward the lake, and Dee buys some ice cream from a sad little truck parked at the curb. I wonder what Lottie’s doing, and then I don’t care. We clamor down over some rocks toward the water’s edge and choose a couple of big ones where the sun is shining all over the place. Dee stretches out, way out, her legs and arms going straight as she gets long and yawns and reaches out like a huge lazy cat. She almost drops her ice cream but saves it, sucking it from the bottom. It’s sweet and obscene, and I look away, out across the lake.

  “So what other movies do you like?” I ask, my back to her.

  “I told you, old high school revenge flicks are my jam. Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Carrie; I even like things like Revenge of the Nerds and Back to the Future, but for me, there has to be some real payoff at the end. The assholes have to get theirs.”

  “What do you consider ‘getting theirs’?”

  “Like, they need to suffer. How else are they supposed to learn?”

  I turn back to look at her, and she is taking off her shirt. I look away again, my face going red.

  “What?” she asks, laughing at me. “It’s hot. I’m hot. I am going to enjoy it.”

  I watch a boat in the distance and say nothing. She lets out a satisfied sigh. I turn my head again and take a small peek. She is stretched out on her rock, arms over her head, brown nipples looking straight up and daring me to defy them.

  Her eyes are closed, but she says, “It’s not going to kill you to loosen up a bit, Stevie.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “I’m serious. What’s the worst that will happen to you?”

  I spend so much time worrying about the worst things. I can’t imagine anymore what it feels like not to care, every second, what people think, what kind of danger I’m in. I look at Dee again, she’s smiling sleepily, bare to the world. I consider my shirt, sticking to me in the heat. What if someone sees us?

  “Just do it, for Christ’s sake,” Dee laughs.

  So I do.

  The rock on my bare back is uncomfortable at first, so I put my T-shirt under me. A shiver runs across my body, and I feel like I might be having an embarrassment-induced heart attack, but I try to relax. And then I actually do. Dee keeps her eyes closed against the sun, which is warm and inviting. “Feel good?” she asks me, and I tell her the jury is still out on it, and she chuckles. I look over at her and try to soak up some of her ability to lay back and chill. We stay like this for a while, listening to the water lapping against the rocks, and to the sounds of voices and dogs around the waterfront paths. Then I hear a kid ask, “Is she bare naked?” and turn to see him pointing at me to his mom, who shushes him and pulls him away, and I giggle, and so does Dee.

  “So: what do you think of our town?” I ask her.

  “It’s got that innocent-until-proven-guilty thing going for it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I mean, it seems quaint, but it’s actually crawling with terrible people.”

  I laugh and cross my hands over my chest self-consciously. I roll over and look at Dee. “Like who?”

  She turns her head to me and opens her eyes. “Like who? Like those people at school who are all over your ass, even though you act like it’s nothing. Paige, Aidan, Luke and Breanne, and the rest of the fucking assholes who run it like some kind of Orange Is the New Black version of high school. And even what’s-her-name, Lottie. Wasn’t she your best friend? What got up her ass? How could you let her treat you like that?”

  I don’t know. I blink away tears that came fast to my eyes and say nothing, sitting up to put on my T-shirt again.

  Dee scoffs. “And the teachers are no better. There’s all this ‘zero-tolerance’ bullshit, but half the time they haven’t got a clue what is going on, and they turn a blind eye the other half. And sometimes they’re the bullies.”

  “I should get going,” I say, because suddenly the clouds are filling up the sky and I don’t want to talk anymore. Dee sits up and pulls her own shirt on.

  “And what about your mom?” she asks, scrambling up with me.

  I turn to Dee sharply. “What about her?”

  “You tell me. Seems like she forgot about you.” Her eyes are holding mine, and I can feel myself about to full-on cry.

  I start climbing up toward the pathway, and Dee grabs my shoulder. “Hey,” she says, gently, then takes her hand off me and smiles. “I just want to say, I—I’m here. I’ve got your back.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that I am not like them.”

  We are standing on the gravel pathway that runs along the lakefront. I look at her, this bold new friend. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. Like a best friend.

&
nbsp; “It’s people like us against the world, Stevie.”

  I roll my eyes and mutter, “You don’t even know me.”

  “Sure I do. You and me? We’re the same.”

  And looking back, after all of it, it might have been here, here in this moment, that I finally felt like I could rebuild myself.

  12

  On Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I stay away if I see Reg’s car at our house. I don’t want to see him—or Mom with him. They’re building a two-person raft to sail away to their new life. There is no room for me. He’s almost totally moved in now. Every time I see him, he’s carrying a box and telling me, “It’s the last one, I swear, Stevie! Hahaha.” I go to my job. I hide in my room at night, claiming to have a mountain of homework. I make myself disappear. All those hours I used to spend at Lottie’s place—I realize now how much time that was, how much it took me out of this house. Mom used to kind of resent me being there so often, but now she doesn’t care that I’m around.

  Dee came over for the first time the other day, and Reg almost fell over himself to prove how cool he was by complimenting her on her Stranger Things T-shirt: “Great show! You have good taste!” I scoffed, and we went into my room together. It was so completely different from Paige being there. Dee ran her hands over all my old movies with reverence, like they were part of some kind of shrine.

  “The. Best,” she said, holding up Heathers.

  “Classic.”

  She threw herself on my bed like she’d been there a thousand times. She gazed at all my movie posters.

  “Ahh. What a great room. A total sanctuary,” she said, grinning. She sat up then and looked at me, a glint in her eye. “It’s almost like a war room in a movie, you know? Like, you could plot some dangerous shit in here.” She paused, then looked serious, and I couldn’t even tell if she was kidding when she said, “I mean, if you ever wanted to, like, seize the town by force.”

  I laughed and looked around my room, seeing it in a new light. There is hardly an inch of wall space not covered in some homage to movies; my desk is covered in scripts and notes for my videos; there are piles of DVDs and VHS tapes everywhere.