by Wendy Wunder
I go into her room, and she’s still in bed. The dreadful black poppies of the mock-Marimekko comforter, which she made herself, wrap around her body, as if strangling her. Her feet, still bare, stick out from the bottom.
I walk to her side and lift her limp arm off the bed. Gravity pulls it back to the mattress.
“Zoe. Get up,” I say, but she won’t budge.
“Draw me a picture,” she mutters into her pillow.
“Of what?” I ask.
“Of why I should get out of bed.”
She’s made bedroom furniture out of found objects like milk crates and button boxes. Underneath a table made out of a stop sign, I find some printer paper and a Sharpie. I begin to draw.
“Don’t do flowers and rainbows.”
I crumple up the paper and get another one. This time I draw a huge rippling staff of music filled with notes and an electric guitar.
“What’s that?”
“Music.”
“That’s enough.”
“That’s enough drawing?”
“No, that’s enough to live for. Music.”
“See? Then get up.”
“I just need five more minutes,” she says, and she rolls back over.
“Zoe . . . Zo,” I say, but she’s already fallen back to sleep.
• • •
I go back to the front door. Noah’s on the stoop reading when I ask him how he is.
Without looking up from his book, he says, “You know I can’t answer that question, so why do you ask it, Hannah? I can answer where I am, and who I am, and what I am doing, but I cannot answer the question how I am.”
“I want you to know that Zoe’ll get up soon, okay?” I say, as I hug him close and muss his straight hair a little. “Because whether you know it or not, you are probably feeling frightened by the party, and lonely without Zoe to take you to school. You probably miss your routine, and I want you to know it will all fall back into place. Okay?”
“What I feel without Zoe is lonely?”
“Yes.”
“What is it that I feel for you right now because you told me that?”
“Gratitude, perhaps. Or friendship.”
“Is friendship a feeling?”
“Not necessarily. I guess what you feel for friends is a special love.”
“Does not compute,” Noah says in his robot voice, and he lets out a rare Noah giggle and smile.
I start to get up to go, and he holds out his hand to stop me. “Will you bring me to school, Hannah?”
“Where is your mom, buddy?”
“She’s crying a lot because of Zoe. Sadness-slash-despair again,” he sighs.
“I’ll take you,” I say. I yell into the screen door that I have Noah. I hear Susan blow her nose, and then she yells, “Thank you, Hannah.”
“And don’t do anything rash,” I yell. “Zoe will be fine.” I’m not sure about this, but I don’t want her sticking Zoe in the hospital again.
“I’m giving it one more day,” she says.
• • •
Taking Noah to school is not part of my routine, and I begin to feel the agitation, a tingling in my hands and feet and my chest closing up like a vault, that happens when I veer from my habitual schedule. I don’t have time to stop at the corner store for my corn muffin. I don’t have time to take the long way past Danny Spinelli’s house. I won’t have time to give my first-period homework a once-over. I won’t have time to park in my regular parking spot.
This makes me a little testy with Noah. But he can’t pick up on it anyway and continues to speak at me about the different categories of star.
“Okay, I’m going to quiz you now. What color star is the hottest?”
I haven’t been listening, but I try, “Blue.”
“Good job,” he says, and luckily we pull up to his school before he can ask me another question.
He opens the door and flutters out of it before I can say, “Have a nice day,” and before he can close the door, Danny Spinelli grabs the top corner of it and holds it open. He has a little sister Noah’s age, and he must have been dropping her off.
“May I?” Danny asks as he slips into the passenger seat and slams the door.
“You already have,” I say. His knees fold up almost into his armpits, so I show him how to pull up the lever and send the seat back.
“You’ve been avoiding me. Want to go for a ride?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. No one cares if I miss school as long as I’m back for practice.”
My palms are freezing and sweaty at the same time, and my stomach twists and cramps. These are not cute physical manifestations of first love but, sadly, my anxiety about missing a day of school. I never have missed a day of school. Even when people seemed to stop keeping track of attendance, I continued to show up every day. “I can’t miss school,” I tell him.
“Why?” he asks.
“I just can’t. It’s a thing with me.”
“Can I talk you down?”
“You can try.”
“Okay, so relax your grip on the steering wheel and take a deep breath in through your nose. Good. Now, slowly release the breath as if you’re blowing through a straw . . . We are going to miss school today, Hannah.” The timbre of his voice vibrates at my center, and I relax for a second, but when I hear “miss school,” I tighten my grip again, and my shoulders hunch up toward my ears.
“Boy, this is harder than I thought,” he says.
“It’s a personal goal of mine,” I say. “Perfect attendance.”
“Perfect should never be a goal. Perfect just happens if you let it.”
“Whoa.”
“You learn that from sports. Perfect happens only if you get out of its way. So what time do you need to be there for it to count as a full day?”
“Ten,” I say.
“That gives us plenty of time.”
“For what?”
“Turn left. Take 206,” he says.
On the drive through other country parts of New Jersey, horse farms and rolling hills and woodsy big estates, I wonder what the hell happened to make him suddenly so interested in me. There must be a rumor circulating that I gave someone a blow job. That’s the only way I can possibly explain it. It’s a perfect linear equation. FALSE BLOWJOB RUMOR = SUDDEN UNEXPLAINED ATTENTION FROM BOYS.
“So is there a rumor circulating about me?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Well, you and I don’t usually hang out,” I answer.
“Yeah. I’m trying to change that.”
“Why? What about Rebecca?”
“I’m tired of them.”
“Who?”
“Everyone. You know, that’s the word they use to describe themselves. They consider themselves everyone. ‘Everyone’s meeting at the beach.’ ‘Meet us at the mall. Everyone is going to be there.’ Everyone who matters in their universe.”
“I’m not part of everyone?”
“Not usually, no. That’s what I like about you.”
“That’s what you like about me now. Until you start to miss ‘everyone.’” I don’t even ask if he’s broken up with her. Somehow I don’t feel like I have the right. Like it’s none of my business. Because I could never understand what they have together.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Try to discredit what I’m saying to you. You have to know that I’ve always liked you. Since second grade when we sat across from each other and you taught me that trick about the nine times table and you let me copy your answers.”
“I just wanted to help.”
“And that’s what I like about you.”
“That’s not very romantic. Those are the same feelings you have for a preschool teacher.”
“Stop. Pull over. We can be real with each other. You and I are, as they say, cut from the same cloth.”
“Aren’t you and Rebecca ‘cut from the same cloth’?”
“I think what we had has run its course. We’re bored with each other.”
“And so you’ve set your sights on me? I’m not the most exciting person in the universe. I sell hot dogs.”
“You’re going to make me prove this to you, aren’t you? Look at me. You are one of the hottest girls in school. And you’re smart and ambitious and kind. Which none of those others are. You are the only girl worth pursuing. And that’s why no one pursues you. You, Hannah Rose Morgan, are intimidating. These losers know they could never live up to what you deserve. And the only reason you don’t know how physically beautiful you are is because you’re always standing next to Zoe. Who, granted, is hot as hell, but she is not relationship material.”
“Watch it. That’s my best friend,” I say. I’m smiling, incredulously. Does he really expect me to believe that I have no boyfriend because I’m too good for “everyone”? I look him in the eye and shake my head.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No,” I say.
“Fine. You forced me to do this,” he says. “We’re sitting here in a gas station parking lot at eight thirty in the morning, and just the idea of being next to you in a car has done this.” He reaches over, grabs my unmanicured hand, and places it on top of the button fly of his extra-tall boot-cut jeans.
The thing beneath it is rock hard, alive, and insistent. I pull my hand away quickly and giggle. “That seems happy to see me,” I say.
“It is.”
“From what I’ve read, though, seventeen-year-old male parts are happy to see anyone. Or it could happen just from driving over a bumpy road.”
“What have you been reading?” He laughs. “That’s fourteen-year-old male parts. Seventeen-year-olds begin to discriminate. I like you, okay?”
“I like you too.”
“Really?” he says.
“Always have.”
“Okay,” he says back, and when he smiles, his eyes crinkle up a little on the sides. It is so adorable, I want to spend the rest of my entire life trying to make him smile. We drive about three more country miles until he directs me to a remote, hilly, and abandoned driving range with Canadian geese grazing among white clusters of far-off jettisoned golf balls.
“I never fancied you a golfer,” I tell him.
“I’m terrible at it. But of all the sports on the planet, it’s the best at teaching you to get out of your own way. To find perfection by quieting your mind.”
“Ha. Sport. Golf is not a sport.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If ninety-year-old ladies can play it, it’s a game. Like shuffleboard. Or pinochle.”
He stares at me for a second and smiles. The crinkling happens again, and I am rubbery. How is this happening to me? For a second I think of Zoe and wonder if she’s gotten out of bed. I think of telling Danny about it, but I want to stay positive. That’s what she would tell me to do. I forcefully push Zoe out of my mind so that I can hit golf balls with Danny Spinelli while we’re supposed to be at school. I know how to hit a golf ball. So I have to decide whether I let him show me or whether I try to impress him. A difficult choice. But then I think maybe I can do both.
Someone has left an old rusty driver sitting in a canister to the left of the shack where you would buy baskets of balls in the summer. He grabs that and runs out onto the grass, collecting balls and shoving them into his deep pockets. When he returns, I let him show me how to swing, so that he can touch me. He stands behind me, and together we hold the club. The insides of his smooth forearms graze lightly against the backs of mine, and my arm hair stands on end. He lifts the club behind us and presses against me as he shows me how to turn my hips. Then he kisses me on the neck, which unbeknownst to me until this very moment is an intense erogenous zone for Taureans, especially those born in April. We don’t even hit an actual ball before we’re back in the car, kissing in the backseat in broad daylight. Finally I come to my senses.
“We need to go. This is moving too fast. I’m missing school. Rebecca . . . We need to go,” I say with a sigh. Danny lifts his face from where it was nestled in my chest and looks at me. “Now,” I say, stroking my finger down the bridge of his beautifully slightly crooked nose. When I get to his lips, tracing them gently, he takes my finger in his mouth. I pull it out with a pop because it really is going too far. “We have to go,” I tell him.
“You’re killing me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” He hoists himself off me, and I take a deep breath. We straighten out our clothes, get back into the front seat, and start driving. We stop at 7-Eleven and get Big Gulps, mostly full of ice, so Danny can hold the cup in his lap for the rest of the drive to school.
On the way there, he talks about his enthusiasm for the food truck industry. And I realize that we don’t actually have a shared passion for mobile restaurantrepreneurship (Zoe’s word for what I do). I’m doing the hot dogs because my sexist, tight-as-a-clam’s-ass father won’t pay for college for his girl-child.
Danny is doing it because he loves it. He tells me that he’s read all of Colonel Sanders’s biographies. “Colonel Sanders tried to sell his Original Recipe idea more than a thousand times before he had a taker. Business is all about persistence,” he says. “And optimism.” Then he actually quotes something from Henry Ford. “‘Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right,’” he says, and then adds hesitantly, “Right?”
“Right,” I say. “Words to live by.”
He’s brave, I think. He cares, I think. And I care too.
Not about hot dogs specifically, or food trucks, or the Original Recipe, but I feel that I care deeply about vague things that haven’t yet crystallized in my heart.
NATURE
According to her texts, Zoe is now up and showered. She assures me she’ll be at my house tomorrow bright and early to share with me the epiphanies from her dreams. Things sound like they’re on the up and up, but you never quite know for sure with Zoe.
On the phone I go through our checklist:
“How is your mood?” I ask her jokingly, because that’s what they would ask her every day in the hospital. “Have you lost interest in your favorite activities? Are you participating in risky behaviors? Irritable? Sleeping too much or too little?” I slip in there: “Talking to aliens?”
“Just needed some rest,” she says.
I try to take her word for it, until I see for myself tomorrow.
In the meantime, Danny’s enthusiasm for mobile restaurantpreneurship motivates me to hitch the cart up and make some sales after school. The rec league has late soccer practice, and if you want to sell some hot dogs on a weeknight, you just have to follow the minivans. I take the dusty dirt road to the field behind the supermarket and set up next to a little pond.
It’s two days until Thanksgiving, and it still hasn’t frozen. The ducks even forgot to fly south. They swim along the ripply frosty edges of the water, puffing out their chests, daring us to ask them to leave now, when the daffodil shoots are already poking their razor-sharp leaves out of the dirt. The kids are still playing in their T-shirts. Nature, it seems, is seriously out of whack. So it is completely in tune with my life.
I put on my baseball hat with the pink and yellow logo in which HANNAH’S is spelled out in one continual cursive chain of linked-together sausages—Zoe designed it and had it silkscreened on some hats and aprons for my birthday—and I get busy marrying the ketchups and boiling up the water. For the kids, it’s all about the ketchup.
I’ve made friends with some of the regular moms. By regular moms I mean both the fact that they buy hot dogs from me regularly and the fact that they’re not too pretentious to let their kids eat
the occasional hot dog. They’re also not too uppity to be seen talking to a teenager. They’re the kind of mom I hope to be. I like the ones with senses of humor who realize not everything has to be perfect.
My favorites are Karen and Jen. They both sit next to me on lawn chairs as I set up the cart. They’re drinking from ergonomic, BPA-free water bottles, but I’m certain they are not filled with water.
“I’m bored,” Karen says. She’s wearing her mom uniform. Tight black yoga pants that don’t breathe because of the tummy-control panels, and a perfectly highlighted ponytail. “Tell me what’s happening in the wild life of Johnson High,” she says. “Are you just ‘sexting’ the whole day long? . . . CHLOE!” she interrupts herself, yelling toward the field, “Stop doing cartwheels in the midfield!” then without missing a beat resumes her conversation with me. “I sent a naked picture to my husband the other day, and he had his phone sitting face up on the table in the conference room. His boss totally saw my boobs.”
“Karen!” Jen says. These two are kind of like me and Zoe in the future. Karen is the Zoe one. “I’m sorry, Hannah. She is so embarrassing. Filter!” she says to Karen. “Where is your filter?”
“Don’t you get tired of the filter? We have to use it all day with the kids. A woman can never speak the truth. So. Tell me, Hannah. Who do you have your eye on?”
“Don’t answer her, Hannah, just so she can get her rocks off. She is disgusting.”
I only pause for a second. I need to tell someone, and Zoe has been MIA. “Actually,” I say as I drop eight franks into the boiling water and shut the lid. They both lean closer to me. “Do you know Danny Spinelli? With the ice cream truck?”
“Get. Out. Of. Town!” says Karen. And then, “SHOOT! JACKSON!!! He always putters up close to the goal and then forgets to get a shot off . . . Danny Spinelli?!?”
“He’s adorable,” says Jen.
“And how big are that kid’s feet, like size fifteen?”
“My god, you are disgusting. Hannah . . .” she begins.
“Size matters,” Karen interrupts. “Don’t let her convince you it doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t,” Jen says to me, and then, “Hey, I’m sorry about your dad. That must be hard.”
