“I’ll be right back,” I tell Paolo.
He nods and says all warm, “I’ll be waiting.”
It’s not a long walk down the three concrete steps and over to Nicole, but it feels like I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail. My legs shake, and it seems I’m still dizzy despite all that aspirin. For a second I worry that Paolo is staring at my bottom and that it might look big. Then I get to Nicole and tap her on the shoulder.
I’ll ask her to sit with us, I think. That’s what I’ll do.
“Hi,” I say when she looks at me.
I want to tell her what a loser Travis Poppins is, with his black heavy-metal T-shirts and his mullet, but I can’t. I want to ask her why she’s with him, tell her I’ll give her Paolo, anything. I want to ask her what she’s read in Cosmo this week, tell her that there’s a hole in my heart where our friendship used to be, that my shirt is ripped and I need her.
“Hi,” she says like an ice-princess hotel heiress and then turns her head back to the game. I’m left staring at her back.
“Nicole?” I say. I poke her shoulder. “Nicole?”
She whirls around, hands on her hips. “What?”
“I don’t want to fight any more.”
“We aren’t fighting.” She stares. She chews her gum.
My body feels a little softer. “Oh, good. That’s good. I hate fighting—”
“We aren’t fighting because you no longer exist.”
“What?”
“You don’t exist,” she says. She waves. “Bye-bye.”
She turns back around. I crumple inside, but don’t move. Everybody yells because we’ve scored a field goal. Nicole jumps up and down and kisses Travis’ cheek and I just stand here, and stand here, and stand here, and here comes Paolo striding down the bleachers and putting his arm around me. I gulp big, and let him. I wish he would kiss me on the top of my head. He just turns me and brings me back to the bleachers.
“Bad night, huh?” he asks.
I shrug.
“I’m getting popcorn,” Sasha says. “Want some?”
Paolo gives her some money. She takes off with Stuart, who is practically doing some Irish step dance down the aisle because he’s so happy to be with her. Now that there’s room, I edge away from Paolo a little bit.
“I saw you go out the window,” he says.
My stomach falls. I swallow hard and stare ahead.
On the field, the boys move in an M pattern down the field. It must be nice to have all the plays figured out for you ahead of time, to have a coach telling you what to do.
“Did anyone else see?” I ask, finally.
He shakes his head. “Maybe my brother. He’d understand. We do it all the time.”
I look at him, try to imagine him getting his big body through a window, how his shoulders could possibly make it through. “You do?”
“Yeah, my dad. He’s got a temper … you know …” he says, and he grabs my hand. I twine my fingers into his. Mine look little compared to his, but I bet they’re almost as strong.
“My mom’s boyfriend …” I start to say, but I don’t finish. Paolo knows anyways. He can tell in my eyes, I think.
He squeezes my fingers. “Did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” I say, which isn’t really a lie or an answer. “Don’t tell. Okay?”
Sasha comes back with popcorn. We eat some and she hugs me, because she thinks the only thing I feel bad about is Nicole. And my sister. She doesn’t know I’m a bastard. She doesn’t know who my potential biological father is.
“Her loss,” she says.
I try to smile. Sasha starts flirting with the boys. She calls her lips bacon lips.
“They’re so big,” she says, but it’s like background noise, like a TV is on in the other room.
“Can I put my arm back around you?” Paolo asks after a minute.
I nod. He stretches his arm along my shoulder and drops his big hand down my arm. I scoot closer and breathe in the smell of popcorn, the cold air of fall, the sweet smell of Coke. I lean my head against him and he doesn’t move away.
Sometimes I think hugs are like helmets. Sometimes I wish I could walk around with someone hugging me the whole time. You could probably make a lot of money doing that, being a professional hugger.
I call my dad from Sasha’s cell phone. She has a zillion Anytime Minutes, so it’s no big deal. I tell him I’m sleeping over at his house and to ask no questions.
He says okay and I breathe out a long, cool sigh like I’ve been out in the war too long and I’ve finally gotten my papers to go home. In the distance bombs go off, but I know they aren’t real. They’re just trucks backfiring. I will myself to breathe in and out, real slow. I try to nestle into Paolo’s side.
Paolo’s brother drives me to my dad’s. Since we have to go all the way to Hancock, I’m the last one he drops off. Paolo rides with me in the back seat and holds my hand.
He doesn’t ask me questions either, just talks to his brother about football and soccer. His brother puts the old Volvo into what he calls turbo drive and we zip down Route 114.
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as turbo drive, but I like that he calls it that. It makes me feel like we’re in a comic book and about to return to our superhero alcove after ridding the world of hyperactive zombies.
As we drive, panic starts to hit me. What if Paolo starts thinking about me climbing out that window? What if he knows how crazy mixed-up my family is? I mean he already thinks my dad is gay, what if he figures out that I’m a bastard and my real dad is a tall drunk man with danger in his smile? I mean, let’s face it. I’m a girl with a lot of baggage and what if he decides I’m not worth it?
I feel him slipping further and further away, sort of like at Christmas when you’re really hoping for a reindeer—any reindeer, it doesn’t have to be Rudolph—and you keep opening present after present and it becomes increasingly clear that you aren’t going to get the reindeer, at least not this year. Santa probably won’t bring it next year either, and maybe you just weren’t good enough, you know? Maybe you just don’t make the reindeer-cut.
Maybe I don’t make the Paolo Mattias-cut.
“Walk her to the door,” Paolo’s brother orders him when we get to my dad’s little beige ranch house.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I say, suddenly shy and all polite.
“I was going to walk her to the door, jerk,” Paolo says, unfolding his legs to climb out of the car.
“Yeah, right,” his brother says like Paolo needs dating tips or something. “You’re such the gentleman.”
Paolo gives him the finger and slams the door. His brother laughs.
We walk up the path to my father’s door in silence. Only chipmunks scurry in spruce trees above our head. Over them are stars.
“I’m really okay,” I tell Paolo, stopping in the middle of the path.
He just looks at me. He frowns.
I start walking. He strides next to me but the path isn’t big enough, so his left shoe keeps going off the concrete blocks and onto the grass. The dog next door howls. A chipmunk shrills out a warning.
Paolo howls back at the dog and I start laughing. All the strangeness is gone. He is a weird, weird boy.
“My grammy—” I say.
“Woof?”
“She’ll think you’re a werewolf from Moravia,” I tell him. “No howling.”
He barks instead, running around in a circle, and I start laughing so hard because he looks silly pretending to be a dog. He pants. He scratches like he has a flea. I laugh and laugh and bend over with this pain in my side because he’s so funny and life is so weird and tonight is both the worst and the best night in my life.
He takes my shoulders in his paws. I mean, hands. In his hand
s.
“Don’t lick me! Don’t lick me!” I shriek.
Now, this has to be one of the all-time stupid Lily things to say, because here I am with this cute cute boy who is trying to make me laugh and who was maybe about to kiss me. He shakes his head at me. He makes eye contact.
“Oh,” I say.
He just leans in and touches my lips with his. They’re warm, not too soft, not too wet. The backs of my knees start to feel all wiggly. I put my hand on his chest. I wish I could feel his heart.
He pulls away and I start laughing. I can’t stop. His face turns blank.
“What are you laughing at?”
I shake my head. He looks hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just—it’s just so good.”
My dad opens the screen door right then and says, “You’re supposed to walk her all the way to the door to kiss her.”
Everything crashes down. The chipmunk scolds some more. I’m not sure who. Me? My dad? Paolo? I bite my lip and I’m afraid to look at Paolo. He laughs.
“I was going to kiss her there, too,” he says. I absolutely die.
They act like old friends. My dad winks and shuts the door, yelling, “I’m going to my beddy-bye now.”
“My father is weird,” I mutter, walking towards the space in the door my father just occupied.
“Weird is good,” Paolo says and he leans in and kisses my cheek. Then he bolts down the sidewalk and opens the passenger door of the Volvo. Before he gets in, he howls at the moon.
I watch them drive away. The bumper of the car reads Mean People Suck. Another sticker says Free Tibet.
There should be more variety in bumper stickers, I think, going inside the house. I lock the door behind me. I try not to hum. I try not to jump up and down, but I can’t.
I look at my dad. He looks at me. I jump up and down and my dad laughs.
“My little Lily-kins, kissing the boys at the door,” he teases. “Smoochie. Smoochie.”
He is not the most mature man.
“Dad!” I say and flop in the chair by the phone. “Do you think he’s cute?”
“He’s hunky,” my dad says, jumping up to sit on the counter. Grammy hates when he does that, but she’s long asleep by now. “He’s a hunky hunky hunk.”
He’s so strange, Mr. Wayne. Can you imagine a father saying that? I shake my head at him and he turns serious.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” my dad asks. He’s wearing his baby blue bathrobe and navy blue slippers. He smells like Noxzema Skin Cream, which I’m not going to ask him about. His feet swing in the air.
“You promised no questions,” I say.
He nods and grabs a toothpick, puts it in his mouth. It turns in circles.
“Grammy’s asleep,” he says.
I nod.
“Your boyfriend’s cute.”
“It was just a date.”
“Lily’s got a boyfriend. Lily’s got a boyfriend,” my dad sings, and he jumps off the counter and starts prancing around the kitchen like a five-year-old ballerina.
I open the fridge and grab the orange juice.
“How old are you?” I ask him.
“Old enough to know that my baby’s got a boyfriend.”
I’m afraid to look at him because I think he might be crying again. He grabs me in a big hug and I have to try hard not to drop the orange juice.
“Jessica’s here,” he says, pulling away.
I start pouring the juice.
“Oh.”
“Brian’s been hitting her,” he says, all serious again. All my stuff forgotten, replaced by her bad plot line.
“I know.”
“Someone should have told me.”
I put down the juice and hug him then. He feels so sturdy beneath his bathrobe, but his body just shakes.
“Jessica should have come to me. Daughters should be able to come to their fathers,” he says, sitting down in Grammy’s wheeling chair.
“She’s here now,” I tell him, sitting on the floor at his feet. I wonder why she left our mom’s house, if it was because of Mike and me. I wonder if she’ll tell my dad what Mike said. I grab his feet and rub them. He likes that.
I can hear the clock above my dad’s head ticking. When they got divorced, my mother was so angry about him taking that clock. He loved it though, loved the little cuckoo. A German friend of his gave it to him a long time ago.
“I’m here,” I say.
He nods, but I’m not sure it’s enough for me to be here. Maybe he already knows this isn’t where I belong.
Saturday morning and I’m at the dining room table with my grammy, who is not really talking much because she’s too worried about everything. Really, you can feel the worry pouring off her as she rubs Pond’s hand cream into the tops of her hands. She’s vain about her hands, unlike her feet, because people can see them.
I think she’s abandoned her feet, declared war on them, because she feels as if they’ve abandoned her. She hates that they don’t work like they used to, that she can’t just bound out of her chair and go off to work in the garden whenever she wants.
My head still hurts, but when I think about Paolo howling, it doesn’t hurt too bad. I sip my cranberry juice, nibble at my toast, and watch her rub her hands in circles.
“Want help?” I ask and take the white jar. Her skin feels like phyllo dough when I rub and I’m afraid to press down hard.
“You should eat more,” she says. “Your father eats bacon and four eggs and potatoes in the morning.”
I take her other hand and begin spreading moisture on that one. I would like to explain to her about heart attack risks and cholesterol levels, but she’s a lady, the kind who calmly waves goodbye to the heroes while standing at the front door of the homestead, and I don’t want to break her heart.
We stay like that for a while, me putting moisturizer on her hands, she looking out the sliding glass door onto the little deck my dad made.
“Your sister hasn’t come out of the bedroom,” she says.
“She sleeps late sometimes,” I say, eating another corner of my toast. It’s perfect toast, not too dry.
“You don’t.”
I shrug.
She pays no attention to me. “Grown ladies don’t sleep forever. You can’t get anything done. It’s just not right, not when you’re so young and there’s so much to do.”
“Grammy,” I say. “You know about Brian?”
“It’s giving up, sleeping all day. It’s just giving up on life,” she says, slapping her feet on the floor and scooting her chair towards the kitchen. “I’m poaching you some eggs.”
She keeps going and yells back to me, “And you’re going to eat them.”
I stand up and all my bones creak. I wonder if we’ve switched bodies somehow, or minds. By the time I’ve walked over to her she’s already in the refrigerator, or at least her head, shoulders and arms are.
I put my hand on her shoulder and feel the bones of it, the blade of it pushed out through the cloth, and it reminds me of a bird’s wing, a fragile bird that’s fallen out of a nest and for no reason at all I ask her, “Grammy, have you ever been in love?”
She doesn’t hesitate. “No.”
“Not with Grampa?”
“He was not an easy man.”
“Oh,” I say. “Do you think Dad loved my mother?”
“Maybe,” she says, breaking an egg. “Who is to know?”
I am to know. I want to know something, something solid. It seems like too much of life is like flower smells—just fragrances. They waft past your nose, you get a good sniff and then they are away, off to somewhere else. How can you hold onto that?
I want the feel of Paolo’s shoulder, not the feel of Mike
O’Donnell’s hand ripping my shirt.
“Can I help you?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she says and smiles.
One thing I do know is that in the kitchen it’s possible to help another person, to break an egg, to throw away a shell, to wipe up the mess.
My mother calls me and my grandmother forces me to the phone.
“I was worried sick,” my mother says, but her voice sounds like acting to me.
“Uh-huh.”
I play with a pencil on the counter, start scribbling on the prescription note pad, drawing circles over and over until they lose their circle look and become knots.
She keeps lecturing, all cranky-voiced. “You’re in big trouble, young lady, you just can’t do that. Sneaking out a window. Then Jessica leaves in a huff. Is she there too?”
“Yep.”
She’s silent, and that’s when I do it. That’s when I saddle up. Wagons ho! One big swallow and I launch the words out.
“Mom, he tackled me. He hit my head into the floor. He’s freaking scary, Mom. He’s not a good man,” I say and it’s like there’s this great big hand pressing down on my chest and it’s threatening to turn my whole entire soul dark if my mom doesn’t answer the right way. That horrible feeling is already spreading because I know she isn’t going to answer the right way, because she didn’t before, with Uncle Mark, and that was so much worse. I manage to say it again. “He hurt me.”
“Come home and we’ll talk about it.”
I watch the seconds on the clock go by. When I was little before the divorce and my family all still lived together, my father would come home from work and the first thing he’d do was lift me onto his shoulders and we would wind all the clocks. We’d fix all the minute hands on all the clocks in the house and make sure they all said the same time.
My dad used to tell me that it was important in a family to have that kind of consistency, the same truth in all the clocks’ times. Maybe it wasn’t the real time, he’d say, but it was family time.
I cut off my mother’s sentence, which is just about how awful I am, and I ask her, “What time does it say on the kitchen clock?”