I jab my dust-encased index finger at her. “Whose skin is it?”
She shrieks and yanks the wheel. The car swerves and steadies itself. I wipe my finger on the door. There’s a little rip in the paneling.
“I’m going to vote for Dylan,” I say. When Dylan announced he was gay it was a big deal. The town was pretty much shocked because handsome, blonde, handy Dylan did not fit their stereotypes of what a gay guy should be like. You’d think by now that people would learn about stereotypes. We talk about this in Students for Social Justice all the time.
For a couple months people called him fag and harassed him, which, according to our civil rights’ team bulletin board, is normal high school behavior. Sometimes things get so bad that kids have to leave school. Dylan didn’t do that. I think sometimes he wanted to, but he toughed it out.
Anyway, at first I was pretty much shocked by the whole Dylan thing because I thought he loved me. He told me that all the time, whispered it in my ear after we had sex, wrote it to me in poems or when he instant-messaged me before going to bed at night. It was hard dealing with that, the fact that it was all some fairy-tale lie, but he still loves me, just not the way I thought he did.
He does.
I love him too.
Just not that way any more.
That new, bold, crazy, stomach-pit-aching, world-spinning, lust-pumping-through-every-neuron way is reserved for Tom.
“You are zoned out,” Em says.
“Dylan is an amazing singer,” I announce as we come up to the Y. “Do you think that I’m messed up because Dylan’s gay?”
“Duh,” Em nods.
She honks her horn at the Eastbrook squad car that’s parked in the Y lot, facing out and ready to catch speeders. Chief Tanner, Tom’s dad, Eastbrook’s head cop, waves his radar gun at her, but smiles. She slows down.
“It’s a good thing he likes you,” I say and cross my legs, rub my hands hard against my thighs trying to get rid of the tingling feeling.
“I know.”
We stop at the red light, one of Eastbrook’s few, and she puts her blinker on, clears her throat and says, “You need to let the Mimi thing go.”
I groan and don’t answer. The red light flickers. Something is wrong with it. Does it want us to stop or not? It’s like it can’t decide.
“Tom does not like Mimi,” she says.
The light flickers. Cars drive in front of us.
“Belle?”
“Whatever.” I’m a tiny bit obsessed about Mimi Cote liking Tom. They went out in eighth grade. She’s pretty open about her desires. She hates me. Enough said. “But maybe that’s why there’s a Problem. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to compare.”
“Maybe he’s just scared.”
“Right.”
“Guys can get awkward about the sex thing. Even Tom guys.”
“Right.”
Em taps her fingernails on the steering wheel. “Fine. Don’t listen. Anyway, I need you to come make a pharmacy run with me tomorrow.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Is it that time?”
“I think so, and I only have two left,” she whines and turns onto Main Street.
Emily is terrified of buying tampons from Dolly at Rite Aid. She’s all uptight about it. I always have to do it for her. She won’t even let her mom do it; it’s like she’s all upset about being an adult or something.
“Having your thingy is not something to be ashamed of,” I announce. I announce this every twenty-eight days. We stop at a crosswalk because Jessica Osheroff, the Eastbrook American reporter is hustling across the street, slinging her pocketbook over her shoulder, pulling out her notepad.
“Yeah. Right. You just called it a thingy.”
“Fine. Your men-stru-al cy-cle.” I make the words long and slow, which cracks Em up. Jessica Osheroff glares at Em as if Em is laughing at her.
Since Jessica has crossed the street, we’re moving forward again. Em finally stops laughing and says, “It’s not just that. We have to buy condoms, too.”
I stop laughing. “Condoms? You want me to buy condoms for you!”
“Shut up! The windows are open.”
“Can’t Shawn buy condoms?”
“He did last time. It’s my turn and we’re all out.”
“Oh my God, you take turns? How often are you guys doing it?”
Em turns her head to give me an eyebrow wiggle. “You’re just jealous.”
“Yeah.” I hang my hand out the window and feel the air hit it, giving it a high five. “I can’t buy condoms from Dolly. I’m not even doing it with Tom.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She sucks in some air and says, “It means we all wish you guys would just get it over with.”
I try to glare at her. Her lip wiggles because she wants to laugh but isn’t. Her lip always does that.
“I can’t believe people talk about my sex life.”
“Or lack thereof,” she says like a teacher. She thrusts her hand in the air to make the point. I grab it and put it back on the wheel.
“Shut up,” I taunt her.
“Make me,” she says right back, matching my annoyed kid tone.
I crack up. So does she.
Then I say it again, because I can’t believe it. “You want me to buy condoms for you and Shawn.”
“Uh-huh.”
I shake my head. “Fine. But you’re coming with me and we aren’t going to Rite Aid. We’re going to Wal-Mart. They have those self-checkout lines there.”
Em’s face lights up. “That’s beautiful! That is such a good idea.”
“I am the best friend you’ll ever have,” I say.
She turns into my driveway and flashes a smile. “I know.”
We weren’t always best friends. We always knew each other and were friends but not in the ultimate friend way. Everyone in Eastbrook knows each other, pretty much because there’s only about six thousand people who live here. I used to be best friends with Mimi Cote, but that ended in eighth grade. It wasn’t just the Tom thing, I swear. It was a bunch of things, like the way she’d lie and pretend to get better scores on her projects than me, or the way she’d get annoyed that I was the flyer on our middle school cheerleading team (see, more small-town multitasking) and she wasn’t and she’d always tell me I was getting too fat to be a flyer, which of course I wasn’t, because I was tiny, tiny, tiny and it was only because I was getting breasts that Mimi even tried to pull the whole “you’re too fat to be a flyer” crapola routine on me.
Pathetic.
There are lots of things that can make you not be a friend with someone, and fewer things that can make you a friend with someone, but I lucked out when Em got seated next to me freshman year in period-A study hall. She is easily the best friend I could ever have.
“I can’t believe your mother’s going on another date with Jim Shrembersky,” she says in my driveway. “Where are they going?”
“Cleonice.” It’s our town’s one fancy restaurant. They serve tapas.
Em laughs. “Hhm. Maybe we should buy some condoms for your mom, too.”
I fling open the door and get out of the car. “I hate you.”
She just laughs harder.
I wave to her as she starts backing out the driveway.
“You sure you don’t want a ride to the cemetery?” she yells, her rear bumper missing our mailbox by five-tenths of a centimeter.
I smile. “I’m good.”
She toots and zooms off down the road, my crazy, uptight best friend who has supermodel hair, a brain that doesn’t give her seizures, a non-dating widow mother, a boyfriend who sleeps with her, who tells her he loves her, a perfect life.
; My mom and I visit my dad every year. I bike there. I can’t drive because I have caffeine-induced seizures, but I wouldn’t drive anyway because that’s not how I do this. Since I was six I’ve always ridden my bike up the steep hills of the Bayside Road. My mom always drives. It’s part of our ritual, but neither of us talk about it. This year, of course, she blows it and brings Jim, her new boyfriend. It’s not like I hate Jim, but he’s not supposed to be here. It’s supposed to be about my mom and my dad and me. She says that he’ll wait in the car when we go visit the grave, but it’s not the same. I’ll still know he’s there.
It rains today, too, but that doesn’t change anything. Rain has come before. Jim, though, Jim hasn’t come before.
People have traditions in their lives, you know. They have ways things happen, and then, all of a sudden, someone decides to change it. I hate that.
I hard-pump the pedals to get up the last big hill, steer around the crumbled asphalt that juts into the breakdown lane. The tires slick to the pavement and I don’t fall despite the slippery surface, despite the rain slashing into my eyes, pouring off my helmet, obliterating the smells of the flowers, the spring-fresh grass, so that all I can smell and taste is iron and rain, metal and loss.
We don’t dress up for the occasion. My mom says he wouldn’t want that. He wasn’t a dress-up kind of guy. I wouldn’t know. I never met him. I was a baby when he died, a massive hole blown in his chest a half a world away.
The rain drenches my jeans and windbreaker/rain coat.
I get off my bike, see Jim sitting in the car. He’s pretending to read a book, but he looks up the moment I walk by and he waves and gives a little half smile. His hair is thin and it’s all wet. I can tell that even through the car windows. He got soaked somehow today, just like me.
I wave back. He’s not a bad guy, Jim. It’s just he doesn’t belong here, not right now. My mom should know that. There’s a way this is suppose to be, every year, and this isn’t it.
My mom’s already at the grave, holding a blue and green umbrella that’s older than me. Maybe my dad once held that umbrella over her head, protecting her from the rain, the way he never had a chance to protect me. My mom’s raincoat touches the ground as she bends down at the knees, strokes his name, the dates; a grave, her face. She clings to air.
So do I.
Leaning my bike against the big granite pillars that guard the cemetery, I head in. My feet squish in the wet grass. Water invades my running shoes. My toes adjust to the damp.
Normally, I bring Gabriel and play my dad a song. Gabriel was his guitar, and she’s a wild, deep blue. I don’t ever sing because that would be too cheesy, sort of crossing the line into schmaltz. Instead, I just play something soft and quiet for him. I think it calms my mother down, too. It gives us something to focus on in the awkwardness of a cemetery. My fingers always relax when they play the chords. You have to keep your left hand loose to play chords well. Anything jerky and it just sounds like crap. And when your fingers relax, your heart relaxes and you don’t think so much about how you’ve never had a dad.
According to my mom, my dad used to love folk music, Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, Tom Paxton, Ewan MacColl, all that old-guy stuff. But it is too wet today, this death day, and I can’t risk bringing Gabriel out in this and singing some Dylan. The rain would pound too heavy on her body. It would ruin her.
So, it’s just me clomping through the wet grass towards my mom, just me alone without my guitar, but with my mom’s new man friend witnessing it all from his spectator seat in the car.
Reaching out, my hand touches my mom’s shoulder. She jumps up so fast the umbrella almost bashes into my face. I stumble backwards to get out of the way and fall on my butt. She laughs.
The sky above her lightens to charcoal gray. The water drops come down at me like slow-motion silver bullets. I can plot their course. The only color is from the flowers she’s brought, bright zinnias, pink and yellow. The rain bends their petals but they somehow stay whole.
“You okay?” she says, reaching out her hand. It’s wet. I take it.
“Yeah,” I say as she hauls me back to standing position. “You?”
She nods, keeps my hand in hers, and tucks me under the umbrella with her. “Your father would be so proud of you.”
She says this every year, even years when I fall on my butt in the wet grass. It’s a cliché. It’s what everyone in Eastbrook says to me. Your father would be proud.
“Why?” I ask my mom. It’s the question I’ve wanted to ask her every year, and now, I guess, without Gabriel here to distract me, I ask it. Plus, I mean, really, would my father be proud knowing about The Problem? I doubt it. “Why would he be proud?”
A truck bellows by on the Bayside Road, past Jim in my mom’s parked car, past the cemetery. Its wheels displace the water for a brief second, pulling puddles from the road, from the earth, before smacking them back down again.
“Why not?” my mom answers.
Lightning brightens the sky. Magic seems to whisk through the trees. The zinnias shake.
“That’s getting closer,” she shudders. “We should go.”
We start walking through the grass. The wetness of it seeps into my shoes, sloshes around my feet and I just ask her, before we get too close to Jim and her car, “Do you think he’d love me?”
“Oh, honey, how could anyone not love you?”
This is a completely good-mother thing to say. My mother is that type of mother, the kind that doesn’t think there could be anything wrong, ever, with her darling little girl.
But that’s not true, especially when it comes to love.
Tom has never told me he loves me even though we’ve been dating for months.
My ex-boyfriend, Dylan, I always thought loved me, but he didn’t, not “that way.” He was gay. I was totally dependent on him for most of high school and then—poof—it turned out to be a big pretend.
“I’m not that lovable, Mom.”
She shakes her head beneath the umbrella. “Yes, you are. I love you. You’re a very popular girl.”
If she wasn’t so cute I would glare at her, but she looks like a wet puppy so I just say, “I’m not popular, Mom.”
“Were you Harvest Queen?”
I shrug.
“Are you in charge of clubs at school?”
“Students for Social Justice and Amnesty International don’t count. Those aren’t the cool clubs.”
She charges on. “Do you have friends? Lots of friends?”
Now, I glare at her.
“Then you’re popular.”
“I’m not ‘popular,’” I say, making the little finger quotes that people make. “Not in the rah-rah pep-rally way.”
I hate labels. I’m not sure why people get labels. But I do not want to be labeled, not popular, not folkie, not good girl, not slut, not anything. People aren’t just one thing; my mom should know that. Like, her boyfriend has a horror movie collection but that does not make him a serial killer freak weirdo, although looking at his choice in media, you would label him that. He’s also a really good 3-D photographer and newspaper guy. Everybody’s like that. Including me. I hate when people pretend life is simple and straight, one label, one plot moving us from point A to point B, pretending our entire makeup fits into a one-word description.
“I’m not popular,” I tell her again.
“Sweetheart,” she says, itching at her ear. “Your boyfriend is a jock, a cute jock.”
“He’s not just a ‘jock,’” I say, a little angry. “Jocks are not into duct tape, and they don’t make little sculptures out of it or write sayings on it and they aren’t as smart as Tom is.”
“No one is ‘just’ anything, Belle. Didn’t I teach you that?” Now she’s finger-quoting at me.
“Yeah.” I shiver in the rain, starin
g at her warm car and Jim sitting in it. “You taught me.”
“Your dad would’ve been so proud of you,” she says, reaching out and squeezing a lock of super wet hair. She smiles, sweetly and slowly. She looks pretty. I forget that my mom is kind of pretty despite the whole thinning hair thing. My dad must have really loved her.
The thunder ripples through the air. Sound waves of grief or anger or something, I think it’s too symbolic, too heavy. All I need is a skull to lift up in my hand and a soliloquy. Dear dead father … Would you have loved me? Your firstborn daughter? Blah. Blah. Blah. To be or not to be …
I would rather have a sunny day and a happy frolic with Tom on a beach somewhere. Okay, fine … a bed somewhere. I would rather have a father who was alive and loved me instead of a war hero. I would rather have dry socks and fingers that relax above guitar strings, ready to play chords.
My mom kisses me on the top of the head as she gets in the car. “You sure you don’t want a ride back? It’s pouring.”
“It’s dismal!” Jim says, leaning forward so he can see me. He rubs his hands together and he’s got this massive smile smacked across his face. I guess horror-movie buffs like dismal weather.
“Yep,” I say. “I’m sure.”
Our ritual is already too different. The least I can do is bike home like normal and obsess about Tom.
My mom’s hunched inside the car, trying to shelter away from the rain and it’s obvious she wants to slam the door shut to keep the rain out, but if she did, it would keep me out too, and she’s too nice a mom for that.
“I’m just going to pick up a few things for my trip next week, drop Jim off at the car place, and then I’ll be right home.”
I close the door for her and as my hands push the cold, wet metal I say, “Take your time.”
Then I add, so I’m not rude, “Good luck with your car, Jim.”
He gives me a dorky thumbs-up sign. “You just must adore this rain! It’s torrential.”
Torrential?
My mom honks. She drives off, taking with her the smell of car air-freshener in pine tree form and tic-tacs.
As soon as she leaves, I slosh back to the cemetery and my father’s grave. The sky opens up for one second and a spot of blue edges out of the gray, like a promise, but as quickly as it appears it’s gone again, swallowed up by the gloom. My fingers touch the zinnias.