“Fascinating,” Emily pops some gum in her mouth, presses hard on the gas. “We’re stopping at Shawn’s house.”
“What?” I slam my feet up on her dashboard and admire my Snoopy shoes, which feature a lovely image of Snoopy on the top. Snoopy is smiling and holding balloons. I got them back in eighth grade when my uncle went to Spain. They are canvas and comfortable and they have a hole in the toe, which makes them look a little ratty to discerning shoe connoisseurs, but I don’t care. They are my favorite shoes in the world but Dylan has always hated them. I have decided to start wearing them again. “Why are we stopping at Shawn’s?”
“He asked.”
“I have homework,” I say. Emily wiggles her eyebrows at me, because she knows I don’t have much. We have almost all the same classes. Sighing, I ask, “Is soccer practice done?”
“Yep.”
We drive in silence for a second and she says, “Do you think he’s cute?”
“Yeah,” I make my feet dance in front of me, a happy little dance. I think about my little duct tape guitar safely stashed in my person. “I think Shawn is cute.”
But it’s not really Shawn I’m thinking about.
She sighs and smiles, sighs and smiles and I imagine little red-crayon hearts floating above her head. “I think he’s really cute.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Did you know that Charles Post gave his business to his daughter when she turned twenty-seven? She was one of the first businesswomen in America. How cool is that?”
She turns off the stereo, parks in a driveway outside a little ranch house that I assume must belong to Shawn’s parents. It’s nestled in some blueberry fields. The wind whips a piece of a blueberry bush across the driveway. “You know, I can try not to like him or talk about it. Is it bugging you that I like somebody, cause I know you’re a little vulnerable right now.”
“I’m not vulnerable,” I slam my Snoopy shoes down off the dashboard. The broken-up blueberry bush blows against the house like tumbleweed. I make my voice sound Russian. “I am strong, strong woman, hear me roar.”
My door zips open and Tom is smiling there. He calls to Shawn across the driveway. “See? I told you she was a pinko.”
Snoopy hides behind his doghouse, but I take Tom’s hand and leave the car. One foot. Another. I go on.
In Shawn’s house, we all chomp on frozen burritos, microwaved of course, and settle into old couches in Shawn’s basement. Shawn’s basement is half-remodeled. There’s walls and flooring, but the ceiling is pipes and electrical wires. There’s a big TV facing the couches and in another corner is a mess of work-out equipment.
Em and Shawn snuggle close to each other on this incredibly ugly plaid couch, so close that their thighs touch and I can imagine how Em’s leg feels, warm and super charged.
Me?
Tom and I are on the other couch, not too close, not too far. I can see the new quote he’s written on the duct tape strip on his shoe: I like getting hit in the head by the ball.
So he did put on a soccer quote. I smile.
We’ve done all the college talk about where everyone’s applied and we’ve got some overlaps. Everyone but Em’s applying to Bates, which is a pretty good school, all top-twenty liberal arts college and all that. She pouts and sticks her tongue out and then says, “I’m just an individual, that’s all.”
“You can say that again,” Shawn teases. She hits him.
“Want to go get a Coke?” he says.
She leaps up. “Yep.”
“You guys?” Shawn nods at us.
“No thanks,” I say. Coke has caffeine. I miss caffeine.
Tom shakes his head and when they’re gone he turns his body to face me. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Anna told me someone called you a fag hag in the hall today.”
I shrug. “No big. You don’t need to protect me, you know.”
His hands, his calf muscles pushing against the upholstery. Some big. I turn away. I will not think about him that way. It’s too soon.
He leans down, unzips his backpack, and pulls out some duct tape. He rips off two chunks and gives me one. It’s sticky and gray and shiny. I hold it far away from me. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
He’s already twisting his up, making arms, legs, a little man, maybe? “Play with it. Make something. It calms me down when I’m spazzing.”
“I am not spazzing.”
I try to twist the tape. It sticks to my fingers. I’m hopeless. I look up into Tom’s tree-bark eyes. I breathe in the scent of him, spicy and clean, against the faint wet smell of the basement.
I say, whisper light, “Do you need that? To calm down?”
He nods, looks me straight on, and says, “When I’m with you, I do.”
My lips press together and my heart wiggles in my chest, which it should not be doing because I am in mourning over my past relationship. And if my heart is already wiggling that must mean that my past relationship is not what I thought it was. I shake my head.
“Really?” I manage to say and then regret it.
“Really.” His eyes are so brown.
We stare at each other. Upstairs Em and Shawn thump around. We keep staring. A slow smile creeps across Tom’s face and he reaches across the couch and takes my hand in his. It feels like every single nerve ending in my body is about to explode. I loved Dylan, I know I loved Dylan, but it never felt crazy like this, like fire and cold and lyrics floating across my skin. I gulp and Tom runs his thumb across my hand.
“Do you ever think about what might have happened if Mimi hadn’t asked me out in eighth grade?” he asks, his voice all husky and low.
I gulp. I look away at the stairs. Shawn and Em are nowhere to be found. I can’t help it. It’s like he’s a magnet. I look back at Tom and my voice answers for me, “Sometimes.”
“Me too,” he says.
“But I ended up with the gay guy,” I say trying to pass it off lightly, like it’s a happy thing. “While Mimi ended up with the soccer stud.”
“Yep,” Tom squeezes my hand and looks at me hard, like he’s trying to see inside me. I squirm and sit up straighter but don’t pull away my hand.
Then I do what I do when I’m uncomfortable. I babble.
“Do you ever think that our lives are like folk songs? You know. Or maybe Bruce Springsteen songs. I know he’s rock, but he’s such a good writer he seems like folk, especially his ancient stuff. You know, like we’re all trying to get out of the Valley, like in that Gorka song, or we’re born to run like that Springsteen song. But it’s like I’m stuck in the wrong song. I want to be in a Dar Williams song where I see the beauty of the rain, which is a song of hers, or a Christine Lavin song because she’s so crazy and funny and quirky and happy, but it’s like I’m stuck in this song of longing and want, you know and have you ever even heard of Dar Williams or Bruce—”
Tom does it then. He just leans in really smooth and I guess he’s been getting closer the whole time I’ve talked because all of a sudden his other hand is on the side of my face. His lips press against my lips, soft and good but really, really there and it’s a good thing I’m sitting down because if I wasn’t sitting down I would absolutely, positively fall down because I am stereotypically weak in the knees.
Yikes.
I am kissing someone other than Dylan. Something sparkles behind my eyelids. I open my eyes back up and see Tom’s long eyelashes, the darkness of his skin.
I pull away and jump up, turn around, sit back down, put my face in my hands, shake my head.
“Belle?” Tom’s voice echoes against my ears. “I’m sorry. I thought you—”
“No!” I say, awkward, my heart thumping, my neurons firing. “No, it’s okay. It was just—I wasn’t expecting it or anything.”
&n
bsp; I take a peek at him. That muscle in his cheek twitches and his face is definitely a deeper color like maybe he’s blushing. He looks scared. I’ve never seen him look this scared, not when taking a penalty kick, not even when giving those German oral reports.
“I mean,” I rush out and grab his hand. “I really liked it. I like it a lot. I liked it way too much.”
I am an idiot.
He smiles at me and his scared eyes turn happy again. “I liked it too, Commie.”
I pull my hand out of his and cross my arms in front of my chest. “I am not a commie.”
He starts to say something back, but Em and Shawn tromp back down the stairs, Em grabs me by the hand, all panicky looking. “We have to go, now. I completely forgot I have a dentist’s appointment.”
“But?” I say, yanked up off my happy couch place with Tom, a delicious-looking happy couch boy. No, he isn’t. Yes, he is. “But . . .”
I know Em just had her dentist’s appointment last Thursday and I know she had no cavities. She is always proud about the fact she’s never had a cavity.
She glares at me and I get it. She’s lying.
“Oh, right. Yeah, I forgot too,” I say and we wave bye and scramble up the stairs, still holding hands, Em still pulling me along.
She slams into her car and says, “I got my thing.”
“Oh!” I say and start laughing.
“It. Is. Not. Funny,” she accentuates every word. She hates her thing, she hates buying tampons. She’d like to pretend she’s still ten, I guess. “I have no tampons.”
“Oh,” I say, straightening up, but the horrified look on her face just makes me laugh more.
“You have to come with me to buy some,” she says, turning on the car, shifting into reverse, and hightailing it out of Shawn’s driveway. The car squeals.
I shake my head. “Emily, you are a big girl. I think it’s time you faced your fears.”
She shifts into forward and heads down the road. “You have to come with me.”
“Dolly is not going to think any less of you if you buy tampons. People buy condoms there, remember?” I try not to laugh and put my Snoopy shoes up on the dashboard.
“Dolly thinks I’m eight.”
“You act like you’re eight,” I laugh and smile.
Dolly runs the local Rite Aid. She’s only about 115 years old, with no teeth, sweet eyes, and smoker’s voice. She knows everybody and everything in town, and she tells you all about it.
“You don’t have any at home?” I ask Em as she whizzes the car past the Y and Harmon’s Auto Tire. She cuts off Ray Davis’s black pickup truck and speeds through a yellow light, one of our town’s four stoplights.
“I’m sure! Would I have ditched Shawn if I didn’t have to?” she yells, slamming into a stop at our town’s second of four stoplights.
I put my hands up in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I will go in with you and I will buy them for you but you have to stand with me when I buy them.”
She smiles and relaxes, she turns on WERV, the alternative community radio station I love but she hates. “Deal.”
I wait until the light turns green and then I say it, “Tom kissed me.”
“What!” She swerves, hits the divider, and bounces back into the lane again. “He did what?”
I shrug and smile and Em shakes her head and laughs, and laughs. Then she says all triumphantly, “Well, I guess we are definitely going to that dance and you are definitely no Mallory.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re obviously not sulking anymore, moaning, whining, crying, sobbing, gesticulating, grousing, complaining, brooding, acting all morose . . .”
I make a pout face and she laughs harder. “Shut up. I think I’m rebounding.”
“So?”
“Well, that’s no good,” I pull up my Snoopy sneaker and start fiddling with the laces.
“Why not?”
“Then it’s not real,” I say. Anna drives by and waves. We wave back.
Em gives a happy little toot and says, “I love Anna.” Then she turns back to the conversation, “Nothing is ever real, Belle.”
She keeps driving with one hand and swerving and taking pictures out the window and I think about all the ways I felt with Dylan. I think about the me I was with Dylan, singing show tunes instead of folk, never using parmesan cheese on my spaghetti because he hated the way it smelled, watching old sci-fi movies even when I hated them, making myself like them anyway because that’s what Dylan wanted me to be.
My heart hits my throat. I am lost without Dylan but I lost myself with Dylan. I am a cliché. “Nothing’s ever real really,” I say. “Nobody’s ever who we think they are.”
“Emotions are real,” Em says, turning on her blinker at the light. I give her the thumbs-up sign for remembering. “Emotions are real just not the reasons behind them. Feelings are real, you just never really know that what you’re basing them on is real.”
The light turns green. Em takes a wickedly wide left turn. I mock her. “Happy advice, oh sage one.”
She bops me in the arm. “Shut up.”
I do. I wait until she’s turned into Rite Aid and pulled into a spot, but still I don’t speak. She puts the car in park, turns to me, and says, “What do you feel when you’re with Tom?”
I grimace at the stupid touchy-feely aspect of this question but answer anyways. “Lots of stuff. Confused. Scared. Happy. Safe.”
Em smiles. “See? That’s too complicated to be fake.”
“Yeah.”
“And when he kissed you, how did you feel?”
I close my eyes, but I don’t have to do that to remember it. Just thinking about that kiss makes my heart a happy thump-thump song. “Giddy. I felt giddy. Shut up.”
She laughs and then panic hits me and I grab Em’s arm. “What if he’s gay, too? What if only gay men like me because I’m not threatening or something?”
“That’s stupid,” Em pulls her keys out of the ignition and pockets them.
“No, it’s not.”
“Belle, I don’t think Tom Tanner is gay.”
“But what if he is? What if every man is? What if no one is ever who we think they are?
“Well, what do you think? That it’s all polarities? Like all gay or all straight all the time?” Em unbuckles her seat belt, shifts forward in the seat, grabs the steering wheel like she’s still driving. “Maybe it’s all shades and everybody is a little bit gay or a lot bit gay or no gay or they shift around. I don’t know.”
I point at her. “You have been watching too many self-help shows again.”
“Shut up. I don’t know. It’s just a theory.”
“So according to your theory, you are a little bit gay,” I wiggle my eyebrows at her to show her how ridiculous this is.
“Well, I mean, you’re looking kind of cute with those bacon lips,” she laughs.
I stick my tongue out at her. “You are so not gay.”
She crosses her arms in front of her chest. “It doesn’t make my theory wrong.”
“This isn’t about your theory. It’s about me. It’s about whether or not I’m some sort of fag hag.”
“That’s a stupid name. Hanging around with gay men is not a big deal,” she sighs and shifts her weight in the seat again, looking uncomfortable. “You seriously think Tom is gay?”
“No, but I didn’t think Dylan was gay either.” I shove my hair into a ponytail, which is what I sometimes do when I’m serious about things. “I feel like I don’t know who anyone is.”
Em’s eyes grip mine. I stop fidgeting with my hair. “You know who you are, right?”
Everything in me heavies. I unbuckle my seatbelt, like I’m going to free myself from the truth somehow, but the truth tumbles out my
mouth anyways.
“No,” I shake my head. “I don’t.”
Em grabs her camera, fiddles with a button, and shows me an old picture of me. Freshman year. Singing in the talent show with Gabriel against my chest. My eyes smile. My fingers strum an old John Gorka tune, a silly one about Saint Caffeine.
Her eyes glint with something fierce and determined and she flicks off the monitor. “You are Belle Philbrick. You are a fantastic folk singer, a good student, my best friend, a sweet political activist who can’t drink coffee, and you are my best friend. Did I already say that?”
I nod, bite my lip, and she grabs me by the shoulders and says, “And you are also going to buy me some freaking tampons before things get really ugly.”
I jump back and the urge for crying passes. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.”
She puts her camera in her pocket and opens the door. “Yeah. But I didn’t.”
We sneak through the front door of Rite Aid like cat burglars. We walk in sideways, looking over our shoulders.
“Doorway clear,” I say to Em in my best military voice, which even I have to admit, isn’t all that good.
She pulls her hair over her face to hide it. She makes her fingers like a pretend gun, unholstered and ready at her side. “Check. I’ll survey the perimeter.”
She sashays away before I can yell at her, the sneak. She’s just checking out the perimeter so that she doesn’t have to go down the tampon aisle. Wimp. She didn’t even bring her camera in here. Double wimp.
I shake my head, pull my hair out of my coat collar, and walk past Dolly, who flips through a tabloid at the register wearing her cute little blue apron.
“Why Belle Philbrick!” she says with a big smile. “Isn’t it good to see you here, little missy. How’s the singing?”
“Good,” I say, smiling back at Dolly and her gums.
She leans her tiny, old body across the counter. “Any record deals, yet?”
I laugh. “Hardly.”