A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (16 page)

“I came into this trip clear-eyed with the idea that I would not back down from whatever terrible thing happened to befall me. And I’m still not backing down. Not that this is any kind of terrible thing.”

“But you are leaving.”

“Not until tomorrow.”

“Do you really think you can make it all that way by yourself?”

I didn’t have any kind of an answer for that question.

How could I say that?

“It doesn’t matter whether I can,” I said finally. “It doesn’t matter whether I think I can. I’m going. That’s all.”

I said that. But the truth was that I had never felt so doubtful about whether I really could, not even in my bleakest moments.

She hesitated as she unlocked the door, stepped inside, turned the air conditioner on. “Well, you don’t have to leave at the crack of dawn. Really, I’ll make waffles.”

I couldn’t help but smile, because she charmed me and because I didn’t want her to see my doubt, my fear. I had to remind myself that I really couldn’t stay. I really couldn’t. I had to say it out loud to convince myself.

“So stay a day,” she said. “Stay two days. This isn’t like high school where you kiss someone and you start thinking all the way forward to forever, complete with two dogs in the yard.”

I told myself that I would run the calculations. I told myself that I would make sure I stayed on track.

I felt like I could tell her the truth. “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.”

“That’s two of us.”

Maggie curled her arm around me, and I nestled in closer to her, but truthfully I was comfortable there because she did know what she was doing, or at least she knew how to make it seem that way. She stretched out like a lazy, contented cat—and there was just a little protectiveness in her hand on my shoulder. And she made me think that she had kissed lots of people before, and it wasn’t the kind of huge thing that should be making my stomach turn over, even if my stomach didn’t understand that yet.

This is the kind of thing that makes people wink knowingly and say, “Yeah, I’m sure,” but this is all that happened: We stayed up and watched David Letterman and
South Park,
and we kissed during all the commercial breaks, and when I was tired and shivery and stupid with everything that had happened, Maggie retreated from the futon to the bed and turned out the lights.

A
fter school the next day, I went back to the hand-catapult that had stuck the day before. By poking and prodding it, eventually I found the place where two pieces were rubbing against each other. I sanded the pieces smooth again, loosened and tightened, until the whole mechanism flowed smooth as water.

I was so absorbed in the work that I didn’t realize Heather had come down into the basement until I looked up.

“Oliver was such a jerk yesterday. You shouldn’t let him get to you.”

I hadn’t even been thinking about him. I’d been thinking about her. What I should say to her, if I should say anything to her, even though I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right time. And getting nervous because in a couple of weeks we’d be done with the play, and I wouldn’t have that excuse.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “We worked things out.”

“And now we have a working catapult. Which is to say, now that function is dealt with, we can think about form . . .”

“You saw it too, didn’t you?” I asked, getting out a dustpan to sweep up the bits of sawdust and wood shavings on the floor.

“Saw what?”

“We can’t have all the sets looking like we saved up our lunch money to build them. Not if we can improve on that, in the time we have left.”

Heather pressed her fingers to her lips. “Mind if I try something?”

“I’ll trust your sense of style over mine. You’re all done with your sewing?”

“Done, and thank God. I never want to see any ribbon or any lace, ever again. My fingers just can’t face another needle.” She held them up, but the light wasn’t very good—I had to get a lot closer to her before I saw all the little pricks on her fingertips.

And I realized how close I was to her, and how my hands were nearly touching hers. I took a step back. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

“Not so much a plan,” Heather admitted. “More of an experiment. Clear out a space on the floor over there.”

While I worked on picking up bits of props, she waded through stacks of old crates and re-emerged carrying a roll of dingy canvas. “I’ve seen this around before. I don’t know if it’s worth using, but—”

“Can we?”

“I ran into one of the guys who’s in charge here. He said no one had any idea why it was there or what it was originally bought for, and we could do whatever we wanted with it.”

She unrolled it upside down, with the less dusty side showing, but it was frayed at the edges and a little yellow. I wasn’t sure about this.

“We want to start in the
middle
so that we don’t trap ourselves while waiting for the paint to dry. You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s not so much.”

Heather pointed at a can by all the other cans of paint. “First, we cover it with black. Like those pretty Japanese lacquer boxes.”

“We’ve already got a black backdrop,” I said, just a little dubiously.

“Trust me,” Heather replied, like someone with a secret too good to keep. “I mean, I don’t know if this is going to work or not, but I can’t resist trying it out.”

We got to work. We started out right beside each other, taking small slow steps toward the edges as we went along. Once in a while I looked up at her just to see her intense concentration, her tongue just barely sticking out between her lips, and the way she crouched over gracefully—or the reckless way she dragged her paintbrush across big swatches of the canvas. For a second I nearly felt guilty, because I liked her and I wasn’t saying anything, and if she knew she would pull down at the pink T-shirt that was creeping up on her midriff, or she wouldn’t let herself sprawl carelessly on the floor like she did. So I went back to my painting as soon as I noticed—not before I noticed the silvery cross dangling on her pale neck.

“I’m going to be really nosy now.”

“What’s left to be nosy about?” She almost laughed.

“Are you still Catholic?”

“Oh, that,” she said, looking down at her chest with a sigh. “Well—some days yes and some days no. Today happens to be a yes day.”

“Even though—?”

“Yeah. You’ve heard of cafeteria Catholics?”

I shook my head.

“Ever been to a cafeteria with one of those people who’s really annoying because they’re vegetarian, and allergic to this, and can’t stand to eat that, and eww, the Jell-O has a skin on it, so they end up sitting at the table with three limp lettuce leaves and a slice of tomato? Kind of like that. So I complain and complain about my lettuce and tomato. And there are times I would rather be complaining about my lettuce and tomato than going somewhere else where I can eat what I want. So—that’s hard to explain, and I guess it doesn’t make much sense. The part that’s easy to explain is that as long as I am in that house I am going to Mass on Sunday,
young lady
.”

She shrugged it off, but I couldn’t help thinking of all the history I didn’t know and couldn’t bring myself to ask about.

“When did you stop thinking it was wrong?”

“Being a lesbian?”

I hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Not until Gianna,” she said, after a long pause. “For a long time I could pretend to think about it abstractly. I just about convinced myself it was about obscure points of theology, not about my own real life and my future and whether I would ever kiss someone on the mouth. Then I saw how sad and scared and hurting Gianna was, and for the first time I got angry with the unfairness of it all. And when I was done with being angry, I was done with being scared too. One of us had to be.”

She kept painting for a while. “Your parents are pretty strict, aren’t they? About TV and makeup and all that?”

“Well, they didn’t want me getting my moral compass from people who are only interested in selling me something. But love is different. If two people care about each other, and take care of each other, they wouldn’t ever say a word against that. And there were usually gay people around at our meeting, and they always just treated it like something normal.”

“Wait,” Heather said, starting to grin. “You’re not allowed to set foot in Sephora, but you’re allowed to be gay?”

“They’re big on hippie Jesus, you know? Turn the other cheek, love your enemies.” I stopped short, because I hadn’t meant to say “love,” didn’t want to say anything that could be about her. I backed away from that subject. “Anyway, I’m going to be seventeen next month. If I really want to wear sparkly purple eye shadow, I’m not going to sneak around applying it in the school bathrooms.”

She shook her head and went back to my first statement. “There’s gotta be a limit to turning the other cheek, or you just get people trying to walk all over you.”

“It’s not about just sitting around hoping that things will get better. It’s that—if you believe in God like my dad does, if you believe that we’re only seeing a tiny sideways glance at all the things that are working themselves out for the best in the end, then there’s no point in flailing around trying to make things better by killing people. It’s like when you’re trying to cut your own hair, and it doesn’t look right, so you just cut more and more trying to fix it, and it just keeps getting worse. Except, you wind up with dead people.”

“But what about you? You don’t believe that?”

“I don’t know. I believe in God sometimes, but I can’t just say for sure that everything’s going to be okay. It’s too glib. It’s like the people who are hurting right now don’t count for anything. But I do know that I want to live in the kind of world where people can get past getting even with each other. I want to live in the kind of world where people can manage to love their enemies.” And I didn’t back off from it that time.

It took the better part of the day to finish getting paint in all the corners we could reach. We didn’t quite have enough room on the floor to spread out the entire width of the canvas, so we left the outside edges for later, when the wet paint dried and we could roll it up in the middle. After we finished, we stretched out in the grass outside, sucking down ice and lemonade in the September heat.

“What now?”

“Well, it should be dry in a couple of days. So, come back Friday night. We’ll finish up.”

Friday. Friday, exactly two weeks before the premiere.

We had two weeks and two days. Twelve school days to finish up all the sets and the lighting for
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
—and keep working on
Our Town
as promised—staying late after school every day, working every weekend on what we could do without sneaking into school.

“We’re gonna make it, right?”

“Of course,” Heather said. “Of course.”

 

 

We kept busy until Friday, plastering the school with posters and flyers for the real performance of
Our Town
(with a handwritten note scrawled in: Special sneak preview, September 19!), hauling our props and pieces of the set into the school. No one cared or paid us much attention. We were just the drama nerds, putting on a play nobody really cared about.

Except for the persistent rumor, which we all denied while raising our eyebrows conspiratorially (and then confirmed in whispers after swearing everyone to secrecy), that the special sneak preview was going to be something a little different.

So the community theater was empty that afternoon when me and Heather went down into the basement, her in a white apron that proclaimed IRON CHEF, me in old clothes that could get splattered with paint. I went down in darkness, my hand pressed against the railing and my toes searching out the steps; then Heather flicked the lights on.

The black backdrop hung on thumbtacks across the entire width of the wall. Around it—I had to get up close to see the detail properly; there were curlicues and elegant flowing strokes of gold, and painstakingly etched flowers and feathers, and when I looked closer I saw the tones of scarlets and oranges that stood out against the black.

But it was the image at the center that was so beautiful I nearly had to sit down from surprise. A bright phoenix, rising up from flames, and so alive it seemed like it could pop off the wood.

“So, um. There isn’t actually anything left for me to do, is there?”

She just grinned at me. “Is it okay?”

I kept staring. “Okay. Yeah. It’s . . . a little more than okay. How did you do this? When?”

“Paint and stencils? When you thought the paint was drying?”

Obviously I was asking the wrong questions. “Why?”

“Because—because—I felt like I wanted to do something good, for you. Because really all I was hoping for was that we might get through the rest of the summer without killing each other, and it got to be something a lot better than that. When I didn’t hardly have a friend in the world, after everything that happened. And I got this idea, and right away I thought, yeah, that’s what I should do. I hope I was right.”

As she was talking I started letting myself smile, first a little as I walked slowly around the whole thing again, looking up close at the careful lines and etched feather patterns, and by the time I was done I was grinning all the way.

“I can’t believe how pretty it is.”

I looked around at the bits and pieces of sets and props, scattered on the floor And—suddenly they didn’t look so amateurish and elementary-school anymore. I could almost believe they would be part of something bright and polished and true and real.

“Eee!” Heather squeaked.

“Eee!” I squeaked back, and ran over to her.