A Step Toward Falling (6 page)

“I think we should do stuff like that in this class.”

“Talk to these people about cutting themselves?”

He rolls his eyes. “Talk about something
besides
relationships and sex.”

“We do,” I start to say, and then it occurs to me: the only other regular topic for discussion besides relationships is hygiene, which always has the implied motivator of a date behind it. “Before you go on a date, what are three things you want to make sure you've done?” was a 500-point Jeopardy! question today. The choices were a) take a shower, b) put on deodorant, c) brush your teeth, d) all of the above. Lucas has a good point. In this class, these rituals aren't done for dental health or personal comfort. They're done for dates.

“It's like the message is, if you're not in a relationship, you'd better start working harder to get in one. But maybe some of these people don't
want
to date.”

This whole conversation surprises me. I know for a fact that Lucas has a girlfriend. He's been dating Debbie Warren since sophomore year, when I first noticed her sitting on his lap at lunch. I registered it the way I register all the relationships in the popular crowd, usually with the same thought:
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
As far as I know, they're still going out. She sits next to him at the popular table. The only french fries she eats are off his plate. Generally that's how you know who's dating who in that crowd.

“The class is half-titled ‘Relationships.' That's the reason everyone signed up, right?”

I think about one of the main points Mary made during our training session: that adults with developmental disabilities have happier lives if they're able to express their sexuality in healthy ways. “We encourage people to meet
with us privately if they're ready for a detailed discussion of sex, so you don't have to worry about that part in class. But the point is, we don't discourage them from thinking about sex. In fact, that's sort of the point.”

I remind Lucas of what Mary said. “These people are adults. If they want to have sex, they shouldn't be told they can't.”

“No, I get that. I'm fine with that part. I just think there's other kinds of relationships, right? Like friendships, maybe? Why don't we ever talk about those?” As he says this, he looks around the lobby. “If you ask me, those can be even more complicated.”

I have to admit, this is the first time I've heard someone admit that being part of the football/cheerleader crowd isn't all that it's cracked up to be. It shouldn't surprise me, I know, but this year—where football players walk like gods down our hallways surrounded by angels in identical short skirts—it does.

M
Y MOM SAYS IT
'
S
good I was born now not a long time ago because back then they didn't know what to do with people like me. I think she means people who believe in romance and love, because I do. I believe somebody will fall in love with me someday and ask me to marry him. Getting married means one person goes to live at the other
person's house. It also means you share everything including food. Even if it's your special treats, like Skittles or candied ginger, you give him half. That's called showing love.

He also has to give you half of his things, too. You share them. That's also love.

It doesn't mean you never fight. Sometimes people in love do fight because they love each other so much and have strong opinions. It's fine to have opinions as long as you don't cry when other people have different opinions. Then you have to yoga breathe, in through your nose, and count to ten to calm your body.

This is what I do when I am sad or frustrated at school.

I used to get frustrated a lot in school, especially when I kept trying out for plays and Mr. Bergman said he was sorry but I couldn't be in one. Then I got frustrated and mad and had to yoga breathe a lot because I am a very good actress and I would like to be in a play.

I've been in twelve plays if you count Children's Story Theater as eight separate short plays which I do. I was in eight stories, sometimes with a big part, sometimes with a smaller one, like a townsperson or a duck. I started acting when I was ten and acted every year until I was sixteen and the Children's Story Theater director said I was too old to be in their plays. Her name was Linda and she said she wished she could keep me on because I was so good but that wasn't fair to the younger kids who wanted to play the parts I usually got like Red Riding Hood and Bremen Town Musician Number One.

During my time with Children's Story Theater, I
could memorize lines and act better than most of the other children. I could also speak loud enough that everyone could hear me. Sometimes I repeated other people's lines if I knew someone's grandma was sitting in the back and hadn't heard them. I can also follow stage directions, which a lot of kids can't. They think upstage means toward the audience, which it doesn't.

I also helped with props and costume changes. I lined shoes up and kept the props table backstage tidy. I like standing backstage where you have to be quiet or people in the audience will hear you. I like when people whisper, “Break a leg,” which means good luck in the theater, not “I hope you break your leg.”

Even though I am a good actress, it's been five years since I've acted in any plays.

In ninth grade I tried out for a play but Mr. Bergman, the director, said I couldn't be in it because there wasn't an aide who could stay after school with me for the rehearsals. Nan came in to school and told them I didn't need an aide. She told them I did very well in theater and I had been in four plays before. He said he was sorry but he still couldn't do it.

He couldn't do it again the next year and the year after that and every year that I've been in this school. This year when I went to audition, he asked me why I kept auditioning and I told him, “Because I'm a good actress. I've been in twelve shows.”

He said, “I wish we could use you. I really do, but the school won't let me. Someone has to be responsible for you
and we don't have the staff.”

“Who is responsible for everyone else?” I asked.

“I am,” he said. “But you're special. They want you to have your own person so nothing happens to you and we can't afford it. We don't have the budget to pay someone.”

This used to make me feel sad and frustrated. Now I'm used to it so I don't feel that way anymore.

My mom says there are different kinds of love. She says you can't be in love with an actor in a movie who you've never met. That's not love, that's called a crush. She says you
can
be in love with the character they play because a character is a whole person who you feel like you know even though you have to remember they don't really exist. What you do if you fall in love with a character in a movie is decide what you like about that person and start looking for those qualities in a real person you know from life. That's what my mom says.

I have memorized all the qualities I love about Mr. Darcy. He is shy but polite. He compliments things, like Elizabeth's piano playing. He pays for things like Wickham to marry Lydia. He has a beautiful house that is different in every movie, but is always big with lots of marble and artwork and fountains, usually.

Another thing I love: he goes swimming in his clothes. He's hot and he doesn't know Elizabeth is in his house, so he swims in his pond and walks out all wet.

I would like to go to England someday and visit Pemberley which is Mr. Darcy's house. Nan thinks there
probably is a real Pemberley somewhere but she doesn't know where. She has to admit, it looks different in every movie version to her, too.

I've only been to one wedding, and I thought it was beautiful and magical until the end when my mom got sad and told Nan she was scared I'd never get married.

I didn't say anything, but I wanted to say, “Of course I'll get married, Mom.”

Nan always says that everyone deserves to have someone to love, and I believe that's true. She was happily married to Grandpa who died when Mom was seventeen which means I never met him, but she always says what a good man he was. He was bald and short so he was different than Mr. Darcy, but that was okay. “He was
mine
,” Nan says. “That's what happens after a while. You belong to someone, that's all. You belong to each other. They've got flaws, you've got flaws. You work it out. You learn to live with each other. That's called love.”

This is what I dream will happen when I meet my Mr. Darcy. That at first we don't see each other's flaws because we are blinded by love. Then the clouds will clear away and we will see them. No one is perfect. But we will focus on happiness because we know we are meant to be together.

That's how I felt the first time I met Ron. It was at a Best Buddies homecoming social. I was wearing my prettiest pink shirt with pearl buttons and a lace collar and skirt but my tights were crooked. One heel was on the front of my ankle, so I was in the corner of the room with my shoe off trying to fix my tights when a new song started and I
felt a tap on my shoulder. “Would you like to dance?” Ron said. I knew he was a football player because our teacher told us some football players were coming to the dance. That made us all a little more nervous.

Before that moment, I'd never had anyone ask me to dance. I'd never had anyone hold out their hand so I could stand up and put my foot back into my shoe. I'd never had anyone touch my back to walk me across the room. There were other people dancing, but I didn't know how to dance the way the other people were dancing. I only know how to dance from watching
Pride and Prejudice.
Those dances are called waltzes.

I was too nervous to tell Ron I didn't know how to waltz. Instead I put my hands on my own shoulders. I made a triangle with my feet and moved around it. I laughed because it was my first time dancing and I was great! I put my head back and closed my eyes and smiled. “Are you okay?” Ron said because even though the song ended, I hadn't stopped dancing. I wanted it to keep going on forever. “Maybe we should go sit down,” he said. He took my elbow to walk me over to the side of the room.

That made two things I'd never done before: dance with a boy, and walk with one holding my elbow. My heart started to beat blood up to my face and my ears. I felt a little dizzy so I sat down. I couldn't look Ron in the face, so I stared at his shoes, then his belt buckle, then his hands.

I couldn't think of anything to say. I remembered the dance parties in
Pride and Prejudice
where people talk about the weather and ask about each other's health. Sometimes
they get so nervous they faint. I didn't want that to happen to me.

I tried to sit the way Jane does in
Pride and Prejudice
, leaning forward a little bit in my chair. I've learned a lot about men and romance from watching
Pride and Prejudice
. Another thing Jane does is never look directly at the boy she's talking to. Instead she talks to the air around his shoulder which is what I do naturally when I'm nervous! It's lucky, I guess.

Ron looked around the room like he was nervous, too. He had come with a group of other boys who were all bigger than everyone else in our school. In a group, they seemed very handsome and exciting, even the ones who weren't so handsome.

In my opinion, though, Ron was the handsomest one of all. He had blue eyes and hair that was red and gold at the same time. It's hard for me to describe his face because it was hard for me to look at it for too long. I can describe his hands because I was looking at those mostly. His hands were beautiful. On one side, they were covered with freckles and blond-gold hair. On the other side they were tough with cracks and calluses. This is because he plays football and has to catch hard balls with his bare hands. Judging by his hands, I assume this must hurt.

I wanted to hold one of his hands, but not the way some couples do around school, with their fingers all mixed. I wanted to put the tips of my fingers onto the tips of his. If everything had been perfect, I would have been wearing gloves. But we were sitting after our dance and
there wasn't any reason for him to touch my hand so we had to talk. For a long time we both felt shy and neither one of us could think of anything to say. Finally I told him I'd never danced with a boy before. When he didn't hear me, I touched his elbow and said it again. I didn't know if he'd danced with a girl before. He nodded when I said this as if maybe he hadn't.
We'll need to take this nice and slow,
I thought.
Both of us are new at this
.

I wanted to tell Ron that he didn't need to worry, we could learn this together. One good way to start, I thought, would be inviting him to my house to watch
Pride and Prejudice.
Of course he'd probably already seen it, I thought, but if he hadn't, I'd like to be there, looking at his face as he watched it for the very first time.

“
W
AIT, SO YOU ASKED
him out and he said
no
?” Richard says the next morning before school when I tell him what happened with Chad in class.

“We were improvising and he was supposed to say no when I asked him out on a date, but he couldn't because we had this
connection.
”

Richard smiles, a little unsure. “That's great, Em.”

“Afterward he asked for my number. When was the last time a guy asked for my number, unrelated to classwork or getting a ride?”

“He sounds really great.” His smile looks even more forced than it did a moment ago.

Suddenly it occurs to me how horrible I sound. For three years Richard and I have joked about our nonexistent love lives. We spend most weekends going to movies together and promising that our lives will be different when we get to college. There, the boys will be different: older,
smarter, more appreciative of our charms. This class was meant to be my punishment and here I've made it sound like my fast track to the future we've both imagined, with cute college boys who are nice enough to like us
and
do volunteer work.

“He'll probably never call,” I reassure Richard. “In fact, I'm sure he won't.”

“No, I'll bet he likes you, Em. He'll call.”

For the rest of the day, I wonder what I'll do if Chad actually
does
call me. Will I tell him the real reason I'm “volunteering” for this class? Could I go out with him and
not
tell him the truth? I try to imagine it and can only picture freezing up before any words come out of my mouth.

One of the awful truths about the football game is that it wasn't the first time I've panicked and frozen up like that. I have a history of almost-but-not-quite speaking up when I should have. In fact, my friendship with Richard began thanks to one noteworthy example. In the fall of ninth grade, Jackie, a semi-popular girl I had a few classes with, asked if I wanted to sign up for flag team with her. “Supposedly it's really fun. It's all about raising school spirit and bringing people together,” she promised. “It's not elitist like cheerleading. They include everyone.” After a month, I realized this wasn't true. We weren't on a mission to increase school spirit or promote inclusive socializing. We were fifty-two girls trying out to be cheerleaders. Practices were gossipy and competitive with a tone set by bitter senior girls who hated one another. It was awful and I hated it, but I couldn't muster up the courage to quit.
These were the girls I ate lunch with. If I quit, I thought, I'll have no friends.

Then, just before the Harvest Day Parade—our biggest event of the year—I overheard Darla and Sue, two senior flag-team girls, talking about a plan they had for getting on to the cheer squad. “If they find booze in cheerleaders' gym bags, they'll get suspended for the rest of the season. There are only two alternates, so they'll have to pick us.” Darla opened her backpack and showed Sue the airplane-sized liquor bottles she had in there.

I should have said something right away—but I didn't. Two days later, as we readied for the parade, I heard the news that four cheerleaders had been kicked off the squad for drinking violations. I couldn't get over it. Those cheerleaders would now have a record. I could have stopped it and I hadn't because I was afraid. A half hour later as I marched along in the parade, distracted and preoccupied with my own cowardice, I accidentally walked my flag into the bass drum in front of me. Kenton, the drummer, fell awkwardly, dislocating his elbow. The parade came to a grinding halt while an ambulance was called.

That night, Shannon, the flag-team captain, called me at home and said that even though no one blamed me for what happened, I should probably quit the team. “Out of respect for Kenton,” she said.

I wanted to tell her the truth—I know what I did was bad, but Darla and Sue did something even worse—but it was too late for that. Though Darla and Sue eventually got caught, it wasn't thanks to any bravery on my part. In fact,
that whole episode left me the opposite of brave. I never returned to practice and or the flag-team lunch table. I never spoke to anyone on the flag team again. Instead I hid in the library before school and at lunch.

Richard appeared in December, after six lonely weeks of eating by myself. We had French together, with a teacher who walked up and down the aisle speaking French so quickly I sometimes thought she was intentionally trying not to be understood. Richard had a funny way of bending his head down, trying not to get called on. When she did call on him, he always spoke in the same high, frightened voice.
“Répétez, s'il vous plait?”

At a time when nothing else made me laugh, his desperate stabs at French did.

One lunch period I found him, alone like me, in the library, and I told him, “You're pretty funny in French.”

He smirked and said, “The sad part is, I'm not trying to be. I'm trying to do my mind control tactics where I
will
her not to call on me and it's never once worked. I have
no
ability to control anyone's mind.”

Please,
I thought, trying my own version of mind control on him.
Talk to me for the rest of this lunch period
.

He did. He wasn't in the library to study, he said. He came because his usual lunch crowd were all in orchestra and they were playing a lunch concert at the middle school. I nodded and thought,
He'll probably be my one-day friend.
Then he added, “Mostly they're geeks, so I don't mind taking a break and talking to you.”

I laughed and the next day he invited me to join them.
They weren't all geeks; they were people like Richard, academically smart but interested in spending their high school days doing more than just getting good grades.

As I look back on it now, I wonder if I loved Richard from the start because he was brave in ways that I'd never been. The third time we talked, he told me he was gay, which seemed like a daring thing for a ninth grader to say, mostly because it meant admitting he sometimes thought about sex. Because we were getting to be better friends, I asked if there was a gay-straight alliance we could join together. A few days later he told me he'd asked around and there actually
wasn't
a club like that, which shocked him. “There's no club at the school to support any youth activism, can you believe that?” He wanted to start one, he said, not just for gay students but to raise awareness of other issues, too. “Want to do it with me?” he asked. “Now that you've got your afternoons free?”

A week later, we filed papers to form the Youth Action Coalition. From the beginning, I loved being politically active, even though Richard has been the president for three years and does most of the speaking. I do the background, administrative work—xeroxing, poster-making, circulating petitions. Even so, I'm proud of our accomplishments, like convincing the cafeteria administration to use only compostable materials and then to create a compost pile to put the material in, which might have seemed self-evident, but apparently wasn't. When we're short on direct-action campaigns, we pick a different issue every month and raise awareness. Richard writes
letters to the editor and school administration. I oversee a lunch table literature handout. The trick to this, I've learned, is keeping a bowl of Hershey's Kisses at your elbow, so people see what they'll get if they sign our petition. We've had awareness-raising ribbon campaigns for breast cancer research, Oxfam world hunger relief efforts, and domestic violence prevention. We've made a good team, I think.

But this year, I've also discovered it's possible that I still haven't learned what I'm trying to show other people how to do: to take action in the moment it's most needed. I've never told Richard or any of our other friends the whole truth about what happened with Belinda. How could I admit that I panicked in a way that I didn't understand? We've spent three years fighting this mentality in our apathetic student body. How could I tell them I embodied the worst of it?

Instead, I told my friends an altered version of the truth. I said that when I walked under the bleachers, Lucas was already there. “I assumed he'd already called someone, otherwise why would he have waved me away?” I said. Then I conceded, “I should have done more. My biggest mistake was trusting his judgment.” With this story, I put about 70 percent of the blame on Lucas but, as I discovered, my crowd was more than happy to put all of it on him.

“Oh, please,” Candace tutted. “Of course he should have stopped it! He's twice that guy's size and he was wearing pads!”

I didn't even realize how much my friends resented
football players until I gave them a reason to resent them more. “It's terrible that he did that,” Weilin said.

“I always thought he seemed like a nice guy,” Richard sighed. “Obviously he's not.”

By then, it was too late to confess the truth—that I was
more
responsible than Lucas since
I
saw them first. My only comfort was assuming Lucas wouldn't care about the bad opinion of four nerds he'd probably never noticed anyway.

After my conversation with Richard this morning, though, I think about what Lucas said in the lobby, about friendships being more complicated than romances. Richard knows more of my secrets than anyone else. He was with me the one time I got so drunk I threw up in my own lap. He helped me clean up and as we left the party, he told people that I'd stood too close to the sink while I was washing my hands. I was the person he called when he smoked pot for the first time and thought it might be laced with LSD. “I can't tell if my toes are covered in fur or just more toe hair than I ever realized,” he said over the phone. He was with a group of friends from summer camp that he couldn't stand anymore, so I talked to him for most of the night. I knew he was crying. Crying and laughing. It made me cry, too. And laugh.

“I hate these people,” he said. “They make me feel like such a loser. I take off my shoes and the first thing they do is make fun of my toes.”

I thought about the flag team and how Richard helped me get past it. I told him, “You're better than that. You
are
.” Because he was stoned and we were both crying a little, I told him something I'd wanted to say for a while: “You're my best friend, Richard. You're not a loser and I love you.”

He went silent for a while. We never talked this way. Ever. Finally he said, “You're trying to make me feel better because you know I'm going to have to start shaving my toes.”

We didn't talk about that conversation later. He never said, “I love you,” or “You're my best friend, too.” He'd been friends with Barry long before I came along and maybe it was presumptuous of me to have said anything. Once, about a month afterward, Barry ordered a vanilla shake at Denny's and Richard said, “My best friend for eleven years and I've never seen you drink a vanilla shake. You don't think it tastes a little like snot?”

The others might have missed it but I didn't. He called Barry his best friend, which meant I wasn't.

What Lucas said in the lobby last night has stuck with me because he's right: Friendships are complicated. Friends have power. Friends can break your heart. Not that Richard has broken mine exactly, but I'm more careful these days. I don't always laugh at his jokes or agree with everything he says. And with Lucas, the more I thought about it, the more I think Lucas was trying to say he doesn't always love his football player friends. That he knows some of them are jerks, and that he's not like them. I'm starting to suspect he might be an okay guy, which only makes me feel ten times worse for what I said about him to my friends.
It's like maybe on a different planet, in a different universe, Lucas and I might have been friends, and now, obviously, we never will be.

W
HEN
I
ASKED
R
ON
if he'd like to watch
Pride and Prejudice
at my house, he laughed, but I think that was only because my invitation made him feel nervous. I said, “It's okay. My mother said I could invite a friend over and my grandmother said okay, too.”

“See, here's the thing,” Ron said. “I'm not really in Best Buddies like that. They asked a bunch of us to go to the dance cause we're supposed to do community service stuff. But we aren't official Best Buddies or anything like that.”

I laughed because
of course
I know he's not my assigned buddy. They would
never
match a girl with a boy buddy. That wouldn't make
sense.
Maybe I laughed for a little too long because I started to hiccup and get red in the face.

“I'd like to,” he said. “You know. Be your buddy. I just don't have the time. I have practice every day after school.”

He looked like he felt sorry about this. Like he really wanted to be my best buddy. I said, “It's okay. My buddies are always girls. I can't have a boy. It's against the rules.”

I wanted him to know that if I
could
be assigned a boy, I'd
definitely
pick him. Since the afternoon of our dance, I thought more about him than I did about Colin Firth
which had never happened before. I'd never had a real person matter more than Mr. Firth. It felt scary in a way. And also nice.

“So—ahh, sorry,” he said. “I have to plow. I have a meeting with Coach.”

I laughed again because plowing was something people did on farms, not in schools.

Later that day, I saw him standing at the end of the hallway talking to a group of girls. That was okay, I thought. I talked to other boys sometimes, too. I shouldn't ask him not to have any other friends. I told him there was something I forgot to ask him earlier. He said, “What?” I could tell he felt funny talking to me with these other girls watching. I did, too.