God is in the Pancakes (12 page)

“That's my girl,” he says. “That's my Gracie.”

And that's when “his girl,” his “Gracie,” has to look away, and my eyes fall on his nightstand. In my ear I can almost hear the words of his wife: “You're allowed to reassess and change your mind about things.” Sometimes we make assumptions. Sometimes we make decisions. And sometimes they're wrong. Isabelle had said life requires reexamination, and I think she's right about that.

I
figure it's worth a shot. Answers can come to you from strange places. And none would be stranger than my sister. “Hey, Lolly,” I say when I get home and find her on the living room floor doing her homework in front of the TV. “How do you decide if you should do something if you're not sure if it's right or not?”

“Huh?” she says, without bothering to look at me.

“Okay,” I reply, trying to figure out how to rephrase without giving away too much. “Have you ever been in a situation where somebody wants you to do something, but you're not sure that it's, like, moral?”

“Why?” she asks, her head suddenly jerking up. “What'd you hear?”

“Nothing, guilty conscience.” I shake my head, taking a peanut M&M from the bag in my pocket and throwing it in her direction.

She snags it out of the air with her right hand and pops it into her mouth.

“So do you mean have I ever been in a position where I'm not sure if I should listen to my conscience or not?” she asks, then sits up crossing her legs, happy for the excuse to close her textbook. “Sure, of course I have.”

“Really?” I take my coat off and plop down on the couch, slipping off my shoes and pulling my knees to my chin. “So how did you ultimately decide what to do or not do?”

But instead of answering that question, Lolly leans in close to me and grabs my pinky with hers. “Promise you won't tell Mom?”

I nod and we unlock our pinkies.

“Okay, well, Jake has been wanting me to have sex with him, right?”

“Uh—” I say, unprepared for the hard left turn my brain has to make to participate in
this
topic of conversation.

“But this is my virginity we're talking about, and I didn't want to give it up to just
anybody
because some guy's putting pressure on me. This is the kind of thing that has to be
my
decision.
I
have to be the one calling the shots on this, you know? That's the kind of thing that once it's gone, it's gone.”

I nod and bite my bottom lip. I'm hearing Lolly's words but haven't gotten Mr. Sands out of my head yet.

“And I don't care what some of the girls at school say, you can't re-virginize if you don't sleep with anyone again for like a year.”

“Re-virginize?” I ask, my eyes finally focusing on my sister.

“Yeah, like when you pick a cherry off a tree, another one grows back in a year. Same idea.”

Though I'd tried to block out most of what we'd learned in sex ed, I definitely remembered the day our wrestling coach/health class teacher did the “breaking of the hymen” unit. Mr. Z. read the description directly from our text book: “It occurs when the male genitalia breaks the thin membrane that covers the opening of the vagina.” Mr. Z. then looked up, smiled, and said, “And boys, best remember that old Pottery Barn slogan, ‘You break it, you bought it.'” Most of the guys laughed uncomfortably, the girls' reactions seemed split between embarrassment and horror. I felt embarrassed, horrified,
and
nauseous.

“The girls at school think they can become born-again virgins? That's bird-brained. Why would they even say that?” I ask.

“Um, because they're sluts?” Lolly replies. “They're trying to pretend like they didn't do all that stuff. But once you make that decision it's obviously a done deal—no second chance to make a first ‘impression.'” Lolly laughs.

“So you
didn't
have sex with Jake?” I feel a rush of relief, like a deep exhale.

“No.” Lolly chews on the tip of her pen cap for a moment until the left side of her mouth curls into a smile. “Not yet.”

Not
exactly
the answer I was hoping for, but close enough for now. And maybe this is Lolly's way of admitting she isn't as sure about Jake as she's been pretending. “You haven't had sex with him because you think, I don't know, he might be fooling around with other girls?”

“What?!
No
, that's not what I meant at all.”

“Oh.” I try to make it sound casual. “Then what? Something stopped you. What was it?”

“Well, I thought about it, but I want it to be special, and I realized that by making Jake wait a little while longer, he would respect me more.” Lolly nods. “And it's working, because he understands what it means. He's not so in my face about it all the time anymore, so that tells me that he really gets it, you know?”

I nod. I did know. I knew he was “getting it” from another girl, and when the phone rings a moment later, I have a sick sense who's calling before I pick up.

“Lol?” Jake says when I answer.

“No, it's Grace,”
you asshole
.

“Oh, hey,” he replies casually. I wonder if he'll come up with some excuse about why he was kissing Natalie in the pharmacy the other day, some long-winded explanation of how he thought his tonsils were inflamed and Natalie said she'd be happy to examine them for him. “You know, I'd really like to see some of your art stuff next time I'm over at your house, okay?”

It is not okay.

“Hang on,” I answer. “Lolly, it's Ja—” Before I even have the chance to finish his name, she springs to her feet and reaches for the receiver, wrestling it from my hand.

“Hey!” she says, sounding way too excited to hear from him. “Wait, I'm going to take this upstairs where I can get some privacy,” Lolly says. After I hear her door close upstairs, the key turns in the lock of the front door. Mom pushes through and enters a moment later, a droopy-dog expression on her face.

“Hope you and your sister want hamburgers for dinner.” She holds up two grease-stained white paper bags with the red You Say Potato . . . logo on the front.

“Yeah, that's fine,” I respond. Whenever Mom brings food home from the restaurant, it usually means something unpleasant happened during her shift. I don't know whether they give it to her as compensation, or whether she takes it to compensate herself, and I don't ask. I do know, however, that if I'm still hanging around in another ten seconds, I'll be forced to hear all about it.

It's not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everyone likes to have an audience—that's why most people have kids, isn't it? Sometimes her stories are even funny. (Like the time she told us about the busboy who wiped out while he was carrying the Caution! Slippery Floor sign across the dining room. Or when one of the managers introduced the four-appetizer combo he named the “Four Play.” Trouble started when waitresses started asking customers if they wanted “some Four Play” before their entrée.) But most of the time when Mom talks about work, it's usually about how she “got into it” with someone else, and she wants me to tell her she was 100 percent right and the other person was totally wrong. The problem is, after she explains the situation and her response, I almost always think she was the one who screwed up.

“Can you believe when I told the chief operating officer that I needed more budgeted for advertising this quarter, he had the nerve to suggest my media plan was wrong?” she asked me last time. “So I told him, Jim, you think you can come up with a better plan, you can do it yourself!” She looked at me for confirmation but all I could do was bite my lip to stop myself from telling her she was probably lucky he didn't fire her then and there.

“Is your sister home?” Mom asks.

“On the phone.”

She nods. “Hey, how was your day?”

I stop at the top of the landing and turn around to face her. The overhead light shines on the crown of Mom's head and illuminates her face. Most of her makeup has worn off, so the purple half-moons under her eyes are no longer concealed and her exhaustion is visible.

“My day? It was okay. It was fine.”

“Good,” she says. “Good,” she repeats as she takes off her overcoat and walks toward the kitchen.

Dinner is eaten in silence as Mom, Lolly, and I seem equally content to marinate in our own thoughts. Lolly picks at her burger and the bottom half of the bun, which is all she allows herself to eat, and when she finishes her few bites of dinner, she pushes her chair out and scrapes her plate in the trash.

“I'm going out,” she says.

“Okay,” Mom replies, not bothering to ask where she's going or with whom.

I follow Lolly's lead, clean my plate, and run upstairs after her. “Where are you going?” I ask, finding her in the bathroom reapplying mascara.

“Out with Jake,” she replies. “We'll probably watch a movie at his house.” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Or something,” she adds with a mischievous grin.

I wonder what Mom would do if she knew what I did about Jake. And then I do the gut check Mr. Sands suggests: What's the right thing to do in this situation? By not telling Lolly that her boyfriend's a cheater, do I ultimately hurt her more than if I come clean about what I know?

The gut tells me to go for it: “You know, Lolly,” I finally say, “I think you can do better than Jake.”

She brings her right hand down and away from her face. “What?”

“I just mean you could date anyone you want, so—”

“Of course I
want
to be dating Jake. Do you have a problem with him or something?”

I shrug, then lean against the bathroom doorway. “I don't like him,” I say quietly.

“He's never been anything but nice to you, so why is it that you don't like him all of a sudden?”

I open my mouth to respond, but the words don't come easily. “It's not all of a sudden. I just get a bad vibe from him.”

“A bad vibe? What's that supposed to mean?” I can see she's getting mad now because a little blue lighting bolt vein crops up on the left side of her forehead. “Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you like him or not, because I'm the one dating him.”

The gut says:
Only until you find out about him and Natalie
. “You're right,” I reply instead. (Apparently my gut has an override switch.)

“Sometimes I don't understand you, Grace.” Lolly shakes her head and returns to staring at her reflection.

I look at her in the mirror instead of looking at her directly, even though she's standing only two feet away from me. Somehow it's easier to talk to the image than the real person. “Don't you ever wonder about him and other girls, though? I mean, he's really flirty, don't you think?”

“So? All guys are like that. It doesn't mean anything.”

“But what if it does?” I don't want to say it. I don't want to say it. And then I do: “What if I told you he really was cheating.”

Lolly makes a laughing sound through her nose.

“I saw him.”

“You
saw
him. You
saw
him cheating on me? Do you even know how stupid that sounds?”

“Lolly—”

“Enough, Grace.” She puts both hands up in front of her, and the forehead vein flickers again. “I mean, I'm sorry you don't have a boyfriend. But I just think it's really sad that you want to wreck my relationship with Jake because no one wants to go out with you.”

I can practically see myself as a cartoon character with steam shooting out of my ears and nostrils. “Wow. Wow, yup, that's exactly what I wanted to do. Just trying to bring you down because I'm a jealous loser.” Skulking away from her, I head for my room.

The mirror over my bureau gives me a jolt. I now have a view of what I must look like to Lolly, and I don't like what I see either. There's a pot of lip gloss on the bureau and I swirl my middle finger in it, then smear it over my lips. I gather my hair to put it up in a ponytail, but the girl in the mirror now looks too little girly, so I decide to keep it loose, running my hands through my hair and mussing my bangs slightly. Not great, but a slight improvement. I grab my sweater and take a final glance back at myself in the mirror before walking out of the room.

I run downstairs, open the front door, and hop on my bike. Riding in the direction of Eric's house, it's like I'm on auto-pilot. Whatever it was that initially stopped me from accepting his invitation to the dance—pride?—well, I'm just going to let that go and tell him we'll go together. I dial Eric's number as I approach his house.

“Grace,” Eric says when he picks up. “What's up?”

“Guess where I am?”

“You're calling me from the trunk of a vehicle speeding toward the border. Your captors mistakenly thought you'd be an excellent candidate to sell into white slavery.”

“I'm on your block.”

“Or you're on my block.”

“I like your version better,” I say. “Everything except the part about me being locked in a trunk and sold into slavery.”

“Mine is slightly more cinematographic than yours, this is true,” Eric replies. “But I do have a director's eye.”

“And a psycho's mind.”

“You know a guy can only hear that so many times a day without starting to get paranoid.” He laughs. “So you want to come over? Or are you just planning to hide in my bushes the whole night—speaking of psychos.”