No More Us for You (11 page)

CarlosD: i want to see you

MiraGirl89: Are you kidding? It's almost 12:30.

CarlosD: i know

CarlosD: i have a clock too

MiraGirl89: Smart ass.:)

CarlosD: well?

MiraGirl89: Leave in twenty minutes. I look like hell.

CarlosD: thats impossible

CarlosD: youve always looked beautiful to me

CarlosD: where did you go?

MiraGirl89: I'm crying now.

CarlosD: why?

MiraGirl89: What I did to you was so shitty. You deserve someone better than me.

CarlosD: stop it

CarlosD: im leaving in 5 minutes

MiraGirl89: Okay.

MiraGirl89: *kiss*

 

I knew what was going to happen before I even snuck out of my house and drove the five blocks to Mira's, before I hopped the gate like I always used to and knocked lightly on the window and climbed into her bedroom, before we talked and she cried and I stroked her hair and she tilted her wet face to mine. I knew that we would kiss, that we'd slip out of our clothes and kiss and I'd touch her and kiss
and she'd moan as I went inside her, that afterward we'd lay panting, trying to catch our breath. But what I didn't expect was that I would end up feeling worse, like my heart was full of dirt and worms, and I wanted to run, put on my clothes and jump out the window and drive back home, my mind already making the trip as Mira's hand slid back and forth across my chest, my mind spinning like a carousel ride until it settled on Nadine's face, the neon pink squiggles on her glasses, her puzzled expression after I kissed her, and her question came back to me.

What the hell are you doing?

Sometimes I believed that all my obsessing over death had somehow caused what happened to happen. I had to keep reminding myself that I not only imagined Vanessa dying, but Heidi too, my mom and dad and little brother, everyone at Millikan, my next-door neighbors, strangers I passed on the street. From car wreck to murder (gun, knife, strangulation) to plane crash to electrocution and all the other ways listed in the “Risk of Death” chart, and in ways that were not listed—dog attack, shark attack, terrorist attack. And
look at all those people. They were still breathing.

Of the hundred or so people who gathered around Vanessa's gravesite for the burial, Heidi and I stood in the outer circle. The sky was overcast and the air as still as the inside of a closet. Not even the trees moved, not one leaf.

Although I couldn't see the preacher, I could hear his words through the wall of black coats and dresses, over the sobs and whimpers. “Man hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,” he said. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower.”

I thought,
A
woman
too. A woman also dies. And a girl just as she's becoming a woman.

I looked down at my dress that my mom helped me pick out on Thursday. I looked at the handkerchief in my hands, my dad's initials stitched with green thread in one corner. He'd left it on my dresser in the morning and said I could keep it, that he had plenty more.

Heidi wept uncontrollably. She was a running faucet. I gave her the hanky and she mouthed
Thank you
before lifting the folded cloth to her face.

“O holy and merciful Savior,” the preacher continued.
“Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

A woman with a large black hat moved her head from side to side like she was looking for someone. A man glanced over his shoulder and shifted his weight. Then I smelled it, the putrid stench of a fart, like a plate of sardines lifted to my nose. I glanced over at Heidi and her face was already scrunched in disgust. She covered her nose and mouth with my dad's handkerchief and I was reminded of the footage from the brush fire a couple weeks ago, of a middle-aged man walking through the haze with a dishtowel held to his lower face.

I tried not to laugh, I really tried—I bit my lip, closed my eyes, pushed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth. I remembered a conversation I had with Vanessa about the giggles, how one day she couldn't stop herself from laughing during a Spanish test. She had glanced up from her exam for a brief moment and saw her teacher twitching his nose spastically, his thick mustache jumping up and down.
I lost it,
Vanessa said.
I couldn't
not
laugh, you know?

That's happened to me so many times,
I told her.

Everyone was shushing me,
she said.
Finally, Mr. Morales told me to please step out of the class, that I was distracting the other students. He said I could come back in and finish the test when I could control myself. But whenever I reached for the doorknob, I thought of his hopping mustache, and I'd laugh all over again.

Imagine if you had the giggles in church, like at a wedding or baptism.

Oh my God, that would be awful. A funeral would be even worse
.

You're right,
I said.
That would be the absolute worst.

And there I was, at a funeral, trying to swallow a giggle that was shimmying up my throat. My shoulders quivered, I made a strange noise in my mouth like a chair leg scraping across the floor. It was as if Vanessa were saying hello to me. Or good-bye.

“Earth to earth,” the preacher said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Then I stopped laughing and my heart felt heavy like a bag of cement. Next thing I knew I was sobbing
like everyone else and Heidi was holding on to my hand.

Before long, people took turns dropping handfuls of dirt onto Vanessa's casket—her mother, her father, a brother I never knew she had, cousins and aunts and uncles I never met, some friends from Wilson High. Basically, people who knew her longer than me, which was pretty much everyone who was there. Vanessa had been in my life for only two weeks. What was I supposed to do with that?

 

Heidi and I were heading down the slope of the lawn, back to my car, when I saw Carlos in the cemetery parking lot talking to the woman with the large black hat. She was pinching the bridge of her nose right between her eyes like she was pushing away a headache.

“Isn't that Carlos?” Heidi asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I want to talk to him.”

“Come on, Is, let's just get out of here.”

I grabbed my keys from my purse and handed them to Heidi. “Wait in my car, okay?”

Heidi clicked her tongue. “This place depresses me.”

“I'll just be a couple minutes.”

Heidi took my keys and marched toward the car, obviously annoyed.

I stood on the sidewalk and waited for Carlos to finish his conversation. I overheard the woman say something about a mailing, about stuffing envelopes and catering and painting the walls and hiring another receptionist. I glanced up and saw Vanessa's brother walking quickly down the lawn, a lit cigarette spooling blue threads of smoke from his hand. His mother and father, their arms hooked together, trailed behind him, taking careful steps down the steep lawn. When the brother reached the sidewalk, he took one last drag from his cigarette before dropping it to the ground. He moved his shoe over it and hesitated—his foot at an angle, the smoke rising underneath—until finally he brought it down.

“Hey,” Carlos said to me. “Sorry about that.”

“That's okay,” I said.

“That was my boss. She wants me to work even though I have the day off.” He looked off to the right, up the incline, as if he was watching people coming down it.

“I haven't seen you around school,” I said.

“I've been there.”

“I heard Snake's still in a coma.”

Carlos put his hands in his pockets and glanced the other way, over my left shoulder. “Yep.”

“Have you visited him?”

“I'm not allowed. Only relatives.”

He was being short with me, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting. I wondered if he was mad at me, if there was something I'd said or done that was making him act this way.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I hope he comes out of it soon.”

Carlos nodded. He scratched behind his ear with one finger.

“I thought maybe we could talk about what happened,” I said.

He jingled his car keys in his pocket and moved his gaze downward, at his shoes. “What's there to talk about?”

“What happened that night. Snake, Vanessa.”

“Yeah? And?”

“We both lost someone.”

“Snake's not dead.” Carlos sighed and shook his head. “I'm tired of people talking like he is.”

“Sorry, that's not what I meant.”

He glanced at his watch.

“What I meant was…”

He began fidgeting with his keys again.

“We were there, the four of us. You and me were the last people they saw before they took off.”

Carlos finally looked at my eyes.

“Where do you think they were going?”

“I don't know,” Carlos said. “I really don't know.”

“I haven't been able to sleep.”

“Me neither.”

“Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if we'd both stayed inside the car.”

“But we didn't.”

“I know, but if we did—”

“You can't start thinking that way,” Carlos interrupted. “It doesn't do any good.”

“But none of this would've happened if we'd all stuck together.”

“They wanted to be alone.”

I thought about not saying it, but then the words came out: “So did we.”

“Look, Isabel…” He paused, as if he was trying to find the right words, as if they were right there on the sidewalk and all he had to do was pick them up. “My life's really complicated right now.”

“Okay,” I said. I watched the cars pulling out of the parking lot, some turning left onto the main street, some right. “I understand,” I told him.

“Good.” He glanced at his watch again. “I need to get home and get ready for work.”

“I guess I'll just see you around school then?”

Carlos nodded and walked back to his car. His head was bowed at a slight angle as if he was studying his own shadow sliding in front of him like a dark fish.

A car horn blared. I recognized its sound and pitch. I turned around in time to see Heidi leaning away from the steering wheel of my car.

Once I was in the driver's seat, I let her have it.

“I can't believe you just did that,” I shouted.

“Did what?”

“Honked. We're at a cemetery, Heidi. Hell-o?”

“Okay, okay, stop yelling.”

I opened my purse and rummaged through it, looking for my keys. “Damn it,” I muttered.

“Relax, Is.” Heidi jiggled the keys in front of my face. “You gave them to me, remember?”

I swiped the keys out of her hands.

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” I said. “Everything's not all right.”

“What did he say?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

I put the key in the ignition and was about to turn it when Heidi said, “Why is she staring at us?”

I looked at Heidi and followed her gaze, through the windshield and over to the sidewalk where a thin girl stood in a simple black dress, facing us. Her hair was dyed platinum white and cut short like a boy's. She held her purse with both hands, then raised one tentatively.

“Do you know her?” Heidi asked.

“I don't think so.”

“Are you sure?”

I turned the key halfway so the car's power came on. I lowered the window and poked my head out. “Do I know you?” I asked the girl.

She came over to the car and I realized how thin she was. She was all bones, a waif of a girl with twig arms and a scrawny neck and collarbones poking out from under her dress like a wire hanger.

“Are you Isabel?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“I'm Sara. One of Vanessa's friends from Wilson.”

“Oh,” I said. “She never mentioned her friends from Wilson.”

“Doesn't surprise me.” She crouched and tilted her head sideways. “And you must be Heidi?”

“I am,” Heidi said.

“How did you know who we were?” I asked.

“Vanessa talked about you two all the time.” Sara
smiled without showing her teeth. “I knew all her friends at Wilson, so when I saw you two walking together…well, it didn't take a genius to figure out who you were.”

Heidi leaned toward the thin girl. “What did she say? About us, I mean.”

Sara slid the tip of her finger down the side of her mouth as if she was fixing her lipstick, which was a dark rose color. “Good things, mostly.”

“Mostly?”
I was getting angry.
Who the hell does this bony chick think she is?
I thought.

“Listen,” Sara said, “Vanessa talked shit behind all her friends' backs. Even mine.”

“Oh, is that right?” I said.

“You have no idea what kind of girl she was, do you?”

I remembered what Vanessa had told me on the phone one night, how she used to hang out with the wrong crowd.
Drugs and stuff. It got out of hand,
she'd told me. I began wondering if Sara was part of that crowd, if she was one of the reasons why Vanessa transferred to Millikan. I looked at Sara and said nothing.

“That's what I thought. And, actually, that's the way she wanted it.”

I started the car. “It was nice meeting you,” I said dryly.

I lowered the brake and checked my mirrors and began to pull out of the parking spot. Sara followed, walking casually by the driver's-side door. She had one more thing to tell me, but I was done listening to her crap and peeled out of the parking lot, the tires squealing on the pavement.

“Hell-o?”
Heidi said, mocking me.
“We're at the cemetery.”