Playing Nice (10 page)

"Did you fall in love with him right away?" I asked.

"There are lots of layers to love, Marty." Mom breathed into a spoon and wiped away the spots left from the dishwasher. "I have to go make dinner."

She walked out of the dining room and we never talked about it again. But I watched them for days, waiting for a sign that my mom was making light of the story, being modest about her love for my dad.

It took four days for them to touch. It finally happened when Mom cut her finger slicing tomatoes.

"Let the doctor see it," my dad said. She stuck her finger out and he kissed it. She blushed, and all my worries washed away. I told myself in that moment I was an X and if I found my Y, I would have a good life, just like my parents. Like so many people in Minster.

Now I can't stop thinking about dancing with Matt and how my parents wouldn't approve of his shaggy hair and bad grades and pothead mother. How my mom would complain that she couldn't monogram Hart-James-Morrison-Walker on anything. But I still want to dance with him again and have his hips press against mine and kiss his fingertips until they're silky smooth. Maybe Lil is right, maybe I'm different. Maybe I'm not an X. Maybe I'm not a letter at all.

But if I think about that, panic starts to gurgle in my stomach and everything goes blank. I don't know how to define myself. I go from:

Marty Hart
: Noun. Nicest Person in Minster High School, WelCo president, musical theater goddess, U of M graduate, future Mrs. ______ to hot Dr. ______.

to

Marty Hart
: Noun.

I place my hand on the application and wait for the surge of rightness I usually get when I think about my future. Nothing comes.
You're different than this town
.
You're better
.

What does that even mean? I don't know anything other than Minster, and I'm not sure I want to. I stare out the window at the crops surrounding my house, the straight rows of corn plowed year after year. My grandma's fields. Why is it that this morning I keep finding holes, like one of the corn plants was bad, so it was torn from the ground and thrown out?

I email Lil again.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Seriously. I'm scared. R u dead? If u r, I'll never forgive u.

I wait ten more minutes. Nothing. Finally, succumbing to my grumbling stomach, I head downstairs.

"How was the movie?" my mom asks. She's in her pink eyelet bathrobe and holding the mug she uses every morning, one with pink, red, and orange polka dots, filled with English breakfast tea.

"Good." I stuff my head into the refrigerator and pretend to look for orange juice.
Good
? How about terrible and wonderful and scary all rolled into one?

"So is Alex a good kisser?" She smiles behind her mug.

I slam the fridge closed with a thud. "Mom!" I bark, and look at my dad who's trying to act nonchalant, spatula in hand behind a griddle full of blueberry pancakes.

"What? All the boys in Minster should want to kiss my daughter." My mom walks over to me and tucks my hair behind my ears. "You're a catch."

"I told you; it wasn't a date. We're friends."

Mom sniffs like she doesn't believe a word I just said and walks back over to her seat. "Fine. If you want to be a spinster for the rest of your life…" She sings her words, but they still hurt. I force myself to remember Matt's hips on mine, his breath in my ear. My hand on his heart.
One love, My Hart
. Shivers cover my skin.

"Do you want some pancakes?" my dad asks. He flips one with the spatula and it lands on the ground. "Okay, maybe not that one."

Can Mom and Dad tell I'm different? Not the kind of different I'm sure I'll feel when I finally have sex for the first time, but the kind someone feels when they've dyed their hair or cut bangs where there were never bangs before.

"Eat them quick. We need to leave for church in an hour," my mom says, her eyes now fixed on the Sunday edition of the
Columbus Dispatch
.

"Why do we go to church? We don't even pray before dinner."

The words fall out of my mouth and splatter onto the floor before I can think better of it. Both my parents look at me, eyes bulging out of their heads, like I've transformed into a three-headed atheist monster who believes in abortion and gay marriage.

I take a breath and hold it. My mom's verbena lotion is all over my skin. She hasn't changed it in seventeen years. I even know her morning routine, how she starts by applying it to her face, then moves to her legs and arms and stomach. In the end, she's covered in a layer so thick nothing from the outside world can reach her.

Mom pulls the newspaper up to cover her face and smacks it open. "Wear the blue dress I got you a few weeks ago. The one with the black belt. It's a good color on you."

The headline on the front page reads: ONE PERSON DEAD. ONE STILL MISSING. I can practically feel Lil's lifeless body in my arms and my knees gets wobbly, like I might not be able to stand for much longer. I force my legs to move and walk back to my room, no longer hungry. Still no email from Lil.

Taking the blue dress out of my closet and placing it on my bed, I get in the shower. Black and white words flash in my head: ONE PERSON DEAD… ONE STILL MISSING.

***

My stomach hurts all through church. We sit in our usual pew five rows from the front, not so close that the Reverend will stare at us the whole time, but close enough that everyone knows the Harts are in attendance. I fumble with the hymnal, dropping it twice.

"What's wrong with you today?" my mom whispers.

I'm worried I'm an accessory to murder and an orange adult onesie is going to be my new signature outfit
.

"I'm just tired," I say.

The rock of worry is slowly working its way into a solid wall of panic. Every hour that Lil doesn't respond to me, it grows.

My mom gives the yarn she bought yesterday to mean old Mrs. Schneider and asks her to make me a sweater. My neck itches just looking at the blue wool.

At home, I strip off my dress and go directly to my computer. Nothing. I want to scream. For a second, I contemplate going over to Lil's to check on her and wring her neck for getting me into this situation in the first place, but then I decide that if she's dead it won't do me any good to return to the scene of the crime. Plus, her mom looked at me last night like I might give her bird flu or something.

Instead, I type into Google: R P McMurphy.

A book—
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by somebody named Ken Kesey—is the first thing that pops up. I skim the Wikipedia entry, distracting my mind so I stop visualizing Lil, dead in the trailer where I left her. I even download the book onto my Kindle and read the first fifty pages. Finally, I can't stand it any longer.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Randle Patrick McMurphy,

From this point forward, I'm going to assume u r dead and I don't care.

From,

The Chief

PS- I figured out what ur email means.

I wait. It's five in the afternoon. A police car should be pulling into my driveway any second. A Minster cop with a mustache will walk up to my door and politely ask for Marty Hart. My mom will cry. My dad will shake his head. The front page of the
Columbus Dispatch
will read: MINSTER'S NICEST PERSON NOT SO NICE.

The computer dings.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Don't say things u don't mean.

I breathe for the first time today. Thank
God
she's not dead.

***

"Did you go to a movie with Alex Saturday night?" Sarah comes up behind me as I wait for the bus on Monday morning. I turn and find her, straight-lipped, hair pulled into a ballerina bun on the top of her head. Just like the first time I met her.
Shit
.

"Did my mom tell you that?"

"Duh," she raises her eyebrows. "Your mom told my mom."

"He asked me last minute. It's no big deal." I spin my hair around my finger, trying to act calm.

"I thought you were against boys who wear jerseys."

I shrug my shoulders. "I made an exception." The answer comes out more like a question, the last word rising upward in hopes of Sarah buying it.

"Whatever," she says. Sarah takes a compact out of her backpack and checks her hair, running a hand along the top of her head to make sure no curls are loose. It's cold and humid, the weather finally turning into typical Ohio in November. Rain, sleet, cold, wind, repeat. "We have more important things to discuss."

"What?" I say.

"Like what we're going to wear to the Hot Shot dance. Should we go casual, dressy, hunting glam?"

"What's hunting glam?"

"I don't know. Maybe sparkly camouflage? Whatever we decide, we need to go shopping pronto," Sarah says as we climb onto the bus.

We sit in our regular seats and she keeps talking, going through every item of clothing she owns and explaining why it's inappropriate.
My boobs look flat in that shirt. Those pants give me muffin top. That dress looks like something a drunk hobbit would pick off the sale rack at Kohl's
.

At my locker, I pull out books like a pre-programmed robot. A collage Sarah made me in art class earlier this year hangs on my locker door. The words
musical
,
pretty
,
great hair
, and
dork
, all glued together with different colored letters from magazines. Two girls' heads, one with brown hair and one with red, are pasted next to each other in the center of the paper with the letters
BFF
in bold underneath. Under the collage is the poster from
Guys and Dolls
. Why does it all look so fake today? Like a different person has been living in this two-foot by one-foot space for the past few months and I'm stuck looking for something that isn't there.

I jot down on a loose piece of paper:

"Pollyanna?"

I almost drop my math book as I stuff the paper into a folder.

"Lil?" My voice squeaks. She cocks her head at me and I worry she saw what I wrote. Dark brown sloppy hair is pulled into a messy ponytail on top of her head and her big red sunglasses shade her eyes. Her white skin is almost translucent and one word pops into my head: vampire. "You look terrible."

"Thanks, ass wipe."

"I'm sorry. What I meant was, how are you?" I try to smile, but the scared feeling from Saturday night comes rushing back to me and I want to punch someone.

"Fucking fantastic. Now that we've established that." She turns to walk away.

"Wait." I grab her arm. Her skin is clammy. "Why do you live in that trailer?" I ask. They aren't the words I want to say. I want to ask her if she remembers anything, if she knows she could have been raped, if her head hurts and she wants me to get her some water, if she was telling the truth when she said she doesn't hate me.

"Because my grandpa's an alcoholic bastard with a one-track memory and he won't let my mom inside his house." Her eyebrows rise above the top rim of her glasses.

"Why?"

"Why do you care, Pollyanna?" Lil says it like it's a challenge, like she's daring me to feel for her.

"I was scared Saturday night. Like, really scared," I say. Those are the words I wanted to start off with but couldn't find.

"Well, I survived … though this two-day hangover makes me wish I hadn't."

"You look just like her, you know. Your mom. She's pretty." Lil doesn't say anything, just spins her skull ring around her middle finger. "Matt asked me to dance with him Saturday night," I say, a bubbly, uncontrollable giddiness rolling through me. It makes me want to throw up or burst into a million pieces.

"At least one of us had a good time." I can tell Lil wants to say something else because her lips purse and her nose pulls up into the snort face people always make when they're holding something back. Instead of speaking, Lil takes off her sunglasses and puts them on her head. Black eyeliner is smudged around her red-rimmed eyes. She takes a breath. "Everyone in town hates my mom, but they're wrong about her."

"Why do they hate her?"

"Just tell me you believe me," Lil says. She grabs my hands, her eyes fixed so strongly on mine that there isn't a chance of wavering.

"I believe you." I whisper.

Putting her sunglasses back on, she says, "Thanks for saving my life," in a muffled voice. The words are so quiet I'm not sure if Lil actually spoke them.

***

That afternoon, I almost faint when Matt Three-Last-Names walks up to me in the hallway on my way to a WelCo meeting. My heart drops to my knees, my body remembering every moment of ecstasy, every fingertip on my back, the way my hand pressed against his heart.

"What are you doing here?" I say. Shit. Shit. Shit.
What are you doing here?!
That's a terrible opener!

"It's school. Aren't we supposed to be here?" Matt says in a husky, sexy, oh-my-God-I-want-to-grope-you way.

"Right," I whisper. I'm losing it. He's wearing a tight white undershirt with sleeves and jeans. I scan his whole body before deciding his simple outfit is the most delicious thing I've ever seen. It makes my limbs turn all gooey, messy like Jell-0.

"Did you have a good time Saturday night?" Matt asks.

"It was interesting." I twirl my hair around my finger and force myself to blink. If I look into his green eyes for too long, I'm worried my entire brain will turn to mush and I'll scream:
touch me, please! Kiss me, please! Have sex with me, PLEASE!