Someone I Wanted to Be (12 page)

“Leah, don’t be a douche.”

She pressed her index finger against her mouth and watched in the rearview mirror. Five minutes later, the guy came around the side of the building. He pulled up his hood and jogged with a limp across the street, looking over his shoulder like a criminal on a cop show.

He leaned on the car roof with one hand, wheezed, and coughed up gunk. He wiped his mouth on his wrist, then held out the lemonade. “Look what I got.”

“Thanks, dude,” said Kristy, sighing, bored. The guy handed over the six-pack, then stuck his head in Kristy’s window. “Hey, babe, let’s party.” His teeth were brown and broken like pieces of dirty dishes.

“In your dreams.” Kristy hit the gas and the car screeched forward.

“You ran over my foot, bitch!” he yelled after her.

Kristy gunned the car down the street. A woman yanked a stroller out of the intersection.

I pressed back against my seat. “Watch out! Kristy, slow down. My God.”

“Open me one,” she said. “They’re twist-off. That guy’s breath smelled like shit.”

“I’m not opening you one.”

At a stoplight, she grabbed a bottle out of the cardboard carrier and opened it with her teeth. She drank half of it down. “OK!” she said, wiping her mouth. “Where to? God, I think I chipped my tooth.”

“I don’t know where you’re going,” I said, “but I’m going home. I’m sorry, but . . .”

Kristy ignored me. She turned onto the freeway, and we zoomed past downtown with its one ten-story skyscraper surrounded by little brick buildings.

She finished her lemonade, threw the bottle under my feet, and grabbed another one. I stuck the rest of the six-pack behind her on the floor of the backseat. She held the second bottle between her legs and wiggled her front tooth. “I think I actually chipped it!” she said.

Steering with her elbows, she opened the second bottle and stuck it in my face. “Cheers. Drink this. Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

I glared at her and took the bottle. It was sweet and syrupy. I was drinking hard lemonade, while Cindy got drunk on Chardonnay. Kristy stretched into the back and grabbed another bottle.

Her phone went off. “It’s my mom.”

She put the lemonade between her legs and took the first exit. “Hey, Mommy. . . . We’re at Leah’s. She’s helping me with geometry. I’m having dinner over here. . . . Yes, very healthy. I think it’s like pasta and salad . . . . Yeah, Mrs. Lobermeir knows I can’t eat wheat. Yes, I’ll thank her. Hi, Leah. That’s from my mom. . . . OK, Mommy, I’ll be home before nine, give Daddy a kiss, K. Bye.”

She looked at me. “We’re going to Damien Rogers’s house.”

“You don’t even know where he lives.”

“Victoria Millerfigured it out. Relax. We didn’t go in.”

“Victoria Miller likes Damien Rogers?” Who was this girl slowly turning the wheel of her car while she chewed her gob of gum like a goat? I wanted to hit her. She and Corinne had always sworn: only I could like Damien Rogers.

“Not anymore. She’s going out with Dwayne Lewis.”

We passed Arapahoe High School. The mascot painted on their banner was supposed to be an Arapahoe man with a large crooked nose and a feather sticking off his head. Next to the school was a nail salon with a broken plastic sign.

Kristy swayed her shoulders to a song on the radio. She waved her bottle in time to the music and turned the wheel with the tips of her fingers. She chugged the second lemonade and tossed the bottle onto the backseat. “Did you know Brian isn’t my real dad?” she said.

“What are you talking about? Are you serious?”

She wasn’t smiling. She squinted into the distance and felt around in her purse with one hand. “Damn it, are we out of cigarettes? Yeah, I’m serious.”

“Are you sure?” I tried to remember if I’d seen any pictures of baby Kristy and her dad. Nope. A bittersweet pain like a beam from a flashlight shone around inside of me. Kristy didn’t have a father, either? Mr. Baker was no more Kristy’s dad than mine?

“Yes, I’m sure! I was at the wedding. I was like three. He adopted me. That’s why I call him Daddy.”

“You never told me that.” We pulled up to a stoplight. I waited for the red light to blink off and the green to flash on, and drank half my lemonade. The sugar and the alcohol hit my bloodstream, and softness spread through my arms and legs. Mr. Baker was not Kristy’s real dad. . . .

Kristy hummed along to the radio and drummed her fist against the steering wheel. She suddenly waved her little finger in my face. “Want to know what I want to be? When I grow up?”

“What?”

“I want to be . . . a fashion designer.”

“What? You don’t even know how to sew.”

“It’s the only thing I want to do. I found a school for fashion in Florida. Mom says it’s a great fit for me, and she says I can go.”

“OK. Well, you better learn how to sew. And that is so weird about your dad. I can’t believe you never told me before. Does Corinne know?”

Kristy looked over at me and bit her lip, trying not to smile.

“Were you kidding? You’re messing with me. I don’t want to go to Damien’s.” I didn’t want to go anywhere. There was nowhere to go. “I want to go home.”

“Yeah, I’m kidding!” Kristy fell giggling against her door. “I’m sorry!” She sat up and wiped her nose. “I just wanted to know if you ever wondered what your dad was like.”

“You’re a freak. No, I actually don’t.” Because he wasn’t even a person to me. He was just Paul, a loser who died in a car crash and ruined our lives. He left me alone with an incompetent parent.

We drove through a neighborhood I’d never been in. Some kids ran through the yards and rode their bikes down the middle of the street. The sky behind the mountain turned orange. All the shadows were blue. We passed a house with a rusty swing set in the front yard and a big work truck in the driveway. Dandelions exploded in the yard.

“I want to go home,” I said again. To the home inside my head.

“I don’t know what I’d do without my dad. He’s just everything to me,” Kristy said. She gnawed one of her knuckles. “I think I chipped my tooth. It feels funny. We just go three more blocks, turn left, and we’re at Damien’s.”

“When were you there? Did you talk to him?” My vision blurred. There was a hammering somewhere in my body. “I don’t want to go to his house.”

“Tough!” She drove past a huge apartment building covered with chunky wood shingles and turned onto a street of small houses with big garages and driveways full of trikes, motorcycles, and old cars covered with tarps.

She stopped in front of a split-level with faded blue siding. An old van and a truck were parked out front beneath a crooked basketball hoop. On the main floor, in a yellow-lit kitchen, a family sat around a table.

A mob of little boys pulled up on their bikes and surrounded Kristy’s car.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She hit the horn.

“Kristy! What are you doing? Stop it! Go! Go! Go!” I grabbed her wrist, but she wrestled away from me and pressed on the horn with both hands.

A dark-haired woman with bangs and a braid came to the window, shook her head, and lowered the blinds. I covered my face with my hands. My lungs were not working. I willed myself to lose consciousness, and everything got gray and fuzzy.

“There he is,” said Kristy. “Leah, there’s Damien.”

I unpeeled my hands from my face. Damien Rogers filled the doorway of his house. He shook the dark hair out of his eyes and yelled, “What do you want? You’re pissing off my mom.”

Kristy looked over at me with a shy smile — she hadn’t chipped her tooth — then she turned back to Damien and screamed, “Leah Lobermeir wants your body, Damien!”

She put the car into first, it jerked forward, then the engine died. She started it up again, and the little boys scattered. We shot down the street. She laughed so hard that tears streaked across her face.

Cindy was on the couch bundled in her terry-cloth sick robe. The TV was on, but the sound was off. She slowly turned and looked at me. Her eyes were puffy, and the tip of her nose was red. She had the blue-and-white shoe box of old pictures open on her knees. The wine box was on the coffee table.

She dropped the photos back into the shoe box. “Where were you?” She wiped her nose with a crumpled Kleenex and stared at a framed poster with cracked glass that she’d bought for a buck at a garage sale. Monet at the Denver Art Museum.

“Kristy’s. I had dinner over there. We were doing homework.”

“Why didn’t you call?” Cindy dropped her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. Without lip gloss, her lips looked so thin.

“Sorry, we were really busy. And Kristy’s mom talked to me for a long time. She said to tell you that she’s thinking of you. She really likes you.”

“That poor woman. It’s so tragic.” Water began to seep out the corners of Cindy’s eyes. The tears rolled into her ears. She sopped the tears up with a tissue, then twisted the tissue and smiled. Her nose and eyes were swollen.

“Honey, maybe we should start going to church again. I’m a little down, Leah. Come play Yahtzee with me. We used to have so much fun! Just one game. Come on!”

“Mom, I can’t play Yahtzee. I was helping Kristy with her homework. Now I need to do my own homework. I don’t have time.”

“Oh, Leah, come on. One game. I bet you can’t beat me!” She tipped her head back and smiled at the ceiling.

“Maybe some other night.” I shut my door.

I had a headache from the hard lemonade but decided that I was going to do my homework. I was going to do all of it. I needed to pull up my grades or I’d never get in to med school, and I’d end up drunk on a couch playing Yahtzee. I sat cross-legged facing the door and pulled out my notebooks and textbooks. I built a little fortress out of algebra and chemistry and Spanish and language arts. It was a red wall. All the textbooks were taped up in shiny Coke book covers.

“What are you doing in there?” Cindy’s voice sounded fake and high-pitched. “Do you want me to wax your lip tonight?”

“No! I have to do my homework, OK?”

“That’s fine,” she said faintly. I heard the bottom of her glass scrape against the coffee table. “I’ll just play a game of Yahtzee solitaire!” She rattled the dice in the plastic cup and threw them onto the table. “Damn!” she said. She shook the dice again.

I wrote five paragraphs about how literature contributes to society. I wrote that literature made people see things they couldn’t see before, invisible stuff that was right in front of them. Mr. Calvino would like that. It drove him nuts that we only read excerpts. Only AP language arts got to read entire books and write whole papers.

I took out a probability test for algebra. The two-page stapled worksheet calmed me. I sharpened a pencil and read the first question: “
We know that there are six ways to get a total of seven with a pair of standard six-sided dice, and since . . .
” I read the problem three times and finally understood, and then it was like I disappeared.

While I was working on a problem about a village of 130 people where 60 percent of the people own cars and 55 percent of the car owners are male, Cindy quit shaking the dice. At first I thought she was hiccuping.

The sound of crying always made the hair stand up on my arms. She went, “Uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh,” squeaked, then “Uh-huh-uh-huh-huh-huh-huh,” then she kind of screamed. I opened my door a crack. She was curled up in a ball, rocking with her arms wrapped around her knees, the wineglass dangling from two fingers.

I quietly shut my door, sat back on my bed, and willed myself to figure out what percentage of women owned cars. My forehead was covered with sweat, and I could feel huge pit stains spreading accross my shirt. I read through “Brønsted Acids and Bases” twice. The chapter made me sweat even more, and my brain hurt. I went over it again. I’d talk to Carl about it. I read the first three books of
The Odyssey,
all about Penelope and her suitors and Telemachus’s journey to find out if his father had died. I studied irregular Spanish verbs —
niego, niegas, niega, negamos, negáis, niegan.
The whole time I had to force myself to keep breathing. After forty-five minutes, Cindy stopped crying. I tipped over backward.

My face was numb with exhaustion. My heart felt hard. I had closed it against her. I couldn’t play Yahtzee. I had to do my homework or I’d never have a plan or any kind of life and I’d never be a doctor.

At 9:30, I finished my homework. The apartment was silent. I closed my Spanish textbook and looked at the cracked green walls a few feet on either side of me. I was as flattened as someone who’d just run a marathon.

Bruno Mars rippled shinily over me. When I had insomnia, his voice was the only thing that could get me to sleep. He sounded so calm, so cool . . . so sweet.

After a thirty-six-hour shift, I walked down a New York street. I was exhausted but still looked gorgeous in my blue scrubs. The wet sidewalk glittered with lights. I stepped into a café with low lights and candles lit in round red candleholders. I sat at a table in the back, where it was dark and private, so I could rest, get a salad, and go online. I’d just ordered a drink and opened my laptop when someone touched my shoulder. Startled, I spun around. It was Bruno Mars. He was wearing a black jacket and a red shirt. He looked stunned, as if he’d been searching for the girl he’d always dreamed of and finally . . . “Excuse me,” he said. “Could I join you?”