The Life of Glass (6 page)

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” I heard Ashley say.

Yes, don’t pay any attention to me. I’m invisible.

I came to
learn that there is an awful lot you don’t want to know that you can learn on the internet. If I wasn’t feeling well or I developed a symptom, I tended to go a little overboard and look it up on Google. Then I’d end up on some website for some strange disease, which I would convince myself that I had in a matter of minutes.

Right after my dad died, I got this weird eyelid twitch, which was really annoying. My bottom lid would just twitch and twitch, no matter what I did to try and stop it. I looked it up online and settled on Parkinson’s disease. I told my mother that I needed to go for an MRI.

“I’m sure you’re fine, sweetie.” She brushed me off, the way she did about most things.

“Look at it.” I pointed to my eyelid, which had started twitching like crazy while I talked to her.

“That happens to me when I get tired,” she said, all nonchalantly, not even caring that I may or may not have this terrible disease.

I sighed. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”

She stopped what she was doing, came over, and gave me a hug. She pulled back and looked directly at me. “I’ll tell you what, sweetie. Let’s give it a few weeks and see if it goes away on its own first.” I could hear it in her voice, that my mother was sick of doctors, that she couldn’t believe that there could really be anything wrong with me, that lightning would strike us twice. I didn’t want to be the one to take her back to that awful place again, so I nodded.

She was right; the twitch did stop after a few weeks, and after that I promised myself that I wouldn’t look up any more symptoms on the internet.

But it was hard to stop. Especially if something was bothering me, if I was home all alone with nothing else to think about. I didn’t mention anything else to my mother though. I figured each time that I would
do what she said and see if it got better on its own in a few weeks. And each time I held my breath, waiting for something to subside: stomach pain (appendicitis or an ulcer), sore throat and swollen glands (lymphoma), pain in my chest (a clogged artery).

The pains all went away, some slowly, some quickly, but the fear did not, the knowledge that a terrible disease could creep up on you at any second, that it could blindside you and take everything, swiftly and all at once.

So you would think after all the worrisome information I’d found on the internet, I might have thought twice before Googling Sally Bedford. But I didn’t. Her name burned my brain, and it made my head hurt. I sat there, my throbbing head in one hand, the scrap of paper with her name in the other, and I debated whether I should try to figure out if I could have a brain tumor or if I should try to figure out who she was. I picked the second choice.

It seemed like it would be a common name, but the first entry that popped up was for a Sally Bedford who worked at Charles and Large Accountants. No, that couldn’t be right. She couldn’t have worked at the same accounting firm as my dad. I would’ve heard of her before.

I clicked on the website, and it took me to the C & L site, with a page that had pictures of their employees. Sally Bedford, it read under her name, senior office manager. The picture of her was grainy and small, so it was hard to see what she really looked like, but she wasn’t beautiful, not even close to my mother.

Her hair was a mousy brown. She had olive skin and green eyes and this pointy little chin and a button nose that looked a little small for her face. It was as if someone had taken all of her features and squashed them incorrectly, because she looked entirely out of proportion. I wondered what her story was—and if it was interesting enough for my father to include in his notes, or if it was something he’d decided to pass up on. It was the only reasonable explanation I could think of for why he would have a note to call her in his journal.

What Grandma Harry said still gnawed at me. But she must have gotten confused. Or maybe Sally Bedford was the name of a girl he’d dated in college and she’d ended up working at the same accounting firm, which didn’t really explain why he had that note in his book.

I felt this anger at him, my father. It boiled up in my chest and burned my throat, giving me this terrible
acidic taste in my mouth. It wasn’t fair that he wasn’t here for me to ask him, for him to make the worry subside. I imagined the way it might have gone:

“Hey, Dad. Can I ask you something?”

“What is it, Melon? You know you can ask me anything.”

“Well, who’s Sally Bedford? Grandma said you dated her and I found her name in your book.”

He’d laugh—I could still remember the sound of his laughter, big and roaring in a way that reminded me of a lion. “Dated her? Why, if you consider doing someone’s taxes dating them, I’d have racked up quite a few women over the years.”

But that didn’t make any sense; why would Grandma Harry know about her then?

“Dated her? Her parents own Sunset Vistas, and she helped us get Grandma Harry in. You know how easily she gets attached to people.” He’d laugh again and shake his head, as if to say that Grandma Harry was a nut job, but still he loved her all the same.

But he wasn’t here. So there was no one to ask, no easy explanations.

I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it in my trash can. What difference did it make now anyway? I
crawled into my bed, climbed under the covers, and put the pillow over my throbbing head.

I fell into a deep sleep, and I had a dream about him. He was riding on my bike down the wash, and I was trying to keep up with him on foot, but he was just out of my reach, just ahead of me. I stopped running and put my head down to catch my breath. “Don’t give up,” he said to me as he kept on pedaling, fast enough to make it to the end of the Earth.

I woke up tangled in sheets and sweating.

The next morning, the first thing I did when I got out of bed was take the paper out of my trash can, smooth it out, and put it back inside the journal. If there was one thing my father loved, it was a good mystery.

My mother hated mysteries. She didn’t have the patience to sift through the clues, to make it to the end, the answer, but like my father I loved to watch things unravel in such a way that they made sense.

I was almost surprised to find Ryan waiting for me in the street on his bike when I walked outside, and then I felt a little silly thinking that one kiss with Courtney was going to make him ditch me. “Hey,” he said when he saw
me, but he didn’t exactly meet my eyes.

“Hey.” I hopped on my bike and we started riding next to each other up the street toward the hill. We didn’t say anything else for a few minutes, until finally I said, “So you and Courtney are like a couple now or something?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know.” I knew he was thinking that Courtney wouldn’t ever want to date him, really date him in an Ashley/Austin sort of way. The knowledge that she did was burning up in my brain, this secret so heavy that it wanted to explode right out of me, but I kept it inside anyway.

Instead, I changed the subject. “I think my father had a secret.”

“Yeah? What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. Just something I found in his journal. And something my grandmother said.”

“Isn’t she, you know, a little loony tunes?” He lifted up a hand and twirled his finger in the air.

“No.” I felt insulted for her. It must be awful to be so old and instantly dismissed just because you couldn’t remember. “She’s just a little forgetful.”

He rolled his eyes.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Say it.”

It took him a minute. We rode up the hill, and he started breathing extra hard, so by the time he did finally say it, his words were heavy. “Mel, he’s been dead a year and a half.”

“So?”

“Well, I don’t know. Just forget it.”

I knew what he was implying, that once you were dead your secrets no longer mattered, that there was only so long you could hold on to the past before it consumed you, until it ate you up and swallowed you whole. But it mattered to me. My father’s secrets were still important, worth knowing, because in a way that was all I had left of him, some sort of odd legacy.

But before I could say anything else, we pulled up in front of the school. Courtney was already standing on the front steps. She waved to me and then ran up to Ryan and gave him a big hug. “Hey, Ry,” she gushed. She turned to me. “Hey, Meliss.” It was annoying, that habit she had of shortening our names in peculiar ways.

Courtney was hanging on him, and she whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. I chained my bike to the rack. “I’ll see you guys inside,” I said, but
neither one of them seemed to hear me. I slipped quietly past them and walked down the hall to my locker alone.

I had my head in there, putting in books I didn’t need and pulling out ones I did, when I heard a tapping on the metal door. I looked up.

Staring right at me, his big brown eyes all sparkly and sweet-looking, was Max Healy. “Hey there, Ashley’s sister.” He smiled. He had this sort of cocky smile that seemed to say he knew just how gorgeous and nice and funny he was, and if you couldn’t recognize it, well then, too bad. He also had really, really nice teeth. Short and square and not at all horselike.

“I have a name,” I said, surprised by the no-nonsense sound of my voice, because I hadn’t thought the words through before they popped out of my mouth.

“A secret name?”

I felt my neck getting hot, and I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before the flush spread across my face and I was completely bright red. “Melissa,” I finally mumbled, and then looked back into the locker as if I were searching for something very urgent, which, unless you were counting piles of old gum wrappers and balled-up math homework, I wasn’t.

When I looked up again, he was gone.

I spent most of the afternoon picking off my red nail polish. I did it meticulously, so that by English last period there were only a few tiny specks of red remaining on my left pinkie. As soon as the bell rang, I jumped up and ran out, even though Mrs. Connor was still talking.

I reached my bike before Ryan and Courtney got there, and I unlocked it, jumped on, and starting riding. I didn’t even look back, didn’t want to know if Ryan was standing there, a little disappointed that I’d ditched him or not caring in the least.

I didn’t feel like going home, so instead I rode to Walgreens, where I spent a half hour looking through different colors of nail polish until finally settling on Glorious Grape, mainly because it was on clearance and I had less than three dollars on me.

When I got home, Ashley’s car was in the driveway for the second day in a row, and I knew there really must be trouble in paradise. She was in her room, talking on the phone, but I walked in and sat down on the bed anyway. She shooed me away with her hand, but I pretended not to notice.

I took the Glorious Grape out of the bag and started on my left hand. I still hadn’t mastered how to do the
right one, and I wondered if it was something you were born knowing how to do, if it could be your genes that determined whether or not you could really make yourself look pretty. Courtney could do both hands in less than two minutes and have them look equally perfect. “Sorry”—she’d grinned when she caught me watching with my mouth open—“I’m a little ambidextrous.” That’s what my father would’ve called a million-dollar word.

Ashley said, “I have to call you back. The imp won’t leave me alone.” She pressed the
END
button. “Melissa, really. Can’t you do that in your room?”

“Will you do my right hand?”

She sighed dramatically, flopped down on the bed, and rolled her eyes. “Hold out your hand.”

I did, and I watched the way she wiped the brush over my thumbnail with a perfectly steady hand. Yes, clearly, her DNA had blessed her with this talent even though it had gotten lost somewhere in mine. “What’s up with you and Austin?”

“Nothing’s up with Austin.” She glared at me.

“You don’t have to be so defensive.”

“Whatever.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said. “Talent scouts. For the minor league.”

That meant nothing to me. “So?”

“So, you idiot, they’re coming to watch practice this week, and I didn’t want to make him nervous.”

“Oh.” This was the first inkling I had that Ashley actually cared about Austin in some real way, and it caught me completely by surprise. “So he might be, like, a real baseball player or something?”

“Hold still so you don’t smudge them.” I looked down and saw she’d finished my nails. They were perfect—bright purple in this odd grape bubblegum kind of way but clearly painted by a professional.

“Thanks,” I said. “Hey, do you know who Sally Bedford is?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“Well, no reason really. It was just someone Dad used to know. Grandma Harry said something about her.”

“Oh crap,” she said. “I totally forgot about her birthday. Did you?”

I shook my head. “I stopped by to see her yesterday.”

“You are such a freakin’ kiss-up, aren’t you?” She sighed. “Go wait for them to dry in your own room, okay?” She gave me a little shove and picked up the phone again. “Go,” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

In my room, I thought some more about Sally Bedford, because it was better than thinking about Courtney and Ryan, together in her perfect pink bedroom, making out. Or thinking about my headache, which was throbbing more today than yesterday.

Eventually, I heard my mother come in, and I thought about going in the kitchen and asking her. But then I thought a) she knew who Sally was and would never tell me because there was something awful that I wouldn’t want to hear, or b) she didn’t know who Sally was and then I’d create this little shadow, this little nagging doubt in her mind that I’d created in my own, or c) she would tell me in no uncertain terms that I was hanging on to the past way too hard and way too long, and it would be much more hurtful to hear it straight from her than implied from Ryan.

So I sat there for a while, just thinking, trying to hatch a plan. And I decided that I would have to meet her face-to-face. That I would have to find her so I could ask her myself how exactly she’d known my father and my grandma Harry.