What Every Girl (except me) Knows (14 page)

I made sure to write down what I could remember in my dream journal in the morning, but I still had an uneasy feeling. I knew it had something to do with all that talking I did with Taylor after swimming. Talking can stir things up in your mind like that. Another mystery of the mind.

But it was no mystery that I had been really mean to Taylor.

*

As soon as I got to school, I had to run and find Taylor and apologize. She was by the main office.

“I’m sorry,” I said right off the bat.

I’m not used to apologizing; admitting I was wrong when I really don’t want to admit that. And besides, you never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get. But this time I really meant it more than I cared how Taylor would feel about me or how I felt about myself

“I shouldn’t have said that stuff about your mom and your stepfather,” I said.

“I’m sorry, too, for asking about your mother,” Taylor said. “You obviously don’t want to talk about it and I pushed you.”

True.

“You were right, though,” Taylor went on.

“About what?”

We started down the hall for our first class.

“My mom was seeing Richard before she and my dad got divorced. I knew it then. I knew the whole time.”

I looked around at everyone passing us in the halls, all the other kids heading to their classes. All with their own embarrassing stories, probably. Still, out of some kind of instinct, I felt ashamed for her. I moved closer to Taylor so we could talk more softly as we walked.

“I never told my dad.” Taylor watched her feet as she talked and walked. “Maybe if I had…”

“You can’t think even for one minute that it’s your fault your parents got divorced,” I said to Taylor.

Taylor stopped at the door to our homeroom. She didn’t need to say anything this time. I knew she didn’t really think she was to blame, but maybe if she had said something to her dad, maybe it would have been different.

It was the same with me. I sort of knew it wasn’t really my fault that my mother had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, but then again I sort of knew it was.

Chapter 29

My dad was in his studio when I got home from school. I opened the back door of the garage to the familiar smells of oil paint and turpentine. I would ask him here. About my mother. I would ask him why he didn’t do anything that morning my mother died. Why we went alone in the elevator.

It is important to confront my dad in his own territory. I remembered once Ian wanting something or another for his guitar or his amp and trying to ask Dad for it while we were eating at a restaurant.

I could have told Ian right then and there it wasn’t going to work. Outside of his natural surroundings my dad can’t think straight, so he gets cranky. “No” is about all he can say when he can’t think straight.

I stepped inside the studio. My dad wasn’t painting. His paint table was wiped clean. White glass, not a drop of color. The easel stood empty, not even a sketch pad for a charcoal study. All the tubes of oils were carefully put away, brushes sorted by function and drying; scrapers, pencils, and charcoals in an old coffee can. There was only a lingering smell from when he had been painting regularly. He still spent a lot of time out there, but he wasn’t whistling very well these days.

And it was dark. Only the light over his desk was on. My dad was bent over and writing. He stopped when I came in. “Hi, sweetie,” he said. “How was school?”

“Fine.”

When I didn’t directly cross and go through the kitchen door, my dad closed his notebook. He put down his pencil. I sat down on the hooked rug that covered most of the cold, concrete floor.

For a long while I didn’t say anything. I listened to the hum of the house, the electric buzzing noises that are always running in the background. It all seemed the same as it had always been, just like Ian said. The three of us. Why would I want to go and ruin that?

“Dad?” I began.

“Hmm?” My dad, too, was staring quietly into space, perhaps listening to the same comforting sounds of a house standing still.

And then Taylor’s voice:

Where was your father?

Didn’t he know something was wrong?

I looked at my dad sitting in the same chair where he always sat. He cleared his throat. Everything the same as I always remembered it. Safe. Why would I want to go and ruin something like that?

“Nothing,” I said.

I uncrossed my legs and stood up. I opened the door to where natural light filled the kitchen and walked inside the house. Ian was home, sprawled on the couch. His guitar was right beside him but he wasn’t playing. The TV was on, an empty package of Fig Newtons was on the coffee table.

“You pig,” I said. I was joking. I don’t even like Fig Newtons.

“There were only a few left,” Ian defended himself. He kept his focus on the TV.

“Anyway,
you’re
the pig,” he said. “There was a whole box two days ago, and I’ve only had seven. Four yesterday and three today.”

Who counts their cookies?
I thought. Ian does. He counts everything. He measures all time. He demands all fairness. He hoards up TV minutes from days before and he’s mean.

“What’s your problem, anyway?” I shouted. “Why do you pick on me so much? What did I ever do to you?”

I suppose Ian could have come up with several incidents at that moment. He could have mentioned the time I warped his favorite CD by leaving it next to the heater, after listening to it without his permission. He could have recalled the time I told everyone at his eleven-year-old birthday party that Ian threw up in the car once when he was little, even though I hadn’t even been there.

But he could be so mean, so mean to me.

I wanted to hit my brother over the head with the Fig Newton box. I wanted to scream out loud forever or till I felt like stopping. I wanted to know everything he was holding inside and keeping from me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ian said. He finally had to look at me.

“You!” I said. “You’re what’s wrong with me! You’re my big brother. You’re supposed to take care of me. Look out for me.” The sound of my own voice and my own words and my own anger scared me, but I continued. “You never do. You never did!”

Ian withdrew deeper into the cushions of the couch. He looked smaller, and all of a sudden I felt sad. I knew I was asking for something from someone who was as alone as I was. I felt like I had thrown an acorn right at the back of Ian’s head and for the first time it hit him.

Still, I couldn’t ask Dad. I had tried that.

“Why haven’t you ever looked out for me?” I said. “Not since that day. Not since that day you took me in the elevator with you. Why did you even take me with you in the first place?”

It was hard to see Ian look so uncomfortable. For as much as I had fantasized about cutting my brother down to size, it was a size that frightened me.

“How could Dad have let you take me like that? And where were we going?” I asked. I had to know.

The TV was still on—talking and canned laughter coming out from the set, cars screeching their tires, and then a commercial for hair gel.

“Dad wasn’t there,” Ian told me as he turned back to the TV screen. “We were the only ones in the apartment. I was going out to look for him, I guess. I don’t know. We were alone.”

*

There are stories you always hear, and stories you know you are making up; not quite lies, really. There are things you’ve always thought were true, maybe just because you’ve never thought about them in any other way. Things that don’t make sense but you’ve never questioned them, and when you finally do, you can’t understand how you could have accepted them for so long.

We were alone?

We wound up in Ian’s room with the door shut. I don’t think I had seen the inside of his room since I was five. At first I just kept looking at all his stuff. The cool CD rack that bent around like a wave, the posters, on every inch of every wall, of every musician Ian thought ever counted for anything. He had an incense burner, an ash tray (I didn’t ask him what for), a major compact disc—and—dual tape player. He had ceramic bowls filled with different things: guitar picks in one, pennies in another, Snapple bottle tops in another.

“After we tried and we couldn’t wake her up, we got in the elevator and went down to the lobby. We told the doorman our mother wouldn’t wake up, but he didn’t believe us. Didn’t believe me,” my brother told me.

“We were still in our pajamas, but we walked out into the street. Then we just went back in and waited. I don’t remember what happened after that.”

With his words, Ian painted a lonely picture of two little children in their sleeping clothes wandering around the halls of an apartment building in New York City.

“I didn’t even think to call nine-one-one. The doorman told us to go back upstairs and let our mother sleep. Well, he was a grown-up, right?”

Is he asking me?
I turned to look at Ian.

I wanted to reach over and touch Ian, the way Taylor could do for me, but I couldn’t move. The door was shut, and I suddenly felt trapped. At the same time, I never wanted to leave this room, this moment. I wanted to go on talking, telling stories, sharing stories.

Chapter 30

Things were changing. It was spring. It was so bright in the mornings that I was usually up and ready for school as early as Ian was. He sometimes let me hold the controller while he watched TV before his bus came.

Even the table arrangements in the middle-school cafeteria were breaking up. Things were changing. Amber Whitman no longer sat at the head of The Ones’ table. Kelly, no longer in purple (I heard that her mother finally put her foot down), and Melanie sat together, but by themselves. They were best friends. And lately Amber was sitting with us.
Us
being, of course, me and Taylor and sometimes Peter. The boys’ table was breaking up and sometimes one or two of them ventured over to sit with some of the girls. Sophie had a real boyfriend and they sat together.

Rhonda Littleman usually sat alone. Or with Alex, and they still thought they were better than everyone else. Which some things considered, they were.

It was spring.

But today the sky was dark. Rain threatened. I got my hot lunch and scanned the cafeteria for a place to sit. Taylor had not come down yet. She had a special project she was working on in Spanish. I saw Lynette sitting all by herself, and I sat down right next to her.

“Hi, Lynette,” I said.

She looked up. If she was surprised that I was sitting here she didn’t show it.

“Hello,” Lynette answered. I saw she had bought hot lunch, too.

“You know, Lynette. There’s something I’ve really wanted to ask you,” I started. We both had gotten the Chunky Turkey gravy with mashed potatoes.

“What, Gabby? What did you want to ask me?” I tried to ignore her pulling the pieces of turkey out and laying them on her tray in a line.

“How did you know that day, that day when Taylor first came.… How did you know she was going to cry?” I began.

“Well, I didn’t know she was going to cry
again
.” Lynette seemed to remember just what I was referring to.

“What do you mean ‘again’?”

“I was in the office when her mother brought her in. She was crying,” Lynette told me.

“But you said, ‘She’s coming and she’ll cry, I said firmly. “I heard you. You said that.”

Lynette shook her head. “I cry, too. Sometimes right in front of strangers.”

“No, Lynette. Remember? You said, ‘She’s coming and she’ll cry.’ Like she was
going
to cry, like you knew it before it happened,” I said.

Lynette shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

Taylor had come in and she walked over with her bag lunch. She sat down beside Lynette. She didn’t say anything. She just listened.

“Well, how did you know about the butter and milk and heavy cream and everything?” I asked Lynette.

“I watch the cooking channel with my grandmother.” Lynette’s face brightened. She looked at Taylor and then back to me. “Do you ever watch that channel?”

“I’ve seen it once,” Taylor said.

Could I have been so wrong? Thinking she had visions or something? How stupid was I?

Suddenly, Lynette started waving her arms back and forth. I turned to see what she was looking at. Her friend, Lea Fry-O’Malley, was standing with her lunch tray and was obviously looking around for Lynette.

“Here, here,” Lynette called out.

Before I knew it, I was sitting with Taylor and Lynette and Lea and Peter, who had wandered over. And then Amber.

The fluorescent lights hummed steadily. Talk and laughter rose and fell from the tables around us. Then a loud clap of thunder shook the walls and at that exact moment a burst of white light flashed outside the windows. A storm was directly on top of us. Rain began to bullet the roof of the school, and then all the lights went out.

A boom of thunder was followed by silence, and then laughter broke into the nervous quiet as everyone realized it had only been lightning that hit the building and knocked out the electricity.