When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (3 page)

Please. Please. Please, I thought, as I bit the bullet and looked up. It was the latter, of course. I could have juggled lunch trays while balancing on a stack of chairs and no one would have looked twice at me. Tom was magnetic, and girls were being pulled in left, right and center, me included.

Melissa was on his arm in an instant. They looked like a couple as she paraded him around the cafeteria, the Homecoming King and Queen. Tom looked bored as she introduced him to the Mutts. I smiled, even though I knew I should care less, given Melissa was basically royalty and I was one of a million dust motes.

 

“Was it as good for you as it was for him?” Sylv asked as we walked through the corridors to class.

“What?”

“The eye-sex.”

“The what?” I asked in a high-pitched voice.

“The eye-sex,” Sylv repeated. “You know, when your eyes meet across a crowded room.” She surveyed our blank looks and sighed, as if we were stupid. “Like this.” She held Jo by the shoulders and gazed into her eyes like they were in a soap opera.

“Get a room,” I complained.

“Should I be pressing charges?” Jo asked.

“Come on, Lillie. I saw him looking at you. Spill.”

“He looked at me for like a second,” I protested.

“Premature ejaculation?” Sylv joked.

“Stop it!” I looked over my shoulder, worried that Tom was within earshot.

I spotted Melissa and her entourage a few yards back,
sans
Tom. They were having their own powwow about our new addition. I heard his name mentioned three times in the one breath, as Melissa fanned herself with a manicured hand.

Jo joined in on the innuendo. “Was he that bad?”

“No!”

“Which means he was good?” Sylv asked.

I gave up.

 

I sat behind Melissa in Economics, staring at her shiny black hair. Of course, Tom would go with her in a heartbeat. They were like two thoroughbreds in a stable of donkeys. She was known for her string of boyfriends, but unlike Sylv she had standards. One of those standards was that they had to be out of high school – the oldest had been a senior at Green Grove State College – but I could see her making an exception for Tom.

He was no Jack O'Lantern.

 

My heart played Double Dutch when I saw Tom at my locker that afternoon. For a moment, I thought he was waiting for me, but then he spun the dial of the locker next to mine and my heart stopped jumping rope.

Get a grip, I told myself, as I spun the dial on my own locker. This connection between me and Tom was one-sided. I took a deep breath and went about my business, but two seconds later my business became our business when a box of tampons fell out of my locker and bounced on the linoleum.

Tom bent down to pick them up, as if on autopilot. My cheeks burned and I closed my eyes, praying that when I opened them I would see the dream-catcher Deb had made from an old coat hanger and a bunch of chicken feathers that hung above my bed, but then I heard Tom clear his throat and I knew that this was no nightmare. Oh well. At least I was safe from the man in the balaclava, if not from Tom.

I opened my eyes and saw him holding out the box of tampons, offering them as casually as you would a packet of mints. He stood about half a head taller than me, tall enough to look down on me, but not tall enough for me to crick my neck.

“Earplugs,” I joked. “For Algebra.” I laughed and took them from him, but when our fingers brushed, the hairs on my arms rose, as if charged with electricity. I laughed again. Magnetic? Electric? Tom was starting to sound like one of the X-Men.

He looked at me and his irises slid through a spectrum of blues like a kaleidoscope as they caught the fluorescent lights. It was mesmerizing, but I lowered my eyes to his chin. There I saw the scar, a thin white line, a flaw on an otherwise flawless face. I knew that scar. I knew Tom. Again, I asked myself how.

A memory knocked on the door of my mind, begging to be let in. It was like having the name of a song on the tip of my tongue. I flicked through my memories, like flicking through a photo album, but there were no snapshots of Tom.

Tom turned back to his own locker with no hint of a smile at my joke. In fact, his eyebrows were furrowed, as if he was bothered by my comment, or maybe by me.

 

It was Monday, which meant the girls and I walked to the Duck-In Diner for an after school snack.

“How about I color your hair tonight?” Sylv suggested, as the waitress delivered our order. The Duck-In Diner had a menu to rival IHOP, with its waffles and buttermilk pancakes stacked to the ceiling. The uniform, however, rivaled Disneyland, with waiters and waitresses walking around wearing duck bill visors and white aprons with plastic feathers.

“This diner quacks me up,” Jo said whenever we walked in.

I looked up from checking my waffle for hairs – the chef had the arms of a gorilla ­– and realized Sylv was talking to me. “You know what? I think I'll pass on getting suspended from school, but thanks.”

Sylv had been suspended at least five times due to her hair color. She liked to change it a couple of times a quarter. You know, mix it up. Her current orange hair looked natural when compared to the purple and green streaks she had put in last winter.

My hair was brown. Thankfully not a mousey brown, but more of a chestnut color. I had let Sylv put highlights in it once. I know, what was I thinking? It ended up looking like caramel. Jo had smacked her lips and joked about having a sweet tooth for at least three weeks until it faded.

Of course, Deb would have done backflips if Sylv had dyed my hair all the colors of the rainbow. When I was twelve, she told me I was too conservative, saying it like it was a dirty word. She had made me sleep with a bundle of witch hazel under my pillow for six months to cultivate my creativity.

I wondered whether there was a delayed reaction. Maybe the witch hazel was the reason for my dreams. It could also have been the reason for my newfound messy streak. Between me and my mother the house had not been vacuumed since spring.

Sylv slumped in her seat. “You girls never support anything I do.”

“What do you call the photo shoot yesterday?” I asked.

“Have you developed the film?”

“Of course not.”

“I rest my case.” I knew her case was not rested though when she sat up straight, ready for a rant. “I was looking forward to inviting you to Paris with me for Fashion Week, but you would probably miss the flight, knowing how you are with deadlines.”

“There was no deadline,” I protested.

“Actually, the deadline was Thanksgiving,” Jo said, as she poured more blueberry syrup over her pancake stack. “Remember? You said you had to be discovered before the SATs.”

“Which gives me three months,” I said. “Please let me come to Paris with you.”

We knew deep down that Sylv was as likely to go to Paris for Fashion Week as I was to be with Tom, but a girl had to dream when she lived in Green Grove.

Dream, I thought as I stabbed my fork into my waffle, once, twice, three times. Dream. Dream. Dream. The word chilled me to the bone. These dreams, or nightmares, were taking their toll. Last week, I woke up with my own hands around my throat. Yeah, I know. A psychiatrist would have a field day. Even Jo had commented that my dark circles were looking black, instead of their standard shade of gray. I wanted to tell her about my dreams, but she was no dreamologist, or psychiatrist come to that. I knew her answer would be to pop an Ambien.

“We should all go to Paris,” I said brightly, shaking off my dreams. “We could sit and gasbag in a French Duck-In Diner. Do they have Duck-In Diners in France?” I paused, wondering if the franchise had made it out of Green Grove, let alone Nebraska or the country, before my mind drifted to the photos I could take in Europe. I wondered if Africa was nearby and then grimaced at these holes in my knowledge. To think, geography had been my favorite subject last year.

“Count me out,” Jo said. “My dad. You know.”

I did know. Jo had been looking after her dad for two and a half years. He had prostate cancer and had been through chemotherapy, radiation and a bunch of operations. He lived with a colostomy bag attached to his bowel, which he liked to tell us meant he could go to the bathroom in his La-Z-Boy, like it was a joke. It was no laughing matter, of course, especially when you considered what had happened to Mrs Green.

Deb sent bowls of tofu stir-fry to their house a few times a week.

“Are you trying to kill me with this vegetarian crap?” Mr Green always asked, but the containers came back empty every time.

“You know your dad wants you to have a life,” I told Jo.

Jo gave a barking laugh. “In Green Grove?”

I shrugged. “Or Lincoln or New York–”

“Or Paris,” Sylv said, flicking a spoonful of grits at Jo, who retaliated with a spoonful of syrup.

I put up my hands and stood up from the booth, deciding I would rather not wear my waffles, no matter what Sylv said about the latest fashion in Milan.

 

When we got to the end of the block, Sylv set off for West Green Grove, while Jo and I set off for North.

“Is everything OK?” I asked when it was just the two of us. “I mean, with your dad?”

Jo shrugged. “Yeah. Fine. I guess.” Her chin trembled and I suddenly felt sick to the stomach.

Jo was not the kind of girl to burst into tears at the drop of a hat. In fifth grade she had split her shorts from the crotch to the waistband on the jungle gym. Melissa and the Mutts had been there to point and laugh and catcall. If it had been me, I would have run home in a flood of tears, but Jo had continued to swing upside-down from the monkey bars until I handed her my sweater to tie around her waist. If Sylv had been there I think she would have used my sweater to strangle Melissa instead.

“He seems… sicker.” Her eyebrows furrowed under her mousey bangs. “He keeps forgetting stuff, like how to change his colostomy bag and that I have my license now.”

“What about his doctor? What does he say?”

“She,” Jo corrected and then shrugged. “He has a check-up next week.”

I nodded and we continued to walk, in silence except for the scuffing of our shoes on the sidewalk.

When we got to my house I ran inside for a bowl of leftovers for Jo and her dad.

When Deb came out to see her “second daughter”, Jo let her hold her for a moment, before taking a couple of steps backwards, out of our front yard and onto the sidewalk.

“You have a cracked aura, sweetheart,” Deb said, following her through the gate. “Do you want me to fix it?”

Jo shook her head. She believed in that mumbo-jumbo as much as I did.

“Your dad will be OK,” I said, as she turned to go. “Yeah?”

She smiled sadly and nodded. “Yeah.”

OK, OK, OK, I thought as I watched her walk down the street, as if the rule of repetition could cure cancer.

 

Because Deb had it in her mind that she wanted to fix an aura, I gave in and let her practice on me. At least it saved me from the pan pipe for a few minutes. She was into her second week of music lessons, courtesy of a couch surfer called Fawn. It sounded like the wind through our broken back window.

I sat on a footstool that Deb liked to tell visitors had been carved by a witch doctor in Peru, but I knew her friend Jordie had bought it at Venice Beach.

“Focus on your energy vortex,” she told me, placing her hands on my shoulders and closing her eyes.

“My what?” I asked.

“I can see a red light,” she murmured.

I closed my eyes and was surprised to see a red light as well, until I realized it was the lamplight through my eyelids.

Deb clucked her tongue. “Your aura has died.”

A sudden lump formed in my throat, as I thought of how many times I had died in my dreams and the chill filled my stomach for a moment, before I made myself tune back into her voice. She was telling me to visualize my aura spinning around, and moving up and down. It was starting to sound like an aerobics class.

I burst out laughing.

“You're ruining the vibe,” Deb complained.

Just then, Fawn came in to announce the rye bread they were baking had risen. “What do I do now?”

“Take it out of the oven,” I said, rolling my eyes and wondering how guys like Fawn made it out of Elementary.

“How about we continue this later?” Deb asked.

“Sure.” I knew not to hold my breath for part two. I guessed that Reiki would be as short-lived as palm reading and basket weaving.

 

When I went to bed, I thought about setting my alarm ten minutes earlier to give myself time to get glammed up. Then I remembered my joke about the box of tampons and flopped back onto my pillow, thinking about Tom and how his eyebrows had furrowed at my comment.

Dumb, I thought, slapping my forehead with my palm.

I closed my eyes and recalled his profile – that chiseled brow, nose, cheeks and chin, and, of course, the scar.

Tom was on my mind as I drifted off and I wondered in that moment between wake and sleep if I could make myself dream about him, instead of about the man in the balaclava. But it turned out the man in the balaclava was ready and waiting.

In this dream, I was standing stock-still, my breath ragged from running. I was in a courtyard paved with the same uneven flagstones from my other dreams. A fountain was to my left, the man in the balaclava in front. He was moving towards me and I stumbled backwards, hemmed in by manicured hedges. My hands went to my stomach instinctively and I looked down, my eyes growing wide with wonderment. It was swollen, extended, as if I were pregnant.

“Tom!” I screamed. “Tom!”

 

4

 

It was two weeks before I processed the photos of Sylv. “I know, I know, tomorrow!” became my catchphrase.

You have to understand that Sylv wanted to be a model like Cinderella wanted to go to the ball. When we were in Elementary, Sylv and Melissa used to rope us into doing runway shows in my backyard. I had taken the photos and Jo had assembled the audience; family and friends, and whatever couch surfers had been staying with us at the time.