The Bermudez Triangle (21 page)

Mel and Avery both kind of vanished off the face of the earth after the holiday. Mel called me once, but I didn’t see them at all, which was bizarre. Nothing has felt right since I saw Avery with that guy at the hayroll. I love you, and we are so much closer to being at school. They will be mailing the early decision notices sometime in the next 15 days, which is kind of more than I can even think about….

December 4

TO: Steve

FROM: Nina

I saw you online the other night and sent like 2,000 IMs. I guess you weren’t actually at your computer and your mom or one of your fugitive houseguests or the FBI read them.

You’re probably saving a river right now, but can you write to me so I know you’re alive?

December 6

TO: Steve

FROM: Nina

Seriously. I am about to call a search party. And I can never get through on your phone!

v.v.v.v.v.v. anxious to hear from you. I am kind of worried that the ceiling
has finally fallen in or the black stuff on the floor has swallowed you up.

your neurotic girlfriend

December 7

TO: Nina

FROM: Steve

Sorry … we had computer problems. And the phone thing. I know. I’m really, really sorry. No Tofurky. Nut roast. Tasty but not very good on the intestines.

Things are crazy here now too … let me know about Stanford.

Mel waited. She
was sure that if she was calm and didn’t bother Avery that Avery would see there was no problem. Mel” interpreted waiting as not even speaking of the argument because she didn’t want it to grow larger and more important than it already was. If it was ignored, maybe it would wither and die.

First the Thanksgiving holiday went by. The Podds were visited. Mel found out that Richie had broken his collarbone jumping off someone’s gazebo. Jim bought some kind of fancy new stove and Mel was forced to admire it. Lyla expanded her list of acceptable foods to incorporate mashed butternut squash with margarine. These were the highlights—the rest was unforgivably dull.

She spent the next three nights sitting with her dad, watching cheesy, romantic movies. Weirdly, her father was a huge fan of them. He owned DVDs of
Notting Hill, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle
, and
Four Weddings and a Funeral
. These were his favorites. If his day was particularly long, he’d come home with two boxes of mac and cheese and pop one of those
movies in and they would watch together. Underneath that rugged contractor’s exterior beat the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl.

Mel wished she could tell him as they were three hours into a Humphrey Bogart fest on AMC that she really didn’t want to watch
Casablanca
, because her own heart was about to explode. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat there with him on the couch, the tissues on her lap, praying that Ilsa didn’t get on her plane and leave Rick. But she did. It figured. Mel cried. Her dad cried. They were the Crying Family.

When she returned to school, just as an added precaution, Mel took extra time in the morning to make sure she looked her best. She kept her hair down because she knew Avery loved it that way. She wore skirts and her favorite ribbon choker. She got new lip gloss. She tried some eye liner.

She was aware that people were looking at her more than usual. She was too preoccupied to care. When a cheerleader got out of line in the cafeteria right as Mel stepped behind her, when a table of guys grew eerily silent as she walked past, Mel ignored it. Getting noticed by Avery was the only thing that mattered.

All this effort was for nothing, though, since Avery managed to make herself invisible. Mel tried to end up in the right places so that Avery would be able to see her, but the most she ever got was a glimpse of Avery’s wine-colored leather jacket disappearing into the parking lot.

A week passed, and the waiting got harder. Mel started about a hundred notes and e-mails—she spent every class composing them
in her head and sometimes writing them down. She went to school. She came home. She dumped her stuff on her bedroom floor. Sleeping made the waiting easier, so she took naps. Her dad would wake her up for dinner and ask her if she was feeling sick. She listened to the same songs over and over until they were imprinted in her brain and flowed through her dreams. The only thing Mel’s life was leading up to was a phone call or a note or a visit that never seemed to materialize.

Things started to fall to the wayside. The random handful of college applications sat on her desk, unexamined. Every time she opened one and tried to read it, she felt a weird kind of paralysis—she couldn’t imagine leaving here, leaving everyone, and going off to live in one of these concrete towers or stark brick buildings with a bunch of strangers. She picked at her homework selectively. She spaced out in class, looking at all the girls and imagining what it would be like to kiss each one, wondering which ones would actually want to try.

None of them would be like Avery, though.

Throughout all of this, Nina was insanely busy. Every time Mel saw her, she was running to a class or a meeting or an event. Besides, she’d already asked not to be put in the middle, so Mel said nothing to her. Instead she confided in Parker—before English, at lunch, at work, on the phone, online—nervously asking him over and over if that was the day she should finally talk to Avery. He always said yes, and he was always good about it, although he looked a little frustrated after two solid weeks of being asked the same question.

It all came to a head one night at work, halfway through December, as Mel was sliding two Mortiburgers from under the heat lamps and thinking about the fact that she hadn’t even started studying for her trig midterm, which was only two days away. The cook leaned out and peered at her through the opening, his face spookily illuminated by the heat lamp, causing it to glow red.

“So,” he said, “where’s your girlfriend?”

And that was that. The bottom dropped out for Mel. She couldn’t be in the pantry anymore—or in the restaurant—or possibly
anywhere
. Mel abandoned the burgers and ran to the nasty employee bathroom, back in the storeroom, and barricaded herself inside.

The void had finally swallowed her up: she was alone and confused and sick of waiting and repulsed by everything.

She wasn’t coming out.

After ten minutes or so, one of the assistant managers knocked on the door. Panicked, Mel faked some coughing and retching noises, which probably didn’t fool anyone, but she still managed to get off for the rest of the night. Parker wasn’t working, but he was supposed to come by at eleven to pick her up. But it wasn’t Parker she needed.

She called Nina.

Nina had been
sitting at her desk, looking through the twelve-page study outline for the AP history midterm, which was in two days. It had just occurred to her that she was in serious trouble since she’d had no time at all to even think about studying for it. She’d been busy with the council, as well as four other midterms and the fifteen-page paper that she’d just handed to Frost that afternoon. She almost told Mel she couldn’t pick her up, but when she heard the panic in Mel’s voice, she accepted her fate and headed for her car.

She was doomed anyway. Might as well go down helping a friend.

Mel was waiting for her on a bench outside of Mortimer’s, huddled in her blue coat. She got up when she saw Nina pull into the lot and quietly let herself in.

“What’s going on?” Nina said. “Are you sick?”

With that, Mel dissolved completely into tears. Nina quickly pulled into a parking space and wrapped Mel in a hug.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

“Shewu call mee,”
Mel gasped.

“What, honey?”

“Shheeeeewuughghhcalllghmeee.”

It took ten minutes of sobbing and hiccuping before Mel was able to relate the story clearly enough for Nina to understand.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nina said when Mel was through. She reached into the well between the seats and pulled out a tiny pack of Kleenex. Mel worked her way through half the pack.

“Can I ask you something?” Nina said tentatively. sure.

“How did you know?” Nina asked. “About being gay. What was it?”

Mel rubbed the tip of her nose and looked over in surprise. Nina realized that this was the first time she’d ever really
asked
. Some friend she’d been.

“I didn’t really get it at first,” Mel said. “I thought I just really liked certain people. And then I realized that I
really
liked certain people. And then I noticed they were all girls.”

“You don’t like guys at all?”

“I like them,” Mel said. “I think they’re nice. But I never
felt
anything. Not like what other girls seemed to feel.”

“How long have you known?” Nina asked.

“A long time,” she replied softly. “Years, probably.”

Mel sniffed for a minute and made a little pyramid of the tissues.

“I don’t want you to feel like I thought Avery was better than you or something,” she continued. “I think you’re beautiful and great. No offense. I swear.”

“I never …”

“It’s okay,” Mel said. “But just so you know. You’re wonderful—but it’s not like that. In my mind, you’re Nina.”

“But Avery is Avery,” Nina said. “How is it different?”

“You know how you can sometimes tell when a person might like you?” Mel explained. “There’s just something about the way they look at you or the way they keep trying to talk to you? Probably like you and Steve.”

“Yeah,” Nina said, stiffening at the sound of his name. “It was like that.”

“I just want to give her another day or two,” Mel said, sniffing. “I think it’s just hard for her to get used to the idea of people knowing.”

The words wanted to jump free of Nina’s mouth—
I saw Avery with Gaz
.

“Mel …” she said.

She clamped down her back teeth again. Mel slumped against Nina’s side, and Nina stroked her hair.

As they sat there, Nina realized that this was the first time in a long while that she hadn’t been on the sidelines watching. She knew something that Mel didn’t. She was needed. She was involved. And she could, potentially, use what she knew to get Avery to talk to her. Avery owed her, after all.

She felt a sudden surge of enthusiasm. She sat Mel upright.

“I’ll talk to her,” Nina said.

“I don’t think she wants to talk.”

“She needs to talk, Mel. It might be easier for her to talk to me because I’m kind of uninvolved. I know how to
facilitate
. I spent all summer learning about facilitation.”

“Really?” Mel asked.

“This is us. This is the three of us. We can fix this.”

This was the first time in months that the “we” actually included Nina. Mel seemed to realize this too because her eyes lit up.

“We can?”

“Totally.”

Over Mel’s shoulder Nina saw a familiar red car come into the lot. It was The Roach.

“Parker’s here,” she said.

Mel opened up the window and waved to him, and he pulled up alongside and got out of his car. His hair was all over the place, and he was wearing a pair of rumpled jeans and a long wool coat. Also he had on glasses, which Nina had never seen him in before. She guessed that he’d gotten out of bed to come and get Mel. Nina unlocked the doors and he climbed into the back.

“Hey,” he said curiously, looking between the two of them. “Party in the parking lot?”

“I had a moment,” Mel said quietly. “I kind of ran away from work.”

“Shit. You okay?”

“Now I am.” Mel looked over at Nina shyly. “Park knows all about it.
All
about it.”

Parker nodded and stifled a yawn.

“Things okay now?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Mel said while wiping away a rogue tear and mustering a smile for Nina. “They’re going to be fine.”

Nina woke up
the next morning feeling like the world had realigned itself a little. She was fueled by a new sense of purpose. A righteous cause.

She decided to skip her run and took the extra time to take a long, boiling shower that flushed her skin. She got a little overzealous with her cucumber-cilantro body wash and had a distinctly saladlike smell when she emerged.

Today she was going to work it. She pulled out her knee-high, caramel-colored boots with the platform heels. An excellent start. There was something about the way those heels clicked on the floor and the three inches of lift that changed the way she saw the world. Deep brown skirt, a little indulgence she’d gotten for herself a few weeks before. (All hail Mom’s AmEx.) Formfitting, cream-colored cashmere sweater (from Nan). This was her battle gear. Tight and tall. That was the only way to play it.

She tracked Avery down at her locker first thing. Down in the basement, things were fairly desolate. It was the closest thing you could get to privacy at AHH.

“I need to talk to you,” Nina said.

“About what?” Avery was shoving her books into her bag in a “What’s going on with you and Mel?”

“This is your business … how?”

“Because we’re friends.”

“Uh-huh.” Avery seemed unimpressed. This wasn’t actually the way Nina had envisioned this starting off.

“We’re not friends?”

“You can’t fix this one, Neen,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “It has nothing to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me.”

“Because?”

“You know why.”

Avery pulled hard on the zipper of her backpack, catching paper in the teeth.

“Listen,” Nina said, “after school we’ll all go to my place and—”

“This isn’t a student council project,” Avery said coldly, ripping the tiny corner of paper from the zipper track. “You can’t just call a meeting whenever
you
feel like it.”

“This affected me too, you know,” Nina said, her tone growing more tense.

“You always do that,” Avery snapped. “You always have to stick yourself into things.”