A Step Toward Falling (13 page)

Even when we walk out of class, he doesn't mention it. Instead we stand in the waiting room for a minute because the class that meets after ours—ballroom dancing—is gathering in front of the main door, creating a blockade. It's a surprisingly big group, twice the size of our class, with about forty participants, an equal mix of men and women.
They're required to wear jackets and skirts, though some of them show up in work uniforms they change out of in the bathroom. Lucas and I stand in the lobby and watch the spectacle of them all greeting one another. There are lots of hugs in this crowd. A few of the women are wearing corsages that get pressed and flattened. Because we are standing in the hallway near the bathroom, a man wearing a McDonald's uniform, carrying a brown grocery bag, rushes up and points to our jeans. “Have you two changed yet? Class is about to start.”

Lucas holds up a hand. “We're not in this class. The bathroom's all yours.”

“Great! Thanks.” He hugs his bag and carries it into the bathroom.

As the class starts, we peek into the open door of the gym, where the dancers are already partnering up. “Heads up!” the teacher commands. “Arms raised!”

It isn't a graceful sight. Their raised arms do more colliding than settling onto each other's shoulders. Even the teacher closes her eyes. When she opens them, though, it's happened: they're all in dance position, poised to begin. “Very good,” she says softly.

We wait just long enough to see the man we spoke with earlier emerge from the bathroom, still wearing his McDonald's pants, but now he has on a wrinkled button-down shirt and a large, clip-on bow tie.

Lucas flashes him a thumbs-up with a smile. “You look awesome, man.”

“Thanks.” The man nods seriously and adjusts his tie.
“You don't, but that's okay. You're not in the class.”

We wait until he's gone to laugh at what he's said. “You don't look awesome either,” Lucas says because I'm laughing a little too hard. As I hold the door open for him, he keeps going. “Seriously, where's your tiara? Every week, you show up without it.”

In the car, Lucas still doesn't mention my note on his sheet. Apparently we both can't stop thinking about this group we just watched, because after a little silence, he asks: “Do you ever think about what these people do the rest of the time, when they're not at the center?”

I do, actually. I wonder about that a lot. From what I can tell, most of them still live with their parents, though not all: a few talk about group homes, and rules about what chores they must do. No one drives a car, which means they must not see one another much outside of class.

Lucas keeps going. “I know some of them work, but what do they do the rest of the time? Watch TV with their parents?”

“I'm not sure,” I say. “Probably.”

“It's just kind of
sad
,
isn't it?”

Maybe I'm annoyed because he still hasn't mentioned the note I wrote on his sheet, or maybe I'm irritated because he says this with more emotion than I usually hear from him. “Why is that
sad
? Why is staying home with parents on a weekend night so tragic?”

“It's not tragic, it's just—I don't know—don't
you
think it's sad?”

“Not going to parties or being part of the popular crowd isn't sad, Lucas. People can have very nice, happy
lives even if they stay home.” I realize, as the girl who doesn't go out a lot on weekends, I sound overly defensive saying this, but I want to make the point: happiness looks different to different people.

“That's not what I'm saying.”

“What
are
you saying?”

He stares at me like I'm much weirder than he thought. “I'm not sure. Forget it.”

I stew over this exchange long after I've dropped Lucas off. What would he think of my life, I wonder, if he knew that most of my social life revolves around going to movies with Richard? I suspect he'd pity me in the same way he pities all our classmates. It's an awful feeling. I don't want his pity. My life is fine.

Even as I think this, though, I wonder if I like doing this class because I feel connected to these people by some intangible loneliness that we all share. Back at home, I pull out my affirmation page to study the handwriting and try to figure out who thinks I'm the funniest person they'll ever meet. Is it Harrison, my first friend, who laughs at my improvs even when I'm not trying to be funny? Or Simon, with whom I now have a few ongoing jokes? It's impossible to tell. All the handwriting is messy and hard to read. Then I notice a little note at the bottom, something I'm certain wasn't there earlier tonight. It's written in red ink—the same color pen Lucas was using to help people star their favorite qualities. It says:

Emily thinks a lot about doing the right thing. It makes me think about it, too.

I
N SCHOOL, WE HAVE
to fill out Transition Plans every year where we say what we want our future to look like. Some people write different things every year, like Douglas says he wants to be a farmer one year and professional soccer player the next. This just shows that he is not realistic. He's scared of tractors and lawnmowers but he thinks he can be a farmer.

I always write the same thing: I want to be an actress and get married someday. I try to read magazine articles about being married because in my family no one is married. Any time I see an article with the word marriage in it, I save it so I can learn more things about what to expect. Sometimes that means I have to read about sex which I don't like doing at all. I don't mind thinking about kissing and holding hands, but I don't like thinking about sex. In class whenever Douglas calls a girl a “hot sexy mama” I have to yoga breathe and ask him to please not say things like that.

Once Anthony said, “You're hot and sexy, too, Beminda,” but that just made it worse.

That was one thing I said during our big, terrible fight.
You shouldn't copy Douglas because everyone hates Douglas
. It was an awful thing to say. Plus it's not true. I just hate when Douglas calls girls hot and sexy, but I don't really hate him.

I don't like thinking about that fight with Anthony so I don't usually.

I'll just say this: if we hadn't had that fight a few days before the football game, I never would have begged my neighbor Annemarie to give me a ride to the game. I never would have gone to the game at all which makes everything that happened at the game kind of their fault.

I don't think they know this.

That's why I told Nan that I can't look at Anthony or Douglas or sit in the same room with them anymore.

The fight started because Anthony kept saying we should get married someday.

“That's stupid,” I said, but we aren't allowed to use that word in class about someone else. If we do, we lose a star toward free choice so I lost a star. That made me mad. I'm always losing stars when Anthony sits next to me. Teachers don't see the way he lets his pencils touch mine and then his leg. Not a lot of touching, just a little, like his leg hairs if he's wearing shorts.

It makes me mad because sometimes I like Anthony. I think he's funny and nice and then I try to imagine waltz dancing with him and I can't. He is not at all a graceful person or a good dancer. Once, at a Best Buddies party, he lay down on the floor and did a dance called the bug that
I wish I'd never seen. Just thinking about that makes me mad at Anthony. He looked like he was trying to eat the floor and throw up at the same time.

Another thing about Anthony I don't like is that he'll do things regular kids tell him to do because he thinks everyone will be his friend afterward. It's called being gullible which is a word we learned after he pulled the fire alarm because a bunch of boys told him to. They said they'd buy him pizza in the cafeteria afterward, but they never did because it was a fire alarm and everyone had to leave the building. It turns out they were just trying to get out of a math test. He believed them about the pizza which makes him gullible.

After we learned that word, everyone started calling everyone else gullible no matter what they did. If Douglas talked too loud in the hall, Anthony told him to stop being gullible which goes to show that Anthony doesn't understand the real meaning of a lot of words he uses.

That's one reason I called him stupid for talking about “getting married someday.” Anthony probably thinks “get married” means have a big party with bowls of M&Ms (his favorite food) where you kiss in the middle of it. He doesn't understand that it means you have to waltz dance together at the party and afterward you live together.

Anthony says he wants to get married but he also says he wants to live with his mother for the rest of his life. I told him you can't do that unless you marry your mom and he said, “Fine, then I'll marry my mom.”

The day we had our fight, he asked me to marry him
again and I said, “Don't be stupid, what about your mom?”

He said he asked about it and he's not allowed to marry his mom.

“That's why you want to marry me?” I said.

He smiled like I was joking which I was
not
. “Yes,” he said. “Plus I don't want to marry anyone else. I want a girlfriend named Beminda.”

Do you see why he upsets me? “I can't be your girlfriend and your wife!” I screamed. “Just forget it, Anthony.”

That's when he got very mad at me. He said I didn't listen to him and then he called me gullible. He said that I should stop talking about movies like
Pride and Prejudice
and I should look around and live in the real world like this class which was full of nice people who I ignore.

“That's not true. I don't ignore anybody,” I said. Then he asked me if I knew everyone's names and he was right, I didn't.

“You think you're better than everyone,” he said. “But you're not.”

I wanted to tell him I didn't think I was better than
everyone
in our class but yeah, I was better than some of them. Didn't he think that, too? There are people in our class who can hardly do anything including feed themselves or go to the bathroom alone.

“I'm not better than anyone else,” Anthony said.

“Yes, you
are
,” I said. “You can walk and talk and eat!”

That's when I looked up and saw Eugene, a boy in our room who uses a motorized wheelchair and a talking computer. He has very bad cerebral palsy but he's also pretty
smart, maybe, because he can play computer games like chess and Minecraft.

I don't like thinking about Eugene or even looking at him because he confuses me. Maybe he is smart on the inside and can't show it. Maybe he is nice and smiles at everyone or maybe his face is stuck in a smile. He never talks in class; he just sits there and smiles and drools a little. That's when it got bad. I didn't want Eugene to think I was talking about him so I got nervous and said, really loud, “I
am
better than you at a lot of things, Anthony!”

Anthony got mad and said he didn't want to marry me anymore. He also said that most people in our class don't like me very much and he tries to defend me but he wasn't going to do that anymore. “Then you'll have no friends,” he said. “You try and see how it feels.”

After that, I started crying so hard even Eugene rolled over and breathed near me for a while to see if I was okay. I cried and cried because I was pretty sure Anthony was right, everyone hated me. That's when I started thinking about Ron again and other people who had been nice to me at the Best Buddies dance last spring.
It's okay,
I thought.
I'll be friends with regular kids
. The nice ones who are friendly, not the mean ones on the bus who steal my food.

The next day at school I found Ron in the cafeteria and I sat down next to him. I sat down with him again in the hallway before school. I went over to him every time I saw him the next few days at school. Usually I couldn't think of anything to say so I said hello and then I just sat there. Mostly it was okay but sometimes I felt uncomfortable.
Like maybe his friends were laughing at me. But I never heard them say my name so maybe they weren't laughing at me. Maybe they just laughed a lot. Ron always said hi but he didn't say anything more. He wasn't like Anthony who was always borrowing my pencils and asking me questions and touching my shoulder.

With Ron, I just sat quietly while he talked to other people. I didn't ask him if he wanted to come over to my house and watch
Pride and Prejudice
anymore because I knew he probably couldn't do something like that during football season. He'd already told me how busy he was and I understood. He hardly had enough time to eat and sleep. Which is why, when I overheard a girl saying she would see him later after the game, I said to her, “He can't. He doesn't have time for things like that. He has to eat and sleep.”

She looked at me for a long time and then she laughed, really loud. It was a mean laugh, I could tell. It made me think, Good. Now Ron will see that she's mean and he shouldn't be friends with her. The more she laughed at me, the more I smiled, until Ron really surprised me. He took one of her hands and said, “Come on, Janelle. Let's just go.”

While he pulled her away, she said to me, “You should probably leave Ron alone. You know that, right?”

Maybe he's pulling her away to tell her he can't be friends with her anymore, I thought. But then he put his arm around her and she put his arm around him and did that thing I don't understand where she slid her hand into the back pocket of his jeans.

I don't understand that.

I
DON
'
T KNOW WHICH IS
worse: the news itself or how I hear. How I hear is pretty bad. I'm standing in the cafeteria line behind Lucas's girlfriend, Debbie, and a group of her friends. Up close, Debbie is even more beautiful than she is from far away, which is hard to believe but it's true. How are her pores so small and her skin so perfect? I don't get it.

For a while, I don't listen to what they're talking about, but then I hear: “I don't even know if they're really
making
him do it. I think he's just doing it because ever since his mom died, he's looking for reasons to get out of the house and away from his dad.”

I know she's talking about Lucas by the way she rolls her eyes like this is one of many things she has to put up with from her boyfriend. Neither Debbie nor any of her friends has looked my direction. She seems so unaware of my presence six inches from their conversation that she must have no idea who I am, which stumps me. I've been driving Lucas to class for two weeks now, but apparently she has never asked him to point me out to her. I can't imagine being so oblivious, but there are a lot of things I can't imagine. Like this horrible fact, made clear by the rest of their conversation: “How did his mom die again?” her friend asks.

“Cancer.”

“When was it?”

“Like two years ago, I think.”

His mother died of cancer two years ago? I think about my boneheaded questions in the car with Lucas and feel so bad, I step out of line, because I can't even remember what I was going to buy and I'm not hungry anymore. I slink back to my table and sit down across from Richard.

“Everything okay?” he says. Richard and I seem to be in a competition these days to see how long we can go without either one of us mentioning his or her love life. I tried to ask once and he said, “It's kind of private, actually,” which made me so mad I decided not to bring it up again. Presumably everything's fine with Hugh, we're just not talking about it, which means everything we say is a little awkward.

Maybe he doesn't see it this way. Maybe his life hasn't changed that radically. He still eats with us every day (Hugh has only made a one-time appearance at our table). He still makes the same jokes. He can still do this—tell I'm upset, even when I say nothing.

“I feel like a jerk,” I say softly.

I tell him the whole story and he stares at me. “You didn't know that Lucas's mom died?”

I can't tell if he's kidding. “You
did
?”

“Yeah. I mean—she died of cancer in tenth grade. He was out of school for two weeks.”

How does Richard know this? “You knew him in tenth grade?”

“No—I just—” He shrugs. “I don't know. I noticed things like that.”

“Big jocks with problems?”

He blushes. “Yeah.”

“Does everyone know this except me?”

Everyone nods. “Sure,” Weilin says. “It was really sad. I knew his mom a little—she used to volunteer in the library where I went after school in elementary school.”

Now I feel even worse. In elementary school, the library had one of the only after-school options for kids whose parents worked. I went three days a week up until fourth grade. “His mom was one of the library ladies?”

“Yeah—her name was Linda. You remember, the one with red hair who did the make-your-own-book projects?”

I feel awful. She was my favorite. She once told me she liked my books so much she was going to put them on the library shelves for a week and see if anyone checked them out. “They're better than some of the other books we have here,” she whispered. And then we realized if she did, I might not be able to keep the book and show my parents, so we decided not to. “
That
was his mom?”

Weilin and I must have been there at the same time, but we didn't know each other. She was probably one of the studious kids who did her homework before project time started. Back then I spent most of my time trying to get invited to sleepovers with girls I wasn't really friends with. I wish I could go back and be a different person back then, one who didn't care about the popular-girl crowd, and would have noticed a better friend in the corner quietly doing her homework. Something else occurs to me. “Does that mean Lucas was in that group?”

“I think so,” Weilin says. “He wasn't so big back then. Or so noticeable. Plus he was pretty shy. I think he mostly just stayed with his mother and helped her.”

I try to remember him and I can't. It's like I noticed all the wrong things back then.

I don't work up the courage to say anything to Lucas until we're back in the car again driving to class. As we pull away from his house, I turn to him. “I'm sorry about those stupid questions I asked you last week. I didn't know about your mom. I felt terrible when I heard.”

He's looking away from me, out the window. “It's okay. You're right. My friends are jerks, pretty much.”