Enlightened (10 page)

The rest of the week was a blur of classes and assignments as we waited with sick fascination for Friday to arrive. I’d cleared the date with the Schreibers, Richard giving me a couple of twenties to pay for the evening’s activities. I think he and Carolyn were pleased that I was trying to be a normal teenager. They had been whispering lately about whether my “trauma” was affecting my social develop-ment, since I was almost seventeen and had never been on a date. The first time I’d heard them talking in hushed whispers from the living room, I’d nearly laughed out loud. I was glad that they cared so much about how I was doing, but they were just so far off base. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have been funny.

Jamie’s parents were delighted that he was taking Emma on a date. He could have done worse, could have chosen a girl with “loose morals,” but they knew their boy had a good head on his shoulders and would never pick a girl like that. I hoped that neither Jamie nor I would ever have to find out what they would say if they knew that it wasn’t the nice girl Jamie had chosen, but the poor throwaway boy from a few streets over.

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boy must wonder what his first date will be like.
Will it be with a cheerleader or the cute girl in math? Will we go to dinner or a movie? Perhaps break with tradition and go on a picnic, or stick with the local mini-golf course?
A few times, even against my own internal, feeble protests, my mind strayed to Jamie and me at the beach, or on a walk through the woods near our houses. Never in my wildest imagination did I come up with the reality of Friday night.

What I wanted more than anything was to go to the movies alone with Jamie. I wanted for us to be free to hold hands or even make out like any other couple would. I wanted for us to go to the local pizza place and talk about our future together over a small pepperoni and a couple of drinks. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be, not with the two silly, giggling girls who would soon be lodged between us.

Since Jamie was the only one with a license, it was up to him to drive us into the scenic town of Jackson Creek. Our parents would never let us go all the way to Mobile alone, so Jackson Creek was it. The town contained exactly one movie theater and three restaurants, which was more than our own tiny hometown of Crayford. Richard had once told me that our town had gotten its name because a clerk in the early 1800s was transcribing documents and miscopied the W in Crawford as a Y. Now we have to explain, and spell slowly, the name of Crayford for eternity, and we have no real place for a teenager to hang out on Friday night.

Jamie picked me up first for our little adventure, and my heart thudded in my chest as we held hands for the short drive. They lay clasped between us on the unused emergency brake, our hands fitting together so naturally. Looking over at me as we pulled onto Oak Street, just a block from Karen Simmons’s pink flamingo-decorated house, he squeezed my hand and said, “I wish it were just us tonight.” Then he sighed, and I looked over to see that we were in front of the house.

To say that the yard was infested with lawn ornaments was really not doing justice to the Simmons’s creative Mecca. Practically every square inch of the weathered ground was covered with lounging flamingos, dancing mice, and the occasional fountain. Outsiders might have mistaken it for a yard sale, except there was no such sign. The only reason I could think of for having such adornments was to detract from the rundown house. Maybe if your eyes were drawn to the giant inflatable Disney characters, you wouldn’t notice the missing shutters or the plastic sheeting covering the poorly insulated windows.

Glancing at Jamie again, I noticed that his posture was stiff. He wasn’t looking forward to this any more than I was, but it was necessary. I had to keep him safe, and if that meant enduring a date with Karen Simmons, it was what I’d have to do. So I kept putting one foot in front of the other until we were at the door.

Mr. Simmons opened the door and, with a rather somber expression, invited us in. He greeted Jamie like a long-lost son, but my reception was much cooler. Chalking it up to the fact that I was the one taking his daughter out, I ignored him. When the girls finally came downstairs, Karen was wearing a brand new sundress, probably purchased specifically for this occasion. She was decked out with a little of what I guessed was her mother’s makeup and a lot of perfume. It was everything I could do not to take a step back as she bounded over next to me.

Emma was altogether different. She wore a pink sweater and jeans, looking much more comfortable than any of us felt. Forgoing makeup, her hair was swept up off of her face into a twist at her neck. It suited her. She looked sweet but almost stylish and had thankfully skipped the cologne.

As we started to walk out the door, we got the obligatory speech about taking care of the girls. Then her dad went on again about being a gentleman with his daughter. To be honest, I had tuned him out, because really, he had nothing to worry about. I glanced over at Jamie to see if he thought the speech was as amusing as I did and was startled to see that he was angry. More than angry, he was enraged. Emma and Karen must have noticed too, because they started pulling us out the door. Karen tossed a quick comment, saying “Daddy, we’re going to be late!” over her shoulder just before she hastily pushed Emma though the door, letting it slam shut behind her.

I noticed as we opened the passenger doors for the girls that Jamie’s hands were shaking. The girls climbed in quickly, and after we shut the doors, Jamie with a little more force than necessary, I followed him around to the other side of the car. Laying my hand on his shoulder, I asked him what had upset him. He sighed and opened the door, shaking his head. Taking that to mean “not now,” I followed his lead and climbed into the back seat next to Karen, who looked almost ashamed.

“Apparently, old man Simmons doesn’t think that some common foster kid is good enough for his precious little girl,” Jamie said, his voice teeming with scathing disapproval. Karen sat forward and put her hands on the back of Emma’s seat. It looked as though she was going to apologize for her father, until Jamie punctuated his remarks by calling him a “fucking prick.” Emma’s hand flew over her mouth, and Karen gasped.

“Jamie,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder again. “It’s not important. Let’s just go have a good time.”

Of course, it felt important. While we were in the house, I pretty much ignored the guy because I thought he was just going through the normal fatherly bullshit. Not until Jamie got so upset about it did I realize what the man didn’t like was me. It felt like someone had poured peroxide on the searing hole inside me caused by my parents’ deaths. The sting, the pain, brought with it a hard lump in my throat. Yes, I was an orphan, a burden on the Schreibers; no one knew that better than I did. To say that I wasn’t good enough for his little Karen was ludicrous, but what stuck with me was the question of whether or not I was good enough for Jamie.

I sat back against the seat, contemplating. Jamie noticed, and I saw the physical effort he was making not to reach back and comfort me. His hands danced on the steering wheel, his shoulders were taut, and his eyes darted back to mine in the mirror every few seconds. However, before either of the girls could notice, Karen spoke up in her father’s defense, and then the shouting started. Watching it, dazed, it felt like some kind of perverted tennis match. The shouting volleyed back and forth between Jamie and Karen as Emma held her hands over her ears and I watched in fascination. Then, to my astonishment, when Karen began to attack Jamie’s character, Emma pulled her hands down.

“Stop it!” Emma yelled deafeningly in the small confines of the Mayfield’s old Ford Taurus. “Just stop, Karen. What your father said was out of line, period. Brian is a good guy. Jamie, Karen’s father might be a bigot, but he was just looking out for his daughter’s welfare. Can we please go now?” Her breathing was quick and shallow; her brunette curls had started to fall haphazardly from the twist. As Jamie started the car, she reached up and pulled her hair down, allowing it to fall in waves over her tensed shoulders. Karen sat back against the seat, clearly stunned by her wallflower friend’s outburst.

The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful after its tumultuous beginning. Following a few mumbled comments of “I don’t care” or “whatever you want to see” at the theater, we decided on a comedy. After the debacle the night had become, we needed a few laughs. The girls sat in the middle, popcorn ready, flanked by Jamie and me on either side.

By the time the evening was over, I was exhausted just from keeping up the pretense. I was sick of pretending that I wanted to be with these girls; I was sick of pretending that Karen wasn’t obnoxious; and mostly, I was sick of having to stop myself from showing affection for the boy that I cared so much about. Thankfully, Jamie and Emma started laughing and talking halfway through the movie, making things marginally less awkward. It seemed that they had a lot in common. Karen and I didn’t feel the need to speak. It was easier to avoid talking in the theater, but the car ride home was just uncomfortable.

After walking the girls up to the door and saying a quick goodnight, we couldn’t get to the car fast enough. We had close to an hour left before we had to be home, and we planned to spend it alone.

Chapter 6

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the course of the next few weeks, Jamie and I talked at length about Emma. Together we decided that Jamie should keep up the pretense of dating her. It was nauseating to watch them together, and there was certainly ample opportunity to do so, because it seemed, to me at least, that they were always together. They sat together at lunch amidst our group of friends; she came over after school so they could work on their history project; he even walked her to school because she lived right up the street. As Jamie was a constant in my day, she became a constant in his.

I hated to sound so petty about it, but it bothered me that the time he spent with her cut into the time he and I got to spend together. Thankfully, this week was the last week of school. Maybe once we were on summer vacation, Jamie and I could spend some quality time together. Again, I thought about afternoons at the beach or walking through the woods where no one could see. With only one more year of high school, I wanted us to start making decisions about what we were going to do the next year. I had already started writing essays for college scholarships, praying that I could get into whatever colleges to which Jamie planned to apply.

Much to my annoyance, it seemed that Emma had been thinking about it as well. She and her friends talked at lunch like Emma and Jamie were already engaged or something.

“Have you started thinking about colleges, Em?” Karen asked from Emma’s other side. This had been a subject I’d heard from many of our classmates frequently over the past few weeks. We were now racing toward our senior year, and it was time to start making plans for the future. If my childhood hadn’t been so goddamned awful, I’d lament becoming an adult.

“I have been, but Jamie and I haven’t really talked about it yet,” Emma said with a shrug, and Jamie nearly spewed his milk over my lunch tray. She gave him a raised eyebrow look, the one Carolyn used with Richard if he contradicted her. Only while Carolyn’s look was generally amused, Emma’s look was anything but.

I had no doubt that Jamie would hear about that later.

While it was the last week of school, it was probably the one that tried my patience the most. On Monday, Emma helped Jamie on the facial structure of his drawing, smoothing out the rough edges and softening the lines. Had I not been so preoccupied with the way her hands lingered on his shoulders, I’d have seen that the drawing looked remarkably like me. On Tuesday, I had to watch Jamie’s hands holding Emma’s as she steadied her piece of plywood on the shop house saw. He was showing her how to make the cuts perfectly even in order to finish her project.

On Thursday, he got to be her counselor.

“Hey, are you okay, Emma?” Jamie asked in a low voice while the others were still in line for their mystery meat. Since Jamie, Emma, and I all had geography together, we were just down the hall and usually arrived first. I pretended to be really interested in the grayish lump on my tray as Emma looked up at Jamie. She did look rather upset, I saw from my quick sideways glance.

“My brother’s girlfriend broke up with him after practice last night, and he’s really upset about it,” she said with a sigh. Emma’s fraternal twin, Brad Mosely, was one of our school’s best pitchers. “She said that she was dumping him for Tim Deans, that new kid from Ohio. He wasted a whole year on her. I think he really thought it was going somewhere, and that’s what bothers him most.” Emma pushed her tray away, just keeping her apple juice.

“It just makes me so angry that she would treat him that way,” she continued. “I’d love nothing more than to walk up to her in gym later and smack her senseless.” At that, I had to look up. I’d never heard meek little Emma talk about hitting anyone.