Fade Out (20 page)

So if Bella’s not the femme fatale in this situation, and Elissa’s not the femme fatale, then I guess one doesn’t exist. I hadn’t considered that before. Unless it’s supposed to be me, because of how I’ve acted and what I’ve done?

While I’m trying to make sense of this, Jackson has been trying to do something of his own: make excuses. I take it he’s waiting to see which one will stick.

“It’s just, you know, we never said exclusive,” he’s telling Elissa. Or is it Bella. It doesn’t matter, because neither of them seems interested.

“Save it,” Elissa says. She starts for the exit.

I guess the night’s drama is about over. But then the door to the lobby comes open and a whole new round of drama storms in. My mom.

“Danielle,”
is all she says. That’s all she has to say.

Ms. Greenway is right behind her. “I called her,” she says. “I happen to know you’re grounded, Danielle.”

The moment is beyond awkward for me, but then I see the look on my mom’s face as she notices the girl standing near me, Nichole. By the way she’s staring at her, I know she knows who Nichole is. Nichole also studies her but without the usual smirk.

Suddenly, thankfully, something catches my mom’s attention. It’s Austin—only, I don’t think he means to be the diversion. He’s cradling his wrist, groaning under his breath.

“Austin,” my mom says, “what’s wrong with your arm?”

His mom, Ms. Greenway, reaches out to check it and before her finger even grazes his skin he yelps in pain. It can’t be
that
bad… can it?

“What happened?” his mom asks.

“I fell on it,” he says.

“How?” his mom says. “When?”

“On the stairs?” he lies. “Before?” Vague is good, Austin, very good. Though I can’t help wondering why he doesn’t just out me as the person who stomped on his hand and knocked him off the roof….

Taylor doesn’t open her mouth to dispute any of this.

Everyone’s like,
Oh, poor Austin, you tripped and fell on your own wrist.

All eyes are on Austin now. Everyone surrounds him. Even Nichole.

I hear a chorus of “Austin, are you okay?” “Wow, it’s really swelling up.” “Do you think it’s broken?” And I catch Austin’s eye and hold it for one long second. You could say he broke his wrist for me.

You could.

“Maybe we should go to the ER?” he says to his mom.

It’s at this point that I notice Jackson looking at me, like he
wants a defender or something. An apologist. Like he thinks I’ll still hang around and make up excuses to ask him about his favorite femme fatale after what he’s done.

Rita Hayworth wouldn’t care for a guy like Jackson. No girl who knows what she’s worth ever would.

I turn away from him, to the dark movie screen. I don’t need to see Rita Hayworth up there to know what to do.

“Can you start the movie up again or what?” someone in the audience shouts.

We look at him in shock like we’d forgotten we’re standing in a theater, where people go, you know, to see movies. Jackson leaps to start up the projector, before anyone can ask for their money back. He may have been betrayed by me, and lost both his girlfriends, but he’s still betting on that car. No one here is getting a refund.

20
Not You Too, Rita Hayworth

D
ays have passed,
days and nights, and I still don’t know how
The Lady from Shanghai
ends. I’m not allowed out to the movies, and I don’t see anyone airlifting the movie screen over here to me. So I’m out on my rooftop as usual. Only, I’m not pretending to get a tan or waiting for a phone call. I’m doing what any grounded almost-fourteen-year-old would do if forced to stay home during summer vacation.

Sulking.

Sulking is an art. I learned it from my brother, Casey, who
didn’t need words—he could do it just by the way he breathed. He’d be sitting at dinner and let out this sigh of air—a drawn-out, discontented hiss. He’d act like the whole world was against him, even that night’s leftover spaghetti.

And once my dad said he was moving out, Casey took it to the next level. When Mom told him to go help Dad move the tools out of the garage, Casey let everyone know what he thought of the tools—and Dad for taking them—and Mom for letting Dad take them—by dropping them in the geraniums so Dad would have to lug them to his new house all covered in dirt. Come to think of it, how I’m the one home grounded and Casey’s away at camp is beyond me.

So I’m sulking up on the roof, but there’s no point sighing my discontent or dropping anything in the geraniums because, for one, Mom hasn’t really been keeping up with the gardening, but also because no one would see. Mom is still at work.

Just when I set my sulk out on the horizon—aiming it at the Catskill Mountains, the blue lumps poking up through the trees—a car pulls into the driveway. Elissa’s at the wheel. She steps out and calls, “Can I come up?”

I’m glad she’s here—though I haven’t seen her since the
Midnight Movie and I’m nervous about it. Still, when you’re sulking, it’s best to keep a face of stone. So I tell her, “If you want to,” and I point her to the ladder of lattice that’s a straight climb up from the lawn. Elissa shakes her head and goes inside the house so she can climb out through my bedroom window instead. Maybe she heard how Austin really got that sprained wrist.

She says, “Your mom told me you’d probably be up here.”

“My mom? Why, did you call her again or something?”

She keeps her eyes trained on the faraway mountains. “Actually… this time, she, uh, called me and asked me to come over tonight.”

I take a turn staring at the faraway mountains. It’s funny how the mountains can seem so distant when you’re actually sitting in them. That’s when it hits me. My mom asked her to come over.

“Is my mom
paying
you to be here?” I blurt out.

The mountains are the most fascinating things Elissa has ever seen—at least, that’s what you’d think by the way she’s staring at them.

“Like a babysitter?” I say.

Elissa breaks her gaze, finally. “Yeah.”

A babysitter. At my age. Imagine the injustice.

“But I wanted to come,” Elissa’s quick to say. “And your mom’s working late tonight to get the paper out, and—”

“And she doesn’t trust me to stay home at night by myself.”

Elissa shrugs. “That’s what you get when you sneak out.”

“Karma,” I say in agreement. I can’t be mad at Mom—no matter how lame it makes me feel knowing she had to
pay
someone to hang out with me. The night I got in trouble, the night she met Nichole, she said she thought Nichole seemed sweet. How nice I’ll have a sister soon, she said. (Yes, she uttered the S-word, she really and truly did.)

She said it in this weird way, all cheerful and fake like there were other unspoken words beneath the words on top, and I’d have to dig under them to hear what she really meant. It felt like a sundae covered in chocolate coating that reveals, when poked with a spoon, something only a stodgy old person would eat, like butter pecan. So I knew that by saying Nichole seemed sweet my mom was really saying Cheryl was sweet, and by that she was saying if I loved Cheryl so much why didn’t I just move in?

I could see the butter pecan and I wasn’t having it. “She’s not sweet,” I told my mom. “She’s awful.” And, that same night,
I made a symbolic gesture. I deleted Nichole from my friends online—that one’s for you, Mom. (Not that I didn’t have a huge smile on my face during the process, though.)

Elissa’s back to staring out at the mountains, and even though she’s getting paid to do it, I guess I should say something. Like,
I’m sorry.
… Is that enough?

She surprises me by speaking first. “So I saw it. I thought you’d want to know.”

She saw it… wait, she saw
it
? It, as in the photo? “When?” I say.

“The other night,” she says vaguely.

“Who showed you?” Someone must have got on my phone to copy the photo. Someone stole it. Some nosy person thought they’d—

“Jackson,” she says, “obviously.”

I can’t figure out how he got a hold of it.

I thought about erasing the picture, deleting it from memory like it never existed. But I had to see it first. I remember pointing my phone at the seesaws, snapping the photo, then running for my life. What I don’t remember is taking a look at what I shot.

And now that I have, I know you wouldn’t necessarily get
that it’s a picture of Jackson and Bella. You wouldn’t see seesaws, or two people on them, or anything recognizable as a physical object taking up space in the actual world. The picture looks like two snowmen doing the hula during an earthquake. If you squint.

“You look so upset!” Elissa says. “I’ll tell you the end if you want. Rita Hayworth turns out to be the bad guy. Then she dies. Spoiler. Sorry.”

“What?”

“
The Lady from Shanghai
,” she says. “What did you think I was talking about?”

“The picture,” I say. “The picture I took. Of Jackson?”

I see my cell phone, propped up on the rooftop between two shingles in the one micrometer of a spot where it gets decent reception. I want to throw it off the roof, see how far it’ll fly—maybe I can aim it at the farthest peak of the farthest mountain.

“Oh no,” Elissa says. “I actually really don’t want to see the picture. Like, ever.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I should probably say it a thousand times more. I’m thinking I may need to walk around town wearing a sign that says it.
SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY
until
people think I’m pitiful enough to forgive me.

“It’s okay,” Elissa says. “You were just looking out for me.” She pauses. “Right?”

“Right. That’s what I was trying to do….”

“It’s not that you were jealous,” she says, watching me carefully.

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

She makes a face at the phone. “Just don’t ever show me that picture.”

“Never,” I say. “’Cause I’m going to delete it.” I grab the phone and open the image. It doesn’t matter that you can’t decipher anything from it, that’s not the point. The point is that it exists. And once I hit erase it doesn’t exist anymore. Easy as that. Like it never happened. Done.

Seeing Elissa’s face, I wish it was like it never happened. I guess you can’t erase that it did.

“So,” I say, “
The Lady from Shanghai
. How’d you know I haven’t seen the end?”

“Your mom said you can’t stop talking about it.” She smiles. “And I told her you wouldn’t like the end, so maybe it’s better that you didn’t see it.”

“Rita Hayworth, the bad guy? I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it!”

I shake my head to make it go away. I mean, if Rita Hayworth isn’t perfect, then, tell me, who is?

Speaking of what’s not perfect, Elissa’s talking about something else. Something I could spend eternity not thinking about, or talking about, even if it meant imprisonment on this rooftop with only the mountains for company for the rest of my life.

“Things happen, things you can’t change. It’s hard at first, but then you get used to them, you know,” Elissa’s saying.

She’s trying so hard, but all I’ll give her is a shrug. Just the one.

“Like with me and Jackson,” she says. “Maybe it won’t hurt so much by… October.”

She said the word “October.” My mom must have told her about the wedding.

“Like, maybe by then I’ll be used to it.” My mom totally told her.

So I up and say it. “What, like Cheryl marrying my dad? I’ll get used to it?”

“Eventually,” Elissa says, “probably.”

I’ll believe
that
when I see it.

“Yeah, who knows,” Elissa says. “Maybe by October you’ll be really close with Nichole and you two’ll be bridesmaids at your dad’s wedding or whatever.”

I clutch my throat, doing a dramatic rendition of a gag.

“Maybe by then your mom’ll be all totally okay again, and the divorce will be the best thing that could have happened.”

“Yeah,” I say, scoffing. “And maybe I’ll grow up to be a movie star like Rita Hayworth.”

“Maybe by then I’ll have a new boyfriend, too,” Elissa continues. And this stops me, and I don’t even pretend to gag.

“Maybe before that,” she continues. And she actually smiles. Because it turns out—it’s a good thing I’m sitting down—that she already likes someone new.

“But you and Jackson—” I say. “You just—I mean, you just broke up.”

She shrugs. “Like I said, things happen.”

Of course I have to ask. “Who is it?”

“Ryan?” she says. “You know Ryan… he works at the tuberental place.”

I wrinkle my nose. “I hate tubing. I have no idea who Ryan is.”

“You’ll like Ryan.”

And I guess I’ll have to. Because any boyfriend of Elissa’s is
a friend of mine, right? But if I lose my tube and get shot down the rapids tubeless and contract river poisoning and practically almost drown, I might not like him for long.

“Hey.” Elissa kicks my foot. “Jackson’s leaving town at the end of the month, so, yeah, I’m steaming mad at the jerk for not telling me he had that girlfriend back home, and it really hurt, it really did. But—” She pauses and looks like she’s about to say something very deep but just says, “But oh well, right?”

“I guess,” I say. Though two words I would not use to describe the drama this summer are “oh” and “well.” If I’d been the one with Jackson, I don’t know if I’d let it go so easily. I don’t even want to let it go right now.

“You have to come tubing with me,” she says, “so you can meet Ryan.”

“Elissa, I seriously despise tubing.”

“So do I,” she says, “but you know how it is… to think you like someone, but all along you liked someone else. Or you should’ve….” And here, if you can believe it, she grins. “Admit it,” she says.

“Admit what?”

“You
know
what!”

Here I am wondering if we’ve been sitting in the theater watching two different movies when she tackles me. She lunges at me across the rooftop, claws out to tickle me into a confession, and I roll away from her, and one false move and we’ll both tip off the roof and flatten what’s left of my mom’s geraniums.