First Time for Everything (30 page)

“Thanks. Yours too.” I relaxed a little. At least she wasn’t screaming at me to get away from her.

I did like her hair. It was still her normal blonde, but was now shorter than mine except for one long chunk of bangs hanging over her left eye. She had three piercings in each ear. Not as many as I had counting the rest of my face, but more than I remembered her having the year before.

She was even prettier than she’d been with long hair, in my opinion, except for the fear in her expression.

“So how was your summer?” Whatever had changed her might have happened over the summer, but the more I thought about it, the more I believed it had been back in the spring. So I figured asking about summer break would be safe enough. I doubted she would open up and tell me anything important, but at least it was a conversation starter.

She shrugged and poked at the fries on her cardboard tray. “It’s over. I survived.”

“Yeah.” So much for starting a conversation. I couldn’t come up with anything else to say.

I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the cafeteria. Alyssa’s old friends were at their usual table in the center of the room, and some of them stared at us like something they would see in a zoo. I narrowed my eyes, and the gawkers became really interested in their meals and each other.

That was good. Whatever had happened to Alyssa, she didn’t need judgment and stares.

“How was yours?” she asked.

“I spent some time up in New Hampshire with my grandparents,” I said. “I had fun there. Other than that, I hung out at the mall and even went to the beach a couple of times.”

She gave me a faint smile. “The beach? Did you wear a black bathing suit?”

“Ha ha.” I bristled a little. Here I was trying to be her friend, and she was making fun of me.

Except the way her face fell when I gave my fake laugh made me think maybe she hadn’t been making fun after all. Maybe she’d meant her question as a friendly joke, and I’d wrecked it.

I didn’t want her to feel bad, so I scrambled through my brain for a way to fix the conversation.

“It was dark blue,” I said. “Two-piece tank and boy shorts. And if you tell anyone about it, I’ll deny it.”

She made a little sound that might have been a chuckle. “Other people must have seen you in it at the beach.”

“Yeah, and I swore them all to secrecy too.” I smiled. “Look, I’m taking a risk here, but if you ever want to talk, I’m around. It looks like your pack exiled you.”

“My choice,” she said quietly. “I don’t have anything in common with them anymore. Thanks.”

I took a second to catch on that she was thanking me for saying she could talk to me, because I was busy trying to figure out why she’d rejected her entire clique. “You’re welcome,” I said.

We sat there without speaking, because I ran out of things to say, and she didn’t seem particularly into the idea of chatting. I understood. Sometimes words covered up too much, and sometimes people didn’t listen.

I wanted to listen to her, though. She was hurting. I felt it just sitting beside her. When someone hurt, they usually hid it from others, but I knew what the pain was like. And I hated seeing Alyssa sitting in a corner alone because of something she didn’t believe she should share.

I decided to take a chance. Talking might be easier with no one else around, and in school, there would always be other people around. And I didn’t exactly have anything to lose. “Maybe you can come over sometime.”

She did a double take, and her eyes went wide again. “To your house?”

“No, to my blimp that hovers over the harbor. Haven’t you seen it?” I bit my lip. Sarcasm was a reflex, but she didn’t deserve it. “Sorry. Automatic answer. Yeah, to my house. We could put streaks in your bangs or something. Jazz them up a little.”

“Um, yeah.” She touched her hair. “I kind of like your pink.”

“It’s the color of the month. Next week I’m thinking about going orange for Halloween.”

She smiled. “That would look cute, I bet.”

“We’ll see.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to be pushy with her, but I had the feeling if I didn’t nail her down to something, she would never actually take me up on my offer. She needed someone to talk to, and I wanted to be that person.

If I was reading the signs right, she and I had more in common now than short hair.

“How about this afternoon?” I asked.

“So soon?” She picked up a fry but didn’t put it in her mouth. “I mean, yeah, I want to hang out. I guess it would be good to be somewhere besides my house after school. But you don’t have plans or anything today?”

“Nope.” I was supposed to go to the mall, but I could take a day off from the usual wandering in a group, going into stores where we almost never bought anything. “If you don’t want to, it’s cool. Some other time. But I don’t have anything to do today, and don’t take this wrong, but you look like you can use a friend.”

“I don’t take it wrong.” She gave me a faint smile. “Yeah, I guess so. I have to check with my parents to make sure it’s okay. Meet me in the lobby at the end of the day, and I’ll let you know.”

“Sounds good.” For all I knew, she would bail on me. The lobby was usually so packed it was hard to find anyone, even if you watched for them, plus the building had other exits. But I had to believe she would actually meet me, even if it was only to tell me she wouldn’t come over.

Lunch ended, and Alyssa gave me a little smile again and got up without a word to throw away her tray. I felt kind of awkward sitting there watching her leave, but I understood.

The two classes I had after lunch didn’t register in my brain. Most of my classes usually didn’t. For a while, I hadn’t believed I would live to graduate, so I’d developed the habit of tuning everything out. I’d begged my mother to homeschool me after I’d changed from Alexandra to Xan, but Mom and my therapist had decided I needed to be around other people. So I went to school most days and sat in classes unless I had a panic attack, and I pretended to learn stuff.

My modification plan allowed me to walk out of class when I felt an attack coming on. Sometimes I just walked out because I felt like it. The plan also allowed me to make up classwork at home, so most of the time, if I was even in class, I simply sat there. Thanks to the plan, I still had passing grades in everything.

At the end of the day, I was totally ready to leave. I headed to the lobby and kind of wished I’d told Alyssa to meet me somewhere else. It was way more crowded than I’d expected, and the only place to stand without risking touching anyone else was in the corner between the window and the state flag.

I stood there for a few minutes, taking slow, even breaths so I wouldn’t freak out. I’d had a good week. It was Thursday, and I hadn’t had a single panic attack. I didn’t want to break the streak. If I made it to the following day, it would be the first time I’d managed a full week of school. Even if I didn’t care much about school, I liked beating goals and setting new records. It gave me one little thing to be proud of.

By the time the flow of students out the door slowed to a trickle, I’d decided Alyssa wasn’t going to show. Which pissed me off. I’d been there for fifteen minutes doing the deep breathing thing, and she hadn’t even bothered to meet me the way she’d promised.

Then I saw her trudging down the corridor past the office. Her shoulders were even more slumped than they’d been in the cafeteria, and she looked like she was trying to bury herself in her sweater.

“What happened?” I asked when she was close enough to hear me.

“Why do you think anything happened?” She hitched her backpack up on her shoulders and hugged herself. “Someone said something stupid about the bandages, that’s all. I was with the nurse just now. Sorry it took me so long.”

“No problem.” I knew the nurse’s office way too well. She had a little room with a cot where I hung out during my freak-outs. Having a private space to calm down was part of my modification plan too. “Are you all right now? Still want to come over?”

“I don’t know if I’m all right, but I don’t want to go home.” She stared at her brown sneakers. “No one’s there, and I’d rather not be home alone.”

“Then you can come to my house, if your parents said it was okay.”

“They did.” She glanced up and twisted her mouth. “They were happy I’d found someone to spend time with.”

“So am I.” I picked up my shoulder bag from the floor where I’d dropped it and gestured at the door. “Come on.”

I only lived a few blocks from school. The town was so small, pretty much everyone walked to the high school anyway, except the kids who had cars or whose parents drove them. But with the hot sun beating down, I was glad we didn’t have to walk too far.

No one was home at my house either. My mother worked and my older sister was in college, so she stayed on campus during the week. She’d moved to the dorms partly because of me, even though she denied it. Alexandra had been one of my sister’s best friends, even though my sister was three years older. She didn’t know how to handle Xan.

I kept starting to say things while we walked, but every time I glanced at Alyssa, I shut up. She kept her head down and her body hunched in her sweater. She had to be sweating like crazy in the thing, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

We reached my house, and I unlocked the front door so we could go inside. Then I closed it and locked it behind us.

Alyssa gulped. “You lock the door?”

“This is my safe place. Locking the door keeps it safe.” I’d said that to other people who’d looked at me as if I was a lunatic. Somehow I had the feeling Alyssa would understand.

She nodded. “Okay. As long as I can leave.”

“Of course you can.” I couldn’t believe she would think anything else.

Actually, I could. I would have probably felt the same way.

I sat on the couch and motioned around at the furniture. “Have a seat. Do you want some water or soda or something?”

“No, it’s okay.” She sat carefully on the edge of the chair by the corner of the couch. “Nice house.”

“Thanks.”

She touched her wrists and glanced around. “I don’t know what to say to you. I haven’t been talking to many people lately.”

“Yeah, I saw.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to interrogate her, but I had questions. Maybe if I asked, she wouldn’t be so afraid of having me find things out. At least she’d have the choice of answering or telling me to mind my own business. “What happened to your wrists?”

She opened her mouth and stared at me. I guessed I’d crossed some line, but she didn’t seem upset. Just surprised.

I pushed apart some of the bracelets on my left wrist, the one with the worse scars since I was right-handed, and pointed to the messy white lines. “I did these when I was eleven. And twelve. And… you get the idea. You’re the first person I’ve showed them to besides my mom and my doctors.”

She frowned. “Why me? Because of the bandages?”

“And because I think I can trust you.” Explaining why I’d shown her was complicated. It had just seemed like the right thing to do so she would know she wasn’t alone.

“What happened to you?”

I should have known she would ask. I had to think about what to tell her. When I heard about bad things that had happened to other people, sometimes it made my own crap so much worse. I didn’t want to make things harder for Alyssa.

“Someone did something to me,” I said finally, keeping it vague on purpose. I’d had tons of practice talking to my therapists about the incident, and nowadays sometimes I didn’t even show any emotion when I recited it. But Alyssa didn’t need details. “I was eleven. I wanted to die afterward, but I knew that would hurt my mom and sister, because it hadn’t been too long since my father had died. So I did this to myself instead.”

Her face went pale. “Did they know what happened to you?”

“Yeah. It was kind of hard to miss.” I didn’t want to think about that day, so I clenched my fists and pushed it out of my brain as hard as I could. “My mom took me to doctors and therapists and stuff, but I still… I felt like I had to do this.” I touched my scars. “Like I deserved it, and it let all the poison out. But the poison never totally goes away.”

“Does it get better?”

Her voice was so tiny and scared I almost cried. I pushed the tears away to hang out with the memories and answered fast. I had to give Alyssa some hope. And myself. “Yeah, it does. I didn’t used to be able to go to school. I spent a lot of time in the hospital during middle school. That’s why I’m a year behind now. They tried to hold me back two grades, but my mother talked them into letting me make up one online.”

“That’s good.” She tilted her head to one side and studied me. “You were in my class in sixth grade, weren’t you?”

“Probably.” I didn’t remember much of that year, and I wasn’t about to try. I’d started the year as Alexandra, and I’d forgotten most of her life.

She took the hint and changed the subject. “Thanks for telling me about that.”

“We have to stick together.” I touched the scars again so she’d know what I meant. Even though she hadn’t told me why her wrists were bandaged, I didn’t doubt my guess about it. “So yours?”

“I wanted to die.” The way she said it made me think she was using my words on purpose, which was fine. Sometimes using someone else’s words made talking easier.

She folded her fingers together in her lap. “Everything was awesome until, like, March. Then my brother brought this friend of his home from college. He goes to UMass and lives on campus, but he comes home sometimes.”

“Yeah, same with my sister.”

I wanted to kick myself for interrupting, but Alyssa relaxed a little, so maybe I’d done the right thing by giving her a break. “His friend kind of flirted with me and stuff. I was flattered, but I’m not into guys.”

She shot me a look out of the corner of her eyes, and I nodded. “Me either. I mean, they’re cool as friends, but I’m a lesbian. And not really out, by the way.”

My sexuality wasn’t exactly a secret. I just didn’t go around talking about it. Sometimes it was hard to like anyone at all, so I didn’t see how it mattered whether I liked girls more than guys. And my mom didn’t need yet another thing to worry about with me, though I’d told her I probably wouldn’t go out with any guy ever. My therapist and my doctor knew the truth.