My Stupid Girl (18 page)

"So he's your little project? Are you
going to ditch him too?" Mike put his hands through his hair, pulling it a
little. It was obvious the guy was truly in pain.

"Mike, I didn't ditch you. I just
didn't want to go out with you anymore."

"That makes me feel better." Mike
answered, head hanging low. Lucy walked over to him and hugged him. He fell
apart and started crying.

"Dude, this girl makes big boys cry.
You should get out while you can.” Isaiah was looking over my shoulder like the
greatest play ever was playing out in front of us. He spoke like people do in
the movie theaters. 

"Mike, I can't explain the way I feel.
You deserve more than a girl who is with you just because you want them.”

Mike didn't answer, he just hugged her
more.

"I really like David." Lucy’s
voice was almost a whisper. She wasn’t fighting with an ex-boyfriend now; she
was talking to an old friend.

"Yeah. I know." Misery consumed
Mike’s words. That’s when Isaiah started laughing. He laughed so hard that he
coughed.

I cringed. With Isaiah’s laughter ringing
throughout the snow-covered parking lot came the sound of footsteps running in
our direction. I put the cigarette on the ground and waited for Lucy to find
me. It only took about three seconds for her red, beaming face to lock onto my
hiding spot.

"Have you been here this whole
time?" She didn’t sound delighted.

"Yes,” I admitted.

"Yo,” Isaiah said, doing a Jedi wave
in her direction to get her attention, "These are not the two morons you
are looking for.” Lucy smiled at him then returned to me.

"What's going on, David?" I
shrugged my shoulders and kept looking down at my shoes. There was nothing for
me to say to her. I spent a few seconds wishing, very hard, for a teleportation
device.

I was an idiot. I had been stupid and acted
irrationally but I couldn’t say this to her. All that seemed like feeble words,
that didn’t come near what I was feeling. I couldn't even bring myself to look
at her and recognize the sadness on her face that I heard in her voice.

“Isaiah, can I please talk to David alone?”

“Yep.” I heard Isaiah get up. He patted my
shoulder as he passed. “Remember Lucy, what would JAY-sus do?” He took another
long drag then threw the half-finished cigarette on the ground near my feet as
he slunk off to the alley. 

“Don’t listen to him. He’s just messing
with you.” I watched Isaiah’s figure disappear in the dark. I didn’t want to
look at Lucy. 

“Did you really kiss Rachel?” Her voice was
direct, no nonsense. I still hadn’t looked up at her and I wasn’t planning on
meeting her eyes anytime soon. I picked my words carefully.

“She kissed me.”

“Did you kiss her back?” Lucy was going to
get this answer out of me, whether I wanted to discuss it or not. I realized
that I had already made it painfully obvious what the answer was. I should just
get it over with.  

“Yes,” I said after a few seconds of
staring at my snow-covered shoes. My shoulders sunk lower. I was trying to curl
up into a ball waiting for my punishment. I felt Lucy’s hand under my chin but
I refused to raise my head. Then Lucy got on her knees in front of my face,
carefully avoiding the still-burning cigarette, forcing herself into my line of
sight.

“Look at me.” I lifted my head to her face.
It was just as pained as I imagined. “Why did you kiss her, David?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Because she’s prettier than me.” Lucy said
the words as a statement, not a question.

“No!” I said fiercely. I hadn’t even
considered that she would think that way. How could she question her own
beauty?

“David!” She yelled, frustration in her
voice, “Talk to me!”

“What do you want me to say, Lucy!?” I
yelled back. “She kissed me, I tried to get away, then I kissed her back
because I’m an idiot and now I’m going to lose the greatest thing that has ever
happened to me. Could you back off?!” 

I picked up the cigarette that was still
burning on the ground, took a long drag off it, and blew it right in front of
me. Directly into Lucy Peterson’s face.

“They were right about you.” She had tears
in her eyes. I shrugged my shoulders. Now I was just waiting for her to leave
so I could live the rest of my miserable life in peace. Without drama, and church,
and Rachel, and Mike, and ice water rescues, and hospital visits, and being
moved out of my home to live with my grandma.

“It was nice knowing you, David.” Lucy
stood up and walked away with brisk steps, not looking back. 

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my
grandma’s cell phone number.

“David?” I heard her say as she picked up.

“Grandma, can you come to Kalispell and get
me? Laurel Lanes bowling alley.”

“Where’s Lucy?” Grandma’s voice went up
several pitches in concern.

“Please, just come and get me.”

I clicked the phone, put my head in my hands,
and tried not to think.    

11. GRANDMA’S LAW

Life went back to normal. Of course, my “normal”
means lonely, pointless, long days…the list goes on. 

I thought about Lucy all the time. I thought
about calling Lucy but every time I got up the nerve to pick up that stupid
phone to call that stupid girl, the thought of the look on her face as she
walked away from me stopped me. I’d blown smoke at her. I went over that moment
a million times in my mind. I don’t know why I did it; I didn’t even want her
to know I smoked. I had never disrespected someone like that before, especially
someone who meant so much to me. And she had spat out “nice knowing you” so
easily, like she’d been saying it every day of her life. That sweet, happy,
gorgeous girl had dropped me without a thought. And I’d earned it. And even
with all that, none of the stuff that had led up to it was solved.

So now I got to add “heartbroken” to the
list of my normal day.

I wanted to apologize but I didn’t know
how. To be fair, I gave it a lot of thought. I thought about apologizing about
every five minutes. But no matter how much time I spent on it, I had no way of
getting it right. “Hey, remember when I kissed that girl Rachel and then you came
to find me and you were defending me against your ex-boyfriend, even after
you’d found out what I’d done, then I blew cigarette smoke in your face? Yeah,
sorry ‘bout that. We cool?”  

The more and more I went over it, I decided
that the most honest apology would sound something like, “I am a complete
idiot. I am scum that grows on scum and I hope to die a slow, painful death.”
But that sounded a little too dramatic, even for me. 

As I wallowed in my giant pool of
self-pity, Isaiah called me a few times. I never picked up. I wasn’t in the
mood for Isaiah to tell me what I was thinking and what was actually going on.
The exact, painful, central truth of the whole situation wasn’t really
something I was ready for. I was having a hard enough time dealing with the one
event at Laurel Lanes.

What was nice, though, was that Isaiah’s
messages all sounded the same. “Hey, David, just calling to make sure the
Christians didn’t kill you for your lack of faith and bury you in the woods or
anything. Call me back so I don’t have to avenge your death.” 

Johnny called too. Prompted by pure
loneliness, I did pick his call up. He told me that Lucy was walking around
school looking like her dog got run over by a truck.  

It had been a month since I’d gone to
Kalispell or talked to anyone besides my grandma. Although not much had really
changed from the previous month to this one, it felt lonelier than usual. I had
always lived my life like this: waking up, going to school, try to stay under
everyone’s radar, come home, do homework, eat dinner, and go to bed. Rinse,
repeat. At school a nice looking girl with a sweet smile and perfect teeth
approached me in math class and asked me to help her with something. I normally
would have been painfully embarrassed and would have totally ruined any shot at
helpfulness by stammering my way through ums and hums, but I didn’t feel
intimidated at all. That girl wasn’t Lucy. She didn’t smell like her, look like
her, talk like her; nothing about her made me feel anything, not even intimidated.
It was like I had shut down to the idea of anyone else.

After having had a taste of life with Lucy,
a life that was filled with joy and a hint of love, my old “norm” seemed empty
to a whole new degree. I missed Lucy’s laugh, her contagious smile, and her
positive attitude toward life. I missed her confidence and her natural beauty
that showed through her unkempt way of presenting herself. I spent a lot of
time trying to figure out what it was that made her and Rachel so different.
Rachel had an outward beauty, like Lucy, but Rachel’s was like sugar-free
candy.

It seemed great but as soon as I tasted it
I could tell it was artificial. I couldn’t help but think that spending too
much time with Rachel might even cause cancer.

The thing that bugged me the most was that
Rachel, someone I didn’t know, didn’t care about, and didn’t ever want to ever
see again, had been the cause of such a great chasm in my life. It would have
been so easy to avoid if I had just paid attention to all the nagging warnings
my brain was sending me about that beautiful ice princess. How had I let it
happen? My jealousy. My frustration. My inability to communicate with Lucy. I’d
let my hormones control my better judgment. Now me (and my hormones) were
paying for it.

My grandma was becoming increasingly
irritated with my mood. She had started off being understanding, and then tried
giving me some off-hand advice. Then she acted concerned. Now she was just
frustrated. 

Her latest phrase was, “you better look up
and answer me when I talk to you, boy.” I would raise my head long enough to
answer whatever question she had for me, then go back to feeling sorry for
myself. I knew it was bugging her, but I couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t like the
feeling of being low was unknown to me; I had always been a bit of a downer.
But I’d never felt this depressed. Normally, I could blame problems on other
people, like my dad or someone like Mike, and that would eventually lift my
mood. But this time it was all on me.

I think it would have been a lot easier to
get through all that if Lucy had just decided that we weren’t the right fit.
But I’d blown it by doing something stupid, royally stupid. In a momentary fit
of jealousy I made what was shaping up to be one of the worst mistakes of my
life.

By February, I hated Fridays because they
meant the beginning of the weekend and that meant that there was nothing to
take my mind of off being miserable. One rainy Friday I went home right after
school, like I always did, closing the door quickly as I entered Grandma’s
toasty house, careful to retain as much warm air as possible. I started peeling
my heavy, hooded jacket off as I walked through the kitchen. I was trying to
keep my face from getting wet; I didn’t want my eyeliner to smear. As I made my
way into the living room, I saw my grandma sitting primly on the couch, hands
folded, waiting for me. She wore a fierce look of determination. 

“Come sit down, David. I need to talk to
you.” Her old eyes bored into me when she spoke. I didn’t respond at first, but
stood there looking at her, debating on whether to rebel. I’d never really told
Grandma “no.” After a fleeting moment, I gave up. I just sighed, put my
backpack down on one of the little side carpets she had lining the room and
walked over to sit next to her. She raised her eyebrows at me, waiting, and I
spoke automatically.

“Yes ma’am,” I answered her, even though I
was already sitting down. Her eyes softened.

“David, honey, I want to talk with you
about the direction your life is taking.” She ignored me as I threw my body
back against the couch in a fit of angst.

“It seems to me that something must have
happened with Lucy.” I crossed my arms tightly over my chest and looked down at
my shoes, splayed across her tiny living room. 

“I’m assuming that you’re the one who did
something to end it,” she answered my look of rebellion quickly, “because she
seems like a sweet girl.” 

That made me angry.

“Really, you think it’s automatically my
fault, just because Lucy seems sweet? Why is it that Lucy couldn’t have done
something to cause this? Just because I don’t sprout sunshine and dewdrops when
I speak, I’m the one that’s responsible?” 

“I know because of the way you’re acting,
David.” 

“Well, maybe something Lucy did made me act
this way,” I said bitterly.

“That’s complete nonsense.” Her voice was
angry and her grey curls shook a bit as she moved her head in emphasis. I found
myself glancing toward the door, wishing I could escape. This was the first
time I’d ever fought with Grandma. Since there seemed to be no avoiding her, I
kept going.

“How is that nonsense? You think perfect
Lucy is incapable of doing anything wrong?” As the words came out I realized
how bitter I sounded. Hadn’t I thought the same thing?

“I’m sure she’s capable of wrongdoing, but
that’s not the issue here, my boy. You are blaming someone else for the
situation. That is what is nonsense. Take responsibility for the part you
played; let other people worry about their part. Stop behaving as if someone
other than yourself should answer for how your life turns out.” 

She spoke quickly, concisely, and without
hesitation. It kind of knocked the breath out of me. I didn’t know what to say.
I couldn’t figure out what to do next. I couldn’t figure out how to get my
brain to make the jump.

“David, tell me what happened. Maybe I can
help you work through it.” 

My grandma is a mind-reader, have I
mentioned?