Someone I Wanted to Be (7 page)

“Duh. Obviously, yes! You are super smart.”

“What? No, I’m not,” I said. “By the way, my nickname for Kristy is Yertle. Like Yertle the Turtle? In Dr. Seuss? Yertle is the king turtle, and he sits on a throne of other turtles stacked on top of each other. . . .”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the story.” Anita shoved her hair behind her ear and studied her picture.

“If I’m really pissed, I call her scrawny bitch.”

The eyebrows again. “That one’s lame, but Yertle’s not bad,” she said. “You’ve got to have a plan, girl. You’re gonna be a doc.”

Kristy, Victoria, and Corinne sashayed by with their arms intertwined. They looked over at us like we were the display of jarred pig fetuses in the biology room. They put their heads together and almost choked on their amusement.

“Hey,” said Anita. “Just ignore them. Ignore them, Leah.”

I tried to ignore them, but the happy ringing inside me faded away.

The next day after study hall, Carl and I walked out of the library together by accident. We stood at the door for a second. He swallowed and started to say something. Before he could, I took off for my locker.

On the bus, Anita said, “I could hang out today.”

I said, “Oh.” Then a minute or two later, “Do you want to come over?” Corinne had been in my apartment a couple of times, but I had never allowed Kristy inside the building.

When we got to my building, Anita walked without any observable disgust through the entryway, down the stairs, and along the hideous orange carpet through all the weird smells. She came into #3 and didn’t stare at the worn-out green carpet, the lumpy couch, Cindy’s teacup collection, the ten-year-old TV, or the battered old Yahtzee box under the coffee table. She didn’t ask to open the gray accordion curtains that covered the basement window above the couch.

I suddenly realized that the shiny beige paint was the color they used in lunatic-asylums and all the little bumps in the paint looked like zits. But Anita stood there like she was in a normal house, and not an apartment that was like a couple of boxes taped together.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“Sure,” she said. “Got anything vegan?”

We went into the kitchenette. I pulled open the pink cupboard doors, which I suddenly realized were brown and sticky around the handles, and pushed around some boxes and cans, the blue cylinder of salt I’d labeled
NaCl
in first semester chemistry, and a bag of potato chip crumbs.

“What’s that?” said Anita. She reached for the decorated mayonnaise jar full of change and tiny fortunes.

“My mom’s hope jar. Don’t ask.”

I had to get her to step out so I could open the refrigerator. There was some milk, lettuce going black around the edges, and a dried-up pork chop on a plate. I checked the freezer — there was a half a can of orange juice concentrate sprinkled with crumbs. “I forgot — we’re going shopping tonight. I thought we had waffles. Do you want a bowl of cereal? I could make some Kool-Aid.”

“I’m fine.” She turned off the light.

I bumped into her as we stepped around the kitchen table into the living room. Anita did a twirl by the couch, and all the fringy things on her jacket swirled around her.

I said, “I don’t want to be mean and that leather jacket is cool, but do you think you should wear the same thing every day? People say stuff.”

She said, “Whatever, Leah. You don’t think the lemmings like it? This jacket is vintage seventies. It’s leather, but it was my mom’s, so I can’t throw it out.”

She came to the door of my tiny room and acted as if a cardboard bookshelf and boxes of clothes were just what you’d expect to find in a teenage girl’s bedroom.

“It’s kind of a dungeon.” I opened the blue polka-dot curtains so we’d have some light, saw the spiderwebs, garbage, and black bars, and closed them again.

She sat on the end of my bed — which was, in fact, just a squishy mattress on a metal frame — and looked at the two newspaper photos of Damien Rogers playing basketball that I’d taped to the wall. After a minute, she said, “He looks very athletic.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s Damien Rogers. He goes to Arapahoe. He’s kind of a friend — more like an acquaintance, I guess — but he’s a super-nice guy and I thought those were really good pictures.”

“Ah.” Anita lifted my laptop off the floor. “Can I check my e-mail?”

“Uh . . . I don’t have Internet. It’s just for writing papers.”

I had the laptop and an iPod that Cindy bought at the EZPAWN for my fifteenth birthday, but no Internet. It was like an online party I wasn’t invited to. In the library or whenever I could borrow Kristy’s or Corinne’s phone, I checked to see what Damien Rogers’s had posted. He constantly shared stats from his games and was tagged in pictures from parties. He always had a different girl under his arm. He wasn’t serious about any of them.

“Me neither. It sucks,” Anita said.

“Yeah.” I sat at the top of my bed on the pillow. “But you kind of get used to it.”

“True.” She smiled and set the computer back on the floor. She pulled
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
off my bookshelf. “I love Dr. Seuss,” she said.

I leaned against the wall and opened an old
Glamour
I’d pulled out of someone’s garbage. “God, I’m fat.”

“Shut up! Don’t talk about yourself like that.” Anita flipped through one of the picture books. “I’d love to live there.” She pointed at a tiny crooked house hanging off a precipice. “Where’s your mom?” she asked.

“Work.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nope.”

“What about your dad?”

“He died when I was two.”

“Oh. Sorry. My mom died six years ago. She went back to Mexico to visit my grandma. Car wreck.”

“God, that’s so sad.”

“Yeah.” She looked at me, shrugged, and gave me a sad, crooked smile. “Her name was Fabiola.”

“What a cool name.”

“I think so.” She set down the book and tightened the laces of her knockoff Keds.

“My dad died in a car wreck, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

I pretended to read. Anita put back the book and pulled out
The Sneetches.
My Dr. Seuss collection was the closest thing to a family Bible that Cindy and I had. My best memory of childhood was of Cindy scrunched up on a little stool reading
Hop on Pop
while I sat in the bathtub and played with a yellow rubber porcupine.

Anita and I both had parents who died in car wrecks. It’s like we were sisters somehow. Her mom and my dad were in car-crash heaven together. I was staring at pictures of “Dos and Don’ts” in the magazine when my phone vibrated. It was Kurt King. I let it go. A few minutes later, it vibrated again.

Anita stared at me over the top of the book. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“Uh . . . it’s just this guy who calls a lot.”

“Is he good-looking?”

“Extremely good-looking.”

She snatched the phone and flipped it open. “Hello,” she said. “This is Tanya. . . . Tanya. . . . As matter of fact, I am Russian. . . . Oh, really? Ashley? No. . . .”

I grabbed the phone and turned to the wall. I said, “Hey, Kurt,” in a slightly modified Kristy voice.

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Pretty good.” I ran my finger down a crack in the green wall.

“Who’s your friend? Is she as beautiful as you?”

“Yeah. She has black hair, though.” I picked paint off the wall, and it crumbled onto my blanket.

“Ashley, I have a question for you. What’s your favorite color, sweetheart?”

“Blue.”

“And how’s your mama doing?”

“She’s really sick. She’s doing pretty bad.”

“Sorry about that, sweetheart. You call me anytime. When can I see you?”

“Sometime. I’ve got to go now.”

I shut the phone. Anita had closed the book. She looked at me carefully. She said, “Your voice sounds stupid when you talk like that, and that dude sounds like he’s thirty.”

Thursday night, after we shopped at Safeway, Cindy made me sit with her in the car. Things were worse at Kristy’s house, and Cindy wanted to tell me about it. We sat in her white Grand Marquis with the smashed bumper as the orange-and-green sky faded behind the apartment building.

“I know you’re having problems with Kristy.” Cindy studied the backs of her hands and picked at her nails. “I’ve never really cared for that girl. She’s been terribly, terribly spoiled. But her mother is a lovely woman. I just feel awful about what’s happening to her. I feel like we should do something.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw open the car door and run as fast and far as I could. Everything about Cindy — the droning sound of her voice, the way she jammed her tongue under her upper lip, how she smelled like cherry fluoride treatment — made me feel like I had chemicals sizzling through my veins.

“What are we supposed to do? Make them a pot of macaroni and cheese? Bake them a cake? They don’t eat that stuff ! They eat spelt bread and organic vegetables. There’s nothing we can do. They don’t want anything from us. Don’t you get it, Cindy? Kristy hates me.”

“Leah!” Cindy crossed her arms and tightened her lips. “First of all, I am not Cindy to you. I am your mother. Be respectful! Second, you do not understand the situation. You’re all wrapped up in your petty squabble. Connie Baker is dying. Do you know what that does to a family? Well, I do. I do! I’ve been there.”

Of course! I had stepped on sacred ground, Cindy’s tragedy, the dying of her husband, the great disaster. It was Cindy’s trump card. Except Paul Lobermeir hadn’t died of cancer; he’d died “instantly” in a car crash. Cindy’s mom and dad had both died of cancer within two years of her graduating from high school. She thought she’d been saved by Paul, but then he croaked, too.

I had only been two years old. After the funeral and the four months she spent either in bed or in the bathtub while I sat in a playpen, Cindy went back to work and worked two or three jobs while I was at the babysitter’s, and she didn’t have a new coat for ten years because she was buying me shoes and paying for my six-month dental checkups. I could recite that story as easily as
Hop on Pop.
The shabby peacoat with big plastic buttons still hung like a phantom in her closet.

“You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to raise a child alone.” Cindy’s voice in the dark car was like an echo from another day, an echo from a thousand other days when she’d said the same words in exactly the same way. YOU have NO IDEA how HARD it’s been for ME to raise a CHILD ALONE.

How many days had I been alive now? I started to do the math inside my head.

“Connie had another operation. There’s nothing left they can take out.” Cindy glared like she hated me as she described how horribly and slowly Kristy’s mother was dying.

She finished with her death lecture and swallowed loudly. It was dark outside now. We sat in the glow from the streetlight. Something, maybe defrosting fish sticks, rustled in the grocery bag. There was no oxygen inside the Grand Marquis.

Cindy hung on to the steering wheel, stared out the windshield, and waited for me to hug her and tell her how much I loved her and how much I appreciated how hard she worked, though there was no way I could ever comprehend how difficult it had been . . . blah, blah, blah. Her mouth was bunched up like the end of a balloon.

And I did love her, but that was hidden beneath all the chaos and explosions going on inside. I blew a bubble and popped it with my tongue. I pulled down the visor so the little light came on, swabbed on lip gloss, and smiled at myself.

Cindy made a gurgling noise as if she were being strangled. She yanked at the seat belt until it finally unbuckled. She climbed out of the car, slammed the door, then limped to the building entrance — her bunion was killing her.

When I came in with the bags of groceries, Cindy was in her room with the door shut. I put the groceries away and turned on the oven. I boiled water for macaroni and cheese, put some fish sticks in the oven, and made an iceberg-lettuce salad.

Anita called. “I just had a breakthrough moment in my art.”

“How so?”

“I’m finally getting the hang of chiaroscuro. I did this new drawing of a man’s face half in shadow . . .”

When I got off the phone with Anita, I started to sing. I didn’t mind making Cindy dinner. Someday soon, I’d leave her far, far behind, and she would be all alone and would have to bake her own fish sticks.