Spark (3 page)

“Don’t get all twitchy.” She has her don’t-mess-with-me lips on. “When your house sells in Penn you can do what you like, but for now I get to spoil you.”

The saleslady laughs. “Most girls are thrilled to see their mom pull out the credit card.”

My “I’m not–” collides with Miriam’s and I choke on the rest.

We get out onto the street and neither of us says anything, though I can see Miriam glancing at me. I finally stop and face her. “Hey, listen. It’s no big deal. Bound to happen, right?”

Miriam nods, scanning my face. “You look pale.”

I feel faint and my pins and needles are going nuts. The day has become hot and I’m suddenly parched. Miriam takes the bags from my hands. “Did you eat this morning?”

I think of the eggs I left congealing on the skillet. “Um …”

“Lunch?”

“Does the last of the chocolate milk count?”

She shakes her head and nudges me towards a cafe with empty tables out front; the lunch crowds have long gone. She pulls out a sticky chair and I sit without protest. “Pins and needles?”

I shrug. No point lying, she can tell I’m uncomfortable.

“Have you been sleeping?”

I shrug again. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since Mom got sick. If I manage to slip consciousness, I dream and wake in sweating panic. “I’m thirsty.”

“Wait here.” She pats my head.

I close my eyes and take deep breaths, trying to ease the tension in my chest.

“Evie!”

My eyes pop open and there she is, Kitty Gallagher, grinning on the sidewalk with a bag in each hand.

“Hey!” I get to my feet, head spinning with the upwards rush. She practically throws herself on me and my pins and needles amplify like I’m plugged in. Stars burst before my eyes and a roaring fills my ears.

“You’re so tall!” She laughs and hugs me tight, her chin barely reaching my shoulder. “Why are you so tall?”

“I – I really need to sit.”

“Sorry.” She steps back, teary eyed. “It’s so good to see you. Blimey, you do look a bit peaky.”

I sit heavily and hold my head, dizzy and weirded out. “Just a little faint. Miriam’s gone to get me something to eat.”

Kitty takes in the array of shiny boutique bags. “You’re coming tonight?”

“No,” I say. “Replacing essentials. Everything’s a bit short these days. It’s great to see you, Kit.” She’s cropped her honey-blonde bob closer to her chin. Her dove-grey eyes sparkle and she looks pretty damn good for someone after a long-haul flight.

She takes the seat opposite and lays her hand on my wrist, sending a strange electric current shooting up my arm to meet the zip-zapping in my spine.

“Are you feeling sick?” Kitty looks genuinely worried.

But I can’t concentrate to answer, too baffled by my body’s reaction to her touch. At that moment Miriam appears. She carries a tray with a muffin, a soda and a chocolate bar. “Kitty! You’re here!”

Kitty lets me go. My arm instantly stops tingling and the roaring in my ears dims, but the pressure in my chest increases.
It must mean something
. Kitty rises briefly to kiss Miriam’s cheek. Miriam places the tray in front of me. “Eat.” She takes a seat, darting furtive glances up and down the street. “Are you by yourself, Kit?”

I rip the wrapper off the chocolate bar and take a big bite. Sugar. Sugar will settle my system. Kitty grins and covers my hand again, producing the same alarming surge in electricity. The chocolate lodges in my throat and I cough to clear the obstruction, pounding my chest with my fist. “Don’t worry,” she laughs. “Jamie’s not behind me. Barb and Dad are on their way to meet him at the airport.”

Miriam gives me a guilty smile and sits back. She must have known he was coming home. I take a swig of soda. Content to sit and eat and let them do the talking, I concentrate on the competing sensations in my body. I don’t feel so dizzy thanks to the sugar hit. My thirst has backed off with the soda. My pins and needles seem to respond to Kitty like she’s a magnet. Yet, despite this, being with her comforts me. Maybe it’s the whole familiarity thing, a friend on hand after weeks of moping around Miriam’s place. I can’t stop looking at Kitty, like I’m relieved somehow to see her happy and well. But why relieved? And why the tight feeling in my chest? Anxiety tight? How can I feel relieved and anxious at the same time?
That’s easy. You’re losing it
.

“You know you’re going to have to see him sometime.” Kitty’s back on her brother. “If you come tonight it would be over and done with. Then we could get on with our last few weeks before school without things being all awkward. It’s been three years. Can’t you be grown-ups?”

“I’m not coming to the ball to prove something to your brother.”

“Oh? But you are coming?” She sits up straight, eyebrows high. Seeing her so hopeful fills me with a strange unwillingness to disappoint her. I shake my head. Her shoulders slump and I feel bad.

The waitress comes out with the coffee pot and places cups on the table.

“I’m good with soda,” I say.

“I’ll have hers,” Kitty says.

As the waitress fills two cups, an eerie feeling comes over me. A tingling awareness of the moment that magnifies small details: the silver rim of a passing bicycle winking in the sunlight, the shimmer of heat rising from the asphalt, the breeze lifting a child’s bangs as she whines at her mother on the sidewalk. To my right a man counts change into his palm, the coins chinking.

My spine tightens.

The circumference of awareness narrows, the micro-details of the periphery diminish. The glint of light on Kitty’s coffee becomes the riveting focal point. Steam pearls upwards, dewing the inside rim. The porous ceramic bears signs of wear and a hairline fracture on the handle catches my eye. Kitty says something and goes to pick up her coffee by the bowl. It’s too hot. She takes the handle instead. Electricity crackles in my spine. I squint at the sharpening light and time stretches. Kitty raises her cup in slow motion. I observe the gradual trajectory of her hand, hear a small pop like the sound of chalk snapping and the handle of her cup breaks away. The bowl of hot coffee falls in a long elastic second.

The instinct to protect Kitty seems as natural as the solution. I simply reach out to catch the falling bowl. I don’t even feel the burn on my wrist where it splashes, scalding my skin.

Time snaps back to its regular speed, my ears clear and I stare at the cup in my hand. Miriam’s on her feet.

“Bloody hell.” Kitty shoves her chair back. She drops the handle on the table and takes the still full cup from my hand. “How did you do that?” She rubs at a few stray drops on her jeans. “Look at your wrist.” A blister rises in a red weal.

“No idea.” I feel awake, like I’ve just come out of a long foggy dream and the world is back in technicolour. “Ha!”

Miriam frowns. “You need something for your hand.” She turns away and goes back into the cafe.

I look at Kitty, who still gapes at me. I feel more alive than I have in weeks and filled with certainty. My social phobia is irrelevant. Jamie is irrelevant.

Being with Kitty is important. Urgent. Inexplicably urgent. If she’s going to this thing tonight, then so am I.

“All right,” I say, as if she’s asked me again. “I’ll come.”

“You’re going to look killer, Evs.” Kitty leans to peer at me through the window of her shiny European car. “Everything, it all works.”

“For the sake of Miriam’s credit card, I hope so.”

Kitty argued for a ball makeover, which apparently meant a total overhaul. Face, hair, dress, shoes, accessories. Miriam had been unsure about leaving me to shop, worried I wasn’t well enough, but even with the electricity in my spine and the roar in my ears, being with Kitty made me feel better than I had in ages. I argued. Miriam conceded. Kitty had to promise to bring me home if I felt faint, and I had promised to use Miriam’s credit card. Sort of a compromise, I guess.

“All for a good cause,” Kitty says. “It’s always the best revenge to turn up looking gorgeous when there’s an ex around.”

“Jamie’s not my ex,” I mutter, but I still feel buoyed enough to laugh it off. In fact, I had followed Kitty around in a daze all afternoon from salon to boutique to shoe store, compliant, content, bolstered to the point where the prospect of meeting her snooty schoolfriends no longer seems to faze me. Seeing Jamie won’t be such a big deal. He’s eighteen, I’m seventeen. Like Kitty says, we can be grown-ups. I even picture us laughing off old misunderstandings.

The strange inner workings of my body reassure me. Zip-zap, Kitty’s very important to me. Zip-zap, she’s probably the best friend I’ve ever had. Zip-zap, it isn’t such a hardship making her happy. Besides, zip-zap, saying yes to Kitty makes me feel good.

“Still,” she says, “won’t hurt him to feel a little regret.”

I roll my eyes.

She waves. “See you tonight.”

“Okay.” The vague anxious feeling tugs at me. “Thanks again.” I hold my breath as her car pulls away. It doesn’t feel right. The not-right feeling peaks when she reaches the corner. I almost cry out. Then the car turns out of sight and the feeling evaporates.

POOF!

The tightness in my chest disappears. Even the zip-zap of pins and needles dies down to a barely perceptible hum. The certainty I felt that everything Kitty said was right evaporates.

Oh crap
.

I stand beneath the thick leafy canopy of Columbia Avenue, paralysed by dawning horror, my rational self clawing its way painfully to the surface. Whatever spell I’ve been under has lost its hold and I look back on the afternoon like a hung-over partygoer whose flashes of memory fill them with cringing regret. What the hell have I done, saying yes to this ball? Why did I let Kitty talk me into it? Now I’ve bought all this ridiculous stuff with Miriam’s money! Had I really believed I could get all dressed up and these rich kids wouldn’t see right through me? What on earth did I expect to talk about all night? How will I dodge questions about my family, my non-existent dad, my dead mom? And Jamie! Jamie, my living nightmare, will be there, smirking, indifferent and gorgeous. I’ll be the idiot trying to act like I don’t remember that he humiliated me in front of his asshole friends, breaking my fourteen-year-old heart.

The memory of crowing boys bursting into the secluded hollow beneath the willow tree, while Jamie and I were mid-kiss, makes my ears burn whenever I’m dumb enough to let it resurface. I remember Jamie’s face paling as his friends crowded in. While most of the boys cheered and money changed hands, one had said, “I knew we should have waited. I could have made another forty bucks.”

The aftermath was a blur. I ran. Jamie yelled at his friends and called after me. The boys’ laughter faded as I tore out of the reserve, blind with shame and fury.

The trouble is, three years ago, before the moment when everything was ruined, it was the best summer of my life. Jamie had shot up – a staggering six-foot-two. His wiry frame had filled out and his square shoulders broadened. Basically, he got hot. For my part, I finally got boobs; changes to catch both our attentions.

Over the months of that holiday, we circled each other with uneasy awareness and the bickering stopped. I was painfully self-conscious and he was less smug than usual. For me it was a big-time crush.

It all came down to that day by the river. We’d wandered away, found the secluded hollow, he’d even called me Evie instead of Everton. Then heart-racing silence, spectacular prolonged eye contact and the softest, sweetest kiss of my life. The price of humiliation.

Thankfully, the summers that followed were Jamie-free. He left his sister and his friends at Gainsborough Collegiate and returned to London. I’m not vain enough to believe it has anything to do with me. I understand there are family expectations surrounding the twins’ education. Though I noticed none of his holidays home coincided with my New Hampshire visits. Suited me. Once or twice I might have allowed myself to imagine a reconciliation, but the thought of having to actually face him tonight is a whole other matter.

“Grab the Nikon,” Miriam calls. “Not the grey case, that’s the Sony. The Nikon has the blue handle.”

The front door clatters open and I watch her from the hall as she goes down the path, two tripods and a crate balanced before her, trying to keep marks off her black silk dress.

Move, you coward
. Panicked, I shoulder my way back into the studio, off balance in my high heels. I place the lens case on the counter, carefully, then turn to the darkroom and recite the access code as I tap the keypad. The light comes on automatically when I slide the door back. I push through the old blackout curtain, hoping I won’t get dust on my dress. Since Miriam has gone digital, the darkroom is simply a glorified storeroom. I scan the shelves, tempted to lock myself in and hide.

I should have blurted my change of mind when I had the chance, railed about Kitty’s voodoo manipulation. Miriam even handed me the very get-out-of-jail-free card I needed, “You don’t have to come tonight, not for my sake.” But she spends so much time worrying and looking after me, sacrificing work and freedom to make room for me in her life, give me a home, even her credit card, for crying out loud! Can’t I slap on a smile and make an effort for a change? So, here I am in high heels that make me feel like Gigantor, my strapless gown in charcoal silk and teardrop earrings, ready for a long night of dying on the inside.