The Art of Losing Yourself (21 page)

His expression softened.

I looked away from his sympathy. I didn’t want it.

“I think the best thing we can do right now is get some sleep.” He turned back the covers. “Let me try talking to her in the morning.”

I let out a long breath and lay back against my pillow. I had prayed for a child of my own—a sweet, innocent baby who would giggle when I smiled and ask for my kisses. Instead, I got Gracie—a hostile, rebellious teenager who hated my guts.

G
RACIE

My head felt like someone had burrowed inside my brain and was using a crowbar inside my skull in an attempt to break free. I clasped my forehead and creaked open one eye. A piercing light shone in through the windows and had me closing my one eye back up.

I rolled over like an old lady and lifted my head off the couch’s armrest. If my neck muscles could talk, they would not have had happy words to say. I squinted into the brightness, the details of last night returning in fits and spurts. My shift at the theater. Eli and Chanelle. Going to the party. Talking to Parker and then…

I clamped my hand over my mouth.

Elias saw me and Parker making out. He dragged me to his car and he called me a cliché and now, I was here. On this couch in Carmen and Ben’s living room, only I had no recollection of getting here. Did Eli have to carry me inside? Did I throw up in his car? If the rancid taste in my mouth was any indication, the outlook wasn’t good. I pushed myself to sitting with a groan. The motion made the person inside my skull attempting a jailbreak more aggressive with the crowbar. I waited for the room to stop spinning and my stomach to stop rolling, then forced myself to stand.

I shuffled to the stairs, the boots on my feet two heavy anchors. I wanted them off, but there was no way I could manage it. I had to keep moving. That was the key. Clinging to the banister, I took one step at a time, desperate to reach my room before I ran into Carmen or Ben. If only my room didn’t feel five hundred miles away.

God help me
.

The intelligent part of my brain realized the absurdity of the prayer. Praying to God in the midst of a massive hangover, asking Him to get me to my room so I wouldn’t have to face the consequences of coming home drunk and stoned the night before? Somehow, I didn’t think God would approve.

Just as I crested the staircase landing, a freshly showered Carmen stepped
out of the hallway bathroom. She stopped. I stopped. And a stare-off ensued. I braced myself for the lecture to end all lectures. Instead, her lips tightened into a thin line and, without saying a word, she disappeared into her bedroom with a towel in hand.

Huh. So maybe prayer worked after all.

I convinced my feet to get moving again, closed myself in my room, and collapsed onto the bed. A moment later, Ben and Carmen murmured and moved about in the hallway, getting ready for church, probably. They went every Sunday morning.

The front door opened and closed right before I fell into oblivion.

In my dream, a woodpecker pounded against my temple.
Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap
. I batted it away, but it didn’t budge.
Tap-tap-tap
. I tried again, but my hand hit nothing but air. I opened my eyes and the woodpecker was gone, but not the tapping and not the pain the tapping left behind. I pulled the pillow over my head. Ben and Carmen must be back from church, and she must be ready for her lecture now.

Tap-tap-tap
.

“Go away!” I moaned the words into my pillow.

There was a pause. And then, “I come bearing gifts.”

The voice belonged to Ben. I set my booted feet onto the floor and found the door.

He wasn’t lying. He did have gifts—a bottled water and two ibuprofen, to be exact.

“My hero.” The words came out like a croak. While Ben watched, I twisted the cap open, popped the pills in my mouth, and chased them down with gulps so greedy they sucked in the sides of the plastic water bottle.

“If you’re here to tell me that I made a fool out of myself last night, don’t bother.” I knew that perfectly well all on my own. Seriously. Since when did I drink? Or make out with spoiled rich kids? The thought of me and Parker on the chaise lounge made the nausea in my stomach a hundred times worse. The thought of Eli seeing me and Parker had that nausea rising up in my throat.

“I know you’ve basically been on your own for the past seventeen years.” Ben crossed his arms. “And I know you think you don’t need a mom or a dad.”

“Yep. I have those already.” I finished off the water. I could drink four more and still be thirsty. “Didn’t work out so well.”

“I know you think you can take care of yourself.”

“I can.”

He dipped his chin and gave me a knowing look. A “yeah, you really took good care of yourself last night” kind of look. It had me taking a sudden interest in the carpet. He was right, of course, but I wasn’t going to admit that out loud. “Here’s the thing. Carmen and I aren’t your parents. But you are staying in our house, and I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect a little bit of respect and courtesy.”

I rubbed my knuckles beneath my eyes. They came away smudged with black. I must have looked ravishing. “I can be courteous.”

“To Carmen especially.”

“Why
especially
?”

“Because she’s my wife, for starters.”

“She doesn’t act like much of one.”

“You should give her a break.” His words cut with a sharpness I’d never heard before. It had me looking up from the carpet, at the hard set of his jaw and the fierce protectiveness glinting in his eyes. “You don’t know what she’s been through.”

What she’s been through?

I looked around the room, immaculately clean like the rest of Carmen’s house, and the rest of Carmen’s life. From my vantage point, she hadn’t been through much. But I guess we all had our secrets.

“She’s trying, Gracie. And despite what you think, she cares about you.”

“She didn’t care about me when I was a kid.”

Ben leaned against the dresser, his arms still crossed. “You want my two cents?”

“Two cents doesn’t buy much these days.”

“You shouldn’t let something that happened in the past stop you from having something that could be great in the present.”

I twisted my lips to the side, waiting for him to finish.

But he didn’t say anything more. Ben pushed off the dresser and left me alone with his two-penny thoughts. I lay back in bed and pulled the pillow over my face. Tomorrow I had to go to school, where I would face Parker and everybody who saw us at the party and worst of all, Elias. The thought made my stomach churn.

G
RACIE

Time moved on and so did the gossip surrounding Parker’s house party. It was a hot topic at school for a good week. Thankfully, most high school students had the attention span of a flea. The student body at Bay Breeze was no different. Not so fortunately, my attention span was decidedly more mature. No matter how hard I tried scrubbing that night from my memory, the details remained.

Needless to say, I didn’t join the debate team. I avoided Elias like he had the bubonic plague. The homecoming dance came and went, and my new life in Bay Breeze fell into a predictable pattern. School, theater, sleep—five times over. Saturdays at The Treasure Chest. Sundays at the theater. Six-thirty phone calls from Mom in the evenings. Lather, rinse, repeat until October turned into November and I’d saved up enough money to purchase my very first car, a rust-eaten maroon Mitsubishi Mirage. Some dude in Pensacola listed it online for a thousand dollars. This morning I called him and talked him down to five hundred, so long as I agreed to pay in cash. I was going to take the bus across the bridge into Pensacola at four o’clock to pick it up.

Four o’clock couldn’t come quickly enough.

My own set of wheels meant I could hit the road without hitchhiking. My own set of wheels meant I could drive out to The Treasure Chest without Carmen. It opened up an entire world of possibility. In my excitement, I forgot to eat breakfast and my stomach was staging a revolt. It snarled through the entirety of third and fourth period. When fourth period finally ended, I made a beeline to my locker, only to discover that breakfast wasn’t the only thing I forgot. I left my wallet on the nightstand in my bedroom.

I slammed my locker shut and turned toward one of the stairwells, away from the cafeteria. I wasn’t too proud to ask Ben to spot me some lunch money. Hopefully, he’d be in his classroom, not in the teachers’ lounge.

I walked down the stairs and stepped out into the hallway. To my left, beyond floor-to-ceiling windows, students played water polo in the swimming
pool. The swimming unit in my sixth-period gym class had started on Monday. Thankfully, it was only a week long. Today was the last day. As I approached, the sound of laughter came from Ben’s classroom. And not just any laughing either, but a familiar nasal laugh that I basically couldn’t stand.

I heard it way too much in fifth-period trigonometry.

When I reached Ben’s door, I found him standing at a tall table off to the side where he broke apart a hunk of clay, slammed one half onto the surface, followed by the other, then kneaded the two hunks back together again. He wasn’t alone. My least favorite teacher sat on a metal stool beside him, chattering in his ear.

Her name was Miss Henson. No relation to the creator of the Muppets, whose movie
The Muppets Take Manhattan
played in theater three all last week. I’d seen her flirting with Ben before, mostly in the hallways, more often now that the regular football season had given way to playoffs and nobody would shut up about Coach Hart and the team.
Would he or wouldn’t he bring home another state title for the Sting Rays?
All the attention gave Henson more opportunity to gush and giggle and touch him. He was always polite. And she was always pathetic.

Miss Henson tilted her head back and laughed, and as she came forward in her laughter, she not only showed off her cleavage, she set her hand on Ben’s forearm and left it there for a few seconds longer than appropriate.

I cleared my throat. Loudly.

Miss Henson hopped up from the stool like the metal had turned into a stove burner. Her smile melted away, leaving behind the face of a guilty person, as if I’d caught her doing a striptease instead of sitting on a stool fully clothed. “Hi, Gracie,” she said.

Ben looked up from his clay and spotted me in the doorway. “Hey. Come on in.”

“I don’t want to interrupt anything.”

My trig teacher’s face turned the color of her pretty pink lipstick.

Ben didn’t seem to pick up on my innuendo. “I appreciate the update, Jill.”

She replied with an awkward nod-smile combo, ran her fingers through her hair, then walked out of the room. Ben resumed breaking apart his clay, slamming the two parts onto the table, then kneading them together with this faraway look in his eye.

“What are you doing?” I asked, snagging one of the stools.

“It’s called wedging.” He repeated the break-slam-knead process. “Before you start a project, you always have to condition the clay. Right now, it has a lot of air bubbles.” Break-slam-knead. Break-slam-knead. “If I don’t work them out, whatever I make on the pottery wheel will blow up in the kiln.”

“Poor clay.” It looked like a violent, painful kind of process.

“It’s for its own good.” As soon as he said it, he got that faraway look again. The man was surprisingly subdued, considering all the hype surrounding tonight’s game. If the team won, their next stop was Orlando for the state championship in the beginning of December, and the Sting Rays were playing the third-ranked team in the state—the Franklin Seahawks—to get there.

“So what was Miss Henson doing in here?” I asked.

Ben brought his hunk of clay to the pottery wheel. “Giving me her weekly report.”

“For what?”

“How my players are doing in math.”

“You’re not that naive, are you?” I’d been around for a while now. He was a favorite at Bay Breeze, not just with his players, but with the girls too—pupils and teachers alike.

He ignored the question and pumped a lever on the wheel with his foot that made it spin, dipped his hands into a bucket of water, and began shaping the hunk of clay. Clearly the man didn’t want to discuss the state of his female-flirting discernment.

Around me, the room was mostly dusty gray, but there were some shelves next to a kiln that housed a collection of student projects—all glazed in shiny earthen blues and greens and dark reds. In no time at all, Ben’s creation on the wheel was a perfectly symmetrical vase with a teardrop-shaped body, long neck, and a lip that flared wide.

“That’s impressive.”

“I do teach this stuff, you know,” he said with a wry smile.

“Why don’t you ever use that pottery wheel downstairs in the basement?” I spotted it the first time I did a load of laundry. An abandoned pottery wheel shoved off to the side, collecting dust.

He let the wheel come to a stop. “I don’t have much time anymore. Not with a state title to uphold.”

My stomach let loose an embarrassingly loud growl.

Ben raised one of his eyebrows. “You better feed that thing.”

“I forgot my wallet at home.”

“Ah. So that’s why you’re here.”

“Any chance I could borrow five bucks? I promise I’ll pay you back as soon as I have my wallet on me. I’ve got a five-dollar bill waiting for you in there.”

Ben washed the wet clay from his hands in the sink, dried them on the front of his apron, and slipped his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. He removed a crisp five-dollar bill and held it out to me.

When I grabbed it, his grip tightened so I couldn’t take it.

“Gracie?”

“What?”

“It’s just five bucks.”

“Hey, five bucks will get you a movie in theater three, along with popcorn and a drink.”

Ben released the bill. “I don’t think I’ll have time for a movie anytime soon.”

I folded the five in half. “Maybe you should make the time. Ask your wife on a date or something.” I mean, I was no marriage expert, but a date seemed like a logical, healthy thing for a marital relationship.

He slid his hands into his pockets and let out a long sigh. “I’m not sure she’d accept.”

Miss Henson plopped the stack of papers on her desk at the front of the room just as the fifth-period bell rang. “I think many of you will need to retake this one.”

Students made a mad dash for their tests. In zero hurry to get to gym class for the swim unit, I waited for the herd to clear. Then I made my way up to the desk and snagged the lone test with my name scrawled at the top.
A-
.

“I really wish you’d apply the same effort in class as you do on your exams.”

“I don’t apply any effort on my exams.”

Miss Henson pursed her lips. Gone was her nasally laugh and her fake smile. She didn’t need it—not when Ben wasn’t around. She had even closed
up another button on her blouse, verifying that she’d
un
done that same button for my brother-in-law. Gross.

“Would you mind closing my door on your way out? Every single year Mr. O’Ryan brings in those foul-smelling goats for some agricultural project for his honors biology class.” She picked up a red gel pen and scooted closer to her desk. “It can’t be sanitary.”

She muttered something under her breath about a traumatic event from her childhood involving a goat, a petting zoo, and her brand-new My Little Pony backpack.

I tossed my test into the trash can, stepped out into the hallway, and slammed her door behind me. Some last-minute stragglers passed by, their sneakers squeaking against linoleum, disappearing into classrooms until the hallway was empty and the sixth-period bell rang.

A goat bleated into the silence.

I peeked inside O’Ryan’s classroom, located directly across from Henson’s.

Two goats stood in the back, tethered to a chair near a door that led outside to the teachers’ parking lot. One of them bleated again and stared at me with doleful eyes. I didn’t speak goat, but it sure seemed like the little guy was pleading for an adventure.