The Gap Year (14 page)

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

G
et the fuck out!” Dori squeals when I tell her that Martin called. Really called. That it really was him.

We’re sitting in the parking lot of Parkhaven Medical Center while I figure out what to do. “He said he hoped I was back from my trip to Europe.”

“Was he kidding? Does he know that the only trip you’ve taken in the last ten years was the College Tour from Hell?”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“ ‘Trip to Europe’? Does Martin have a really bad sense of humor?”

“Actually, he had a good sense of humor. Before Next. Forget Martin’s sense of humor; he said there might be a problem at the bank.”

“Call him! Call him! Call him!”

I try. Several times, but don’t get through.

Dori gasps in wonderment. “You just heard from the love of your life for the first time in sixteen years.”

“Dori, calm down, okay? This is not an episode of
Gossip Girl
, and who said he was the love of my life?”

“You. On more than one occasion.”

“Had there been drinking beforehand?”

“There is always drinking beforehand with us. Um gee!” she bursts out, her abbreviation for the abbreviation “OMG.” “Do you remember that article I e-mailed you?”

“Dori, you e-mail me roughly half a dozen articles a day. I don’t always have time to catch up on
Cosmo
’s ‘Seventy-five Crazy-Hot Sex Moves.’ ”

“No, the one about rekindled romances.”

“Dori, please.”

“Seriously, this researcher wrote about why Classmates-dotcom and Facebook and all these sites where you reconnect with old sweethearts are causing this epidemic of divorces. A person’s first big love gets stored in the brain in the exact same place as crack cocaine does and just even seeing the old flame’s picture on Facebook can, like, reactivate the addiction. So are you all rekindled?”

“Dori, no kindling. No crack. Okay? I have got to focus.”

“No, really. This is all true. The researcher did a whole study on it and found out that the most amazing thing is that these couples who get back together, you know, leave their wives and husbands of thirty years for their first big love, have incredibly successful relationships with the first love. I mean, it’s a delusion, but a delusion that totally works in the real world. So are you blown away? You seem blown away.”

“Dori, you’re not following the plot here: There is a very real possibility that something has happened to my daughter’s college fund.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe he was just checking to make sure you got the money.”

“He said there was a problem.”

“Where was he calling from?”

“He didn’t say. Sounded like he was driving. I heard traffic.”

I hit Aubrey’s number. For roughly the thousandth time, her voice mail picks up and I scream at the phone, “Answer, damn you!”

Dori states the obvious: “Call Tyler the Defiler.”

I hesitate. Not just because Tyler is the last person on earth I want to talk to, but because when, under great duress, I did manage to extract his number, Aubrey made me swear that I would use it only under very precise circumstances. Like if I were bound and gagged in the trunk of a kidnapper’s car. For the past six months, Aubrey has done everything in her power to keep Tyler and me as far apart as possible.

I dial his number and, of course, it’s straight to voice mail. I put his message on speakerphone for Dori to hear, and slump back as I wait for whatever cocky, football-hero attempt at lame humor will follow. I predict white-boy ghetto wannabe, “wigger,” as Aubrey so charmingly calls such poseurs. Instead, we hear a polite young man tell us, “Hello, you have reached the number of Ty-Aub Enterprises.”

Dori pops her eyes, mouths,
Ty-Aub Enterprises
?

“Please leave a number and one of us will return your call as soon as possible.”

I press the phone to my mouth. “Tyler, this is Aubrey’s mother. I need her to call me right now! Immediately. There might be a problem at the bank. So, seriously, when you get this have her call me.
Stat
.”

I hang up. “ ‘Ty-Aub Enterprises’? That delusional asshole has upgraded his goddamn roach coach to ‘enterprises.’ God, I hate that cocky little bastard.” I calm down, turn to Dori. “So, you up for coming with me to drag Aubrey to the bank?”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks for being on my side.”

“Is there any other?”

We drive in silence as I beeline along the fastest route to the roach coach. A horn honks when I cut a pickup off. I wiggle through a yellow light, then floor it, blasting down the road, swerving from lane to lane, passing nothing but an endless loop of Best Buy–Ross–Home Depot–Joe’s Crab Shack–TJMaxx–Best Buys.

A person looks at his or her surroundings in completely different ways depending upon whether they are temporary or permanent. Parkhaven, for the eighteen years we’ve lived here, has been softened for me by the gauzy scrim of impermanence. It was just the place Aubrey and I had to be to get her an education good enough that she’d never have to live in a place with no sidewalks, where no one knew their neighbors, and all physical activity started with loading children into a minivan. With that scrim now in danger of being ripped away, with Aubrey’s college escape plan threatened, Parkhaven’s awfulness hits me in a whole new way and I speed up even more.

“Uh, just FYI,” Dori says, gripping the sides of her seat. “That light? The one you just barreled through? It was red. A deep, dark, hemorrhaging, corpuscle red.”

I recognize in a distant, abstract way that if Dori Chotzinoff is scared, I should slow down, but I am too intent on my mission. I nod without taking my mind off passing a dump truck overloaded with gravel.

Pebbles are ricocheting off my windshield when Dori asks, “So?”

Even though I know exactly what she means, I say, “So what?”

“Oh, come on. Any tingles?”

“Dori, please, this really is not the time.”

That’s what I say, but I am remembering the split second after Martin said, “Cam.” Before the more orderly parts of my brain had processed what was going on, there were, in fact, nothing
but
tingles. Massive, heart-stopping tingles. Colossally irritating, humiliating tingles that I will never acknowledge.

I blast past the truck. It is several miles before I warn Dori, “Look, when—if
—if
he calls back, there will be lying.”

“God, of course. Will it be of the I-am-surrounded-by-hot-hunky-lovers-lining-up-to-kill-for-what-you-tossed-away variety or the my-life-without-you-has-been-an-impeccable-dream version?”

“The impeccable-dream one.”

“Great. In that case, Aubrey is all packed and ready and eager to go to college and she has a major picked out and her roommate has already invited her to spend Thanksgiving with her family on Cape Cod.”

“Yeah, the Cape Cod version. Sign me up for that one.”

OCTOBER 29, 2009

I
cram my backpack under the attendance counter. There is already a swarm of students waiting on the other side.

“You’re late,” Miss Olivia teases. “Should I write you up?”

I shrug. “Go ahead.”

“How was the big college tour?”

“Fine.”
I.e., effed-up, insecure, neurotic, and evil. Highly evil
.

And then I am besieged by kids shoving notes at me from their orthodontists, pediatricians, marriage counselors. I don’t care. I am supposed to care, supposed to check, but I don’t. They could hand me a note cut out of letters from the newspaper telling me where to drop the ransom money and I’d write them out an excused absence slip. If Peninsula or, really, any college is what I’m supposed to be working toward, caring about, then I seriously,
seriously
do not care.

When Twyla’s old emo-stoner friend Miles Kropp, the chronic Jims ’n’ Jays guy, shows up with his eyes flaming red, he no longer seems like a giggling ass. He suddenly seems like the only person in my whole universe who has the tiniest clue. He’s figured out that Parkhaven High requires anesthesia. All the synonyms that Twyla was so fond of for getting messed up scroll through my brain, because, for the first time ever, I am overwhelmed by the desire to “toke up till I woke up.” I want to ask Miles to take me to his car and get me stoned, blazed, blitzed, toasted, tore up from the floor up, wrecked, high, ripped, buzzed, and then I can’t remember any more. Wasted? Wasted might be one of Dori’s.

Tacked under the counter is Miss Olivia’s latest list of all the students who aren’t allowed any more excused tardies. Miles Kropp is at the top of her list.

Miss Olivia has her headset on and is listening to messages using her supersleuth powers to decide whether the person calling in is a parent or a conniving student she must hunt down and punish. Possibly kill. As fast as I can, I write Miles a slip, shove it at him, and whisper, “Next time they’ll suspend you.”

The wheels turning very, very slowly, he finally nods in understanding and is about to leave when Miss Olivia rips her headphones off. “Aubrey, what are you doing? That’s Miles Kropp! Kropp is on the list. Aren’t you reading your list? No more excused tardies for Kropp.”

I grab a note off the pile in front of me and wave it at Miss Olivia. “He has a note from his doctor. See?”

Miles manages to fire just enough synapses to snatch up the slip and disappear. Miss Olivia, who is not a fan of standing or, really, moving her body in any way, rolls her chair toward me. “Let me have a look at that.” She sticks her hand out. “It’s probably forged.”

My doom wheels closer and I am oddly elated to discover that even then I don’t care. I wonder how many lines I’d have to cross to get suspended. “Suspended.” Why has that word ever held any terror for me? Suspended. Suspended animation.
Not
having to decide where to go to college and what to major in and, essentially, plan out the rest of my entire life. Just to completely freeze everything. Like Sleeping Beauty. Only not at Parkhaven High. Anywhere but Parkhaven. It sounds like the most blissful state I can imagine. I
want
to be suspended.

Miss Olivia abruptly stops dead in her tracks and looks up at someone behind me. A voice asks, “Hey, Pink Puke, how was Penn State? Awesome team. They recruiting you? Hold out for a car.”

As I turn around, Miss Olivia babbles at me, “He asked where you were. I told him Penn something and he knew right away what I was talking about. Didn’t you, Ty?” She giggles. Miss Olivia giggles.

The sun is angling in through the glass doors behind Tyler and sending beams of light shooting out around his head in a haloed, He Is Risen way so cheesy even
I
can’t take my pathetic fan-girl crush seriously anymore. A handsome, sexy quarterback? Could I be a bigger cliché? And it is so clear from the way he is acting that this happens all the time. It happens so much, in fact, that, like a celebrity, he’s learned to handle it gracefully. To be nice to the Little People.

I have to laugh at myself.

Tyler thinks I am laughing at his recruiting joke and the Dimple appears. OK, now
he
is being a gigantic cliché. It is so ridiculous that it feels like we are in some bad comedy sketch together and I have no choice but to treat it that way.

He drapes his hand over the counter for me to shake and says in this skeevy Rico Suave voice, “Tyler Moldenhauer. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

We joke-shake and he hangs on to my hand while gazing into my eyes and giving me the Dimple. Talk about cheesy. I cannot
not
call him on it. I bat my eyelashes in a flirty pickup way as corny as his soulful gazing and Dimple-dimpling and ask in my best Southern-belle accent, “Why, suh, are you one of the Savannah Moldenhauers or are you a Buh-mingham Moldenhauer?”

Tyler gets that I have busted him and drops my hand and the whole Señor Suavecito act. He leans down, rests his head on his hands, and points a finger at the official name tag pinned to my chest that Miss Olivia makes all the aides wear. Mine reads
AUBREY J. LIGHTSEY
. Tyler flicks the edge of the plastic tag. “So is that what you like to be called?”

He understands. He gets an entire life of defending a name I never liked to start off with. Correcting people, saying, “No, it’s Aubrey, not Audrey.” Then they call me Audrey anyway. Or the real smarties ask me if I know that Aubrey is a boy’s name.

“Actually,” I answer with no more thought than I’d give to my next breath, “my friends call me A.J.” No one in my entire life has ever called me A.J.

“What’s the
J
stand for?”

“That’s classified.”

“A to the J, I miss you. Why don’t you ever come to practice anymore?”

“I quit band.”

“You don’t go to games, do you?”

“Only if I have a clarinet in my mouth, and that is never going to happen again. Not in this lifetime.”

“Ty,” Miss Olivia breaks in with the false intimacy of a fan who would call Britney Spears “Brit.” “What do you need? You know Coach already has you automatically excused from fifth period.”

“No, I’m good, Miss Olivia.” He shoots her an extra helping of cheese complete with the Dimple and some kind of crinkling twinkling of the eyes that makes me wince and Miss Olivia wheeze like her asthmatic Chihuahua. “I just want to say hey to our girl here. See how the big college tour went. So how’d it go, A.J.?”

“It went.”

He nods as if I’ve just given the correct answer to the hardest question on the test. I know I am supposed to ask him about the schools he’s interested in and where he’s applied and what his first choices are. But I don’t care. Even if it is Tyler Moldenhauer, I can’t make myself care. So I say nothing. The moment gets awkward; he taps his fist on the counter and leaves.

The instant he is gone, Miss Olivia, her face bright and shiny as a kid on Christmas morning, asks, “A.J.?”

It is me and Tyler she wants to unwrap. To tear through the crinkly paper and pull us out and exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

But even if there is nothing inside the package—or maybe especially
because
there is nothing inside—it is my package, to unwrap when I want.

So, dry as toast, I answer, “Yes, Olivia, A.J. In the future, I’d like to be called A.J.”