The Opposite of Hallelujah (14 page)

SweetCarolina:
Pawel. With a W.

Rebelieuse:
Really? How … ethnic.

SweetCarolina:
LOL I like it.

Rebelieuse:
I’m sure you do.

I was about to send back a cheeky response when there was a knock on my door.

“Come in!” I called before realizing that since neither
of my parents was home from work yet, it had to be Hannah.

“Hey,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb. She was wearing a pair of dark sweatpants and a thin T-shirt I recognized as my own. I thought about protesting, but I figured it wasn’t worth it; I hadn’t worn that shirt in ages. Her hair was back in a ponytail again. She seemed never to wear it down.

When I was little, I was jealous of her hair. I used to beg to brush it and braid it. The memory came out of nowhere, and I must’ve looked strange, because Hannah asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What do you want?”

“I was just wondering if we could firm up a date for you to take me to the DMV,” she said hesitantly.

“Whenever,” I said, turning back to the computer.

“How about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know, I think I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Um, homework?” At least that was something that was, in one way or another, always true.

“Are you sure you can’t squeeze me in?” Hannah looked at me blankly. I could tell she was going to press until I broke.

“Fine. Tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She paused in the doorway, then said, “Thanks,” and was gone.

Reb’s latest IM flashed on the screen.

Rebelieuse:
Mall tomorrow?

I sighed.

SweetCarolina:
Can’t. Busy.

Rebelieuse:
Pawel?

SweetCarolina:
No.
Family stuff.

Rebelieuse:
Bums.

10

By the time I got home the next afternoon, I’d forgotten about taking Hannah to the DMV. I remembered as I was walking up the driveway and saw the car Mom and Dad had left behind that day specifically so that Hannah could use it for her test.

Hannah was in the living room, a cold, impeccably decorated room we never used, waiting for me in an overstuffed armchair that dwarfed her. She had Dad’s keys in hand, and her purse, a new one Mom had bought her when she’d taken her shopping, was sitting on the glass coffee table. It looked light, as if it didn’t contain
much. She probably wasn’t used to carrying one around and didn’t have a lot to put in it. It was just a prop to make her look normal.

“Are we going?” she asked when she saw me.

“You sure you want to do this so soon?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” She sighed. “If I don’t drive, I can’t get a job or go back to school.”

“Is that the plan?” It shouldn’t have surprised me that nobody was cluing me in on the Hannah Reacclimation Strategy, since I’d shown less than zero interest, but I felt weirdly out of the loop. It made sense for Hannah to go back to school, but I couldn’t imagine her with a job that didn’t require a four a.m. Mass. Then again, I couldn’t really imagine her as a nun, either. I couldn’t imagine her as anything other than what she was, which, at the moment, was a nonentity hovering on the outskirts of actual life.

“Yes,” she said shortly.

“Are you going to go back to Loyola?” I asked. She’d only gone there a year. Maybe she wanted to try something new.

“Mom wants me to.” It was strange to hear Hannah call my mother Mom. Even I knew how stupid that was, but it didn’t stop me from feeling it. “In the spring, I think.”

“Is that really what you want to do?” She obviously wasn’t over the moon about it. The way she was talking made it sound like a death sentence, not a life plan.

Hannah shrugged. “What choice do I have? What can I possibly do without a college education?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Besides,” she said, taking in a deep breath, “I was always good at school.”

“So what are you going to do until then?” I asked.

She rubbed the knuckles of her left hand with the palm of her right. “I don’t know. Get a job?” She sounded incredibly unsure. It was strange:
I
was the teenager.
I
was the one who Mom and Dad should’ve been pressuring to go to college, get a job, get a driver’s license, pick a plan, pick a path, pick a life. And yet here Hannah was, more than a decade older than me and she was the one without any direction or vision for her future.

“Are you qualified for any jobs?”

“Are you ready to go?” Hannah asked abruptly.

“Sure,” I said, holding my hand out for the keys.

We rode to the DMV in silence, got out in silence, entered the building in silence. There was a line, of course, an eternal line full of weary-looking women and bland, depressing, aging, balding men. The DMV was always like that. Even Hannah remembered.

“I hate the DMV,” she groaned. She fidgeted with her paperwork, folding the forms in half and then doing it again in the other direction, over and over again until the crease became a hinge and the top half wouldn’t
even stay upright. We sat next to each other on the blue plastic chairs surrounding the fortress of bored, listless employees, whose tendency never to look up for any reason—not even to greet a customer, or in surprised reaction to the overturning of a couple of chairs by a swarthy eight-year-old throwing a tantrum—made them seem identical, rows of cogs in a limping machine.

“Everyone hates the DMV,” I said, examining my cuticles.

Hannah stared ahead, rigid and quiet. Something was simmering in there, and it had to be more than nerves. But whatever it was—fear, anger, depression, uncertainty—she kept it close and said nothing, like she’d trained herself not to let it show. Maybe she had. I doubted Mother Regina smiled on emotional displays. I’d met her once, Mother Regina, when I was ten. I remembered it because
she
was what I thought a nun should look like, but perhaps that was just because she was older and more self-possessed. I was on my best behavior beneath her gaze; it felt as though she could see everything, even what was hiding deep down inside me.

I glanced at Hannah quickly, then averted my eyes before she noticed.

After forty-five seemingly interminable minutes, they called Hannah’s name and she went up to the counter, handing her forms to a woman who looked as though she hadn’t slept in weeks. The woman stamped the forms
and directed her to an evaluator waiting with a clipboard, and they disappeared outside with the keys to the car.

I slumped down in the chair, wishing I’d brought a book with me, or at least my cell phone. Hannah had been in such a rush that all I had was my wallet. I went through it absently, crumpling up receipts and tossing them into a pile in Hannah’s vacant chair.

“Hey, Caro!”

I froze. I recognized the voice as Pawel’s, and he was the last person I wanted to see with Hannah lurking around. I felt a deep flush crawl up my face when I thought of the lies I’d told him about my sister, how quickly they could be discovered, and how helpless I was to stop it if Hannah came back from her test soon. I hoped he couldn’t see it on my face.

“Caro?” He was standing next to me now.

I looked up at him. He was smiling. “Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Getting my driver’s license,” he said.

“You don’t drive?” I asked.

“I do now,” he said, waving his newly minted license in my direction. “All I need is a car.”

I laughed. “You and me both.”

“What are you here for?” he asked, sitting down and turning so that he was facing me.

“Getting my license.”
Said the liar
, I thought. Why was I doing this? I had my driver’s license, and anyway he was
going to figure out very quickly that I wasn’t telling the truth. Why couldn’t I just be honest about Hannah, even in the smallest of ways?

“You don’t
drive
?” he teased.

“Well …”

“What are you waiting for? Your test?”

“Sort of,” I mumbled. Eventually Hannah was going to walk through the door and ruin the weak story I’d managed to cobble together. I had no choice but to tell him the truth.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s my sister who’s getting her license.”

He looked momentarily taken aback, possibly calculating the complex psychological mathematics that would compel me to tell him
I
was getting my license even though it was my sister who was. “Oh, yeah. What’s her name again?” he asked, his face rearranging itself into an expression of mild interest.

“Hannah,” I said. “And I don’t think I ever told you her name.”

“Well,” he said, grinning. “My mistake. Wait, I thought she was your much older sister. She’s just now getting her license?”

“She had one a long time ago, but it expired,” I said. “The Peace Corps.” It was the social equivalent of a face-plant; there was no way I was getting out of this now.

“Oh, yeah.” He was trying to figure me out. It didn’t
entirely make sense, what I was saying, but I banked on his being too polite to contradict me.

He settled back in his chair. “Well, I’ll wait with you. I don’t really have anywhere to be, and to be honest you look bored to death.”

“That’s okay. You really don’t have to,” I said, glancing at the door.

“It’s no problem,” he said, putting his hands behind his head. “Why are you being so weird?”

I shrugged and sat back in my chair in an attempt at nonchalance, although I don’t think he bought it. “I’m not.”

“Do I make you nervous?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows suggestively.

“No.” I laughed. Of course he did.

“Good,” he said, sitting up. “So …”

I waited for him to follow up on that, and when he didn’t, I gave him a suspicious look. “Was there something you wanted to say?” I asked sweetly.

“That guy a while back …,” he said, looking away.

“What guy?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.

“The guy—the guy in the hallway,” Pawel said. He wouldn’t quite look me in the eye, and I caught a slight blush in his cheeks.

I shook my head. “I don’t know who …”

“You know, we were talking about how ugly the painting was, and then that guy came up and wanted to
talk to you … 
alone
 …,” Pawel said expectantly, waiting for me to catch on and fill in the blanks.

“Right! Yeah, Derek. I forgot about that.” I really had forgotten; I was too busy worrying about what I had told Pawel about Hannah.

He chuckled. “I thought he might have been your boyfriend.”

“Oh, no,” I said. He smiled at me in … was that
relief
? My skin tingled. “Not anymore, anyway.”

His smile faded a little. “He’s your ex-boyfriend?”

“As of the end of the summer,” I said.

“And you’re … over him?”

I didn’t want to take too long to answer the question; I knew how he would interpret a pregnant pause. So I blurted out, “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know, maybe. Probably.”

“So … no?” Pawel’s face was hard to read. I couldn’t tell if he was put out by the idea that I might still want Derek, or if he was just gathering information.

“It’s hard to say,” I told him. “I haven’t really talked to Derek since we broke up, except that one time. And it hasn’t been that long, so I’m, you know, working on it.”

“Working on getting over him?”

“Yeah. Working on getting over whatever it is I need to get over.”

“Which is what?”

I sighed. This conversation was the definition of
awkward. It was a relief, though, to talk to him about something I didn’t have to lie about. “Not really Derek himself, necessarily, but, like, Derek and me,” I said. “You know,
us
.”

“Ah.” Pawel nodded. “Gotcha.” The answer didn’t appear to have made him very happy. I should’ve just said, “Yes, I’m over him.” It was close enough to the truth.