Wallflower In Bloom (9 page)

When people show you their true colors, color yourself convinced the first time
.

T
he first time I met Mitchell I was sitting at a little round table having a glass of wine with someone named Belinda. Belinda and I had gone to high school together. We’d chosen the Marshbury Tavern because it was the only place for miles around that had entertainment on Tuesday nights.

Belinda was in town for the week to visit her parents. She lived in North Carolina but kept closer tabs than I did on what was happening on the hometown front. Belinda was one of those people who sent you a birthday and a Christmas card with a chatty little note every year, year in and year out, whether or not you ever sent them a card back, whether or not you’d ever really known each other in the first place.

“So,” she said, “whatever happened to Marla Embrey?”

“Marla Embrey,” I repeated. “Which one was she again?”

Belinda sighed and reached for her wineglass. Clearly she was starting to wish she’d tracked down Marla Embrey instead of me. I wasn’t intentionally trying to disappoint Belinda. High school just hadn’t appealed to me much the first time around. Trying to give it a second incarnation by reliving it did even less for me. I’d also noticed
that people who no longer lived in the town they’d grown up in automatically assumed those who did knew everything that was going on. The truth was that the way to handle still living there was to let go of the past.

Belinda regrouped and tried a new direction. “By the way, I was so sorry to read about Tag and his wife splitting up.”

I shrugged. “Split happens.”

Tag’s star was rising fast back then and this was our family’s first major run-in with the tabloids. Shortly after the breakup, my father had made the mistake of talking to someone at the town landfill. That someone had in turn sold the story for big bucks.

The headline in the
National Enquirer
screamed, “Tag Tells Wife of Seven Years: You’re No Longer It.” And the first paragraph of the story contained this little gem: “The New Age phenomenon’s own father told a close family friend requesting anonymity, ‘That boy never could manage to keep it in his pants.’”

It was a wake-up call for the whole family. We closed ranks. For the first time, we were careful whom we talked to and what we said.

I didn’t know it then, but it was the first step toward my isolated, family-only claustrophobia of today.

I took a sip of my wine while I rooted around for some safe conversational ground. “I can’t believe they’re playing ‘There’s a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)’” I said. “I mean, how retro can you get?”

Belinda looked over at the band. “The drummer even looks a little bit like Herman of Herman’s Hermits.”

“Peter Noone,” I said.

“You know him?”

I laughed. “No. Peter Noone was Herman of Herman’s Hermits. I had a huge crush on him. After Sajid Khan and before Micky Dolenz.”

Belinda leaned forward as if she were about to get a tabloid-worthy scoop. “Okay, Micky Dolenz was one of the Monkees, but who was Sajid Khan?”

I shrugged. “He rode an elephant on a TV show called
Maya
with the guy who played Dennis the Menace. I was madly in love with him. I was probably only five or six, but my mother helped me write him a fan letter, and he sent me a signed postcard of himself. And the elephant. I lived off the high for an entire year.”

Belinda picked up her wineglass and suddenly froze. “Don’t look,” she said without moving her lips, “but he’s coming over.”

I looked. “Sajid Khan?”

It was the drummer. He walked almost to our table, made eye contact, ran a hand through his straight, stringy hair, and then kept going in the direction of the men’s room.

“Ohmigod,” Belinda said. “The drummer totally likes you.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Holy déjàvu,” Belinda said. “It’s like we just flashed back to high school. Or maybe we just time-traveled to a John Hughes movie.
Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club. Making It in Marshbury
.”

I rolled my eyes again.

When the drummer came back from the men’s room, he stopped at our table.

“Hey, Herman,” I said.

He ran a hand through his hair and smiled. “Do you really think I look like him?”

It would take me the next decade to learn that when people show you their true colors, color yourself convinced the first time.

When he asked me out, I said yes.

“Would you keep it down?” I said. “I barely even hit you.”

Mitchell was lying on his back. His eyes were closed and he was holding one thigh and rolling back and forth. “Oww,” he kept saying. “Oww, wow, wow, wow, oww.” It was almost like one of Tag’s group chants.

I wondered if I could get away with leaving, or if, in this crazy, crazy world, tapping the man who’d completely wasted the most marketable years of your life on the leg with a golf cart that barely did fifteen miles an hour and not hanging around could possibly be considered a hit-and-run.

He interrupted his chanting to whisper, “Call. An. Ambulance.”

“Oh, puh-lease. You call an ambulance.”

“I can’t believe you
hit
me,” he said. I’d almost forgotten how whiny his voice was.

“You should be thanking me for missing your hands,” I said. “At least you’ll live to drum again.”

Mitchell groaned. He mumbled something about the pedals.

When I didn’t say anything, he went back to his chanting.

“Listen,” I said. “I barely slept last night. I’m going to get going now.”

He opened his eyes. “You’re just going to leave me?”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I was about to say the exact same thing to you.”

I found his cell phone in his car and threw it at him so he could call his pregnant bride-to-be. It was the best I could do.

I took off before I had to listen to his phone call. I didn’t even want Mitchell, at least I was pretty sure I didn’t, but it still stung. More than stung. In fact, it felt a little bit like a golf cart had hit me, too, right in the gut. A few tears escaped, and I blinked them away as I drove. By the time I pulled up to my front steps, a sheep shed had never looked so good.

Tag’s architect and his team had indeed done an incredible job on it. They’d kept most of the shed’s original rough interior barn board, which made it feel warm and cozy and also meant that I could hammer a nail in a wall pretty much anywhere without making a mess. The kitchen was just the right size for someone who didn’t cook, and it was open to a cute little dining nook and a mini–great room
beyond. The guest bath even had a pocket door to save space. They’d tucked a narrow staircase up against the wall when you first walked in, which you had to climb hand over hand like a ladder. The second-story addition created a surprisingly big master bedroom with south-facing windows and a French door leading out to a tiny balcony. It had a spacious walk-in closet and a master bath with a garden tub and a separate shower.

The sheep shed was a sunny, happy space for one person—two if you were
really
getting along. It would have been perfect, if only it had been mine.

“For all intents and purposes, it
is
yours,” Tag would say whenever I offered to buy him out. “It’s just a business thing.”

“It’s not a business thing,” I’d say. “It’s a control thing. You’re a total control freak.”

“I know you are, but what am I?” my stupid brother would say.

I put everything I’d pilfered from Tag’s house in the fridge and bumped my suitcase up the stairs in front of me. I had a stacked washer and dryer tucked into a corner of the walk-in, so I dumped out my dirty clothes on the floor in front of them. A pair of stretched-out dingy underpants rose to the surface, and for a minute I thought my ripped underpants had mysteriously reappeared after I had abandoned them in the hotel elevator. Then I remembered that, minus the rip, I owned a wardrobe full of clones.

I opened my underwear drawer and started throwing underpants on the floor, one after another after another. Big fat ugly underpants I’d fallen into wearing after Mitchell moved out the last time. Because they were comfortable. Because no one was going to see them anyway. Because I really didn’t give a shit. About anything. Anymore.

I turned my head, but before I could close my eyes in self-defense, the way I usually did, I caught myself in the closet’s full-length mirror. I tried to look at myself as if I were assessing a stranger. My eyes had raccoon circles under them from yesterday’s mascara. My hair
was flattened on one side and sticking out on the other. I was wearing baggy sweats and a baggier T-shirt and I looked lumpy and bumpy and frumpy. It was as if my shrunken insides had donated their weight, their bulk, to my outside.

I closed my eyes and rolled the top of my sweats down over my hips. I rolled the bottom of my T-shirt up as high as it could go. Then I counted to three and made myself open my eyes and face the mirror again.

I tried leaning forward. I angled to the right and then to the left. I pulled in my stomach and held my breath. I squinted my eyes in case I’d lucked out and Steve was nearsighted. But even if I factored out the toothpaste drool cascading from my mouth, the man who had walked into my hotel room had seen, up close and personal, the disaster I’d become.

If only I could turn back the clock. I’d be in killer shape when I met Steve Moretti. I’d be wearing dazzling underwear when he walked in on me. By the time he figured out I was Tag’s sister, he’d have already fallen head over heels for
me
. He wouldn’t want to use me to get to Tag. He’d only want to get to me. When Tag found out about us and got all territorial, we’d already be a couple. We could both tell Tag to get over himself. Together.

My head was starting to pound. Really pound. I was old enough to know my Austin meltdown wasn’t only about Steve. He was just one more person in a long, long line of people trying to use me to get to the rest of my family. If only I’d hightailed it out of town as soon as I graduated from college. I would have called my family once a week and sent presents on holidays. Visited for a week in the summer, or maybe early fall, when it was still beach weather but the tourists were gone.

I’d drifted through high school, mostly marking time. Tag played in a band and Colleen was an artist, so those worlds were taken. If I joined a club or tried out for a play, the minute I turned around
Joanie would be right behind me. Until I could get out from under the shadow of my siblings, it didn’t seem possible to carve out a space of my own.

Even my friends seemed more interested in my family than in me.
Do you think Tag will be home?
they’d ask as we got out of the car or walked up the brick path that led to my house.
Is he seeing anyone?

Anyone and everyone
, I’d say.
Take a number
.

Will Colleen be home? I want to ask her where she got that miniskirt she had on today
.

In junior high, I went steady twice, which didn’t involve much more than a few pause-laden phone calls, a couple of dances, and spin the bottle in somebody’s rec room while the parents were upstairs. I didn’t date much in high school, and when I did, it was usually one half of a double date.
You’re perfect for each other
, one of my friends would say, fixing me up with her boyfriend’s friend.

Of course this was never true, but by then it would be too late. I’d have to sit in the front seat and listen to some guy with knobby elbows and a wannabe mustache go on and on about himself while my friend and her boyfriend groped each other in the backseat.

I whiled away the time with crushes on movie stars and a moderately cute guy named Chad Gibson who, by virtue of his last name, was sentenced to four years sitting in front of me in homeroom. Freshman year we ignored each other. Sophomore year he turned around and asked to borrow a pen one day. The next day he gave it back.

Junior year he walked me home. We talked about books and movies and teachers we hated, and when I stopped to switch my shoulder bag to the other side, he reached for it and carried it the rest of the way.