Weird Girl and What's His Name (15 page)

“Hey Walter, are—are you religious?” I asked him all of a sudden. I don't know why I cared.

“Religious?” Walter barked a laugh. “What brought that on?”

“I dunno. Sorry, forget I asked.”

“I'm not a regular church attendee, if that's what you mean. Are you?”

“Me? No. Not at all.”

“But you get it, don't you?” He looked at me with a sort of Gandalf-like twinkle in his eye.

“Get what?”

“Being up here. Feels like you're getting the point, don't it?” Walter crossed one hand over the other, ruminating. “You can spend your day running from here to there, busying yourself with all these things you're convinced are so important. It's easy to lose your sense of being alive in it. Easy to forget that you're still part of all this . . . all this life. You're just another animal, and you're right here in it with the bugs and birds and trees and mountains, on this little rock spinning around the sun. Doesn't seem possible to forget that, but somehow we all do.” Walter scratched his long, sunburned nose. “The first time I ever came up to these mountains, when I was just a kid, I had this crazy idea that this is where God lives. But on the other hand,” he squinted out at the epic, molten-lava sunset, a half-smile on his face. “Maybe it's not all that crazy.”

“Maybe you should bring my mom up here sometime,” I said. “If you can pry her off the BlackBerry.”

“Oh, your mom's seen the sights.” Walter smiled to himself. “Sometimes you gotta be patient with her. She's got a lot on her plate. But once you get to know her better, you'll see. She's amazing, Lula. Sometimes I wonder why she even gives raggedy ol' me the time of day. I just thank God that she—” Walter stopped. “I suppose that's your answer, right there. You wanna know if I'm religious? I sure haven't made a dent in the pew, but boy do I thank God. For every morning I get to wake up and my coffee's hot and your mom's right there next to me at the breakfast table. I thank God I get to work this ranch for a living instead of having to put on a necktie and commute to some office. I get to smell sage and piñon instead of traffic exhaust. Somebody or something made a beautiful place in this ugly world, and saw fit to put me right in the middle of it. Now, whether there's some old fella with a beard floating on a cloud up there or just some . . .” Walter waved his hand, “cosmic energy or whatnot, I got no idea. But whatever God is, wherever He lives, I thank Him because, I tell you what, I can look back on ever minute of it, good and bad, and I can tell you that I've had one hell of a life.” Walter laughed. “Pardon my French.”

I felt the horse shift his weight beneath me. I took a deep breath. Smelled the prickly-sweet pine smell and the sharp, musky sage. Smelled horse hair and leather. My own sweat.
Thank God for this. Thank God.
But I didn't know who or what I was thanking. Did anybody know? Janet was Jewish, or at least she had been once. Leo was raised Lutheran, but he'd given up on religion after Vietnam, and Janet had followed his lead. Most of the kids at school, except me and Rory, went to the big First Baptist church in town, or their basketball rivals over at First Methodist. I went to the Baptist version with Jenny once, but I didn't get it. A bunch of guys in shiny suits giving me earnest, toothy smiles like an army of Bill Clintons, shaking my hand with both of theirs and saying emphatically “We're just so
glad
you're here. God bless you, we just
love
you.” Who was this “we,” I asked Jenny skeptically, and why do they love me when they don't even know who I am?

But I wanted to feel like Walter did. Like there was something or somebody in charge, watching over us, who had put me here for a reason. When I was all old and crusty like Walter, I wanted to look back and say I had one hell of a life. Pardon my French.

“I reckon that all sounds pretty corny, huh?” Walter chuckled. “Y'ask an old man about religion, you'll get an answer, one way or the other. Come on.” He slapped the slack reins against his horse. “We better get back home before it gets too dark.”

“Okay. How do I . . . um . . .” My horse was just sitting there. “Where's reverse?”

“Gingerbread!” Walter whistled sharply and clicked his tongue. Gingerbread craned his neck and, slowly, turned and followed.

“You're looking pretty good up there,” Walter remarked.

“You think so?” I leaned back in the saddle as we began our descent.

“One ride and you're already a pro,” he called back over his shoulder.

“Beats driving a car, that's for sure.” Gingerbread's hooves made dry claps along the rocks.

“Not much of a driver, huh?”

“I don't know how,” I confessed.

“You don't know how to drive a car?” Walter was mildly incredulous. “Shoot, time I was fifteen, I was driving horse trailers all over California.”

“Janet and Leo were too nervous to teach me on the Cadillac. I signed up for Driver's Ed at school last fall, but there was only one period where you could take it, and it was the same time as Advanced English.”

“Maybe your mother could teach you. She's pretty good behind the wheel.”

“Sounds like a bonding experience to me.”

nine

T
HE
F
RIDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL GAME WAS
the absolute last place on earth I expected to find Samantha Lidell. I'd successfully avoided her ever since the Humiliating Incident last spring. And now there she was, smoking discreetly behind the Booster Club tent.

“Tallulah Monroe.” She said my name. “Didn't expect to find you here. Long time no see.”

“Likewise,” I muttered, having a hard time getting the words out.

“I heard you got your GED. How is college life treating you?”

“I um. It's okay.”
I um. It's okay. Dum de dum dum.
Listen to me. I was like some monosyllabic mouthbreather. Did she have to be so cool? Just . . . standing there like that? “So what are you doing here?” I blurted out. Not very cool at all.

“I'm rooting for the home team.” She displayed her Fighting Eagles sweatshirt. “I'm Rory's Senior Year Advisor. He's been having a bit of a rough go lately, so I'm here for him.”

“Well. That's nice of you.”

“His mother threw him out of the house. You knew that, didn't you?” She gave me the patented Mrs. Lidell Withering Stare, so lethal it's banned in twelve states. I wanted to crawl under the bleachers and die. “He—” Her mouth was moving, but I couldn't hear anything over the marching band.

“He what?”

“You heard me.” She exhaled smoke.

“No, actually, I didn't.” The band was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” if you can believe it. The Nirvana song. Since when did it have a trumpet solo? “What did you say?”

“He came out to his mother. Not on purpose. It happened during the summer, right before you came back. She caught him out on a date with a boy from UNC. And she told him not to come home.”

“Oh my God.” I felt terrible. And Sam was staring at me as if I were the one who'd thrown the kid out. “Is he all right? Does he have a place to stay?”

“He's not out on the street,” she said. “Not anymore. I don't know if I should tell you anything else.”

“What? I mean, I heard you this time—why not?”

“You know why not. Because of everything he went through. Rory was barely holding it together when you left. And you just went blithely along on your trip, never thinking once about who you hurt, or what it cost. You couldn't leave a note, or pick up the phone just once? Return an email?”

“I already had this lecture from my grandparents, thanks,” I muttered, turning to leave. “I messed up. Well aware. Thank you.”

“No, Lula. I don't think you are aware. We all care about you.” She grabbed my arm. I stopped. “You can't just make people feel . . . feel so much concern for you, then act like it's nothing when they get upset.”

“I didn't think I could make you feel anything for me,” I said, surprised. She was concerned? For me? “Let alone feel upset.”

“Just because I didn't have feelings for you like you wanted doesn't mean I don't have feelings at all.” For a second there, our eyes locked. Finally, she flicked her cigarette butt to the ground and stomped it. Shrugged toward the field. “Why don't you go down there and find Rory? It's halftime.”

O
KAY, SO, YOU
'
RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHAT
exactly went down between me and Sam—Mrs. Lidell, to you—and why that whole exchange was so awkward and fraught with horribleness. And you're probably wondering why I was hiding out in the girls' bathroom instead of hanging out by the sidelines trying to catch Rory's eye. The answer to the second one is that people were staring at me like I've got antennae coming out of my head. Seriously, it was like they'd never seen somebody who ran away from home before. I couldn't believe I actually wished it was like it used to be, when they all just ignored me and acted like I was invisible. Now it was all staring and “Hey, Lula, glad you're back” from these assholes who used to call me Weird Girl when they thought I was out of earshot. You jerks aren't glad I'm back. You could care less. If you knew what kind of tremendous screwup I truly am, you'd wish I'd stayed gone forever.

And on that note, let's climb into the wayback machine, and I'll tell you exactly what went down between me and Sam.

Not that I'm jumping up and down to revisit last spring. The end of eleventh grade. What a shitty time. But maybe if I tell you where I was, then you'll understand where I am. Which is in the third stall down on the left. Trying not to cry.

Samantha Lidell singlehandedly kept eleventh grade from totally sucking. She was the coolest teacher Rory and I ever had. Maybe we were inclined to like her just because she shared a first name with Agent Mulder's long-lost sister. Maybe it was because she was younger than our other teachers, or maybe it was because she had lived in Paris. Or maybe she was just naturally cool. Like the time I ran into her in the parking lot after school and asked her to bum a smoke. I don't know why I did it—I hate cigarettes. But Sam Lidell even made smoking seem awesome.

“I don't think you'd like these,” she said, not even shocked that I asked. “They're strong. Gitanes.”

“Gitanes?”

“They're French.”

“Why do you smoke French cigarettes?” I asked.

“Because my friends in France send them to me,” she said, exhaling, considering the cigarette between her fingers. “And because they make me feel like Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

“Who's Jean-Paul Belmondo?” I asked.

“Look it up,” she said, giving me her usual half-smile. Mrs. Lidell was always dropping little hints, saying “Oh, you know, it's just like so-and-so,” then telling us to look it up when we asked who or what so-and-so was. And of course Rory and I always did. It usually turned out that she was talking about some foreign movie or an old band. Sam would—huh, that's funny. I just realized that when I thought of her in school, as a teacher, I always thought of her as Mrs. Lidell. But when I thought about her any other time, I just thought of her as Sam.

And I did think of her. Outside of school. You might have noticed my tendency to go a little overboard on the research. I admit it: when I'm into something, whether it's a movie or a TV show or my own mother's whereabouts, I go whole-hog. I want every detail I can find. Well, last year, Samantha Lidell was one of my prime interests. Some of the research, like figuring out who her name-drops were, I did with Rory. But some of the research, like looking up her home address, I did by myself.

I don't know why I did it, or why I didn't want to tell Rory. I guess I knew I was crossing a line, somehow. I looked up her address and then, one afternoon, I rode my bike past her house. I just wanted to know where somebody like her lived. I mean, I couldn't even believe she lived in our
town,
let alone right there in a regular old split-level on Loblolly Court. It seems kinda crazy and stalker-ish, I know. But I didn't plan on doing anything else with that information besides my one brief bike-by. It's not like I was going to . . . I dunno, show up at her house in the middle of the night. Completely uninvited and unannounced.

I blame Rory.

Okay, I don't
really
blame Rory. I take full responsibility for all of my insane, foolhardy behavior. But maybe what happened between me and Sam would never have happened if Rory had trusted me. If he'd just been honest with me from the start.

Actually, he was honest, in the beginning. I mean, at least he told me he was gay. He was so upset when he first came out to me, back in tenth grade. So afraid that I'd stop being his friend. Bullshit, I'd said. We're best friends no matter what. So what if he liked boys? So did I; it was one more thing we had in common. It was a relief to both of us, at first. He could be himself and we could still be friends. We could crush on David Duchovny together. No big deal! But then things got weird. As they often do.

At first, I felt like, theoretically, sure, I could understand how a person could be gay. It was probably easier being with someone of the same gender, right? Like, sexually and stuff, you'd know how their body worked. And you could share clothes! Thrifty and fun, the whole gay experience. But as far as actually feeling attracted to other girls, I never looked at, like, Mandy Coleman coming down the hall in her cheerleading outfit and felt compelled to yell,
Whoa, watch your backs, everybody, hot babe alert!
like that paragon of chivalry Mike Landy would.

To be honest, most of the girls at Hawthorne High seemed terminally uninteresting, obsessed with boyfriends and manicures and Youth Group ski trips. (Not that the boys were that much better, but, even though I wasn't into jocks, for instance, I could totally see how Sexy Seth Brock got that nickname.) But maybe I was never able to fit in with them because I'd never been very good at being a typical girl, myself. When I was little, Janet still had a job working as a receptionist in a dermatologist's office. Leo was the one who ended up looking after me, and he didn't have any idea how to relate. He let me help him paint his model airplanes and watch
M*A*S*H
reruns and movies like
The Magnificent Seven.
By the time I started school, I was completely inept at relating to girls, too. Girls liked shopping for clothes and drawing pictures of horses. I could quote freely from Lee Marvin movies and hold my own in a Phil Mickelson-versus-Tiger Woods debate. You'd think I would've fit in with the more tomboyish girls, but I was terrible at both soccer and lacrosse. Aside from Tracy at Drama Camp and Jenny Walsh, who was quiet and shy and became my friend because she needed protection from the older girls who smoked under the bleachers after gym class, I was lousy at making female friends.

Fast-forward to eleventh grade. Enter Samantha Lidell. She smoked French cigarettes and didn't have a manicure. She kept a picture of Bob Dylan tacked to her office door and she once got in trouble for saying “bullshit” in class. When she was fifteen, her mom bailed on her just like mine did. I found myself thinking about her a lot. Not, you know, sexually or anything. But I'd see something on TV or read something, and get this urge to call her on the phone and ask her what she thought of it. I wanted to tell her things. I kept signing up for tutorials with her so I actually could tell her things. It was kind of freaking me out, the amount of time I spent thinking about her. Was this, like, a gay thing, or was it just that she was the coolest person I had ever met? I tried to suss out how much obsessing over her was too much, and I thought Rory could help, even though I felt too weird about the whole thing to just come right out and say it. I asked him one time, how did he know for sure he was gay, before he even slept with a guy? Was there some kind of tipping point, a moment he knew for certain one way or another?

“I just knew,” he shrugged.

“Yeah, but . . . I mean,
how
did you know? What happens now if you finally do it with a guy, and then you're like, ‘You know what? I kind of prefer the other.'”

“Look, you're still a virgin, right?”

“Thanks for bringing it up.”

“Sorry. What I mean is, you don't have to have sex to know what you want. Like when we watch
Lord of the Rings.
You might be a virgin, but you know you're attracted to men because the person that catches your eye is Viggo Mortensen and not Liv Tyler or Cate Blanchett.”

“And, let me guess, the person who caught your eye was Orlando Bloom, and that made you suspect something was up?”

“Well, Hugo Weaving, but, essentially, yeah, that was how I figured it out.”

“You figured out you were gay from watching
Lord of the Rings.
Won't Peter Jackson be surprised.”

“It wasn't just that one movie. It's everything. It's not just thinking some man is attractive. I feel like . . . it's just who I am, you know?” Rory shrugged. “I've been different my whole life, and I didn't know why. It wasn't just the kind of books I read or the characters I identified with, or the movies I watched or the fact that I sucked at soccer. It was something deep down inside . . . I've known it was there for a long time. But I'm just now able to say it. Able to say it to you, at least.”

Hm, okay. The next time we watched
Lord of the Rings
, I tried checking out Arwen and Galadriel. . . . Nope. Nothing. I couldn't really picture myself taking an elf out to the Regal 7 on a Friday night. Eowyn was pretty badass, but she was no Aragorn. Great. That was
no
help. I tried looking at other girls in movies and on TV, but ultimately, no matter how badass they were, no fictional character was as cool as Sam Lidell in real life.

I tried again with Rory, when we were over at his house, dyeing my hair. I asked him what would happen if he met someone he really liked, but they just happened to be the wrong gender. I thought he could tell me. If I was or I wasn't. Gay, I mean. Or maybe I really was just trying to make him jealous all along.

And this is where it gets really wacko. Because even while I was obsessing over Sam Lidell, Rory was the one I thought was my soul mate. What sucks is, I didn't even realize I had feelings for him until he came out. There I was, trying to be the Supportive Female Buddy, and all the while, my mind had started wandering into restricted areas. Wondering what it would be like to hold him. Kiss him. And various other activities. I even dyed my hair red in an attempt to look more like Gillian Anderson, aka Special Agent Dana Scully, who, according to Rory, was the Greatest Actress Ever to Grace Stage or Screen. I figured, you know. Just in case he might be leaving the heterosexual window open for redheaded girls.

But all this muddle didn't reach Maximum Awkwardness until the spring of our junior year. Rory started spending more and more time at his job at Andy's Books and Coffee. At first, I thought it was good for him. The guy, Andy, took him on all these trips, book-buying and even camping and hiking and stuff. Rory needed a guy like that in his life. A stable, sober adult. A father figure. But Rory was spending more and more time away, and it wasn't all work-related. He kept making excuses why he couldn't come over, or why he had to leave early. He was working out all the time, trying to lose weight, and suddenly he decided to try out for the football team, of all things. Sweet, sensitive Rory, on the
football
team. How many linebackers do you know who wax rhapsodic about Shelley and Keats?