Words and Their Meanings (6 page)

For the next two stoplights, I don't say a word, and when we near the Cowboy Grill, I flick my hand, indicating where he needs to turn, then cross my arms and push back into my seat.

“Did I say something wrong?” Mateo asks when he parks and I still don't open my door.

“No. Just something …
interesting.
”

He lets out a whistle.

“You are, whew. I don't even know. Tough.” He hops out and jogs to my door, opening it for me. “Or are you just afraid to get busted for bluffing about this being the world's largest banana split? Because I gotta say, I'm picturing a pretty wimpy, limp banana and double scoop of ice cream.”

Inside the restaurant, the lights are almost orange and hang from wagon wheels above all the booths. A waitress with dark black circles under her eyes and huge boobs bulging out of her uniform comes up and says, “what'llitbe,” like the entire question is one syllable and she's too tired to bother peering down to get our answer.

“Can you eat a whole one by yourself?” Mateo asks me, raising his eyebrows like a challenge.

“Only if you'd like me to explode. Gross. No.”

“We
'll have one banana split, please,” he says to the waitress, returning our menus. She gives him a kind smile. There's a quality in his tone; it's soft, slow, and I can tell she feels like she's been spoken to, not at, for the first time all night. She flushes a bit when he adds, “Thanks
so much, Darcy.” Her name is embroidered across one of her boobs. I automatically look at my pathetically under-developed chest, and feel heat rise in my face too.

I spend most of the five minutes we're waiting ripping
apart a cheap paper napkin. Silence has never been a good friend of mine. It makes my chest tight. Mateo asks me a few questions about school and how I ended up waitressing. (I explain my best friend and I want to hang out as much as possible during our pre-senior-year summer. Not a lie. Not a full lie, anyway.) I try to think of witty things to ask back, but it's been a year since I've tried to make small talk.

The banana split serves as a good icebreaker. Mateo falls to the side of the booth cracking up when it arrives: four bananas topped with a half gallon of ice cream, chocolate sauce, nuts, probably a whole can of Reddi-wip, and six cherries dotting the top.

“Holy Mother—”

“I told you.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Dig in. It gets pretty disgusting within seven minutes or so.”

We stuff ourselves to such a point I can't even look at my spoon, let alone pick it up for one more bite. I realize I don't have any cash on me. And I want to sink under the table.

“Um, I'm really sorry, but I just remembered I left my purse in my best friend Nat's car.”

I start laughing again when I say this, and it makes Mateo laugh too. I'm pretty sure my stomach might seize up any second. My giggle-related muscles are way out of shape.

“Wouldn't be a date if I let you pay, right?”

I'm caught off guard and say the first thing that comes to mind, which is needing a bathroom, while tripping over myself getting out of the booth. Instead of the restroom, though, I walk straight out of the restaurant and into the night air. I shiver and my flesh goes to goose bumps. Mateo comes out a few minutes later.

“Hey, sorry, I didn't mean to—”

“No, it's okay.” I wave like I'm waving away smoke, which makes him seem to remember he wants to light up.

I watch him suck in and blow out ten or so puffs before he's crushing the cigarette against the ground and walking it over to the outdoor ashtray.

“Why do you do that? I mean, nobody smokes anymore.”

“If nobody smoked, I wouldn't have these,” Mateo says, patting the pack of Kools in his pocket.

I wrinkle my nose.

“I sort of picked it up a few weeks ago,” he adds. “I don't know why. Must have a death wish. Ready to go home now?”

“Yeah,” I say out loud.
No. No. No
, I repeat in my head.

Everyone on my street is sleeping. All the cars are tucked into their garages. Houses are only shadows. A rabbit darts into the road, and Mateo slows down. It pauses, blinking in the headlights before diving back onto a lawn.

“This is me.”

The windows are dark, but I catch a faint glow from the kitchen island light. Mom used to leave it on when Joe was a senior and got to stay out until midnight.

Mateo moves the gear shift to park. He looks at the closed garage door, then down at his lap, then over to me.

“Thanks a lot,” I say.

I know I need to get out, but I just keep sitting here, watching him blink.

“Sure,” he says. “Would have taken you 'til tomorrow to walk home. Besides, it was nice, hanging out with you.”

Watching his lips fold into themselves, I don't want to want him.

I unbuckle my seat belt. Instead of pulling the car door open, I sit statue still. Coffin still. I need to get out of here. My eyes keep shifting toward him. Those lips.

“Well, good night,” I say, opening the door.

“Night,” he says, not putting the Jeep into reverse.

I count breaths. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Mateo clears his throat.

“Right, well, I gotta get home before my mom wonders if I got abducted by some vixen waitress.”

He flashes a dimple. His thumb grazes my cheek, traces one side of my jaw. I freeze. Except for my heart. It's echoing into my ears at a maddening pace.

“Night, Anna.”

And … nothing. He straightens up and shifts into reverse.

I scramble out, standing in the middle of the sidewalk leading up to my front door until every last trace of red taillight is gone. My skin thrums with a buzz I've read about, a buzz I've witnessed but never experienced. Rush. Heat. Ache.

I lie down on cracked concrete, fold my arms across my stomach, stiffen my muscles, open my eyes so wide the stars and moon blur with the black sky, watercolors of light and dark running together. I start counting seconds, then minutes, until I reach nineteen. Because here's a universal truth: You never feel more aware of what it means to be alive than when you're falling in love.

Or dying.

13

I
can't sleep. It's 3:45 a.m. and I've gone through every possible solution for insomnia: warm milk; counting sheep (only sixty-four wooly critters jumped a fence before I got too bored, but still); reading passages of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, one of those classics no one could have ever possibly enjoyed; coffin yoga to an old Cowboy Junkies record, with my eyes closed, twice. Still awake.

The moon casts a hazy light inside my room. I untangle from the covers and get up, throw on one of the sweatshirts my dad left behind, and go to the window. We haven't put the screens back on yet, probably because it's always been Dad's job. I didn't even notice until now. Guess we ha
ven't opened them much.

Before I can think about it, I grab my cell phone, yank up the window, and crawl out onto the roof. Last time I was up here was two Christmases ago. It had snowed, so the shingles were full of fluffy white flakes, and Joe and I bundled up and watched the sky. I mean, I was fifteen, so it isn't like I believed in flying reindeer. At least, I claimed I didn't believe. I didn't want to be teased about my secretly-not-meant-to-be-ironic Rudolph Christmas sweater.

Even though the roof is bone dry, I'm unsteady on my feet. So I sit down and look up. Then I crawl to the left, toward his window.

For a few minutes, I debate whether or not to text Nat. I start typing a couple times, then hit delete. I start writing, “I'm sitting on the roof outside Joe's room,” and hit delete again because she'd think I'm about to hurl myself off, even though I'm pretty sure the one-story overhang wouldn't be enough of a fall to kill me (plus I was only walking that night on the highway, walking with stardust beneath my feet). Texting might not be a great idea.

I stand up. Turn and face the blackened glass. Put both palms against it. And wait. It's not as if I expected a ghost to reach up from the other side and match his hands against mine, but I did maybe hope I'd imagine him there. I've read lots of books with people who see their dead friend or relative in a familiar spot. I know, fiction.

When nothing happens, I push up on the glass. The window cracks open. My hands fly off like I touched a hot stove. Then they go back again, palms against glass, pushing up until there is enough space for me to crawl through.

Joe's room is locked from the outside. There's a high little latch Mom had Gramps install one day after Bea hid for three hours by simply sitting on top of Joe's bed. I could reach up and unlatch it if I wanted to, but the day Gramps locked it was the last time anyone stepped foot in here.

The air still smells like Joe; it delivers an invisible punch in the gut. My eyes adjust to the familiar shapes of his room. His clothes hang in the half-open closet. A little pile of his laundry sits in a heap on the floor. His bed is made, but everything else is exactly as it was the day he went into the hospital.

I tiptoe over to his bookshelf, afraid if Mom hears movement in Joe's room and gets up to find the door still locked, she'll go right over the edge. His shelves are crammed with books that Dad wanted to donate to the local library and Mo
m insisted we keep to be divided between Bea and me someday. It's tricky to navigate without making noise. I want the biggest book on the shelf, his
Anthology of American Literature
, still dog-eared in a hundred places. When I free it, I flip through, tracing imprints of notes written in the margins.

Nineteen minutes go by. I count the seconds. I sit perfectly still until I say “sixty” under my breath for the nineteenth time. It's like I'm a cuckoo clock striking midnight. I stop counting and start ripping pages from his book. I tear slowly at first because I don't want to wake anyone up, but at some point I stop caring and I'm thrashing around like the book and I are in a fight to the death, and there's a confetti storm of paper floating around me.

When there's nothing left but two ragged covers, I curl up on the floor amid the mess.

I wake up to my phone ringing. It's still out on the roof. It takes me a second to realize where I am. The window is wide open. So is the bedroom door.

The ringing stops and then starts again. I get up and lean out to grab it.

“Hello?” I say, rubbing my eyes. Everything is still dry and fuzzy, so I can't see the number.

“Hey.”

Pause.

“Um … hey.”

“It's Mateo.”

“Right. Hi. Uh, how'd you get this number?”

“It's on the waitress board that goes to all the catering jobs—you know, in case one of you flakes and we need an immediate replacement.”

I'm pretty sure it only takes a second to recover, but in that time I've worked out (a) I am standing in a sea of shredded pages in my dead bruncle's room, (b) I am talking to Mateo, who just called me, which means (c) he took down my number before pulling over and splitting the world's biggest dessert and not kissing me. And this means (d) he might … wait, (e) I have no right to even be thinking like this or feeling a flutter of happy when I'm in Joe's room and Joe's gone and—

“Anna?”

“Ah, yeah. I'm here. So did you need something or did I forget some—”

“I just wondered what you are doing after work tonight.”

“I'm … I'm busy. Sorry.”

I hang up without saying goodbye.

Daily Verse:

I was always looking backward. It took me a long time to appreciate the present.

14

I
stand. I walk toward the hallway. I head down the stairs.

I do not prolong the inevitable.

Logical deduction: open door means Mom knows where I slept. Which means she knows about the shredded book mess. Which means she knows I'm a bigger disaster than ever. Deduction part two: I'll be packing my bags for Hell very, very soon.

Jazz plays in the kitchen. Gramps must be here. I slink into the room and await my verdict. Gramps glances up from his paper. It's
the
New York Times
, and the cover photo is of people screaming and running. It looks like a Hollywood movie set behind them, one where a bomb just blew up a fake coffee shop or something. Except, of course, the people in the picture aren't in a movie.

I wince a little, waiting for what comes next. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

But he gets up, tucks the paper under his arm, and walks past, slowing down long enough to kiss my forehead.

“Morning, sunshine,” he calls back.

I turn around like a girl in boot camp and follow him.

“That's all you have to say?” My eyes narrow. I don't like sneak attacks.

“What else would you like to hear?”

“Where's Mom?”

“Believe it or not, she's out back. Pulling weeds.”

This stops me dead. I scan our living room to make sure I didn't fall off the roof last night or get sucked into some parallel universe. Blue couch, worn spot on the left arm. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of books everybody has read and books nobody will ever read. Flat-screen TV, on without volume. Scratched wood floor. Fuzzy cream rug with a faint red stain in the corner from when Nat laughed so hard at Joe's suck-tastic charade-playing skills, Cranapple juice shot out her nose.

Yup. Same house as yesterday.

Mom's clients used to brag about her horticultural genius, like she's a fairy yard-mother or something. Dad joked a lot, before, about our own backyard “garden.” He always made air quotation marks when he called it that. He said Mom put in every perennial that was impossible to kill, like daisies, black-eyed Susans, oregano, and thirteen varieties of mint plants.

The problem? Everything requires some level of care. The mint plants got zero love this spring. A person could argue they're thriving (because those things spread like green wildfire). Except in reality they're one giant, tangled mess of suffocating roots.

Mom's bent over in the middle of the mint and oregano jungle when I step outside. She hears the sliding door open, and pulls her big brown sunglasses to the top of her head as she turns around.

She isn't wearing makeup, and the half-moons beneath her eyes are the color of charcoal.

“Can you go get me a pair of garden scissors from the garage?” she asks. “I think you'll find them behind the tin tubs of work gloves.”

I stare at her.

“Well, can you?” she repeats, bending down to pull a monster pricker weed.

I come back a few minutes later, scissors in hand, sharp part pointed down. When she takes them, I catch a glimpse of my arm. Yesterday's verse is still there, barely faded at all.

Yesterday's words are still there.

Coffin yoga. My arm. My morning. I spin around and reach for the door so I can run inside and up the steps and into my room and onto my bed and stretch out, eyes wide, trying not to breathe. But Mom grabs my other wrist. She holds on tight.

“Help me out here for a bit, please?” Her voice is unsteady but she smiles, and it almost feels real. I try to pull away. She doesn't let go
.

I'm really hot and then really congested and I need to get away but I don't want to go to Hell (at least not while alive). I stoop over to yank a bunch of weeds and mint shoots as tall as my knees.

We work like this, not talking, for a long time. We move from overgrown herbs to perennials to shrubs. Bea comes out, hands on her hips, grumbling about how Gramps went fishing and she's been hiding inside the couch forever and nobody even noticed she was gone.

My shirt clings to my back and my lips taste salty. Mom glances at her watch and hops off her knees, a huge pile of wilting weeds in her arms. She says she needs to get Buzzy to her doctor (read: therapy) appointment. I follow her inside. Wait while she jogs up the stairs, wait until her bedroom door closes and the steady thrum of the shower is going.

Then I slide back into my room. Settle into my coffin. I can't seem to get comfortable or hold my breath longer than fifteen seconds. Maybe I need to find my verse first.

The words pop up on my computer screen like a story from the other side:
I was always looking backward. It took me a long time to appreciate the present.

The ink is still wet when I creep into his room. Shredded pages are still everywhere, but there's also the white plastic tub we use for paper recycling. Gramps.

I pick up handfuls of words until the carpet is free of scraps. The hollowed hardcover is still on the floor. I push it into the hole of space between his copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Harry Potter
. That's when I see it.

The sharp angle and pointed tip of a paper crane's tail. It's smooshed against the back of the shelf, cream paper almost blending in with the cream paint of the wood. I have to pull
The Chamber of Secrets
out before I see the rest of the bird. Cranes are the first origami design Gramps teaches, because they're his favorite. He and Joe had a goal of making a thousand cranes every year, starting the year Joe went to college.

They were playing off some lucky marriage story, where a thousand paper cranes meant a life of happiness and love. There's a box of cranes sitting in the basement. Joe was still trying to finish his half when he got sick. Gramps tried to encourage him in the hospital, bringing in some of the five hundred he'd already finished. He lined them on the windowsill of the hospital room. A red one, a green one, three yellows, and a blue.

This crane's a little lopsided, made with regular paper. Inside has a bunch of scribbled lines, probably notes from one of Joe's classes. I open it up to see.

And then it's clear: this paper crane was folded up and tucked in the back of a bookshelf because the words on the page were not to be found or read by anyone else. I have to sit down. I have to read the first paragraph ten times before I can process what it is saying.

I wish you'd have picked up your phone the 100 times I tried it today. Or maybe I don't. Maybe I should stop trying to write this and just let you go on hating me. Because it's better if you do. Because then I can't tell you how I really think I feel. There are so many reasons that what's been happening is wrong, and we both know it. But it didn't feel wrong. It felt more like the most right thing ever. What are we supposed to do?

He cheated.

He was cheating.

He was with someone. With someone who wasn't
Sameera.

A part of his life was a lie. A secret. Kept from his best friend in the universe. Me. I blink to bring the words back into focus.

The next two paragraphs suck every bit of air from my lungs.

I told you it was a screwup. That we were stupid. That I don't—can't ever—truly feel that way toward you. I know it's the right thing to do, to make you
hate me. You wanted me to make a choice I wasn't ready to make. Sameera and I have been together for so long. I needed space to get my head around what was happening between us. The
re are so many other factors at play, and no way to know
if we'd work or if it would be worth everything
we'd lose. Except when I said I wished I
could take it all back, it wasn't because I regret it. You deserve more. That's the bad line every scumbag jock in the universe uses. I'm trying to explain how being with you—I'm aware it's wrong. But it doesn't stop me from wanting it. It's killing me not to drive right over to your house and crawl through your bedroom window.

Someday I hope you understand, how I never meant to hurt you. How this thing with us, it just hit like a truck. You know it did. No one would ever, ever believe that. Nothing will ever be the same, but we don't have to make things worse. We can't, even if I wish we could.

Joe's sloppy scrawl is unmistakable. So is his adherence to letter-writing etiquette, because the date is in the top right-hand corner: May 24. Twenty-one days before he died. Two days before he started to get sick. There's no name at the top.

He didn't give it to whomever it was meant for, obviously, but he saved it. Hid it. Hid all of it. I pull another book off the shelf, and another and another until there are books flipped open, books in crooked piles, books sagging sideways on their spines. Six shelves emptied onto the floor. No more cranes. No more hints. This is all he left behind.

“What are you doing?” Bea asks, leaning against the doorframe. She's sucking on a round lollipop and makes a puckering noise, pointing to the new mess.

I shake my head and hold up my hands in a silent plea to be left alone. Instead, Bea says “criss-cross applesauce” and plops down, blocking the doorway. The one time I want her to, she refuses to disappear.

I stuff the crane in my pocket. Pick up the books one by one. Hold their covers like wings, shaking each to make sure there are no more secrets tucked inside their pages. He was a liar. He was a cheater. He never told me.

I need to get out of here. Need to get anywhere else.

Stumbling out of his room, I get to mine and slam the door.

The words “He never told me. He never told me. He never told me” crash through my head and I need to do something, anything, to get it out. I want to scream. I want to break. I want to burn that crane and never, ever know it existed.

How could Joe—the person who shared everything with me, the guy who was so good and honest and true—also be a total douche bag? Maybe a friend wrote it. But then he wouldn't have folded it into a crane and saved it. I can't slow my brain down. It's like the only thing I have left of him, the picture of who he was, is suddenly splitting into a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

I can't get answers. It makes Joe feel more gone than ever. Because how do you hold on to someone you've lost, if maybe you didn't really know him, the real and true him, in the first place?

“I'm going for a run! See you later,” I call into the hallway. I don't run. Not even when chased. But my car is still in the shop and I need to leave fast before Mom catches a glimpse of me.

“Whoa!” She's standing at the top of the stairs. I turn, but bend over and act like I'm scooping up all my hair into a ponytail.

“You're doing what?” she asks. There is clear concern in her voice. I hear Bea whisper something behind her. She pauses and then says, “Gramps wanted to take you to lunch in about an hour.”

“I'll—I'll be back by then,” I stammer and open the front door. “I just … I want to run. Or jog, or fast walk or whatever.”

I don't wait for a response. My legs are burning before I get around the block and the back of my throat's on fire. Patti's words on my arm pump in and out of view. The phrase means something different, harsher now.