Then Everything Happens at Once, page 17
“So, what’s going on with that? Are you . . . is this a crush-type situation?” Lara asks. “Are you two dating?”
“I think we are somewhere between feeling each other out and whatever comes after that,” I say. “Maybe.”
It feels weird talking to Lara about it, not at all like what I was hoping it would feel like. I don’t feel superior. I still don’t even feel equal.
“Hang on,” Lara says. I can tell by her face that she’s working on choosing her words. “So you’re telling me that you’ve moved on to someone else, yet you’re still going to sit there and hate me for talking to Freddie?”
The look on her face brings heat to my cheeks.
“Do you realize Freddie basically stopped talking to me because of you and your over-the-top meltdown, and this whole time, you’re talking to someone else?
“I can’t believe this!” is the last thing I hear her say, then I cut the call.
Inside Bookworm, I feel a pang of guilt. Or maybe it’s shame. Shame that I got called out by Lara for something I hadn’t even considered. I had the upper hand, and I just gave her what she needed to climb back up her tower. Now I’m back to being the petty, dramatic one.
It’s nothing I’m not used to living with, so I push it all aside and veer right, toward the café.
There are definitely not as many people in here as there usually are for this time of day. The barista behind the counter is wearing latex-looking gloves, like at the restaurant in Toronto.
Alex is there, putting the finishing touches on the blackboard covered in colorful chalk calligraphy, announcing featured products. I watch as she pulls her phone out of her back pocket, frames the shot, and then spends a minute with her nose aimed at her phone screen, no doubt posting on the café’s IG account. The baristas cross back and forth behind her, sometimes throwing questions at her, which she answers in a way that makes it clear she’s in charge. A smile spreads on my lips.
What was I thinking? This is so much better than my hot and cold feelings for Freddie.
Alex is one of those people who is full of energy. I watch her bounce behind the counter, grabbing things, stocking things. At one point she hops right up on the counter to change a lightbulb, and afterward, she wipes up her footprints with spray and a large white cloth.
She sees me now.
The smile she gives makes my mouth want to crack open with glee, and if it did, a thousand pink butterflies would escape.
She waves me over.
“Sorry I’m a little later than I said I’d be,” I say.
“It’s okay. I’m just finishing up, then we can go.” She waves an arm over to the glass display of all the things I shouldn’t eat. “What would you like? My treat.”
“I’m actually not hungry,” I say. “Can I have a drink, though?”
“Absolutely. Anything you want, I’ll make it,” she says.
“Is it a thing now, that employees wear gloves?” I ask.
“I suggested it, after seeing what they were doing at Raunchy Chauncey’s. My boss thought it was a good idea,” Alex says. “So what do you feel like having?”
For a moment, I consider ordering tea. “I would like to try the Oreo drink.”
“All right. Let me whip that up for you.”
I wait by the other end of the counter for my free drink, enjoying the special feeling that comes from knowing someone who can offer me something on the house. The drink Alex hands me looks like it should be photographed for the product ad. The symmetry of perfect swirly mounds of whipped cream, crunchy cookie sprinkles, and chocolate drizzled over it all is striking.
“Wow,” I say. “This is going up on my Instagram in about seven seconds.”
“Tag the store!” she says. “All right—I’m going to grab my things. I’ll be back.”
I take a seat at my usual table, the one Lara and I always try to get when we come here. I take a pic of the drink, then I try and take a decent shot of myself taking the first sip. Some man a couple of tables away makes super-dry eye contact with me, making me feel like a total fool for posing with my beverage. But I do it anyway.
“Ready?” Alex says as she materializes next to me.
“Totally.”
“I’m kind of thinking of inviting you to my place,” she says.
She stares at me to gauge my reaction, eyes squinted with this playful, hopeful expression. When I nod my approval, she does this little victory fist pump.
Twenty-Eight
We walk through the lot, headed to Alex’s dad’s car. The whole time I walk next to her, there’s an internal battle between my overseeing judgy self and the me that wants to just be here, next to her, not worrying about anything else. The overseeing version of me keeps intruding, reminding me to suck it in, to jut my chin out so the one below it flattens out a bit, to ensure there’s a bit of swing in my hips and absolutely no waddling. I just can’t shut myself up.
We drive to the east side of Castlehill, to a subdivision of small town houses laid out in seemingly identical rows. I’ve never been friends with anyone who lives in this area. It feels like a whole different town.
“This is really nice,” I say. “It’s very . . . symmetrical.”
“It’s not bad,” Alex says as we walk up her driveway.
“How long have you lived here?”
“My whole life.”
I start worrying that I might sound out of breath, talking while walking, which is driving my focus right on my breathing, creating the very problem I’m trying to avoid.
Inside, Alex kicks off her shoes, so I step out of mine. The house is tidy and simple, with thin carpet that seems to have no color, like beige overkill. The walls are white, and the windows have basic plastic white blinds. It smells like fresh laundry, and it feels bright and airy.
“So your dad is away right now?” I ask.
“A couple of US flights. He’s a flight attendant,” she says. “I kind of wish he’d just come home.”
“I hope he’s safe.”
“He’s making sure to be extra careful,” Alex says.
“So, you’ve grown up with a dad who was always up in the air somewhere?”
Alex curls her index finger around mine to lead me through the hallway. I can’t help but look down at our hands. “Not really. He just started doing that about five years ago. Most of my life I guess my dad was in school and working shit jobs.”
“Oh.”
“My parents had me at seventeen, and it took my dad forever to finish high school and then be able to get through college with everything that happened with my mother.”
“Wow,” I say, which is when my eyes find photos in the living room to our right. There are school photos of Alex looking like a girly girl. There’s a man I take to be Alex’s father, and I can see where Alex gets her looks. “So, um, what exactly happened with your mother? Is it okay that I ask that?”
Alex nods. “She’s the kind of person who never should’ve had kids, although I’m glad she did, because, well, I’m here.” She smiles all goofy. “She made our lives hell for a while—although I don’t really remember it. My dad has basically been my dad and my mom.”
“My mom’s also my mom and my dad. I get it.”
Alex opens a door and leads me down the carpeted stairs. The basement has a couple of slivers of natural light from the thin windows on the back wall. Otherwise it’s dim yellow lighting from a few lamps she’s just turned on. Everything down here looks like it’s from a different decade, one I wasn’t alive in. The wooden furniture pieces are arranged around the massive avocado-colored velvet couch.
“Welcome to my happy place,” Alex says, waving an arm around.
“When you said you got all your great-uncle’s stuff, I pictured a ton of boxes of things piled high against a wall. Not an actual living room,” I say, then I point to this big dark-wood cabinet. “This is so cool! That’s your record player?”
“Yeah.” Alex lifts the flap on the top to reveal it, and she opens the cupboard below it to show off a thick row of records. “It’s the very definition of vintage. Totally unspoiled, right from the hands that purchased it all originally.”
“This is literally pure gold,” I say. I think the best part about it is how proud Alex seems of it all. You can tell just how special these possessions are to her by the way she touches them.
“Right?” She pats the velvet beast. “Give it a try. It’s the best thing your butt will ever experience. Trust me.”
That makes me laugh.
Alex says, “That sounded a little . . . wrong, I guess.”
I take a seat, realizing I can’t sit at the very back without my feet hanging off the ground. For a moment I wonder how my shirt looks right now, if it’s tucked in places it shouldn’t be, if the roll of fat underneath my boobs is sticking out farther than my boobs are. My purse goes on my knees, and all is instantly almost well.
“I’m gonna play you something,” Alex says.
She crouches at the cabinet, talking to herself as she flips through records. “This? No—maybe this. No—wait.”
Out of habit, I light up my phone screen to see who might’ve texted me. It’s like I forget that the only person whose texts I would truly be interested in getting right now is in front of me.
[Freddie] Hey. How are you?
How am I? I am . . . not interested.
“What do you think?” Alex asks, which is when I notice there’s music.
I stuff my phone deep into my purse, then ditch it on the floor and grab one of the square throw pillows to use as my fat shield instead. My eyes close as I try to make a show of taking in the music.
“Interesting. I like it,” I say. “What is it?”
“It’s Pat Benatar,” Alex says.
“I like the way the record sounds.”
“This was a pretty sweet system back in 1977,” Alex says. “My uncle said it was like, five hundred, which would be—I don’t know—twenty thousand dollars nowadays?”
She keeps making me smile, smiles that she returns every time. She sits cross-legged on the wide couch, facing me. We listen to the record for a bit, and I find myself really loving the crackly breaks between songs, like it’s part of the music. It’s definitely a lot smoother transition than just straight-up silence for a couple of seconds.
“She’s pretty good,” I say. “Is she still alive?”
Alex laughs. “Of course she’s still alive. She’s like sixty-something and she’s still touring and making music.”
A softer, slower song comes on and we listen. Alex mouths the words and closes her eyes.
“I feel like Rebecca would totally be into this Pat lady,” I say.
I relax into the couch, letting my head fall against the cushy high back.
“So I’ve been wanting to ask you about your sister.” There’s caution in Alex’s words. “You said she has special needs, but I wondered what that means. Is it okay that I ask?”
“Of course,” I say, so I start with the medical details, because what most people want to know is what’s “wrong” with her. I can tell Alex doesn’t mean it that way, but people are usually curious, and I get it. “She has severe cerebral palsy, which causes a bunch of different issues. She gets looked after the way a baby would, I guess, because she can’t talk or walk or even eat the way people typically would. Plus, she’s medically fragile, so when she gets sick, it’s always a huge deal. It’s never just a cold, you know? It’s pneumonia and dehydration and issues getting her to put on weight.”
“Sounds like a lot,” Alex says. “Can I ask, um, is she there? Like, does she interact at all?”
“Oh, she’s definitely there. Her moods are very obvious. So when she’s mad, you can tell. When she’s bored, you can tell. When she likes something, there’s no mistaking it. Same for stuff she doesn’t like.”
“So, you would totally be able to tell if she liked Pat Benatar, then.”
“One hundred percent. If she doesn’t like something, you get the dirtiest look ever or whining. If she likes something, then you get the massive smiles and the big waves.”
“That’s really cool.”
I pull out my phone again and open the media folder I have of my sister, full of photos and videos I’ve taken, and I hand it to Alex.
“You did not give her perfect spiral curls,” Alex says, zooming in.
“Of course I did! It was picture day at school!” I say. “It was such a pain, but her hair is so thick, and it looked really good.”
Alex scrolls through the photos and short videos.
“Do you ever wonder what she’s thinking?”
“All the time. And like, what do her dreams look like? What does she think about before she falls asleep?” I say. “I have no idea.”
Alex’s gaze finds mine. “I don’t know how to feel about that. It’s kind of sad.”
What’s sad is that my mother has made sure to tell me, since I was very little, that Rebecca probably wouldn’t be hanging around as long as other people’s siblings normally do. But I don’t tell Alex that.
“It’s just how it is,” I say, with a shrug.
“Kind of scary, with this virus stuff.”
“I try to be very careful with germs.”
This is the moment Alex picks to reach for my whole hand.
Next thing I know, she is leaning toward me.
“Is this okay?” she asks.
“Yes.”
My mind is almost quiet as her lips come closer to mine.
It’s not my first kiss, but that’s what it feels like. I close my eyes, and my chest moves up and down with slow, deep breaths. I decide that I could probably be kissed like this, by her, forever and it would be awesome. Except my projected self is there, ordering me to suck it in, to fix my shirt so it doesn’t cling too much, to extend my neck.
Alex’s hand comes up near my side, and I shift away from it.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
“I’m just . . .” I pull myself up, straightening against the back of the couch. “Can you maybe . . . avoid certain areas? I’m just—sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says. “I’ll avoid whatever you want. But you should know that nothing about you should be avoided.”
I give Alex a half smile, staring at her lips, at the silver in her cheeks. She’s so thin, and I just can’t comprehend the fact that a thin person like her would be okay feeling a body like mine. Does she understand that things are not just bigger on me, they’re also like, shaped differently?
She kisses me again, keeping her hands to herself. For a while, at least. But then they find themselves on me. I want to touch her, too, but my arms are frozen at my sides. The internal cringe is in and out as my focus shifts between the things that are happening and the way my mind wants to judge and interpret those things.
The chanting in my head gets too loud, and I push her away.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just . . . I’m not really used to this.”
She nods. “It’s okay. We can just hang out. We don’t have to do anything.”
For the next hour, we are together, but I am in my head trying to come up with a way to build a wall around that voice in my mind. Trying to recapture the feelings and confidence I felt with Freddie. Here I am with Alex, in a scenario of my dreams, and I can’t shut the hell up and just go with it.
Twenty-Nine
March break was going to be amazing, despite all this coronavirus stuff. It was going to be me and Alex hanging out, maybe getting over the weirdness of the other night and making up for it. But then someone died of the virus in Ontario, and now no one knows what’s going on. Things pile on quick over the next few days. My mother is constantly on the phone, untangling messes and coming up with solutions when some of her employees start calling in sick out of fear. The worker who was supposed to be here all week to look after Rebecca during March break canceled on Thursday and Friday, so Mom’s been home, making the occasional quick trip to her store when her best friend, Juliana, can come over to be there for Rebecca.
[Freddie] Did I do something?
[Freddie] Hey?
[Freddie] We can just forget the whole thing then.
[Freddie] Hello?
[Freddie] . . .
Freddie is in the background, sending exactly one text a day, but I don’t respond. I simply enjoy the fact that he’s trying to get to me, and I’m too busy with other things to give him my time.
I am busy constantly messaging with Alex.
[Alex] Can I ask u something?
[Baylee] Of course.
[Alex] Am I the first girl you’ve dated?
[Baylee] Yes.
[Alex] So this is like, super new to u.
All people are new to me, but I want her to know this less than I want her possibly thinking I’m newly discovering I might be attracted to girls. Better her think that than me having to awkwardly explain all the ways I suck.
[Baylee] It’s new, but it’s not like it’s freaking me out.
[Alex] R u sure?
It’s not touching other people that’s freaking me out—it’s other people touching me.
[Baylee] Yes. I swear.
I wish I wasn’t so awkward. I wish I could explain the reason I’m like this, the things that scare me, but it would make me look like some inexperienced newbie, like some self-conscious fat girl. How would any of this be attractive? How would Alex want to make out with someone like that? Telling the truth is for when you have nothing to lose.
Before I know it, it’s the following Sunday, exactly a week since I’ve seen her. A whole week, and life is all different. A state of emergency is declared, which sounds serious, but I don’t really know what that means. What happens after you declare that? Who comes running?
Mom prepared grilled cheese and tomato soup for us, and now we settle in front of the TV to watch the news, of course, because that’s all that’s allowed on the living room TV these days. We see numbers and statistics from other countries, and we hear scary stories about other places. While I eat, I google the coronavirus. There are articles claiming to predict what it will look like when it really hits this continent full force. It sounds super dramatic, and I don’t really understand how it can just spread like that, especially when you see it coming.
