Then Everything Happens at Once, page 25
They probably don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, all those people who are out. Those men, maybe they just drove over to get coffee—because that’s essential and totally legal—and they’re taking five minutes to talk to their friends, outside, far apart. Alex was doing just that the other day, running into Pen and Blake.
How can you tell who’s careless and who is actually a decent person doing something you wouldn’t decide to do, but that they still took time to consider? Something that isn’t as bad as what they could be doing, what other people are doing?
My phone buzzes with a text.
[Freddie] Where did you go?
[Baylee] Something bad happened.
He calls immediately.
“What happened?”
“The girl I was seeing—Alex,” I start. “She found out about you.”
“How? You told her?”
“Not intentionally.” Then I tell him about my forgotten video chat with Alex, the reason I disappeared on him. “I thought the video call was done. My mom had just walked into my room to talk to me. It turned into another lecture about my having snuck out to see you. She said pretty revealing things. Alex was there the whole time. The call hadn’t ended.”
“She heard it all?”
“Everything.”
“Oh,” he says. “So now what?”
“Now I’m on my way there.”
“What?”
“I’ve been released from custody, and my mom allowed me to go outside for very legal exercise,” I say. “So now I’m walking to her house.”
“Why?”
“She won’t talk to me.”
“So you’re going to just walk your ass over there. Then what?”
“There are things I should have said.”
“Were you her girlfriend or something?”
“No.” I check my phone for the tenth time, and still nothing from anyone. “Not officially. She was going to ask me, but it didn’t exactly happen.”
“What does that mean?”
“She texted me about it, then she told me she wanted to video-chat so she could ask me properly. It was sweet.”
“Oh. Then what happened?”
“Well, I didn’t answer. I went to see you instead.”
“Yikes.”
“It wasn’t technically official. We hadn’t even talked about being exclusive!”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me,” he says. “I’ve had plenty of conversations just like this. Usually when I’m leading someone on, though.”
“Stop it!”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“Yes, well, I can see where I might have deceived her. I’m not entirely stupid.”
“I know,” he says. “Where are you right now?”
“I’m at Church Corners,” I say, which is this intersection where there is a church on all four corners. “Almost halfway there.”
“You think she’s going to come out and talk to you?”
“Maybe?” I wait at a red light. “No. Probably not.”
“Well, then what the hell are you doing?”
A text comes through.
[Mom] Where are you, Baylee?
“Oh shit—my mom is looking for me. This was such a stupid idea!”
“What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know! I’ve lost my mind,” I say. “I have to go.”
It has become apparent that all I needed was some fresh air and to cool off. This plan was completely ridiculous. I am standing on the Baptist corner, ignoring the green signal to walk through the intersection to the Catholic corner.
[Baylee] I’m on my way back, Mom. Be there in like, five minutes.
I spin around on my heels and take off down the road, running.
Everything is fine for a couple of minutes, and I almost get into a rhythm. But then my left foot lands on a pebble or something, throwing me off-balance. I recover quickly, but my weight gets displaced from the front of my foot to the back. The heel gives out with a crack, and my body starts tipping over to the left.
I don’t fall, but my shoe is ruined.
What do I do now? Take them both off and continue running home? Limp home with the slow hobble of a right foot being four inches higher than the left?
All I wanted was to see Alex. I thought us being near each other would make things clearer. I thought I’d have some kind of realization.
I hobble, carrying the heel of the broken shoe in my hand.
I pass my old elementary school. A car swerves over a little too last minute, pulling into the entrance to the school lot. I turn to see Freddie in the driver’s seat.
Forty-Four
I get into the back seat, my mask on. Freddie is also wearing a mask.
“Are you sick?” I ask him.
“No. I just figured you’d feel better if I came like this,” he says, locking eyes with me through the rearview mirror. “What happened to your shoe?”
“It gave out,” I say, thankful he wasn’t close enough to witness me running or nearly wiping out on account of my shoe giving up trying to hold all of me up in the air. “I can’t believe you came to get me.”
“You told me where you were, and you’ll never make it back fast enough,” he says. “Plus, any excuse to go for a ride is a good one.”
“Your mom still lets you go out to drive?”
He nods. “She knows it’s the only way I’ll be able to deal with this staying-home-alone thing. If I get pulled over or questioned by the cops, I’m to tell them I’m on my way to the pharmacy to get Tylenol for Shaya.”
“That’s really cool of your mom.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty chill.”
He rides just above the speed limit, trying to make all the lights before they turn red. We are quiet for the five minutes it takes to get back to my house. I steal glances at him through the mirror, and sometimes our gazes meet. Maybe what I wanted was to see how I felt, being near Alex. It wouldn’t have had to break the distancing rule, but just enough to have her in front of me for real, to know—no, to feel whether or not I’d been a total idiot.
I must be really warped in the head, just totally damaged or something.
“I’ll drop you off here. That way your mom won’t see me,” he says, stopping near the walkway. “Text me later.”
“Thank you.”
I’m out and on the sidewalk seconds later, the broken heel still in my hands. This will make a pretty good lie for why I was gone so long, I think.
After making my way up the driveway in a quick hobble, I come to a halt when I see my mother standing on the front steps. Behind her, the front door is wide open, and my sister can be heard babbling happily with her music going.
“Where were you?” she asks, sounding curious more than anything.
“I went for a walk that way,” I say, pointing to the direction I came from. “I broke my heel, so it took forever to get back.”
“How was the walk?”
“It was good.”
“So you just went up the road there? How far did you get?”
“Just to the post office, then I turned around.”
“Walked all the way home, huh?”
“Well, limped,” I say, holding out my broken heel.
She nods, and when I’m about to walk past her, she holds a hand up. “Remember a few years ago, when you got that phone? Remember what the deal was for you getting a phone?”
“Yes,” I say. “To keep my room clean and help around the house.”
“And?”
“And, um—oh, put away my clean laundry right away,” I say, recalling the basket of folded clothes still sitting at the foot of my bed. “I forgot. I’ll do it right now.”
“And?”
She watches me. I think some more, but no other chores come to mind.
“The deal was that we’d install a tracking app,” she says. My heartbeat moves to my ears, and I blink too long. “Forgot about that, huh, Baylee?”
It never mattered, the tracking app. There was never a reason to lie about where I’d been, where I was going. I completely forgot about it.
“I saw you went all the way to Church Corners,” Mom says. “Then you were all of a sudden mighty fast at getting home.”
“I ran.”
“You ran?”
“That’s how I broke my heel.”
She shakes her head, and the blank expression morphs into something else. She breathes deeply a couple of times and closes her eyes.
“Baylee, I’m done. I’ve given up trying to understand your stupid reasoning for your inability to follow the rules,” my mother says, her tone even.
“I didn’t—”
“Did you think you and Freddie were invisible just now, parked in front of Peter’s house there?”
“This looks bad, but it wasn’t,” I say. “I had my mask! And he had one, too. I was—”
“You know what’s going on. You’ve already gotten in trouble for this. I just let you out of your room—not even an hour ago—and what did you go and do? You ran away to see Freddie.”
“No! That’s not how it happened,” I say.
“You were in the car with Freddie, Baylee! How are you going to try and justify this? You’re being reckless. You’ve snuck out of this house multiple times, and for what? For a boy?”
No use in telling her I snuck out for a girl, actually, and I came to my senses before messing up for real. Freddie was just decent, running over to rescue me, trying to help me avoid what’s happening right now.
“I know I’ve been lenient, letting you come and go as you please, but you should have been able to trust that if I’m suddenly telling you no, it’s for a good reason and I mean it.”
I open my mouth, ready to counter, but she holds a hand up again.
“Your stuff will be in the garage,” she says. “I don’t want you in this house anymore.”
“What?”
Oh my god. This isn’t right.
“I can’t take any more risk,” Mom says.
“Okay,” I say. “I get it.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t get it.”
“I can’t live in the garage, Mom.”
“Then go to Freddie’s. It’s where you keep trying to go, right?” She’s stone-faced. “Just go to Freddie’s, Baylee.”
“For how long? Should I wear a mask?”
“Do what you want,” she says. “Go!”
Mom turns around and heads inside, slamming the door behind her.
I can’t go inside my house.
I stare at my house, looking up and down, unable to comprehend this fact.
I can’t go home.
Forty-Five
About ten minutes later, the automatic garage door starts to rise. Mom’s already gone back inside by the time I get there. I’m too stunned to know what to feel, what my next move should be. This has got to be a joke. A temporary messed-up situation meant to get me to realize how terrible I’ve been.
The garage is this junk room that’s part forgotten sensory room for Rebecca and part garage-sale central. Half of it is a rectangle of fake grass with colorful lights strung from the ceiling, a rubber mat we use for my sister outside in the summer, and this old special custom seat she used to spend hours in before outgrowing it a few years ago. The other side of the garage is boxes of my grandfather’s things that my mother keeps around. There are old cobwebs everywhere, and the tiny window is grimy, barely letting any light in.
It’s cold out here and there’s nowhere clean to sit. The basement is cement floors and unfinished walls, but it would make more sense to put a sleeping bag down there than out here. She must just be trying to make a point. She’s probably about to open the door and send me to my room.
At the foot of the steps that lead to the house, there are a couple of large reusable Ikea bags my mom would usually keep for grocery shopping. Inside are some of my clothes, makeup, shower products, different pairs of shoes, my laptop, schoolbooks. Everything is just thrown into the bags, no care for any of the items. I open my favorite Jimmy J eye shadow palette, the one Lara gave me last summer. A couple of the colors are cracked and chunks are displaced, contaminating the other shades.
This is where the urge to cry comes, but I swallow it down.
I switch into different heels, leaving my broken shoes on the garage floor. I drag the bags down the sidewalk, through the walkway.
When I get to Freddie’s, he’s pulling the garage door open, head gazing around, already looking for me. I stand at the bottom of his driveway, a bag looped over each arm.
“I heard your shoes,” he says.
“It could’ve been anyone.”
“I know the way your walk sounds,” Freddie says, then he seems to notice the bags. “What happened?”
“I got kicked out.”
He waves a hand toward the garage, inviting me in. I sit on my usual spot of the couch, leaving my mask on.
“I think you’re safe to take that off,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“Well, you’ve been quarantined in your room alone, and I’m the last person you were around,” he says. “It’s not like you’re going to get the rona over social media.”
“That’s . . . logical,” I say, pulling my mask off and enjoying the feel of air on my face.
In the garage, Freddie and I are quiet for a while. I am convinced this isn’t a real thing that is happening. This is my mom being next-level upset, next-level mad, but once she cools off, I’ll be able to explain that while this little escapade might’ve seemed unforgivable, it didn’t happen the way she thinks. It wasn’t like I was throwing myself at the coronavirus. My plan included a little consideration for safety.
Freddie reads from a stack of pages, a printed version of his script, every once in a while jotting things down in red ink. I scroll through my phone, expecting something to come through from my mom, maybe even from Alex.
“It’s going to work out, Bay.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugs. “It has no choice but to.”
From where I sit on the corner of the couch, I can see down Freddie’s street. Sounds call my attention, and I watch two people coming on the sidewalk, walking close. They look a little older than me. If they’re not from the same household, then they’re definitely using the I-just-happened-to-run-into-my-friend-while-exercising excuse to be out together. I guess it looks bad, unless you know exactly what’s going on, what the specific circumstances are that led them to make that choice—it looks like not caring.
Mrs. Morales opens the door to peek into the garage. “Baylee, why don’t you come in for a minute? I want to chat with you.”
I lock eyes with Freddie before following his mother inside.
Forty-Six
Inside Freddie’s house, I go straight for the bathroom and wash my hands. Mrs. Morales is in the living room. Shaya is on the floor, pulling plastic food out of a mesh bag.
“Have a seat,” Mrs. Morales says.
“Oh, my mask,” I say, and when Shaya spots me, she comes running over. “I forgot it in the garage. Should we all be wearing masks right now?”
“They’re saying masks are for those who have symptoms,” she says. “Are you coughing or sneezing?”
“No.”
“Neither are we. I think we’re fine,” she says. “But I think it’s really responsible that you’re thinking about that.”
“With my sister, it’s not like wearing masks is totally new,” I say, taking Shaya’s hand and letting her lead me to her pile of food.
“A corn,” she says, so I look for it and hand it to her. “Good job, Bayee!”
“Are you okay?” Mrs. Morales asks.
I shrug. “My mom’s just very mad.”
“I heard you’ve been having some issues at home.”
“Did Freddie tell you that?”
“He told me a little,” she says. “But your mother told me a lot.”
“When did you talk to her?”
“I talk to her here and there. I know what’s going on,” she says. “These are weird times, and no one knows what’s going to happen. It’s scary for everyone, but imagine what it’s like for your mother, trying to protect your sister.”
“I know that. I wasn’t trying to make my sister sick,” I say, picking the next food item Shaya asks for. “I would never do that. I’m always careful. But I don’t think my mom’s being fair.”
“How so?” When I shrug, Mrs. Morales nods. “Really, I want to know what you think.”
“Well, she talks about risk, and I just don’t think out of all the risk I see at my house, being around Freddie is the worst one,” I say. “But my mom acts like it’s the only risk. Like I’m the only one breaking the rules. And I can’t even have a conversation about it to try and make it make sense. My mom is the first person to argue when things don’t make sense—I’ve heard her argue with the nursing agency people enough times about their rules not being fair—but I’m supposed to just be quiet when it’s happening to me.”
“I don’t think you’re going to win that argument, Baylee,” Mrs. Morales says. “We have to do what we’re told, even though there are probably a hundred examples of it not making sense, of it being totally unrealistic. Ask me how I’m supposed to work from home and watch my toddler alone, yet I’m still supposed to pay the day care right now—what is that? I still have to pay them fourteen hundred a month so that I can watch my own kid at home, and I gotta work to be able to be the day care. That’s a dumb rule that isn’t fair, but there’s so much going on right now, and things are changing so fast, and we just can’t fight every little thing at the same time and expect it to magically be fixed right away. But it’s not fair—you’re right.”
“I should’ve been staying away from Freddie,” I say. “But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.”
Partly because I felt I made the decision carefully. Partly because I just wanted to see him more than I wanted to do what I was told without question. And, yes—there’s a small part of me that just was going to do it no matter what. I can’t just accept the fact that what happens to me, what matters to me, isn’t important. It’s supposed to just be forgotten. It’s not fair.
