You, Maybe, page 13
“What’s wrong?” I asked Michael. “What happened? What are you doing here?”
“It’s your mom, Josie.”
I kept my grip on his olive-green sleeves and didn’t move.
“She was in a car accident.”
I felt my knees buckling under me.
“She’s in the hospital. She’s pretty banged up, couple of broken ribs and a black eye, your father said, but she’s okay.”
Emelina dusted the snow off a chair. “Sit down.”
I did. I looked up to thank her and saw Carson, beside her. Michael knelt in front of me. “She wants to see you,” Michael said. “Your father called me. He gave me the address. I said I’d bring you right away.”
“Michael.”
He took my hands. “She’ll be fine, Josie. I promise. Come.” He stood up and pulled me. I stood up too but didn’t take a step. “Come on, Josie.”
I looked at Carson. “You want me to go.”
“Of course,” he said, in his soft soothing voice. “Your mother was in an accident, Josie. What are you gonna do? Stay here and bumper ski with us? Go!”
“You want me to go so you can be with her.” I pointed at Emelina. By now most of the people were on the back deck, but I didn’t care. “You want me out of the way so you can get back together with Emelina.” I turned to Daniel, who was leaning against the back door. “You know that’s what’s happening here, don’t you, sophomore?”
“No,” he said. “I have no idea what’s happening here. I’m having a surreal day.”
“Don’t you care that your girlfriend loves another guy?”
Daniel shrugged. “High school drama.”
“Josie,” Michael said.
“I’m not going,” I told him.
“You have to,” Michael said. “Josie, come on.”
I broke away from him and went to Carson, threw my arms around him. “Come with me,” I begged. “Please. Carson, I love you. You love me, don’t you? You did. You almost did. You were falling in love with me, remember?”
Somebody stop me, I thought. I am that girl, that horrible girl screaming But I love you Carson! But even recognizing that I had become my own worst nightmare, and knowing then the complete humiliating futility of pleading, begging, screaming in front of everybody, I couldn’t stop. “Frankie!” I turned on him ferociously and saw him flinch. “Didn’t Carson say he was falling in love with me?”
Frankie shrugged his bony shoulders.
“He did! He told you. Carson,” I was crying, yelling, smiling, everything at the same time. “Come with me. I need you to be there with me. It’s not over between us, I swear it’s not. Don’t give up on us. I’m sorry for, for everything. Okay? Please. I love you! Don’t you love me even a little?” I looked deep into his eyes, into his witch eye, hoping for some magic.
Carson pushed me softly away. “Go.”
Michael picked up my hand. “Come. It snowed seven inches last night.” He shot a nasty look at Emelina, then leaned closer to me. “The roads are bad. It’ll take three hours, at least. Let’s grab your stuff and get out of here.”
“Carson,” I said.
“Go,” Carson said. “The guy drove up in a blizzard to get you, and your mother is in the hospital. What’s wrong with you?”
“You, maybe,” I said.
I let Michael lead me toward the back door.
Twenty-six
I SLEPT THE whole way home. I didn’t think I’d be able to with all that was going on but I think I was asleep before we got to the highway. Michael woke me in the hospital parking lot. I blinked my eyes, looking at him, gradually remembering what had happened. “Hey,” I said. “You drove.”
He half-smiled. “I turned sixteen two weeks ago.”
“I remember,” I said. “I can’t believe you drove up to get me in a snowstorm. Your mother let you?”
“She wasn’t pleased.”
“I bet.” I could just picture that scene. “Why would you do such a stupid thing?”
“Tell you later.” He unbuckled me. “Let’s go in.”
“Michael . . .”
“Later,” he said.
We zipped through the parking lot and into the lobby. I hate hospitals so much; they are way too full of sick and damaged people. We went around and around, down a long corridor, up an elevator, down another long hall, stopped at a nurse’s station. Michael talked to them. I stared at my feet.
“Come on,” he said, and I followed him to a door. He knocked and we went in.
My father jumped up, off the edge of the bed. He threw his arms around me. “Josie,” he said, and then turned to Michael. “Thank you so much, Michael.”
Michael shook his head. “I’ll wait outside, to bring Josie home.”
“Right, okay,” Dad told him. “Good idea.”
“Mom?”
She looked weird, a little dazed, banged up, and pasty. It was scary.
“You okay?”
“You look so worried, Josie,” she said, and started to laugh, but stopped herself, grabbing her side. “Oh, don’t make me laugh, that’s the worst. Don’t frown like that, Josie, or you’ll be a wrinkled prune by the time you’re forty.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “If you’re still criticizing me, you must not be that close to death.”
“Death?” She started to laugh again but caught herself. “You are the most operatic person. I had a little accident. I’m fine. You should see the other guy.”
“You hit somebody?” I hadn’t even thought of that. “Mom, you hit somebody? How is he? Were you talking on your cell phone?”
“No,” she said. “And yes. The guy I hit was twenty feet tall and made of oak, or walnut, or something.”
“You hit a tree?”
“It was the tree’s fault,” she said.
I smiled, a little. She smiled back.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re back already from your fabulous weekend?”
“It wasn’t very fabulous,” I admitted.
“Did you eat cheese?”
“No,” I said. “Mom, I am more than a digestive tract.”
“What happened to your hair?”
I turned to my father. “I gotta go,” I said. “Are you staying here or going home?”
“Go,” my mother said. “Come back in the morning and spring me from here.”
“They have to see if the bleeding stopped,” my father said to her, and then said softly to me, “She had a lot of internal bleeding.”
I took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to do. It was habit to be mad at her, and she just pushes all my buttons, even from a hospital bed. Even with internal bleeding. Why couldn’t she be like Michael’s mother for once and tell me what a fine young woman I was becoming? Maybe if she did, even once, even if it were a lie, maybe I’d have a better chance at becoming a fine young woman.
Her eyes were closed.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked my father. “Is she okay? Did she just pass out? Maybe we should call a nurse.”
“She’s had quite a bit of morphine,” he whispered. “She’ll be fine, the doctors think. She was lucky.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Gently he brushed the hair off her forehead. I watched him, realizing it had been a long time since I’d seen them touch. “We were lucky.”
“Do you like stilettos?” I asked him.
“What?” He was fussing with my mother’s covers. “Oh, the high heels? They’re awful. The worst thing for feet, absolutely dreadful.”
“Mom said one time . . . something. Nothing.”
He looked at me, finally, sheepishly. “That I liked them? Yes, well. Your mother has amazing legs, and they do look good in those awful shoes.” He kissed her forehead. I looked away. If I were in a hospital bed, who would kiss me as I slept? Not Carson, probably. Maybe he would. Maybe he would realize he loved me, if I were in a hospital bed. But maybe not.
I would want him to be there.
“Why don’t you head home,” my father suggested. “I’ll stay here again tonight, but I’ll call you later. Or you can call here. Michael has the number. He’s a good person, Michael.”
“Unlike me,” I muttered.
“No,” Dad said. “Like you.”
“That’s not what Mom thinks,” I said, and turned toward the door.
My father grabbed me by the jacket. “Don’t. You. Dare. Don’t you dare criticize her.”
“I wasn’t,” I stuttered. “She always criticizes me. Why don’t you ever yell at her?”
He shook his head. “Get out of here. Go.” He shoved me toward the door. I slammed through it.
“Let’s go,” I said to Michael.
“You okay?”
I didn’t answer, just started walking fast down the hall. I couldn’t even see where I was going. I set the pace and Michael set the course, yanking me around corners and into an elevator. “Is she all right?” he whispered as the doors slid shut.
“She’s the berries,” I said.
Out in the parking lot, the cold air on my face felt good. I followed Michael to his father’s car. He opened my door and closed it after I was in. We drove for a while without talking.
“They must’ve been cracking up when they brought her in,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “A car accident with internal bleeding is a big laugh.” I looked out my window. I am alone in the universe, I thought.
“No,” Michael said. “I meant the clown getup.”
It took me a minute to hear what he said. “The what?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” I asked.
“That’s where she was, or where she was going, when she got into the accident. They didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what, damn it, Michael?”
He made a complete stop at a stop sign, turned right, and pulled over on the side of the road. “You blew off a birthday party, Saturday?”
“I canceled one,” I said.
“Apparently the mom of the kid called, asking if by any chance your plans had fallen through because they like hired a pony or something and the kid was still all broken-hearted, only wanted Tallulah the Clown. So, your mother—and this is third-hand, this is what your dad told my mom—your mom told this lady that you had to be out of town for a very important meeting but that your backup had become available, and would do the party.”
“I don’t have a backup,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
“My mother?”
He nodded.
It was impossible to imagine. “My mother was going as my backup?”
“She was on the cell clarifying the directions when she smashed into a tree. When they brought her into the hospital she was in the rainbow wig, the striped suit, whiteface, red nose . . .”
“Was she driving in my clown shoes?”
“That I don’t know,” Michael said.
I hit myself on my forehead with the heels of both my hands. “She thinks it’s that easy? You can just put on the costume and that’s it, you become Tallulah? She doesn’t know the first thing about doing it. She doesn’t know how to run a kid’s birthday party! Maybe it looks that easy to everybody else but there’s a lot more to it than putting on a red nose, believe it or not. What the hell was she thinking?”
Michael shrugged. “Maybe she wasn’t thinking anything. Maybe she was just backing you up.”
“Why would she do such a stupid thing?”
“Why does anybody do a stupid thing?” he said. “Love. She loves you.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but started crying again instead.
He sat there quietly for a long time while I cried myself dry. He didn’t even look at me.
“Michael . . .”
He turned the car back on and said, as he pulled out, “Love makes us stupid, sometimes.”
I looked out the window as he drove. “Thank you,” I said.
Twenty-seven
“YOU HAVE TO stop stalking him,” Zandra said to me Friday morning. She slammed my locker shut. “Come down to lunch with me. We’ll annoy Tru while she tries to read.”
“I’m not stalking him,” I said.
She stared at me. “Josie.”
“Okay, maybe I’m stalking him, but what else am I going to do?”
“Nothing,” she said, looping her arm through mine. “Do nothing. He doesn’t exist. Let’s go.”
“It’s not that easy.” I pulled my arm away. “You have no idea what Carson and I . . .”
“It’s not a marriage, Josie,” she said. “The whole relationship crashed and burned so fast I’ve only changed my hair color once since it started.”
I smiled a little, but it turned into a sigh. “It’s been a rough week,” I explained.
“That’s why we’re cutting you a lot of extra slack. But now your mom is home and on the mend and it’s time for you to suck it up and move on.”
“This is a lot of extra slack?”
Zandra nodded. “Yeah. But enough already. It’s time to take out the stupid ponytail and put your own clothes back on. Come sleep over my house tonight with Tru. We’ll watch sappy movies and mock what’s-his-name while we eat junk food and paint our nails black.”
“I don’t want to.” I spun the combination only Carson and I knew, and yanked open my lock. “He likes to see me, really see me. He thinks I’m beautiful. Crazy, huh? But for the first time in my life I don’t feel ugly if my face shows. He did that for me. What you don’t get is that I don’t want to go back to how I was.”
I opened my locker and bent down to get my stuff. Tru’s sneakers were rounding the corner to stand beside Zandra’s. Great. They were ganging up on me. I blotted my damp eyes with my sleeve and didn’t look up at them.
“What you don’t get,” Zandra said, “is that your real friends don’t actually care what you wear or do to your hair. That’s not the point. We just love you, me and Tru. Right?”
“Right,” Tru said. “And Michael, too.”
“The jerk,” Zandra said. “He’s totally in love with you. We know you, and we love you, no matter what. So we deserve you. And the Golden Egg? Well, screw him. He blew it, his loss. It’s time to move on. Say good-bye.”
“Hey!” Tru pointed at my Wiffle bat as if it were infectious. “What the heck is that?”
I looked at it and said, as innocently as possible, “It’s a Wiffle bat.”
“Is there a Wiffle ball team you have joined,” Zandra asked, “to complete your personality transplant?”
“Sometimes we like to play ball at lunch,” I muttered.
“They,” Zandra said. “Not ‘we,’ Josie. They play ball at lunch. You argue about philosophy. You don’t play ball. You listen to cool music and help your friends and organize peace rallies, and you laugh. Loud. Remember you? You don’t have to be a poor imitation of them. You are a fabulous, weird, original, smart, kind, strong person.”
“I’m not weird.” I stood up and faced them.
“Well, you’re pretending not to be,” Tru said. “And the effort is making you miserable, Josie. Look at yourself. You have dark circles under your eyes and what do you weigh now? Nothing? You really want to dull yourself down like this? For what? For a guy?”
“He’s not just a guy.” I rested my head against the cold metal of the locker next to mine.
“No,” Zandra said, her hand on my shoulder. “He’s a guy who, after maybe a week of being into you, has now clearly dumped you.”
“He did not dump me!” I shouted. I grabbed the bat and swung it up in the air, to take aim at their heads.
Tru took a step back but Zandra didn’t flinch. She stared at me, hard and cold, her lips tight.
“I’m his girlfriend!” I yelled.
Zandra shook her head.
My arms were shaking. “I love him.”
“I know you do, Josie,” Zandra said slowly. “But he doesn’t love you.”
“How can you say that to me?” I felt the tears well up in my eyes. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”
“I am your friend. That’s why I’m telling you this,” Zandra whispered, reaching up to take the bat from my tight fists. She placed it gently back inside my locker. “You have to try to stop loving him, because he doesn’t love you.”
Tru touched my shoulder. “Asymmetry sucks.”
I pulled away.
“You know where we’ll be,” Zandra said.
I watched Zandra and Tru walk away from me. I knew they were probably right, but what did that mean for me, about me? That I was nothing? That once he got to know me, he decided, oh, yuck?
I sunk down against my locker, caught my aching head in my hands, and cried. They’re right. He doesn’t love me. I love him so much and he doesn’t love me. Wait, what if they’re wrong? Okay, Carson and I are obviously going through a bad time, but all relationships are work; my own mother said they all have their miseries, or even if she said mysteries—this week of him not talking to me might be a mystery of my relationship with Carson that my friends could never have access to. Just because we’re in a rough patch, does that mean I should give up? It didn’t even make sense: I’m being lousy to Zandra and Tru and they still love me, they were still trying to reach me, right? They weren’t just writing me off, saying good-bye, moving on. No. They were sticking by me, showing me how much they love me. Isn’t that what good friends do? And don’t I love Zandra and Tru for that? Of course I do. So don’t I owe at least that much being a good friend to my boyfriend?
Well, except that Carson and I were never really friends.
He just swept me off my feet, and here I am, on my butt.
I hoisted myself off the floor. He hadn’t given me back my earring. He still had it, which meant he hadn’t given up on us. Maybe he was taking some time to figure out how he felt, and giving me some time. My mother had just gotten out of the hospital, after all. Maybe he was feeling guilty about how badly the weekend had gone and was so embarrassed he wasn’t sure how to approach me. People think he’s smug and confident but they don’t know him the way I do. I wiped my face dry, grabbed my lunch and bat, and headed away from the cafeteria, toward the courtyard.
