In an Instant(38)
Like so many things, a baked potato will never be the same. Baked potatoes are the opposite of hunger and cold, an innate comfort factor built in, and when Mo gets older, I bet she will always keep a bag of potatoes in her house just to know they are there. She takes a bite, and I feel the heat and taste fill her mouth, and I smile with her as her eyes close at the pure wonderfulness of it.
Through the window I catch sight of Charlie and decide to hang out with him for a few minutes as well, curious to watch him from this unobstructed vantage point. I’m surprised when he does not head to the bleachers to hang out with his soccer friends and instead walks off campus to a small park behind the baseball field to sit behind a tree where he can’t be seen.
He pulls a sandwich, chips, and a bottle of water from his backpack, plugs earbuds into his ears, and props a notebook on his lap and begins to draw. He smiles as he sketches, and when I see what he is drawing, I smile as well, my grin widening until it fills my face.
The cartoon is of him and me. He wears a tuxedo, the pants rolled up, his feet bare. I wear a poufy dress and hold up the skirt, my feet also bare. Between us is a soccer ball. When he finishes the ridiculous drawing, he titles it First Dance, and then he holds it out to admire it and chortles softly.
As he eats his sandwich, he leafs through the other sheets in the notebook, snickering as he turns the pages, and I laugh with him. The drawings are hilarious, and he must have been doodling them for months. Not all are of me. Some are of teachers or of strange cartoon animals that remind me of Dr. Seuss. He’s not much of an artist—the proportions are strange and his technique rough—but he’s very funny.
In one I am kicking a goal, my leg wrapped around my body in a contortionist pose, the ball headed toward the wrong goal. Gumby is the title, and the bubble over my horrified mouth reads, Oh shit! Another is of me asleep on my desk, drool dripping from my mouth onto my notebook—Sleeping Beauty.
And that’s what perhaps stuns me the most. Even with all the exaggeration and less-than-Michelangelo talent, in every drawing, he has drawn me as beautiful. It’s something I’ve never thought of myself as before. Cute maybe, pretty if you’re being kind, but I’ve always been the tall, skinny girl with skinned knees and too many freckles to be attractive in anything but a Pippi Longstocking sort of way. Beautiful is a word used for girls like Mo and Aubrey, girls with curves and lashes and flawless, freckleless skin.
But Charlie didn’t draw me in a cute sort of way. Funny, yes, but also beautiful. He exaggerated all my best features—my large eyes, my long legs, the smile dimple that I only have on my left cheek and not the right. Over and over he drew me like I was a genuine muse, a girl worthy of being drawn, as if my too-long chin and bony shoulders were the most gorgeous chin and shoulders in the world.
When his sandwich is finished, he closes the notebook and heads back to the school, and as I watch him go, I sigh with the realization of how perfect we would have been together and what a shame it is that I didn’t realize it when I was alive.
Charlie and I only had one conversation, and it was far from meaningful. “Finn, right?” he said as I made my way to the locker room after practice. Blood flooded my face; I was certain that all the fantasies I’d had about him were telegraphing from my brain like a five-alarm siren. I managed a nod.
“Great goal,” he said.
“Thanks,” I answered and raced away, recounting the syllables as I went. Four. Charlie McCoy spoke four words to me. The next day, I practiced my future signature, Finn McCoy, scrawling it over and over in my notebook until my hand hurt.
Regret. I wish I’d said more to him that day, that I’d been braver and realized how little time I had. I would have kissed him. I hate that I never kissed him.
45
Mo stands with her friends, a group of three girls from our neighborhood, who, along with Mo, have been known as the Milkshake Gang since fifth grade, luscious and sweet. Though Mo is my best friend, at school we’ve always hung in different crowds, she among the popular and beautiful and me among the jocks.
“Sure glad you’re back,” Charlotte says. “Natalie told everyone how awful it was.”
Mo tenses.
“Yeah,” Claire adds. “She said it was totally gnarly, like you had to boil snow for water and stuff.”
“What I don’t get,” Francie says, “is if you could make a fire, why didn’t you just make it bigger so you could stay warm? Natalie said the wood was wet, but if you were there for like a whole day, couldn’t you just dry it?”
A shadow falls over Mo’s face, the dangerous look she gets when she really doesn’t like something. Then it passes, and she smiles sweetly at her friends. “A fire to warm our feet and hands, how silly that I didn’t think of that.” Then she spins and walks away, leaving them to stare after her.
Francie speaks first. “Bitch. It’s like because she was in an accident, she thinks she’s too good for us.”
“Maybe it was even worse than Natalie said,” Charlotte says. “I mean, Mo’s pretty smart. If she could have made a fire, don’t you think she would have?”
“I don’t know. When people get freaked out, you never know how they’re going to act. Natalie said a really cute boy was there. Maybe Mo didn’t want to go all Rambo on him,” Claire says.
“I kind of like her moccasins,” Charlotte says.