When My Heart Joins the Thousand(15)

Finally she pulls back, flushed and breathless and smiling, with tears in her eyes. “We’ll go out tomorrow,” she says. “We’ll have our own party. With no smelly Jessamine.”

The next morning, she takes me out for pancakes at my favorite restaurant, the Silver Dollar. As we sit, eating, she says, “You know, it might help if you went back to counseling.”

I poke my pancakes with a fork. I’m still seeing a psychiatrist—Dr. Evans—but she just gives me medication to keep me calm at school. I stopped seeing my last counselor months ago. “I don’t want to.”

“You were getting better,” Mama says. “You were learning to . . . how did she put it? ‘Adapt to social norms.’ If you kept at it, I’m sure you could make a friend. It would be good for you to have at least one friend.”

What good is friendship, I wonder, if I have to pretend to be someone else? “I don’t want to go back. I don’t need any friends. I just need you.”

Her face changes for a second. “I won’t be around forever, you know.”

“But you’ll be around for a long time. Right?”

“A very long time.” She tries to smile, but it looks strange, like there are wires hooked into the corners of her mouth, pulling.

After breakfast, we go shopping, and she buys me a little yellow candle in a clay jar. It smells like honey and vanilla and clover, but the smell isn’t too sharp, so it doesn’t make my nose itch. I keep the jar long after the candle has burned down to nothing. Even years later, particles of the scent still cling to its sides, and sometimes I bury my nose in the jar and breathe in deeply.





CHAPTER EIGHT


The digital clock on the floor next to my mattress reads 5:42.

It’s time.

I put on a faded Pink Floyd T-shirt, along with my usual black skirt and black-and-white striped stockings. Most of my clothes, aside from my work uniform, are frayed and faded. I shop mostly at thrift stores and Goodwill, and because it’s difficult for me to find comfortable clothes, I tend to keep them until they literally fall apart.

I walk to the park. The pond is gray and empty of ducks; the air is still and cool. Stanley is sitting on his usual bench, facing away from me. His hair is almost curly, I notice. In the back, where it’s longest, it falls into loose waves.

I don’t know what gives me away—maybe he hears a twig creak under my foot—but after a few minutes, he raises his head and looks over his shoulder. My heart lurches into my throat. Quickly I lower my head. Sweat dampens my palms as I slowly approach and sit down next to him, not looking up.

“Alvie?”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Hello.”

He’s wearing khakis and a polo shirt under a blue windbreaker, and he has a crutch tucked under his right arm instead of his usual cane. His cast peeks out from beneath his pant leg. After a few seconds of silence, he draws in an unsteady breath. “I was worried you wouldn’t show up.”

“I said I would.”

“Yeah. You did.” He holds out a hand. “It sounds strange to say ‘pleased to meet you,’ but, well . . . hi.”

I hesitate before grasping the proffered hand, then let go quickly, as if I’ve touched a hot pan. If he’s offended by my discomfort with touch, he doesn’t show it.

“You know,” he says, “it’s funny. You look just the way I imagined.”

For the first time, I meet his gaze. And I can’t stop staring.

His eyes are blue. Not just the irises. The sclerae—the whites—are tinted a misty blue gray, like the interior of a seashell I once found on the beach. This is the first time I’ve been close enough to see, and for a few seconds, I can’t breathe. My voice comes out as a thin whisper. “Your eyes—”

There’s a subtle change in his face, a stiffening of the muscles, and I stop.

I should say something else. I reach for words, but nothing comes.

When I talk to someone, I have to run my answers through various filters in my brain to see if they’re appropriate. Online, the frequent pauses in my speech aren’t a problem, but this is different. I’m sitting next to Stanley, the person I’ve been talking to every night for the past couple of weeks, and I have no idea what to say.

I start to rock lightly back and forth on the bench. I can’t help it. One hand drifts up to tug on my left braid. Several yards away, near the base of a tree, a rabbit grazes on yellowed grass.

And then the babbling starts.

“You know,” I say, “lots of people think rabbits are rodents, but they’re not. They’re lagomorphs, along with hares and pikas. Lagomorphs are herbivorous, where rodents are omnivorous, and lagomorphs have four incisors in their upper jaw instead of two.”

He blinks.

The words run out of me in a stream, filling the silence the way air will rush in to fill a void, and I can’t stop: “Another thing about rabbits. They have no paw pads. They have a layer of thick fur to cushion their feet instead. They’re one of the few mammals with paws but no pads.” I keep tugging on my braid. I know that I look and sound completely crazy, but I can’t help it. The more nervous I am, the worse it gets.

The rabbit lopes another yard away and continues grazing obliviously.

He clears his throat. “That’s . . . um . . .”