Here So Far Away(30)

“We once snuck down to the basement to watch Nightmare on Elm Street on the VCR,” I said. “She started sleeping in her parents’ bed after that.”

“How old were you?” Miss Aker asked. “Nine? Ten?”

“Fourteen.”

“George swallowed a marble because she wouldn’t admit she’d thought it was candy.”

“Lisa throws up if she runs through deep snow.”

“George thought a harbinger was an eating disorder.”

“Lisa laughed so hard she thought she’d peed her pants, but she hadn’t.” The laughter that had been bouncing around the classroom died down. “There was this big brown dot on the back of her pants, though.”

Lisa’s face as the room erupted.

It would have been kinder to smack her. How could I hit her so hard where it hurt? Because she’d gotten me into a corner is how, and being willing to say anything, if not everything, was how I fought my way out of corners. She’d said it herself. Except usually I wasn’t fighting my own fight. Usually, I was protecting the person I’d just knocked out.

“Okay! Very revealing and extremely regrettable!” said Miss Aker. “So let’s move on. I want you to partner up, pull your desks together, and brainstorm a poem based on your shared memories. Lisa and George, you should have different partners since you’ve . . . purged yours already. Who would like to partner with George?”

Four guys were on their feet at the same time—Bill, Derek, Jeremy, and Mike. Bill stared down the others.

“Told you,” he said as I turned my desk around. “You’re the girl all the guys want to get.”

“Especially now that I’ve gone from ungettable to notorious slut. So why am I partnering with you, if I could have any guy I want?”

He flexed his biceps, strong-man-style. “I’ve got muscles.” He said it like musculls. “I just look soft because of the Dorito layer on top. Anyway, hardly anyone buys that story about you and the East Riverview guys. It sounds too convenient, that they all happen to go to a different school.”

“Life’s a bad writer, buddy.”

That was as far as we could get before the weight of what had happened fully settled. I glanced over at Lisa working with Shelley-with-an-E, the yearbook editor. She had her back to me.

“I didn’t think one fight would screw things up this badly,” I said.

“It didn’t.” Bill reached under his desk for the Tupperware container with the breakup cake. “But it’s good and broken now.”





Fourteen


Dad was asleep in his recliner, still wearing the jogging pants he’d slept in the night before. I dumped my knapsack onto the carpet next to his prosthetic and myself onto the velour chesterfield beside him.

We were broken, Lisa and me. Good and broken, Bill had said. As in, broken up. She’d already asked Nat if she could get some stuff from me, like a sweater and a mixtape one of her exes made her. She wanted me to know we were done.

I’d never had a breakup with a boy before, let alone a best friend, and didn’t know all the rules and procedures. Crying was usually part of it, but I was too stunned to cry. Not calling was also important, that I’d learned from magazines and my friends, and it seemed to be true whether you were a dumper or a dumpee. You had to let the other person come to you, and if they didn’t, so be it. Calling always, always made it worse. Except it wasn’t clear how both people not phoning was going to get you anywhere. Was that the point? To keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you would be able to stay friends? And what was the friends’ version of staying friends?

I was sure that if I called Lisa, she wouldn’t pick up, not only because she understood the rules better than I did, but because she was really, really mad. I was mad too. She’d started that fight in front of the whole class. She had, not me. Still. It was crazy to want to make it so final so fast. I stared at the stucco ceiling, knowing that I was seconds away from calling because I was lousy at doing nothing; the kid whose mother had to duct-tape mittens on my hands to stop me from scratching when I had hives.

Dad stirred in his chair. “Hey-o! That’s a shirt,” he said at the sight of my orange top. “Did you see the message on the pad in the kitchen?”

I sat up. “Lisa?”

“No, your boyfriend.”

It was Rupert Fraser, wanting to know if I’d like to help out around the house and farm as Mum had suggested, only he offered to pay me. “Six dollars an hour,” he said when I called him back. “Up to fifteen hours a week, let’s say. Less if you like.”

I couldn’t flatter myself that Francis had decided he wanted to hang out, but where else would Rupert have gotten the idea to hire me? Then Rupert said, “Mick will be working a lot of long hours.”

“You call him Mick?”

“What do you call him?”

“He introduced himself as Francis.”

Sort of.

“Hoity-toity. I’ve been thinking you’d be good company for an old man while he’s gone. Though I got to warn you, I can be quite a handful. . . .”

So the idea was that Francis and I would dodge each other. Fine. Rupert was offering more than the heritage society paid me, and that would make up for my lighthouse hours going down now that it was the off-season. The more hours I worked, the less likely it would be that I’d end up at Noel, and the less time I’d have to think about why that would be even worse than I’d originally thought.