Where the Staircase Ends(24)

It’s what I wished happened, but my heart and the Alana-ghost who gave me the pristinely wrapped gift told me that’s not what happened at all. Her eyes bored into mine, and even though I wanted to tear my eyes from hers, I couldn’t.

She blinked once, purposefully, and then suddenly the day spun through my head the way Alana experienced it, the way it really happened.

At first, Alana’s mom said no, rightfully suspicious of Sunny’s sudden niceness given the years she’d spent ridiculing Alana.

“Why would you even want to give that horrible girl the time of day, Alana?”

“It’s different this time,” Alana promised. “Please, please, please … ” she begged over and over again, tears spilling down her cheeks until her mother finally agreed to let her go to the party.

They went shopping after school the next day, and Alana spent hours at the mall pouring through racks of clothing and accessories in search of the perfect gift and the perfect outfit that would finally let her fit in with Sunny’s perfect friends. She settled on a Coach wristlet, and even though it was more than her mom thought she should spend and it meant depleting her allowance savings, it was too perfect to pass up.

The night before the party Alana barely slept, tossing and turning as the butterflies flitted around inside her stomach, her mind spinning with possibilities. The meticulously wrapped present was perched on her nightstand, a glittering reminder of the exciting day ahead.

In the morning she woke up early, taking care to do her makeup and ensure that every pleat of her dress was perfectly placed. Once she was flawlessly coiffed, she climbed into the car and readied herself for the afternoon at Sunny’s house.

“Stop here,” she said to her mother when they were a few houses down from the address on the invitation. Her mother frowned at her daughter’s attempt to dispel embarrassment, but she agreed, driving off after Alana grabbed the shining package and adjusted her new party dress.

The smile on Alana’s face was enormous, slipping only slightly when she saw the “for sale” sign sticking out from the front yard of Sunny’s claimed address. Maybe they’re getting ready to move, she told herself. Even after she took in the curtain-less windows and empty living room it didn’t register that the address was fake. It was only after she rang the bell three times and heard the chime echo inside the empty house that she realized she’d been tricked. There was no party, no Sunny, and no one to appreciate the carefully selected gift that Alana was so sure Sunny would have loved.

The long walk home was blurred with tears, but Alana was too embarrassed to call her mom. She walked until her new shoes rubbed blisters onto her feet, the pain barely comparable to the ache of disappointment.

The Alana-ghost didn’t move, her sad eyes watching me with a heaviness I didn’t want to understand. She reached forward and took Sunny’s present back from me, her hands clinging to it like it was a buoy that could save her from our cruelty.

All this time I’d told myself she stayed home, that she knew it was a trick. But as I watched the shadow from my past, I knew with certainty that she went to the empty house. Maybe she doubted Sunny when she first gave her the invitation, but it was my words, or lack of words, that reassured her. All because I was too much of a coward to stand up to my friend.

There was a song lyric from a band that Justin liked: “Words don’t sink, they swim.” I used to dream about those lyrics; I dreamt about a sea of glittering invitations, paper cranes and origami flowers with pictures and hangman puzzles scribbled across them. Alana James was in the center of them all, trying to bury her head under the massive pile of notes so she didn’t have to look at them. But every time she tried to drag herself under she was pulled back to the surface of the paper sea, the words swimming all around her.

The Alana-ghost faded into the stairs, leaving me with one thought: maybe the stairs didn’t need to lead me to hell, because I was already there.





CHAPTER NINE


BLIND MAN’S BAR




Competition does funny things to people. Like my mom at Christmas. Every year our neighborhood held a competition, giving out awards to the houses with the best decorations. Pretty much every participating house got some kind of award, like “Best Use of Reindeer,” or “Best Paper Luminary Display.” But only one house got the coveted “Holiday House” award for best overall display. Every year my mom turned into a crazy person obsessing over that stupid prize, which incidentally was nothing more than a metal sign stuck in the winner’s front yard a few weeks before Christmas.

It was the only thing my mom could talk about for the entire month of November, and my poor father spent the better part of his weekends on a ladder stapling crap to our house while my mother shrieked at him from the safety of our yard. A little more to left, Todd. No left! I said LEFT!

One year someone stole the baby Jesus from the Cumberlands’ nativity set and poked a hole in the Schmidts’ giant inflatable Santa. I never could prove it, but I swear I heard my mother sneaking back into our house late the night it happened. And it always seemed a little coincidental that our house was one of the few on the street that didn’t get vandalized, or that the Cumberlands and Schmidts were the two previous “Holiday House” winners.

But that’s my mom. Perfection at any cost.

I never really understood how you could want something so badly you’d go all crazy like that, at least not until the whole Justin/Sunny debacle. To clarify, I didn’t want to break Sunny’s legs or anything that insane, but something shifted in me and I didn’t like the way it felt. I didn’t like the competitive glances we’d started giving each other after Sunny made her interloping crush announcement, or the way I’d started comparing myself to her. So when I showed up at Sunny’s house the night of The Fields, I made a silent vow to be cool about everything. To relax. Sunny was my best friend, I reminded myself, and I couldn’t let a guy come between us. That was almost as dumb as stealing a plastic Jesus to win a yard sign. I vowed that all the drama I’d sensed between us would end the night of The Fields.