Girl, Hero

  “Can you believe it?” Nicole asks. “I mean, once I heard I thought, ‘Well, you can kind of tell.’”

  I chomp my bagel, take a swig of my Coke. I count to ten to try to calm down and not commit homicide in the cafeteria with just a plastic cream cheese spreader and a bagel.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  “I mean,” Nicole continues and goes back to spreading, “I’ve never known anyone who actually was …”

  Five.

  “ … before, other than possibly Mary.”

  Seven.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

  Eight.

  “It’s just so, so gross really and …”

  Nine.

  “Well, I thought I should tell you because, because …”

  Ten. I look at her, fix her with a real good stare, but she doesn’t notice. My gun hand twitches but I don’t have a gun. I believed in her. I thought we could go back to normal, but we can’t. We can’t. We’re too different.

  “Well, if you hang out with her a lot, people are probably going to think you are too,” she finishes.

  I put my Coke down and stand up. Saddle up.

  “Nicole,” I say, a parting shot before heading to the bathroom, “you must be one of the stupidest damn people in the whole damn world.”

  Before turning to walk away, I let myself watch her mouth drop. In the bathroom I throw up like a cat that eats too much, too fast. One splurting removal of all I’ve eaten and then my stomach is empty and free. I’m not sick, but it happens anyway. Nervous throw-up, my mother calls it. It’s because I can’t deal with confrontations. It’s because I can’t deal with yelling at the girl who used to be my best friend. It’s because I can’t deal with anything, really.

  I wipe my mouth with one of the brown paper towels by the sink and get a drink of water from the water fountain before going back to the cafeteria. Nicole’s moved to sit with her brother and Travis Poppins. She’s crying, and Travis has his pimply arm around her shoulders. Her brother glares at me. I glare back. When the bell rings for biology, I make my way to class and worry about my breath and what my lab partner will think. Onion bagel barf breath. Yuck.

  On my way through the hall, I walk alone. Usually I walk with Nicole because her earth science class is next door. It seems too quiet, despite all the other people around me. It’s like all the innocent town folks just roaming about, going about their business before the outlaw gang comes through, rifles firing. And then Alyssa Cutler, queen of popularity Alyssa Cutler of all people, comes up to me and says, “Lily, I heard you’re doing great in South Pacific. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I say and try to think of some compliment to give her, but I can’t. I can’t say, “Oh, you’re so beautiful.” Or, “How did your lips get to look like bacon?” Or “How could I be thin like you?” Or “God, will you please be my friend?”

  Instead, my mouth somehow manages to smile, which is something at least. One working body part. That and my feet. It seems my tongue and brain have deserted me.

  “I was wondering,” Alyssa says, still beside me. “Is it too late to join Students for Social Justice?”

  “No way. You can join anytime. We’d love to have you.”

  “Great.” She smiles a cover-girl smile and says, “It’s Mondays, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you think you could give me a ride home?”

  We stand outside the door for biology and I say, “I get a ride home with Sasha and Olivia. It’s pretty squished, but I don’t think it would be a big deal or anything.”

  “Good,” Alyssa says before she walks away. “Will you ask for me? I love your belt.”

  “Thanks.” I smile and wave as Alyssa saunters down the hallway, and it’s only as I get in the classroom that I remember about Olivia maybe being a lesbian and wondering if Alyssa knows, if Alyssa thinks I’m one too, if Nicole was making it all up, if Alyssa would care if I was a lesbian, or if Olivia was, or if she’s just so cool that she doesn’t care about anyone’s sexual preferences.

  Alyssa Cutler likes my belt. But I still feel all hollow because Nicole’s such an idiot and I’m so mad at her for always, always, always caring more about what people think than what they do, and for how she flirted with Paolo when she knows I like him, but still there’s an empty space inside me where a Cosmo-loving, boy-luster should go.

  In biology, I sit next to Martha and try not to breathe on her.

  “Lily?” she asks, taking out her notebook and placing it on the black top of the lab table we share. “What’s that sound?”

  “What sound?”

  “Like purring?”

  I lift up my shoulders to show her I have no idea what she’s talking about, and then I reach down to get a notebook and pen out of my backpack.

  “Oh,” she says, opening her notebook to the next blank page. “It stopped.”

  I hate fighting.

  I hate fighting with my mom.

  But I really hate fighting with Nicole.

  My head throbs because there isn’t anyone to talk to, because there isn’t anyone I can call and cry to and not have them think badly of me after. Sometimes if you tell people your sorrows they want nothing to do with you, afterwards they’ll almost ignore you, give you vague smiles that don’t go past their teeth, little nods and small talk and then you know you’ve gone too far, told too much, exposed yourself to someone who couldn’t or didn’t want to see.

  I pick up the phone. Dial the numbers and call my dad, who should be home from work by now.

  “How about I bring my homework? And come over tonight,” I say. It will be musty smelling there and his voice already sounds weepy, but it has to be better than another night at this house with my mom and her man.

  “Oh goody! I’ll come get you,” he says.

  “I’m sleeping over at dad’s,” I announce when my mom gets home. I grab some stuff and call Sasha to tell her I won’t need a ride tomorrow morning, that my dad will bring me to school. My mother goes into the TV room and turns it on. She seems happy to have me gone. She probably figures it means more alone time with her man, her hard-drinking, got-no-job man.

  Yeah, get rid of the kid, she’s probably thinking, then we can do it doggy-style on the kitchen floor.

  I shudder. I sit there by the counter, I just sit there on the stool for a while because I don’t have enough energy to move. I’m sort of hunkered down and rocking back and forth, feeling like the gray or lightish purple color in front of my eyes is the color of my soul. Blah. Bleak. Sad. I hate my mother.

  The sliding noise and creak that the doorknob makes when it turns forces me to lift my head up for a second, startled. Great, Mike O’Donnell. I wipe the back of my hand against my eyes, so he doesn’t know what it’s all about. Maybe he won’t notice anything. I try to smile but it comes out all crooked, and my lips just don’t make it into the upturn.

  “Lily?” he asks. “What’s happened, honey? Do you want me to get your mother?”

  I shake my head no. That’s the last thing I need.

  He kneels down and grabs my hand. I try to pull mine away, but he just grips harder. Trapped. I take big breaths, but it makes me start tearing up more and I almost start to panic because I can’t get my hand away, and then the sobs just come, whoosh right out of me and I try to pull away but he heaves me into his arms. My head presses into his ugly, tan, old-man jacket, smelling him, pipes and aftershave and steak. He holds me against him, patting my hair with his hand. I can’t breathe. I push away.

  He smiles at me and says, “Let’s go outside. I have some things to tell you.”

  “No,” I say. “My dad’s coming. I have homework to do.”

  “Soon then?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Soon.”

&n
bsp; But I say it just to make him go away, which makes me a liar, which is something a hero never is. But we all know I’m no hero, don’t we?

  On the table, Grammy has placed cut tomatoes, acorn squash filled with pools of butter, pot roast, potatoes cut in squares and covered with gravy, sweet potatoes, butter, homemade bread, carrots rolled in brown sugar and butter, and carrots in gravy cut in circles.

  “Did you make all of this?” I ask, pretty much drooling.

  “Don’t I always?” Grammy answers. “Can’t expect your father to cook well.”

  “I helped,” my dad says, pouring whole milk, not skim, from a pitcher into my glass and then his. “I turned the pot roast over.”

  “And talked on the phone. He’s always talking on the phone to his friends,” Grammy says. “Liliana, have some tomatoes.”

  I watch Grammy fork some tomato slices onto my plate. One. Two. Three.

  “That’s enough. Thank you.”

  “A couple more. These are good for you. They’re fruit. Did you know that tomatoes are fruit?”

  I nod and worry about getting all my homework done.

  “That’s the strangest thing,” my father says, sprinkling salt on one of his tomato slices. “Tomatoes are like apples and oranges.”

  “They’re sweet,” Grammy says, sucking on one.

  “But could you imagine putting salt on an apple?” my father asks.

  “You shouldn’t put salt on anything. It’s bad for your blood pressure,” I say, biting into a tomato. It squirts into my mouth. It is sweet. I smile at Grammy. She smiles back.

  “Good?” she asks me.

  “Good.” I stab into another one.

  “Oh, my pills!” My father rushes up, nearly knocking his chair over as he goes to get his pills off the counter. His baby blue sock has sagged down because the elastic is gone and a gold chain hugs his ankle in between the dark hairs. Sparkly little gems stick to the chain. These too are baby blue.

  Grammy sees me looking and whispers, “He should have been a girl.”

  “He’s a truck driver.”

  “Women can drive trucks. Your great grandmother was the first female doctor in Czechoslovakia. Of course, it was Moravia then. Czechoslovakia, what sort of horrid name is that?”

  I nod. I’ve heard it before. My father comes back and sits at the table. “So how are things going with your house guest?”

  “Mike O’Donnell?” My knife freezes in midair.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I guess.” I breathe out and cut into my pot roast. It’s tender and I can use a bread knife. “Good roast, Grammy.”

  “I turned it,” my father says, drinking some more milk.

  “Good roast, Dad.”

  My father smiles and nods and cuts into his meat. His hands are large and delicate like his father’s were. In pictures of Grandpa, it is his hands that always stick out, long and white and thin beneath the elegant and practical black overcoat that he always wore. He was a stock broker and an existentialist. Everyone says he was a brilliant man, but cruel. My father can barely read or use a calculator so I don’t think he takes much after his father. But when you talk to him, he seems smart. He knows about all kinds of things, like you do, Mr. Wayne.

  You, of course, were a straight-A student.

  “Dad,” I ask, thinking and talking simultaneously, not to mention chewing. “When you call people up on the phone you get the numbers wrong a lot, don’t you?”

  “All the time.”

  “Is it off by two digits usually? Do you dial 3391 instead of 3319 and stuff like that?”

  He looks up from his sugar carrots, chews for a moment before answering because his mother makes sure his manners are impeccable, and says, “Yes, I do. How did you know that?”

  I think about the birthday cards he has given me and how often he writes p’s instead of b’s and writes q’s for d’s and how he writes over these mistakes.

  “I think maybe you’re dyslexic.”

  Both he and Grammy stare at me like I’m crazy.

  “No offense,” I say and spear a cubed potato with my fork.

  I have recently seen a talk show about this, if you can’t tell. And it’s all coming together now. Like a bullet into my back; I didn’t see it coming. I don’t know where it came from, but suddenly my whole idea of the world shifts as it penetrates.

  “Dyslexic?” Grammy asks me and her voice loses its elegant timber, becomes croaky like an old woman’s voice always seems, but hers never is. She drinks lemon water all day. One of her vanities.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I suppose that might make some sense,” my dad says, not eating at all now, just staring at me with those blue eyes of his, waiting for me to go on.

  “Well, you aren’t a stupid person. I mean you’re always asking people questions and watching PBS and learning things. You know tons of facts about everything, right?” I say.

  “Your father is the king of trivia,” Grammy says. “Ask him anything. But he was never as bright as his brother.”

  My dad frowns and starts eating again.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Grammy. I think Dad is smart. It’s just that his brain works differently. Dyslexics transpose numbers. They have a hard time reading. Even using the calculator can be difficult because they switch the numbers they see on a page around before they get them into the calculator. It isn’t something bad. It’s just that their brains process things in different ways.”

  My dad swallows some more roast, washes it down with some milk and keeps staring at me, waiting for more. I think about the bracelet on his ankle. That has nothing to do with being dyslexic. Being dyslexic does not make you want to wear anklets or pierce your belly button (not that my dad has; thank you, God). I guess what I mean is, I think about all the ways my dad is different, and how hard that must be for him.

  “Einstein was dyslexic, wasn’t he?” he asks, smiling.

  “He had some sort of learning disability,” I say.

  “Brilliant man.” Grammy plucks a few tomatoes off her plate and puts them on mine. They are the same firehouse red that I once painted my dad’s toenails. That was a long time ago, when he still lived at home and I was only three or so. I didn’t stay on the nails, and colored the hair on his toes, everywhere. When my mother saw what we had done she flipped, dumped a bottle of nail polish remover on his feet and got it all over the rug. The color of the carpet leached right out and I couldn’t understand where it went.

  They got divorced pretty soon after that.

  “A lot of dyslexics are brilliant,” I say, “but a lot of them are so upset about their reading capabilities, their transposing of letters and numbers, that they never realize that they are.”

  My dad’s smile slows across his face and his hand shakes a little bit. He changes the subject. “How are Mike O’Donnell and your mother? Is he going to find a place soon?”

  I shrug and lift some potato onto my fork. “He’s still looking for a job.”

  “She needs more milk,” Grammy says and motions for my father to refill my glass.

  My dad gets up with the pitcher and pours the milk into my glass. I can smell his clean smell, a soap and lemon detergent kind of smell. Very different than Mike’s.

  “He used to be quite a drinker,” my father says.

  Grammy scowls. She is still, more than half a century after the movement passed, a prohibitionist. “Who?”

  “This friend of Rita’s,” he says, sitting back down.

  “Mike O’Donnell,” I say, giving him a name. “Thanks.”

  “Irish. All of them are drinkers.”

  “Grammy!” I say. “That’s offensive.”

  “It’s true,” she says. “Just like the Moravians are all depressed.”

&nbsp
; “I’m not depressed,” I say and plunk a tomato into my mouth, feeling the juices of it spurt against my teeth.

  “The young,” Grammy says to my father, completely ignoring me, “are all such liars.”

  When he tucks me in, my father puts his hand on my knee where it’s upraised under the covers and says, “I’m sorry I forget to feed you on Sundays and about the child support checks and all that.”

  I look straight ahead at the double circles of light on the ceiling. “It’s okay.”

  He squeezes my knee. “No. No, it isn’t. I know I’m not perfect, that I’m not the perfect dad. Thanks for sleeping over. I wish you’d do it more often.”

  “Maybe I will.” Sometimes he is a such sweet man. After a second, I ask him, “What’s up with the ankle bracelet thing?”

  “You saw that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He laughs. “It brings out my eyes.”

  He blinks them really fast and flirty, and then rolls them.

  I laugh too, and our giggles echo against walls of this tiny bedroom and join the sound of the classical music Grammy always plays at night, reverberating in the darkness. One car comes down the road and then another, each shining their lights inside the room for a few moments, and during these seconds I sneak a glance at my dad. He looks happy.

  “Do any of your trucker friends know about it?”

  Laughing again, he spreads his arms wide open and says, “What do you think?”

  “I think some of your trucker friends might knock you some good,” I say.

  “Either that or ask me home.”

  He fluffs the bed covers, pulls the comforter to my chin like I’m a little girl. The soft weight of it makes me feel all cozy safe. The smell of clean sheets is comforting, so I smile, and then he asks, “Do you really think I’m dyslexic?”

  I tell him yes, and then I spend the rest of the night wondering about how people can be so many things that they don’t even know. How my dad could be dyslexic all his life and not realize it. How my mom could be selfish and not know it. How about me? What could I be and not realize? God, I hope it’s something good, and not like World Champion Bratwurst Eater.