They were clunky black and white saddle oxfords with thick black laces. “They’re nice,” I said. “They look . . . durable.”
“You bet. They’re called Fluevogs. They’re made by this little Polish guy off in Poland.”
“Go figure,” Finn said.
“Check out the soles,” she said.
I took another swig of beer, then lifted one of her shoes. On the bottom, carved into the tread, were nine tiny angels. “Huh. That’s cool.”
“Yep. I have angels on my soul. On my soul, get it? And when I walk in the snow, I’ll leave baby angel prints everywhere I go.”
Finn snorted. “When you walk in the snow, you call me, okay? This is Atlanta, remember?”
“Whatever.” She wiggled her foot again, lifting it for me to hold. “Read what’s written in the middle.”
I held her foot still. “‘One hundred percent Natural Hevea-Tree Latex.’ What’s natural Hevea-tree latex?”
“Not that part. The other part.”
I squinted. “‘Resists Alkali, Water, Acid, Fatigue, Satan.’” I laughed. “Your shoes resist Satan.”
“Why do you think I bought them?”
“Walk with God,” Finn said solemnly.
“Walk with God,” she repeated. She moved her feet out of my lap. “I got a new nose ring, too.” She leaned forward. Embedded above her right nostril was a dark red stone, maybe a garnet.
“She’s mad at her parents,” Finn said. “She’s rebelling. That’s why she has the beer—she stole it from her dad.”
“Well, you wear it well,” I said. “The nose ring, not the beer. Although you drink the beer well. Why are you rebelling?” I finished my beer, then shook my head, which was feeling muzzy. Finn handed me a second Rolling Rock, and I took a long swallow.
“Because they’re being assholes,” Ariel said. “They want me to be more like my sister.”
“Shannon?”
“Uh-huh. She’s a cheerleader now. Did I tell you? She puts Vaseline on her teeth so her lips won’t get stuck when she smiles.”
I laughed. “I hope Beth never does that.”
“Is she a cheerleader?” Ariel asked.
“She’s ten.”
“You never know. They start young, these rah-rah types.”
Above us, an airplane flew across the sky.
“I love the trails planes leave,” Ariel said. “They look so pretty, like wispy, delicate clouds.”
“They’re smoke,” Finn said. “Exhaust. Pollution.”
Ariel swatted him, then scooted down so that her head rested against his thigh. She closed her eyes and said, “I think I’ll be a skywriter when I grow up. I’ll only write love letters. Love letters in the sky.”
“I thought you were going to be a dowser,” Finn said.
“Yep. A dowser and a skywriter. What a lovely existence.”
Finn looked at me and swiveled his finger by his temple, stopping abruptly when Ariel opened her eyes to see why I was laughing. “Shh,” he said in a loud whisper. “We don’t want to upset her.”
We didn’t leave until it got dark, and Finn ended up driving me home. He’d had one beer to my three and, unlike me, he was operating on more than two hours of sleep. At least I assumed he was.
“What about my drunk?” I said. I tried again. “My truck?”
“I’ll follow behind in your truck,” Ariel said, “and then Finn can take me back to my car. How about that?”
“Are you safe to drive?”
She held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor. I’m fine.”
I stumbled, and Finn put his hand out to steady me.
“Come on,” he said, guiding me to his car.
“Wait. I’ve got to give my keys to Ariel.”
She dangled them in front of me. “Already did. Remember?”
I’m not sure what Finn and I talked about on the way home. Pizza, I think, and how good a cheese and pepperoni sounded about then. Mainly I watched Ariel from the rearview window, wincing as she lurched behind us in my truck.
“Looks like she’s having some trouble with the stick shift,” Finn said.
The truck jolted forward, narrowly missing the curb.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
We pulled into my driveway, and Finn cut the engine. He cleared his throat. “So, um, you want to go out for pizza some night?”
I turned to look at him. “Huh?”
“Pizza. Maybe we could go to Fellini’s on Saturday, if you want.” His hands were in his lap: his right hand covering his too-small left one. I thought of Kate’s strong hands, her nails filed short for gymnastics. When she was in junior high, she used to bite them.
“But if you don’t want to—”
“No,” I said. I banished Kate from my head. “Pizza sounds good. Oh, but I work that night.”
“Ariel said she’d cover for you.”
“She did?”
“Only if you want her to. I mean, it’s up to you.” A flush crept up his neck.
“Oh,” I said. I felt slow, like my brain wasn’t working the way it should. “Well, uh, sure.” I opened the door and got out.
“See you later,” he called when I was almost to the house.
I looked back. “Right. See you later.”
CHAPTER 21
“SO,” I SAID THE NEXT DAY at school.
“So,” Kate said.
Our eyes met briefly before we both looked away. We’d decided during history to hang out together this afternoon. Only now, standing by our lockers, neither of us knew how to act. It was like we had to get to know each other all over again.
Kate half-laughed and brushed her hand through her hair. “How’d you do on the quiz Mr. Neilson gave us?”
“Okay, I guess. How about you?”
“I bombed it, as usual. I totally forgot who Joseph Smith was.”
“The guy who founded Mormonism,” I said on reflex. I blushed and tried to think of something else to say.
From the end of the hall came loud male voices, and Kate’s eyes flicked toward the sound. Her face paled and she stepped closer to her locker, fiddling with the lock even though she’d already gotten her books.
“What?” I said
“Nothing.”
I glanced over my shoulder, and my chest tightened. “Just ignore him. He’s an asshole.”
They stopped behind us, Ben and Travis Wyrick. “Hi, Kate,” Ben said. He nodded at me. “Hi, Lissa. You two going to Travis’s this weekend? He’s getting a keg.”
“Going to be a good time,” Travis said.
Kate didn’t respond.
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “I don’t think so.”
“Kate?” Ben said.
She turned around, but she kept her eyes on the floor. “I can’t. I’ve already got plans.”
“Oh,” he said. He shifted his weight. “Well, if you change your mind . . .”
“Come on, buddy,” Travis said, clapping Ben on the shoulder. “Let’s bounce.”
I waited until they were out of earshot, then shook my head. “God, talk about ego. He ditches you for Alice Spradling, then has the nerve to act like nothing happened. What a jerk.”
“Lissa—”
“What? I mean, if anything you were the one acting guilty, when you have nothing to feel guilty about. He’s a loser, Kate. Let it go.”
Kate fiddled with the strap of her backpack, then folded her arms over her waist and looked past me down the hall. “Let’s go to Smoothie King. I’m starving.”
Over strawberry smoothies, I told her about my upcoming date with Finn. I’m not sure why. And for some reason I acted more enthusiastic than I really was, describing our afternoon at the park and how he tried to be so casual when he suggested we go out for pizza. I thought Kate would be excited for me, but she put down her smoothie and gave me an odd smile.
“Finn O’Connor? You’re going out with Finn O’Connor?”
“Yep. Saturday night.”
“Huh.??
? She crumpled her straw wrapper into a ball. “What about his hand?”
“What about it?”
“Nothing, it’s just—” Again, that smile. She flicked the wrapper across the table and said, “That’s great, Lissa. That’s really great.”
I felt off balance, like no decision I made would be right. You can’t have it both ways, I wanted to tell her. You can’t hate me for kissing you and then act all weird when I go out with someone else.
But if I said that, Kate would get up and leave. Or she’d close herself off like the other night on the phone.
“Kate, I don’t . . .” I spread my hands flat on the table. “It’s not like I like him or anything.”
“Who, Finn?”
I gave her a look.
“Sure you do,” she said. “He’s a great guy. You’ll have a wonderful time.”
The bell on the door tinkled, and Kate and I turned our heads. In came a woman wearing a brown coat, nothing special about her, but we both feigned interest as she ordered her smoothie, paid, and left. When she was gone, Kate gazed out the window and I stared at the table. I tried to think of something to talk about. Anything, just so she’d see we could still have fun together.
“Hey,” Kate said. She leaned forward over the table. “Did I tell you what happened in English today?”
“What?”
“Well, Mr. Crankshaw was going on and on about something, I don’t even know what, and Lissa—” she looked at me and lowered her voice “—I got the hiccups.”
For most people, getting the hiccups was no big deal, but for Kate it was an affliction. She couldn’t hold them back no matter how hard she tried, and each time she hiccuped it sounded as if a frog were trying to escape from her lungs.
I raised my eyebrows. “So what’d you do?”
“What do you mean, what did I do? I hiccuped. Mr. Crankshaw broke off right in the middle of his lecture and said, ‘Young lady, was that a burp?’”
I looked at her, how she’d widened her eyes and lifted her hands, and a lump rose in my throat. It wasn’t easy for her either, I realized. And she was trying.
“I needed you, Lissa. I needed you to give me the cure.”
The cure was for Kate to take a deep breath, stare straight at me, and slowly exhale while I counted backward from ten to one. While she exhaled, she was supposed to draw a cow in the air with her finger. Or a poodle. Or a zebra. Once I told her to draw a warthog from hell, and she let out all of her air in a giggling whoosh.
“How’d you finally get rid of them?” I said.
“I ignored them, and finally they went away. It took forever, though.”
I’d been stirring my smoothie with my straw, but now I stopped. I wondered if she knew what she’d just said. Or was she so good at ignoring things that she even had herself fooled?
She gestured at my Styrofoam cup. “You done with that?”
I wasn’t, but I pushed it toward her anyway. It was the least I could do.
CHAPTER 22
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I took Beth to the High Museum so she could get extra credit in art, and at the last minute I called Kate and asked if she wanted to join us. She said sure, so Beth and I stopped by her house to pick her up.
“There she is,” Beth said, spotting Kate jogging down her front steps. “Oh, her coat is so cute. I want a coat like that.”
I smiled. I liked Kate’s coat, too. It was periwinkle blue with a hood and big buttons up the front, and it reminded me of Paddington Bear.
“Hi,” Kate said, opening the door of the truck. Crisp fall air blew in as she climbed onto the seat.
“I love your coat,” Beth said. She scooted over to make room. “Where’d you get it?”
“My mom ordered it for me. Somewhere in New York.” She pressed her legs together and shut the door.
“Sorry it’s so crowded,” I said.
“That’s okay.”
“I could sit in the back,” Beth said.
“No,” Kate and I said in unison.
“It’s dangerous,” I added. “You know that.”
“Anyway, we want you up here with us.” Kate said. She was blushing, but we both ignored it. “You’re the whole reason we’re going, remember? And I haven’t seen you in ages.”
Beth beamed and launched into a blow-by-blow of her day, telling us how a boy named Roger lost the fifth-grade gerbil and threw the entire elementary school into a state of chaos.
“I bet it was in somebody’s lunch box,” Kate said. “Was it in somebody’s lunch box?”
“No,” Beth said. “How would it get in a lunch box?”
“You never know. Gerbils are tricky. Did it crawl into someone’s jacket? Hide in a shoe?”
“No, no, no.”
“I know,” Kate said. She tickled Beth’s side. “It’s right here! It’s been here all along!”
Beth shrieked and jerked back, and the two of them fell together giggling.
I glanced at them and smiled. This was the way it was supposed to be with me and Kate, even if it took a ten-year-old to smooth things over. I pressed on the accelerator, snapping them, laughing, against the back of the seat.
At the museum, we wandered single file through the post-Impressionist exhibit, listening to the tape-recorded audio tour on individual headsets. All of the paintings were nice, but there was one, a Matisse, that I absolutely loved. It was called Icarus, and it showed a man falling through a night sky. The figure of the man was curvy and sprawling, and stars were flung onto the sky so that their points went every which way.
The voice on the audio tour switched to the next painting before I was ready to move on, so I clicked off the tape and gazed at the figure’s outstretched arms. There was a red dot to show where his heart was, the only color on his otherwise solid form.
Kate came and stood beside me. Her earphones hung around her neck. “Wow,” she said, studying the Matisse. She took a step closer. “He’s the guy who died because he flew too close to the sun, right?”
“Well . . . but look at his heart.”
“You mean that one dot?”
“Yeah.”
Kate shrugged. “So?”
“It’s red, which means he’s still alive.”
“Until he hits the ground,” Kate said. She smacked her hands together. “Splat.”
Her comment cut me. I could feel my ears heat up, and I took a step away from her.
For a second Kate looked surprised, and then her mouth drew into a knot. She thought I was being too sensitive, I could tell.
“But he doesn’t hit the ground,” I said. “In the myth he lands in the sea, remember? Which means there’s a chance he survives.” I didn’t know why I was going on about this, but I couldn’t let it go. I wanted Kate to understand.
Kate glanced at me, then back at the Matisse. She didn’t respond.
Beth’s favorite part of the museum was the children’s exhibit on the lower level, and she dragged us there as soon as we finished the tour.
“This is so cool,” Kate said when she walked into the first room. Brightly painted metal structures stretched from the floor to the ceiling, an avant-garde jungle gym. “Has this always been here?”
Beth scaled the side, looping her leg over a thick red bar. “Come on! What are you waiting for?”
Kate swung onto one of the bars, then sidestepped toward the middle and climbed higher. I followed, resting midway across to admire Kate’s grace as she climbed from bar to bar. Her movements were quick and assured, and she seemed more like herself than she had all day.
“What’s the holdup?” she teased when she glanced back to check my progress. The weirdness between us had retreated. “You going to stay there all day?”
“Probably,” Beth said. “She’s such a slowpoke.”
“Excuse me?” I reached for the bar above me and pulled myself up.
After the metal jungle gym came a hall full of twisting mirrors, which we stumbled through with our hands out, grinning at our mult
iple, clumsy images. Next was an optical illusions room, and following that was a room called “The Magic of Touch,” where you could run your fingers over every kind of texture imaginable.
But the last exhibit was the best. I watched Kate’s face as we filed in.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.” She stared at the far end of the dark room, where heat and motion sensors projected kaleidoscopic images onto the wall-sized screen. She lifted her arm, and an orange figure on the screen lifted her arm as well. She took a step forward, and the figure enlarged. She leaned to the left, and the figure, no longer orange but purple, leaned with her. Colors rippled across the screen like a puddle of rainbows, and in the middle was Kate’s outline: slender, pale yellow, her arms moving in a fluid arc above her head.
A turquoise Beth twirled and danced, giggling at her reflected twin, while Kate moved more slowly, swaying back and forth as if she were underwater. I stood still and watched my image shift from one hue to the next. It reminded me of my lucid dreams, that same quality of reality overlaid with fantasy. Enchanted. Surreal.
“Watch this,” Beth said. She leaped into the air, and her image splashed across the wall.
“Stunning,” Kate said, clapping her hands.
“Now you,” Beth said. “Do a cartwheel.”
Kate stepped away from us and did a perfect cartwheel. “Your turn,” she said to me when she finished.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “I told Jerry we’d be home by five.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. She poked me in the ribs until I grinned and twisted away.
“Okay, okay,” I said. I raised my hands over my head and shook my hips. “There. Are you happy?”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Kate, do one more thing. Do that flippy-over thing where your hands don’t touch the ground. Please?”
“An aerial?” she asked. She lifted her arms, then brought them down quickly and tucked at the waist, flipping her legs over her body. My breath caught in my throat, and I clapped hard to cover what I was feeling.
Beth clapped, too. “Do it again! Do a handspring!”
“No, Beth,” I said, “we’ve really got to go.” I started forward, and Kate turned to wait for us. Her profile changed from gold to green, then back to gold.