I fell in beside her, and together we left the exhibit. I was careful not to brush against her, because I was too aware of wanting to. I didn’t want her to sense it and pull away. But on the screen, when I glanced back one last time, colors flowed between us as if we were connected.
CHAPTER 23
“LISSA, YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, ” Beth complained on Friday evening.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “You were talking about Vanessa, how she’s got a new best friend. Mandy something-or-other.”
“Mindy,” Beth said. She draped herself over the back of the sofa, one foot dragging the ground. “Mindy’s dad manages the Apparel Mart, and Mindy gets to go whenever she wants and buy jewelry really cheap. Today she and Vanessa wore matching necklaces. Fourteen-carat gold.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s terrible! They sit together at lunch and everything!” She shook my shoulder. “Lissa!”
I jerked myself back. “Huh? So they eat together. What’s the big deal?”
She slid off the sofa. “You’re not paying attention. You don’t even care.”
“Beth—”
She stomped upstairs and slammed her door.
I closed my eyes. Beth was right; my mind was somewhere else. Today during my free period, I’d gone to the library and accessed the Internet on one of the school computers. My palms had gotten sweaty and my stomach had cramped up, but I’d glanced around to make sure no one was looking and then typed in the word homosexuality. Over a thousand pages were found, so I typed in teenage to narrow the search. This time there was less information, and most of it was really depressing. Gay teenagers were two to six times more likely to attempt suicide than other teenagers, one study reported, and another said that up to thirty percent of all adolescent suicides were committed by gay teens.
Jesus.
But I also found an on-line magazine called Prism, and in it were poems and essays by kids who were gay. Someone named Lucy McDonald had written a poem about loving another girl, and she compared stroking her girlfriend’s stomach to running her hands along the inside of a wooden bowl. I read that and I got a breath-catching feeling inside, anxious and full of longing.
When Kate and I were in junior high, there was a game the two of us played where I would close my eyes and hold out my arm, and Kate would walk her fingertips in light, fluttering steps from the inside of my wrist to my elbow. Then we’d switch, and I’d do it to her. The point was for the person with closed eyes to call out “Stop” before the other person got all the way to her elbow, which is harder than it sounds. But really, we did it because we liked the way it felt. It wasn’t sexual or anything, no more than tracing letters on each other’s backs or fixing each other’s hair.
I sank into the sofa and stared at the ceiling. Things were better now that Kate and I were talking again. They were. But in some ways I still missed her so much.
The doorbell rang, rescuing me from my thoughts. Sophie. She was here to take Beth and me shopping—her idea, not ours. I pushed myself up from the sofa. “Beth!” I called. “Sophie’s here!”
In the front hall, Jerry opened the door and invited Sophie in. When I joined them, they were standing close together, Sophie’s hand on Jerry’s arm. She let go when she saw me. “Lissa,” she said. “Hi. Ready to go?”
“Sure,” I said.
Beth trundled down the stairs.
“Beth, honey, better grab a jacket,” Sophie said. “It’s chilly. And Jerry, I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself all night long, but this is a girls’ night out and we’re going to have some fun. Isn’t that right, girls?”
Beth made a face. She was still mad at me, I could tell, but we were stuck in this together.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Beth wanted to check out the jewelry counter at Macy’s, so that’s where we went first. We each had fifty dollars, given to us by Jerry, and Sophie had thrown in twenty-five apiece on top of that. I told her she didn’t need to, but she insisted.
Beth pored over the gold necklaces, tons of them, all different lengths and widths, then pointed to the one she liked the best. The salesclerk separated it from the others and draped it over her fingers. “A hundred sixty-five dollars,” she said.
Beth bit her lip.
“You don’t have enough money,” I said.
“I know.”
“Anyway, you shouldn’t get one just because Vanessa and Mandy have one.”
“Mindy.”
“Whatever. I’m not trying to be a jerk, Beth, but you don’t even like jewelry.”
“How do you know? I love jewelry. I’ve always loved jewelry.”
“Beth, honey, how about this?” Sophie said. She held up a delicate gold chain with a pendant shaped like a teddy bear. She took in Beth’s expression and wrinkled her brow. “Not your style?”
“Uh, not exactly.”
She placed the necklace on the counter. “Well, then, we’ll just keep looking. And if I pick out something you don’t like, you just tell me. Just say, ‘Sophie, that is the ugliest necklace I’ve ever seen.’ All right?”
Beth rubbed the toe of her shoe against the floor. “I might not want a necklace after all. I’m not a hundred percent positive one way or the other.”
“Should we go look at clothes?” I suggested.
“Yeah. Let’s go to The Gap.”
Beth found a denim skirt she loved, and Sophie, who turned out to be better at clothes than jewelry, helped her select a couple of shirts to go with it. “Tops,” Sophie called them. They were cute.
I grabbed some sweatshirts from the rack, along with some loose-fitting jeans. I’d just about made up my mind when I heard a tap on the dressing-room door.
“Try this,” Sophie said, passing a light pink shirt over the top of the door.
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t mind the style—it was a V neck with short sleeves—but the fabric was clingy and the cut was snug. Not my kind of thing.
“Just try it,” Sophie said.
I sighed and slipped it over my head. I looked at myself in the mirror.
“Well?” Sophie said.
I hesitated, then opened the door.
Sophie’s expression went soft. “Oh, honey, that’s the one.”
I walked to the full-length mirror at the end of the narrow hall and turned sideways. The color went well with my skin, and the way the shirt hugged my body made me look curvy and slender at the same time.
“Wow,” Beth said, coming up behind me.
I bought the shirt, as well as a necklace Sophie spotted at one of the jewelry carts in the middle of the mall. No teddy bears this time; this one was an antique-y looking silver chain with tiny blue stones inserted between the links. From the middle dangled a larger stone that rested in the hollow of my throat. It cost $22.99.
“It’ll go with your new shirt,” Sophie said. “Chokers are perfect for V necks.”
While the vendor punched the price into the cash register, Beth fingered a different necklace, one made from a thin leather cord strung with funky purple beads. I watched her for a couple of seconds, then counted the money in my wallet. “Ring that one up, too,” I told the guy.
“But I already spent all my money,” Beth said.
“I know.”
“Here,” the guy said, lifting the necklace from the stand and handing it to Beth. With Sophie’s help, she fastened it around her neck.
“It’s not gold,” I said.
She reached for the mirror, tilting it so she could see.
“Don’t you want to say ‘thank you’ to your sister?” Sophie asked.
Beth threw her arms around me and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s beautiful.” Then she stepped back and examined her reflection. Raising her eyebrows, she put her hands on her hips and cocked one shoulder forward. “Really?” she mouthed to an imaginary admirer. “You do?”
I caught Sophie’s eye and smiled.
CHAPTER 24
r /> ON SATURDAY, Ariel called and asked if I wanted to come to her house that afternoon instead of meeting at Java Jive’s.
“You know, to report on our dreams,” she said. She paused, then added, “I made a Tunnel of Fudge.”
“A what?” I said.
“A Tunnel of Fudge. It’s this awesome cake from the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest.”
“Oh,” I said. Still, for an instant I balked, feeling that old sense of being backed into something. Coffeehouses were safer: there were other people around, it was neutral territory. But then I realized—and it was weird that I had to realize, that I didn’t just know—that I liked Ariel. As I drove to her house, I remembered all the judgments I’d made about her, and I felt bad, because wasn’t that exactly what was so messed up about Kate? The way she focused only on how things looked on the surface, instead of pushing deeper and figuring things out for herself?
I pulled into Ariel’s drive and cut the motor. For several seconds I sat there, listening to the engine pop, and then I unbuckled my seat belt and stepped outside. A flutter of cloth in the kitchen window caught my eye, and I saw Ariel holding back the curtain and waving. The curtain dropped, and she came out the front door to greet me.
“Lissa! Hey!” she called. “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”
“What? No way.” I took a step forward. “Nice house.”
“Yeah?” She glanced up the street at the other, almost identical houses and made a face that suggested she wasn’t so sure. “Come on in. I’ll get you some cake.”
The kitchen was bright and sunny and very clean. A spice rack on the counter held alphabetized jars of spices, and matching blue and pink pot holders hung from the cabinet knobs to the left of the oven. Above the sink hung a framed piece of needlepoint that said “Bless This Mess.”
Ariel grabbed two plates from the cabinet and cut into a chocolate bundt cake with drizzly chocolate frosting.
“Yay, yay, yay,” she said, lightly clapping her hands as she examined the inside of the cake. “Sometimes the tunnel part collapses, and it becomes an avalanche of fudge instead. It tastes good either way, but I’m so glad it turned out.”
She handed me my plate and watched as I took a bite. The outer edge of the cake was rich and moist, while the inside, as promised, tasted like a dense ribbon of gooey fudge. “Mmm,” I said. “You are a goddess.”
The screen door squeaked, and Ariel’s mom came in loaded with shopping bags from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Behind her trailed a girl a year or two younger than Ariel and me.
“Hi, girls,” Mrs. Thomas said. She put her bags on the table and pushed back her hair. “You must be Lissa. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too.”
“That’s Shannon,” Ariel said, nodding at her sister.
“Hi,” I said.
Shannon leaned against the counter. She was small and blond and looked bored. “No nose ring?” she said to me.
“What?”
She walked over and scooped a dab of frosting from the cake plate. Ariel snatched the cake and moved it.
“Mom,” Shannon said, “tell Kimberly she has to let me have some.”
For a second the name threw me, and then I remembered: Kimberly/Ariel; Ariel/Kimberly.
“I’m sure Kimberly will be happy to share,” Mrs. Thomas said.
I shifted my weight. It was strange that Shannon and Mrs. Thomas still called Ariel “Kimberly.” Or maybe Ariel hadn’t told them she’d changed it? I’d thought of her as Ariel for so long that Kimberly now sounded wrong.
Ariel glared at Shannon, then opened the refrigerator and poured two glasses of milk. She handed one to me and said, “Come on. Let’s go to my room.”
“Watch for crumbs,” Mrs. Thomas called. “And please bring back your dishes!”
Upstairs, I settled myself on Ariel’s floor and broke off a piece of cake. I thought about Ariel’s mom, how she was pretty in a tired sort of way. And Shannon was a pain, but what little sister wasn’t every so often? Mainly, they both just seemed normal. I looked at Ariel and smiled.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. I like your room.” My eyes traveled from her colorful bedspread to the Mardi Gras beads draped over the side of her mirror. I did like her room, although it, too, was more normal than I’d have guessed. But what did I expect? Black walls? Shrines to Inanna piled with tea cakes and dowsing rods?
“So,” Ariel said, “I tried those techniques you told me about, but I haven’t had a lucid dream yet. What about you? Any luck?”
I leaned back against the wall. I hadn’t had a lucid dream this entire week, not one. I felt as if I’d stalled out. It frustrated me.
“None,” I said.
“I almost had one, I think. I was having a dream about being at the grocery store, only for some reason I had all this gunk in my mouth. Like wet sand. It was disgusting. And I kept spitting it out and spitting it out, and I remember thinking, ‘God, this can’t be real. I have to be dreaming.’ But even though I thought that, it didn’t shoot me into a lucid dream.”
“Weird,” I said.
“I think the gunky stuff was my mouth guard,” she said. She blushed and rolled her eyes. “I wear a mouth guard when I go to bed. Isn’t that gross?”
“You mean, like a retainer?”
“Sort of. It’s like what football players wear, only smaller. It’s to keep me from grinding my teeth.”
I envisioned Ariel in bed, her heavy eyeliner gone and her mouth guard in place. “It’s not gross.”
She pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her cheek on her knee. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “I really wanted to have one, though. A lucid dream.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes I just . . . I don’t know. It would just be so nice to have something special happen, you know?”
Her expression was so wistful that it felt wrong not to tell her. I put down my plate. “Um . . . actually, I did have a lucid dream. Not this week, but a while ago. Before we even talked about it.”
She lifted her head. “You did?”
I swallowed. “Two of them.”
“Lissa!” She sat straight up. “So tell me about them. Tell me, tell me, tell me!”
She didn’t ask why I hadn’t told her before, and I was glad. I told her about my moon dream and then about my weird floating dream, how I imagined myself drifting around the house like a ghost. She listened with parted lips, and when I came to the part about bumping up against the window, she laughed and slapped the floor.
“That is so strange,” she said. “And cool. So then what?”
“Well, I finally floated outside, and it was all dark and kind of spooky. And I looked down, and below me was—”
I stopped. Ariel lifted her eyebrows.
“A girl,” I said. “Just this girl, walking on the street. And then the dream shifted, and I was in my bathroom flossing my teeth. Isn’t that bizarre?” I spoke quickly, scrunching my toes in my sneakers.
“Wow,” Ariel said.
“Yeah. Although what was really weird was how real it felt. Even though I knew I was dreaming.”
Ariel shook her head. “Isn’t it amazing the stuff we can convince ourselves of? And not just in our dreams, but in our normal lives, too. You know?”
I wondered what she was thinking of, what lies she’d convinced herself were truths. But I didn’t ask.
I stayed at Ariel’s for a couple of hours. We agreed to keep working on having lucid dreams, and I gave her more tips, such as memorizing certain dream signals (for her, maybe the gunk-in-the-mouth thing) and telling herself that the next time that happens, she will realize she’s dreaming. I hoped that by talking about it, maybe I’d get things back on track for me as well.
At 5:30, we headed over to Darlin’s, me in my truck and Ariel in her Volvo. I had to be home by 7:00 to meet Finn, but I figured there was no reason I couldn’t deliver an order or two. It would give me something to do.
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But Darlin had other plans. She ushered Ariel and me into the living room, sat us down, and brought out a bottle of sparkling cider. “A toast,” she said, untwisting the wire cap. She filled our glasses and beamed at us.
“What?” Ariel said, looking from Darlin to me. I lifted my eyebrows, and she turned back to Darlin. “Darlin, what’s going on?”
“To Darlin’s Delights,” she said, clinking her glass against ours. “Or maybe that’s too cute. Darlin’s Delicacies? Or just plain Darlin’s?”
“What are you talking about?” Ariel demanded.
“I’ve decided to do it,” Darlin said. “I’m going to phase out Entrées on Trays—”
“What? Why?!”
“—and start my own catering business. My own catering business, with my food and my recipes. And hopefully a ready-made list of clients, if only they’ll trust me to cook for them!”
“Oh, Darlin, they will!” Ariel said. “They totally will!” She put down her cider and gave Darlin a hug. “Darlin, that’s awesome!”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s great!”
“And you two will be my charming and courteous servers, of course. If you want to be. I’ll run it by my weekday drivers, too, and see who all is interested. I’ve got so much to do—apply for a business license, update my kitchen, create a menu—but I’m enjoying every minute of it. Can I tell you how wonderful that feels?”
“It’s because you’re doing what you love,” Ariel said. “You’re following your heart.”
“Oh, girls,” Darlin said, squeezing us both. “My soul is in a riotous condition. It’s the truth. But if I start with this . . . well, we’ll just see, won’t we?”
Ariel and I celebrated with Darlin for a little over half an hour, until at 6:15 I glanced at my watch and made a face.
“Shit,” I said. “I’ve got to get going.”
“Ooo, that’s right,” Ariel said. To Darlin she announced, “Lissa’s got a date.”
“A date?” Darlin repeated. She looked surprised.
“She’s going out for pizza with this awesome guy named Finn,” Ariel said. A line formed between her eyebrows, but disappeared when she smiled. “It’s very exciting.”