My Life in Black and White

  Only it wasn’t.

  It really happened.

  I was actually lying here in a hospital bed, with half my face bandaged and the other half not—like one those half-moon cookies Taylor and I used to bake by the dozens during our fifth-grade baking phase. Vanilla frosting on one side, chocolate on the other. Whenever I ate one, I would start with the vanilla. I’d take my sweet time. Bite after tiny bite, saving the chocolate—the best part—for last. But Taylor? Well, Taylor ate hers straight up the middle, plowing through both flavors at once, with no regard—

  “Beans,” my father said softly.

  No regard whatsoever—

  I could feel his hand on my foot, squeezing. “Beany?”

  NO REGARD.

  “Jeff, I think she’s asleep.”

  “No, she’s not, Mom.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I shared a room with her for three years, remember? She snores like a truck driver.”

  I opened my one good eye and tried to glare at Ruthie, but it didn’t really work. My face was too sore and swollen to move. Which sucked. Everything sucked.

  “You suck,” I muttered, just loud enough for my sister to hear.

  “See?” Ruthie patted my arm. “She’s awake.”

  “Lex,” my father said. “Do you want me to start making phone calls? Because I will.”

  “It’s your decision, baby,” my mother said to me. “Either way, everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

  After a long silence, during which I was thinking, I will never eat another half-moon cookie again as long as I live, my dad tried once more. “What do you want to do, Beans? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  “Nothing,” I said finally. “I want you to do nothing.”

  Because I knew, even then, that the damage had been done. And there wasn’t a thing my father could do to fix it.

  How Do You Make a

  Venetian Blind?

  EVERY MORNING WAS the same. The nurse on duty would walk into my room with a bag of ice chips, which got Ace-bandaged to my head for twenty minutes. Then I had to rate my pain. Mostly they used a number scale, 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, but one nurse, Janelle, always brought in this stupid laminated chart of facial expressions. “Are we a smiley face or a boo-hoo face today, Alexa?” Like I was three years old or brain damaged, which made me want to yank her perky little ponytail right off her head. But I didn’t. I never even said a word. I just pointed to the face that looked the way I felt: horrible.

  Depending on my pain level, I got either codeine or morphine, pills or shots. Then the gauze came off, my face got doused with antiseptic, and new gauze went on. If I got pills, they didn’t kick in right away, and sometimes it hurt so bad I cried. Other times, I’d bite my lip hard enough to draw blood. To distract myself, I’d close my eyes and replay the images of the party, over and over again, on the miniature movie screen in my mind. Taylor-and-Ryan, Taylor-and-Ryan, Taylor-and-Ryan.

  The whole time my mother was firing questions. How were things looking? Was the swelling any better? When would it go down completely? What about the scarring? What were they doing now, to prevent scarring later?

  Finally, the nurses would cut her off. “Okay. Mrs. Mayer? The doctors will be making rounds in a little while. They’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  Day Five. The doctors brought in diagrams to explain things to me. 3-D models of the human skull. “This is the zygomatic bone.” “This is the malar.” “The lachrymal.” “The maxilla.” While they blathered on, I stared out the window at the summer passing me by. Why couldn’t this have happened to me in January? I should be at the beach! I pictured Ryan’s hands, rubbing oil onto Taylor’s bare back, as the two of them lay poolside in the LeFevres’ backyard, drinking Crystal Light.

  “Alexa?” the doctors said. “Do you understand what we’re saying about your face?”

  “Uh-huh,” I’d say, nodding. “Yup.”

  My face. Everyone in the hospital was obsessed with my face. The doctors, the nurses, the med students, and—worst of all—my mother. Unlike my dad and Ruthie, who ate in the cafeteria and went home to sleep, my mother never left my side. She was too busy hounding the doctors to go anywhere. How was my face healing? Was the swelling going down? What would it look like later? My face was all anyone could talk about. And me, the actual owner of the face? I couldn’t have cared less. The only thought in my head was Taylor and Ryan. Taylor-and-Ryan, Taylor-and-Ryan, Taylor-and-Ryan.

  “Look at these roses Ryan sent,” my mother said when the flowers and cards and balloons started pouring in. “They’re absolutely gorgeous.”

  I pretended not to hear.

  The next fifty times my mother commented on Ryan’s roses—how gorgeous they were, how thoughtful he was—I said nothing. Finally, without stopping to plan my words, I cracked. “Will you throw them in the trash? Please?”

  I kept my eyes on the ceiling, but I could feel my mother’s stare.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I turned my gaze to the wall. Cards were taped up everywhere. Get well soon, Lexi. Hope you feel better, Lex. God speed, Alexa. We’re praying for you.

  “Alexa,” my mother said.

  “What.”

  I expected a lecture on gratitude. Instead, she walked around the bed and pulled up a chair. “What happened? Did you two have a fight?”

  Obviously, I couldn’t tell her. This was Laine Chapman Mayer, Southern belle, who I am 99 percent sure did nothing more than kiss until she got married. Her idea of The Talk was to hand me and Ruthie a book titled Abstinence and You: 501 Reasons to Wait. The notion of telling my mother about Ryan and Taylor’s hookup was insane.

  “A fight,” I mumbled. “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  This was my mother’s big opportunity to launch into her high school boyfriend story. Landry McCoy, star forward on the basketball team, Laine Chapman, head cheerleader, who, naturally, fell madly in love, applied to all the same South Carolina colleges, and—

  “Oh, God,” Ruthie said, entering the room with a soda the size of a barrel. “Is this Lifetime Television, The Laundry McCoy Story?”

  “Landry McCoy,” my mother corrected her.

  “Who names their kid Laundry? That’s just wrong.”

  “It’s Landry, and it’s a family name.”

  Ruthie took a sip of soda and grinned. “Good ole Laundry McCoy … Well, go on.”

  It is an old routine with them. My sister mocks our mother’s high school boyfriend, but she secretly loves hearing the Landry McCoy story almost as much as our mother loves telling it.

  I used to love it, too. Especially the part where my father, the University of Virginia law student, shows up at the UVA-Clemson game and sees my mother for the first time. He is short, nerdy, and not remotely athletic—the opposite of Landry McCoy. But does he let this stop him? No. My father walks right up to my mother after the game and says, “I’m Jeffrey Mayer. I’m just a schmuck from Hackensack, but I’m going to marry you.”

  “Of course,” my mother said, smiling, “I thought he was crazy, but then I started getting these letters…”

  Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the abridged version. She was going to rehash my father’s entire courtship, play-by-play, right down to the fateful moment when he shows up at her dorm with a guitar and proceeds to serenade her. My mother has no choice. The minute she hears “Carolina in My Mind” she knows she will break Landry McCoy’s heart, confessing that she is not only in love with someone else, but she is also transferring to UVA to be with him.

  “What’s your point?” I asked, cutting my mother off.

  “My point?” She looked surprised.

  “Your reason. For telling me this.”

  “It’s the Laundry McCoy Story,” Ruthie said. “She doesn’t need a point.”

  “Never mind,” I muttered. I felt an inexplicable lump in my throat, realizing tha
t my mother had been so busy reminiscing the glory days she’d forgotten what we’d been talking about to begin with.

  But I hadn’t forgotten. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ryan. It wasn’t just the roses. It was the texts he’d been sending, the pathetic attempts to apologize.

  Lx, sry abt wht hapnd sat nite. (You should be.)

  I f-d up bg time. (Yeah. You did.)

  Let me x-plain. Pls? I lv u.

  Lv? Lv??? How much could Ryan love me if he did what he did? If he couldn’t even write the whole word?

  “Honey,” my mother said, obviously catching the look on my face—well, half my face. “There’s a plan.”

  “What?” I croaked.

  “There’s a plan,” she repeated, “for you and Ryan. Just like there was for your father and me. Everything happens for a reason.”

  “What’s Ryan got to do with it?” Ruthie asked, giving her soda one last, noisy slurp. I have never known anyone who drinks as much soda as my sister. No wonder she has so many zits.

  “Nothing,” I told her. The last thing I needed was one of Ruthie’s cracks about me and Ryan—one of her Ken-and-Barbie comments.

  “Whatever.” Ruthie shrugged and tossed her cup in the trash. The perfect ending to a conversation that never should have started.

  The whole Ryan-not-showing-up-at-my-bedside situation was easy to explain to my family. We had a fight.

  Taylor was harder.

  After a week, I was allowed nonfamily visitors, and thirty girls arrived at my door. No joke. Thirty girls, fifteen balloons, eight teddy bears, six People magazines, three bags of Swedish fish, one Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants DVD, and one fruit basket. But no best friend.

  “Lexi! Omigod! You look so good!”

  Ironically, it was Heidi leading the pack, carrying the fruit basket. Heidi, whose lifeblood was Little Debbie snack cakes. “This is from me and Taylor,” she announced, walking ceremoniously across the room and lowering the basket to the foot of my bed. “We’re so sorry this happened to you, Lexi. Taylor really wanted to be here in person today, but…” Heidi paused, trying for an aggrieved expression but not quite pulling it off. “…she couldn’t make it.”

  In the silence that followed, thirty arms were nudged, thirty knowing glances exchanged.

  Suddenly, I understood why so many of them had shown up—girls I’d gone to school with and played field hockey with but wasn’t really friends with, girls I barely knew. It wasn’t compassion; it was morbid curiosity. They’d heard about Taylor hooking up with Ryan and wanted to witness the emotional fallout for themselves. Not to mention the carnage.

  I took a deep breath, reminding myself that however I was feeling, my face was still bandaged. Whatever I looked like, no one could tell. And I wasn’t about to give Heidi the satisfaction of appearing anything but fine.

  “Thanks, Heidi,” I said. Calm. Cheerful. Then, to the rest of them, “Thanks, you guys.”

  “You’re welcome!” everyone chorused back.

  Awkward silence followed. Made even more awkward by my mother launching into hostess mode, bustling around collecting teddy bears, offering Dixie cups of water, while out of nowhere my dad became a stand-up comedian. How do you make a Venetian blind? … You poke him in the eye!

  If Kendall and Rae hadn’t burst through the door in their sarongs and flip-flops, swooning over the male nurse they’d just met in the elevator, I might have yanked the IV out of my arm and run screaming out the door.

  “Omigod, you guys, he was so hot!”

  “He looked like Mario Lopez—”

  “But with Justin Bieber’s nose—”

  “I told him he could give me a sponge bath anytime—”

  “Kendall gave him her number on a piece of toilet paper!” Rae shrieked, and everyone laughed. Except my dad, who shook his head, as if to say, statutory rape is no laughing matter.

  “Omigod, Lexi!” Rae suddenly said.

  And Kendall said, “You look so good!”

  As they ran over to hug me, apologizing for being late—they’d been at the beach—I felt a rush of tears that I couldn’t explain. “Thanks for coming,” I said. Because that is what you say when your friends come visit you in the hospital. And even though I was thankful, Kendall and Rae being there only made me feel worse. Their presence made Taylor’s absence all the more glaring.

  “Where was Taylor?” Ruthie asked as soon as everyone left.

  I shrugged.

  “Did something happen with you guys?”

  “Gee, Ruthie, I don’t know. Her brother just decided it would be fun to drive me into a tree.”

  My dad cleared his throat and said, “Maybe a little distance from Taylor is a good thing. Until we determine the legality of this situation.”

  “Jeff.” My mother frowned delicately. “We’ve discussed this. We are not going to sue the LeFevres.”

  “Well, someone needs to take responsibility here, Laine. Someone is going to need to cover these medical bills. Do you know what our deductible is?”

  The minute the conversation stopped including me, I reached for my cell. Just to torture myself, I listened to Taylor’s voice mails, starting with the gem she’d left me the morning after the accident. Eight days ago. But who was counting?

  “Lex, oh my God … I heard what happened. Well, obviously, since Jar was driving … I can’t believe he was driving … anyway … I’m freaking out here. Call me when you can, ’kay? I’ll keep my phone on.”

  Oh, you’ll keep your phone on? Wow. You are such a good friend. You should win an award.

  “Lex … it’s me again. Still freaking out … Call me.”

  You’re freaking out? YOU’RE freaking out???

  “Lex, hey … My mom talked to your dad and he said something about surgery…? Oh my God … I guess that’s why you haven’t called me back…”

  Yeah. That’s why.

  “…but could you at least text me? … I’m sooo sorry about everything. We need to talk. Please?”

  It was unbelievable. Taylor spent a full fifteen voice mails pretending to care about my well-being, pretending to care that she hadn’t heard back from me. She throws out some lame, generic apology to assuage her guilt, and I’m supposed to call her back like everything’s fine? No mention of the party. No mention of Ryan. It was like she thought my brain had been so damaged in the accident I couldn’t remember what she’d done. Please.

  I drove myself crazy, listening to Taylor’s voice mails.

  And reading Ryan’s texts.

  And picturing those thirty girls in my hospital room, nudging each other, exchanging glances.

  I went certifiably insane trying to make sense of it all. Why Taylor and Ryan did what they did, how they could live with themselves, whether it was just the one night or if it had happened before. My head was spinning so fast, and my stomach was twisted up in so many knots that I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

  I had no idea.

  A Lifetime Supply

  of Antimicrobial Soap

  THE NEXT DAY I met with a new plastic surgeon, a specialist in reconstruction, who examined my face for all of two seconds before concluding that the skin wasn’t healing properly. I would need another procedure, a “split thickness skin graft,” taken from my buttocks. While my mother cried, I had one nauseating, hysterical thought. I’ll be a butt-face! Literally!

  As if that wasn’t preposterous enough, not thirty minutes after Dr. Ass-Graft dropped his bomb, Taylor’s mom showed up. Unannounced. Holding an enormous cellophane-wrapped duck.

  Seeing Mrs. LeFevre standing in the doorway of my hospital room, I felt a slow burble of crazy juice rising in my throat. I didn’t know whether to barf or cry.

  “What is she doing here?” I hissed to my mother, who was perched on a chair next to my bed. “I told you no more visitors.”

  “You know what they say…” Taylor’s mom called gaily from across the room. “If Mohammed won’t answer her cell phon
e, the mountain will come to Mohammed!” She plopped the duck down on a chair and ran a bejeweled hand through her red, spiky hair. “You would not believe how crowded the gift shop was. Everyone and their dog seems to be having a baby today! All they had left were ducks!”

  I watched my mom glide across the room like an ice dancer, her face morphing before my eyes. “Bree,” she chirped as though Taylor’s mom were a guest arriving for a dinner party. “It’s so good of you to come.”

  “Hello, Laine.”

  The mothers clasped fingertips.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Fine, just fine. How are you holding up?”

  You would think, watching the two of them, that they were old pals. But the truth was, even after all the years Taylor and I had been friends, our parents barely knew one another. Whenever they overlapped at school functions and sleepover drop-offs, they would exchange pleasantries, but that was about it. Taylor’s mom tried once, when we first moved to town, inviting my mother to one of her ladies’ cocktail parties. I never heard what happened. I just I remember my mother telling my dad she wouldn’t be doing that again.

  Laine Mayer vs. Bree LeFevre was like milk vs. whisky. Talbots vs. Juicy Couture. If my mother were a bumper sticker, she would read THAT’S NOT APPROPRIATE. Taylor’s mom would read WHY THE FUCK NOT?

  “Oh, Lexi.” Mrs. LeFevre shifted her gaze to me. “Oh, sweet girl.” When she reached my bed, my ex–best friend’s mother took my hand in hers, cupping it gently. Her voice dropped three octaves. “I am so sorry this happened.”

  “That’s okay,” I mumbled. The lie of the century.

  Taylor’s mom held my hand tighter.

  She read my palm once, I remember. It was during a thunderstorm. I was ten and I was sleeping over at Taylor’s when a humongous boom woke me up. I was so scared I ran downstairs, where Mrs. LeFevre was sitting alone at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of wine. She took my hand to comfort me, and then she started reading it. My heart line, she said, was the deepest she’d ever seen.