Read Between the Lines

  Anything.

  But the lady has gone back to her scribbling. And now she’s humming a sweet tune while she does so. And I realize the scratching out of faces is as far as her commitment goes.

  I lean my head against the dirty glass and stare out the window.

  It was like this last weekend, too. Me, with my head against the window, wanting to get out. Wanting anything but the right then of the endless night.

  I was in Grace’s car with the girls. I hate that name for us. But that’s what everyone calls us. That’s what we say. Or did say, anyway. “The Girls.” Like we all make up one living mass instead of being individual people. First, it was Grace, Sammy, me, and Leslie. But Leslie moved away and was recently replaced by Lacy. I don’t know the rules for who gets to be one of us. I don’t even know how we became an us. We just always have been. Ever since we were little.

  We were driving around in Grace’s car, looking for the party Grace’s boyfriend, Ben, was supposedly at, which he said was for “guys only.” He goes to a lot of this kind of party.

  We were driving for what felt like hours. The conversation never veered from each of us sharing our thoughts on where this party might be, who might be there, and what they might be drinking and saying and eating and playing and listening to.

  Question: How much time can a group of supposedly smart and interesting girls spend talking about all the possible places a girl’s boyfriend might be (hiding)?

  Answer: An unbearably long time.

  The better question and discussion should have been: Why is Grace dating such a jerk?

  I didn’t talk much. I never do. But the more they talked and the less I did, I began to fantasize about unbuckling my seat belt, opening the door, and falling into the street.

  Instead, I stared out the window. At streetlights. Through windows of houses with lights on but shades not drawn. A hopeful glimpse of a life less mundane. But all I saw was a man eating dinner alone at a table. A family sitting in the TV light, staring at a flat box containing something more interesting than their entire darkened house. Than their entire neighborhood, entire city. Surrounded by the world, but focused on a box.

  It was getting more depressing by the minute. But it was still less depressing than the back of Grace’s head and the nonstop chatter of the other girls in the car, which I’d been trying to tune out for miles.

  Why don’t people come with mute buttons?

  And when did I become such a horrible friend?

  “Don’t you guys ever want to talk about something meaningful?” I finally blurted out after what seemed like the seven hundredth time Grace had said, “Oh my God, why isn’t he replying to my texts?”

  The car grew silent.

  “What do you even mean, Claire?” Lacy asked, all clueless.

  “I’m sorry my love life isn’t meaningful enough for you, Claire,” Grace whined.

  Inside, my stomach was curling in on itself. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  It’s not love, I wanted to tell her. But instead I said, “Just forget it.”

  I rested my head against the cold glass window. Beside me, Sammy just sighed. She’d been a bit more quiet than usual, too. I suspected she might also be looking for more meaningful discussion but was afraid, or didn’t care enough, to say so.

  “I’ll talk about something meaningful,” Lacy said, mostly under her breath.

  “What did you say, Lacy?” Grace asked.

  But it wasn’t really a question.

  “Nuh-nothing,” Lacy said.

  I didn’t know what she was so afraid of. Not until this morning, when the girls didn’t welcome me into the circle.

  Now I know.

  Before today, I had this life. This predictable life. This bored life. This life in which I was a small part of something only slightly greater called “the Girls.” This life I wanted more from.

  Now my life has shifted. But instead of feeling glad or excited, I feel lost. I didn’t realize how alone alone would feel.

  I wonder, are any of the people on this bus guessing my story the same way I guessed theirs?

  Here is what I think they see:

  An average girl living an average life. Every day she experiences the same meaningless thing. She goes to school. She attends classes. She eats lunch at the same table with the same friends. They eat the same thing every day. Lettuce with fat-free ranch dressing. Don’t feel sorry for them. They’ve gotten used to it. They attend more classes. They pass each other in the halls and roll their eyes like this is the most agonizingly boring, torturous, unfair life. After school, they go to cheerleading practice. In the locker room, they talk about who looked at them the wrong way or in an interested way or any way at all. They practice their cheer routines. They go home. They do their homework. They eat dinner. They call each other until their parents tell them to stop. Then they text each other from under the covers and stay up too late, gossiping about things they should never put in writing. But they trust each other not to share. They finally drift off to sleep. They get up the next day and do it again.

  If that is the picture these passengers see when they look at me, then they are right. Can anyone really blame me for wanting more?

  Here is what they don’t see:

  Nothing.

  I lift my head from the glass when the bus stops. I realize now that we are headed into the city. More people climb aboard and we move on, picking up larger clusters of passengers as we go, until the bus is packed and we are in the heart of downtown. I look out the window and wait for something interesting to call me off this ride.

  It’s a bookstore café that finally lures me. I don’t normally go to cafés. At least not alone. The girls sometimes drag me in and try to act cool like they know how to order a venti latte half-caf something or other, but it is all foreign to me. I bet it is to them, too.

  I don’t even like coffee.

  I don’t drink tea, either. It makes me need to pee every ten minutes.

  But today, especially, I like the idea of going inside and sitting at a table all by myself. Without Grace, Sammy, and Lacy.

  Just me.

  I like the idea of reading a book or writing in my journal, as if I have something important to say. If the girls don’t want to talk about something interesting, maybe I could write something interesting instead. Maybe I could come to the same café every day. Maybe I could become a regular and make friends with the other regulars. We could have friendly arguments about politics. Or discuss obscure, independent movies that we pretend to understand. And books. We could talk about and share them with each other. It could all be so romantic. So artsy. So beyond high school. So much more than driving around in Grace’s car looking for Grace’s boyfriend and wondering why Grace’s boyfriend hasn’t texted Grace.

  Because I just can’t do that anymore.

  I open the door to the café.

  It’s not really the café of my imagination. There isn’t a worn wooden floor, and there are no candles sticking out of old wine bottles on the tables. The chairs match. There is no comfy couch where a hipster couple plays Scrabble while sipping cappuccinos. No bookcase with a handwritten note saying: “Free to borrow and absorb.” Instead, the café is a bit more like a cafeteria. I consider walking out. But it’s warm, and the music is nice. Different. Dreamy. I stay.

  There’s a menu board above the counter, and I try to decipher the choices. I’m always forgetting the difference between a cappuccino, latte, espresso, macchiato . . . they all sound so pretentiously similar.

  The man behind the counter smiles at me. What do they call coffee guys? A barista. No, that sounds female. Barister? No, that sounds stupid. Either way, he’s shockingly cute.

  “What can I get for you?” he asks. He has a nose ring. I like it.

  “A latte, please?”

  I don’t even know what that is.

  “Regular milk or skim?”

  Is he offering skim because he thinks I’m fat?

 
I can’t believe I just thought that. I sound like Grace or Sammy in my head.

  Stop. I always drink skim. Just order skim!

  “Um, skim?”

  “You got it.”

  He takes forever to make the drink. He shakes his hips to the jazz music as he moves a green mug from machine to machine. He’s wearing faded black jeans and a fitted black T-shirt. His arm muscles are just right. Not too big, not too small. He has a silver thumb ring. And a tattoo on his arm of a sunburst.

  When he finally hands me my mug, there’s a light-brown heart made out of cinnamon on top of the foam. He winks at me.

  “Enjoy,” he says, smiling. Even his teeth are nice.

  I thank him and carry my drink to a table, my heart beating in a way it never has before. I pick a table in the corner and sit with my back to the wall so I can observe the people around me. I slip my journal out of my bag. It’s black, with line-less pages. And it is empty.

  I touch the thick ivory paper waiting for me to tell it a story with my pen. Or my political thoughts. Or my desires. Or a secret.

  It waits and waits.

  I take a careful sip of my coffee but burn my tongue anyway. It tastes terrible. Bitter and unsweetened. I look up and catch Barista Boy watching me. He gives me a thumbs-up with a look like, Do you like the delicious drink I made especially for you? So I return the thumbs-up and flash him my newly acquired liar’s smile.

  Then I realize I have a foam mustache.

  Barista Boy grins and goes back to barista-ing.

  I glance around at the people sitting nearby. They hide behind their laptops or else talk loudly with a tablemate because obviously what they are talking about is so important that the rest of the room should “overhear” and be impressed. I listen for something interesting, but all I hear are complaints about bosses, a long list of ingredients for the most amazing vegetarian strata some guy made last night (what’s strata?), and a bad review of a movie I didn’t catch the name of.

  On my table, the open pages of my journal stare back at me, bored. Waiting. It’s not a real journal. It’s a mini sketchbook with wide spiral rings. If you look very closely, you can see the fibers in the paper. When I write on it with my Sharpie, the bright-blue ink bleeds just a little and makes my careful letters look like art, even though I never could draw.

  The problem is, however, that all I have written is the day’s date. That’s all I’ve got. What could I possibly have to say besides, I’m bored. Please talk to me about anything but Grace’s boyfriend.

  Sometimes I feel like such a jerk.

  I think about what most girls my age would write in a journal. What Grace might write. Or Sammy. Or Lacy. It’s awful of me, but I imagine the worst. Grace would write her name with Ben’s last name. With hearts around it. And then, maybe on the next page in impossibly small letters, she would write the truth. That she knows Ben doesn’t love her. That he tries to hide from her. That he lies about the parties and laughs with his friends when they find out she and her own friends drive around every weekend looking for a party that doesn’t exist. That sometimes he is secretly hiding out with Lacy’s ex–best friend, Stephen. That once Grace saw them kissing. She told me, in a moment of weakness and desperation, followed by a moment of clarity and regret and “I mean it looked like they were, but they probably totally weren’t. Oh my God, I can’t believe I even thought that. Never mind. Please don’t tell anyone. Ever. Promise me, Claire. It was totally nothing. I don’t even know why I said anything. If you tell, I will totally tell everyone about your secret crush on Jack Messier. Oh my God. You know I didn’t mean it, right?”

  She’s a liar, too. And obviously not the best friend in the world.

  She pretends that she and Ben have a future. That he’s just confused and that she’ll change him. Somehow, he’ll fall in love with her eventually. If she could just be a little more perfect than she already is. He’ll fall in love with her, and they’ll get married and have cute babies and live in a pretty house and drive a stylish car and have real parties with real people and both of them will be there. For real. Not hiding with a boy named Stephen. The one he really loves.

  Sammy would write about Grace, most likely. About how they’re best friends and how Sammy worries about her. She would also design a food chart to keep track of her intake and — gross — probably her output, too. Sammy and her salads. Sometimes when she’s feeling extra fat, she even eats the lettuce plain. I really worry about Sammy. Why do people want to be so skinny? What do they think will happen when they reach their size-zero goal? What happens at zero? Zero means there’s nothing left. Why does she want to disappear?

  But I know there’s more to Sammy than food charts. Sometimes I see her looking out the car window in that Please get me out of here way that I feel. But she was never stupid enough to say it out loud like me. Maybe she would write ideas for new cheers for the squad. Maybe she secretly wants to be a dancer. Or a writer. Maybe she hates cheerleading. I don’t know.

  Lacy might write about her new spot on the cheerleading squad. Her new status as one of the girls. How she wonders if she only made it on cheerleading because she’s “solid.” That’s Grace’s code word for fat. But Lacy isn’t fat. Just . . . well, it’s true. She’s solid. She isn’t zero.

  Every cheer squad needs someone who can be their base. Stand at the bottom of the pyramid. Throw the zeros up in the air and catch them. I bet Lacy would write about how that feels. About how Grace convinced her to be on the squad so she could hold them all up. About how she wishes she could look like Grace or Sammy (or me) just one day. About how she is really tired of salads and fat-free ranch dressing, too. And how all of this brings her to wondering why the girls want to be friends with her in the first place. Maybe she’d secretly write that her biggest worry is whether the only reason she is one of the girls is because one of the girls is in love with her brother, who might very well be in love with a boy.

  But I don’t know that, either.

  And this is the problem.

  I don’t know the real thoughts of my closest friends. I used to, when we were younger. We used to share our dreams. What we wanted to be when we grew up. What we cared about. I don’t know when that stopped. I don’t know when finding Grace’s boyfriend’s parties became more important than trying to find ourselves.

  Maybe it’s because we became afraid of what we’d find.

  What if all there is to this life is this? Is boredom?

  If I was a food, I would be plain yogurt. Colorless and a little sour. Is that really worth finding?

  My parents are more or less happily married. They have steady, dependable jobs. I don’t have a sibling to fight with or make me feel less loved. I have a safe crush on a quiet boy who probably doesn’t know I exist. I can write his name next to mine in an old diary, Jack Messier, with hearts all around it, and leave it unlocked in my underwear drawer without worrying anyone will see it because my parents would never try. It is the one and only secret I keep from them. From everyone (except Grace, who somehow figured it out). That, and I’ve never even kissed a boy. My parents have nothing to worry about.

  We live in a medium-size house — not too lavish but not too small, either. My parents never fight. In fact, even when they start to argue about something as mundane as which movie to watch, they fail, because they have the same tastes. They don’t argue about politics because they’re in the same party. How can you get passionate about something when the other person just says, “I know! I know! Right?”

  It’s not that I want a tragic life. I’m lucky I have nothing to worry about. Nothing.

  And that is what I feel.

  I bought this journal because it seemed like writing something down, anything, would be a way to be heard and not silenced.

  What do you even mean, Claire?

  The problem is, I don’t know what I want people to hear. Maybe I just want them to know I’m here. Waiting. Ready to be . . . something. To know, for whatever reason, I matter.


  Maybe I just need to be able to feel the significance of my own existence.

  I sip my bitter latte and draw a squiggle line across the top of the page in my journal. As I watch the line run across the page, it reminds me of a life line on a heart monitor machine like in the movies. I imagine the little blip in my head as I make the line go up and down until it reaches three-quarters across the page when I decide to flatline it.

  Beeeeeeeeeep.

  Lifeless.

  I look around to see if anyone noticed what I just wrote. No one did.

  People continue to talk and type and sip and clink their cups in their saucers. The tiny bells attached to the door of the café jingle, and an attractive couple strolls in, arm in arm. They gesture to Barista Boy and point to a medium-size display cup on the counter.

  “Cappuccinos!” the man says strangely and way too loudly.

  Barista Boy nods and gets to work, grooving confidently to the music as he makes their drinks. He has such style. Even the frothy sound of the machine makes me feel like I’m in a sophisticated place.

  The couple smiles at each other as they walk toward me with their drinks and sit nearby. The way they smile, I can tell they’re in love. They look at each other as if they’re glad of the other’s existence. Like neither one of them believes their luck.

  The woman sits with her back to me while the man sits at a slight angle, so his knees can touch the woman’s, which are bare because she’s wearing a short and stylish-looking skirt and tall leather boots.

  The man reaches for one of her pointy knees. His fingers flex as he squeezes, then lets go. I look down into my coffee cup, no longer steaming. At the line on my notepad. Flatlining.

  I take another sip of bitterness.

  Even though I’ve only had a small amount of caffeine, I can feel it entering my veins and making my stomach feel queasy.

  The couple settles their things, then the man begins to motion to the woman with his hands. She motions back. I’ve never seen anyone use sign language in real life. Only on TV. I watch them closely, not realizing I’m staring. But I can’t help it. No one ever told me how beautiful signing is. How graceful. How — to ignorant people like me — private.