I’ve kept up with baseball news by visiting ESPN.com. At this point, New York and Seattle have each won once, so there’s a decent chance next weekend’s game will be happening. Dad hasn’t said anything more about giving the tickets away, so I’m still hoping I’ll be able to go.
The only human contact I’ve had are my e-mails with Shannon. I’ve been writing her nearly every hour. She always writes back, not quite as frequently, but whenever she’s online.
It’s hard, though. Shannon is currently having a love affair with her Walla Walla friends. Well, not romantic love. I double-checked that in my last e-mail. This was her response:
To: citigurl13
From: goddess_shannon
Date: Sunday, October 13, 3:11 P.M.
Subject: no such luck
Gin—
Regarding your question about love, no such luck. Hunter and Evan are interested in each other. THEY don’t know this yet, but Sabrina and I think that once they leave conservative Walla Walla, they’ll move to Seattle and profess their undying love for each other. Speaking of Sabrina, I finally asked about the “Mom” tattoo on her arm. She said it actually spells “Wow” and it’s only meant for when she’s doing handstands.
How are you? Have you left your bedroom yet?
Love,
Shan
I’m relieved that Shannon isn’t getting a boyfriend on top of everything. Even so, it’s hard to hear about these great additions to her life. Especially since all I’ve got is a failed diet and a kink in my lower back from remaining sedentary for the past twenty-nine hours.
On school days my alarm rings at 6:15 A.M. I keep my clock on my dresser. That means I have to get out of bed to hit the snooze bar, which starts waking me up. Snooze lasts for seven minutes, so I do it twice. If I’m up by 6:29 A.M., in the shower by 6:33 A.M., and out the door by 7 A.M., I can make it to school on time.
As I’m stumbling across my bedroom this morning, I turn the alarm off altogether. I collapse onto my bed again and conk out.
I don’t know how much time has passed when I hear a knock on my door.
I roll onto my stomach.
“Can you open up, Virginia?” Mom says from the hallway.
I tug a pillow over my head.
“I gave you your space for the entire weekend. I just want to talk for a minute.”
I roll onto my side.
“Are you awake?” Mom asks. “It’s after seven. You’re going to have to take a cab to school.”
“I’m not going to school,” I grumble.
“Please unlock your door and we’ll discuss it.”
I unlock my door and scramble back to bed before Mom can see me in my shirt and undies. As I dive under the sheets, a cashew jabs into my shoulder blade.
Mom walks in. She’s dressed for work, but her hair is damp and she’s not wearing any makeup yet.
“You don’t feel well?” Mom presses her palm to my forehead. Her hand feels so soft it makes me want to cry.
“No,” I whimper.
Mom sits on the edge of my bed. “Does it hurt somewhere specifically?”
I gesture to my stomach. “Maybe here. Sort of all over.”
“Do you have any tests today? Anything you can’t miss?”
I shake my head. We’re starting a unit on atomic theory in chemistry, but I doubt I’ll be able to pay attention.
“I’ve got to get running. I’m meeting Nan for an early yoga class. But I’ll give the principal’s office a call. It sounds like you need a personal day.”
What I really need is a hug. I lift my hands, like a toddler asking to be picked up. Mom leans over, wraps her arms around me, and rocks me back and forth. I can’t remember the last time she gave me a hug like this. Tears start running down my cheeks.
“You’re having a hard time with this, aren’t you?”
I nod and wipe away some tears.
Mom sits back. She inhales through her nose and exhales through her mouth. I call this her ShrinkBreath. It’s how I always assume she looks around her patients — calm, cool, composed.
“This isn’t an easy ordeal we’re facing,” she says. “But we all love Byron, so we have to stick by him.”
A fresh crop of tears pours out of my eyes. “How could he have done something like that?”
Mom presses her lips tightly together. I have no idea what she’s thinking. If some people’s faces are open books, Mom’s is one of those leather-bound diaries with a lock on the front and a long-lost key.
“I don’t know what to say, Virginia.” Mom is quiet for a long time, then she takes another ShrinkBreath and says, “Let’s just keep going about our lives and pretty soon everything will be back to normal.”
I wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
“Do you think you can do that?” Mom asks.
“I’ll try,” I say quietly.
Mom gives me a quick hug. “I’m glad we had this talk. It’s all going to be just fine.”
As soon as Mom is gone, I lapse into a fitful sleep. I have bizarre nightmares, one right after the next. I’m having a particularly creepy one about being chased by wild boars when I jolt awake. The clock says 10:21 A.M. I stare out my window at the cloudy sky.
That’s when I hear grunting noises. I get out of bed and press my ear against my door. The grunts become longer, throatier. I grab some sweatpants from my laundry heap and pull them on. Then I tiptoe across the hall and stand in front of Byron’s door.
“Grrrrrrr. Grrrrrrrrrr. AAAARGGGHH!”
My legs feel weak. Is Byron jacking off in there? Or worse, is he having sex? Oh god, I really didn’t want to think about that.
I hear a barbell knock against his floor. I dash into my room and slam the door.
So Byron was lifting weights. While I’m relieved that he wasn’t exercising a lower portion of his body, I’m still a little shaken.
I slip into my sneakers, grab my wool sweater, and scurry to the elevator.
It’s overcast outside with a tinge of winter in the air. I button up my sweater and fold my arms across my chest. As I walk over to Broadway, I realize that I forgot my bankcard. I scrounge around in the change purse attached to my key chain and extract a crinkled five-dollar bill.
I head down to Krispy Kreme. It’s about a ten-minute walk. Whenever I pass a college-aged woman on the sidewalk, I find myself wondering if she’s the one. No one has given me details, other than what Dad told me after the phone call from Dean Briggs, about it being the girl Byron brought to that Virgins and Sluts party.
The “Hot Now” light is on in the window of Krispy Kreme. I head inside and am comforted by the sweet aroma of doughnuts. As I get into the line, I try to remember her name. I think it was fairly generic. Maybe Amy? Or Abby? Or Ashley?
I order a glazed, a blueberry, and one with chocolate frosting. I’ve already polished off the glazed doughnut by the time I reach the door.
It’s drizzling outside. I lick some sugar off my fingers. I remember Byron’s friend, the one who looked like a hamster, mentioning something about the girl. That she was a math major. A cute math major.
As I take a right on Broadway, I try to imagine what happened that night.
Let’s say Byron took a shower. He shaved and worked gel through his hair. He only wore a pair of boxers, so he could flaunt his new pecs. But they were nice boxers, like navy blue silk.
I eat the blueberry doughnut. The drizzle is turning to rain — cold, driving droplets. My wool sweater is getting wet, so it’s emitting a putrid animal stench.
By the time Byron met up with her, she was flying high. It’s not every day a math major goes out with a rugby god like Byron Shreves. She almost chickened out of wearing the leather bustier and fishnets, but her roommate convinced her to go for it.
They stopped by Hamster Boy’s party, had a few beers, and headed over to Virgins and Sluts. They drank. They danced. Maybe it was the spiked punch, but she didn’t feel as nervous as before. They started grinding their hi
ps to hip-hop music.
I finish off my last doughnut, crumple the bag, and toss it in a trash bin. It’s pouring by this point. My hair is clinging to my ears. My sweatpants are heavy with water. My feet are sloshing in my sneakers. I know it’s time to yank the plug on my imagination, but I force myself to watch the next scene.
When the party wound down, Byron invited her back to his room. She’d had a lot of punch, so she knew she shouldn’t go. But her brain was too murky and Byron’s aftershave smelled too good.
Maybe Byron lit candles. Maybe he played jazz. Either way, they started making out. At first, she thought it felt good, but soon she noticed that Byron was moving really quickly. They’d barely started kissing when one of his hands undid her bustier, the other pushed down her fishnets. She asked him to slow down, but she was so drunk that her words were garbled.
The next thing she knew, Byron was rolling on a condom. She said no, but he was already inside of her. She told him to stop, but his eyes were closed as he pumped into a body that didn’t feel like hers anymore.
“Are you OK, sweetheart?”
I blink several times. My vision is blurred, but I can make out a middle-aged woman with a concerned look on her face. Until she stopped me, I hadn’t realized I’d been bawling my head off.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I’ll be OK.”
She nods reluctantly, so I dodge into a nearby Starbucks and head for the bathroom.
I glance at my reflection. My hair is drenched. My saliva and tears and snot are streaming together.
I dry my face with a scratchy paper towel.
This is so confusing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked up to Byron more than anyone in the world. If he’s the sun, I’m a planet revolving around him. Everything I’ve done in my life — from where I chose to go to high school to how I feel about myself — has been because of my big brother.
But now that Byron has done something this horrible to a girl, I don’t know what to make of anything. I mean, if you take away the sun’s light, the planets won’t know where to go or what to do.
I start sobbing again. As I lean against the filthy bathroom wall, I remind myself to be numb.
It’s the only way I’ll be able to carry on.
“Where were you yesterday?” Froggy asks as I hang my jacket in my locker.
It’s Tuesday morning. I wanted to take another personal day, but Mom reminded me of our “keep going about our lives” talk. So here I am, keeping going.
“I didn’t see you in French, but I waited on the front stoop anyway.” Froggy leans against the locker next to mine. “I waited for more than twenty minutes.”
I fish a few textbooks out of my backpack. “I was sick.”
“Again?” Froggy asks as he snaps and unsnaps his three-ring binder.
I don’t respond.
“So you’ll be there next Monday?”
When Froggy says that, my stomach does a flippy thing. I think about how his neck smells up close and what it feels like to nuzzle my face against his lips. But then I get a sharp pain in my gut. I don’t want to think about fooling around right now. I don’t want to think about anything that will remind me of Byron’s ordeal. I don’t want to think about it so much that if a certain sexy green-eyed shortstop came up to me and said I was the love of his life and he wanted to elope to the Bahamas with me, I’d tell him I was a nun.
“No,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I stare into the dark void of my locker. Last year Shannon and I stayed after school to line our lockers with wallpaper and hang up pictures and postcards, but this year I didn’t do anything at all. “I won’t be there next Monday.”
“Are you saying it’s over?” Froggy’s voice cracks on the word “over.”
Just then Mr. Moony hobbles by. He’s got a Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose. He hasn’t been in top form these days, colliding with lockers, tripping down stairs, sleeping in class. But his song archives are still as sharp as shattered glass.
The next thing I know, Mr. Moony starts rasping, “Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride, a-huh, a-huh.”
People stare at us. Froggy drops his notebook and scoops it up again. Normally, I would have croaked from mortification, but I’m instructing every muscle in my body, every cell, every emotion to be numb.
As soon as Mr. Moony is out of earshot, I turn to a red-cheeked Froggy and say, “It can’t be over because it never began.”
Froggy takes a step backward. “So what was the last month, Virginia? Wasn’t that anything to you?”
I want Froggy to go away. I need Froggy to go away. If he hangs around for another second, my self-inflicted anesthesia is going to wear off.
“Did you think that was something?” I ask curtly. “Because you sure didn’t act like it when we were in school.”
Froggy tweaks his nose a few times. “I thought that’s how you wanted it. I mean, you always seemed to —”
I cut him off. “Well, stop thinking, OK?”
Then I grab my notebooks, slam my locker, and march away, leaving Froggy rubbing his nose and staring in my wake.
I can barely pay attention in global studies. That’s probably a good thing because Mr. Vandenhausler is knee-deep in the carnage in Katmandu. As soon as the bell rings, he announces that we’re going to learn the process by which they inhumed the bodies of the Nepalese royal family. I’m not sure what “inhumed” means, but judging by the amount that his mustache is twitching, I don’t want to know.
I keep replaying the interaction with Froggy in my head. I was just a total rotten bitch to him, which he didn’t deserve in the slightest. But I couldn’t help it. The words spewed out of my mouth. The idea of any guy, even Froggy, coming near me makes my skin crawl. It reminds me too much of my brother and that girl.
At lunchtime I grab a pack of Hostess Cupcakes and snarf them on the way up to Ms. Crowley’s office. I stop briefly in the second-floor bathroom to toss the wrapper. I’d never hang out in a stall again — too many bad memories from the Bri-girls episode — but I still come in for a quick pee or to remove some food from my braces.
As soon as I walk in, I hear movement in a stall. I freeze when I notice that the person in the stall is wearing high-heeled magenta boots. Those are Brie Newhart’s boots. She’s the only girl in school who has them because they came all the way from Paris.
My first thought is: What is Brie doing up here? She always spends lunch period at the sophomore royalty table — flanked by cute boys, far from the trash bins, close to the exits. Besides, there’s a bathroom right near the cafeteria.
My second thought is: Stop thinking thought #1 and get out of here! Brie Newhart is the last person on earth I feel like seeing.
I toss my cupcake wrapper in the trash and hurry out of the bathroom.
“I’ve missed you these past few days,” Ms. Crowley says. She’s sitting at her desk, marking up an essay test with a red pen. “Were you braving the cafeteria?”
“Nope.” I sink into the spare chair. “I was out sick.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I guess.”
“Did being sick have anything to do with your diet?”
I think about the masses of sugar and chocolate and carbs I’ve consumed these past five days. I think about how I crept into the kitchen last night and tore the Food Police off the fridge.
“No.” I sigh. “My diet is over.”
“What happened?”
I gnaw at a hangnail on my thumb.
“Other stuff going on in your life?”
I nod.
“And eating helps you deal?”
I nod again.
“I’ve been there,” Ms. Crowley says. “All I can say is, you’ll figure it out eventually. It has to be the right time in your life. You don’t want to diet to make someone else happy.” Ms. Crowley is quiet for a moment. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk
about what?”
“What else is going on in your life.”
I yank at the hangnail with my teeth, so hard that it tears off a strip of skin. I wish I could tell Ms. Crowley about Byron being kicked out of college and how I’m so confused about everything. But I can’t. Byron was a star student at Brewster, four-time MBS winner and overall legend. So who am I to drag his reputation through the mud? Besides, it’s a Shreves family policy to not talk about our dirty laundry — in public and usually not even in private. It’s sort of like if you don’t discuss it, it didn’t happen.
“No thanks.” I grab a tissue from Ms. Crowley’s desk and dab it on my thumbnail, which is dotted with blood. Then I repeat what Mom said the other morning. “It’s all going to be just fine.”
Ms. Crowley looks unconvinced.
“Really,” I say, flashing her my best imitation of a smile.
To: citigurl13
From: goddess_shannon
Date: Tuesday, October 15, 5:51 P.M.
Subject: something to be thankful for
Virginia—
How are you coping? I hate to think of you crying outside in the rain. I wish I could be there for you.
Guess what?
I MAY BE SOON!!!!!
Liam just got some royalties from the shoelace book, so he and Nina have decided to live it up. We’re going to Seattle for Thanksgiving. Three nights. Two rooms at the Claremont Hotel. One room for them and one for us.
Us = YOU AND ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My parents said your parents would only have to get the plane tix and they’d cover the rest.
PLEASE SAY YES!
Love,
Shannon
To: goddess_shannon
From: citigurl13
Date: Tuesday, October 15, 5:53 P.M.
Subject: ???
Don’t you want to bring your new friends?
To: citigurl13
From: goddess_shannon
Date: Tuesday, October 15, 5:56 P.M.
Subject: !!!
Don’t be an idiot, Virginia.