Everyone was peering into their own trays and talk had quieted. Several of them were muttering just loud enough for me to know that they were talking about me, but not what they were saying.
I did hear someone say: “Is she going to bring her notebook?” and another person laughed and answered, “Is she going to bring a date?”
It was too much. Stupid of me to think I could fit in here, even after all this time. Even with Jessica on my side. See what’s real, that’s what Dr. Hieler wanted me to do. See what’s really there. Well, I could see what was really there now and none of it was good. It was all the same as it was before. Only before I would have written down their names on the Hate List and run to Nick for comfort. Now I was a different person and I had no idea what to do, other than run away.
“I forgot,” I said, standing up and picking up my tray. “I have to turn in a report for English before sixth period or I’ll have to take a zero on the assignment. Duh.” I tried to laugh breezily, but my mouth felt dry and I was sure that when I talked, things in my throat clicked.
I got up and carried my tray to the dishwasher’s window. I dumped the entire contents of my lunch into the trash bin and scurried out of the cafeteria, vaguely hearing Dr. Hieler’s voice in my head—If you keep losing weight, Val, your mom’s going to be asking about anorexia again. I power-walked directly to the girls’ restroom in the Communication Arts wing and locked myself in the handicap stall. I stayed there until the bell rang, promising myself that there was no way in hell I would go to that party.
28
I was sitting on my bed, admiring the new hot pink polish I’d painted on my toenails. I hadn’t painted my nails pink in so long I doubted the polish was still good. It was all crusty around the neck of the bottle and had separated into two layers—pink on bottom with clear on top. It had even seemed pretty congealed, so I’d added a few drops of fingernail polish remover to it and that seemed to do the trick.
Normally my mainstay was black. Or navy. Sometimes a hunter green or sick corpse-yellow. But once, a long time ago, it had been pink. Everything had been pink. I think I burned myself out on pink. And then burned myself out on black. I’m not sure.
All I’m really sure about was that I had finally given in to my curiosity and dragged the old box of fingernail polishes long since gone to the Pretty Pretty Princess Valerie in the Sky out from under the bathroom sink and set about painting my toenails hot pink. It wouldn’t hurt anyone for my toes to be pink for a few days, right?
I was still waiting for them to dry—puffing out little breezes of air from my mouth without giving it any real effort—when there was a knock, real soft, at my door.
I leaned over and turned my stereo down. “Yuh?”
The door opened a crack and Dad stuck his head in. He grimaced in the general direction of the stereo, so I leaned over and flicked it off.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
I nodded. He and I hadn’t spoken since the Britni/Brenna incident at his office a couple weeks ago.
He came into the room and picked his way across the floor like he was coming through a minefield. He pushed a pile of T-shirts out of the way with his foot. I noticed he was wearing shoes. Running shoes. And jeans, a polo shirt. His casual, but still going out, look.
He sat on the edge of my bed. He didn’t say anything at first, just stared at my toenails. I curled them under instinctively and immediately was worried that I’d messed up my painting job. I let them uncurl. Only one was marred. I used my thumb to rub most of the polish off of it and then I stared at my foot, which suddenly looked so vulnerable and imperfect with the one toe ringed in hot pink polish but bare on the inside of the nail. Like I’d started but had forgotten to finish being beautiful.
“New color?” he asked, which I thought was a really odd question coming from a dad. Were dads supposed to notice fingernail polish on their daughters? I wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t something my dad would notice, and the very thought of it made me feel uneasy.
“No. Very old,” I replied.
“Oh.” He sat some more. “Listen, Val, about Briley…”
Briley, I thought. Of course. Her name is Briley.
“Dad,” I started, but he held up a hand to stop me. I swallowed. Any sentence that began, Listen, Val, about Briley… was not going to be the start of a pleasant conversation. Of that I was sure.
“Just listen,” he said. “Your mother…”
He paused. His mouth opened and closed a few times, as if he wasn’t sure where to go from there. His hands sort of flopped around in his lap. His shoulders slumped.
“Dad, I’m not going to tell Mom. You don’t have to do this,” I started to say, but he interrupted.
“I do,” he said. “I do.”
I was quiet then, my toes getting cold. I stared at them hard, expecting the hot pink to change to purple or icy blue like a mood ring. Maybe corpse-yellow wasn’t so much of a thing of the past after all. I began to wonder who was the imposter, the old Valerie or the new, something I felt over and over again after the shooting, as if I could change on a moment-by-moment basis.
“I told,” he said finally. “I told her everything. Your mother.”
I said nothing. I wasn’t sure what to say. What could I say?
“She didn’t take it well, of course. She’s very angry. She’s asked me to leave.”
“Whoa,” I breathed.
“If it makes any difference to you, I love Briley. I’ve loved Briley for a long time. We’ll probably get married.”
It made a difference. But probably not in the way he’d hoped. I thought with dark satisfaction that I finally had a “stepmonster.” Somehow, within the context of my life, it fit. I felt a tug of regret—having a stepmonster would’ve been something else Nick and I would’ve had in common.
We sat there in silence for a while. I wondered what Dad was thinking, why he was sticking around. Was he waiting for absolution? For me to say it was okay that he did this? For me to make some sort of magnanimous statement about accepting Briley into my life?
“How long have you and… um… she… been together?” I asked.
He pulled his eyes up to look straight into mine. It might have been the only time I ever looked my dad in the eye and I was surprised at how much depth I saw there. I guess I’d always seen Dad as one-dimensional. Never a thought that didn’t include work. Never an emotion that wasn’t impatience or anger.
“This happened long before the shooting.” He gave a half-hearted chuckle. “In some ways the shooting brought your mother and me closer. Made it more difficult to leave her. I’ve broken Briley’s heart a million times over the past several months. I was set to move in with her over the summer. We’d hoped to have been married by now. But the shooting…”
He, like so many others, left the sentence hanging after those words, as if they explained anything and everything all on their own. I knew what he meant, though, without him going on. The shooting changed everything. For everyone. Even for Briley, who had nothing to do with Garvin High.
“I couldn’t leave Jenny alone after that. She’s gone through so much. I respect your mother and I don’t want to hurt her. I just don’t love her. Not the way I love Briley.”
“So you’re going to do it,” I said. “Leave, I mean.”
He nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s only right that I do. I have to.”
I wanted there to be a part of me that raged against this. No you don’t, I wanted to scream at him. No, you can’t! But I couldn’t do it. Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he’d gone long, long ago. I’d just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way he was another victim of the shooting. One of the ones who couldn’t get away.
“Are you mad?” he asked, which I thought was a really strange question.
“Yes,” I said. And I was. It’s just that I wasn’t so sure I was mad at him. But I don’t think he needed to hear that pa
rt. I don’t think he wanted to hear that part. I think it was important to him to hear that I cared enough to be angry.
“Will you ever forgive me?” he asked.
“Will you ever forgive me?” I shot back, leveling my gaze directly into his eyes.
He stared into them for a few moments and then got up silently and headed for the door. He didn’t turn around when he reached it. Just grabbed the doorknob and held it.
“No,” he said, without facing me. “Maybe it makes me a bad parent, but I don’t know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy.”
He opened the door. “I’m sorry. I really am.” He stepped out into the hallway. “I’ll leave my new address and phone number with your mother,” he said before walking slowly out of my sight.
29
As always, I decided it would be safest to skip dinner and grab something to eat after everyone went to bed. I waited until I could see the strip between the bottom of the door and the floor turn dark—lights off—and I limped out.
I padded into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich by the light of the refrigerator. I closed the fridge and sat at the kitchen table, choosing to eat in the dark. It felt good and secluded that way. Like I had a little secret. Like I could be alone, away from all the nonsense around me. And that’s what it all was, wasn’t it? Nonsense. After your classmates get blown away pretty much everything else in the world—even your father bailing on your family—seems pretty trivial.
I finished my sandwich and was about to get up and leave when I heard a noise in the living room. It sounded like a long, watery sniff and a small cough. I froze.
I heard the noise again, this time followed by the definite sound of a Kleenex being pulled out of a box.
I crept around the corner and peered into the darkness.
“Hello?” I said softly.
“Go to bed, Valerie, it’s just me,” Mom said from the dark fortress of the couch. Her voice sounded gravelly, her nose stuffy.
I paused. She sniffed again. Again I heard a Kleenex being pulled out of the box. Instead of heading toward the stairs I took a few steps into the living room and stood behind the recliner. I rested my hands over the top of it.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She didn’t answer. I came around the recliner and started to sit in it, but thought better of it and instead took a few more steps and folded myself to my knees on the floor a few feet in front of the couch. I could now make our her shadow and see the white of her robe splitting off her knees, making her skin look super tan against it in the darkness.
“You okay?” I repeated.
There was another long silence and I began to think I should just go to bed like she’d asked. But after awhile she said, “You got something to eat, then? I told Dr. Hieler that I haven’t seen you eat anything in weeks.”
“I’ve been coming down at night. I’m not anorexic if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was,” she said, and I could hear tears begin anew in her voice. She sniffed some more and the sound of silent sobbing drifted in and out of the air around me. She took a deep breath at the end of it. “You’ve gotten so thin and I never see you eat anything. What was I supposed to think? Dr. Hieler said he thought you were probably doing that, eating when I’m not around.”
Score another for Dr. Hieler. Sometimes I forgot how much he probably stood up for me without my even knowing it. Sometimes I wondered how many times he brought my mom down off the ceiling about something ludicrous.
“So is Dad gone?” I asked after a while.
I think she nodded because the shadow shifted slightly. “He’s living with her now. It’s for the best.”
“Are you going to miss him?”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a gust. “I already do. But not the guy who I’ve been living with for the past few years. I miss the guy I said ‘I do’ to. You probably wouldn’t understand.”
I chewed my lip, trying to decide if I wanted to be offended by her brushing me off like that. Trying to decide if I should argue.
“Well, I kinda do,” I said. “I miss Nick, too. I miss the times we were just like bowling and stuff and we were just happy. I know you think he was all bad, but he wasn’t. Nick was really sweet and really smart. I miss that.”
She blew her nose. “Yeah, I guess you probably do,” she said, which felt so enormously good I had no words for it. “Do you remember…” she said, then trailed off. I heard another Kleenex leave the box and another watery sniff. “Do you remember that summer we went to South Dakota? Remember, we went in Grandpa’s old station wagon and loaded up that giant cooler with sandwiches and sodas and just took off because your father wanted you and Frankie to see Mount Rushmore?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember you took the training potty in the car just in case we had to go on the road. And Frankie ate crab legs on a buffet somewhere in Nebraska and threw up all over the table.”
Mom chuckled. “And your father wouldn’t rest until we visited that godawful corn palace.”
“And the rock museum. Remember I cried because I thought there was going to be like rock musicians in there and we got there and it was just all these rocks.”
“And your grandmother, god rest her soul, smoked those disgusting cigarettes the entire way.”
We both chuckled and trailed off into silence again. It was a horrible trip. A wonderful, horrible trip.
Then Mom said, “I never wanted you kids to have divorced parents.”
I thought about it. I shrugged even though I knew she couldn’t see it. “Yeah, I think I’m okay with it. Dad hated being here. He may not be the best dad in the world, but I don’t think anyone should have to be miserable like that.”
“You already knew,” she said.
“Yeah. I saw Briley a while back at his office. I guessed.”
“Briley,” Mom said, as if she were testing out the name. Did she think it sounded sexier than her own name? More appealing than Jenny?
“Have you told Frankie?” I asked.
“Your father did,” she said. “Right after he talked to you. I told him I wasn’t going to be the one to break you kids’ hearts. I thought it was only fair that he had to tell you himself that he’s shacking up with a twenty-year-old girl. I’m not doing his dirty work for him anymore. I’m tired of being the bad guy.”
“Is Frankie okay?” I asked.
“No. He hasn’t come out of his room, either. And now I’m afraid I’m going to have another child in trouble and I don’t… know… if… I… can handle it… alone.…” Her voice drowned in a wave of tears so abrupt and soulful they drew tears out of my own eyes without my even knowing it. Had you been a passerby and heard someone crying like that you would have sworn she’d just lost everything she ever had. I wondered if she felt as if she had.
“Frankie’s a good kid, Mom,” I said. “He hangs out with good kids. He won’t…” be like me was what was about to come out of my mouth, but that embarrassment crept up on me again and instead I said, “… be in any trouble.”
“I hope not,” she said. “I can barely keep a handle on what’s going on with you most days. I’m just one person. I can’t carry everyone all the time.”
“You don’t have to carry me anymore,” I said. “I’m okay, Mom, really. Dr. Hieler says I’m making really good progress. And I’m doing those art classes with Bea. And I’m working on that Student Council project.” And suddenly I felt this overwhelming need to repair something inside of my mother. Suddenly I was awash with a compassion for her that I might have sworn would never again exist. Suddenly I wanted to be the one to give her hope, to give her back South Dakota. “In fact, I was wondering if you would let me go to a sleepover at Jessica Campbell’s house next weekend.” My throat felt tight.
/>
“You mean that blond girl that keeps coming over here?”
“Yeah. She’s Student Council president and on the volleyball team. She’s a good person, I promise. We eat lunch together every day. We’re friends.”
“Oh, Val,” she said, her voice thick and heavy. “Are you sure you want to do this? I thought you hated those girls.”
My voice raised an octave. “No, really, Mom. She’s the one I jumped in front of. I saved her life. I saved her. And we’re friends now.”
Again there was a long silence. Mom sniffed a few times and the sound was so clouded I almost felt like I couldn’t breathe. “Sometimes I forget,” she said, her voice threading out to me in the darkness. “Sometimes I forget that you were also a hero that day. All I see is the girl who wrote a list of people she wanted dead.”
I resisted the urge to correct her. I didn’t want those people dead, I wanted to say. And you would’ve never even known about that list had Nick not lost it. But Nick lost it, not me! Not me!
“Sometimes I’m so busy seeing you as the enemy who dismantled my family’s life I forget to see that you were the one who stopped the shooting. You were the one who saved that girl’s life. I’ve never thanked you for that, have I?”
I shook my head, no, even though I knew she couldn’t see me do it. I had a suspicion that she, like me, could feel it in the air.
“She’s really your friend, then?”
“Yeah. I actually really like her.” This, I discovered with some amount of shock, was the truth.
“Then you should go. You should be with your friend. You should have fun.”
My stomach dropped. I wasn’t sure if I even knew how to have fun with those people. Their idea of fun was so different from anything I’d ever known.
30
“So I guess you know my dad left,” I said, studying Dr. Hieler’s bookshelf, my back to him as he took his usual pose in his chair: leg slung over the side of the chair, right forefinger lazily tracing his bottom lip in contemplation.