The Gap Year

NOVEMBER 22, 2009



So Tyler isn’t gay and he clearly is attracted to me. Why hasn’t he made a move?

Maybe some really bad STD? Herpes? HIV? And, also, what is going to be different with us?

My favorite theory, though, on why he hasn’t ripped my clothes off is Unspeakable Sexual Desires. That the instant he lets himself lose control, he is going to be begging me to spank him or tie him up or he’ll plead with me to put on a badger costume.

I can’t gather any more evidence, though, since there is a giant game coming up Friday, regional play-offs, day after Thanksgiving, and he needs to get his head into it, so he isn’t going to see me for the next week.

This gives me time to consider other theories, like an abstinence pledge of some kind. If that is what it is, I decide that when he asks me to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, I am going to say yes.

I think about our wedding night. A lot.





NOVEMBER 27, 2009



He calls me up late Friday night after regionals and, like we always do, we talk about anything other than football. We have the dopey kind of conversations that my mom always rolled her eyes about when we overheard girls curled around their cells, twiddling their hair with their free hand, and saying things like “I don’t know, what about you?” And “No, you. You hang up first.”

“How was your T-giving?” he asks.

“Gruesome.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously. My mom’s friend Dori came over and they played old eighties songs and danced while they basted.”

“Sounds fun. What did they make? Turkey? Stuffing? Yams with little marshmallows? Those baby onion things?”

“Pearl onions? Yeah, we had all the usual, typical stuff.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, except why do people get so worked up over turkey when the best thing you can say about it is that it’s moist? Who wants to eat moist meat?”

“I’ll get a list to you.”

I think that might be a sex joke but I’m not sure, so I just say, “You weren’t here.”

“I will be. Soon as the season’s over, you’re gonna get so sick of me.”

“So the season’s not over yet.”

“Not quite.”

That’s when I know the Pirates won and are going to be in the state quarterfinals. Then, like he always does when football comes up, Tyler immediately changes the subject and asks, “Did you go to sleepaway camp when you were little?”

“Wow, that was a random segue.”

“These guys on the drive home were talking about sleepaway camp. Made me wonder if you’d ever gone.”

“Yeah, this one summer when I was ten I went to, like, YMCA camp, because it’s supercheap. I was the only girl who gained weight. I actually liked the food, since it was so much better than my mom’s.”

“So did your mom write your name in all your clothes?”

“Obsessively.”

From there, he gets me to talking about how I gashed my head open in third grade on the jungle gym and how no one would hold my hand for Red Rover in first grade when I had a wart on my thumb and about the Christmas that I got BeeBee Pretty Hair Purple Puffalump.

“Is that the Christmas your dad left?”

“How did you remember that?”

Then, the way he always does, he asks me all about myself, my childhood, what I remember about my father.

“To me,” I say, “he was like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. I can’t say if this is a true memory, since I was two, but I remember how, when he’d pick me up, it was different from when my mom would. Everything would turn streaky with speed blurs as he lifted me up to him and his face would get bigger and bigger. There always seemed to be a light behind his head, which is what made it like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. But seriously, Tyler, tell me about you.”

“I know about me. I want to know about you.”

“Tyler! You always do this. You always make me talk about myself. I feel like some giant egomaniac. Tell me about when you were little.”

He considers for a long time. “Different kind of deal.”

“Tell me anyway. I want to know all about you. God, I bet you were such a cute little boy. Those big ears.”

“Big ears?!”

“Oh, yeah, big ol’ cute Furby ears. So tell me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Something. If you don’t tell me something about when you were little, I’m going to hang up.”

“Well, you know …” There is a silence that gets longer and longer. He is sad when he finally says, “Not a rocket-ship ride to the moon.” He hears himself sounding sad and this makes him mad. “OK?”

I’d never heard him even close to mad before and it makes me wish I hadn’t forced him to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about. I am scared he’ll hang up and never talk to me again. I am scared my life will go back to exactly the way it was before him. So I tell him, “I had a dream about you.”

“You did? What kind of dream?”

“One of those kinds of dreams.”

“Tell me.”

“No!”

“A.J., you cannot say that, then not tell me.”

“You have your secrets, I have mine,” I say, making both our secrets equal. Nothing to get mad about.

Finally, he gives up trying to make me tell him my dream, holds up his iPod to the phone, and plays a song he says reminds him of me. I think it’s a Rascal Flatts song or something even more mainstream and uncool.

I am just glad that he’s changed the subject, because I never would have told him that I dreamed about us sleeping in the same bed and waking up together. And then sleeping and waking up together again the next night. And the night after that. And that sex, with badger costumes or spanking or whatever, sex of any kind, wasn’t even the biggest part.

And I never, ever, ever would have told him that I wasn’t asleep when I dreamed it.





NOVEMBER 28, 2009



Tyler and I go to Holiday Formal. I decorated his locker; then, the night of the formal, he decorates me with a hanger from the booster club. The long silver-and-black ribbons strewn with tiny gold footballs and helmets cover half the front of my dress. They are beautiful floating against the slinky, wine-colored fabric of the formal I’d scored at Ross for $19.99 that, in the dark, looks like real silk.

Tyler somehow even managed to find a tiny clarinet and has that pinned to the hanger as well. Or maybe whichever Pirate Pal he’d ordered it from came up with that touch on her own. I’m becoming kind of an idol to the quiet, ordinary girls who populate the booster club. A commoner like them, except that the glass slipper fit my foot. At the formal, they watch from the sidelines. Tyler splays his large, tan hands across my pale, bare back like he owns me. Like we are lovers.

I wonder what they think he is whispering in my ear when he massages the muscles along my spine and jokes, “Shit, girl, you are ripped. How did you get so scary-mad ripped? What can you bench?”

Laser lights strafe across the dark gym, which now, in addition to sweat, smells like Captain Morgan rum and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. The deejay plays the song that tells everyone to get “low, low, low.” Groups of girls dance with one another, hiking their strapless dresses back up every time they finish getting “low, low, low.” The deejay commands us to put our hands up and the gym looks like it is filled with born-again Christians.

A slow dance comes on. Lights strafe us with a pattern that is like giant snowflakes falling across our faces, our shoulders, spilling over onto the floor. Tyler puts his hands on my hips, looks down at me, and we sway to the music. The floor around us clears. A photographer crouches down and takes photos from several angles. Tyler whispers, “Smile.”

It all makes me remember the Halloween when I was four and really, really, really wanted to be a princess. I can’t recall if I’d actually expressed this desire in words, but I was certain that I had communicated it through the entirety of my being. I was equally certain that my mom understood, since she told me all the time that I could be anything I wanted to be.

But that Halloween, I guess, my mom really didn’t have a lot of time or money or mental molecules to spend coming up with a costume. Which is why, when she picked me up from day care, she had a costume in a bag from the grocery store.

It was on the backseat next to where I was strapped into my booster seat and I immediately tore into the package, my chubby fingers aching for the touch of the fluttering pink princess dress I was certain would be inside. Instead I pulled out a Wonder Woman costume.

I trick-or-treated that year in a red plastic cape like Superman and a gold belt like a professional wrestler. I had only just figured out that I was a girl and then she dressed me like a boy. That confused me. I wanted to be a princess. I wanted everything I wore and touched and ate to be pink. I didn’t want to leap and punch and fight crime and save someone. I wanted to float through life serene as a billowy cloud. I wanted to be pretty.

I put my head against Tyler’s chest and he wraps his arms around me and I float across the floor serene as a billowy cloud.





SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010



I glare at Coach Hines. “What do you mean, Tyler Moldenhauer is not who I think he is?”

He purses his lips in a way that’s meant to be thoughtful but is just prissy. “Where that boy came from, I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“Where did he come from?”

Maybe the dogs hear the high pitch of anxiety that suddenly spikes into my voice, because they go crazy, barking and hurling themselves against the closed door.

“I am not at liberty to discuss that. I’ve got to—”

“Martin.” I try to prompt Martin to do something, but Hines is already wedging himself back into the crack he opens in the door.

“No. Wait. You can’t go. You have to tell us. You have to—”

But the dogs lunge frantically at the opening, insane with the desire to break free and crush my trachea in their massive jaws. Coach slips inside and slams the door shut.

While he yells at the dogs on the other side—“Silencio, Big Shot! Baron! Where’s your manners!”—I start to punch the doorbell, but Martin touches my hand gently. “Don’t bother. We’ve gotten more than he wanted to give. He’s Walled In.” I wince at the Nextspeak, but can’t argue with his analysis.

In the car, Martin reads through the thick pile of letters and packages while I try to find my way out of a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs where all the street names start with Park—Parkview, Park Terrace, Park Ridge, Park Drive.

“ ‘Raising’?” I ask. “What does ‘raising’ mean?”

Martin, absorbed in the letters, says, “I don’t know. What’s Tyler’s family like?”

I don’t answer.

He looks up from the stack of mail. “Cam? What’s this kid’s family like? You met his family, right?”

“He transferred in from another district. Don’t look at me like that, Martin. You have absolutely no right to look at me like that.”

“Cam, I am not looking at you like anything.”

“You’re judging me. You’re wondering ‘How could she have let this happen?’ ”

“No. I’m not.”

“ ‘How could she not know anything about this person my daughter was spending all of her time with?’ As if they were both sitting on the porch swing courting or something and I just willfully chose not to know anything about him. Like I was in the house getting high or something. Do you realize what my life has been like since you left? How I have had to hustle every minute of every day just to keep us afloat?”

“Cam, I honestly don’t doubt anything you’ve done.”

“How exactly are you supposed to force your way into someone’s life? Like I said, I have nothing she wants anymore. Not even, or especially not, my love.”

“She wants that, Cam. She’ll always want that.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know a goddamn thing about her.”

“I know she had a wonderful mother.”

“F*ck you, Martin. Just f*ck you. And f*ck Park Pebbles Cove.” I circle the cul-de-sac I’ve accidentally turned into. “Where the hell are we?” I ask him automatically. Martin has a freakish sense of direction and was always able to answer that question no matter how lost I thought we were.

“Take a right, then another right at Park Vista.”

I follow his directions out of the neighborhood.

“You think I should have been able to control her. That you could have. Don’t you?”

“Cam, here’s what I think. I think that I have no right to think anything, and that I am lucky you have allowed me to be here at all, and that some of the answers to our questions might be in one of these letters.”

He holds up the one he’s reading. “This guy was heavily recruited. So far, they’re all from college football coaches encouraging Tyler to”—he skims the letter in his hand—“ ‘seriously consider’ blah-blah and to ‘remember what we talked about.’ Wonder what these guys were ‘talking about’ that they don’t want to put in writing? I’m sure the NCAA would be interested too. Must be a hell of a player. I wonder why he didn’t answer any of them.”

“Martin, you sound like Coach Tighty Whitie back there. I could care less why this bonehead jock football player gave up his chance to bang college cheerleaders. That is not my concern. Aubrey is my one and only concern.”

“We don’t disagree.”

“God, I hate that expression. ‘Don’t disagree.’ You agree, okay? Could you just say you agree?”

“I agree.”

I could use a little less agreeability at this moment. A screaming brawl would take my mind off the question it circles back to so many times that I can’t hold it in any longer, and I ask, “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“I think we need to find out. Oh, this is interesting.” He holds up a grease-smudged carbon of a form filled in by hand.

“What is that?”

“Looks like an invoice with a balance-due date of …” He studies the scrawls more closely. “Hmm, this is interesting. Today.”

“Oh, spectacular. How much?”

He puts on the glasses Next was supposed to keep him from needing and studies the faint bluish scrawls at the bottom of the form. “I can’t make it out. But whatever the actual sum is, it’s a five-figure number.”

“Great, so that’s where our daughter’s college money went.”

Our daughter. The words are out before I have time to edit them. I hope Martin won’t notice, but a minute turn of his head lets me know that he caught the unintended plural possessive.

“We don’t know that. It’s just a bill.”

“Does it say what for?”

“The carbon is too faint to read—”

“Who uses carbon copies anymore?”

“—but the name of the business is Worthy Restorations. ‘Randy Worthy, Prop.’ Proprietor, I guess.”

“Restorations? Is that little criminal using our daughter’s college money to buy Old Masters or something?”

“Restorations? Okay, houses are restored, cars are restored, computer drives are restored.”

“Oh, God. I saw this Nightline about this whole crime syndicate that bought used computers from Goodwill, then got these data-recovery people to mine credit card numbers and Social Security numbers off the hard drives, then sent them to the Soviet mafia.”

Martin beams at me.

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re just such a good mother.”

“I am?”

“You are.”

Martin delivers this bulletin with the explaining-gravity certainty that I learned to hate and distrust. Still, I want this one pronouncement to be true so badly that I have to clamp my jaws closed to keep from whimpering, “Really?” To keep myself from presenting all the evidence of my bad motherhood—the lax discipline, the breakfasts in the car, my complete and utter failure to also be a father—for him to rebut. Instead, I give a crisp nod toward the form and ask, “Is there a phone number?”

The smile fades and Martin studies the carbon copy. “There’s no phone number, just an address on North Fifty-four out past Layton.”

“We should talk to Randy Prop, don’t you think?”

“Oh, we are most definitely going to talk to Randy, and sooner rather than later.” Martin glances at me the instant the words are out of his mouth and says, “Sorry, soon. Just soon. So, we should probably head for Layton.”

I say, “We don’t disagree.” We laugh. Mostly at how ridiculous it is that we can still make each other laugh.

I make a U-turn and head for North Fifty-four.





DECEMBER 8, 2009



We’ve been sitting in his truck a block down from my house for at least an hour, maybe more, since all the windows are frosted with our condensed breath, when Tyler tells me, “Get ready for it all to end.”

I stop breathing, give him popped-open disaster eyes, and he adds quickly, “No, not that. Not us. State semifinals are next Friday.”

“The last game of the season, right? Unless you win?” I squint as if I’m not exactly sure. I am; I’ve been checking the schedule.

“Oh, it will be the last game. No question about that. Lincoln Consolidated?” He names the powerhouse team they are playing. “They will kick the snot out of us. After that, no more football. No more Ty-Mo.”

“You’re quitting football?”

“Uh-uh. Not quitting. That job will be over.”

I want to ask about college. Won’t he have to play in college? But I don’t want to speak the C-word. I want to sit in his truck and look out at a world that our breath together has made into a soft, gauzy place where the ugly crime lights now make everything shimmer with a golden radiance.

Tyler murmurs into the top of my head, “You probably need to go in. Your mom’s gonna worry.”

“Mmm.” I snuggle in tighter, thinking what a challenging but ultimately good idea it is that we are saving ourselves for marriage. He peels me off his body. “I should go in with you and meet her, your mom.”

“No. Don’t. She hates meeting people. She has, like, this really bad social anxiety.”

“She doesn’t sound like a social-anxiety person. I mean, isn’t she out there teaching classes on …” He circles his hands around his chest to indicate breast-feeding.

“Oh, yeah, she’s fine out of the house. That’s not really a problem. But she hates—hates—having people come into her house. She feels all invaded and shit. It’s a phobia.”

“What about Dori?”

God, does he ever forget anything? “Dori’s the exception.”

He helps me out of the truck. As he is getting back in, he pauses and says, “I think it’s time for us to talk. No, don’t look like that. It’s good. Well, not good, but … Just don’t look like that, OK? I’ll call as soon as the game is over. The second it all ends.”

I watch until long after his taillights disappear before I go into the house. It is stiflingly hot.

“Are you trying to get sick?” Mom asks the instant I am in the door.

The shift from Tyler to her is so jarring that my brain actually hurts. She jerks the giant dogsled parka she bought me for the trip to Peninsula out of the hall closet. “Why don’t you wear your jacket?”

“Uh, because it’s hideous?”

“Well, it would have been nice of you to tell me that before I spent almost two hundred dollars on it.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“Right. I was supposed to just let you get soaked and frozen at Peninsula. Wear the damn jacket, Aubrey.”

“I’m not going to wear that jacket. Ever.”

She flaps her lips like a horse. A very annoyed horse.

“Mom, I don’t really get that cold.”

“Aubrey, your lips are blue as we speak. And now you’ll probably get bronchitis like you do every year. Then that will turn into a sinus infection. And I’ll have to miss work. And you’re resistant to everything now except those designer antibiotics that cost a fortune.”

“Sorry to be such a bother.”

That gets me Hurt Look Number 85, which is the one about how my father screwed her in the divorce and that’s why we have no money. Of course, that look is based on the reality that my being born is pretty much the whole cause of the divorce. The thing that drove her husband to what she has always told me is his psycho religion. Not that I’ve heard his side of that story.

She yells at me that there are going to be some new rules around here from now on. The first one is that I have to come straight home after school every day or she will ground me.

After she lists a bunch of other rules like calling and checking in, I say, “Sure. Not a problem,” and walk away. By the time I’ve closed my bedroom door I can’t recall any of the new rules because I’m concentrating so hard on figuring out exactly what Tyler meant, and to do that I have to remember every word he spoke.