CHAPTER 51
Nastya
On Tuesday during fifth hour, Ms.
McAllister continues the poetry unit. We covered the same lesson earlier in my class and now I just get to listen in and try not to stare too much at the beautiful, priceless boy in the back row whose heart I stomped all over. I don’t even know how long we ended up talking on Saturday morning. I know that we didn’t resolve anything. There wasn’t anything left to resolve. We had already put everything through the shredder and it was just gone.
I walk through the aisles, passing out a list of discussion questions on the poem Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I pass Ethan Hall’s desk and he checks out my face again. I’ve been able to do a good job covering it, but you can still make out the bruise.
“So you’re beating your girlfriends now?” he directs at Drew. A hint of smug satisfaction crosses his face like he’s telling me I got what I deserved for rejecting him. Maybe I did get what I deserved, but it wasn’t for anything I did to him.
“No, that’s your thing,” Drew replies, unfazed.
“She did it in kickboxing.”
I turn to catch Tierney Lowell glaring at Ethan. She’s the only other person aside from Drew, Josh and I who knows what happened with Kevin. I’m not surprised to hear her chime in. It’s Drew she’s defending, even if she won’t admit it. I nod almost imperceptibly in thanks to her, because if he won’t acknowledge it, I will.
When I pass Kevin Leonard’s desk, he reaches out to grab my hand and say something. He looks embarrassed, but before he can touch me or open his mouth, Josh kicks the back of his chair. Hard.
Kevin drops his hand and looks down at the paper in front of him, muttering sorry under his breath, which I get the feeling is directed at Josh, not me.
Josh slides the handout across his desk when I place it there, but he makes no move to acknowledge me at all. I don’t even exist. I’d trade my hand all over again to take back everything I did and hear him call me Sunshine.
“Who can explain what the poem is about?” Ms. McAllister asks to get started.
She places the leftover handouts on top of a beautiful handmade oak podium that magically appeared in her room a week ago. It’s a mystery where it came from.
“Trees,” someone calls out.
“There are trees in the poem. That’s not what it’s about,” she says.
“Aren’t poems supposed to be short?” Trevor Mason asks. “Because this one was like a hundred pages long.”
“Hyperbole,
Mr.
Mason,”
Ms.
McAllister replies.
“Hyperbo-what?”
“Exaggeration, you tool,” Tierney shoots at him and then rolls her eyes, looking up to the ceiling before exhaling in defeat. “I’ll just take the detention.” Ms. McAllister walks to her desk and fills out a detention slip.
“Who’s the tool now?” Drew says, smirking at Tierney. He lifts his head to catch the glare of Ms. McAllister who’s still at her desk, pad of detention slips in hand. Then he glances back to Tierney.
“Yeah, I know. Just give me one, too.”
“Someone still needs to answer the question at hand.” Ms. McAllister passes off the slips and returns to the front of the room.
Even if I wasn’t watching the class, I would have been able to hear the collective turning of every head in the room when Josh’s hand went up. Even Ms.
McAllister looks like she doesn’t quite know what to make of it.
“Josh?” she says tentatively.
He doesn’t speak for a second, looking pained, like he already regrets drawing the attention.
“It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words.
“The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.”
I’ve turned away from Josh to look at Ms. McAllister. She’s watching him with an expression of pride and endearment which reminds me of the way I’ve seen Mrs. Leighton look at him. But I don’t think Ms. McAllister’s expression is as much about his answer as it is about the fact that he answered in the first place.
“And does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it.
“She does.”
***
Josh
It’s Wednesday before I see her again outside of school, and even there she hardly looks at me. Nothing has really changed except that, before last weekend, I felt more like a victim in all of this and, now, not so much.
It’s already eleven. I’ve been in my garage for hours, but I haven’t done much of anything. I reorganized the same tool chest twice and now I’m sweeping up sawdust. I don’t have the energy to do anything worthwhile, but I have a list that’s just getting longer and I have to get started at some point. I’ve had more time over the last six weeks than I’ve had in months, and I haven’t accomplished crap.
I go inside, make another cup of coffee and carry it back out, resolving to start the initial cutting for the matching end table I promised I’d make Mrs. Leighton.
And maybe I’m more tired than I thought, because when I open the door, the first thing I see is a set of pale white legs capped with black steel-toed boots swinging from the workbench.
“You
know
you’re
an
addict.
Caffeine’s a bitch to break.”
“Guess I won’t break it then.”
She nods and I want to ask her why she’s here but I’m glad she is, and for a few minutes, I want to pretend that everything is back to the way it used to be.
Maybe that’s what she wants, too.
“It’ll stunt your growth, you know.”
“Didn’t know you were worried.”
“Only about some parts,” she smirks.
I smile for a minute, but it’s weak, and I realize that I don’t want to joke with her. Especially not like that. It makes me think of everything that happened that night and everything that’s gone wrong since, and as much as I want to pretend everything is the way it was before, I’m just not a good enough liar.
“Helps keep me awake,” I answer, not taking the bait.
“Why not just sleep?”
“Haven’t been sleeping well,” I say honestly.
“Maybe that’s because of the caffeine.
Vicious cycle.”
“You don’t drink it. Do you sleep well?”
“Point taken,” she says faintly.
“Thank you.” This conversation is so civilized, it’s twisted.
She hops off the counter and walks over to me. The bruise on her face has faded, but it’s not covered with make-up now, like it is at school, and I can still see it. I have to fight the urge to run my fingers over it and then run to Kevin Leonard’s house and give him four more just like it.
“Here. Let me try it again.” She reaches for the cup in my hand.
“If you’re going to try it, you should at least put some shit in it first.”
“Sounds appetizing.”
“I drink it black. You won’t. Your taste buds are opposed to anything that isn’t sweet.”
“Give it, jackass.” I let go of the cup and she takes a mouthful while I watch her face contort at the bitterness. “Still gross.”
“You get used to it,” I shrug, taking the coffee back from her. She relinquishes it and shudders as if she’s trying to expel the taste from her mouth. I have to try not to smile.
“I’d rather not.” She scrunches up her nose and goes back to sitting on the counter. Her legs start swinging again and I know how easy it would be to stay in this place
and
forget
everything
that’s
happened. But we’ll always end up back where we were, because nothing’s been resolved, and I’m not the one with the answers. Maybe, for once, I need to stop letting her dictate everything just because I want to keep her. I can’t forget what she did and I can’t expect her to forgive what I did and I don’t know where we go from here.
“It’s not the same,” I say, watching her write her name in the dust on the counter next to her. “We can’t act like nothing happened… just pretend that it’s all good.”
“I know it isn’t,” she says, lifting her eyes to mine with something I might actually believe is hope, “but, maybe.” She ends up staying for the next two hours. She measures and marks the wood for me and I cut. We don’t talk about us or Kevin Leonard or Leigh or lost hands or lost people or long agos. We talk about furniture and tools and recipes and art competitions and debate. It’s familiar and comfortable.
There’s
something
still
hanging over us that we can’t ignore forever, even if we do ignore it tonight.
But, maybe.
It’s after one in the morning when I drive her home since she ran to my house.
We sit in the truck, staring at her front door, because things shifted just a little bit in the other direction tonight, and neither of us is ready to let go of it yet. I reach my hand over and lay it, palm up, on the seat between us and she doesn’t hesitate. She lays her left hand on mine and I close my fingers over it.