7
meg
My makeup was done and I had just finished blow-drying my hair. While I was waiting for Jo to get out of the shower and curl my hair, I picked up the book she had slid under my pillow on Christmas. Honestly, I hadn’t opened it since then, but I had a few minutes, so I lifted the black cover and turned to a random page. It began:
my favorite thing about you is your smell
I read the words in silent awe, and then read them again, and Shia’s hands, dirt under his fingernails, came to my mind. He was always dirty, always planting something or helping some old woman or other move her furniture around or some such. He always smelled like the earth, like a garden.
I couldn’t believe he was back—and worse, I couldn’t believe that I was thinking about him right now. John would be home in a week to see me. I should be thinking about John’s clean, strong hands, and the way he always smelled like fresh cologne and laundry detergent.
He wouldn’t dare to wear ratty T-shirts or dirty sneakers the way Shia did.
“Jo!” I yelled.
It was eight thirty, and everyone was going to start arriving at our house around ten. By “everyone,” I mean a few of the neighbors and their kids. I didn’t invite any of my “friends,” since half of them weren’t talking to me over a rumor that wasn’t even true. That’s what happens when you’re labeled the school “slut” in a small Army town. It follows you past graduation. I didn’t mind so much and still don’t, really. If they were truly my friends, they would know that I wouldn’t do what they are accusing me of doing. The same thing happened to me at Fort Hood, and it was so much worse; the rumor mill here seemed like child’s play.
That night we would have followed our tradition of celebrating at home, but Jo and I got a last-minute invite to the Kings’ house for Bell Gardiner’s engagement party, so we decided to stop by there for an hour, then make sure we were back home by eleven. I didn’t want to go, especially because I was afraid to see Shia there, but I had assumed since the party was at the Kings’ huge estate, many people would be there and lessen my chance of running into Shia.
“Josephine!” I shouted again.
While I waited for her, I flipped to another page in the book she’d gifted me.
The poem there was simple, and began:
how can our love die . . .
Stunned, I turned a few more pages.
he isn’t coming back . . .
Underneath the poem was the word wilted, as if the poem was signed by Wilted. I thought of the bouquet of flowers on Mrs. King’s nightstand. The card was signed by Shia, and the red petals were wilted. I touched the corner of one and it broke off, falling onto the wooden dresser. I thought about how he left so suddenly and how much time I’d wasted wishing that he would come back.
Trying to push those wilted flowers and his shining green eyes out of my head, I slammed the book shut and tossed it onto my bed just as Jo came strolling into our room.
“I’m here!” she said with a smile.
Her hands were full. In one hand she held the curling iron and her phone, and in the other she had a handful of Bugles. Her long hair was down, touching the top of her hips as she moved toward me and stood behind me at the vanity. Her face was freshly scrubbed pink, and her pale skin was glowing.
She would never listen to me when I told her how lucky she was to have such flawless skin. Beth and I suffered from acne the most, but mine had cleared up since I started working at Sephora, where I got to try all the new skin-care products from the best, most expensive brands, for free.
“Your makeup looks so good,” Jo said.
She plugged in the curling iron, and I parted my hair, clipping up the top of it so she could curl the bottom.
I stared into the mirror and smiled at my sister. We had been getting closer lately, and I was starting to see a change in her. She was no longer my little Josephine who ran away from home when Old Mr. Laurence trapped a raccoon in a cage and wouldn’t let it go. She was growing up so fast, and that meant I was, too. I was ready to be older; I hated being on the cusp of being a woman, because I felt like one but wasn’t treated like one.
“Big curls, please.”
Jo nodded and went to work.
“Do you think Amy will be able to stay up tonight?” I asked as she curled a chunk of my hair. The strands were hot when she let them out of the barrel and they fell onto my shoulder.
Just as she started to answer, Amy bounced into our bedroom.
“Jo. Meg. Whatever you do, you have to tell me how the party is.”
“We will. Are you trying to stay up? Or will you be asleep when we get back?” I asked as Jo wrapped another piece of my hair around the metal barrel.
Amy shook her head and moved around us. She grabbed a tube of lipstick from my vanity and leaned down into the mirror as her small fingers pulled the top off, revealing a deep purple shade.
“I’ll be up.” Amy’s fingers turned the tube around and around as if she was trying to figure out how to use it. “You guys will have all the fun. Did you hear that Bell Gardiner is engaged! I can’t wait to see her ring! Ugh, you’re going to have way more fun than me.” Amy sighed heavily and licked her lips before she smeared the stick across her lips. When she was done, she pulled back and looked at herself in the mirror.
“It’s going to be a blast. And of course we know, Amy. We were invited.” Jo rolled her eyes.
Amy pouted. “Stop rubbing it in.”
I didn’t particularly care about Bell Gardiner’s engagement, or her at all. She was one year older than me and had supposedly been going to move to Florida for college, but she only made it as far as the French Quarter. Rumor had it that she worked at a bar downtown, right in the center of the Quarter, somewhere between Bourbon and Royal. Of course she was a bartender, like my aunt Hannah.
“How big do you think her ring is?” Amy asked, her little sock-covered feet moving around my small bedroom.
Jo and I made eye contact in the mirror.
“Who is she even engaged to?” Jo asked.
I shrugged my shoulders and closed my eyes. Who knew? Not me, nor did I care. I felt bad for the poor man who asked her to marry him. I could have made up excuse after excuse on why I didn’t like her, but the main reason was Shia. They had dated briefly during the end of my junior year, their senior, and those two weeks felt like the longest of my life.
“Who knows. Probably some soldier,” Jo said, looking at Amy through the mirror.
Amy’s eyes lit up. “Can you imagine? Everyone is lucky but me.” She sighed.
“Lucky? To be engaged at twenty?” I responded to Amy.
Even though I had a catty response, I had grown up wishing I would find the love of my life at a young age and have the security of being someone’s wife. I knew I was jealous of Bell Gardiner, and though I would never say it to my sisters, I was secretly hoping John would propose to me when he came home for leave the following week.
Beth’s voice came from over by the door, where she was leaning against its frame. “I’m glad I don’t have to go and be with all those frightening people and try to think of things to say.”
She hated to be around crowds. I felt a slight guilt when I got the Facebook invite for only Jo and me, but Beth would much rather be home with Meredith and Amy than at a crowded party with me and Jo.
I gave Beth a sympathetic smile and looked back at Jo.
“Is that what you’re wearing tonight?” I asked her.
She nodded and looked down at her all-black outfit. Black jeans, black shirt. A thin line of pale skin showed just above her hip. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Jo in a dress. Probably that one Easter where Meredith made all of us wear matching dresses and carry matching baskets to get family pictures done. Gah, they were horrendous. They were probably on some BuzzFeed list of corniest family photos.
“What’s that smell?” Amy asked, and sniffed the air. It smelled like burnt . . .
“Oh my God, Jo!” I yanked my head away from her, and a chunk of my hair was smoking, still on the barrel of the iron.
Amy screamed louder than I did, and Jo dropped the hot curling iron onto the floor.
“Get it off the floor!” Beth yelled. “It’s going to burn the carpet!”
I stared at my hair and ran my fingers over the hole in it.
Jo began, “I’m sorry! I—”
“I can’t go anywhere like this!” My eyes welled up with tears, and as much as I didn’t want to yell at Jo, I was always going to be that girl who cared about what her hair looked like.
“I ruin everything,” Jo mumbled, barely loud enough for anyone to hear her.
Her words made such a sad sound that I wanted to comfort her. But I just kept staring at the chunk of my hair she’d burned off and I didn’t know what to say.
Amy clucked around me and pulled the bow from her white hair. “Here, put this on, you’ll barely notice.”
I took the bow from her hands and put it in my hair. I never wore bows, I was too old for them, but there was something edgy, a little baby-doll-like, about the way the black bow wrapped through the front of my hair.
I looked at myself in the mirror and straightened my back. I couldn’t let my burnt hair ruin my night. I still looked sexy. I liked the contrast between my dark makeup and my girlish bow.
“You’re so pretty, Meg. I hope I’m as pretty as you when I get older,” Amy said.
That made me smile. Leave it to little Amy to give me the extra confidence boost I needed. Bell Gardiner would look flawless. I knew she would. She always did, and her fiancé was probably some rich Southern gentleman, and she was going to spend her party showing off some beautiful diamond, and I was going to spend the party sulking and reminding myself that I had someone, too.
John would be home soon.
John would be home soon.
“John will be home soon,” Jo said, stealing the words from inside my head.
I smiled at her effort and pushed my feet into my heels.