Chapter Eight
West
Vicky approached me at my locker after school. Before she could get a word out, I said, “The answer is no. We’re not going on a double date.”
“Well, that’s rude,” she said.
“No. It’s normal.” I slung my bag over my shoulder. “People don’t go on double dates with their exes.”
“You’re taking this all wrong. I really like Cole.”
“Good for you. Be happy with him and stop tormenting me.” I slammed my locker and turned to go.
“So are you and Nina a couple, because I heard the strangest rumor.”
I turned back around. “No, you heard a stupid rumor.”
“Same thing, really.” She grinned like this was all a big joke.
“Vicky, bottom line, what do you want?”
“For all of us to be friends,” she said.
“I doubt that.”
“Honestly, you were a bad boyfriend.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.” I turned to walk away from her.
“But I still care about you, and you need friends,” she said.
That brought me up short. I turned back to her. “I have friends. And you’re not one of them.” The look of hurt on her face made me regret my words. Whatever. It was too late now. I headed for my car.
Honestly. Did she have delusions of being a social worker or a psychiatrist? I had more than enough friends. Adding people to my life never made it simpler. They always asked too many questions, just like Vicky had.
As I drove home, I wondered why I’d even bothered with her. She was pretty and curvy, but none of that made up for the lectures about how I should act or how weird it was that she could never come inside my house. Like I didn’t know that was weird, but facts were facts. Until I moved out of my parents’ home, I’d continue to protect my mom’s secret. I planned to move out as soon as possible. I’d received acceptance letters from most of the schools I’d applied to. Now I was waiting to hear back about their financial aid packages. If all went according to plan, I’d trade my grade point average in for a scholarship to a university far away from Greenbrier.
When I pulled into our shared driveway, I noticed Nina had beaten me home and parked right on the edge of the line, again. I parked on my side, behind her so I didn’t have to deal with making sure our driver’s-side and passenger-side mirrors didn’t hit. Why couldn’t my dad have rented to some conservationists who drove tiny little smart cars?
No. He’d rented to Nina’s family. Nina—oddly interesting and sexy in a smart-girl kind of way, who tried to turn everything into a debate or a confrontation. As entertaining as she might be, I didn’t need any more conflict in my life. And it’s not like she wanted to go to the stupid dance anyway. It was all about the truth. What I needed was to find a way to catch her in a lie, and then she couldn’t pretend to be so high and mighty about always telling the truth.
I put my car in park and sat, taking in the view. To the right, I could see inside Nina’s house because the curtains were open. There was light and movement. My house sat there like a tomb, quiet and sealed. The curtains were shut tight. No light or air moved through the house. My mom probably sat in the middle of her bed like a deranged bird on a crazy nest of bedsheets that needed to be washed.
The weight of it all pushed down on me. I wasn’t ready to go in yet, but I knew my mom would be waiting for me. If I was late, she’d get worked up. I checked the calendar on my phone. Only 120 days until graduation. I could do this.
I went into the house and started a pot of French roast. Once it was ready, I poured two cups and added sugar to both, leaving them on the table. If the smell didn’t lure my mom out of her room, I’d go get her. In the meantime, I made a PB&J and ate it while I made another two sandwiches, which I cut into fourths and put on a plate.
This was how my mom used to greet me when I came home from school as a kid. Back then, my cup had been full of milk, but I still found the routine comforting, and I think she did, too.
I heard footsteps. My mom came around the corner. “That smells wonderful.”
She sat and sipped her coffee. It was funny, but at times like these she seemed like a normal person, like her old self.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Pretty good,” I said. “How about you?”
She picked up a sandwich square. “I cleaned out some boxes today.”
The bite I’d taken seemed to lodge in my throat. After taking a drink of coffee, I worked at keeping my tone even. “Really? What did you do?”
“I’ll show you after we eat.”
“Okay.”
“I know your dad doesn’t like it when I move things around, but I wasn’t sure where my magazines were.”
She had three giant tubs of magazines in the bedroom, which my father had clearly labeled with a large black permanent marker. “Weren’t they in the right boxes?”
“It’s hard to find them when they’re in the boxes,” she said.
“If you didn’t keep so many of them, you’d be able to find the ones you wanted.”
“Let me show you what I did.” She stood and headed for her bedroom.
I checked the time on my cell. My dad wouldn’t be home for an hour and a half. Hopefully, I had time to fix whatever she’d done.
I walked in the doorway of her bedroom and leaned against the doorframe, praying for strength. She’d taken all the magazines out and stacked them on the dresser. There had to be hundreds of them. The stacks were so tall you couldn’t see the mirror. She’d also piled them on the floor in the space that had been left as a walkway to the closet.
I ran my hand down my face and worked at keeping my tone even. “Dad won’t like this. We need to put them back in the boxes.”
“Let me worry about your father,” she said.
Right. Like it was that simple. “Why don’t you pick out your favorite magazines, and I’ll put the rest in the recycling bin.”
“There’s no way I could choose,” my mom said. “I need all of them.”
If I argued, she’d become agitated, so I tried another tactic. “Do you have any car magazines? Charlie said he and Matt were looking at cars.”
“I do have some car magazines.” She brightened and went over to the stacks on the dresser. After a few minutes, she came back holding a dozen Car and Driver magazines. “See, this is why I never throw anything away, because you never know when you might need it.”
“Thanks, Mom, I’m sure Charlie and Matt will appreciate them.” I held my hand out.
She stared at the magazines and then at my hand. Retreating a step, she hugged the magazines to her chest. “Tell them they can come here and read them. That way I won’t lose them.”
Why had I thought that might work? Time to retreat. “Sure. I’m going to start on my homework now.”
“Okay.” My mom went back to her bed, still clutching the magazines.
I didn’t actually feel like doing homework, so I headed into the living room and shifted a few boxes so I could climb over them toward the middle of the room. That way, if my mom wandered in, she wouldn’t be able to spot me right away. I opened a tub and filled an old backpack with junk mail that had to be at least five years old. When another sliver of paper wouldn’t fit inside, I snuck back out, grabbed my coat, and went out the sliding glass patio doors into the backyard.
I crept across the patio, through the grass, and out past the shed to an old overgrown basketball court that the former owners of the house had installed, which my dad never had any use for. I kept an old barbecue grill and a couple of lawn chairs on the cracked concrete slab for plausible deniability. I opened the grill and dumped the old mail inside. From the cooler I kept near the grill, I pulled out a container of lighter fluid. After dousing the papers, I threw a few charcoal briquettes on top and then tossed in a match. The lighter fluid-soaked paper burst into flames.
There was something cathartic about watching things burn. Not that I was an arsonist, but these papers, these things my mother insisted on hoarding, had destroyed our normal lives. Now I spent most of my time hiding the truth or telling lies to cover things up. Burning these magazines and papers to ash felt like retribution.
Not that I liked to admit it, but more than one night I’d fantasized about burning the entire house down. I’d make sure my parents weren’t inside, of course, but if the house and all my mother’s crazy garbage went up in flames, maybe we could start over somewhere else. Start over in a nice, clean house where we weren’t drowning in Rubbermaid containers and my mom’s insanity.