FALLING FROM GRACE
By: S.L. Naeole
Falling From Grace
© 2010 by S.L. Naeole
All rights reserved.
Published by Crystal Quill Publishing
All of the situations and characters in this novel are fictional. Any similarities to actual people or situations are completely coincidental and wholly unintentional.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Editing done by Pauline Nolet
S.L. Naeole
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For my wonderful husband, who gave me support.
Even when I probably didn’t deserve it—you are my rock.
And for my mites, who give me just about all the reason I need
to write and laugh and write about laughing.
“Thus, in
discourse, the lovers whiled away
The night that waned and waned
and brought no day.
They fell: for Heaven to them no hope
imparts
Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.”
Al Aaraaf—Edgar Alan Poe
PREFACE
His beauty was painful to take in, even as his passion pulled from me a cry of agony. Captured in his frozen eyes was the light of every star ever born, and every wish ever made. His beautiful smile stretched cruelly across his face as he took in the panoramic of my fear.
There was lust in his eyes that begged him to be quick, but there was no need to rush; he had all the time in the world, while I had only the time he spared me. His beautiful smile grew as my breathing quickened.
A comforting caress as he leaned into me, a promise of nothing but suffering and death on his lips as he said my name lovingly. I was pinned to my fate—this was to be my last embrace—I welcomed it as the bitter flood began.
GRACE EXPECTATIONS
I dread Mondays.
And the incessant buzzing of my alarm clock heralded it like some newly crowned king. What idiot had set that thing for—I peeked from beneath my pillow at the clock sitting on my dresser, mere inches from the foot of the bed—five-thirty? It couldn’t have been me; not in a million years. I wasn’t ready, not for today anyway, and I definitely wasn’t ready for it to start at five-thirty. The darkness of early morning still blackened my window.
As a rule, Mondays don’t start until the sun comes out. Oh, who was I kidding; it was September…in Ohio. There wasn’t going to be any sun for another hour at least, and in less than three, I’d have to face the world again. Summer was over and my senior year was starting, just as my life was ending.
It was unavoidable, this first day of school after a lifetime of memory making; all those whispered secrets and shouted declarations between friends were as permanent as time. And yet, nothing could be as permanent as broken promises, or my shattered heart, broken by my best friend. In truth, my only friend; the only person in the world I trusted, who knew me inside and out and who looked past what the others saw as freakish.
Graham Hasselbeck wasn’t just my next door neighbor. We grew up together. He had been my childhood playmate, the two of us inseparable all our lives, from diapers to puberty. It goes without saying then that we had the same tastes in just about everything two friends could share. Even fate seemed inclined to throw us together when we started school, with the both of us being assigned to the same classes from kindergarten through high school.
Our life’s milestones seemed to run in time together as well, since we learned how to ride our bikes together, broke bones together, even got sick together. We were beyond close, our bond too strong and significant to break.
Even when he grew taller than me and everyone else, when he took off the braces that straightened imperfect teeth while mine still displayed that heinously embarrassing childhood gap, when he became popular with everyone while I lagged behind, when all of the girls noticed his dark blond spikes and green eyes, and no one noticed me at all—Graham had remained my best friend.
And this summer together, like all of the previous summers before, had been spent hanging out, just being with each other, just being friends…up until two weeks ago. That was when he stopped taking my phone calls, and when he started leaving his house before I got up, only coming home long after my curfew kept me indoors.
That was after I broke the cardinal rule of friendship and told him I was in love with him.
It sounded reasonable enough, telling the person you’ve known since forever that you’re in love with them, especially since I was. And why not tell him? After all, he knew everything about me. Every secret, every obvious and invisible flaw, and every screw up were all well documented in our memories, if not in photo albums created solely for blackmail use at a later date. I had been nothing if not unbearably and unfailingly honest with him.
And perhaps that was where I had gone wrong.
With a dismayed groan I thought back to that moment, that crucial blip in time when I’d finally found the courage to tell Graham how I felt. We had been sitting on the hood of his Buick Skylark, which used to be his dad’s. The rusty green coupe with the dented passenger door had been our home away from home when Graham’s parents were fighting—which seemed to happen on a daily basis now—or when my dad had his girlfriend over to visit.
The car was a birthday present his dad had told him when he’d given it to him two years ago. Graham had just made captain of the football team—the youngest ever at sixteen—and had also just passed his driver’s test. It was a defining moment for him and receiving that car was like being given the world. Of course, it didn’t go unnoticed that Graham’s dad had also just bought himself a brand new truck right around that time.
Richard Hasselbeck wasn’t exactly trying to hide that fact from his son, but he also didn’t come right out and say it either. I had called it tacky, but Graham had gone on and on about the freedom we now had to go to the mall—which we never did—or go to the Indian Mound park to throw the ball around—which I could never quite do without him complaining that I “threw like a girl”—or go to the cemetery to visit the graves of my mother and his grandmother—a monthly ritual for us.
But at that moment, right then and there that car was my platform, where I stood as the executioner put the invisible noose around my neck—and released the trapdoor.
“Graham,” I started, my voice quivering from the chaos of my nerves. I took a few deep breaths to calm them while I braced myself against the windshield. Its smooth, sloped surface did nothing to comfort me or give me any real sense of stability; I was just fearful that without it, every word that came out of my mouth would send me flying backwards in retreat—rocket propulsion via the pouring out of my heart.
He glanced over at me and smiled cockily. Call me a simpering little girl stuck in Cinderella mode, but I loved that smug smile of his. Then again, so did every girl over the age of twelve within a five mile radius. The way his cheek dimpled ever so slightly, teasing me with the promise of its depth, never failed to make me forget just what it was that I had wanted to say.
“What’s up, Grace?” he asked in a stunted tone, taking note of my awkward tension and adjusting his posture in kind. He leaned back, as though bracing for the emotional upheaval that he could sense was on the brink of breaking through my awkwardly feminine defenses.
I started to speak, but my tongue grew heavy and dry in my mouth as doubt began to slip in. I had replayed the speech over and over again in my mind, imagining what I’d say and what his reactions would be. But I’d never vocalized them, never stood in front of a mirror and said them out loud just to hear what they sounded like, and now it appeared that the internal fuse that existed solely for this purpose had shorted out on me, causing me to stare at him dumbly.
“Grace? What’s up?” he asked again, sensing my caution and frowning in response. When had I ever held back from telling him how I felt, he’d probably wondered. His confusion was warranted; I knew that I wasn’t acting like myself and that was putting him off.
If this was going to go well, I would have to put myself back together otherwise I’d never make it beyond just sitting there. After taking several more calming breaths, I swallowed my doubts and decided right then and there to wing it. Seizing my moment of renewed strength, I took the first hesitant step towards my running leap of faith. Olympic medal of openness, here I come.
My mouth opened and the words tumbled out.
“Graham, I love you—”
I quickly bit down everything else that wanted to join those four words, a jumbled mess of disclosure catching in my throat and nearly causing me to choke.
I wasn’t that brave…yet.
For one agonizingly long moment he said nothing, and the silence felt like it would strangle me. Or it could have been that I was just holding my breath while waiting for a response.
His face was an ever growing map of emotions, and though I professed to know him better than anyone else ever could, even I had to admit that I couldn’t see just where exactly he was going to land. This was the first time that I had said those three words to him in a tone that wasn’t playful or mocking—the way you’re supposed to say it to your best friend—and I knew that it had caught him off guard completely because he’d never been at a loss for words before. In one fell swoop, I had managed to do the impossible and silence Graham Hasselbeck.
After what could have been a lifetime or perhaps seventy-two seconds—give or take a minute—he sighed…somewhat reservedly. “Ditto, Grace.”
The ground rumbled beneath me, opening up a hungry chasm that awaited my next move.
And then Graham smiled.
So I leapt. “I’m also in love with you,” I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. Maybe too loud. Out of habit, I had closed my eyes when I had begun to speak, but at that moment I needed them to be open, needed to gauge his reaction. I didn’t want to miss anything; I needed to see his face, see his eyes when he heard my confession.
And I didn’t recognize it at all.
He was looking past me, avoiding eye contact as his face held on fast to a blank expression, though I could see a slight puckering between his brows as he struggled with some inner turmoil. I wasn’t used to this, to seeing him so aloof, and it was one of the most terrifying moments in my life. For reasons unknown I began see my life flash before my eyes—Graham was in almost every scene, filling them up like the sun fills up a frigid morning with its warmth—and those images were slowly being eaten up by hungry flames of doubt that clawed at my heart as it beat slowly, almost painfully in my chest.
He carelessly shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans in some vain attempt to keep them occupied. “Grace…” he sighed.
Maybe he muttered it. I don’t remember which because the next few minutes destroyed me to my very core and prevented me from being able to distinguish anything apart from how dark and desolated my world was becoming. The sudden feeling of loss as all the blood in my body started to drain away to some unseen place was causing an acute buzzing to flood my ears. It blocked out everything but the sound of my entire world being knocked off of its foundation—the very thing that kept me from falling into that chasm that waited patiently for me to stumble—and crushing my hopes as it landed on my heart.
“Grace, I…I don’t know how exactly to put this without hurting your feelings…but I don’t feel the same way about you.”
He paused for a minute, the blank expression finally cracking, revealing a very incredulous, very angry scowl upon his face. I was taken aback by the sudden shift in his emotions as he barked, “You should have known better than to be so stupid! We’re in two different leagues, Grace. We run with different crowds—or, at least I do. You’ve been struggling to keep up since the sixth grade and I’ve been weighed down with this friendship for too damn long. You’ve been holding me back, and now you gotta tell me you’re in love with me, like that’s supposed to mean something? What are you thinking?”
He shook his head, muttering to himself as he ran his fingers through the crisp spikes of his hair over and over again, frustration wracking him in ways I had never seen before. He slid off of the hood, landing on the sidewalk with very little grace, too upset to care, and started pacing, his hands alternating between jamming themselves into his pockets and running through his disheveled hair.
I watched him, unable to say anything, unable to find the strength in me to argue in my defense because I knew that he was right. I had been holding him back, and we were in different leagues. We always had been. I just didn’t think that any of that had mattered to him before.
After several minutes of pacing, his head bobbed down once with such finality that it made my heart skid to a halt. It was as though he had just won some silent argument he’d had with himself and was agreeing with the outcome, and I knew that whatever that outcome was, it wouldn’t bode well for me.
He lifted harsh eyes to mine, his mouth opening just wide enough to let the words tumble out as quickly as they could, if only to keep from prolonging the inevitable, or perhaps from saying something worse. “This has got to end now. We can’t be friends anymore, Grace. We can’t be anything anymore.”
And so my future had been decided, I realized, and he had been the one to make the decision.
I didn’t know what my face read at that point, if it showed anything at all because in that moment I embodied what the proverbial “they” meant when they said they felt numb. It’s how you’re supposed to feel after your heart takes an emotional beating and then decides to escape, abandoning you, leaving you to fend for yourself without the aid of love and hope to keep you going.
Whatever it was that Graham saw in my face then, it gave him enough reason to pound that final nail into my coffin, sealing it shut from everything that was good, everything that had been us up until that point.
“I didn’t know how to tell you this when school was over—didn’t want to, really—but I got accepted to NC Prep. They’ve got an amazing football team, and the only way I’m going to get scouted is if I’m playing for a ranked school. It’s my one shot out of here, so that means I won’t be going to Heath this year.”
He paused to reach into his jacket pocket with a clumsy hand and pulled something out, shoving it towards me with such blatant disgust I could almost taste it. “Here, take it,” he said to me as he pushed it against my hand, never once reacting to the way I flinched at the contact.
Call it being childish, call it just plain stubbornness, but I refused to accept whatever it was he was trying to force into my unwilling grip, clenching my fingers so tight I knew my knuckles were turning white from the effort.
My head turned from side to side in utter refusal; I didn’t want parting gifts, as though I was the second runner-up on some game show. This was my life he was destroying, my heart he was breaking—couldn’t he see how humiliated I was? How horribly and hideously inadequate he had made me feel now that not only had he reminded me that I wasn’t popular or pretty—or even liked—but that he’d also reinforced that fact by informing me that he couldn’t even stand to be in the same school as I was?
“Take it, Grace,” he demanded as he pried open my fist and pressed the small object against my palm, closing my stiffened fingers around it. I took it numbly, my arm dropping dead at my side in defeat. I didn’t even bother to look at it; I was too busy staring at the stranger standing before my eyes.
“Grace,” he continued, his voice softer now, his gaze drifting downwards toward some unseen object that had no real purpose other than to keep him from having to look at me, from having to see the hurt he had caused me.
“I guess I should have told you this a while ago, but I suppose now’s as good a time as any, and I don’t want you to find out from anyone else because I know that that would be worse than finding out like this. See, I’ve been dating Erica Hamilton for the past six months. I didn’t want tell you about it because…well, I guess I kinda already knew how you felt and didn’t want you to get hurt.”
Didn’t want me to get hurt? The rough exhalation that came out of me told him clearly that it was too late for that.
He sighed, as though a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and ran his fingers through his hair again, calming it down some, only to cause it to stand up at weird angles when he struggled with what he had to say next.
“Erica and I…well, she and I have gotten pretty serious—really serious actually—and she thinks that it wouldn’t be right for me to stay friends with you. And now that I know for sure how you feel, I know that she’s right. It’s not right, and it’s not fair to you, or to me.
“She also said that it would be wrong of me to keep some of the stuff you’ve given me—like that—” he motioned towards the object that he had forced into my hands “—she said that I needed a clean break from you, to rid my life of everything that you’d ever given me. And so I thought that maybe you’d like that back, instead of me just throwing it away.”
I didn’t want to look down at what was in my hand and affording him my reaction. Instead I simply nodded.
Truth was, I was afraid of finding out what he had returned to me. What had I given to him that wasn’t deserving of being thrown away or completely destroyed, like he had just done to my life? He couldn’t be giving me back my heart; that lay in a pile of ashes in my lap.
“I have to get going, Grace. I gotta go pick up Erica at the mall; we’re having dinner with her dad. It’s her birthday today.” He started to walk away then, but suddenly stopped and turned to face me, a wistful smile on his face.
“Um…have a great rest of summer, ’kay? Maybe I’ll see you around. Or something.”
With a wave, he was gone, back into his house to await my departure. At least he wasn’t just standing there, waiting for me to leave. Or better yet, at least he hadn’t told me to leave. No, he had done me the favor of leaving himself, one last act of kindness from my now former friend. At least, that’s what I told myself.
It was in that moment of comprehension that I knew I had not only lost my best friend, but I had also lost most of my summer as well. All of those moments, those memories that I had stored in my mind, that touched my heart in so many different ways, were becoming distorted now, like an over pixilated movie. All of our conversations, our inside jokes, our confidences replayed in my mind, and all of them were now taking on new meaning for me…because all of them were now meaningless to him.
I was now the inside joke: his and Erica’s. And whoever else knew about this. Of course, it was a given that everyone else already knew. Why wouldn’t they? I wasn’t popular and they were. Two different leagues, he had said: the reality and the fantasy. But I never wanted to be anything other than Graham’s friend. Even with loving him, I valued his friendship so much more. Now I didn’t even have that.
As I got off of his car and walked towards my house, I started analyzing the past several weeks in my mind. Had we really spent the summer together like my memories had foolishly led me to believe? Every single day, they told me. And that’s how it looked from my end…at least it did on the surface. He would meet me at the small library I worked at every morning, hanging out for a bit before leaving right after lunch for football camp.
When we went camping with our dads every other weekend, something that hadn’t changed since the two of us were in middle school, he had never given a sign that he was distracted by a missing girlfriend. It was only afterwards, when we got home, that he’d disappear for several hours, leaving our dads and me to unpack and clean out the gear.
We’d watched campy old movies and held a Rocky Horror Picture Show marathon at the beginning of summer break, holding it at the end of the month like always—it was a Grace and Graham tradition to call each other Rocky and Frank all day until one of us forgot, at which point that person got punched in the arm—because we were buds, Grace and Graham, best friends since forever. But he said he was busy with football and helping out his dad at the store last month, and so he asked for a rain check. I had never thought to question any of that until then.
I calculated the time in my head as I walked towards my front door and the numbers only added to my grief. The burnt out hollowed shell of a person I was when I entered my room was completely unrecognizable. Everything suddenly hurt and I needed to lie down.
I remained that way for the last two weeks of summer, getting up only to head to work at the library, knowing that there was no chance that I’d run into anyone from school there.
My dad, the only other person in my life—in my existence really—had made several attempts to comfort me in his own little way, but quit trying altogether when he received no encouragement on my part. When he couldn’t get an answer out of me as to what had happened after asking on several separate occasions, he went and spoke to Richard. I knew that his goal was to find out what had transpired outside that day to turn me so inside out, but he wouldn’t get a straight answer from that avenue either. Richard couldn’t tell the truth if it killed him—he was a natural born liar.
Dad eventually guessed what had happened, though. He wasn’t blind. He’d noticed Graham’s absence just as surely as he noticed the absence of my sarcastic comments, my ability to laugh at his corny jokes, and…well, me; perhaps even more so, because the absence of Graham meant the absence of Richard as well.
Richard and Dad had become fast friends after they had both moved here to Heath with their wives: Dad and Mom came from California—Dad was coming to work as a manager for a chain grocery store—and Richard and Iris from Nevada, Richard having just purchased a small auto dealership near Newark. Both were avid football fans, but only Richard was blessed with a son who would fill Friday and Saturday nights with high school games to cheer at.
James and Abigail Shelley, on the other hand, were blessed with a daughter they named Grace, after the three Greek Goddesses; Mom had been a lover of all things Greek, which was odd considering she was Korean.
Now see, the three Graces are supposed to be these symbols of beauty and fertility, of peace and friendship, and charm and creativity. This Grace, the version I grew up to be, while not ugly, is far from being even remotely similar to what one would describe as beautiful. I’ve got a slightly wide forehead—I’ve been called a five-head a few times, if that means anything. I’ve got dull brown hair that seemed to suffer from fits when the weather isn’t cooperating. My brown eyes are rather unremarkable and owlish, a pretty lousy compromise between my mother’s dark brown and my dad’s bright blue. And the freckles scattered across my pale skin seem out of place for my dark coloring. Suffice it to say, I’m an odd mish-mash of my mixed parentage.
And unlike most girls who lived in Heath, I didn’t take ballet, or jazz, so I wasn’t graceful. I didn’t enter pageants or talent contests for sashes and trophies, so there went my charm and creativity. I didn’t go to gymnastics, or take swimming lessons, or any of those things that little girls did with their mothers standing by, watching proudly. I was content with my books, my poetry, and my movies. Most importantly, I was very happy being a best friend to Graham. But what symbol of friendship could I be with no friends to speak of at all now? The only thing I had ever been successful at, I had failed the minute Graham had left me.
Lying in bed and remembering so much had me trembling with undeniable and bitter grief; the feeling of loss still felt so new. It was easy to choke on it, to suffocate on its core of bitterness. Its hold on me was so strong that I was bawling and hiccupping like a baby into my comforter, needing it for its imaginary strength almost as much as I needed it for its ability to muffle my sobs. I was in near hysterics…again.
How would I go back to school? How could I? The only person who had ever talked to me just because would no longer be there. I also couldn’t avoid the fact that the person who I partially blamed for all of it—his girlfriend, Erica—would, joking and sharing snide comments with the friends I now knew had all been having a good laugh at my expense for the better part of a year.
“Pity, party for one, your table is ready,” I mumbled into my pillow.
Monday.
I think I’ll hate Mondays for the rest of my life.
POSITIVE
With a resigned sigh, I dragged myself out of my bed. It was the first time in nearly forty-eight hours that I had done so for reasons other than to use the bathroom. The ever looming return to school had kicked my depression into high gear when the last weekend of summer started.
I needed to take a shower and wash the stiffness out of my body, as well as my face. Dried tears could iron a face flat, my mom used to say, and she had been right. Plus, I couldn’t face this horrible first day looking my worst, even if my worst was only second place to my best. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and recoiled at what I saw. Ugh, I was ghastly. There were lines imprinted on my face from the creases in my pillowcase, and my eyebrows were all spiky and pointing in odd directions. I definitely needed to shower and shave. And brush my teeth. Ew—I’ve never been a stickler for personal hygiene on an OCD level, but there was something to be said for having smooth armpits and legs, and clean teeth and hair. Gross! At the moment, my teeth felt like they’d been soaking in sludge, my hair…it needed prayers. My legs and armpits? Big Foot would be frightened.
I climbed into the shower and sat on the little bench that was molded into the shower wall; I waited for the hot water to hit me. I had to stand up to readjust the angle of the showerhead, but after a few minutes, I was as close to content as I could possibly be with the world outside waiting for me to face it or return to cowering beneath my blanket.
While brushing my teeth in the shower, I did a very—and highly unusual for me—girl-type thing and thought about what it was that I would wear. I hadn’t bought anything new this year. Dad didn’t have the money for anything other than secondhand when it came to my clothes, and with class and lab fees for school, there really wasn’t much to spend on the secondhand stuff anyway. Everything I made working at the Library during the summer had been socked away for college. My old standbys were a pair of jeans and one of my many garage sales T-shirt finds. So after mulling it over in the steam, I decided that if I was going to be the butt of every joke today, I might as well do it as comfortably as possible.
With that oh-so-important decision now out of the way, I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and started to squeeze the pink, sweet-smelling goo into my hands. It was at that moment, while staring at the shimmering pink sludge, that I remembered the object that Graham had placed in my hands before ending our friendship and turning my whole world into one burning mound of rubble. What was it? Where did I put it? With haphazard care, I rubbed the soap into my hair and quickly rinsed, soaping the rest of me in record time before I jumped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my body. It went around almost twice and I made a quick mental note that I had to learn to eat better.
I hurried back towards my bedroom, which was directly across from the bathroom, and scanned it quickly, assessing the most likely places it could be. Ugh, it stunk. It smelled like depression, tears, sweat, and…ashes? Had my figurative burning create actual smoke? I shook my head at my own digressive imagination.
My bed wasn’t made, as usual—why make it when I’d just sleep in it again? Clothes were strewn on the floor, while the hamper sat in the bathroom half-full. The curtain hanging over the large window facing the doorway was closed, letting in no real light other than a small sliver of blue-gray. I pushed it aside and opened the window, letting some of the stale air out. And there, on the floor beneath the sill where it had fallen, lay what Graham had placed into my numb hand.
I got down on my knees to inspect it, a little whimper of delayed grief catching in my throat when recognition hit; it was a little pink ceramic whale that I had made in the second grade. Or what kind of resembled a whale; seven-year-old whales looked a lot different from seventeen-year-old whales.
A depressed smile crossed my face as a ten-year-old memory slammed into my chest. The whale held a shard of ceramic that had once been the tail of Graham’s little green whale, which had exploded in the kiln during firing. He cried so hard that day; I felt so bad that I gave him mine. My seven-year-old mind had rationalized that it was his whale, too, and that he’d appreciate it more than I would. That was the day he told me he loved me for the first time. It was seven-year-old playground love, the kind you have for your favorite stuffed animal, but it signified the true beginning of our friendship, and he needed to get rid of any reminders of that.
I picked up the small whale and threw it against the dresser forcefully, my anger and hurt making me unwilling to believe any of my deceitful memories anymore. The oddly shaped head with its unintended addition broke apart from the raised tail, and both pieces fell to the carpet in a soft thump. Chips of paint and ceramic were scattered around it. It was very symbolic, these two pieces. Once a whole, but neither looking like they had belonged together at any time.
I turned away from the mess and grabbed a pair of jeans from the laundry basket by my dresser. Dad must have done laundry while I was in my cocoon of self-pity—I probably get my weirdness from him. For a guy, he loved washing and folding clothes. It was something that he and Mom had done together after I had gone to bed; it was a nightly ritual for them, he had told me once, and doing it felt good, reminded him of her.
It reminded me of her, too…what little I could remember, anyway. Little bits here and there of a woman that I remembered had been beautiful, with a glow of happiness that I, in all my childish wisdom, had sworn up and down tasted and smelled just like sunshine. I suppose all little girls think that of their moms.
As I reminisced, I brought out a shirt from the top right-hand dresser drawer; I grabbed a pair of underwear and a dilapidated bra from the opposite drawer and then proceeded to get dressed. My shirt, I noticed, bore one of those ridiculous smiley faces with its tongue sticking out. How fitting. How ironic. How pathetic.
“Grace, are you ready for breakfast?” a voice called from downstairs. I guess Dad had heard me take a shower. People back from the dead needed breakfast. At least, my stomach thought so, if its grumbling was any indication.
I grabbed my brush, resigned with the fact that I’d fallen into a new routine that ran parallel to my old one—just emptier—and headed down the steps to the small kitchen below, where the smell of buttered toast and coffee made my stomach rumble once more like a starved animal contained within another starved animal.
“I’m ready. What’s to eat?” I asked in as cheerful a tone as I could muster. Dad turned around, shocked at my appearance. Had I really looked that hideous before that a simple shower could cause such a reaction?
“Um…I’m making egg-in-a-hole and some bacon. You want some?” he asked me, showing me the pan with the egg that had been cracked into a hole cut out of a slice of bread, then pointed at the pile of bacon sitting on the table. “I can make you something else if you want. I think there are some toaster waffles in the freezer.”
I shook my head. “What you’re making sounds just fine, Dad.” And it did. It smelled wonderful. Not eating for a few days would probably have made my boots seem edible—add some new potatoes on the side and you’d have a gourmet meal—but this, this was bacon fat heaven at the moment. I sat down at the small table that filled up half of the kitchen and glanced over at the clock. It was just a little past seven. I had an hour to eat and get going. We didn’t live that far from the school, but I had to watch the time. Today would be the first time in over a year that I’d be walking to school.
“So, um, G-Grace,” Dad’s nervous speech began as slid a plate in front of me, “I wanted to know how you’re feeling…um…about…you know, school and everything.”
“I’m fine, Dad,” I said, only half lying. I grabbed my fork and started to lean in towards my breakfast, fully intending to concentrate on eating and not talking.
He watched me as I went through the motions—I was so unlike my mom that he could read me like a book. “No, you’re not. You don’t have to lie to me, hon. I’m your dad. You can tell me if you’re not feeling up to this yet. It’s just the first day, nothing really important going on, right?”
I shook my head even though inside I was thinking that my entire senior year wasn’t really that important. “I’m fine, Dad. Really—I can do this. It’s just school. H-he’s not going to be there anyway, so it’ll be all right.”
He regarded this with shock marking his face. “What do you mean he’s not going to be there?”
Hadn’t Richard told him? Why wouldn’t he have bragged about his son getting into one of the most prestigious schools in the state, with an even more prestigious football program? “Um, Graham was accepted into NC Prep, Dad.”
A moment of silence passed, and then Dad threw down the spatula, splattering the table with grease and bits of egg. “I cannot believe that sonnuva…I cannot believe he lied to you like that.” His voice was drowning in anger, choking on it. I felt the same strangling sensation in my throat.
“What do you mean, he lied to me, Dad?”
Graham wouldn’t have lied to me about not being at school with me, would he? My mind raced around the fact that our entire summer—perhaps our entire friendship—had been a lie; the facts were staring me in the face, and yet I just couldn’t accept it.
“Grace, Graham isn’t going to NC Prep. No one is. The school is no more—defunct. It’s been closed down for three weeks now. Janice told me over month ago that it had lost a lot of money on some big investments and couldn’t afford to operate anymore.”
Janice was Dad’s girlfriend of the moment. Aside from being the one to last the longest among all of Dad’s girlfriends, she was also the school nurse at NC Prep; how had I forgotten that?
“So Janice is now out of a job?” I asked, trying to buy some time to process this bit of information. If the school was closed, that meant that Graham would be attending Heath High School…with Erica…and…me. The forkful of eggs and toast in my mouth suddenly felt like lead; it weighed down my tongue, and the metallic taste of something I didn’t recognize filled my senses as they clobbered each other to occupy space in my already confused mind.
I was so consumed by this new piece of information that I barely heard Dad as he answered me. “Technically, she’s been out of a job for a while now. She’s having difficulties finding other work, both in Heath and Newark, and she’s getting desperate. Her unemployment is set to run out soon.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, pressing down in what should have been a reassuring gesture, but instead felt more like he was holding me down for what he had left to say. He looked into my eyes once more, hesitant, as though he knew that what would come next would cause a negative reaction. “Grace, I asked Janice if she’d like to stay here with us until she can get back on her feet. I wanted to tell you a week ago, but you were still in such a state, I couldn’t bring it up.”
Stupid Graham. Stupid North Cumberland. Stupid me. Look at me—reduced to juvenile insults. Why did I have to open my mouth? All it ever did was disappoint me in some way.
“You invited her to live with us? Without talking to me?” I was incredulous. I was angry. I was…hurt.
He looked down at the table and stared at his plate, now full of cold, greasy eggs surrounded by stale toast. “Janice needs a place to stay, Grace. She’s been out of work for too long, and she can’t afford her mortgage on top of all of her other bills. You’re almost an adult, getting ready to head off to college, to a whole new life without your old man. I didn’t think that it would be a big deal if she stayed here.”
Janice. Janice “Du Jour” Dupre. Janice “The-woman-who wants-to-take-my-mom’s-spot” Dupre was going to be moving in to my mom’s home. Sleep in my mom’s bed. Cook in my mom’s kitchen. The thought disgusted me. The betrayal to my mom turned the already congealed blood within me to ice. Could things get any worse?
Dad took a deep breath, exhaling it slowly while his hands gripped the table, preparing for what came next.
Of course. Things could always get worse.
“Grace. Listen. I care about Janice a great deal. She’s funny and she makes me laugh, and that’s not something I have done a lot of since your mom died—you know that better than anyone. Your mom will always be your mom, nothing can or will ever change that, and I will always love her, but Janice is giving me a new start…at a lot of things.”
Your mom? Suddenly she’s no longer just “Mom”. She’s your mom. And new start? At a lot of things? What things? What could he possibly need a new start at? The warning bells starting going off in my head. The knocking at the door of my consciousness turned into banging: insistent, desperate. A question quickly formed in my mind, a frightening question that I had to voice. I had to hear the words, even though I knew the answer before they ever left my lips.
“Dad—is Janice pregnant?”
His wide-eyed stare, coupled with his silence was, ironically, pregnant with the answer that I dreaded. He slowly nodded his head.
My face burned from embarrassment and anger. “Why, Dad? Oh my God, aren’t you guys old enough to know how to use a condom or birth control pills?!”
Okay. I admit that I went too far, but what was I to do? My forty-seven-year-old father had just knocked up his girlfriend!
I sensed it before I saw it; Dad’s face turned several shades of red before settling on a near ketchup-like color, and it couldn’t have been more of a warning than if he’d actually had it tattooed on his forehead: I was about to get an earful.
“Grace Anne Shelley, don’t you ever speak that way to me again! I won’t be disrespected in my own home; you will do well to remember that, young lady. Yes, Janice is pregnant, and how that happened is none of your damned business! Yes, she is moving in with us in three days, and I expect you to be respectful to her, if not friendly, because this is my house, and when you disrespect someone in my house, you’re disrespecting me.”
I stared at his face, his nostrils flaring so wide that I considered shoving some bacon up there just to get him to stop talking about respect and houses, especially when he was planning on disrespecting Mom’s memory by bringing that woman into her home. I really didn’t like to pay much attention to him when he was angry. It saved me from having to relive the words he’d said later. The words he was about to say now.
“I love you, Grace Anne. I have loved you from the first moment you entered into this world, probably before you were even born. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done, the best part of me and your mom. You make it easy to love you; you’re a lot like your mom in that regard. But while it’s easy to love you, Grace, it’s very difficult to like you. It’s hard. You make it so difficult with your expectations, your guilt!”
He shook his head, his disappointment clear, and then said quietly—almost too quietly—but not quietly enough, “Perhaps it was best that Graham ended your friendship. You always expected more from him than he could give you, especially after Mom died.”
I felt my fingers dig into my thighs under the table and winced; my once numb body had started feeling again. It was feeling the burn of anger, betrayal, and…pain. But this time I wasn’t going to let it turn me into a ball of gelatinous Grace. Instead, I got up, ignoring the outraged expression that crossed over Dad’s face.
Déjà vu had me walking upstairs to my room. But rather than throwing myself on my bed to cry myself senseless again for another two weeks, I grabbed my book bag, tossed in my wallet and my binder, grabbed my MP3 player, and left.
The clock read twenty past seven.
I was going to be early to the worst day of my life.
ERICA
I stood in a line, invisible while in plain sight like any other day. Over half of the senior class was either in front or in back of me, all of us clamoring for our class schedules like junkies looking for a fix. Everyone else who had already endured the wait stood off to the side, comparing classes together. The typical questions were being passed around: who was in whose class, who would sit next to whom, who was going to be closest to the doors for a ditch day success, and who had free periods.
All I wanted to know was if Dad had been right. Would Graham be here? And if he was, would we be in any classes together? It was a strong possibility and I didn’t know how I’d be able to handle that. Seeing him would be difficult enough. My heart, still nothing more than a cold pile of ashes, did nothing at the thought.
And then there he was, standing next to a beautiful girl with a halo of blonde hair that hung down her back like a gold curtain. They had their heads bent towards each other, comparing schedules and laughing, completely oblivious to the icy turmoil that raged within me just a few yards away. When she looked up at him, he smiled down at her, his hand reaching up to stroke her hair. His fingers trailed to her waist, and she leaned into him, her arm wrapping around his in return. I, in turn, felt nothing but the cold September air around me, still warmer than I was on the inside. But death wasn’t supposed to be warm unless you were heading straight to Hell, right?
Well, I was in Hell. A cold, dead, Graham-holding-onto-a-beautiful-blonde-Erica filled Hell.
A little cough from behind me alerted me to the fact that I was next; great, caught daydreaming again. I hurried forward and quickly whispered my name to the registrar whose name I could never remember, despite seeing her every single year for the past four. The slightly plump woman with the friendly smile was standing outside her office with her folder of senior schedules. Now, Heath isn’t exactly a large school; our student body is quite small in comparison to some of the surrounding high schools, so comparatively, her task was undoubtedly quite easy. But she hadn’t heard me—I had to repeat my name, she told me, and so I did, my voice just a decibel higher, and yet still barely louder than a whisper.
“Oh, honey, I know who you are. You’re Miss Grace Shelley. My, you’ve matured a great deal over the summer, haven’t you, sweetheart?” she cooed robustly. She cooed at everyone. She knew everyone. It was nothing special to be recognized by the school’s registrar—it was her job. But why did she have to be so loud? I could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on me, burning through my bag, my shirt, my hair.
My hair! I forgot to brush it!
Quickly, my hand reached up to what I hoped was a few neatly disorganized strands, knowing full well that the wrath my hair could put down on me probably meant something much worse. What I felt was my own embarrassment doubling, all in the palm of my hand. My hair—or what should have been my hair—felt like I had a blind ostrich’s nest attached to the back of my head, the unruly weave of tangles and knots forming an unrecognizable mass that sat at the base of my neck in a heap.
I would need to get to a bathroom quickly to try and fix this, though I was certain that enough eyes had seen the horror that was my hair and the news would spread throughout the school before I’d even gotten a chance to see the damage for myself. I stared at the registrar, trying to will her to hurry up. She rifled through several sheets of paper and finally pulled out what I hoped was my schedule.
“Here you go, sugar. Have a great first day!” she said in a sing-song voice, a broad and cheerful smile stretching across her pretty round face.
I snatched it out of her hand and stepped backwards, trying to get as far away from the cooing, the syrupy sweet endearments, and the pair of jade-green eyes that I could see staring at me from the corner of my eye as quickly as possible. I backed up…right into a wall that had not been there a minute ago.
I turned around to see what it was that had obstructed my escape and ended up giving one of my best glares to a button. An expensive button, judging by the logo stamped on it. There were many of them, too; I counted them, my gaze going higher, the look in my eyes becoming less mean and more…confused. Five buttons later, I was staring into a pair of gray eyes nestled in a face that I didn’t recognize—not that I could have recognized half of the faces at Heath anyway—but I thought I had made mental images of every senior here, if only to know who to avoid. He was new. He had dark hair. He was tall.
He was…beautiful.
“Um’scusemesorrygottago,” I quickly mumbled with no breath, no pause, and no thought as to what I sounded like. I had spent a lifetime staring into the perfection that was Graham’s face, and not once had I ever been at a loss for coherency. Yet here I was, mush-mouthed, a gigantic bird’s nest in my hair, and an eager and willing audience that included Graham just six feet away. And so I did what any reasonable person would do in such a situation.
I bolted.
I felt like such a coward, but self-preservation screamed at me, urging me to go, pulling me away as quickly as my feet could carry me. I found an empty girls’ restroom as far away from the office as possible, threw myself into a stall, and felt my breathing stumble and falter as I sat down on the seat, locking the door as my backpack tumbled to the ground by my feet.
My chest rose and fell like a teeter-totter; I couldn’t seem to find a pace that mimicked normal breathing. It seemed that the more I focused on doing it as naturally as possible, the more odd it felt, out of place.
How many breaths per minute were enough to keep you alive? How many would be enough to get you to start hyperventilating? Where among those numbers was I? Not wanting to lose this inner battle, I concentrated on trying to keep the burning in my eyes from unleashing its fire in the form of tears instead. That seemed to be easier.
I hadn’t cried in school since the seventh grade, when Patricia Daniels had lifted my shirt in front of the entire junior high student body…and I wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
Oh God, why did I remind myself of that? The heat that rimmed my eyes was growing ever stronger. I needed to think about something else before I turned into a bawling, babbling mess in the girls’ bathroom.
I looked down at my hand and saw my class schedule, still clutched in my grip, now wrinkled and crushed by hands that had balled up into frustrated little fists. I hadn’t had enough time to put it away before I bumped into him. Its sterile and benign print beckoned. I might as well look it over while I sat here in self-inflicted purgatory.
I had homeroom with Mr. Frey, French with Madame Hidani and Calculus with Mrs. Hoppbaker. I was pleased so far. Mr. Frey was always asleep during homeroom, so I could be late if I wanted and walking to school would most likely make me late. Madam Hidani was a transplant from Hawai’i who somehow mastered in French Literature and ended up teaching in our small Ohio town. Her fluent and flowing French, coming out of that exotic face always made me smile. Just to throw us off a little more, she had even done the hula while singing in French! Then there was Mrs. Hoppbaker, who was probably the largest woman in all of Heath, and never failed to point out that fact to us every year. I felt a bubble of laughter form in my chest when I thought of how she had introduced herself to us at the beginning of last year.
“Good afternoon, students. My name is Mrs. Hoppbaker, and I’m so big, I’ve got two parking spaces reserved for me: one for my car, and one so I can get in and out of it.”
She always did her best to make math fun and had it not been for her, I probably would have never been accepted into the Calculus program she taught in the morning. It was going to be tough, but she would make it a much more pleasant experience than—I scanned down the list…
Ugh. Fourth period science: Biology II. Not that I hated dissection or bodily examinations. I’m the furthest thing from squeamish. Rather, it was the teacher, Mr. Branke, that made me ill. He liked to touch all of the female students. And I mean all of them, including me. It wasn’t the kind of touching that’d get you arrested, just the kind that made you feel uncomfortable. His unwanted attentions had earned him the nickname “The Octopus” because of how it seemed as though he had eight arms, and each one of them somehow managed to touch you all at the same time.
I had hoped for the only other Biology teacher at Heath, Mr. Yost, but he required you to take a placement exam before allowing you in, and I’m not one of those naturally gifted brainiacs. I’m not an idiot, but I’m not MENSA material either; seeing Mr. Branke’s name on the schedule confirmed what I already knew: I wasn’t cut out for advanced biological sciences.
Fifth period was English Literature, which was a sleeper class with Mrs. Muniz. I had read all of the books on last year’s fourth year syllabus, so I knew there would be nothing new learned there. Sixth period was a surprise, however. Theater? I didn’t even know we had a Drama program! But there it was in black and white, with a Mr. Calvin Danielson listed as the teacher.
I knew I hadn’t chosen an elective at the end of last year, hoping that on the off chance that there was nothing else, I could have a free period, but Theater? Seriously? What did I know about the arts other than the plays I had read? I could understand their emotions, sure, but to physically act them out? If I couldn’t lie with a straight face to my dad, how would I manage lying to an entire audience? Maybe I could be a stagehand, a techie—I’d be the person pulling the curtain or handing out props. As long as we didn’t have to get up on stage, I’d be fine.
The sound of the bathroom door opening and the clunking of heavy soles on ceramic tile yanked me from my thoughts. Giggling and talking accompanied the interruption. I recognized one of the voices immediately, even though I had never spoken to her in my life.
Erica Hamilton’s voice filled the bathroom with its presence and did nothing to detract from the air she gave of money, power, and popularity. We were a lot alike in some ways, I suppose. Most people avoided her like the plague, too. Well, most sane people anyway. The difference between the two of us was that while people avoided me because I was odd, they avoided her because of how mean she could be if you dared to cross her. It was the main reason she was as popular as she was. No one felt brave enough to stand up to her; beauty and money were intimidating things.