Chapter 13 Bird #2
She looks down at the table, traces the wood grain with her finger, and says, “So, like, hypothetically, say we’re sitting outside for lunch between the quad and E building. That’s a liminal space?”
“Yes,” I tell her, but I keep talking because she’s making me nervous, or maybe it’s the strangeness of this place.
“The word ‘liminal’—it means threshold—well, in Latin, limen means threshold. That’s where the word comes from.
I’m a bit of a word nerd, if you couldn’t tell.
” I clear my throat because the way she’s looking at me makes my words catch.
“But liminal isn’t just a physical threshold.
It can be metaphorical, emotional…” I force myself to just. Stop. Talking.
“Hmm. I feel like my whole life is one big liminal space, then. Just sitting here waiting for my real life to start.”
I laugh, unexpectedly, then cover my mouth.
“What, did I use your fancy word the wrong way?”
“No, y-you used it perfectly. Sorry. I—I guess I laughed because I get that. You know, being on the precipice of something… unknown.”
She doesn’t break eye contact with me, doesn’t say anything, but I can see her thinking while she’s watching me watch her. God, the smile that’s threatening the corner of her mouth right now is another liminal space. Somehow, I don’t think I should use that as an example.
She nods a few times and almost smiles again. “Precipice,” she repeats quietly. “And this is how you talk when you’re sober?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, nothing. You’re just a little…” She trails off.
“A little what?” I ask.
“I dunno. Different.”
“You know, I can never tell if you’re insulting me or—”
“I’m not,” she interrupts, her face for once very serious. “I’m not insulting you.”
I clear my throat once again. Take out my notebook and open to a clean page, bypassing the photo still stationed inside the front cover. “So,” I begin, pencil in hand. “We clearly need some new ideas. Better ideas.”
“Right. You got any?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking… roller-skating? I mean, Kayla’s really bad at it and she hates not being good at stuff. That right there could be an advantage.” I write it down.
“Meh. Dade’s pretty good on wheels, though.”
And I flip my pencil upside down to erase the words, when I feel Jessa’s hand close over mine for just a moment before she pulls back.
“Hold on. Hold on just a second,” she says. “Okay, Skateopia, by the mall? There’s this girl. At least, last year there was this girl who worked there. Umm, I can’t think of her name—Daria Dana, Dani, I dunno—but she was smokin’ hot, and Dade had the most enormous hard-on for her.”
“Ew,” I interject.
“Okay, most enormous crush on her,” she amends, rolling her eyes at my distaste. “Ever. They were constantly flirting with each other. It’s literally why he got into skating so much. So annoying, but maybe that’s the advantage we’ve been looking for? Get them thinking about other people?”
“That could really work, Jessa.”
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, I suck ass at skating, but… I’d be willing to take one for the team.” She pauses and looks off into the space above my head, smiling. “And hey, it would be great if Kayla biffed it hard and embarrassed herself right in front of Dade and the hot girl.”
And there it is. Just when I think I’m changing my mind about her, she says something like that. “That wouldn’t be great. She could get hurt. We’re not trying to maim anyone here, Jessa.”
“No, I didn’t—”
“That’s not funny,” I tell her, and I surprise myself at how commanding I sound.
“I… no, I know. I’m sorry. I just—”
“Well, don’t say stuff like that, then,” I interrupt. “It’s mean. This whole thing is already mean, and I don’t love the idea of my best friend getting hurt emotionally. I really don’t want her to get hurt physically.”
“I don’t either!” she says, raising her voice to match mine.
“Okay!” I shout back.
“Okay,” she mumbles, closing her eyes tight. “Can we please not yell at each other? I fucking cannot stand yelling. I hear enough of it at home.”
My heart. On the seesaw again. Tipping back in the other direction. “All right,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”
She opens her eyes, but just stares at her hands now, and I wish I was one of those people who’s good at small talk.
I wish I could think of anything to say.
But I can’t. In my bag, I have my old pack of Djarums from the summer, with only two cloves left.
I pull out the pack and place one between my lips.
The lighter Kat gave me is trying to die, but I flick it anyway, over and over and over.
Until Jessa’s hands are in front of my face, lit Zippo in one while the other is shielding the flame from the soft breeze floating around us.
“Thanks,” I tell her, and exhale the smoke. “I have one more if you want?”
She shakes her head, finally making eye contact again, squinting at me slightly, the way I’ve come to recognize, when she’s thinking about saying something.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s weird that you smoke those.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “You seemed so offended when you saw me smoking with Nat that night at Six Roots.”
“No, not offended.” I was offended. But not by her smoking or because she was with Nat.
I was offended by her laughing at me pouring my heart out, offended that she ruined my favorite shirt and didn’t seem to care—I wish I could let it go.
“Just… I don’t know. Guess I’m not really a fan of that kind of thing,” I tell her, instead of just coming out and asking her why she laughed at me like that.
“Yet you smoke cloves,” she says.
“Well, it’s new. I just tried it over the summer with my—at that writing workshop. College campus rite of passage, I guess. Reminds me of being there again. I like the smell, I suppose. Mostly, it just reminds me of someone.” Kat. And Silas. But mostly Kat.
“Boyfriend?” she asks.
“No.” Because I didn’t really think of Silas as a boyfriend, and Kat… she was something else entirely. Jessa opens her mouth, I think, to ask more questions, but I cut her off. “I’ll probably quit after this pack.”
Taking the cue, thankfully, she places her elbows on the table and tucks her fading blue hair behind her ears. “So,” she begins, letting a puff of air escape her mouth. “Does Kayla have a superhot ex we can get her interested in again?”
I barely inhale, just enough for the clove scent to encircle us. “No, but she did have a pretty serious crush on Emmanuel Tyson all through middle school.”
She lets her arm fall against the table, and her row of woven leather bracelets full of charms and metal grommets clang against the wood. “Middle school, really?” she says, tilting her head.
“Yes, but then he finally asked for her number during freshman year.”
She scoots a little closer across the table. “Yeah, and…?”
“Well, he never called her.”
“Oh.” She sits back again. “Okay, how does that help us, exactly?”
“She never forgot about him. Or stopped wondering why he never called. I mean, I think she’s still hung up on him. I feel like every guy she liked after him was just a distraction. Maybe even Dade, I don’t know?”
“I see Emmanuel around sometimes,” she offers. “Maybe we could try to get them in the same place, see if she takes the bait?”
I nod. But really, I wish Kayla would just listen to her friends and we didn’t have to try to replace one guy with another to get her to see that Dade is not good for her.
A creaking door at the back of the house screeches open, a man’s voice shouting to someone inside. He props the door open with a dirty old bucket and lights a cigarette before he looks up to see us sitting there.
“Hey!” he yells. My heart starts beating faster, because I had let myself forget that I didn’t quite buy Jessa’s story that it was okay to be here. My brain starts racing through possible excuses when Jessa calls back, “Hey, man.”
“What up?” he says, walking toward us. “You staying for the show tonight?”
Jessa looks over at me and hitches one shoulder, her face open, asking, “You game?”
I’m shaking my head, but part of me feels like I do want to stay. Everyone else is going to homecoming tonight. I don’t want to be home alone, doing nothing. But more than that, I’m rapidly realizing, I want to be with Jessa tonight. “No, no, I—I—I sh-should get home. My mom needs my help later.”
“You sure?” she asks.
No, my heart screams. “Yeah,” my voice tells her. “I should get home.”
“ ’Kay,” she says, standing up and walking over to the guy, extending her fist, pounding it on top of his. As I watch her, so comfortable with this older guy who really should be intimidating, she seems so tough. Somehow more mature or worldly than I thought. “Nah, we’re gonna peace out.”
She turns to look at me, looking at her, and I’m frozen in place.
“Ready?” she asks.
On the ride home I feel like I have a thousand questions forming thought bubbles in my head, but each time I reach for one it bursts and I don’t know what to say to her.
She turns the music on low, and I silently thank her for not trying to make me talk. It takes me a second to realize why I’m humming along. “Wait, this is Janis Ian?”
“Yeah, I felt she should be added to the mix.”
“Cool.”
She smiles, looking straight ahead. The next song is Counting Crows.
The next is a Smashing Pumpkins song I don’t know but I like.
When we pull into my driveway, she stops the music, rummages through the center console, and pulls out a clear case.
I recognize her handwriting on the cover—and it instantly strikes me as oddly personal that I know her handwriting.
She pops the lid of her Discman and carefully places the CD inside the case, closes it, and hands it to me.
The writing on the cover is song titles and artists. When I open the case, in her all-caps permanent marker script, it reads: BIRD’S MIX.
“You made me a mixtape?”
She shrugs. “Yeah. Well, mix-CD.”
“No one’s ever made me any kind of mix before.”
“It has some stuff you mentioned you liked, and then some other stuff I thought you might like.”
“Wow,” is all I can manage to get out.
“It’s not a big deal,” she adds, running her hand through her hair.
“Oh. Okay.”
But then we sit, side by side, looking at each other, neither of us seeming to know how to say goodbye. If it’s not a big deal, then why does this feel like that part in the movie, at the end of the date, when we’re supposed to kiss?
A car horn blares, making both of us jump.
She looks up into the rearview mirror, then twists around abruptly.
Behind us, Liv’s boyfriend Garrett has pulled into the driveway.
Then I hear the front door close, drawing our attention away from each other.
There’s Olivia, in her perfect princess dress, last year’s homecoming tiara secured tightly in place among her expertly styled pile of up-done hair.
She’s shouting, “Garrett! Get in here, my dad wants pictures!”
“Oh god,” I mutter, as Garrett walks past Jessa’s open window in his suit with matching corsage in hand and leans down to give us a strange look like he can’t imagine why I’d be here, in my own driveway.
When I look at Jessa, she’s watching Liv and Garrett go back inside the house. “What the hell?” she breathes. “What. The. Hell. Is Olivia Fucking Rubens doing at your house?”
“You really didn’t know? She’s my sister. Well, stepsister.”
“Holy shit,” she mumbles, wringing her hands around the steering wheel. “You could’ve warned me.” I start to laugh because I think she’s joking, until she looks up at me. Her face is drained of color. “And Garrett… that living jockstrap is blocking me in. This is just great.”
“Sorry,” I offer, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. “They’ll be gone in a minute.”
She breathes in deeply and then exhales slowly, keeping her eyes on my front door. Until they emerge again and start walking down the front steps toward us. Then Jessa turns toward me, physically shifts in her seat, to look at me instead.
“Are you okay?” I ask her. But she doesn’t speak, and I know Liv must’ve done something really bad to her if she won’t even look at her.
I’m glad Jessa can’t see as Liv gives her beat-up car the once-over and glares and then pretends to stick her finger down her throat, mouthing, Gross! in her direction.
When Garrett’s car doors close, Jessa finally looks away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “She’s horrible. I know.”
Jessa shakes her head and somehow commands that tough exterior once again, but I saw the crack there, just a minute ago. “Whatever,” she mumbles. “I gotta go, Bird.”
“O-okay, um… Are you okay, though?”
“I’m fine.”
I unbuckle my seat belt. “Well, thanks again for the mix.”
“Sure. It’s nothing.” She’s looking all around now, anywhere but at me this time.
I wave as she pulls away, but she never looks back.