Chapter 11 Possibility #2
Hannah shakes her head and looks to Joanie.
“Sick,” Joanie answers. “Like, totally incapacitated. She was heaving her freaking guts out. I thought we might have to take her to the hospital.”
Wally looks sideways at Hannah. “And she let you take care of her?”
“I think she was too out of it to argue.”
“That’s not true,” Joanie says. “It’s more like, she was so out of it that she reverted back to her true self.”
“I don’t get her,” Wally says. “I mean, I’ve never understood her the way you do, Han, but now I understand her even less.”
“You and I are in agreement on that, Walton,” Joanie says.
“Did Clay tell you anything more about what happened on Saturday?” Hannah asks.
“Nothing that you haven’t told me.”
“She looks so skinny,” Joanie says, chewing her lip. “And like she needs a really long nap.”
Hannah watches Baker again, and the ache in her heart bleeds anew.
Hannah charges her way through her final exams, feeling grateful for the distraction of studying.
She and Wally continue to meet at Garden District Coffee, where they trade notes and split up their study guides, and now Joanie comes, too, and buys them all sugar cookies when they need a break.
“You look like you’re drawing loop-de-loops,” Joanie says, scowling at their Calculus notes.
“Why the hell would you take AP Calc, anyway?”
“Because now I won’t have to take it in college,” Hannah answers distractedly. “I’ll just take all the English and humanities classes I want.”
“And I can nerd out with even crazier math classes,” Wally says.
“You’re such a dork, Wall,” Joanie says, poking the back of his head. “And I love you for that. But don’t expect me to root for the Yellow Jackets.”
“I would never lay that ridiculous expectation on you, Joanie.” His eyes twinkle. “But I might expect you to visit.”
“Are you kidding? Fucking duh. I’ll be there anyway to see Han. We can all hang out together.”
“Yeah,” Wally agrees, nudging Hannah’s leg under the table. “It’ll be perfect.”
On Tuesday, after her Theology final, Hannah comes upon Luke alone at his locker. “Hey,” she says, approaching him tentatively. “How’d you do?”
Luke spins around in a daze. “Oh, hey,” he says, as if she’s merely an old neighbor he hasn’t seen in a while. “I did okay. How about you? Did you blow it out of the water?”
“I think I did all right. There’s a lot to remember.”
“Yeah. I forgot a lot of that stuff about Vatican II, so I pretended like I thought it was the sequel to a really bad sci-fi movie.”
Hannah grins for the first time in a long while. “Did you really?”
“No,” he laughs, and she sees that old familiar hitch in his smile, and for a second she forgets that anything ever came between them all.
But then Luke’s grin shrinks in on itself, like he has just remembered the reality of things. “Anyway, I’m late for track,” he says, swinging his book sack over his shoulder. “See you later, Han.”
He walks away before she can think of anything else to say to him.
“I didn’t think the end of high school would be like this,” she tells Joanie when they’re washing dishes on Tuesday night.
“Like what?”
“Like—so messed up. So fragmented. I mean, just a few weeks ago I had the best group of friends in the world, and we were all getting drunk together and planning future trips to Destin. Now we’re about to graduate and the group is totally split up.
It just sucks. I always imagined the end of high school would be bittersweet, not just bitter. ”
Joanie is silent as she towel dries a saucepan. “Yeah.”
Hannah hears the sadness in Joanie’s tone and chides herself for being insensitive, for forgetting that Joanie has been affected just as much as she has. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Hannah pauses, wondering how much to say. “I, um. I talked to him today.”
Joanie sets the saucepan down. “You did?”
“At the lockers.”
“How was he?”
Hannah tells her about the joke Luke made, and Joanie takes on a soft, yearning expression. “I miss him so much.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay. When it all comes down to it, it’s my fault.”
“Do you still want to be with him?”
Joanie doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Every second of every day.”
Hannah knows exactly what she means.
Hannah and Wally sit for the national AP Calculus exam on Wednesday morning. It’s a grueling exam—long and full of complicated problem sets—and by the end of it, Hannah’s wrist aches from writing, and the eraser on her mechanical pencil has been worn down to a nub.
“I am so done with math,” she tells Wally afterward, when they’re walking back to their classes. “Like, don’t even show me another number for the rest of my life.”
Wally holds up three fingers. “What number is this?”
“Stop,” she laughs, hitting him in the ribs, and he recoils and pretends like she hurt him. And then, right there in the hallway, with the rest of the student body still in their regular classes, Wally kisses her.
“Oh,” Hannah says in surprise.
“We haven’t done this in way too long,” Wally says against her mouth.
They hear a catcall, and both of them whip around to see a handful of their AP Calculus classmates crossing another hallway. “Get it, Sumner!” David calls, and Wally turns red and raises his middle finger.
“One,” Hannah says.
“What?”
She laughs. In the middle of this hallway, where her classmates just spotted her kissing this boy, she feels wholly normal and beautifully conventional. “One,” she repeats, her voice giddy now. “You just held up one finger.”
Wally’s face breaks into a huge smile. He kisses her again, and Hannah lets him, and she feels so, so safe.
When she gets home from school, she pours herself a bowl of Apple Jacks and eats the green and orange pieces one by one, trying to keep an even ratio between the colors.
She studies a page from her AP Literature notes (Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale”) and deliberately avoids looking at the right-hand corner, where Baker once scribbled a cartoon of a bald, dumpy little friar with a speech bubble that read Where’s my hair?
“Han,” Joanie says, dashing into the kitchen, “have you seen the news today?”
“No,” Hannah says, only half listening.
“The president came out in favor of same-sex marriage.”
Hannah looks up. “What?”
Joanie’s eyes are wide as saucers. “I just saw it on my news feed,” she says, handing her phone over. “Look—”
Hannah reads the transcript with her heart in her throat. Joanie hovers over her shoulder, following along.
“Wow,” Hannah says when she’s through.
“This is great,” Joanie says earnestly. “Hannah, this is really, really good. He’s the first president in US history to support same-sex marriage!”
Hannah slams her notebook shut. “Yeah,” she says absently, her mind racing and her heart still hammering. She carries her cereal bowl to the sink, turns the faucet on, waits for the water to turn hot.
“Aren’t you excited?” Joanie asks.
Hannah’s throat is clogged. She can’t get her body temperature right. She feels like she’s on the verge of screaming, but she doesn’t know why.
“Han…?”
“Can we not talk about this right now?” she snaps.
Joanie falters. “What’s wrong? Don’t you want to get married one day?”
“Who says I can’t, Joanie? Just because I’m—I mean, just because I told you about all this confusing stuff with Baker, doesn’t mean I’m—like, I might not even be—”
“What?”
“You know ‘what.’”
“I’m not gonna say it for you.”
Hannah jams her cereal bowl into the dishwasher. “Maybe I still want to marry a guy, okay? Maybe I don’t have to be this way.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wally’s been really great to me. He’s a good person and he understands me. And we’re both going to be in Atlanta for the next four years. Don’t you think that’s significant? Don’t you think maybe it’s a sign?”
Joanie scrunches up her face. “A sign of what?”
“That maybe that’s the right path for me! I mean, just because I feel a certain way, doesn’t mean I have to indulge it—doesn’t mean I can’t decide to marry a guy—”
“Hold up. Are you saying you like Wally now? Like, really like him?”
“You ask that like it can be a straight answer.”
“It is a straight answer.”
“I could grow to like him! I really think I could. I love him in a way. I really do. He’s smart and sweet and totally devoted to his family—”
“Does he make you happy?”
The question stops her short. “What?”
Joanie gives her a long, hard look. “Does—he—make—you—happy?”
Hannah hangs on the answer. “Of course he does.”
Joanie narrows her eyes. She picks up her phone, scrolls until she finds something, and thrusts it in front of Hannah’s face. “Does he make you happier than this person?”
Hannah stares at the image on the screen. She and Baker stand in front of Baker’s birthday cake, arms around each other’s shoulders, both of them grinning with pure joy.
“Well?” Joanie prompts.
“What do you want me to say? This”—she jabs the screen—“is not a possibility.”
“It could be.”
“In what world, Joanie?”
“In this world! Are you not listening to me? Things are starting to change!”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
Joanie flings her phone onto the counter. She steps nearer to Hannah, arms crossed and eyes blazing. “You need to talk to her.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You’re both struggling and you need each other to—”
“I can’t!” Hannah shouts madly. “Joanie, do you not get it? Everything is different between us! We’re not the same people we used to be! I don’t know what we are to each other anymore. I don’t even know if it’s okay for us to be what we are—”
“Stop it!” Joanie yells, pushing Hannah back against the sink. “Stop! Stop saying that!”
“It’s true!”
“It’s not true!”
“THEN LOOK ME IN THE EYE,” Hannah roars, “AND TELL ME, WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, THAT HOW I FEEL ISN’T WRONG, THAT IT’S NOT BAD, THAT IT’S NOT DISGUSTING AND PERVERTED AND FUCKED UP—”
“IT’S NOT!” Joanie screams, shoving her with all her might.
Hannah falls back against the sink; at once, she feels a bruise blooming on her back. Hot tears spring into her eyes. She looks up at Joanie and steels herself.
“You’re lying,” she growls, the words costing her everything. “I don’t believe you.”
Joanie glares at her, eyes burning, chest heaving. The St. Mary’s logo on her Oxford blouse pulses up and down. She looks like she wants to push Hannah again, or maybe like she wants to hug her and never let go.
“Start believing,” she rasps.
The words ring in the air around them. Fresh tears flood Hannah’s eyes, and she lets them fall without wiping them away. Joanie, unfazed, continues to stare her down. Neither one of them speaks.
Then Hannah staggers up from the sink, her back aching. “I need ice.”
Joanie rolls her eyes, but it’s all for show. She fills a Ziploc bag with ice cubes, wraps a dishcloth around it like their mom does, and hands it over. Hannah hitches up her shirt and presses the cold, soothing compress to her skin.
“Don’t ever talk about yourself like that again,” Joanie says abruptly. “It’s wrong.”
Hannah looks at her. “It’s what we’ve been taught.”
“Well then, what we’ve been taught is wrong.”
“Easy for you to say when you’re not the one dealing with it,” Hannah says shortly.
“Put yourself in my shoes. I believed everything they ever told me. Now it feels like the whole world has rolled over in the air and I can’t tell which way is up.
I don’t know the truth anymore. I don’t even know if I’m a good person. ”
“Jesus, Han, nobody knows that! What I do know is that you’ve always been a strong, stubborn, self-assured pain in the ass, so if you’re feeling like this, then how do you think Baker feels? You’re both hurting, but I worry she’s not as strong as you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” Joanie says, her voice rising.
“I’m worried she’s going to hurt herself even worse than she already has.
She’s barely eating, she’s binge drinking to the point of getting sick, she’s isolating herself from our friends—Hannah, you have got to talk to her, or at least get her to talk to an adult. ”
There is a space opening in Hannah’s chest, a space that says her sister is right, but Hannah can’t deal with that yet. “When did you get so bossy?” she says instead. “I’m supposed to be the older one.”
She’s aiming for a light, breezy tone to wrap up the conversation, but Joanie’s response remains serious.
“I’ve watched you since before I can remember,” she says, so matter-of-fact that she might as well be explaining gravity. “That’s how I learned to push for the right thing.”
Late that night, Hannah lies on her stomach on her unmade bed, still wearing her rumpled uniform clothes, a fresh bag of ice cubes balanced on her back.
She watches the news clip of President Obama so many times that she loses count.
His words flow through her like a balmy ocean breeze, and her heart skips with wonder as she thinks, Maybe …
But she pulls herself back when she’s right at the edge of that possibility. It’s still too unfathomable. Or perhaps it’s just too miraculous to imagine.
But the possibility stays with her as she finally tucks in to sleep, and she wonders who the president was thinking about when he spoke those words. Was he imagining a scared teenaged girl in Louisiana? Was he imagining her?