Chapter 50
— Chapter 50 —
Shray sleeps over the night before the first day of school so he and Aubrey can get ready together. Aubrey comes downstairs wearing a black linen dress that she got at the junk store and then splattered with paint like it was one of her drop cloths. Shray braided her hair in two fat fishtails, and she did her makeup like a pinup girl from the fifties. Shray is wearing stonewashed jeans, a Def Leppard t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and sky-blue eyeshadow.
Aubrey rolls her eyes at me for waking up so early and making them pancakes.
“You’re nocturnal,” she says. “You shouldn’t mess up your body clock for me.”
“You’re a kid,” I tell her. “You’re supposed to be the center of your universe.” Every time I realize how a teenager should feel—how I want Aubrey to feel—I see the gap between what my life was and what it should have been. Taking care of her is an exquisitely beautiful, painful way to make sense of myself.
Aubrey snorts.
“Really,” I say. “You’re supposed to be like, ‘It’s my first day of school and I want pancakes, damnit!’?”
“Aunt Frey,” Shray says, grinning, with a forkful of pancake in his mouth. “I love your heart, but these are terrible, so maybe Aubrey should demand Cheerios.”
“Shray,” I say. “I love your heart, but…” I pick up one of the pancakes from the stack of extras and throw it at him. It hits him on the forehead and falls in his lap.
He holds it up, laughing so hard his eyes tear. “It didn’t even break when it hit me.” He chucks it at my face, and it still doesn’t break.
I watch Aubrey as she laughs, covering her mouth with her hands. She looks like a normal, happy kid.
Over the summer I found my old Instamatic camera in a box in the basement with a case of unused flash cubes and five rolls of film. I make Shray and Aubrey pose for first day of school pictures on the front step before they leave. Aubrey pretends to be embarrassed, but I think she’s pleased. Shray insists on one where they hold the unbreakable pancake between them, and I hope the film’s still good because it’s adorable.
I sit on the front step and watch them drive away. I’ve gone from constantly shouldering the fear that I won’t be able to get Aubrey through high school to wishing I could slow down every sweet moment. The whole summer passed in a quick flash of joy. I’m not ready for it to be over.
I have the day off, so I drive to the Somers Library to see if they have any books that will help me figure out how to fix the stone steps. I find one called The Complete Guide to Home Masonry , one on automotive repair, and two books on woodworking. Then I walk around and play the library game I made up as a kid: I think of a color, walk down an aisle, and grab the first book I see with that color on the binding. I read the whole first chapter, and if I like it, I check the book out. I end up adding She’s Come Undone (blue) and White Oleander (black) to my pile but leave The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (gray), because I don’t think it will be good for my nerves.
I’m walking over to the front desk to check out when my phone rings—on full volume. A mom looking at picture books with her toddler glares at me.
I flip the phone open to get it to stop ringing and whisper, “Hold on,” abandoning my books on top of a display shelf as I run outside.
“Aunt Frey?”
“Are you okay?”
“Can you come here?”
The high school is massive now, like someone built a new layer of building over the old one. It appears to be a different place entirely, and I’m grateful the sight of it isn’t adding grade-school anxiety to the rest of my fear.
Bee escorts Aubrey to the parking lot so she doesn’t have to sign out and I don’t have to sign in. Even though we’re meeting in the open, it feels like we’re doing something shady, and I can’t help but think that if our lives together blow up, I’ll probably only ever get to see Aubrey like this. If I’m lucky.
She’s wearing a black cardigan and a pair of gray sweatpants with Somers Tuskers printed down one leg, a smiling elephant over the hip. As they wait for me to walk over, Aubrey turns to say something to Bee, and I see that between her braids the back of her neck is smeared with red.
“Oh god!” I shout, running over. “Are you okay?”
“She’s fine,” Bee calls.
“What happened?” As I get closer, I can tell it’s paint.
“She won’t tell me,” Bee says, throwing Aubrey a pointed look.
“If I tell you, you’ll have to do something, ’cause it’s your job. But that’ll make everything worse,” Aubrey says.
“Do you believe this kid?” Bee shakes her head. “Twelve steps ahead, trying to protect me at the same time. What I know is someone chucked red paint at her back in the hallway. My guess is either Carter or Kelly. I’d put my money on Kelly.”
I can tell Aubrey is expending a lot of effort to stay expressionless.
“What do we do?” I ask Bee.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really, really don’t.” She looks to Aubrey. “I get why you want to let this go. But I don’t know if it’ll stop. Kelly had a whole summer to cool off, and clearly, she didn’t.”
Aubrey shakes her head. “I didn’t say it was Kelly. Anyway, it’s fine. That dress was like a dollar.”
“It’s not fine,” I say. I want to march into that school and pull that shitty kid out to this parking lot by her collar and make her apologize to my niece.
“I’m okay,” Aubrey says.
Bee offers to see if she can cook the books on Aubrey’s attendance for the rest of the day so I can take her home. Aubrey swears she can handle class, but then Bee says, “Are you sure? You don’t have to be tough all the time, kid.”
Aubrey’s eyes well up with tears. She reaches over and grabs my hand, like she used to when I’d pick her up at preschool. She does it automatically. There’s no thought. She needs to be taken care of and I am here to take care of her.
“Thanks, Bee,” I say, and walk Aubrey to my car.
“I’ll call you later,” Bee shouts. She waits until we get in the car, waving to us, before she walks back into the building. Over the doorway a red banner with the cartoon head of a glaring elephant reads Welcome to Somers High School. Home of the Tuskers. This new version of Old Bet is fearsome and aggressive, her tusks sharp, ready to spear someone. I know it’s posturing about the toughness of the football team, but I’m glad that somebody has finally let Bet be angry.
The smell of tempera paint fills the car as we pull out of the parking lot.
“Where were you?” Aubrey asks. “You got here really fast.”
“I was at the library.”
“What books did you get?”
“I didn’t. I was about to check them out when you called.”
Aubrey insists we go back to get them, and I teach her how to play the color game. We spend ages walking up and down the aisles until Aubrey has a stack of books to check out too. She gets A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (black), Speak (red), The Kitchen God’s Wife (blue), and The Secret Garden (green).
Next, we hit King Kone. Aubrey gets a chocolate-dipped vanilla soft serve in a flat-bottomed wafer cone and I get plain chocolate in a waffle cone with rainbow sprinkles. We sit at one of the picnic tables outside the old sweet shack and look through the masonry book. Aubrey picks the chocolate shell off the ice cream to eat it separately, wiping her hands on her napkin.
“I think we can do this,” she says, flipping pages forward, then back. She points to a picture of a trowel spreading mortar. “Yeah. We can do this. It’s just like tile.”
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I wouldn’t care at all if I didn’t have to care. Like, it doesn’t hurt my feelings that Kelly hates me. She’s awful. Why would I care about her opinion? She dumped Carter’s brother over the summer and started hooking up with Carter, so that’s what this is about. Like she sees my existence as some kind of commentary on hers.” Aubrey’s ice cream drips on her hand, and she turns her wrist to lick it off, almost dumping her cone. “I used to care when I had no one else to care about, but those people, they only have power when you don’t have anything better, you know? I have Shray, you, Jam, Bee. What do I care if some awful person doesn’t like me for stupid reasons? I just don’t want to have to fucking deal with it. I don’t want to be stuck in that school with those people.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I wish I could just go to the library all day.”
“Me too,” I tell her. “That’s exactly what I used to wish for.”
“Oh, shit!” she cries, slumping down, raising the book to hide her face.
“What?”
She nods toward the road as a gray Porsche 911 drives off. “My dad.”
“Fuck. Did he see us?”
Aubrey nods and looks like she might cry. “I should have stuck out the day in school. I feel like my parents only leave me alone because I keep doing everything I’m supposed to.”
I check the time on my phone. “School is over now,” I say. “He can’t know you skipped out.” But I feel like I’m throwing myself on a grenade to try to keep her calm. I want to run away screaming.
She looks around. A line of teenagers has formed at the order window since we sat down.
“Yeah,” she says. “He wouldn’t know I left.”
“It’ll be fine.” I smile like we have not a care in the world, but while Aubrey finishes her ice cream, I watch the road for his car, hoping he does not come back.