All We Have Left (4 page)

Ms. Donaldson walks in.

Of course she does. This is me we’re talking about, where Lia lives only in my head, and my actions spill like dark ink across my hastily drawn life.

She takes in the swirling cloud of smoke, and me holding the joint. “Ms. Susanto, Ms. Sanchez. Go to Ms. Julio’s office.
Now
.”

“I’ve seen the way Nick looks at you,” Teeny says, shoving her Health book into Emi’s locker a day after the me-versus-mimes incident. “I suppose he
is
cute, in a kick-ass nerd-boy kind of way.”

I’m not sure whether to be offended or not, so I shrug. It’s not surprising that Teeny picked up on the vibe between me and Nick; she’s always been good at seeing the complicated webs of connections between people and groups. She laughingly says she plans to use her powers for good when she becomes a psychologist. Pretty and curvy, her real name is Christina—which she hates—and though she claims to have hit five foot even, no one believes her.

“I heard Hailey Brinson is all into him,” she continues. “You know, Hook-Up-Hailey?”

“
Teeny
,” Emi says disapprovingly.

“What?” Teeny shrugs. “If she doesn’t want to be called that, she shouldn’t get drunk and try to hook up with every guy she meets.”

Hailey isn’t in any of my blocks, but she’s one of those girls everyone knows about. She arrived at our school last year and immediately made herself notorious—you know the type: flashing Mr. Johnson’s tenth-grade Algebra 2 class when he had his back turned, kissing Michael Higgins with full-tongue when he won class president.

“Are they going out?” I ask, and Teeny bursts out laughing.

“Jealous?” she hoots, and nudges me with her hip.

“Me, jealous of Hailey Brinson? Right,” I say, but I can’t help but grin as I hip-bump her back. Because, yes. Yes, I am.

I don’t tell them that I have Nick’s number in my pocket, that right before we left class he slid it across my desk with an expression of feigned indifference, though the number burns against my leg for the rest of the day. Emi, Teeny, and Myra are my best friends, but this is something I’m not sure they would understand, because I’m not sure I understand it myself.

That afternoon, I weave my way through Dad’s climbing shop, waving at Grill, the shop manager. I go through the door marked No Entry and climb the narrow staircase to our
apartment. Dad is watching TV in the living room. I know he should be working, know it because of the exasperated look Grill threw at me, but it’s not like it’s unusual lately.

“Hi, Dad.” I open the fridge and pull out a jug of OJ. Mom’s got dinner in the oven, so she must be off to another committee meeting, or whatever it is she does to make sure she’s not at home as much as possible.

“Keep it down, will you?” Dad says, his attention fixed on the screen.

Being as quiet as possible, I rinse my glass and put it in the dishwasher.

Mom comes into the kitchen, a whirl of motion as she checks the casserole, sends a quick text, and then turns to me.

“Hi, honey,” she says, but her gaze slides off me as if I’m a big stick of butter. She doesn’t really see me. She hasn’t for a long time.

“I have a school meeting tonight.” She adjusts her dress, which used to be her favorite and is just a little too tight, and runs her hand through her silvering blond bob.

When I meet her former students, they rave about her. She’s the best, most conscientious, most inspiring fourth-grade teacher on earth. She must be a great mom, I’m so lucky.

Right, okay, if you say so.

I think about how, over Christmas break, I found her asleep with her head on the kitchen counter, her well-worn
Bible in her hands. In front of her was a perfect chocolate cake with thirty-three candles on it, all burnt down to smoky nubs, the cheery red wax melted all over the top of the cake.

I must have made a sound, because my mother woke up and looked at me blearily, and I wondered how much of the bottle of wine beside her she had drunk. She’s a lightweight, and I hardly ever see her drink. My dad takes care of that for the both of them.

She saw me staring at the cake. “He should have been here,” she said. “He should have been here to blow them out.”

It hit me then that it was Travis’s birthday. My brother Travis who died in the Twin Towers almost fifteen years before.

Part of me wanted to yell,
But
I’m
still here.
Doesn’t that count for something?

She got up unsteadily and went to her bedroom, and I was left staring at the smoldering cake.

Of the three children my parents brought into this world, one is dead, the second is in Africa, and then there is me. The unwanted, invisible kid they still have to act like they give a damn about.

I haven’t been able to get the picture of my mom and that sad melted cake out of my head, and it makes me want to scream until someone hears me, but the screaming is only in my head.

“Gerald,” she says now, a little sharply, and my father looks over at her. “I’ll be back late.”

Their eyes lock for a brief moment, and some sort of private conversation flows between them, and it could be,
Gerald, maybe you should cut back on the beer
and
Susie, when the hell was the last time you were actually
here
for dinner?

As a kid, I used to bounce up and down and demand the “bike story” from my mother, because when you’re five, stories about your fledgling parents seem like something out of a fairy tale.

It was the story of how they met. Dad was finishing up college and working as a bike messenger in the city, and Mom was doing her first student teaching assignment. On her way home one afternoon, she saw a group of older kids start messing with one of her students. Mom, young and fearless, jumped into the fray and stared down the group of hoodlums. Enter Dad like some sort of freaking superhero. He had no brakes because he had stripped them off his bike so he could go as fast as possible. He rode right up to Mom and a cowering Juan Arias and jumped off. His bike flew into a nearby van, and Dad told the hoodlums to go packing. In the story, they actually do, and in the story, it was love at first sight. Mom’s hero.

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that Mom always told the story fast and bitter, as if by then she was having to convince
herself
that the younger her and Dad had existed, that they weren’t just a young couple in a love story.

There were no other Mom-and-Dad stories, but in my mind I’ve filled in the rest. They were married, moved from the city
to the Gunks, and had two boys, first Travis, then three years later, Hank. Everything was fairy dust and perfection. Then, almost seventeen years after Travis was born, an accident came along and they named it Jesse. Two years later Travis died in the Twin Towers and Dad decided to hate everyone and Mom started running so fast she left the rest of us behind. Hank just fell off the freaking page completely, and sometimes I wished I could follow him.

The end.

My dad mutters something, and my mom stands there for a moment, her face perfectly blank, and then she drops a quick kiss on my forehead and is gone.

“I’m going over to Teeny’s. We’re studying for a Statistics test.” I feel like I’m whispering, though I’m pretty sure I’m not.

“Why can’t you be friends with normal people?” Dad doesn’t look at me.

“They
are
normal people.” But I say it under my breath. Avoiding confrontations is my specialty.

I feel myself shrinking, like the atoms inside me are deflating one by one. I think of Nick then, his face shining with something like sympathy as he watched the mimes put me in the box. Then I think of what he mouthed:

Blow up the box.

I hold up my favorite long-sleeved yellow shirt against my chest and eye myself in the mirror. The yellow fabric does nice things for my dark hair, but it just isn’t right.
Nothing
seems right today.

I flop down on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Grounding me so I can’t attend the NYU program might not seem like a big deal to my parents, but to me it feels like the continuing game of Whac-A-Mole I play with them. I dare to dream, and they wallop it into oblivion.

I’m lying on a pile of clothes, and I fish out a silky blue shirt and hold it up in the air above me. Superheroes get to wear masks and capes and pretty much anything they need to keep their identity a secret and kick some major butt in the process.

I wish dressing for school was that easy.

I throw down the shirt and roll over to look at the white scarf covered with swirling yellow designs and delicate flowers in green and crimson. Finding something to wear with it is harder than I thought it would be. Tanjia got a party and a new wardrobe when she started wearing the hijab, and the thought of a hijab-themed shopping spree with Tanjia and Kaitlin cheers me up a tiny bit.

I jump off my bed, dislodging piles of clothes and tripping over my track shoes as I lunge for the radio.

Music. Music is what I need.

I flip through radio stations until I find a good song, Blink-182’s “The Rock Show,” and turn it up as loud as I dare. I dance around, jumping on the bed and off again, knowing that Ms. McGillicuddy downstairs will probably “have a word” with my mother about my thumping around, but not caring. I might not be the best dancer in the world, but I have dancer friends, and I’ve seen their moves. I shimmy my hips and wave my arms around and then catch sight of myself in the mirror and collapse on the bed, because it. Is. Not. Working.

Lia in a dance club, really breaking down her moves, while the people who are talking about her all mean just stand around with their mouths open.

I can see the panel in my mind, and I almost grab my notepad, but I don’t have time, and besides, Lia would never be caught dead in a nightclub. She knows better.

I wonder again if it’s worth wearing the scarf today. There’s so much going on, but if I don’t do it now, then when? I’ve thought about it for months, since camp, but when the first day of school came, I put on my regular clothes and marched off to the subway, pretending I didn’t notice the disappointment in Tanjia’s eyes.

“Alia! Turn down the music, you’re going to wake the entire building!” my mother yells through the French doors into my room, which used to be a dining room until my parents turned it into a bedroom for me.

I want to turn the radio up and up until I don’t hear the disappointment and frustration in my mother’s voice.

“Alia!”
Mama smacks her hand on the outside of my locked bedroom door.

“Yeah, okay, I heard you.”

I turn down the radio and glance at my desk. Lia’s face, confident and strong, stares back at me, and I swear she winks.

“When I was stuck at the bottom of the Hudson River after the Evil Mad Doctor turned me into a squirrel and locked me in the trunk of a Camry, who was there to save me? That’s right. No one. It was all me, baby.”

“Easy for you to say,” I mutter, picking up the yellow shirt.

I need to get going or I’m going to be late for school.