The Gap Year (8 page)

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

I
am completely and unequivocally into football territory. Paige Winslow and Madison Chaffee, sitting on the aluminum bleachers five feet away, don’t notice me.

In world history last year, we studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Figge explained what de-Stalinization was, how leaders like Stalin would be expunged from the country’s history so completely that their faces were literally erased from photos. That’s what Paige and Madison have done to me: They’ve de-Stalinized me. I still remember when we all played together at the pool, diving under for plastic rings, riding together on field trips to Pioneer Farm, but they don’t. Friendship with me turned out to be the kind of embarrassing accident that happened when you were little, before everyone found their place in the social hierarchy.

They assume that I hate them. That I am deeply jealous and want to be them, but that since I never will be, I’ve channeled my envy into scorn and hatred. It is a valid assumption and generally true. But wrong in my case. I don’t want to be them any more than I want to be one of Twyla’s burnout buds. I don’t think my life is tragic and that it would be golden if I was popular. I just think they are exactly who they were raised to be since their parents named them Paige and Madison and it is irrelevant if I hate them or want to be them.

I smile and shrug. Paige and Madison have no idea what I am shrugging about any more than I would understand them if they shrugged at me. It would just be a chance to huddle with my friends and get that delicious feeling that comes from whispering about someone who is not like you with someone who is like you. I understand. I truly do. I would like whispering with someone who is like me. But no one is.

I think it is because my sizzle doesn’t match anyone else’s. I want something to happen so bad that it sizzles inside of me. It never stops, but it also never fits any of the choices presented. Maybe because there is only one you are ever allowed to talk about: college.

“Which schools are you thinking about?” everyone asks, like they are taking each other’s temperatures, seeing whose sizzle matches theirs. But, even when I try, I can’t make myself care about colleges. About next year. Not when there is so much to pay attention to right now.

At the end of practice, the players all get in a circle, bump fists, yell, “Pirate Power!” and run to the locker room. Paige stands up on the bleachers and calls out, “Tyler! Ty-Mo! Are we studying after school today?”

Tyler turns, yells back, “Yeah, sure! I’ll meet you at your car!”

The instant Tyler’s back faces her, Paige bites her knuckle like she wants to eat her entire arm. Or Tyler Moldenhauer. Madison fans herself to show that she agrees that Tyler is unbearably hot.

Tyler pivots back around. Paige yanks her hand out of her mouth; he yells, “I’m starving!”

Paige answers, “I’ll pick up tacos, OK?”

Before he can say anything else, Tyler’s glance hits me. I hold up my water bottle and wave it at him to show that I’m drinking fluids like he told me to. He doesn’t acknowledge me in any way other than a pause of half a second before he looks back at Paige and yells, “Cool!”

Half a second is exactly long enough for me to be sure that he has seen me and that he could care less.

12:12 A.M. SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

=Why did you leave us?

=Aubrey, hi. Wow, I’ve been waiting for that bomb. Trying to figure out what I’d say. I used to know the answer. I used to know all the answers. But I don’t anymore. Not to that. Not to anything. That’s a long conversation that probably can’t/shouldn’t be done inside a tiny chat bubble
.

=Yeah. OK. GTG
.

=Aubrey, don’t run off. I want to answer that question. Just … I’d like it to be in person
.

=And I’m sure that will be real soon. Aren’t you, like, supposed to get excommunicated for even talking to me?

=They would not be happy about it
.

=So I don’t see a big in-person meeting happening anytime soon
.

=Aubrey, remember this: I loved you from the first second of your life
.

I loved you from the first second of your life
.

Big freaking lot of good that did me.

I close the page without saying good-bye or GTG and think about unfriending him. But why? So I can join Mom in pretending that I haven’t spent most of the past sixteen years thinking about him? Oh, except, unlike Mom, I would then have
two
people that I can pretend I am not thinking about. Two people who, according to her, I am supposed to hate and must erase from my consciousness.

It’s impossible to make yourself
not
think about someone. Who’s one of the top three figures everyone knows from Russian history? Maybe Rasputin. Maybe Catherine the Great. But, for sure, everyone knows Joseph Stalin.

De-Stalinization. Didn’t even work for Stalin.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

A
fter the Water Bottle Incident, I move as far from the football practice field as I can get, all the way back to the band sidelines. Back to where T.M. will never see me again.

Shupe does see me, though, and asks, “Where are your notes, Lightsey? If you’re not marching and not memorizing the new drills, I can’t give you credit.”

Though I already know that I am never going back, it still surprises me when I hear myself say, “That’s OK, Shupey-Doo. I’m dropping band.”

I am also surprised at how easy it is to walk away and leave three years behind as if they had never happened. I didn’t think that I was the kind of person who could do that.

But it turns out that I am. Turns out that I am a lot of things that no one, especially not me, thought I was.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

A
ubrey is pregnant.

Stupid as it sounds for someone who spends every day with women who either are or just were pregnant, the thought of my daughter knocked up never crossed my mind, since I have been hammering birth control into her since she lost her baby teeth. Still, what else would explain why her sullenness has escalated so dramatically recently?

I run to Aubrey’s room. It is even more freakishly neat than usual. Stark, actually, since over the course of the summer she has moved so many of her clothes to Tyler’s. All her books are arranged according to when she acquired them.
Amelia Bedelia
at the very beginning and those
Twilight
books at the end. I notice that she hasn’t bought the last book in the series and my pulse races even faster; this lack of interest in an unconsummated love affair is an ominous sign. I’m not a fool. I know that there has been consummation. Far too much consummation. I knew that from the first night she failed to come home.

What I want to find are signs that all this consummation has been controlled. A nice, empty pill dispenser, a diaphragm would be great. What I really
don’t
want to find is a white plastic stick with a pink positive sign on it. Mostly I’m doing what I did when I sniffed at the new odors clinging to Aubrey: gathering evidence from an uncooperative witness.

Tiny bottles of hand sanitizer gleam at various spots around the room. What clothes remain in her closet all hang in the same direction. The shoes she’s left behind are boxed up in perfect rows on the shelf above her clothes. Peeking down at me from a shelf beside her bed are her My Little Ponies, with their squat bodies and pastel manes, that I recall her occasionally rearranging long after most girls her age had abandoned ponies and morphed from cuddly pre-teen puppies into aloof, disdainful adolescent cats whose fondest hope was that their parents would leave their credit cards in a neat pile before signing on for an extended tour aboard a nuclear submarine. Listening to the other moms moan about how their daughters had mutated overnight from sweet, submissive girls into snarly tramps who hated them and wanted to wear little junior-miss stripper outfits was part of the reason I thought I was a parenting genius.

Eventually, of course, the “whatevers” and eye rolling, gasping, and utter exasperation began. I thought I’d nipped the problem in the bud by telling her, “Look, let’s save us both a lot of time. Just end every statement you direct toward me with the words ‘you asshole,’ because that is exactly what you’re saying to me.”

I now look back on that time fondly because, although the “whatevs” did start, we were still connected. There would be entire weekends of truce when we would watch a complete season of
Project Runway
or shop for new tops for her together. Since Tyler Moldenhauer, however, Aubrey hasn’t been connected to anyone but him.

Resting on the pillow of her neatly made bed is BeeBee, Aubrey’s favorite Puffalump. BeeBee was once a Pretty Hair Purple. Pretty Hair Purple BeeBee is gray now, all the stuffing from her head has shifted into her lumpy legs, and her braids are dull, fuzzy ropes. BeeBee was a present from the last Christmas that Martin and Aubrey and I spent together sixteen years ago.

I put my nose to the bedraggled toy and a bit of wisdom I’d stumbled across in my Googling last night flits through my mind: “Your kid will always come back.”
Yes, I know she’ll come back
, I now want to tell that blithe poster,
but will she ever come back as a newborn with breath that smells like caramel? A four-year-old who sits in my lap through whole movies so she can bury her face in my chest at the scary parts? A ten-year-old eager to explain to me in dazzling detail why Sailor Moon must search for the fabled Moon Princess? A two-year-old who tries to say “baby” and it comes out “BeeBee
”?

A couple of poster-size collages trace her romance with Tyler through homecoming, prom, winter formal, and formals that I never even learned the names of. In the next-to-last photo, they’re holding their maroon polyester graduation robes open to reveal that they’re wearing nothing except bathing suits underneath. The last photo was taken at a graduation party given by their friends. Well,
his
friends, really; I didn’t recognize any of the sports-capped chuckleheads or spaghetti-strapped hoochies holding up cups of beer caught in mid-slosh and grinning drunken grins at the camera. Tyler—wayward curls of dark hair flipping out beneath the weathered cap hugging his head, the torn-away sleeves of his snap-button Western shirt showing off arms still pumped up with football muscles—has Aubrey slung over his shoulder and is carrying her away, off toward the dark beyond the flash.

I shift to alternate-universe mode and imagine how our lives would have turned out if we’d never left Sycamore Heights, the vibrant, diverse neighborhood in the city we abandoned so that we could send our child to the best schools within driving distance of Martin’s job. Would Martin and I still be together? What if I’d never gotten pregnant? Life without Aubrey is the one parallel universe I am incapable of imagining. All I know is that had we not left Sycamore Heights, Tyler Moldenhauer would never have entered the picture.

I check under the bed. Her clarinet case is shoved far off in a back corner. I pull it out and hold the instrument, stroke the keys worn smooth by her fingers. There is another box hidden so far under the bed that I have to get the broom to drag it out. I promise myself that I will take a quick peek, then slam it shut if I don’t see what I’m looking for. I blur my eyes a bit so that if it is love letters, naked photos, I won’t absorb any details.

I don’t know why I am surprised to find the Book of Palms, a scrapbook with all the photos of her father I could gather. I run my hand over the big album. I’d pasted the title on myself using peel-off gold letters in a swirly font, hoping to underline the joke aspect of the name I’d given this volume. I wanted Aubrey to know about her father. But not to take any of it too seriously. She was such a quiet, solemn child, I didn’t want her absent father to become a dark, intense issue.

I open the book and there is the first photo of his palm, frozen by the flash from a paparazzo’s camera, shielding the face of a celebrity. I first saw it on a dreary, cold Monday in February fourteen years ago. I was in the checkout line at the grocery. It was sleeting outside and almost dark at six in the evening. Aubrey was four and cranky from getting her MMR vaccine and from a too-long day at day care. All the days were too long back then when I was scrambling to get my business started. Aubrey wouldn’t stop fussing and whining even with black drool running down her face from the bag of Oreos I’d opened and stuck in her hands to keep her quiet. I felt achy and chilled, knew I had a cold coming on, and couldn’t afford to cancel any visits with the few patients I had. All I wanted was to pay for the milk, juice, eggs, apples, and bread in my cart, go home, throw something together for dinner, unload and reload the dishwasher, pack lunches, and try to be in bed before I dropped in my tracks.

And then Aubrey threw the open package of Oreos on the floor and lunged for the box of Twix bars next to us in the checkout aisle, knocking those to the floor as well. I was on my hands and knees picking up candy bars and Oreos when I first came face-to-palm with Martin, now going by his bizarre new name, Stokely Blizzard, on the cover of the
National Enquirer
, sticking his hand out to shield the celebrity he was shepherding. The caption read, “Next! Honcho Stokely Blizzard wards off photographers as former sitcom star Lissa Doone exits a three-month stay at Ramparts, Next’s! exclusive rehab clinic.”

I bought the tabloid and started a photo album. Every few months I’d add another clipping. It was from them that I learned that Next sued any publication that didn’t capitalize their name and include the trademarked exclamation point. That their lawyers were so ferocious they’d even battled off a lawsuit brought by Scientology that claimed Next had stolen much of their theology and most of their biggest adherents. And that “the church” christened the ultraelite converts like Martin, who’d surrendered all their worldly possessions and enlisted for “ninety-nine lifetimes,” with names that combined their mother’s maiden name with their favorite meteorological phenomenon. Hence Stokely Blizzard. It was like figuring out what your porn-star name would be except with weather instead of pets.

As I’d told Dori, the fact that Next bordered on the farcical actually made losing Martin to it harder. So, no, Next would be getting no exclamation points from me.

At first the “stars” that Martin counseled and was photographed with were has-beens—pinwheel-eyed drug burnouts; sex addicts trying to look ashamed; duckbilled, eternally surprised plastic-surgery casualties. All of them caught in the act of rebuilding their careers with steel beams forged in the Next crucible.

After a few years of counseling and guarding has-beens and never-weres, Martin moved up to shielding the faces of currently working, B-minus-list actors on the make looking to move up. Or solid B-listers, maybe even a few A-minuses who were slipping off the list after a string of bombs. Actors appeared to be the ideal candidates for Next. These were people who dreamed of the chance to be whoever someone told them they needed to be. Hopefully the person doing the telling would be a director with a closetful of Oscars. But if Spielberg or Scorsese didn’t materialize, Next was always there, ready to tell the world’s most insecure humans precisely who they needed to be. And what Next told them all to be was a Nextarian.

Gradually the hidden faces behind Martin’s palm came to belong to celebrities who were seriously worth protecting: solid box-office earners, leads in popular television series, musicians with platinum albums. Finally, he and his palm protected the faces of some of the hottest stars in the world.

As if association with celebrities that blistering could ignite any chunk of matter they came into contact with, Martin himself eventually became a paparazzi target. I knew he had arrived the day I saw someone else’s palm, some other Next underling, shielding
his
face. Apparently Martin had risen high enough in Next that he required his own Swiss Guard stiff-arming the press and hiding him from view. It had been years since I’d come across a clear shot of his face.

So I collected the photos and made the Book of Palms for Aubrey, hoping that the fact that she shared genes with a father who could sell tabloids would register on some level. But mostly the palm photos confused her. By middle school, her only comment when a new one appeared was, “Weird.”

By that time, she had cut her ties with the fairy-winged Twyla and told everyone that I was “a pediatric nurse.” Like Dori said, Aubrey wanted to fit in, so I just stopped adding photos. Then she stopped mentioning him altogether, and, taking my cue from her, I did the same.