Tuesday

Tuesday

My heart is pounding really fast. I try to take deep breaths to calm down, but it's not working. I brought the NyQuil with me to school today and swigged some in a bathroom stall between classes, but maybe I didn't have enough to ease my anxiousness. I've never done that before and I was nervous, like what if I spilled it down my shirt and someone was like, "What's that giant red stain on your chest?"

I hate this. My least favorite part of school is when you have to stand up in front of everyone and present something. I don't know why humiliation in the form of public speaking is required and then, to add insult to injury, graded. I don't like people looking at me. I don't like looking back at all of them, my fellow students, bored and playing with their hair, or scrolling on phones underneath the desk, or the ones who act like they're interested in what you're saying, but the way their mouths curl really means they are waiting for you to totally lose it.

The four of us are standing at the front of the room, our PowerPoint presentation on the pull-down screen. Cherie has the clicker. Lemon is supposed to do the first three slides, Dawn the next three, then me, then Cherie.

My palms are starting to sweat. I feel dizzy. Why isn't this cold medicine kicking in? Cherie is still not talking to me. I can feel her annoyance pouring off her like a kind of heat. That's freaking me out, too.

Lemon says pubic instead of pubis and everyone starts to laugh. "Chill out, people," Lemon says smoothly. "Be adults. This is art. "

"Fart," someone says from the back of the class. It's hard to see who, because of the easels.

Dawn starts talking. I can't really listen to what she's saying because I'm so nervous. Her words sound cloudy. This is not something I was built for. I wear baggy clothes. I like a lot of eyeliner and powder. I stay quiet, for the most part, out of the way of the usual high school bullshit. Those are supposed to be my protections. Staying at the margins, the edges of things. I'm thinking too much. Why can't I stop thinking? I need to calm down. Those sips of NyQuil are not doing the trick. Dawn's voice sounds warped, like she's talking inside a tube. I'm trembling. I lick my lips. Did I just get lipstick on my teeth? I think I'm going to pass out.

Cherie jabs me, hard, with her elbow. "Bella. Go. "

We're presenting on Greek statuary. Creamy nudes, ideal figures. The Greek goddess Nike. Hermes. The Venus de Milo with her missing arms. I have notecards in my hands, even though we have the slides. I just needed something to hold, but the cards are warm and damp and half crumpled now, the ink smeared from the moisture on my hands. I look at the first of my three slides, trying to extract the words somehow, make them leap from the slide to my brain, to my mouth, and out into the world.

The words blur. The words laugh and say screw you.

Just read the words, Bella. You love these statues. These statues are fixed and strong and you love them. They are like the women in Laurel's photographs, alive forever, and strong. You can do this, Bella.

My voice is shaking and my mouth is dry. Each individual letter in each word is slippery, sliding across the screen. I can't catch them, can't bring them to me.

"Um…," I say. "So…"

"This is painful," someone whispers.

My face prickles with heat. My lips feel so dry I'm afraid they might spontaneously crack.

"When we consider…," I try.

Thumpthump-thumpthump-thumpthump. I press a hand to my chest. It's like I can feel my heart trying to break out of my body. Now I've dropped my notecards. I bend down to pick them up, but my hands are shaking so badly I can't get a grip on them.

"Shoot me now," someone else says.

Next to me, Dawn leans over, picks up my cards, presses them into my hands. "It's okay," she whispers. We stand up.

Dizzy again.

"The."

The. That's all I have, all I can manage. I can't see anything anymore. Everything is out of focus. I can't breathe. Kids shift and sigh impatiently on their stools.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump goes my heart. I just want to disappear.

The familiar heat of warm tears whooshes up in my eyes. Oh no. No. No. Do not cry.

Dawn's voice takes over, ringing out, reading the rest of my slides. Then Cherie, smooth as silk, reading hers.

After the other group presentations, students clapped, but for us, there's just silence.

"Thank you," Ms. Green says finally, clapping lightly. "Very thoughtful work."

Her voice sounds very far away.

I'm frozen in place until I feel the tiniest movement against my elbow.

It's Dawn. "We can sit now," she whispers. "It's over."

I walk back to my easel, my legs rubbery, Cherie and Lemon staring at me, everyone staring at me. I hide behind my easel. The underarms of my flannel shirt are damp and sticky. I look at my stupid tree with its stupid charcoal branches and I no longer love it. It's just a stupid sketch of a stupid thing that proves I can't do anything right, no matter how hard I try.

I hate everything.

—

I have to take the bus after school to pick up Ricci, because my dad has a meeting and Vanessa is working. We stop at the 7-Eleven by the bus stop near her school to get her a snack before our bus to Dad's comes. "I petted the goat today," she says as she grabs a bar of chocolate. "Her name is Teddy."

"Cool," I say.

We're across from the beer cooler. I always see those kids in movies who grab beer and stuff it in their coat or pants. Is that really a thing? I would so much like to just chill now, after the art presentation debacle. Just smooth everything over. Look at all those bottles. They aren't that big. Who would notice? There's a giant line at the register and just one cashier. I look up. Cameras in the ceiling corners and on the wall above the coolers. Maybe Ricci and I could take the bus to Laurel's and I could make a bottle there. But how would I do it with Ricci there? She'd tell. And what if Mrs. Rabinowitz saw us and told my mother? Or if my mother was out at the mailbox and saw us walking down the sidewalk when we're supposed to be at Dad's?

"Bella," Ricci says. "Earth to Bella."

"What?" I say, looking down at her. Messy hair falling out of her scrunchie. A smudge of dirt on her cheek. She was happy today when I picked her up, shoving a bunch of drawings at me, showing me her special beanbag in the quiet room, where she goes when the classroom gets too noisy for her. "Sorry. I wasn't listening to you."

"Are you okay?"

No, says my brain.

Ricci's blue eyes are wide and worried. "Are you sick? Did I give you icky germs again?"

"I'm fine, Ricci. Let's go pay. We don't want to miss our bus. I'll let you listen to music on my phone. I added to your bus playlist the other day."

She gives me a big smile.

—

At home, I set her up with her YouTube cat videos and look in the refrigerator. It's practically bare, except for a six-pack of beer, peanut butter, jelly, bread, and some yogurt and milk. In the freezer, I find a frozen pizza and a bag of frozen peas, so I guess that's dinner. I put the pizza in the oven and the peas in water on the stove.

My phone jingles.

"Bella," my mom says. "I miss you."

Relief floods through me at the sound of her voice. "Hi, Mommy."

There's a pause. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just…" Everything, I want to say, but I don't.

"Did something happen at school?"

"It's okay. I'm fine." Can she hear me sniffle? Water is bubbling furiously over the peas. I shake some salt on them.

"Your sister okay?"

"Yes." I pause. "Mom? I forgot about Thanksgiving. It's the first one…without Grandma, you know?"

My mom is quiet for a minute and I'm afraid maybe I upset her. I know she doesn't like to talk about her mom all that much because it makes her cry, and I think she doesn't want us to see that, like we all have to be strong or something, but I kind of wish she would cry sometimes.

"I know," she says finally. I think I hear a catch in her voice, but I can't be sure.

"Are you going out to Agnes's?" I ask.

"I am," my mother says slowly. "I thought about not going, but then I realized how so many of Grandma's friends will be there, and how much they miss her."

Laurel has this friend, Agnes, who lives outside Tucson in a place called Tubac on an old former cattle ranch with a bunch of other older women artists. Some of them are still making art, some don't anymore, but I guess when they were all younger they made a pact that when they got too old, or too lonely, they'd buy a place together and live out their days. It's a shabby rose-colored hacienda with a lot of bedrooms and bathrooms and tons of couches and hammocks and a hot tub outside and a chicken coop. They retrofitted the old barn as an art studio, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas, they invite loads of people and there are these funky old musicians with long gray hair and tie-dyed T-shirts who play all sorts of interesting instruments in the studio after the potluck meal. Zithers, bongos, guitars, bells, gongs, anything you can think of, really. That's where we always go for Thanksgiving. It feels warm and homey and nice. I love it out there. I think it's so nice these women decided to take care of each other.

"I wish I wasn't missing it," I say.

My mom is quiet for a second. Then she says, "It's important for your dad to make his own traditions with you."

"I guess," I say. I clear my throat, hoping she doesn't notice that my voice kind of broke.

"Does he have anything special in the works?"

I think of Vanessa on the couch with her cookbook, planning a meal, and I decide not to mention that. The fact that Vanessa is a thing upsets her. When my mom picked us up from Dad's a couple of months ago and asked how our week was, Ricci shouted, "Good! I made cookies with Vanessa and we played Go Fish," my mom's face fell, like all the blood had literally drained from it.

"Who?" she said to Ricci, glancing in the rearview mirror, her voice really faint.

I turned around in my seat to motion to Ricci to shut up, but she was busy with her tablet and not looking at me. "Dad's friend," she said. "Vanessa."

My mother stared straight ahead through the windshield, not speaking.

"Mom?" I said softly.

"A girlfriend," she murmured. It wasn't a question. It was a statement. Her hands dropped from the steering wheel to her lap. She'd been about to start the car.

"Mom."

She was kind of scaring me, the way her voice was so flat and so…hurt. The way she was sitting so still, her hands placed flat on her jeaned thighs.

She wasn't even blinking, her body had gone so still.

"I'm right, aren't I." Her voice sounded ghostlike and eerie.

In that moment, I felt a thousand things: I hated my dad for not telling my mother. I hated my dad for finding a girlfriend, like my mother was easily replaceable. And I hated my dad because the realization was slowly coming to me, in that car, the sounds of the cows on Ricci's game moo-mooing in the back seat, that he never planned to tell her. He was going to leave it to us, like this. Like it was an accident. A blip.

Yet another example of Bella, do it.

"I'm sorry." That was all I could think to say.

I knitted my fingers together in my lap, hard enough to make my bones ache. I waited for my mom to erupt. She could yell loud when she was really angry. I know, because of her fights with Dad and sometimes when she reaches her limit with me.

But my mom didn't erupt. She didn't yell, or scream, or go up and pound on my dad's apartment door or grab her phone and start mad-texting.

She just sat in her seat, her hands white and flat in her lap, as big tears splashed down onto her cheeks, not making a sound, until finally Ricci looked up and said, "Why aren't we going?" and our mom didn't even wipe her face; she just put the key in the ignition and started driving, her wet face shining in the late-afternoon sun through the windshield.

"I don't know," I say now on the phone, finally. "I'm sure we'll think of something."

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yep," I say, trying to make my voice sound bright. I put the phone on speaker and lay it on the kitchen counter. The pizza is bubbling golden brown in the oven, so I turn off the heat and pull it out, setting it on the counter on the cutting board.

Mom sighs. "Okay, then. Want to put Ricci on?"

I call for Ricci, who runs in and grabs the phone.

I turn the peas off and find the pizza cutter. Get a cup for Ricci's milk.

That's when I see it, on the top shelf, third one up, tucked behind the wineglasses my dad insisted on taking in the divorce, even though he doesn't drink wine.

A bottle of rum, the kind with the sexy pirate on the label.

I freeze, Ricci's chatter behind me splintering into bits.

My brain says: Take it. You can pour it over ice, it'll look like soda. Add some water.

My heart says: No, if it's soda, Ricci will want some and pitch a fit.

I could do it during her bath. It's bath night. She's fine in the bath by herself. She just plays with toys and dunks herself over and over and generally makes a big mess. Dad won't be home until later.

It's so high up, I'd have to climb on the counter, or use one of the kitchen chairs.

I'd feel so much better. Amber would never know. I could just have some, and then nothing tomorrow. I haven't had any in like two days. Just that NyQuil, and that shouldn't count. That's a long time. And I had a shitty day. That's what adults do: they drink after a shitty day. Why can't I?

Sweat is prickling at my hairline. My mouth is watering a little just thinking about how that first swallow will feel when it hits my stomach and the warmth starts spreading. My breath catches in my throat.

My brain says: Bella, do it.

The front door opens.

I whirl around, almost knocking the pea pot off the stove.

My dad throws his bag on the couch. "Hey-oh," he calls, coming into the kitchen. "Oh, peas, my favorite. Peas and pizza."

He grabs a beer from the refrigerator and pops the cap off. "Oof, I had a rough day," he says to me, taking a drink from the bottle.

I shut the cabinet door. Ricci shoves the phone back in my hand and grabs Dad in a hug.

"I petted a goat!" she yells. "Can we get one?"

—

Ricci's bath, then Ricci's two pages of homework, which entails twelve Skittles, one for each math problem, a lot of whining, four giant teardrops, a glass of milk, and six frog stickers on her homework folder. My dad is asleep on the couch. I spend an hour getting Ricci to sleep and then go back out into the front room.

I put the dishes in the dishwasher. Make lunches for me and Ricci tomorrow.

Turn around, look over the breakfast bar.

Dad's still asleep, dressed in his cubicle-job outfit of button-up shirt, chinos, brown shoes, hair in a ponytail. He works for a retailer helpline and takes phone calls all day from people complaining about faulty recliners and refrigerators, uncooperative ovens and misbehaving rice cookers.

Open the kitchen cabinet, look at the bottle, so high up.

You can make it another day, I tell myself.

My brain says: Why do you have to? You had a bad day. A total suck day. You just need a little help.

I can feel it then, the anticipation of maybe having a drink. The little pops of excitement pinging around my stomach, sort of like when Dylan and I first started kissing, how everything slowed down as our mouths crept closer and my body would flood with warmth, knowing that soon everything would fall away and it would just be that, our bodies pressed together, time disappearing.

Bella, you shouldn't drink so much. It's kind of not cool.

I shake my head like someone's slapped me. Why is Dylan's voice in my head?

Dylan, staring at me at 191 Toole, the music pounding around us, his face disappointed. Bella, I can taste it. You don't need to do that so much, okay?

Me pulling him back, wanting to kiss more.

Nah, let's go home.

Silent bus ride home, him letting me get off the bus by myself at Amber's corner, no kiss or hug goodbye.

"Baby?"

I slam the cabinet door shut and whirl around. My dad is rubbing his eyes. "It's almost ten-thirty. Did you finish your homework? Vanessa said something about a paper?"

"Oh my god," I say, the dish towel falling from my hands. "My paper. My paper. "

I rush out of the kitchen and into our bedroom. Rip my folder out of my backpack and grab the syllabus for lit. Tomorrow. Ten typed pages by tomorrow. I grab my copy of Wild.

I still have like a hundred pages to read, but I can't quite remember what or how far I read on Sunday, when I fell asleep in bed. Shitshitshit.

I feel like crying, but I can't. I look at my phone. Ten-forty. I can do this. I can do this. I only have one more day of school and then a break and I can rest. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.