100 Days of Cake (7 page)

A minute or an hour passes, and my phone rings. It's in the pocket of the shorts I wore yesterday, which are slung over the back of my desk chair, which is miles and miles and miles away from the safety of the bed.

Probably Dr. B. calling to ask where the hell I am.

Gut punch of guilt. Mom will probably have to pay for the session, and even though Dye Another Day is going, like, gangbusters, we're not one-percenters or anything. Plus, Dr. B. had promised to bring in some of his favorite old mix tapes for our session. Feeling
that
much worse for disappointing all these people yet
again
, I roll over.

Time is kind of gooey on the life raft of my sleigh bed, and I sleep on and off. Our old house had those popcorn ceilings, and sometimes V and I would stack chairs on our beds and pinch off the little plaster balls between our fingernails. But in the model home, the ceilings are smooth and free of cracks. Just blank nothingness. I wonder what it would feel like to blend with the ceiling, become one with that.

Elle—except she looks like Miley Cyrus—and her kid brother are chomping up a line of cakes like Pac-Man. Alex and T.J.
are doing “I'm Not the Father” dances, and Mom and V are performing a mother-daughter tap number with feather boas. I'm just standing there.

Not participating
.

Because even in my dreams I'm pathetic.

When I wake up, I'm sort of hungry. Mom and V are both at work, so I head to the model kitchen to see if we have any non-cake food. The best I can find is a couple of string cheeses and half a tuna wrap Mom must have had for lunch a few days ago. It has that too-cold-fridge taste.

The formal dining room isn't on the way back to the stairs and my bedroom, but I go there anyway, and have a seat on one of the plush chairs.

One of the few things we did bring from the old house is this framed ten-by-twelve family photograph of all of us that hangs over the sideboard. In the picture I'm in an OshKosh jumper holding this little doll that the photographer gave me; baby V is just blue-green eyes (like Mom's and Gram's and mine) peeking out from a swaddle of embroidered blankets; Mom, not even thirty, and so achingly beautiful; and Dad with his high-sloped forehead, wavy mouse-poop hair like me, and these giant hands as big as catcher's mitts. He's got one on Mom's forearm, the other protectively on my shoulder—so large that his fingers reach all the way down to my elbow.

I was three (well, almost three—the accident happened the day before my birthday) when he died, and
there isn't much I really remember besides those hands and his voice, which was this incredibly deep cannon, like a DJ's on a classic rock station. A voice that made everything, even Dr. Seuss books, sound important.

As much as I love my mom and her misguided attempts to cure me with baked goods, I wonder—a lot, actually—how things might have been different if Dad hadn't gone out that day. If he could have offered a different perspective to balance things out. Wonder if he could have shared stories about his own childhood and filled in all those blanks. Wonder if maybe, just maybe, his hands would have been big enough that they could still hold me up even now.

I'm back in the sleigh bed when Mom knocks on my door around six. She asks if I'm okay and if she can come in.

“I kind of just want to be alone,” I say.

“Are you sure?” She's got the nervous syrupy voice again. “I was thinking maybe you could help with today's cake.”

I tell her I'm pretty tired, which is somehow true, despite the fact that I've been sleeping for hours and hours.

“Okay. I think that you're really going to like it; it's red velvet.”

“Mom, maybe we can skip it today—”

“Nonsense.” She makes it sound like I'm suggesting that she not show up for my wedding day.

An hour or two passes, and then there's another knock on my door, Mom announcing that she's finished baking. I don't say anything.

“Okay, sweetie?” she asks. “You awake?”

I say nothing and hope that's enough of an answer. “Maybe I can just slide it under the door,” she says. Then she's trying to shove a three-inch-high plate of cake through the inch and a half of space between the bottom of the door and the floor.

“Oh, shoot,” she says. On my side of the door there is now a plate with red crumbs and a smear of cream cheese frosting. I can only imagine what kind of mess happened on her end.

It's actually really funny, like something that Rose might try on the
Golden Girls
. I should get up, open the door, hug my mom, and tell her that I love her. I
want
to.

But I don't do that.

And I hate myself for it.

I
t's still a million degrees outside, but from the way Alex and Elle are yapping on and on about the ACT versus the SAT, you'd think that it was fall and we were all back in school already. (To be fair, it will probably still be a million degrees then; central Florida is really freaking hot.)

We're sitting on the steps of Elle's front porch, while her eight-year-old brother repeatedly rams his bike into the mailbox post as if he's stuck on a difficult level of a really lame video game. When the force is enough that Jimmy actually falls off the bike, Alex turns nervously to Elle.

“Um, should we maybe do something?”

“My mom's free-range when it comes to parenting,” Elle explains. “She believes that we should let him discover things on his own.”

I'm pretty sure that Mrs. Lovell hasn't put that much
thought into it and just doesn't care, but I would never say that. Elle can get sensitive about stuff with her mom.

“That's cool, I guess.” Alex doesn't look convinced.

The three of us have never hung out like this before, but when Alex and I were closing up FishTopia for the night, he asked where I was headed. When I told him Elle's, he kind of invited himself along. Under normal circumstances I would have protested hanging out outside the aquarium of FishTopia, but it was literally 104 this afternoon, and his Ford Fiesta is air-conditioned. And I still feel bad about blowing him off the other day, no matter what Dr. B. says. Also, with Elle there I figured it wouldn't be a date-date so things couldn't get too weird.

Of course Elle was all excited when Alex and I showed up together, and the minute Alex went to the bathroom, she asked if we were together. She looked genuinely bummed when I told her no.

But now the two of them are talking and talking and talking about school and college applications. They're so animated and alive, they don't notice that I haven't said anything in forever.

Alex is going on about how he really wants to go to a music conservatory program, but his father is this macho guy who would never be okay with that. “I'm trying to see what places have okay music schools so I can double major,” he says. “I might be able to slip that one past my dad if I got an econ
degree or something, but everything is just so expensive.”

Elle is nodding. “I hear you. Like, Columbia has a great environmental studies program, but unless I win the lottery, there's no way. So I'm probably going to FSU like everyone else . . .”

I'm really glad they are getting along so well, but it's like I'm watching them from above, like they're on a TV show, playing the roles of optimistic teens excited about the next phase of their lives. Everything they're saying is from some script that no one bothered to send me.

This past spring I gave up Facebook cold turkey because of all my senior “friends” posts.
I'm a USF Bull! Just signed up to be all that I can—go army! Don't hate, but I got into
Georgia! Karla said yes!!!
Like everyone had to decide everything about the rest of their lives by June 5.

“Have you looked into student loans?” Alex is asking Elle in their TV-show conversation going on beneath me. “It might be worth it if that's really your first choice.”

“My dad might make too much money—”

A crash. Metal on concrete.

Jimmy has knocked over the big silver garbage cans on the curb and has somehow managed to get his head and upper body stuck in one of the bins. From the opening, his summer-scabbed legs jut out.

“Ugh.” Elle sighs. “This is the second time he's done that this week.”

She heads over to unstick Jimmy, and Alex turns to me, laughing.

“This just a normal day for that kid?” he asks.

“Yeah, he is pretty much a rabid possum,” I say, and Alex laughs harder, and then I start laughing. The floating/watching sensation is gone; I'm a part of this world again.

Until Alex asks, “What about you, Mol? What are your big college plans?”
Crap.

“I'm just waiting to see how the year goes,” I say, which isn't a total lie. I'm definitely waiting for something. To change the subject, I tell him about JoJo going totally ballistic a few days ago when a woman on
Maury
broke up with her man because she found a tooth in the house that he couldn't explain.