Authors: Kristen Chandler

Girls Don't Fly (22 page)

BOOK: Girls Don't Fly

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“Not if you’re afraid of everything,” says Erik.

Come on, Myra.
“What did you want to talk about?”

Suddenly Erik hauls off and kisses me. And honestly, I miss being kissed, so the kissing would be fine if I didn’t know what was on the other end of it. I pull away.

“Myra, come on,” he says. “Just breathe.” He takes my arm and pulls me forward, so now we’re sitting on a dry patch of grass by a bush. He starts kissing me again. Like I’m not even there. And suddenly it’s like that weekend when his parents were out of town. When things got all messed up.

And then I realize what I’m here for.

I was wearing his mom’s apron. I know how that sounds, but I always cook in an apron. It’s like my ironed money, I just like it better that way. He came up behind me while I was breaking the spaghetti noodles into the pot and put his long arms around me. When he held me like that it made me feel so good, like we were almost the same person. He said, “I love spending the day with you. I mean, the more I’m with you the more I want to be with you. It’s like time doesn’t even matter, except after a while we remember we’re hungry.”

We’d been hanging out in the hot tub, and we were starving. We stood there in his parents’ kitchen with the swirling granite countertops and chandeliers like you see in hotels, dripping water from our swimsuits on the kitchen rug. He started humming that song from the radio in my ear in little tenor pieces. I think I could have stayed like that for the rest of the day.

But then, after a minute or two, his hands started moving. Too much. It’s not like I was innocent of the whole thing. I’d been there most of the day enjoying it, until I wasn’t anymore. About the time he started pulling off my suit.

I shrugged him off. “I’m cooking.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to, Erik.” That’s what I said.

He kept smiling like I was kidding. “Don’t want to what?”

I moved and kept stirring the pasta. He turned off the stove. “Hey! Let’s go in my room. I’ll be good. Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers, like he was hilarious. Like he was doing this for an audience. Or maybe he was doing it for himself, so when he was eating Sunday dinner next week with his parents he could remember that he had said that to me right in the spot where his mom makes pot roast in her tacky sunflower apron that says “April Showers Bring May Flowers.”

He rubbed my shoulders. “Why are you like this, Myra? You act like you love me and then you just freeze up every time. I’m the one who’s going to hell, right?”

“Nobody’s going to hell. I just don’t want to do it on your kitchen floor.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

He took my arm and started walking to his bedroom.

The voice in my head was having a shouting match with the other voice that wasn’t saying words, just noises. Noises that told me I did love Erik, and I loved being with him. And there was nothing wrong with it and it’s normal and natural and blah, blah, blah.

I pulled my arm away. “I don’t want to do it in your bedroom either.”

“Just keep breathing, Myra. Don’t be scared.”

I was scared, but not like he thought. We’d been close to this before. But I was scared because I knew that this was going to make things different.

Then he kissed me again, pushing me into his room backward. And it didn’t feel good. It didn’t even seem like this was about me, or even Erik. It seemed like it was all about us being here and his parents being out of town so this was what we were supposed to do. It felt like a mistake.

“It’ll be fine.”

“I don’t want to.”

He pushed me hard onto his perfectly made bed, like my brothers would push me if they were kidding. But Erik wasn’t kidding. He didn’t even seem like Erik.

“What are you doing?” What I meant was,
What is wrong with you
? But I didn’t say that.

“What do you think?” He leaned over me and pulled down the top of my suit. He was smiling, like this was a big party. But everything felt wrong. Everything. Especially me.

I put my arms up, and without meaning to, hit him in the cheek. Not hard, but he stopped. Angry. Like I’d never seen him. He wouldn’t force me. But I’d humiliated him.

And then he said, “Are you too stupid to know how this works?”

Erik knows a lot of stuff I don’t. He knows how to win. He knows how to be smart. He knows how to make people think he’s a good guy. He knew I would pretend like this never happened to keep him. But, just for that moment, I knew enough to pull my suit back on and hang his mother’s apron on his bedroom door. I knew enough to run.

The finch is still barking behind us. Erik says, “Is this about Ariel? Because she’s not an issue.”

“I couldn’t care less about Ariel.”

“What are you afraid of then?” he says.

I take back my arm. I say, “What are
you
afraid of?”

He rests his arms on each side of me. “That you and me aren’t getting back together.” He sounds completely sincere. Framed in sky and grass, Erik is beautiful. And horrible.

I take a deep breath. “Did you dump me because I didn’t sleep with you?”

He shakes his head in disgust and moves away from me. “I just asked you to get back together with me and that’s how you treat me?”

“Did you?”

“Of course, I’m the bad guy. Not that you freaked out, or that you were clingy, or that I just needed some space.”

I can’t believe he’s saying these things to me just seconds after he asked me to get back together with him. The speed that he moves from one personality to the other, that’s what I felt at his house. That’s how I knew, but I didn’t realize what I knew. “I think you’re going to have to get someone else to work with on your proposal.”

He turns to face me. “What, like I need your help? Give me a break. I’m not cleaning out my sock drawer.”

I get up from the ground. I rub my mouth with the back of my dirty sleeve. I wish I could wipe off every slimy, hypocritical kiss. But more, I wish I could wipe away the memory of how much I treasured them.

I want to walk silently, stoically away. That’s what I would have done before. That’s not what I’m going to do now.

I take another long breath. “You’re a conceited, spoiled pretty boy.” His eyes get wide and then narrow. His perfect smile is gone. “This is not a bluff. If you ever try to push me down or throw yourself at me again, I’m going to tell the entire world that you tried to jump me in your mom’s apron. I mean, you so much as touch me and I’ll beat the pansy shit out of you myself.”

Erik says, “Nice mouth.”

“Goes with the rest of me.”

“Your words, not mine.”

I’m not listening to his words. I’m walking back to the car as fast as I can.

He yells, “No one would believe you anyway.”

I call over my shoulder, “No one but Sophie. Doesn’t her mother have lunch with your mother every Tuesday?”

A few seconds pass and then I hear Erik’s feet.

I’m within sight of the trailhead right when he catches up. “If you say a word to that bitch ... She’s the biggest gossip in three counties.”

“Nice mouth.”

He takes my hand and I shake it free. He’s not going to touch me again.

I hear a honking horn and look up. Ranger Bobbie is sitting in her truck. She waves.

Erik and I walk to the road and separate without speaking. I move quickly to Bobbie’s window. I don’t think she’s sightseeing.

“Where you been, missy?” She’s wearing an empty holster. Her gun is on the seat.

“I’m sorry if I’m late.”

Erik’s truck passes us.

“Damn. He’s driving the speed limit,” she says.

“Of course he is.”

She puts her gun back in the holster. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

My knees wobble. I lean on the window of the truck and try to act like I’m just being friendly. I look into Bobbie’s wrinkled, freckled, beautiful face. “I could use a ride back to my car,” I say. “And maybe some of your ice cream.”

“You can have a ride,” says Bobbie. “But you gotta carry a permit for the ice cream.”

Striking:

When a bird bites you to let you know who’s in charge. Not you.

The only good part about school for the next week is that nobody expects me to do much brain crunching anymore, except Ms. Miller. The rest of my teachers are as sick of school as I am. There’s the busy work that goes with the “transition” into “real life” (which doesn’t sound ominous or anything), but mostly school is just about showing up now.

Unfortunately, that means I have to show up in biology with Eric. But thankfully, Jonathon is all about this movie he’s making so he manages to keep me distracted.

“... then my cousin put his hand right in the blender and I had my camera totally focused on him the whole time.”

“How did his mom like you filming while her kid got maimed?”

“That was the best part. The tattoo on her forehead actually changed color. There was blood in the batter. Isn’t that a great title?” He holds out his hand so I can see it in lights. “‘Blood ... in the Batter!’ ”

Ms. Miller sighs loudly in our direction. Her hair looks grayer than it did when we started the school year. She points to her timeline on evolution. I thought we had covered this unit, but she seems to be circling back to it for some reason. “We don’t take up much room. In fact, we are hardly a blip. But we’ve changed the way the earth does business. For better or worse we have altered the earth’s chemistry.”

“If we blew everything up tomorrow, wouldn’t it all eventually go back to how it was before us?” says Jonathon. “All that stuff in the timeline?”

“Time only moves in one direction, Jonathon. It’s reasonable to think the earth would be less polluted without us around, but depending on what we did to exterminate ourselves, that might not matter much.”

“Isn’t that assuming that all this is just random?” says Erik.

“We aren’t talking about the purpose of the earth, Erik. Just the history.”

Jonathon studies the board for a change. “Like, I see what you’re saying, Ms. M, but how do you know any of this? How do you know that evolution isn’t some bogus theory. Like spontaneous generation? Or, like, how do we know that the way we figure out the age of everything isn’t wrong? Maybe our whole idea of the universe is wrong and we’re really just a dust speck on a giant cosmic dandelion.”

We all look at Ms. Miller.

“Well, aside from the fact that we haven’t found any evidence to support your ‘Horton Hears a Who’ Theory, there are some things we can almost know. I say ‘almost’ because nothing is absolute. Let’s look at evolution. What did Darwin discover that made him question the popular beliefs of his time?”

I say, “One thing he saw were finches that were adapted to each of the Galápagos Islands. It didn’t make sense to him that God had made each one of them from scratch.”

“Nicely put, Myra. Let’s make it personal. Do you see any evidence of evolution in your own family, or in your own life?”

“You mean like how my family gets taller with each generation because we marry hot, tall women?” says Jonathon. He nudges me and clucks.

Ms. Miller nods, frowning.

“Tall kids and finches with funny beaks don’t necessarily mean that God doesn’t exist,” says Erik.

“Of course not,” says Ms. Miller. “Many people, including Einstein, believe, or believed, there is a divine origin to evolution. But our understanding of evolution does suggest that a certain amount of change is inevitable and what direction that change takes can alter the future permanently.”

The tight T-shirt girl says, “Well, duh. We’d all die of boredom if nothing changed.”

See, there you go. Just when I thought I knew everything, I learn something in school.

The bell rings. Ms. Miller points to the reading for next time. “And I need to see Myra after class.”

The class says, “Ooh ...” in unison.