Love Edy (6 page)

“
I told you not to go over there,”
Hassan said.
” I told you to wait for Mom. Did you really need to
meet him so bad? Was he all you dreamed?”

Lawrence shot him a curious look, before
sliding Edy’s food back across the table. She snatched it up and
stabbed it with her spork.

“
He’s a nice guy,”
Edy said with
enough enthusiasm to annoy.
“You’d like him. I sure do.”

Hassan’s gaze narrowed to a pinpoint. The
muscle in his jaw quivered. Every bad choice he’d ever made could
be attributed to that foul temper of his, a temper that meant he’d
draw blood first and only maybe mop up the mess thereafter.

“
Not everyone’s your friend,”
he
said.
“Even if they look it.
”

Edy’s gaze skated to Chloe, then the
cheerleaders, the redhead, and the football players that suddenly
couldn’t bear to be without him.

“
Not the same,”
Hassan said to her
sullen, deadpanning face. “It’s not,” he added, hesitant though in
his insistence.

Five

The new boy blocked the double row of water
fountains as he waited in the crowd-swollen hallway. All around
him, people swarmed, shoulder to shoulder, person to person, wall
to wall without relief. Wyatt slicked back blunted locks from his
eyes, only to have them flop back in. When they did, his hand
snatched through his hair a second time, scowl as comical as if he
meant to tear the hair from his eyes. His expression melted to
nothing when Sandra Jacobs passed.

He grabbed her by the arm. Edy started,
though Sandra turned on him with expectancy.

Of course, Edy thought. He’s a guy, so he’d
go for long hair, runway makeup, and an assertive amount of boobs.
Even if he had smiled at Edy as if she were buttered sunshine—this
girl—Sandra Jacobs—was the trophy worth having.

Words passed between Sandra and the new boy.
Hot words, heated words, bitter. Wyatt stabbed a finger in her
direction, accusing, and Sandra shook her head vehemently. When he
turned to stalk off, it was her that snatched him back. She made a
swipe at her face as if to rid it of tears.

“What in the . . .?” Hassan said. He’d come
up next to Edy for the sole purpose of staring, and now he looked
at her as if hoping she’d explain. She couldn’t. Others slowed and
gawked, though that did nothing to temper the performance.

Wyatt stormed off, this time past the grasp
of Sandra’s arms. She was all running eyeliner and black smears,
too much of a mess for class. She started for the girl’s bathroom
instead. Hassan darted off, abandoning Edy to catch her.

Every set of eyes shifted to them, to
Hassan’s private whispers for Sandra alone. To him reaching in his
backpack for the white towel he kept there—his sweat towel, Edy
called it—to him caking it with her clown mask. Edy couldn’t hear
their words, but she imagined they were intimate. She could picture
them lazing about and smiling at each other, lacing their fingers
together, doing more when they were alone.

Edy went back to her locker. She had class.
Class and ballet and no doubt something else she couldn’t remember.
She shoved books and notebooks into her backpack in no discernible
fashion, with no clue of what they were and whether she needed
them. When Edy pulled her book bag on, she strained under the
weight of scholarship.

Let them fight over Sandra. Let Hassan and
Wyatt and every other boy tear at each other over the obvious
beauty. She had a life to get on with.

Head high, gaze on a point decidedly past
Hassan, Edy strode in the direction of History, before backtracking
at the realization that she had English the next hour.

~~~

Every day after school, Edy sat in on some
bore of a meeting. Five days meant five different organizations,
each joined at her mother’s insistence. On that day—Math Club
day—she waded through polynomials for kicks before tearing out,
late for ballet, as usual. She’d pay for it—as usual. Anyway, Edy’s
ability to juggle all her mother’s wants alongside her own made
ballet possible.

She had to run. A cut through the 4-H club’s
composting site, upending a bin, had her back and apologizing and
burning more time. Toad, a boy whose real name she could never
remember, waved her off in red faced annoyance—facilitating her
trip over a spade.
Dang it.
How both a graceful ballerina
and an oaf could occupy the same body she’d never know.

In ballet, Edy felt what she never did
elsewhere—whole, beautiful and accomplished. While tardiness had
earned her the ire of her ballet instructor, Madame Louis, wrath
became but a memory the moment she began to dance.

She didn’t feel as others did, move as
others did, or even allow her heart to beat as another’s would,
once the music began. Every pore in her bloomed with the promise of
movement, and once realized, she transcended all of life’s
imperfections. She was dandelion dust in the wind, ashes in ocean
water. She’d mastered her body and challenged it, challenged it to
bend, twist, warp and defy gravity in gracefully daring ways. Edy
was the thunder of a hurricane and the weightlessness of yesterday.
Dance felt like her destiny.

Until practice ended and reality struck
again.

She made it home with time enough to shower
before heading over to Hassan’s for dinner. Edy stopped at the
sight of her mother’s Lexus in the drive. A touch to the hood
brought her hand away cool. She’d been in grade school the last
time her mother made it home before her and food poisoning had been
the blame. Edy unlocked the front door and eased in, with the dread
of a girl who came home to find her door ajar. Ballet had run over
in accordance with her tardiness; it was the way of Madame Louis.
She was home later than she should have been and her mom would
sling the hammer for it, regardless of blame.

Breath held, Edy eased inside. On turning to
close the door behind her, she jumped at the figure on the
couch.

Hassan pressed a finger to his lips. “Shh,”
he said.

Even though he had a key to the place, it
seemed wrong for him to lurk in the shadows, unannounced. Still,
Edy’s attention turned; keen to hear whatever required her
silence.

“There’s confusion about what did and didn’t
happen,” her mother said from an adjacent room. “No more than that
at this point.”

“There’s more than confusion, Rebecca. There
are outright accusations,” came a second voice. Edy recognized it
as Kyle Lawson’s dad, Cam, a long time friend of her mother’s.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Cam, please. How do you find the energy to
worry so? I don’t give rumors much thought,” Edy’s mother said.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Do you?” her mother said.

Cam hesitated. “Maybe.”

Edy and Hassan exchanged a frown.

“You always did confuse wishful thinking
with reality,” her mother said.

“Rebecca. We have to know. Our best currency
is knowing,” said Cam.

“So get the police report and be done with
it. Speculation is garbage, as is worry,” her mother said.

“Let me do this my way,” Cam said. “Let me
deal with him.”

“Oh be quiet,” she snapped. “Witch hunts are
so passé. And where’s that keen ear of yours? We haven’t been alone
in this house for at least ten minutes.”

Edy and Hassan flung into action, tearing
open her backpack and spilling the contents on the couch. Both
snatched for a random book and notebook, before spreading out
papers on the cushion between them. Edy’s mother and Cam stepped
into the hallway; just as Edy realized her Latin book sat upside
down in Hassan’s hand. She snatched it from him, heaved the history
book she held at him, and squinted in what she hoped looked like a
mimicry of real, serious scholarship.

Out the corner of Edy’s eye, she watched her
mother’s beige heels as they strode down the hall and out the door,
never pausing to acknowledge them. Cam did the same.

“What was that about?” Edy said the second
they were gone.

“Politics, what else? They’re going to burn
some sucker alive.” Hassan tossed aside his book.

He gave her a once over, gaze snagging for a
second as he did.

“What?” Edy looked down at herself. She
blushed, before remembering the way he’d rushed to Sandra Jacob
said. Heat drained from her face.

“You’re late,” Hassan said. “Mom cooked your
favorite, butter chicken. It’s probably cold by now.”

He went for the door without looking back.
Edy followed, with the taste of his mother’s heavy handed spices
already on her lips.

~~~

The next day, Edy carried a brown bag lunch
of leftovers into the cafeteria. On entering, she spied not just
the redhead Aimee at the “it” table, but Sandra Jacobs and Eva
Meadows, too. She wasn’t in the mood, she realized, and set her
eyes on Wyatt Green with the thought. She passed Hassan and the
Dysons, in line, and smirked at the weight of their glares. Edy sat
down before the lone boy, aware that they had the attention of the
room.

Wyatt sat up straighter.

“Remember me?” Edy said.

“Of course,” he breathed. He ran a hand down
the front of his shirt, another through his tangle of wheat-colored
locks and again corrected his posture.

Edy pulled out her lunch, peeled back the
lid, and sniffed indulgently. At the sight of Wyatt watching, she
extended the container to him.

“I . . .don’t know what it is,” he said.

“Butter chicken,” she said.

He stared. She went on to explain how it was
only the most famous Indian dish known to man and the cultural
equivalent of a hamburger. “Only tastier,” she said and dug in.

When she cautioned a glance up, it was to
see Hassan’s darkened face, unwavering in his devotion to glaring
at them.
Good
, Edy thought.
Feel jaded and set
aside.

Wyatt had asked her something. Something
about going to India. She told him about summering there three
years in a row, figuring it would answer whatever question he’d
had. As she spoke, she made a point of looking at Hassan. He’d
started in on his chicken, picking absentmindedly, when the redhead
leaned over and said something in his ear.

“Edy?” Wyatt said. He’d spoken her name with
the weight of expectation. She racked her memory bank for the last
vestiges of conversation. “India” was all she could come up
with.

“I go there with his family,” Edy inclined
her head in Hassan’s direction. “But we haven’t been in years.”

Wyatt’s gaze skidded apprehensively to the
table of jocks and then back again. The redhead said something and
Hassan laughed.

Edy made a point of looking away. “Where do
you summer?” she said brightly.

Wyatt’s cheeks flooded with color. “We went
to the Jersey Shore once. For a week, not a summer.” He looked
around as if desperate for assistance. “It was my first time at the
beach.”

Edy broke wide into a grin. Seconds slid
home into a minute before it melted from her face.

Stupid. Stupider than stupid.

The image of the battered pickup truck came
back to her, the clothes in the CVS bag, the tattered old backpack.
He sat before her in a sickly pale polo, rinsed to a listless
yellow.

Cruel.

“God. You must hate everyone.” Edy
remembered making him out to be the hired help, a move no better
than the rumors encircling his arrival—that he was scum, a
squatter, a sidewalk-sleeping meth addict whose dad was wanted for
a convenience store robbery in Hoboken. Okay, so maybe her
assumption was a bit better, but all of it stunk of xenophobia and
elitism. He was an
other
and a poor other at that, promised
obscurity if not outright torment. No doubt, she’d pay some price
just for sitting with him.

“Chaterdee,” he said simply.

“What?” She’d been shaken from her reverie
again.

“It’s where I’m from. You wanted to know,
didn’t you? Where I came from? I’m from Chaterdee. A soot-filled
town on the edge of Pawtucket, where steel mills blot out the
sun.”

He met Edy with a steady, shy smile of his
own.

“You’re different,” he said. “From the other
people around here.”

She looked up in surprise.

“You didn’t hiss when I told you where I’m
from.”

He took a spork to his roasted chicken,
tearing off a bit of flesh before popping it into his mouth.

“I have to admit that Boston’s much nicer,”
Wyatt said. “And I’m liking it more every day.” His gaze slid from
her face downward, before shooting up as if caught falling
asleep.

Edy blushed and dug into her chicken.
Somehow, she didn’t think he meant his new view of the sun.

~~~

Wyatt walked Edy Phelps home that day. The
girl with wide button eyes and the lines of a dancer, the girl so
far above anyone her age that she submitted papers on political
philosophy and chattered aimlessly about places he hadn’t the money
to dream of.
That
girl had spent an hour, maybe more, on a
roundabout route with Wyatt that only eventually led home. They
talked of school and Chaterdee, Boston and dance, and
oh
,
did she unravel when the talk turned to dance, companies and
schools of thought, productions and most routines. He didn’t care,
and he absolutely cared. He hadn’t even known that both were
possible.

Wyatt and Edy parted for the pair of homes
facing each other with reluctance. During their walk, she’d gushed
about ballet, as though clinging to every thought she’d ever had
about every performance until the moment they’d met. Wyatt listened
when he could and let his thoughts wander when they did—swept by
her voice and the sudden way she touched his shoulder or his arm
with a thought. At his last school, he’d been an outcast. An early
and gruesome crop of acne on his face and torso made most steer
clear, and those who didn’t, well, they certainly didn’t touch him.
And though some of the reddening had cleared, his outbreaks could
still be frequent and obnoxious.