The Rules of Inheritance (21 page)

 

Colin buttons his pants and goes back into the kitchen, where I hear him open a bottle of beer.

 

He reappears in the doorway.

 

Well, he says, let's talk.

 

He listens calmly as I explain all the reasons I want to leave. I tell him how sick I am of him telling me what I can and can't do, can and can't wear, who I can and can't be friends with. I tell him that he scares me. I tell him that I am sad. So very sad.

 

He listens and he smokes, and we talk and after a while none of it seems so terrible and I can't remember why I've been so upset about it in the first place.

 

And just like that, things go back to normal for a while.

 

A few weeks later I am up early one morning so that I can catch a bus to the Cape. Colin is still asleep, and when I get out of the shower all our phones are blinking with messages. I scroll through the call history on my cell phone and see that it was Colin's father calling.

 

My heart drops. I imagine that his mother has been in an accident. Or worse, that my father is dead.

 

I push the buttons to call him back, but there is something wrong with the phone and the call won't go through. I try again and again until finally I hear ringing, then Colin's father's voice on the other end.

 

Are you okay?

 

What do you mean?

 

Turn on the television, he says.

 

In the living room I fumble with the remote, pushing the buttons until the screen pops into life.

 

The second tower has just been hit. Two great plumes of smoke pour upward into the sky.

1993, I AM FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

I
AM SITTING IN the back of Ms. Cusak's tenth-grade algebra class when I meet Zoe. Technically it's not the back since all the tables are arranged in a circle, but it's as far as I can get from the center of the room.

 

Ms. Cusak is the only thing I dislike about my new high school. Well, her and Algebra I. Sarah Cusak is in her midthirties, single, and overly tanned, with stringy hair. She is the basketball coach and the math teacher, and she constantly tries to impress upon us how cool it is to be thirty. She tells us stories about her apartment complex and the bars that she hangs out in on the weekends. She favors athletes over the weirder of us.

 

Ms. Cusak will attend my mother's funeral in two years, and the pity her presence evokes for me will somehow be worse than my shaved head and too-short dress.

 

It is my first month and I'm still trying to figure out where I fit in. It's a small school—there are only thirty-seven of us in the tenth grade—and the philosophy is one that encourages individualism and creativity. There are town meetings, independent studies, tons of art classes. There are kids with blue hair and some who wear pajamas to school every day. When I graduate, three years from now, I'll do so barefoot, with flowers in my hair.

 

My mother was immediately enchanted by the school, and even if I am intimidated at first, I will look back on my experience here with wonder and gratitude for years to come.

 

Zoe and I end up sitting next to each other in Ms. Cusak's class. Although our friendship builds slowly, it doesn't take long to discover that we both hate sports and math and, in turn, Ms. Cusak.

 

Zoe has just moved back to the States from Paris, where she's lived for the last five years because her stepfather works for the UN. She has a magnificent tangle of inky black hair and amber-colored eyes. At fifteen, Zoe is not what kids my age usually think is beautiful, but I think she is anyway.

 

She is exotic too, with her flared jeans and ratty cardigans. She is the first in our class to own a pair of Doc Martens, and she got them in Europe no less. Zoe has smoked a cigarette and she's been drunk before.

 

Zoe's parents are divorced. She hates her stepdad and misses her own all-too-absent father. She is full of rage and self-loathing and she speaks in a quiet whisper most of the time. All of these things I find out later, not in those first few weeks of school.

 

But they are things I can tell about her already, things that aren't surprising to hear come out of her heart-shaped lips.

 

Zoe is shy, and our friendship starts out slowly. I've always made friends easily, but with Zoe it is different. There are rules to abide by. She has to be handled gently. I have to be careful not to push her too hard, too quickly.

 

Otherwise she just turns off.

 

Her lips close and a lock of hair falls over her face and suddenly she's gone. I am intrigued and eventually obsessed. Something about Zoe blinds me to everything else. I feel about her the way I've never felt about a friend before: impatient and possessive, needy and desperate.

 

Although I have arrived at school already attached—Liz transferring in the same year—I drop her immediately for Zoe. I don't take the time to acknowledge how much this hurts her.

 

I can't.

 

In the last two years, since my parents' cancer diagnoses, something about me has changed. There is a rip inside me, a tiny tear in my fabric, a darkness waiting there, and everything about Zoe threatens to help me make sense of it.

 

We are living in Atlanta again, having given up on Florida offering our small family anything but misfortune. My mother has spent the last two years seeing shrinks, taking shark-cartilage capsules, and doing some kind of weird art therapy.

 

She spends hours in the basement, working tirelessly on a disturbing collection of decoupage masks, carefully laying them out to dry at the end of each day. At night she drinks red wine on the couch until she is sloppy, and my father sits at the dining room table, bills and papers spread out around him, trying to figure out how to support our family.

 

Although my father has been in remission since his radiation treatment, he is now seventy-three years old. His hair wisps around his ears in white tufts and he is slow to push himself up out of chairs. He leaves the house most mornings in a suit and tie, returns from each job interview defeated and deflated. Empty-handed.

 

I hide in my room, trying to just disappear from it all.

THIS IS THE YEAR that everything changes between me and my mother. One day I shift from wanting to be her, to wanting to be anything
but
her. It's not as conscious as that, of course, but we both feel it in the ways I begin to withdraw.

 

Later it will be hard for either of us to tell whether this individuation was a result of my mother's cancer or simply my perfectly timed teen angst. Whatever the case, I begin keeping secrets from her. Just little things, mostly omissions.

 

How was school today, sweetie?

 

Fine.

 

It was actually great, but I don't want her to know that. I don't want her to have the satisfaction.

 

Are you making new friends?

 

Uh-huh.

 

I'd love to hear about them sometime.

 

Maybe later.

 

I don't consider whether these responses might be hurtful to her. I only know that if I say more than a few words, the anger simmering just beneath my skin might gush forth. The rage living inside me is new. It's not something I've ever felt before and I don't know where it came from. I don't know enough to connect it to the most obvious source.

 

The first day I saw my mother in the hospital, a year and a half ago, it felt like something was being taken away. I walked down the long, sterile corridor, my hand in my father's, as we approached her room.

 

The room was washed in a soft, gray light and my mother's eyes were closed, her hair limp and shapeless against the pillow behind her head.

 

When she opened her eyes and spoke to me, it was in a voice that wasn't hers.

 

Hi, sweetie.

 

There were tears in her eyes and she reached out for me.

 

My father nudged me from behind, and I moved forward to embrace this woman who wasn't my mother.

 

A year and a half later and I'm still not sure that I trust her.

ZOE IS AN ARTIST. Her pencil never stops moving over a page. With just a flick of her oval-shaped fingernails against a no. 2, I'm looking into a mirror, a perfect portrait of myself, shaded in Zoe's lead, staring back at me while fractions and decimals swim by.

 

It's hypnotic to watch, and I am often left feeling kind of helpless.

 

We meet that first week of tenth grade, and by Halloween we are inseparable. Zoe spends almost every weekend at my house. We hole up in my basement room, and my mother makes occasional appearances, bringing offerings of brownies or pretzels. She likes that Zoe is an artist, but it only annoys me that they have a shared connection. I want Zoe for myself.

 

Zoe and I each have a boy at school that we are in love with. Hers is Ethan. He is a transfer too. Divorced parents; long, scraggly blond hair; a painter. He is mocking and cruel, and none of us can get enough of it.

 

Mine is Henry. Shy, sweet Henry, who likes to draw and has a permanent bump on his forehead.

 

Coincidentally, Henry and Ethan are best friends. I run cross-country with them after school. Zoe has third-period art class with them. We compare notes every night on the phone.

 

Neither I nor Zoe has any real experience with boys. I've kissed a couple of them, but they were awkward, fumbling experiences that weren't at all what I was expecting.

 

When it comes to boys, I've always been the same. I've always been the girl who gives too much too easily and expects the same in return. I don't remember which boy was first. In the beginning they were all the same: smooth and hairless and vulnerable, emulating or disobeying their fathers—there was nothing original about them yet.

 

Maybe there never is.

 

Suddenly—maybe it was the first week of sixth grade, I don't really remember—suddenly, I loved them all, their soft eyelashes and downy cheeks, the slight swelling in their biceps, the way their hair clung with sweat to their smooth, tan foreheads.

 

Then, back then, I could never be as beautiful as they were.

 

And suddenly an ache, this
ache
, filled me up so fast. And suddenly—it was all so sudden back then—I could not remember the time before the ache and I could see no way past the ache. So I followed the boys with my eyes, my skin warming as they walked past, sweaty and musky from gym class. I followed them at night when I closed my eyes and lay in my canopied bed, cicadas ringing at the windows.

 

I followed them like this, silently, throughout three torturous years of middle school and into the fringes of high school. Sometimes they seemed to notice my footsteps behind but I never spoke up. I was never sure where it was they were going, what I was following them toward.

 

Some part of me understood though, I know that now. I know that because the first time I reached the end of that path I knew exactly where we were.

 

The body has memories that begin before we do, I think.