Watch Me Disappear (23 page)

I flip open my phone. I am not supposed to send text messages. It isn’t part of my plan and every message will be tallied on the bill that my parents will scrutinize when it comes. I don’t care.

“U were right,” I type and select Maura’s number.

A few minutes later, my phone vibrates. I read Maura’s response. “What r u talking about? Where r u?”

“Missy and Paul suck,” I write back.

A conversation carried on via text can take a ridiculously long time. I spend the entire night sitting by that window, my hands and feet numb from the cold, watching the sky slowly drain from black to white as dawn approaches, texting back and forth with Maura. I can’t call her—that would wake Missy. And Maura doesn’t seem to mind being up all night or texting rather than talking. Every message I send her gets a response. I am going to be in big trouble when the phone bill comes.

*          *          *

I finally crawl back into bed around four o’clock and manage to sleep, but I am already awake when Missy gets up around nine. I smell breakfast cooking downstairs. Waffles and coffee—the aroma makes my stomach turn. Staying up all night doesn’t agree with me.

“I have something for you,” Missy says, getting up and rummaging around in her dresser. “I meant to give it to you last night.”

She turns toward me with a small box wrapped up in Christmas paper. I don’t have anything for her. My mother actually suggested that I buy Missy a present as it is rude to attend a Christmas party empty-handed, but I told her she had no clue about being a teenager. Stupid me.

“You didn’t have to,” I say.

“I know. But I wanted to get you a little Christmas present,” she says, handing me the box.

“But I don’t have anything for you,” I say.

“I’m not giving you a gift because I want something,” she says. “It’s funny, last week at church our minister was talking about just this, how hard it is sometimes to receive a gift, but the truest gifts are given freely, don’t you think?” she asks, pulling her tangled hair back into a messy pony tail and plopping down beside me on the bed.

I open the package. Inside is a silver charm bracelet with three charms: a book, a music note, and the number 12. “Thank you,” I say, studying the pieces.

“I tried to pick good ones,” she says. “The book since you love books and the library was our excuse for meeting, the music note since we first really got to hang out at that concert, and the 12, well, that one is obvious. Class of 2012.”

“It’s great,” I say, setting it back in the box.

“Let me help you put it on,” she says, taking the bracelet and opening the clasp.

I hold out my arm and she secures it, and then she leans forward and gives me a hug.

“I’m so glad we met,” she says. “You are the best friend I’ve had since starting high school.”

What reply can I give except to echo the sentiment? But all I can think about is Maura, and what I mostly feel toward Missy is resentment. She’s too perfect. She’s too sweet. And she is trying way too hard to make up for the fact that she stole Paul from me.

When I get home that afternoon, I put the bracelet in its box in the back of my closet. It isn’t my style at all.

Chapter 16

My brother finally arrives home late on December 23
^rd
. I thought I would have the pleasure of his company—the pleasant buffer between myself and my mother, the comfort of being able to be completely myself with someone—for a couple of weeks until he had to head back to school, but it turns out he and Jen have plans for New Year’s. He is leaving again on the 29
^th
to spend the end of his break with her and her family. On top of all of my other grievances, to learn that I can’t even count on my brother is too much. Everyone sucks.

On Christmas Eve we drive to Gram’s to trim her tree. She has some superstition about the tree that includes waiting until December 24
^th
to decorate it, even though that means it will hardly be up for any time at all. Each year we arrive around four o’clock, the afternoon already dark with the short days of winter, and decorate the tree while eating her amazing cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to oldies versions of Christmas carols. It is my favorite part of Christmas. Sometimes neighbors drop in with more goodies, and it feels to me the way Christmas is supposed to feel—people coming together to fill the dark, cold, gloomy days with light and laughter.

But this year my heart isn’t in it. I haven’t managed to get back on a normal sleep pattern after my all-nighter at Missy’s, and I am annoyed at Jeff for making plans that messed up my vision of our vacation time together. The gap between me and Jeff has grown in the past year. When he first went to college, I still talked to him a couple of times a week on the phone or online, and he used to come home to visit more often, but since we moved in June, I’ve barely spoken to him once a month. I’m not sure what the connection is between our move and my sudden distance from Jeff—sure, the physical distance between us is greater, but even before we moved, we lived a full day’s drive from Jeff’s school. Really, I suppose, the problem is that he is a junior in college, a half step from independent adulthood, while I am still just a kid in high school. Besides, he has a girlfriend, and he’d rather spend time with her than chat with his sister online or call home.

While Jeff talks Gram’s ear off, my mother fusses over the antique ornaments, cautioning us on how to handle them and where to hang them so they won’t fall and break. My father wanders in and out of the kitchen where he’s making deviled crabs and all the fixings, a job that always falls to him and the only time of year he ever cooks anything. I eat cookies and half-heartedly hang ornaments. Hang a star, eat a cookie; hang an angel, eat a cookie; hang a ball, drink some eggnog, eat a cookie. Maura and I have decided we are going to go on a diet right after the holidays, so I eat like it is my last supper. By the time we’re done with the tree and ready for dinner, I am so full I can barely stand to look at the food before me.

After dinner, as always, we watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
and then walk down the block and around the corner to St. John’s Cathedral for midnight Mass. We have to get there about an hour early to get a seat. It is hot in the crowded church, and I sit there, stuffed and bleary-eyed between my grandmother and my brother, trying not to fall asleep. I can see the girl in the pew in front of me texting and I am jealous, both that her parents seem not to mind that she is ignoring the Mass and that she has someone to send messages to at midnight on Christmas Eve.

Missy and her family have gone to visit Anna’s family in Virginia for Christmas, and I haven’t talked to her since I left her house Saturday morning. It is a relief, not having to talk to her, not having to pretend I am happy for her and Paul, and not having to feel guilty for my duplicity.

I know Paul is also at midnight Mass tonight, but at Immaculate Conception, across town. I have thought about calling him a few times since Missy left, but I don’t have the nerve.

And then, of course, there’s Maura. She told me her family doesn’t do much on Christmas Eve. They usually just sit around watching old Christmas cartoons and claymation movies. Probably if I texted her right now, she would instantly write back and would keep my thumbs in motion for the entire Mass.

How has it happened? How have I ended up seeing Maura as someone I can count on? A few months ago I never would have imagined the possibility.

*          *          *

On the Monday after New Year’s, I finally get my license. I take the test with hands shaking from nerves and hunger. The diet Maura prescribed for us mostly involves not eating. But I pass, amazingly, despite the fact that I’ve had only minimal practice. Tuesday morning, my mom hands me the keys to her car when I come down to breakfast.

“Don’t think you’ll be driving yourself every day,” she says.

I grab my lunch from the counter, wrap my bagel in a paper towel, and run out the door, my mother hollering at me about not eating while driving. I get in the car and then call Maura to say that I don’t need a ride. As I only have a junior operator’s license, I technically can’t give her a ride, so although we are leaving from houses all of twenty feet apart and are headed to the same destination, we have to take separate cars. I don’t know if my parents are aware of the annoying Massachusetts law forbidding teenagers from driving other teenagers for six months after getting their licenses. It seems to me that most kids break that rule all the time. They just drive more carefully to avoid getting pulled over. Of course, a lot of other seniors have had their licenses much longer than six months, so they don’t have to worry at all. Anyway, I know Maura will be expecting me to start driving her around soon, and I wonder if my parents will let me or if I’ll have to lie. Then again, I am becoming a good liar, so it won’t really matter either way.

First period I feel my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. It’s history class. The teacher is so old I think he has firsthand experience of the Civil War. I sit in the last row near the back of the room. He’ll never see me. I slip the phone out of my pocket and hold it low on my lap.

“Mel’s diner after school? U can drive!” reads a text message from Maura.

I hadn’t lingered at home that morning long enough to know when my mother expected me home. I’m sure she won’t be happy about not having a car all afternoon, not that she has anywhere to go, but that’s just how she is.

“Have to get the car back to mom,” I answer, my heart pounding as I glance around to make sure no one is paying attention to my illicit texting.

“OK but this wkend u r my ride,” Maura replies. I shut off my phone and slip it back into my pocket. I’ve had enough rule breaking for one day, and when I do see Maura I am going to have to remind her to stop texting me. My phone bill is due any day and my parents are going to be pissed.

*          *          *

I am happy when second quarter ends in the middle of January. It means the end of art class, which is only a half-year elective. And without art class, I don’t have to see Paul at all, as long as I don’t look his way in the cafeteria. I was supposed to take psychology second semester, but I told my guidance counselor that I had realized that with my heavy load of AP classes, I should just take a study. She glanced at my sinking second quarter grades, raised an eyebrow, and agreed. Study hall, for the first time in my life. Of course, I won’t get much studying done, because Maura and I are going to be free the same period.

The Friday after the quarter ends, I go out with Maura to celebrate the unofficial end of all effort in school—colleges won’t be seeing our grades again until they’ve already accepted us. I get home just in time to make curfew, but then I am up half the night anyway, mostly wondering if I did enough to get into any of the colleges I applied to.

When I come downstairs Saturday morning, my parents are reading the newspaper in the living room. I grab a bowl of cereal and sit down at the bar in the kitchen. As soon as I do, my mother folds her section of the paper and comes to stand across from me.

“I’m not crazy about this new sleep schedule you’re on,” she says.

I don’t say anything. I just shovel another bite of cereal into my mouth.

“You’ve never been one to sleep half the day.”

“I’ve just been really tired,” I say, wiping milk from my chin.

“From all the homework you’ve been doing?” she asks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I haven’t seen you crack a book since Thanksgiving.”

“I’m doing fine in school,” I say, getting up to put my bowl in the sink.

“Report cards come out this week, so we’ll see, won’t we?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We will.”

“Mrs. Morgan called this morning.”

I feel blood rushing to my face. My mother wouldn’t bother telling me her friend called if it didn’t somehow involve me and something I’ve done wrong.

“She’s worried about Maura,” my mother says, her tone softening. “That girl is giving her parents a world of grief.”

I don’t say anything. I’m waiting to see where this is going.

“Has she seemed okay to you?” she asks. “I told Mrs. Morgan I’d talk to you, see if you knew if anything was up.”

“She’s seemed fine to me. Same as ever.”

“She hasn’t been acting differently? Has she seemed depressed?”

I shake my head.

“Do you think she’s taking drugs?” my mother asks gravely.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I need to ask. It’s what mothers do.”

“I’d better go do my homework,” I say.

My mother regards me. “So you think Maura is totally fine, and there’s no particular reason you two were exchanging millions of text messages over Christmas break and racking up this ridiculous phone bill,” she says, tossing the pages of my phone bill onto the kitchen table.

I am defeated. I knew I’d have to face this down eventually.

“Hand over your phone,” she says, extending her arm toward me, palm up.

I place the phone in it. I wonder if my parents are savvy enough to know how to read my text messages. I don’t think they are, but I’m not certain. Why did I leave all those messages in the phone?

“Two weeks,” she says. “And then we’ll talk about whether or not you can have it back.”

I head back upstairs to pretend to do my homework.

*          *          *

Before two weeks are up, my parents realize it terrifies them to let me take the car without having a cell phone, so I get it back, but only when I have the car, and they called the phone company and disabled all text messaging. Still, I have the car a lot, so I have my phone a lot. They can try to revoke my freedoms, but every day I am getting one step closer to the end of high school—the end of their rules.

Thursday afternoons I am supposed to have calculus study group. The AP exam is looming ever closer. Missy got everyone on board for weekly study sessions back before Christmas. I need the help. The weeks are flying by so fast I can barely keep track of the date, and now it’s February. I am starting to wonder if I’ll even pass third quarter, let alone do well on the exam, but I blow off study group all the time anyway. Week after week, I let my mom think I am working hard on math, and she lets me take the car so I can stay late after school. Then, instead of studying, Maura and I go to Mel’s Diner or the mall. The minute the last bell rings, I dash to my car, which I park beside Maura’s at the back of the student lot, and follow her wherever she wants. The first time I followed Maura to the mall was the first time I ever drove above eighty miles per hour. I suspect Maura was pushing it, driving faster than normal, just to see if I would keep up. I clutched the wheel with a death grip, but I kept pace.