Текст книги "Just One Day"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Seventeen

DECEMBER

Cancún, Mexico

It has become tradition when we arrive in Cancún for Melanie and me to strip to our bathing suits as soon as we get into the condo and run to the beach for an inaugural swim. It’s like our vacation baptism. We’ve done it for every one of the last nine years we’ve come down here.

But this year, when Melanie digs through her suitcase for a bikini, I go to the little desk next to the kitchen that normally holds nothing but cookbooks and prop open my textbooks. Every day, from four to six, I am to have study hall. I get New Year’s Day off, but that’s it. These are the terms of my parole.

I kept my grades a secret throughout the entire semester, so when the report cards showed up at the end of the term, it was kind of a shocker. I’d tried. I really had. After my midterms were so dismal, I’d tried harder, but it wasn’t like my bad grades were a result of slacking off. Or skipping classes. Or partying.

But I might as well have been partying, given how tired I was all the time. It didn’t matter if I got ten hours of sleep the night before—once I set foot in the lecture hall and the professor started droning on about wave motion, writing up equations on the monitor, the numbers would start dancing before my eyes and then I’d feel my lids grow heavy, and I’d wake to other students tripping over my legs to get to their next class.

During Reading Week, I drank so much espresso that I got no sleep at all, as if I was using up all the credits from the class naps. I crammed as hard as I could, but by that point, I’d fallen so behind, I was beyond help.

Given all that, I thought it was miraculous I finished the semester with a 2.7.

Needless to say, my parents thought otherwise.

When my grades came through last week, they flipped out. And when my parents flip out, they don’t yell—they get quiet. But their disappointment and anger is deafening.

“What do you think we should do about this, Allyson?” they asked me as we sat at the dining room table, as if they were truly soliciting my opinion. Then they presented two options. We could cancel the trip, which would be terribly unfair for the rest of them, or I could agree to go under certain conditions.

Melanie shoots me sympathy looks as she disappears to change into her suit. Part of me wishes she’d boycott the beach in solidarity, though I know that’s selfish, but it seems like something the old Melanie would’ve done.

But this is the new Melanie. Or the new, new Melanie. In the month since Thanksgiving, she looks totally different. Again. She cut her hair all asymmetrical and fringy, and she got a nose ring, which her parents gave her crap about until she told them it was between that and a tattoo. Now that she’s changed into a bikini, I see that she’s let her armpit hair grow, though her hair is so fine and blond, it barely shows.

“Bye,” she mouths as she slips out the front door, her mom, Susan, thrusting a tube of SPF-40 into her hands. My mom is digging through a suitcase for her special magnifying glass so she can check all mattresses for bedbugs. When she finds it, she walks by me and pretends to look at my chem book with it. I snap the book shut. She gives me a pissy look.

“You think I want to be your warden? I thought I’d have all this free time now that you’re in college, but it’s like keeping you on track is its own full-time job.”

Who asked you to keep me on track?I fume. In my head. But I bite my lip and open the chemistry textbook out and dutifully reread the first chapters as Mom has instructed me to do for catch-up. They make no more sense to me now than they did the first time I attempted them.

That night, we all six go out to dinner at the Mexican restaurant, one of the eight restaurants attached to the resort. We go here every year for our first night out. The waiters wear giant sombreros, and there’s a traveling mariachi band, but the food tastes the same as it does at El Torrito back home. When the waiter takes our drink orders, Melanie asks for a beer.

The parents gawk at her.

“We’re legal to drink here,” she says casually.

Mom gives Susan a look. “I don’t think that’s wise,” Mom says.

“Why not?” I challenge.

“If you want my opinion, it has to less to do with the age than the expectation. You’ve grown up with a drinking age of twenty-one, so you’re not necessarily prepared for drinking now,” is Susan’s therapist answer.

“I’m sorry, but did you not go to college?” I ask. “I can’t imagine it’s changed that much. Do you not remember how all anyone does is drink?”

My parents look at each other, then at Susan and Steve.

“Is that’s what going on with you? Have you been drinking too much at school?” Dad asks.

Melanie laughs so hard that the special bottled water Mom brings sprays through her nose. “I’m sorry, Frank, but do you not even know Allyson?” They continue to stare. “On the tour last summer, everyone drank.” There is a moment of shocked silence. “Oh, spare me! The legal drinking age in Europe is eighteen! Anyhow, everyone drank but Allyson. She’s totally straight and narrow. And you’re asking if she’s boozing it up at college? That’s ludicrous.”

My dad stares at me, then at Melanie. “We’re just trying to understand what’s going on with her. Why she got a two-seven GPA.”

Now it’s Melanie’s turn to gawk. “You got a two-seven?”She clamps her hand over her lips and mouths, “Sorry.” The look she gives me is one part surprise, one part respect.

“Melanie got a three-point-eight,” Mom brags.

“Yes, Melanie is a genius, and I am an idiot. It’s official.”

Melanie looks wounded. “I go to the Gallatin School. Everyone gets As,” she says apologetically.

“And Melanie probably drinks,” I say, knowing full well she does.

She looks nervous for a second. “Of course I do. I don’t pass out or anything. But it’s college. I drink. Everyone drinks.”

“I don’t,” I say. “And Melanie has the A average, and I have the C, so maybe I should go on a few benders and things will even out. Maybe that’s a much better idea than this stupid study hall you have me in.”

I’m really into this now, which is kind of crazy, because I don’t even want a beer. One of the few things I like about this restaurant is the virgin margaritas—they’re made with fresh fruit.

Mom turns to me, her mouth ready to catch some flies. “Allyson, do you have a drinking problem?”

I smack my hand to my head. “Mother, do you have a hearing problem? Because I don’t know that you heard a word I said.”

“I think she’s saying that you might ease up a little and let them have a beer with dinner,” Susan says.

“Thank you!” I say to Susan.

My mom looks to my dad. “Let the girls have a beer,” he says expansively as he waves the waiter back over and asks for a couple of Tecates.

It’s a victory of sorts. Except that I don’t actually like beer, so in the end, I have to pretend to sip from mine as it grows sweaty on the table, and I don’t order the virgin margarita I really wanted.

_ _ _

The next day, Melanie and I are sitting at the giant pool together. It’s the first time we’ve managed to be alone since we got here.

“I think we should do something different,” she says.

“Me too,” I say. “Every year we come down here and we do the same things. We go to the same frigging ruins, even. Tulum is nice, but I was thinking we could branch out. Talk our parents into going somewhere new.”

“Like swimming with the dolphins?” Melanie asks.

Dolphin swimming is different, but it’s not what I’m after. Yesterday, I was looking at the map of the Yucatán Peninsula in the lobby, and some of the ruins are inland, more off the beaten path. Maybe we’d find a bit more of the real Mexico. “I was thinking we could go to Coba or Chichén Itzá. Different ruins.”

“Oh, you’re so wild,” Melanie teases. She takes a slurp of iced tea. “Anyhow, I’m talking about New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh. You mean you don’t want to do the Macarena with Johnny Maximo?” Johnny Maximo is this washed-up Mexican movie star who now has some job with the resort. All the mothers love him because he’s handsome and macho and is always pretending to mistake them for our sisters.

“Anything but the Macarena!” Melanie puts down her book, something by Rita Mae Brown that looks like it’s for school but Melanie says is not. “One of the bartenders told me about some big party on the beach in Puerto Morelos. It’s a local thing, though he says lots of tourists come, but people like us. Young people. There’s going to be a Mexican reggae band, which sounds bizarre. In a good way.”

“You’re just looking for a guy under sixty to make out with come midnight.”

Melanie shrugs. “Under sixty, yes. A guy? Maybe not.” She gives me a look.

“What?”

“I’ve sort of being doing the girl thing.”

“What?!” It comes out a shout. “Sorry. Since when?”

“Since right after Thanksgiving. There was this one girl and we met in film theory class and we were friends and one night we went out and it just happened.”

I look at the new haircut, the nose ring, the hairy armpits. It all makes sense. “So, are you a lesbian now?”

“I prefer not to label it,” she says, somewhat sanctimoniously, the implication being that Ineed to label everything. She’sthe one who’s constantly branding herself: Mel, Mel 2.0. Punk-rock librarian. I ask her girlfriend’s name. She tells me they’re not into defining it like that, but her name is Zanne.

“Is that with an X?”

“ Z.Short for Suzanne.”

Doesn’t anybody use a real name anymore?

“Don’t tell my parents, okay? You know my mom. She’d make us process it and talk about it as a phase of my development. I want to make sure this is more than a fling before I subject myself to that.”

“Please, you don’t have to tell me about parental overanalysis.”

She pushes her sunglasses up her nose and turns to me. “Yeah, so what’s that all about?”

“What do you mean? You’ve met my parents. Is there a part of my life they’re notinvolved in? They must be freaking out to not have their fingers literally in every aspect of what I’m doing.”

“I know. And when I heard about the study hall, I figured it was that. I thought maybe you had a low B average. But a two—point—seven? Really?”

“Don’t youstart on me.”

“I’m not. I’m just surprised. You’ve always been such a kick-ass student. I don’t get it.” She takes a loud slurp of her mostly melted iced tea. “The Therapist says you’re depressed.”

“Your mom? She told you that?”

“I heard her mention it to your mom.”

“What did my mom say?”

“That you weren’t depressed. That you were pouting because you weren’t used to being punished. Sometimes I really want to smack your mom.”

“You and me both.”

“Anyhow, later on my mom asked me if Ithought you were depressed.”

“And what’d you tell her?”

“I said lots of people have a hard time freshman year.” She gives me a sharp look from behind her dark glasses. “I couldn’t tell her the truth, could I? That I thought you were still pining for some guy you had a one-night stand with in Paris.”

I pause, listening to the shriek of a little kid jumping off the high dive. When Melanie and I were little, we used to hold hands and jump together, over and over again.

“But what if it’s not him? Not Willem.” It’s weird saying his name out loud. Here. After embargoing it for so long. Willem. I scarcely even allow myself to think it in my head.

“Don’t tell me another guy dicked you over!”

“No! I’m talking about me.”

“You?”

“It’s, like, the me I was that day. I was different somehow.”

“Different? How?”

“I was Lulu.”

“But that was just a name. Just pretend.”

Maybe it was. But still, that whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I’ve been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I’d never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find that door.

“It didn’t feel pretend,” I tell Melanie.

Melanie arranges her face in sympathy. “Oh, sweetie. It’s because you were all hopped up on the fumes of infatuation. And Paris. But people don’t change overnight. Especially you. You’re Allyson. You’re so solid. It’s one of the things I love about you—how reliably youare.”

I want to protest. What about transformations? What about the reinvention she’s always going on about? Are those only reserved for her? Is there a different standard for me?

“You know what you need? Some Ani DeFranco.” She pulls out her iPhone and shoves the buds in my ears, and as Ani goes on about finding your voice and making it heard, I feel so frustrated with myself. Like I want to pull my skin wide open and step out of it. I scrape my feet against the hot cement floor and sigh, wishing there was someone I could explain this to. Someone who might understand what I’m feeling.

And for one small second, I do imagine the person I could talk to, about finding this door, and losing it. He would understand.

But that’s the one door that needs to stay shut.

Eighteen

Somehow, using the same we’re-adults-you-have-to-treat-us-that-way argument from the Beer Dinner, plus promising to hire a hotel-approved taxi for the entire night, Melanie and I manage to procure parental permission to go to that New Year’s Eve party. It’s being held on a narrow crescent of sand, all lit up with tiki torches, and at ten o’clock, it’s already slamming. There is a low stage on which the touted Mexican reggae band will play, though right now a d.j. is playing techno.

There are several giant piles of discarded shoes. Melanie tosses off her bright-orange flip-flops. I hesitate before taking off my less conspicuous black leather sandals, hoping I’ll find them again, because if I lose anything else, I swear I will never hear the end of it.

“Quite the bacchanal,” Melanie says approvingly, nodding to the guys in swim trunks holding bottles of tequila by the neck, the girls in sarongs with their hair freshly cornrowed. There are even actual Mexicans here, the guys smartly dressed in sheer white shirts, hair slicked back, and the girls in fancy party dresses, cut up to there, legs long and brown.

“Dance first or drink first?”

I don’t want to dance. So I say drink. We line up at the packed bar. Behind us is a group of French-speaking people, which makes me do a double take. There’s hardly anyone but Americans at our hotel, but of course people from everywhere come to Mexico.

“Here.” Melanie shoves a drink into my hand. It’s in a hollowed-out piece of pineapple. I take a sniff. It smells like suntan lotion. It is sweet and warm and burns slightly going down. “Good girl.”

I think of Ms. Foley. “Don’t call me that.”

“Bad girl.”

“I’m not that either.”

She looks peeved. “Nothing girl.”

We drink our drinks in silence, taking in the growing party. “Let’s dance,” Melanie says, yanking me toward the ring of sand that has been allocated as the dance floor.

I shake my head. “Maybe later.”

And there’s that sigh again. “Are you going to be like this all night?”

“Like what?” I think of what she called me on the tour– adventure averse—and what she said at the pool. “So like me? I thought that’s what you lovedabout me.”

“What is your problem? You’ve had a stick up your ass this whole trip! It’s not my fault your mom is Study-Hall Nazi.”

“No, but it is your fault for making me feel like crap because I don’t want to dance. I hate techno. I have alwayshated techno, so you should know that, what with me being so reliably me.”

“Fine. Why don’t you be reliably you and sit on the sidelines while I dance.”

“Fine.”

She leaves me on the perimeter of the circle and goes off and just starts dancing with random people. First she dances with some guy with dreadlocks and then turns and dances with a girl with super-short hair. She seems to be having a fine time out there, swirling, twirling, and it strikes me that if I didn’t already know her, she would no longer be someone I would know.

I watch her for at least twenty minutes. In between the monotonous techno songs, she talks to other people, laughs. After a half hour, I’m getting a headache. I try to catch her eye, but I eventually give up and slip away.

The party stretches all the way down the curve of the water—and into it—where a bunch of people are skinny-dipping in the moonlit sea. A little way’s farther down, it gets more mellow, with a bonfire and people around it playing guitar. I plant myself a few feet away from the bonfire, close enough to feel its heat and hear the crackle of wood. I dig my feet into the sand; the top layer is cool, but underneath it’s still warm from the day’s sunshine.

Down the beach, the techno stops, and the reggae band takes the stage. The more mellow bump-bump-thumpis nice. In the water, a girl starts dancing on a guy’s shoulder, pulls off her bikini top, and stands there, half naked like a moonshine mermaid, before diving in with a quiet splash. Behind me, the guys on guitars start up with “Stairway to Heaven.” It mingles strangely well with the reggae.

I lie down in the sand and look up at the sky. From this vantage point, it’s like I have the beach all to myself. The band finishes a song, and the singer announces that it’s a half hour until the New Year. “New Year. Año nuevo.It’s a tabula rasa. Time to hacer borrón y cuenta nueva,” he chants. “One chance to wipe the board clean.”

Can you really do that? Wipe the board clean? Would I even want to? Would I wipe all of last year away if I could?

“Tabula rasa,” the singer repeats. “A new chance to start over. Start fresh, baby. Make amends. Make ch-ch-changes. To be who you want to be. Come the stroke of midnight, before you kiss your amor,save un beso para tí. Close your eyes, think of the year ahead. This is your chance. This can be the day it all changes.”

Really? It’s a nice idea, but why January first? You might as well say April nineteenth is the day that everything changes. A day is a day is a day. It means nothing.

“At the stroke of midnight, make your wish. Qué es tu deseo?For yourself. For the world.”

It’s New Year’s. Not a birthday cake. And I’m not eight anymore. I don’t believe in wishes coming true. But if I did, what would I wish for? To undo that day? To see him again?

Normally I have such willpower. Like a dieter resisting a cookie, I don’t even let myself go there. But for the briefest second, I do. I picture him right here, walking down the beach, hair reflecting in the flames, eyes dark and light and full of teasing, and of so many other things. And for a second, I almost see him.

As I open myself to the fantasy, I wait for the accompanying clench of pain. But it doesn’t come. Instead my breath slows and something warms inside me. I abandon caution and all good sense and wrap myself in thoughts of him. My own hands circle around my chest, as if he were holding me. For one brief moment, everything feels right.

“I thought I’d never find you!”

I look up. Melanie is striding toward me. “I’ve been right here.”

“I’ve been looking for you for the last half hour! Up and down the beach. I had no idea where you were.”

“I was right here.”

“I looked everywhere for you. The party’s getting totally out of control, like roofies-in-the-punch wild. Some girl just puked six inches from my feet, and guys are hitting on me with the worst pickup lines in the world. I’ve had my ass pinched more times than I can count, and one charming guy just asked me if I wanted a bite of his sandwich—and he wasn’t talking about food!” She shakes her head as if trying to dislodge the memory. “We’re supposed to have each other’s backs!”

“I’m sorry. You were having fun, and I guess I just lost track of time.”

“You lost track of time?”

“I guess so. I’m really sorry you were worried. But I’m fine. Do you want to go back to the party?”

“No! I’m over it. Let’s leave.”

“We don’t have to.” I look toward the bonfire. The flames are dancing, making it hard to pull my gaze away. “I don’t mind staying.” For the first time in a long while, I am having an okay time, I’m okay being where I am.

“Well, I do. I’ve spent the last half hour panicking, and now I’m sober, and I’m beyond over this place. It’s like a Telemundo frat party.”

“Oh, okay. Let’s go then.”

I follow her back to the shoe piles, where it takes ages for her to find her flip-flops, and then we get into our waiting taxi. By the time I think to look at the dashboard clock, it’s twenty past twelve. I don’t really believe what the singer said about midnight wishes, but now that I’ve missed mine, I feel like I should’ve tried before the window of opportunity closed.

We ride home in silence, save for the cab driver softly singing to his radio. When we pull into the gates of the resort, Melanie hands him some bills, and for a minute, I get an idea.

“Melanie. What if we hire this guy in a day or two and go off somewhere, away from the tourists?”

“Why would we want to do that?”

“I don’t know. To see what would happen if we tried something different. Excuse me, señor, how much would it be for us to hire you for a whole day?”

“ Lo siento. No hablo inglés.”

Melanie rolls her eyes at me. “I guess you have to be satisfied with your one big adventure.”

At first I think she means this party, but then I realize she means the ruins. Because I did actually manage to get our families to visit a different ruin. We went to Coba instead of Tulum. And just as I’d hoped, we stopped at a small village along the way, and for a moment there, I’d gotten excited, thinking this was it, I had actually escaped into the real Mexico. Okay, my whole family was in tow, but it was a Mayan village. Except then Susan and my mom went crazy buying beaded jewelry, and the villagers came out and played drums for us, and we all were invited to dance in a circle and then there was even a traditional spiritual cleansing. But everyone was videoing everything, and after his cleansing, my dad “donated” ten dollars to a hat that was conspicuously put in front of us, and I realized that this was no different from being on the tour.

The condo is quiet. The parents are all in bed, though as soon as the door closes Mom pops out of her bedroom. “You’re early,” she says.

“I was tired,” Melanie lies. “Good night. Happy New Year.” She pads off toward our room, and Mom gives me a New Year’s kiss and goes back to hers.

I’m nowhere near tired, so I sit out on the balcony and listen to the dwindling sounds of the hotel’s party. On the horizon, a lightning storm is brewing. I reach into my purse for my phone and, for the first time in months, open the photo album.

His face is so beautiful, it makes my stomach twist. But he seems unreal, not someone I would ever know. But then I look at me, the me in the photo, and I hardly recognize her, either, and not just because the hair is different, but because she seems different. That’s not me. That’s Lulu. And she’s just as gone as he is.

Tabula rasa. That’s what the reggae singer said. Maybe I can’t get my wish, but I can try to wipe the slate clean, try to get over this.

I allow myself look at the picture of Willem and Lulu in Paris for a long minute.

“Happy New Year,” I tell them.

And then I erase them.