The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [21]
8
It’s raining on Monday. I guess we’ve been lucky so far that when Jeremy’s come for a cigarette, it hasn’t rained. I guess it was only a matter of time. Jeremy sits with me at lunch. Alexis isn’t even there today, so there’s no excuse for the way that we sit without talking.
But everyone around us is talking.
“I swear to God, she’s in the hospital.”
“No way.”
“They said it was anorexia—”
“Who said?”
“How the hell should I know? But anyway, I heard it was really coke.”
“Heard from where?” Jeremy cuts in. Jeremy and I think we know better. We’ve been watching her. We know it’s anorexia.
It was Brent Fisher who said that, and he’s obviously embarrassed. Emily Winters comes to his rescue. “It’s true. I heard Mrs. Downing on the phone with her mother.” This has to be a lie. Why would Alexis’s parents tell the faculty it was coke? If anyone had heard anything, it would have been from one of Alexis’s friends. Emily tries to loop me in. “I meant to tell you about it, Connelly, this morning.”
I shrug. “I haven’t heard anything.” Emily looks disappointed in me, and I feel bad that I didn’t take her side. Jeremy touches my shoulder before he gets up to leave.
Kate isn’t in school either, but no one’s whispering about her, at least not out in the open. I guess a sick seventh grader isn’t exactly fodder for the rumor mill like an anorexic coke addict.
In physics, the formulas swim over my head and it’s all I can do not to beg Jeremy to tutor me again. The chairs in the physics lab aren’t really chairs but stools, with desks so high they come up to my chest when I’m standing. I swing my legs from the high stool, which makes me feel even younger, even more clueless, like I’m way too little to be in this grown-up class where everything is so hard. After class, I look to Jeremy for help, for some reassuring look that he understands everything and he’s here to help, but he’s surrounded by two guys and Nina Zuckerman, the most beautiful girl in our class, and maybe the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in real life. She’s wearing almost the same thing I’m wearing—jeans and a tank top under a cardigan sweater—but the outfit looks so different on her, so thoughtlessly stylish that you can tell it takes effort for me to dress right but she doesn’t even have to try. I couldn’t possibly go up to him in those circumstances. I can only take his help if he offers it.
I’m spending a free period in the library, and it occurs to me that there must be records somewhere about my father’s death. The school has a bunch of old newspapers on microfiche; maybe I can just find his obituary. It’s such a simple idea that I feel stupid not to have thought of it before. The microfiche are still organized by card catalog, unlike the rest of the library. I guess no one ever has cause to look at the New York Times from over a decade ago. I’m about to open the card catalog when I realize that I don’t know the exact date of my father’s death. He died after I turned two; that’s all I know. I wish I could remember the funeral, at least—if I could remember what I wore (if I went), maybe that would help me figure out what time of year it was. I’ve never been taught how to use a card catalog—everything’s computerized now—and I’m embarrassed to ask the librarian for help. She’s practically senile anyway, with glasses thick like Coke bottles, her gray hair cropped close to her head. I can’t imagine she would have the wherewithal to help me. And I can’t imagine admitting to that woman, the one with the bad glasses and the unflattering haircut, why I need help, that I’m looking for my father’s obituary. If she asked why, I could just pass it off as sentimentality, not give away that I don’t know how he died. But I’m sure she’d see through me, that she’d know I was searching for something I’m not supposed to know. She’d hesitate. She probably doesn’t even know