The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [45]
“Brent Fisher and Marcy McDonald are breaking up.”
Kate makes a face like she’s tasted something sour. “Ugh. Marcy.”
“I know, kid. Serves her right.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, feeling left out. “One of these days, one of you is going to have to tell me what happened with Marcy McDonald!”
Kate grins at me. “One of these days, one of us will.”
“Good comeback, kiddo,” Jeremy says approvingly.
“Are you kidding?” I groan. “She’s full of them. Kate always knows the right thing to say.”
“Anyway,” Kate says, “Brent’s a nice guy. Hope he’s the one who dumped her.”
“Kate,” Jeremy mock-admonishes. “I don’t like this nasty side of you.”
“Got it from you, big brother,” Kate says, and Jeremy pounces on her, gently and very carefully play-wrestling, and Kate dissolves into giggles. I allow myself a jealous glance at them and then go back to my Middle East reading.
We ride silently to my building. Jeremy always takes me home so we can share a couple of bedtime cigarettes. We almost never talk in the cab, so tonight’s silence doesn’t have any big implications. I’m thinking about Kate—about her family, being foolish enough to think that they might get away without telling her the truth about her disease, without even telling her that she had cancer at all. What did they think—that she wouldn’t figure it out when the chemo made her hair fall out? What did they say to the doctors to make them not insist upon telling her? That they would tell their daughter when the time was right, some other time, like maybe after this whole thing had blown over, which surely it would?
And I think about what Kate said, that her parents were weak not to tell her, no matter how hard it might have been for them. I think about my mother and me, the care we take to avoid confrontation, be it about my father, or about what I do every day after school with the Coles, or why I came home so late that Saturday night. My mother doesn’t ask. Tit for tat—I don’t ask, so she doesn’t either.
Weak, Kate called it. I never thought of my mother that way, but then, I did think that I had to be strong, strong enough to protect her from my questions. Like by inventing a deadbeat dad sunbathing in the desert, I could protect her from the truth. But she’s the one who knows who my dad really was, and I’m the one in the dark.
I’m sick of thinking about this. I want to think about something else, anything else. I think about Jeremy and Marcy McDonald. By the time we reach my block, I’ve built up quite a curiosity.
Outside my building, cigarette in hand, my curiosity gets the better of me.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened with Marcy McDonald?”
Jeremy’s surprise is written on his face. I think he wonders why I even care.
“I’m sorry, Jer. I just … I just really want to know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just being girly or something. I just want to know.”
“I promised Kate I’d never tell.”
“Kate?”
He breaks his gaze; looks above me, behind me. “Yeah. She was embarrassed. I promised her.”
He still isn’t looking at me, so I hold the sleeve of his shirt. “Okay. I understand.”
“Okay.” Jeremy takes a last drag and flicks the cigarette onto the ground. “See you tomorrow,” he says, and heads toward the corner.
“Are you mad at me?” I say to his back. The possibility scares the absolute crap out of me.
Jeremy turns around. “Mad?”
“Yeah. For asking.”
Jeremy grins at me and without stepping any closer says, “Sternin, you got a lot to learn about me still, huh?”
I exhale. I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath. I feel better and turn to walk into the lobby.
16
On Thursday, a couple of weeks before winter break, Jeremy tells me to meet him in the library at lunch.
“What for?”
“I have an idea,” he says mysteriously. I think this must be some kind of prank that his friends want to pull and they need me as an accomplice. The teachers would never suspect me.
They redid the library recently, so it doesn’t have that old-book smell you’d expect. It feels like there are more computers here than books. I manage to find a table entirely