Confessions Of An Angry Girl

He holds out his pencil. “What did you do?”

“I…just…it was…” I falter.

“What’s this stuff on it?”

“Oh, um, sorry—it’s eyeliner.”

He takes a few steps closer and looks carefully at my eyes. “You don’t wear that stuff.”

The flush starts. It’s slow-moving, but it’s going to be a huge burn—it stretches from shoulder to shoulder and it’s going to spread above my collar in about three seconds. I notice that his eyes are hazel with gold specks and then I can’t look anymore.

“Sometimes I do.”

“Like when?”

“If I’m going out with my boyfriend or something.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s that?” I have nothing to say. “You’re a freshman, right?” he asks.

“I’m fourteen,” comes out of my mouth. And then, like we’re playing in the sandbox, I ask, “How old are you?”

That glint of a smile shows up briefly again but disappears before I’m sure it was real.

“Come on, I’ll take you home.”

“You don’t know where I live.”

“Yeah, I do,” he says. I stare at him dumbly. “How’s your brother?” he asks.

The question surprises me. Even though Peter and Jamie played hockey together, I assumed they never talked off the ice. “Okay, I guess. He’s at Tufts. Are you guys friends?”

“I drove him home when Bobby Passeo skated over his fingers,” he says, not answering my question.

“I saw you, you know. Play hockey. When you were still on the team.” I become very interested in my shoes, realizing that I sound like exactly what I am—a babbling fourteen-year-old. He looks at me, waiting. When I don’t say anything else, he says, “So do you want a ride?”

“I can’t get in the car with you,” is my response. I’m no longer a babbling fourteen-year-old. I’m now ten. Or maybe eight.

He can’t help himself this time. He breaks into a huge smile. My heart skitters for a second.

“What do you think is gonna happen?” he asks, taking my French horn from me. I feel like an idiot. “Come on, freshman. I’ll drive you home.”

* * *

His car is old, and rusty and a strange, flat green. But the inside is clean, and black and smells like cold rain. I’m sitting far away from him, embarrassed that I was embarrassed when he opened my door for me in the school parking lot. The radio is playing Kanye, but Jamie changes it to a classic rock station. Pearl Jam. When I was in kindergarten Peter used to play Pearl Jam for me and make me recite the band members and the instruments they played. Eddie Vedder, singer. Mike McCready, guitarist. I can’t remember the bass player’s name. Jeff Something. Peter got me addicted to good music and real musicians at a very young age, which, to be honest, hasn’t done me any favors socially.

I can’t believe I’m in a car with Jamie Forta.

“Are you cold?”

“No.”

“You look cold.”

“Not really.” He’s right. I am cold. But not because of the weather—September in Connecticut still feels like summer. I always spend the first three weeks of school sweating through my new fall clothes because I couldn’t stand to wear my summer clothes for another minute. I’m probably the only person in my entire school of 2,500 who wore a sweater today, willing the weather to be cooler.

Well, I sort of got my wish. I’m cold now. Fear does that to me.

I look at him and he’s looking at the road. He stops at a yellow light. I’m surprised. I guess I expected someone like Jamie Forta to just blow through a yellow light without even thinking about it. He’s still looking at the road. Nobody seems to have anything to say. I’m embarrassed again. I’ve been embarrassed a lot today. Mostly because of him.

“Where’s your notebook?” I ask.

“Locker.”

“Don’t you have any homework?”

He looks at me like I’ve said something funny. The light turns green, and he turns left. I realize that he actually does know where I live.

Silence. Silence, silence, silence.

“I liked the house you were drawing.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a good artist.”

He takes another left. We drive by Tracy’s brown house with the red trim, where I will spend the first part of tonight lying on her bedroom floor, continuing our endless conversation about sex. After she decides she’ll sleep with Matt “soon,” since they’ve been going out since the beginning of eighth grade, she’ll move on to whether I should go out with Robert or not. The answer is usually no, but sometimes she says he’d probably treat me really well. Then I remind her that I hate cigarettes. She suggests I convince him to quit. I reply that people only quit if they want to. She says he’d definitely quit for me.

Robert, according to Tracy, has been in love with me since the sixth grade. I tell her that that’s impossible, because how did we know what love was in elementary school? She tells me that just because we couldn’t identify love when we were eleven, that doesn’t mean we weren’t capable of feeling it. Maybe she’s right. I have no idea. But I do know that I’ve never been in love with Robert. And I have no intention of going out with him just because he’s “in love” with me. Which he’s probably not. Because why would he be? I’m not pretty, and I like to use words with a lot of letters in them—two big turn-offs for guys.

My dad always got mad at me when I said things like that in front of him. “First of all, Rose, you are pretty,” he’d tell me. “And second of all, never look twice at a man who doesn’t appreciate a smart woman. Never.” He was always full of good advice that was impossible to follow.

For a while after he died, I saw him almost every night. I’d dream that I was in an empty movie theater, sitting by myself in a sea of red seats, watching him on a huge screen like he was a star. He was twenty-feet tall, his brown hair sticking out every which way, his blue eyes burning like neon when he looked at me, pinning me to my seat with his stare like he was waiting for me to do something, to fix the situation, to get him out of the action flick or Western he was stuck in and back into the real world. Sometimes I’d see things that really happened, like when I was ten and he took Tracy and me to a Springsteen concert, and I was embarrassed by his weird dancing but also kind of proud that he was so into the concert. Or I’d see us looking at his twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, studying the history and derivation of some crazy word that had come out of his mouth, like erinaceous. One night at dinner he’d said, “Pete, you seem to have inherited the erinaceous hair Zarelli men are often cursed with—consider cutting back on the product.” Later, when Peter found out that Dad had basically said his hair looked like a hedgehog, he didn’t talk to my dad for almost a week.

I bet Peter regrets that now.

Other times when I was having the movie theater dream, I’d see things that I didn’t experience. Like when the convoy Dad was riding in blew up, killing everyone within fifty feet.

Dad never should have been in Iraq. He wasn’t a soldier. He only went because when the economy tanked, he lost his job as an aircraft engineer, and the military recruited him as a contractor, offering him a big salary for a short tour of duty. Mom was freaking out about money, and they had eight years of college tuition to look forward to, thanks to Peter and me, so he went.

Peter and I never said it to them, but we both thought they had gone completely insane. And we were right. Dad got to Iraq in February and was dead by June, when the truck he was in hit a homemade roadside bomb. He died instantly they told us, to make us feel better. But it didn’t make us feel better—well, not me, anyway. It just got my imagination going, wondering exactly what that meant.

Dreaming about exactly what that meant.

The dreams about the convoy didn’t have sound. I never heard the explosion, or the dying, or anything. And there was no blood. I just saw Dad, sailing through the air with his eyes wide open, twisting and turning, and then landing on his back on the ground and cracking into sections like a piece of glass that had been dropped from just a few inches up, shattering but still keeping its shape.

The dreams stopped after a while, and I was relieved—until I started to miss them. Now that I don’t see my dad at all anymore, I worry that I’m forgetting everything about him.

Jamie takes a right and then a quick left, and ten seconds later we’re at my house.