Number of empty Ben & Jerry's containers: 3—two mint chocolate cookie, one plain vanilla. (Who buys plain vanilla ice cream from Ben & Jerry's, anyway? Is there a greater waste?)
Number of Pottery Barn catalogs: 14 (No items marked or otherwise identified, even though the Windsor Washable Throw Pillows were on sale and appeared to be quite a bargain.)
"Where are we putting the paper towels again?" Bex asked, looking around our odd little circle of piles. "Are they household or food?"
"Depends," Liz said, leaning toward her. "What's on it?"
Bex took a whiff of the used paper towel in her hand and said, "Spaghetti sauce … I think. Or blood?"
"So, either they love pasta or are a family of axe murderers?" I quipped.
Bex turned and dropped the towels onto one of the half dozen piles that were growing around us while the original pile in the center began to slowly shrink. We'd opened all the windows in the suite, and a cool, damp breeze blew in, diluting the smell of garbage (a little) as we sat on a plastic tarp, examining everything from used tissues to empty cans of tuna.
If you ever wonder whether or not someone is too good for you, I'd advise going through their trash. Really. No one looks superior after that. Plus, if Mr. Solomon was right, there were answers here—answers I desperately wanted.
Why did he offer to walk with me to (supposedly) get my mom's jacket, and then turn around and tell his friend I was no one? Did he have a girlfriend? Had he struck up that conversation with me in the street so that he could win some horrendous bet with his friends, like they always do in teen movies? I mean, I know I spend my winters in a mansion with a bunch of girls, and my summers on a ranch in Nebraska, but both places have movies, and a lot of them involve wagers in which plain-looking girls (like me) are approached by really cute boys (like Josh).
But those boys aren't Josh-like, not really, or so I realized the deeper into his garbage we went. The boys in those movies wouldn't help their kid sisters with a fourth-grade ode to Amelia Earhart (Gallagher Academy, Class of 1915). Those boys wouldn't write notes like the one I have taken the liberty of pasting below:
Mom, Dillon says his mom can drop me off after the field trip, so don't wait up for my call. Love you, J
He tells his mom he loves her. How great is that? I mean, the boys in the movies with the bets and the plain girls (who are never really plain, just poorly accessorized) and the big, dramatic prom scenes—those boys would never leave their mothers kind and courteous notes. Plus, boys who leave kind and courteous notes become men who leave kind and courteous notes. I couldn't help myself: I instantly imagined what it would be like to get a note like that myself someday.
Darling, I may have to work late, so I might not be here when you get back. I hope you had a great time in North Korea and disabled lots of nuclear weapons. With all my love, Josh
(But that's just a draft.)
I stared at an empty pack of chewing gum—the teeth-whitening kind—and I tried to remember if his teeth had been extra white or just regular white. Regular white, I thought, so I chucked the pack into a stack beside Liz and dug back into the pile again, not knowing what I hoped to pull out.
I found an envelope, small and square, with beautiful calligraphy on the front. It was addressed to The Abrams Family. I'd never seen anything in my life addressed to The Morgan Family. We never got invited to parties. Sure, I remembered a time or two when Mom and Dad dressed up and left me with a sitter, but even then I knew she had a teeny tiny microfilm recorder in her rhinestone broach and his cuff links contained cables that could shoot out for fifty yards and let a person rappel down the side of a building if he really wanted to. (When you think about it, it's not that surprising we didn't get invited out much.)
I was just starting to imagine what it would be like to be the other kind of family, when I heard an ominous, "Uh-oh."
I turned to look at Liz, who was holding a piece of paper toward Bex.
She has to go through Bex first, I realized in terror. Josh only has six months to live! He's taking drugs that will prepare him for a sex change operation! His entire family is moving to Alaska!
It was worse.
"Cam," Bex said, her voice bracing me for the worst, "Liz found something you should probably see."
"It's probably nothing," Liz added, forcing a smile as Bex held out a folded piece of pink paper. Someone had written "JOSH" on it in blue ink with a flowery, ornate kind of penmanship that no one at the Gallagher Academy ever seemed able to master—after all, if you've got organic chemistry, advanced encryption, and conversational Swahili homework every night, you're not going to spend a lot of time learning how to dot your i's with little hearts.
"Read it to me," I said.
"No…." Liz started. "It's probably—"
"Liz!" I snapped.
But Bex had already started. "'Dear Josh. It was great seeing you at the carnival. I had fun, too. We should do it again sometime. Love, DeeDee.'"
Bex had done her best to make the note sound blah, adding lots of unnecessary pauses and dull inflections, but there wasn't any denying that this DeeDee person meant business. After all, I didn't write notes on pink paper with fancy writing. I didn't even own pink paper. Edible paper— yes, but pretty pink paper—no way! So there it was, proof in black-and-white (or … well…pink-and-blue, but you get what I mean), that I was officially out of my league. That I really was nobody.
Liz must have read my expression, because she jumped to say, "This doesn't mean anything, Cam. It's in the trash!" She turned to Bex. "That's got to mean something, right?"
And that's when I couldn't ignore it anymore: the universal truth that, despite our elite education and genius IQs, we didn't know boys. DeeDee, with her pink paper and ability to make the big, puffy J's, might have known the significance of a boy like Josh putting her perfect pink note in the trash, but we sure didn't. The boy of my dreams may have been as close as the town of Roseville—just two miles, eighty security cameras, and a big honking stone fence away, but he and I would never speak the same language (which is totally ironic, since "boy" was the one language my school had never tried to teach me).
"That's okay, Liz," I said softly. "We knew it was a long shot. It's—"