holding a fuzzy toilet-seat cover that looks like it was made out of a poodle.
“You was jealous then, girl, don’t try to lie. Alvin got his daddy’s nice station wagon for the weekend and he put that mattress back in there.”
They are laughing so hard, I inch slowly away, trying not to get caught in between the memory of someone named Alvin and his daddy’s car.
“I was not jealous. You coulda got frostbit back there ’cause the heater broke. You forget that?”
“Remember you was gonna name the baby Frosty the Snowman?” Dora’s mom chimes in, and they all explode in a fit of giggles.
I cannot imagine talking so freely about what I did with Ray. And it wasn’t in the back of some car on a freezing cold night. It had meant something.
Right up until it didn’t. For him. I hate the feeling that this is exactly what you hear about. How nothing changes for the guy. I am a cliché and a statistic all in one. And nothing says that louder than this moment, standing in the Salvation Army completely alone, looking for clothes that six of my closest friends probably could have all fit into at once. Except I don’t have six close friends. I’m getting close to having no friends at all.
Is Ray letting Della May sneak into his room, I wonder? Does she look out at the lake and then go home with the smell of cedar in her hair?
I put my face into a gray hoodie with an orange basketball etched on the front and breathe in the smell of someone else. Someone named Lucy, according to the name embroidered on the front of it. Over the top of the basketball it says SHOOT FOR THE STARS, and it smells like sweat and mildew. But that’s better than cedar. If I ever smell cedar again, I will probably throw up.
“Are you okay, young lady?”
I look up into the face of the oldest man I’ve ever seen. And for the first time since Ray’s mom looked at me with her sad blue eyes, I feel like someone is actually seeing me—not my face or my widening belly, but the me that I’ve become since my parents left, since Gran cut off my hair, and since I realized that my life was never going to be the same again.
An hour later, I’m still sitting in the back room at the Salvation Army, my face puffy from crying, and George, the crinkly-faced manager, has given me a doughnut and some Swiss Miss cocoa. In between customers, he keeps coming back to check on me. He doesn’t say anything, just pats me on the shoulder or hands me a tissue, then goes back out to ring up sales.
“Want me to call someone?” he finally says after checking on me four or five times. His voice wraps around me like a warm bath and I’m afraid I’ll start crying all over again, just when I’ve finally managed to pull myself together. “How about your friend with those big brown eyes?”
“You remember us?” Selma and I shop here sometimes after school, but we had never really paid attention to George before. It seems rude now, after how nice he’s been to me.
“I ain’t seen eyes like that since my seal-hunting days,” he says. His own eyes are the size of two tiny black apple seeds, and yet they look right through me.
I just nod at him, but I do not want to call Selma. Who, by the way, would be thrilled to know George thinks she has eyes like a seal. Ironically, that’s what we were fighting about, on the surface anyway. Selma was going on and on about how her real mother was probably a selkie, one of those half-human, half-seal creatures that can take off their skin and walk out of the ocean during the full moon. This can’t possibly be true, but Selma loves to fantasize about anything that might give her story an air of mystery. The reality is that she never met her parents, and Abigail, her mom, doesn’t like to talk about it. Maybe she doesn’t know who Selma’s parents are, but she’s not really forthcoming with the details.
It’s one of the things Selma and I have in common: not knowing what happened to our mothers. But I’m fed up with Selma’s ridiculous make-believe stories. It was fine when she was ten, but now it’s just childish.
Mostly, my emotions are kind of all over the