feels good to be with my girls. We’ve been friends a long time. It’s nice to have people who will always watch your back. Sometimes it’s more important than family.
I continue listening to them blah-blahing, but I turn my body to stare out the window. A man walks by and then just stops in front of me and looks in through the window. He’s middle-aged. Conservative. White. Wearing beige trousers and a boring sweater. Brown hair. Totally nondescript. At first I think he’s staring at me, like he’s some pervert, but then he licks the tips of his fingers and pushes his thinning hair back into its contained side part. I realize he doesn’t even see me. And for a moment, seeing him seeing his reflection, it’s like I am witness to how he truly feels about himself. A totally raw and naked, honest appraisal, something you would never show others. It feels so personal that I’m embarrassed. I almost turn away, but really, I’m too intrigued to pull my gaze.
At first there’s hope in his gaze. He touches up his hair, squints his eyes, and bites his lower lip like he’s pleased with his face. But then there’s this pause, an exhale of air and slight shake of the head, like he’s experiencing some kind of despairing defeat. And then he just walks away into the night. And it all strikes me as so sad. ’Cause I get it—that awareness that you just have to deal with what looks you have, and that your attempts at improving them better barely matter in the long run.
But then I think about it more, because it actually runs deeper than being disappointed with his looks. It’s like I saw how disappointed he was with himself. How unhappy he was in life. And it’s so weird to see someone, a grown man, so vulnerable and raw like that. Normally, he’d just be any boring person walking down a boring street. You would never guess all that pain was on the inside.
And I think that’s what Michael and I were all about. It was like he caught me staring into my reflection and he saw what I saw: the real me. My true and honest gaze. Someone slowly falling apart. Like those people in the Renaissance portraits at the art gallery: when you look up close, you can see the hairline cracks breaking their faces apart. Only instead of running scared away from my broken pieces, Michael held my gaze and made me realize that maybe something good was there between the cracks.
It’s so early when I get home that I watch a movie, because I’m still wound up and won’t be able to sleep. My mom and Scott show up at three o’clock in the morning and my mom is pissed drunk, which is totally scary because, little does Scott know, she’s pregnant. She’s all loud and obnoxious and is bitching at Scott in the kitchen. Apparently everything he is doing is wrong. She lays into him relentlessly: he drinks out of the milk carton, he wears those “gay” jeans, he talks like an idiot. It starts out harmless enough—I’m so used to my mom saying that garbage when she’s drunk that I don’t really even hear it anymore—but then they start talking about her ex, Dirk, whom they must have seen tonight. I hear something new in Scott’s voice. An edge. Something sharp. He starts fighting back. He drills her, asking how she knows Dirk and when she last saw him.
When I go into the kitchen to get some orange juice, they don’t even say hi. I walk around them like a ghost. They don’t even comment on my swollen lip.
“I don’t know … he’s … it’s not like …” My mom slurs her words. “I don’t know … maybe I saw him … at … once … it’s not like … shit … Crystal speaks to him … she told … I guess once I saw … but what the hell is it to you? Dumb-ass … you …”
She’s so drunk she can’t even curse right. She starts to get up in his face. And you can tell Scott is confused and uncomfortable with it, so he sort of pushes her aside. Not really hard, but because she’s so drunk, she ends up completely crashing into the kitchen chair, which pushes into the table, which topples the glass vase that’s on it, which comes down, barely missing her head and smashing