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.
“This is it, right?”
“Yes.” Silence. “So, when did Bobby Passeo skate over Peter’s fingers?”
“I don’t know. Two years ago, I guess.”
I can’t believe he still remembers where we live.
“Wait, you had your license two years ago?”
He shakes his head and leans back against his door, looking at me with those perfectly hazel eyes that make me nervous.
“You okay?” he asks, a cloud passing across his face. His question and dark expression catch me off guard, as I’m still thinking about him driving without a license. A thousand people have pissed me off by asking that question in the past few months. But I don’t seem to mind it when it comes from Jamie. “I’m sorry. About your dad,” he says.
I nod, but that’s all I can do. I’m not going to risk crying in front of Jamie. I can’t really predict when I’m going to cry, but when I do, it involves a lot of snot. “Well, thanks for the ride,” I say, reaching for the door handle.
“Rose,” he says. “You know my name, don’t you?”
His name? He thinks I don’t know his name? The idea that I’m so in my own universe that I haven’t heard Angelo call him “Jamie” and “Jame” every two minutes in study hall—that I wouldn’t know his name, that I wouldn’t know who he was after watching him play hockey all those times—is crazy. But should I admit that I know his name? If I know his name, will he think I…like him?
“Um…” I say.
His expression quickly goes blank. He turns back toward the steering wheel and puts the car from Park into Drive as if he were planning to gun it the second my feet hit the pavement.
“Jamie,” he tells me as he stares straight ahead, waiting for me to leave.
I’m an idiot. But if I now say, Of course I know your name, I’ve always known your name, he won’t believe me. “Thanks again for the ride,” is all I can manage.
I get out as fast as I can, and he takes off, leaving me standing in the street, feeling like a complete loser for pretending not to know the name of someone who just went out of his way to be nice to me, who seemed genuinely sorry about what happened.
Nice going, Rose. Way to make friends. Keep up the good work.
belligerent (adjective): inclined to hostility or war
(once again, see also: me)
3
A FEW HOURS later, I’m in my usual Friday-night spot, sprawled on Tracy’s bright orange shag carpet that we got at Target, waiting for Robert and Matt to show up so we can go to Cavallo’s for pizza. I am very carefully not talking about Jamie, although I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t. He was being so nice, and I messed everything up. I want to ask Tracy if she thinks he actually likes me or just feels sorry for me, but I can tell she doesn’t like him by the way she looked at him in study hall today. It’s easier just to say nothing.
Tonight,
