Love in the Time of Cynicism Page 9

  “Seriously?” Amanda’s been terribly devoted to this boy for so long, nobody thought she’d be the one to break up. “This happened because you saw me leaving for Rhett’s?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know, I just…” She trails off for a moment, eyes lingering on the family portraits in the foyer. There are pictures of Michael and mom, of me, Trent, and mom, and of Amanda, Mal, and Michael, but none of the whole clan together. Mom’s been trying to arrange a group photo for years, but it’s never been serious. “I really think we should try to fix this, Del.”

  I’m dubious, to say the least. “Fix what, exactly?”

  “This.” She gestures emphatically at the space between us. “We should try to be sister, like for real.”

  I’m taken aback. For the year or so we’ve coincided in this dwelling, the general agreement has been don’t speak unless provoked or provoking. This is…surprising. “I, ah. Why?”

  “It’s super sad we don’t get along well, right? I mean, our parents are married and we’re going to have another sibling soon who’ll be related to both of us and I think we should make an effort to, like, bond. Spend time together or do whatever sisters are supposed to do.”

  “Seriously? This isn’t some grand plot to get me in trouble?”

  “Cross my heart,” she says earnestly while drawing a little x over her chest with an index finger.

  “Okay…” I straighten on the step and think. Breathe. Of all the crazy things that have happened today, this was not one I was ready for. “What do you…um…want to, like, do in order to…bond?”

  She pops up from the step and beams. “You should let me give you a makeover tomorrow morning, for whenever you see Rhett again.”

  “If you let me do your hair and makeup and pick out your outfit, fine,” I reply, figuring she won’t agree to this as the simple idea of showing Rhett whatever my, ah, sister could think up (which would almost definitely involve a dress, heels, and enough makeup to scare even Tannis away) makes me flustered in ways that freak me out.

  “Okay!” She’s so pumped, it’s comical. “We’ll, like, look just like each other!”

  I nod, then tell her, “I promised Rhett I’d call him tonight, so I’m going to head upstairs. If you, um, need anything, let me know.”

  The moment I’m on my feet, she wraps me in a tight hug. “Thanks for being so cool about this, Del.”

  I pull back and smile. “If we’re going to be proper sisters or whatever, you can start by not calling me Del, alright?”

  “Awesome…Cordelia.”

  Taking back my own name, one person at a time, feels empowering. Though the four syllables sound better on Rhett’s tongue than the ever could on Amanda’s, the knowledge that she’s committed to this is almost nice, if not freakishly odd and out of character.

  She follows me up the stairs until we’re both in our own room. I look around once the door’s shut, debating with myself when the best time to redo the room would be. Though my room has been a mishmash of styles – from the punk band poster-covered walls phase to the stark white I’m-going-to-run-away-at-the-earliest-convenience phase and everything in between – as long as I’ve lived here, this one has been wearing on me quicker than normal.

  White fairy lights trace the top edges of the frost blue walls, the main source of light for me. I put them there as a passive protest against living in Lightfoot. In Oregon, there were these spectacular, snow-capped winters where the sunlight would sparkle against the hills until it was like looking out over a sprawling mirror of the sky. That’s the biggest thing I miss about my past life, besides my dad. The seasons were so pungent. Each one had a different smell and taste and feel to it. Here, they’re muddled together and slur by without anyone taking notice or caring. Thus, the holiday lights.

  Sighing again (I must be in a sighing mood), I walk over to the dresser and slide out each drawer to see what’s going on the pajama department. The laundry desperately needs to be done. My basket of dirty clothes cries for me to wash it but I only glare as I rifle through the near-bare drawers. None of the new clothes mom and I bought are suitable sleepwear besides the gross frilly bras. Tonight, though, I’m more in a sweatpants and tank top kind of mood. Luckily, my last pair of disgusting green, amazingly warm man sweats are waiting for me at the bottom of the last drawer, right next to a tight black tank which I probably haven’t worn in several years. I undress fast and yank them on very gracefully. Then I take out my contacts, put on my crooked glasses, and let my hair down.

  Once finished with this late-night transition, I flop onto my soft, cozy bed and smile-sigh before taking my phone off the desk. I tuck myself into bed in preparation for the phone call. The silver gray comforter is warm as my body heats it up quickly and I pull the napkin from my pants pocket.

  I haven’t used my phone in a few days so I have to turn it on and plug it in before putting in Rhett’s numbers. My fingers shake a bit as I punch in the digits purposefully (he’s…wait for it…my eighth contact) before calling them. The phone rings. Rings. Rings.

  On the fourth, he picks up. “Tressler’s crematorium; you kill ‘em we grill ‘em. You’ve got Eight Ball.”

  I laugh out loud at how serious his voice is, then muffle my chortling when I hear the garage door open downstairs. My voice lowers. “That’s how you always answer your phone?”

  “I have a list, actually.”

  “Can I hear some more?”

  “No. It’s insurance that you’ll call again.” He pauses and I can hear the smile in his voice. “What’s up?”

  “Do you want to meet up tomorrow after school? You know, to work on the project?”

  He laughs, “Sure. Another one of your schemes to get me alone and kill me.”

  “Drat! Foiled again!” The words come out naturally. “Memorial Park, four o’clock?”

  “I’m in. Always up for a good murder. Even my own.” There’s an edge to his voice as he says this.

  I snuggle into my blanket even more, feeling its warmth drifting me toward sleep. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, absolutely,” he answers unconvincingly. “My dad’s playing a bunch of crap on the radio station and I have to listen to it through the walls. Play one of my mixes, old man!” This last bit is shouted through the house almost sarcastically. Vaguely, I hear, “Not a chance, kid!”

  “What station does your dad run?”

  “KAZ-102.5.”

  I climb out of my bed, feel the now chilly floor through my socks, and turn my radio on, the phone balanced between my shoulder and my ear. Once the static comes through, I tune it with the dial and antenna until one of my all-time favorite songs blares through the speakers. Instantly, I sing alone and admonish Rhett. “You don’t like this song?!”

  “Are you kidding? This is awful!”

  Feeling giddy with the pumping bass of the song, I sing the words into the phone. “Kiss me at New Years, just to taste the lies on my tongue. Kiss me at midnight, just to hear the stars in my eyes.”

  “Cordelia, I am losing respect for you by the moment.” He moans, “The lyrics don’t even make sense.”

  “This song is the shit,” I laugh. With my eyes shut as I jump up and down to the thudding bass line, I can feel Rhett in the room with me and can hear the happiness creeping into his voice with every cynical comment. “Don’t lie to yourself.”

  “If you keep singing it, I might learn to love…it.”

  I nearly scream the next line, which is my favorite, “For those freckling constellations on your skin to brush the earth of mine, I’d swim the seas a thousand times.”

  Mr. Tressler’s voice floats over me as the song crescendos to an end and I fall back on my bed. “That was Recklessly Rejected by Turning. Next we’ve got Hot Devil by Foreign Heart.”

  “Oh my god!” This is Rhett. His fist bangs on the wall. “Dad, this song rocks.”

  Now it’s his turn to sing into my ear as this gorgeous song I’ve never heard before thunders from my radio. I hav
en’t listened to music in the house in ages and the feeling is exhilarating. Rhett’s voice mashes with a bit of lag to the song, which contains fantastic lines like to you, I am the etching of a pen against the blistered paper of your skin. I fall in love with it instantly and when it’s over, I beg for Rhett to make me a copy.

  Another song starts up, this one so loud and heavy I turn it down, and Rhett tells me, “I’ll bring you a CD tomorrow, okay? I’ve got to go, Cordelia Kane, but I look forward to seeing you. Always a pleasure.”

  “Goodbye, Rhett Tressler.”

  We hang up, and I shut off the light with a smile on my face.

  Amanda stomping into my room and smacking the lights on is what I wake up to Tuesday morning.

  Blearily and rubbing sleep from my eyes, I sit up and stare at her. She’s toting what to me seems like an exorbitant amount of makeup in four huge clear containers. As she sets up shop on my desk, shoving aside my books and stacks of papers, I can’t help but wonder what I’ve gotten myself into by agreeing to bond with Amanda on her terms.

  While she’s absorbed with the arduous task of arranging pallets my shade, I stand up, yawn, and put in my contacts by the glow of twinkling lights. No light is coming through my window, it’s so early; the only real distinguishable feature between fall and summer here is receding sunlight in the mornings and evenings. Despite the outrageously early time, Amanda’s perky and excited, practically bouncing with the thrill of making over her feministic half-sister.

  “Ready?” She asks me while grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing me onto my spinning desk chair. Her fingers eagerly grab at my hairbrush and the locks falling in frizzy masses to my shoulders before I can respond.

  For the next forty five minutes, I willingly sit through being poked and prodded by various torture devices until Amanda allows me to look in the mirror, where I see a semblance of myself. Sculpted pink lips, porcelain skin, thick brown eyeliner over golden shadow, and the most shocking feature – perfectly straight hair with bangs brushed to the side. For once, I look like the daughter my mom wanted to have, the kind of girl who could fit in as Mal and Amanda’s sister. And when she picks out what is possibly my most girly new dress – white lace with sheer half sleeves and a pale blue tie – for me to wear the entire day, I feel absolutely nothing like myself.

  By the time the ordeal is finished, it’s like we’ve swapped fashion senses. I’ve given Amanda jean shorts and a tank top with big curly hair (simply because merely the idea of Amanda with Southern-belle curls makes me laugh) and almost no makeup while I’ve become a prima-donna in her early years.

  “You look gorgeous.” Amanda beams. “Like a real girl. Make sure you tell Rhett this was my handy work the moment he claps eyes on you.”

  “He won’t care,” I tell her with an eye roll.

  “And why not?”

  “I don’t know; he’s just not-”

  “Not like that?” When I nod, she laughs at my apparent inexperience. “All guys love it when a girl dresses up for them. It’s in their biological makeup.”

  I sigh and stare at myself in the mirror. “It’s not for him, if you recall. This was your idea.”

  “Keep telling yourself that and maybe it’ll become true.” She runs a brush through my hair a few more times until satisfied and grimaces while saying, “You wouldn’t have agreed to this if Rhett wasn’t on your mind even a little. And I wouldn’t have agreed if I wasn’t single for the first time in a year.”

  I shake my head with a small laugh right as Michael pops his head in the door without knocking. “I won’t pretend to understand what’s going on in here, but you girls need to get to school.”

  He leaves, confused, and Amanda smiles. “You can take my car; I’ll take one of dad’s.”

  “O…kay?”

  Never, in the entirety of our dual-existence, have I been allowed near her (insert professional priss voice here) convertible matte blue Audi R8 until now. Frankly, I have no idea how to drive a car that starts on the first try and doesn’t require excessive force on the break and acceleration. I’ll probably get into a crash and then nobody will be able to identify my body because of all the makeup. Still, I appreciate the gesture and take the keys when she hands them to me.

  The drive to school is a terrifying mirage of starts and stops from the shock of driving a vehicle made in the past ten years with a properly maintained engine and such. Barely pressing my toe to the acceleration shoots the car forward and it stops on a dime with slight force. Then comes the issue of parking. I’ve only driven to school a few times for after school activities and have never had to actually use the student parking lot. It turns out you have to pay to park there, which seems like a massive injustice to me. I don’t get my paycheck from Ebony’s until Friday and every cent given to the school feels like a betrayal of human rights.

  But I pay the three dollars and leave Amanda’s car by the side entrance, which means I’ll have to adjust my normal route out to get back to it.

  Then I’m walking inside and the air feels different instantly for one reason and one reason only. Even before I make it to my locker, people are staring. Their gazes are normally unsettling at best and aggravating at worst but today, covered in a face that doesn’t quite belong to me, the glances are more than warranted. I’ve shifted the dynamic between me and my peers by agreeing to assimilation. As usual, I try to meet as many gazes as possible before the perpetrator of stare looks away in embarrassment at being caught.

  Then Rhett catches up with me and these thoughts fall away. Suddenly I’m struck with nerves as his bright small turns to one of laughter.

  “Cordelia Kane, you look like you belong here.” He shuffles as we reach my locker, where he leans comfortably on someone else’s.

  It’s said like a joke, so I return in similar tone as my locker, for once, opens on the first try without protest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean…” It’s clear he thinks he offended me, which is far from the truth. “You look great and all, but it’s not exactly…you.”

  I continue to tease him because watching him squirm is more amusing than I’d anticipated. “Like you’ve seen every detail of my life after a week’s worth of observation. For all you know, I could wear makeup and a dress every Tuesday without fail. You have no right to dictate whether or not my choice of dress reflects my personality.”

  “Yeah, I guess, but-”

  “God, Rhett,” I break, slamming my locker and shoving his arm. “Kidding.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right, duh.” He cuts a sideways glance at me. “Then what is the façade about?”

  We arrive outside my first period class. “Amanda mugged me, tied me to a chair, and forced me to dress like a princess. She has a cold, un-beating heart full of glitter and girlishness.”

  “I see.” He smirks at me and looks over my outfit. “See you later, then, to work on your anthropology project?”

  “Memorial Park,” I agree. “Four o’clock.”

  “It’s a date.”

  As he begins to walk away, I call, “Don’t get ahead of yourself, grasshopper. It isn’t a date until I hear that poem Friday!”

  “Can’t wait!”

  Unsurprisingly, we get absolutely no work done that afternoon. Or any of the other afternoons leading up to the Friday night poetry reading. An average session of ‘work’ on the anthropology project and the day that follows:

  Every day we meet after school under this stunning willow tree by one of the Twin Rivers, Eleora and Orfeo, though I’m not sure which one, in Memorial Park.

  We discovered the spot the first afternoon on Tuesday. The park was crawling with people and Rhett wanted to find a spot where we could observe without being disturbed. So we walked along the cobblestone path talking (we were still quizzing one another on favorites at this point. Animal? Him: dogs because of the one he had as a kid. Me: otters because they hold hands when going downstream so they don’t lose their families. Holiday? Both [at the same
time, no less]: Halloween. At this point he vowed to take me on a spectacular Halloween date) until we stumbled – literally, I tripped over a twig or something – upon a wood and iron bench taking refuge under the puckering shade of the willow. The leaves cause a brilliant green smattering of light to fall over us as we’re sitting, and I swear nobody has ever looked as breath-taking as Rhett did with the streaked sun washed over his golden eyes.

  Once sitting on the bench, he tries to get a conversation going on various people walking past, since it’s an anthropology assignment and we should be paying attention to people, right? He points out attractive, sad, or plain-old interesting passers-by with fleeting interest, cradling his notebook in his lap and scratching down random thoughts as I do the same.

  But it doesn’t last. Eventually, we both end up writing about the other person, purely on accident. What he writes is surreally poetic, daydreams dressed as words and containing heart-stopping lines where he mentions ‘our shared laughter where a thousand perfect moments are wrapped in her voice’ while mine is mostly rambling teenage-girl sighs over his eyes or his hands or anything, really. He’s made me understand the phrase ‘easy on the eyes’ for the first time, simply by being so compelling to look at.

  Then we’ll pressure one another to read what we wrote until one of us (normally me) gives first. Rhett’s been holding out on letting me hear his writing before the poetry reading because he thinks that would undermine the importance of our deal. Between transitions, though, I manage to catch a glimpse at some of what he’s written and I must say, it shocks me how profound and agonizingly beautiful his thoughts are. I want nothing more during these sessions than to climb inside his mind and see what’s there beyond his smile.

  This goes on until I have work at five thirty (my shifts have been moved forward, as they normally are the week of a poetry reading so I can help Tracy prepare everything), where I make drinks with one headphone in, memorizing songs instead of watching customers. Every day so far, he’s brought me a CD of the songs his dad plays on the radio each night, labeled with the date and a track list, hand written in his tiny, slanted, barely-decipherable print. I’ve grown accustomed to listening to KAZ-102.5 from nine to ten before bed while on the phone with Rhett. I swear, I haven’t spoken this much since I was little and still lived with people who cared what I had to say.