“I know.” But there’s an uneasy flickering in my heart. Saz broke a promise. Maybe it was a silly promise. An eight-year-old promise given by ten-year-olds. But more than the promise, it’s that Saz kept Yvonne a secret from me. We haven’t even graduated and left home yet. How many more secrets will there be once Saz is at Northwestern and I’m at Columbia and we’re not here, together, in Mary Grove? Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.
Maybe none of it would bother me so much if I didn’t have a secret of my own, a secret belonging to my parents that they’ve now handed to me. A secret I don’t want.
I force myself to take her hand. I say, “I wish we were going to California.”
“Me too.”
Her eyes meet mine, dark and flashing. Saz usually looks as if she’s thinking a million exciting thoughts at once. But right now her eyes are quiet, and behind the happiness that’s there over Yvonne, I can see the worry and the sadness and maybe the fear that I’m upset with her.
I say, “I could never be mad at you. Especially not for following your heart.” Especially not when I’m keeping secrets too.
“Promise?” she says.
“Promise.”
I can see the relief in her face. She squeezes my hand. With the other hand she scoops up the vodka bottle. Takes a drink now that she’s so close to home.
She says, very low, “I really like her.”
And it feels almost like a death, like Old Saz and Old Claude are suddenly gone. I squeeze her hand this time, because if I don’t, I might burst into tears and lose it right here, right now. Then I hug her hard and long before climbing out of the car.
“Hey,” she says, leaning over the seat, eyes shining. “I love you more than Tootsie Rolls and Ariana Grande and summer.”
We’ve done I love you more than since we were ten, because we love each other beyond three words and needed to find a way to say it.
“I love you more than Kraft mac and cheese and Zelda Fitzgerald and spring.” But the words fall flat onto the ground around me. She holds up her hand and waves her pinkie, and I hook it with my own. Then I slam the door and run for the house.
6 DAYS TILL GRADUATION
When I wake up the next day, the world is different. It’s a different I can feel more than see, as if something in the gravity of the earth has shifted.
There’s a short story by Ray Bradbury about a man who pays a company named Time Safari to go back in time for the privilege of shooting a dinosaur. He can only kill this specific dinosaur, which has been carefully marked, because it’s old and diseased and going to die no matter what. In killing it, the man won’t upset the balance of nature. He’s warned to stay on the path Time Safari has built. Never venture off the trails. If he kills anything else, no matter how small, it could throw off the future of the world.
And of course he goes off the path, and they almost leave him there, and when they get back to the present, it all looks just as it did when they left it. But not the same as they left it. And then—dun-dun-dun—the man finds a dead butterfly on the sole of his boot. And he knows he has changed everything.
What sort of world it was now, there was no telling.
That is how it feels in my room, in my house, in my life. Mom, Dad, Saz, sun, earth. Atmosphere. Stars. Floor. All gone.
THE WEEK OF GRADUATION
The days that follow are strange, like the aftermath of a natural disaster, when the world goes too still. My parents and I move carefully around each other, glass figures in a glass house, and when we are outside, we move even more carefully, so as not to give anything away to anyone we see.
My dad and I are rarely alone together. I tell Saz he needs to be at work early this week and ask if I can ride to school with her. She talks the entire way, but I like how the words fill the silence and the air and the hollows that have grown up inside of me.
At home, if my dad walks into a room and finds me by myself, I make up some excuse to walk out. I don’t know what to say to him right now: Please bring my dad back because I don’t recognize you, this person who’s decided to leave my mother and me. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t want to know you anymore. He seems to get this—or maybe he doesn’t know what to say to me, either—because he doesn’t push it. My mom, on the other hand, hovers. But the strange thing is that they are also acting weirdly normal. They run errands and we do our usual chores and we watch Netflix together and eat dinner together except for a night or two when Dad works late. But this is normal too.
As we ease into our everyday roles, I feel this tiny, delicate bud of hope growing in my chest. Maybe it won’t happen after all. Maybe this is some sort of midlife crisis that all dads go through. Maybe Mom will talk him out of it. Maybe it was all a mistake. I stare at the floor of my room until I tell myself that I can see it again and that it won’t break like thin ice if I walk on it.
Meanwhile, life goes on, and I try not to be shocked that it does. I go to school on Monday—my last Monday of high school—and wait for everyone to see that I’m Claude, but not Claude. The old Claude has been replaced by Robot Claude, who sits in class and walks through the halls and eats lunch and listens to her friends talk about sex and college or complain about their bodies. I’ve never realized how hard we are on our bodies. I think, Why are we so mean to ourselves? Why aren’t we happy with what we have? And then I say it aloud, and Alannis and Mara stare at me like I just told them they were monsters.
I get my period during lunch hour, which means I’m not pregnant with Shane Waller’s baby, but I barely feel it—the relief. I see Shane afterward, in calculus, and we don’t talk. He doesn’t even look at me, and it’s as if we’re strangers who didn’t go out for two months. It’s so fucking bizarre to me that one minute you can be naked with someone and the next it’s as if you never met, yet I’m so strangely okay with this that I wonder if I ever really cared about him. Maybe Mr. Russo is right and I’m incapable of feeling.
Except that later that day I’m in the hallway outside the library when I see Wyatt Jones and Lisa Yu making out against her locker, and as I watch it happen, I can feel myself unraveling. Lisa is cooler than anyone has ever been on this earth. She is cooler than I can ever dream of being. And now she has her mouth suctioned to his. Not you, too, Wyatt Jones, I want to say. I need you to stay still, to remain the Wyatt you’ve always been. No changing. No leaving like everyone else.
Saz says, “Control your face, Hen. Look away! Look away!”
I blink at her because until this moment I didn’t know she was there. I say, “When did that happen?” And I mean Wyatt and Lisa. “Wyatt doesn’t like Lisa Yu. He likes me. Since when is she someone who gets to kiss him? That should be me making out with him, not her.” On and on. Even to my own ears, I sound like a complete and total baby.