Bleed. Part 1

Bleed.

Laurie Faria Stolarz.

For all who bleed.

SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 10:50 A.M.

Sat.u.r.day morning. In my room. Just me ... and Vanessa and Roland making love on the canopy bed. I love watching them do it. The way Vanessa rolls on top and dangles her hair in his eyes and mouth. The way Roland presses his fingertips into her shoulders so she'll lean closer and kiss him, with tongue, just as her hair swings free of his mouth.

"Nicole?" My mother knocks on the door.

"Yeah?" I click the TV off and grab a book from the bedside table.

She comes in, a pile of fresh towels propped up on one hand like a tray-carrying waiter. "For your bathroom," she says, making her way in there.

"Uh-huh." I flip the book open to the middle and pretend to read.

"What's on your agenda for today?" she asks.

Since I don't feel like explaining, I just shrug and turn a page.

"You can always put in a few hours at the hospital."

Volunteering on a Sat.u.r.day? Is she crazy? I fake a smile that tells her to leave. Thankfully, she does.

My agenda, as she calls it, has been the same for every Sat.u.r.day morning this summer. Sleep in till nine. Shower, dress, and breakfast until nine forty-five. Watch Friday's TiVo'd episode of Sands of Time (since I'm busy volunteering at the hospital on Friday afternoons), taking full advantage of the extra thirty-minute window I've left open to rewind over the juicy parts. Tame down my frizzy hair with a few squirts of spray gel (this needs to be done hourly), and apply a fresh coat of lipstick (Nude Glow-my favorite shade). And then, just before eleven, I fetch a tall, freezer-chilled gla.s.s of raspberry iced tea, my mother's pair of pearl-plated bird-watching binoculars, and do a stopover at the mirror on the way to my bedroom window.

Since it's about that time now, I hustle through the preparations and then take position in front of the window to watch Him mow the lawn next door. To watch those calves. I love his calves-dirty and sun-bronzed, the most adorable wisps of short, honey-colored hair that make capital C's and inverted J's at the front and back of his legs. The look-out-David, Michelangelo-sculpted cuts.

Him = Sean O'Connell. The one, I truly believe, I was put on this earth to be with, to make real, live soap-opera love with. Except, he's my best friend Kelly's boyfriend. Reason #47 why my life sucks.

He looks more tired than usual today, like the sun has drained all the blood from his body and replaced it with boiling water. I wonder if he's hungry, if I should bring him something to eat.

I edge the curtain open wider and watch the white of his T-shirt wilt to a pale peachy color as sweat drips down from his shoulders and neck. I study the way his teeth pinch his bottom lip each time he looks up toward the sun. His shoulders round forward as he turns the mower away from the house, and the small of his back slopes downward like half of a valentine heart.

After a couple weeks of watching him at the window, I commented to my mother about the Harris's well-maintained lawn and shrubbery, the perfectly square holly bushes, and how the sidewalk has been shaved of the dandelion patches that used to sprout through the cracks. I suggested that she hire Sean to do our yard, too. But she was able to see through that suggestion, and told me she wasn't ready to throw away good, hard-earned money so I could get chummy with my best friend's boyfriend.

I sit back on my bed and imagine what Sean might want to eat, what I might bring him. A Popsicle? But the juice would probably drip all over my fingers by the time I made it over there. A couple of oatmeal-and-raisin cookies? But those are from a box.

Lucy, my velvety white cat, trots into my room and sits in the square patch the sun has painted on the hardwood floor. I click my tongue for her to come and join me, even kick the bubble of covers down to make room for her on the bed. No deal. I have to resort to force. I s.n.a.t.c.h her up from the floor and plop her onto my lap, doing my best to scratch at her cheeks the way she likes and rub behind her ears. But she runs off to take her place on the window perch in the living room, like the traitor she is.

The other day I sat on my bed, trying to conjure up a list of all the ways Kelly has betrayed me since we were eight. It took me four whole hours to come up with three instances. I pluck the notebook from beside my bed and flip to the page, mostly filled with doodles of three-dimensional squares, and vines of daisies and roses. I read the occasions of betrayal softly to myself: 1. In fourth grade Kelly slipped a secret-admirer note in my desk at school and signed it with Ricky Malick's name. When I had our friend Maria go up to Ricky's friend Mike at recess, to ask him if Ricky really liked me, Mike s.n.a.t.c.hed the note and read it aloud to everyone in our cla.s.s. They laughed at me and Ricky, and Ricky never spoke to me again after that. 2. In eighth grade Kelly got asked to the junior-high dance by Billy Ready, the same guy I liked. I knew she knew I liked him, even though I never told her I did. But obviously, my feelings didn't matter, because the two of them ended up going together while I stayed home and played with Lucy. 3. Just last year Kelly told me she'd come with me to get my hair straightened at her favorite hair salon for the soph.o.m.ore semi. Apparently, her aunt knows someone who works at one of those trendy places on Newbury Street, and Kelly always gets a huge discount. But she blew me off instead. She told me that she had to help her mother clean the house, but I later found out from Maria that she went to the movies with Chuck Wagner, a senior on the soccer team.

Of course, none of these relationships worked out. Kelly only keeps her boyfriends for a few months max-aside from Sean, that is. I think she likes the chase more than anything else. Plus, it's not like she and Sean are going to get married or anything. So they've been going out for eight months-big deal. If she hadn't left to visit her dad, she probably would've broken up with him by now anyway.

I turn another page in the notebook. For every one of Kelly's betrayals on my list, there's an example of when she's been really great. Like the time she stayed up all night on the phone, listening to me cry over how Ferris Beckman dumped me for baton-twirling Monica Piramachi. The time she told Ms. McMa.n.u.s, our history teacher, that the cheat sheet on the floor was hers, not mine, because she was acing history anyway. And the time in seventh grade when she told the school nurse that it was she who needed a maxi pad, super-absorbency, because I was too embarra.s.sed to ask.

I've tried to find things to distract myself from all this. Yesterday, I cleaned out my closet and dresser and brought all my old clothes to the Salvation Army deposit box on Ca.n.a.l Street. And earlier today I rearranged my photo alb.u.ms so they make sense. I took out all the pictures that don't mean anything to me-pictures of my older brother's friends; a picture of a cute boy that came with the frame I'm using to hold my middle-school graduation picture; pictures of my parents' friends' babies, kids I don't even know. Pictures I put in there merely to fill up the pages.

I glance at the snapshot of Kelly and me that I've set aside: the two of us sitting on my front steps, playing War with two decks of cards. I remember how we used to play every Friday night in the summer, just before the sun went down. We'd sip raspberry iced tea and talk about what we would do when we grew up, who we would be. I hold the picture up and glance back toward the window.

Sean is still there.

I drop the photo back on my dresser and adjust the focus on my binoculars. He's so close, like I can reach out and touch the tag sticking out from his shirt, help him by tucking it back in. I imagine doing this for him in the hallway at school. Him thanking me with a kiss, and everyone smiling and tilting their heads at how cute we are.

He shuts the mower off and yanks a rag from the back pocket of his shorts. Sweat drips over his pale eyebrows, along his nose, down his lip, parting his mouth, and then over the moon-shaped cleft in his chin. He swipes the rag over his face and then looks up in my direction. I drop the binoculars to my lap and freeze. At first I pull away, hide behind the curtain so he doesn't see me. But then I feel myself edging back toward the screen, not caring if he does. I think he spots me, and this makes my heart go off at about a thousand decibels, like one of those vibrating clocks that shakes you out of dreamland. But instead he just reaches for the water bottle on the front porch, setting the clock back to snooze mode.

Snooze mode-just like my life.

Sean places his lips over the mouth of the bottle and tilts his head back to get a satisfying drink. I watch the lump of his Adam's apple bob up and down as the water swims down his throat, and feel myself swallow as well.

I rack my brain for just one more example of Kelly's betrayal. But the only one that keeps creeping across my mind is the one I am most afraid to write down. Was Kelly's going after Sean a betrayal? She knew how much I liked him. Knew since the third grade, when I stared at him from behind open phonics books and monkey bars at recess. When I wrote his name a million times inside my notebook covers-Sean + Nicole, Mrs. Sean O'Connell, Nicole loves Sean 4-eva-and put it in MASH games that foretold who my husband would be and how many children we'd have.

She knew it when I memorized his cla.s.s schedule each semester. When I'd sit bundled up at the ice rink watching his hockey games. When, at the beginning of each year, I came up with all these elaborate schemes to try and be his lab partner, or b.u.mp into him in the hallway.

Last October was the worst. But I was determined to finally ask Sean out. I had it all planned. The Sadie Hawkins dance was still a few weeks away. I would come home from school, get all my house ch.o.r.es done so my mother wouldn't be on my back, and then call him up and ask him to go with me.

The only wrinkle in my otherwise brilliant scheme: Kelly insisted on coming over that day. She even helped me finish all my ch.o.r.es, right down to peeling the potatoes for our dinner that night despite her recent manicure-anything, she said, to get my b.u.t.t to the dance instead of parked at home in front of the tube, where it'd been during every other social event.

"Okay, I'm really going to do it now," I told her, sitting on the edge of my bed, my heart practically pumping through my chest. I'd been sitting in that exact same spot for more than forty minutes, the phone in one hand, Sean's number pressed in the other.

"Give it up," Kelly groaned, when forty minutes turned into an hour. "It's obviously not going to happen today."

"I'm going to call him," I insisted.

"Uh-huh." She rolled her eyes. "I need a snack. You hungry?"

I shook my head and watched as she hopped off the bed and bounded downstairs to the kitchen.

The perfect opportunity to finally do it.

I dialed the numbers quickly and pressed the receiver to my ear.

"h.e.l.lo?" said a boy's voice-Sean's voice, I was so sure.

I opened my mouth to say something back, but all that came out was a soft choking sound.

"Hel-looo?" the voice repeated.

"Is this Sean?" I asked in practically a whisper.

"Yeah. Who's this? Danielle?"

Danielle who? I almost hung up, only I heard a weird rustling sound on the other end of the line.

"Not Danielle," Kelly's voice said through the receiver. She'd obviously picked up the phone extension downstairs.

"Then who?" Sean asked.

"It's Kelly from school."

My mouth dropped open. The receiver still pressed against my ear, I sprung from the bed and flew down the stairs with the full intent of ripping the phone right out of her meddling little hands. Kelly must have heard me charging, because she ran into the bathroom and locked herself in.

I pounded on the door, but it obviously didn't bother her any, because she kept right on talking to him Completely horrified, I kept listening.

"So what's up?" she asked him.

"Not much," Sean answered.

"Surprised it's me?"

"A little."

"Oh, come on," she continued. "I've seen the way you look at me in history cla.s.s. Don't deny it."

"Whatever," he said.

"I'm just kidding. G.o.d ... can't you take a joke?"

"What do you want?" he asked, trying to get to the point.

"Are you going to the Sadie Hawkins thing or what?"

"I don't know."

"I don't know as in you haven't been asked yet?"

"I guess so."

"I guess so what? You haven't been asked?"

"Not yet; isn't it still a whole month away?"

"Hmm ... interesting," she said, ignoring the question. "So what do you think of Nicole Bouchard?"

"Who?"

"Nicole Bouchard," she repeated, turning up the volume on her voice.

"I don't know."

"Do you think she's pretty?"

"Kelly!" I hissed, patting on the door, half afraid that he would hear me, more afraid of the damage Kelly could do. "Hang up NOW!" I whisper-shouted.

"What's going on?" Sean demanded. "Who's on the other line?"

"No one," Kelly said, letting out another giggle. "It's just me."

"Yeah, right."

"Are you trying to tell me that you're hearing voices? They have shrinks for that, you know."

"Whatever," Sean said. "I gotta go."

And with that, he hung up.

"Great!" Kelly shouted. "I totally could have gotten you in!" She whipped the bathroom door open and glared at me like his hanging up was my fault.

"I can't believe you just did that," I said.

"Are you kidding me? I was trying to do you a favor."

I shook my head and bit my tongue, barely able to even look at her.

"Like it even matters anyway." Kelly sighed. "The guy was a total a.s.s. It was like he didn't even know who you were."

I shrugged, holding myself back from tearing up.

"You need to forget him, Nickie."

"I will," I whispered.

"Good, because it's not like he's even worth it. Sean's so completely average." With that, she hugged me, telling me how I could do so much better than Sean O'Connell, how she could get me a date with Ferris Beckman if I wanted, how she knew for a fact that he liked me.

Feeling defeated, I agreed. And then a few weeks later, when me and Ferris didn't work out, Kelly announced that she was going to get Sean for me-for real this time.

But instead, she got him for herself. "You're not mad, are you?" she asked, the new-boyfriend excitement on her face masked only partially by concern. "I mean, you know I'd never do anything to hurt you. It's just that you said it yourself-you want to forget about him, right?"

For some reason, I nodded. After that she prattled on about how if it bothered me, she'd call it all off, how she had no idea how it even happened, and that our friendship was way more important than some stupid boy. "You know I love you," she said, giving me an extra-tight squeeze.

"I love you, too," I repeated-only I wished I were saying the words to Sean.

"Nicole," my mother yells from somewhere downstairs. "I'm going to the hospital. Are you sure you don't want to volunteer a few hours in the gift shop?"

"No thanks," I yell back. "I've got some stuff to do."

It's eleven thirty. I still have over an hour before I'm supposed to pick up Maria. I decide to go outside, pretend to get the mail or something, peek over and act surprised to see him there. It's summer, for G.o.d's sake, and I haven't seen him since the last day of school. He'll want to say h.e.l.lo to someone from school, especially me, Kelly's closest friend. We can even talk about Kelly. That'll be fine. That'll be perfect. I can go over just to find out how Kelly is. I haven't spoken to her in two whole weeks, after all. "I saw you out here working," I practice into the mirror. "By the way, have you heard from Kelly?" I do want to know if she's having a good time. Maybe Sean has some news.

I watch my lips as I practice what I'll say. I hate my lips, the top one is way fuller than the bottom. I conceal it as best as I can with more Nude Glow, the way the woman at the Clinique counter advised me. I wish I had lips like Kelly's, stacked up like perfect little peach wedges, lipstick or not.

I'll just go over and say h.e.l.lo, I tell myself, squirting down my hair with extra spray gel. I repeat the word "h.e.l.lo" in my head as I make my way past the mailbox and across the front lawn.