Inside, it was dark, with a disco ball flickering over the rink proper. I stood at the edge, watching people sail past, and at first I didn’t see Joseph. Then I turned and spotted him on a bench tying up his regular shoes, another boy next to him. I walked over. “Hurry up. Dad’s waiting.”
“He said ten-fifteen.”
“It is ten-fifteen. It’s after ten-fifteen.”
“And what does it look like I’m doing? Don’t be such a bitch.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and when the other boy’s eyes widened, I wondered if I seemed like our father. But Joseph and I were peers, it wasn’t like I was bullying him-this was just standard bickering.
Joseph turned to his friend. “You need a ride?”
“Nah, I’m going to Matt’s.”
“All right. See you later, man.”
When we were out of earshot of the other boy, I said, “You definitely wouldn’t have offered him a ride if you knew what a bad mood Dad is in. Where does that kid live?”
“In Larkwood.”
“That’s twenty minutes from our house.”
“First of all, it’s ten minutes, which I’m not surprised you don’t know because you don’t even live here. And second, the Petrashes drive me everywhere. We owe their family big-time.”
“We owe their family big-time?” I repeated. “Have you been watching Mafia movies?”
We were outside, and I was a stride behind him, which was why he reached the car first, and how he opened the door to the front seat.
“You’re not sitting there,” I said.
“Oh, really?” He slid in. “Hi, Dad,” I heard him say. “Sorry I’m running late.”
I knocked on his window, and he glared at me and mouthed, Get in back.
I shook my head.
He unrolled the window. “Dad says get in back,” he said. “You’re acting like an idiot.”
Briefly, I considered the feasibility of walking away, calling a taxi, and asking the driver to go directly to the airport. But it actually wasn’t feasible at all. I didn’t have my wallet, or my plane ticket, or the clothes and books I needed to take back to Ault. I opened the back door and got in, and I was stiff with fury.
“Trouble with the lock back there?” my father said. His tone was cheerfully sarcastic, his bad mood apparently having vanished.
“Joseph should not be sitting in front,” I said.
“It’s fair this way,” Joseph said without turning around. “You were in front on the way out.”
“Yeah, exactly. The way out to get you, you dickhead.”
“Oh, did Dad need help steering? I bet you helped him a lot. You’re a really good driver from what I hear.” He laughed-the joke being that though I’d turned seventeen the previous June, I still didn’t have my license-and my father laughed, too.
“Tell you what, Flea,” my father said. “When we get home, I’ll park, Joseph and I will go inside, and you can sit in front for as long as you like.”
They laughed uproariously then, and I hated them. I hated them because they thought I was someone to mock and insult, because of the way they brought out the worst in me and it felt so familiar, it felt like the truth-it made my life at Ault seem like pretense. This was what I was, fundamentally: a petty, angry, impotent person. Why did I even care who sat in front?
I didn’t speak for the rest of the ride, and they chatted about the birthday party-Joseph disclosed far more information to our parents than I ever had-then the conversation segued into the basketball team at the rival high school to Joseph’s. All the names they mentioned belonged to kids I no longer knew, or hadn’t known to begin with. About halfway through the ride, my father looked in the rearview mirror, made eye contact with me-I averted my gaze immediately-and said, “I must say, Joseph, I’ve never found your sister’s contributions to the conversation so fascinating.” They both laughed, Joseph especially.
At home, I stepped out of the car while the engine was still running, slammed the door, and walked into the house. In my room, I removed my coat and climbed into bed with my clothes still on, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, and I cried hot tears of rage that resulted not in that high gulping but in sustained periods of silence marked by thick hissing outbursts. My mother knocked perhaps fifteen minutes later, murmuring my name, and when I pretended to be asleep, she opened the door but did not enter the room. But she said, “Good night, honey,” so maybe she knew I was faking.
Of course I’d turned out like I had-being part of this family, you were always about to be made fun of, someone’s mood (my father’s mood) was always about to change, and there was no situation you could trust or settle into. Their mockery was both casual and slamming, and it could be about anything. So no wonder-no wonder I never wanted Cross to see me naked.
I hated them because they thought I was the same as they were, because if they were right, it would mean I’d failed myself, and because if they were wrong, it would mean I had betrayed them.
Probably I had started thinking seriously about the Valentine’s flowers months before-even as a sophomore and junior, I’d wondered each year if there was any chance, if there was the remotest of possibilities, that Cross would send me one, and apparently there never had been-but after we got back from winter break, I was fixated.
Every year, accompanied by notes, I received one pink carnation (friendship) from Sin-Jun and one white carnation (secret admirer) from Martha, whose note would say, in her undisguised handwriting, something like, From your red hot mystery man. As a sophomore, I’d also gotten a pink one from Dede, which immediately made me wish I’d sent one to her, and I’d gotten a pink one from my adviser Ms. Prosek, who was one of the few faculty members who participated in the exchange; a lot of them openly disapproved of it. I had never gotten a rose, which stood, of course, for love, and cost three dollars to the carnation’s dollar-fifty. The exchange was a fund-raiser, organized by ASC, the Ault Social Committee, a club overseen every year by pretty junior girls who planned the dances and ran spring carnival. And therein existed the flower exchange’s most predictably flawed and titillating aspect: Whoever you sent a flower to, whatever message you wrote on your note, the ASC girls saw it. They processed all the forms, and it was only natural that the closer the giver or receiver of a particular flower was to their social nucleus, the greater the interest that flower held for them. There was, therefore, nothing truly secret about sending a secret admirer carnation.
Around midnight, as February 13 became February 14, ASC members (they had special permission to be out after curfew, they had work to do!) delivered the flowers to each dorm in large brown buckets, the flowers giving off cold air like the food in the refrigerated section of a grocery store, the notes stapled around the stems but never stapled in such a way that someone for whom the note was not intended couldn’t still open it and read a good chunk of the contents. The idea was that you’d have flowers awaiting you in the morning; the reality was that in most dorms, the flowers were pawed through by twelve-fifteen. Usually, they were pawed through by someone like Dede, a person unsure how many flowers she’d get, and unable to conceal this anxiety. A person like Aspeth, on the other hand, could stroll into the common room just before chapel the next morning to pick up her bounty, and it would be impossible to say whether she’d waited so long because she wanted everyone to see how many she’d received or because it really wasn’t that big a deal to her. My freshman year, Aspeth had received-I feared these figures would remain with me long after I’d forgotten the date of the Battle of Waterloo or the boiling point of mercury-six pink carnations, eleven white carnations, and sixteen red roses, twelve of which were from a sophomore named Andy Kreeger, who had never before spoken to Aspeth.