The Way I Used to Be

LUNCH-BREAK BOOK CLUB. I named it. The next week we have our first meeting. We bring our brown bags to the table in the back of the library by the out-of-date reference materials nobody ever uses. It is me, Mara, Stephen, plus these two freshmen girls. The one girl looks to be about ten years old and transferred from a Catholic school at the beginning of the year. She dresses like she’s still there, always wearing these starchy button-down shirts under scratchy sweaters, and embarrassingly long skirts. The other girl chews on her hair. She looks so out of it, I’m not sure if she even knows why we’re here.

“We’re one short,” I announce, hoping this doesn’t spoil everything.

Miss Sullivan looks at me like she knows just as well as I do that this is basically bottom of the barrel here. Then she looks up at the clock. The minute hand clicks on the one. “There’s still time,” she says, reading my mind. “Besides, it’s all right if we don’t have all six people the first day.”

Just then this guy I’ve never seen walks toward the table—this severe-looking guy—skinny, with pale skin and deep black hair with blue streaks that match his bright blue eyes. He wears these funky, thick-rimmed glasses, and two silver rings encircle his lower lip.

“Wow,” Mara whispers to me, grinning ear to ear.

“What?” I whisper back.

“Just . . . wow,” she repeats, not taking her eyes off him.

“Cameron!” Miss Sullivan greets him. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”

“Oh,” he says, pulling out the chair beside Stephen. “I mean, yeah. Hi.”

“All right,” Miss Sullivan begins, clearly encouraged by our new addition. “Why don’t we get started? I thought maybe we could just go around the table and introduce ourselves, tell everyone a little bit about your interests and why you’re here. I’ll start. Obviously, I’m Miss Sullivan.” She laughs. “I’m your librarian. But when I’m not here, I’m actually a real person, believe it or not. I spend a lot of time volunteering for the animal shelter and I foster rescue dogs while they’re waiting to be adopted. As far as this book club is concerned, as I mentioned to Eden, this is your club, so I want each of you to shape it. I think this will be a great way to do some reading for fun, outside the usual classroom setting, where we can have discussions and debates, talk about issues we don’t normally get to address in your forty-minute classes.”

She waves her hand in my direction, as if to say you’re up. I sink into my skin a little deeper. “I’m Eden—Edy, I mean. Or Eden. Um, I guess, I just like reading.” I shrug. “And I thought this book club sounded like a good idea,” I mumble. Miss Sullivan nods her head encouragingly. I hate myself. I look to Mara, silently begging her to just please interrupt me, just start talking—say anything.

“My name is Mara,” she says sweetly, flashing her new smile at all of us. “I’m a freshman. I’m interested in music—I’m in band. I like animals,” she adds, so naturally. Why couldn’t I have thought to say something like that? I’m in band too. I like animals—I love animals. “What else? I really think this will be a great way to spend our lunches—it’s a lot nicer, and quieter, than the cafeteria.” She adds a little giggle onto the end of her sentence, and everyone smiles back at her. Especially this new guy. Mara kicks my foot under the table, like, Are you seeing this?

“That’s great, Mara—we could always use more volunteers at the animal shelter, you know,” Miss Sullivan says with a smile. And I really wonder how people get to be normal like this. How they just seem to know what to say and do, automatically.

“I’m Cameron,” the new guy says, skipping over the two other girls. “I’m new here this year. I’m interested in art. And music,” he adds, smiling at Mara. “I like reading too.” He breaks his gaze away from Mara to make eye contact with me. “And dogs,” he smiles, looking at Miss Sullivan.

Miss Sullivan smiles back at him like she means it.

“I’m Stephen,” Stephen mumbles. “When Edy told me about this, I thought it sounded like a good alternative to having lunch in the cafeteria. Oh, and I like art too,” he adds, looking at Cameron. “Photography, I mean. I’m on yearbook.”

“Awesome, man,” Cameron says, flashing Stephen one of those smiles. This New Guy stepping all over my territory—first with Mara, then Miss Sullivan, now Stephen. And he’s going to try to smile at me like he’s some kind of nice guy.

He catches me staring at him, trying to figure out what kind of game he’s playing. I don’t know what expression I must be wearing, but his smile fades a little, and his eyes look at me hard too, like he might be trying to figure out why I’m trying to figure him out. Somewhere, my brain tells me I should be listening as the two other girls introduce themselves, but I can’t.

“Thank you for the introductions—this is great. So, I think the thing to do at this meeting is establish some logistics,” Miss Sullivan says through the fog of my brain. Cameron redirects his attention to her, and I follow. “What sounds reasonable to you? Two books a month? One? Three? I don’t know. We can vote on which books we would like to read together—we’ll do the reading on our own time, and then these lunch sessions will be for discussion. Thoughts?”

“Two a month sounds good,” Cameron offers, just before I was going to say the same thing.

“Yeah, two sounds right,” Mara agrees, with this strange twinkle in her eye.

“Why not three?” Catholic Schoolgirl asks.

“I don’t know if I have time for three extra books, with regular schoolwork and everything,” Stephen says uncertainly, looking around the table for support.

“I agree.” I say it firmly, just so I have something to say. Stephen smiles at me. He had, after all, supported me on Columbus.

“All right. I think we have a majority then. Two books per month it is!” Miss Sullivan concludes.

“Edy, this book thing was the best idea you’ve ever had!” Mara squeals the second we cross the threshold of the outside world, as we prepare to walk home after school. “That guy today was, like, so cool.”

“You mean the guy with blue hair and all the piercings?” I ask in disbelief.

“It’s not blue. It’s black with little steaks of blue. It’s awesome—he’s awesome.”

Okay, I mouth silently.

“Things are about to get good, Edy, I can feel it,” she says, clasping her hands together.

“What are you talking about?”

“This is just the beginning—me and Cameron. We can only get closer from here on out, right?” She trails off, looking into the distance. And I know I’ve lost her; she’s gone into her obsessive fantasizing state: “Yeah,” she continues, finally looking at me again, her eyes wide. “We’ll get to know him now that we’re all doing this book thing. We’ll become friends first. They always say that’s better, anyway. It will be—”

I have to tune her out, though, because she could go on like this for hours, planning out how things will be.

“You noticed the way he was looking at me, right, like, looking at me?” I hear her say.

Sometimes I wonder if she gets it, like Miss Sullivan and Stephen—how they just get it. Most of the time I think so, but then sometimes it seems like we’re on different planets. Like now.

“Maybe I should dye my hair blue?” she concludes, after a monologue that’s lasted almost the entire walk home from school.

“What? No, Mara.”

“I was just making sure you’re listening.” She smirks.

“Sorry, I’m listening,” I lie. We stand at the stop sign at the corner of my street. This is where we part. I go straight. She goes left. Except I can’t force my feet to move in that direction. It’s like I’m in quicksand. She stands there looking at me like maybe she really does get it. Like she knows something is wrong.

“Wanna come over?” she asks. “My mom won’t be home until later.”

I nod my head yes and we start walking toward her street.

“Okay, so I won’t dye my hair blue”—she grins—“but I am getting contacts. I already guilted my dad into it. We’re going to the eye doctor next weekend.”

“Sweet,” I tell her as I push my own glasses back up over the bridge of my nose.

We have no choice but to walk past his house to get to Mara’s. Kevin’s house. It hardly matters that he’s not there. I can feel my legs weakening the closer we get. I suddenly hate this neighborhood, loathe it, despise the way we’re all so close that we can’t get untangled from each other’s lives.

I already see Amanda in the front yard as we approach their house. His sister. She always seemed so much younger than me—I always thought of her as this little kid, but as I’m looking at her right now she doesn’t seem so little. She’s only one year behind us in school. We used to play together a lot when we were little, before Mara moved here in the sixth grade and took her place as my best friend. Their youngest sister is with her, along with another little kid—probably a neighbor—bundled up in layers, playing in the snow. It looks like they’re trying to assemble a snowman, but it’s really just a big blob of cold white. Amanda stands next to it, winding a scarf around and around the place where the top blob and the middle blob meet, while the two little kids scream and throw snowballs at each other.

The kids are oblivious to us, but Amanda sees us coming. She ties the scarf in a final knot and then places her mittened hands in her coat pockets; she stands there watching us. She doesn’t say anything, which is strange. Even though we weren’t technically friends, not like we used to be, we still talked, still got along at the occasional family get-together.

When I don’t say anything either, Mara fills in the blanks: “Hey, Mandy!”

Mandy. It’s what we all called her after they first moved here. It didn’t stick. I remember that’s how they introduced her the first time we met. It was at my eighth birthday party, back when our two families started celebrating everything as one, because Kevin and Caelin were inseparable from the very beginning. Kevin was always included, and his family by extension. But I guess that was a million years ago.

“Hi, Amanda,” I offer, trying to smile.

She crosses her arms and stands up a little straighter. “Hey,” she finally replies, monotone.

“So, did you have a nice Christmas?” I try, anyway, to act like things are normal, but all I can think of is Kevin.

She shrugs slightly, staring at me. The seconds drag by.

The thing about the Armstrongs—the thing I never really gave much thought until now—is that when they came here, they weren’t just moving here. They were leaving something else. Something bad had happened wherever they were before. I’d overheard Mrs. Armstrong telling Mom about it. She was crying. And then later I was eavesdropping while Mom told Dad about it. I didn’t get most of it, other than it involved Kevin, and Mr. Armstrong’s brother, Kevin’s uncle.

“Actually”—I turn to Mara—“I think I am gonna go home instead. I’m not feeling great, honestly.”

“Really, what’s wrong?” Mara asks, her voice genuinely concerned.

“Nothing, I just—” But I don’t finish, because I’m literally backing away from them. I turn to look only once, and they both stand there watching me.

Mara raises her arm to wave, and yells, “I’ll call you!”

I start running after I round the corner, my head pounding harder and faster with each footfall, my whole body in this cold sweat. By the time I make it home I’m so nauseous I’m actually crying. I run into the bathroom and am instantly on the floor kneeling in front of the toilet, gasping for air.

I lie down on the couch after, not even bothering to take my coat off.

I close my eyes.

The next thing I know, my mom is leaning over me, touching my forehead with the back of her hand. “She sick?” I hear Dad ask as he tosses his keys down on the kitchen table.

“Edy?” Mom puts her freezing hands on my cheeks—it feels so good. “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

“I guess so,” I mumble.

“Well, let’s get your coat off, here.” She puts her arm around my back to help me up. And I wish more than anything that she would just hug me right now. But she pulls my arms out of my coat instead.

“I threw up,” I tell her.

“Did you eat something weird today?” she asks.

“No.” In fact, I didn’t eat anything today. I was too busy trying to figure out that Cameron guy during lunch break to actually eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I packed for myself.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She stands and looks down at me like she really is. “Why don’t you go get in your pajamas, and I’ll make you some soup, okay?”

“Okay,” I answer.

I go into my room to get changed, careful not to stare too hard at the fading gray bruises that still line my thighs. Careful not to dwell too long on the bruises on my hip bones and ribs. They’ll be gone soon, anyway. I pull on my pajama bottoms and button the matching flannel shirt all the way up to my neck to hide the remnants of bruises still on my collarbone.

“Chicken noodle?” Mom calls out from the kitchen as I take my seat at the table.

Before I can answer, she sets a cup of steaming tea down in front of me.

I don’t actually feel like soup at all, chicken noodle or any other kind. But she has this big smile on her face, like the kind she would always get running around after Caelin. I think she must like having someone to take care of, something concrete to do for me.

“Yeah, chicken noodle,” I agree, in spite of my churning stomach.

“Okay. You drink that,” she tells me, pointing at the tea.

I nod.

Dad sits down at the table across from me. Making his hands a tent, he says, “Yep. Some kinda bug going around, I guess.”

If only I were sick all the time, things might feel a little more normal around here.