The Way I Used to Be

“EDY?” VANESSA SAYS, pushing my bedroom door open. “I asked you ten times, very nicely, to go out and shovel.” It started snowing Wednesday night. And then on Thursday school is canceled, work is canceled—life is canceled, trapping me in the house with Vanessa and Conner all weekend. There’s a driving ban for the entire county, and everyone’s cars are buried under two and a half feet of snow that is only getting deeper and deeper with every hour that passes.

I really just want to ignore her, because she has in fact interrupted me about twenty times already, not ten, to bother me about shoveling. What the hell are snow days for, anyway? What would be so wrong with just sitting at my desk pretending to do homework while I drown in the sheer rightness of a day off?

I take my headphones out of my ears and look up at her like I didn’t hear. “Huh?”

“What are you working on?” she asks, trying to smile at me.

“Homework. English,” I lie.

“Well, do you think you could take a break? Your father shouldn’t be out there this long.”

“Then why doesn’t he just come in?” I counter.

“Edy, I’m asking you,” she tells me firmly.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t even make sense to be shoveling during the snowstorm. Doesn’t it make more sense to just shovel after it stops? None of our neighbors are out there shoveling right now. Why do we always have to do this?”

“No, why do you always have to do this?” She points her finger at me. Then I watch as she takes a deep breath, like she does when she’s trying to calm herself. Watch as she takes one deliberate step backward. I wonder if she’s afraid she might slap me. “What I’m saying is,” she begins again, more restrained, “why can’t you just do what I’ve asked? You know, why do you have to challenge everything I say, Eden? I don’t understand.”

“I’m not challen—”

“There you go again,” she accuses, waving her hand at me. She starts getting that look in her eye. The one that gives its victim the sense that everything wrong with the world—war, famine, global warming—is her fault. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not challenging anything. God. I’m just pointing out the obvious. Why should we have to shovel all day long, instead of just once?”

She throws her arms up and walks away, muttering to herself, “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Fine,” I call after her, tossing my book down against the desk. “I’ll go out there even though it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of!”

By the time I shovel to the bottom of the driveway, the cold has infiltrated my core, but it’s invigorating somehow. I look out, squinting my eyes so that my vision blurs beyond the identical houses and cars and streets and trees, until I am the center of this frozen nowhere suburb-scape.

I refocus my eyes and turn around to look at the house. At the rate the snow is falling, it looks like I never even started shoveling. The cars are still blocked in, and my extremities now feel like they are about to fall off. And somehow, this satisfies Vanessa. “Thank you,” she says when I come inside with icicles dripping from my eyelashes.

“It doesn’t even look like I did anything.”

“That’s really not the point, is it?” She smiles, licks her index finger, and turns the page of her magazine.

“Isn’t it?” I ask, hanging my coat up on the hook by the door.

“Isn’t what?” she says absently.

“The point,” I reply, “of shoveling?”

“Oh. Well . . .” She places her finger on a word and looks up from the magazine, stares into space for a moment, squinting her eyes like she’s thinking of something to say to me. I stand there, in actual suspense, waiting. But then her eyes refocus on the dingy wallpaper, and she swats her hands in front of her face, like she’s shooing some annoying insect. She goes back to her magazine, never finishing.

I send myself to my room, lock myself in, crack the window, and light a cigarette. I’ve never smoked in my house before. I was always afraid they would smell it and they would be disappointed in me yet again. Nobody was noticing anything, though. She couldn’t even be bothered to finish a sentence.

After dinner Vanessa knocks on my door, asks if I want to help decorate the tree. I don’t answer. I close my eyes and cover my ears and will her to just please walk away. She doesn’t ask a second time.

As I sit on my bedroom floor smoking cigarettes—listening to the sound of the TV under my door, and the rustling of Christmas ornaments being unwrapped and unpacked—I have this intense longing to call Mara. To make up with her, and just say whatever words I need to say to put things back in place. But I know the only way to do that is to apologize to Steve first. I shake my head as I reluctantly dial his number.

It only rings once before he picks up.

“Steve, hey. It’s Eden.”

“I know” is all he says.

I pause, consider hanging up.

“Look, I’m sorry about the party,” I finally tell him.

Silence.

“Sorry if I was jerk,” I try. “I was messed up. Sorry.”

Finally he sighs into the phone. “It’s okay. You know, I get it.”

“Thanks, Steve. Well, I’ll talk to you—”

“So, what’s goin’ on?” he interrupts before I can say good-bye. “I mean, what’ve you been up to—all this crazy snow?” he asks awkwardly.

He wants to keep me on the phone.

“Not much,” I answer, suddenly realizing I kind of want to be kept on the phone.

“Yeah, me neither.”

Silence.

“Well, what are you doing now?” I ask him.