At ten-thirty the ghost girl gets up and brushes the sawdust off of her pants with her good hand and then she’s gone again.

CHAPTER 16

Nastya

Josh shows up at five forty-five on Sunday, right on schedule. I run to the refrigerator as he pulls into the driveway. I made tiramisu for dessert since everybody seems to like coffee, except for Sarah, and I couldn’t care less about her. My fingers are still splinted so I’ve got to get the dish out with one hand and it’s proving difficult. Margot put it in the fridge for me this morning but she left for work early so I’m on my own. It’s awkward, but I manage to stretch my hand over the edge and get a good enough grip on it. The doorbell rings just as I get there, but now I have the dish in one hand and I can’t grab the doorknob with my left so I’m just standing there for a minute, holding tiramisu and looking at the door. Finally I have to put the dish on the floor so I can use my right hand to turn the knob.

Josh is standing on the porch, hands in his pockets, looking as if he’s picking me up for a date. His hair, as usual, hangs over his forehead, just a little longer than it needs to be. Like a kid who doesn’t have a mother nagging him to get it cut. I hate to admit how well he cleans up, dressed in a burgundy polo shirt and khaki dress pants, not that I mind the worn out jeans he’s usually in. I’m still surprised to see that he’s not wearing work boots. I was beginning to think they were physically attached to him.

We’re going to have to hurry to beat the rain. I can see the storm forming in the sky behind him. I’ve been inside all day so I hadn’t noticed. Usually I like to sit at the kitchen table and watch the clouds roll in and the sky turn because it happens so quickly here that you can see it change in a matter of minutes.

Today I was too busy making tiramisu, kicking myself for not going to the mall to buy a new dress, and ultimately trying to think of a brilliant plan to get out of this dinner. Dysentery was topping my excuse list today. It would have been far easier if Drew’s parents had looked down their noses at me and the whole affair last week had been uncomfortable and forced, but they didn’t and it wasn’t. I won’t ever fit in there the way they’re pretending I do. I’m not even sure why she invited me back. The only thing I contributed to the evening was cake. Though, according to Drew, one could never underestimate the power of cake to his mother. I imagine they’re accepting me for Drew’s sake. And if that’s the case, they probably don’t expect me to be around for long. I wonder how many girls have passed through the Leighton Sunday Dinner, one time, never to be seen again.

I ended up not bothering with the pretense of a nice conservative innocent dress. I figured the sooner we got to the truth of it, the sooner we could cut our losses and walk. I’m wearing a low cut black halter top and a black miniskirt‌—‌emphasis on the mini‌—‌paired with knee-high, spike-heeled leather boots. If I looked out of place last Sunday, it will be nothing compared to this. After tonight, things can go back to normal. Drew can find himself a nice girl who will have uncommitted sex with him and I can go back to a comfortable, expectation-free existence.

Josh studies me for a minute, taking in my appearance as if he’s looking for an answer to an unspoken question. His greeting consists of one word, “Sunshine.” Mine consists of no words.

I kneel down to retrieve the tiramisu from the foyer floor but I can’t get my fingers under it for leverage. I find myself silently cursing hammers and clueless boys. I’m about to try to use the palm of my left hand to push it into my right when Josh steps inside and kneels down, far too close to me, and picks it up without another word. He doesn’t smell like sawdust and there’s nothing right about that. No matter how good he looks right now, Josh Bennett without work boots and the smell of sawdust is all sorts of wrong.

We pull into the driveway at the Leighton house and have just enough time to jump out and run as the sky opens up. I wrap my arm around the dish and reinforce it against my chest. Somehow both the tiramisu and my ankles survive the jump intact. When I hit the ground, Josh is next to me and he takes the dish out of my hands and runs to the shelter of the porch overhang. We manage to make it without getting completely drenched. Before he opens the door, he hands me back the tiramisu and then reaches up and frames my face with his hands, running his thumbs across the skin below both of my eyes. I think my mouth might be hanging open because I have no idea what the hell he’s doing.

“Black shit,” he says, by way of explanation, and I realize that my eye make-up must be running. Then he opens the door for me without another word.

When we get inside, everything happens almost precisely as it did the week before. The table isn’t set quite as fancy which I’m glad for because it means I’m not such a novelty this week. But then I have to face that, if I’m not a novelty, it means I have a place here and I don’t want that at all.

We walk into the kitchen, past the dining room where I notice there’s an extra place setting at the table and I wonder who else is coming. Drew is fighting with the stereo because apparently it’s his turn to pick the dinner music tonight and I can’t imagine what that’s going to be.

Mrs. Leighton proceeds to rearrange the refrigerator to make room for the dish while telling me that I didn’t have to go to the trouble. I have a monstrous case of déjà vu and I know that in a minute I’m getting hugged whether I like it or not.

Sitting on two bar stools at the granite breakfast bar off of the kitchen are Sarah and a girl I recognize from school. I’m pretty sure she’s the one who accused me of being sired by Dracula. They’re laughing and attempting to knot their hair together. It’s the height of immature teenage girlishness. I want to mock them for it but I’m appalled by the fact that it makes me sad.

For a moment I feel like a survivor in some post-apocalyptic world, looking through a window, imagining a part of my life that’s gone now. I wonder what it would be like to have even one girlfriend. I used to have a couple, but they weren’t like this either. They were single-mindedly music-obsessed like I was. It was our link. Other girls compared nail polish colors and crushes; we compared audition pieces. Our friendships with each other never came first because music was always more important. Take the music out of the equation and I don’t know if I had anything in common with them at all. Even if I did, I still would have cut them off afterward. It hurt too much to be around them.

My friend Lily called me for months, but the only things she ever had to talk about were auditions and recitals and practice. I tried to be happy for her, but I wasn’t. I was jealous and pissed. It was like watching my best friend blissfully dating my ex-boyfriend who I was still madly in love with; watching her have everything I loved but couldn’t have anymore. In other words, painful, depressing and unhealthy. And I’m nothing if not healthy.

Even if I was talking, because let’s face it, the silent thing is definitely a barrier in terms of making friends, I probably still wouldn’t have any. I lost almost the entirety of my sixteenth year. While other girls my age were thinking about homecoming dances, driving lessons and losing their virginity, I was thinking about physical therapy, police line-ups and psychiatric counseling. I left the house to go to doctor’s offices, not football games. I interviewed with police detectives, not the manager at Old Navy.

Eventually, my body healed as much as it was going to. My mind started getting put back together, too. I think it’s just that the pieces got put back a little out of order. It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren’t enough wires and screws to fix the breaks in it.

So I didn’t do the normal stuff I was supposed to be doing at fifteen and sixteen. At the age when most kids are trying to figure out who they are I was busying trying to figure out why I was. I didn’t belong in this world anymore. It’s not that I wanted to be dead, I just felt like I should be. Which is why it’s hard when everyone expects you to be grateful simply because you’re not.

It left me lots of time to think, lots of time to get angry and feel sorry for myself. To ask Why me? To ask Why? period. I have a black-belt in self-pity. I was an expert in the field. Still am. It’s a skill you never forget. Needless to say, all the thinking and all the questions didn’t accomplish much. That’s when I started focusing on the anger. I stopped worrying about being polite, about hurting people’s feelings and saying what I was supposed to say, healing the way I was supposed to heal so that everyone could believe I was okay again and move on with their lives. My parents needed to believe I was okay, so for a long time I tried to convince them that I was. I tried to convince myself, too, but I was a much tougher sell because I knew the truth. I was so very not okay. I realized that I was going to feel shitty either way. I was probably going to feel shitty for the rest of my life, a life I should not even still be living. A life that should have let me go. So I got angry. Then I got very angry. Then I got angrier still. But you can only go so long being angry before you learn to hate. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and started hating instead. Whining was pathetic, but hate got things done. Hate strengthened my body and shaped my resolve and what I resolved to do was to get revenge. Hate seemed pretty damn healthy to me.

Nonetheless, I’ve learned that although hatred is good for some things, it won’t make you a lot of friends. I turn away from Sarah and the girl who has since been introduced as Piper. Piper. I roll it around in my head. It’s a pointless name, a meaningless name (unless you count pipe player as a meaning and that thought makes me laugh, because well, you know, pipe player), a name for someone like her. As I walk toward the dining room, I’m not at all confused about why I have no friends.

Despite the presence of Sarah and Piper, dinner is fun again. We, okay, they talk about college applications, building the homecoming float, drama auditions and how drastically the tax laws are changing. That last one is courtesy of Mr. Leighton who is a CPA. I kind of tune out at that point because the intricacies of tax law are a little outside of my sphere of comprehension, but then the conversation starts turning toward debate.

“We’ve got a tournament two Saturdays from now,” Drew tells his parents.

“What are you arguing?” his Dad asks, refilling his wine glass. Mrs. Leighton stares at it like she’d like to rip it out of his hand but I guess she’s not allowed. Pregnancy puts a crimp in the whole wine-drinking thing. I can’t blame her, though. I’d kind of like to rip it out of his hand, too.

“I’m not sure exactly. Something centering on the importance of the conservation of fabric.” He looks in my direction, focusing on my clothes, or lack thereof, while he bullshits them. “Mr. Trent assigned Nastya to help me with the research so I wanted to pick something she was passionate about.”

At that point Sarah chokes on whatever she has in her mouth. Mr. Leighton continues swirling his wine around in his glass as if he’s actually giving credence to what Drew said and considering the relevant arguments on the topic. Piper doesn’t even seem to have gotten the joke. I watch Josh’s jaw twitch out of the corner of my eye, the only sign at all that he’s sitting at the same table with the rest of us, listening to this conversation. I’m still watching him struggle to remain stoic and unaffected when I hear the sound of Mrs. Leighton’s shoe connecting with Drew’s shin.

CHAPTER 17

Josh

My father started teaching me how to build after my mother and sister died when I was eight. I don’t know if he necessarily wanted to, or if he had no choice because I just kept following him. He holed up in the garage all the time and if I wanted to see him I had to come out here. He never really talked, but I took what I could get. In the beginning, I mostly watched him. I picked up on a lot just by paying attention, but once I got the tools in my hands, I realized how little I knew. The first thing I built was a lopsided birdfeeder. I ended up making four of them before I got it right. I’ve been at this for almost ten years and some days I still feel like I don’t know shit.