Mel waited. She was sure that if she was calm and didn’t bother Avery that Avery would see there was no problem. Mel” interpreted waiting as not even speaking of the argument because she didn’t want it to grow larger and more important than it already was. If it was ignored, maybe it would wither and die.
First the Thanksgiving holiday went by. The Podds were visited. Mel found out that Richie had broken his collarbone jumping off someone’s gazebo. Jim bought some kind of fancy new stove and Mel was forced to admire it. Lyla expanded her list of acceptable foods to incorporate mashed butternut squash with margarine. These were the highlights—the rest was unforgivably dull.
She spent the next three nights sitting with her dad, watching cheesy, romantic movies. Weirdly, her father was a huge fan of them. He owned DVDs of Notting Hill, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. These were his favorites. If his day was particularly long, he’d come home with two boxes of mac and cheese and pop one of those movies in and they would watch together. Underneath that rugged contractor’s exterior beat the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Mel wished she could tell him as they were three hours into a Humphrey Bogart fest on AMC that she really didn’t want to watch Casablanca, because her own heart was about to explode. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She sat there with him on the couch, the tissues on her lap, praying that Ilsa didn’t get on her plane and leave Rick. But she did. It figured. Mel cried. Her dad cried. They were the Crying Family.
When she returned to school, just as an added precaution, Mel took extra time in the morning to make sure she looked her best. She kept her hair down because she knew Avery loved it that way. She wore skirts and her favorite ribbon choker. She got new lip gloss. She tried some eye liner.
She was aware that people were looking at her more than usual. She was too preoccupied to care. When a cheerleader got out of line in the cafeteria right as Mel stepped behind her, when a table of guys grew eerily silent as she walked past, Mel ignored it. Getting noticed by Avery was the only thing that mattered.
All this effort was for nothing, though, since Avery managed to make herself invisible. Mel tried to end up in the right places so that Avery would be able to see her, but the most she ever got was a glimpse of Avery’s wine-colored leather jacket disappearing into the parking lot.
A week passed, and the waiting got harder. Mel started about a hundred notes and e-mails—she spent every class composing them in her head and sometimes writing them down. She went to school. She came home. She dumped her stuff on her bedroom floor. Sleeping made the waiting easier, so she took naps. Her dad would wake her up for dinner and ask her if she was feeling sick. She listened to the same songs over and over until they were imprinted in her brain and flowed through her dreams. The only thing Mel’s life was leading up to was a phone call or a note or a visit that never seemed to materialize.
Things started to fall to the wayside. The random handful of college applications sat on her desk, unexamined. Every time she opened one and tried to read it, she felt a weird kind of paralysis—she couldn’t imagine leaving here, leaving everyone, and going off to live in one of these concrete towers or stark brick buildings with a bunch of strangers. She picked at her homework selectively. She spaced out in class, looking at all the girls and imagining what it would be like to kiss each one, wondering which ones would actually want to try.
None of them would be like Avery, though.
Throughout all of this, Nina was insanely busy. Every time Mel saw her, she was running to a class or a meeting or an event. Besides, she’d already asked not to be put in the middle, so Mel said nothing to her. Instead she confided in Parker—before English, at lunch, at work, on the phone, online—nervously asking him over and over if that was the day she should finally talk to Avery. He always said yes, and he was always good about it, although he looked a little frustrated after two solid weeks of being asked the same question.
It all came to a head one night at work, halfway through December, as Mel was sliding two Mortiburgers from under the heat lamps and thinking about the fact that she hadn’t even started studying for her trig midterm, which was only two days away. The cook leaned out and peered at her through the opening, his face spookily illuminated by the heat lamp, causing it to glow red.
“So,” he said, “where’s your girlfriend?”
And that was that. The bottom dropped out for Mel. She couldn’t be in the pantry anymore—or in the restaurant—or possibly anywhere. Mel abandoned the burgers and ran to the nasty employee bathroom, back in the storeroom, and barricaded herself inside.
The void had finally swallowed her up: she was alone and confused and sick of waiting and repulsed by everything.
She wasn’t coming out.
After ten minutes or so, one of the assistant managers knocked on the door. Panicked, Mel faked some coughing and retching noises, which probably didn’t fool anyone, but she still managed to get off for the rest of the night. Parker wasn’t working, but he was supposed to come by at eleven to pick her up. But it wasn’t Parker she needed.
She called Nina.