A few days after our “family talk” about Mom and Norm’s weekend, I called Noah.
“¡Caramba! Se me olvido mi cuaderno,” he said. (Which means, “Shoot! I forgot my book!”)
“¿De veras? ¡Que lastima! Usted puede pedir prestado de minas,” I answered, laughing. (Which means, “Really? What a shame! You can borrow mine.”)
This was the way we always opened our phone conversations. He’d been in my Spanish class last semester, and the first time he called me, we’d practiced a Spanish dialogue.
“What are you doing?” he asked now.
“I think my parents are going to marriage counseling.” I straightened the horse statues lined on the bookshelf beside my desk. They were kind of babyish, I guess, but I still liked them. Then I lay on my bed, making a pillow from a big stuffed horse Mom had given me years ago for my birthday. “They didn’t tell us, but we’ve figured it out.”
“My parents went to marriage counseling. Before they got a divorce,” he said.
“That went well.” I laughed loudly, pretending it was funny. The reason Noah had moved here in the middle of the year was because his mom had married Kevin’s dad.
Then there was a silence between us.
“Noah?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Me neither.”
Last semester, when people were calling me names, and Noah was new, he was the one who asked me why I didn’t just punch somebody. After I got back to school from being suspended, I went up to Noah in the hall and yelled at him.
“It’s your fault I got suspended!”
“Excuse me?” he said, ducking away from me, pushing his longish, wavy blond hair behind his ear.
“You made me throw my book at her!” I followed him down the hall.
“How did I make you?” He stopped and turned to face me.
“You know what I mean! You’re the one who told me to punch somebody.”
“I say a lot of stuff,” he said. “You shouldn’t pay attention to me.” We were standing still and people flowed around us like fish in a river. “No one else does.”
“I did. I paid attention to you,” I said. He was looking at me funny, with these intense greenish-blue eyes.
Two nights later he called me to practice our Spanish dialogue for class, and gradually, we started talking a couple of times a week. And he always said the same thing when I picked up the phone. “Caramba! Se me olvido mi cuaderno.” And then one Friday night at a basketball game, when we all went to watch Stephanie’s squad perform during half-time, he showed up by himself. Came over and sat next to me on the bleachers. He alternated between two flannel shirts, one mostly green, the other mostly red. His mom was a nurse and worked the night shift, so a lot of times he was on his own for dinner, and Mom started inviting him over. He was teaching himself to play guitar, and he’d bring it and play songs for us. I remember the first song he played for us was “Hey Jude,” by the Beatles.
He wasn’t my boyfriend. We just hung out. It was cool to have a guy friend. It was cool to have a friend, period.
The next day, work was crazy. By the end of my shift, I was so sweaty from skating into that hot kitchen that my shirt was sticking to me, and the skates were killing my feet. Right before I was about to get off, I brought a burger to some guy with big teeth and he opened it and said, “It’s not cooked enough. Take it back!”
I took it back. Brought it back out. He ripped it open, and, without looking at me, said, “Still not done enough.” He threw it back onto my tray.
I almost said, “What do you want me to do, buddy, light it on fire?” But I heard Dr. Shrink’s voice in my head telling me to count to ten. “I’ll get the manager,” I said, and skated away from him before I exploded.
By the time Mom picked me up, I was ready to throw something. As I opened the back door to drop my skates on the floor, Mom said “I can’t help it, Norm!” into her phone, and then tossed it into the cup holder. Her mouth was set in an angry line. She moved to the passenger seat so I could drive home. “Whew,” she said. “You smell like greasy French fries.”
“I love you, too.” I climbed into the driver’s seat, and put on my seat belt. “Oh, my feet are killing me! And why are people so rude to servers? They don’t even treat us like humans.” I backed out of the parking space and pulled into the lane leading out of the lot.
Normally Mom would commiserate with me, but today she didn’t answer. “Look left and check traffic before you pull out,” was all she said.
“I know, Mom. You don’t have to tell me. I got it!” I said, glancing left..
“I do have to tell you! You haven’t got it!” Mom’s voice rose. “Or else you already would have done it!”
“Okay, okay! What’s with you these days, anyway?”
She glanced at me with a guilty look on her face and swept her short blonde hair behind her ear. “Oh, nothing.”
“Then why do you and Norm keep fighting?”
“We’re not fighting.”
“So the yelling and the hanging up the phone are just my imagination.”
Mom sighed. “Diana, Norm and I are trying to balance everything and sometimes … sometimes there’s not enough of us to go around, that’s all.”
I almost told her that I knew about the counseling weekend. It was on the tip of my tongue. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, in a voice imitating Dr. Shrink, “Just remember, Stephanie and I are vulnerable to insecurities about our home and family because of the divorces.”
Mom laughed. “Maybe we’ve had you in therapy too long, Diana.”
“It wasn’t my idea.” Though I didn’t like therapy at first, now I kind of enjoyed spilling my guts to Dr. Shrink. Who else would sit and listen for fifty minutes while I talked about myself? I’d learned the whole counting to ten thing like I did tonight with the guy with the big teeth. She’d taught me how to rate my moods. I called it the Moronic Mood-o-meter, but it worked. She’d taught me to think about stuff that relaxed me, like being at the barn.
“Don’t forget to put on your left turn signal,” Mom said. “So many drivers these days don’t put on their signals.”
“I’ve got it!” I flipped on the signal.
“Diana, I’m not going to let you drive if you keep acting like this!”
“Okay, okay!”
Sometimes life felt like one big argument.