And I kept thinking of her having sex with Joel. Actual sex, with his naked body, his beautiful lips. If that was even true. But who else? I asked and she told me it was Victor. Who told me himself he was gay. At least that’s what I thought he meant when he said he was a fairy.
It all made me feel sick to my stomach. I missed my mother more than I thought I would, but if I thought she’d warm up after the divorce, I was wrong. I cried at night sometimes, feeling like my entire world had been trashed, like some giant hand of fate had upended my box of toys and flung them all over the room.
And the one person I would have poured my heart out to had way bigger problems. A couple of times I tried to tell her how sad I was, and I could tell she thought I was an idiot.
But just because you don’t have the worst problem in the world doesn’t mean it isn’t a real problem to you.
So I was reluctant to go see her. How could I make any of it better? Her dad, the fire, the beating. I was afraid to see her with her shaved head.
It was Amma who shamed me into it, appalled that I hadn’t been there to support her. It made me mad, honestly. Suze had problems, but so did I! My parents were getting divorced and I was losing the only house I’d ever lived in, and nobody seemed to care!
Why did it always have to be about Suze?
The home was a long way across town, too far for me to be able to take a bus. My dad finally agreed to drive me there after he finished classes on a Thursday afternoon.
Rain fell hard that day, and the neighborhood was not the greatest. The house was a tall Victorian with a big porch that hadn’t been painted in a long time. My dad peered at it. “This is where they sent her?” He swore under his breath.
“I guess. This is the address, right?”
“Yes.” He smoothed his beard between his fingers. “Do you want me to go in with you?”
A part of me was really afraid of going up those steps, into that world, but I shook my head. “No.”
“I’ll come back in . . . what? An hour? An hour and a half?”
“Hour and a half. I haven’t seen her in months.”
“Take your time. I’ll be right out here.”
I dashed to the porch and up the steps, feeling like a girl in a gothic story. The screen door was extra wide and the door behind was open. I knocked, and a girl who looked younger than me appeared. She was enormously pregnant, her belly like a ball stuck on her body. “Yeah?”
“I’m here to visit Suze Ogden?”
“She know you’re coming?”
“Yes.”
She pushed the door open and I slid inside, dashing water off my hair. “She’s in room seven. Two flights up on the right.”
“Thanks.”
The air smelled of cooking, and I could hear girls talking somewhere as I climbed. The first set of stairs was generous, but the second was narrower. Servant stairs, I thought, something I picked up from a book somewhere. The tight hallway I found confirmed that. The door of room seven was plain white. I took a breath, steeling myself, and knocked.
The door was yanked open—angrily, I thought—and a girl stood there. It took me a full breath to realize it was Suze. Her yards of hair had been shaved off, and only a soft blonde fuzz covered her scalp. She wore a smocked shirt that belled out over her pregnant belly, so shockingly weird that I didn’t know what to look at first—head or tummy. She didn’t help, just stared at me with the tiniest quiver of her lower lip. Her eyes burned like eerie marbles in her face, bright bright blue. I felt embarrassed for her. And sad. And awkward. And hurt. She’d excluded me from everything. She had sex and never told me! How could we really be friends?
I didn’t know what to do or say or where to look. A roar filled my ears and I glanced over her shoulder to a window, where a thin curtain lifted in the breeze. “You’re going to freeze to death,” I said.
“Nah, I’m always hot.” She stepped back. “Come on in.”
I slid by her, turning sideways to slither by like a snake. The room was furnished with a single bed against the wall, a metal chest of drawers, and a desk with a gooseneck lamp. Over the surface were pencils and paper, drawings I couldn’t make out. “You’re drawing a lot.”
“Your grandma sent me some art supplies.”
“That’s nice.” I was standing in the middle of the room, waiting for some signal, some indication of what I should do. Like how did you act when somebody had been through something so big? My hands felt awkward beside my body so I tucked them in the back pockets of my jeans.