A Little Friendly Advice

“I honestly didn’t know what to do. His hands were so shaky; it took him about half a book of broken matches before he got one lit. It was very awkward and very quiet, so I got the dustpan out and swept up your flowers. But I did ask him what he’s been doing these days. He said he’s been living in Oregon, working as a park ranger, but now he’s moving on to something new.” Her fluttering lashes mask her eyes. “And he said, ‘Tell Rubes I’m real sorry for ruining her party.’ Then he left.”

Cold sweat beads on my temples. “That’s it?” That can’t be it.

“Don’t look so surprised. You should know by now that your dad isn’t particularly good at apologies.” She couches it in a hollow chuckle, because she’s not being mean. Just honest.

I cram the million other questions I have back down my throat.

Mom shakes out her arm until a gold watch slides to her wrist. She checks the time and says matter-of-factly that she better get over to the hospital, as if our conversation needed an official ending. Leaning over, she takes a bite of the toast in my hand and plants a quick kiss on my cheek. Her gooey lipstick deposits sticky crumbs on my face.

“Sorry,” she says. And she wipes my face clean.

I don’t bother to clarify the intention of her apology.

On her way out of the room, she bends over to pick something up off my floor. “Oh, Ruby. This is beautiful!” She rubs my gray birthday scarf against the side of her face.

“Yeah. Beth made it for me.”

Her fingers trace the yellow ribbons. “She’s such a good friend.” Mom carefully folds the scarf up and lays it on top of my dresser, making me feel crappy that it was ever on the floor in the first place.

I roll away from the rest of my breakfast and fill my face with the pillow until her car scuttles down the driveway. Then our tiny house is quiet, except for the silence, which seems extraordinarily loud. There’s no sleeping through this kind of silence. So I get up and take a shower.

My fingers jerk hard and fast through soapy knots of hair. I squint my eyes so tight while I rinse that, when I open them again, the colored spots take forever to fade from the white bathroom tile. Not once but twice, the bar of Ivory flies out of my hands. Every movement feels clumsy and awkward. So I make the executive decision not to shave my legs, even though they’re pretty prickly.

It’s certainly no secret that I’ve got some serious emotional baggage. Make that a complete set of luggage with wheels for easy transportation, zippered sections for compartmentalizing, and ballistic nylon for an impenetrable shell. But I remind myself that there’s no need to worry. All my issues are packed nicely and neatly away. Just because Jim randomly showed up doesn’t mean I have to relive everything all over again. Once was more than enough.

The water turns icy and my skin is pruned. I run to my freezing room and slam the window shut. I squeegee myself with a towel and pull up my favorite Levi’s. They feel chalky and in desperate need of a wash, just the way I like them. I shiver into a white tank top and a Japanese Coca-Cola T-shirt I found at Revival, twist a pile of my thick wet hair on top of my head, and secure it with a rubber band. I take one more Advil and start a load of towels in the washing machine.

Then I crash onto our puffy floral couch. The late afternoon light makes everything in the living room look dusty. Traces of leftover cigar smoke burn through my nose.

I try not to think of Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

Especially because it’s a very boring train of thought. I don’t know a thing about the state, other than its general Pacific Northwestness.

The Internet might enlighten me a bit, if not for our hulking paperweight of a computer. Wedged in the corner of the room, it’s covered in catalogs, credit card offers, and receipts. The sickly green monitor is practically bigger than our television set and the dial-up modem can barely handle a heated IM discussion. We can’t afford a new computer, but we might as well throw this one out. It’s completely useless.

Then I remember. My map.

It hung on my bedroom wall in our old house — a temporary cosmetic concealer for the garish metallic wallpaper Jim promised he’d strip and replace with something nicer when he had a chance. Each state was a different pastel color. I’m almost positive that Oregon was pale yellow. That’s a pretty weird thing to remember. But my post-shower chill is suddenly replaced by a shade of warmth.

I head up the creaky attic stairs, past the bulk toilet tissue and paper towels we buy from Costco. I throw all my weight into the door to get it open. Inside the main room, packed moving boxes are bricked tall like the Great Wall of China.

We used to live in the smallest of the Victorian homes on Rose Lane, but it was still enormous by anyone’s standards. My parents bought it cheap because it was classified as a Fixer-Upper — meaning it had been left vacant and uncared for after the bulk of the Akron rubber industry shifted overseas.

Tiny flecks of white house paint would flutter in the air like confetti whenever it got windy. Roof tiles wriggled loose and got lost in the tall grass of the front yard. The pipes leaked and made patches of ceiling turn rusty. Some of the rooms had exposed nails poking through the raw studs, which I was warned to be careful around. It was creaky, run-down, and pretty spooky, especially at night. But the house was also full of endearingly weird quirks, like false-bottom floorboards, sliding doors that would disappear into the wall, and a hidden back staircase that Beth and I filled with stuffed animals and made into a hideout.

I loved that house. I’d never forget that house.

Mom and Jim had planned to restore it together. A labor of love. But up until the time he left, most of their repair projects were in various states of half-ass. The perfect metaphor for their relationship, I guess. Mom pledged to finish the place herself, but that never happened. Partly because he took all his tools with him. Though I seriously doubt she could have done that kind of work alone anyhow.

Two years later, property taxes went up in our neighborhood. Mom and I moved to a tiny two-bedroom row house across Akron that was practically the size of an apartment. We packed up the old house together. At that time, I had been doing okay for a few months. My grades had gone back up and I had stopped seeing the school counselor. But moving shattered any progress I might have made. I think I cried the entire time. It was like I was being forced to look at all these things from my old life and then bury them in boxes forever. It must have been unbearable for Mom. But the one pacifier to the whole situation, which Mom made sure to constantly remind me of, was that our new house was just around the corner from Beth’s.

I restack a few of the boxes off to the side to gain access to a cardboard poster tube in the corner. The plastic cap makes a hollow pop that echoes through the room.

The map is not nearly as big as I remember it to be, stretching barely the length of my arm. Random boxes make for an uneven display surface, so I unfurl only the top left corner and press it against a stack at eye level. The rest of the map uncoils sloppily off to the side. A slight tear grows through a state that may or may not be Wyoming.

Well, I was right. Oregon is yellow. Ohio is blue.

But beyond that, there’s no real information about the state except for its capital, Salem, a couple of brown triangles indicating the Cascade Mountain Range, and a tiny cartoon horse with a cowboy on top. I squint forward, as if something secret might suddenly emerge if I just stare hard enough, long enough.

Then I spot it. A fleck at the peak of the cowboy’s hat. It looks like a pinprick. It looks like his plan to leave us.

Another wave of nausea crashes over me and I get clammy. My hand shakes as I carefully reach forward, as if I were adjusting one of the logs in a campfire.

But the fleck sticks to my damp fingertip. It’s dust. It’s nothing at all.

A plastic tarp rustles and I jump. My sweaty bare feet slip on the attic floor and I fall hard into one of the boxes. A corrugated corner jabs my pathetically untoned bicep. I touch the red spot softly and find it’s already tender and lumpy, a definite bruise in the making. Across the room, the tarp flutters again. From the ground, I can see it’s draped over a hissing heat vent.

I pull my knees up to my chin and wonder what it is that I’m doing up here in the first place, and what kind of grand revelation I expect from a stupid third-grade classroom map.

FIVE

I fight through gusts of fall wind, the tails of my scarf flapping wildly behind me. I sink my face into the folds until my eyelashes bat away woolly strands. Autumn has peaked, and the trees are on fire with color.

As I wait for a stoplight to change, I find myself underneath one insanely bright orange-leafed tree. I stare up at the netting of delicate branches splayed overhead like the inside of an umbrella. It’s chokingly beautiful.

So I take out my camera from my bag and snap my first real picture. Maybe I could make a collection, like flashcards of beautiful things that I could look at whenever I’m feeling down. Or maybe that’s dumb. I doubt the pictures could ever look as good as the real thing. Especially Polaroids. As cool as they are, they always seem a little bit out of focus.

The sidewalks are mostly deserted, save for random old ladies shuffling along with carts commandeered from the Giant Eagle parking lot, or smiling young moms pushing strollers and chatting into their hands-free cell-phone wires. After a few minutes of brisk walking without any real game plan, I’m on the main drag of tiny mom-and-pop stores on West Market that have somehow survived all the strip-mall development.

The temperature is pretty chilly, so I zip up my navy-blue hooded sweatshirt and cram my hands into the shallow pockets. The flashing bank clock across the street says it’s almost three. Since Akron High School is about as far away as my house at this point, I decide to head over in that direction and meet up with Beth and the girls. It’s weird, but it feels like forever since I’ve seen them.

Akron High is your typical brick fortress, surrounded by usually green, but now crispy brown, lawns. I can see students inside three floors of classrooms. The parking lot off to the side displays the vast spread of wealth in town — boxy maroon four-doors from the mid-90s reflect in the polished chrome rims of the sleek silver imports parked next to them. Company allegiance is printed in the white letters circling each tire. Firestone and Cooper and the local favorite, Goodyear.

I walk up and down each row until I find Maria’s orange Volvo, Goodyear tires. The car is pretty beat up, with dents and dings in the metal and rips in the beige interior, but it always gets us where we need to go. The funniest thing is the back left seat, which we all call the Period Seat. Once Maria tossed a lipstick over her shoulder and it melted in the summer heat and stained the cloth just like a period. It went unused after that, but now that there are four of us, someone always has to sit in the Period Seat. We take turns, rotating around from shotgun. Beth always jokes how just sitting in that seat gives her cramps.

I jump up on the hood and wait until the sound of the final bell catches on a cool breeze. When it does, Maria is the first to walk out. She sees me and blows me kisses with both of her mitten-covered hands. Beth is right behind her. She has on a pair of brown wide-leg polyester pants, stolen out of her granny’s suitcase when she last came to visit. Her pace quickens when she spots me, and the fabric bells swish wildly around her ankles. She comes up nose-to-nose with me and grabs the strings on my sweatshirt. One hard yank and the hood shrinks until only my lips are exposed.

“Where were you? I must have called your house a thousand times!” She sounds pretty pissed. And worried. “Are you okay?”

I hop off the hood and stretch my arms like a worn veteran of many drunken nights out. “Mom let me ride out my hangover in bed. She even delivered me a full breakfast. Eggs and toast and all that.”

Beth rolls her eyes, still semi-annoyed at me but happy to see that I’m doing all right after last night. She shrugs off her book bag, which I hold while she puts on her jean jacket. Rain clouds swarm overhead in remarkably fast motion.

“Weird! So she wasn’t pissed?” Maria walks around to the back of her car, pops the trunk open, and carelessly tosses her books inside one by one.

“Nah. She gave me a No Drinking Lecture, but I’m not grounded or anything.” The truth is, I bet my mom was just happy that I came home in one piece. The power of pity is an amazing thing. I should remember that.

Maria slams the trunk closed and cozies up to me against the side door. “Did she get any dirt on your dad? I mean, Jim?” She whispers the last part, almost as if she doesn’t want Beth to hear. But she does hear. Her head spins toward us really fast.

I rub the sole of my left sneaker back and forth over the gravel. When I look up, Beth is walking over to us. “It’s nothing, trust me,” I say.

“Ruby. Spill it.” Beth rubs her hands together and blows on them to keep warm.

It’s not that I don’t want to tell her. More than anything, I’m embarrassed by the whole situation and for what Maria might think about everything. But I ignore the redness burning up my cheeks, unbutton my lips, and recite the two new facts I’ve learned this morning.

“A forest ranger? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Beth snarls. “Hopefully, karma will strike and a big pine tree will fall on him.”

Maria digs in her purse for her favorite lip gloss. She squeezes a dollop on her bottom lip and smoothes it out with her pinky. “Yeah. Tiiiiimber.”

Over Beth’s shoulder, I spot Katherine trucking across the parking lot with huge athletic strides. Palming an orange basketball, she bobs and weaves around milling students like she’s driving for the hoop. The oversized, yellow-mesh uniform hangs comically off her slender frame. Her hair is pulled back into a long, sleek blond ponytail, so tight it yanks up her eyebrows.

She skids to a stop a few feet away from us and shuffles the last few steps. “I waited for you guys at Maria’s locker, but you never showed.” Her voice is barbed with annoyance. Then she locks eyes with me. “Ruby. I thought you were out sick today.”

“I was out sick today.”

“And we told you to meet us at the car,” Beth barks. As sweet as Beth is, she can get pretty snippy when you don’t follow the plan. And I can’t say that I don’t love it when she’s snippy with Katherine.

“Oh. Sorry.” This time, Katherine’s voice is softer. She divides her attention among the three of us and starts over. “Did any of you guys want to come to my basketball game? It should be a good one. There’s this girl on the other team that I know from camp and she’s got incredible moves underneath the basket. But she can’t score on me and it drives her nuts.”

“My dad’s leaving town tomorrow, so I’ve got a mandatory dinner,” Maria says. I’m secretly jealous that Maria’s family has this tradition before his business trips. I imagine the three of them sitting around their dining room, her mom doling out scoops of stuffing and slices of roasted turkey like Thanksgiving. That’s just the way it is in my mind, though. Really, her family dinners mean shoes-off sushi on the mini bamboo tables at Little Tokyo. Still. She’s lucky. The couples who stay happily married should get some kind of special prize, maybe from the government. Maybe a trophy.

Katherine focuses on me and Beth. “What are you guys up to?” Her nose crinkles up, like she’s already sniffing out our crappy excuses.

The truth is that watching a basketball game is about the last thing any of us would want to do, Beth especially. She despises organized athletic activity more than anyone else I know. Last year, she used the asthma excuse so often, Mr. Parisi made her write a ten-page paper on crab soccer to pass gym.

“My mom promised to take me out for another driving lesson.” Because Beth’s sixteenth birthday is almost a week away, on Halloween, she’s as obsessed with getting her license as she is with planning her yearly costume party. I didn’t even bother getting mine, because it’s not like I’ll have a car to drive or anything. Mom can barely make ends meet as it is. “But . . . I guess I could get her to take me out after dinner.” Then she shoots me a pleading look, like I’m supposed to suffer with her.

It’s hard to say no to a friend who has done so much for you. So I quickly run through the positives. I only come up with one — we’ll get to hang out alone for a few hours. But that’s more than good enough for me, especially with how weird and sentimental I’m feeling. “Yeah, okay. I’ll go.”

Katherine’s face lights up. Even though she can be pretty nasty sometimes, I still feel a flicker of happiness at cracking her surly exterior. She is having a pretty tough time lately. I guess I’m a sucker that way.

Before parting ways, we discuss plans for the evening. Maria is our social director because of all the boys she knows, and she rambles off a list of uninteresting Friday night options, including meeting up with Davey and some of his friends at Pinz. Which I’m kind of over. We’ve done that for the last three weekends. It’s supposed to be really cold out tonight, and I think some of those guys suspect I’m a lesbian because I’ve never walked hand in hand with them to the dark corners of the park. Not that I have guys throwing themselves at me or anything. I’ve never even talked to most of them, like one-on-one. I just kind of lurk around other people’s conversations and smile or laugh when it’s appropriate.

Then Maria says, “Oh, well, I got a random e-mail from Teddy Baker about a party tonight at his house. You guys know him, right?”

Teddy went to grade school with Beth and me, but transferred to Fisher Prep for high school — the sprawling all-boys school next to Akron’s golf course. I haven’t seen much of him since I was twelve, the year I moved off his block.

“Wait. How do you know Teddy?” I ask.

Maria shrugs. “I hooked up with his friend at a party once, and then he found me online. But a party at Teddy’s means lots of boys,” she says, waggling her eyebrows. “Lots of richy-rich rubber boys.” She sprays the air with machine-gun-style kisses.

“Won’t Davey be mad that you’re not hanging out with him?” Beth asks.

“Davey’s not my boyfriend,” Maria says. “We haven’t even kissed yet.”

“Yeah, right,” Katherine says.

Maria laughs. “Seriously! Not even one smooch.”

“I thought you guys were together,” I say.

“Well, we are. Kind of.” Maria shakes her head. “We’ve been hanging out a bunch but it’s always more friendly than flirty.”

“Seriously?” Beth shakes her head, flabbergasted. “I think it’s time for you to move on. You don’t want to look desperate, throwing yourself at him if he’s not into you.”

“Yeah,” Maria says, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “I guess maybe.”

We decide to meet at my house to get ready, since my mom will be at work. Maria drives off, sputtering gravel at the backs of our heels as Katherine, Beth, and I make our way toward the gym.

Katherine dribbles her basketball effortlessly through her legs as we walk. “Listen, Ruby,” she says, but pauses to clear her throat, spitting a huge yellow ball of smoker’s phlegm a few feet ahead of us. “I’m sorry if I came off harsh last night. I’m just going through my own drama. And seeing you freak out on your dad and, like, understanding that all this divorce stuff is going to mess me up for, like, years to come, really made me lose it.”

Decoding Katherine’s babble is a skill I’ve yet to master. But I know there’s an apology in there somewhere, which is pretty surprising. Until I glance over at Beth, who kicks a bottle cap. The faint smile she wears tells me everything.

“That’s okay,” I say, opening the double doors for her. And it is. While she might hang out with us, Katherine isn’t really my friend. I’m not the easiest person to get to get close to, but I keep people like her at a distance for a reason.

Predictably, there are not many people in the gym. Though every inch of wall space is covered by navy-and-yellow felt banners, proclaiming countless championships in every sport imaginable, most are titles won long before I was born. Akron’s athletic program has been on the end of a losing season for many many years. The crowd is mostly other basketball players from the freshman and JV girl squads, a few family members, and a bunch of little kids who storm the court at every unoccupied second to shoot free throws or run races to the half-court line and back. We have our pick of uncomfortable bleachers. I follow Beth up to the very top row.

“I’m glad you came,” she says, dropping her bag and slumping onto the bench. “After that last fight, no one in Katherine’s family would come to cheer for her. It’s amazing to me how selfish parents can be.” Beth shakes her head dismissively. “She reminds me a lot of you.”

“Really?” I say, sliding next to her and trying to hide the disappointment in my voice.

The Akron varsity girls team commandeers the center of the gym for some stretches. Most of the girls are half-assing it, talking and laughing while Katherine calls out counts of ten as sternly as an army drill sergeant. I recognize a few of them from the hallways. Specifically, two tall blondes and a short brunette. They are all wearing lipstick. The brunette catches me staring and points up at me and Beth. The two blondes lean in and all three whisper with curled upper lips, while keeping their eyes locked on us. They are Katherine’s old friends.

I pull my sweatshirt over my head to break their gaze.

“Yikes, Ruby! What’d you do?” Beth pokes my arm.

I wince and twist it so I can see the inside of my bicep. There’s a deep purple blob, speckled by flecks of red.

My throat fills up with a lump that I force down with a big swallow. “Ugh, this is so stupid. Okay. Well. Do you remember that map I used to have in my bedroom? I don’t know why, but I wanted to take a look at Oregon.”

Beth blinks a couple of times.

“You know, in my old house. The U.S. map that hid my super ugly wallpaper?”

I search her face for a glimmer of recognition. If anyone should remember something from my life in painstaking detail, it’s Beth. But then I realize she’s not confused. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“Ruby,” she says, wrapping my hand inside hers, “I don’t think it’s such a great idea for you to be thinking like that.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like, imagining where Jim might be living or something. Because — and I’m only saying this because I’m your best friend — he’s probably not coming back after how things went down last night. And the more you learn about him, the harder he’s going to be to forget again.” She looks away from me, up at the buzzing lights in metal cages over our head. “You’ve come so far. Don’t let this mess you up.”

“I was just curious,” I whisper. Though I know she’s right. I hardly knew anything about Jim when I was a kid, and it took years for me to get over him leaving. Imagine how tough it would be if he became a real person, instead of a vague idea of what he might really be like.

“I’m just giving you a little friendly advice.” She nudges me with her bony shoulder. “That’s my job.”

The shrill whir of a whistle diverts my attention to the court. Katherine is underneath the basket, wrestling with a girl from the opposing team over a loose ball. Neither wants to let go, so two additional referees add their whistles to the mix. Katherine’s throwing crazy elbows, thrashing for control. Finally, the other girl releases her grip, and Katherine screams a hoarse victory cry into her face. The referee blows a final long blast, flashes his hands in the shape of a T, and the angry Akron coach flags Katherine over to the bench.