The Gap Year Read online

  The fourth exclamation mark is overkill. Unneeded. All the fourth exclamation point communicates is Aubrey’s belief that I am a loser dipshit airhead who can’t be counted on to do things like keep her alive.

  Being blamed for the lack of refills makes me ask, “You’ve sort of been going through the inhalers lately, haven’t you?”

  The universe that lies in my simple observation.

  Though I qualify it with “sort of” and couch it as a question, Aubrey still bristles. It’s never the words. Not between a mother and a daughter. It’s what lies beneath the words. It’s every asthma attack Aubrey has ever had. It’s her having to quit the soccer team when she was eight because Dr. Queng thought that exercise triggered the attacks. It’s the fact that she had her first serious attack in a long time on the day of graduation three months ago and they’ve continued through the summer and, judging from the one empty and one nearly empty inhaler, have skyrocketed in the past two weeks. It’s that we both know that anxiety is a much worse trigger than soccer ever was. It’s that we can both turn our heads and see that the great room is filled with supplies for a four-year journey she won’t even talk about making. It’s that I’m starting to suspect that something far more ominous than simple grumpiness and reflex resistance is at the heart of her reluctance to claim her college money.

  She gives me a look that encodes an encyclopedia’s worth of information and I translate every buried meaning: Stop hovering. Stop knowing enough about me to monitor, to judge, every single, solitary breath I take.

  I go into Zen Mama state, refuse to mirror back her mood, and say with as much perk and pep as I can manage, “So, today has to be the day we collect your tuition. For the first year.” No reaction. Though it’s a strategic weakness, I am so desperate for signs of life from her that I ask, “Are you excited?”

  Aubrey glances at me as if I’d inquired brightly, “Triple root canal today! Are you excited!?” Since Aubrey shut me out after Black Ice Night, almost nine months ago, I have been reduced to gathering clues about her in nonverbal ways. So I step close enough that I can smell her breath. It is metallic from the inhaler. Before her expression curdles and she backs away, I inhale more of her smell and analyze it as if I were a perfume maker. I detect the odor of burned coffee and Fritos that clings to her no matter how many times she showers. I can also smell the enemy: Tyler Moldenhauer. Besides those familiar odors, though, there is a new one that I’ve been catching hints of for the past few weeks. Amazingly, it is the aroma of actual cooking, the last thing that might occur in the lunch wagon. I try to identify the novel odor’s components—garlic, cumin, lemon, parsley, and an earthy aroma that for some inexplicable reason causes me to recall the moment I met her father on that train lumbering through Morocco.

  Aubrey reaches out and flicks the clips I used to pin my sheepdog bangs out of my face. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”

  Delighted just to be interacting, I run my fingers along the bristly hedgehog array poking out behind the clips and explain, “Oh, you know, my bangs are in that awful stage when they’re too short to pull back behind my ears and just hang in my eyes.”

  “You look like a Chinese gymnast. I don’t see why you cut bangs in the first place.”

  “You’re serious?” I ask her, flabbergasted. “I cut them because of what you said.”

  “I never told you to cut bangs.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  She pretends not to remember what I’m talking about. Not to remember that moment right before we set out for her high school graduation in the middle of May when she studied me with the laser intensity that only a teenage daughter can bring to bear upon her forty-four-year-old mother, then asked, “You know who you remind me of?”

  “Who?” Grateful that Aubrey had tossed me a rare conversational bone and thrilled by the unusual experience of eye contact with my daughter, I wondered who she’d name. It had been a while, but people used to tell me I reminded them of Joan Cusack. It might be because I too have a barely perceptible lisp, since both of us seem to have tongues a tiny bit too big for our mouths. Would Aubrey even know who Joan Cusack was?

  “Who do I remind you of?” I prompted. I’d also heard Maggie Gyllenhaal. I knew she knew who Jake Gyllenhaal was.

  “Benjamin Franklin.”

  “Benjamin Franklin!” I’d laughed and swatted at Aubrey, pretending the Benjamin Franklin comment was a joke. “You bitch!” Back before Tyler, when I used to know who her friends were—the sweet, gawky girls from band, the boys who hoped they were gay rather than permanent misfits; before them, Twyla—Aubrey called them all “bitch.” Especially the boys.

  Aubrey squinted in irritation. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” I asked, though I knew immediately what she meant: Don’t try to talk like me. Be like me.

  I had wanted to tell her that I couldn’t try to be like her because I no longer knew who she was. Later that day, though, after graduation, when Tyler had yelled out, “Go, Aubrey!” so loudly that everyone in the megachurch where the ceremony was held had laughed, I’d come home and examined my forehead. Beneath the harsh overhead light in the bathroom, I saw it, the Benjamin Franklin resemblance. Where my hairline had once been thick and dark as Wolfman’s, spindly, sparse hairs now barely held the line above a dome of a forehead that did indeed suddenly appear huge and shiny as any Founding Father’s. I’d recently had to start wearing reading glasses, and the wire-framed numbers I’d grabbed at the grocery store after the cool leopard-print pair I’d started with had broken didn’t help.

  So I experimented a little. I brushed down a few strands of hair, then snipped them into the barest of feathery wisps. It was such an improvement that I snipped more. Then some more. Improvements continued right up to the moment when Aubrey barged in, blinked twice, and said, “Oh, my God. Miss Tarketti.”

  “What?” I play-screeched. “Miss Tarketti?!” Miss Tarketti was her second-grade teacher who wore her hair in a tight pageboy with a Mamie Eisenhower sausage roll of bangs. I squashed my new bangs down and added, “I think they’re cute. I was going for a Betty Page look.”

  Aubrey squinted. “Who?”

  “The fifties pinup girl. She’s very in now.”

  “With who?”

  “Hipsters?” I supplied.

  “Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Mom, not too many ‘hipsters’ here in Parkhaven. Unless you’re counting yourself. You probably just spaced out again and cut too much off.”

  Aubrey took the scissors out of my hand as if I were a mental patient. I began growing my bangs out that very moment.

  “Oh, hey,” I ask Aubrey now, casual, as if the thought had just that second popped into my head. “Have you gotten in touch with …” I pause and snap my fingers as if I can’t quite recall the name of the girl assigned to be her roommate. “Sierra! Have you written Sierra back yet?”

  Aubrey shakes her head, as annoyed as if bees were swarming around it. “I told you, I will.”

  The Jerry Springer audience in my head screams at me to Whup her sorry ass! Lower the boom! Quit pussyfootin’ around!

  “When? Aubrey, you’re leaving tomorrow. All this girl has ever wanted to know is what your colors are so she can get a rug that coordinates. Did you even tell her that you most definitely do want to go in on a minifridge and a microwave?”

  Inexplicably, Aubrey reacts to my innocuous questions as if I’d gone after her with a blunt object. She splays out her fingers to silence me and shrieks, “I will! I told you I will! Do you ever believe or even listen to one single thing I ever say to you?”

  I know she’d rather engage me in a big, screaming argument about whether or not, in her entire eighteen years of life, I, her oppressive, paranoid mother, have ever, for one second, believed anything she’s said to me than actually answer my questions, so I don’t oblige her and instead invoke Zen Mama and answer in my Hal the robot voice, “Aubrey, I’m not being unreasonable here. We don’t even—”


  “Amethyst and turquoise.”

  “What?”

  “Or sage and heather.”

  “Sage and heather what?”

  “Her colors, I’m sure those are what this roommate’s colors are going to be. I mean, her name is Sierra. And her last name is hyphenated. How much more über–crunchy granola can anyone get? She’s probably got a nose ring and major tats and creepy white-girl dreads.”

  “You’re reading an awful lot into a name. Sierra did take the initiative to get in touch with you. That’s friendly, isn’t it? She’s reaching out.”

  “Stalkers reach out too.”

  “Aubrey, she’s your roommate. You could be living with her for the next four years.”

  She starts to speak and her right nostril twitches. This is Aubrey’s “tell.” It unnerves me because Martin had the same giveaway twitch. If we were playing poker, I’d know that he was considering bluffing. With Audrey it means that she is hiding something. She was always a horrible liar, and I can feel now that there is something she wants to tell me. For a fraction of a second her eyes widen with panic and I am certain that she is about to reveal everything.

  I lean forward, reach out, and she whirls away. “I cannot be having this conversation now. Tyler will be here any second and I have to—”

  I grab her arm before she can rush off. “What do you mean, Tyler will be here any second? You don’t seriously think that you’re going to work today. I have canceled all my appointments except for the class I have to teach later this morning to get this done. Why are we even discussing this? You’re coming to the bank with me right now. We’re going to transfer the money to pay for your first year’s tuition. Then we’re going to pack all of this up.” I wave at the college supplies. “Then we’re going to put you on a plane. Tomorrow. End of discussion.”

  “Okay! All right! I’ll go. I just can’t do it right now. Tyler and I are running a business and he needs me.”

  “You’re working at a frigging lunch wagon, and if we don’t go today, right now, that is exactly what you are going to be doing for the rest of your life! Is that what you want?”

  “I am not ‘working at.’ We rent it. We’re partners. We’re building something, but just because it doesn’t exactly fit your perfect-daughter image, you don’t want to know anything about it.”

  “About what? What is there to know? Seriously, tell me.”

  “Why? So without you knowing anything, I can listen to you tell me what a loser I am?”

  “Tell you you’re a loser? Aubrey, when have I ever told you you’re a loser? I have bathed you in toxic levels of self-esteem your entire life. I adored every drawing you ever held up for my approval and cheered every spelling test you ever passed. Your entire childhood was nothing but a Milky Way of gold stars awarded every time you brushed your teeth or pottied. Come on. We have been waiting for this day for sixteen years. We can finally claim your get-out-of-town money. Please, sweetie. For me. Let’s just keep all the options open.”

  She jerks her arm away. “I said I’d do it! I can go this afternoon. I’ll meet you back here after the lunch rush.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t want to be at the bank as soon as the doors open. What is so hard about this?”

  “Uh, honoring your commitments. Ever heard of it?”

  “How about your commitment to your future?”

  “Whatever.”

  “ ‘Whatever’? Did you just say ‘whatever’ to me?”

  I stare at this surly stranger planted in the middle of my kitchen radiating disgust at me in her inevitable pair of Nike shorts and one of her redneck boyfriend’s old T-shirts and wonder if she is my penance for once believing that I was a parenting genius and that puberty was a tale invented by old wives who didn’t know how to accept and love their children and let them follow their own unique path to become the unique human they were intended to be. The way I, in all my enlightenment, had.

  At just the moment when I want to scream, “You bitch!” and not in the chummy BFF way, I see tears, staunchly unshed, glaze her eyes. Mossy green with thick lashes, her eyes are exactly like Martin’s. Exactly like the one other person I loved most in the world who also became a complete and total stranger to me.

  “Aubrey, sweetie. What is it? What’s going on? You can talk to me. You know you can tell me anything.”

  Her chin quivers. The past year of hardness and distance falls from her and she is the little girl who collected dinosaur stamps and begged me for a pink bedroom with a canopy bed. There is a second of clarity, a truce. An umbilical connection joins us and I feel her anguish as surely as if she were kicking inside me beneath my heart.

  “Aubrey, what’s wrong, baby? Please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together.”

  SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

  Every day I edge six inches closer to the football field. Today I reach the midway point between the football and band fields. It’s not even about Tyler. The android predator with the number seven on his jersey directing the other androids on the football field is really beside the point. Seven has become just one of 360 degrees on a compass. I could have picked any number to move toward. Just so long as it took me away from where I was, that was all that mattered.

  That’s also how I feel about chatting with my father. I am just going to keep edging into it. Inch by inch. He wants to know everything about me. My classes, my teachers, my friends. He was actually interested in the fact that I got Saunders, the psycho physics teacher, instead of Miss Brawley, the non–mentally ill one. He loved my Freddie Mercury insight. He even noticed that I use “hectic” a lot. I told him it is sort of my signature word except that no one else besides him has ever noticed it. He told me that his signature word used to be “churlish.”

  Having him to report back to makes the reversed-binocular feeling useful rather than weird. Like I am an anthropologist gathering data on the customs and culture of a strange tribe I’ve been dropped in the middle of.

  Today is the first day since school started that isn’t so humid that my hair can make you seasick with all sorts of hectic waves and loopy roller-coaster twirls. The lack of humidity is good, since I got in some flatiron action myself and my hair is almost as straight and smooth as Paige’s or Madison’s. Also, the Nike running shorts that I am wearing are as short and ridiculously expensive as theirs, and my T-shirt is just as unflattering and generic, and the flip-flops I got at Goodwill are just as broken-in and run-down.

  Why not? It is their world I am edging into. They didn’t invite me. When you visit Muslim countries aren’t women supposed to cover up?

  I know Mom will say that they are all clones and I am being a clone. As if all Twyla’s old friends, all the emo kids, are such giant individualists in their identical skinny black jeans and hair smushed down perfectly over one eye. Or me in my inevitable pair of whatever jeans and whatever top. As if being completely and utterly anonymous is less clonish than Nike running shorts.

  While I am occupied thinking of how I will word it when I tell my dad all my insights into clone levels, a guy with a video camera stations himself a few feet from my blanket. He yells to a skinny kid in cargo pants who has a mic in his hand, “That’s good! Right there! Move in a little closer! We can get the whole team in the shot! OK, get Coach!”

  The kid with the mic pulls Coach Hines away from practice and leads him over close to where I am sitting. I want to leave, but it would be too obvious.

  The camera guy is like, “OK, rolling,” and Cargo Pants is, “Hi, this is Paul Harbaugh with Pirate Video, and we’re interviewing Coach Hines. So, Coach, we’ve got our first game against Pineridge Consolidated tonight. Are the Pirates ready?”

  Coach Hines has been watching his players on the field the whole time the kid is asking his question. When he notices that the talking has stopped, he turns around and plants himself with his feet spread wide and his arms crossed across his chest. Coach Hines is a very neat person. He wears crisp, pressed kha
kis and made the school order him and the assistant coaches white polo shirts with their names and a little pirate embroidered on them in red. He was recruited from a small college up north and always wears a tie and blazer to games. Some older kids told me that before he came, Parkhaven’s team was crap and there were no black players. Now it’s about half black, and last year we went to state. Everyone expects us to go again this year.

  Without really knowing what the question was, Coach Hines answers like he is on ESPN. “We’ve got some good athletes this year. Lot of talented athletes. Lot of seniors. Trent Dupey, returning defensive end.” He talks about a “strong safety” and a “dog linebacker,” how they need to focus on their defensive game. “Offensively, we’ve got some top players returning. Wayshon Shelf set a couple of school records last year. A very smart kid. Runs great routes.”

  Cargo Pants asks him a long, involved question. While he listens, Coach Hines shifts his lower jaw back and forth like a snake. Like he is going to unhinge it so he can consume Cargo Pants in one delicious pockety bite.

  Coach’s answer grabs my attention away from his snaky jaw. “Of course, we’re depending on Tyler Moldenhauer. Sports Desk just listed Moldenhauer as one of the top ten quarterbacks in the tristate area. He’s being heavily recruited but hasn’t committed yet. A very talented player. A team leader. A prolific passer. Tyler did a great job for us last year of getting the ball where we need it to be. We just hope he stays healthy.”

  “Can we borrow Ty-Mo for a second, Coach?”

  I tense up, wondering where I can hide, then relax when Coach gives the guy a look that asks if he is kidding and walks away without answering.

  In rapid succession, Cargo Pants drags several players off the field for quick interviews. Colt O’Connor, a kid both muscular and chubby, tells Cargo that he plays tight end, that his goal this year is to “take it one game at a time,” and that the one person, dead or alive, who he would most like to have dinner with is Megan Fox. When Cargo Pants asks why, Colt gives him a look like, “How gay are you?” and says, “ ’Cause she’s lookin’ good, dog.”