The Word for Yes Read online

  To her horror, fat tears rolled down her cheeks and onto the pages of her book. She wanted her fury back, and not this sudden, uncontrollable sadness. But these days she had no control over her feelings from one minute to the next, and her father’s voice seemed to exacerbate the problem—exposing the rawest, most childlike parts of her personality. “We’ll have breakfast before I go. I’ll be staying at the Conrad when I get back from Providence, until my flight on Friday,” Dad said quietly. Melanie nodded, and tried to speak, but only a humiliating croak came out. She didn’t want to cry. She just wanted him to go. But just as strongly, she wanted everything in the apartment put back exactly the way it was—the old lamp, the old rug, and the dingy blue armchair.

  Her father was infuriating, with his bossiness and his double standards. But she wanted to bury her face in his chest and cry the way she had when she was little and she’d fallen off her scooter on the asphalt path at Washington Market Park. Her father had sat there with her for a long time, patting her bloody knee, and never telling her, as her mother surely would have, to stop her crying, that she was okay, and it was only a scrape.

  It was only later, after her father had left and the apartment was silent, that Melanie saw the yellow bird. It was behind the curtain at the far side of the living room where Dad had had his desk. For a moment, all she could do was stare at it. Had he left it behind on purpose? Because it was nothing? A worthless, ugly bit of painted clay? Or had he forgotten it, and it was something he’d have treasured? She could still grab it and run and try to catch him downstairs, where the movers were undoubtedly still loading the van. Melanie went to the window and looked down at the street below, but the angle was wrong, and she couldn’t see the front of the building.

  She picked up the bird sculpture and held it in her hand. It felt good and solid. She was numb now, neither sad nor angry, and so there was no reason to do what she did next: she wound up like a pitcher on the mound and threw the clay bird with all her strength across the room, so that it ricocheted off the far wall and bounced toward the front door, just as Erika was emerging from the bedroom. The bird narrowly missed Erika’s head, and instead crashed into the bookcase by the front door, bouncing onto the flowered foyer rug, still intact, with only a small chip out of the top of its misshapen head.

  “What was that for?” Erika asked, hand across her chest in a gesture of shock that reignited Melanie’s anger.

  “For everything,” Melanie said. “For living.” She didn’t mean what she said, and hadn’t even seen Erika coming, but she had no ready explanation for what she had done.

  “What did I do?” Erika asked tearfully as Melanie picked up the bird and held it once more in her clenched fist.

  “I don’t know,” Melanie said. “But you’re doing it again.”

  There was no place to go. Erika was still dragging her things into Jan’s old room, and from her bedroom Melanie could hear her sister muttering to herself, moving things into place until everything was perfect, the way Erika always needed them to be. The apartment was too quiet, and yet not quiet enough.

  Melanie stormed into the kitchen and threw the clay bird into the garbage. There it lay on top of the leftovers from breakfast—soggy cereal and toast ends—though she figured, belatedly, the clay was probably recyclable. What she had wanted was to break something. Her hand still twitched and her heart still beat with the desire to do damage.

  2

  “Time for the first-annual back-to-school Morris Foster birthday bash, and you lucky ladies are numbers one and two on my list,” Morris said. “Free music, free drink, free love, all Morris Foster style. And the Big Daddy Dog, Foss Senior, will be there, too, so your moms can’t say no. Friday night. Early, because I’ve got soccer in the a.m. No excuses accepted, that means you, Erika Russell.”

  Erika let Morris Foster and Binky Sanders, her two best friends and perennial science fair partners, corner her in the hall on her way to American history. She looked skeptically at Morris. Of course, she wanted to go to his birthday party, but she tried to avoid hanging out with Morris when he also had his jock friends around. Morris was brainy but athletic, someone who easily crossed social barriers at school, while Erika held closely to Binky and Morris. But this was junior year, Dad and Jan had both moved out of the house, and Erika had resolved to try to “be more normal,” as she put it to herself. Mom and Melanie were the most normal people she knew, if “normal” meant people who were popular, went out a lot, and dressed cute every day of the week. Erika sometimes felt like a mutant in her own house. She knew her mother loved her, but Mom often looked at her with that bewildered “where did you come from?” look she never gave Melanie. Melanie, on the other hand, hardly gave Erika the time of day, unless it was to scowl at her for daring to borrow her purple sweater, while Melanie stole whatever she wanted from Erika’s closet, without a word from Erika. Melanie’s purple sweater was the only thing Erika ever took from Melanie, and she only took it for chess, because purple was lucky for chess.

  “Seriously, Erika. No worries. The Big Man maintains a smoke-free castle, so any true partying is happening off-premises. No one blowing smoke up your virginal nasal passages, like at that thing at the park last year. Y’all remember that? How Erika tripped out on the thought of getting a contact high? Anyway, dude swears my ass is in a sling if he smells shit on any underage breath. I got to have my straight-edge people surrounding the Big Man, keeping him in the kitchen with the other oldies. Convince him all the ladies at RD are as boring as y’all.”

  “I’m definitely going,” Binky said. “I already said during study hall. Come, Erika. It’ll be fun, and it’s at Morris’s. You’ve been there a million times.” Binky pouted, tossed her head, and stamped her foot like she was six. Binky was hard of hearing and still resorted sometimes to pantomime-like communication. In her early years at school, Binky had suffered socially for her disability and her husky voice, but in the last year Binky had become almost sought-after. She had straight blond hair, and full lips, and, unlike Erika, she enjoyed parties. Erika knew Binky would go to Morris’s with or without her, even though she acted like she needed her.

  The hallway was crowded with people changing classes, and Erika knew she’d have to make her decision quickly, or Morris would harass her for the rest of the day. Erika didn’t smoke or drink. Unlike other people, she didn’t even pretend to like these things. Morris said she should tell people she was a straight edger—a vegetarian, a drug-free punk—just to get people off her back, but Erika didn’t even know what an “edger” was until Morris told her, and it seemed stupid to say she belonged to some sort of scene she’d never even heard of, especially if it meant getting a tattoo or a crazy haircut just to seem authentic. “That’s cool, though,” Morris had said. “No one else will know the edge scene either, but then they’ll find like eighty-thousand edger sites, and you’ll be the one who brought it to RD!”

  Morris was always bringing new music or styles to their small downtown Manhattan private school. When they were in middle school, he’d listened to punk and dyed his hair red, and now he was all about jazz, and wearing old-school blazers with his jeans and dark, vintage glasses. But Erika was the opposite of Morris. Morris was a human chameleon. Erika was stuck in the prison of being Erika.

  Erika had had wine before at home. Her mom and dad let her try it—two pretty full glasses last New Year’s Eve. The first glass was like liquid happiness, a golden feeling that spread throughout her body. She thought then she understood what all the fuss was about. She’d drunk practically the entire second glass, and the feeling only got better. But almost immediately, a dullness followed, a gray dullness as huge as the golden feeling that came before it. Her body felt like lead, and her tongue became thick and clumsy, so it was hard to get the words out. She had decided after that that nothing should enter her body that changed the colors of her mind. Her mind took on strange, disturbing colors sometimes as it was, and she was afraid to make them any stranger.

>   “I guess I’m in,” Erika said. “If your dad is there, we won’t get in trouble. And if Binky deserts me for Christopher Primrose, it’s only down the street and I can walk home myself.” Binky shot Erika a sharp look, and Erika shrugged. Binky’s nocturnal meetings with Christopher Primrose were supposedly secret. But that was only because Christopher wanted it that way, and avoided Binky at school. Morris shook his head.

  “Live and let live, I always say. Girl likes a douche, that’s cool. Takes all kinds,” he said, winking at Binky. Binky hit him with her book bag, seeming to forget it was Erika who’d told her secret, and Morris waved his arms in the air in mock surrender.

  Erika, Binky, and Morris Foster had been good friends for as long as Erika could remember, at least since Binky had transferred to RD from her uptown school in fourth grade. Kids uptown had been mean to Binky. They called her Deaf Barbie because she was nearly completely deaf, and she had blond hair she could almost sit on. Now, Binky’s voice was clearer, and she’d gotten curvy, unlike Erika, whose body only knew one direction: up. It was okay with Erika that she wasn’t as developed as either Binky or her younger sister, Melanie. Someone told her that for tall girls everything happened later. She worried, though, that more was missing from her than curves, and that being tall wasn’t the only reason she didn’t feel more like other girls.

  The party was in two days, and Thursday would be busy, since they had a chemistry test Friday, so after school Erika and Binky went to Brenda Martin’s in SoHo and chose outfits—things that were partyish, but not try-hard. Erika got a light-pink formfitting T-shirt dress that was looser on the top, blousing over a very tight lower half. It was short on Erika—grazing her upper thigh. Binky wanted to wear the same dress in black, but after seeing Erika in it, she chose a boxier dress—a black and white shift that looked good with ankle boots.

  Erika loved the way she looked in the pink dress, so much so that she regretted having to take it off and change back into her regular T-shirt and jeans. When she got home, she showed it to her mother, and her mother had been so overcome with how good she looked, she took her right out to Century 21 to buy a pair of tan faux-suede boots to go with it. It wasn’t often that Erika’s mom approved of something she chose. Often Erika chose clothes for reasons other than how she looked in them.

  This time, Erika had chosen well. The dress actually reminded her of strawberry meringue, her favorite sort of cookie, since it was made almost entirely of egg white. It was a kind of baking that was practically chemistry, the way the protein in the egg whites clung to the water molecules, which clung to fructose. The dress was colored like meringue and was clingy; it also happened to flatter her in every possible way, by chance really. The night of the party, her mother helped her with her makeup, and Erika felt transformed, but in a good way, as though the way she looked now was the way she was supposed to look always.

  Erika was happy, a crystal-clear happiness, with no smoke or clouds in it. But then Melanie came out of the bathroom and stared opened-mouthed at Erika, as if she were some improbable creature. “You’re letting her go to a party looking like that?” Melanie asked, as though she were the older sister, with a right to judge.

  “She looks gorgeous—what’s the problem, Melanie?” Mom responded.

  Then Melanie said the thing that still rang in Erika’s ears hours later. “She doesn’t know how to handle it, Mom.” Her mother had looked back at Melanie and waved her off, as if she didn’t know what she was talking about. But Erica knew Melanie was right. There was some fundamental way in which who Erika looked to be was not who she really was.

  At the party, Erika mostly hung out in the kitchen, where Morris had deposited her, and where Morris’s dad was cooking and his stepmom was chatting with friends. Binky hung out in there for a while, too, helping Morris’s stepmom lay out the snacks. Binky was good at making food look more attractive than it actually should. There were tricks for this, Erika learned, like the way Binky lined the guacamole bowl with a large piece of romaine lettuce, or the way she scattered dried cranberries and walnuts around the cheese platter, so they looked random but in fact were spread evenly, with no clumps of this or that. Randomness, Erika knew, had clumps.

  Binky left to join the crowd in the other room. Although she never left Erika out, these days Binky moved comfortably through the cliques at school. This year, Erika had gained some attention from the same guys who hit on Binky, but usually, after the first few minutes of staring her up and down, they drifted away. It was easier to just talk to adults, which is what she was supposed to do at Morris’s party, anyway.

  Morris’s dad, Foss, was in the kitchen with some old-style music on, some seventies stuff. He was drinking wine, enjoying his kid’s party while not being in the thick of things. “What’s up, Erika-girl—how’s school treating you?” he asked. He was a big man, in his fifties, with light, coffee-colored skin and a deep voice. He had been a movie actor when he was young, and now directed movies and TV shows. He was one of the most famous parents at the school. Erika had once seen him in an old movie about a jazz singer, and she had been startled and slightly alarmed at watching someone she knew pretend to be someone else, as though acting were some sort of psychiatric illness. Poor Foss, she’d felt, had been crammed into the idea of someone else, betrayed by his own face.

  “I like this year better than ninth or tenth. The new science lab is awesome, and we have three choices for lunch,” Erika replied. She liked Foss, and felt comfortable with him, even though he was famous. Erika’s mother often complained about the big egos of people in fashion, and the stars she occasionally interviewed. Julia claimed that fame made people bitter about having to go on being people.

  “Oh yeah, gotta have choices for lunch, that’s what I always say!” Foss laughed and slapped Erika on the back as if she had said something intentionally funny. But then he stopped talking and looked at her for a moment. She had her hair up in a high ponytail, which set off her cheekbones. Her mother had made her eyes up so they stood out against her slightly olive skin. For a moment, she looked like Julia Roberts, only with a narrower nose—and prettier. “You ever do any acting, Erika-girl? You’re always behind the stage when Morris is up there hamming it up in those school plays—but do you ever act?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Erika said. “I modeled, though. A friend of my mom’s got me an agent.”

  “Well, there you go. But you look like an actor, to me.” Morris’s dad still stared at Erika, and she was beginning to feel herself flush all over.

  “I think being an actor seems really hard,” Erika said, looking down, remembering Foss in the movie.

  Morris’s dad laughed and slapped his knee. “Erika-girl, that’s what I like about you! Most people think acting is the easiest job there is—just playing for a living—but you’re right. It’s hard, if you’re any good—and knowing that it’s hard is probably the first step to being any good. You should think about it.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I liked modeling, though, because you can just focus on one thing—like a body part or something—and then stay that way. I can stand still a really long time—the fashion director liked that about me.” Erika found herself striking a pose as she spoke. She was standing between Foss’s leather barstool and the cooking island where Binky had set out all the food.

  It was then, as she held her head high and stared in a far-off way, that she noticed one of the other men in the kitchen staring at her. It was Morris’s half brother, Jason, who was also in the movie business. Unlike Morris, Jason was half white, and he had long curls that hung almost to his shoulders. He had very dark eyes, so it was difficult to distinguish pupil from iris, and his lashes were long and curled so he looked somehow like a very large, very happy infant, the type of baby everyone wanted to hold, jiggle, and make laugh.

  “You can’t keep all the pretty girls to yourself, Foss,” Jason said, stepping toward the island that was between him and Erika, and shaking his head so his curls skimmed hi
s shoulders. Erika had met Jason once at a birthday party years before, but he didn’t seem to remember. He was in college when they were in elementary school, so they’d just been kids to him. He called his dad Foss, as everyone else did, which was short for Foster—Morris’s last name.

  “Oh, this one here is special—she’s my girl, Erika, been my girl since maybe third grade, right, sweetheart?” Morris’s dad winked at her. It was true, she’d always talked to Morris’s dad at parties and at school events. He seemed, unlike most people, to find her amusing.

  Jason leaned across the island and narrowed his baby eyes at her, pretending to try to determine what was so special about her. “You’re right—she is special. And tall. Care for a bite?” Jason picked up a tray of mini hot dogs wrapped in pasty-looking dough and smiled a little too broadly, as though he were making a not-very-funny joke and needed to compensate for it by grinning.

  “No thanks,” Erika said. “Those look like they once had a face.”

  Jason looked at her a moment, perplexed, and then back at the mini hot dogs. “Yo, man, that’s kinky. I like that,” he said. Erika blushed. She wasn’t sure exactly what Jason was talking about, but she had the uncomfortable feeling she got sometimes when people around her said dirty-sounding things. “I’ve been off meat for two years now,” Erika said, still blushing. “It’s totally impossible for me to choke something like that down.”

  Jason laughed and smacked his chest with his own fist. When he started to say something else, Foss interrupted him. “Cut it, Jay. She’s just a kid.” Foss’s voice was stern suddenly, not jokey, but like a dad whose kid had crossed the line. Jason looked up, startled. “Chill, Dad, I’m just having a little fun here.” But Morris’s dad shook his head gravely and Jason walked out of the room. Erika knew Foss had been trying to protect her, but her heart sank a little as she watched Jason retreat. She had liked the shadow his eyelashes cast on his smooth cheek, and the way the cheek held at its center an equally smooth dimple.