Cuts Like a Knife Read online

  “She said she didn’t want them anymore and she knew I’d always liked them, so she asked if I wanted them, and I said yes.”

  “You didn’t think that was weird?” I asked.

  “No,” Ren said, and her eyes kind of slid off my face. “When she wants them again, I’ll just give them back to her.”

  Ren was a crappy liar.

  Chapter Seven

  “You think she’s going to take off again, don’t you? Did she tell you that?” I hadn’t eaten any more onion rings, so why did I have this lump in my throat that I couldn’t seem to swallow down?

  Ren looked away and didn’t answer.

  The thing was, when life got too hard for Mac, she ran. I knew she’d run away right after her grandmother died, when she had to switch to Riverview, and then she’d taken off a couple of months ago after some big blowup with her uncle. I wondered if that was when he’d told her he was going to sell the little green house.

  I didn’t know where she’d gone or what she’d done those two times before. She was just gone, and everyone—Mr. Kenner, Mrs. Robinson—kept asking, had she called us, had she said anything? And then three or four days later she was back like nothing had happened. When I asked her where she’d gone, she just shrugged.

  The last time, before she took off, she’d given Ren her favorite purple scarf, and she’d given me this funny little windup chicken that did the bird dance. It was like she didn’t want us to forget her in case she didn’t come back, but of course she had.

  Now Mac had given Ren those earrings. That had to mean she was planning on taking off again, except she hadn’t given anything to me yet. Then it hit me that she kind of had.

  I still couldn’t swallow whatever was caught in my throat. “What did she say, Ren?” I said.

  “She didn’t say anything. She just gave me the earrings.”

  “She’s taking off again. I know she is.” I pulled a hand over my face.

  “You don’t know that,” Ren said. “And anyway, you can’t say anything to anybody. Just let Mac work things out in her own way. She needs some time by herself, that’s all.”

  “Running away is stupid,” I said. “It doesn’t fix anything.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s Mac’s business, not yours,” Ren said. “Don’t go all weird about stuff, like Shannon did.”

  Shannon.

  She was Mac’s friend for a little while, another math genius who hated gym class like Mac did, which meant they were always the last two people changing in the locker room. She saw some scars and cuts on Mac’s arm and went to Mrs. Robinson, who is probably the world’s worst guidance counselor. She overreacts to everything.

  There was a whole lot of drama. We all got called into Mrs. Robinson’s office one at a time so she could ask us if we’d ever seen Mac hurt herself or if we thought she was depressed. (That would be no and no.) And Mrs. Robinson got to give her I’m-here-for-you speech probably ten times—like anyone was going to take her up on that.

  Finally Mac had to admit that she’d gotten the cuts on her arm when she was trying to wreck some of the equipment the city was using to take down the merry-go-round at the park—the same one where we’d gotten to be friends. Mac loved that merry-go-round. I think it had something to do with her grandmother.

  She hadn’t actually damaged anything, but she’d tried to, which was almost as bad. She got detention for a month, and The Asshole grounded her—not that that worked for long—and she had to spend two weekends picking up garbage in the park.

  She never spoke to Shannon again. It was like Shannon was dead. Mac just looked right through her and froze her out.

  “I’m not that stupid,” I said. I wasn’t going to do anything that would make Mac start acting like I didn’t exist.

  “So you won’t say anything?” Ren asked. “C’mon, you know how Mac is. Once she figures stuff out, she’ll come back. She always does.”

  “I’m not going to say anything. Give it a rest, Ren,” I said. I shoved my chair back and got to my feet. There was a buzzing sound in my ears like a hive of bees had somehow gotten inside my head. “I gotta go,” I said. Ren said something else, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

  Chapter Eight

  Outside, I just started walking fast, hands jammed in my pockets. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. I just needed to get away from Ren and Alex.

  Mac liked Gavin Healey. Was that why she’d had sex with me? Out of spite because Gavin made her look stupid in front of most of the school? Or was it her gift to me because she was taking off again? Last time I got a dancing chicken, so this time I got laid?

  So why did she take me to the house? Why did she show me her room and that ceiling if it didn’t mean anything?

  I needed to talk to Mac. I pulled out my phone and tried her again. I got voice mail. Again.

  “It’s Daniel. Please call me,” I said.

  Okay, she wasn’t answering her phone, so I’d just find her and ask her what the hell was going on. Except I didn’t know where to look. When we weren’t at school, or in the music room or with Ren and Alex, I didn’t know what Mac did. I realized I didn’t know where she lived. I didn’t even know The Asshole’s real name.

  I leaned against a telephone pole. I was so lame. How could I say I was Mac’s friend? I didn’t really know her at all. Her having sex with me was pretty much the same as her giving Ren a pair of earrings. It didn’t mean anything beyond that she liked to give people presents before she took off in case she decided not to come back.

  The onion rings lay like a greasy lump in my stomach. I thought about going home, but I didn’t really want to talk to my mother. She’d know something wasn’t right. She had this weird mother thing where she could tell something was wrong with me, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. It was almost like she could see inside my head.

  What would I say to her? “Hey, Mom, I slept with this girl I’m crazy about, in this old house that’s about to be torn down, but it turns out the whole thing didn’t mean squat because she’s taking off, and she decided sleeping with me was a better goodbye present than a windup chicken.”

  No, that wouldn’t freak her out or anything.

  I looked around and realized that I wasn’t that far from the school. I figured I might as well walk over there and see if Mr. Hanson was around so maybe I could at least get into the music room and work on my composition project.

  What were the chances he’d be at the school on a Saturday night? Pretty good, actually. Mr. Hanson’s love life seemed to be about as lame as mine was.

  I could see the lights on in the music room as I came around the side of the old stone building. Mr. Hanson was at the piano. No one else seemed to be around. How big a loser was I?

  I stood there in the darkness thinking maybe I should go somewhere else. Do something else. Yeah, great idea, except I didn’t have anything else to do or anywhere else to go.

  I banged on the window. Mr. Hanson looked up, smiled when he saw me and gestured for me to come around to the end door so he could let me in.

  “Hi, Daniel,” he said.

  “Hi, Mr. Hanson,” I said, mostly faking a smile. My voice sounded kind of hoarse, and I coughed to clear it. “Is it okay if I work on my project?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m going to be here for probably another forty-five minutes.” He didn’t ask me why I had nothing better to do than hang out at school on a Saturday night. Maybe he figured if he asked me, I might ask him.

  I wondered sometimes why he hung out in the music department so much after school hours. Didn’t he have a girlfriend? He wasn’t bad-looking for a guy his age. He was tall. He wasn’t fat. He had all his original hair. It was half gray, but he didn’t wear it in some kind of dorky ponytail in the back or anything.

  Maybe he was thinking the same think about me, wondering why I didn’t have a girlfriend. I wasn’t ugly, and I was fairly tall. Okay, so I didn’t have a lot of muscles, but I wasn’t some skinny geek bo
y either. And I took a shower every day and put on clean clothes. My mother said when I got a bit older, girls would be all over me. What else was she supposed to say? She was my mother.

  I got my folder from the back of the room and plugged a set of headphones into my favorite keyboard. Then I put my music on the stand, except there really wasn’t much music, because I’d been stuck on this dumb assignment for more than a week.

  I wanted to write a song for Mac. Stupid, I know. But I couldn’t make it sound right, and the harder I tried, the more it just sucked. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it had felt like when she kissed me. No girl had ever had a mouth so soft and warm. I thought about my skin next to hers, and suddenly my fingers were moving over the keys.

  I found a pencil, and for the next forty-five minutes I played and transcribed and Mac’s song came to life. I pulled off the headphones just as Mr. Hanson came over to me.

  “Progress?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Sorry I have to kick you out,” he said.

  “It’s okay.” I stuffed the music in my folder before he could look at what I’d done. I wasn’t ready to show it to anyone yet. “I’m pretty much finished.”

  I put my folder back in my slot and hung the headphones inside the cupboard. Mr. Hanson pulled on his jacket, grabbed his backpack and carefully picked up something wrapped in a green plastic bag. “Can you hold this while I lock up?” he asked, holding out the bag.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Don’t drop it,” he said lightly, though there was an edge of seriousness to his voice.

  “What is this? Our final exam?” I asked as he took out his keys.

  He looked at me over his shoulder and grinned. “No, something way more valuable than that. Long John Baldry’s 1971 album, It Ain’t Easy—the original, not the reissue, and vinyl, not cd.”

  I almost dropped the record. It was a good thing it was dark and he couldn’t see my face, because he would have known something was up. “Where, uh, where did you get it?” I asked, and I was surprised at how normal my voice sounded, because I didn’t feel normal at all. I already knew what he was going to say.

  Chapter Nine

  “Your friend Mac gave it to me. I guess she found it in some old things that had belonged to her grandmother. She knew how much I like bluesmen like Baldry, so she asked if I wanted it. It didn’t mean anything to her.”

  I was glad to hand the album back to him, because my hands were shaking so badly it would have ended up on the parking lot pavement in another minute.

  “I, uh, I gotta go,” I said.

  “Good night, Daniel,” he said. “See you Monday.”

  I walked away from him across the parking lot in long strides and then blindly down the street until I was out of sight of the school. Then I stopped and sat on the curb.

  I couldn’t breathe, and every part of me was shaking—my hands, my arms, my legs. My teeth would have been banging together if I hadn’t been biting on my tongue so hard I could taste blood.

  Mac had gotten that album from her grandmother. She had a whole collection of them, old stuff like Long John Baldry. She liked the pops and hisses and scratches those old records made. Maybe because she’d listened to so many of them with her grandmother.

  But that Baldry album was her treasure. Mac’s grandmother was a huge fan. The album had been hers, and I knew that the liner inside had Long John Baldry’s signature. Mac would never give that away.

  It meant nothing to her? No way. It meant everything.

  I pulled both hands back through my hair. I knew Mac liked Mr. Hanson, even though she said all teachers were lame. Giving him the album was like giving Ren her earrings and me…well, herself. She was going to run again because of Gavin and because her grandmother’s house was going to get torn down. Except I was starting to think that this time she wasn’t going to come back.

  I pulled out my phone and punched in Mac’s number, and the whole time all I was saying in my head was, “Pleaseanswer, pleaseanswer, please-answer,” and she didn’t.

  And I didn’t know what to say, what message to leave on her voice mail. Please don’t run away again because I love you? I’d already said “I love you” to Mac, and I’d noticed that she hadn’t said it back.

  I don’t know how long I was there sitting on the edge of the curb, shaking. Finally I decided I should move or someone was going to see me and think I was stoned or something and call the cops.

  So I got up and started walking again, and I guess my feet were on some kind of autopilot, because I was almost home before I noticed which direction I was going in.

  I let myself in the back door and stood in the darkness in the kitchen for a minute, listening, trying to guess where my mother was. My dad was on a business trip to Los Angeles. While I was standing there, Mom came into the room, saw me standing there and gave a little shriek.

  “It’s just me, Mom,” I said, holding up a hand.

  She put her own hand flat on her chest, shaking her head. “What are you doing standing in the middle of the kitchen in the dark?” she said. “If you were trying to scare me to death, it didn’t work, but it was close.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking.”

  She padded over to the cupboard and took down a bag of dill pickle chips from the shelf. I could see the bag was already half gone and I hadn’t had any. She bought baked chips because they were healthier, but then she ate them all, which didn’t seem that healthy to me.

  “So what were you thinking about?” Mom asked, tipping her head on one side to look up at me. My mother was short, which didn’t mean she didn’t know about twenty-seven different ways to put you down on your knees if you gave her any trouble. She had four big brothers.

  “Were you thinking about why we’re all here on this planet, or were you trying to decide whether you wanted frozen pizza or the last piece of cake?”

  She always asked questions like that. My friends either thought my mother was deeply weird, or they kind of had a thing for her, mostly the last part.

  I shrugged and hoped it looked casual so maybe just this once she wouldn’t notice anything off about me. “I was just, you know, thinking about school and stuff.”

  She popped another chip in her mouth and held out the bag to me. I took a handful even though I wasn’t that crazy about dill pickle chips.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked in the same tone she’d used when she’d asked me if I was trying to decide between frozen pizza and leftover cake.

  For a second, I thought about telling her that I’d slept with Mac and it was wonderful, but after, she’d just disappeared and I couldn’t find her, and she was giving presents to her friends just the way she had the last time she ran away, except I was afraid that this time she wouldn’t come back in a few days.

  What kind of loser tells his mother stuff like that? So instead I just said, “Nothing.”

  Her eyebrows went up, but she ate another chip before she said anything. “You don’t lie very well, Daniel.”

  “I’m not lying,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other.

  She set the bag on the counter and leaned back against the cupboard. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what the problem is,” she said softly.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said again, looking up at the ceiling and shaking my head. “So there isn’t anything to help me with.”

  Mom stared at me for a long moment, and it was hard not to move or at least look away, but I didn’t.

  “Okay,” she said. She picked up the bag of chips again and pushed past me.

  Chapter Ten

  Once she was gone, I slumped against the counter and folded both arms over my head. How could I tell her what was going on? If I did, she’d be calling the school and Mac’s uncle and maybe even the police, and Mac wouldn’t be able to take off, if she hadn’t already, but she’d never speak to me again. It wasn’t like I was six and I could just go running to my mommy. Tha
t’s not how the world worked.

  “No, it’s not okay,” my mother’s voice said then.

  I lifted my head and opened my eyes. I hadn’t even heard her come back into the room.

  She was standing in the doorway. “Something’s wrong, Daniel,” she said, “and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know that.” She sighed. “Please talk to me.”

  I shook my head. “Just leave me alone, Mom.”

  “Can’t do that, kiddo.”

  “There’s nothing you can do.” And she couldn’t. Mac wasn’t answering her phone, and I didn’t know where she was or even where to start looking for her. I didn’t know where she’d taken off to the last two times she’d left.

  And how pissed would she be if I was wrong? Maybe she wasn’t going to run off. People got tired of stuff and gave it away all the time. I had an old bike in our garage I was going to give away, and that didn’t mean I was going to leave home.

  “You can’t help,” I said.

  Mom pushed a piece of hair back behind her ear. “I can do all kinds of things,” she said.

  I was starting to get angry, which felt a lot better than the cold lump of fear that had been sitting like a rock in my stomach ever since I’d left the school. “Really?” I said. I sounded kind of snarky. “What? You got some kind of superpowers?”

  The only thing that gave away that she was pissed was the way her jaw tightened. I knew she was clenching her teeth together. “I’m going to make a cup of coffee,” she said. “You’re going up to sit in your room.”

  I pushed away from the counter. “You’re not sending me to my room like I’m a little kid or something.”

  “Then stop acting like you’re a little kid.” She pulled herself up to her full height of five foot nothing. I was taller, but that didn’t make a difference to her.