20
HEATHER’S WORLD
When Jordan got to her art class there was a
notice on the board informing the students their teacher was sick
and that this week’s class was canceled.
As Jordan read the scrawled message,
she was surprised by how disappointed she felt.
Heather wasn’t the most inspiring art
instructor in the world. Most Saturday mornings, she barely looked
awake. Jordan always tried to arrive early with coffee; she liked
to listen to Heather rattle on about all the stuff she’d been doing
on Friday night. There was always someone’s “show” she’d gone to,
or else she’d been out hearing a band until the small hours. From
the sound of things, going to bed before three was almost unheard
of in Heather’s world.
Heather’s life was perfect. She just
did what she wanted and didn’t worry about what anyone thought of
her. And she didn’t pigeonhole people into little categories like
most adults Jordan knew. Jordan had helped her haul a really heavy
statue back to her apartment complex once, and the whole way there
Heather never asked her boring questions about school, or her plans
for college, or any of that crap. She’d just asked if she had a
boyfriend, and when Jordan had answered no, Heather had said they’d
have to work on that. They’d have to work
on that. As if they were really friends.
She didn’t have Heather’s phone number,
but luckily, she knew where she lived.
She took the bus as close as she could
get to Heather’s apartment and walked the rest of the way, stopping
at a convenience store to buy a fresh coffee for
Heather.
When she knocked, it took a minute to
get an answer. Heather finally poked her head through the door, and
Jordan let out a yip of surprise. Bloodshot eyes stared out at her
from a pale, greenish face. Heather’s wild hair was looking wilder
than usual; several braids seemed to be stuck
together.
“Oh, hey.” Heather blinked her eyes
like a rodent peeking out from its burrow. She brightened slightly
at the sight of the cup. “Coffee—you’re so
welcome to come in with that.” She stepped back, leaving the door
open for Jordan to follow her.
Jordan hesitantly stepped across the
threshold, wincing at a stench in the air.
Heather flopped on the couch, which was
loaded with a pile of laundry. Clean, Jordan hoped. “Shut the
door,” Heather told her. “Buns could get out.”
Buns was Heather’s brown lop-eared
rabbit, which had apparently been a bone of contention—one of
many—between Heather and Jed while they were married. Now Jordan
could see why. There were round bunny poop pellets all over the
place.
Heather took a slurp of coffee and then
leaned back against her laundry, her elbow hooked over her eyes to
shut out what little light managed to penetrate the blue plastic
miniblinds.
“Class was canceled today,” Jordan
said. “I was worried.”
“Were you? That’s so
sweet.”
“Have you been to the
doctor?”
“Christ, no. For a
hangover?”
“Oh.” Jordan relaxed a little. “I
didn’t know what was wrong. I thought you might be really sick or
something.”
“I might not be diseased, but I can
swear that two hours ago I was truly sick.”
Jordan’s stomach turned. That’s what
the stink was. Vomit. And rabbit. And overflowing
ashtrays.
Heather lifted her head. “You didn’t
happen to bring anything salty to eat, did you?”
“Uh, no.”
Her head plopped back again. “Oh, well.
Maybe we can send out for a pizza later.” She sighed. “It’s so nice
you came to take care of me. I guess I really could use some help
here.”
Jordan hadn’t realized she’d
volunteered for “taking care” duty, or what that would entail. But
Heather did look bad. “I think you should open a
window.”
“Go to it, girl,” she said, lying back.
“I just need to rest my eyes a minute longer.”
A minute later, snores rose from the
couch.
Jordan didn’t know what to do. It would
be rude just to walk out. And Heather did feel bad, even if her
illness was self-inflicted. She decided to tidy up.
Thirty minutes later, she was starting
to feel as if she was making some headway. Finding an ancient pair
of rubber gloves under the kitchen sink had emboldened her. She’d
torn through the dirty dishes in the sink, hit the bathroom with a
can of scrubbing bubbles, and done a poop pellet patrol through the
apartment with the dustpan. Making as little noise as possible, she
stacked papers and pushed clutter into already-overflowing drawers
and closets. It was a superficial fix, but it looked better.
Finally, she decided she needed to fire up the vacuum, but she
hesitated to, fearing the noise would wake Heather or set off
Buns’s bowels, or both.
Heather, hearing the vacuum being
rolled out of the bedroom closet, sat up and stretched. “Wow! Look
at this place—you are a miracle worker.”
Jordan glanced around. The discouraging
thing was, it still looked like a dump.
“You know what I feel like?” Not
waiting for Jordan to answer, Heather continued, “Chinese food.
Tell you what—while you run the vacuum, I’ll hop in the shower and
then we can go to this great buffet I know. All you can eat for
four ninety-nine. It’ll be my treat.”
An hour later, Jordan was slumped in a
booth at Ho House, staring at a plate of sweet and sour chicken
with sauce so orange it glowed.
“Is that all you’re getting?” Heather
asked, flopping down opposite her. Her plate was loaded down with
food—fried rice and gloppy, greasy entrees as well as a pyramid of
egg rolls. Jordan didn’t see how someone could possibly expect to
eat that much, especially with a hangover.
Eyes furtively scanning the restaurant,
Heather produced a large Ziploc baggie. With hand movements as fast
and direct as a frog’s tongue, she transferred all the egg rolls to
the baggie and then hid it in her purse.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do
that,” Jordan warned.
Heather rolled her eyes. “These places
always have tons of leftover food anyway.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Hey, I’m not a millionaire. I gotta
take what I can get.”
Jordan frowned. She’d never been so
poor that she needed to steal food.
When Jordan didn’t answer her, Heather
chuckled. “You’re cute, you know that?”
“Cute?”
Heather gasped under the power of a
brainstorm. “You should come to my place for Thanksgiving! You
could be my Little Sister—for my parents. They’re coming down from
Denver.”
Jordan tried but failed to understand.
“Won’t your parents remember that you don’t have a little
sister?”
“I don’t mean a real little sister, I mean, a Little
Sister little sister. You know—the program that pairs an
older person with a kid? See, it’s important because . . . well,
long story short, I’ve had to borrow a little money off my folks
and they never would have given it to me if
I’d just asked for myself. They’d have just gone all tough love on
my ass. So what I did was, I made up an underprivileged Little
Sister to tell my parents about so they’d lend me money to help
her. So now maybe if they saw this
underprivileged Little Sister, preferably looking kind of scrungy,
they’d feel like they should help some more.”
“Wait a sec,” Jordan said. “You’ll tell
your parents that you’ve been spending money on me?”
“Well, not you,
actually, but the person you’ll be representing, yeah. Mostly to
help pay for your ear operation.”
“What?”
Heather’s eyes lit up. “Yes! That’s
it—it would be so cool if you could just pretend to be a little bit
hard of hearing.”
“I don’t know . . .”
Heather leaned forward. “You’re not
offended, are you? I mean, it’s not like you really are a poor deaf
kid. That would be exploitive.”
“But this is a big lie,” Jordan pointed
out.
Her new friend let out a sharp cackle.
“Right, but it’s lying for a good cause—me!”
Jordan couldn’t help
smiling.
“Please say you’ll come—it will be
miserable if you don’t,” Heather said. “My parents are both CPAs.
If you’re not there, the whole afternoon’s going to feel like The
Attack of the Phil Collins People.”
Jordan laughed. “What are you going to
have? For Thanksgiving, I mean. Are you going to make a turkey and
all that?”
Heather laughed. “If you’d pitch in
here, we might just have a great big platter of frozen egg
rolls.”
As Heather was driving Jordan home, her
ancient Geo Metro started belching smoke from the hood, but Heather
didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t seem to notice her windshield had
a sunlike crack that made her have to lift herself up and crane her
neck to see over it, either.
“Is that normal?” Jordan
asked.
“Is what normal?”
“The smoke.”
Heather lifted her shoulders in a
careless shrug. “It goes away sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
Heather glanced at her sidewise. “I
guess I should get it fixed, huh? The trouble is, once you start
fixing things, it never ends.”
Jordan knew something was faulty in
that logic, but she couldn’t pinpoint what exactly. She tried not
to be judgmental, but she wasn’t in the best of moods.
Heather glanced at her warily. “Hey,
I’m really sorry about the buffet thing,
Jordan. I swear—I’ve been going there for years and I’ve never
gotten caught. It was just bad luck. And I had no idea that
restaurant owner was so insane. The way he treated
you!”
Jordan shuddered in humiliation as she
remembered the angry Chinese owner threatening to call the police
and making Heather upend her huge purse. When all those egg rolls
had spilled out, Jordan would gladly have sunk through the floor,
but Heather just shook her head and acted amazed that the egg rolls
had managed to find their way into her bag.
They’d offered to pay the owner—Mr. Ho,
evidently—an extra five dollars to keep him from calling the
police. He took the five dollars, but then had insisted on calling
Jordan’s parents. Jordan had experienced an awful flashback to last
March; she just couldn’t bear the idea of someone calling her
father and telling him she’d screwed up again. So she’d resorted to
a desperate measure—the first thing that had popped into her
head.
A few weeks earlier, she’d been trying
to reach Dominic and had run him down by telephone at the
professor’s house next door. She had programmed the number on her
phone.
So, with Mr. Ho hovering over her,
she’d whipped her phone out and speed-dialed the number. Thank
heavens Grace picked up, though she sounded confused when Jordan
blurted out, “Hi, Mother, it’s me,
Jordan.”
“What?” Grace asked.
Jordan’s voice had trembled. “I’m in
trouble again. I’m so sorry—but could you please please please talk
to this restaurant owner, Mr. Ho, and tell him that I’m not a
thief?”
“What? What?
What’s happened?” Grace sputtered.
“He wants to know that I’ll be
disciplined at home so he won’t call the
police.”
“Oh my God . . .”
“Please, Mother?”
Taking a deep breath, she handed the
phone over to the Chinese dude.
Jordan had worried that Grace would
blow it, but it turned out she barely had a chance to. Mr. Ho
started shouting down the phone, declaring that if he ever saw
Jordan in his restaurant again he would call the police and have
her hauled off to jail. Then, in his anger, he’d hung up before
handing the phone back to Jordan. She hadn’t had a chance to talk
to Grace again, which was probably just as well.
“So have you thought any more about
Thanksgiving?” Heather asked her, as they pulled onto Jordan’s
street.
“You really want me to
come?”
“Would your folks mind—I mean, your
dad?”
Jordan had told her that her mom and
her sister had died in an accident, but she hadn’t given her all
the details.
“Probably. But I don’t
care.”
Heather stopped where Jordan told her
to, across the street from the house. She started to get out of the
car, but the door was stuck, compelling Heather to go around and
open it from the outside. When Jordan stepped out, Heather gave her
a big hug. “Remember, we’ve got a date. Hasta luego!”
Heather got back behind the wheel, but
when she turned the key, the car wouldn’t start. She tried again
several times, but the engine would just let out a few mechanical
growls and then fall silent. Jordan looked over and saw that woman
Grace heading toward them.
Great.
Finally, the engine made a reluctant
whirring sound and picked up. With a grinding of gears and a wave,
Heather rattled off down the street, streaming smoke like an old
locomotive.
“What is going on?” Grace asked. “What
was that man on the phone saying? I could barely make out a
word.”
“Nothing—it was so stupid. The guy
caught Heather stuffing an egg roll in her purse and had a
cow.”
Grace stared after the smoke-belching
car. “Was that your partner in crime?”
“Yeah. She’s my painting teacher at
ACC.”
“Your painting teacher takes you out to
steal food? Geez, Jordan.”
Jordan rolled her eyes. “Yeah,
geez, someone who doesn’t treat me like a
pariah. Must be something wrong with her!”
“She could have gotten you arrested!”
Grace said. “As it is, this whole situation’s put me in an awkward
position.”
“I should have guessed,” Jordan huffed.
“You’re going to run squealing to my dad. That will be great.
Really cheer him up!”
“You might have
thought of that earlier,” Grace said.
“I didn’t do anything! I told you, the
owner was just being a dick. Is that a good reason to cause a
family crisis? You think my dad doesn’t have enough to worry about?
That his year hasn’t been bad enough already?”
Grace frowned, and Jordan could tell
she was getting through to her. Finally. “Okay, I won’t say
anything to him,” she said. “But please don’t do this to me again.
And you really should be careful about who you’re friends
with.”
“Heather’s okay—she’s just going
through a rough patch,” Jordan said.
“She’s sort of old to be running around
with, isn’t she?”
Jordan felt her spine stiffen. “What
would you know about it?”
They watched the Metro make a squealing
left-hand turn at the intersection. It exhaled another cloud of
black before disappearing from sight.
“She should have that car worked on,”
Grace said. “It’s an environmental disaster.”
“Thank you, Madame Earth
Muffin!”
Grace shook her head. “You make it
seriously hard for people to like you, don’t you?”
Jordan’s cheeks felt hot. Your mother always said you were a difficult child to love. .
. .
“I just don’t care whether they like me
or not,” she declared.
“That’s not a very pleasant attitude,”
Grace said.
Jordan snickered. “It’s not pleasant to
be a hemorrhoid, either, yet here you are.”
While the shock was still fresh on
Grace’s face, Jordan stalked away. Just because the woman had done
her a piddling little favor, that didn’t give her the right to tell
her how to live her life.