Useless Dresses

We’re all pushing each other closer to the edge.

Just past 3 am I woke up to Denny screeching out of the driveway, his tires sliding across a layer of snow. I didn’t go back to sleep. Emily hasn’t spoken to me in days. Bobby cried last night when Denny wasn’t home to tuck him it. I made an A on my history test last week.

“Rich!” Milly screeched and waved her hands wildly in the air, flinging my Rubik’s Cube onto the table beside us and causing a quiet uproar among the people sitting there. Rich sat nearly across the cafeteria from us, at a severely overcrowded table.

The boys at that table ordered bacon cheeseburgers every day. Every single one of them. The girls ordered Caesar salads. I never saw Rich eating.

He looked back at Milly like she just shot him in the back with a poison arrow.

“Rich! Hey!” Milly screamed again, waving frantically. She sat in the dead center of our empty lunch table, her back straight as a board and a frizz of mousy brown hair jutting under her baby pink beret.

“Mills, you’re scaring the hell out of the guy,” I laughed, picking at what was left of my French fries.

“Maybe he didn’t hear me,” Milly decided. She leapt off the table and snatched my Rubik’s Cube from an abandoned pile of chili nachos. I grinned an apology at the group of teenagers glaring daggers into my friend.

“Oh, he heard you.” I pointed toward Rich as he shrugged his way to our table.

“Ah, what’s up Milly?”

“Hi,” Milly squeaked and retook her place on the center of the table.

“Hey. Hey, Milly. Ok, is that all? I gotta go.”

“What? Rich, we haven’t seen you in days. Where have you been?” I asked, waving my hand at one of the open chairs surrounding our table. Rich shifted under my gaze and didn’t take the seat.

“Just…around. Busy.”

Milly inhaled deeply, like she was about to say way too much while breathing way too little, but a voice interrupted her.

“Rich,” a short brunette bounced up beside him, her dark brown hair matching mocha skin.

She didn’t smile exactly, but tightened her mouth in a sort of forced grin. When she stood on her tip toes, Rich still had to crouch slightly to let her whisper something in his ear. After that she laughed, like she’d just told the funniest joke, and Rich frowned slightly then gave a chuckle as forced as the girl’s smile.

“Come on, lunch is almost over and you need to talk to me,” the petite dark brown said. It sounded like she spoke predominantly through her nose. She turned around with Rich’s wrist clutched securely in her hands.

“How cliché,” I muttered as the two walked away.

“Huh?”

“Milly, will you go get us some cookies? Please?” I smiled at my friend and dug a crumpled dollar bill out of my pocket. Again, her mood skyrocketed. She jumped off the table and hop-skipped into the lunch line.

I took a moment to stare at Rich and the girl, trying to ignore the loud way she laughed and the sober way he ran his hands through her curls. The more I looked at him, the more sunken in Rich’s eyes look. The paler his skin seemed. He almost looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in days.

Rich hadn’t been hanging out with us much lately—or more accurately, not at all—and I didn’t think Milly’s spastic attitude scared him off. Something was bothering Rich. I just wished I knew what.

I didn’t realize what I was doing until I was already standing behind Rich, greeting the people at his table with a nervous wave.

I got the urge to grab Rich by his shoulders and shake him, shake him until he realized how much I missed him and realized he could talk to me. Me. I wanted to get him away from this table and the little brunette looking as though she wanted to kick my head in.

And it wasn’t because I felt jealous. Because I did, I think. And that was weird and unfamiliar and I didn’t have the time to think about what that meant. No, I wanted to get Rich away from things because they were poisoning him. Or enabling him to poison himself. I didn’t know which.

“What are you doing, Kate?” Rich asked, looking up but not at me. He looked nervous, terrified. He didn’t want me there. He didn’t want all of his new friends to know that he knew Kate, the circus freak from Baltimore.

“How are you?” I asked. Because honestly, that was all I wanted to know.

“I’m fine. Awesome.” Now go away.

“No,” I responded to his unspoken demand. I spoke again before Rich could question me. “Milly misses you, you know.”

He ignored me. I realized I wouldn’t be getting anything out of Rich like this.

“We’re going…outside,” I told Rich. The rest of his table tried their best to ignore me as well, but Rich’s brunette still stared. “Milly and I. Come see us. Talk to us.”

Again, I got no response from Rich or the silent table. So I said it. And I knew I shouldn’t have. It was selfish and mean—but I said it. I said it to charge him up enough to get him out of his seat.

“We’ll wait for you, Richie.”

Milly rolled up behind me. “Got ‘em. They had Carnival flavored, the ones with the little colored candies. So I got four, because they were only a quarter.”

Rich was fuming in front of us, looking as ready to slam his fists on the table as he was to run out of the cafeteria like a surprised rabbit.

He did neither. He just sat their fuming.

“Let’s go finish lunch outside,” I suggested to Milly, who looked excited to do anything at all. As we made our way into the cold, a high screech formed when Rich’s chair scraped against the cafeteria floor as he stood.