Safe with Me: A Novel

My dad comes home just as Mom and I are finishing dinner, around eight o’clock. He walks into the kitchen, loosening his tie as he enters. He stops short when he sees me sitting at the table, his eyes wide, and stares at my head.

I set down my fork and speak so Mom doesn’t have to. “My hair was so trashed from all my meds, I asked Mom to take me and get it fixed.” I feel Mom’s eyes on me, hoping she’ll understand that I’m trying to keep Dad from getting angry. “I really love it, Dad. All the girls at school are like, fashion models or something. I’m just trying to fit in. And I feel so much better now.” I wait a beat, trying to gauge how he’ll react from the look on his face. “Do you like it?”

He hesitates before responding, looking to my mom then back to me again, his expression softening. “You look beautiful.” I can almost hear Mom’s internal sigh of relief. “How was your first day?” Dad asks.

“Okay,” I answer, not wanting to get into what had happened with Hailey and Noah. Knowing my dad, if he found out what they said, he’d be on the phone with their parents in a hot minute, which would only make everything worse. “I still need to do some reading, though, so I think I’m going to head upstairs.”

“Clear your plate, please,” Mom says, then stands up, walks over to Dad, and gives him a kiss. She could win an Academy Award for her acting. He wraps an arm around her waist, squeezes her tightly to him, and makes the kiss deeper, which totally grosses me out. That’s how it is with my parents, though. They run hot and cold, and I’m never sure which side of them I’m going to get. It’s different when it’s just me, alone with my mom. She’s way more relaxed. She smiles more and even acts a little goofy. But when she’s around my dad, it’s like she turns into a skittish cat. She gets all twitchy and guarded.

I grab my plate from the table, hurry over to the sink to rinse it off, then put it in the dishwasher. Small chores like this are a new thing for me, since for years, I ate most of my meals in my bed, but I try not to complain about having to do them. It could always be worse, I figure. I could always be dead.

I rush up the stairs to the safety of my bedroom, the one place in the house that is completely mine. When I was twelve and stuck in the hospital for a month after having a shunt inserted in my liver to drain the toxins my body couldn’t process on its own, Mom distracted me by bringing in endless stacks of decorating magazines and catalogs. “You’re almost a teenager, now,” she said, as we flipped through the pages together. “We should redo your room.”

She was right—I’d outgrown the décor she’d picked out for me when I was a toddler: cotton candy pink walls and white lace curtains. “I like this one,” I said, pointing to a page in the Pottery Barn teen catalog.

“Neon green and turquoise, huh?” Mom asked, eyeing the polka dot bedspread and thin-striped curtains. “Are you sure? It’s a little bright.”

“I like bright,” I said. I tapped the page with my index finger. “This is the one.”

“Let me talk to your dad,” she said. In the end, he agreed. The one bonus of being a sick kid, I guess—parents who are willing to overindulge you. He even hired a decorator to manage the project since Mom was busy at the hospital with me. When I finally came home, the walls of my room were white, and the rest of the room was accented by loud spots of turquoise and bright green on my bedspread and curtains—exactly what I’d wanted. The decorator gave me a queen-size, four-poster bed and an entire wall lined with white bookcases. She filled the corner with a huge turquoise beanbag chair and fuzzy neon green pillows. Now, everything about the room is comfortable and plush. It is by far my favorite place to be.

As my computer boots up, I stand in front of the mirror above my chest of drawers, regarding my new reflection. I wasn’t lying to my dad that I loved my new hair—in two hours, Hannah somehow made me look like an entirely different person. I tuck one side behind my right ear, turning my head back and forth and making kissing lips at myself, wondering what Hailey might say about me now. I still need to put on a little makeup and go shopping for some new clothes, but maybe now she and Noah will at least leave me alone.

My laptop chimes, letting me know it’s ready for me to log on. But instead of immediately checking my email to see if I’ve heard from Dirk, I open Facebook and look up Hailey’s profile. Even without her last name, it only takes a few minutes to find her under Eastside Prep’s page. She’s listed as one of the people “liking” the school, and with her mop of red hair, her profile picture isn’t hard to pick out. Like Tiffani’s, Hailey’s account is set to public, so I don’t need to send her a friend request in order to read all the posts on her wall or dig through her About.me page, either. She has over a thousand friends, she likes pages like Cosmopolitan and Your Daily Horoscope, and her most recent post was ten minutes ago: “Yo! Green beans = Yuck!” Eighty-seven of her friends “liked” this.

“Seriously?” I say aloud. “How old are all of you?” I scroll down through her other posts, most of them fairly similar in tone. She seems a little in love with herself, posting self-portraits clearly taken with her cell phone—her chin down, eyebrows suggestively raised, with coy, fishing-for-compliment statements like “Who says a girl needs makeup to feel good about herself?”

“You might need it to cover up Mount Vesuvius on your chin,” I mutter, despite the fact that I realize making fun of anything to do with Hailey’s appearance makes me just as ugly as she was to me. I consider using my Sierra account to post inappropriate YouTube videos on her wall or signing her email address up to receive endless amounts of spam, but decide that cyberbullying might be a bit more retaliation than she actually deserves. Teenage girls are supposed to be catty to each other—at least, that’s what I gathered watching movies like Heathers and Mean Girls, along with countless episodes of The Secret Life of the American Teenager when I was stuck in the hospital. Hailey’s comment about my hair might have only been reflex, and not necessarily evidence that she is related to Satan.

Hoping it’s not too late to chat with Dirk, I quickly log in to my email, smiling when I see his name in the inbox. Over the last two weeks, we’d all but abandoned the Zombie Wars game, choosing instead to chat over instant messaging and through emails. I learned that he works as a systems engineer for Google, helping to write the complicated scripting that makes things like Gmail and Google+ function on a day-to-day basis. He has two younger sisters—both still in high school, but they live in North Seattle with his parents, so at least I’m not in danger of running into them at Eastside Prep—not that they’d know it was me, since the only picture he has is the one I sent him of “Sierra.” His apartment is downtown on Capitol Hill, a small studio inside a converted brick warehouse. “It definitely needs a woman’s touch,” he wrote. “I’m sort of a slacker when it comes to decorating. Unless you consider stacks of empty pizza boxes artistic expression.”

“Hey Sierra,” his note tonight reads. “I’ve been thinking, and I’m pretty sure it’s time I get your digits. I mean, we’ve been talking online for a month now, right? I’d like to hear the voice attached to that pretty face. Call me tonight. I’ll be up until midnight.”

He included his number at the bottom of the screen, and I take a deep breath, considering whether or not talking with him on the phone is a good idea. I’m not sure if I sound like I’m almost twenty years old, or if I’ll give myself away when I don’t have the added protection of the computer screen. But my curiosity gets the better of me, and I grab my cell phone out of my backpack, dial his number, and immediately head inside my closet, shutting the door behind me so my parents won’t hear me talking.

I can do this, I say to myself. I can be Sierra. The phone rings six times before he answers. “This is Dirk,” he says. His voice is low and warm, and I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe. “Hello?” he says after a moment of silence. “Sierra?”

“Yes. Um, I mean, no.” I cover my eyes with one hand and shake my head. Oh, god. I’m such an idiot.

“No?” The way he says it makes me picture the word curling up at the end.

“Well, sort of.” I should just tell him the truth. I should just get it over with and get on with my life.

“You’re sort of Sierra? Sounds like a name for a bad sitcom. Sort of Sierra, starring Blake Lively as the girl wrestling with an identity crisis.” He says it in a deep, mocking movie voice-over tone, which makes me laugh. So he’s not just charming on the computer. “I’m happy you called,” he continues.

“Me, too.” I drop my hand from my face into my lap. “I mean, I’m happy you asked me to.”

“So, what’s this ‘sort of Sierra’ biz?”

I pause, feeling my pulse thud inside my ears. “Well . . . that’s not actually my name.”

“Oh.” He is quiet, then clears his throat. “Like it’s a moniker for the game?”

Tell him, I think. Tell him who you are, NOW. “Yeah,” I say, the lie slipping out of me so much more easily than the truth. “I just like it better than my name, so that’s what I go by online.”

“What’s your real name, then?” he asks, sounding clearly relieved.

“Madelyn. But I mostly go by Maddie.”

“Maddie,” he repeats. “Well, I think it’s pretty, but coming from a guy named Dirk, I can totally understand wanting to use a different one.”

“It could be worse,” I offered. “You could be Cornelius.”

“Ha! Totally true.” He’s quiet again, and I struggle to find something interesting to say. I don’t really know how to talk with boys, and all I can think is I’m going to say something that’s going to give me away. But then I don’t have to speak, because he does. “It’s nice to finally hear your voice, Maddie. I mean, it’s cool and everything talking online, but this is better.” He sounds so relaxed, so comfortable with himself, I feel terrible for deceiving him. “What are you up to tonight?” he asks.

“I got my hair cut and had dinner with my parents. Exciting, right?” I remember reading somewhere that the closer to the truth you keep a lie, the less likely you are to be found out. I’d already told him that “Sierra” still lived at home with her parents while she went to school to become a computer graphics artist. “What about you?”

“Well, I was helping my dad rebuild the engine on a ’69 Corvette a little while ago, and now I’m back at my apartment, sitting on the couch, talking with a super-cute girl on the phone.” My face warms, and for a moment, I feel like that girl—the girl in the picture I’d sent him. But then it hits me—that’s the girl he’s thinking of, not me. He’s imagining Sierra’s long, smooth torso, not my thick belly, marked by an ugly red scar. He’s not imagining the Franken-babe. Even with my new haircut, I’m pretty sure if he saw me on the street, he’d look the other way.

“Maddie?” I hear my mom’s muffled voice, coming from the hallway. “Can I get you anything, sweetie?”

I sigh and shift a little on the floor. “Hey, can you hold on a sec?” I say to Dirk.

“Sure,” he says, so I set my phone down and quietly step out of my closet into my bedroom. I open the door to see my mom standing there, her face turned away from me, showing me only the right side.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks. Just going to read and go to sleep, okay?” She nods, and I notice her eye is watering. “Are you okay?” I ask, and she nods again. “Mom, look at me.”

She turns her head a little bit, and gives me a half smile. “I just wanted to check to make sure you’ll remember to take your meds.”

And then I see it—the red mark on the other side of her face, next to her ear. “Oh my god. Did he hit you?” My stomach clenches. I’ve seen marks on my mother’s body before—small, fingertip-size bruises on her biceps, a slight pink swelling around her eye—but she denies my dad had anything to do with them. She always has a good story.

“No,” she says, but her voice breaks on the word. “I opened the pantry door too fast and smacked my cheek. That’s all.” She leans toward me and gives me a quick kiss. “I love you, sweetie. Get some rest, and I’ll see you in the morning.” She turns quickly and moves down the hallway toward my parents’ room.

“Mom?” I call out, not knowing what I could possibly say to make her feel better. She pauses just in front of their door, then turns back, a questioning look on her face. Though her eyes are shiny with tears, she is so beautiful. My heart suddenly hurts. “I love my new hair,” I finally say, faltering. “Thank you.”

She holds my gaze a moment and then smiles. “You’re welcome, sweet girl.” And then she is gone.

I keep my hand on the doorknob a moment, wishing I had the courage to run down the stairs and scream at my father. I wish I knew how to stand up to him—I wish I knew the right words to say. But before I can think of any, I remember Dirk, waiting for me on the phone. I rush back inside the closet, making sure I’ve shut my bedroom door behind me. “God, I’m sorry,” I say, breathlessly. “That took longer than I thought.”

“It’s okay,” Dirk says. “I like it when a girl plays hard to get.” Despite the weight I feel in my chest after seeing my mom, I smile. “Everything okay?” he asks.

“My parents had a fight,” I say, before I can stop to wonder if telling him this is a good idea. “My dad’s got a temper.”

“Like how bad a temper?”

I swallow hard, trying to push down the lump in my throat. “Pretty bad,” I whisper. I can’t help it, a tear rolls down my cheek.

“Hey . . . are you okay?” Dirk asks, with real concern in his voice.

I take a deep breath. “I’ll be fine,” I say, hoping that somehow, I can find a way to make those words come true.