If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson Read Free Book Online Page A

builds the lines, like distant desert mountains. We take turns with a rolled-up dollar bill. The smell of money, that particular synthetic burn, will years later still elicit a Pavlovian shudder and a cold ache in my jaw.
    We swig back glasses of wine and light cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” I say.
    “I can’t move,” says Jordan. “I mean, I just want to be right here, with you.”
    We sit quietly, smoking, and I feel my thoughts begin to trip over one another, my heart racing. I watch the old flip clock clicking through those arbitrary numbers, and it seemsso loud, that clicking, like Ms. Gregori’s heavy black heels echoing down the hallway. She was our ninth-grade English teacher who smoked incessantly and wore the same clunky black heels every day, even in the heat of late spring.
    “Doesn’t that clock sound like Ms. Gregori stomping down the hallway? Like when it’s empty, you know, when everyone’s in class and you’re going to the bathroom or something? And then she’s just there, all of a sudden. You know how she’s always just there, everywhere , all at once, with that notebook and all that red hair? I think she might be psychic, or like a witch or something. Do you know what I mean?” I ask. “How she’s always there , wherever you are.”
    Jordan reaches over and covers the clock with a blanket. It goes silent, which we soon realize is not the same as stopping time.
    “I love her,” I say.
    “She hates me,” says Jordan. “They all hate me.” He takes another gulp of his wine, and then refills our mugs from the giant bottle of Carlo Rossi, the one with the glass handle that Angel’s mom bought for us earlier that day.
    “Do me a favor,” she had said to Jordan. “Don’t steal Angel’s Ritalin tonight. I can’t afford to keep refilling that girl’s prescription.”
    “Mrs. Farley,” he said from the front seat of her car, “it was an experiment, that one time. I’m sorry it happened,” he said, as if it were something beyond his control.
    I said nothing, the mute accomplice, the silent partner. Nobody expects anything bad from me. My own mother, leastof all. Then Jordan had leaned over and gently kissed Angel’s mom on the cheek, and pulled her pale hair from the rubber band that had held it away from her face.
    “There,” he had said. “You are so beautiful.”
    Around 2:30 AM , we hear footsteps on the kitchen floor above us. We hide our notebooks under the sofa and feign sleep, clumped together on the floor, our feet tangled under a yellow blanket. The heater clicks on and then there is the rush of water pouring through old pipes. I turn off the lamp. I yawn despite the pounding in my chest, despite the water crashing through a terrible quiet and the cold tears on my arm that make me shiver.
    “Why are you crying?” I whisper to Jordan.
    “Shut up,” he says, as Angel storms across the room and tears away our blanket.
    “What the fuck?” she yells. “Are you guys, like, making out?”
    She turns on the lamp. The room spins into focus. Our mugs of wine sit next to us on the floor. She looks like a lion, her skin yellow in the artificial light, all that curly hair sticking straight up in the air. She is wearing a Boyz II Men T-shirt and that stupid purple thong. Jordan starts to laugh. We were not, of course, making out, but instead writing poems in our spiral notebooks—serious poems that we imagine ironic and witty, but are really just sarcastic.
    “Angel!” he says. “Your hair is trying to escape from your head!”
    “Where’s Rick?” she says. “Where’d he go?” She turns around and surveys the room as if he might be hiding in a corner, or crouched behind the giant television set.
    “Lost him again, have you?” says Jordan, but by now she is gone, turning off our light with the main switch by the staircase, all the way over there.
    “All the way over there,” I say.
    “What?”
    “All the way over there. The light. It’s all the way over