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How to Love

Page 17

by Katie Cotugno

“Because of the music thing?”

  “Uh-huh. When are you going to let me read your essay?”

  I grinned; it was a joke between us now, Sawyer saying he wanted to read the words I’d sent off to Northwestern and me feeling too shy to let him. “Someday,” I promised. “We’ll see.”

  We made out for a little while longer, ten hidden minutes with my jeans and my sneakers, the Northwestern T-shirt my father had ordered off the internet despite my protests that I wasn’t even in yet. Sawyer ran his fingers through my hair. His free hand drifted down and I tensed for just one second, but in the end he just squeezed my knee, glanced up at the contents of my closet, and nodded. “You’ve got a lot of space in here,” he said, barest hint of a grin. “I wish my closet was this big.”

  “To accommodate all your ironic concert T-shirts?”

  “Think you’re smart, huh?” he asked, fingertips seeking my sides. I scrambled up before he could tickle me, grabbed his arm to pull him out of the closet. “Come on, Slick,” I said, smiling. “I need to go back downstairs.”

  “Mmm,” he said, not moving. “No, you don’t.”

  “I really do. My father is going to come looking for me.” I grinned. “With his shotgun.”

  “Your father doesn’t own a shotgun.”

  “Sure he does. He uses it on guys who try to make out with me in closets.”

  “Duly noted.” Sawyer grinned back, and moved on. “Biggest pet peeve?”

  I sighed, crouched down again so we were at eye level. “People who mispronounce the word nuclear.”

  He laughed. “English nerd.”

  “Favorite book?”

  “The Sound and the Fury.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not completely illiterate, you know.”

  “No, of course not.” I blushed. “I just thought you were going to say, like—”

  “Catcher in the Rye?”

  “Well,” I said, embarrassed. “Yes, actually.”

  Sawyer leaned toward me. “I’m not that predictable. First kiss?”

  “Elliot Baxter, at the eighth-grade dance. What did you really pick up from your drummer that day?”

  Sawyer frowned. “Okay,” he said suddenly, up off the carpet, attempting to climb over me and out the closet door. “You’re right. Time to go back downstairs.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I dropped Allie’s sweatshirt and let him pull me out with him, slightly dizzy. We stood up in the light of my bedroom, sudden and bright. “Painkillers, right?”

  “I—” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, surprised, and I knew I wasn’t wrong. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I have eyeballs,” I told him. Also, I had Google. “I’m not dumb.”

  “I never thought you were.” He didn’t apologize, or try to deny it. Instead he wrapped both arms around my shoulders and squeezed, friendly and familiar. “I don’t do it a lot,” he promised. “Every once in a while.”

  How often is that? I wanted to ask him. I thought of Lauren Werner and long nights at the Prime Meridian, of the intervention shows Shelby liked to watch. From what I’d seen in movies and on TV, Sawyer didn’t seem like an addict—someone who sweated all the time and stole his parents’ DVD player. Still, here were such huge swaths of his life I didn’t know anything about—whole paragraphs blacked out of wartime letters, movies modified to fit this screen. Who are you? I wanted to demand, but instead I only nodded, tucking this piece of information, and everything it might mean, into the back of my head for further consideration and trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach. I needed him not to be too good to be true.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said then, catching a glimpse of my hair in the mirror above the dresser, photos and jewelry box and deodorant scattered across the surface. Forty-five minutes’ worth of Soledad’s careful handiwork was completely and totally undone. “See what you did?”

  He watched as I repaired the worst of the damage, kissed me on the forehead, and smiled. “You’re pretty cute.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him. “All right, you drug-addled hair-wrecker. Let’s go.”

  “Right behind you, you language-obsessed intellectual elitist.”

  I waited five more minutes after Sawyer went downstairs, snuck down as unobtrusively as I could manage. He wasn’t a secret, I told myself, dirty or otherwise, but this was Cade’s day, and I was happy. The last thing I needed was another grave, disappointed look from my father, the nagging feeling of something not right behind my ribs.

  I grabbed a slice of wedding cake, made my way through the yard. Carin grabbed my arm as I passed by. “Reena,” she said curiously, an expression on her face like I’d changed inexplicably in the thirty minutes since she’d last seen my face. “What happened to the photos?”

  33

  After

  Fighting with Shelby makes me totally miserable. I keep going to text her—for all kinds of different reasons, stupid regular stuff, to let her know that Center Stage is on cable or to complain about the new Taylor Swift song lodging itself deep inside my brain—before realizing we aren’t speaking and flinging my phone back onto the couch. I sulk. I remember this feeling from the year before Allie died, the weird emptiness of not having a best friend to tell things to. How it’s lonelier than any breakup could ever be.

  We work the same busy dinner shift at Antonia’s one night, two big eight-tops and a party back in the banquet room. I catch her by the wrist by the bar during what’s as close to a lull as we’re going to get, my fingers curling around the half dozen bracelets she’s wearing. “Shelby,” I start, then completely fail to follow it up in any kind of meaningful way.

  Shelby raises her eyebrows, an armful of napkins and a look on her face like whatever I have to say, it better be good. “What?” she asks shortly.

  I hesitate. I want to ask her how her week’s going; I want to get the latest Hipster Cara updates. I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I feel like one of those horrible girls who can’t make friendships work with other girls, that I miss her a crap ton and I didn’t mean to screw with her brother and I’ll do anything she wants to make it up to her. I want to fix this in the worst, stupidest way, but I don’t know how to do it, and in the end I just shake my head. “Forget it,” I say, chickening out at the last possible second. “Never mind.”

  “Okay.” Shelby rolls her eyes at me like she both expected this and finds it colossally lame. “Have it your way, Reena,” she says finally, and after a second I let go of her arm.

  *

  The week creeps along. I’m restless and edgy; Hannah and I cruise the highway for hours every night. “You’re wasting gas,” Cade points out, but I just shrug, handing my credit card over to the pale, skinny attendant like a crack addict looking for a fix. The road rumbles under my feet: keep going, keep going, keep going.

  I drive.

  Five o’clock on Sunday and Soledad is cooking; the kitchen smells delicious, a big pot of yellow rice simmering on the stove and the counter strewn with ingredients I know she pulled from memory. Soledad never makes anything from a book. “Are you going to be around for dinner?” she asks as I pull a bottle of water from the fridge. “The LeGrandes are coming over.”

  I tense. “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?” she asks, looking at me oddly. “To eat.”

  “No, I know.” It was an idiotic question. Roger and Lydia still come to dinner from time to time, though usually Hannah and I do our best to scoot out the back door before they get here—it’s always seemed cleaner to do it that way, and it’s not as if anyone’s ever encouraged us to stay. I have no earthly clue what they talk about.

  “Are you not seeing Aaron this weekend?” Soledad asks me now, her expression all practiced-casual as she pulls a covered dish out of the oven, and I do my best to match it in return. He’s left a couple of messages on my cell phone since I broke up with him. So far, I haven’t called him back.

  “Um, nope,” I say,
fussing a little with the magnetic letters on the fridge. REENA, I spell, red and green and yellow. HOME. “We’re taking kind of a breather. Can I help?”

  “Here, keep stirring this. It’s sticking.” She moves so I can have the stove to myself, a whiff of lilacs and vanilla as she passes by. “What do you mean, ‘a breather’?”

  “Hmm?” I ask, stalling, banging the wooden spoon around in the pot with more force than is strictly called for. “I don’t know. Just, like, some time apart.”

  “Really? That’s too bad.” Soledad throws some cherry tomatoes into her wooden salad bowl, then sticks one in her mouth and one into mine for good measure. “I like Aaron,” she says, swallowing. “I think he’s good for you.”

  “No shit,” I say, then, “Shit. Sorry. Just, you know, you and everybody else.”

  “Ah.” She doesn’t say anything after that. The silence hangs suspended, a drop of blood in a bowl of milk. I wait, though, patient, and finally Soledad sighs. “Reena, about Sawyer.”

  Right away I don’t like where we’re heading. “Sol, please, I don’t want to—”

  “I know there is a certain kind of … romance in him being here. Like a movie. But I just need you to remember what the last few years have been like, all right?” Soledad has moved on to onions now. Her thin, graceful hands chop and dice. “For everyone. For your father.”

  “For my father?” I blink at her.

  Soledad works steadily, the efficient sound of steel on wood. “It’s been hard on everyone, is what I’m saying. And we all might have done things differently, and—” Her face softens and she is looking at me with compassion, which is why I am so surprised when she says, “Please just think this time, sweetheart.”

  I just stand there for a moment, dumb like an ox. Then my eyes widen. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask quietly, and I am sure she’s going to scold me for my dirty mouth, but instead she just puts the knife down on the counter and shakes her dark, beautiful head.

  “No, Serena,” she answers calmly. “I’m fucking not.”

  *

  I’ve gotta go.

  I don’t know where—Shelby’s, maybe, if she’ll even talk to me, or the highway, or in my car right off a cliff—but out of this house is the first step. I pluck Hannah from her playpen and am rooting around in the couch cushions for my keys when the doorbell rings, and when Roger and Lydia come inside, Sawyer is right behind them.

  Wearing a tie.

  I stare for a minute, like the baby does when she’s trying to make sense of something she’s never seen before. I laugh one short, hysterical laugh.

  “What happened?” he asks, before hello.

  “Nothing.” I lie as a reflex. “Hi.”

  Sawyer isn’t satisfied. He nods at the keys in my hand. “Where are you going?”

  Roger and Lydia are looking at me expectantly; Soledad is coming through the kitchen door. “Nowhere,” I say, and it’s final, like the sound of something slamming. I put the keys back down and follow them inside.

  34

  Before

  I was walking to school one sunny April morning, totally lost in my own brain, trying to untangle a particularly stubborn knot in my headphones and planning the article I was going to pitch Noelle that afternoon, about teen travel tours for summer. When a horn honked behind me, I jumped like crazy, iPod skittering to the sidewalk. I whirled around, spooked, and there was Sawyer’s Jeep parked at the curb.

  “Did it break?” he called from the driver’s seat. He’d pulled over a half block from my house, right along my usual route. He was wearing sunglasses, but even from over here I could see that he was laughing. Sawyer had a really excellent laugh.

  I scooped the iPod up off the ground and examined it for permanent damage, but other than a couple of scratches it seemed okay. “No harm done,” I called back, shaking my head as I made my way over to the driver’s side door. “Did I just walk right past you?” I asked, embarrassed.

  “Uh-huh.” Sawyer reached a hand out and kissed me through the open window, warm morning sun gleaming off the chrome on the Jeep. He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that looked like it had been washed a million times, as if it might pull apart like cotton candy if you tugged on it even a little. “You,” he pronounced, fingers laced through mine and squeezing, “are tightly wound.”

  “I am not!” I protested, holding up the headphones and shifting my weight a bit to accommodate my backpack. I had to bend at a weird angle to lean inside the Jeep. “I was concentrating.”

  “Clearly.” Sawyer laughed again, his face tipped close enough to mine that our noses brushed together when he moved. I could feel sweat starting to prickle pleasantly on the back of my neck. “So here’s the thing,” he said, this quiet confidential voice like he was going to tell me something really exciting but I had to promise to keep it just between the two of us. “I woke up thinking about waffles.”

  I snorted. “Is that a code word?” I asked, teasing.

  Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Do you want it to be?”

  I shrugged and got a little closer, nudging the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose with one finger. Inside the car it smelled like him. “Maybe,” I admitted.

  “Maybe.” Sawyer tilted his chin in my direction, brushing a row of kisses along my bottom lip. He smiled and I could feel it in my teeth. “Get in and find out.”

  God, I wanted to. My stomach swooped sideways with the force of how much, but: “I can’t,” I told him, shaking my head. I exhaled a little, like breaking a spell. “I have homeroom in, like, fifteen minutes.”

  “So?” Sawyer asked. His mouth followed mine as I pulled away, still grinning. “Skip it.”

  I laughed, straightening up all the way and wiping my suddenly clammy hands on the back of my jeans. I was still holding my iPod. “I can’t just skip it,” I said—lamely, sure, but I really couldn’t. I had a quiz on the first half of Anna Karenina and an appointment with Ms. Bowen to talk about internships for the summer, plus the newspaper meeting and a lab report to turn in. I needed to get to school—and soon, actually, if I didn’t want to be totally late. “I can’t.”

  Sawyer, apparently, was in no hurry at all. “Sure you can,” he promised easily. “Here, I’ll show you. Just get in the car, and then I’ll hit the gas, and then boom: waffles.”

  I wrinkled my nose, bright sun and the headphones tangled up in my fingers, worse than they had been to start with. “Just like that, huh?” I asked.

  “Just like that,” he agreed.

  I didn’t doubt that for him it was exactly that simple: When Sawyer wanted to do something, he did it. End of story. He didn’t stop to think about everything that could possibly go wrong. I wondered what it was like to be that kind of person—the kind that wasn’t always worried about what might happen, about what people might think or every disaster that could potentially befall him a dozen steps down the road. He just … acted.

  I thought again of my internship meeting and the newspaper article I’d been so psyched to pitch barely five minutes ago, but I could feel my resolve weakening the longer I stood there and looked at Sawyer’s face. Even after dating a full month, it was thrilling to have him show up like this, knowing that he’d been thinking about me enough to come and seek me out. That he thought I could be the kind of person who just acted, too.

  “You’re a bad influence,” I said finally, feeling a guilty, delighted smile spread across my face as the idea of spending a full, secret day off with Sawyer started to firm up in my mind. I glanced over my shoulder, then down at my feet, so he wouldn’t see how excited I was. “I mean it.”

  Sawyer nodded ruefully. “I know,” he said. For a minute it looked like maybe he felt legitimately bad about that, like he thought he was dragging me down in some way. Then he grinned like the Fourth of freaking July. “Get in.”

  *

  It turned out waffles did actually mean waffles. We went to a trashy Denny’s on Federal Highway and ordered big plates of them covered i
n whipped cream and blueberries, a giant side of bacon between us. Sawyer’s warm knee pressed into mine under the table. We sat there half the morning surrounded by a bunch of senior citizens, a couple of moms with noisy kids in a sticky-looking booth by the window. Cheesy Michael Bolton music piped in through the speakers. Being here at such a weird time felt like vacation, like we were a lot further from home than just fifteen minutes: It was as if this was some great trick we were pulling off together, him and me against the world. I knew that was stupid—it was cutting school, not bank robbery or international intelligence gathering—but still, it wasn’t exactly an unattractive fantasy.

  “So, how many people in here do you think are spies?” Sawyer asked, taking a long gulp of orange juice and grinning like he’d read my mind. “It’s the perfect cover, right?” He dragged a piece of bacon through a puddle of syrup. “Nobody would ever suspect.”

  “Except you,” I pointed out, laughing. I was hugely full but I wanted to keep eating anyway, to hang out in this crappy diner for the foreseeable future. To drink so much coffee I began to vibrate.

  “Well, and you, now.” He nodded at an old lady at a table not far from ours, flowered housedress and bright orange Crocs. “Take her, for instance. You think she’s just sitting there minding her own business eating her Grand Slam, but the whole time she’s a special operative for the CIA.” Sawyer raised his eyebrows ominously. “I’m just saying, she could be into some real crazy James Bond shit.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I leaned in close across the table. “What’s her alias?”

  “Moons Over My Hammy,” Sawyer replied without missing a beat. He nudged my leg with his under the table, hooking one ankle around mine. “Duh.”

  Once Sawyer paid the bill we headed back to his place without really talking about it, like we both sort of knew that’s where we’d end up. Purple-green weeds sprang up from between the cracks in the walk. Inside it was quiet and empty-seeming, all his various roommates out or asleep, that vaguely abandoned feeling houses get in the middle of a weekday. The air smelled a little close. There was a half-finished bag of Doritos on the grimy-looking futon and beer bottles scattered on the coffee table, plus one that had toppled over without anybody bothering to wipe its contents up off the floor. Sawyer grinned guiltily. “I, uh. Didn’t clean this time,” he admitted.

 

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