Someone Else

by Rebecca Phillips

  Someone Else

  By Rebecca Phillips

  Someone Else

  By Rebecca Phillips

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Rebecca Phillips

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, are coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover Image: Copyright 2012 dolgachov

  Used under license from depositphotos.com

  Cover Design by Jason Phillips

  Chapter 1

  The day before my boyfriend Michael left for his freshman year of university, I decided to dye my hair.

  Now, I wasn’t one for impulsive decisions like this. I wasn’t spontaneous like my friend Robin, who, as it happened, was an accomplice to this spur of the moment hair-dying inspiration. In fact, she picked out the color.

  “Pomegranate,” she said, opening the shiny green box after we had shut ourselves up in the bathroom. “Sounds delish.”

  I was still out of breath from our quick, adrenaline-soaked jaunt to the drug store and back. As I dug through the linen closet for an old towel, I could feel beads of sweat forming on my upper lip and neck. “Are you sure red will work with brown hair?”

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Robin pushed me down into the folding chair she’d dragged in from my bedroom. I sat facing the mirror, a ratty old beach towel wrapped around my shoulders and a panicked look on my face. I couldn’t believe I was trusting my long, chestnut-brown hair—one of my best features, or so I’d been told—to a girl who 1) had no hair-dying experience whatsoever and 2) was unable to do anything without making some kind of a mess, somehow. Robin wasn’t familiar with the concept of careful.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked. My eyes widened as she pulled a pair of plastic gloves out of the box, along with two small tubes, a plastic bottle, and an instruction sheet. It all looked so…chemically permanent. I felt my first wave of doubt but quickly pushed it back.

  “Of course.” She slipped on the gloves and then stood at the counter, mixing and shaking, pausing ever few seconds to check the directions. When she moved around to the back of my chair, plastic squirt bottle in hand, I scrutinized her reflection in the mirror. As usual, she projected an air of coolness and confidence, sprinkled with the occasional glimpse of pure evil. She so enjoyed having me at her mercy. “Ready?” she asked.

  Our eyes met in the mirror as she hovered over me, poised to begin. I closed my eyes in a silent prayer. “Do it.”

  The first squirt of dye was cold, but by the time half my roots were covered, it had started to burn a little. Every so often I cracked opened my eyes to check for falling clumps of hair or rising smoke.

  “Almost done,” she said, massaging my hair up into a slimy clump at the back of my head. We’d bought a no-drip formula, but a spattering of purplish blotches clung to my temples and forehead. Robin used the edge of the towel to wipe my skin. “Now,” she said, standing back. “We have to wait twenty-five minutes and then wash it out.”

  I consulted my watch. It was 3:47 now. My mind scrambled for the exact washing-out time while Robin immediately figured it out. “Four-twelve is the moment of truth.”

  I turned my goopy head this way and that. I wasn’t about to take my eyes off myself. “I hope it doesn’t look like ass.”

  Robin sat on the closed toilet and put her chin in her hands. “We should’ve picked up an extra box for me. I could do with a change.”

  “Another one?” She’d already had plenty of changes over the summer, what with her mother’s hasty marriage to her bald investment banker boyfriend, Alan—a guy she’d dated for a record-breaking six months—and their subsequent move to Alan’s big new house over in Redwood Hills, one of the city’s fanciest neighborhoods. Not to mention starting a brand new school in four days, where she knew virtually no one.

  “Maybe I’ll go all dramatic.” She wrapped a strand of her long, reddish-brown hair around her finger. “Like black.”

  “Don’t you dare. Your hair is perfect the way it is.”

  “So was yours.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “What came over you this afternoon, anyway? You don’t do stuff like this, Taylor. Jesus, you freak out when I suggest you try a new shade of lipstick. You’re so conformist you’re practically a sheep.”

  “Hey.”

  “It’s true.” She smiled to let me know she still loved me despite my flaws. “Ba-aa-aa.”

  “Shut up.”

  She laughed and leaned over to poke at my hair. So far so good. I wasn’t bald or on fire. Yet.

  We had ten minutes to go when a voice on the other side of the door said, “What in the hell is that smell?” A moment later the bathroom door eased open and my stepsister Leanne stuck her head in. “What is going on in here?” she asked, looking alarmed as she took in my hair and the various items splayed out on the counter.

  “Taylor got a wild hair,” Robin said with a cackle.

  Leanne slipped into the bathroom to get a closer look. She picked up the empty box. “Pomegranate? Isn’t that a fruit? What color are pomegranates, exactly?”

  “Auburn, I guess.” I’d never actually seen a pomegranate.

  “You dyed your hair auburn? Why?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Robin said, grabbing my wrist to check my watch. “Eight minutes.”

  Leanne squinted at my hair, her hands on her hips. “Just…because?”

  “Yes.” I sighed. “Just because.”

  They both stared at me with matching dubious expressions, but I ignored them. I didn’t feel like trying to explain why I had suddenly gotten the urge to change my hair color when I’d never even considered dying my hair before. Like Robin, I craved change, even though my life as I knew it was about to get very different very fast, starting tomorrow morning when Michael’s car, with him in it, drove off toward a highway that would take him three hundred miles away and out of my life—at least physically—until Thanksgiving at the earliest, or until he found time to come home to visit.

  But unlike Michael’s leaving, my hair going from brown to red was a change I could easily control with a few dollars, a box full of chemicals, and a friend to help. And as I struggled to deal with my mounting anxieties, I felt like I needed control over something.

  But who would understand that, besides me?

  “Time’s up,” Robin said.

  The three of us pounded down the stairs to the kitchen sink, the best place to rinse my hair without making too much of a mess. Plus it had one of those handy sprinkler attachments. I bent over the sink while Robin doused my head again and again with warm water. Leanne acted as her assistant, letting her know when she missed a spot and keeping the floor free of puddles.

  Once my hair was thoroughly rinsed, Robin squeezed a tube of moisturizing conditioner into it, and then rinsed it again. Finally it was time to wrap my head in a towel, but not before I checked for bald spots and scalp burns. Everything seemed normal and intact.

  “Let’s go see,” Robin said, her pale cheeks flushed with excitement.

  My stepsister was invested in th
e outcome now too. “Once,” she said as we went back upstairs, “I tried to dye my hair red and it came out orange. Like the color of a pumpkin. All my friends called me Pumkinhead or Jack for weeks.”

  I remembered that; it happened shortly after our parents had gotten married, when Leanne was deep into her wild phase. Back then, the orange hair seemed to complement the whole rebel vibe she had going on, but I knew it wouldn’t look quite so fitting on me.

  The three of us stood side-by-side facing the mirror while I cautiously unveiled myself. I cringed as the towel dropped, preparing myself for the worst, but after a moment I relaxed. It wasn’t a dramatic change. My hair was wet and stringy, which made it hard to tell if the dye had worked, but upon close inspection I could detect a new reddish tinge. Red. Not orange.

  “Let’s dry it,” Robin said, rubbing a strand between her fingers. She plunked me down in the chair and started combing through my hair. I shut my eyes again as she trained the hair dryer at my head and worked her magic.

  “Oh my God,” I heard Leanne say when the dryer stopped.

  “What?” I was afraid to open my eyes. I couldn’t tell from her voice whether it was a good Oh my God or a bad one.

  Robin styled my dried hair into place. “Taylor, look.”

  When I opened my eyes, I gasped. I had red hair. Well, not red-red, but a deep, dark, luscious auburn. And with my green eyes, it totally suited me.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “I know, right?” Leanne said, smiling so wide that the stud in her nose almost touched her cheek.

  Robin stood back and nodded, admiring her work. “It’s the new you.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, still staring at my reflection.

  The New Me, I thought. Someone who was strong enough to make it through the year with her boyfriend miles away, no longer within easy reach. Someone who would never be jealous, insecure, or suspicious. Someone who would learn to be satisfied with phone calls, email, and memories until he came back again. Someone who would ignore the brown-haired girl inside who desperately wanted summer to drag on and on, unending, so she wouldn’t have to say good-bye.

  ****

  I’d kept my promise to my mother and got a job as soon as school ended. After all, I had a car to support now. Stella, the Chevy Cavalier that my aunt had handed down to me last December for my sixteenth birthday, still ran as smoothly as the day she’d gotten home from the shop, where she’d been stripped down, tuned up, and given new life. Aunt Gina had named the car Stella when she bought it over a decade ago, and I gladly carried on the tradition. It looked like a Stella.

  Back in July when I started pounding the pavement with my paltry little resume, the only place I could find that was hiring inexperienced, clueless sixteen-year-old girls was this fast food joint in the next town over called Chick N’ Burger. Still, I was elated when I got the job. The work wasn’t exactly stimulating, and I gained five pounds gorging on leftover fries and milkshakes, but it was a job and it paid. My shifts were mostly days, which worked out well because Michael’s job at the golf course was days too. We had almost every evening together, all summer long.

  But now summer was over, making way for my dread to roll in like a thick, blinding fog. I refused to let it catch up with me though, not yet. Not tonight, my last night with Michael for who knew how long. Tonight, I’d assume a new outlook to go with my new hair and get through it unscathed. This was what I kept telling myself, anyway.

  I maintained the false cheerfulness through most of our date. My perma-grin held for the hour or so we spent at his house, and for our trip to get some ice cream, and even for the short drive to the hotel parking lot near the waterfront boardwalk, where we always went to be alone. But once there, as we snuggled up together in the back seat of Michael’s Volkswagen, my facade began to falter. Suddenly, I felt a desperate need to discuss what we’d been dancing around all night. All summer, really.

  “I was reading this magazine at the dentist the other day,” I said as Michael and I sat together in the quiet darkness, my back against his chest while his fingers played with my hair. He loved my new hair color; he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off it. “It had an article about long-distance relationships.”

  “Yeah? What did it say?”

  “Just…a bunch of things.”

  “Like…”

  “Like…things about trust. A couple needs a lot of trust, I guess, to make it work.” I started chewing on my thumbnail, an old nervous habit I had given up months ago, or so I thought.

  Michael was quiet as he thought that over. Trust had been an issue at the beginning of our relationship, but we loved each other. No one had ever come between us and we assumed that was how it would always be. “I trust you,” he said, his arms circling my waist.

  I smiled, feeling the warm, salty breeze on my face as it drifted in through the open window. I loved being here with him. It was our own little haven, a place for escape. My mother had strict rules about supervision, meaning Michael and I weren’t allowed to “park”, or be left alone at all for that matter, but we always managed it somehow. I wasn’t sure if my mother suspected that Michael and I had long ago bypassed the hand-holding and kissing stage, or if she was simply trying to prevent us from ever crossing it. In any case, she had failed.

  “I trust you too,” I told him. It was true. It wasn’t that I was worried about Michael cheating on me, or me on him, while he was away. If he wanted to cheat, he probably would have by now. He’d had plenty of opportunities. Girls liked him, and not just because he was hot. He was also nice and totally unpretentious. I worried a lot about girls. Other girls. College girls. Older, prettier, determined girls who refused to give up until they got what—or who—they wanted. They were bound to want him, and without solid, physical evidence of a girlfriend around, they would no doubt stop at nothing.

  Oh yes, I trusted Michael. It was the girls I didn’t trust.

  “We’d better go,” Michael said now. “I told my mom I’d be back in an hour and I still haven’t finished packing.”

  There were several things I still wanted to say, but I held my tongue as we left our private sanctuary. Maybe over the phone would be a better way to discuss such things, when I wasn’t distracted by his body next to mine. And besides, all I wanted to do at the moment was go home and cry myself to sleep.

  “I guess I’ll call you tomorrow, when I get in,” Michael said once he’d parked the car in my father’s driveway.

  My throat suddenly felt very tight. “Okay.”

  “And I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

  I nodded, trying to smile. I could see how hard this was for Michael too. He wanted to leave home, but he didn’t want to leave me.

  “I wanted to give you something before I left,” he said, reaching across me to the glove compartment. He dug out a small velvet box and handed it to me.

  “A present? My birthday is three months away.”

  “It’s not a birthday present.” He nudged my leg. “Open it.”

  I eased it open. Inside was a ring, a beautiful, white-gold ring made up of two hearts, joined in an infinite loop. I sat there staring at it, too stunned to take it out. After a minute Michael did it for me, slipping it on the ring finger of my right hand. It fit perfectly. I wondered how he knew my size.

  “I asked your father for your ring size,” he said before I could ask. He touched the daughter’s pride ring on my left hand, a gift from my parents two Christmases ago. “I knew he gave you this ring. He couldn’t remember your size, so he said he’d ask your mom and get back to me. But first he made me swear I wasn’t giving you an engagement ring.”

  I laughed so I wouldn’t do what I really felt like doing right then, which was cry. Too late. My eyes started burning anyway. I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t snivel like some pathetic, clingy loser, but there was no stopping once I’d started. As the tears spilled over, Michael put his arms around me.

  “I didn’t get a gift for you,” I
said into his shoulder. I didn’t think what we had done when we first got to our private parking spot counted as a going-away present.

  “Wear the ring until I get back. That can be my gift.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  And that was that. After another extended hug, I climbed out of the car and watched him drive away. When I could no longer see the headlights, I sat on the front porch for a while, on the same bench Michael and I had shared many times before, and thought about him. About us, and what lay ahead. And whether or not we could do this long-distance thing… if I could do it. I honestly didn’t know. It was still so early, he had only just left, and at this point I still had plenty of hope.

  I sat on the bench until my eyes were sufficiently swollen and then trudged inside. My stepmother Lynn emerged from the living room as I passed by on my way upstairs.

  “You okay, honey?” she asked gently.

  I nodded and continued up to my room. I didn’t want sympathy right now. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone. I just wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and hibernate till spring.

  Chapter 2

  Four days later, I started my junior year.

  As I pulled Stella into a narrow space in the jammed school parking lot, I couldn’t help but note the differences between this day and my first day of school last year. Then, Michael and I hadn’t even met yet, and I was dating my childhood friend, Brian, who’d ended up cheating on me with a little blonde named Kara Neilson. Rumor had it, they’d broken up over the summer. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tiny spark of satisfaction when I heard that.

  “Ready?” Ashley said from her spot in the passenger seat.

  I let out a sigh and reached into the back seat for my bag. “As I’ll ever be.”