For Keeps

by Natasha Friend

  Her yelling makes me jump, but I don’t back down.

  “He thought you were getting an abortion. He moved, thinking you were getting an abortion. . . . And then—what—you just changed your mind? You changed your mind and you didn’t think he deserved to know? That’s why I never heard from him, isn’t it? Because you never told him. You never even told him he had a kid, and he was the one who wanted to keep it. He wanted the baby and you didn’t. He wanted me.”

  The expression on her face is horrifying, but I don’t care.

  “No,” she is saying, shaking her head. “No. . . . Josie, listen to me. You are my life.”

  But I am not listening. I am opening the car door, and I am slamming it in her face. I am sprinting across the parking lot, sprinting as fast as I can because I need to get away from her.

  I need to get to school.

  I need Liv.

  It’s twelve thirty—the middle of fifth period—by the time the PVTA bus drops me off. Now I am standing outside AP English, trying to flag down Liv without Mrs. Montrose noticing.

  Finally I do, and Liv gets a bathroom pass.

  In the hall, I don’t have to say a word. She takes one look at my face and she knows. “Something happened.”

  I nod.

  “Tucci-related?”

  I nod again.

  “Tell me.”

  I can feel my eyes filling with tears and my chin quivering slightly. I know that if I open my mouth I’ll start bawling hysterically in the middle of the junior corridor, which is the last thing I want to do.

  “OK,” Liv says gently, getting it. “OK.” She tells me that the bell is about to ring for lunch. She tells me it’s burgers and tater tots and if we’re first in line, Lynette the lunch lady will give us extra. “Grease,” Liv says, “is good for the soul.”

  I nod, making a little whimpering sound.

  She slings an arm around my shoulders as we walk down the hall. “Whenever you’re ready,” she says, “just tell me who needs a slap upside the head, and I will do the honors.”

  Somehow I make it through the rest of the day. I didn’t think I’d be able to focus on school, but it is actually a good distraction. Equations, not abortions. Mansfield Park, not mothers who wish you were never born. Then, as I am walking to the girls’ locker room to get dressed for practice, I spot Riggs entering the guys’ locker room, and I get mad all over again.

  Liv is at her locker, pulling socks over her shin guards.

  “I’m not going to practice,” I say low, even though it’s so loud in here right now, no one would hear us anyway. Music is blasting and Jamie and Schuyler are showing off the stripper moves they learned at some pole-dancing class at their gym.

  Liv looks at me, eyebrows raised.

  “I just can’t deal right now,” I mumble. “Tell Coach I’m sick or something. I need to get out of here.”

  “So,” she says out of the side of her mouth, “let’s get out of here.”

  “We?”

  “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  “What do you mean you’ll take me—”

  “I had my driver’s test this morning, so . . .”

  “What? You never told me you were—”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, Josie, I did. You’ve just been a lit-tle self-involved lately. But I forgive you . . . because I passed.”

  “You did?”

  Liv crooks her finger for me to come closer, then reaches into her gym bag, pulls out a key ring, and grins. “You’re looking at a licensed driver.”

  “Oh my God, Liv!”

  “I know! I have Dodd’s car!”

  “He gave you the Beamer?”

  “Yeah. Just for the day. . . . Come on.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Josie. We’re going.”

  She yanks my hand and I follow. No one even notices us leave.

  Five minutes later, here we are, gunning it out of the parking lot. If you’re going to blow off soccer practice, it’s a good idea to have Little Miss Honor Society by your side, instead of, say, Chuck Bikofsky, who’s been smoking pot since the third grade.

  I know Coach will be pissed when we don’t show up, but I feel strangely calm about what we’re doing. Liv is a good driver. Confident. . . . Then I remember why we’re leaving—everything Matt said, and Patrick said, and my mother said—and I feel sick. The farther we drive, the deeper the pit in my stomach. I have to do something to get rid of this feeling or I’m going to barf.

  I tell Liv to pull over.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “OK,” she says and steers the car up over a curb, onto a patch of grass next to some woods. She cuts the engine and turns to me and I tell her. When I get to the real punch line of the story—the abortion part—something in her face changes and she looks away.

  “I mean do you see the freaking irony here, Liv? . . . The one person who wanted to keep me doesn’t get to, and the one who gets stuck raising me . . . well, she never wanted me in the first place.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Liv says to the window.

  “You’re a mind reader now?” I say.

  “No. I just know.”

  “How?”

  “When I thought I was pregnant . . . I wasn’t, I know, but if I had been . . . Josie, there’s no question in my mind what I would have done, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell my best friend.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I would have had to make up some story about miscarrying or falling down the stairs or something. I couldn’t have told you the truth.”

  I stare at her. “Of course you could have told me the truth.”

  “No, I couldn’t. Look how you feel about Kate, almost doing the same thing.”

  “What? You think I would have judged you because of my mom? You think I would have tried to talk you out it?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t have!”

  “Josie, what your mom went through . . . the decision she had to make . . . you don’t know—you can’t know unless you’ve been there.”

  “I think I know my own mother.”

  “Listen to me. It’s not like that. And it’s not about her wanting you or not wanting you. There was no you. You were just a clump of cells.”

  Thanks, Liv.

  You would think that this point would be enough, but no; she is just getting warmed up.

  “When you can see your whole life stretched out ahead of you and then one morning you wake up and you think you’re pregnant and you can’t see that life anymore, it’s . . . I can’t explain the feeling. . . . But Kate had to face that, Josie—really face it, not just hypothetically. And she had to face it without a crystal ball telling her what would happen if she made one choice over the other. And maybe the pressure she was getting from Paul didn’t help; maybe it made everything worse.”

  Liv pats my knee. “There,” she says. “I’ve said my piece.”

  “You have to stop watching Dr. Steve,” I tell her.

  “Pops finally got TiVo. I can watch every episode now.”

  “God help us.”

  “We should blow off practice more often. I think we’ve made some real progress here.”

  I snort. Then it hits me. “What do you think Coach is going to do to us?”

  Liv shrugs, turning the key in the ignition. “Just a warning. I mean, it’s not like we do this sort of thing. This was our first offense. . . .” She pulls off the grass and onto the road, formulating her counterargument as she drives—everything she’s planning to tell Coach tomorrow, to justify our actions. This is classic Liv. I don’t mind listening to her; anything is better than rehashing what happened with my mother and Paul and Matt and everything.

  “Great,” I mutter ten minutes later as Liv pulls into my driveway.

  “What?”

  “That,” I say, pointing
to the car that’s parked in my mom’s spot. The rusty beige Subaru with the I BRAKE FOR MOZART bumper sticker.

  “Sweet ride,” Liv says.

  I grunt.

  There’s no mistaking who’s on my front porch right now, sitting on the top step. Sandy hair, suede jacket. Funky green sneakers poking out of khaki legs. The only question is, where’s his little blonde sidekick?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Liv says, whipping out an imaginary microphone. “The man, the myth, the musical legend . . . DJ . . . Jazzy . . . Jonathaaaan!”

  “Hilarious,” I say.

  “Why is he on your porch?”

  I shrug.

  “Where’s Kate?”

  “Gee, I don’t know . . . an abortion clinic? A liars’ convention ?”

  Liv shoots me a look.

  “What?”

  Jonathan must have spotted me because now he’s standing, looking over at the driveway.

  “Well,” Liv says, glancing at her watch, “I’d love to join your little duet, but . . .”

  “Liv. You are not leaving me alone with him.”

  “I have to get the car back. . . .”

  “Liv.”

  “I promised Dodd! It’s my first day out, and if I ever want to drive again I have to—”

  “Fine,” I mutter, reaching for the door handle.

  “Call me later,” Liv says, leaning over to kiss my shoulder. “I want to hear everything.”

  And then she deserts me.

  Crap, I am thinking as I walk across the lawn toward the porch.

  Crappity crap.

  Big, steaming pile of crap on a stick.

  The closer I get to Jonathan, the worse he looks. Slumped shoulders. Bags under the eyes. He’s like a puppy that’s been kicked, and, truth be told, I feel a twinge of sympathy. If I’d been the one to run into the ex of the person I was dating— and that ex’s entire family—I might look the same way. I might go slamming out of houses and peeling out of drive-ways in the middle of the night too.

  “Hey,” I say, as nicely as I can.

  “Hey,” he says. Then, “I’m looking for your mom.”

  “She works on Mondays.”

  He shakes his head. “That’s the first place I checked. She called in sick, they said. Early this morning.”

  “Yeah . . . she’s not sick. She . . . we . . . went back to the hospital. You know, to check on Mr. Tucci.”

  “Oh,” Jonathan says. “Uh-huh.”

  The expression on his face is so miserable I have to ask, “Are you OK?”

  “I just . . . need to talk to her.”

  “Did you try her cell?”

  “About a hundred times. She isn’t picking up. Do you know where else she could be?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  Well, this isn’t exactly true. I might know where she is, if I bothered to check my voice mail. Ever since I booked it out of the parking lot this morning she’s been calling and leaving messages. I’ve just chosen to ignore them.

  Jonathan looks at his watch. “I’ve been waiting here for two hours. . . . I canceled my afternoon lessons. . . . I don’t know why. Well, I do know why. I . . . I’m crazy about your mom, Josie, and . . . I don’t want to lose her.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Uh-huh.”

  I am cringing so hard right now.

  “This happened to me once already, in college. . . .” Jonathan shifts his eyes to the yard, staring out at nothing. “Amy Hahn. We went out for two years and then, out of nowhere, her ex-boyfriend shows up for homecoming and . . . never mind.” He laughs, a short bark. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. . . .”

  I can’t believe it either. I would like nothing more than to jackhammer a hole in the porch and dive through it.

  I have no idea where my mother is right now, but I’ll tell you one thing: I cannot stay here, having this torturous conversation—

  “Will you come with me? To look for her?”

  “No,” I say. The last person I want to see right now is my mother.

  Jonathan looks like I just punched him in the stomach.

  “But I will take you to do something else. . . . If you let me drive.”

  “What?”

  I shrug. “It’s a fair trade. You give me your car keys. I take you somewhere fun, to get your mind off my mom.”

  I can’t believe I’m suggesting this. I must be completely mental. But . . . I feel for the guy. And also, there’s no way I’m staying on this porch.

  “OK,” Jonathan says. Incredibly. He reaches into the pocket of his suede jacket, pulls out his keys, and hands them to me.

  Twenty minutes later, we are in the back room of the Pizza Palace, playing video games. In middle school, Liv and I used to come here all the time. Whenever one of us had a crappy day, the other one would say, You need the Palace. I reached Level 5 on Super Mario Bros. the day I farted doing a hand-stand in gym. Liv can attest to this; she still has the chart she made of all our humiliating moments in seventh and eighth grade and which video games we played to make ourselves feel better.

  Jonathan is great at video games, as most guys are. He throttles me at Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. So I move us on to Virtual Boogie, because—despite my questionable talent on an actual dance floor—I am a virtual boogie machine.

  I have already racked up 200,000 boogie points when Jonathan takes over the mat. And he is hilarious. If I were in seventh grade and I were watching him across the arcade, I would think, What a dork. In fact, a cluster of girls over by Skee Ball is watching; they’re wearing their super-low jeans and drinking their supersized sodas and laughing hysterically. Because Jonathan is dorking out, big-time. His feet are moving at warp speed, his arms are flying every which way, and his mouth is forming this crazy “O” shape the whole time.

  I don’t know why this makes me like him more, but it does. I am thinking, How many grown men would do this, voluntarily, without alcohol?

  Now Jonathan has hopped off the mat and is shaking his head around like a big, wet dog, sending sweat beads flying everywhere. It’s completely disgusting.

  “You,” I say, “need to hydrate.”

  After a visit to 7-Eleven, we are back in the car. I let Jonathan drive, so I can focus on the task at hand. “I can’t believe you’ve never had a Slurpee before,” I say, sucking hard on my straw so that red slush shoots up into my mouth, exploding against the back of my throat, coating it in ice. Ahhh.

  “Deprived child,” Jonathan says. “My parents were health nuts. No sugar. . . . No artificial colors. . . .”

  “You think Blue Woo-Hoo! Vanilla isn’t found in nature?” I ask. “Come on. . . .”

  He turns to me, smiling a little. His lips are turquoise. “See?” I say. “Slurpees are good for what ails you.”

  “Well ... .”

  “You’re loving it. Admit it.”

  “OK,” he says, sticking the straw back in his mouth. “I admit it. . . . Now I want to introduce you to something. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Not what. Who.” Jonathan reaches out, presses a bunch of buttons on the stereo. Then he pauses, one finger hovering in the air. “Josie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Prepare to have your mind blown.”

  “Oh, God,” I say.

  “Better than God,” he says. “Better than Slurpees.” He presses Play. “John Coltrane.”

  When we get back to the house, my mother is still not there. Before Jonathan can lose his John Coltrane high, I reassure him.

  “Listen,” I say, as we’re walking across the lawn toward the porch. “About my mom . . . I don’t think you have to worry.”

  Of course, these words are based on nothing. Because what do I know? I know squat. I am only saying what I would want to hear right now, if I were him.

  “Really?” he says. I can see the mixture of hope and doubt in the crinkles of his forehead.

  “Really,” I say.

  Because clearly I don’t have ey
es in the back of my head. Clearly I can’t see my mom’s car pulling into the driveway behind Jonathan’s Subaru, or the red SUV pulling in behind her. I can’t see who’s getting out. I can’t see the two of them opening their separate doors and closing them. I can’t see this: My mother and Paul Tucci, strolling across the lawn toward us. Side by side.

  I only turn around when I see the look on Jonathan’s face. Like a kid who’s just dropped his ice-cream cone.

  “Josie,” my mom says. Her arms are outstretched. When she gets to the top step she hugs me: a long-lost-daughter hug.

  “What’s up?” I am trying to sound cool while the voice inside my head is screaming, WHAT THE %&*#?!

  Paul Tucci is on our porch.

  Paul Tucci is wearing jeans with a rip in the knee, and hiking boots, and he is on our porch.

  Maybe this isn’t really happening. Maybe it’s a dream—a hallucination brought on by the physical trauma of one hundred squat thrusts. Maybe if I close my eyes and open them, he will disappear. . . .

  Close. . . . Open. . . .

  Nope.

  “Josie,” my mother says again. She’s stopped hugging me and has pulled away just enough to stare into my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  She’s sorry.

  “For what?” I mumble.

  The sky is getting dark, but the porch lights have kicked on, so everyone is illuminated. Paul Tucci has great skin—olive-toned, the kind that tans perfectly in summer. My mom is pale and burns. I am somewhere in the middle.

  In my peripheral vision I can see Paul and Jonathan size each other up. This is what guys do. I remember seeing it on the playground in fourth grade. A new kid, Ryan Lounsberry, had come into our class and during recess all the dodgeball boys lined up along the bushes, checking him out. Ryan was short, unlike the coolest boy in our class, Willy Meyer, but there was a beefy cockiness about Ryan, and it took all of five minutes before the two of them were rolling around in the dirt, pummeling the crap out of each other.

  Not that this would happen here. Jonathan isn’t exactly the boxing type. He’s skinny, for one thing. And anyway, all you have to do is look at his car. In addition to braking for Mozart, his message to the world is, NO NUKES! NO WARS!