“Sure. So, uh, what’s he like?”
“He’s . . . interesting.”
I snort, and Hope laughs.
“No, I don’t mean it like that. It’s just. Her other boyfriends were a lot like Dean, and this one was more of a—” She blushes. “Well, he’s different.”
I guess I’m not surprised to hear Janie’s boyfriends were like Dean. The Deans of the world get the girls. It’s like a law of nature.
“I guess I’m realizing that maybe my sister didn’t have everything all figured out. Maybe she was still figuring things out, too.” Hope shivers and rubs her arms. “Anyway, thanks for listening to all of that. I could never talk about this kind of stuff around Mikey. That’s kind of why I broke up with him.”
“Oh, yeah?” I try not to sit up straighter or anything, but she almost never talks about them breaking up. “What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know. Honest stuff? Maybe that’s not right. I’m not pretending when I’m happy. But sometimes I’m not happy. I felt like I could never be serious around Mikey—but at least I could be angry? And I can’t be sad or angry around most people.”
Is it wrong that it feels so good to hear her say that about Mikey? Oh, she’s looking at me expectantly. This is the part where I’m supposed to say something. “That has to be really hard.”
She shrugs. “It’s okay. I think as long as you’ve got at least one person you can tell all your stuff to, that can be enough.”
She holds my hand and rests her head against my shoulder. But it’s okay, because friends can do that, right? And our fingers are cupped and not interlocked, so it barely counts.
“Thanks for being my friend. Again. I’m glad you didn’t give up,” she says.
She’s talking really close to my face, but it’s okay. I think friends probably do that, too.
Then she leans in like she’s going to kiss me. Okay, if the past has taught me anything, it’s that friends definitely do not kiss each other. Like, ever. Like, it causes a friendship apocalypse, in fact. So, even though our mouths are so close together, and her eyelids are halfway shut, and I can feel her breath against my cheeks and see the rain dripping from the ends of her hair—
She kisses me.
Lightly on the lips and just for a second. Atomic bombs go off in little thought bubbles over our heads. And then we’re staring at each other, watching the fallout on each other’s faces. Her eyes are saying everything I’m thinking: This can’t be a one-time thing. It has to happen again.
Now. It has to happen now.
I lean forward again, and her lips are parted this time, and I can see the smallest crescent of tongue inside her mouth, and I want so many things.
But before we can kiss again, she says, “I can’t.”
My mouth opens and closes. Did I misread everything? Again? I don’t understand. She kissed me first.
“No, it’s not that.” She squeezes my shoulder like that’s supposed to tell me something.
It doesn’t work. There are hummingbirds where my lungs should be. “I’m sorry. I thought—”
“It’s okay.”
I cup my hand over my mouth. “Oh, gosh. I’m so sorry.”
“I wanted to.” She takes a deep breath. “I want to. I—well, there’s something I need to do first.”
I’m so scared this is all going to disappear. “But after?”
“After.”
It feels like a promise.
Hope helps me up my back porch, and I watch her walk into her house, waiting until that last flash of white hair disappears with the close of a door. Then I tear (read: hop clumsily on one foot) upstairs to my bedroom. Rip open my blinds. Hope’s window is right across from mine, and if I see her it means, well, I don’t know, SOMETHING. I need to know, is she dancing around her room? Is she brushing her teeth repeatedly?
There she is! She’s walking to the other side of the room! She’s—oh, holy crap, she’s looking out her window, too, and she just saw me. I flip to the side, my back against the wall. I’m huffing and panting. I can’t believe she saw me. It’s so embarrassing. Hey, wait. She was looking, too. SHE WAS LOOKING, TOO. I peek back, and she’s still there. She gives me a wave before she pulls the blinds shut.
I clutch my heart. That smile. That wave. I float over to my bed and fall spread-eagle onto my back.
A recap:
- Hope and I have kissed.
- Neither of us has a boyfriend/girlfriend.
- I have no idea what to do next.
Naturally, my next move is to involve Paul. I follow him downstairs to his basement to play foosball, which I’m pretty sure is a homeopathic therapy for relationship problems. I move slowly, gingerly, careful about how I apply weight to my ankle (which is, thankfully, not broken or even sprained, just like, badly bruised or something).
“I don’t see why you’re freaking out,” he says. “Based on everything you just told me about what happened in the tree house—”
“Tree stand.”
“Whatever. You should be totally fine.”
“Ah, but then there’s two hours ago.”
He swivels his little wooden man back and forth, trying to get the ball out of a corner. “What happened two hours ago?”
“I saw her when I was leaving the house, and I was like ‘Hey, Hope.’ But she seemed really flustered, and she was all, ‘Hey, sorry, I can’t talk right now. I have to meet my dad so we can pick up some stuff for the trip, and I’m already late.’ And I was all—”
Paul jerks one of his handles and the ball shoots across the table and hits the back of my goal with a thwack. “Terminator!”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Sorry. What?”
I roll my eyes, but I’m laughing. “She was leaving, and I was all, ‘Oh, okay, well what about . . .?’ And then she smiled and squeezed my shoulder and said, ‘Later. I gotta go.’”
“Huh. ‘I gotta go.’”
“But it wasn’t necessarily a bad ‘I gotta go.’”
Paul is more skeptical. “Is there any such thing as a good ‘I gotta go’?”
“I don’t know.” He scores. Again. “You’re not helping!”
“Helping beat your ass at foosball.”
“Ha.”
I could ask Dean—he has tons of experience with girls. My desperate brain tries to forget for a second that Hope is included in that “tons of experience.” I shudder.
Paul is pretty unhelpful, despite his recent influx of experience in the girl department, but getting creamed three times in a row at foosball has a surprisingly positive effect on my mood. I’m definitely not freaking out anymore (well, not more than a little bit) on the drive home.
I keep coming back to Dean. What if I don’t tell him it’s Hope? If I just say “a girl.” I’d still feel pretty gross, though. Maybe I should just ask Hope herself. Yeah, or at least say hi. Make sure she’s okay.
I get out of the truck and stand on my front porch, keys in hand, debating.
Then I see Hope leave her house. She’s walking this way! This is even better! But before she can get to the stepping-stone path that leads to the porch, she veers off like she’s going to the side of the house. I run to the edge of the porch. No, she IS going to the side of the house. She kneels in front of Dean’s window. Wedges her hands in the space where he keeps the window permanently cracked.
This isn’t happening.
She didn’t just open his window and slip into his room. And I am not hopping the porch railing and trailing after her like some kind of pathetic stray dog. I hear the creak of her landing on his bed. He hears it, too, because he turns from where he’s digging through his closet, and his face lights up. I freeze because I don’t want him to see me. I freeze because the girl I love, the girl I thought might finally feel something back, is on my brother’s bed, and it turns me to stone.
They don’t seem angry at each other. She’s saying something, but I can’t hear what. And then he says something back, and her
arms wrap around his neck, and he pulls her against him by the waist like they’ve done this a hundred times. Because of course they have.
I can’t watch anymore.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I go to my room and lie on my bed with the knowledge that Hope is still in my house right this second doing who knows what with my brother. I don’t understand how she could kiss me one minute and want him the next. I keep turning over all the information in my head, trying to organize our feelings and classify what we are to each other, but there is no solution. I can’t make any sense of it. Unless. I don’t even want to admit it to myself. Unless the kiss in the tree was an anomaly. Because Dean always gets the girl. That’s the pattern, right? Of course, Hope would pick him over me. Again. Anyone would. Everyone does. These are things I already know, but they hurt more this time than they ever have before.
“Spence?” She’s in my doorway.
Hope is in my doorway, and she’s smiling so big (of course she is), and then she’s sitting beside me on my bed. I’m reminded of that time in my attic. I know how this plays out. Except I don’t think I can handle another dose of her pity/happiness cocktail.
“Hi,” she says. Again with the smiling. She’s practically bouncing.
“Hi.” My arms are crossed over my chest, but it’s like she can’t even detect my sourness.
“Sorry I had to run off before.” She grins again. Her face is going to hurt tomorrow if she doesn’t cut it out. “But I’m here now.”
Now. As opposed to where she was five minutes ago.
The smile train finally stops. “You seem really bummed out. Are you okay?”
She tries to arrange her face into an expression that is appropriately sympathetic. It bugs me how much she fails.
“No. You know what? I’m not okay. I’m sick of you stringing me along for the past five years. And I’m really sick of seeing you screwing around with Dean.”
“What are you talking about? I—”
There is searing rage tunneling through the space where my heart used to be. I’m not about to listen to her excuses.
“Just stop. I am done with you and your bullshit. Congrats on being one of Dean’s girls.”
Hope is curling up and dying on the inside, I can see it on her face. Which is good. Because now maybe we’re even.
She stands there and stares at me for a good five seconds.
“I can’t believe you,” she finally says. Her voice cracks, and she’s gone.
I think all our chances are gone, too.
There are a lot of good reasons not to go hunting with Dad and Dean today:
1) Sleep. I like it. Getting up at the ass-crack of dawn on a non-school day is not my idea of a good time.
2) A certain incident involving a certain Bubba Blade and an uncertain amount of vomit.
3) I don’t want to accidentally punch my brother in the face.
4) It’s not like they’ll notice whether I’m there or not.
It’s always been like this. Even when we go camping. You’d think us being crammed into a tent, the only three people for miles and miles and miles, would bring us together. Fresh mountain air and manly bonding and all that shit. But they’re always off hunting. Or strategizing about hunting. Or sharing war stories about The Hunt. And I’m hunkered over my magnifying glass trying to check off more bugs in my beat-up copy of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders.
But none of these are the most important reason I’m not hunting today. No, no, no. That would be:
5) Today is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which means Dad’s intensity will be dialed up to an eleven, and if he doesn’t shoot a wild turkey, he’ll come home from today’s hunting trip with a store-bought turkey and a magnum of shame.
When I wake up Thanksgiving morning, there’s a burlap sack with a freshly shot turkey sitting on the kitchen island, and all is right with the world. The conquering heroes emerged victorious from yesterday’s hunt, and now’s when I feel like I can really contribute. I have a particular set of skills, and while those skills do not include hunting, they definitely include eating. And Thanksgiving is the one day during all of wrestling season for which I make an exception.
I spent most of yesterday helping Pam make pies—blackberry-apple, chocolate-pecan, pumpkin and cherry and coconut cream. This morning she started on the vegetables, and I worked on this sweet-potato thing topped with a crunchy brown sugar–pecan mixture. Mimi is making Brunswick stew, which isn’t really a Thanksgiving thing, but nobody cares because Mimi makes a mean venison Brunswick stew. And if you want to go all traditional, you’re technically supposed to make it with squirrel, but really, who wants to eat a squirrel? I think she’s mostly making it so she could use some of the deer Dean shot yesterday, and even though I hate going hunting with Dad and Dean, I still think it’s pretty cool how they never hunt more than we can eat.
“Spencer! Where have you been, my love chicken?” Mimi squeezes me into a hug that smells like her sugar-lemon hand lotion. And safety. If safety had a smell, it would definitely be sugar lemon. “Do you mind taking out the trash again?” she asks. “We seem to create extra on Thanksgiving.”
“Wait, let me get these in first.” Pam moves to dump some pie crust trimmings, but Mimi stops her.
“Oh, no, dear. Save those for the possum plate.”
Some people compost. Mimi has a possum plate. Only Mimi has a heart big enough for the possums (or raccoons or flesh-eating Morlocks or whatever it is that comes to eat our food scraps in the middle of the night). It’s really pretty impressive. Have you ever seen a possum? They make rats look positively cuddly.
Pam’s face pinches. She clearly does not share Mimi’s affinity for butter-faced marsupials. “Here.” She deposits the floury scraps in Mimi’s hands. “I’ll let you take care of that.”
Pam and Mimi are incapable of preparing a meal without sniping at each other (too many Mama Bears in the kitchen), and I’m not expecting a Thanksgiving miracle today, so I grab the trash bag and haul ass, but not before I hear Pam mutter something about vermin.
I’m just shutting the lid on the trash can when I hear: “Hey, Spencer.”
My dad emerges from behind the woodpile, cigar smoke clinging to his clothes. I hope he knows he’s not fooling anyone.
“Yes, sir?”
He brushes at the front of his jacket. “Listen, I’ve got a big sale going on for Black Friday, and I think we’re gonna be short-staffed.”
“Do you want me to help?” I try not to sound like it matters too much.
“The store’ll be pretty packed . . .”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been watching you work. It seems like you’re a lot more comfortable with talking to people. Do you think you can handle it?”
He noticed. “Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”
He grins. “Well, great.”
I grin back. “Yeah.”
“Well, I’m just gonna get a little more fresh air. I’ll see you inside.”
“Okay.”
He’s going to walk around the yard until the cigar smell goes away, but I’m so happy I don’t even care. All the stuff I learned at camp and from meeting other people with Tourette’s, figuring out how to explain it to people in a way that makes me feel the most confident—I never would have guessed those things would have helped just as much as my meds, but now I feel like everything is paying off. When I get back inside, Mimi is making sweet tea.
“Didn’t Pam already do that?” I ask.
Mimi glances around and puts an arm around me conspiratorially. “That woman can’t make sweet tea to save her life, bless her heart.” She stirs faster. “I poured hers down the sink, and I’ll have this in the fridge before she gets out of the shower. You got my back?”
I cross my arms like I’m really taking my time to think about it. Mimi looks scandalized.
“You know I’ve got your back.”
“And I’ve got yours, chickadee.”
She puts the new pitcher of sweet tea away, and I go upstairs to change into a polo shirt and khakis because that’s something we do on Thanksgiving. I take a bag of ice, too, so I can sit on my bed and RICE (Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation.) my ankle again.
RICEing is pretty boring. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then I attempt to re-read Harry Potter for the eighty-seventh time, while Lord Voldemort silently judges me for how I handled things with Hope.
“Dude, I know it was a dick move. You don’t have to stare at me like that.”
He bites the head off a cricket in reply.
I turn my body so I can’t see him because eight eyes’ worth of judgment is A LOT of judgment. I guess I get a little carried away what with the reading and self-loathing, because by the time I get back downstairs, Mimi is gone, and Pam is crying.
“I can’t believe it,” she says.
“Is it the tea?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“The rolls.” Pam is full-on sobbing now. “I let them go too long while I was getting ready, and now they’re burnt to a crisp.”
The rolls are the only part of Thanksgiving that’s not made from scratch (well, that and the cranberry sauce—hello, my delicious, gelatinous friend). They’re just these Hawaiian rolls we get at the store. No big deal.
I try telling this to Pam. “Don’t worry. Those are like the least-important part of Thanksgiving.”
“But they’re your dad’s favorite.”
“Um.” I am starting to feel completely and utterly out of my depth when Mimi swoops into the kitchen. Oh, thank goodness.
“Don’t you worry.” She wraps Pam in a hug. “I’ll send the boys out to get more, and they’ll be back before you know they’re gone. You’ve made the loveliest meal.”
Pam nods and cries and cries and nods. Mimi sends her upstairs to fix her makeup.
“That was really nice of you,” I say.
A Taxonomy of Love Page 21