I had never told anyone that I liked Luke, and it suddenly felt vital that I got it off my chest, that I got to express exactly what it felt like to secretly love someone you’ve known nearly your whole life. Normally the ideal candidate to tell would have been Mel, and if I thought she would be alone or any less high by the time I got there, I would have gotten off the bus and turned around and walked back to her house. As it was, for one of the first times ever, talking to Mel wasn’t an option.
So I did something I’d never done before.
When I got home that evening, I passed my dad, where he sat at the dining table doing paperwork for the clinic, and made my way upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. I knocked once, and when I didn’t hear a response, I pushed the door open and crept inside. For once, the curtains in the room were open—definitely Dad’s doing—but Mom was fast asleep anyway, a satin sleep mask over her eyes to block out the light.
I sat down on the carpet at the foot of her bed and pulled my knees up to my chest, listening to the steady rhythm of her breathing, and then I spoke.
I told her what I’d kept buried for so many years. I told her all about the boy who was my first real crush: Luke Cohen.
NOW
I can’t erase his face from my brain.
Deep cleaning my room doesn’t help. Going for a run in the scorching midafternoon sun doesn’t help. If anything, it makes me hallucinate. Seeing him in cars and behind trees and everywhere else I look.
My thoughts are no better than my eyes; they are loud and anxious and sad.
Finally, figuring there’s no other way to shut my mind off, I call Willow and agree to go with her to Bailey’s party. It’s kind of a gamble, because people I might not want to see could be there. People like Eric Lerner.
But I also know who’s not likely to be there, since he’s a year older and this isn’t really his crowd: Luke. And that’s good enough for me.
“Yay, you’re going to have so much fun!” Willow says that evening as she climbs into the passenger seat. Willow is a tall brunette with bright eyes and an even brighter future. She lives in this massive, Old English style house, but it’s only a couple of minutes from my house, so we’re carpooling and meeting her boyfriend, Brett, there.
“Seat belt,” I say, waiting to start the car.
“One sec,” she says, holding her phone to the roof of the car and aiming the camera at her face. At this point Willow knows me well enough not to even ask if I’ll be in the picture with her, but I scoot closer to the door anyway, out of her camera’s line of sight.
She taps away on her phone, and it vibrates immediately. The first of hundreds of likes she’s going to get. Willow is what people call “internet famous.” Her videos accumulate hundreds of thousands of views, companies send her all sorts of products clamoring for a feature in one of her posts, and a couple of her followers recently started selling T-shirts with quintessential Willow sayings. A favorite is “Hold hands, not grudges.” Budding social media empire aside, she manages to be one of the nicest people alive.
“I’m so happy you’re coming,” Willow says now, finally pulling her seat belt across her chest. “What changed your mind?”
I start the car. “Just super bored.”
“Right,” she says, unconvinced.
“I’m serious.”
“No, I believe you. I would be too if I spent most of my days with a grandpa I’m not even related to.”
Spending time with people I’m not related to is kind of my specialty, but since we rarely discuss what my life was like before she got here, she doesn’t know that.
“He’s really sweet, you know,” I say in Ernie’s defense. Willow may be a good person, but like most eighteen-year-olds, I guess she prefers spending time with people her own age. Which is probably why she hates our job at the community center, where we work with kids. Her dad, who has no clue about her thriving online life and the money she earns from views, made her work there because, millionaire dad or not, he wants her to learn the value of hard work.
“Like, it’s not a bad job if they took out all the sports and science classes and let me teach something I actually have a clue about,” she muses when the topic of work comes up. “Like makeup tips or confidence advice. We could call it a life skills class or something! If I had access to experts at that crucial stage, I’d have turned out completely different.” She says the last part so wistfully, I have to laugh.
“Um, it seems to me like you turned out just fine.”
“Omigosh, Jessi. You don’t even know who I used to be,” she says, giving her lip-gloss a once-over in the mirror.
You don’t know who I used to be, I think.
“One day I’ll tell you all about the glow-up,” she promises. Considering that she isn’t even in the vicinity of ugly, I’m skeptical that Willow’s “glow-up” involves the usual ugly duckling to swan tale, but I say nothing.
We pull up to Bailey’s house, which is nestled in a cul-de-sac. I’ve been here a couple of times before. Once, for her all-girls eleventh birthday party. Another time to work on a group project with Bailey and Rowan.
My heart pinches with a familiar pain, but I force my brain to think of something else. No Cohens tonight, I tell myself.
We park and make our way around Bailey’s house to the backyard pool, where the party is taking place. There are a bunch of people already in the pool, another few lounging around in swimsuits and drinking.
“Wills, you made it!” Bailey says, grabbing Willow by the hand. They hug, like long-lost friends, even though I’ve known Bailey longer than Willow has been in the state.
“Hey, Jessi,” Bailey says. She looks a little surprised to see me, but she gives me a genuine smile and leads us over to a cooler full of cans and bottles on a small foldout table.
“What do you want?” Willow asks me, digging into the cooler.
“Is there soda?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bailey says. “There’s some in the fridge. I can go grab a couple of cans.”
“Do you want me to come and help?” I offer.
“No, I’ve got it,” Bailey says, then disappears into the house.
When she’s gone, Willow turns on me. “You’re not drinking? I thought you said you were ready to let loose and get crazy!”
“Not my exact words,” I say.
“Close enough.”
“I’m driving,” I point out.
“In like maybe three hours. One drink won’t kill you,” she says. “Or I can make Brett stay sober and be DD.”
“Soda’s fine,” I insist, starting to wonder how I ever thought that coming out tonight was a good idea. Thankfully, at exactly that moment, Brett appears, snaking his arm around Willow’s waist.
“I heard my name,” he says. When he gives her a slobbery kiss on the cheek, she giggles.
“Ew, you’re all wet.”
“You’re all dry,” he says.
“On account of how I haven’t been in the pool yet, yeah,” she deadpans.
“Hey, Jessi,” Brett says. Brett is one year younger than we are, a senior next year. He’s a little self-obsessed for my taste, but he’s always been nice to me. His sport of choice is also soccer, which helps. I may teach tennis to little kids, but avoiding the tennis team this last year has basically been my full-time job.
“Hey,” I say back.
“Ooh, I promised I’d post from the party,” Willow says now, and draws Brett closer for a selfie.
“Hell, yeah,” Brett says. “My hot girlfriend’s dress deserves to be seen.”
“Aww.” Willow plants a kiss on his cheek.
“I’ll take it,” I offer. Willow hands me her phone and I back up to take the picture. They lean in close, their bodies facing each other, and they’re so cute it’s a little nauseating.
As parties go, this one is fairly tame. The music isn’t crazy loud, and everyone is only mildly drunk and it’s both a good and a bad thing. A good thing because wild parties really aren’t my s
cene, and a bad thing because it isn’t doing quite enough to quiet my thoughts. Still, it’s nice to hang out with Brett and Willow, and both of them are nice enough to not complain about my third wheeling.
And then everything changes.
They arrive in a pack, like most jocks, and they’re almost all already wasted. My stomach drops as soon as I see Eric Lerner. I knew I was taking a chance, hoping he wouldn’t be here. But he’d been off work all this week, so I thought the odds were in my favor.
“Bails!” Eric says, lifting her off the ground as soon as he sees her. “Orange looks good on you.”
“Shut up, Eric,” Bailey says, but she’s smiling.
After Eric puts Bailey down, he and a couple of other players make a beeline for Brett and Willow. They’re instantly all talking over one another and laughing. I feel stupid for trying to sink into the shadows. Brett, Willow, Eric, and I all work together. You’d think I’d have developed a better strategy than camouflaging into the scenery and hoping for the best.
Thankfully, I’m the furthest thing from Eric’s mind.
He pulls out his go-to party trick, holding his forearms out and getting everyone to see how much bigger and stronger his right arm, his dominant arm, is. Then he moves on to his other favorite: showing off the calluses on his hand from his racket.
Eric is going to the University of Illinois on a tennis scholarship, and he never lets anyone forget it. All through high school, he and Ro were competing for the same scholarships and titles. When they weren’t commiserating about how much of a hard-ass their coach was, they were embroiled in an intense (mostly friendly) rivalry. Other than me and his family, I think Ro spent most of his time with Eric.
Andrew, another guy on the tennis team, starts chatting up Willow. “Wills, how come you’re not in the pool right now? I heard you can hold your breath underwater for, like, a minute. Do you have any—what are they called—hacks?”
Willow rolls her eyes and ignores him, but a flash of annoyance crosses Brett’s face.
Undeterred, Andrew tries again. “You can teach me your tricks.”
“I’m not teaching you anything,” Willow says.
“Dude, you’re barking up the wrong tree—” Some guy I recognize as a junior smacks Andrew on the back, but he is too drunk to be embarrassed, so he just laughs, and everyone laughs with (or at) him.
“You’d have better luck with Jessi,” Eric says. I freeze at the sound of my name and try not to react to the words that follow. “Everyone knows she’s easy.”
I give him what he wants anyway. I flinch.
You can hear a pin drop in our group, until Willow whacks his shoulder. “What the hell, Eric?”
Even after all these months, she still manages to be shocked at his comments.
“Yeah, not cool, bro,” Brett says.
“Fuck off, Eric,” I say. Embarrassment snakes its way around my body, but I force myself to look him in the eye. It’s nice of Brett and Willow to stand up for me, but I am more than capable of telling Eric which cliff to jump off.
Not that it helps.
“Great suggestion, Rumfield, but I don’t think I will.”
You can slice the tension in our group with a knife.
“How can you drink that?” Andrew asks out of nowhere, pointing to my club soda. “It tastes like piss.” His comment is meant to be a diversion, an easy out of the friction all around us. I’m supposed to say something funny and smile, but I don’t play along. As it turns out, I’m also more than capable of making myself feel like shit. I don’t need Eric to do it for me.
So I turn around and walk off, empty my half-finished soda in the garbage can near the drinks table. I hear Willow telling somebody off, and then she’s running across the yard to meet me.
“Hey, are you okay? We can leave if you want.”
“I’m fine.” I roll my eyes to make it seem like Eric’s comment was only slightly annoying. “I was just going to wait in the car until you’re ready. I don’t want to make you leave.”
Willow hooks her elbow in mine. “As if I’m going to stay and hang out with these jerks.”
“Wills—” I start to argue, but she doesn’t let me finish. She’s steering me toward the backyard gate and around the house again to the place where we parked.
“I’m really sorry,” I tell Willow for the third time when I pull up in front of her house.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks, quirking her head to the side.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Why does he do that? All these comments . . .”
I look out through the windshield at her house. “We’ve just never gotten along. We’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“Yeah, but it seems so personal. And, like, so mean.”
I shrug. “That’s just Eric.” I attempt a smile, but she doesn’t buy it. If she knew everything that happened last summer, she’d probably hate me too. Now she leans over and hugs me.
“Just think, once this summer is over, you never have to see him again.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, though it’s not really true. We live in the same small town, and though everyone thinks they’re leaving and never coming back, they do. Even if it’s just for visits or holidays or whatever.
In my case, I’m not even leaving.
Willow climbs out of the car then and waves at me.
As I drive home, I’m trying not to dwell on Eric’s asshole comment, but I can’t help it. It’s not even that he said it in front of everyone, or that he’s been making these digs for months and clearly doesn’t intend on stopping. It’s that I know in my heart that he’s right about me.
That I’m not a good person, no matter how hard I’ve tried to make everything right.
There’s so much I can’t undo.
As I’m pulling into my driveway, I notice a car on the side of the street in front of my house. It’s silver and looks vaguely familiar.
When I get out of the car, I realize it’s the same one I saw outside the Cohen house days ago. And climbing out of it now is Luke.
I stay frozen as he crosses my driveway, walking toward me.
My heart beats a frantic rhythm in my chest the closer he comes, and then he’s standing right in front of me, the moonlight making his hair look shiny in the dark.
“I tried to call you” is the first thing he says. “Didn’t know if you were home.”
After a second, I manage to stutter, “I didn’t—haven’t checked my phone.”
I stare at him, and all the ways he is different stare back at me. The edge in his eyes, the coldness in his voice, the thin layer of scruff along his jaw.
“Luke—” I start to say, but he talks over me.
“She wants to see you,” he says.
And I know right away who he means.
Mel.
Mel wants to see me.
A million questions race through my mind, but all I manage to say is, “When?”
“Tomorrow?” Luke asks, and I nod.
He looks at me for one more second, then turns and walks back to his car.
He drives off, leaving me standing in my driveway, wanting to call after him, to drive after him, to go with him to the place that used to feel like home.
4
THEN
If you counted all the secrets I’d spilled in the Cohen house over the past ten years, you would think I lived there. We were cleaning out the garage when I told Mel I’d gotten my period when I was in fifth grade, and we were dancing to Amy Winehouse in the living room when I told her about Callum Turner, the first boy I kissed when I was thirteen. Ro, Luke, and I were in the backyard running through the sprinklers when I told them I’d seen my dad smoking in the driveway, and Ro and I were in the shed when I told him that having me was what made my mother so sad.
We were in the kitchen during the fourth week of summer school, when I finally admitted to myself and to Mel that I was failing calculus.
“Oh, no! Is it because
you’re spending so much time over here?” Mel asked. “I told you to stop trying to look after me. I’m fine!”
“No, it’s not that. I just suck at it,” I said, defeated, as I sifted flour into a mixing bowl.
“Do you know what sucks? Babies and climate change,” Mel said. “You do not suck.”
“Maybe I’ll just retake it in the fall and drop one of my electives.”
Mel took a break from whisking her sugar and butter mix and frowned thoughtfully. There was a line of sweat on her upper lip and her face was paler than normal. I’d tried to suggest that we spend the day lounging in front of the TV, but she’d refused. These days it was like she was on a personal mission to prove she was the lone human who responded to radiation with renewed energy and zest for life rather than the nausea and fatigue she’d been told to expect. Between me and her sons, though, she was fooling absolutely no one.
“Should we take a break?” I asked, but she ignored me.
“You could retake it in the fall,” she said now. “Or maybe you could find someone who excels in math, has the time to tutor, and won’t make you pay an arm and a leg for it.”
I knew right away where she was going with this and immediately regretted not keeping my academic woes to myself. I was so used to divulging all the details of my life to Mel; it never occurred to me to keep my mouth shut.
“I probably just need to study more,” I said, trying to course-correct.
“You probably do,” she agreed, nodding. “Then again,” she continued, “a tutor could have its benefits. Someone who lives in the area, has experience tutoring, probably wants to be paid in comic books, and is around six feet tall. But we shouldn’t be too specific.”
“Mel,” I sighed. “He won’t want to tutor me.”
“He personally told you that?”
“Well, no,” I said. “But like he has his job and everything. Also, I’m not just a little bad at this. I’m pretty bad.”
“Sounds like you need a tutor,” she said smugly.
“Not that tutor.”
Some Other Now Page 5