by Sam Mariano
"I like that about you, too," he said, bending his head and kissing my shoulder.
I merely pressed my lips together as his kisses moved closer to my neck, and then he started to try to coax me over onto my back.
"Derek, I'm trying to study."
"Oh, me too," he replied, his kisses moving to my ears.
"Mm," I murmured, closing my eyes, goose bumps traveling up my neck. "Derek, you're distracting me."
"I like to distract you," he said, finally getting me on my back.
I sighed, deciding easily that there was no point. "Fine, I surrender," I said, wrapping my arms around his neck and returning his kiss.
"I do like when you surrender," he murmured against my mouth.
For all that I shrugged the matter off to Derek, it bugged me a little when he brought up college.
I always said I was undecided, as if I merely didn't feel like going, but I did wish I could go to college. When Stephanie brought it up, it bothered me too, but she was normally just talking about going herself, never trying to bring me into it.
And it wasn't that I wasn't trying to save up some money, but there was just so little time and so much money that needed to be saved. Even if I went to the community college that Derek and Steph were going to, I would have to come up with enough money for a car; there was no way Alex was going to let me borrow his car to drive 30 miles each way every single day. Steph was one of those lucky people whose parents had not only saved money for her to actually attend college, but would also let her live at home with them for as long as she needed to while she got a higher education.
I was not in the same boat.
I would need about a thousand bucks just for a car to get me to and from school, then probably close to another thousand for books, and of course there was the actual price of tuition, not to mention all the gas and unexpected car troubles. Even if I could miraculously figure all that out, the chances of Alex actually letting me stay with him for two more years... let's just say I wouldn't put any money on it. So I would have to figure out how I was going to pay rent on top of all those expenses. If I had to do all that, when would I be able to actually study and do my assignments? I would have to work all the time just to pay for it.
There was simply no way.
On Sunday, a mere two days after our talk, Derek caught me by surprise again when he came over after work and tossed an application on my bed.
"What's this?" I asked, picking up the application and looking at it.
"Your bookstore's hiring. It's a barista job, but it is in the bookstore," he replied.
I could only stare at him. "Why?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Because... they need one? How am I supposed to know why they're hiring?"
I shook my head, smiling a little. "No, I mean... why would you go to the extra trouble of not only going to the bookstore, but getting an application for me?"
He shrugged. "I guess you're growing on me. Just a little," he said, giving me a small smile.
"Like mold?" I asked gravely, my expression innocent.
His eyes twinkled and he nodded. "Yes, exactly like mold."
I chalked it up to joking at the time, but I realized later, as I was looking over the application, that Derek really was being nice to me lately. I kept noticing it, but I always seemed to have some reason that I was just mistaken.
If I didn't know any better, I just might start thinking that Derek was starting to like me.
But when thoughts like that would surface, I would usually reject them, telling myself I was being silly. Derek hated me, he had always hated me. But as I looked at the application, I thought maybe he really was getting over his senseless hatred, and that's why he was treating me like a friend.
Maybe we were friends.
After all, I was hardly a friendship expert.
That thought made me happy, but I didn't want to get too excited about it in case I was wrong.
Monday came too soon, and Derek came to give me a ride to school, as he had been doing since the weather was getting colder. I told him cautiously about Stephanie's invitation for us to join her at her lunch table, and while he didn't seem very excited about the idea, he did agree.
During lunch, Derek mostly stayed out of the conversation. Since Thanksgiving was fast approaching, Stephanie was talking about her family from North Carolina coming to visit for the holiday. She asked me what I was doing, and I realized I didn't really know.
Sometimes for Thanksgiving I would go with Alex to his mother's house, but since it was one of maybe four times a year that we saw her, it was usually fairly uncomfortable.
Stephanie casually asked Derek what he was doing for Thanksgiving, wanting to include him, and he said he would probably get roped into going to his grandmother's house.
"Which grandmother?" I asked curiously.
"On my dad's side," he said.
I wanted to ask if he ever saw Sarah's parents anymore, but I didn't want him to get all freaky on me, so I didn't.
I really didn't like holidays very much. It was the worst time of the year, with everyone planning to visit their loving families. It never failed to remind me that I didn't have one, and I wondered if it bothered Derek, too, but of course I wasn't allowed to ask.
That did bother me. If we were friends, shouldn't we be able to get past our family history and actually talk about our families?
Our conversation was cut short, though, because Kayla entered the lunch room and she started to come sit by Stephanie, but when she saw me and Derek at the table, she was outraged.
"Bitch," she said to Stephanie, upon learning that Steph was the one to invite us.
Stephanie sighed, trying to reason with her friend. "Kayla, just sit down."
"No, you invited them to the table, so obviously you like that freak and my ex better than you like me. Some friend."
"Kayla," she said, sighing again as she stood up and went after Kayla.
I rolled my eyes. "She is such a drama queen."
Derek nodded his agreement, taking a bite of his pizza.
"She can't really be that upset, right?" I asked, my conscience uneasy. "I mean... when you two were together, she never claimed to love you or anything, right?"
Derek shrugged. "Not that I can remember."
"I just thought she'd be over it by now," I said, before turning my attention back to Steph, who was sitting back down, Kayla at her side.
"I'm sorry," Kayla said to Steph. "I've just been a little emotional lately, I don't know what's wrong with me."
I glanced down at Kayla, but when she realized I was looking at her she fixed me with a glare, asking, "What the hell are you looking at?"
I rolled my eyes at her once again, not bothering to reply, and returned my attention to eating my lunch, not really talking much to anyone once Kayla sat down.
As usual, Derek's bad mood seemed to come out of nowhere. When Thanksgiving break started, we were perfectly fine, possibly even friends.
Then he went to that stupid dinner with his grandmother, and suddenly he was grumpy toward me again.
I was really starting to hate his family, maybe even more than I did when I met him. It was almost always after he would be around them that his moods would turn mean and he would push me away. Normally it was just his dad, who, despite telling me that Derek "could" date me if he wanted to, still didn't seem to be wildly fond of me. That was probably partially my fault, since I had never been more polite to Mike than the day he gave me a ride home, but it was still really annoying. Just when I thought I was wearing Derek down and possibly earning his friendship, his family could easily wipe out all of my progress, and it would seem like he hated me again.
It was starting to drive me crazy.
But for the next couple days, Derek was sullen and withdrawn, completely disinterested in being nice to me. I didn't like to sleep with him when he was like that either, because although he would let me cuddle for a few minutes, he made me feel like I was forcing him
, and then he would leave, making me feel just a touch aggravated. After all that physical closeness, it took me just a couple minutes to be able to space myself, and it didn't seem that way for him.
I waited patiently for his moods to go back to normal, but when the beginning of December rolled around and he still seemed withdrawn, I decided it was time to have a discussion, whether he felt like it or not.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked him one day.
"What do you mean?" he asked, glancing up at me.
"Well, for a while it seemed like you didn't hate me so much, but even today I felt like I had to convince you to study with me. Did I do something?"
"No," he said, turning his attention back to the book as if the conversation was over.
"Then why are you being like this?" I asked him.
He sighed irritably. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You never do," I responded. "But unfortunately I'm not really feeling the brooding silences you've been practicing lately. I want to know what's wrong with you, and if I have to use a crowbar, I will pry it out of you."
"Look, Nikki, the only person you have to deal with is Alex, and he doesn't have a problem with my father or me. It isn't like that for me. As soon as someone in my family finds out that I actually associate with you, I'm automatically betraying my mother's memory, and I'm sick of catching shit about it."
I frowned at him. "That's stupid."
"Maybe it is, but it's what I deal with," he said in an agitated tone, turning his attention back to his books.
Since he had been weird since Thanksgiving, I assumed it was at that dinner that it had come up, but why would it still be bothering him?
I decided to be nice, and I got on my knees behind him and started to give him a back massage. "Well, do you want to talk about it?" I asked. "Maybe it would help to make you less grumpy."
"Doubt it," he said, but allowed me to keep rubbing his shoulders.
"Before we reject the idea, let's try," I suggested. "Tell me, when did this start?"
"The day your mother decided to crash into mine."
I tensed a little, but didn't let it bother me. "You know what I mean. You've been nice lately, you've taken me to bookstores, you've talked about my future, and you’ve acted like a real friend to me."
He scoffed a little. "Yeah."
Undeterred, I went on. "Then you went to Thanksgiving dinner. Is that where it started?"
He sighed as I started to massage his neck and admitted, "My grandmother didn't know I even knew you. I don't know that she even knew you existed."
"How did she find out?" I asked, continuing to knead the tense muscles in his back.
"My step-mom cluelessly told her," he said. "My grandmother... she adored my mother, at least that's what I've been told. My dad started seeing my mom when he was 14, and I guess my grandmother has loved her ever since. As far as she's concerned, my liking you is the most blatantly disrespectful thing I could ever do to my dead mother, and we got into a fight about it. She makes me feel like shit, and it pisses me off, because... honestly, I don't understand why I'm supposed to hate you. It just doesn't make sense anymore. I know I've always been under the impression that I was supposed to hate you, so I just did, but that was before I knew you. Now that I know you I just don't understand why the hell I should have to hate you because of something your mother did over a decade ago. Yes, I lost my mother, and that sucks, and of course I miss her, but you aren't the one who did it and I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for liking you. You’re your own person. Nobody gets that."
I stopped massaging him in the middle of his speech, although I didn't realize it. But I couldn't seem to help it. As soon as he told me that he got in a fight with his grandmother for sticking up for me...
Nobody ever stood up for me. Especially not Derek. It made me feel so good inside to think of Derek actually standing up to his grandmother, probably in front of his father, and defending me. I couldn't even describe the way that made me feel.
"Really?" I asked a little quietly.
He nodded, lying down on the bed. "I just don't feel like I'm wrong, I feel like they are. But I'm really sick of having to fight with people about it. I'm really sick of people being on my case and saying that I'm being disloyal to my mother because I decided to be with you. Maybe that is how she would see it, I don't even know..."
I thought about it for a moment, then I cuddled up next to him, draping an arm across his shoulders. "You know what, I don't think she would," I finally said. "I mean, there's no denying that our mothers hated each other, but that's because they loved the same man. Personally, I don't believe they would have wanted to condemn us to that kind of hatred. When I think about it, I never even consider that my mom would be angry at me for not hating you. I know she wouldn't."
It took him a moment, but then he said, "You must have known your mother better than I knew mine."
"Well, you had a mother and a father," I reasoned. "I didn't. My mom was pretty much all I had, and I was all she had. We were each other's world. Your mom... had Mike, so... If my mother would've had the man she loved, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so much attention."
He glanced over at me. "You know, I never remember feeling like they loved each other. I don't even know if they did."
That comment made my heart skip a beat, but I didn't know how to coax information out of him without making him clam up. So I just casually responded, "Really?"
Derek nodded. "They fought a lot, I think I told you that. He cheated on her once," he said.
My heart dropped when he said that. "What?" I exclaimed.
He nodded his head. "I remember hearing her screaming at him, hearing things breaking against the wall. She thought it was your mom, he said it wasn't. I don't know if she believed him, I just remember she kept screaming ‘that whore’ at him."
My mind raced, and I dug to the very depths of my memory, trying to figure out if there was some journal I was missing. Surely if Mike would have cheated on Sarah with her, she would have recorded that. And was he married? Would she have really done that? She might have, I realized. She loved him more than anything and would have done anything to be with him, probably including being an adulteress.
"When was this?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I don’t know, I was little."
"Well..." That didn't help.
"Wait," he said. "No, I do remember, it was... around his birthday the year I started first grade. We still had cake left, because I remember she threw the cake at him."
"That's February," I remarked absently, my brain trying to put the pieces together. When the hell had this happened, and how did I not know about it?
But then I remembered that he said Mike claimed that it wasn't my mom that he cheated on her with.
"Well, did he ever say who it was?"
Derek shook his head. "Not that I know of. I don't remember hearing any other name, I just remember that fight. It was their worst."
"And it was near the end," I said, my interest stirred.
"What?" he asked, glancing over at me.
I looked up. "Oh, well, if it was near the end of February then... the accident happened in April, so that was just a couple months before the end. I turned seven in May, so..."
"I don't know," he said, sighing a little. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm just tired of this, especially since I can't seem to stop liking you, even when I think I should."
I was only half paying attention at that point, my mind making its way back to the past, my only desire at that moment to go home and search through my mother's journals.
As soon as Derek dropped me off, I ran to my room.
I knew I had read through the last journal of my mother's, the one she never finished, trying to find some sort of reason, something that might have triggered her. As many times as I had searched, I never found anything. Everything seemed completely ordinary. It seemed like she had just snapped for no apparent reason.
I
dug the journals out again and went back to that February, carefully reading each entry again. I didn't know if I expected to find a page I had somehow missed before or what, but I didn't. The entries were still the same. It seemed to be just another ordinary month. No matter how thoroughly I read each entry, she just journaled about work, about me, about a conversation she had with Alex.
Mike’s birthday was the 15th, so I started concentrating on the 12th. But there was still no entry that read, "Oh, and I slept with Mike." On the 12th she had been pretty pleased with a particularly generous tip she got at work. On the 13th she had a bad dream (that she didn't describe) and then she went on to have a lousy day at work, then she didn't get home in time to even put me to bed. On the 14th was when she was talking about Alex, a conversation they had on the phone that day. Mike’s birthday was the 15th, and she just wrote that morning that she was already in a pretty lousy mood, that she didn't feel like going to work, that she just wanted to sleep in. "Today is always a little strange for me, which I find incredibly annoying." But that was the only comment that might have even been about Mike, as far as I could see.
She had to work that night until close, so she didn't write anymore until the 16th. On the 16th she was contemplative. She did mention him, because she wrote how she hated that February 15th was a bad day for her every single year. She wrote:
You would think after all these years it wouldn't matter anymore. You would think he wouldn't be able to get to me anymore. But he still can. Even knowing it's his birthday... thinking back to the year I got to see him for his birthday, because he had worked that day. I remember I teased him, and I told him I was going to give him a kiss for his birthday, then I gave him a Hershey's kiss. Of course I really did kiss him after that...
It felt so good to kiss him.
But why am I doing this to myself?
Never mind, I refuse to think about this anymore right now.
I have to go to work anyway, because Debbie called off again...
I kept reading carefully through each entry, although there were days that she didn't journal that month, but she never mentioned him again, not once for the rest of the month.