by Sam Mariano
"Have you done anymore thinking about college?" he asked.
I grinned up at him. "Smooth subject change, Noble."
"Wasn't it?" he replied with a smile. "I already applied at the community college and took the placement tests. Have you done that yet?"
I nodded. "I placed into the highest English, but I'm going to go back one more time before I'm satisfied with my math score. I took my last math course last year, so I'm a little out of practice."
"I'm good at math; I had more trouble with English. It's amazing that I'm an American born and raised, yet I get barely a B in English and an A in French. How the hell does that happen?"
Smiling, I said, "I guess you were born to be a Frenchman."
"I'm Polish," he stated.
I gave him a mock sympathetic face. "I'm so sorry."
"Shut up," he said, tickling me in the side and causing me to squirm away from him.
"Okay, okay, I'll be nice," I said, blocking his hands with a little laugh.
"Doubt it," he responded.
I was about to make a comeback, but then I heard what was unmistakably Alex's car pull into the driveway.
I jumped off the bed, grabbing at my clothes and throwing Derek's back at him. "Get these on," I told him, yanking my gray Grease T-shirt on over my head.
"What's going on?" he asked, confusion all over his handsome face as he caught the shirt I flung at him.
"Alex is home," I stated, hopping across the floor and attempting to pull my foot through my pant leg.
Derek merely gave me a funny look, half amused, half confused. "So?"
"So… he isn't quite as supportive of our relationship this week, and I just think it would be better if he didn't find us like this. Get up," I said, throwing his blue and white plaid boxers at him.
He muttered as he sullenly pulled his clothes on, but he did finally get dressed and come skulking out into the living room where I had already planted myself on the couch and cracked open a textbook.
Derek shook his head as he sat down beside me, asking quietly, "Since when does Alex have a problem with me?"
Before I could answer him, the door opened and Alex stepped inside. His gaze immediately fell to Derek, but instead of acknowledging him he mutely stared at him for a second, his gaze sliding over to me.
"Hey," he muttered.
"Hi," I returned brightly.
Alex glanced at the book in my lap, then briefly over to Derek. "Studying?" he directed at us.
"Oh yeah," I replied a little too fervently. "Lots of studying. We have a test this week, so…"
With a nod Alex remarked, "I hope it's not in sex ed."
My smile lost much of its momentum and I quickly glanced over at Derek, hoping he wasn’t offended.
Alex grabbed an energy drink from the refrigerator and plucked a piece of paper off the outside, casually sticking it in his pocket.
"You're on your own for dinner, I'm going out with Katrina. You know the number to the pizza place," he said, flipping his cell phone open and dialing some numbers.
I thought we were in the clear, but Alex called over his shoulder, "By the way, tell Derek he forgot to zip up his fly."
I flushed, burying my face in one of my hands and using the other one to pick up a pillow and throw it at Derek's head.
"Oops," he muttered, throwing the pillow back at me.
I made sure Derek was gone when Alex got home later that night, and I was curled up on the couch with some homework. When he walked in, I looked up as if everything was great between us, smiling and asking how his dinner was.
He gave me a dry look. "Fabulous. How was your night with the Noble kid?"
"He's the Noble kid now?" I asked, unable to maintain my smile.
"Forgive me if I don't start calling him son just yet," Alex said, opening the refrigerator and snatching a bottle of beer.
As I watched him open it, I asked a bit dryly, "Why, isn't he good enough for you?"
"Sure," he responded, looking me dead in the eyes. "But he's definitely not good enough for you."
I looked down then, giving in to that particular feeling of guilt that only parents can produce in their children. "Look, it's my choice, okay?"
"Yes, it is. It's a bad one, but it's yours. I'll remind you of that in a few years."
I rolled my eyes, standing up. "You know, I really don't understand why you're being such a jerk about this. It's not like you've ever even been interested in my life before, and now all of a sudden you're a concerned father?"
"Well, you used to be a smart girl who never made bad decisions. I couldn't figure out how you could possibly be the offspring of me and your mother, but the genes are finally showing through."
"I already told you, I'm not my mom," I stated, not at all in the mood for more lectures on what a dumbass I was turning out to be.
"You tell me that, yes, but your actions say otherwise, Nicole." He took a sip of his beer. "Now, I could sit here and explain to you all of the reasons you should just dump Derek right now and get out while you're ahead, but you won't listen to me anyway. You don't listen to me any more than your mother ever did—in that way you are exactly like her. Stubborn Harmon girls," he said, shaking his head. "You're all convinced you're right, then you act all surprised when some bastard smashes your heart open for the umpteenth time."
I frowned a little as I studied him a little closer. "Are you drunk?"
He smiled, tilting his head to the side a little. "Guilty."
"You just opened it."
"Katrina made dinner at home and there was lots of beer in her fridge."
"Did you drive?" I asked, my eyes widening.
"I'm an excellent drunk driver, and we were talking about your stupidity, not mine. Now, back to Mike's demon spawn."
"Ugh, Dad, just go to bed," I said, rolling my eyes in disgust and turning to go down the hall.
"No, come back here." He stood, pausing unsteadily and walked down the hall after me. "I want to talk to you."
"No, I don't want to talk about it," I retorted stubbornly.
"Of course you don't," he said easily, "because in your heart you know you're fucking your life up, just like Jamie did."
It always aggravated me when he talked like he understood my mother, because I had read her journals, and I knew her feelings for Alex. "You say that like you know what her thoughts were."
"Oh, I knew Jamie's thoughts more than most, Nicole Harmon,"' he said arrogantly.
"How's that? All the long conversations you shared?" I asked a sarcastically.
He laughed a little. "If you only knew. I knew more about your mother than anyone else did, she just…didn't like me very much," he said. "I suppose I probably didn't help, but…that's not the point. She still told me things—things she didn't tell anyone else. Mike may have been the one she loved, but I…" He paused, his gaze moving to the ground as he tried to focus on what he meant. "I was her friend. I was the one that she told…" He trailed off, a distant look on his face that I took for confusion.
Assuming that Alex was just being a maudlin drunk, I didn't take anything he said to heart. "Yeah, I know you were," I said, mostly just to humor him.
"Things…she never told anyone else," he repeated, leaning against our trailer wall. "Why did she have to tell me?"
Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to Alex when he was drunkenly blabbing on, but there was something in the way he slouched against the wall, his gaze distant, almost haunted.
I hesitantly questioned, "Things like what?"
He didn't answer, just stared at the ugly brown carpet on the ground. Finally, he shook his head slowly and said, "Nothing."
With that, he pushed himself away from the wall and said, "I have to work tomorrow, I need to go to sleep."
"Dad," I said, stopping him with the title I seldom used on him.
He stopped for a moment, but just long enough to smile at me in a way that I knew if there had been a window of opportunity to find some deep dark
secret he might harbor in that seemingly shallow head of his, the window had closed. With a light tousle to my curls, he swayed slightly and then made his way to his room, closing the door behind him with a murmured, "'Night, kid."
I stared at his door for just a moment longer, sighing and dismissing the whole drunken ordeal as I went back to my homework.
Chapter Sixteen-
Since there was only so much I could do to try to help Derek control his life, I decided –with all the free time I still seemed to have—to continue getting my own together.
After a particularly bad day at work, I left Wendy's and went directly to the bookstore—my happy place. As soon as I got there the first thing I noticed was the "Now Hiring" sign they had up—and not as a barista, but an actual employee.
I asked the lady at the register about it and she said it was a part-time position but she didn't know much else. She gave me an application, which I wasted no time in filling out and giving back.
After applying for my dream job, I found myself wandering down the aisles, my fingers perusing the spines of the books as my thoughts drifted back to a nicer time in my life, a time when Derek and I were first "official," Kayla wasn't pregnant, and we were free to spend time together and play our own little game of hide-and-seek in the aisles.
I missed that simple time. As much as Derek told me that we would work through the complications, part of me didn't really believe him and the other part thought, "But what if I don't want to deal with the complications?"
It had been a given before; Derek screwed up so I would learn to deal.
But why? As my hand dropped to my side and I sighed, I wondered how many other almost-18-year-olds had to factor their emotionally elusive boyfriend's child support situation into their college plans. I had already spent some time picking out which classes I wanted to take in the fall semester after I graduated—did Derek? I didn't even know, I realized as I picked up a new romance novel with some easy, saccharine relationship.
I scoffed a little, making a face at the book even though it really hadn't done anything to offend me.
It was more fun to come to the bookstore with Derek, I thought. It didn't matter that he didn't read, that he would follow me around waiting for me to be done with that little twinkle in his playful blue eyes.
But now he had to work a million hours a week, and he didn't have time to come to bookstores with me or discuss future plans. Most guys could always be counted on to find time for sex, but just a couple nights before I had tried to lure Derek out with just such an idea, and to my surprise he told me he couldn't, that he had to help his dad with something. I stopped listening after that, a little bit offended. How could he not have time for a quickie? He was a man; that was one thing they were always reliable about.
Nobody said it would be easy, I reasoned, putting the book back into its place on the shelf and heading over to the book I had actually come to get, vowing not to think about my Derek drama anymore…at least until I was back in my car.
Just when I thought I finally had life under control, Fate saw fit to throw yet another wrench in the gears.
It occurred to me once or twice that maybe I was inappropriately placing too much of the blame for the situation on Kayla and not enough on Derek, but each time I shoved the thought to the back of my mind.
I had an interview at the bookstore later the very same week that I put in the application, and I was extremely excited. Landing an interview was the hard part, I figured, and once I got an interview I was –hopefully—as good as hired.
The manager who interviewed me was this radical looking woman named Susannah with really short brown and pink hair and really pretty brown eyes. She seemed intelligent to me, and she seemed to like me almost immediately. She was totally down-to-earth and the interview began as an interview and ended up in a discussion about how we coincidentally liked many of the same books and movies. She told me about a couple that I had never heard of and never read, so she jotted them down on a piece of paper for me.
At the end of our interview/discussion, when she said she would be making the calls in the next couple days, she stopped, smiled at me and said, "Why waste time on formalities? I'm going to call you."
Thrilled at landing my current dream job, I got in my car and drove straight to Derek's house. I knew he was off, and while I was on the way it crossed my mind to call and tell him I was going to come over, but I rejected the idea. We had talked earlier and he knew I had the interview, so if I called him on the way he would ask how it went and it would completely ruin the surprise.
I was giddy and excited as I turned onto Derek's street, already imagining throwing my arms around him and giving him a great big hug and kiss, so I wasn't really paying attention until I turned my turn signal on and started to cut the wheel into Derek's driveway.
Seeing Kayla's car already parked there, I sharply jerked the wheel straight and swerved back onto the road, frowning as I looked back to make sure I hadn't been hallucinating.
Nope.
Kayla's piece of shit little car was still in my boyfriend's driveway.
Lovely.
So instead of happily greeting my boyfriend at his door to tell him about my new job I could: A.) go to his house anyway and find out why the hell Kayla was there, or B.) go home.
I selected option B, and an hour later as I buried my problems in my new copy of Howl and Other Poems, Derek called me, and I let him go straight to voicemail.
When my phone alerted me of a new message, I felt a little snag of hope that when I checked it, I would find a message from Derek being completely honest with me, complaining about Kayla showing up unexpectedly at his house two seconds before I happened to drive by and him, naturally, kicking her out because he had to call his girlfriend, whom he loved.
Instead, I got: "Hey, it's Derek. I just got off work a little bit ago and …I thought I'd see if you wanted to hang out or something. Give me a call, okay? Later."
Wow, an endlessly disappointing message in which Kayla wasn't even mentioned, let alone complained about.
And it wasn't just his words, but his tone. His tone seemed normal, just like any casual conversation that we had on a day-to-day basis. If Kayla had shown up at his house for some reason, shouldn't there be some sign of distress?
It was what he didn't say that bothered me.
He didn't say anything out of the ordinary, and Kayla being at his house was –to my knowledge, at least—anything but ordinary.
And he implied that he had just gotten off work.
Why didn't he tell me? Would he tell me? I wanted to call him to give him a chance to explain, but a larger part of me could only concentrate on what he hadn't said in the message.
If he didn't intend to tell me and I would have never known if I didn't serendipitously drive by, did I even want to know?
Scolding myself for seeming to favor ignorance again, I closed my book and picked up my phone, dialing Derek's number.
"Hey," he greeted.
Nothing suspect about his tone so far.
"Hey," I returned, trying to mimic his good mood.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Reading," I replied.
He chuckled. "Of course you are—why did I even ask? Did you buy a new book?"
"No, I decided to wait until my first day so I get a discount."
"Aw shit, that interview was today, wasn't it? You got it? That's awesome," he said. "The discount should save you enough for your college tuition, right?"
"You didn't remember?" I asked lightly, not wanting to make too much of it, but kind of offended that he had forgotten such an important detail.
But he was teasing me. Was I delusional, or was Derek teasing me as if he would any other day when Kayla wasn't at his house?
Maybe he hadn't been home, I realized. Maybe, for some strange reason, while Derek was at work Kayla went to his house for…something. To talk to Mike about…something...baby-related.
Yes, that must
be it. Derek had been at work.
But Derek hadn't been scheduled, which was why I had been on my way over….
Maybe he got called in!
"No, I did," he said. "It just…I don't know, my head—I just forgot when you called."
"Oh. No big deal. So, how was work for you?" I asked casually.
"Same old, same old," he replied.
"Yeah?" I asked, not encouraged. "What time did you work until?"
"Two," he replied.
Two o'clock. My interview had been at two o'clock, and he should have been home by the time I was finished with the interview and had time to drive to his house.
"Oh yeah? I thought that's what you said. So…did you do anything exciting after work?"
"Not really," he responded. "I was going to call you earlier," he began, and I felt a weight begin to lift off my shoulder. "I thought you could come over after your interview, let me know how it went."
The interview he hadn't remembered until I told him I got the job?
"Oh yeah?" I said hopefully. "Why didn't you?"
In my mind, I heard him say, "Because Kayla's a dumb bitch and she showed up at my house…"
But on the other end of the phone I heard, "Ah, one of my buddies stopped over and…you know how it is. But hey, if you're not doing anything, you should come over now, tell me about your interview and….maybe we can pretend to study," he said teasingly.
I felt like I had swallowed my heart, and it was made of a big block of ice. I could feel it slide slowly down my stomach, landing with a sickening thud somewhere in the vicinity of my foot.
I felt like vomiting.
"Which buddy?" I managed.
"What?" he asked.
"Your buddy that stopped over, which one was it?"
"Just a neighbor, you don't know him. I tried to kick him out so you could come over, but..." he trailed off.
"I can't hang out," I heard myself say, feeling my stomach turn over. "I have…a lot of homework."
"Oh. Okay,"' he said, sounding a little bit confused, maybe even a little offended. "Well, I guess if you have so much homework I should let you go."