Waiting for You

by Susane Colasanti

  He looks so out of place. I wish things would just go back to the way they were before, with all of us happy and Dad lounging on the couch, hogging the remote.

  “Hey, kid,” Dad says. Sandra’s sitting next to him, quiet for once.

  My parents exchange a look. Mom nods at Dad.

  He says, “There’s something we need to tell you. I thought it would be better if we were all here for this.”

  They look serious. This is not a good thing.

  Mom goes, “We’ve thought a lot about this, and we think it’s best—”

  “I want you girls to know,” Dad interrupts, “that I never wanted this to happen. But it’s the only way we can move forward.”

  “We’re getting a divorce,” Mom blurts out.

  They’re getting a divorce. Not just a separation. They can’t stand to be with each other so much that they have to make this thing permanent. Lock it down and let the whole world know.

  They’re just staring at me. I’m not sure what they expect me to do. Yell? Cry, like Sandra’s doing? Have a screaming, hysterical fit? Whatev. They’re not getting a reaction. They’re not entitled to one.

  I can’t even look at my mom. Or my dad. She was the one who started this, but he let it happen.

  35

  We are sad.

  We are sad and pathetic.

  And we’re not recovering any time soon.

  Even our lunches are sad. Nash has limp spaghetti with cheap sauce. I have a soggy sandwich with rubbery cold cuts. Not that we’re eating anything. We’re too sad and pathetic to have an appetite. I bet if Sterling were in this lunch with us, she wouldn’t even be able to tempt me with one of her famous brownies. I was so relieved when Nash’s schedule changed and he showed up in my lunch this semester. Now we can be miserable together.

  “At least you didn’t get dumped,” Nash says.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I argue. “This still sucks.”

  “It sucks worse for me.”

  We do this sometimes. Argue about who’s more depressed. All things considered, Nash wins. He’s been trying to get over Rachel, but now he gets to watch her at lunch. Being all happy and laughing with her friends.

  Nash looks absolutely crushed. He looks exactly how I feel.

  “So what should I do about Derek?” I ask. I’ve already told him everything that’s been going on with Sierra. “Do you think I should talk to him more and try and get him to tell me what’s really going on? Or should I just believe him that nothing is?”

  “I think any time something’s bothering you, you should talk about it.”

  “But I did talk about it. He said nothing’s going on.”

  “So maybe nothing’s going on.”

  “But I know something is.” I pick up my water. I put it back down. “You know how sometimes you can just tell? You have a gut feeling?”

  “Then why do you have to ask?”

  He has a point. If it’s really true and I’m not just obsessing over nothing, then it’s still true whether Derek admits it or not.

  “If I were lucky enough to be Derek,” Nash says, “I would never do this to you.”

  What did he just say?

  Nash goes, “I would never even look at another girl. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  Where did all that come from? Nash must really feel bad for me. That was so sweet. And intense. He’s really . . . wow.

  I’m trying to figure out what to say. Nash takes out his iPod. He selects a song, staring at the screen, not looking at me. He has one earbud in, the other one dangling down his shirt.

  “What are you listening to?” I ask.

  “Here.” He gives me the other earbud and I put it in. I don’t know what song this is, but it’s extreme. I immediately love it. The iPod screen says it’s called “Treasure.”

  I take my earbud out. “It’s sad,” I say.

  “I know. The Cure is like that. But it always improves my mood. Misery loves company and all.”

  I never knew boys had songs that made them feel better. I always thought that was exclusively a girl thing.

  “We should probably eat something,” Nash decides.

  “I know. I feel dizzy.”

  “I feel sick.”

  We stare at our food. We’re not hungry. We push our trays away.

  “Did you hear it last night?” Linda asks some random junior at the other end of the table.

  “Dude,” he says. “I always hear it.”

  They’re obviously talking about Dirk.

  Linda’s like, “Can you believe it about Mrs. Hunter?”

  “What a load.”

  “No, it’s true. I mean, he never said she was the teacher who did it, but he was definitely talking about her.”

  “There’s no way she’d do that.”

  “So now you’re sticking up for a teacher?”

  “It was probably Tabitha’s fault. That chick is psycho.”

  They keep talking. We keep sulking.

  Nash glares at Rachel for the bajillionth time.

  I go, “Here, switch seats with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.” I yank Nash out of his seat and we switch so his back is to Rachel. I can’t stand watching him watch her. It’s heart-breaking.

  I pick up my cookie. I break off a tiny piece of the edge for me and hold the cookie out to Nash. “Want?”

  “Dude, no. If I eat anything, I’ll vomit.”

  “But you already feel sick.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  I rest my head on the table and look out the window. As if I don’t have enough to deal with, it won’t stop raining. It’s rained for three days already. Three days of wet socks and bad moods and the locker room smelling like grungy mold. The rain fluctuates between drizzle and torrential. It messes with your mind. It makes you think things will always be like this, never getting better, always letting you down right when you thought the worst was over.

  36

  A note lands on my desk in psychology elective. I turn a round to see who threw it. Julia is giving me a look.

  I hold the note under my desk so Ms. Knight doesn’t snatch it away. She’s infamous for that kind of thing. I unfold the paper slowly, so she can’t hear it crinkle. Then I peek under my desk and read it.

  There’s no way. If they’ve been talking since the last time I saw them, why hasn’t Derek told me? And how is he all of a sudden having lunch with her?

  I glance back at Julia. She does this shruggy thing with her shoulders like, Sorry to have to tell you.

  Why did she have to tell me? Unless she thought it was important. Like if she thought something was still going on between them.

  I go up to Julia after class. I’m all, “Why did you tell me this?”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Did it look like . . .” This is so embarrassing. I don’t even know her that well and I have to ask her this. “. . . they were . . . like, that something was going on?”

  Julia doesn’t say anything for a minute. She’s a nice person and I know she didn’t tell me this to hurt me. So she doesn’t want to say anything I don’t want to hear.

  “Not really,” she says. “I wasn’t sitting close enough to tell, though.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just didn’t know if you knew, so . . .”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Sorry.”

  I’m furious. The need to talk to Derek is burning me up. It will be totally impossible to think about anything else until I can talk to him and find out the truth. But I have to wait because there’s one more period left. I’m sure it was nothing.

  Except if I’m so sure, why can’t I stop thinking about it?

  The last bell rings ten years later. I bolt out of class and get to Derek’s locker way before he does.

  “Hey, sexy,” Derek goes when he finally shows up. Then he hugs me like nothing’s wrong. As if I’m the only girl he’s interested in. As i
f he didn’t just sit with Sierra at lunch.

  He doesn’t know I know. I want to see if he admits it on his own.

  “What’s up?” he says.

  “Nothing much here. How about you?”

  “You know how it goes. Same old same.”

  “So, like . . . nothing unusual happened today?”

  “Where, here? Good one!” He holds my hand and starts walking, but I don’t move. He looks back at me. The look doesn’t look scared. It looks like not only does he not know I know, but he has no intention of telling me about his lunch date. “Ready to go?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Did you . . . have lunch with Sierra?”

  “Is that what’s bothering you?” Derek laughs. “I wouldn’t call it having lunch. She just came over to my table.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Five minutes?”

  “What did she want?”

  “We were just talking, Marisa. It was nothing.”

  “Well, if it’s so nothing, then why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “Because it’s nothing!” Derek drops my hand. “There’s nothing to tell!”

  You know that feeling you get when you know you’re not hearing the whole story? Yeah. But I’ll do anything to avoid a fight. So I go, “Sorry.” I grab his hand. “I’m just being weird.”

  Derek smiles and presses his forehead against my shoulder. “Can we please forget this?”

  “Forget what?” I go. Because he’s right. I have a boyfriend who loves me. What else do I need? “I’m still coming over, right?”

  “You know it. And we have the whole place to ourselves for”—Derek holds up our attached hands and twists his wrist so he can read his watch—“two hours and thirteen minutes. If we hurry up.”

  We speed walk down the hall and karoom around the corner. And there’s Sierra, putting up a poster.

  Of course Sierra’s putting up a poster. Of course, out of all the possible people who could possibly be in the hall right now, there’s Sierra. And her poster.

  She’s all, “Hey, you guys.”

  “Hey,” we say back.

  And that’s it. No inside jokes. No secret look.

  So I’m feeling a lot better. Until we get to the end of the hall. That’s when Sierra yells, “Derek!”

  He turns around. “Yeah?”

  “Can you come here a minute?”

  Derek looks at me. “If it bothers you, I won’t go.”

  “No. Go.”

  He runs back down the hall. I watch them talking. Then, Derek takes the poster from Sierra and climbs up the ladder to hang it on the wall. She steps back to tell him if it’s straight. This takes much longer than it should. It looks straight to me, but I’m all the way over here. I can’t even hear what they’re saying.

  Derek gets off the ladder. Sierra says something to him. I watch him smile. I watch her touch his arm as he starts walking back to me, letting her hand brush along his arm as he turns away.

  I stay quiet as we walk outside. When we get to where Derek’s ride is supposed to pick us up, he’s like, “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t go home yet. I forgot . . . I have to get some stuff from the library.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll go back in with you.”

  “But then Evan won’t know where I am.”

  “So I’ll wait here and tell him you’re coming.”

  Evan pulls up in a ridiculous SUV. He only has his permit, so I don’t think he’s allowed to drive without an adult in the car. But Evan gives Derek rides home when he doesn’t feel like walking.

  “I don’t want him to have to wait.” Derek goes up to the driver’s side and tells Evan that he needs to stay late. Then he calls over to me, “Do you want a ride, or—?”

  “That’s okay.” I really don’t need some random boy illegally driving me home.

  “Later, dude,” Derek says. Evan drives off.

  And then it’s just the two of us. Deciding which way to go. Derek says, “So . . . do you still want to come in with me?” Part of me wants to go with him. Because I have this annoying feeling that he’s going back in to see Sierra. I seriously doubt he has to get anything from the library.

  But my parents have always taught me the importance of trust. And if I want this thing with Derek to work, I have to trust him.

  “No,” I decide. “I’m walking home.”

  How can it feel so perfect with someone one second, but then the next second everything’s suddenly all wrong?

  37

  Just when I thought Nash was coming out of his haze of despair, the worst thing imaginable happened to him. Rachel officially started going out with someone else. And the someone else is Edwin.

  “Wait, Edwin the massive football player?” I ask when Nash breaks the news.

  “The one and only,” Nash mumbles.

  “That’s just plain flat-out wrong.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  I grab a card before it flies away in the breeze. Nash taught me how to play Set, which is a logic card game that rocks. We’ve been hanging out a lot since Rachel broke up with Nash, playing games or just talking or doing lab reports. It’s officially spring today, which usually means winter didn’t get the memo about how it’s supposed be getting warmer, but it’s freakishly warm out and really sunny. So we decided to play Set out on the dock.

  “How did you find out?” I ask.

  “Darius told me when I ran into him at Shake Shack.”

  “Darius? Why would he care?”

  “We used to be friends before he went all ghetto on our asses, remember?”

  I totally forgot about that. Nash is a Mathlete and Darius was on the team until he dropped out. I heard that he tried to get back on when he snapped out of his rebel phase, but the coach wouldn’t let him join again. Nash and Darius used to be good friends. I know how quickly that can change.

  “It’s so stupid,” Nash complains. “What do they have in common, anyway? Rachel is way too smart for that Neanderthal to even comprehend what she’s talking about.”

  “There’s no way it’ll last.”

  “How can she even like him? I thought she had more class than that.”

  “It’s so sad.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No! It really is sad. She totally didn’t realize how lucky she was to have you.”

  Nash looks at me. It’s one of those times when I wish I could take back what I just said. Because the thing where he tried to kiss me is out there. Me knowing that he liked me is out there. Once things like that are out there, you can never take them back.

  “I have an idea,” I announce. “Let’s play Would You Rather.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not? Or do you want to play more Set?”

  Nash throws a twig into the river. We watch it swirl around. I squint at the bright sunlight twinkles on the water.

  “Or would you rather be miserable and sulky forever?”

  Nash sighs. “Fine. You start.”

  “Okay. Would you rather . . . um, let’s see . . . would you rather be in love with one person your whole life or have lots of different relationships?”

  “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Sorry, I can think of something else. Okay—”

  “No, I’ll answer it. I’d rather have relationships with tons of different girls so I could dump them whenever I felt like it and I’d never have to know this kind of pain again.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you. You’re not like that.”

  “Oh, yeah? How am I?”

  “You’re loyal. You’d never hurt anyone. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make you feel better. You’d feel horrible about it.”

  Nash smiles. “Yeah. You know me.”

  “It’s your turn.”

 
“Would you rather rule the world for one day or get to do whatever you want for a month?”

  “Are people actually going to listen to me while I’m ruling the world?”

  “Yes. You can make any laws you want.”

  “Can I make world peace a law?”

  “Yes.”

  “Deal.”

  The breeze pushes my hair back. The river sparkles all around us. I wish the Now could always be like this.

  “You’re up,” Nash says.

  “Okay . . . Would you rather have your entire bell collection get stolen or fail all of your classes for one marking period?”

  “Dude.” Nash thinks about it. “The bells would have to go.”

  “Yeah, right! You’d give up all your bells just to save your GPA for one marking period?”

  “I’d have to.”

  “That sounds like a load of hoo-larkey.”

  “Um. Hoo-larkey?”

  “Yeah. You know, like a combination of malarkey and hoo-ha.”

  “Malarkey? Throwback moment!”

  “I’m vintage like that.”

  “I know. It’s one of your best qualities.” There’s this spark of energy that passes between us and I feel like I’m not alone in the world.

  We sit on the dock for a really long time. The color of the sky fades to orange. We watch the sky reflected on the water, shifting and changing, but still being sky.

  38

  Some people are suspecting that Kelvin is Dirty Dirk. Andrea is one of those people.

  “I know it’s him,” she whispers. “Who else is like that?”

  “We don’t know Dirk’s actually like that in real life,” I whisper back.

  “I’m telling you,” she whispers fiercely, “it’s him!”

  Mr. Silverstein is working up a sweat. This tends to happen when we play faster pieces with a lot of complicated parts. He’s working with the cellos now.

  “I’m watching him,” Andrea whispers.

  “Who, Kelvin?”

  “Yeah. I’m watching for clues.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything that proves he’s Dirk!”

  Today is a full orchestra day, so the band geeks are playing with us. There’s a new kid playing the triangle this semester. He’s a freshman, so maybe he doesn’t realize how dorky it is for a boy to be playing the triangle. Or anyone, really. The girl who played the triangle last semester has moved on to the wonders of the oboe. So far, I am not impressed with the new boy. He’s so bad he makes the triangle sound out of tune. Which I didn’t even think was possible.