My Cheating Heart

by Ann Steinke

  My Cheating Heart

  Ann Steinke

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Daniel Weiss and Associates, Inc., and Ann Steinke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Alloy Entertainment. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), write to permission@alloyentertainment.com. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Reprint edition 2016

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I am so mad!” Teresa Martinez said, standing across the counter from me in Taco Bell. She’d come a little early to pick me up from work at the end of my shift. “I am so—” She took deep breaths, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her posture was ramrod straight, and her dark eyes looked as if they could shoot sparks.

  “Ter! What happened?” I asked, casting a quick look around to see if Ernesto, my manager, was on the prowl. There was no sign of him, so I turned my attention back to my best friend.

  “I am so mad I—” She heaved another chest-deep sigh. Ter tends to get emotional about a lot of things, so it was difficult for me to figure out if this was just another one of her overdramatic reactions to something. I was sure I’d find out as soon as I got off work, though.

  “I’m gonna murder someone!” she ranted.

  “Ter—” I began. She was really letting herself get carried away this time.

  “No, with my luck I’d get caught,” she went on as if she didn’t hear me.

  “Teresa Martinez!” I exclaimed, finally grabbing her attention. I wanted to laugh, but instead I turned toward the drink machine and filled a paper cup with ice and Coke. Shoving it at her, I said, “Here. Go have a Coke and calm down.”

  She made a batting motion with her hand in dismissal. “I’m not calming down. Besides, there’s caffeine in Coke and that won’t calm me down.” Her face was flushed, and her mouth turned down in a pout.

  I shook my head, and my long, straight blond hair rippled down my back. It was slipping out of the job-required ponytail. “7-up then,” I said. Placing the Coke off to the side, I prepared a cup of the clear drink and shoved it at Teresa. “Ter, just wait until I’m off work to have your nervous breakdown, okay?”

  “I don’t want to wait!” Teresa wailed. “But I guess I have to.” She made a frustrated noise deep in her throat, grabbed the drink, and said, “Go back to work. Don’t mind me. I’ll wait in the corner. And by the way, I think there’s caffeine in 7-up, too.”

  With her dark hair flying wildly, Ter flounced over to the booth farthest from the front entrance, and slid in. An old-fashioned lamp hung directly over her, casting the contours of her face in light and shadow. She reminded me of one of those charcoal drawings we used to try to do in art class. The effect showed how pretty she was. I flashed her a smile, and Ter raised her cup in mock salute. Then I promptly turned to wait on the next customer before Ernesto had a chance to say something like, “You’re not paid to chat with your friends, Miss Stevens.”

  The sleepy atmosphere of Taco Bell was made even more so by the darkness outside. Soon it would be ten o’clock, and I could get off work. I was exhausted, and as much as I loved my best friend, I wasn’t sure I had the energy to deal with her latest crisis—whatever it was. But I knew I owed Ter my full attention. After all, she had been driving me to and from work for weeks, ever since my car had broken down.

  At ten sharp, Teresa appeared like magic across the counter from me. “Come on, you gringo. Let’s get out of here,” she said, her words full of barely suppressed laughter.

  Teresa thinks it’s a real joke that I—blond and blue-eyed—work in a Mexican fast-food restaurant. She works in a shop in San Luis Obispo, selling dried flowers, both loose and in arrangements, and she often jokes that we have our jobs mixed up. “You should be downtown in SLO, and I should be out here, tossing tortillas,” she says. And I always point out that she’s stereotyping. “Remember what my mother’s always preaching,” I tell her, and Ter nods and joins in chanting with me, “Don’t lump people together.” Then we grin at each other, and she sighs and says, “You’re right.” But then, the next time, she does it all over again.

  I collected my purse, then joined Teresa out front. We exited the small building and stepped into the cool night. I followed Teresa to her battered old Chevy Malibu and sat next to her in the front seat.

  “So, what’s up?” I asked.

  “I want you to be the first to know,” Ter said seriously. “I’m done with guys. I’m through with the suckers. . . . Hey! This is serious. It’s not funny. Why are you laughing?”

  My chest hurt as I struggled to stifle my laughter. “Oh, Ter! You must say that six times a month. What happened?”

  “That creep Carlos. I practically poured my lifeblood out for him, helping him with his English essay for summer school. You should have heard the way he pulled on my heartstrings, with this business about how he’d get axed from the football team this year if he didn’t pass English. He had to do really well on his essay, so I—like a dope—wrote practically the whole thing for him. That louse took it from me like that—” She snapped her fingers to illustrate. “Then he never spoke to me again.”

  I tried to think of something suitably comforting to say, but Ter went on before I had a chance to get a word in.

  “I saw him today when he and a bunch of his buddies were out cruising on Higuera Street. So I asked how he did. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I passed. Did great. Got a C in the class. A C, mind you! Big deal. So I asked him about the essay. ‘Yeah, that was great. I got a B+ on that.’ He got the B+! I wrote the thing! And did I get any credit? No. Did he ever say thanks? No! I’m so mad at that creep. . . .”

  I let Teresa mutter on, but as she did, I reached over, took her keys out of her purse, and put them in the ignition. Then I started the car and pointed it down the street. Without missing a beat Teresa put the car in gear, and the thing lurched forward and moved fairly smoothly out of the parking lot onto Olive Street.

  “. . . and I tell you, he must have told his buddies all about me, because I swear they were laughing at me! So that’s it. I don’t care if the next guy that comes along looks like he’s straight out of Hollywood, I’m not gonna be impressed. And I’m gonna seriously look into becoming a nun!” Teresa took a breath and looked at me. “I mean it,” she said decisively.

  “Sure,” I said. “Look, I have to pick up some milk for Mom on the way home, okay?”

  Teresa shook her head, making her heavy brown hair fan out over her shoulders. Her dark eyes snapped in anger. “You don’t believe me,” she said, throwing me an accusing look. “Why don’t you believe me?” She wrenched the wheel sharply, and we flew around the corner, following the signs for Highway 101.

  I tried to stabilize myself by holding on to the door handle
more tightly “Because you’ve said you’re done with guys too many times before,” I answered. “You said that after you broke up with Chris Ortega, and after Daniel Lopez left you for that out-of-town girl, and . . .”

  “Okay, okay! Shut up,” Ter said, but I heard a hint of laughter in her voice. She screeched down the ramp and whipped onto the southbound lane of 101. Then she started muttering again. “Maybe that rat would have been nicer to me if I’d lost some weight.”

  “Ter! You’re fine. You’re gorgeous!” I said, launching into my familiar counterargument. Physically, Ter and I are opposites. She has a figure that can be called lush, while I’m built more on the line of a drinking straw. And we had contrasting personalities, too. One of our ninth-grade teachers once said, “You are two of the most unlikely friends I’d ever hope to see.” But why should differences rule out friendships? I had argued. Why couldn’t differences make a friendship richer and more interesting? I never look at our differences as divisive factors. I look at them as comic relief—a never-ending source of amusement.

  I think it’s funny, for example, the way Teresa uses as a mirror any surface smooth enough to reflect her image. She’s forever checking to see if she looks okay. Is her hair wild and all over the place, or just right? Is her mascara running or flaking off? Is her lipstick smeared? Do her clothes make her look fat?

  I, on the other hand, can walk by rows of cosmetic counters and never pause to look at myself. And I stopped wearing lipstick to school a long time ago because I always eat it off by the end of second period anyway. And my hair is perfectly straight, so there’s nothing I need to check in a mirror. But Teresa can’t even walk in a straight line if she sees something shiny off to the side.

  The glare of the headlights from an approaching car illuminated the masses of almost-black hair fluffing out behind Teresa’s head. Teresa has hair that can be weighed in pounds. I have hair that can be weighed in ounces. “You want to lose weight?” I said jokingly. “Get a haircut.”

  Teresa groaned out loud. “Is it really that bad? Do I need a cut?”

  “Oh, Ter!” I lamented. I should never have made a joke about her hair. I know how she takes everything to heart.

  We were approaching the city limits of Pismo Beach. In the fog, all the street lights seemed to have halos around them. It’s often cool and foggy at night on the California central coast. The sun might shine all day long, but when it finally sets, the air becomes cool, and the fog rolls in from its parking spot on the ocean.

  “Take the Marsh exit,” I instructed Ter. “I’ll grab Mom’s milk.”

  She roared down the off ramp, brought the car to a barely civilized semistop, and zipped down the main drag. Teresa’s driving was on the wild side, so I always rode with my feet securely planted underneath the dashboard, and my left arm crossed over my chest so that I can hang on to the door handle with both hands. Two seconds later, I pointed to a spot on the curb in front of the Quick Stop convenience store. “Pull over there, and I’ll just jump out and run in,” I told her.

  “No way,” she replied. “It’s late at night. I’ll go with you. You could get mugged out there all by yourself.”

  “Ter, we could both get mugged.”

  “Yeah, but it wouldn’t be so easy. One of us could always hit the assailant over the head with my purse.”

  “All right, Teresa. You win,” I said, laughing. I wouldn’t have been able to stop her anyway. And she was probably right about that purse. Since it seemed to contain her entire cosmetics collection, along with a zillion other things she thinks she’s going to need, it weighed a ton. Still, Ter’s only five four, and I wasn’t sure she actually had the strength to use that purse as a weapon.

  The Quick Stop was one of those small but incredibly packed stores where things are stacked literally to the ceiling. The off-white floors gleamed underfoot. The glass doors of the refrigerated sections were smudgeless. Whoever was in charge of the store obviously had high standards. As I entered the store, Ter grabbed my wrist, pulling me to an abrupt halt.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, turning toward her.

  “Oh, why didn’t I take off those five pounds I was gonna lose before school began?” she grumbled. She fluffed out her pounds of hair, then tugged at her blouse.

  “Ter, the aisles aren’t that narrow,” I teased and tried to move on. Ter’s fingers clutched my arm tighter.

  “Look at those two hunks,” she said, pulling me closer.

  I followed her line of vision. There were two guys down the aisle from us. One obviously worked there, because he was taking things out of a large carton and setting them on a shelf. The other, a tall sandy-haired guy, was slouched against the shelving unit, talking to his friend. Whatever he was saying must have been funny, because although the dark-haired guy was facing away from us, I could see his shoulders shaking from laughter.

  “Those are the guys for us,” Teresa whispered. “The dark one’s mine. You can have the Nordic type.”

  “Yeah? And what if I want the dark one?” I said just to tease. Ter frowned at me as though she wasn’t sure if I was being serious. I grinned and shook a finger at her. “There you go, lumping again,” I said in a scolding tone.

  “Hhhh,” she grunted, grabbing at my finger. “Well, you have to admit. You and the tall one kind of look alike. You’d make a nice couple.”

  Now I was getting irritated. “Ter, what has looking alike got to do with it? You and I are great friends, and we don’t look anything like each other. In fact, being from different backgrounds is kind of neat.”

  Ter just shrugged and grinned. “Don’t lecture me. Just let me gaze at him!” she said, turning to do just that.

  “Ter, you really are impossible!” I said, forcefully pulling her with me over to the dairy section. “You just got through telling me that you’re going to be a nun.”

  “But that was before I saw that great-looking guy.”

  “Yeah, and you said it wouldn’t matter if you met someone straight out of Hollywood,” I reminded her. I reached over and snagged a carton of skim milk from the shelf, all the while holding on to her wrist.

  Teresa craned her neck around to see the two guys, and squirmed to release herself from my grip. “When did you decide to take what I say seriously?” she asked, successfully pulling away from me. She positioned herself a little closer to the guys, and a deep sigh of appreciation escaped her lips. “Besides, he’s better than anything out of Hollywood.” I came over and snatched her away from the scene.

  “How do you know he’s great-looking?” I objected. “He was turned the other way.”

  “Buns. Great buns,” Teresa said, ignoring the groan rising deep in my throat. “I wonder what his name is. I know I’ve seen those buns before.”

  I rolled my eyes and tucked the carton of milk under an arm. “I don’t know how I ended up with such a boy-crazy friend,” I teased.

  “And I don’t know how I ended up with one who’s unconscious,” Teresa returned.

  I headed toward the checkout counter, dragging Teresa along with me. As we passed the end of the aisle where we had seen the two guys, we both paused to look. Now the one with dark hair was turned more toward us. We could see his profile and the full-face view of the blond guy. Both guys were good-looking. The blonde looked a good four to five inches taller than his friend. The dark-haired one looked Chicano, like Teresa, although he had a narrower face than most of the Mexican-Americans I know. Maybe he wasn’t all Mexican.

  “Come on,” I urged. “Those two look like the types who have strings of girls hanging on them. And I have to get home. Tomorrow’s the first day of school, and I’m beat.”

  “You’re right. I’ll bet they’re just like Carlos,” Teresa said in a rare moment of clear thinking. “I gotta listen to myself.”

  “Right,” I said. “From now on, every time you look at a guy, just keep saying ‘Carlos, Carlos’ over and over again, like a chant. It’ll keep you out of trouble.” I paid the man b
ehind the counter for the milk. He was Chicano, like the guy stocking shelves.

  He smiled at us. “Have a good night, girls.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled back, and then towed Teresa, who was entertaining second thoughts about giving up men, out of the store and over to her car, where I practically stuffed her behind the steering wheel.

  “Come on, you flirt,” I said indulgently. “Let’s get home. We need our sleep if we’re going to face the first day of our senior year tomorrow.”

  “Flirt!” Teresa objected, scandalized. Then the second part of my speech seemed to sink in. “Senior year,” Ter echoed. “Only one more year, and we’ll get sprung from prison! I can’t wait.”

  I just smiled at her and sighed, laying my head against the top of the seat back. Ter had to be one of the most resilient, positive people I knew. She hadn’t had it easy with guys in the past, but she quickly got over the bad experiences to seek out the good ones. I thought about how rotten Chris and Daniel had treated her. She had entered those relationships so trustingly, but neither of the guys had really been serious about dating her. In fact, both had dated other girls at the same time without telling her. And Ter always seemed to throw herself into relationships with her whole heart, sometimes forgetting to use her head.

  I sat up and looked at Ter. “Listen, Ter,” I said earnestly. “Someday a guy’s going to walk into your life, and he’ll be the one. He’ll like you for who you are—not how he can use you. He’ll be better than all the guys who’ve hurt you in the past. He’ll make you forget all about them. I just know it.”

  For once, Teresa didn’t argue. Maybe she wanted to believe me so much that she was shoving down any thoughts she might have had about the likelihood of my prophecy.

  My own experience with boys has been pretty run of the mill. I’ve dated about four guys since ninth grade, but none of them made me fall madly in love. They were nice; just not special. Ter thinks it’s because I have perfectionist tendencies. Well, maybe I do, but at least I haven’t been hurt like she has.