My Cheating Heart

by Ann Steinke

  The guys laughed, then Scott turned to me again. “So where were you for two years?” he asked.

  “I was in Seattle,” I answered. “My family had to move there for business reasons, but my Mom missed this area so much, we finally moved back just this last July.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, nodding. “So what are you, a junior or a senior?”

  “We’re seniors,” I said. “You?”

  “Yup. It’s our last year, too, thank God,” Scott said. “I have a feeling this is going to be a bummer of a year.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what’s your problem?” Lou put in. “We’re top of the heap this year.”

  Scott grinned. “There is that, but unfortunately, this is also the year I have to start seriously thinking about college and getting good scores on the SATs in October.” He grimaced. “You’d think with two parents who were dropouts in the sixties, I’d get a break. But no. Somewhere along the line they got a social conscience, and now they think I’m supposed to make up for all the things they didn’t do right—like take education seriously.”

  I laughed. “I know what you mean. My parents were sixties people too, but you’d never know it. We live like supernormal people,” I said with suitable disgust.

  “Well, at least I can’t say we live like normal people,” Scott said.

  “No? Why’s that?” I prompted.

  “My dad runs the Surf City shop in Arroyo Village, and Mom’s got a used-book store on Grande Avenue,” he said.

  “Not Secondhand Rows?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “Have you been there?”

  “Not much, but my dad really likes it,” I said. “The woman who runs it is helping him find stuff for his collection of Louis L’Amour westerns. Is that your mom?”

  “Always dressed in tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans?”

  I laughed, nodding. “That’s the one. Hey, she’s nice.”

  Scott smiled. “Yeah, she’ll do.”

  I was really enjoying this conversation, and I wanted to keep it going, but then I glanced at my watch. “Um, Ter, it’s late,” I said tentatively. Ter had to get to work. And since she was my transportation, we had to get going so she could drop me off at my house in time to make it into downtown SLO.

  “Ugh,” Ter said, grimacing. She smiled apologetically at Lou. “We’re gainfully employed, and I guess we’d better get going if we’re gonna to stay that way.”

  Lou glanced at his watch, looking surprised and annoyed at the same time. “Oh, yeah, so are we.” He sent a look at Scott. “I have to get going or my dad’ll get on my case. See you tonight?”

  “Yeah.” Scott nodded and fished in his pocket, pulling out a set of keys. He looked at Ter and me. “I guess we all have to get going. We’ll see you tomorrow?”

  From the way they were showing interest in Ter and me, maybe they didn’t have flocks of girls after all, I thought. I slid a look at Teresa. She seemed to be mesmerized. “Yeah. See you tomorrow,” I said, nudging Ter.

  I took Ter by the elbow and quickly steered her toward the parking lot. She got into the car and drove out of the parking lot without saying a word. But as soon as we got on the road, she honked her horn ten times and squealed a sound of pure joy.

  “Ter!” I said in surprise. “What are you trying to do, get us arrested for disturbing the peace?” I shook my head and laughed at her. Her emotions were so infectious that I couldn’t help but feel incredibly high too.

  “I can’t believe it!” she shouted. “Those hunks picked us out of the whole orchestra. Us!” Disbelief colored her every syllable. “Didn’t they seem nice?” she asked, her dark eyes shining.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “They did seem nice. Not at all what I would’ve expected.”

  “Why? What did you expect?” she asked, confused.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I didn’t really think about it.”

  “Well, I did! As soon as I saw Lou in orchestra, I just knew he was different.”

  “Different? How?” I asked.

  Ter shrugged. “Well, I figured that if he was in orchestra, that meant he was a musician,” she began. “And you know how they say artists and musicians are these tortured sensitive types?”

  I tried to stifle my laughter. “Ter, did those two look like they were tortured?”

  “You know what I mean!” she said impatiently. “If they’re musicians, then they must have a gentle side, a tender side, a more sensitive personality. It just works that way.”

  “It does?” My tone was full of barely disguised mirth. Ter’s a nut. That’s why I love her so much. Any time I’m in danger of taking life too seriously, Ter comes along and brings out the craziness of it all.

  “It does,” Ter said firmly. Then she threw me a look that told me I’d better not say anything more. “And besides that,” Ter continued, “he’s not just a musician, he’s a drummer! Lou’s perfect for me. I’m done with all those muscle-bound macho types.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from pointing out that Lou seemed to be working toward becoming a muscle-bound type. Maybe not macho, though, I reflected, remembering how embarrassed he actually seemed about admitting that he worked out.

  “And another thing,” Ter went on. “They’re musicians and we’re musicians. Don’t you remember what we used to wish for, Krista? Can you think of a better reason for us to become couples?”

  I burst out laughing and looked at Ter with affection. When we were in junior high we used to sit on the steps of Ter’s house, baby-sitting her little brother, Ricardo, who’s six years younger than us. While he ran around like a wild child, torturing neighborhood girls and roughhousing with the boys, Ter and I would spend hours dreaming up the criteria for our perfect boyfriends. We were like engineers, planning a dam. Our requirements had been precise and unbending. We had wanted our boyfriends to be reasonably good-looking. They also had to be intelligent and have a good sense of humor. And we really, really wanted them to have an interest in music, like we did. The idea of all four of us playing music together had just seemed so neat to our twelve-year-old minds. I hadn’t cared what instrument my guy would play, but Ter had been more specific. “Drummers are always energetic people,” she would say. “They seem so full of life. I definitely want a drummer.” But our toughest demand was that our ideal boys had to be friends with each other, so we could date as a foursome. Of course, when you’re twelve, you think this is something that can be easily achieved. But in reality, Ter and I learned later, boys don’t necessarily like to run in coed quartets.

  “No,” I agreed indulgently. “No, I can’t.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  After orchestra the next day, Ter and I were chatting with Cathy as we exited the room. When we got out into the hall, we spotted her twin brother, Gavin, talking to Scott and Lou. We approached their group, and I noticed that Lou seemed to be in a particularly upbeat mood.

  “Man, that is the best way to end the day,” he said with a huge smile on his face. “Doing music.”

  Scott made a sour face. “Right. Orchestra. B-o-r-i-n-g.”

  “Why boring?” I asked, jumping into the discussion.

  Scott turned to look at me, then grinned. “’Cause I’d rather do rock than Bach.”

  We all laughed, then Cathy sidled up to her brother. “Hey,” she said, touching him on the shoulder. “We have to go straight home tonight, remember?”

  Gavin seemed slightly irritated. “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he said. “We have to take my mom up to see my grandmother,” he said to the group. “So I guess I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  “Bye!” Cathy said with a wave.

  Brother and sister left, and the four of us stood around, looking at each other awkwardly. Finally Lou spoke and tried to pick up the previous conversation from where they left off. “Well, you get your chance to do rock at my place on some nights,” he said to Scott. “We can play whatever music we li
ke then.”

  “You guys play drums and the cello at home?” I asked with interest.

  The guys laughed, then Lou explained. “No, we play a lot of different instruments. I play the drums, keyboard, and acoustical guitar.” He nodded in Scott’s direction. “And he plays both electric and acoustical guitar. He just learned the cello so he could be in orchestra with me in ninth grade.”

  “Why did I ever listen to you?” Scott said, half in jest.

  “Because I wanted someone to join me in my misery,” Lou responded.

  “Misery?” Ter said. “If orchestra’s so bad, why did you join?”

  Lou turned his warm brown eyes on Ter. “Well, it’s like this. For a long time I was a self-taught musician, and joining orchestra seemed like a good way to get free lessons.”

  “And, man, he needed them,” Scott teased.

  Lou grinned at him and continued his explanation. “My folks can’t afford music lessons—not with four kids in the family,” he said. “Like when my sister, Magdalena, wanted to learn the piano, she had to spend her own hard-earned dollars on a portable keyboard. Then she had to learn the technique herself.”

  “Yeah,” Scott put in, laughing. “Then Mr. Perfect came along, and she married him and lost interest in the keyboard.”

  “Right,” Lou said. “So I got it.” He laughed, then went on. “And lucky for me, my brother Raul wanted to be another Richie Valens on the guitar, until real life knocked on the door in the form of Miss Perfect. . . . And now he’s a married man with kids.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, smiling. “You got a guitar out of it.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  “And the drums?” Ter prompted.

  Lou was silent, and a shadow crossed over his face. I glanced over at Scott. He looked uncomfortable too. After a while, Lou said simply, “My other brother, Roberto, left them behind when he . . . moved out.”

  I immediately sensed a tightness in his voice and I made a mental note not to bring up the subjects of drums or his brother ever again. Ter had a puzzled look on her face, but she didn’t say anything.

  “So, do you two play anything but violins?” Lou asked, suddenly very upbeat.

  “You bet we do,” Ter answered proudly. “I play the piano, and Krista plays acoustical guitar. And sometimes we have jam sessions together at her house or mine.”

  Scott brightened. “Hey, you know what?” he said excitedly. “With all these instruments, we could play together. We could form a band of our own.”

  “Yeah,” Lou agreed. He looked at Teresa, smiling broadly. “We could switch off on the keyboard,” he suggested to her.

  “Or play a duet,” Scott suggested.

  “Yeah!” Ter exclaimed. She smiled at Lou, trying not to look too eager. If I hadn’t been her best friend, I wouldn’t have known how she was feeling. But I was, and I did know. She was fit to be held down by ropes to keep her from floating off.

  The guys began walking toward the senior lockers, and without really thinking about it, Ter and I followed. The layout of our school is typical of California: all the classroom doors lead directly outside, and most of the lockers are spread out along the open-air walkways. The senior lockers, however, are located indoors, in one of the school’s nicer wings. One of the special privileges of being a senior, I guess.

  So we were headed toward the senior lockers, with Scott talking very seriously about the four of us forming a band. He wanted us all to get together sometime soon, so that we could hear each other play and determine whether we sounded good enough to get gigs. The more he talked, the better it sounded.

  After a couple of minutes, Lou and Ter dropped back to walk together behind me and Scott. I glanced over my shoulder and thought they looked so good together. I hoped this would work out for Ter. I really wanted someone to like her the way she deserved to be liked. And Lou somehow seemed like the perfect guy for her. I had sat with Ter through a lot of crying sessions—even on the phone, long-distance, when I lived in Seattle—and I knew how vulnerable she was. Though she always recovered from her ordeals and heartaches quickly, the pain she had inside never really went away. I didn’t want Lou to cause her more pain.

  “So what do you think?” Scott asked as I paused next to my locker.

  “Well . . .” I began.

  “Hey, how did you get one on the top?” he said, referring to my locker. “I thought the people in the office never gave tall people the high lockers.”

  Our lockers were tiny, practically useless compartments, stacked three high. I giggled. “I see you’ve noticed the same thing I have. Sometimes I think the person who assigns lockers looks at each student’s statistics, then chooses the worst possible locker position. So we end up with low ones for tall people—”

  “And high ones for short people,” Scott said, laughing.

  “Right,” I said. “So when Ter got her original locker assignment, she had one on the top row. And I had one on the lowest row. So we simply switched—I learned her combination, she learned mine, and now we’re both happy.”

  Scott looked at Lou and smiled. “Amigo, I’d like to make a deal with you.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Lou said, pretending to be wary. “You want my combination.”

  “You guys have the same problem we did?” Ter asked.

  “Yep. But soon we’ll have that problem solved, right, amigo?” Scott joked.

  Lou smiled and shook his head slowly. “No chance, buddy,” he said. “I may not be as tall as you, but I’m not that short.”

  We all laughed, then Scott shrugged and turned back to me. “So, when do you think we can all get together and play some music?” he asked.

  He was obviously serious about forming a band, and I didn’t quite know what to say. I mean, the four of us had met only the day before. “I’ll have to think about it,” I said, looking up at him. “You know . . . look at my work schedule and all.”

  “Good enough,” he said affably. He punched Lou on the arm. “Hey, amigo. We’d better hit the road if we’re going to make it to SLO on time.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lou said, his eyes still on Ter. He had been talking to her about something, and he’d seemed to be giving her his total attention.

  “We’ll catch you guys tomorrow,” Scott said, smiling at me.

  “Mañana,” Lou said with a wave.

  I turned to Ter. She looked as if she were going to burst out of her skin. I could tell she was trying to keep herself in check until the guys were out of sight; she had her mouth clamped shut to keep back the laughter. We couldn’t get off campus fast enough. We grabbed our stuff from our lockers, then raced to her car.

  As soon as we dropped into the front seats, Ter screamed. “Oh, I cannot believe it!” Then, once she had calmed down a bit, she asked, “Am I crazy, or does it look like Lou likes me?”

  “You’re not crazy,” I assured her. “It does look like he likes you. And you guys make a great-looking couple.”

  “So do you and Scott,” she said. “You’re both blond and tall and gorgeous.”

  “Stop, Ter! My head’s swelling,” I said, pretending to hold my skull in. “But seriously, Ter,” I added earnestly. “I hope this is the one.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “I hope Lou’s the guy I told you was going to come along some day.”

  “Oh, I hope he is too,” Ter said fervently. For a minute, she just sat there, staring dreamily out the windshield. “He really seems special,” she said. “I can feel it. You know, when I talk to him, he looks like he’s really listening. Not like that creep Carlos—Carlos just wanted me to be quiet and decorative.” Ter started the car, put it in gear, then gave me a mischievous look. “You know, the four of us really could form a band—you and Scott, me and Lou. We’d be two couples making great music.” She laughed delightedly, throwing her head back. “Krista, can’t you just see it?”

  “Maybe,” I said, not feeling quite as enthusiastic as Ter. It was a great idea to form a band, but Ter was already makin
g Scott and me into a couple, and I really wasn’t sure that was what I wanted.

  My mother is trying to train me to be a good cook. One night a week she teaches me how to prepare all kinds of food. When I got home that evening, Mom announced that it was time for another cooking lesson.

  “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll be down in two minutes.”

  I ran up to my room to change, and when I came down to the kitchen, my mother was busy studying a cookbook on the counter in front of her. She had it propped up in one of those Lucite cookbook holders, the kind that keeps the opened book behind plastic so you won’t spill on the pages. I don’t know why she even bothered. She never spills anything. Anyway, she’d decided that we would cook French that night—homemade French onion soup.

  Before long, Mom was patiently showing me the correct way of putting the cheese on fat slices of French bread. I was looking at her, but my eyes weren’t seeing anything. Instead, I kept picturing two guys and Ter and me playing in a band. Ever since Scott had come up with the idea after school, it was all I could think about. Could we really become a band? Would we be good enough to actually get paid to play at dances and things? Ter and I had our own personal jam sessions sometimes, but so far only our families had heard us play. They hadn’t covered their ears when they heard us, so I figured we probably weren’t all that bad. But were we good? I wondered.

  “You’re awfully spacey tonight,” my mother said, sounding annoyed. “Here, let me have the measuring cup.”

  I relinquished the glass cup to her. “Mom, I don’t see why we have to measure every time. Why can’t we just estimate how much a quarter cup of grated cheese is?”

  “I could,” she said. “But you can’t. You need to measure many, many times before you can begin estimating things. That’s the point of this whole exercise.” Her tone implied that she had told me this a thousand times, and she had.

  “Okay,” I said, watching her measure out the first portion of cheese and place it very precisely on a piece of bread floating in onion soup. I looked around the kitchen, which had all the culinary touches she’d demanded: granite counter tops, a six-burner stainless-steel stove, and a center island with a built-in coupling for her food processor and blender. In one corner of the kitchen stood an appliance garage containing a toaster, a crock pot, and a can opener. I wasn’t sure I liked such absolute precision and order. I lean more toward a cluttered existence, which is probably why my mother had suddenly decided to teach me how to use the kitchen. Maybe she hoped to override my natural tendency to be a little bit messy by teaching me only the neat, organized way to do everything.