Live Through This

by Mindi Scott

  Jacob says, “Can we have a Star Wars marathon someday at our house for Reece?”

  “We’ll see,” Mom mutters.

  But Tony says, “Sure. And I can show you my vinyls, too, while you’re over. I’ve got jazz. I’ve got classical. I’ve got it all.”

  “That sounds cool,” Reece says, nodding.

  I have no idea what I missed while I was showering and getting ready, but everything’s backward here: Tony’s being nice to Reece, Mom’s mad at everyone, and I don’t want to look at my brother.

  “I’m going to pack now,” I say, pushing my chair out.

  • • •

  Downstairs, I throw all my bathroom stuff into my small bag. I head to the bedroom and strip off all the bedding for housekeeping. I set my suitcases open on the bed. The sooner I finish packing, the sooner I can escape this place for good.

  I pull clothes from the drawers, the closet, the floor and throw them in my suitcase. I toss shoes, books, magazines into the mix. Whatever I see, I grab. Faster, faster, faster.

  I hear someone coming down the stairs and then Bryan’s voice behind me. “Hey.”

  My chest constricts. “What?” I ask, without turning, without slowing down.

  “Look, I wanted to tell you, C. I’m really sorry.”

  My arms fall to my sides and my shoulders sink. I can’t look at him. I don’t want to talk about it. Only once has he ever admitted to anything out loud. It was during a tickle fight when I was thirteen and he was seventeen. I kept shrieking and panting while he was holding me down and he made some joke about me having an orgasm. When I asked what that meant, he said, “Trust me, you know.”

  Later, I looked up the definition and he was right; I’d known for quite a while.

  Bryan speaks again. “The way I was acting at the restaurant was so out of line. You should never have had to deal with that. I’m going to make it up to you. I swear.”

  I turn slowly and stare at him, blinking, blinking, blinking to keep the moisture in my eyes from forming into real tears. His apology is for what he did at the restaurant?

  He looks at the carpet. “So. I guess you’re riding back today with Reece?”

  A tear trickles down my cheek. Then another. I swipe them away with the back of my hand. “I doubt it. Mom’s mad—”

  “Yeah, I heard her. Just get your permission letter out of my car, and you guys leave when I leave. She isn’t going to cause a scene in front of him.”

  Bryan meets my gaze and we study each other for a long moment before he goes back to watching the floor. He remembers everything; I’m sure of it now. But why does he want me to go with Reece? To help “make it up to” me? Or because he doesn’t want to be around me any more than I want to be around him?

  He doesn’t give an explanation. He doesn’t give me anything. He just goes to his room with his head still down.

  I push my door shut and lean against it, ruining my makeup as I sob quietly into my hands.

  CHAPTER 18

  About five hours before the scheduled start of the Crowne family’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a cosmetics-counter lady at the mall is painting lipstick stripes on the back of my hand. Long ago, Alejandra and I learned the hard way that makeup tested on our hands doesn’t always look the same on our faces, but this woman seems too distracted by all the customers gathered around her booth to actually let me take the time to try any on my lips.

  “All of these work with your skin tone,” she says in a rush. “The Stellar Plum will be especially nice.”

  I’m unconvinced; I already told her that what I’m looking for is something to go with the red dress that I’m wearing tonight.

  A girl’s voice calls out from behind me. “Coley Sterling, is it really you?”

  I turn, and Ming is stepping around people. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail that shows off her amethyst earrings from Xander and she has on a huge smile.

  I wave at her, and then say to the saleswoman across the counter, “I’m going to have to think about this.”

  She hands me a tissue without a word, and I quickly wipe off my hand, step aside for the next customer, and head over to Ming who’s waiting near a perfume case.

  “What a surprise, seeing you here,” I say, returning her smile. “You’d think we planned it or something.”

  She grips my arm as I get close. “Oh, my gosh, Coley!”

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry.” She loosens her hold. “It’s just that I’ve been dying to talk to you about Xander and me. How much time do you have?”

  I’ve been grounded for the past five days—ever since Reece dropped me off after the Whistler trip—so I haven’t been able to go anywhere or hang out with anyone. My life lately has been all about homework, watching TV with the triplets, and sending thousands of texts. This last-minute mall trip with Mom before the big party tonight is the first time she’s allowed me to step outside of the house, even though I’m not exactly speaking to her.

  “I have only as long as it will take for my mom to get her hair and eyebrows done,” I say. “Tell me about you and Xander.”

  “Okay. We”—Ming lowers her voice to a near-whisper—“did it.”

  “It?” I ask.

  She nods. “It.”

  I don’t know how to respond. The only time I’ve ever had a friend confide in me about this type of thing—aside from Truth or Dare—was Alejandra at that Saturday dance practice in October.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” Ming asks.

  “Of course. Just not exactly right here.” I look around and pull her to the escalator. We run to the top and rush into the ladies’ lounge. Luckily, the sofa is free. “So was it something you hadn’t done before?” I ask as we throw ourselves down.

  “Neither of us had,” she says. “But now we have!”

  “Yay!” We bounce up and down on the couch together, until I realize what we’re doing. “Okay, this is just wrong.”

  “What? This?” She gets up on her knees and bounces faster and harder, grinning while I’m jostled all over the cushions and my legs hit against my bag on the floor. “For the past eight days, this is exactly what I’ve wanted to do,” she says. “Jump on a couch and yell, ‘My boyfriend and I had sex!’ ”

  “Will! You! Stop!” I shriek, unable to hold in my laughter.

  It amazes me how genuinely happy she is about this. Nothing at all like how Alejandra was.

  “Okay, okay.” Ming puts her feet back down and folds her hands over her lap. “In case you wondered, he didn’t actually go that fast. Not until the final seconds, I mean.”

  “Ming!”

  She bursts out laughing, and I can’t help joining in, even though my face is getting hotter and hotter, thinking about the intensity of “the final seconds.”

  “I seriously don’t need to hear those details,” I say.

  “You don’t? Not even, like, positions or how long it lasted—”

  “No!”

  “Wow. You’re letting me off easy.” Her voice is tinged with disappointment. “I went to a movie with Dia and Kimber, and they pretty much wanted me to draw a diagram to scale. I didn’t, though, because there was no way I was going to boink and tell to them.”

  Ming wants me to be excited and interested. She seems to need for me to be. “Okay,” I say, faking it a little. “Give me one detail. Was it romantic like in a movie or was it embarrassing?”

  She smiles. “Both. Romantic because it was with him. Embarrassing because of everything else about it. Just the first time, though.”

  My phone chimes with a new text, but I ignore it. There’s no way my mom could be looking for me already. She isn’t big on texting anyway; she’ll call when she’s ready. “There was more than one time?”

  Ming nods. “The night after Christmas and again two days ago.”

  The door between the lounge and the bathroom opens and a woman and a little girl come out together. Ming and I pause our conversation until they pass through. “
And the second time was better?” I ask.

  “Yes!” She smiles big. “Way, way, way better.”

  “Does that mean that you . . . ?”

  I trail off, not sure of the best way to phrase it.

  “That I what?” She tilts her head. “Ohhh. You’re wondering about the Big O?”

  Now my face feels like it’s on fire. “No. I’m wondering about Kimber and Dia. How are they? What movie did you see?”

  “Let me try to remember,” she says, tapping her cheek with her fingertip. “Oh, yeah. It was that new one called ‘No, I didn’t have an orgasm, but thank you for asking.’ ”

  I didn’t actually ask, but she guessed correctly what I was wondering about. Why would I wonder about that? “I’m sorry. That was way too nosy, wasn’t it?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t mind with you. But there’s a lot that I didn’t want to tell Dia and Kimber, so this all has to stay between us, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say cautiously.

  She lets out a loud breath. “So you know how people always say that your first time is all pain and gore?”

  I nod, even though I’ve never actually heard it described in quite that way.

  “So I was prepared,” Ming says. “But what no one ever told me about is, you know, the parts and the fact that they don’t just slip into place. There’s, like, angles to work out. We couldn’t, um, get it in. And we both wanted to die of embarrassment. At one point, we looked at each other and started laughing hysterically because there was nothing else to do.”

  I’ve never heard of this angle thing, either. “Obviously, you figured it out, though.”

  Ming’s phone beeps. “Eventually,” she says. “The second time was way, way, way better because we had a better idea what to do.” She takes her phone out and looks at the screen. “And look! A text from my hot boyfriend. He and Brody are on their way to the food court. Do you still have time?”

  I check my phone to make sure. Just as I suspected, the text from a couple of minutes ago wasn’t from Mom.

  Piper: Can you do me a super HUGE favor and help me put my hair up before the party? Pleeeeeease?

  “I still have time,” I tell Ming.

  She types back to Xander, and I send a quick response to let Piper know that I’ll be there an hour early to style her hair.

  As we head out of the lounge, Ming says, “They’re at the other end of the mall, so I told Xander we’ll find a table and he and Brody can meet us there.”

  “Oh, great. It just occurred to me that I’m now going to have to see your boyfriend after the things I’ve heard.”

  She laughs and we step onto the escalator behind a big family. “That’s how I felt about seeing him after the first time. I got over it, though.” She lowers her voice. “I’ve been teasing him that we should have watched porn first so that we wouldn’t have been so clueless.”

  “Too much information!” I cover my ears. “Between your and Alejandra’s horror stories, I’m not sure that I ever want to . . . you know.”

  “It won’t be like that if your first time’s with Reece,” Ming says. “But speaking of Alejandra—has it ever occurred to you that maybe she wasn’t into that guy? That she only went out with him to make you jealous?”

  I think back to this past summer at camp, to the night that Derrick first kissed Alejandra. When she came back to our room and told me about it afterward, she’d seemed worried about how I was going to take the news, but mostly she’d seemed excited that he felt the same way about her that she felt about him.

  “Alejandra was totally in love with Derrick,” I say as we reach the main level and head toward the mall corridor. “Her decision to go out with him had nothing to do with me.”

  Ming shrugs. “You know her a lot better than I do. But, I mean, how dramatic is she? Breaking up with someone she supposedly loved because her first time wasn’t as good as she wanted it to be? I could never have done that to Xander.”

  “Maybe Derrick didn’t watch porn either, and Alejandra just took it more personally than you did?”

  She gives me a small push, and I laugh as if I really don’t care. Honestly, though, this conversation with Ming has made me more confused than ever about why Alejandra did what she did.

  • • •

  At the food court, Ming and I find an empty table for four and sit across from each other. “When’s Reece coming back from Portland?” she asks.

  “Not until Sunday night. Just in time to go back to school on Monday.”

  She chews her fingernail. “You won’t tell him all that stuff I told you, right?”

  “About you and Xander? Of course not.”

  “And . . . you won’t tell Xander?”

  I burst out laughing at that. “I can’t imagine any circumstance ever that would get your boyfriend and me talking about that.”

  “But if it came up somehow, you’d keep quiet? I don’t want to embarrass him.”

  “My lips are sealed forever and ever. I promise.”

  “Promise what?” Xander asks.

  “Oh!” Ming yelps. “You’re here!”

  “I thought you were expecting me?” he says, smiling down at her. “Or did someone else send me that text?”

  Brody takes the seat next to me and immediately pulls out his phone, while Ming grabs Xander’s hand and has him sit beside her. She bulges her eyes at me as if to ask if I think they heard anything. I don’t think so, but I keep my expression blank so that it won’t be obvious that we’re attempting to have a telepathic conversation.

  “What?” Xander asks. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing!” Ming smiles at him.

  “You’re both looking at me weird.” He rubs the end of his nose. “Don’t tell me I have a booger hanging out.”

  “You don’t.” Ming leans in and gives him a quick kiss. Then she looks at me again. “Hey, Coley!” she says in an overly chipper voice that’s sure to keep Xander suspicious. “Are you going to Brody’s party on Friday after the basketball game?”

  “I hadn’t heard about it,” I say.

  “That’s because I’m not having a party,” Brody says, without looking up from his phone.

  “Dude, seriously,” Xander says.

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay, fine,” Xander says. “But one of your sisters is having a party at the house where you also happen to live. It’s pretty much the same thing.”

  “You should see if you can spend the night with me that night,” Ming says to me. “And then we’ll all go to the kegger that Brody isn’t having.”

  I’ve never been to a “kegger.” I’ve actually never been to any party that didn’t involve movies, ice cream, and sleeping bags on my teammates’ floors, but I say, “I’ll ask.”

  “Hey, Brode,” Xander says, “I figured out a way to get Taku and Seth and Rosetta to come. We could do something with the band that night. Play a little show downstairs maybe?”

  “No way,” Brody says, setting his phone on the table. “I don’t want people in my studio.”

  “You have a studio?” I ask.

  Brody nods.

  “That’s where we practice every day and where I keep my drums,” Xander says.

  “I want to play your drums!” Ming says.

  Xander looks at Brody. “Can I at least take Ming and Coley down that night, so they can check it out?”

  “And Coley’s boyfriend,” Ming says.

  “Fine,” Brody says. “Ming, Coley, and Noah. No one else. I’m serious, Xander.”

  “Noah?” I ask.

  Ming laughs. “Her boyfriend is Reece, not Noah.”

  “Oh.” Brody shrugs. “Did you guys break up or something?”

  “We’re just friends,” I say. “Noah’s been, like, my best guy friend since kindergarten.”

  “Oh,” Brody says again.

  “You know what I just realized?” Ming says. “It’s going to be crazy when we get back to school and people find out you’re with Reece.
Everyone’s going to think you dumped Noah for him and there will be drama and rumors all over the place!”

  I say, “I doubt people pay that much attention to Noah and me to even care.”

  “Brody obviously does,” she says.

  “Not really.” Brody’s cheeks redden. He looks around and stands up. “I’m getting a burrito.”

  Ming scrunches up her face as he walks away.

  “I guess I’ll go see what his deal is,” Xander says. “Do you want anything?”

  “Cinnabon?” Ming suggests.

  “You got it.”

  Xander goes after Brody, and Ming shakes her head. “I swear. The guys Xander hangs out with are so moody. Aren’t you glad we set you up with his only non-emo friend?”

  I’ve always suspected that Ming and Xander had purposely been trying to get Reece and me together, but this is the first time she’s ever confessed it to me.

  “You know what?” I say, smiling at her. “I am glad.”

  CHAPTER 19

  An hour into the Crowne’s New Year’s Eve party, Piper and I are surrounded by the Law Offices of Crowne and DeLuca’s attorneys and admin staff, everyone’s significant others, and a few clients and fellow country club members. I don’t know how much longer I can take this—my new heels are killing me. The fact that Bryan isn’t here yet is clearly killing Piper.

  I’m sure that he’ll show up eventually—my mom’s late too, and they’re coming together—but I don’t bother reassuring Piper. She hasn’t admitted to me that her sapphire blue dress and the pretty chignon that I pinned up for her are all for him, but I know it’s true. Whether or not he’ll care is the real question.

  Well, that, and whether he’ll talk to me. Bryan’s been gone a lot since we got back from Whistler, hanging out with friends from high school while I’ve been trapped at home. I know that he’s avoiding me on purpose, and part of me is almost okay with it. I haven’t been sleeping much, though, wondering every night if he’s going to change his mind.

  “I still can’t believe Alejandra,” Piper says, going back to her default topic of the night. “We start school again in two days so she can’t avoid us forever.”