by Lulu Pratt
“God, I’m pathetic,” I mutter to myself as I jump at the sight of myself in the mirror on my closet door for the third time in twenty minutes. I take a deep breath and try to sort out how I’m feeling, and what I’m going to do.
I have to go back to Brooklyn in less than twenty-four hours. I know that the dinner with the Lewises and my parents and me is going to be tense no matter what. I don’t even know if Zane’s parents know about Mom finding us together, but just from Mom knowing, and probably Dad, too, things are going to be tense, let alone the situation between Zane and me since we fought the day before.
I’d been avoiding him since then, not even stepping foot outside of the house, using the excuse of having to get pre-project work done to keep from having to see Bev or Nolan about anything.
Mom’s been busy getting everything ready for the fancy dinner tonight, and Dad’s been doing whatever it is Dad does to stay out of Mom’s way. I’m not even letting myself look across the yard to Zane’s window, or the Lewises’ driveway.
But obviously if I don’t want the whole evening to go badly, I’m going to have to do something else. We’re going to have to actually talk about the situation, and figure out what the hell we’re going to do about it. But to do that we’re going to have to have some privacy. There’s no way either of us could to go to the other one’s house to have the talk. Our usual spot at the dead center between our two parents’ yards isn’t going to work either.
There’s a knock at my door, cutting through my thoughts. For a moment or two I resent the hell out of it, but I know it has to be one of my parents.
“Yeah?”
“Are you busy, sweetie? I could use your help with something in the kitchen,” Mom says.
I consider telling her flat out that I’m too busy, but I decide that after the fight the day before, Mom and I should at least have a chance at mending fences.
When I came back in yesterday, Mom wasn’t interested in rehashing the situation with Zane. She pretended like nothing at all had happened, and brought up a snack to my room in the afternoon and asked me about the project I’m going to be working on when I go back to Brooklyn. Things are still tense between us, but I figure that if I help her in the kitchen for a while, that might help things. I open the door and put on my best smile for my mom.
“Yeah, I can help you for a bit, I should take a break from paperwork anyway,” I say, letting her lead the way from my bedroom to the kitchen.
Mom apparently has decided to make fresh, homemade rolls to go with the dinner she’s serving to celebrate the Lewises’ anniversary, and I get to work with her, taking the slightly sticky dough and forming the lumps into individual rolls.
“Do you do much baking in your apartment anymore?”
I shrug, smiling slightly to myself. When I first moved into my little Brooklyn loft apartment, I had been so thrilled to have an oven of my own that I’d made cakes, cookies, brownies, anything I could think of.
“Not that much, just for special occasions, like if the office has a potluck, or it’s someone’s birthday,” I say. We keep talking about the job, about my mediocre social life in New York. In the back of my mind I keep thinking about how Zane and I can manage to maybe meet up and talk about what’s going on between us, come to some kind of conclusion.
I know I have to do something.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ZANE LEWIS
I leave my room feeling a little bit worried still. I can’t quite believe that the week is almost over. That things are still so messed up between me and Harper, and there’s not really much I can do about it.
Mom’s in the kitchen, working on lunch. While I don’t think she knows about the situation with Harper and me, I also don’t know what to talk about with nothing more than Harper and my reenlistment on my mind.
“Hey, are you hungry, sweetie?”
I sit down at the table and think about the question. “I could eat,” I tell her.
Really my stomach’s in knots, but eating at least will give me something to do. Mom brings over what she’s been working on, pasta salad, with leftover roast chicken, tomatoes and little cubes of cheese mixed in. I serve Mom and then myself, and try to think of something to say. How many hours is it until we have to go next door for dinner?
“So you’re leaving in the morning, right?”
I nod. “I’ve got a late-morning flight, so I should have just enough time to get some breakfast with you and Dad and then drop the car at the airport, and I’m off.”
“I have to say, I’m glad that you and Harper could both make it this week,” Mom says.
“You are?”
“Well of course, sweetie,” Mom tells me. “I love you both.”
I’m right there on the point of telling her that I think I might have feelings for Harper, but I don’t even know what those feelings actually are, or whether there’s anything either of us can do about them. So I let the comment stand, and try to think of something to talk about while I eat a few more bites.
“I went out to the lake yesterday,” I say.
“Oh, your father and I used to go out there all the time,” Mom says.
“He told me that.”
“I know you and your friends used to go skinny dipping down there when you were teenagers. Though you all thought you were so clever you couldn’t get caught,” Mom says with a little grin.
I laugh. “I think we’re all just glad the cops never showed up,” I say.
“I think there was probably a little conspiracy to prevent that. None of us wanted you kids to get in trouble for the kinds of things kids do.”
I have to laugh again, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking of the fact that Harper and I only just went skinny dipping a few days before, and Mom apparently has no idea. It’s probably for the best that she doesn’t know.
I finish off one bowl of pasta salad and consider having another one. I know we’ve got a big dinner at the Polsens’ place, but I don’t know if I’ll even be able to eat. Everything I try to think about circles right back around to Harper. This isn’t good. It isn’t like I’ve never been into a girl before. I had a couple of girlfriends in high school, and I dated Cheryl Sheppard more than half the year between high school and basic.
But there’s something different about the way I feel towards Harper.
It isn’t that she’s been my next-door neighbor for as long as I can remember, or even that she’s suddenly gone from being the nerdy girl who’s practically my sister to this hot city-living woman. It’s something that goes in another direction that I don’t even really know how to name.
“Do you think you’re going to end up deciding to reenlist? I know you said you didn’t really want to talk about it, but you’re going to leave in the morning and I figured I’d pick your brain a bit before the only way I can talk to you is on the phone,” Mom says.
I try to pull my head out of the clouds to think of a way to answer her.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“You should talk to your dad about it,” Mom suggests, and I grin.
“We talked about it yesterday, and I’ve got a lot on my mind about it, it is really complicated,” I tell her. “Right now, I don’t really know which direction I’m leaning more towards. It’s weird.”
“Well, you’ve been in the army for pretty much your whole adult life so far, seeing as how you went into basic just before you turned nineteen,” Mom points out.
“There’s that, and the fact that I don’t really know what I’d do outside the army,” I say.
“You have great skills, and you’re really a lot more disciplined than you were before you left,” Mom tells me.
“I could see about going to college, or transferring my certifications into something in the civilian world,” I say, almost more thinking out loud than anything else. “I really don’t know.”
I finish up half a bowl more of pasta salad, and decide that before Mom gets any bright ideas that might lead her to
ask me questions I can’t answer, I’ll go back to my room.
I start playing Tekken on my PlayStation. Of course, that makes me think about Harper and I groan, even as I’m playing a tournament against the computer, because it seems so damn pathetic not to be able to get her off my mind.
I know she’s been avoiding me since our fight, but I don’t know if that’s because she’d really rather never see me again, or because she thinks it’s going to be awkward and wants to put it off until she absolutely can’t anymore. She could just be busy, but I don’t really believe that.
There is going to have to be something done between us before dinner tonight, or sitting down with her parents and mine is going to go absolutely pear-shaped. FUBAR, as my commanding officer likes to say. But it can’t come from me.
Harper made it clear at the lake that she doesn’t even want to talk to me, that she didn’t even want to be in the same room or the same place as me. I’m pretty sure she’s probably cooled down by now or she wouldn’t be in her parents’ house, but I don’t know.
You could text her and see if she’s at least interested in talking, or if she’s still pissed at you.
But then almost right away I push that idea out of my head. If I text her and she’s still pissed, that’s going to make dinner that much more awkward. I have to hope that Harper is going to decide to do the right thing and somehow get in touch with me.
Just when I’m on the point of deciding to leave the house out of sheer boredom, my phone buzzes. At first I think it’s one of the guys from the base, wanting to confirm when I’ll be back, but instead I see, as soon as I check the screen, that it’s Harper.
We need to talk, don’t we?
I grin to myself. I’m relieved that at least Harper’s willing to reach out.
We do. What do you think we should do?
Obviously, in the middle of the day and considering the situation, we can’t meet in our usual spot. I don’t even think that the lake is necessarily a great idea.
We need to hash everything out. We need to do it before dinner.
I almost roll my eyes. It was obvious enough that I didn’t even think it needed to be said, and yet Harper had said it.
Right.
We can’t meet at the usual spot, so we need to figure out somewhere we can both go. I think to myself that at least Harper isn’t still so pissed at me that she can’t stand to even talk to me. That is a good thing, even if the rest of the situation is pretty shitty.
Do you know if your parents know about the other night?
I think about that question for a moment. From the conversation I had with Dad, I almost figured that he knew that I was talking about Harper, but neither of us had mentioned her name. I have to assume that if he did know about her, that he would have said so directly.
I don’t think your mom said anything to them, at least not yet.
We need to find a place where we can meet privately.
I know she doesn’t mean it that way, but I can’t help but think of what I want to do with, and to, Harper as soon as I get her alone. I can’t, I know that, but I want to all the same. She was so good that in the back of my mind, ever since the night we had sex, a fantasy of having her again has been playing steadily, right along with everything else going on in my head these past few days.
Let me think of something. If you figure something out, text me.
I sigh and put my phone aside, trying to think of somewhere we could go. It’s not easy. Our parents will probably be watching us like hawks, even if it’s for different reasons. We need a getaway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HARPER POLSEN
Maybe fifteen minutes after Zane tells me to let him think of somewhere for us to meet, it occurs to me — the perfect place for us to go to, and where they’re even less likely to end up accidentally finding us. I just don’t know if the place in question is still standing.
I debate whether it would be worth it to go there myself and scout it out before I suggest it to Zane, but finally decide that even if the landmark I have in mind isn’t still standing, we can make use of the place where it should be. After all, we’re only going to go there to talk, aren’t we?
Do you remember the treehouse?
I haven’t thought of the treehouse in years, and it’s been even longer since the last time I actually set eyes on it. For all I know, it fell while I was in college, and the pieces of it rusted and rotted into the ground, or got carried off by mendicants. But even if the old playhouse in the trees isn’t there anymore, it shouldn’t be too hard for both Zane and me to find the spot where it used to be, should it?
Oh man, the treehouse! Duh!
I grin to myself in spite of how agitated I feel.
Our parents, or, more accurately, our fathers, built it for us when we were five or six in a little stand of woods that separates our neighborhood from another neighborhood. Just old enough for both our mothers to decide that we would probably not die from being up in a tree.
Even though we stopped being friends sometime around middle school, when Zane suddenly became the funny, popular, jock-without-a-sport that he was, we essentially decided without debate or discussion that the treehouse was there for both of us. Neither of us had a better claim than the other, and we’d stay out of each other’s way.
I kind of hoped it was still there. I was sure that even if it was, it would look absolutely nothing like my memories of it. It would probably not be even a little bit safe to climb into, but it might be nice to see it all the same. It would give us both a place we knew the way to, but that our parents weren’t likely to consider.
I take a deep breath and try to figure out when, how, we’re going to meet there to figure out this huge mess we found ourselves in. Why am I so nervous? I shake my head. Of course I’m nervous, I’m about to meet with Zane to talk about the incredibly awkward topic of us having sex and how we’re going to get through a big dinner with both sets of parents, with hopefully only one of the four of them already in the know.
When do you want to meet up?
I bite my bottom lip as I read the text from Zane. That’s the question, isn’t it? The dinner is hours away, but I don’t think there will be a better time before it.
Why not now?
I hope I can breeze through the house and get out to where our treehouse may or may not still be standing.
Zane texts back a thumbs up, and I find myself quickly checking my make-up, changing out of my pajama pants and into a skirt.
“God, what am I doing?” I shake my head at myself and hurry out of my bedroom before I can give into the impulse to do even more to prepare. We’re going to be talking, it isn’t like I need to look particularly good, is it?
“Harper! I was just going to come and get you,” Mom says as I’m about to walk past the kitchen. Shit.
“I’m actually just on my way out,” I tell her, hoping she won’t ask too many questions.
“Where are you going?” Mom stops in the middle of what she’s doing and looks at me. “What’s happening, Harper?”
“Nothing important,” I say. “Just wanted to take care of some errands.”
“You don’t have your purse,” she says.
“Well I do have a life of my own, Mom,” I point out, smiling. “I have lots of things that I do that you don’t know about.”
“And one thing that you’ve recently done that I found out about,” Mom says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I try to keep my face neutral, but I can feel the blush beginning to rise into my cheeks.
“Are you going to meet with him?” She doesn’t say who, but we both know Mom means Zane.
“Why would you ask?” I cross my arms over my chest. “It’s not even really your business, is it?”
“Harper Polsen, I want you to think about what you’re doing. This boy is someone you grew up with, and his parents are very close friends. If you and he keep messing around to
gether and it ends poorly, you could wreck a friendship of almost thirty years.” She stares me down and I feel even more irritable than when we’d argued about it before.
“First, I’m an adult, Mom. I can do what I want. And yes, I am meeting with Zane. And in fact I’m trying to do what I can to make sure that things don’t go all awkward and weird between everyone, okay?” I return her stare for a few moments.
“Just think about what you’re doing, okay?” Mom sighs.
“Mom, of all the people in the world who you know, who do you think is the most likely to overthink what she’s doing?” I smile at her.
“Just promise me you’re going to think about it carefully, and not rush into it just because Zane is… hot and familiar.”
I have to laugh at that advice. “Mom, I’m not rushing into anything. I’m trying to figure out the situation as best as I can, so we can all have a nice dinner tonight. Okay?”
Before she can answer I’m already turning away. I don’t want this to become a fight again. I don’t know how much time I have left until Zane leaves his house, and if he does that while I’m still in view, it won’t just be my mom who knows about what happened between us.
I almost run across the yard, to the woods that border the property line. For a second, as soon as I’m in the cooler air and dimmer light of the woods, I feel like I might actually get lost.
And then I find the trail that my dad and Zane’s dad cut out and tamped down, and it’s like I’m fourteen again, the age I was when I still went to visit the treehouse regularly. Before I got too wrapped up in studying and being a straight-A student to spend as much time outside climbing trees. My heart’s beating faster because I don’t know what Zane and I are actually going to talk about. But I know we’re going to talk.