“Do you need me to throw another fry at your face?”
“Only if you want to get killed.”
“Look, it’s not as weird as you think. You’re making it weird. Just ask her. I need to finalize reservations for next week.”
“Alright, I’ll ask her. You sound stressed as hell, by the way.”
“You’d be stressed too, if you had to coordinate all this. It’s a lot.”
“I’m still pissed that you co-opted our Comic Con plans for your anniversary.”
“Shit, man, we’ve already had this talk, you can’t possibly be mad anymore. You’re like a chick who can’t let something go.”
“That’s a great way to resolve this situation, asshole, by insulting me.”
“Maybe this is why we never speak on the phone. ‘Cause you know if I was sitting in that room you wouldn’t be so tough.”
“Why don’t you come by and find out.”
Now this was not a real fight, just to be clear. This was best friend guy shit 101. Puffed chests, calling each other ‘assholes’, fake threats of kicking each other’s asses. That was just what we did. It’s what we all did. But it was all love. The one thing I was really pissed about was the Comic Con thing, though. Here’s the story. Pete was low key a much bigger comic book geek than I was. Kid was hardcore, he just didn’t wear it on his sleeve the way I did. Had you walked into my room at any point up to two years ago you would have seen X-men posters, boxes of Spider-Man comics, and enough collectible figurines to subsidize an undergraduate degree at Princeton. Pete was even worse, but he left no evidence of his crimes. He was clean, secretive, and didn’t like anyone to know how into books he was.
We’d saved up our birthday money, and other funds we’d procured from selling off some of our lesser books online, so we could get some VIP tickets to Comic Con, and it was something I had truly looked forward to since the time we planned it out. Then came Lindsey. Now don’t get me wrong, when I told you how great Lindsey was before I meant every word. I loved the girl, and she was as sweet as they came. She deserved the best anniversary that Pete could offer her. But don’t get it twisted; she had no right to my Comic Con experience. Maybe that was immature of me to think, maybe I was being Petty Crocker, but that was our thing, and Pete sold me out. Fucker asked me to give up my ticket to his girlfriend, to which I told him to eat shit, as any self-respecting nerd would do when presented with such a ridiculous ultimatum.
Don’t be a dick, he told me. I’m not being a dick by not giving your girlfriend a ticket, I told him, go buy her one if you must, but what business does she have even coming with us? No answer. There was an answer, actually, but it was too difficult for Pete to admit to himself or me. Kid was about as romantic as Jack the Ripper. No creativity, no original ideas. He was a good boyfriend, mind you, but when it came to rituals like anniversaries, Pete couldn’t get anything good going. So what did his unoriginal self do? Right, he tried for some one-stop-shopping. Two birds, one stone. Our thing became their thing, and the dude tried to push me out like a hostile Comic Con takeover. Only my insistence that he was being a royal asshole got him to back off, but there was no convincing him to leave Lindsey out of it. He bought her a VIP ticket also, and apparently bought an extra ticket for the non-existent girl he thought I’d have at the time. Maybe he knew I’d talk to Annalise before I did.
Anyway, our best friend negotiations had yielded the situation we now found ourselves in: we were going to Comic Con as a foursome, with dinner and a hotel stay over to follow. And now I had to bring up the hotel issue to Annalise. Shit.
“Because I don’t want to kick your ass in your own home. That would be embarrassing.”
“Alright, alright,” I said. “Enough of this. I’ll talk to her, alright?”
“Today?”
“Sure,” I said, getting more annoyed with each syllable on the other end of the phone. “Why not? I’m going to see her in a little bit anyway.”
“Ok, let me know ASAP. Later.”
“Later.”
I felt like driving around a little. It was a pointless activity, but I enjoyed getting out of my neighborhood and seeing other places that I would have never walked to in a million years, so I asked Anna if she wanted to tag along. Sure, she said, I could go for some aimless driving. She worked Friday and Saturday nights at a burger place a town over, so we had to be back before three, which was when she got ready. It was a little past noon at that point, and I was set to pick her up in about a half hour.
When she jumped in the car I was nervous like it was the first time I’d ever talked to her before. It had only been two weeks since we’d seen each other but she took my breath away. Seeing her in person was a whole different experience than talking to her over text. She looked beautiful, but her face was stressed, and she strained to even smile at me. “Hey there,” I said when she sat down.
“Hey.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said, clearly not wanting to talk. “Drama inside.”
“Oh shit, I’m sorry. You just got back, what the hell could there be drama over already?”
“Don’t worry, it’s irrelevant, I’ll live.” She always said that. It was as if she was allergic to comfort, but I never stopped trying to make her feel better.
“I know you’ll live, but if you need to get anything off your chest, I’m here to listen, you know?”
She leaned over and kissed me quickly, then sat back in her seat, staring forward through the glass. “Just drive away from here,” she said. “That’ll do the trick.”
So I did. I’d learned not to pry too hard, but the truth of the matter was that her secrecy was starting to bother me more than a little bit. I felt like I’d told her things that no one else knew about me. I’d let her into some of the most secret places that I had inside of me, and told her things I didn’t even tell Pete, but she didn’t seem willing to do the same. Then I felt like a dick for feeling angry at her for not opening up to me as much as I wanted her to. After all, we all had our ways of coping with family drama, right? It wasn’t about what I wanted, it was about what she needed. And apparently she needed to be really closed off and secretive. And I was the king of deflecting questions about my home life when I didn’t want to talk about it. But I had this expectation that being in a relationship should have been different. If my girlfriend couldn’t confide in me then maybe something was wrong with us. Wrong with me.
I decided to table that particular frustration because I had more important matters to discuss, and they were stressing me the hell out. I decided to drive a few towns away to the Land of the Rich People. After all, if I was going to drive around and look at cool stuff, why not hit the richest neighborhood I could find? It only took about ten minutes, but in that time Anna barely said a word to me. She didn’t seem mad, she just seemed distant, like her mind was somewhere far gone from the passenger seat of my car. I tried to make small talk a few times—dumb stuff about school, asking what was wrong again—all of which she basically shut down with a simple one word answer, all the while staring out her side window.
“Look, I’m not trying to be annoying—”
“Well that’s a good thing,” she joked, cutting me off.
“But. . .”
“Oh, no.”
“But you seem like you’re a million miles away. If you didn’t want to come out you didn’t have to.”
“You think I don’t want to be here with you?” She loved to pivot like that in conversations. She’d flip your statement into a question that put you on the defensive and deflected from what you were trying to say to her. I wasn’t biting today.
“I think that you wanted to get out of your house,” I said blatantly. “And I was the way out of there. But you’ve barely said a word to me, so yes, you seem like you don’t want to be here.” It wasn’t too forceful and I wasn’t raising my voice or giving her any attitude, but it was a brutally honest statement meant to provoke some kind of respo
nse. Frankly, I would have taken anything other than apathetic silence, even if she wanted to scream and yell and jump out of the car while cursing my name. Well, not that, but you know what I mean. She pondered what I’d said for a minute.
“You’re half right,” she finally said to me.
“Which half?”
“I did just want to get out of my house. But I also wanted to be here with you. The two things just coincided. If I just wanted to leave I could have walked out the door and taken a long walk. I take a lot of those.”
“You take a lot of long walks?” I asked.
“Yeah, all the time.”
“Like how long is long?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ve never kept track, but I’ve walked around this neighborhood before.”
“Wait, you’ve walked to where we are now from your house? That’s got to be fifteen miles.”
“Yeah,” she said, sounding depressed. “Sometimes I just can’t be home with them.” It was weird, but the more she talked the more distant she sounded. “And anyway, how do you think I keep in good shape?” She tried to smile, but the joke fell flat. There was something about fake happiness meant to cover up real sadness that turned me right off —it was like those guys in gym who try to put on body spray or shitty cologne to cover up their BO.
“You know you can talk to me about this stuff, right? I feel like you keep everything bottled up. That’s no good.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she said. “It’s hard for me to open up, okay? It’s not you, it’s with everyone.”
“I get that, but I’m not everyone.” I could feel the conversation getting a little contentious, and I was getting a little angry. The point of hanging out wasn’t to start a fight, so I decided to move on. “Anyway, let’s change the subject.”
“Great idea,” she agreed, starting to sound a little annoyed herself.
I knew just how to change the subject. Let me rewind for a second. Anna’s birthday was fast approaching, which of course meant that I had to get her a gift. It’s not that I had to, per say, but I really wanted to. I was excited to actually be in a position to buy something for a girl, but I had no idea what to get her at first. I was out of my league when it came to stuff like that, so I did what anyone would do, I asked my more experienced friend for advice at lunch.
"How do you buy a gift for a girl?" It was a stupid question on its face, I knew, and Pete didn't miss his chance to point that out.
"That's a really stupid question."
"I'll rephrase. I've never bought a gift for a girl before and I don't know what to get or how much to spend. Like, is there such a thing as too much?"
"Definitely," Pete said. "But not because we guys can't afford it—I mean in most cases we can't—but it's more about the comfort level of the girl."
"Like how?" I asked.
"Well it depends. Some girls wanna be showered with expensive stuff. Others feel real uncomfortable with that, like they owe you something for it."
"Something?"
Pete raised his eyebrow at me. "You can't be that naive."
"Oh," I said, finally getting the point. "Well that's not how I'd mean it. I hope Anna would know that."
"I'm sure she would," Pete said, reassuring me. "But just to be safe, don't go nuts. Don't empty your bank account for something shiny. Get her something you know she'd like."
Something I knew she liked. That was a difficult one. Not knowing what to get her should have been my first red flag as to how little I knew about Anna's life, but in the fog of first love sometimes these things get missed. But after a few minutes of post-lunch-with-Pete contemplation there was one thing that popped into my head. I smiled ear to ear when I thought of it, and probably looked crazy as hell. If someone had been next to me at a traffic light and looked over at my crazy smile, I might have closely resembled a super villain who’d just had an epiphany on how to achieve world domination. But my smile was all pride.
The next day, after school, I took the car and drove to the mall. Normally me and the mall had a worse relationship than me and school, but that day its existence was a necessary evil. Luckily for me the store I needed was right by the entrance to the parking lot, and thirty minutes after my anxiety ridden walk through the side doors, I was headed out of there with my gift-wrapped box in hand. With Pete’s voice in my head, I immediately worried that I had spent too much money, but then again I had no idea what too much was. I didn’t really care, either. Back to us in the car. . .
“What are you grinning at?” she asked me. “You look like you did something wrong.”
“No, I’m just happy.”
“Oh, okay,” she said, looking at me like I was being a little weird, which in retrospect I probably was. “About what?”
“Here.” I handed her the gift, still in the bag from the store, my dumb happy grin getting wider by the second. She took it from me and started to unwrap it.
“What’s this?”
“Happy birthday,” I said. “I know I’m a little early but I couldn’t wait.”
She opened the box and took it out. I did that weird thing where I stare at a person’s face while they open a gift, and all I was waiting for was a smile.
I watched her pull the crucifix out of the box I'd asked the guy at the store to gift wrap because, well, I sucked at wrapping, and I wasn't about to let such a momentous occasion as buying my girlfriend a first gift get screw up by my inability to fold corners properly. She lifted it up slowly, and my face lit up when I saw the smile on hers.
I'd thought forever on what to get her. I contemplated the perfect gift for so long that I missed the obvious thing that was right in front of me. Her faith. I told you how religious she was, right? Good Spanish girl and all that. She never talked about her faith unless you did something to offend it, which I probably did more than once. And I get the irony of the atheist giving his uber religious girlfriend a cross. But the truth of it was that even though I didn't believe myself, I loved how faithful Annalise was. In fact, it was one of my favorite things about her. The whole time we were together she never missed a Sunday service with her Mamita.
A word about Mamita is in order. Now just because she doesn't occupy these pages much that doesn't mean she isn't one of the most important people in the story you'll never actually meet. Mamita was Anna's grandma, who lived in a town over from ours. Not a week passed without Anna going over to her apartment to spend time with her at least a few days after school. I wasn't kidding when I said that I couldn't even talk to her on Sunday's until she got back from church. That was their thing—Sunday church. And for all the craziness in Anna's life, the one pure thing that seemed to ground her was her Mamita.
And that was what I thought of when I decided to get her the gold cross she was now dangling from her fingertips, as the light from the sun reflected off it and onto her face. "I love this so much," she said, staring at it.
"Really?"
"Are you kidding me? This is the nicest thing anyone's ever gotten me. I love it."
"I hope that's not the best thing you've ever gotten before. You deserve way nicer than that, but it was all I could afford."
"It is," she said. "And I'm never going to take it off. Can you put it on me?"
I was so happy that she was happy. It's hard for me to describe to you just how her face looked when she really smiled. Not an obligation smile, not a polite grin, but the real thing. She didn't have too many unburdened smiles, but the once or twice I got to witness them were some of the purest moments of my own happiness. She lit up my car, and I unhooked the clasp and placed my cross around her neck.
"Thank you," she said, leaning into me. We kissed for what felt like forever, but it was probably only a few seconds. When our lips finally separated I felt my most vulnerable.
"You're welcome. And God, did I miss you so much."
"I missed you, too," she said. "But don't take the Lord's name in vain."
"Right, right, sorry."
<
br /> "It's okay."
"I guess giving you a cross and then blaspheming is a bad mix, huh?"
"A little bit," she said smiling. "But I forgive you. Thanks for thinking of me."
"I kinda do that all the time. It's my full time job now."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. Best job ever, by the way."
It wasn’t my intention, but I’d interrupted our near fight with some birthday happiness, and then the anxiety came flooding back as I remembered that I still had to ask her about the city. I could feel my heart beating faster than hearts are supposed to beat. I always thought things like sweaty palms were some cliché in a romantic comedy, but I legit started to feel moisture building in my clenched hands. I took a deep breath to relax myself so she wouldn’t think I was about to stroke out right there in the car, and she actually looked worried. “Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine,” I lied. But I knew I needed to spit it out before I had a full blown panic attack on this random person’s street. “So, look, I wanted to ask you something before you left for Peru, but we were only together for a little while. . .”
“Okay.” she said, waiting for me to spit it out.
“Pete, my best friend. Him and his girlfriend Lindsey—”
“Oh I love Lindsey,” she said, cutting me off. “She’s a really sweet girl.”
“You know her?”
“Yeah. I mean, not well or anything. We’re not friends, but she stood up for me once when these petty, little bitches in our grade were bullying me in gym freshman year. I always liked her after that.”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t know that happened. Small world.” I was rambling, and a little shocked that we were playing six degrees of Pete. But I had to ask her already. “Anyway, he and Lindsey are celebrating their month-a-versary by going to Comic Con in the city.”
“Wait, their what?”
“Don’t ask. 11 months.”
“Oh, I get it now. That’s a new one.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Anyway, I know Comic Con sounds lame, but. . .”
“Lame? Are you nuts? I think that’s like, the best anniversary ever. Or, month-a-versary gift, whatever. I’ve always wanted to go.”
Away From Here_A Young Adult Novel Page 13