Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2)

by Charlotte Roth

  “I was just wondering,” I said, working my hand through his sticky blond hair. “Do all European guys use hair spray?” I looked up at him and bit down on my lip.

  “Nope,” he said, shaking his head, “only the really vain ones.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m a Euro-trash kind of guy. Isn’t that what you guys call us over here?” He turned and posed as a skinny model in heels.

  “Well, um, hair spray and musicals.”

  “Musicals?”

  “Annie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Here we call that, um, pretty gay.” I pulled him to me and kissed him.

  He leaned in to my ear and whispered, “Well, I hope I proved that to be untrue last night.” I nodded and blushed. Again. I guess thinking about sex and looking at the person you just had sex with sure didn’t help on color control issues.

  He smiled like he knew what I was thinking. “Look at that pretty red face. How can I let you go? Can’t you stay till Monday, right to that very last minute when Lufthansa takes me away? Please? Please? Please?”

  I looked up at him and shook my head. “I have to go, right?”

  We had promised each other that we would say our goodbyes that same night. To see each other just one more time would only make things worse. I was already beginning to miss him even though he was standing right there. How could you miss someone standing right in front of you?

  He stepped back a little and cupped my face with an intense expression. “There’s something I didn’t tell you back there.” Oh no, here it comes. I was right; he is engaged back home to some big-, lederhosen-wearing farm girl named Helga Von Shithausen. My first time having sex, and I was already the other woman. I focused on my feet, scared to look him in the eyes.

  A flutter poured through me when he finally said in a quiet voice, “It was my first time.”

  I looked up and locked eyes with him.

  “And I know this sounds weird, but thanks, Ella. Thanks.” He pulled me into his arms and kissed me.

  Holy shit! He was a virgin too—a perfect, symmetric, German virgin with protection in his back pocket. This guy can’t be real. Now I missed him even more.

  In a soft voice that matched his, I whispered back, “Mine, too,” and we kissed while the world around us faded away. Finally, we pulled apart and I said, “And I actually do know what you mean by thank you. I wanted my first time to be something special, too. Not some alcohol-induced chance encounter in the backseat of a car or something.”

  He smiled. “For real? Do people actually do that?”

  I nodded. “Are you kidding me? That’s like the number one place to make out.”

  He looked at me like he was genuinely surprised. “Really? I thought that was some kind of a myth, only happening in American movies, you know,” he said with his innocent German accent.

  “Oh no, my German friend,” I said, resting my head up against his chest. We sucked up the last drop of air between us until we were as tight as Siamese twins—hugging like there was no tomorrow, hoping tomorrow would never come. If it hadn’t been for Mom driving up to the curb and honking the horn, we probably would have stayed like that the rest of the night.

  I grabbed my cell from my pants’ pocket and looked at the time; it had only been a little over twenty-five minutes. Apparently, Mom had risked her own life to save mine. I waved.

  “Hey Mom, can you just give us a minute?” She nodded, turned the car around and parked on the other side of the street with the motor running. I could tell she was trying hard to look occupied with something besides spying on her daughter making out with a boy.

  I took a deep breath and turned around and faced Hans.

  “Well, um, hasta la vista, baby,” I said, in attempt to conceal my intense sadness.

  He smiled. “If I had a penny for all the times I’ve heard that this summer...” His voice trailed off. He looked down.

  “I just had to say that once, just once.” I got on my toes and wrapped my arms around his neck. I buried my face in his jacket and took in his essence, in hopes of permanently infusing my senses with it. I couldn’t believe this was actually it. How can I let him go?

  “We tried humor once. It didn’t work, remember?” he said with a thick German accent from behind my back. He pulled back a little and looked at me, like, every little inch of me, without saying a word. “I’ll really miss you, Ella,” he finally said.

  “Me too.” I looked down.

  “No, look at me,” he demanded. “I mean I’ll really, really miss you, like...” He stopped and looked in the direction of Mom’s car and then back at me. “I’ll miss you so much. This feels so wonderful and weird at the same time.” He looked down at our feet, tangled up in each other. “Can I call you when I get back to Germany?”

  “You could,” I said, still looking down at our feet, “but then what? I mean, you’ll still be there, and I’ll be here. Germany is pretty far away, you know,” I said, thinking Germany was as far away as Denmark, thinking it would take a lot more than a one night stand, a twelve-hour fling, to survive the distance and longing that Martha and Frederick, a married couple, had done for all those weeks and months and even years. It was against all odds.

  He looked up. “I know,” he said, tucking a few curls behind my ear.

  “I’m just saying,” I said, not really knowing what I was saying. “I think it just might be easier this way.” I looked up at the street light and sighed. Of course, I wanted him to call me. I was just trying to save myself from the hours of hopelessly-in-love heartache—just waiting for the inevitable disappointment down the line. Because, eventually, he would be out of my life like so many other people before him.

  “This way?” He let go of my curly hair. “Like saying our goodbyes now?”

  I nodded. “I think.” But I wasn’t sure. Not sure at all. The only thing I did know for sure was that I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go home with Mom—waiting in the car on the other side of the street, pretending not to look. I wanted to stay there, wanted to stay like that forever ... with Hans, forever.

  He nodded and kissed me.

  “You’re probably right,” he whispered in my ear. “But don’t you ever forget me, Ella. I love you.”

  Too overwhelmed to even speak or look him in the eyes, I just nodded, took one long last kiss with me before I ran to the car without looking back.

  “Bye, Hans,” Mom yelled as we left.

  “Bye, Mrs. Jensen. Bye, Ella.” And then a few Jensen turns later, he was gone.

  FOR A WHILE, WE JUST drove in silence. Mom concentrated on driving, and I concentrated on not crying. Finally, Mom broke the loud silence. “Did something happen, Ella?”

  “No,” I lied, sobbing as I looked out the window.

  “Are you okay?” she said, glancing into the rearview mirror.

  “Yes.”

  “You had fun?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, swallowing hard.

  “But why are you sad then?” She turned in her seat and looked at me.

  I snapped, “I’m not, okay?” But before we even hit 520 I began bawling my eyes out.

  “Oh, baby,” Mom said, trying to look at me and keep her eyes on the road at the same time. “But why?”

  “Be-be-because he’s leaving tomorrow and I’m never going to see him again and I really, really like him, Mom.” I did like him. In fact, I more than liked him. I loved him. Why hadn’t I said it back to him?

  “Huh.” Mom stared ahead for a moment, obviously thinking. “But you could see him, right?”

  “Where? In Germany? Mom, he lives in freaking Germany, a whole ocean away, and tomorrow he’ll be gone.” I looked at her in the mirror. “Lufthansa,” I added, I guess to make it even more official.

  “Well, we’ll just have to go there, right? I always wanted to see the Berlin wall anyways.”

  “That’s gone too,” I cried.

  “I know, smartass, but I’d like to see where it used to be.” She looked at me in th
e mirror and smiled.

  “Never mind, Mom.” I looked down at my feet, my untangled feet, and sighed. “We already said our goodbyes and that’s it. I’m never going to see him again. Period!” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and looked out of the window. I saw my own reflection in the window as we drove by a traffic light. He had even told me how he loved the way I could blush in less than two seconds. There could be no bigger compliment to a shy girl. I felt another stab of what I believed to be early onset heartache. I took a deep breath and looked at Mom.

  “It’s okay, hon. Let’s not talk about it right now. Why don’t you close your eyes and try to get some sleep? It’s a long drive home.”

  “Mom, it took you twenty minutes to get here,” I said, trying to work up a smile.

  “Yes, I know, and that was reckless of me. So this time, I’ll be going under a hundred miles per hour.” She winked at me in the rearview mirror. “Get some sleep, El. Everything is going to be just fine. Just fine, I promise.”

  I don’t know how, but I actually managed to fall asleep. It was almost four o’clock in the morning, I’d had sex for the first time in my life, I was in love for the first time in my life, and I had already had my first broken heart. All in one night. I guess it was more than my seventeen-year-old body and soul could take.

  Miss Tarantino in da house

  The next couple of weeks, I tried hard to stay focused on my algebra and tried hard not to think about Hans. Easier said than done, of course; how do you tell your brain not to think? I even thought about calling Maddie to tell her all about my German love affair, but as far as I could see on Facebook (her status now said, “in a relationship”), she was madly in love with a guy named Eric, who was now the main motive for all of her pictures. So, I didn’t. I mean, who wants to talk about a broken heart with someone who’s madly in love? Besides, we hadn’t talked much the last couple of weeks and I didn’t want this—my Hans-hurting-heart—to be the way for us to connect again.

  I was doing okay—as in, not weeping from dusk to dawn, okay—constantly rationalizing about the humongous ocean between us, the fact that he didn’t even have a green card, that I couldn’t speak German, or see myself dressed in lederhosen, yodeling with his symmetric sisters. I told myself it was for the best. It would never have worked out.

  Until one night where I totally lost it and spent the entire night looking up all the German Hans’s in the world, give or take a few. I was on Google, Bing, the Yellow Pages, and Facebook, obviously. After hours of searching for “Hans” (and why didn’t I know his last name?), I somehow ended at this website for German high school friends trying to catch up on some bad memories. I sure found a lot German Hans’s (with very bad German haircuts), but not the right Hans. Why had I been so stupid? Why had I said no to keeping in touch? In my entire life I had never read anything more romantic and real than Martha’s and Frederick’s long-distance love letters. Yes, they were married and had been together for more than twenty-two hours, but still, why had I said no to that? Why had I been so afraid to try? Because I was a loser! “A loser is one that never tries,” as Miss T had quoted Little Miss Sunshine’s crazy old Granddad a few weeks earlier. And that’s exactly what I was—a complete loser!

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, LOOKING through an entire world of wrong Hans’s and many bad German haircuts, realizing how stupid I had been, I felt even more sorry for myself and even more focused not to think about Hans, which, of course, had the exact opposite effect.

  I guess I was not good at hiding my teenage depression from the world around me, and into week three I started noticing how hard Mom, Dad, and Miss T were all trying to cheer me up. Dad was going way out of his way not to upset his teenage daughter. Not once did he complain about all of my (four) shoes, casually thrown in the hallway with his usual, “Abby, come look. If I didn’t know better, I would say we were opening up a shoe store right here in our own house. All size eight and half,” comment. There was also no mention of dirty socks, in all shapes and colors, scattered around the living room floor, and there was no teasing or giving me a lecture on the “good old days” when I was sleeping till two in the afternoon. Mom was making an unusual amount of hot coco and cookies straight from the oven. “Bake sale,” she had said, lying, when I had asked her about the never-ending cookie production. “Cookies for Ella’s broken heart,” they cried all the way from the oven. Miss T came around a lot asking me to go somewhere with her and the Dylan Porsche, always with the same silly excuse to go get a single bottle of shampoo or a pack of gum, though I had never seen her chew a single piece (actually, I kinda suspected she wore dentures).

  Then one morning, Miss T invited us, for the first time ever, to come to her house for a special book night. “I will make cookies,” she said, smiling, “straight from the oven.”

  Mom and I smiled back. We were not exactly craving any more cookies.

  “Homemade cookies. Yummy,” we both replied, exchanging a knowing glance. Then we told her we were thrilled to go, which was true. Even though I had been in her yard almost every other day for the last three months, somehow I had never made it inside the house. It was kinda weird really, but I figured she just preferred it that way. Grandma would have said that it was downright suspicious; as with bathrooms, she would probably argue, you can learn a lot about a person from how the inside of their car looks and how they live. So, of course, we were both dying to go.

  “Book night, huh?” Dad said when we told him we were going to Miss T’s house for the evening. Of course, we had already told Dad that the three of us had formed a weekly informal book night (just in case he would stay up really late or come home late one night to find us in my room—in sleeping bags and oversized ponchos—attached to the black Victorian mailbox like it was the last supper on earth).

  “Every week?” he had said, looking very suspicious, when I told him at breakfast one morning. I was sure he was on to us, I had told Mom afterwards.

  “No way,” she had said, “he believes me to be Prudence herself.”

  “Every week?” he had commented again later that same day at the dinner table, which had made even Mom, a.k.a. Prudence, look a little insecure of her earlier assessment.

  “That sure is a hell of a lot of books a month,” he had said, going for a second round of potato salad.

  “Um, books a month?” Mom had said, slightly raising her eyebrow at Dad.

  “Books a month?” I had echoed.

  “Yes, books. Isn’t that what books nights are for? You read a book and discuss it and, ta da, you have book nights. And my point is that if you have book night every single week, well, that makes it one book a week, four books a month. A lot of books,” he had said, spelling the last part out loud and clear.

  “Oh,” Mom had smiled and looked at me with a worried nod.

  “Oh,” I had echoed.

  “I mean, normal people meet up every month or two months, right?” he had said, stuffing his mouth with a fresh load of potatoes.

  “Rrrrright,” Mom had said, resting the eyebrow a bit. “But see, the little polite Miss T would never accept coming over here more than once a week unless it was, you know, some kind of club or some other kind of formal arrangement.”

  “I thought you said it was an informal book night,” Dad had said, obviously teasing.

  “Yeah, yeah, dumbass, you know what I mean and besides, you don’t even have to read a book. We can talk about anything we like.” She had grabbed a green bean from the salad bowl and pointed it at him. “Anything we want,” she had said, biting down on the bean, smiling.

  Quick thinking, Mom. “Yes, everything we want, Dad,” I had said, leaning all the way back in my chair with my arms crossed.

  “So why even call it a book night?” he had said, looking all proud at the both of us.

  “It’s a book night, okay. Maybe you would care to join us and let us in on your latest book about some tiny undiscovered ecosystem in the Amazon? I’m sure Miss T would be more than thr
illed.” Mom had looked at me and winked.

  “Oh, shove it, Abby.”

  And those were the last words about the disputable naming of our weekly social gatherings; it was called book nights. Period.

  Dad looked up from the paper as we were leaving. “Well, have fun at book night tonight,” he said, still, I guess, not quite satisfied with the whole semantics of the concept of book nights.

  WHEN MISS T OPENED the big heavy door, we hardly recognized her. She was wearing a long silk housecoat with dragons dancing in the sun setting in a deep red ocean. She had a scarf on her head (not unlike the ones Mom would wear) and was sporting more makeup than usual. In her right hand she had a cigarette stuffed into one of those long plastic pipes.

  “You smoke, Miss T?” Mom and I said at the same time.

  “Nah, it’s just a prop,” she said, giggling. “Can’t stand them, but I think they make such a dramatic appearance. Do come in.”

  Mom and I exchanged a look. Miss T and props? She was full of surprises. We stepped in and were hit by a loud echo as the door slammed behind us.

  “I know,” Miss T said, smoking her fake cigarette. “It’s really big and still very empty, but it’s home. It’s my home.”

  Mom and I sat down at the bottom of the gigantic staircase and took off our shoes. I looked up at the humongous dark house looking down at us. She was right; the house was really big and very empty—as if she hadn’t quite decided whether she was moving in or moving out. The chateau-like hallway was packed with boxes and what I believed to be paintings or some kind of wall art, resting up against the walls, still covered in brown wrapping paper.

  “Come on now,” she said, heading for what appeared to be a humongous country-style kitchen.

  “Okay,” we echoed (literally), following in her tiny footsteps.