But, as it turned out, Michael had the self-control of a monk and I was the one who always ended up feeling frustrated. I knew my inexperience made him a little nervous, but I still hadn’t anticipated having to actually talk him into things.
Later, after we’d finally shoehorned our bodies apart, he said, “We should probably talk about this.”
“I agree.” I shifted away from him and adjusted my clothes, giving us both some much-needed space. I couldn’t think straight as long as I was near him, breathing in his cinnamony scent.
“I don’t want to pressure you into anything,” he said, leaning back against the seat. “And I’m not just talking about this, right now. I really like you. I know you’re not ready for anything serious after what happened to you last time and that’s fine with me, but…” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go out with anyone else. Just you.”
Even in the face of the blinding fear I felt at that moment, I couldn’t help but melt a little. Just you. They were the perfect words, even if they weren’t entirely true. Or realistic. Brian had wanted “just me” too, at first.
“You know,” I said, smiling, “I think I was the one who did the pressuring.”
He laughed. “You can’t take all the blame. Sometimes I forget you’re younger. I have to keep reminding myself.”
I nodded. Obviously, I had to keep reminding myself of certain things too.
****
The next day, as I was in my room packing to go back home, something almost equally as scary happened. My wicked stepsister appeared in the open doorway.
“Hey,” she said, all nonchalant, as if she moseyed on in to my room all the time.
I froze holding a pair of blue bikini underpants. Leanne had been gone all weekend and I hadn’t even noticed her return.
“Oh, um, hi,” I said, stammering. The girl had spoken maybe twenty words to me in the past two years. She’d certainly never engaged me in an actual give-and-take conversation before. I didn’t know how to react.
She studied my room like she’d never seen it before, while I studied her. Her short blond hair was smoothed back from her face with a black headband, and she wore a gray T-shirt with the name of some band I’d never heard of emblazoned across the front, boxer shorts, and bare feet. She’d taken out her nose ring and extra earrings. She looked fresh and clean and somehow younger.
“So,” she said, meeting my eyes for possibly the first time ever. “How’s it going?”
“Okay.” I moved over to the dresser, where I scooped up a pile of shirts. Leanne inched into my room, running her finger along the wall as she walked until she ended up where I was standing. I glanced at her, uneasy. Her light blue eyes told me nothing. For a minute or two she watched me while I packed, making me feel more paranoid with each passing second.
“Hey, I like those jeans,” she said suddenly.
I peered down at the folded jeans in my hands. “Really?”
“I like the pockets. Where did you get them?”
“Old Navy, I think.”
She nodded. “It’s hard to find jeans that fit when you’re short.”
“I know.” I’d encountered this problem myself, and I had at least two inches on Leanne.
Neither of us spoke for a minute. I zipped up my bag, the sharp sound of it making me wince. I returned to the dresser to pack up my makeup and hair products. I knew my stepsister would never covet any of those things. She wore only eyeliner, usually black and heavy, and dark nail polish. I could see chips of it on her bitten nails now as she drummed her fingers on the wall behind her.
“Robin told me you’re going out with Michael Hurst,” she said.
Robin? Robin told her this? Of course. Not exactly shocking. Leanne and Robin did speak to each other once in a while. They’d been neighbors for years, long before I’d met either of them. Leanne liked Robin just fine. It was me she hated. And Dad. And possibly Emma.
I looked at her again, noting her surprise. “Yeah,” I said, verging on defensive.
“He’s hot.”
I allowed myself a quick, proud smile.
“I’ve never spoken to him—we aren’t exactly in the same social network—but I see him around school a lot. He’s in my AP physics class. He’s smart…not like some of the Neanderthals he hangs around with.”
I’d almost forgotten that Leanne went to Redwood Hills High too. She wasn’t in that school district, but last year she’d transferred there for some reason. I was sure there was a story there, but we’d never been close enough to talk about it and I didn’t want to ask Lynn.
“Anyway,” Leanne said as she headed for the door. “He seems like a decent guy. Not like the rest of them.”
“He’s…” I tried to find the right word to describe Michael, sum him up for my stepsister. She paused at the door, waiting. “…nice.”
She nodded once, put her hand on the door frame, and swung herself out of my room, leaving me feeling both pleased and confused as hell.
What a weekend. First, my father hadn’t completely humiliated me during the dreaded parent meeting. Then I found out Michael wanted just me and no one else (and even crazier than that, I almost believed him). Then my stepsister—who, up until now, had hated me just for existing—sought me out, spoke to me, treating me like a three-dimensional person instead of an inanimate object.
After so many strange occurrences, I was left to wonder if the world had suddenly gone mad.
Chapter 11
For an early birthday present, my mother let me invite the girls over for Friday night. We planned to order pizza and watch sappy movies and eat popcorn and cake. Ashley had made it quite clear I’d been neglecting them lately. I couldn’t argue with that, not after all the extra time I’d been spending in Weldon.
As an added bonus, Mom agreed to spend the evening at Aunt Gina’s so we could have the house to ourselves. Emma would stay the night at our aunt’s house, but Mom claimed she’d be back around eleven to supervise/spy on us. She acted like we were planning on whipping out a keg and having a drunken orgy the minute she walked out the door.
But we behaved like little angels, aside from one broken glass and a frenzied popcorn fight that left the kitchen looking like the inside of a snow globe. When everything was reasonably cleaned up, the four of us—Ashley, Erin, Brooke, and me—lined up our sleeping bags on the living room floor. By then it was close to ten and time for the movies. We turned the first one on, but no one really watched it. They were too busy teasing me.
“Say it, Taylor,” Erin demanded. “Tell us what you have. Come on, admit it.”
“I dare you,” Brooke said.
“Say it just to shut them up,” Ashley said, pulling a pillow over her face. “Please.”
Erin sat facing me, cross-legged style, the cuffs of her flannel pajamas pushed up to her elbows. “Say it. I…have…a…”
I knew I’d never hear the end of it either way, so I thought what the hell—I’d throw them a fresh bone. “Okay, okay. I’ll say it. God, you guys are pushy.” I exhaled loudly. “I have a boyfriend. Michael’s my boyfriend. Yes, I know I said I was done with boys. Yes, I know I said he wasn’t my boyfriend. But obviously I lied. There. Happy now?”
They all gawked at me, speechless for once, and shocked that I had broken so quickly. But I couldn’t deny Michael’s status, even to myself. He’d met my father. We saw each other every single weekend, and spoke on the phone every single day. His hands had been underneath my top. The evidence pointed to one thing and one thing only—I had myself a boyfriend.
“When can we meet him?” Erin asked. She was like a tiny dog, nipping at my heels.
“Soon.”
Brooke knotted her hair at the back of her head, securing it with a clip. “You seem to like him more than you liked Brian.”
“I do,” I said. Then I made the mistake of grinning.
Erin cackled. “Taylor’s in love,” she sang, drawing the word “love” out into many syllables. I reached over
and flicked her knee. “Ow!” she whined.
“Have you slept with him yet?” Ashley asked.
Stunned silence, followed by uproarious laughter from the peanut gallery.
“Ashley,” I said patiently. “I’ve only been dating him a few weeks. Of course I haven’t.”
“Just checking,” she said, shrugging. Then: “Will you tell us when you lose it?”
“Ashley,” I said again, this time with a warning tone. Erin and Brooke tittered.
“What? I’ll be married before I lose it. I want to know what it’s like.”
Erin’s eyes bulged. “Married? You’re honestly going to wait until you’re married? When you said that before, I thought you were joking.”
“It’s called abstinence,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know, that thing Ms. Winters mentioned in passing last year in sex ed? I’m a Christian, remember.”
“So is Sherry Beaumont,” Erin pointed out. Sherry, a girl we all knew from junior high, was presently five months pregnant. “So are lots of people. Christians do have sex before marriage sometimes, you know. It’s not a crime.”
“I know. But I’m choosing not to.”
“Oooo-kay.” Erin was not convinced. “You’re not going to see me waiting until I’m married. If I get married, it won’t be until I’m at least thirty. And there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to hold off that long.”
“I’ve already done it,” Brooke reminded us. “I’m not traumatized or anything.”
They all looked at me to gauge my thoughts. “I have nothing against premarital sex,” I said, burrowing into my sleeping bag. “But don’t tell my mother I said that.”
Ashley snorted. “My mother thinks Brea is still a virgin. How’s that for a joke.”
Brea, Ashley’s black sheep older sister who, a few days ago, came home with a tattoo of some guy’s name on her left butt cheek, was most certainly not a virgin in any sense of the word, or a devout Christian for that matter. With Brea for a role-model, you couldn’t blame Ashley for being a little prudish.
The sex talk ended with that, and then we finally did watch the movie. When my mother came in around eleven-thirty, we were all standing around the kitchen, gorging on the last of the cake.
“Girls,” Mom said in greeting. Her eyes scanned the house as if checking for tell-tale signs of debauchery. We must have passed inspection because she went to bed without another word.
Once the coast was clear, Erin said under her breath, “Does your mom know?”
I opened the fridge and brought out a carton of milk. “Know what?”
“About Michael.”
“Are you kidding? She’d kill me.”
“She’s bound to find out,” Ashley said, licking icing off her fork. The leftover cake sat in the middle of the table, like a trough. We didn’t see a reason to dirty more plates. “Your dad will tell her, or Emma.”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“So you’re gonna keep it from her? And lie?”
“Grow up, Ash,” Erin said as she speared another chunk of cake. “Parents don’t need to know everything.”
Ashley shot her a dark look. “Parents have a way of finding this stuff out.”
“My parents would kill me too,” Brooke said, sympathizing with me. “They don’t want me to date. They think boys will interfere with my school work.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Erin said. “Anything that distracts us from school work has got to be a good thing.”
Brooke nibbled daintily on a tiny blob of icing. “When I was going out with Paul, we had to sneak around. Remember?”
I nodded. Paul was the guy she’d dated over the summer, the one she’d lost her virginity to. She met him at a day camp for special needs kids, where they both worked as swim instructors. They went out all summer and then broke up right before school started. Luckily he went to a different high school.
“I remember how stressed out you got,” Ashley said, tossing her fork in the sink. “It was hardly worth it.”
Brooke’s mouth curved into a smile. “No, it was worth it.”
Erin and I laughed, but Ashley just shook her head. I was so looking forward to the day she fell in love and learned that not everything was so black and white. That there were a lot of gray areas too, and they weren’t all necessarily bad.
****
“We’re here,” Michael said, pulling his car into the wide driveway of his huge, two-storey house with its two-car garage and landscaped acre or two of yard. It looked like many of the other houses I’d been to in Redwood Hills during his friends’ parties. But this one held people I actually cared about trying to impress.
It was the next night and, in a very boyfriend-like fashion, Michael had brought me home to meet his family. And in a very Taylor-like fashion, I was terrified. What if they hated me?
On the way inside we passed a shiny white Mustang convertible. “Whose car?” I asked, trying to stave off an anxiety attack.
“It’s my brother’s.” He ran his hand along the hood, almost reverently. “I’m not allowed to drive it.”
Again, I waited for him to say more and again, it didn’t happen. “It looks…fast.”
“That’s why he bought it. It has a V8.”
“The only V8 I know of has tomatoes in it.”
He laughed and towed me into the house. Unlike Dad’s house, we weren’t assaulted by an animal when we entered. I remembered that Michael didn’t have any pets because his sisters were both allergic. It seemed like years since he told me about the collie he’d had to give up when they were born.
The house was amazing. Older, yet modern, with lots of plants. “My mother’s into plants,” Michael told me when he noticed me taking them all in.
“So is my stepmother, but most of hers are outside.”
“There are dozens more in the back yard.”
He led me into a kitchen that was three times the size of mine at home. This room, too, was decorated with lots of plants and flowers. Standing by the fridge was a petite, attractive woman with dark, salon-styled hair. When she looked at us, I saw that her eyes were the same blue-gray as Michael’s. “Hello,” she said in a soft voice. “You must be Taylor.”
“Hi,” I said, flattered that Michael had mentioned me around the house.
“My mom,” Michael said.
“Cheryl.” She crossed the room to shake my hand. I couldn’t help but notice her elaborate, diamond-encrusted wedding ring. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you too.” Her skin felt rough and dry, like Lynn’s—a side effect from the constant hand-washing nurses had to endure. For some reason, this made me feel less intimidated by her. She may have lived in a fancy house and wore a diamond the size of a doorknob, but other than that, she wasn’t much different from what I knew.
“We’ll be upstairs,” Michael said after a few minutes of idle chitchat.
His mother fixed him with a look I’d seen a million times on my own mother’s face. A silent warning to behave. It made me wonder how many other girls he’d brought up to his room and what they may have been caught doing.
We made our way across the main floor, past a living room with a cozy-looking fireplace that appeared untouched and up a long, carpeted staircase to the bedrooms. The first door we passed was obviously a girl’s room, going by the bright colors and stuffed animals lining every available surface. Also, there were two girls in there, one reading and the other tapping away on an iPod. They both looked up at the sound of our footsteps. Michael had mentioned before that his sisters were fraternal twins, not identical, but their differences still surprised me. One girl looked exactly like her mom, small and dark with those blue-gray eyes, and the other was tall, with light brown hair and brown eyes. Even without having met their dad, I knew she must have resembled him. I wondered who the mysterious Josh took after, or if he was a hybrid of both, like Michael.
I was introduced to the twins—Megan, the short
one and Jennifer, the tall one—who both carefully appraised me, as if telepathically wagering on how long I’d last. These two were way more intimidating than Michael’s mother.
Michael and I continued down the hallway. His room was the last one on the left. I was interested to see what it looked like. The only teenage boy’s room I’d seen was Brian’s, and he was a slob like me. His clothes were always all over the floor and his walls were covered in posters and other junk. Michael’s room, though, turned out to be the exact opposite of that. It was big, about twice as big as my room at home and, like his car, exceptionally neat.
Attached to a desk at the far side of the room was a large book shelf, lined with books. “Did you read all these?” I asked, leaning in to read the titles. It was mostly science fiction and fantasy stuff.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’m a geek.”
“I read horror. I’m a bigger geek.”
I continued to snoop along the bookshelf, my eyes scanning titles until they rested on a thin, maroon-colored yearbook. A junior high yearbook. I slid it out and began flipping through the pages, looking for Michael’s familiar face. I was curious to know what he looked like when he was younger.
“Hey,” Michael said, coming up behind me. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for you.”
Suddenly, he took the book from me and closed it. I looked at him, surprised. “You wouldn’t recognize me,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “You don’t want to see it, trust me.”
That only increased my curiosity. Smiling, I made a grab for the book. He held it behind his back and ducked out of my reach.
“I knew I should have burned this thing,” he said, and I attempted again to wrest the yearbook from him. He backed up until we hit the bed, then threw it down and fell on top of it, shielding me from it altogether.
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