Sarah Dessen

by This Lullaby (v5)

  “I don’t want a song.”

  “Everybody wants a song!”

  “Not me.” I tapped Chloe on the shoulder and she turned around. She had on her flirting face, all wide-eyed and flushed, and I handed her a beer and said, “I’m going to find Jess.”

  “I’m right behind you,” she replied, waggling her fingers at the guy she’d been talking to. But crazy musician boy kept after me, still talking.

  “I think you like me,” he decided as I stepped on somebody’s foot, prompting a yelp. I kept moving.

  “I really do not,” I said, finally spying Jess in a corner booth, head propped on one elbow, looking bored. When she saw me she held up both hands, in a what-the-hell gesture, but I just shook my head.

  “Who is this guy?” Chloe called out from behind me.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “Dexter,” he replied, turning a bit to offer her his hand while still keeping step with me. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, a bit uneasily. “Remy?”

  “Just keep walking,” I called behind me, stepping around two guys in dreadlocks. “He’ll lose interest eventually.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said cheerfully. “I’m just getting started.”

  We arrived at the booth in a pack: me, Dexter the musician, and Chloe. I was out of breath, she looked confused, but he just slid in next to Jess, offering his hand. “Hi,” he said. “I’m with them.”

  Jess looked at me, but I was too tired to do anything but plop into the booth and suck down a gulp of my beer. “Well,” she said, “I’m with them. But I’m not with you. How is that possible?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s actually an interesting story.”

  No one said anything for a minute. Finally I groaned and said, “God, you guys, now he’s going to tell it.”

  “See,” he began, leaning back into the booth, “I was at this car dealership today, and I saw this girl. It was an across-a-crowded-room kind of thing. A real moment, you know?”

  I rolled my eyes. Chloe said, “And this would be Remy?”

  “Right. Remy,” he said, repeating my name with a smile. Then, as if we were happy honeymooners recounting our story for strangers he added, “Do you want to tell the next part?”

  “No,” I said flatly.

  “So,” he went on, slapping the table for emphasis, making all our drinks jump, “the fact is that I’m a man of impulse. Of action. So I walked up, plopped down beside her, and introduced myself.”

  Chloe looked at me, smiling. “Really,” she said.

  “Could you go away now?” I asked him just as the music overhead cut off and there was a tapping noise from the stage, followed by someone saying “check, check.”

  “Duty calls,” he said, standing up. He pushed his half-finished beer over to me and said, “I’ll see you later?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then! We’ll talk later.” And then he pushed off, into the crowd, and was gone. We all just sat there for a second. I finished my beer, then closed my eyes and lifted the cup, pressing it to my temple. How could I already be exhausted?

  “Remy,” Chloe said finally in her clever voice. “You’re keeping secrets.”

  “I’m not,” I told her. “It was just this stupid thing. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “He talks too much,” Jess decided.

  “I liked his shirt,” Chloe told her. “Interesting fashion sense.”

  Just then Jonathan slid in beside me in the booth. “Hello, ladies,” he said, sliding his arm around my waist. Then he picked up crazy musician boy’s beer, thinking it was mine, and took a big sip. I would have stopped him, but just the fact that he did it was part of our problem. I hated it when guys acted proprietary toward me, and Jonathan had done that from the beginning. He was a senior too, a nice guy, but as soon as we’d started dating he wanted everyone to know it, and slowly began to encroach on my domain. He smoked my cigarettes, when I still smoked. Used my cell phone all the time to make calls, without asking, and got very comfortable in my car, which should have been the ultimate red flag. I cannot abide anyone even changing my station presets or dipping into my ashtray change, but Jonathan charged right past that and insisted on driving, even though he had a history of fender benders and speeding tickets as long as my arm. The stupidest part was that I let him, flushed as I was with love (not likely) or lust (more likely), and then he just expected I’d ride shotgun, in my own car, forever. Which just led to more Ken behavior—as in ultraboyfriend—like always grabbing onto me in public and drinking, without asking, what he thought was my beer.

  “I’ve got to go back to the house for a sec,” he said now, leaning close to my ear. He moved his hand from around my waist, so it was now cupping my knee. “Come with me, okay?”

  I nodded, and he finished off the beer, slapping the cup down on the table. Jonathan was a big partier, another thing I had trouble dealing with. I mean, I drank too. But he was sloppy about it. A puker. In the six months we’d been together I’d spent a fair amount of time at parties outside the bathroom, waiting for him to finish spewing so we could go home. Not a plus.

  He slid out of the booth, moving his hand off my knee and closing his fingers around mine. “I’ll be back,” I said to Jess and Chloe as someone brushed past, and Jonathan finally had to cease contact with me as the crowd separated us.

  “Good luck,” Chloe said. “I can’t believe you let him drink that guy’s beer.”

  I turned and saw Jonathan looking back at me, impatient. “Dead man walking,” Jess said in a low voice, and Chloe snorted.

  “Bye,” I said, and pushed through the crowd, where Jonathan’s hand was extended, waiting to take hold of me again.

  “Okay, look,” I said, pushing him back. “We have to talk.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  He sighed, then sat back on the bed, letting his head bonk against the wall. “Okay,” he said, as if he were agreeing to a root canal, “go ahead.”

  I pulled my knees up on the bed, then straightened my tank top. “Running in for something” had quickly morphed into “making a few phone calls” and then he was all over me, pushing me back against the pillows before I could even begin my slow easing into the dumpage. But now, I had his attention.

  “The thing is,” I began, “things are really starting to change for me now.”

  This was my lead-up. I’d learned, over the years, that there was a range of techniques involved in breaking up with someone. You had your types: some guys got all indignant and pissed, some whined and cried, some acted indifferent and cold, as if you couldn’t leave fast enough. I had Jonathan pegged as the last, but I couldn’t be completely sure.

  “So anyway,” I continued, “I’ve just been thinking that—”

  And then the phone rang, an electronic shriek, and I lost my momentum again. Jonathan grabbed it. “Hello?” Then there was a bit off umm-hmming, a couple of yeahs, and he stood up, walking across the room and into his bathroom, still mumbling.

  I pulled my fingers through my hair, hating that my timing seemed to be off all night long. Still listening to him talking, I closed my eyes and stretched my arms over my head, then curled my fingers down the side of the mattress closest to the wall. And then I felt something.

  When Jonathan finally hung up, checked himself in the mirror, and walked back into the bedroom, I was sitting there, cross-legged, with a pair of red satin bikini panties spread out on the bed in front of me. (I’d retrieved them using a Kleenex: like I’d touch them.) He came strolling in, all confident, and, seeing them, came to a dead, lurching stop.

  “Ummpthz,” he said, or something like that, as he sucked in a breath, surprised, then quickly steadied himself. “Hey, um, what—”

  “What the hell,” I said, my voice level, “are these?”

  “They aren’t yours?”

  I looked up at the ceiling, shaking my head. Like I’d wear cheap red, polyester panties. I mean, I ha
d standards. Or did I? Look who I’d wasted the last six months on.

  “How long,” I said.

  “What?”

  “How long have you been sleeping with someone else?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “How long,” I repeated, biting off the words.

  “I just don’t—”

  “How long.”

  He swallowed, and for a second it was the only sound in the room. Then he said, “Just a couple of weeks.”

  I sat back, pressing my fingers to my temples. God, this was just great. Now not only was I cheated on, but other people had to know it, which made me a victim, which I hated most of all. Poor, poor Remy. I wanted to kill him.

  “You’re an asshole,” I said. He was all flushed, quaky, and I realized that he might have even been a whiner or weeper, had things gone differently. Amazing. You just never knew.

  “Remy. Let me—” He reached forward, touching my arm, but for once, finally, I was able to do what I wanted and yank it back as if he’d burned me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I snapped. I grabbed my jacket, knotting it around my waist, and headed for the door, feeling him stumbling behind me. I slammed door after door as I moved through the house, finally hitting the front walk with such momentum I was at the mailbox before I even realized it. I could feel him watching me from the front steps as I walked away, but he didn’t call out or say anything. Not that I wanted him to, or would have reconsidered. But most guys would have at least had the decency to try.

  So now I was walking through this neighborhood, full-out pissed, with no car, in the middle of a Friday night. My first Friday night as a grown-up, out of high school, in the Real World. Welcome to it.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Chloe asked me when I finally got back to Bendo, with the help of City Transit, about twenty minutes later.

  “You are not going to believe—” I began.

  “Not now.” She took my arm, pulling me through the crowd and back outside, where I saw Jess was in her car, the driver’s door open. “We have a situation.”

  When I walked up to the car, I didn’t even see Lissa at first. She was balled up in the backseat, clutching a wad of those brown school-restaurant-public-bathroom kind of paper towels. Her face was red and tear streaked, and she was sobbing.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked, yanking open the back door and sliding in beside her.

  “Adam b-b-broke up with m-m-me,” she said, her voice gulping in air. “He just d-d-dumped me.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said as Chloe climbed in the front seat, slamming the door behind her. Jess, already turned around facing us, looked at me and shook her head.

  “When?”

  Lissa took in another breath, then burst into tears again. “I can’t,” she mumbled, wiping her face with a paper towel. “I can’t e-e-ven—”

  “Tonight, when she picked him up from work,” Chloe said to me. “She took him back to his house so he could take a shower and he did it there. No warning. Nothing.”

  “I had to walk p-p-past his p-p-parents,” Lissa added, sniffling. “And they knew. They looked at me like I was a kicked d-d-dog.”

  “What did he say?” I asked her.

  “He told her,” Chloe said, clearly in her spokesperson role, “that he needed his freedom because it was summer and high school was over and he didn’t want either of them to miss any opportunities in college. He wanted to make sure that they—”

  “M-m-made the most of our lives,” Lissa finished, wiping her eyes.

  “Jerk,” Jess grumbled. “You’re better off.”

  “I l-l-love him!” Lissa wailed, and I reached over, sliding my arm around her.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “And I had no idea,” she said, taking in a deep breath, which shuddered out, all bumpy, as she tossed aside the paper towel she was holding, letting it fall to the floor. “How could I not even have known?”

  “Lissa, you’ll be okay,” Chloe told her, her voice soft.

  “It’s like I’m Jonathan,” she sobbed, leaning into me. “We were just living our lives, picking up the dry cleaning—”

  “What?” Jess said.

  “. . . unaware,” Lissa finished, “that t-t-tonight we’d be d-d-dumped. ”

  “Speaking of,” Chloe said to me, “how’d that go?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said.

  Lissa was full-out crying now, her face buried in my shoulder. Over Chloe’s head I could see Bendo was fully packed, with a line out the door. “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Jess, and she nodded. “This night has sucked anyway.”

  Chloe dropped down into the front passenger seat, punching in the car lighter as Jess cranked the engine. Lissa blew her nose in the paper towel I handed her, then settled into small, quick sobs, curling against me. As we pulled out I patted her head, knowing how much it had to hurt. There is nothing so bad as the first time.

  Of course we had to have another round of Zip Drinks. Then Chloe left, and Jess pulled back out into traffic to take me and Lissa to my house.

  We were almost to the turnoff to my neighborhood when Jess suddenly slowed down and said, very quietly, to me, “There’s Adam.”

  I cut my eyes to the left, and sure enough, Adam and his friends were standing around in the parking lot in front of the Coffee Shack. What really bugged me was that he was smiling. Jerk.

  I glanced behind me, but Lissa had her eyes closed, stretched out across the backseat, listening to the radio.

  “Pull in,” I said to Jess. I turned around in my seat. “Hey Liss?”

  “Hmmm?” she said.

  “Be still, okay? Stay down.”

  “Okay,” she said uncertainly.

  We chugged along. Jess said, “You or me?”

  “Me,” I told her, taking a last sip of my drink. “I need this tonight.”

  Jess pushed the gas a little harder.

  “You ready?” she asked me.

  I nodded, my Zip Diet balanced in my hand. Perfect.

  Jess gunned it, hard, and we were moving. By the time Adam looked over at us, it was too late.

  It wasn’t my best. But it wasn’t bad either. As we whizzed by, the cup turned end over end in the air, seeming weightless. It hit him square in the back of the head, spilling Diet Coke and ice in a wave down his back.

  “Goddammit!” he yelled after us as we blew past. “Lissa! Dammit! Remy! You bitch!”

  He was still yelling when I lost sight of him.

  After a sleeve and a half of Oreos, four cigarettes, and enough Kleenex to pad the world, I finally got Lissa to go to sleep. She was out instantly, breathing through her nose, legs tangled around my comforter.

  I got a blanket, one pillow, and went into my closet, where I stretched out across the floor. I could see her from where I was, and made sure she was still sleeping soundly as I pushed aside the stack of shoe boxes I kept in the far right corner and pulled out the bundle I kept there, hidden away.

  I’d had such a bad night. I didn’t do this all the time, but some nights I just needed it. Nobody knew.

  I curled up, pulling the blanket over me, and opened the folded towel, taking out my portable CD player and headphones. Then I slipped them on, turned off the light, and skipped to track seven. There was a skylight in my closet, and if I lay just right, the moonlight fell in a square right across me. Sometimes I could even see stars.

  The song starts slowly. A bit of guitar, just a few chords. Then a voice, one I knew so well. The words I knew by heart. They did mean something to me. Nobody had to know. But they did.

  This lullaby is only a few words

  A simple run of chords

  Quiet here in this spare room

  But you can hear it, hear it

  Wherever you may go

  I will let you down

  But this lullaby plays on. . . .

  I’d fall asleep to it, to his voice. I always did. Every time.

  Chapter Three

  “
Aiiiieeeeeee!”

  “Mother of pearl!”

  “Oh, suuuugggaaarrr!”

  In the waiting room, the two ladies on deck for manicures looked at each other, then at me.

  “Bikini wax,” I explained.

  “Oh,” said one, and went back to her magazine. The other just sat there, ears perked like a hunting hound, waiting for the next shriek. It wasn’t long before Mrs. Michaels, enduring her monthly appointment, delivered.

  “H-E-double-hockey-sticks!” Mrs. Michaels was the wife of one of the local ministers, and loved God almost as much as having a smooth, hairless body. In the year I’d worked at Joie Salon, I’d heard more cussing from the back room where Talinga worked her wax strips than all the other rooms combined. And that included bad manicures, botched haircuts, and even one woman who was near perturbed about a seaweed body wrap that turned her the color of key lime pie.

  Not that Joie was a bad place. It was just that you couldn’t please everyone, especially women, when it came to their looks. That’s why Lola, who owned Joie, had just given me a raise in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I’d turn my back on going to Stanford and stay at her reception desk forever, keeping people under control.

  I’d gotten the job because I wanted a car. My mother had offered to give me her car, a nice Camry, and buy herself a new one, but it was important to me that I do this on my own. I loved my mother, but I’d learned long ago not to enter into any more agreements with her than I had to. Her whims were legendary, and I could just see her taking the car back when she decided she no longer was happy with her new one.

  So I emptied out my savings account—which consisted mostly of baby-sitting and Christmas money I’d hoarded forever—got out Consumer Reports, and did all the research I could on new models before hitting the dealerships. I wrangled and argued and bluffed and put up with so much car-salesman bullshit it almost killed me, but in the end I got the car I wanted, a new Civic with a sunroof and automatic everything, at a price way off the manufacturer’s suggested rip-off retail. The day I picked it up, I drove over to Joie and filled out an application, having seen a RECEPTIONIST WANTED sign in their front window a week or so earlier. And just like that, I had a car payment and a job, all before my senior year even began.