Sarah Dessen

by This Lullaby (v5)

  “Exactly,” Lucas said. “Listen to Remy.”

  Dexter looked at me. “Honey, you’re not helping.”

  “We’re in the dark!” John Miller said. “And it’s your fault, Dexter.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dexter said. “Fine. I’ll do something for the house. I’ll—”

  “Clean the bathroom?” Lucas said.

  “No,” Dexter said flatly.

  “Do a load of my laundry?”

  “No.”

  Finally, John Miller said, “Buy beer?”

  Everyone waited.

  “Yes,” Dexter said. “Yes! I will buy beer. Here.” He reached into his pocket and came up with a crumpled bill, which he held up for all of us to see. “Twenty bucks. Of my hard-earned money. For you.”

  Lucas swiped it off the table, fast, as if expecting Dexter to change his mind. “Wonderful. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll drive,” said John Miller, jumping to his feet. He and Lucas left the kitchen, arguing about where the keys were. Then the screen door slammed, and we were alone.

  Dexter reached over the kitchen counter and found another candle, then lit it and put it on the table as I slid into the chair opposite him. “Romantic,” I told him.

  “Of course,” he said. “I planned all of this, just to get you alone in a dark house in the candlelight.”

  “Chee-sy,” I said.

  He smiled. “I try.”

  We sat there for a second, in the quiet. I could see him watching me, and after a second I pushed out my chair and walked around the table to him, sliding into his lap. “If you were my roommate and pulled this kind of crap,” I said as he brushed my hair off my shoulder, “I’d kill you.”

  “You’d learn to love it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I think,” he said, “that you are actually, secretly attracted to all the parts of my personality that you claim to abhor.”

  I looked at him. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “What is it,” he said, “that makes you like me?”

  “Dexter.”

  “No, really.” He pulled me back against him, so my head was next to his, his hands locked around my waist. In front of us the candle was flickering, sending uneven shadows across the far wall. “Tell me.”

  “No,” I said, adding, “it’s too weird.”

  “It is not. Look. I’ll tell you what I like about you.”

  I groaned.

  “Well, obviously, you’re beautiful,” he said, ignoring this. “And that, I have to admit, was what first got my attention at the dealership that day. But then, I must say, it’s your confidence that really did me in. You know, so many girls are always insecure, wondering if they’re fat, or if you really like them, but not you. Man. You acted like you couldn’t have given less of a shit whether I talked to you or not.”

  “Acted?” I said.

  “See?” I could feel him grinning. “That’s what I mean.”

  “So you’re attracted to the fact that I’m a bitch?”

  “No, no. That’s not it.” He shifted his weight. “What I liked was that it was a challenge. To get past that, to wriggle through. Most people are easy to figure out. But a girl like you, Remy, has layers. What you see is so far from what you get. You may come across hard, but down deep, you’re a big softie.”

  “What?” I said. Honestly, I was offended. “I am not soft.”

  “You bought me plastic ware.”

  “It was on sale!” I yelled. “God!”

  “You’re really nice to my dog.”

  I sighed.

  “And,” he continued, “not only did you volunteer to come over here and teach me how to properly separate my colors from brights—”

  “Colors from whites.”

  “—but you also stepped up to help solve our power bill problem and smooth over the differences with the guys. Face it, Remy. You’re sweet.”

  “Shut up,” I grumbled.

  “Why is that a bad thing?” he asked.

  “It’s not,” I said. “It’s just not true.” And it wasn’t. I’d been called a lot of things in my life, but sweet had never been one of them. It made me feel strangely unnerved, as if he’d discovered a deep secret I hadn’t even known I was keeping.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now you.”

  “Now me what?”

  “Now, you tell me why you like me.”

  “Who says I do?”

  “Remy,” he said sternly. “Don’t make me call you sweet again.”

  “Fine, fine.” I sat up and leaned forward, stalling by pulling the candle over to the edge of the table. Talk about losing my edge: this was what I’d become. True confessions by candlelight. “Well,” I said finally, knowing he was waiting, “you make me laugh.”

  He nodded. “And?”

  “You’re pretty good-looking.”

  “Pretty good-looking? I called you beautiful.”

  “You want to be beautiful?” I asked him.

  “Are you saying I’m not?”

  I looked at the ceiling, shaking my head.

  “I’m kidding, I’ll stop. God, relax, would you? I’m not asking you to recite the Declaration of Independence at gunpoint.”

  “I wish,” I said, and he laughed, loud enough to blow out the candle on the table, leaving us again in total darkness.

  “Okay,” he said as I turned back to face him, sliding my arms around his neck. “You don’t have to say it out loud. I already know why you like me.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  He wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me closer. “So,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “It’s an animal attraction,” he said simply. “Totally chemical.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “You could be right.”

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway, why you like me.”

  “No?”

  “Nope.” His hands were in my hair now, and I was leaning in, not able to totally make out his face, but his voice was clear, close to my ear. “Just that you do.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “This,” Chloe said as another bubble rose up and popped in her face, “is disgusting.”

  “Stop,” I told her. “He can hear you, you know.”

  She sighed, wiping her face with the back of her hand. It was hot, and the black asphalt of the driveway made things seem positively steamy. Monkey, however, sitting between us in a plastic baby pool up to his haunches in cold water, was totally content.

  “Get his front feet,” I said to Chloe, squeezing more shampoo into my hand and lathering it up. “They’re really dirty.”

  “All of him is dirty,” she grumbled as Monkey stood up and shook again, sending soap suds and dirty water over both of us in a wave. “And have you looked at these nails? They’re longer than Talinga’s, for God’s sake.”

  Monkey stood up suddenly, barking, having spied a cat working its way through a row of hedges on the edge of Chloe’s yard. “Down boy,” Chloe said. “Hello? Sit, Monkey. Sit.”

  Monkey shook again, dousing us both, and I pushed down on his butt. He sat with a splash, his tail flopping over the side. “Good boy,” I said, even though he was already trying to stand up again.

  “You know, if my mother were to show up now I’d be homeless,” Chloe said, spraying Monkey’s chest with the hose. “Just the sight of this mangy beast within spitting distance of her prized Blue Category Chem Special would give her an aneurysm.”

  “Blue Category What?”

  “It’s a kind of grass,” she explained.

  “Oh.”

  Chloe had first given me a flat-out no when she opened the door to see me on her front porch, shampoo and dog in hand, before I’d even begun my hard sell. But after a few minutes of wheedling, plus a promise to buy her dinner and whatever else she wanted to do that night, she’d relented, and even seemed to warm to Monkey a bit, petting him cautiously as I got the baby po
ol—a Wal-Mart bargain at a mere nine bucks—out of my car. I’d planned to wash the dog at my house, but Chris had co-opted our hose to rig up an elaborate watering system for the lizards, which left me with few options.

  “I still can’t believe how low you’ve stooped,” she said now as I finished the final rinse, then let Monkey leap from the pool and do a series of full-body shakes up and down the driveway. “This is total girlfriend behavior.”

  “No,” I said, steering Monkey away from the grass before Chloe had a chance to freak out. “This is a humanitarian act. He was miserable.”

  Which was true. Plus, I’d been spending a fair amount of time with Monkey lately, and okay, there was a certain odor to him. And if all it took to fix things was a five-dollar bottle of dog shampoo, some nail clippers, and a quick trim, what was the harm in taking action? It wasn’t for me, anyway. It was for Monkey.

  “I thought you weren’t getting attached,” she said as I pulled the clippers out of my pocket and sat the dog down again.

  “I’m not,” I told her. “It’s just for the summer. I told you that.”

  “I’m not talking about Dexter.” She nodded at Monkey, who was now trying to lick my face. He stank of citrus now: all they’d had left was an orangey citrus scent. But we’d trimmed the hair over his eyes and around his feet, which made him look five years younger. It was true what Lola said: a good haircut changed everything. “This is an additional level of commitment. And responsibility. It’s going to make things complicated.”

  “Chloe, he’s a dog, not a five-year-old with an abandonment complex.”

  “Still.” She squatted down beside me, watching as I finished up one paw and switched to the other. “And anyway, what happened to our wild and carefree summer? Once you dumped Jonathan I thought we’d just date our way to August. No worries. Remember?”

  “I’m not worried,” I said.

  “Not now,” she said darkly.

  “Not ever,” I told her. I stood up. “There. He’s done.”

  We stood back and surveyed our work. “A vast improvement,” she said.

  “You think?”

  “Anything would have been,” she said, shrugging. But then she bent down and petted him, running her hand over the top of his head as I spread a few towels across the backseat of my car. I liked Monkey, sure, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was up for picking dog hair out of my upholstery for the next few weeks.

  “Come on, Monk,” I called out, and he sprang up, trotting down the driveway. He just hopped in, then promptly stuck his head out the back window, sniffing the air. “Thanks for the help, Chloe.”

  As I slid into the front seat, the leather hot under my legs, she stood and watched me, her hands on her hips. “You know,” she said, “it’s not too late. If you go ahead and break up with him now you’d still have a good month’s worth of quality single-girl time before you leave for school.”

  I stuck my key in the ignition. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “See you around five-thirty?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up.”

  She nodded, then stood there, one hand shielding her eyes as I backed out into the street. Of course it would be that cut-and-dried for her, how I could end things with Dexter. It was the way we’d always operated. Chloe was, after all, my twin in all things concerning boys and relationships. Now, I was throwing her a curve, veering off in a way she couldn’t understand. I knew how she felt. Ever since I’d met Dexter, things weren’t making much sense to me either.

  The collage was on the wall in the kitchen of the yellow house, right over the sofa. It started innocently enough, with just a couple of snapshots tacked up; at first glance, I’d assumed they were of the guys’ friends. But upon closer inspection, I’d realized that the pictures, like the ones Dexter had given me weeks earlier, were of customers of Flash Camera.

  Dexter and Lucas had both been hired there to run the photo machine, which basically consisted of sitting on a stool and peering through a little hole at the images, marking them and adjusting them, if possible, for optimum color and brightness. This wasn’t rocket science, but it did involve a bit of skill, a good eye, and most of all an attention span that could focus on one, sometimes monotonous activity for an hour or two at a time. This meant, pretty much, that Dexter was out. After Dexter had ruined an entire set of once-in-a-lifetime Hawaiian vacation pictures and twenty disposable wedding cameras, the owner of Flash Camera gently suggested that he might be happier using his strong customer service skills by taking a counter position. And because he was so charming, she’d kept him on at a technician’s salary, which Lucas was always quick to bitch about when given the chance.

  “My job involves so much more responsibility,” he’d sniff every payday, snatching up his check. “All you have to do is basic math and be able to alphabetize.”

  “Ah,” Dexter always said, smartly adjusting his name tag in a model employee fashion, “but I alphabetize very, very well.”

  Actually, he didn’t. He was constantly losing people’s pictures, mostly because he’d get distracted and stick the Rs in with the Bs, or sometimes glance at the labels wrong and put them under people’s first names. If he worked for me, I wouldn’t have trusted him with anything more complicated than sharpening pencils, and even that only when supervised.

  So while Ted, working at Mayor’s Market, could score some bruised but edible produce, and John Miller was jacked up on coffee constantly from his job at Jump Java, Dexter and Lucas were left with little to contribute. That is, until they started making doubles of the pictures that intrigued them.

  They were boys, so of course it started with a set of dirty pictures. Not X-rated, exactly: the first one on the wall that I saw was of a woman in her bra and panties, posing in front of a fireplace. She wasn’t exactly pretty, however, and it didn’t help that right in the back of the shot, clearly visible, was a huge bag of cat litter with the words KITTY KLEAN! splashed across the front of it, which took away from that exotic, Playboy-esque quality that I assumed she and whoever took the picture had been going for.

  As the weeks passed, more and more pictures were added to the collage. There were vacation snapshots, a family posing en masse in front of the Washington Monument, everyone smiling except for one daughter who was scowling darkly, her middle finger clearly displayed. A few more nudie shots, including one of a very fat man spread out in black underwear across a leopard-skin bedspread. All of these people had no idea that in a little yellow house off Merchant Drive their personal memories were being slapped up on the wall and showcased as art for strangers.

  The day I washed Monkey, Chloe and I brought him back about six, and Dexter was already home, sitting in the living room watching PBS and eating tangerines. Apparently they were on special at Mayor’s Market, and Ted was getting a discount. They came about twenty-five to a case and, like Don’s Ensures at home, were everywhere.

  “Okay,” I said, pushing open the screen door and holding Monkey back by the collar. “Behold.”

  I let him go, and he skittered across the floor, tail wagging madly, to leap on the couch, knocking a stack of magazines to the floor. “Oh, man, look at you,” Dexter said, scratching Monkey behind his ears. “He smells different,” he said. “Like you washed him in Orange Crush.”

  “That’s the shampoo,” Chloe said, flopping into the plastic lawn chair next to the coffee table. “It’ll stop stinking in, oh, about a week.”

  Dexter glanced at me and I shook my head to show him she was kidding. Monkey hopped off the couch and went into the kitchen, where we heard him gulping down what sounded like about a gallon of water without stopping.

  “Well,” Dexter said, pulling me into his lap, “those makeovers sure make a man thirsty.”

  The screen door opened and John Miller walked in, tossing the van keys onto a speaker by the door. Then he walked to the middle of the room, held up his hands to stop all conversation, and said, very simply, “I have ne
ws.”

  We all looked at him. Then the door opened again, and Ted came in, still wearing his Mayor’s Market green smock, and carrying two boxes of tangerines.

  “Oh, God,” Dexter said, “please no more tangerines.”

  “I have news,” Ted announced, ignoring this. “Big news. Where’s Lucas?”

  “Work,” Dexter said.

  “I have news too,” John Miller said to Ted. “And I was here first, so—”

  “This is important news,” Ted replied, waving him off. “Okay, so—”

  “Wait just a second!” John Miller shook his head, his face incredulous. He had been born indignant, always convinced that he was somehow being wronged. “Why do you always do that? You know, my news could be important too.”

  It was quiet as Ted and Dexter exchanged a skeptical look, not unnoticed by John Miller, who sighed loudly, shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” Dexter said finally, holding up his hands, “we should just take a moment to really think about the fact that we’ve gone a long time with no big news at all, and now here, simultaneously, we have two big newses all at once.”

  “Newses?” Chloe said.

  “The point is,” Dexter went on smoothly, “it’s really impressive.”

  “The point is,” Ted said loudly, “I met this A and R chick today from Rubber Records and she’s coming to hear us tonight.”

  Silence. Except for Monkey walking in, dripping water from his mouth, his newly clipped nails tippy-tapping very quietly on the floor.

  “Does anyone smell oranges?” Ted asked, sniffing.

  “That,” John Miller said darkly, glaring at him, “was totally unfair.”

  “A and R?” Chloe said. “What’s that?”

  “Artists and Repertoire,” Ted explained, taking off his smock and balling it up in one hand, then stuffing it into his back pocket. “It means if she likes us she might offer us a deal.”

  “I had news,” John Miller grumbled, but it was over. He knew he’d been beaten. “Big news.”

  “How serious is this?” Dexter asked Ted, leaning forward. “Just-making-conversation-I’ll-show-up-to-see-you, or definitely-I-have-pull-at-the-label-I’ll-come-see-you?”