Who Do You Love

by Jennifer Weiner

  For Christmas when he was twelve, he used some of his paper-route money to buy Mr. Sills the brass elephant bookends that he’d seen him admiring in a shop called Time and Again on South Street in Center City. At the same place, he bought his mother a necklace, a real pearl on a gold chain. It cost forty dollars (actually fifty, but the old lady behind the counter had said, “Forty for you”), and it was worth it to see his mother’s expression when he woke her up on Christmas and gave her the small square box, wrapped in red paper with a gold ribbon.

  “It’s too much,” she’d said, and tilted her head up toward the ceiling, blinking, the way she did when she was trying not to cry, even though it was so early that she hadn’t put on her foundation yet, or the mascara that turned her lashes into stiff, bristly spider legs. Her hair, uncombed and unteased, hung in soft waves over her cheeks. She looked as young as a teenager in her plaid pajamas and chenille robe as she got out of bed and went to her closet. “Here,” she said, sounding shy, handing him a rectangular package wrapped in Sunday’s comics. “I hope I got the right kind.”

  Andy’s hopes weren’t high. Most years, Lori got him useful stuff—shirts for school, a new blanket, and bars of soap and toothbrushes for stocking stuffers. When he found the Nike Air Flight sneakers, white with a blue swoosh, he shouted with delight. “I hope they’re the right size,” Lori said, and Andy had hugged her and said, “They’re perfect.”

  Since the big fight, Andy and his mother had made their own Christmas traditions. They’d open their presents first thing in the morning. Then Lori would bake the one thing she made from scratch, cinnamon rolls with yeast and honey and flour that made a dough that had to rise twice. They’d have cinnamon rolls and sliced ham for lunch. Then Lori would put a prestuffed chicken into the oven, and they would watch A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. Lori would drink eggnog and Andy would drink hot chocolate, topped with whipped cream, and every time the whipped cream was gone, he’d take the canister out of the refrigerator and spray another white ruffle on top. “Only on Christmas,” his mother would say, and kiss the top of his head. In the warm little row house, with his belly full of good food and the living room full of the blue glow from the television set and the lights from the Christmas tree that he and Mr. Sills had carried in together, Andy felt warm and safe. For the last two years they’d gotten a white Christmas. The plows would push high drifts up against the cars still parked on the street, and the wind would send silvery gusts of flakes twirling and spinning down the empty sidewalks, but inside, all was calm and all was bright. Lori would wear Andy’s necklace, and she’d put on a Santa hat in the morning, and by the end of the day it would be cockeyed, one side slipping down over her penciled-in eyebrow, her lipsticked mouth curved into a pretty smile, and Andy would think that no boy had ever loved his mother as much as he loved Lori.

  •••

  In his new sneakers, Andy ran through the spring and the summer, timing himself as he did laps around the park, getting ready for high school track-team tryouts in August. Because Lori was working, Mr. Sills had agreed to drive him. Stopped at a light, about to get onto the highway, his friend had patted his shoulder and said, “You’re going to do just fine.”

  Andy didn’t answer. He rolled down the window, letting the hot air and the city sounds come through, and pushed the door lock down, then pulled it up, then pushed it down again, rolling his water bottle back and forth in his free hand.

  Roman Catholic, Andy’s new school, was downtown, right in Center City, at the corner of Broad and Vine, and it didn’t have a track of its own. All of its meets were away meets, and most of its practices were held at the Penn campus. Mr. Sills dropped Andy off at Franklin Field, said “Good luck” one more time, then drove off to go fix an air conditioner.

  It had been warm the week before, but that afternoon in August the temperature had soared into the nineties. Andy counted thirty boys sweating on the infield, some of them doing stretches, others standing in groups, talking. A man in a Roman Catholic T-shirt with a whistle around his neck introduced himself as Coach Maxwell. He had a blunt face like a clenched fist and a short, stocky body that seemed to be made entirely of muscle. His khaki pants were crisply pressed; his plain black sneakers were as pristine as if they’d just come out of the box.

  Coach Maxwell reached into his pocket and removed a stopwatch. The two men beside him, Andy saw, both had pads of paper and pens. “Okay, fellas,” he said, and lined them up and told them what to do.

  At his direction, the boys ran sprints, then hurdles, the quarter-mile, the half-mile. They did standing long jumps and running long jumps. Coach Maxwell would watch, occasionally saying something to one of his assistants. At the starting line for the mile, with eight other guys, some of them in fancy running cleats, Andy thought coolly, I’m better than you are. He had put in more time, all those mornings on his paper route, all those afternoons in the park. He’d worked harder, and he could suffer more.

  There was no pistol, just the coach yelling, “Go!” At the sound of his voice, Andy sprinted to the front of the pack, pushing himself until his lungs burned, grabbing the lead and holding it, fighting off every challenge, leaving the second-place finisher at least ten lengths behind him.

  When they were done, Coach Maxwell sent the boys to the bleachers. Andy could feel their eyes on him, could catch snatches of their conversation, could hear his name repeated. Then the coach called Andy down, and put his hand on his shoulder, the same way Andy had seen Ryan Peterman’s father do. “You’ve got something special,” he said. That blunt face relaxed long enough for a brief smile. “Too early to tell how much. Too early to tell how special. But you’ve got something,” he said. “Did your mom or dad ever run?”

  “Basketball,” he told Coach Maxwell. His heart was swelling. You’ve got something special. He wondered if his dad had felt this, this kind of pure happiness, like he’d swallowed the sun, sinking a game-winning three-pointer, or stripping an opponent of the ball. “My dad played basketball.”

  Coach Maxwell clapped his hands once, calling the boys together. They sat on the first two rows of bleachers, shoulder to shoulder, listening. “You’re gonna work harder than you ever imagined,” he said. “We will run sprints. We will run laps. We will run suicides. We will lift weights. We will do burpees and squats and lunges and jumping jacks until you wish you were never born. There’s no game,” he said, thin lips curling, blunt face contracting even more tightly as he let the distasteful word out of his mouth. “No game, no ball, no points, no substitutions. No cheerleaders shaking their ta-tas. No band. No homecoming. It’s just you and the track and the clock. It’s the most elemental thing there is—the simplest and the hardest. Not every boy’s cut out for it. Boys get bored. Boys get tired. They don’t want to put in the time it takes to build the FOUNDATION that is the KEY to SUCCESS.”

  Andy had nodded. He didn’t care that there was no band or cheerleaders at track meets, that football and basketball players got all the glory. Scores and goals, ribbons and medals, all of that took a distant second place to the joy that he felt when he ran, the sensation of being entirely in his body, every worry and concern left behind, feeling the ground beneath his feet, the air against his skin, moving so fast it was almost like time itself had to hurry to catch up.

  “You put in the EFFORT, you get the RESULTS,” Coach Maxwell roared that August, his red face getting even redder, a thin mist of saliva surrounding his mouth, and when he asked, “Are you ready to work hard?” all the boys, Andy included, shouted some version of assent.

  Indoor track was in the winter; outdoor was in the spring. Andy did both. By the end of freshman year he held the statewide record for the 1600 meters, for Catholic and secular schools, and was named to his first all-regional team. He kept his paper route in the mornings, eventually applying for a longer route that paid better. He started a lifelong habit of meticulously recording his workouts—e
very lunge, every squat, every turn around the track. After school, he would go to the Central Library at Nineteenth and Vine, check out every book about running that he could find, and read and reread them until he could recite passages from memory. He learned about Roger Bannister, who’d done what scientists said was impossible and run a mile in less than four minutes, and Jim Ryun, who in 1964 became the first schoolboy to duplicate that feat; about Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, who’d gone undefeated for 121 races. He read about Bill Rodgers, who won four Boston Marathons, and Frank Shorter, whose 1972 gold in the Olympic marathon had started the running boom in the United States, and Alberto Salazar, who’d run so hard as a twenty-year-old in the Falmouth Road Race that his body’s temperature soared to 107 degrees, and a priest was called to the finish line to read him his last rites. Salazar was his favorite, Salazar and Steve Prefontaine, a front-runner, like Andy, who’d been a schoolboy star and once held the American record in seven different distance track events, from the 2000 meters to the 10,000 meters, and never lost a collegiate race in his distances.

  By the time he was sixteen Andy had set three goals for himself: He would go to the University of Oregon, like Steve Prefontaine. He would run in the Olympics. He would make money, enough for anything he and his mother ever wanted, so that they’d never have to worry again.

  Rachel

  1993

  This is going to be amazing,” I said to my best friend, Marissa Feldman. I capped my bubblegum-flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smacker, put it back in my Bermuda bag, and snapped the wooden handles shut. We were riding in a tricked-out bus that was taking us and twenty other members of Beth Am synagogue’s youth group to Atlanta for the first week of our summer vacation, where we’d sleep in dorms, eat in a dining hall, and build houses in a low-income neighborhood for an organization called Home Free.

  This was the first time my parents had let me leave home for longer than a single night’s sleepover, and it had taken months of pleading, plus a phone call from Rabbi Silver and a special check-in with my cardiologist.

  “Good to go,” said Dr. Karen, whose hair had started to show strands of silver in the years she’d been treating me. My parents and I were sitting in her office, and Dr. Karen was behind her antique desk, piled high with charts, and her binoculars and birding journal. Most doctors play golf, she’d told me once. I collect birds. Much less stressful.

  “She’ll need to be careful,” she’d told my parents, who’d sat side by side, holding hands. “As you know, this is a chronic condition, and she’ll be managing it all her life, just like diabetes. But the surgeries worked as well as we hoped they would. For all intents and purposes, she’s got a normal heart now.” She leaned forward, looking at them with a smile. “Let her be a normal teenager,” she said. “I know that’s not easy for any parents to do, but try to let her spread her wings.”

  Of course, me spreading my wings was the last thing my mother wanted, but I’d cajoled and bullied and finally threatened to stow away on the bus if they didn’t sign the permission slip, and now here I was, watching the scenery through the window get greener as we headed east, up through Georgia.

  I adjusted the angle of the reclining seat and touched my hair, making sure my hairband was still in place and that the face-framing waves were still framing my face, not curling up in revolt. After the disaster of my bat mitzvah, I’d been convinced that unless I did some serious damage control, my social life was over and my friends would abandon me. I’d spent the whole party, and the whole rest of the month, not exactly saying that my mother was crazy, but strongly hinting that she was prone to exaggeration; that I really hadn’t been that sick, and now, of course, I was completely fine. “She just feels bad that she gave up her job, I think,” I’d said, and Marissa and Kelsey and Kara and Britt had nodded, maybe thinking of their own mothers. Marissa’s mom was a lawyer who was never home. Kelsey’s mom was an art teacher who did that job only because she hadn’t found a gallery to sell the wire sculptures she made in the spare bedroom she called her studio, and Britt’s mom, like mine, had once worked but was now home full-time, overmanaging her children’s lives.

  Marissa raised her quart of Gatorade, the one she’d spiked with vodka before we left town. “To new cuties!” she said, and swallowed, then passed me the bottle. Marissa had an older brother at the University of Florida who, for the extortionate rate of ten dollars a trip, would buy us peach schnapps and wine coolers in such adventurous flavors as Racy Raspberry and Whatta Watermelon, but lately we’d moved on to vodka, ­reasoning that it was more sophisticated than the sweet, babyish drinks that I suspected we both secretly preferred.

  I took a sip, trying not to wince at the burn, or to worry when it felt like my heart had hiccupped when the booze went down. Acting like a careless, laughing girl who hadn’t come any closer to mortality than the death of a grandparent or a beloved pet was only part of it. Proving it mattered more. For that, there were boys.

  First there’d been Jason Friedlander, who’d asked me to dance at my bat mitzvah and then, before the candle-lighting ceremony, had taken my hand, led me into an empty classroom, and kissed me. It was shocking, to feel his hands on my shoulders, his face against mine, his breath in my mouth. When Jason tried to sneak one of his hands up my top to explore the recently brassiered terrain, I pushed him away, not wanting his fingers to find the raised, bumpy line of my scar.

  “What?” he blurted. He was breathing hard, and his brown hair, which turned out to be remarkably soft, was flopping over his eyes. “Don’t you like me?”

  The truth was that until that day I’d never given Jason any thought, and didn’t have an opinion about him one way or the other. After that day, though, he became all I could think about. His face, which had once struck me as unremarkable and maybe even a little goofy, was suddenly handsome. His hands, his lips, the confident way he touched me—all of it combined made me dizzy, like I would swoon right onto the floor. Best of all, his desire, the way he’d chosen me, made it clear to the whole seventh grade that I was a normal girl.

  By the time my parents drove me home—my mother, still teary, apologizing for embarrassing me; my father, gruff and a little stern, saying, “Now, Helen, just calm down”; and my brother, Jonah, rolling his eyes with a rolled-up joint barely hidden in his suit pocket—all I could think about was Jason. Had he liked me for a long time? What had caught his attention—my hair, my eyes, my laugh? Did he think I was pretty? Was he my boyfriend now?

  The questions left me feeling like someone had adjusted my skin, taken nips and tucks and tiny tapers, and now it fitted me perfectly, and every inch of it was tingling with a new awareness. I felt unbroken, whole. Late that night, inspecting myself naked in the bathroom’s full-length mirror, with a towel pressed against my chest to cover my scar, I thought about Jason looking at me this way, seeing my flat belly, my narrow, high-arched feet, my long neck, the shape of my breasts. Maybe I could never be the prettiest girl or the one with the least-complicated history, but if I was a good girlfriend, if boys liked me, it meant that I was normal, just like Kelsey and Britt and the rest of them.

  Tell me more, I’d said to Jason when he’d talked about making it to the state quarterfinals in Little League the night his mom drove us to see Edward Scissorhands at the six-plex. Tell me more, I’d said the next year to Scott, whose parents were getting divorced and whose dad had moved into a one-room conch shack on Casey Key near Sarasota. After Scott had been Derek, who’d starred as Captain Hook in our school’s spring musical. When the show’s run ended, I talked him into keeping the hook so we could park in handicapped spots when we went out for pizza. People would start to yell at us, to tell us we were inconsiderate and rude, until Derek flashed his hook and gave them a smile at once woebegone and brave, and they’d swallow hard and start to apologize.

  After Derek was Anand, who had run lights during the show and comforted me after Derek hooked up—no pun intended, I’d told
Marissa—with Jill Pappano, who’d played Tiger Lily. By my sophomore spring, Anand was replaced by Troy, a tennis player with beautifully molded calves and forearms and, it soon emerged, nothing much to say, although he was the most persistent of my boyfriends, always trying to slide his hands up one article of clothing or down another, or pushing my hand between his legs and saying things like, “Feel what you do to me.”

  I knew what he wanted. By then girls were starting to get serious with their boyfriends. Marissa had gone all the way, except she and her boyfriend had both been drunk at the time, so she claimed it didn’t count, and Britt had given a guy a blow job, except none of us had met the guy, a sophomore at Duke whom Britt said she’d met during spring break on the beach. The truth was that sex scared me. My whole life, I’d had to be careful with my body, never running too fast, never getting too hot, taking vitamins and staying hydrated and washing my hands until my skin chapped, knowing that, with my weakened immune system, I’d catch any cold that was going around, and a cold could turn into the flu, which could turn into pneumonia, which could send me to the hospital again.

  Sex was the absence of control, the opposite of caution. It meant letting go entirely. What if I couldn’t? Or worse, what if I could and did, and got hurt?

  It wasn’t something I could discuss with my cardiologist, kind Dr. Karen with the monogrammed handkerchiefs that she kept in her pocket for crying parents and the curly hair she kept cut short and never bothered styling. She had been taking care of me since I was a baby, so there was no way I could ask her what would happen to my heart if I did it, and it certainly wasn’t something I could talk about with my mom. After my sixteenth birthday, she’d knocked on my bedroom door. I’d opened it to find her standing there, still wearing the name­tag from the library, where she’d started volunteering three days a week, dressed in pale-gray linen pants and a peach silk blouse. My mom wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty, with her pale, freckled skin and soft, light-brown hair and round brown eyes that always looked a little surprised, like someone had just snuck up behind her and pinched her bottom.