Anything to Have You

by Paige Harbison

  “You’re not hungover at all?” I asked her, walking in and tossing my bag on the steps.

  “Oh, Nattie.” She laughed. “It would take a lot more to get me hungover.”

  “But you were pretty drunk,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I usually only get hungover if I don’t eat or something. Anyway, hi!” Brooke plopped herself on the couch in the living room. “Did you have more fun than you thought you would last night?”

  “I did, actually...yeah. You and Aiden okay after the whole Justin thing?”

  She waved a hand. “He told me to forget it and that we all make mistakes or whatever. It was surprisingly relaxed of him.”

  I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling. Relief, I suppose, that no one had said something like, Oh, yeah, Natalie and Aiden were being completely weird together.

  It was upsetting and strange, not being able to tell her something. Aiden was probably feeling the same way, since I doubted he had ever lied to her or withheld anything from her, either.

  “Well, that’s good, I’m glad he wasn’t too pissed at you.”

  “Definitely. But I am going to do what you were talking about, and be a better girlfriend. You’re so right. I need to stop trying to get attention from other guys. Aiden is everything I ever wanted. He’s smart, protective, hot as all get out and, I mean...he’s all about me. And you know what I love?”

  “What?”

  She smiled and bit her lip. “Sometimes when he’s pissed or drunk or tired or whatever? A tiny bit of that Texas accent comes out. And God, it’s hot. Because it’s not like a redneck accent. It’s like...like a Southern gentleman accent.”

  I bit my lip, remembering how, only an hour ago, I had heard that very accent.

  Brooke looked proud of herself. “I really need to stop acting like he’s not enough.”

  “Yeah. Probably a good idea.”

  “I’ve been freaking out, because no matter where I go next year, I won’t be near him. Or you. Unless I go to Towson.” She mimed a gun at her temple. “He’ll be at College Park being all successful and busy with his vet program, and I’ll be a million miles away. It’ll never work unless I stay here.”

  “Right...but I’ll only be here because I’m an idiot who hasn’t figured herself out yet. And my dad only gave me one semester to figure it out, and then he’s reportedly going to start applying to places for me.”

  Brooke groaned. “Maybe I’ll stay here, get knocked up and live off Aiden and his vet money, have beautiful children and spend my afternoons at, like, Bikram yoga or something.”

  I took the throw pillow from next to me and tossed it at her face. “You are a lost cause.”

  “I know it!” She squeezed the pillow and bent over it with a groan. “Okay, but point is! I’m not breaking up with Aiden, because even if we are doomed for a breakup, I’d like to enjoy the rest of the year with him. I love him, ya know?”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but evidently couldn’t bring herself to say that, yes, she was in love with Aiden. She started smiling, and I shook my head and said, “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Ugh, Nattie...I mean, if we were older, yes, it would be selfish. But what, am I holding him back from meeting someone new or something? No, there’s, like, three months left in high school. I’m pretty sure he knows who he’s going to know until next fall.”

  I became suddenly conscious of my facial expression.

  “And what would the point be in being single now,” she went on, “right when you find a boy?”

  “I did not find a boy!”

  “Yes, you did, and he’s superhot, named Eric Hornby, and I’m so excited!” She spewed the words quickly and bounced up and down. “Which is why—” she stood up and went into her purse “—we’re going to have a spa night.”

  “Spa... What did I say? I said no movie-style makeover!”

  “It’s not a makeover! At all. It’s a spa night. We’re going to refresh ourselves. I’m not saying you need to do anything to look better, but every girl feels better with freshly buffed skin, shiny nails and perfect eyebrows.”

  We both knew that she was a magician when it came to all things appearance-related. She nodded at me, knowing I was going to let her do her magic.

  I sighed, resigned.

  “Yay! We’re going to beautify ourselves. I repeat...it’s a spa night, not a makeover.” She squealed and ran over to hug me. “This is going to be the best time ever. Ohmigod. We can double date. How fucking cute is that? Ooh, game night!”

  “You are getting way, way ahead of yourself,” I said as she went over to her speakers and put on the new Black Keys album.

  The music wasn’t on for a full verse before Brooke’s mom came into the kitchen looking irritable but perfectly put together, as she always did. It must be where Brooke got it.

  “Brooke, turn that down, honestly. I’m scrambling to get my things together, I really can’t listen to you blast music right now.”

  Brooke rolled her eyes at me, but said, “All right, sorry.”

  “Now, I’m gone until Wednesday, I need you to really get on this college thing. If you don’t make up your mind—”

  “Mom, I am, I told you. I went to the guidance office, but I have to go back at the end of the week when I have an appointment with my counselor.”

  She shook her head and pulled her Kindle and its charger from the wall by the desk. “It’s so incredibly last second. You should have been on top of this a lot sooner.”

  “I know that, you already yelled at me about this a hundred times, what’s the point in continuing to talk about it? I’m doing what I can now, so just stop.”

  Her mom raised her eyebrows in a signature move that had always intimidated me. “You want to adjust your attitude?”

  “I can’t do anything about it right now, regardless, so I don’t see why we have to go on and on about it.”

  “Because if I don’t bring it up, you will choose to forget about it, and then you’ll end up loafing around here next year.”

  “That is not true! I—”

  “Look, Brooke, I don’t have time to argue about this right now. I have to make sure this flight is still taking off because of the weather.”

  “You brought it up! Jesus.”

  “Watch it, Brooke.”

  Brooke took a deep breath that filled her chest, and then sat on the couch next to me. She stared at the wall with her arms crossed, saying nothing but gnawing on her thumbnail until her mom left, talking loudly on her cell phone about a layover she wanted to avoid.

  Once she was gone, Brooke popped up, said nothing about the verbal squabble and went back to being her normal self. Like always. I had come to know and expect this.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and disappeared upstairs and out of sight as I turned up the music. She returned with the Tiffany Blue crate full of bottles, lotions and tools that usually sat on the bottom of her bathroom shelf.

  The first thing she did was slather some horrid oil in my hair and wrap it up in a little terry-cloth turban. The second thing she did was pop a bottle of champagne.

  “I had Aiden get one of his friends to bring us some bubbly. I think it’s necessary.”

  I laughed and took the glass she handed me.

  “Now,” she said. “You might want to down that first glass.”

  “Oh, no, why...?” The thought of drinking again made my stomach turn, but as always, I had trouble saying no to her. She was the only person who consistently had this effect on me.

  “Because this mask is going to burn a little.”

  It did. The next seven processes we did were equally uncomfortable. There was so much burning, tingling, plucking, pulling...and so therefore quite a few refi
lled glasses. I chucked two of them in the sink when she wasn’t looking.

  “All right, now on to the last portion.”

  “I’m dying to know why we’re wearing your freshman-year bikinis, Brooke.”

  “Because!” She pulled a screw-top tub of nasty greenish-brown stuff from the blue crate. “Come on over.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s, like...seaweed and oatmeal and honey and chamomile and about forty other things. Come here, I have to slather you!”

  I took a few timid steps, and she took a handful and laid it on my bare stomach.

  “Oh, my God, that is gross.”

  “It really is.” She spread it around, grimacing. “But it’s worth it! Because—and I’m really sorry this is how it is—boys like girls who are put together.” She gave a what can I say? shrug. “What do you want to be? Do you want to be a Pretty Girl with a capital P and a capital G? Or just a regular ol’ pretty girl?”

  “I mean, I guess...the first one?”

  “Well, there are a couple of things you have to be before you can be a Pretty Girl. I’m not saying you should slab on the makeup until you end up with a three-layer cake on your face, but you have to take extra-special care of yourself. You don’t end up with skin that is the softest he has ever felt by using a regular soap bar and nothing else. Or hair that is so shiny that he wants to reach out and touch it, and find out if it really is as smooth as it looks.

  “You don’t end up with lips he longs to kiss again and again when you don’t slough them off with a sugar scrub every once in a while. When he imagines you, he should think of every sensation of you before he remembers how you look. How you sound when you laugh at a joke he makes, how your soft, sun-kissed shoulder feels in his calloused hand, how your lips taste like sugar and how when you get just close enough to him, he can catch a slight breeze of you and he’ll always remember that you smell like flowers and sunshine.” She finished covering me in the mud, looking nonchalant, as if she hadn’t just recited words that could have carried a whole ad campaign.

  I gawked at her. I had never heard her be so profound, had never had so much insight into how she became the glistening goddess she was. “Wow, Brooke.”

  It did make perfect sense, though, that Brooke’s entire outlook was based on appearance. Her foundation of life and love started with the belief that you needed to look and, thusly or at the very least, feel beautiful.

  “It is only then,” she went on to say, “that he should remember that you’ve got a bangin’ bod and ass that don’t quit.”

  “And back to the Brooke I know and love.”

  She laughed and handed me the tub to slather her up. “I’m just saying. In movies, when they picture the girl who got away or who changed them completely, it’s never just a nice-looking girl being average and having normal problems. The girls are always laughing in the sunlight, moving a strand of perfect Aniston hair back from their eyelashes or lying in bed, with brushed, flossed and whitened teeth, no grocery store mascara in the corners of their eyes or hair filled with nasty product residue. You go for natural, but you make it the natural you choose. And of course, to top it all off, you need sparkling confidence and daring wit. Honestly, all of these things get you to the point that makes you the most confident, and that’s what causes the ‘smiling in the sunshine’ effect more than anything else. And you’ve already got wit, so you’re totally on your way.”

  I thought about what she’d said as she stood, arms out for me to rub in the grossness, and took a sip from her glass.

  She really was an oddly wise and glamorous girl.

  When I finished, we washed our hands and champagne glass stems, then put the final potion on our faces. She grabbed four slices of cucumber, and we took some towels and lay them down in front of the enormous hearth in her living room. She had at some point lit a fire.

  We lay down, side by side, and covered our eyes with the cucumbers.

  “I’m sorry if I’m pushing you too hard about finding a guy,” she said after a few minutes. “I want someone to see you, and for you to feel the way that only a guy can make you feel. Maybe that’s Eric, maybe it’s not. But I want you to find someone.”

  “Isn’t that against everything we’re supposed to think now? As girls? Aren’t we supposed to feel complete without the approval of a man and all that?”

  I felt her wave away the comment. “Whatever. Be empowered. Be your own woman. But no matter how independent you are, no matter how much you love yourself, there’s something only romance can make you feel.”

  “I guess I know what you mean.”

  “It’s true, sorry ’bout it. People think I’m a slut sometimes, but I’m not. I’m not a sex addict. I don’t crave attention so much that I’ll sacrifice my dignity for it. I love love. Romantic love is different every single time, with every person. It’s like having these lovely, sparkly little secrets with different boys. I love feeling those sparks fly. And I’ll do anything to get them. But to lots of people, that means I’m a slut. And whatever. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what it is to be a slut.”

  I wanted to respond to this insight with something better, but all I could utter was, “You’re not a slut, Brooke.”

  “Whatever,” she said again. “I act how I act because that feeling is so addictive. The feeling that you are the girl in somebody’s montage. Even when a romance is short-lived and lame, and disappointing, there’s that moment...that moment where you feel like...a girl. Not a queen, not a goddess, not a supermodel. A girl, in the way that boys are supposed to think about us. Like the golden sunlit, breeze-in-the-hair girl that we all want to be.”

  I breathed deeply. I wanted to be that. She was right. That was what she had meant all along. Not that I needed a boyfriend because of social status or because of a date. But because I wanted and deserved a few glistening memories and moments with someone who saw me that way.

  “Know what I mean, jelly bean?”

  “Yeah, I do, actually.”

  I thought of Aiden. I pictured him walking into the diner last night. Shaking my dad’s hand. The look on his face when he really liked the pie. I pictured his glances in the rearview at me in the backseat. I pictured his hand on my back, leading me through a doorway before him, but after Brooke. I imagined his hair, and wondered if it was soft.

  Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit. Why was I having an Aiden montage?

  “Okay, let’s go rinse. I once left this stuff on too long and looked like I’d gotten a bad spray tan,” said Brooke before leading me up the stairs.

  I rinsed first and then sat on the sink in a towel while she did.

  “So, Natalie,” she said from behind the curtain.

  “What?”

  “Is there anything you aren’t telling me about the party?”

  All of my insides froze. “What?”

  “I mean, you hooked up with Eric, right? I know you made out with him. But did something else happen? I remember that someone said they couldn’t find you. I was still avoiding downstairs because I was pissed at Aiden, so I didn’t go investigate. But I’m wondering what happened. You’re kind of acting weird. Not like superweird, but you seem different to me.”

  “Do I?”

  She ducked around the side of the curtain. “I’m your best friend, Nat, I think I know when you’re acting weird.”

  Maybe she knew better than I even did.

  “All right, whatever, have your secrets. But I think you like Eric. Do you like him? You should totally go to prom with him! You guys should hang out more. Oh, my God—you, me, him and Aiden are going to make, like, the most gorgeous prom group ever! If you’re with him, you’ll definitely get a nom, too.” She nodded at me, agreeing with her own comment.

  “A nom?”

  “Prom queen nomination, duh.”

  It s
hould have been obvious what she meant, but the idea was so foreign to me. Me, nominated for prom court? My life had already changed completely, but was that really possible? No way, right? And if it was, did I want it?

  “That would be crazy,” I said.

  “It’s really not. You are, but it’s not. You’re like this phantom It girl that everyone adores. But dating Eric will totally shoot you into the stratosphere of popularity.”

  “I don’t really care about that stuff.”

  “No, I know. But what you can’t fool me about—” she turned off the shower and grabbed her towel “—is the fact that you want to be in love just like I do. You can act blasé about everything else in the world, but I know you care about love. And I know you would do almost anything to meet the guy of your dreams.”

  “And this gross mud crap is that ‘almost anything,’ huh?”

  She gave a hoot of laughter and said, “Pretty much!”

  She did know me. And she was right. It was probably the only thing I did care about, even though it was something I barely pursued. But I wouldn’t mind meeting a guy who made me happy. Someone to do things with. Someone to always have my back. Someone with whom I could exchange a look at a bad party, and he’d make an excuse for us and we would leave. We would go back to my house and watch movies on my couch. Getting snowed in would be fun, because we wouldn’t be at a party.

  The idea gave me a heart-twisting thrill. Followed by sadness and guilt as I recognized that I knew who I wanted that person to be.

  And he had a slight accent that slipped out when he talked about pie.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I HADN’T EXPECTED Alexa to actually follow up with me about getting our nails done, but she did. She found me after school on Thursday and asked if I was “ready for a pedi.” She laughed at her own rhyme. Before the party, I might not have said yes, but I did now. One of the things Brooke had told me about making friends with girls was that you would get one window in which to be friends with them. If you declined an invitation, or if you were un-fun at whatever it was, you were unlikely to get another invite.