Analee, in Real Life
Page 12
“Well, you’ll have to come try it on.” Harlow laughs. “We can make a girls’ day of it. Get our nails done, go to that new smoothie place on Woodland.”
“I don’t get an invite to girls’ day?” Dad asks. He does this fake cutesy pout that almost makes me dry heave. Dad is so obsessed with Harlow. It’s like he can’t be alone for a second anymore.
“No boys allowed,” Harlow says. “Oh and, Analee, make sure you talk to Seb!”
“About what?”
“About going as your date.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I raise both hands in the air. “That’s . . . He’s . . . We’re not . . .”
The three of them stare at me, possibly because I’ve lost all ability to form a coherent sentence. It’s not so unusual, what Harlow’s suggesting. Seb is my boyfriend, after all, and shouldn’t I be thrilled to bring my boyfriend to this disaster of a wedding? It occurs to me that Seb and I never talked about how long we’d keep up our farce. Will we still be together by the wedding? Are we doomed to stay a couple until Chloe and Lily see the light? Or will we fail and eventually peter out after realizing none of it ever meant anything?
It might be nice to have someone along for the wedding. Someone who will save me from the small talk and the dancing and the watching my father marry a woman who is not my mother.
“I’ll ask him,” I say to Harlow.
Seb might agree to it. He might understand. I think back to our conversation in the cafeteria about his stepmom. The hint of anger simmering underneath the cheeky smile. Anger that might come close to a fraction of mine. Seb hides his well, but I feel like mine is exposed at all times, toxic and black, repulsing everyone around me.
I love lattes now. I hate that I love lattes now, but it is what it is. Seb is at my locker every day like a faithful dog, but even better than a dog, because Seb comes with lattes.
“Got your fix,” he says, handing me my cup.
“Mmm, come to mama,” I say to the drink. Caffeine is a hell of a drug. I take a long, milky sip.
“Remember when you claimed you didn’t like coffee?” Seb asks as I open my locker.
“Nope.” I slide my textbook out, which he immediately takes from me. “I don’t think that ever happened.”
“It’s almost like you shouldn’t form an opinion before you try something.”
I’m too busy savoring my latte to respond. It’s gotten easier to talk to Seb. I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but I’m not as careful with what I do or don’t say. It’s harder when the two of us are plunked into the East Bay fishbowl. Even now, when students are hurrying to get to class, I’m keenly aware of how many people stop to look at us. I’m only slightly better at pretending that I don’t notice. It’s progress for me, getting here. We did it little by little. Seb hands me my morning latte and walks me to my first class, and then later we eat lunch together, just the two of us. I can handle this routine. I’m almost starting to enjoy it.
When the lunch bell rings, Seb is stationed once again at my locker. We head into the cafeteria together and load our trays with chicken nuggets and stale french fries. The perk of dating Seb Matias is that no matter how crowded the cafeteria gets, our table is left open. It’s unofficially reserved.
Seb pulls out the chair for me. He’s laying the gentleman routine on thick, probably because Chloe is looking in our general direction, though not specifically at us.
“M’lady,” he says.
“Thank you, m’lord.”
I’m thinking that this fake dating thing isn’t so bad. Seb isn’t so bad either. I can handle talking to someone one-on-one. It’s like talking to Lily, or Harris.
Then Seb ruins it by saying, “We should probably sit with the group at some point.”
“The group?” I repeat. My heart seizes in my chest.
“Yeah, I mean . . . that’s the goal, right? You get in with Lily, I get in with Chloe?”
That’s 100 percent the goal. The problem is, I was just starting to feel comfortable with Seb. Adding other people to the mix could be potentially disastrous, like a chem experiment gone horribly wrong.
“I need more time,” I say.
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you make things way more complicated than they need to be?”
“Oh, okay. Nothing complicated about hanging out with your ex-girlfriend, my ex–best friend, the guy who’s trying to bang your ex—”
“All right,” Seb says. “I get it. Maybe it is a little fucked up.”
“A little?”
“They’re still my friends, though.”
I don’t say anything. I dip my chicken nugget into some ketchup and bite into it. Why is Seb so desperate to call these people his friends? Matt McKinley? Waste of oxygen. Colton? Douchebag. And Chloe? She said she wanted space, and Seb is giving her that space.
“You still have pictures of Chloe on your Instagram,” I say. “Did you know that?”
“You’re checking out my Instagram?” Seb asks. He looks very self-satisfied right now. I ignore it.
“There was a picture you took of her at the beach.”
“Oh,” Seb says. He dips a nugget into my ketchup. Without asking. “That was a huge pain in the ass. I had to take seventeen pictures that day before I found one that would satisfy her.”
“Hold on,” I say. “What?”
“What?”
“You took seventeen pictures of her?”
“That’s a rough estimate.”
“That’s insane,” I say.
Seb shrugs. “Every date with Chloe was a photo shoot. She had to approve of every picture I took of her, plus pick the filter and retouch it.”
“What about the ‘love of my life’ caption? Was that her too?”
“No,” Seb says. He looks down at his food, focusing much too intently on rearranging his fries. “That was me.”
What is it about Chloe? Besides the obvious—that she’s smart and pretty and outgoing. Maybe I’m overthinking it. There’s no magic Chloe essence that makes her so much better than me. It’s a bunch of little ingredients that I lack.
“Do you want me to take the picture down?” he asks.
It doesn’t look great for me, as the new girlfriend, to compete with it. And it’s wholly inappropriate for Seb to call someone else the love of his life when he’s supposed to be dating me. Still, I don’t want to make him take it down. It just doesn’t feel right.
“It’s okay. Keep it.”
“You bring up a good point, though,” Seb says. He’s eaten, like, half my ketchup now. “We need to take some pictures together. What are you doing this weekend?”
I have zero excuses at the ready. And the truth—that Harris and I are going to help an orc widow in the Redlands avenge her husband’s death—is much too sad.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Let’s go to the beach.”
I groan. I can’t help it.
“Here we go,” Seb says, rubbing his hands together. “What’s wrong with the beach?”
“Beaches are so overrated. It’s one of those ideas that’s great in theory but awful in practice. You have to pack all kinds of crap with you—beach chairs, towels, umbrellas, food, water. You sit there for hours, baking in the sun, getting sweaty and sticky, washing yourself off with salt water that dries out your skin. Then you get sand all over the car when you leave. And then you continue to find sand everywhere for a week after.”
I don’t mean to rant and rave like a lunatic, but my hatred of beaches runs deep. Seb should be looking at me like I’ve sprouted horns, but instead he laughs and shakes his head.
“You are ridiculous,” he says. “And we’re going to the beach on Saturday.”
“I’m not getting into the water,” I say.
“I didn’t say you have to get into the water.”
“I’m just letting you know.”
“Can’t you swim?”
“We live in Flori
da,” I say. “Of course I can swim.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Bathing suits.”
“I’m not even going to ask,” Seb says, fishing out the remains of my ketchup with a french fry.
There’s so much wrong with bathing suits. The lack of boob support, the amount of shaving required, the way they put your entire body on display, everything hanging out for the world to see. No, thank you. I’ll spare Seb this rant, though.
“Harlow and my dad invited you to their wedding,” I say. It’s my turn to look down at my french fries. “I know it’s super-lame. You totally don’t have to go. I can make up an excuse. I don’t even know if we’ll still technically be a couple by that time.”
“I love weddings,” Seb says.
I look up. “You do?”
“Yeah. I know that’s, like, uncool of me to say or whatever, but I honestly do. I love watching the bride walk down the aisle. I love dancing to ‘Shout.’ I love wearing oversize glasses in photo booth pictures.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Judge me all you want.”
“No, no judgment. Does that mean you’ll come with me?”
“Sure, why not?”
“But what if you’re with Chloe by the time the wedding rolls around?”
“You and I could still go together,” Seb says. “As friends.”
The word is like a trigger on my heart. It has been so long since anyone has called me a friend. Harris, sure, but it’s not the same as having a friend in front of you, breathing and talking and moving. Seb is my friend. When our fake relationship goes to shambles, maybe all won’t be lost.
“Did your dad and stepmom have a wedding?” I ask, and Seb’s eyes cloud over.
“No,” he says. “They married at the courthouse. I wasn’t even there.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to handle Dad and Harlow’s wedding,” I admit.
“Is Harlow really that bad?”
“Yes,” I say, half-joking, half not. “No. I don’t know. She’s just . . . she’s not my mom.”
Seb nods like he understands. “When did your parents get divorced?”
I knew this was coming. I always dread this moment in a conversation. The big reveal. When I have to say the words out loud and then get the “I’m sorry” and the awkward silence and that look. That look that makes me feel like a puppy at the pound.
“They didn’t,” I say. “My mom died two and a half years ago.”
“Fuuuuuck,” Seb says.
I laugh. I don’t know why. It’s a totally inappropriate thing to do after telling someone your mom died.
“How?” he asks.
“Ovarian cancer.”
“Fuck,” he says again. “God. That really sucks, Analee.”
“Believe me, I know.”
He wipes his hands on a napkin, still chewing his food. Neither of us speaks for a few seconds. I usually hate these types of silences. I feel the need to talk to fill the empty space, but I can never think of anything to say. Then I worry I’m a horrible conversationalist, and that added stress prevents me from coming up with any talking points whatsoever.
It doesn’t feel uncomfortable now, though. Seb, still eating as always, looks deep in thought.
Finally he says, “No wonder you’re so pissed off all the time.”
I burst out laughing. “One of many reasons.”
“Is that a picture of her? On your phone?” he asks.
“Oh.” I can’t hide my surprise that he noticed something of mine. Most of Seb’s attention span is devoted to himself, then Chloe, then the rest of the student body. “Yeah. It is.”
“Can I see?” he asks.
I pull out my phone to show him, thinking he’ll give it a cursory glance. Instead he takes it and studies the picture intently, running his finger over the cracked screen.
It’s the last picture I took of Mom before she was diagnosed. She, Lily, and I had gone to the mall that day, and we had eaten all the samples in the food court and gorged ourselves on Cinnabons. At some point Lily began talking to a store mannequin. We were hopped up on sugar, and Mom laughed so hard that she cried, and that’s when I took the picture.
“You look just like her,” he comments.
“You think?” I’ve been told this before, but I like hearing it. Looking like Mom, even a second-rate version of her, is the one thing I truly love about my appearance.
“Like, exactly,” Seb says. “You have the same smile. I mean, the rare times you actually show your smile.”
He studies the picture a little longer as I shift around next to him.
“What was she like?” he asks.
I’m not sure what to say. It’s been so long since someone brought her up. Dad never talks about her, and Harlow carefully avoids the subject. Avery is barely aware that another woman ever existed in Harlow’s place, that Dad and I had a life before they came into it.
“She was . . . ,” I start to say, but I’m not sure how to finish the sentence. She was my mom. How do you put that connection into words? She was everything. My whole world. The person who made me. It’s like someone asking you to sum up your entire existence in a snapshot.
“She was funny,” I settle for saying, but it doesn’t even cover a fraction of what she was.
“Yeah?”
“Not funny like a comedian. She was goofy. She liked to make people laugh, even if they were laughing at her.”
That’s where Mom and I differ. I’m terrified of people laughing at me. She welcomed it. As long as everyone else was happy, she was happy.
He smiles, and I have the urge to keep talking.
“And her favorite holiday was April Fools’ Day,” I say. “She liked regular holidays too, but she went all out for April Fools’. She was a legend.”
“Sugar in the salt shakers, that kind of thing?” Seb asks.
I wave the question away. “Amateur hour. It would be a full day of torture. She’d serve caramel onions that were disguised as apples, attach party poppers to the doors, cover my entire room in sticky notes . . .”
As I’m retelling it to Seb, it’s like something inside me is uncorked. All the stuff I miss about Mom, all the stuff I want to remember and so I keep it locked tight, is spilling out of me before I can stop it. I can’t remember talking this much, for this long, to anybody recently.
“You’re lucky,” he says when I pause to breathe.
I scoff at this. “Not the word I’d use.”
“You had an awesome mom.”
“Had,” I repeat. The past tense hurts, every time.
“Some people don’t even get that.”
“I think that makes it easier,” I say. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Believe me, you know what you’re missing,” Seb says. It occurs to me that for all his complaining about his stepmom, he’s never mentioned his real mom. I think about bringing it up, but his face closes shut, and I can tell it’s the end of that. People think they know Seb, but maybe they know only one version of him. Maybe something inside of him matches what’s inside of me. The only difference is, I give in to it completely, and he pretends it doesn’t exist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Harris: you’re blowing me off to go to the beach?
Harris: who is this, really?
Me: I don’t want to go
Harris: so don’t
Me: I have to
Harris: why?
Harris: beaches suck. get ready for a sunburn and sand in unforeseen places
Me: Ugh, i know
Harris: you going with the fam?
I pause, fingers draped over the keyboard.
Me: No, just a friend
Harris: ? did you and lily make up?
Me: Not yet
Me: Working on it
Harris: i guess i’ll have to entertain myself while you’re gone
Harris: even though the internet is no fun without you
Me: Uh-huh . . .
Harris: no, really
Harris: talking to you is the best part of my day
My insides turn to butter. I don’t want to leave this conversation and spend the day getting itchy and sweaty. I want to sit in my air-conditioned room and soak up every single one of Harris’s words.
Me: Mine too
Me: Tonight we’re delivering the hell out of that trinket, though
Harris: promise?
Me: I swear on the spirit of orc husband
Harris: RIP, orc husband. you are forever in our hearts
I shave every spare inch of my body in preparation for beach day. It’s a lot of work, contorting myself into Harlow-like poses so that I can reach the backs of my thighs and around my knees. I start to feel dizzy and light-headed in the process, and I wonder if it’s possible to suffer from heat stroke in the shower.
The funny thing is, I don’t even believe in shaving. I think all women should agree to go full Chewbacca, grow out all hair everywhere. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t agree with me. And I’m not going Chewbacca by myself.
So, I spend an hour scraping a razor all over my skin. Then I put on the only bathing suit I own, a retro one-piece that makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe. It minimizes my stomach pouch and makes my boobs look fantastic. Not that I care what Seb thinks of my breasts. I’m just saying.
On top of my vintage suit, I throw on jeans and a tank top. Seb already texted me that he’s a few minutes away from my house. When I get downstairs, I see Avery decked out in a tiny hot-pink bikini, platform sandals, and sunglasses. I stop in my tracks.
“Where are you going?” I ask her.
“With you.”
“Uh . . . what? No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
Dad calls my name from the kitchen. “Analee!”
“To be continued,” I warn Avery. She crosses her arms in front of her as I stomp into the kitchen, where Dad and Harlow are drinking coffee at the table. No, scratch that. Dad is drinking coffee. Harlow is drinking what she has previously informed me is called Teeccino, an herbal coffee alternative. Because she’s Harlow.