by Sarah Dessen
“Excuse me?”
“Brie,” she repeated, lifting a small glass tray from the end table and extending it toward me. “It’s a soft cheese, from France.”
“Oh, right,” I said. I just hadn’t heard her, but now she looked very pleased with herself, as if she actually thought she’d brought some foreign culture into my life. “Thank you.”
We were not given the opportunity to see if the conversation would progress naturally. Jennifer Anne clearly had a list of talking points she had culled from the newspaper or CNN she believed would allow us to converse on a level she deemed acceptable. This had to be a business tactic she’d picked up from one of her self-improvement books, none of which, I noticed, were shelved in the living room on public display.
“So,” she said, after we’d all had a cracker or two, “what do you think about what’s happening with the elections in Europe, Remy?”
I was taking a sip of my ginger ale, and glad of it. But finally I had to reply. I said, “I haven’t been following the news lately, actually.”
“Oh, it’s fascinating,” she told me. “Christopher and I were just discussing how the outcome could affect our global economy, weren’t we, honey?”
My brother swallowed the cracker he’d been eating, cleared his throat, and said, “Yes.”
And so it went. In the next fifteen minutes, we had equally fascinating discussions about genetic engineering, global warming, the possibility of books being completely obsolete in a few years because of computers, and the arrival at the local zoo of a new family of exotic, nearly extinct Australian birds. By the time we finally sat down for dinner, I was exhausted.
“Great chicken, sweetheart,” my brother said as we all dug into our plates. Jennifer Anne had prepared some complicated-looking recipe involving chicken breasts stuffed with sweet potatoes topped with a vegetable glaze. They looked perfect, but it was the kind of dish where you just knew someone had to have been pawing at your food for a long while to get it just right, their fingers all in what now you were having to stick in your mouth.
“Thank you,” Jennifer replied, reaching over to pat his hand. “More rice?”
“Please.” Chris smiled at her as she dished food onto his plate, and I realized, not for the first time, that I hardly recognized my brother anymore. He was sitting there as if this was the life he was used to, as if all he’d ever known was wearing a tie to dinner and having someone fix him exotic meals on what clearly were the good plates. But I knew differently. We’d shared the same childhood, were raised by the same woman, whose idea of a home-cooked meal involved Kraft dinner, Pillsbury biscuits, and a pea-and-carrot combo from a can. My mother couldn’t even make toast without setting off the smoke detector. It was amazing we’d even made it past grade school without getting scurvy. But you wouldn’t know that now. The transformation of Chris, my stoner brother with a police record, to Christopher, man of culture, ironing, and established career of lubrication specialist was almost complete. There were only a few more kinks to work out, like the lizards. And me.
“So your mother and Don get back Friday, correct?” Jennifer Anne asked me.
“Yep,” I said, nodding. And maybe it was those meticulously made chicken rolls, or the fakeness of the entire evening thus far, but something suddenly kicked up my evil side. I turned to Chris and said, “So we haven’t done it yet, you know.”
He blinked at me, his mouth full of rice. Then he swallowed and said, “What?”
“The wager.” I waited for him to catch up, but either he didn’t or was pretending not to.
“What wager?” Jennifer Anne asked, gamely allowing this divergence from her scripted dinner conversation.
“It’s nothing,” Chris mumbled. He was trying to kick me under the table, but hit a leg instead, rattling Jennifer Anne’s butter dish.
“Years ago,” I said to Jennifer Anne, as he took another swipe, barely nicking the sole of my shoe, “when my mother married for the second time, Chris and I started a tradition of laying bets on how long it would last.”
“This bread is just great,” Chris said quickly to Jennifer Anne. “Really.”
“Chris was ten, and I must have been six or so,” I continued. “This was when she married Harold, the professor? The day they left for the honeymoon, we each sat down with a pad of paper and calculated how long we thought they’d stay together. And then, we folded up our guesses and sealed them in an envelope, which I kept in my closet until the day my mother sat us down to tell us Harold was moving out.”
“Remy,” Chris said in a low voice, “this isn’t funny.”
“He’s just mad,” I told her, “because he’s never won yet. I always do. Because it’s like blackjack: you can’t go over. Whoever comes closest to the actual day wins. And we’ve had to really be specific about the rules over the years. Like it’s the day she tells us it’s over, not the official separation day. We had to establish that because when she and Martin split Chris tried to cheat.”
Now, Chris was just glaring at me. Sore loser.
“Well, I think,” Jennifer Anne said, her voice high, “that is just horrible. Just horrible.” She put down her fork carefully and pressed her napkin to her lips, closing her eyes. “What an awful way to look at a marriage.”
“We were just kids,” Chris said quickly, putting his arm around her.
“I’m just saying,” I said, shrugging, “it’s like a family tradition.”
Jennifer Anne pushed out her chair and picked up the chicken dish. “I just think that your mother deserves better,” she snapped, “than for you to have so little faith in her.” And then she walked into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her.
Chris was across the table at me so quickly I didn’t even have time to put down my fork: he almost pierced his own eyeball. “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed at me. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Remy?”
“Gosh, Christopher,” I said. “Such language. You better not let her hear you, she’ll make you stay after school and write a report on those Australian blue-footed boobies.”
He sat back down in his chair, getting out of my face at least. “Look,” he said, spitting out the words, “I can’t help it if you’re a bitter, angry bitch. But I love Jennifer Anne and I won’t let you play your little games with her. Do you hear me?”
I just looked at him.
“Do you?” he snapped. “Because dammit, Remy, you make it really hard to love you sometimes. You know that? You really do.” And then he pushed out his chair, threw his napkin down, and pushed through the door into the kitchen.
I sat there. I honestly felt like I’d been slapped: my face even felt red and hot. I’d just been messing around with him, and God, he’d just freaked. All these years Chris was the only one who’d ever shared my sick, cynical view on love. We’d always told each other how we’d never get married, no way, shoot me if I do it. But now, he’d turned his back on everything. What a chump.
I could hear them in the kitchen, her voice quiet and tremulous, his soothing. On my plate my food was cold, just like my hard, hard heart. You would have thought I’d feel brittle too, being such a bitter, angry bitch. But I didn’t. I felt nothing, really, just the sense that now the circle I’d always kept small was a little smaller. Maybe Chris could be saved that easily. But not me. Never me.
After much whispered discussion in the kitchen, an uneasy peace was negotiated. I apologized to Jennifer Anne, trying to make it sound genuine, and suffered through some more talking points over chocolate soufflé before finally being allowed to leave. Chris still wasn’t really speaking to me, and didn’t even try to make it sound like he wasn’t slamming the door at my back when I left. I shouldn’t even have been surprised, actually, that he’d caved so easily to love. That was why he’d lost our marriage bet every time: his guess was always over, way over, the last time by a full six months.
I got in my car and drove. Going home seemed depressing, with just me there, so I cut across
town, into Lissa’s neighborhood. I slowed down in front of her house, turning off my lights and idling by the mailbox. Through the front window I could see into the dining room, where she and her parents were eating dinner. I thought about going up and ringing the bell—Lissa’s mom was always quick to pull a chair and another plate up to the table—but I wasn’t in the mood for parental talk about college, or the future. In fact, I felt like I was primed for a little backsliding. So I went to Chloe’s.She answered the door holding a wooden spoon, her brow furrowed. “My mom’s due home in forty-five minutes,” she informed me, holding the door open so I could come in. “You can stay thirty, okay?”
I nodded. Chloe’s mom, Natasha, had a strict policy of no uninvited guests, which meant that as long as I’d known Chloe there’d always been a set time limit of how long we could hang out at her house. Her mom just didn’t seem to like people that much. I figured this was either a really bad reason to choose a career as a flight attendant or a natural reaction to having become one. Either way, we hardly ever saw her.
“How was dinner?” she asked me over her shoulder as I followed her into the kitchen, where I could hear something sizzling on the stove.
“Uneventful,” I told her. I wasn’t lying as much as I just didn’t feel like getting into it. “Can I score a couple of minibottles from you?”
She turned around from the stove, where she was stirring something in the pan. It smelled like seafood. “Is that why you came over?”
“Partially.” That was the thing about Chloe: I could always shoot it straight with her. In fact, she preferred it that way. Like me, she wasn’t into bullshitting around.
She rolled her eyes. “Help yourself.”
I pulled a stool over and stepped up, opening the cabinet. Ah, the mother lode. Tiny bottles her mom had filched from the drink cart lined the shelf, arranged neatly by height and category: clear liquors on the left, dessert brandies on the right. I grabbed two Barcardis from the back, readjusted the rows, then glanced at Chloe to make sure it looked okay. She nodded, then handed me a glass of Coke, into which I dumped the contents of one bottle, shaking it around with some ice cubes. Then I took a sip. It was strong, and burned going down, and I felt this weird twinge, like I knew this wasn’t the way to react to what had happened at Jennifer Anne’s. It passed, though. That was the bad thing. It always passed.
“Want a sip?” I asked Chloe, holding out my glass. “It’s good.”
She shook her head. “Yeah,” she said, adjusting the flame under the pan, “that’s just what I need. She comes home to my first tuition bill and I smell like rum.”
“Where’s she been this time?”
“Zurich, I think.” She leaned closer to the pan, sniffing it. “With a layover in London. Or Milan.”
I took another sip of my drink. “So,” I said, after a few seconds of quiet, “I’m an angry, bitter bitch. Right?”
“Right,” she said, without turning around.
I nodded. Point proved. I supposed. I drew in the dampness left by my glass on the black countertop, stretching out the edges.
“And you bring this up,” Chloe said, turning around and leaning against the stove, “because . . .”
“Because,” I told her, “Chris suddenly believes in love and I don’t and therefore, I am a terrible person.”
She considered this. “Not altogether terrible,” she said. “You have some good points.”
I waited, raising my eyebrows.
“Such as,” she said, “you have really nice clothes.”
“Fuck you,” I told her, and she laughed, putting her hand over her mouth, so I laughed too. Really, I don’t know what I’d expected. I would have said the same thing to her.
She wouldn’t let me drive when I left. She moved my car around the corner—if it was parked out front her mom would be pissed—then drove me to Bendo, where I had to swear I would only have one more beer and then call Jess for a ride home. I promised. Then I went inside, had two beers, and decided not to bug Jess just yet. Instead I set myself up at the bar, with a decent view of the room, and decided to stew for a while.
I don’t know how long it was before I saw her. One minute I was arguing with the bartender, a tall, gangly guy named Nathan, about classic rock guitarists, and the next I turned my head and caught a glimpse of her in the mirror behind the bar. Her hair was flat, her face a little sweaty. She looked drunk, but I would have known her anywhere. It was everybody else who always liked to think she was gone for good.
I wiped off my face, ran my fingers through my hair, trying to give it some life. She stared back at me as I did this, knowing as well as I that these were just smoke and mirrors, little tricks. Behind her and me the crowd was thickening, and I could feel people pressing up against me, leaning forward for drinks. And the sick thing? In a way, I was almost happy to see her. The worst part of me, out in the flesh. Blinking back at me in the dim light, daring me to call her a name other than my own.
Truth be told, I used to be worse. Much worse.
I hardly ever drank much anymore. Or smoked pot. Or went off with guys I didn’t know that well into dark corners, or dark cars, or dark rooms. Weird how it never worked in the daylight, when you could actually see the topography of someone’s face, the lines and bumps, the scars. In the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.It wasn’t the drinking or the smoking that was really the problem. It was the other thing, the one harder to admit out loud. Nice girls didn’t do what I did. Nice girls waited. But even before it happened, I’d never counted myself as a nice girl.
It was sophomore year, and Lissa’s next-door neighbor Albert, a senior, was having a party. Lissa’s parents were out of town, and we were all sleeping over, sneaking into their liquor cabinet and mixing anything we found together, then chasing it with Diet Coke: rum, vodka, peppermint schnapps. To this day I couldn’t stomach cherry brandy, not even in the torts my mother loved from Milton’s Market. The smell of it alone made me gag.
We never would have been invited to Albert’s, being sophomores, and weren’t bold enough to even consider crashing. But we did go out on Lissa’s back porch with our spiked Diet Cokes and sneaked cigarettes we’d stolen from Chloe’s grandmother, who smoked menthols. (Which also, to this day, made me gag.) Some guy, who was already drunk and slurring, waved us over. After a bit of whispered conferring, which consisted of Lissa saying we couldn’t and me and Chloe overruling her, we went.
That was the first night I ever got really drunk. It was a bad start with the cherry brandy, and an hour later I found myself making my way across Albert’s living room, clutching an easy chair for support. Everything was spinning, and I could see Lissa and Chloe and Jess sitting on a couch in the living room, where some girl was teaching them how to play quarters. The music was really loud, and someone had broken a vase in the foyer. It was blue, and the pieces were still scattered everywhere, strewn across the lime carpet. I remember thinking, in my blurry state, that it looked like sea glass.
It was one of Albert’s friends, a really popular senior guy, who I bumped into on the stairs. He’d been flirting with me all night, pulling me into his lap while we played Asshole, and I’d liked it, felt vindicated, like it proved I wasn’t just some stupid sophomore. When he said we should hang out and talk, alone, I knew where we were going and why. Even then, I wasn’t new to this.
We went into Albert’s bedroom and started kissing, there in the dark, as he fumbled for a light switch. Once he found it I could make out a Pink Floyd poster, stacks of CDs, Elle McPher son on the wall with December beneath her. He was easing me back, toward the bed, and then we were lying down, all so quick.
I’d always prided myself on having the upper hand. I had my patented moves, the push offs and casual squirm, easily utilized to slow things down. But this time, they weren’t working. Every time I moved one
of his hands another seemed to be on me, and it seemed like all my strength had seeped down to my toes. It didn’t help that I was so drunk that my balance was off, my equilibrium shot. And it had felt so good, for a while.
God. The rest comes in bursts when I do reach that far back, always these crazy sharp details: how fast it was all happening, the way I kept coming in and out of it, one second vivid, the next lost. He was on me and everything was spinning and all I could feel was this weight, heavy, pushing me backward until I feel like Alice, being sucked into the rabbit hole. It was not how I wanted my first time to be.
When it was over, I told him I felt sick and ran for the bathroom, locking the door with my hands shaking, unable at first to perform even that easiest of operations. Then I gripped the sink, gasping hard into it, my own breath coming back at me, amplified, rattling my ears. When I lifted my head up and looked in the mirror, it was her face I saw then. Drunk. Pale. Easy. And scared, unsteady, still gasping as she looked back at me, wondering what she had done.
“Nope.” The bartender shook his head, plunking a cup of coffee in front of me. “She’s cut off.”
I wiped my face with my hand and looked at the guy beside me, shrugging. “I’m fine,” I said. Or slurred. Maybe. “I only had a couple.”“I know. They don’t know anything.” We’d been talking for about an hour now, and this was what I knew: his name was Sherman, he was a junior at some college I’d never heard of in Minnesota, and in the last ten minutes he’d progressively slid his leg closer and closer to mine while trying to pass it off as just the crowd jostling him. Now he shook a cigarette out of the pack in his hand, then offered it to me. I shook my head and he lit it, sucking down smoke and then blowing it straight up in the air. “So,” he said, “a girl like you must have a boyfriend.”