by Allen, Jacob
Three and a Half Years Ago
I couldn’t believe it, but Tyler Morrison had actually asked me to homecoming.
It had been my biggest fear since I started high school that not only would I have to just breeze through as quickly as possible, I would do so while being ignored. It seemed like a good idea, in theory, to just focus on school and ignore everything else, as I had told Jackie.
But in practice, seeing Emily with Adam—even if they had broken up harshly over the summer—made me jealous and sad. I wanted to know what it was like to be wanted. I wanted to know what it was like to have people interested in me. And all through middle school, I never had that.
Then, go figure, I got my braces removed, and Tyler had asked me out. And I still couldn’t believe it had actually happened.
I sat in the Uber taking me home, eager to see my mom and dad and tell them what had happened. I knew they were mostly interested in my schoolwork, but I figured they would at least have some level of happiness about the fact that I’d gotten a homecoming date. Granted, that would come the night before PSAT prep class, but I didn’t think they would mind that much.
I wasn’t going to drink or stay out late. That wasn’t my style. It also had no interest to me. I wasn’t even sure that I was going to kiss Tyler—that just seemed gross. He had braces too, after all.
As soon as I got home, I found my mother and my father in their office, typing away and working as they usually did.
“Hey guys.”
“Hi, Samantha,” my mother said, not looking up from her computer. “What did you learn in school today?”
“Well, lots of things in biology especially, but I have some good news. Tyler asked me to homecoming!”
I wasn’t sure what sort of reaction I had expected, but I could safely say that muted and almost alarmed was not one of them. My mother paused her typing, took a deep breath, and turned to me with a concerned expression on her face.
“When is homecoming?”
“Oh, it’s October 15th, that’s OK, right?”
My mother sighed.
“Samantha, that’s the night before your PSAT prep class. We have talked about this. If we’re going to get you into Harvard, you need to make sure that you spend your time wisely. We have to do every step perfectly. You being out late the night before your PSAT prep class is not going to accomplish it.”
My heart began to sink. How was I going to explain this to Tyler? Couldn’t I just have one moment of happiness, one moment of not being a learning machine? Couldn’t I just be a teenager at least once?
“But Mom, I’m not going to stay out late. The dance ends at 11, and—”
“11?!?” she said, as if I’d just told her I would be out until sunrise. “Heavens, no, Samantha. I’m sorry, but we cannot allow you to go to homecoming.”
“Mom—”
“I’m going to cut this off right now before it goes any further, Samantha,” my father said. “You will not be going to homecoming so long as you are in the PSAT course. And you are not going to be dropping that PSAT course as long as we believe you can get into Harvard. I’m sorry, but that is final. This is the only way forward.”
With that, as if turning their backs on me, my mother and my father both turned their attention back to their computers. I looked at both of them yearningly, pleading for them to face me, but neither did.
I eventually had no choice but to accept this humiliation. What other parents drove their kid like this? Why couldn’t I have just even a few hours of being a teenager?
Apparently, my parents refused to believe I could balance both.
Apparently, I wasn’t allowed to be a teenager.
* * *
Present Day
“My parents are rude and condescending to me.”
Mr. Smith had come in just moments after my confession, leaving a sort of cliffhanger to our conversation I needed to fill. I worried that if I just left the words hanging and didn’t elaborate on what I meant, Nick would find a way to twist what I’d said and use it to mock me even more.
But to my surprise, when we left detention, Nick patiently waited for me outside, didn’t hurry away, and seemed to listen very closely as I spoke.
“I’m the only child in my family,” I said. “I don’t know if that was on purpose or not. But what it does mean is that they can focus all of their efforts on me, sometimes much to my chagrin. I don’t have any room to breathe, because they are always on me. It’s like if I fail to do something perfectly, if I’m off by a single point on a test, they don’t look at the things I did right to get a 99. They ask what I failed to do to get the hundred.”
I shook my head, laughing at how utterly real that was. If anything, I had understated how driven my parents were to see me be perfect. Most kids exaggerated the burden their parents put on them, but for me, there was nothing like that. It was work, work, and more work.
“Then, I come here, and the environment my parents put me in doesn’t prepare me at all for Providence Prep. My teachers love me, sure, but I’d like to be a teenager once and a while. I’d like to hang out with Emily and Jackie. Not you.”
“I get it.”
“I just want to be an eighteen year old girl with friends sometimes. But I know what I am. I know I’m awkward. I’m blunt. I’m not a jackass like you, but I can be too on point.”
“Like just then,” Nick said with a smirk.
“Yeah, exactly. So… yeah, I know I’m the nerd, the class dork. I just accept it and move forward.”
“I got you,” Nick said.
We got outside the school grounds and headed toward our cars, which were parked only six spaces apart. When we got to my Accord, though, Nick didn’t seem in any rush to move on. Instead, he leaned against my car, curious to hear more.
“At this point, I don’t really care that I am that way,” I said. “It’s not like something’s going to magically change in the next three months. I just want wherever I go to be like me, you know? Show me an arts class at Harvard where people name-drop historical artists and movements without being called a dork. Show me a history class where we can debate the influence of different eras on the rise of fascism in the early 20th century. I don’t get that here. But I sure hope I can there.”
Nick, still leaning against my car—something I found myself strangely not as bothered by as I would have guessed—nodded, put his hand on his chin, and smiled.
“Seems like you and I are a lot more alike than I realized,” he said.
“You belong here much more than I do, you’re an athlete.”
It was a bit of an oversimplification, but I didn’t think that it was that wrong. After all, I knew that he had multiple girls chasing after him. I had multiple nothing chasing after me.
“You say that, but that’s just not all there is to it,” he said. “If you applied some of that brainpower you have to me, you might just figure it out.”
I rolled my eyes, but relative to some of the other things he had said before, it wasn’t quite as bad as before.
“Oh come on, Samantha, you can figure it out,” he said. “I’m an athlete, but I don’t have a scholarship. I’m smart, but I’m not smart enough to get somewhere really good on my own. I run with the cool kids, but I’m not the coolest kid. How do you think it feels always finishing in second place wherever I go?”
“Sounds a lot better than last place,” I said.
But I was beginning to see where he was coming from. I never felt inadequate to Emily and Jackie because we were so different and had such different goals. My focus was much more on school than they were; they wanted to be good students, but they were never obsessed with it, like I was.
“But you get it, right? You get the feeling of not living up to the best?”
“Yes.”
It was mostly through my parents.
Right now, though, I was feeling some very different. I was feeling… I was almost starting to like this side of Nick.
No, no,
you can’t do that. This is the same guy that put you in the in-school suspension and detention you just got out of. You want to like this guy? You really want to do that?
But that was the guy who wasn’t thinking clearly. This guy before you is thinking a little more objectively and a little more politely. Give him a chance.
A chance for what?
“You know, I may have been a bit of a dick for what I did.”
“You don’t say.”
“I just acted out a bit.”
Can you say I’m sorry?
“I was in a weird place, still am, and, well… I didn’t handle things the way I could have. But you could have lashed out so much worse than you actually did. I guess you’re not the dumb, awkward bitch I thought you were.”
I guess that’ll have to do for a non-apology right now.
“Although you are still the awkward girl, but we knew that already.”
I chose to take that as a compliment, as Nick seeing me how I saw myself.
“Do you have anywhere to be right now?”
“Um… no,” I said. “Why?”
Nick cleared his throat, noticeably speaking deeper.
“Let’s go for a walk, huh? We can talk about this more.”
“What more is there to talk about?”
But I knew what he was asking. This was just a pretense. All those looks he’d given me in detention, all of those attempts to be near me, that kiss he’d tried to give me when we were at the ice cream place… they all weren’t isolated, random, one-off incidents.
“I’m asking you to walk with me, not to stand under oath before me,” he said. “Come on, what are you scared of?”
“Not you.”
He laughed.
“You shouldn’t be, I’m one of the least intimidating people there is on campus. Come on. Not like you have anything better to do. It’s me or your parents.”
“Let’s walk.”
I don’t think either of us had any idea where exactly we were walking toward. There were no parks near Providence Prep, no trails leading into any woods or small ponds or anything like that. Mostly, we just walked down the busy streets running parallel to the school. I was sure this was a great sight for anyone in my class observing this. The girl almost as tall as the starting—well, former—point guard and wideout for Providence Prep. It wasn’t Beauty and the Beast; more like Hagrid and the Handsome.
“Probably didn’t foresee your Friday evening being spent walking with me, huh,” Nick said.
“After what you said last week, nope.”
“The fake ID comment?”
I nodded. I was surprised he even had to confirm it. It was about the only thing he’d said all of that Friday.
“You really think I, of all people, would have a fake ID?”
“I wouldn’t quite say it was a statement made of logic.”
“That seems to be a theme for a lot of what you say.”
That came out a lot meaner than I intended it to, but it wasn’t wrong.
“You know, it’s kind of cute the way you have no filter.”
Cute?
“Not a lot of girls would stand up and say it so forcefully like you do. I think that’s a very attractive trait of yours, Samantha.”
Oh, Lord. Are we about to go down this road again?
I looked at Nick, whose eyes were very intensely locked on me. He wasn’t quite undressing me with his look, but he was trying to penetrate my eyes. At least he wasn’t trying to penetrate something else of me right now.
This whole dynamic had me utterly baffled, and I hated that logic wasn’t helping—if anything, it was making it more confusing. Why was Nick going from utterly malicious and cruel to me one day and the next, flirting and making sweet comments? What was going on in his world, besides the obvious—or, perhaps better said, what were the reactions to what was going on his world—that was causing him to act this way?
And more pressingly, I was I finding myself attracted to Nick still? Why, after all he had done, was I feeling something for him when he looked at me like he did?
Could it be that there’s two Nicks, and you can recognize the good and the bad? You can recognize the bad Nick isn’t the real Nick?
Or maybe you’re just a confused teenager who doesn’t know any better.
Just don’t do anything with him that would affect your future.
God, if only it were that easy.
“Thanks,” I said.
“That’s it? Thanks?” he said. “Awfully mute for the girl who tends to say whatever is on her mind.”
“There’s nothing on my mind,” I lied.
“Really,” Nick said, putting his hand on my back. “Seems to me that there would be an awful lot on your mind. Heaven knows there’s a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?” I said, sensing that he’d said that for an invite.
“I mean, I could tell you, but I don’t really think you’d be interested,” he said. “I’ve already told you most of it, anyways. You’re the one that suddenly went mute when I said something nice to you.”
“Something flirtatious,” I blurted out.
Well, if flirting was the art of subtlety, I’d failed that one pretty badly. I couldn’t wait to get to Harvard, meet a cute guy, and blurt out how hot I thought he was, making myself look like a giant fool in the process.
“Maybe,” Nick said, doing this much better than I was. “Your ability to speak the truth and stay even-keeled, if I may say so, is pretty damn sexy.”
Now you’re just getting bold, bucko. Careful.
Of course, despite thinking and telling myself to be cautious, my body warmed to his presence, wanting to lean in and stay close to him. It wanted to press up on him…
But what my body wanted was not what I wanted. I know that made no sense, which sure seemed to be a theme in my life right now. The rational girl suddenly couldn’t tell what was truthful and what was fake, what was flattery and what was honesty, and what blurred the line between the two.
Maybe this is why I stay away from love. I don’t understand it, and if I can’t understand it or have no chance of understanding it, I run like hell away from it. Sure seems like that’s the case right now.
“What do you like about me, Samantha?”
“You?” I said, chuckling nervously. “You planted alcohol in my locker, got me detention, and make fun of me at my locker. Why would I like you?”
“I don’t know, why would you?” he said. “I’ve seen the way you look at me during detention. I see the way you walk close to me right now. I feel all of this. I know how you are.”
He hurried up his pace for just a few seconds so he could stand right in front of me. And damnit, his presence, standing before me—especially when he put his hands on my hips—was creating all sorts of hormonal feelings that I just could not fight very well.
It was the smell of his body, first and foremost, that drew me in. It was like pine trees, a crisp fall, the kind of thing you’d want to lean your nose into and take a whiff of.
It was his long face and his strong chin, which practically begged to have his lips kissed. It was his blonde, well-kept hair. It was his body, slim but muscular, not overly bulky but well chiseled even with a full assortment of clothes on. Weird as it sounded, even his neck looked handsome.
If his body didn’t also contain a giant jackass, I might have already jumped it. Well, that, and if I wasn’t so awkward and hesitant and nervous about such things.
“Would you like me to tell you?” he said. “Or would you rather me show you?”
I gulped. I had no words. What could I say? I’d given up trying to make sense of any of this. I’d given up trying to pretend that I could predict what Nick would do. It was awful, but it was arousing. It was aggravating, but it was invigorating. It was dangerous, but it was exciting.
This dichotomy was going to kill me long before my parents’ or my own perfectionism did me in.
“You have to let me show you if you cho
ose, Samantha,” he said. “No repeats of what happened at the ice cream place.”
“Show me,” I blurted out.
But I immediately regretted the decision. My lack of filter had bit me in the ass. I wanted him to be bold, which he couldn’t do with words, but…
He started to lean forward. I closed my eyes.
And then I had one thought that stopped everything dead in my tracks.
12
Nick
Seven Months Ago
My best friend laid out drunk at homecoming. My date, the girl that I could actually treat well, didn’t want to leave him alone.
“Emily, come on,” I said. “He’s chosen to make a mess of himself. If this is what he wants to do, let him.”
“I can’t just leave him.”
Actually, you can. You left him at the last party that you threw. And you did a pretty damn good job of it.
“He’s got adults around him who will take care of him,” I said. “Come on, let’s go dance.”
But no matter how much I tried to insist, Emily wouldn’t leave it alone. Though she did follow me back into the gymnasium for the dance, she kept looking over her shoulder, trying to see what Adam was up to. Whenever I tried to pull her in close, she kept her distance. It was like she was trying to save room for Jesus while dancing.
“I’m sorry, Nick, but I really need to take him home.”
She headed out the door. I refused to allow this to happen. I followed her just in time to hear Adam drunkenly utter the words that I knew would fuck me and her over.
“Never shoulda left you, Emily. Sorry. Sorry… I’m an ass. I’m worthless.”
I groaned so loudly when I heard that. At this point, if everything went normally, I had no chance of keeping Emily. I had to make one last ditch effort.
I reached for her arm, pulled her in, and tried to kiss her.
And instead, she turned and gave me her cheek.
“Nick, I’m sorry,” she said. “But this is not going to work out. OK? I just… need to be honest and say that we’re not going to be a thing. It’s not just Adam. It’s that I went out with you… look, it’s not going to work, OK?”