by Jenny Han
I stared at him. “So while you race around with your buddies in the desert, you want me to hang out with a bunch of girls I don’t know?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know Alison. You guys were beer-pong partners in our house tournament.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to Cabo. I’m going home. My mom misses me.” What I didn’t say was, your dad misses you too.
When Jeremiah just shrugged, like, Have it your way, I thought, oh, what the hell, I’ll say it. “Your dad misses you too.”
“Oh my God. Belly, just admit that this isn’t about my dad. You’re paranoid about me going on spring break without you.”
“Why don’t you admit that you didn’t want me to go in the first place, then?”
He hesitated. I saw him hesitate. “Fine. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind if this was just a guys’ trip.”
Standing up, I said, “Well, it sounds like there will be plenty of girls there. Have fun with the Zetas.”
Now his neck started to turn a dull red. “If you don’t trust me by now, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never done anything to make you question me. And Belly, I really don’t need you guilt tripping me about my dad.”
I started putting my shoes on, and I was so mad, my hands shook as I tried to lace up my sneakers. “I can’t even believe how selfish you are.”
“Me? I’m the selfish one now?” He shook his head, his lips tight. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then he closed it.
“Yes, you are definitely the selfish one in this relationship. It’s always about you, your friends, your stupid fraternity. Have I told you I think your fraternity is stupid? Because I do.”
In a low voice, he said, “What’s so stupid about it?”
“It’s just a bunch of entitled rich guys spending their parents’ money, cheating on tests with your test bank, going to class wasted.”
Looking hurt, he said, “We’re not all like that.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
“Yeah, you did. What, just because I’m not pre-med, that makes me this lazy frat guy?”
“Don’t put your inferiority complex on me,” I said. I said it without thinking. It was something I had thought before but never voiced. Conrad was the one who was pre-med. Conrad was the one at Stanford, working a part-time job at a lab. Jeremiah was the one who told people he majored in beerology.
He stared. “What the hell does that mean, ‘inferiority complex’?”
“Forget it,” I said. Too late, I could see things had gone farther than I had intended. I wanted to take it all back.
“If you think I’m so stupid and selfish and wasteful, why are you even with me?”
Before I could answer, before I could say, You’re not stupid or selfish or wasteful, before I could end the fight, Jeremiah said, “Fuck it. I won’t waste your time anymore. Let’s end it now.”
And I said, “Fine.”
I grabbed my book bag, but I didn’t leave right away. I was waiting for him to stop me. But he didn’t.
I cried the whole way home. I couldn’t believe that we had broken up. It didn’t feel real. I expected Jeremiah to call me that night. It was a Friday. He left for Cabo on Sunday morning, and he didn’t call then, either.
My spring break consisted of me moping around the house, eating chips, and crying. Steven said, “Chill out. The only reason he hasn’t called you is that it’s too expensive to make a call from Mexico. You guys will be back together by next week, guaranteed.”
I was pretty sure he was right. Jeremiah just needed some space. Okay, that was fine. When he got back, I would go to him and tell him how sorry I was, and I would fix things, and it would be like it never happened.
Steven was right. We did get back together a week later. I did go to him and apologize, and he apologized too. I never asked him if anything happened in Cabo. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to wonder. This was a boy who had loved me my whole life, and I was a girl who believed in that love. In that boy.
Jere brought me back a shell bracelet. Little white puka shells. It had made me so happy. Because I knew that he had been thinking of me, that he had missed me as much as I had missed him. He knew like I knew that it wasn’t over between us, that it would never be over. He spent that whole week after spring break in my room, hanging out with me and not his fraternity brothers. It drove my roommate Jillian crazy, but I didn’t care. I felt closer to him than ever. I missed him even when he was in class.
But now I knew the truth. He bought me that stupid cheap bracelet because he felt guilty. And I was so desperate to make up, I hadn’t seen it.
chapter six
When I closed my eyes, I saw the two of them, together, kissing in a hot tub. On the beach. In some club. Lacie Barone probably knew tricks and moves I’d never even heard of. But of course she did.
I was still a virgin.
I’d never had sex before, not with Jeremiah, not with anybody. When I was younger, I used to picture my first time with Conrad. It wasn’t that I was still waiting for him. It wasn’t that at all. I was just waiting for the perfect moment. I wanted it to feel special, to feel exactly right.
I’d pictured us finally doing it at the beach house, with the lights off and candles everywhere so I wouldn’t feel shy. I’d pictured how gentle Jeremiah would be, how sweet. Lately I had been feeling more and more ready. I had thought this summer, the two of us back at Cousins—I thought that would be it.
It was humiliating thinking about it now, how naive I’d been. I’d thought he would wait as long as it took for me to be ready. I really believed that.
But how could we be together now? When I thought of him with her, Lacie, who was older and sexier and more worldly than I’d ever be, at least in my mind—it hurt so bad it was hard to breathe. The fact that she knew him in a way I didn’t yet, had experienced something with him that I hadn’t, that felt like the biggest betrayal of all.
A month ago, around the anniversary of his mom’s death, we were lying in Jeremiah’s twin bed. He rolled over and looked at me, and his eyes were so like Susannah’s, I reached out my hand and covered them.
“Sometimes it hurts to look at you,” I said. I loved that I could say that and he knew exactly what I meant.
“Close your eyes,” he told me.
I did, and he came up close so we were face-to-face and I could feel his Crest breath warm on my cheek. We wrapped our legs around each other. I was overcome with this sudden need to keep him close to me always. “Do you think it will always be like this?” I asked him.
“How else would it be?” he asked.
We fell asleep that way. Like kids. Totally innocent.
We could never go back to that. How could we? It was all tainted now. Everything from March to now, it was tainted.
chapter seven
When I woke up the next morning, my eyes were so puffy, they were practically swollen shut. I splashed cold water on my face, but it didn’t really help. I brushed my teeth. And then I went back to bed. I’d wake up and hear people moving out of the dorms, and then I’d just fall back to sleep. I should have been packing, but all I wanted to do was sleep. I slept all day. I woke up again when it was dark out, and I didn’t turn on the lights. I just lay in bed until I fell asleep again.
It was late afternoon the next day when I finally got up. When I say “got up,” I mean “sat up.” I finally sat up in my bed. I was thirsty. I felt wrung dry from all the crying. This propelled me to actually get out of bed and walk the five feet over to the mini fridge and take one of the bottled waters Jillian had left behind.
Looking across the room at her empty bed and empty walls made me feel even more depressed. Last night I wanted to be alone. Today I thought I would go out of my mind if I didn’t talk to another person.
I went down the hall to Anika’s room. The first thing she said when she saw me was, “What’s wrong?”
I sat on her bed and hugged her pillow to my chest. I had come to her wan
ting to talk, wanting to get it out, but now it was hard to say the words. I felt ashamed. Of him and for him. All my friends loved Jeremiah. They thought he was practically perfect. I knew that as soon as I told Anika, all of that would be gone. This would be real. For some reason, I still wanted to protect him.
“Iz, what happened?”
I’d really thought I was done crying, but a few tears leaked out anyway. I went ahead and said it. “Jeremiah cheated on me.”
Anika sank onto the bed. “Shut the front door,” she breathed. “When? With who?”
“With Lacey Barone, that girl in his sister sorority. During spring break. When we were broken up.”
She nodded, taking this in.
“I’m so mad at him,” I said. “For hooking up with another girl and then not telling me all this time. Not telling is the same as lying. I feel so stupid.”
Anika handed me the box of tissues on her desk. “Girl, you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel,” she said.
I blew my nose. “I feel . . . like maybe I don’t know him like I thought I did. I feel like I can’t trust him ever again.”
“Keeping a secret like that from the person you love is probably the worst part,” Anika said.
“You don’t think the actual cheating is the worst part?”
“No. I mean, yeah, that is horrible. But he should have just told you. It was turning it into a secret that gave it power.”
I was silent. I had a secret too. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Anika or Taylor. I had told myself that it was because it wasn’t important, and then I had put it out of my mind.
The past couple of years, I sometimes pulled out a memory I had of Conrad and looked at it, admired it, sort of in the same way I looked at my old shell collection. There was pleasure in just touching each shell, the ridges, the cool smoothness. Even after Jeremiah and I started dating, every once in a while, sitting in class or waiting for the bus or trying to fall asleep, I would pull out an old memory. The first time I ever beat him in a swimming race. The time he taught me how to dance. The way he used to wet down his hair in the mornings.
But there was one memory in particular, one I didn’t let myself touch. It wasn’t allowed.
chapter eight
It was the day after Christmas. My mother had gone on a weeklong trip to Turkey, a trip she’d had to postpone twice—once when Susannah’s cancer came out of remission and then again after Susannah died. My father was with his girlfriend Linda’s family in Washington, D.C. Steven was on a ski trip with some friends from school. Jeremiah and Mr. Fisher were visiting relatives in New York.
And me? I was at home, watching A Christmas Story on TV for the third time. I had on my Christmas pajamas, the ones Susannah had sent me a couple of years back—they were red flannel pjs with a jaunty mistletoe print, and they were way too long in the leg. Part of the fun of wearing them was rolling up the sleeves and ankles. I had just finished my dinner—a frozen pepperoni pizza and the rest of the sugar cookies a student had baked for my mother.
I was starting to feel like Kevin in Home Alone. Eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and I was dancing around the living room to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” feeling sorry for myself. My fall-semester grades had been eh. My whole family was gone. I was eating frozen pizza alone. And when Steven saw me that first day back home, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Wow, freshman fifteen, huh?” I had punched him in the arm, and he said he was kidding, but he wasn’t kidding. I had gained ten pounds in four months. I guessed eating hot wings and ramen and Dominos pizza at four in the morning with the boys will do that to a girl. But so what? The freshman fifteen was a rite of passage.
I went to the downstairs bathroom and slapped my cheeks like Kevin does in the movie. “So what!” I yelled.
I wasn’t going to let it get me down. Suddenly I had an idea. I ran upstairs and started throwing things into my backpack—the novel my mom had bought me for Christmas, leggings, thick socks. Why should I be at home alone when I could be at my favorite place in the world?
Fifteen minutes later, after I rinsed off my dinner dishes and turned off all the lights, I was in Steven’s car. His car was nicer than mine, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Besides, that was what he got for bringing up the freshman fifteen.
I was heading to Cousins, rocking out to “Please Come Home for Christmas” (the Bon Jovi version, of course) and snacking on chocolate-covered pretzels with red and green sprinkles (another gift for my mother). I knew I had made the right decision. I would be at the Cousins house in no time. I would light a fire, I would make some hot chocolate to go with my pretzels, I would wake up in the morning to a winter beach. Of course I loved the beach during the summer more, but the winter beach held its own special kind of charm for me. I decided I wouldn’t tell anyone I’d gone. When everyone came back from their trips, it would be my little secret.
I did make it to Cousins in no time. The highway had been pretty much deserted, and I practically flew there. As I pulled into the driveway, I let out a big whoop. It was good to be back. This was my first time at the house in over a year.
I found the spare set of keys right where they always were—under the loose floorboard on the deck. I felt giddy as I stepped inside and turned on the lights.
The house was freezing cold, and it was a lot harder to get a fire going than I thought it would be. I gave up pretty quickly, and I made myself hot chocolate while I waited for the heat to get working. Then I brought down a bunch of blankets from the linen closet and got all cozy on the couch underneath them, with my chocolate-covered pretzels and my mug of hot chocolate. How the Grinch Stole Christmas was on, and I fell asleep to the sound of the Whos in Whoville singing “Welcome Christmas.”
I woke up to the sound of someone breaking into the house. I heard banging on the door and then someone messing with the doorknob. At first I just lay there under my blankets, scared out of my mind and trying not to breathe too loud. I kept thinking, oh my God, oh my God, it’s just like in Home Alone. What would Kevin do? What would Kevin do? Kevin would probably booby-trap the front hall, but there was no time for any of that.
And then the burglar called out, “Steven? Are you in there?”
I thought, oh my God, the other robber is already in the house and his name is Steven!
I hid under the blanket, and then I thought, Kevin would not hide under a blanket. He would protect his house.
I took the brass poker from the fireplace and my cell phone, and I crept over to the foyer. I was too scared to look out the window, and I didn’t want him to see me, so I just pressed my body up against the door and listened hard, my finger on the number nine.
“Steve, open up. It’s me.”
My heart nearly stopped beating. I knew that voice. It was not the voice of a burglar. It was Conrad.
I flung the door open. It really was him. I gazed at him, and he gazed back. I didn’t know it would feel that way to see him again. Heart in my throat, hard to breathe. For those couple of seconds, I forgot everything and there was just him.
He was wearing a winter coat I had never seen before, camel colored, and he was sucking on a mini candy cane. It fell out of his mouth. “What in the world?” he said, his mouth still open.
When I hugged him, he smelled like peppermint and Christmas.
His cheek was cold against mine. “Why are you holding a poker?”
I stepped back. “I thought you were a burglar.”
“Of course you did.”
He followed me back to the living room and sat in the chair opposite the couch. He still had that shocked look on his face. “What are you doing here?”
I shrugged and set the poker on the coffee table. My adrenaline rush was fading fast, and I was starting to feel pretty silly. “I was all alone at home, and I just felt like coming. What are you doing here? I didn’t even know you were coming back.”
Conrad was in California now. I hadn’t seen him since he’d tran
sferred the year before. He had some scruff on his face, like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. It looked soft, though, not prickly. He looked tan, too, which I thought was weird, seeing how it was winter, and then I remembered that he went to school in California, where it was always sunny.
“My dad sent me a ticket at the last minute. It took us forever to land, because of the snow, so I got here late. Since Jere and my dad are still in New York, I figured I’d just come here.” He squinted at me.
“What?” I asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden. I tried to smooth down the back of my hair—it was all fuzzy from being slept on. Discreetly, I touched the corners of my mouth. Had I been drooling?
“You have chocolate all over your face.”
I wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand. “No, I don’t,” I lied. “It’s probably just dirt.”
Amused, he raised his eyebrows at the near-empty can of chocolate-covered pretzels. “What, did you just put your whole head in it to save time?”
“Shut it,” I said, but I couldn’t help smiling.
The only light in the room was from the flickering TV. It was so surreal, being with him like this. A truly random twist of what felt like fate. I shivered and drew my blankets closer to me.
Taking off his coat, he said, “Want me to start a fire?”
Right away, I said, “Yes! I couldn’t get it going for some reason.”
“It takes a special touch,” he said in his arrogant way. I knew by now it was only posturing.
It was all so familiar. We had been here before, just like this, only two Christmases ago. So much had happened since then. He had a whole new life now, and so did I. Still, in some ways, it was like no time or distance had passed between us. In some ways, it felt the same.
Maybe he was thinking the same thing, because he said, “It might be too late for a fire. I think I’m just gonna go crash.” Abruptly, he stood up and headed for the staircase. Then he turned back and asked, “Are you sleeping down here?”