by Anna Todd
I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to answer. “You shouldn’t care. If you pretend like you don’t care, you win anyway. Isn’t that how it works?”
Meg smiled at me. “Oh, Jo. You’re so right. Who would have thought?”
I simply nodded, and she led me farther toward the back of the building. We passed Meredith as we walked, and she didn’t notice us. She was too busy talking to Denise about something. It could have been anything from the struggles of deployments to the shade of Denise’s new hardwood floors. It depended on that woman’s random moods. She was always like that.
Her daughter Shelly was like that, too. One minute she was nice, praising me for my two-page spread about the dirty drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and the next she was talking about me behind my back and calling me Joseph as an insult. A lot of people at my school couldn’t seem to wrap their head around me and why I didn’t see the point in waking up early and putting lipstick on before the sun was even up.
Since I had known Shelly’s biological dad when I was younger, and I knew her stepdad, General Hunchberg, too, I thought she got her personality from her dad, Mr. Grisham, a teacher at our middle school in Texas. Rumor had it that Denise, an Army brat herself, married Mr. Grisham right after high school, and when he got medically retired from the Army ten years ago, Denise couldn’t stand the civilian life. It drove her insane that she never got her American dream of being an FRG leader and getting to move into one of the big houses that was specifically built for generals and their families.
Denise had big plans, and being married to a health teacher wasn’t a part of them. She wanted the attention; she wanted the respect and the recognition for the patriotic sacrifices she made being a general’s wife. Denise Hunchberg needed the luncheons and bake sales. Here she was with Meredith, being the patriot that Denise is, stuffing peppermint bark down her throat and washing it down with a nice glass of boxed wine. I thought it was funny in an awful way that Denise and her family followed us to this post too.
“Where are we going?” I asked Meg when she pushed against the black bar on the heavy back door of the ballroom. The cold air rushed in with the loud squeak of the metal, and I looked behind us to see if anyone saw us. No one seemed to notice the two girls leaving through the back of the party. It felt liberating in a way.
“Outside. Don’t talk about Shia,” Meg warned me, and before I got to ask her why, my eyes fell on three boys standing in the grass.
I only recognized one of them, the young guy from Old Mr. Laurence’s driveway this morning. His hair seemed even messier now, down past his ears. Was it that long earlier? I couldn’t remember for sure, but I didn’t think so. His hair was so thick, like a puddle of yellow paint, spreading down his neckline and onto the collar of his black jacket.
“What’s up?” the tallest, biggest of the guys asked. He had the body of a comic-book superhero. His arms were massive and his chest expansive, making his uniform tight at the middle. I wondered if they even made uniform tops big enough to fit him. The name sewn over the chest was Reeder. I didn’t know him. I would have remembered if I did.
“Nothing in there,” Meg said, looking back to the building.
She was still holding on to my arm as we walked down the small set of stairs to get to the grass. I didn’t notice that the corner of the concrete porch was chipped until the toe of my boot caught and my foot slipped. I quickly caught myself, using Meg as a crutch, and she held me up. My heart pounded in my chest. Really, again? That was the second time that day I had tripped in front of him. I was quickly turning into that wannabe quirky girl who always trips and makes a flat joke about her awkwardness.
When I looked up, the long-haired boy was the only one staring at me. The smirk on his face made me want to run back inside the building or call him out—I wasn’t sure which was the better option. He looked like a boy who never got called out for anything. When I weighed the consequences for each, embarrassing Meg and having her not see me as mature seemed worse. I had already felt so much closer to her that day, I didn’t want to ruin it.
I looked away from him and watched my sister start her engine of social cool. She said, “Hi,” to all three, and the blond-haired boy we had met that morning stuck his hand out for her to shake. She took it, letting go of my familiar hand, and told him it was nice to meet him. Did she not recognize his face from earlier today? I wondered.
The guy standing between the long-haired boy and my sister was wearing a uniform, too. His said that his name was Breyer. I never wondered what soldiers’ first names were anymore; they usually didn’t want to be called by them anyway.
Breyer had stubble around his mouth that was so dark it looked almost like paint. The closer to his thin lips, the darker his beard was. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pants pocket of his uniform, and the big guy, Reeder, handed him a lighter. He pushed the stick through the line of his lips, and smoke clouded around his face. It was menacing, and my imagination was running wild. It only took the smallest of things to make me imagine so much more. When I was younger, I used to spend my time writing stories about vampires, and wizards, and magical lands inside closets like Narnia, but as I grew up, I found myself attracted to nonfiction and the journalism side of writing.
“How’s the party?” Reeder asked.
“Lame for me, but cool for the kids.” Meg held her hand out and took his cigarette from him. I never knew she smoked. What I did know then was that she trusted me, at least enough not to tell Meredith, or the other girls.
It had warmed up already since we left the house this morning. So much for snow on Christmas in southern Louisiana.
“Aren’t you two supposed to be working?” she asked the two in uniform.
I watched their eyes and how they looked at her. They were admiring her with a zoned-out expression on their faces, like they would follow her to the other side of the Dothraki Sea if she wanted them to. Dragons or not. Comparing Meg to a khaleesi felt like comparing Joan of Arc to a politician’s trophy wife.
Reeder laughed, and the sound was like an echo. “We are. We’re on patrol.”
Meg laughed, and the smoke rolled out of her mouth in perfect swirls of gray. “Looks like it.”
Both guys laughed at her comment, and I figured they would laugh at just about anything she said if she wanted them to. The blond-haired one didn’t seem to be paying attention; he was staring off into the empty field behind us.
“Laurie, how long you staying here?” the big one asked, looking directly at the boy from this morning.
Laurie? His name is Laurie Laurence?
What an awful choice his parents made.
“At the party, or this town?” Laurie asked. Drama seeped from his response, and I pictured him sitting over a cup of coffee and a half-finished manuscript. My imagination again.
“The party.” Reeder blew smoke from his mouth and looked a little annoyed. He immediately took another drag, then glanced at his phone.
“Two more minutes,” Laurie said.
I stepped closer to him, and my mouth opened before I gave it permission to. “And the town?” I asked.
Meg stared at me like I had just asked him if he wanted to have sex with me in front of his friends.
Laurie—his name was so strange—smiled at me. “Not long. My dad sent me here to bond with my grandpa while he’s overseas. He will be home in a year, so I’ll go back to Texas when he’s back.”
A year could be a very a long time, depending on what one did with it . . .
“Iraq or Afghanistan?” I asked.
“Neither. Korea.”
“Oh.” I had heard awful things about being stationed in South Korea. My dad told me that the local people didn’t want them there, so most of the soldiers stayed on the base, hardly ever going outside the gate.
Laurie didn’t say another word before dismissing himself. I watched his back as he strode through the grass field and disappeared between the thick clusters of trees at the beginning of the
woods.
“So, are you two going to work at all, or can we go somewhere?” Meg asked the two who remained.
I didn’t go with Meg that day. I didn’t even wait to hear their reply. I went back into the party and helped hand out food to families who missed their soldiers on Christmas.
6
The next week went so fast. The time between Christmas and New Year’s was always so weird. The decorations are still up from Christmas, and the entire post basically shuts down for two weeks. I remembered feeling ready for the new year that year—I was so ready.
I was going to be seventeen in just a few days, and I already felt so much older. Meg had been spending more time with me, too, while she played sick to Mrs. King. Meg had me call her employer every morning since she’d seen Shia at the battalion’s Christmas party. Mrs. King was trying not to sound irritated over Meg’s illness, but I could hear it in her voice. I was always good at knowing what people were feeling, even when they wouldn’t say it. Especially then. Or so I thought I was.
“What time should I put the meatballs in the oven?” Meg asked Beth, who knew more about cooking than everyone else in the house combined.
“Around nine-thirty. So they are ready around ten when we will start the party.”
The kitchen was a mess, a tray of meatballs and three Crock-Pots covering the little counter space we had. On the small kitchen island were bags of chips, and one small bag of Bugles for me. They were my favorite food, and I could have lived off their salty goodness alone.
I grabbed the bag and popped it open. I ate a handful before I climbed onto the counter to get the bowls from the cabinet. Our family always did the same thing every year: we covered the kitchen with food and tried to stay awake until midnight. Amy usually didn’t make it past ten, but this was her year, she claimed.
“Beth, can you make me a cup of coffee?” Meg asked. “Not with mom’s coffee machine, with the pod thing. It’s only six and I’m already tired.”
Beth, of course, said she would, even though her hands were busy crushing crackers for her famous cheese ball. Since I was a vegetarian, Beth always made me my own small ball with no bacon and extra shaved almonds. I ate every bit of it.
“Look,” Amy said as I dumped a bag of chips into a big red bowl.
I looked at her and tried to see what she wanted me to look at, but she was just staring out the window in front of the sink. Her hair was in a tight bun, which I assumed Meg did for her.
Crumpling the bag and shoving it into the recycle bin, I walked over to the window and stood next to Amy.
I looked out the window and into the window of Old Mr. Laurence’s house. The boy Laurie was pacing in front of the window with a book in his hand.
“Do you think he’s being held captive there?” Amy’s eyes twinkled with the hope of something more interesting than a new neighbor.
I stared at him and watched as he set the book down, then took a seat at the grand piano directly in front of the window. I had looked at this scene—the window, the piano—so many times while helping Beth wash and dry dishes, but it looked so different now that a boy was inside. Usually, I just stared at the red curtains and wondered if Old Mr. Laurence had ever thought about redecorating since the 1930s.
“He looks lonely,” Meg added. She had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder into the window at Laurie.
“Mom said he’s from Europe. He was living there for years.” Amy’s voice was full of childish wonder.
“I wonder if he has a secret. A tragic European secret,” I said, using a haughty but vague accent. When we were younger, my sisters and I would re-enact plays I wrote, and we would dress in our dad’s oversized clothes and use fake accents to go along with the characters I created. My favorite was a man named Jack Smead, whose voice ranged from Australian to Jamaican and back.
I continued to stare at Laurie. The bridge of his nose had a bump like it had been broken before, and his hands grabbed the book again and he took a heavy breath. I could see his chest move up and down from our kitchen. He was fascinating.
“Mom said he didn’t really have any upbringing. With his dad gone all the time and his mom an Italian artist or something,” Amy continued her gossip.
I suddenly felt that everyone around me seemed more interesting than me.
In the room across the yard, Laurie began moving his mouth, the book in his hand. I strained to figure out what he was saying, but I couldn’t read his lips. He stood up again, and the bottom of his white T-shirt caught on the corner of the piano, exposing the bottom of his stomach. There was a flash of black on him, but he shoved the fabric down so fast that I couldn’t make out what it was.
“He has good eyebrows,” Meg said.
I couldn’t look at his eyebrows. I was still thinking about his stomach.
“If I were a guy, I would want to look like him,” I said to my sisters. He looked like he knew the world, like maybe he owned part of it.
Amy went to say something to me, but she must have thought better of it because she closed her mouth and looked out the window again.
“Why do you think he’s here?” Beth asked.
I didn’t want to tell Beth and Amy what he’d told me the day of the Christmas party. For some reason I felt like that would be betraying him somehow, which was a ridiculous thought, since these were my sisters and he was a complete stranger.
“Imagine giving up Italy to come to the bottom of Louisiana,” I said, staring at his hands as he turned the pages of the book. I tried to look at the cover to see what he was reading, but I couldn’t make it out. “And with awful Old Mr. Laurence,” I groaned, watching Laurie sit back down, put the book aside, and spread his hands over the keys of the piano in front of him.
“Jo, don’t be mean. He’s not awful,” Beth told me.
He was awful, though; he always yelled at us for walking on his grass. Over the summer he’d told Meredith that I snuck out of the house and I got grounded for a month. On top of that, every time he saw us outside he was always yelling, “Those damned Spring Girls!” He acted as if I shattered the windshield of his car on purpose. I was just trying to learn a sport so my parents would feel like they had a normal child. My interest in softball only lasted a week.
“I would live in that big house with him whether he’s awful or not,” Meg said.
Beth joined us finally and leaned against the window, her other shoulder touching my own.
“They do have a beautiful piano,” she said with longing dripping from every word.
Laurie’s fingers moved so roughly over the keys that I swore I could almost hear the music from inside our kitchen.
“When I’m a successful writer, I’ll buy you the best piano ever created,” I promised my sister, and I meant it.
“Most writers can’t even pay their bills, let alone buy a piano, Beth. So, let’s say when I marry a rich man, you can come over and play mine,” Amy said.
Ugh, she sounded like Meg, always talking about getting married, but at least we knew Meg was actually old enough to be married.
Amy danced around the kitchen and stuck her hand into the bowl of chips, pulling out a handful of cheesy dusted fried potatoes cut into triangles. They were her favorite. Her orange fingers always grossed me out.
“And what if the man you love is poor, but a good man? Like Dad?” Beth asked Amy. Beth stuck a pod of coffee into the Keurig for Meg and pulled the handle down.
Laurie’s head began to bob along with the movement of his fingers. It was fascinating to watch. He was the opposite of Beth when she played, her calm fingers gliding over the keys, smooth as butter, and her eyes closed in the tranquil melody. Laurie’s fingers were violent to his keys, combatively smashing over the ivories, and his eyes were wide-open as he played.
My heart was beating from inside my chest to the backs of my ears as I watched him. I could barely hear what my sisters were saying.
“Well,” Amy said, “it’s not like being stuck with a big nos
e or something. I have a choice of who I love.”
“People aren’t stuck with big noses anymore anyway. You can get that fixed easier than you can get a boyfriend,” Meg replied.
My eyes were still on Laurie as he played. I had never seen anyone so oblivious of their surroundings as he was then. We were staring at him—well, at least I was—and he didn’t notice at all. He was too involved in whatever he was playing.
“What about you, Jo? Would you marry a poor man if he was nice?” Amy asked, her little body moving around the kitchen still. She had a can of orange soda in one hand and orange chips in the other.
I didn’t look away from the window. “I wouldn’t marry anyone for money. I don’t want anyone to have that type of control over me. And besides, I’m going to make enough money on my own.”
Amy snorted. “Sure, Jo.”
I couldn’t even gather enough anger toward her; I was too fascinated by the boy framed in the window.
“And what about you, Amy?” I said coldly. “You think you’re going to have a rich husband? I hate to break it to you, but—”
“Jo,” Beth’s voice broke off my sentence.
“Stop talking about boys anyway, Amy. You’re too young,” Meg said.
I didn’t mention that by seventh grade Meg had already kissed a handful of boys.
Amy took a swig of her orange soda, and it left a line of orange above her lip like a mustache. She quickly licked it away. “We’ll all grow up someday, Meg. We might as well know what we want.”
Laurie wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and his blond hair moved, touching the tips of his shoulders. I tried to image what my husband would be like, but as usual, I couldn’t picture him.
I didn’t even know if I wanted a husband. They seemed like a lot of work, and I’d never met a boy who I could even consider letting take me to dinner, let alone marry. I stared at Laurie, and his fingers stopped cold. I ducked down just as he looked toward our window, and Beth laughed when I popped my head back up.