Nothing Like You (12 page)

I slid my hand over the stiff material of my jeans. I felt happy. Grateful. I’d lose a boy but I’d gain a friend. The choice was clear.

Paul had to go.

At first, I didn’t really
do anything different. I just stopped paying attention to him. Every time I thought about him I’d think about
her
instead. What I’d be losing if I continued to see him—a real friend. One that I didn’t share a tool shed with. Or feed Snausages to after school.

So when Paul didn’t look at me when we passed each other in the hall on Monday, I tried not to care. And when Tuesday came and went without a visit to my bed, I danced around my bedroom to Mom’s albums instead.

On Wednesday, though, Wednesday he was out by my car, waiting for me in the school parking lot after gym. “Hi,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.

“Aren’t you scared someone might see?” I quipped.

“No one’s around, come on.” He dragged me forward by the waistband on my shorts.

“Don’t.” I squirmed, pulling at his fingers.

“You look great, though … all sweaty.” He grinned and ruffled my hair. “Let’s go to the beach. Come on, I’ll drive.”

I took a step back. “I can’t go to the beach with you.”

“Why not?” He lit a cigarette, inhaled extra deep, and slipped the lighter back into his shirt pocket.

“I just don’t feel good about it anymore. I want to stop.”

“Stop what?”

I darted my eyes down. I thought if I looked at him for too long I might not be able to say what I had to say. “Seeing each other. We can’t see each other anymore.”

Paul wasn’t saying anything, so I glanced up.

He was fidgeting with the lid on his Zippo. “Why not?”

“A lot of reasons.”

“Like?”

“Like … it’s not really good for me, I don’t think.”

“What about me?”

“What
about
you?”

“Don’t I get a say?”

“You have a girlfriend. You don’t need me.”

He wrapped one arm around my waist and pulled me into him. “Maybe I want you.”

“I see you
once
a week,” I scoffed. “You don’t even talk to me anymore.”

“Is this about the psychic?”

We were still standing close, his arm around my hips. “I just think it’s wrong.”

“Wrong.”

“Yes.
Girlfriend
,” I said again, slow and loud, hoping he’d hear me this time.

He leaned forward to kiss me. And I’m not sure why, but I let him. Then I stepped backward, pulled my keys out of my book bag, and said, “I have to go.”

“So that’s it?”

I got into my car and slammed the door shut. Then I rolled down my window and looked at him.

He said, “You think this is over, but it’s not.”

You’re wrong,
I thought. Then I turned the ignition and put the car into first. “See you around,” I said, laying into the gas pedal.

Saskia and I
were in the hills by my house, winding up a narrow, dusty path covered with dry brush and pricker bushes. It was dark out.

“What time is it?”

“I dunno. Not late. Eight?” I guessed.

Saskia skipped around me and ran up ahead toward a clearing at the top of the hill. “You wanna sit for a bit?” she asked, breathless from the climb.

“Okay.” I nodded, hiking up the extra ten yards or so. She was kneeling in a puddle of dusty dirt. I dropped down next to her. For a minute or two we just sat side by side, breathing dry air.

“We’re lucky, huh?”

“Why’s that?” I asked, pulling on a dead root, ripping
it out of the ground and snapping it in two.

“All this?” she pointed at our view: mountains, ocean, dry grassy hills and valleys. “We lived in New York when I was a kid. Until I was, like, six or so? Suburbia. Nothing like this. I mean, there were beaches, but they were different. And it was flat.”

I nodded. I’d never been to New York. I’d only ever lived here and couldn’t imagine life outside Southern California. I broke my dead root into fours.

“Look, planes,” said Saskia, pointing at the tiny blinking lights floating over the ocean. There were four or five at least, small specs of light that barely looked as if they were moving. “They look like fireflies,” she said, sinking further down to the ground.

“I’ve never seen a firefly,” I said.

“Yeah, we don’t have those here, do we?”

“Nope.”

“Well, they look like that,” said Saskia, pointing at the glowing dots of light speckled over the sea. “Exactly. They’re small and they blink like planes do. That’s the one thing I miss. Bugs”—she laughed—“that glow.”

“They sound unreal. Like magic critters.”

“They are,” she said, turning to face me. “That’s exactly what they are,” she murmured, pulling on a lock of long, sandy hair.

When I was really small
, before we lived in the house we have now, Jeff, Mom, and I lived in one of those two-story townhouse complexes by the beach. I don’t remember much about that place other than the ocean out back, our spiral staircase, and this really red, rectangular table where we ate all our meals, but lately, I’d been thinking a lot about that apartment.

“You okay?”

Jeff and I were in the kitchen eating brown rice and beans. I took a sip of water. “Fine,” I said. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

I’d been picturing dinners at that old apartment. Me, Mom, Jeff. Mounds of Italian takeout. I had the perfect memory fixed in my head: the three of us slurping spaghetti
around our chintzy table. “Nothing interesting,” I said. “School stuff. Do we have any soy sauce?”

“Fridge,” Jeff said, taking a bite of rice.

I got up and shuffled forward, drifting back to my memory—spaghetti, old apartment—I swapped out my image of Jeff and replaced him with visions of Ballanoff— rewriting my memory so that the new version went something like: me, Mom, and Ballanoff, together, eating sizzling Szechuan chicken with chopsticks. “You want chili sauce?” I asked, my hand hovering over the huge orange bottle on the door of the fridge.

“Sure, yeah.”

I grabbed both bottles and kicked the door shut with my sneaker sole. “Maybe we can get Chinese sometime this week.”

“You want Chinese? I thought you didn’t like Chinese.”

“No, I do.” I pictured Ballanoff lifting a white, doughy dumpling to his lips. “I like Szechuan chicken. Dumplings, too.” I dropped back down in my chair, then slid the chili sauce across the table toward Jeff.

“Then, okay, yeah, sounds great, Hols.”

I nodded, satisfied, lifting my cup to my lips.

Tap tap tap.

I’d been asleep. I opened one eye and stared up at my window.
Tap tap tap
. Paul was wearing this ratty, old red T-shirt I’d loved. Still did. It was thin and had holes at the armpits.

“Holly,” he mouthed. My window was shut.

“Go away,” I said back. He’d been calling nonstop lately. Every day, sometimes twice a day. I hadn’t been answering his calls.

He shook his head. I turned over so I was facing away from the window.
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
I turned back around. “Holly,” he said again. I sat up, slipped on my slippers, and ran down the hall to the front door. He was waiting when I got there. I cracked the door a smidge a slid outside.
“You have to leave,” I whispered, folding my arms over my chest and leaning my back against the side of the house.

“I was a total asshole,” he started. “Please, let me come in. I won’t touch you. I just want to talk.”

I stiffened.

“Come on, Holly. I’m like your fucking dog. Please”—he clamped his hands together as if he were praying—“let me come in.”

“Just say whatever you have to say. And keep your voice down, Jeff’s asleep.”

“Let’s go to the toolshed.”

“No.”

“Isn’t that where you and your little boyfriend play house?”

I twisted toward the door. I was going back inside.

“Holly Holly Holly
…”
He pulled me back by my elbow. “I’m sorry, I’m just jealous, okay? I’m sorry.”

He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. “I miss you,” he said, lighting up.

I pulled my shorts down so they sat square on my hips and watched Paul puff out a big poof of smoke.

“And I’m sorry. And I want things to go back to the way they were.”

I looked at the ground and kicked a pile of dirt.

“I’m gonna break up with her.”

A bolt of fear shot up my spine. “You can’t do that. Why would you do that?”

“For
you
.”

“But I don’t want you to.” I looked down by Paul’s feet and saw a rotten lemon. I rolled my foot over the moldy part and smashed it into the ground.

“Holly.” His voice was pleading. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to take him inside and take off his clothes and sleep next to him all night long. But all his promises and declarations of everlasting adoration couldn’t change the fact that he only wanted me because I wouldn’t let him have me. “You have to go,” I said.

He shook his head, took a long drag off his cigarette, and exhaled in my direction.

I opened my front door and went back inside. Then I watched from the kitchen window as he jogged back down the hill toward his car.

Saskia’s room was plastered
with photos of her and her friend Sarah whose last name I could never remember. The twin bed she’d had as a kid had been replaced by a queen-size mattress and box spring with no bed frame or headboard. On her nightstand sat a stack of crappy fashion mags and next to that a picture of her and Paul together in the canyon somewhere.

“You guys are pretty close, huh?” I pointed at a collage hanging over her dressing bureau. “You and your friend Sarah, I mean.”

“I guess, yeah.”

I turned and walked toward her bed. “Did you know I was here once before?”

“You were?”

“In sixth grade, for your birthday party.”

“I don’t remember you being here. So weird.”

I sat down on her bed. “Where’s your brother?”

“Work, maybe?” She walked to the mirror, grabbed an elastic off the vanity, and pulled her hair back into a smooth ponytail. “You hungry?” she asked, whipping her whole body around to face me.

I nodded.

“Come here.” Saskia took my hand and led me downstairs to the kitchen. She pulled a tub of guacamole out of the fridge and a bag of potato chips from the cupboard. We plopped down on the couch in the living room and ate the entire bowl, barely stopping to breathe between bites.

Afterward I lay on the floor, my hands resting on my stomach. Saskia was on the couch, still.

“Have you finished all your school applications?”

“Basically, yeah.” She sniffed. “Have you?”

“Pretty much.” I was applying to four schools, all in California, which wasn’t the original plan, but Mom died and that put an end to any big dreams of leaving for snowy New York or whatever. So, three of my schools were in L.A. or nearby. One was up north, in Santa Cruz. “Doesn’t matter much, anyway, I won’t be going all that far.”

“You’re staying here?”

“Looks that way.”

Saskia eyed me curiously.

“I feel guilty leaving Jeff.”

“Oh.”

I rolled over onto my front. “You know Ballanoff used to date my mom in high school?”

“No way, theater guy?”

“Yeah, theater guy.”

“Gross, Holly.”

I laughed. We lay there for a bit and didn’t talk. My stomach gurgled.

“Holly?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“Yeah, sure.” The cat came by and licked my face. I ran a hand down her smooth coat.

“Are you a virgin?”

I froze. My hand locked around the cat’s neck. I shook my head—a slow
no
. “Why, what about you?” I asked, as a courtesy, a gesture, because I already knew the answer to that question.