Anyone But You (16 page)

Wearing baggy purple basketball shorts that revealed pasty, skinny calves, Perry stood at the top of the stairs out back, his arms folded across his chest. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was standing in this spot swooning over the boy of my dreams. Now I was attempting damage control with my worst nightmare.

“So, what do you want?” he mumbled. I silently ordained him with my new favorite Perry moniker, The Incredible Sulk. He was clearly still ticked about last night. I hadn’t really thought out how I was going to approach this conversation, but the “more flies with honey” tactic seemed like a good place to start.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “I wanted to apologize about last night.”

He didn’t say anything, but I thought (or hoped!) he looked slightly less annoyed.

“So,” I ventured, walking up the steps toward him. “I heard things went a little south between your dad and mine this morning.”

“You shouldn’t be surprised,” he said, staring past me at the brick wall.

“But I am. Your dad seemed to be having such a great time at the party last night. I can’t help but wonder what changed. If there’s been some sort of misunderstanding, then maybe we could—”

“I wouldn’t call it a misunderstanding. ‘Misled’ might be the better term.”

“Oh. I see.” It didn’t take a master at inference to read between these lines. He was ticked off that I’d given him the cold shoulder. Roman’s rescue mission hadn’t helped, either, of course. But that couldn’t have been what led his father to yank all our funding. Could it?

“You said you had an apology?” Perry asked with a note of impatience in his voice. I blanched. I’d only waved that olive branch to try and get things back on the right foot—at least between Rich and my dad—but I wasn’t about to apologize for anything that I’d said or done to him the evening prior. And I most definitely was not going to apologize for Roman.

“Things got a little crazy by the end of the night, granted,” I said. “I should have been a better hostess. You brought me a rose, after all!” I plastered a chipper smile on my face as I said this. He remained stone-faced, like some wax figure at Madame Tussauds.

“Did your dad put you up to this?”

“No, honestly!”

“Well, then, riddle me this: Who was that dude who came up to us in the hallway?” he asked. “The one who said he was your boyfriend?”

“Who? Oh, him,” I waved my hand dismissively and scoffed, camouflaging my inner disgust at the fact that he thought I owed him an explanation. “I didn’t even know his name!”

“Really?”

“Uh-uh. I mean, I was just as surprised by that whole thing as you were!”

“Oh.” One corner of his pouting mouth gave a barely perceptible uptick, as if he was weighing this new information. Though I hadn’t exactly lied to Perry, I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to take this conversation. On the one hand, if I could fix this whole falling out with Perry’s father, maybe we wouldn’t have to ship out to Peoria. On the other hand, letting Perry believe he still had any sort of chance with me, romantically speaking, just made me feel sick to my stomach.

“What are you doing tonight?” Perry wondered, his tone of voice markedly less harsh. At least this time I actually had a valid excuse.

“I’m needed here, alas.” I motioned down at my work attire.

“Your dad told me last night that he’d give you the night off if you ever wanted to, you know, hang with me.”

“No offense, Perry, but I think my dad’s opinion on that front may have changed sometime between last night and this morning.” (Duh. I couldn’t believe I even needed to explain that fact.) “And with the money trouble Cap’s is in these days,” I added, “I really need to pitch in.”

“Money problems? You mean the loan my dad wants repaid, ASAP?” Perry smirked as if he was semi-amused by the whole situation. “Pops can be a real Shylock, I’ll grant you. But that’s not to say it can’t be sorted out.”

“Really?” I asked, attempting to ignore his blatant use of a racial slur. “Do you mean that?” I dubiously wondered what might be required of me to remedy my dad’s financial troubles.

“Let’s just say I can be pretty persuasive where my dad is concerned,” he slowly responded, “if I had the right motivation.”

“If?”

“Well, I mean, now that I stand corrected about the situation with your pseudo-boyfriend last night, I think we can make this little situation just—poof!—go away.” He made a sleight of hand gesture with his revolting, spindly fingers.

“We?”

“We. As in you … and me.” He inched closer, staring too suggestively at me with those creeper eyes of his.

“Can’t we just be friends?” I asked, though I suspected I already knew what his answer would be.

“Friends?” He rolled his eyes at my suggestion. “If you want to save your dad’s restaurant, you’re going to have to give me more than that. A
lot
more.” Though my recent involvement with Roman was as complicated as quantum physics, Perry’s suggestion—and my response to it—couldn’t have been more black and white. My choice was clear.

“You’re disgusting,” I said, turning to go back down the stairs. As I opened the back door to Cap’s I offered one parting word of advice. “Next time you’re in the market to buy a girlfriend, try the Dollar Store. They come a lot cheaper, there.”

One thing I knew for certain: I would rather spend an eternity in purgatory (or Peoria) before I’d endure another minute with Perry.

“W
HERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING,
P
ANCAKE?”
Smitty whispered to me, shivering underneath his threadbare rags. “The latrine, again?”

“Nah—I just need some fresh air,” I said, tossing him my poor excuse for a blanket so he could double up and keep warm.

“If they come across you out there, you’ll be cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

“Yeah, so. What else is new?” I grumbled, clambering over two more guys sawing logs between me and the open doorway. I would have grabbed my boots and put them on, but my captors had confiscated them months ago when I had arrived in this godforsaken cesspool. The open blisters covering my feet could attest that barefoot life wasn’t as idyllic as Mark Twain had made out in my favorite childhood classic,
Huck Finn
, the plot of which I had replayed over and over in my mind during these many days of my captivity. Exiting our ramshackle barracks, which made a chicken coop seem like the Taj Mahal, I crept over to a palm tree near the barbed wire fence and collapsed against it. I knew they’d be rousing us before dawn with the business end of their Arisaka rifles and screaming at us in Japanese—not exactly the reveille you look forward to each morning. I ought to have been at least trying to get some shut-eye so I could somehow endure tomorrow. But a rain-free night like this one provided me with a rare temporary respite from all the pain and terror.

My stomach churned. Hunger pangs or, perhaps, a harbinger that I’d soon be back hunched over the squalid hole in the ground we’d affectionately nicknamed “The Gents’ Room.” When the agonizing abdominal pain I’d grown accustomed to didn’t materialize, I chalked it up to the mere side effects of starvation. Funny thing about nicknames. I’d earned my new moniker after the ritual stunt I enacted each morning at “breakfast” (a meager portion of maggot-infested white rice).

“Mmm-mmm,” I would loudly enthuse, digging into our revolting repast and grinning at my fellow prisoners. “Tastes
just
like pancakes!” It was the sort of thing Benny would have said. I’d come to rely on the memory of his goofy antics and optimism during my time here.
What crazy thing would Benny do in this scenario? What outrageous nicknames would he come up with for the bastards who tortured us daily?
Thoughts of my pal back home helped keep my spirits from landing somewhere down that Gents’ Room hole—but just barely.

Glancing up at the sky, I marveled at the beauty of the countless stars twinkling overhead. They naturally made me think of one person in particular: Stella. It would be mid-afternoon back in Chicago, and I tried to imagine what she might be doing: taking in a movie with a girlfriend, shopping in some posh boutique on Michigan Avenue, or maybe just curled up by the fire reading one of those sci-fi dime-store novels she went on and on about.

“
Lizard Goddess of Lake Neptune
?” I’d once teased her, holding the paperback just out of her arm’s reach.

“Give it back, you! This’ll be considered classic literature one day, I’ll have you know.” She circled around my back, then under my arm as I dangled it just overhead, until I finally caught her up in my embrace. She was laughing and rosy-cheeked, but when she stopped laughing and looked at me with those baby blues that had turned suddenly serious, my pulse raced. “I don’t care if I get the book back,” she chided, “but if you don’t kiss me right now, it will go on your permanent record.” The memory seemed so far away now.

There went my stomach again. It sounded like an angry tomcat howling. When I got back home, the first thing I’d eat was one of our pizzas loaded up with plenty of ham, pepperoni, and our homemade
salsicce
. One pie wouldn’t be enough, though, so I’d probably eat two, then finish it off with a big fat piece of apple pie with a slice of cheddar on top. As always, my thoughts drifted back to Stella. Benny and I had laughed at her that day when she thought pizza would resemble a dessert pie. But why couldn’t it? All these days stuck out here in the jungle as a “guest of the emperor” left me hungry for the biggest, densest pizza pie imaginable. When I got home, I’d stuff a pie tin to the brim with pizza ingredients, load it up with sauce, cheese, and even more sauce on top, for good measure. A
deep-dish
pizza—yeah … that would hit the spot. If I made it back—when I made it back—I’d be more like Benny and swing for the bleachers every time.

Before the war, I’d had a lot of fears, but they all seemed laughable in retrospect. I was no longer afraid of any of the things that used to scare me. Now they only made me laugh. Flying, for example; I’d give anything to still be up above the clouds in my own little dream world. Nothing up there was so bad as what was down here. I knew that, now. During primary flight training back in Arcadia, Florida, the first plane I flew in was a single engine prop with a two-seat open cockpit—a bona fide Red Baron kind of deal that would have driven Benny mad with jealousy. I cursed him as the instructor sped us down the runway—
What in God’s name did you rope me into?
—but once I felt the sensation of the ground dropping away and the tops of the trees came into view, an adrenaline rush kicked in. Leaving the world behind, I decided right then and there to jettison all my fears and doubts along with it. On a wing and (admittedly) a few prayers, I was reborn.

It was eventually determined that I wasn’t quite pilot material (go figure), but given my head for numbers and general punctiliousness, I became an onboard navigator instead. I was trained in determining a plane’s position using only onboard instruments, a technique known as “dead reckoning.” But by far, the most fascinating skill I learned was being able to plot our location using a sextant and the location of stars in the sky.

“Men have been able to navigate by the stars for three thousand years,” our instructor had explained. “Your controls may fail you, but the stars never will.”

Stella. We’d been exchanging letters faithfully every month right up until the bombing mission that went awry. The bundle of letters that I normally kept with me in a pocket of my flight suit had disintegrated into mush while I drifted in the Pacific, but it didn’t matter. I’d memorized most of them.

Desperate to get a message to Stella after arriving in this abhorrent limbo, I’d managed to come by a scrap of paper and a nub of pencil, with which I wrote to her. The boys chided me, saying only a fool would think our tormentors might actually post some sad sack’s love letter home. Nevertheless, I needed to let Stella know (to let anyone know, really) that I was here, that I’d survived the plane crash. I’d humbly presented my letter to one of the younger soldiers who kept guard over us. He had an unreadable face, but unlike most of the others, he didn’t appear to take sadistic pleasure in our suffering. I’d been holding onto a glimmer of hope that he’d actually be willing to help me, but when I covertly handed him my letter, he merely glanced at it, crumpled it in his hand, and tossed it in the dirt. And with that, my glimmer of hope had disappeared completely.

The air was frigid, but I tried to enjoy it. Nine hours from now, it would feel like I was standing inside old Bessie—maybe even hotter. If I got out of this mess, I knew I would never be the person I once was. Though I was becoming physically weaker and weaker, I swore to myself that I was only getting tougher mentally. I was being forged into steel, and the Nick that emerged from this wouldn’t be the diffident, self-doubting Nick from years past. Maybe that was the whole point. I was being turned into the man who would make Stella proud, my mom proud, my father ….

Perhaps it was just the delusional effects of exhaustion and malnutrition, but sometimes the faint rustle of tree leaves or the way the long, wild grasses bent in the wind told me my dad was here with me. He was right behind me, just as he had been when I was first learning how to ride a bike, when I thought I’d never get the hang of it. “
Don’t give up,
” his voiced seemed to whisper. “
Just keep going. You can do this. Don’t give up.
”