Bright Before Sunrise (8 page)

Normally Carly is waiting out front when I pull up, eager to kiss me, burrow beneath my chin, then kiss me again. It’s an impatient-Carly thing, but also a practical one; if I enter her house, it’s at least an hour before we finish talking to all her family members and get back out the door.

Tonight she’s not sitting on the steps, but that’s no big deal. I love her family. I’d even asked my parents if I could move in with them and finish my senior year at Hamilton High. Mom had said, “Don’t you understand the opportunities I’ll be able to give you now that I’m married to Paul?” Dad had been speaker-phoned into the conversation. When Mom mentioned “Paul,” he’d hung up.

But tonight, if we end up watching a Brazilian soccer game with Carly’s parents, sister, and brother before going to Jeff’s party, I’m okay with that. One of the best things about her is that she’d probably be okay with that too.

Seven-year-old Marcos answers the door. “Hey, Jonah.”

“How’s it going, little dude?” I brace myself for an
ambush—for him to jump on me and demand a piggyback ride or whip out his Nerf guns and begin a foam-bullet assault. When he just stands there eyeing the toes of his scuffed blue sneakers, I ask, “Do we have time for a quick catch? My glove is in the car. Or want to play a round of
MLB Showdown
?”

“Can’t.” Marcos’s sigh is so exaggerated I have to fight a smile. “I’m supposed to go watch TV. Carly’s in a bad mood—she said I’m not allowed to play with you. It’s not fair.”

I put my hands on my knees and stoop to make eye contact. “Level with me. On a scale of one to ten, how cranky is she?”

Marcos sucks on his pointer finger while he thinks about this. “Eleven. She’s been yelling at Ana all night and she slammed her door—twice.”

“Hmmm. How about I come over tomorrow and we play catch? I haven’t seen Carly all week—I was cranky today too.”

Marcos nods and sticks out a hand to shake on the deal, then disappears downstairs to his playroom. I take another step into the kitchen and look around—the house is abnormally quiet for a Friday night.

I’m disappointed Mr. Santos isn’t around. We typically talk baseball until Carly’s tugging on his sleeve and whining, “Papai, we need to go.” Or until his wife intercedes. But the only one here is Carly’s grandmother, Avó. She’s sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine devoted to her soap operas. It must be a high-drama article, because she doesn’t get up to hug me and fuss. She raises her eyebrows over the
glossy cover and then turns a page. I lean down and peck her cheek and scan the headlines.

“Do we want Dr. Drake to come back from the dead? Or is it better for Cordelia if he stays gone?”

“She’s better off without him; he’s a cheating scoundrel.” Avó lowers the magazine and adds a string of rapid-fire Portuguese that reminds me, yet again, what I’m being taught in school is not at all helpful in the real world. At least not in
my
real world. It’s probably useful for my classmates who spend their spring breaks on Ibiza. And those who pat themselves on the back for being
so
cosmopolitan when they use their textbook Spanish to give condescending instructions to their Hispanic housekeepers. Cross Pointe High offers six languages—I could study Latin, which isn’t even spoken anywhere but stuffy universities—but I can’t learn the language my girlfriend’s family uses when they’re pissed off.

Avó turns another page before looking up and adding, “Carla’s in her room.”

I walk to the bottom of the stairs. “Hello?”

No response. Normally Carly’s little sister, Ana, is my shadow—fluctuating between a curious kid who peppers me with questions and an awkward preteen who’s trying to figure out how to flirt. It drives Carly crazy—which could be why they were fighting. Though they’re always in these huge fights—followed by dramatic apologies and what seems like instant forgiveness. Having spent my first seventeen years as an only child, I can’t imagine Sophia and I will ever have that type of volcanic relationship.

“Carly?” It’s a well-established rule that I’m not allowed
on the second floor, but it’s uncomfortable to stand here and bellow, so I go up a few steps and try again. “Carly? Are you almost ready?”

Her door opens. She dyed her hair a few weeks ago, and I’m still not used to it being cinnamon colored. She’s wearing jean shorts and a black T-shirt that slides off one shoulder so I can see a hot-pink strap underneath. It’s either a tank top or a new bra—I’m hoping for the second.

“Hey. You ready to go?”

She nods and calls back over her shoulder, “Papai, I’m leaving. I won’t be late.”

It’s her mother who meets us at the door, giving her daughter a long look and a hug. I get a quick nod as she holds the door open.

Either Carly has been in a brutal mood or something’s up.

“Where do you want to eat?” I reach for her hand, but she’s holding her cell phone.

“I already ate,” she says. “Why are you so late?”

It’s barely five. I’m tempted to make a joke about her catching the early-bird dinner with Avó, but she huffs out a breath, so I answer her question. “I got stuck on Sophia duty.”

She rolls her eyes.

I pull her into a hug beside the hood of my car. “I missed you this week.”

She puts a hand on my chest and leans back to look me in the face. “Can we skip Jeff’s party? Let’s go to the state park and talk.”

She means the always-empty parking lot that borders the state park. We must be fine. I kiss her greedily and don’t argue. Carly pulls away to climb into the car. It’s a shorter
kiss than her usual greeting—especially since we haven’t seen each other in five days, but like me, she’s got to be impatient to get to the park. I pull out of her driveway and try not to speed for the ten-minute drive.

Talk? Yeah, sure.

I want Carly’s hair between my fingers. I want her voice in my ear. I want to erase the doubts she’s planted in my head lately and forget everything but how she feels.

She bites her lip as I park the car—glances at me out of the corner of her eye with a look that makes me want to stop and thank the inventors of zippers. I know what comes next: she’ll climb over the console into the backseat, squealing “Jo-nah!” when I tickle her on her way by.

But she doesn’t. Instead she fiddles with her seat belt.

I lean across the console to kiss her, but she leans away to apply another coat of her inescapable cherry lip gloss. Then she pauses, the cap in one hand, tube in the other. Both hands fall to her lap. She sucks on the left side of her bottom lip and pulls a knee up to create a barrier between us.

“Okay, Carly, what’s going on?”

She brings the gloss back up to her mouth, touching up the spot she’d been sucking and rolling her lips together. “Where were you
really
tonight before my house?”

“Watching Sophia. Waiting for Paul to come home and tell me what a failure I am. Why?”

She pulls a folded piece of blue paper from her pocket and flips it over twice, before shoving it back and saying, “I don’t want to go to Jeff Diggins’s party. I want you to take me to one in Cross Pointe.”

“There are no Cross Pointe parties.” At least, not that I know about. None that I’m invited to.

She juts out her chin. “Really? They don’t party in Cross Pointe? What do they do all weekend—listen to Mozart? Eat caviar? Count their money? What?”

“Carly, why do we have to do this again? I thought we were done with this.”

“Because I want to see who you’re with when you’re not here.”

“I’ve told you, I’m not with anyone.” I’m being careful to keep my voice level, but the pauses between my words are a dead giveaway that I’m annoyed she’s brought this up again.

“Are you ashamed of me or something?” she asks. Her chin’s not out anymore. She’s lowered it and is barely looking at me through her eyelashes.

“You’re kidding, right?” I schedule my life around when she’s free for phone calls. I’ve driven an hour round-trip just to watch one of Marco’s soccer games with her, or study next to her at her parents’ kitchen table with our ankles and fingers linked beneath it. “I’m sorry this week was crazy and I couldn’t get over here—” But I don’t know why I’m apologizing.
She
was the one who was busy, not me. She’s the one who turned me down every time I offered to drive up.

“If you’re not ashamed of me, then why won’t you ever take me to things at CPH? You’ve lived there since January; why haven’t I met anyone yet?” She narrows her eyes. “Why couldn’t we go to
your
prom?”

There are so many answers to that last question: because I didn’t want to spend a night in a rented tux surrounded by snobs who probably own theirs, because then you’d see what a loser I am, because I already emptied my bank account to rent a limo for Hamilton’s prom after you hinted—“I hear all
Cross Pointe girls get them; what do you think it’s like to ride in one?”

Carly can’t seem to grasp that just because Paul has a bottomless checkbook doesn’t mean I do. I have no clue how I’m going to pay for the post-graduation dinner she wants at La Fin, Cross Pointe’s most expensive restaurant.

But I won’t tell her any of these things. I can’t. Carly’s always asking for funny anecdotes about Cross Pointe excess so she can mock their superficiality. The last thing I want is for her to make a poor-little-rich-boy joke about me—or turn my new life into a punchline.

There’s nothing I can say, so I don’t say anything. A pattern that’s becoming too common with us lately. When she gets sick of waiting, she snaps, “What are you hiding?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She looks away and says quietly, “You think I don’t know what’s going on, but I do.”

I touch her face, trace the line of her cheekbone, and slide my hand to the back of her neck. “Carly, nothing is going on. Nothing’s going on in Cross Pointe tonight, and nothing’s going on with me.”

She grasps my hand and places it back in my lap.

I know I’m only going to antagonize her—bring out the famous Carly temper—but I can’t help it. “I don’t believe I drove all the way over here so you can play prove-you-love-me games.”

“Games?” Her eyes snap wide open. “
I’m
not the one playing games! Screw you, Jonah.”

Except, apparently, I’m not getting screwed tonight. I turn away and glare out the window.

Carly speaks first: “I think we should break up.”

“What?” I sit up so fast I hit my head on the roof of the car. “Why? Because I won’t take you to Cross Pointe? All right, let’s go. When we get there we can buy eight-dollar coffees at Bean Haven or try and have a civil conversation with Paul and my mom—it’ll probably be a fascinating discussion about something important like if the landscaper is cutting the lawn too short or their endless debate about whether Paul has enough support to run for a spot on the country club’s board of directors. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”

She shakes her hair out of her face and meets my eyes. A lock sticks in her gloppy lip gloss and she frowns as she extracts it and smoothes it behind her ears. She’s wearing large gold hoops, not the ruby studs I saved up to buy for her birthday.

“You’ve changed.”

“I haven’t,” I lie.

“Yes! Yes, you have. You’ve become another Cross Pointe snob and you treat me like I’m not good enough for you anymore.”

“That’s crap.”

“Oh, really? Convince me you’re my old Jonah. Tell me one thing that happened at school today—to
you
, not one of your classmates. Tell me one fact about your life.”

I look away. What good will come from me whining about how I eat lunch in the library because there’s no place for me at the cafeteria’s round tables? How it’s almost physically painful listening to the baseball players who sit near me in bio talk about organizing a father-son summer league? How my math teacher still calls me “Noah”? Or what about how the Empress of Cross Pointe graced me with a lesson on operating my locker?

“Please?” she says, leaning forward and putting a hand on my knee. “Just talk to me, Jonah.
Please
.”

I flip my hands palm up in a half shrug. I can either tell her I’m a loser, or I can lose
her
. “I figured out how to lock my locker.”

“You mean unlock,” she says with an eye roll, pulling away from me.

“No,
lock
.” I shift in my seat, trying to find a comfortable position where I can face her without the steering wheel impaled in my ribs. “See, in Cross Pointe the lockers—”

She waves a hand, cutting me off. “Don’t talk down to me.”

“What?”

“
In Cross Pointe
,” she mimics with an affected accent. “Please, Jonah, explain to me how lockers work, because since I’m not from Cross Pointe, I’m clearly not smart enough to know.”

“Forget it.” I’m shaking my head and we’re both sighing. Frustrated exhales that are the only sound in the car.

“So that’s it? That’s all you can come up with about your day?” It’s an accusation, but I’m not sure what I’m being accused of. And when I try to think of something to share, something that would make today stand out from every other day of invisibility and over-polite refusals to acknowledge my existence, I can’t.

“Let’s talk about something else. It was just a normal day—nothing happened.”

“Just because I don’t go to your fancy high school and I’m not headed to an Ivy League college doesn’t make me stupid—” I try to interrupt, but she’s on a roll. “And just because I can’t make out with you in the back of the Jag I got
for my sixteenth birthday and seduce you with the perfect boobs I got for my seventeenth—or is it the other way around, Jonah? How do Cross Pointe snobs order their lives: cars or plastic surgery first?”

I laugh. I can’t help it. “Plastic surgery. Then the cars.”

“Oh, so this is a
joke
to you? I guess you’d know. So tell me: Exactly how many sets of Cross Pointe boobs have you seen?”

The nail of her pointer finger is inches from my face. I push it away and snap back, “You think I’m cheating? Are you crazy?”

“We both know you are. At least be man enough to admit it.”

“That’s such crap. I can’t believe—”