If You Really Love Me (17 page)

“That’s not true, Saul.” I have to get this out in the open between us. “Your dad told me about Wayne, your first boyfriend.”

Another pause. This one is not cozy or comfortable at all. “Oh.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s embarrassing. I can’t stand to even think about it. I cried for like, two days straight. Wayne dumped me after just three little months. He dumped me because I wasn’t hot enough.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He didn’t have to tell me anything. Wayne was hot, and Kirk, the guy he left me for, was even hotter. And there I was, just a skinny twerp. I wasn’t good enough for Wayne. Why else would he dump me?”

“Maybe because he’s king of the jerks. Did you ever think of that?”

Silence on the other end.

“Saul, I’ve got something embarrassing too. It’s something I haven’t told you. But I want to tell you now because I don’t want us to keep things from each other anymore. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s about why none of the kids at school talk to me.”

“You mean the thing about you breaking that guy’s arm when you were in ninth grade?”

This time the silence is on my end. “You mean… you already know about that?”

“I got word of it when I first transferred in. Some of those losers at school warned me to stay away from you because you’re crazy.”

“I think I did go crazy. This guy—his name was Jonah Mullins—he was always after me about something. He’d take my money, he’d throw my lunch and books in the garbage, he’d rip up my homework. He took a baseball cap Cary gave me for my birthday that year. There was this little stray dog that hung around the school, and I sort of adopted it. I couldn’t take it home or anything because I live in a no-pet building, but it waited for me at the front gate of the school every morning. I’d give it treats and play with it and stuff. When Jonah saw how much I liked that dog and how the dog trusted me, he took it and threw it into the garbage can like he did everything else of mine. The dog howled and I just snapped. I went crazy. I started screaming, and I knocked Jonah down, and then I jumped on his arm until it broke. It was a really bad break. When I saw the broken bone poking out of his arm, I got sick and threw up all over the teacher who was trying to get me off him. None of the other kids would come near me after that.” Including Ray and Jaime, two guys I
thought
were my good friends.

“Well, nobody bothered to tell me about the part with the dog or how that asshole was coming down on you, but I did hear the part about you breaking the guy’s arm and throwing up on the teacher.”

“You knew that and you still became my friend?”

“Why not? There are two sides to every story. I figured I could make up my own mind about you. Besides, I saw how you were in school. You didn’t seem like the kind of dude who gets off on going around breaking people’s arms.”

“But everybody said it was crazy to do that to Jonah over a dog that didn’t even belong to me.”

“The way I see it, you stood up to a guy who was crapping all over you on a regular basis. Come on, what were you supposed to do? Just keep letting him do it?”

“I got suspended from school. And it cost my mom a lot of money. She had to pay Jonah’s medical bills. That was the only way his parents wouldn’t press charges against me.”

“Jeez. That’s a bummer. And so wrong.”

“And you’re actually okay with what I did?”

“El, I’m okay with you. Period.”

There really is nothing else for me to be afraid of.

“Here comes my mom,” Saul says in a rush. “I gotta go. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

“You bet.”

T
HE
DAYS
are getting warmer. It’s March, and we’re closing in on spring break. Mom and Breeze are taking Saul and me to a cabin in the mountains for three days. There’s fishing, which I’ve never done before, and the cabin has lots of games like air hockey, table tennis, and video poker. We’re going to grill, hike mountain trails, and take a bike-riding tour of the local town. I’m looking forward to it. We all are.

Mom has been true to her word. She hasn’t hit me since that time she beat me with the spatula. She got really pissed at me the other day for leaving the burner on after I boiled a couple of hotdogs for my dinner. All the water boiled out of the pot and the pot burned and smoke was everywhere. Mom yelled at me for something like fifteen minutes, about how I could have caused a fire and burned down the whole building, and how I had to start being more careful. I apologized because I knew she was right. But all she did was yell.

Saul’s helping me study. I have to take the ACT at the end of the month. I’ve put in a college application, and they need my ACT score to make a final decision about admitting me. This is all sort of last minute, and I have to do everything in a rush, but it took me a while to decide what I want to do with my life. I want to be able to help people who have emotional problems. When I told him that, Mr. Roberson said I should consider being a clinical psychologist. I read through the pamphlets he gave me, and now I’m convinced that’s the career for me.

I’ll have to go to the college here in the city. Based on Mom’s income, I’m eligible for both state and federal grants, but together they don’t come anywhere close to covering the costs of attending an out-of-state school like Dartmouth. Saul wants to go to the local college too. He doesn’t like the idea of us going to separate schools any more than I do. But his parents still want him to go to Dartmouth, and I just want what’s best for him. I believe Dartmouth would be the best school for him. We’ll have to find a way to keep our relationship going long distance. I know it can work because Cary and I keep our relationship going long distance. Some things are hard, but you find a way to do them for the people you love.

I still want to get a part-time job somewhere, any kind of job. I’ll be a janitor, mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. I’ll wait tables, like Mom. Or stock store shelves and bag groceries. Cary may be living with his grandfather for now, but he buys his own food, his own clothes, and he pays his grandfather rent. When he’s saved up enough money, he’s going to get his own place. I want to be like that. I want to pay Mom back all the cash she had to give Jonah Mullins’s parents. I want to take care of my own needs. And most of all, I want my own personal space, a little sanctuary that’s all mine. Saul has said he’ll definitely be coming back here, every fall break, every winter break, every spring break, and every summer break. Every chance he gets, he’ll be coming back to Ravenna Point. He’ll come to see his parents, and he’ll come to spend time with me. We’ll go out and do things, of course, all the things we do together now. But we’ll also need a place to be alone with each other, where we don’t have to wait until his parents or my mom go off to work or something or worry about them coming back unexpectedly. I probably won’t be able to afford an apartment anytime soon, but maybe I can get a room in a dorm.

Saul is seeing a psychiatrist, and he’s on medication to help him with his obsessions and compulsions. He told me his family lawyer, a woman with a reputation of being compassionate but lethal in the courtroom, met with the prosecutor and explained to the guy that Saul’s OCD caused him to shoplift. She also said she’d have plenty of expert witnesses to back up the diagnosis made by that doctor Saul saw once (and refused to see again). The prosecutor agreed to drop the charges if Saul agreed to go into long-term treatment. He has a long way to go. He still works out too much some days, but the sessions aren’t as long. Sometimes I can talk him into skipping a session altogether, and he doesn’t freak out like he used to. He’s not shoplifting anymore. He’s getting better. Everyone can see that.

“You’re gonna ace that test, man,” Saul whispered in my ear one Saturday morning, the last weekend in February, when we were sitting side-by-side at a table in the back corner of the library near my apartment complex. We had the ACT study guides spread out in front of us, and he was taking me through the practice questions at the back of the guides. I was nervous when he first brought the guides to me and I started studying from them. I kept telling him there wasn’t enough time for me to go over all the stuff in those books and get enough of it in my head before the test date rolled around.

But once I got started, I realized I already knew a lot of the material on science, mathematics, and English. And I’ve been getting most of the practice questions right. I’m not so anxious about the test now. “I kind of feel that, too,” I whispered to Saul, looking at him with all the confidence I felt. “The test won’t be as hard as I thought it would.”

He smiled at me. I could see how happy he was, and for the first time, I realized how much he had been holding back. I finally understood that the blank looks he kept on his face in the beginning and the don’t-give-a-damn attitude he projected were his way of protecting his feelings. He was just as afraid as I was back then. He was opening up at last, letting the real Saul come through completely. And I believed he wasn’t worried anymore that his obsessive-compulsive disorder or anything else would drive me out of his life. Maybe that wasn’t completely true, him not being worried, not yet, but I sure felt it was. And if it wasn’t totally true, I was certain he’d get there soon.

That made me so happy I just laughed. I could tell Saul understood what I was feeling, because he laughed too. “You know,” I whispered, “you are one good guy, Saul Brooks. I’m so glad to know you.”

“Same here,” he whispered back. He reached over and slid his arm across my shoulders. “We’re gonna be okay, man.”

T
HE
FINAL
bell rings on this Wednesday afternoon. I hurry out of class and head for my locker. Saul shows up there maybe ten seconds after I do.

“Man. I’m glad this day’s over,” he says as he wraps an arm around my waist from behind. “Let’s go to the park. We can watch the stoners and the supposedly cool people.”

“Okay. Sure.” I pull the ACT study guides out of my locker and shove them into my backpack. After we do our people watching, we’ll find a quiet spot for me to work in some study.

As we walk out to Saul’s car, I take his hand. That’s something I would never have done in the past. Every time Saul put his arm around me or kissed me in school, I worried about what kind of reaction the gesture might get us from the other kids. I don’t worry about that anymore. The kids here already think I’m some kind of freak, and now I wonder why I ever cared what they thought of me. In a few months, I’ll be gone from this school for good, and I’ll probably never see most of them again. I want to hold my boyfriend’s hand now, so I do, and that’s all that matters.

It feels good to toss my backpack onto the backseat with Saul’s and forget about homework assignments and studying for a while. It feels good to let all the windows down on the car, to put some rock music on the radio, to sing along in loud, wildly off-key voices as we drive through a warm, sunny afternoon with spring dancing in the air. It feels good to not have fear and worry sitting on my shoulders like unwanted pets, to have a direction for my life.

And it’s great to share this little uncomplicated time with my boyfriend. I believe Saul’s right. Everything is going to be okay.

G
ENE
G
ANT
grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and lives with his family in a quiet little rural community just outside the city.

By
G
ENE
G
ANT

N
OVELS

The Battle for Jericho

The Thunder in His Head

Lessons on Destroying the World

N
OVELLAS

Everything We Shut Our Eyes To

If You Really Love Me

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ARMONY
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P
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