Just You (10 page)

“Want to sit?” I asked, suddenly nervous
again. It amazed me that even after several dates, I could still
feel so jittery around him.

“Sure.”

We sat close together on the couch. Robin’s
tinkling laughter drifted out from the kitchen, followed by Devon’s
slow, rumbling drawl.

“Did the rain let up at all?” I asked, and
then mentally kicked myself for asking about the stupid
weather
like we were making small talk in an elevator or
something.

“Not really,” Michael said. “It’s still
coming down pretty hard.”

“Oh.”

We fell silent again. We weren’t used to
much conversation on our dates. We saved that for the phone. When
we were together like this, in person, talking became a waste of
precious time. It probably would have been different had we gone to
the same school and saw each other every day, but as it stood now
we only had the weekends.

Robin poked her head around the kitchen
doorway. “Want something to drink, guys?”

We both shook our heads and she disappeared
again. Michael let go of my hand to sweep some hair off my
forehead, and as usual I felt shaken by the intense physical
attraction I had for him. Brian, in comparison, may as well have
been my sibling for the lack of sparks between us. I never had to
worry about forgetting myself around him. Keeping my clothes on had
never been a problem. I knew it wouldn’t be so easy with
Michael.

As it turned out, we did end up watching a
movie, some action/sci-fi/comedy thing that failed to hold my
attention. Partly because it was dumb but mostly because Michael
was lightly caressing the back of my neck through the whole thing,
giving me goose bumps the size of glaciers. Robin and Devon started
making out about halfway through the movie, and by the end they had
slipped away into her bedroom, closing the door behind them. I
kissed Michael as the movie credits rolled, all the while reminding
myself that he was almost two years older than me and surely a lot
more experienced. And now, alone in the dark, I wondered what he
expected of me, and if we should talk about it.

But my worry turned out to be for nothing.
Michael’s hands stayed on my hair or on my waist the entire time.
We kissed until Robin and Devon surfaced from the bedroom, looking
dazed and disheveled. I didn’t even want to guess what they’d been
doing in there. I knew Robin was still a virgin, in the technical
sense, but looking at her now, I wondered if her status had been
upgraded.

The boys left a little before midnight, but
I stuck around for a minute to help clean up and get the scoop. No,
Robin said, they had not done it. No, she wouldn’t dish out any
details. Yes, she was definitely still a virgin. For now.

“How ‘bout you?” she said, snickering.

I refused to dignify that with an answer. I
left her to her empty house and rushed home, sprinting across the
neighbors’ yards in my rush to get out of the wet cold. Leo was
waiting up for me, like always, but to my surprise, so were Dad and
Lynn. They were curled up on the couch together under a big quilt,
watching TV.

“Oh,” I said, passing by the living room on
my way to the stairs. “Hi.”

They turned their heads toward me in unison.
Dad’s hair was sticking up like he’d just slept on it. “Hi, sweet
pea,” he said, peering closely at me, like he was searching for
signs of something. “How was your evening?”

“Fine.” I paused by the door frame, confused
as to why they were still awake. They usually went to bed early,
unless they were out with friends or at a movie or whatever. “Well,
good night,” I said, moving toward the stairs again.

“I think we’ll go to bed too,” Lynn said,
yawning. “This movie doesn’t look promising.”

They disentangled themselves from the quilt
and headed toward their room while I went upstairs and ducked into
the bathroom. As I washed my face, I noticed a gleaming brightness
in my eyes, a flush in my cheeks. I looked different. Happier.

In my room, I changed into my pajama pants
and T-shirt and climbed into bed. I felt sleepy, like I was
crashing from an adrenaline rush. When I closed my eyes I felt this
strange falling sensation, kind of like what happens in dreams
sometimes, when you fall and fall and fall but never hit the
ground.

Chapter 9

A week later, Dad showed up at my bedroom
door. “May I come in?” he asked, sticking his head in the room.

I was standing in front of the full-length
mirror, applying mascara. “Be my guest.”

He opened the door but didn’t enter. Instead
he rested one hand on the door frame, his sweater stretching across
his paunchy stomach, and loudly cleared his throat. He seemed
fidgety, uncertain, as if he wanted to say something but wasn’t
quite sure if he should. I rifled through my makeup bag for lip
gloss and waited for him to speak.

“Going out again?” he asked, striving for
casual.

I smoothed some gloss over my lips. “Uh
huh.”

“You’ve been going out a lot lately.”

I wondered why he picked tonight to bring
this up for the first time. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think
he knew something. But that was silly. Dad wouldn’t notice if I’d
suddenly dyed my hair purple and took up opera singing. Not that he
was neglectful or anything; he was just in his own little world
half the time. It drove Lynn crazy, but I didn’t mind. It was a
nice contrast to my mother’s eagle-eyed scrutiny.

“Who’s the boy?”

My hand, holding the lip gloss tube a few
inches from my lips, froze in midair. Slowly, I recapped it and
dropped it into the makeup bag, all the while avoiding my father’s
gaze. But going by his light, easy tone, he wasn’t about to grill
me or tease me, so I answered honestly. “His name is Michael. He
lives in Redwood Hills.”

“Ah ha,” Dad said, as if he’d uncovered some
great mystery. “And how long has this been going on?”

“A while.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“There was nothing to say, Dad.” I searched
the room for my earrings, finding them on the night stand under an
empty CD case. “It’s no big deal.”

Dad frowned. “This boy’s older than you.
Lynn saw you a couple of weeks ago. You and Robin, driving off with
some boys.”

Ah, so
that
was why they’d been
waiting up for me the other night, because they knew I was out with
some guy they didn’t know. Dad may not have been the observant
type, but Lynn missed nothing. “He’s seventeen. Not that much
older. I’ll be sixteen in three weeks.”

“You’re being careful, right?” He pretended
to examine a scratch on the paint on my wall. “Staying out of
trouble?”

I didn’t know quite what he meant, but I
assured him anyway. “Yes, I’m staying out of trouble.”

“He
is
a little old for you.”

I gave him a look. “Dad. Come on.”

“I don’t know…a boy that age…”

“You haven’t even met him.” Obviously he had
the wrong impression of Michael.

“Well,” Dad said, scratching his beard. “I
should meet him then, don’t you think?”

Now my whole body froze. Bringing the person
you’re going out with home to meet your parents made it official. I
wasn’t sure if I was ready to climb that step, to expose Michael to
my corny, unpredictable father, not to mention the rest of my
family. They were liable to show him my baby pictures and tell him
about the time I fell off the stage during my fourth grade
Christmas recital, among other tidbits from my vast collection of
humiliating childhood moments.

“I guess,” I said, hesitant. “But…not
tonight.” I needed time to psych myself up and warn Michael.

“No? What’s going on tonight?”

“Another party.”

He seemed mollified with this answer. As
lenient as my dad was, he still didn’t want me anywhere alone with
a seventeen-year-old boy. Never mind the drinking and drugs that
accompanied these parties. I guess the way he saw it, drugs and
alcohol couldn’t impregnate me.

Ready to go, I walked over to my father,
thinking he would move as I approached him, but he stayed put.
Clearly he had more to say, but he just looked at me in a lost,
helpless sort of way. Feeling sorry for him, I decided to help him
out.

“You can trust me, Dad,” I told him.
“Really.”

“Okay,” he said, and he stepped aside to let
me leave. That was all he needed to hear. For him, it was
enough.

Robin and I caught a ride with Devon to the
party, which was taking place at an imposing ranch-style house with
a sprawling lawn, held by a girl I didn’t know whose parents
happened to be away for the weekend.

“Do you want a drink?” Michael asked me
after I discovered him in the crowded kitchen, where a makeshift
bar had been set up on the island.

“No thanks,” I said. I felt naturally buzzed
from his presence alone. This feeling hadn’t tapered off over the
past few weeks. If anything, it had intensified. I’d discovered
that underneath all the hotness, there was this nice, down-to-earth
guy who was easy to talk to and get along with. He became less and
less intimidating as I got to know him, and when we were together I
wanted to do things I never even imagined wanting to do before. My
father was right to be concerned.

Michael led me around from group to group,
talking to his friends, and I tried to follow the conversation
despite being distracted by something else, something I experienced
often when I was with Michael in public—the evil once-over. It
consisted of a long, sometimes subtle/sometimes obvious glare in my
direction, during which the girl’s eyes narrowed and traveled from
my head to my feet, presumably trying to figure out what I had to
hold the attraction of someone like Michael. I couldn’t blame them,
but that didn’t make the Evil Once-Over any less uncomfortable.

Right now, I was getting slammed with it by
a pretty blond girl on my right. It was Elena Brewster, a junior at
RHH who quite plainly wanted Michael. She had the Evil Once-Over
down to a science, never failing to bombard me with it whenever I
saw her. And when she wasn’t glaring at me, she was moving in
whenever I left Michael’s side to use the washroom. I would’ve
loved to ask her what her problem was, but I knew if I did confront
her she and her pack would be on me like rabid wolves on a
carcass.

Often, Elena accompanied the Evil Once-Over
with a sneer or snicker or, when I was really lucky, like tonight,
a cutting remark.

“Are you
still
around?” she said as
she walked by, flanked by her ever-present collection of BFFs. When
I ignored her, they all burst into giggles. Their mocking laughter
made me feel small and inadequate, and I wanted to slink away and
hide in a bathroom for the rest of the night.

I tugged on Michael’s hand and he turned to
me, smiling, oblivious to the cattiness flung my way simply because
I dared to be seen with him. “I’m going downstairs for a second,” I
said, knowing my face was pink.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s a little too warm in here,
that’s all.” People were packed like sardines on the main floor,
and the fire blazing in the living room fireplace wasn’t helping
matters.

Michael walked with me downstairs, where we
found a nice, cool workshop room with a deep freeze in the corner
and tools hanging from nails on the wall. We slid up on top of the
freezer. I felt better immediately.

We sat there and talked. We’d been doing
more of that lately, talking instead of being all over each other.
Well, in addition to it, anyway. We usually stuck to the safe
topics—school, family, aspirations—and avoided touchy issues like
exes and this mysterious older brother of his that he hadn’t
mentioned after that one time. We also avoided talking about our
relationship, such as it was. Maybe because neither of us knew how
to classify it, exactly. Were we boyfriend-girlfriend? Casually
hooking up? Exclusive? Non-exclusive? Sometimes I didn’t care, but
other times I wished I knew how he really felt about me. I knew
what I was about to say next might give me an inkling.

“My dad wants to meet you.”

He bit his lip, which made him look more
sexy than worried. “Really?”

“Don’t worry. He’s harmless.”

Now he smiled, his teeth glowing in the
semi-darkness. “I guess he’s going to interrogate me.”

“You guess right.”

“What about your mother? Do I get to meet
her too?”

I nibbled at my thumbnail. This was one of
those touchy subjects we’d never discussed. “Well…she doesn’t
exactly know about you.”

“Why not?”

How to explain my mystifying mother to him
without scaring him off for good? “She’s strict. She wouldn’t let
me go out with you.”

“Because I’m a little older than you?”

I nodded. “And because you live here. She
knows Dad will let me do whatever I want and she wouldn’t be able
to control the situation.” This was one of the main reasons I was
apprehensive about bringing Michael around my dad’s house—sometimes
Emma had a big mouth.

“She’ll probably find out someday,” Michael
said.

My stomach fluttered a little. What he said
implied that he thought we’d be together for a while.
Someday
. Surprisingly, this word made me more happy than
scared. So happy that I leaned over and kissed him with enough
enthusiasm to erase all lingering thoughts of dreaded
parent-meetings out of both our minds. He kissed me back, his lips
moving against mine until I forgot where and who I was.

Good thing Dad had faith in me to “stay out
of trouble”. At least one of us did.

Chapter 10

I put it off the meet-the-parents date for
as long as I could, partly because of the “boyfriend/girlfriend”
connotations attached to it, and partly because I was afraid Emma
would mention it to Mom, who still didn’t know Michael existed. So
I waited for a night I knew Emma had a sleepover and wouldn’t be
around.