Just You (12 page)

“Anyway,” Leanne said as she headed for the
door. “He seems like a decent guy. Not like the rest of them.”

“He’s…” I tried to find the right word to
describe Michael, sum him up for my stepsister. She paused at the
door, waiting. “…nice.”

She nodded once, put her hand on the door
frame, and swung herself out of my room, leaving me feeling both
pleased and confused as hell.

What a weekend. First, my father hadn’t
completely humiliated me during the dreaded parent meeting. Then I
found out Michael wanted just me and no one else (and even crazier
than that, I almost believed him). Then my stepsister—who, up until
now, had hated me just for existing—sought me out, spoke to me,
treating me like a three-dimensional person instead of an inanimate
object.

After so many strange occurrences, I was
left to wonder if the world had suddenly gone mad.

Chapter 11

For an early birthday present, my mother let
me invite the girls over for Friday night. We planned to order
pizza and watch sappy movies and eat popcorn and cake. Ashley had
made it quite clear I’d been neglecting them lately. I couldn’t
argue with that, not after all the extra time I’d been spending in
Weldon.

As an added bonus, Mom agreed to spend the
evening at Aunt Gina’s so we could have the house to ourselves.
Emma would stay the night at our aunt’s house, but Mom claimed
she’d be back around eleven to supervise/spy on us. She acted like
we were planning on whipping out a keg and having a drunken orgy
the minute she walked out the door.

But we behaved like little angels, aside
from one broken glass and a frenzied popcorn fight that left the
kitchen looking like the inside of a snow globe. When everything
was reasonably cleaned up, the four of us—Ashley, Erin, Brooke, and
me—lined up our sleeping bags on the living room floor. By then it
was close to ten and time for the movies. We turned the first one
on, but no one really watched it. They were too busy teasing
me.

“Say it, Taylor,” Erin demanded. “Tell us
what you have. Come on, admit it.”

“I dare you,” Brooke said.

“Say it just to shut them up,” Ashley said,
pulling a pillow over her face. “Please.”

Erin sat facing me, cross-legged style, the
cuffs of her flannel pajamas pushed up to her elbows. “Say it.
I…have…a…”

I knew I’d never hear the end of it either
way, so I thought what the hell—I’d throw them a fresh bone. “Okay,
okay. I’ll say it. God, you guys are pushy.” I exhaled loudly. “I
have a boyfriend. Michael’s my boyfriend. Yes, I know I said I was
done with boys. Yes, I know I said he wasn’t my boyfriend. But
obviously I lied. There. Happy now?”

They all gawked at me, speechless for once,
and shocked that I had broken so quickly. But I couldn’t deny
Michael’s status, even to myself. He’d met my father. We saw each
other every single weekend, and spoke on the phone every single
day. His hands had been underneath my top. The evidence pointed to
one thing and one thing only—I had myself a boyfriend.

“When can we meet him?” Erin asked. She was
like a tiny dog, nipping at my heels.

“Soon.”

Brooke knotted her hair at the back of her
head, securing it with a clip. “You seem to like him more than you
liked Brian.”

“I do,” I said. Then I made the mistake of
grinning.

Erin cackled. “Taylor’s in
love
,” she
sang, drawing the word “love” out into many syllables. I reached
over and flicked her knee. “Ow!” she whined.

“Have you slept with him yet?” Ashley
asked.

Stunned silence, followed by uproarious
laughter from the peanut gallery.

“Ashley,” I said patiently. “I’ve only been
dating him a few weeks. Of course I haven’t.”

“Just checking,” she said, shrugging. Then:
“Will you tell us when you lose it?”

“Ashley,” I said again, this time with a
warning tone. Erin and Brooke tittered.

“What? I’ll be married before
I
lose
it. I want to know what it’s like.”

Erin’s eyes bulged. “Married? You’re
honestly going to wait until you’re married? When you said that
before, I thought you were joking.”

“It’s called abstinence,” she said, rolling
her eyes. “You know, that thing Ms. Winters mentioned in passing
last year in sex ed? I’m a Christian, remember.”

“So is Sherry Beaumont,” Erin pointed out.
Sherry, a girl we all knew from junior high, was presently five
months pregnant. “So are lots of people. Christians do have sex
before marriage sometimes, you know. It’s not a crime.”

“I know. But
I’m
choosing not
to.”

“Oooo-kay.” Erin was not convinced. “You’re
not going to see me waiting until I’m married.
If
I get
married, it won’t be until I’m at least thirty. And there’s no way
in hell I’ll be able to hold off that long.”

“I’ve already done it,” Brooke reminded us.
“I’m not traumatized or anything.”

They all looked at me to gauge my thoughts.
“I have nothing against premarital sex,” I said, burrowing into my
sleeping bag. “But don’t tell my mother I said that.”

Ashley snorted. “My mother thinks Brea is
still a virgin. How’s that for a joke.”

Brea, Ashley’s black sheep older sister who,
a few days ago, came home with a tattoo of some guy’s name on her
left butt cheek, was most certainly not a virgin in any sense of
the word, or a devout Christian for that matter. With Brea for a
role-model, you couldn’t blame Ashley for being a little
prudish.

The sex talk ended with that, and then we
finally did watch the movie. When my mother came in around
eleven-thirty, we were all standing around the kitchen, gorging on
the last of the cake.

“Girls,” Mom said in greeting. Her eyes
scanned the house as if checking for tell-tale signs of debauchery.
We must have passed inspection because she went to bed without
another word.

Once the coast was clear, Erin said under
her breath, “Does your mom know?”

I opened the fridge and brought out a carton
of milk. “Know what?”

“About Michael.”

“Are you kidding? She’d kill me.”

“She’s bound to find out,” Ashley said,
licking icing off her fork. The leftover cake sat in the middle of
the table, like a trough. We didn’t see a reason to dirty more
plates. “Your dad will tell her, or Emma.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to
it.”

“So you’re gonna keep it from her? And
lie?”

“Grow up, Ash,” Erin said as she speared
another chunk of cake. “Parents don’t need to know everything.”

Ashley shot her a dark look. “Parents have a
way of finding this stuff out.”

“My parents would kill me too,” Brooke said,
sympathizing with me. “They don’t want me to date. They think boys
will interfere with my school work.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Erin said.
“Anything that distracts us from school work has got to be a good
thing.”

Brooke nibbled daintily on a tiny blob of
icing. “When I was going out with Paul, we had to sneak around.
Remember?”

I nodded. Paul was the guy she’d dated over
the summer, the one she’d lost her virginity to. She met him at a
day camp for special needs kids, where they both worked as swim
instructors. They went out all summer and then broke up right
before school started. Luckily he went to a different high
school.

“I remember how stressed out you got,”
Ashley said, tossing her fork in the sink. “It was hardly worth
it.”

Brooke’s mouth curved into a smile. “No, it
was worth it.”

Erin and I laughed, but Ashley just shook
her head. I was so looking forward to the day she fell in love and
learned that not everything was so black and white. That there were
a lot of gray areas too, and they weren’t all necessarily bad.

****

“We’re here,” Michael said, pulling his car
into the wide driveway of his huge, two-storey house with its
two-car garage and landscaped acre or two of yard. It looked like
many of the other houses I’d been to in Redwood Hills during his
friends’ parties. But this one held people I actually cared about
trying to impress.

It was the next night and, in a very
boyfriend-like fashion, Michael had brought me home to meet his
family. And in a very Taylor-like fashion, I was terrified. What if
they hated me?

On the way inside we passed a shiny white
Mustang convertible. “Whose car?” I asked, trying to stave off an
anxiety attack.

“It’s my brother’s.” He ran his hand along
the hood, almost reverently. “I’m not allowed to drive it.”

Again, I waited for him to say more and
again, it didn’t happen. “It looks…fast.”

“That’s why he bought it. It has a V8.”

“The only V8 I know of has tomatoes in
it.”

He laughed and towed me into the house.
Unlike Dad’s house, we weren’t assaulted by an animal when we
entered. I remembered that Michael didn’t have any pets because his
sisters were both allergic. It seemed like years since he told me
about the collie he’d had to give up when they were born.

The house was amazing. Older, yet modern,
with lots of plants. “My mother’s into plants,” Michael told me
when he noticed me taking them all in.

“So is my stepmother, but most of hers are
outside.”

“There are dozens more in the back
yard.”

He led me into a kitchen that was three
times the size of mine at home. This room, too, was decorated with
lots of plants and flowers. Standing by the fridge was a petite,
attractive woman with dark, salon-styled hair. When she looked at
us, I saw that her eyes were the same blue-gray as Michael’s.
“Hello,” she said in a soft voice. “You must be Taylor.”

“Hi,” I said, flattered that Michael had
mentioned me around the house.

“My mom,” Michael said.

“Cheryl.” She crossed the room to shake my
hand. I couldn’t help but notice her elaborate, diamond-encrusted
wedding ring. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you too.” Her skin felt
rough and dry, like Lynn’s—a side effect from the constant
hand-washing nurses had to endure. For some reason, this made me
feel less intimidated by her. She may have lived in a fancy house
and wore a diamond the size of a doorknob, but other than that, she
wasn’t much different from what I knew.

“We’ll be upstairs,” Michael said after a
few minutes of idle chitchat.

His mother fixed him with a look I’d seen a
million times on my own mother’s face. A silent warning to behave.
It made me wonder how many other girls he’d brought up to his room
and what they may have been caught doing.

We made our way across the main floor, past
a living room with a cozy-looking fireplace that appeared untouched
and up a long, carpeted staircase to the bedrooms. The first door
we passed was obviously a girl’s room, going by the bright colors
and stuffed animals lining every available surface. Also, there
were two girls in there, one reading and the other tapping away on
an iPod. They both looked up at the sound of our footsteps. Michael
had mentioned before that his sisters were fraternal twins, not
identical, but their differences still surprised me. One girl
looked exactly like her mom, small and dark with those blue-gray
eyes, and the other was tall, with light brown hair and brown eyes.
Even without having met their dad, I knew she must have resembled
him. I wondered who the mysterious Josh took after, or if he was a
hybrid of both, like Michael.

I was introduced to the twins—Megan, the
short one and Jennifer, the tall one—who both carefully appraised
me, as if telepathically wagering on how long I’d last. These two
were way more intimidating than Michael’s mother.

Michael and I continued down the hallway.
His room was the last one on the left. I was interested to see what
it looked like. The only teenage boy’s room I’d seen was Brian’s,
and he was a slob like me. His clothes were always all over the
floor and his walls were covered in posters and other junk.
Michael’s room, though, turned out to be the exact opposite of
that. It was big, about twice as big as my room at home and, like
his car, exceptionally neat.

Attached to a desk at the far side of the
room was a large book shelf, lined with books. “Did you read all
these?” I asked, leaning in to read the titles. It was mostly
science fiction and fantasy stuff.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’m a geek.”

“I read horror. I’m a bigger geek.”

I continued to snoop along the bookshelf, my
eyes scanning titles until they rested on a thin, maroon-colored
yearbook. A junior high yearbook. I slid it out and began flipping
through the pages, looking for Michael’s familiar face. I was
curious to know what he looked like when he was younger.

“Hey,” Michael said, coming up behind me.
“What are you doing?”

“Looking for you.”

Suddenly, he took the book from me and
closed it. I looked at him, surprised. “You wouldn’t recognize me,”
he said, not meeting my eyes. “You don’t want to see it, trust
me.”

That only increased my curiosity. Smiling, I
made a grab for the book. He held it behind his back and ducked out
of my reach.

“I knew I should have burned this thing,” he
said, and I attempted again to wrest the yearbook from him. He
backed up until we hit the bed, then threw it down and fell on top
of it, shielding me from it altogether.

I took his hand and tried to pull him off
the bed, but he didn’t budge. “Let me see, or I will tickle
you.”

“Damn, you’re pushy,” he said with a
laugh.

“And you’re stubborn. Now let me see that
yearbook.”

He sighed and pushed himself up on his
elbows, reaching under his back for the book. “Okay, you win. I
guess you’re going to see old pictures around the house
anyway.”

I held out my hand for it, but he evaded me
once again and instead started leafing through the pages himself,
finding the picture for me. “You asked for it. This is me, in all
my eighth-grade glory,” he said, finally handing it over.