Just You (2 page)

I went over to help my father. Slipping both
thumbnails into a pistachio shell, I cracked it open and dropped
the insides into the bowl between us. Over and over I did this,
until my thumbs were sore and stained red. Oddly enough, it was
kind of soothing.

“Lynn on night shift?” I asked Dad.

“Eleven to eleven, all week.”

I nodded as I split another shell. It was at
times like these, when we were doing simple, everyday things like
watching TV together or talking about school or even engaging in
mundane tasks like shelling pistachios, that I found myself
forgetting what happened. My father was simply Dad again, my hero,
the man who could do no wrong. In those moments, he wasn’t the same
man who’d broken my heart when I was twelve, or the same one who’d
left his family to be with a woman he’d met just a few months
prior, at a colleague’s surprise fiftieth birthday party. Lynn
Hayden—a no-longer-grieving widow with two kids and an eye for
pudgy, balding, married English professors—happened to be the guest
of honor’s sister-in-law. Little did anyone know at the time, a
year and a half later she would also be my father’s second wife.
Surprise party, indeed.

“Thanks for your help, honey,” Dad said now.
The pistachio supply had been depleted, leaving behind a pile of
gutted shells.

“No problem,” I said. I felt the anger start
to mount in me again, like a paper cut that only stung when you
remembered it was there.

Dad tossed the empty shells in the trash and
then retreated to the living room and his La-Z-Boy, bowl of nuts in
one hand and a beer in the other. Craving another distraction, I
scrubbed the red stains off my fingers and brought the cordless
phone upstairs to my room, the one place in the house that truly
felt like my own. I sat on my lumpy twin-sized bed and punched some
numbers into the phone.

“Hey, Tay,” Robin answered after several
rings. “I knew you’d call me today.”

“How did you know?”

“Because you’re dying to hear about what
happened to me last night.”

Her cheerful voice was like salve on a burn.
I felt better already. “You’re psychic,” I told her. And she was
also right. Her life—and everything she did—captivated me.

“So I met this guy…” Robin began.

“No way,” I said, faking surprise. Robin was
always meeting “this guy.” She fell in love on average of twice a
month, always so convinced that the current guy was “the one”, her
perfect match.

“No, really, I was standing outside Burger
King with my friend Haley and he just came up and started talking
to me,” she said, speaking fast like she did when she got excited.
“His name’s Devon. And get this—he’s a
senior
at Redwood
Hills High.”

“Redwood Hills?” This was the upscale
neighborhood near the golf course.

“Yeah, I’ve been to a few parties over
there. They have, like, the wildest parties ever.”

I’d have to take her word for it. The
wildest party
I’d
ever been to involved a stolen case of
beer and a huge bowl of Cool Ranch Doritos.

“When are you seeing him again?” I was awed
by her ability to pick up boys like they were library books.

“Tonight. He’s picking me up in about an
hour. Come on over and help me get ready?”

“Okay.”

I let my father know where I was going and
then jogged four doors down to Robin’s house. She came to greet me
her bathrobe, letting her cat Nermal out as she propped the door
open for me. As usual, she was home alone. Robin’s mother had an
even more active social life than Robin did. She usually stayed
gone all weekend, leaving her daughter to take care of herself and
do whatever she wanted. This constant solitude got to Robin
sometimes, but I envied it. My own mother was always breathing down
my neck, asking questions, and my father still thought of me as an
innocent, asexual six-year-old.

“I’m trying to decide between two outfits,”
Robin said, picking up right where we left off on the phone. We
went down the hallway to her messy bedroom and she motioned to
several pieces of clothing lying flat on the bed. “What do you
think?”

I surveyed her choices: a plaid, pleated
skirt that reminded me of a school uniform, only much shorter, and
a sleeveless white top. Next to that, a pair of tight jeans and a
black camisole-style top. I’d never seen her in either ensemble but
I was quite positive she’d look hot in a garbage bag. Robin had
been pretty when I met her, when we were both thirteen, but since
then she’d bypassed attractive and landed on gorgeous. Tall and
thin with not much of a chest, she could pull off any outfit she
wanted and look like a runway model.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To the movies, I think.”

“Oh. Well, either would be fine.”

If the lack of enthusiasm showed in my
voice, she didn’t seem to notice. Frankly, I was growing tired of
acting as her fashion coordinator every weekend. Robin had started
ditching me for guys around the time we turned fourteen, but lately
it had gotten ridiculous. We rarely hung out anymore aside from
these outfit emergencies. Before discovering older boys and
partying, she’d practically lived at my dad’s house with me on
weekends. We would watch movies, make brownies, babysit the kids,
and sing karaoke in the living room. She would spread out a
sleeping bag on my bedroom floor and we’d giggle over nothing into
the wee hours. Now, I was lucky if I could keep her attention for a
few minutes, let alone a whole weekend. She was so different now, a
mature party girl who smoked and drank and did things with boys I
had only read about in dog-eared copies of “older teen” Judy Blume
books.

I missed her sometimes. The
old
her—the one who’d made my new way of life seem bearable.

I’d met Robin during one of my first
scheduled visits with my dad. She and her mother lived just down
the street in an equally old but much smaller house. When I first
started spending weekends at Dad’s new residence, the entire house
vibrated with tension so thick I think even the dog felt it. My new
stepsister Leanne made me anxious, so when she was around I’d taken
to sitting out on the front porch with a book, keeping a low
profile, or going for walks by myself around the neighborhood.

One day as I was heading home from one of
these walks, I noticed a girl about my age sitting on a blanket in
front of a white bungalow-style house, holding a gray kitten in her
lap. She had long, straight reddish-brown hair and milky-white
skin. Something about her intrigued me, and I slowed my pace as I
passed her. She glanced up, noticing me.

“Hey,” she’d said in a friendly tone, one I
wasn’t used to hearing from girls who looked like her. “Want to pet
her?” She held up the kitten.

I nodded shyly and made my way over.

“I’m Robin,” she said when I stopped in
front of her. She was really pretty up close, with big, long-lashed
blue eyes and a pert little nose. “And this is Nermal. You know,
like in the Garfield comic?”

“Right.”

She slid over, making room for me. I sat
down and ran my index finger over the cat’s head. Its fur felt like
silk, barely there.

“What’s your name?” Robin asked, crossing
her legs. She had long, skinny legs and no curves to speak of,
while I already filled out my jeans and T-shirts to the point of
embarrassment.

“Taylor.” I pointed toward Dad and Lynn’s
house. “My dad lives over there.”

She smiled at me, and that was that.
Instantly we were friends. We had nothing in common beyond our ages
and one crucial thing—we both wanted to escape from our houses as
much as we possibly could. Me, because of the tension. Her, because
of the silence.

The strain had eased up in Dad’s house since
then, but not in Robin’s. She was still trying to escape, only now
she had more efficient methods: parties, dates, and boys with
cars.

“We should double date sometime,” Robin said
now as we waited for Devon outside on her front step. “We’ve never
done that, even while you were going out with Cheaty McAsshole.”
This was the nickname she made up for Brian after I’d called to
tell her what happened.

“What, you and Devon and me and my imaginary
boyfriend?” I’d meant to be facetious, but a sly smile appeared on
her shiny pink lips.

“Why settle for imaginary?” She finished her
cigarette and squished it under her shoe. “You’re single now and
the fish are jumping, baby.”

She sounded suspiciously like my aunt Gina
during her self-affirming lectures to Mom. Before I could come back
with a response, a car skidded to a stop across the street and
Robin started toward it. It was too dark and far away to see the
person in the driver’s seat. She glanced over her shoulder at me as
she strutted down her driveway. “We’ll finish this tomorrow, Tay.
Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, feeling suspicious all of a
sudden. I knew that mischievous look of hers all too well. It
usually only meant one thing: she was about to get me into
trouble.

****

Nothing exciting happened that weekend,
however. Robin went out with Devon again on Saturday night (it was
love at first kiss, again), and I stayed in and watched
The
Breakfast Club
on TV. This lack of excitement only intensified
my crappy mood.

It deteriorated even further on Monday, when
I had to watch Brian and Kara Neilson walk hand-in-hand through the
school halls all day long. My sympathetic friends rallied around
me, pissed off on my behalf. They assumed I felt hurt—and I did, in
my ego at least—but mostly I just wanted to forget him and move on.
Having the happy couple shoved in my face several times a day
wasn’t exactly helping.

“Start going out with someone else,” Erin
said at lunch. We were huddled around a table in the cafeteria,
discussing my love life over bad pizza and skim milk. Well,
they
were discussing it.
I
was there to eat. “Make
him jealous.”

“I don’t want to make him jealous,” I said,
picking the shriveled pepperoni off my slice. “And I don’t want to
go out with anyone else.”

“Aw, Taylor,” Ashley said. She gave me an
I-feel-sorry-for-my-pathetic-friend smile and patted my arm. “He’s
not the only guy in school, you know.”

“No, I mean…” I dropped my pizza back onto
its grease-stained paper plate. “I don’t want to date anyone,
period. I’m done with boys.”

Erin’s dark eyes grew wide. “Switching teams
is a little extreme, don’t you think?”

I glared at her and she jostled my leg with
hers, smirking. I smirked back. Erin still dated Brian’s friend
Mitchell, though their relationship was what our English teacher
might call
tumultuous
. They broke up and got back together
every couple of weeks, it seemed.

“Don’t even joke about that,” Ashley said,
her brow furrowed.

“Joke about what, Ashley?” Erin fluttered
her eyelashes and leaned into her. “Oh, you mean about being
gay
?
Les
bians? Homo
sexuals
?”

I laughed, and Ashley shot us both the stink
eye. As a dedicated, church-going Christian, she didn’t take kindly
to being teased about her beliefs. But that never stopped Erin from
poking at her.

“So you don’t plan on going out with anyone
for the rest of high school?” Ashley asked me, ignoring Erin
altogether.

“Maybe I’ll join a nunnery.”

She nodded solemnly. “Devote your life to
God.”

“I’ve already devoted mine to reckless
immorality,” Erin said, positioning a pointed index finger at each
side of her head to mimic devil horns.

“Erin, shut up,” Ashley said.

I pushed my tray away and scanned the
cafeteria crowd. Despite my determination to forget and evolve, my
gaze found Brian and Kara as if there were spotlights trained on
them. They sat at the opposite end of the cafeteria with a group of
their friends—people who used to be my friends too—and Kara was
talking into Brian’s ear. As she spoke, her hand slid up his
shoulder to rest on the back of his neck, and he reached up to
gently brush back her hair. Something about this intimate display
made my chest ache, and all of a sudden I needed to get out of
there, fast.

“Be right back,” I told my friends as I
jumped up. Without even dumping my tray, I tore out of the
cafeteria and into the nearest girl’s washroom, where I locked
myself in a stall. I wasn’t crying, but I felt on the verge. I was
too confused to cry.

Why did it bother me to see them together
when I’d never loved him in the first place? It wasn’t jealousy,
exactly, but this odd
longing
that I didn’t completely
understand. I didn’t want Brian back. That I knew for sure. But
maybe, deep down, I wanted what he’d found in Kara, that part of
her that wasn’t afraid to love back.

Chapter 3

My mother was on to me.

Despite the fact that she could sniff out
trouble like a trained police dog, two weeks had gone by before she
realized something was different about me, that something had
changed in my life. To be fair, she’d been buried in work lately,
putting in extra long hours at the bank, where she worked as a
financial advisor. Meanwhile, I kept to myself. Mom had never been
the easygoing type, and she had a well-documented history of
overreaction, so I’d learned over the years to steer clear of
certain topics. Especially personal topics. It was just easier that
way. I’d been doing a great job of it too, until the day she rose
out of her work fog long enough to zero in for an inspection.

It was Monday, the second week of October.
Due to teacher meetings, schools were closed for the day. I slept
in until ten-thirty and then shuffled out of my room, still
half-asleep, to find my little sister in the living room, sitting
cross-legged on the floor in her pajamas and watching
Jerry
Springer
.