My Best Friend, Maybe Page 4

  “Let’s talk upstairs for a minute,” he says. I know he’s worried about Sadie, whether I’ll be friends with her again and whether I’ll ditch him and go to Greece after all. I don’t want to go upstairs with him.

  But when we start to cross the few feet toward the stairwell and the boys erupt into a deafening chorus of Ooohs, I realize that yes, I do.

  And then we’re in a dark room, standing close, and I know that no matter what he was thinking when he asked me to come up here, there’s no way we’re about to chat about Sadie. The light is out and the shades are drawn, but just enough street light is sneaking around them for me to see a little bit. The room is tiny and it smells like wood. The bunk beds against the wall remind me of our old beach apartment. There is a border of primary-colored trucks and boats running along the middle of the walls: a little boy’s room.

  I stop looking around and turn to Mark. He’s standing in the middle of the blue carpet, his face cast in shadows but the gray light highlighting the muscles in his right arm, the arm holding the beer.

  For the first time all day, I’m not thinking about Sadie or milk shakes or Costa Rica versus Greece or being perfect versus having adventures. I’m thinking about Mark.

  I step toward him and clink my bottle against his. We both drink. We’re standing so close the energy bouncing between us is visible—silver and electric.

  “So,” he says, but I move closer. Now our clothes are touching, my skin breaking out in goose bumps beneath the fabric of Sadie’s shiny black T-shirt. I clink again.

  He smiles. His crooked tooth is so skippin’ adorable. He brushes his hair out of his eyes.

  “So,” he says. This time I kiss him. Hard. He stiffens for a second but when he doesn’t pull back, I put my left hand behind his head and rake my fingers through his smooth hair the way I’ve always wanted to when we’re kissing. His mouth opens and our tongues find each other and he inches into me so our entire bodies are touching, his chest flexing against mine, his free palm running the length of my side and then pressing into the small of my back, and this this this. This is what I’ve been wanting. And for once I don’t feel wrong about wanting it. This is perfect.

  Then he pulls his lips away.

  He smiles down at me, his arm still tight, keeping me close. “You graduate tomorrow,” I say too quickly. It’s so stupid how I feel like I always have to have an excuse to make out with him. Like loving each other for years isn’t reason enough. But we only make out on special occasions—Christmas and Valentine’s Day and when he got into Princeton.

  “I know,” he says. “I was just looking at you.” Then his arm is gone and my heart falls, until he reaches for the bottle in my hand and puts both of our drinks on the edge of the top bunk, and I realize he was just freeing up his other arm to get me even closer.

  He crosses back to me, sweeping me up so my feet hover off the floor; my chest crushed into his is the only thing connecting me to the ground. And then we’re making out again. And I feel like we’re floating, suspended above the carpet, close to the ceiling. Like I’ll never come back down to earth.

  The other times we made out were not like this. We’d be leaning over the divider in the front of Mark’s car or the armrest between our movie seats. This is like our whole bodies are making out, pressed together, wanting more.

  He puts me down but our mouths stay together. I pull my hand from his hair to touch his stomach. I feel the ripples of his abs through his soft T-shirt. They’re as delicious as I always imagined.

  And then I almost gasp through all the kissing because Mark’s hand goes to my stomach as well. Leaving his lips on mine, he tilts his hips back so that he can trace his pointer finger across my abdomen and I realize that he’s following my lead.

  My nerves squeak with all the words my mom would use—“lust” and “danger” and “temptation.” But for once I ignore her.

  Slowly, very slowly, I move my hand up the fabric of his T-shirt. My palm moves one inch. So does his. Then another, another. It’s a game. It should be a game.

  We’re in high school and teenagers and in love and it should be like this. Fun. Pure, not at all overrated fun.

  Finally my fingertips pause at the crease where his abs become his chest and my heart skips a beat when I feel him start to play with the underwire of my bra. This is it. He hasn’t been resisting me. He hasn’t been un-into-me. He’s been following my lead.

  I slide my hand up so that his pectoral muscle is in my palm and his hand hesitates over my left breast for just a second before it’s on me in the most intimate touch of my life and my entire body erupts with tingles.

  Then the moment is over, and that’s okay.

  He plants a kiss on my cheek and bear-hugs me. “I love you, Colette,” he says.

  “I love you, Mark,” I say, and I kiss him again and mean it, and there’s no way I’m going to Greece, no way I’m leaving him this summer after that. Even if I do kind of wish he’d called me Coley.

  “Colette! Colette!” I hear Louisa squealing my name before Mark and I are even halfway down the stairs. “I got in! I got in!” She’s screaming when we reach the bottom. She hugs me and spins me around. “Can you believe I got in?”

  “Got in where?” Mark asks.

  “You’re going? To Japan?” I ask slowly.

  She nods, her smile so wide it puffs out her thin cheeks.

  My heart slows, almost dissolves, almost drips down my rib cage into my feet. I paste a smile on my face. I have to be happy for her. I can’t think about senior year with no Mark and no Louisa.

  “This is huge!” I manage to squeal back. “Congratulations!” She keeps spinning me, the two of us dancing in circles. “I want to hear all about it.”

  This is the part where I’d normally turn to Mark and awkwardly make arrangements about meeting up with him later, but I can feel a shift between us, puzzle pieces falling into place. “Congrats, Lu,” he says, patting her on the shoulder. Then he swigs his beer and disappears into the crowd.

  Louisa stops spinning and holds me at arm’s length. “Is he drinking? A beer?”

  I nod, my mush of a heart so happy and sad and confused as images of what happened upstairs explode in my brain like fireworks right next to the blank surface of a lonely senior year.

  “Does this mean you can ‘cheers’ me on my good news?” she asks, exclamation points dancing in her dark eyes.

  “Sure,” I say.

  We snake our way through the crowds in the hallway, living room, and kitchen to the back deck. There, I grab two magenta not-beers and huddle with Louisa at the bench on the far side. A bunch of youth groupers are playing volleyball in the yard below us and beyond them a group of pretty-girls sit clustered by the stream at the edge of Sally’s property. Their noises gather around us—the giggle of tipsy girls, the slap of a palm on the ball’s surface, the shouts of the score back and forth.

  “Do you realize how huge this is?” Louisa demands.

  “To you!” I say. I hold out my bottle and she clinks hers against mine before downing almost half of it in one long gulp.

  “Do you realize how many people I beat to get this spot? There were, like, thousands of kids who applied. Thousands! From all over the world. I never thought I’d get to go.”

  “Yes, you did,” I say.

  Louisa shakes her head, her straight bangs rearranging themselves on her forehead, her eyes still wide with surprise and adrenaline.

  “But all that extra studying,” I point out. “And you asked for leave from work.”

  She nods. “I know. I like to feign confidence sometimes.” She giggles. I can count the number of times I’ve heard her giggle on one hand. “But it happened. I’m going.”

  I pat her arm. “I’m not surprised,” I say. Inside I’m wondering what else this confident, energetic friend of mine feigns. How do I comfort someone who is faking confidence?

  She sips again. “I get my class schedule next week. I’m taking classes at . . .” Sh
e keeps talking and I try to listen but her words don’t make it past my ears and into my brain. They’re blocked by my own panic. Lonely.

  She’s drinking and drinking and talking and talking and her words loosen up until she’s chatting about her nerves and her fear and the classes she hopes to take and the boys she hopes to kiss. But all that jabbering globs up thick outside my skull and stays there.

  Inside, one word pounds on repeat to the beat of the party’s hip-hop: lonely lonely lonely. No Louisa. No Mark. No Sadie.

  We lean close together. The party shifts around us, kids passing through the deck to the yard and back, grabbing drinks and clinking them together, making out, swatting at mosquitoes. I focus on Louisa. I let her talk and watch her drink until, after three bottles, she’s swaying a little.

  She’s leaving. Right after I get back from Costa Rica, she’ll be getting on her own plane. She’ll be gone for our entire last year in this boring town. She’s the only person I could ever tell what just happened with Mark. She’s the only person I could ever talk to about Sadie.

  But this is Louisa’s day and I can’t be selfish.

  And then she’ll leave and I’ll never get to talk about myself, the real me who lives somewhere underneath the Perfect crust created by my parents and, even, a little, by Mark.

  “When do you go?” I ask when she starts to slur her words together. It strikes me that even though I’ve been to so many of these parties, I’m not sure I’ve ever talked to a drunk person. I’ve watched them from afar, but I’ve kept myself among people who control themselves.

  A slow, contented smile spreads over Louisa’s face and for the first time I can see the appeal of consuming multiple beers. Not vomiting and making out with strangers like the party frothing around us, but smiling so easily like Louisa is right now. “Three weeks,” she says.

  The summer spreads out before me, lonely except for Mark. No smart talk by the pool. No sci-fi marathons with homemade cookies. No loose smiling like that. I suck it all in.

  “I hope my Japanese is good enough,” she repeats.

  “It is,” I say again.

  Then she leans even farther toward me, her elbows on my knee.

  “But can I tell you something, earthling? Something I don’t want to say out loud? Can I?”

  “Sure.” I smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a shadow in the doorway to the kitchen. A steady figure that’s been there for a while, almost like it’s watching us. It’s probably Mark looking to take me home . . . or maybe back upstairs. I wonder if he’s also a little drunk, loose-smiling, like Louisa, now that he knows I won’t mind. But I also wonder if I would mind.

  “Don’t repeat this, okay?” she says. “Not even to me, okay?”

  I nod and focus on her, ignoring the shadow streaking the deck. He can wait.

  “I kind of don’t want to go anymore. Does that make sense? It’s like I worked so hard for this and I work so hard to be as good as everyone else. As smart as everyone. And now that I’ve proved it, I kind of want to spend my summer hanging out at the snack bar.”

  She slouches like it felt really good to say that but now she wants to suck the words back in.

  My eyes go wide. I almost tell her how much I get that, and how that’s exactly the way I feel about my Costa Rica trip. I want to stop with the goals and the fighting for stuff and the preparing for my future. I want to have fun.

  I’m nodding, but then the shadow shift s and I can’t help but turn my head to motion for Mark to wait a minute.

  Only it isn’t Mark. It’s Sadie. Standing just inside the glass door. Watching us lean together with a long face, a lonely face. The face that would spread along her features when we were ten and her brothers were refusing to let her play basketball with them.

  I turn back around. “I get it,” I tell Louisa. Don’t go.

  “Let’s go home,” she says.

  We find Mark. He’s drinking a Pepsi and playing volleyball and stone-cold sober. He drives us both home. He drops me off first so all I get is a little peck.

  It’s the first day of summer, but I’m back at school the next evening. It’s a cold day for late June. I sit on the football bleachers next to Mark’s parents and sister and I try not to shiver as the wind cuts through my light blouse and long skirt. Principal Morris drones on in an oh-the-places-you-will-go-type speech, and as the goose bumps crawl up my arms it hits me: my life is changing. Mark will not bring flowers to my locker every Friday in September. He won’t take me to every school dance. He maybe won’t text me every morning. In fact, he didn’t text me this morning. Last week I would have felt some sense of relief and breathing room in the absent text but in the wake of what happened last night, it’s making me anxious. We’ll probably make out even less. He’ll go off to college and I’ll be . . . here, without Mark and without Louisa.

  (And Sadie? No. No Sadie today. This is Mark’s day.)

  Principal Morris isn’t talking about me, but he kind of is. Things will change. Maybe they’re shifting, wiggle room for something else, someone else. Some adventure.

  I look around for Louisa, wanting to roll my eyes as our principal spouts yet another cliché into the microphone. I glance past Mark’s parents and I catch his mother eyeing me. Like she can see right through me. Like she can open up my scalp and watch the scene that has been playing on repeat in my brain like it’s on HDTV: Mark’s hand inching up my shirt, grabbing on for just a second. Or the other scene—the one that takes place in the future, the one where we do more.

  My cheeks burn crimson and I feel a vague sense of guilt. It hits me for the first time that what we did was wrong, technically wrong. Against the rules. It didn’t feel wrong, though. It feels like it can’t be. It was too small and quick to be either right or wrong. But it’s been feeling so right all day. And I’ve always been taught it’s wrong, wrong to let anyone who isn’t my husband touch me like that. Even if everyone acts like Mark is going to be my husband. Like it’s a done deal.

  As if it’s possible for me to imagine having a husband.

  I hear Jasmine start her valedictorian speech and I try to focus as she talks about hard work, goals, and all of the things that have been drilled into me for as long as I can remember. I can’t help thinking it sounds boring.

  Later, Mark and I sit side by side in his car in my driveway and I can tell something isn’t right. We should be kissing, leaning over the barrier to get our mouths as close as possible. I’ve been imagining more all day: crawling into his lap, into the backseat.

  Instead, Mark watches the driveway like he’s doing ninety on the freeway. While we sit, still. His freckles don’t bounce.

  “So . . . congratulations,” I say.

  He rewards me with a quick smile, a glimpse of the crooked tooth. Then he turns back to the windshield. Does he want me to go inside?

  I put my hand on his. He doesn’t take it, but he lets it sit there, my palm grasping his knuckles as he clasps the steering wheel.

  “Look, Colette.” He finally turns to me and I can see worry etching lines in his forehead. I’ve never seen that before. He’s always so self-assured. So laid-back. “I know I owe you . . . an apology. I don’t know how to say it.”

  My eyebrows shoot up.

  “God! This is so awkward!” he almost shouts. I’ve never heard him say “God” like that before either.

  “It’s okay,” I mumble. Even though it’s not. Because if he’s going to apologize for what I think he’s apologizing for, then it’s the apology that’s not okay.

  “No, I need to show more self-control. I hope you know I don’t see you . . .” He shifts around like he can’t find the words and I lean closer to him, willing him to stop talking, to stop saying the things we hear in church and from our parents, to ignore all of those rewritten instincts and to wrap his arms around me and press his lips to mine and let our nerve endings make our decisions. “You know . . . you’re not an object to me. Or whatever.”

  I burst into la
ughter.

  He looks surprised but he doesn’t crack a smile.

  “An object? Come on, Mark. It’s me. I know you love me,” I say. I move to kiss him but he doesn’t meet me halfway. “Seriously, everything’s fine,” I say, straightening up. “You graduated tonight. You should be happy.”

  He nods, working his lip with his teeth. I want to kiss him. I want to feel his overlapped tooth. I want him to pick me up again, press his body to mine so that my feet have to leave the ground. It felt joyful. It felt fun. It felt like love. How does it merit an apology?

  “Still,” he mumbles, “I shouldn’t have . . . I should have—”

  “But.” I cut him off. He turns to me and his eyes are so sad I can’t finish my sentence. But I liked it. But I started it. My cheeks burn with shame.

  “It was, like, thirty seconds,” I say, trying a new approach. “Not a big deal.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He looks at me again. A little smile. And when I try to kiss him this time he lets me, but only for a second.

  “Wasn’t Principal Mo’s speech awful?” I say.

  “Totally!” He nods, joy on his lips but stress in his eyes.

  “ ‘You will climb mountains and run marathons and hear the screams of new life,’ ” I quote in Principal Morris’s low voice. “ ‘You will sail the high seas.’ Who is going to sail the high seas?”

  Mark laughs. He says, “So, why were you at that party with Sadie anyway?”

  It feels like all of the giggles cram their way back into my throat and I choke. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was at her house.”

  Then I remember that my bike is still there.

  “Why?” he asks.

  I shrug. Honesty, I think. Mark isn’t my parents. I have to be honest with him. “Sometimes I miss her,” I say.

  He frowns. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him frown. I’ve seen him frustrated with his sister and I’ve seen him disappointed about a test grade or a soccer game, but I’ve never seen him like this. “So here’s more of why I’m sorry,” he says. “I know it’s wrong to be jealous but when I see you with her . . . I don’t know the Colette that was friends with her, you know? When you say you miss her . . . I don’t get it. I see Sadie screaming in the hallways and dyeing her hair crazy colors and draping herself across all of my teammates and dressing in those crazy outfits . . . She’s just so . . . much. I don’t get why you liked her, why you liked being friends with her.”