Anywhere but Here (8 page)

“Done.” Her foot slips a bit as she hits the gas pedal, and she giggles. She's wearing black high-heeled shoes with strings that lace up her calves and a short denim skirt. I don't know if it would win any fashion awards, but it's more than enough to keep me awake for the rest of the drive.

I unlock the basement door and head straight for the shower without even checking to see if Dad's upstairs. When I come out, feeling less cherry-juice pink, Hannah's flipping through discs. She picks up
The Corporation
.

“That one's a bit heavy. It's all about proving that corporations are psycho.”

She shoves it back on the shelf as if she's been caught snooping. “I know. I thought I was going to need antidepressants afterward.”

“Seriously? You've seen it?”

She shrugs, blinks, flicks her hair over her shoulder. “You smell nice. You locked the bathroom door, though.”

“Um . . . habit, I guess.”

“Bad habit,” she says, nuzzling against me.

“It will never happen again,” I say. I'm thinking I may have stumbled into my own fantasy, and I'm just deciding whether or not I care that Dad may be upstairs when my phone rings and ruins it all. I make the mistake of glancing at it, and Lauren's number is lit up on the call display.

Flashing neon warning sign: Do not answer ex-girlfriend's call while hot new girl is in the room.

Apparently, I'm blind to neon. Or maybe two years of dating Lauren have ingrained me with Pavlov's-dog reflexes. I pick up the phone.

“Cole? Can you come over? I need to talk to you.” After Hannah's low purr, Lauren's voice sounds young.

“Right now?” I scrub a hand through my hair.

“It's important. I need to see you.”

I can tell she's upset, which makes me want to see her less. It's going to be messy.

I hang up the phone and wince at Hannah, feeling as if I've been called into battle.

“Lauren's upset about something. She says I have to stop by.”

“Oh. Okay.” Even though she looks disappointed, Hannah doesn't sound angry. Suddenly, all I want to do is blow off Lauren and hang out with the gorgeous girl standing in front of me, her
teeth biting the corner of her lip, her eyebrows crinkled with the strain of thinking. The fact that she's not creating some big scene even though she had something planned . . .

“I'm sure it won't take long. I know it's not a great thing to ask, but you could wait and then we could hang out.”

“Sure!” And Hannah's face is sunny again, as if there's never been a problem.

Ten minutes later we're parked on the street in front of Lauren's. We still have Hannah's car because she says she has her “surprise supplies” in the trunk.

“I'll be back as soon as I possibly can,” I promise.

“No worries.”

When I get to Lauren's door, I'm confused for a moment. For more than two years, I walked in without knocking. That doesn't seem right anymore, so I kind of knock and let myself in at the same time. Pepper, Lauren's little black poodle, goes crazy as soon as I enter, as if I'm his prodigal owner. When I scoop him up, he wiggles ecstatically in my arms.

“In here,” Lauren calls, and I follow her voice to the living room. The curtains are pulled and the lamps are off, making it cavelike. Above the recliner hangs a giant cross-stitch, which reads:
BE NOT FORGETFUL TO ENTERTAIN STRANGERS: FOR THEREBY SOME HAVE ENTERTAINED ANGELS UNAWARES.
Above the words, there's a dour portrait of the Virgin Mary. Her righteous eyes follow me
when I move. She's never seemed particularly hospitable, and tonight she's downright hostile.

I force myself to break the stare.

Lauren's curled in a corner of the couch with a cushion crushed against her chest. As soon as I put Pepper down, he runs to lie on Lauren's bare feet.

“What's up?” I admit, I'm tempted to copy the poodle. It's impossible to date someone for that long and not want to hug her when she's upset, maybe put my hand in her hair and tell her everything's going to be okay. It must be some sort of programmed male instinct. Or I was a poodle in a past life.

I resist. I stay standing and remind myself of who's waiting for me outside. Lauren and I are over. She's about to tell me that she wants to get back together, and I'm going to tell her—as nicely as I can because I
do
care for Lauren—that we can't have the
Princess Bride
ending. It's just not going to happen. Her life is going to be a fairy tale and my life . . . well, lately it's more like a Martin Scorsese film. The two just don't mix.

“I need to talk to you about . . .” She starts, stumbles, and starts again. “First of all, I wanted to say that I miss you. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Sometimes,” I hedge.

“Do you remember our last afternoon together, when I came by your house?” she says.

“Yeah.” Maybe it wasn't the best idea to sleep together that day, but it was a damn good hangover cure.

“Why are you staring like that?”

I forgot how well she knows me. “I was just thinking . . . that was a nice dress.”

Lauren half grins, and I smirk. My shoulders relax. Even though I still don't know exactly why I'm here, at least I'm seeing the real Lauren. My Lauren. I have to admit, I've missed her.

•  •  •

Lauren's family moved from Alberta when we were in second grade, and we grew up one block apart. She lived on Juniper Street and I lived on Pine.

I remember when I met her. I was in the playground with Greg before school (friends don't change much in a town like Webster), and a scrawny little girl was swinging on our monkey bars.

“Hey,
we're
playing here,” I said, or something to that effect.

Greg elbowed me. “Be nice to her or she'll tell Mr. Green. She's in our class.”

“She is not in our class. She's too little,” I said.

Greg just shrugged, the same don't-say-I-didn't-warn-you type of shrug he would still be giving me a decade later.

I don't know who ended up playing on the monkey bars, but I know that Greg was right about Lauren being in our class. There she was in the center row when I walked in.

I ignored her for the rest of that year and the year after that, pretty much right up until Trisha Bernard's seventh-grade birthday party, when the bottle spun and pointed to me. Lauren and I were shoved into a dark closet together. I kissed her, the fastest kiss in the history of the world, and then I ignored her for another two years until I saw her at the ninth-grade Christmas dance.

I don't know how or when it happened, but suddenly she was cute. Thin and blond and shiny, Lauren was exactly how the girl next door always looks in the movies. Her scrawny calves had become long, shapely legs, and she was wearing this glittery pink lip stuff that made her mouth look like a Christmas ornament.

It took me three songs to get up the courage to ask Lauren to dance. When it turned out to be a slow dance, I spent the entire time wondering if she could feel what was going on in my pants. And if she could, was that a good thing or a bad thing?

•  •  •

Hannah. I have to remember Hannah's outside. I glance at the front window.

Lauren stands up and straightens her shoulders as if she's about to do a public presentation. “Cole, before we talk about what I wanted to talk to you about, could you just think about that day for a minute and tell me . . . well, tell me whether you think—when you remember that day—if we could have something together again.”

There it is. It's not fair, really. Breaking up with her the first time was hard enough. Why does she need me to say those things again? “Lauren, I'm—”

“I know I did some things wrong.”

For Lauren to say that is unusual. She lives in a world where mistakes don't happen. Maybe it's because her dad's an accountant. And he's old, at least sixty. Which is probably why her parents are so overprotective.

“Greg said something recently,” she continues. “He made me think I wasn't, you know, supportive in the way I could have been.”

“You were always supportive,” I say. How many times did the two of us sit by my mom's hospital bed, watching Mom sleep or spooning ice chips to her one by one? Lauren was like a butterfly in that room—a splash of color fluttering across a sterile white screen.

I feel like crap. What kind of person doesn't like butterflies?

“No. Greg's right,” she says. “I should have talked to you more about the future, and about the things you wanted. But we had a lot of good times too, and . . .”

Damn Greg.
I glance toward the window again, imagining Hannah sitting in the car, wondering what in the world I'm dealing with in here.

Following my gaze, Lauren walks to the window and flicks
open the curtain a little. When she turns back to me, her face has changed. Her lips are pressed tightly together, and her eyes are like cut stones. She is the un-butterfly.

“You came here with
Hannah
?”

I look away. The Virgin Mary glares at me from the wall.

“This is why we broke up!” I want to yell at her, or the Virgin Mary, or both. “I can't do the right thing all the time.” Although logically, I can't see what's so wrong about coming with Hannah. Lauren and I are not together. Hannah and I have plans. Besides, I thought after I gave her a ride home with her groceries, we were on our way to being friends again.

Judging by the look on Lauren's face, I was mistaken.

I make one last attempt. “You called at the last minute. We were together.”

“Is that all you think of me? That I'm an errand to run while your new girlfriend waits in the car?”

Put it that way and I can see why Lauren might be mad. But really, I'm too tired to deal with this sort of argument. The kind that's not even about what it's pretending to be about. After work, I had wanted to go home and sleep. Now I want to go somewhere with Hannah. I definitely don't want to be here.

“Hannah's not here to hurt your feelings. She's here because we were going out. Then, when
you
called, I made an effort to change my plans to see what
you
needed.”

“How considerate.”

“You're making a big deal out of nothing. She's a friend.”

Lauren sniffs. “You know she spends all her time making ‘friends' with guys because the girls think she's a slut, right?” Then, immediately: “That was mean. I take it back. But not the rest.”

“Do you actually need something?” If this were a courtroom, I would want it officially noted that I
tried
to be understanding.

She answers with her teeth clenched together. “No. I don't need anything from you, and I never will need anything from someone who can break up with one girl and start screwing another the week after.”

“I didn't screw anyone a week after breaking up with you.” Fondled, yes. Screwed, no. There's a difference.

“Oh, so you're just screwing her
now
. That's way better.” The poodle whimpers from the couch.

“I'm not screwing Hannah!” Not that I want to be discussing this with Lauren. Why am I telling her this?

“Like I believe that! Just get out of my house!” By the end of her sentence, she's pushing me, both hands open against my chest, across the room.

I escape out the door, wincing as it slams behind me. Then I climb back into Hannah's car like Clint Eastwood paddling away from Alcatraz.

“Everything okay?” Hannah asks.

Taking a deep breath, I try to figure out what just happened. That was a seriously warped, misguided attempt to get back together.

“Is everything okay? I suppose that depends on whether you think crazy is okay,” I say.

“Are
you
okay?”

Why does nobody else ever think to ask that? I smile at her. “I'm okay.”

She pulls away from the curb and we drive in silence for a few minutes, heading out of town. I have to take a few deep breaths to smooth the tangled mess of fishing line that my brain has become. On one hand, I feel bad about leaving Lauren so upset. I'm the one who broke up with her after two years. Of course she's emotional. Girls get emotional. I should have been more patient. I have this nagging feeling she was trying to say something important and I ruined her moment.

On the other hand, let's be honest. The girl was freaking out. Being patient in the face of crazy doesn't come easily to me. And Lauren has to figure out, eventually, that I'm not the one for her. I don't belong in that cloistered living room. I need bigger spaces. Spaces where the Virgin Mary isn't watching me from the wall.

There is no right answer. No immediate way to untangle the situation. While my brain goes into neural overload trying to
figure out where I went wrong, I find myself staring at Hannah's legs again.

I reach over to touch the warm skin at the edge of her skirt, and she glances from the road to smile at me.

“Where exactly are you taking us?”

“Nester,” she says.

“Nester?”

“Relax,” she says. “You'll like it.”

I raise an eyebrow at Hannah. Nester's one of the farming districts on the outskirts of town and there's not much there, unless you count cows. Or a small polygamous group. (Seriously.) Or more cows.

But I've forgotten about the fairgrounds, and that's where Hannah pulls in, the headlights sweeping swaths of light through the long brown grass as the car bumps off the pavement and onto the field. Once she cuts the engine, it's almost completely dark. Above us, there are so many stars that the sky doesn't look quite real. We could be in another country, populated only by frogs and crickets.