Biggest Flirts (14 page)

“I have too much time on my hands, obviously,” he said. “I should get a job.”

I shook my head. “These are beautiful.”

“Thanks.” He said this matter-of-factly, proud of his work but confident enough that he didn’t need my approval.

“You should major in art, not architecture.”

He gave me a thumbs-up. “Great idea. My parents would lose their shit.”

“Yeah.” I turned the page to a grand house. “I can’t even take this in, all the detail. I want to spend a couple of hours with these another day.”

He laughed. “Okay.”

“I’m not kidding, for once.” I turned the page, and there was the house beside us, palm fronds softening the stark logic of the mansion’s careful proportions.

“I think it’s the coolest house ever,” Will explained. “It’s so much bigger and so different from everything else in this neighborhood. That’s why I wanted to ask you about it. I wondered if it’s a city landmark.”

“Oh, I’ll say!” I laughed. “I used to live there.”

He gave me a funny look. “Are you serious?”

“Why would I make up something like that?” I heard my voice rise in anger. I wished it wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it when I thought someone was assuming things about my family, and our income, and my dad.

Will’s voice rose in turn. “Because I’m the Fucking New Guy, and everybody is giving me incorrect information about the school and the town because that’s hilarious and I am a sitting duck.”

By “everybody,” I assumed he meant Sawyer. I wondered what wild goose chase Sawyer had sent Will on just for spite. And I regretted that our happy talk about Will’s cool drawings had unraveled into accusations. I said more quietly, “I really lived here. My dad used to buy run-down houses for cheap so he could fix them while we lived there. Then he sold them at a profit.”

“Oh.” Will’s brows knitted, and he pointed to the
FOR SALE
sign in the yard. “You weren’t able to sell it?”

“We did,” I said. “It’s been up for sale a couple of times since then. Folks probably buy it thinking they’re going to finish fixing it up, and fail miserably, just like we did. I can see why they want it, though. You wouldn’t believe the inside. High ceilings. Thick crown molding. An original chandelier in the foyer that makes the light look golden instead of white. And smack in the middle of the house there’s an atrium with a fountain, all tiny glass tiles in a mosaic of stylized mermaids. That fountain and the chandelier just
look
1910.”

“That’s so cool!” Will exclaimed. “Did the fountain work?”

I almost said yes without thinking. “No. In my mind it works, though. That’s funny. I watch all these home improvement TV shows, and couples are always walking through a potential home and saying, ‘Ew, we couldn’t live here. The walls are blue.’ Well, paint them, Sally Jane and Earl! I understand other people can’t always see potential like my dad and I can.” I paused. “In fact, there are a
lot
of things I can see in my imagination that don’t actually happen.”

“I know what you mean,” Will said. “Me too.” His tone told me all I needed to know about what he was thinking.

I grinned across the car at him, so relieved that we were back to normal. But when he didn’t make a move on me, I looked toward the mansion again. It drew my eye. I couldn’t ignore its white angles glowing in the night. “My dad is brilliant. He has a contractor’s license, and he knows how to do everything in a restoration.”

Will didn’t say anything. As we continued to gaze at the house, I realized why.

I said, “You’re thinking my dad is pretty bad at flipping houses, since we didn’t finish it. After my mom left, he wanted something more stable. The real estate market was up and down. He had four girls to take care of on one income, and he needed a sure thing. He took a job at the boat factory, thinking he would use that money to supplement his real estate income. Then the factory job offered him extra shifts. He took them. He was never home to fix the house. And then our family shrank, and he realized we’d save money if we moved to a smaller house. That’s why we’ve moved four times in the last seven years. When I leave, he’ll probably move into a mailbox. A run-down one.”

“Why does your family keep shrinking?” Will asked gently, like he suspected this was a touchy question.

It was. It was so touchy, in fact, that my family had been the subject of many rumors over the years, most of them true. I was surprised Will hadn’t heard them all by now.

“I would say you don’t have to tell me,” he offered, “because obviously you don’t want to, but I’d really like to know.”

I shifted uncomfortably on the very comfortable black vinyl seat. “Well, I guess it started when I was nine, and my mom was in a car accident.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him flinch like he’d been hit. “Oh! Tia, I’m sorry.”

“No, she’s not dead or anything.” I turned to smile at him, reassuring. “At least, we assume. I haven’t heard from her in a while. What happened was, she hurt her back, and she got on pain pills, and she couldn’t get off. I was so little that I didn’t really know what was going on, except that something was wrong, and my sisters wouldn’t tell me. Even now when I bring it up, they say they don’t want to talk about it. But I gather that she made friends with the people who kept getting the pills for her, and she started a relationship with one of them.”

Will took a long, slow breath, giving himself time to think of some way to respond to that. He exhaled without coming up with an answer. I knew how he felt.

“My parents had Izzy when they were seventeen,” I explained, “and Sophia when they were nineteen, and they kept having kids. It’s what my mom said she wanted. But I know it was hard on them both. The accident and the pills—it’s unfortunate, but I think that opened the door to my mom’s downfall. And she walked through it. She started sneaking out to be with the guy she met. She told my dad she was trying to get back something she’d missed out on when they were younger.”

“And so you’re not going to miss it,” Will broke in.

I shrugged. I supposed there was a big contrast between my mom and me, but I’d never given it much thought. “Once when my mom went to see this guy, she forgot about me and left me home by myself. I was ten. I was fine by myself. I should have just stayed cool. But she hadn’t told me she was leaving. I couldn’t get her on the phone because she’d left it in her bedroom. I panicked and called my dad. He went to find her. And that was the end of their marriage.”

I felt Will’s hand on my bare leg. Then he mistakenly groped across his art pad and finally found my hand. He asked quietly, “Your dad didn’t get her help or anything?”

“They had been talking about it,” I said, “but after she left me at home so she could cheat on him, no. Every once in a while, she’ll go see one of my sisters and say she’s going to clean up, but we’ve stopped believing it.” I looked toward the house again. The front right bedroom on the second floor, the one with the window nearly obscured now by out-of-control palms, had been mine. All my own.

“So!” I turned to Will. “How did my family shrink? That got rid of one of us. Then my oldest sister—that’s Izzy—got pregnant when she was—hey! our age. It wasn’t exactly a shotgun wedding because my dad has a pistol. Ha ha ha, a little humor there for the boys who want to fake-date me.”

“Ha ha,” Will said uneasily.

“Izzy moved in with her new husband, and that marriage lasted all of six months. My dad felt more pressure to make money fixing up the house, but also to work more hours, so he could help her out. She was pregnant again by that time. She had to go to court to get her ex to pay child support. And when that finally calmed down, my sister Sophia married her boyfriend because he’d joined the navy and he was about to spend a tour on a submarine. Then she got pregnant. And then he cheated on her.”

“On a submarine?” Will interjected.

“No, when he came back to town. And when that calmed down . . . say it.”

“Your sister Jane got pregnant?”

“Her name is Violet, and see, that’s what she thinks everybody assumes, so she goes out of her way to tell everybody she did
not
get pregnant out of wedlock. Her boyfriend moved south of town for a job. She dropped out of high school to go live with him because she missed him so much. She only had a couple of months left until graduation. That was one of the stupider moves my family members have made, though definitely not the stupidest. And that is how I got rid of my entire family in seven years, except for my dad, and why we have downsized to the point that the next thing smaller is a mailbox.”

Will squeezed my hand. “And that’s why you say you don’t want a boyfriend.”

I drew my hand away from his. He was probably right. But knowing where my heebie-jeebies came from didn’t make them go away. Suddenly the heat of his skin was burning mine.

“It’s not just a sex thing,” I said quickly. “You can have a boyfriend without having sex. You can have sex without getting pregs. It’s not sex that messes people up. It’s love. You can have sex and protect yourself and still keep out of trouble. It’s love that starts to tangle everything up, and makes you think that an army private who’s been to juvie would make a great dad, and that seventeen is the perfect age to start a family. When my sisters and I used to talk about sex, it wasn’t embarrassing as long as we were being honest. It’s love that confuses things and makes you unable to explain later why you didn’t use a condom. Love and pressure and the feeling that you’re everything when you’re with this guy, and when he leaves you, you’re less than you were before. If you fall in love, you attach yourself to somebody, and you can’t do what you want ever again.” I examined his drawing of my house. With one finger I traced the outline of my bedroom.

I felt him watching me quietly from his side of the car.

“Sorry,” I blurted. “You probably didn’t do it with Beverly before you left, after all. You’re a virgin, and I’ve just told you some things you weren’t ready to hear.”

He didn’t say a word.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I said to fill the silence. “Some of my best friends are virgins.”

Now his silence was making me uncomfortable. Normally I accepted that I was a talker and didn’t beat myself up for my big mouth. But right now I felt like I was blathering on and couldn’t stop. The only way to fix the blah blah blah was with more blathering, apparently. “You didn’t do it with Angelica, did you?” I asked.

At least that got a rise out of him. “No!” he exclaimed. “I’ve only known her a week!”

That seemed like plenty of time to me, but whatever. “Beverly from Minnesota was your only one, then.”

Because of his silence, I assumed that the answer was yes.

“There’s your problem,” I said. “
You
want to do it with someone you’re in love with. Love gets you in trouble. If it were only sex, you could have been getting it on with Angelica by now. But you fell in love with Beverly, and you vowed to make it home to her as soon as you could. Now that she’s cheated on you, you’re caught between two worlds. You can’t move back, and you can’t move forward. You’re stuck.”

“I am,” he agreed. “But so are you. You’re afraid to make plans because they might get broken. What would having a boyfriend prevent you from doing? Seems to me you don’t want to do anything at all.”

I glared at him. “You’re probably right about getting arrested. We’d better move on before the current owner of this house suspects we’re casing the joint and chases us off with a chainsaw.”

Will ignored that. Stubbornly he asked, “Why aren’t you applying to college or . . . anything? Why won’t you even try out for drum corps? You don’t talk about any plans after high school, like your life is going to stop. But every one of your close friends is leaving town after graduation.”

“Sawyer isn’t.” As soon as these words left my lips, I regretted them. Will wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true, but the truth hurt, and lashing out was my natural response.

“I’ll bet he does leave,” Will said.

I wondered what he saw in Sawyer that made him think so. There was a lot more to Sawyer than most people knew. He seemed to grow deeper all the time. And since he’d convinced me yesterday that he was interested in someone . . . maybe Will was right. Sawyer would follow a girl elsewhere. I couldn’t picture most of our class hanging around town. Not just anybody could get elected Mr. and Ms. Least Likely to Leave the Tampa/St. Petersburg Metropolitan Area.

Will reached over to me. I stiffened, expecting him to take my hand again. Instead, he tugged his art pad out from my hands and tucked it back into the glove compartment where it was safe. He didn’t trust me with his work anymore.

He ran his fingers through the shorn back of his hair. “Remember when you told me that Izzy insulted you, and you haven’t seen her since?”

I nodded.

“Does Izzy know you’re mad at her?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I really didn’t care. “Why?”

“When you’ve got a beef with somebody,” he said, “you don’t act mad. Not right away. You avoid confrontation. It only comes out later, when you make cutting comments. Izzy’s lived with you, so she understands that about you. But if you haven’t been by her shop, she probably doesn’t even know you’re angry. She’s busy with her job and her kids, but she’s wondering why you’ve gone missing. She thinks you’re just busy too.”

Letting that hypothesis hang in the air, he started the car.

I was shocked into silence. It made me uncomfortable that he understood so much about me, so quickly. We were already driving through the town’s main drag, past the shop where Izzy worked, before I managed to stammer, “I’m—I’m sorry, Will. I’m sorry about unloading all of that on you. I have a chip on my shoulder.”

“What you have is not a chip,” he said.

As he prepared to turn onto the street leading into my neighborhood, he looked right. His earring glinted under a streetlight. Feeling miserable, I wished I could take back the last half hour of spilling my guts. I tried to balance the evening a little by asking him a personal question, something I’d been curious about since our first night together. “Why did you pierce your ear? Is it a Minnesota thing?”