Biggest Flirts (17 page)

“Would you stop?” I whined, so annoyed by her manic mood swing. Any other day I might have thought she was halfway cute, but not while Will was there to see.

Will spit the nut into a napkin. “That is horrible! Nuts should not be mushy.”

Violet giggled and retreated quietly into the back.

After a pause, Will held his hand out toward her over the seat. “Give me another.”

He was so adorable. Handsome, strong, stoic. Vulnerable. Willing to laugh at himself at every turn. A wave of love washed over me, a yearning to touch him and talk to him alone, chased closely by blind panic that this was exactly how Violet had felt at first about Ricky.

“Ahhhhhh!” Violet yelled, teasing Will. “I knew it.” She shelled a peanut and put the meats in his palm.

They settled into a companionable silence. The car roared along the road. Alt-rock whispered on the radio. Violet cracked nuts and deposited some in Will’s hand whenever he held it out. Only I was fuming in my bucket seat, knowing now that I would have to break up with him as soon as we got home.

16

HE WAS SO SURPRISED AT
my words that he stepped backward, crunching through the magnolia leaves in the driveway. To give himself time to think, he reached through the open window of his car, snagged his T-shirt, and pulled it on.

He recovered quickly after that, walking forward to tower over me again. “No,” he said. “You’re upset. It’s been a really stressful morning. Just have something to eat, a shower might be nice, go to work. I’ll come pick you up after your shift at the shop, and we’ll talk about it.”

“See?” I spat. “This is how it starts. You convince me of things. You get everything you want, and I forget what I wanted in the first place.”

I was serious, and he began to get it. His nostrils flared as he said, “So you’re breaking up with me after we’ve been together for . . .” He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. “Nope, it hasn’t been quite twelve hours.”

“That’s a record for me,” I said, “because I’ve never been with anybody at all.”

“
I
don’t think this is funny!” He half turned away from me and ran his hands up the back of his neck, where his long hair used to be. “When you said on the first day of band practice that Beverly tricked me . . . no.
You’re
the one who did that. You wanted another hookup that didn’t mean anything. Maybe you even wanted to see this look on my face again. Do you get off on making me feel like an idiot?”

“Listen,” I seethed, then cringed at the volume of my voice. I would wake my dad over this stupid shit. Though my heart was racing, I managed to say calmly and reasonably, “I haven’t been the person that you wanted. I’ve sent you mixed signals. I’ve also changed my mind. But I’ve never lied to you. What I’ve said and done is exactly what I was feeling at the moment, and—”

“That’s enough,”
he barked, putting his hand up to stop me. “I’m going to get in my car and drive away. You can’t change your mind after this. Don’t flirt with me. Don’t cry. Don’t stare at me and look jealous when I go out with somebody else. You’ve jerked me around enough, and now it’s over.”

“Fine.” I shrugged and headed for the house. Behind me I could hear the Mustang backing out of the driveway and roaring down the street. In front of me, my vision collapsed into a tunnel, dark all around and clear only at the center. I opened the front door.

As I stumbled inside, I heard Harper say
Breathe
inside my head. I inhaled a long noseful of stale air, a house full of dust.

I left the front door open.

Violet was in my room—our room—lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The manic mood that took over her when she was stressed was fading away now. She and I were opposites in that regard. She was normally more serious and got silly under pressure, whereas I was silly and got serious when everything went to hell, like now.

She looked up at me. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

“I’m sorry. It’s kind of a mess.” Just as when Will came over, I was seeing the house through the eyes of someone who didn’t wade through it daily.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You’re sweet to come get me in the first place. And the house was a mess when I left.”

This was true, but I was pretty sure it was five months’ worse now. Before, we’d been kicking things aside to make a path through the den to our bedroom, but I didn’t remember that we’d been balancing piles on top of piles like now.

“Anyway,” she said, gesturing to her bed, “I won’t have trouble finding my stuff, because everything’s exactly where I left it.”

I took another long breath, shallower now. My body wanted the oxygen. When I was angry, I needed to remember to keep breathing. But now that I’d noticed the stale smell, I didn’t want to inhale it. I said slowly, “I . . . am going to call in to work and ask for the afternoon off . . . and clean.”

“Really!” she exclaimed as though this was a novel idea, like hanging festive streamers from the ceiling. She sat up and said, “I’ll help you.”

We stuffed a towel under the door of my dad’s bedroom and set up an electric fan for white noise outside the doorway so we wouldn’t wake him with our banging around. With both of us working, it didn’t take us long to pick up, sort through, and stash away everything in our tiny bedroom, and vacuum and dust the whole thing. She moved on to the bathroom. I tackled the laundry room. The den was going to take longer. By that time, some of my adrenaline from my fight with Will was draining away, but I wasn’t ready to think about him yet. As I folded blankets into boxes and found a place for books on shelves, I listened to Violet talk about Ricky, and what had gone wrong.

“You know, I never liked school, and I wasn’t doing too well. The whole thing seemed pointless. The only time I felt great was when I was with Ricky. Then he decided to drop out of school and get a job. I wouldn’t see him anymore. He asked me to go with him. And I felt so unexpectedly great thinking about that possibility, like the doors of heaven had opened. I’d thought I was saddled with high school and more school and living here for another few years, but instead of that, I could become an adult
right then
.”

I gazed at a history report that I was supposed to turn in last May but had gotten lost under the cushions of the sofa, apparently. I didn’t understand what she meant, not really. I didn’t see what was so awful about living here, or how a life with Ricky could seem better.

But I did understand how she felt good about herself when she was with Ricky. That’s how Will made me feel.

And I understood her view that a different life was within her grasp, a better life, like a magic door opening. I felt that way every time Will wanted us to get more serious. The thing was, Violet thought this was a magic portal. I thought it was a painting of a magic portal, like on the cover of one of Sophia’s fantasy novels. If you tried to step into it, you would realize it was only 2-D.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Violet murmured, wiping off a photo of Dad and Izzy and setting it on a shelf.

“Sure you do,” I said with all the fake cheerfulness that went with pathological cleaning. “You’ll get a job.” I snapped my fingers. “Actually, I have a good fit for you. You always loved helping Dad restore the woodwork and the fountain in the white house, right?”

“Aw, the white house!” She sounded as sad as I was about the loss of our mansion. We’d never talked about it, because moving out of that house had been tangled up with Mom leaving.

“I might be able to hire you at the antiques shop if you wanted,” I said.

“I love that place,” she said. “How’s Bob?”

“Better,” I said. Man, hiring Violet for the shop was the best idea I’d had in years. She would get a steady job that paid okay. With her working there too, I could wean Bob and Roger off relying on me to the point of making me feel trapped. I would have been impressed with myself if I hadn’t been panicking about Will underneath.

“You get a job there,” I told Violet, “live here, and go to school. Look for one of those programs where you study for your GED and take college classes at the same time.”

“School!” she said. “I couldn’t do that. I was never smart like you.”

“Like me!” I snorted.

“Of
course
like you. Are you crazy? We’re all proud of you for getting in that special class for smart kids, and for doing so well on the drums.”

I almost laughed when she put the gifted class and band together in the same sentence, as if they were related. But I probably sounded just as nonsensical to Izzy when I talked about hair color.

“Dad always said you’d be the first person in the family to go to college,” Violet went on.

“Well, of course he would say that now. You and Sophia and Izzy haven’t been to college.”

“He said that when you were a baby. You picked up on everything so quickly. Mom said Izzy didn’t talk until she was three, but she didn’t have another baby to compare her with. She said if she’d had you first, she would have put Izzy in an institution.”

I laughed. That was the funny yet slightly wrong sort of comment I remembered my mom making. “News to me,” I said. “I thought you only kept me around for comic relief. That’s all anybody ever seemed to think I was good for.”

“Well, sure,” Violet said, “back when you were in third grade. But now you’re grown up.”

That, too, was news to me. My heart started pounding again. It knew what I had done to Will. My brain didn’t want to deal with it yet. But as Violet pointed out how old I was, my fear of having a boyfriend seemed immature. It might have worked for me in ninth grade.

Not now.

“This didn’t take as long as I thought,” Violet said, rescuing the last pair of panties from the sofa and twirling them around on one finger. “If we could get the kitchen counters and the stove cleared off, I could run to the store for groceries.”

I inhaled as if the house already smelled like Puerto Rican food instead of dust. “We could make carne guisada,” I said.

Her dark eyes flew wide open. “And pasteles? And—”

“Amarillos!” we both said at the same time with all the reverence of two hungry girls who hadn’t eaten fried plantains in months. If we made them, maybe Dad still wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t care anymore.
I
would eat them.

“Divide and conquer,” she said. “Kitchen or store?”

“Kitchen.” If cleaning would make me feel better about breaking up with Will, I still had a whole town to polish.

After the kitchen was in reasonable order, I went outside. As we’d cleaned, we’d thrown mounds of trash into the yard, which probably frightened the neighbors. I bagged it up and stacked it neatly by the curb. Then I raked the magnolia leaves. I was pleasantly surprised to see that grass was living underneath. With some rain in September, the yard might start to look like a yard again.

I crossed the street with my rake and looked at our house from a distance, really
looked
at it like a potential buyer would have viewed it if Dad had followed his original plan of flipping it. A previous owner had painted it an unfortunate dark brown, but it had good bones for someone who didn’t mind a funky 1950s bungalow with retro lines.

My heart thumped painfully again as I realized I was viewing this house as if I was Will, parked in his Mustang on the street, capturing the proportions with a pencil and a ruler.

“Uh-oh, what’s the matter?” Harper said beside me.

I jumped. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard her roll up on the sidewalk. She and Kaye straddled their bikes, watching me with worried eyes.

“We came to ask what was up with you and Will last night,” Kaye explained. “But your yard looks beautiful. Obviously something has gone horribly wrong.”

That’s when I broke down.

***

“I have a theory,” Harper said.

My crying jag was over, but she kept her arm around my shoulders, even though this must have practically dislocated her arm because I was seven inches taller than her. We sat on a handmade bench my dad had brought home and set under the magnolia tree, then lost under the leaves. Cleared of plant rubbish, it was a nice place to sit—or would have been, if the heat hadn’t been so oppressive.

Kaye stopped sweeping the sidewalk to circle her finger in the air, telling Harper to cut to the chase. In spite of my despair, I almost laughed at this interaction I’d seen play out between them countless times since third grade.

“Your sisters missed your mother,” Harper told me, “and they felt like your family wasn’t whole. Starting their own families was their way of getting back what they’d lost. The problem was, they were so young that it didn’t work. I mean, I get carried away buying art supplies and run out of lunch money. You”—she poked me—“can’t get up in the morning. Could you imagine one of us being the primary caretaker for somebody else?”

“No,” I said. Izzy seemed stable now, but I had seriously worried about her children at first. I still worried about Sophia’s baby.

“And the boys your sisters hooked up with are even worse,” Harper said. “They bailed on their girlfriends and their babies. Seems to me Izzy is doing a pretty good job putting her life back together, though.”

“
Now
she is,” I acknowledged. Two years ago was a different story.

“You’ve watched your sisters make mistakes. You’re younger, so you may have seen your mother leaving very differently from the way they saw it. You miss your mom, but instead of trying to fix your life by filling her shoes, you avoid further complications by sidestepping responsibility when you can. You have an allergic reaction when you do get put in charge. You stay out of any relationship at all.”

“But that’s a good thing,” I defended myself. “I’m a lot better off than my sisters.”

“But what if you don’t change?” Kaye asked. “At some point when you’re older, you’re going to look around and see that everybody is in a relationship while you’re alone. And pretty much everybody in your high school classes will have gone off to college.”

“
I’m
going to college,” I declared. “I’ll be a National Merit Scholar.”

Kaye raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Not if you don’t get your grades up and convince some teacher to vouch for you. I worry that you’re going to stay right here because you couldn’t be bothered to take the next step.”

“At least the house will be clean,” I said.

“True,” Harper said. “And maybe there will be other boys you can mess around with. But most people want a relationship sooner or later. Even those boys will move on while you stay put. And as for your relationship with Will . . .”

I held my breath, waiting, hoping, praying for Harper to give me some insight into how to fix this.

“I wouldn’t have paired you two up in a million years,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen you together, I get why you’re so compatible. You’re different from each other, but you each understand what makes the other tick. It would be a shame for you to let your knee-jerk reaction rule your life, and let him go.”

I shrugged. “Our time together was all a misunderstanding to begin with,” I said. “He misread me as girlfriend material. I misread him as a player. By the time we found out we were wrong about each other, it was too late.”