Girlfriend Material (23 page)

“This is something,” said my mom. “I’m not sure what, exactly. But yes, your dad and I have some decisions to make.”

“Wow,” I said. “Am I … should I be packing too?”

My mom leaned against the back of the couch. “I reserved you a seat,” she said. “But I didn’t book it. The truth is, I’d like a little time alone with your dad. But I also don’t think it’s fair to make you stay here if I’m going back. So the decision is yours. I’d like to leave for Boston after lunch.”

“Wow,” I said again. How tempting was it to just start packing, to say good-bye to the disaster that was Adam and Natasha and basically every single aspect of my summer east of the Mississippi?

But my mom and dad needed time alone together. She’d just said that. Was I really going to risk my parents’ marriage so I didn’t have to deal with the spectacular wreckage I’d managed to make of almost all the relationships I’d formed here?

“No,” I said slowly. “You go.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I know you’re having a little bit of a tough time here right now. I don’t want you to have to stay if it’s going to make you unhappy.”

You don’t know the half of it, I thought.

“I’m sure,” I said. “You should go and I should stay.” I was afraid if I told my mom what had just happened with David she’d feel bad and tell me to come home with her.

And I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to say no again.

My mom went back to packing, and I went out to the deck. Standing there looking at the bay, I tried to convince myself that I’d be okay on Cape Cod without her. It was beautiful. Sarah and Jenna were my friends. Okay, I could never face Adam or his brother again, but how hard could it be to avoid them just because the only people I knew within a thousand miles were people we had in common.

Luckily my phone rang before I could get too hysterical about what the rest of my summer was going to be like. It was a Cape Cod number; I recognized the area code.

“Hello?” I said.

“Kate?” said a female voice.

“Yes.”

“It’s Natasha.”

My heart started hammering. “Natasha,” I said. “Hi.” She spoke quickly. “I got your number from my mom. I’m really sorry.”

“What?” I said, confused. “You don’t need to be sorry about calling.”

“No,” she said. “I mean I’m sorry about what I said.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. I sat down and covered my face with my hand, even though she couldn’t see me. “I handled everything so badly. I was just really angry about … something else.”

She laughed. “Yeah, I think I was too.”

There was a pause, and then I said, “So do you want to have another lesson?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. And even though I didn’t exactly blame her, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”

“But I
do
want to form a writers’ group,” she said.

“What?” I said, even though I’d heard her.

“I said, ‘I do want to form a writers’ group.’ So are you in or out?”

“Um …” Natasha was younger than I was, but she seemed pretty smart. And she was definitely serious about reading and writing.

“Come on,” said Natasha. “What do you have to lose?”

It was true. What did I have to lose?

“Okay,” I said, and just saying it made me feel happy. Maybe I could never face Adam again, but at least I hadn’t totally destroyed my relationship with Natasha.

I pushed Adam out of my mind. “Okay,” I said again. “Let’s meet the day after tomorrow. That will give us time to write something.” The thought of having a deadline got me excited.

“First assignment?” asked Natasha.

“Hang on a second,” I said. I went inside and dug the book Ms. Baker had given me out of the bottom of my underwear drawer, where it had lain, untouched, ever since I’d unpacked it. I flipped through the pages, each of which had a number and a writing exercise on it. A few were cool, like the one that said “Write a story entirely in dialogue,” but they didn’t seem as if they would work for both poetry and prose. When I hit page twenty-five, I almost laughed out loud. Then I went outside and picked up the phone.

“Ready?” I said.

“Ready,” said Natasha.

“‘Write about a trip from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t want to take it,’” I read.

“Oh, that’s good,” said Natasha. She thought for a second. “I’m going to write a poem about how when it’s cold I hate getting out of bed to pee in the middle of the night.”

I laughed. “Excellent.” I was impressed by how fast she’d come up with the idea.

“So I’ll see you Sunday,” she said. “What time?”

In case I wanted to have the morning to write, I said, “Four o’clock.”

“Library?” she asked.

“Actually,” I said, “let’s meet at the gazebo outside the library. I need to reclaim it.”

“From what?” she asked.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Cool,” said Natasha. “Maybe you’ll write it someday.”

“You know, maybe I will.”

MY MOM AND TINA AND I
went for lunch at this little burger place on Route 6, and then my mom hugged us both and turned the car west, toward Boston, while we headed east, to the house. It was really weird to drive back without her. I couldn’t help feeling like,
What am I doing here?
I mean, I didn’t know Tina and Henry all that well, and Sarah and I were friendly and everything, but it wasn’t like we were friends the way Laura and I were (or had been) friends, like it’s totally normal that I’d be staying at her house for days (or even weeks) on end. Thinking about Laura made me feel kind of bad for how I hadn’t wanted to hear about her and Brad very much. I mean, if there’s one thing I’d learned from my … thing with Adam, it was that liking people makes you lose your mind a little.

“Would you like to come stay in the main house now that your mom’s gone?” asked Tina as we pulled into the driveway.

“You mean so I won’t fall victim to the local serial killer?”

She turned off the engine. “You know, I just thought it would be nice to have you closer. But when you put it like that, I guess it’s imperative that you relocate immediately.”

I was really glad she’d asked me to move. Despite my having freaked out at the idea of sharing a room with my mom when we first arrived, the idea of not sharing the guesthouse with her (or with anyone, for that matter) was even freakier. I threw my stuff into my suitcase and dragged it up the path and over to Tina and Henry’s.

The guest room was on the third floor of the house, all by itself with its own little bathroom. It was tiny. There were sloping walls, a ceiling that wouldn’t have allowed a grown man to stand up straight, and barely enough square footage for a single bed and a narrow chest of drawers. But the second I saw it I fell in love. It totally made me think of a writer’s garret, and from the bed you could see out the window over the tops of the trees to the bay. On the dresser was a glossy coffee table book called
The Beaches of Cape Cod
and a stack of beautiful cream-colored note cards, each with a line drawing of the Dryer’s Cove town hall. Tina gave me fresh sheets and towels, and after I’d made the bed, I just sat on it, wrapped up in the brightly colored patchwork quilt, looking out at the view.

“Hey, hey, hey,” said Sarah, simultaneously knocking on and pushing open my door.

“Hi,” I said. I hadn’t even heard her car pull into the driveway.

“Hi,” she said, and even though she already had, she asked, “can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Your mom called me at work and said good-bye,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “She left so fast.”

“Yeah. I think it’s some kind of make-or-break time.”

“Intense. Are you okay?”

I crossed my legs so she would have more room to sit. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Do you want to watch a movie at Jenna’s later?”

I remembered the amazing dinner we’d all eaten there. Had it only been a few nights ago? “Who’s going?”

I was relieved that Sarah knew exactly what I meant. “Well, not Adam because, according to Lawrence, he’s skipped town.” I didn’t feel like admitting to Sarah how and why I’d actually already acquired that particular tidbit of information, so I just nodded. “And not David Carpenter, because I totally cannot face him. That’s why Jenna and I didn’t go to The Shack last night.” For the first time since I’d known her, Sarah looked acutely embarrassed. Her face blushed pink and she lifted her shoulders and shuddered. “Ugh,” she added.

I didn’t exactly want to talk about David Carpenter, but at least Sarah had said she
didn’t
want to see him. Which seemed a little strange given how crushed out she was on him. “Why can’t you face David?” I asked. Thinking about it, I really couldn’t picture Sarah with the guy I’d seen on the porch that morning. When she’d described him as outdoorsy and manly, I’d pictured someone a little less … Grizzly Adams.

She shook her head. “It’s too embarrassing.” “Tell me.” She turned to me, opened her mouth, and then shut it immediately. “Can’t.”

Maybe she knew something really awful about him, something I could use to blackmail him.
Breathe one word to your brother about what I said to you and I’ll tell everyone about … .
I leaned toward Sarah and took her shoulders in my hands. “Sarah, I’m not kidding. You have got to tell me why you can’t face David Carpenter.”

“Aaaah,” yelped Sarah, thrusting me off her and curling up at the other end of the bed with her head as far away from me as she could get it. Suddenly she started speaking really fast. “Because last time I saw him was at our friend’s graduation party in New York, and I’d had all this champagne and I told him I was totally in love with him.” As soon as she finished her sentence, she whimpered and buried her head under a throw pillow.

“It’s too awful.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Oh my God,” I said.

“What?” she asked, lifting her face. “You can’t believe what a loser I am, right?”

“Hardly,” I said. I couldn’t look at her so I dropped my eyes to the quilt and started pulling at a loose string. “This is going to sound
totally
impossible, but—”

“Yes …” she prompted.

“The exact same thing happened to me.”

Her face was the picture of confusion. “You told David Carpenter you loved him?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not what you think.”

By the time I finished relating the story of my morning run, Sarah and I were both under the quilt.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” asked Sarah.

“Neither of us can leave the house until Labor Day?”

“Exactly,” she said. “I’m calling Jenna. I’ll tell her it’s safer if she comes here tonight.”

“Good plan,” I said. Sarah stood up and grabbed her shoes off the floor. “Tell her to bring provisions,” I added as she went out the door.

“Most definitely,” said Sarah. “At least a month’s worth.”

Now that I’d told Sarah what had happened with David that morning, it didn’t seem nearly so bad as it had before. It was as if telling David Carpenter you were in love with him, purposely or mistakenly, was a rite of passage, something akin to failing your driver’s test or getting caught cheating on a Spanish test. Sure it’s embarrassing and awful, but it happens to everyone.

And even though I knew Sarah had been joking about our spending the entire summer locked in her house, it was pretty cool how she hadn’t minded the plan—like being forced to hang out with me for the next few weeks didn’t bother her at all.

In fact, she’d kind of seemed to like the idea.

THE FIRST THING I DID
when I woke up the next morning was start working on my story. I only had a day to finish it, or at least get it to the point where I wouldn’t mind showing it to someone. I wrote for over two hours, and when I stopped it wasn’t because I’d run out of ideas but because my phone rang. When I saw it was Meg, my heart stopped. What if our parents had made some kind of decision and called her first?

“Hey,” I said.

“I don’t know anything,” she said. “Do you?”

“Nothing,” I said. I realized it was stupid to think something had already been decided. My mom hadn’t even landed in Salt Lake yet.

“Ugh,” she said. “This is driving me crazy.”