Nothing Like You (15 page)

I willed myself to go to her, hug her,
anything
to get the tears to stop, but I couldn’t make my legs move. “Can I do anything?” I asked.

“Like what?” She looked genuinely perplexed by my offer to help.

I shrugged. “I dunno. You want a soda from the machine?”

She blew her nose. “Could you talk to him, Holly? Maybe you could find out what I did wrong?”

This crushed me. She was making me so sad. “I don’t think … I mean, I don’t know if it’s the best thing, for me to get between you guys.”

Nora walked over to the sink. She cupped her hands underneath the faucet and splashed water under her eyes. “Are you sick?” she asked.

“No, why?”

“I heard you gag before I knew it was you.”

“Oh … my period,” I said, quickly covering. “Always makes me wanna hurl.”

She considered herself in the mirror, blotting her face with a paper towel. “Do I look okay?”

“You look great,” I lied.

She turned toward me. “So is that it? Nils and me? Like, you think it’s over for good?” Her eyes were really big. She expected so much.

I shrugged and watched her whole body deflate.

“Thanks, Holly.”

“Sure.”

She passed me, grabbing my arm on her way out. “Hope your stomach feels better.”

“Thanks,”

I locked myself back in the bathroom stall.

Lunch outside on the grass with Saskia. No sandwiches. French fries and fried eggs from the cafeteria.

“You know there’s a bonfire Friday night at the beach?”

“Really?” I stuffed four fries into my mouth, chewed quickly, and swallowed. “Who’s going?”

“Everyone. I don’t even know who’s organizing. Should be fun, though.” She took a bite of salad. “You’ll come, right?”

The thought of another night out with Paul was terrifying to me. Besides, Friday would be exactly one week since we’d last spoken. So we were due. “Maybe,” I said. “I dunno, not exactly in the partying mood …”

She kicked my leg. “Come on. This is
it
. After this year,
no more bonfires … good-bye, Topanga … you know? You
have
to come.”

I took a long chug of my water bottle. “We’ll see.”

And then it happened. I suppose it was inevitable. Just a matter of time before Paul, Saskia, and myself all stood face-to-face. We were on the ground, she and I. And then all of a sudden there he was, hovering overhead.

“Babe.”

We both looked up. My whole body went rigid. I waited for him to say something shitty.

“Hey!” she squealed, reaching up and grabbing his hands. “Sit!” She patted the grass. “You want fries?”

Paul looked at me. “That’s okay. I’m gonna eat inside with Pete and Broder.”

Saskia swallowed a big gulp of Coke and threw her hands in the air. “I’m sorry, so rude. Do you two even know each other?”

“Not really,” Paul said, real quick, extending a hand for me to shake. “I mean, I know you, but I don’t know you.”

I took his hand. It was limp.

“Paul, Holly, Holly, Paul.”

Paul nodded and squatted down next to Saskia. “I’m going,” he said. Then he pulled her forward, leading her by the chin with one hand into a kiss. It was a long kiss, fifteen seconds long—I swear it. At one point he totally opened his
eyes and looked at me sideways, just to make sure I’d been watching. I had.

“Really nice meeting you Holly.” Paul waved lamely and headed back toward the cafeteria. Saskia looked a little dazed. “What the F? That kiss? Totally for your benefit. He never kisses me like that anymore.” She leaned into me. “Hang out more often. Please.”

I took a huge bite of cold fried egg.

So I went
to the bonfire. I wasn’t going to go but then Nils wanted to go. “Hols, it’ll be fun,” he’d said, giving me a similar pitch to the one Saskia had thrown at me earlier:
Good-bye Topanga hello big world
.
Let’s go let’s go let’s go.
So I let him talk me into it. I let him kiss me and promise me nice times. I told myself that Paul had been bluffing and drunk the week before, and that tonight would be just another party at the beach. Bonfires and beer.
No big deal,
I said to myself.

So Nils drove. Nils barely ever drove, but that night he did. We took his dad’s truck and parked in the same parking lot that Paul and I had been to a few times, and right before we got out of the car, Nils kissed me. He slid across the seat of his dad’s pickup and pulled me into his lap.
He touched my face with his hands and pressed his lips to my lips. He said, “I like it like this. You and I like this together.” My stomach went warm. Then we got out of the car. We followed a trail of smoke toward the party. A cluster of kids were huddled together in sweatshirts drinking who-knows-what out of sippy cups in front of the fire. I spotted Nora. Then Paul and Saskia, soon after that.

“Drinks?” I asked Nils, squeezing his hand and heading off in search of beer.

“Drinks.” He nodded. Following close behind.

We grabbed two Tecate cans out of a small red cooler by the fire. We drank those, side by side, sitting in a chilly little spot in the sand. Nils made circles on my ankle under my jeans with his pinkie finger. We drank two more Tecates. We watched the others drink and talk and dance and kiss, then we drank another two beers and
presto—chango
! Like magic, we were drunk.

From this point on, things get kind of patchy. I drank a lot, Nils drank a lot, and I can’t remember much about the night other than how we all ended up in the end. Here’s what I do remember:

Sometime around ten, a crying, drunken Nora pulled Nils away toward the ocean. They sat on a rock and I sat on another rock, alone, until Saskia came by with more beers. We drank those. We danced around the fire. I watched Paul watch me and periodically I would turn
backward and watch Nils and Nora but I didn’t care much about anything. I wanted to dance. I danced and danced and sometime around midnight Nils came over and said, “I’m fucked, Nora’s driving me crazy. I’m gonna go sleep in the car.” And I said okay. And then I can’t remember how much time lapsed but suddenly Saskia was gone, most of the party was gone, and I’d been asleep on a towel for hours. Paul woke me up.

“Time to go, Holly.”

“Hmm?” I was half asleep still. I sat up, spinning.

“I’m gonna drive you home, okay?”

I let him take my hand. We stood up. “What about Nils?” I asked. “Where’s Nils?”

“He left,” Paul said. And that was that.

We ended up back at The Shack. I don’t know how. I don’t know if I told him to take me there or what. Maybe I thought I’d wait there for Nils. I don’t really know now. All I know is there we were, Paul and I, and it was dark and I was drunk, and I let him undress me. I let him take all my clothes off and kiss me and it’s not like I told him no or anything, I was into it. I remember that part. I remember undoing the buckle on his pants and I remember that he kept his shirt and his shoes on. I can’t tell you why I did what I did. All I know is hours later, when I woke up alone with my pants in a ball on the floor by the futon, I wanted to die. It was light out and I was halfway sober and I knew
what I’d done and felt nothing but shame. I opened my mouth to cry but no sound came out and then I pulled my underwear back on and picked my jeans up off the ground. I got dressed and walked back to the house.

In my dream
, Mom was my age and wearing that gauzy cotton dress of hers I wore the first time I went hiking with Paul. Ballanoff was there too, dressed up in that stupid fuzzy cardigan he’s always wearing in the auditorium on really cold days. Mom was kissing Ballanoff, only
I
was the one feeling the kisses—soft and exhilarating and similar to how it felt kissing Nils in The Shack that one night. Mom had her arms wrapped around the back of Ballanoff’s head and his hands were gripping her waist. Jeff was there too, as were Nils and Paul and Mom’s old boyfriend Michael. They were all there, watching from the sidelines as if kissing were a spectator sport. Like tennis. Or golf.

But then Mom was alone. No Ballanoff or Jeff. Mom was alone and all the love I’d felt between her and Ballanoff had
vanished. Then the room changed shades. It went from dark to light, then from light to white, and Mom was suddenly see-through, drifting up and away, dissolving into the clean white walls, fading like a soft stain or an old photograph.

I sat in front
of the TV and tried to watch something about bowhead whales on the Discovery Channel but couldn’t focus. I just sat there watching the screen lights blink and tried to keep myself from crying. Harry hugged my ankles while I thought about Nils and Saskia and how I could never take back what I’d done. Then I heard a rattling at the front door and didn’t turn around because I figured it was Jeff, who’d been out in the yard all morning planting annuals.

“You’re here. What happened to you last night?”

It was Nils. My fingers went tingly. I twisted around so I could see him. He looked adorable. His hair was all mussed from sleep. Looking at him made my heart hurt. “Hey.” I stood up. “I’m here, yeah, I’m fine. Saskia drove
me home,” I lied. “Someone said you’d left and I was so messed up, Nils, I couldn’t even walk straight… .”

He moved toward me. “I woke up at, like, five thirty, in the backseat of the pickup and I was still at the beach. And I couldn’t find you and I flipped.” Now we were hugging. He’d buried his face in my neck and was kissing me. “You smell so clean,” he said, running a hand through my wet hair.

“I just showered.”

“You feel nice,” he said, rocking me from side to side. “I was so scared, I thought something really bad had happened.”

I felt a tear trickle down my cheek.
Tell him,
I thought.
Tell him tell him tell him what you’ve done.
I wiped my eyes and pulled backward so we were face-to-face.

“Are you crying?” he asked, scrunching his brow.

I opened my mouth to say it.
I’m a horrible person,
I thought.
I don’t deserve you,
I thought. And then my cell rang. Nils dropped his arms to his sides and I stepped forward to check the caller ID screen on my phone. It was Saskia.
Saskia.
I turned to Nils, and my face must have looked really weird because he said, “What’s wrong with you? Who’s calling?”

I just stood there and thought,
Saskia knows. Soon Nils will know too. Tell him, Holly, before he finds out some other way
. But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to have him for as long as I could have him before he realized what a horrible person I was. “No one. I’m just so tired. Come sleep with me?” I took him by the hand and led him down the hall toward my
room. “Let’s just get into bed and sleep for a while? I’m so tired,” I said.

So that’s what we did. We kicked off our shoes and crawled into bed together and then we just slept. Side by side, Nils’s body curled around my body from behind.

When I woke up around five, it was already almost dark out. Nils was gone. I checked my phone. Three new messages. I didn’t check my call log to see who they were from. Instead, I dropped my phone back on my bed and shuffled in my socks down the hall to the kitchen. There was a note from Jeff on the fridge that he’d gone to the store. Harry was with him. I sat back down on the couch and turned on the TV. I watched the last half of
Agnes of God
on Showtime, then grabbed my book off the coffee table and headed out back to The Shack to read.

The lights were already on inside. I could see a thin line of soft yellow creeping out from beneath the old, tin door. I pressed my book to my chest and went inside. There was Nils, sitting on the futon with his head down. Clutching something little and plastic and blue.

“Hi,” I said. “You left. Where’d you go?”

He held the little plastic thing up high above his head. “I came out here, to read. This was on the bed.” It was a condom wrapper.
A
condom wrapper.
I hadn’t even checked The Shack when I’d left that morning.
Stupid stupid stupid, Holly.
I looked down at Nils and plucked the little plastic
wrapper from his fingertips. I felt like someone had socked me in the chest.

“You wanna tell me what that’s about?” he said. He was still looking at the ground.

“It’s … mine, I guess.” I sat down next to him. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. “Will you look at me, please? I have something to tell you.”

“I don’t want to look at you.”

My eyes blurred.
This is it,
I thought.
Six years of friendship, wrecked in a blink.
“I didn’t mean to do it. I can’t even remember half the night, Nils… .”

He moved away from me. His head was still down.

“Can you look at me? Please?”