Sarah Dessen (26 page)

“Here, somewhere,” I said, stopping the door before it slammed shut. “Mom and Don were locked out earlier.” Then I filled him in on the gory details as he munched on a peanut butter sandwich—bread butts again—nodding and rolling his eyes in all the right places.

“No way,” he said as I finished. I shushed him, and he lowered his voice. Our walls, we both knew, were thin. “What a chump. He was yelling at her?”

I nodded. “I mean, not in a violent way. More in a pouty, spoiled brat kind of way.”

He looked down at the last remnants of bread butts in his hand. “No surprise there. He’s a total baby. And the next time I trip over one of those Ensures on the side porch someone’s going down.
Down.
”

This made me smile, reminding me of how much I really liked my brother. Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.

“Hey Chris?” I asked him as he pulled a carton of milk from the fridge and poured himself a glass.

“Yeah?”

I sat down on the edge of the table, running my hand over the surface. I could feel little pieces of sugar, or salt, fine but distinct beneath my fingers. “What made you decide to love Jennifer Anne?”

He turned around and looked at me, then swallowed with a glunking noise my mother always screamed at him about when we were kids, saying it made him sound like he was drinking rocks. “Decide to love?”

“You know what I mean.”

He shook his head. “Nope. No idea.”

“What made you,” I expanded, “feel like it was a worthwhile risk?”

“It isn’t a financial investment, Remy,” he said, sticking the milk back in the fridge. “There’s no math to it.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What
do
you mean?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

He put his glass in the sink, then ran water over it. “Do you mean what made me love her?”

I wasn’t sure I could take further discussion of that question. “No. I mean, when you thought about whether or not you wanted to open yourself up, you know, to the chance that you could get really hurt, somehow, if you moved forward with her, what did you think? To yourself?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I snapped. “God. It’s a simple question.”

“Yeah, right. So simple I still don’t even know what you’re asking.” He flipped off the light over the sink, then wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “You want to know how I debated about whether or not to fall in love with her? Is that even close?”

“Forget it,” I said, pushing off the table. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to find out. I’ll see you in the morning.” I started toward the foyer, and as I got closer, I could see my keys laid out neatly on the table by the stairs, waiting for me. I slid them into my back pocket.

I was on the second step when Chris appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Remy.”

“Yeah?”

“If what you’re asking is how I debated whether or not to love her the answer is I didn’t. Not at all. It just happened. I didn’t ever question it; by the time I realized what was happening, it was already done.”

I stood there on the stairs, looking down at him. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“What part?”

“Any of it.”

He shrugged and flipped off the last kitchen light, then started up the stairs, brushing past me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Someday, you will.”

He disappeared down the hall, and a minute later I heard him shut his door, his voice low as he made his required good-night-again-this-time-by-phone call to Jennifer Anne. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and was on my way to bed when I stopped by the half-open door of the lizard room.

Most of the cages were dark. The lights for the lizards were kept on timers, which clicked them on and off at just the right cycles to make the lizards believe, I supposed, that they were still sunning themselves on desert rocks instead of sitting in a cage in a converted linen closet. But at the far end of the room, on a middle shelf, one light was on.

It was a glass cage, and the floor of it was covered in sand. There were sticks crisscrossing it, and at the top of one stick were two lizards. As I came closer, I saw that they were entwined—not in a mating, nature-takes-its-course kind of way, but almost tenderly, if that was even possible, like they were holding each other. They both had their eyes closed, and I could see the pattern of their ribs, revealed and hidden with each breath they took.

I kneeled down in front of the cage, pressing my index finger against the glass. The lizard on the top opened his eyes and looked at me, unflinching, his pupil widening slightly as he focused on my finger.

I knew this meant nothing. They were just lizards, cold-blooded and probably no smarter than the average earthworm. But there was something so human about them, and for a minute all the things that had happened in the last few weeks blurred past in my mind: Dexter and I breaking up, my mother’s worried face, Don’s finger pointing at me, all the way up to Chris shaking his head, unable to put into words what seemed to me, at least, the most simple of concepts. And all of it came down to one thing: love, or the lack of it. The chances we take, knowing no better, to fall or to stand back and hold ourselves in, protecting our hearts with the tightest of grips.

I looked back at the lizard in front of me, wondering if I had finally gone completely crazy. He returned my gaze, now having decided I was not a threat, and then slowly closed his eyes again. I leaned in closer, still watching, but already the light was dimming as the timer kicked in, and before I knew it, everything was dark.

“What’s going on?” I asked, already suspicious.

“Just sit down,” Amanda told me, and the next thing I knew I
was
sitting: Talinga had snuck up behind me and pressed down on my shoulders, whipping a hair cape around me and snapping it at the neck before I even knew what was happening.

“Wait a second,” I said as Amanda grabbed my hands and planted them, quick as lightning, onto the table between us. She spread out my fingers and started filing my nails with quick, aggressive jerks of an emory board, biting her lip as she did so.

“Just a quick makeover,” Lola said smoothly, coming up behind me and lifting up my hair. “A little manicure, a little trim, a little makeup—”

“No way,” I said, pulling free from her grip. “You are not touching my hair.”

“Just a trim!” she replied, yanking me back into place. “Ungrateful girl, most women would pay big money for this. And you get it for free!”

“I bet not,” I grumbled, and they all laughed. “What’s the catch?”

“Keep your hands still or I’ll cut more than this cuticle,” Amanda warned me.

“No catch,” Lola said breezily, and I braced myself as I heard snipping behind me. God, she
was
cutting my hair. “A bonus.”

I looked at Talinga, who was testing lipsticks on the back of her hand, glancing at me every so often as she gauged my colors. “Bonus?”

“A plus. A gift!” Lola laughed one of her big laughs. “A special present for our Miss Remy.”

“A gift,” I repeated, warily. “What is it?”

“Guess,” Amanda said, smiling at me as she started applying smooth streaks of red polish to my pinky nail.

“Is it bigger than a bread box?” I said.

“You wish!” Lola said, and they all started laughing hysterically, like this was the funniest thing ever.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said sternly, “or I’m out of here. Don’t think I won’t do it.”

They were still tittering, trying to control themselves. Finally Talinga took a deep breath and said, “Remy, honey. We found you a
man.
”

“A man?” I said. “God. I thought maybe I was getting some free cosmetics or something. Something I
need.
”

“You need a man,” Amanda said, moving to my next nail.

“No,” Talinga said, “
I
need a man. Remy needs a boy.”

“A nice boy,” Lola corrected her. “And today is your lucky day, because we happen to have one for you.”

“Forget it,” I said as Talinga bent down next to me, poking at my face with a makeup brush. “Is this the one you tried to set me up with before? The bilingual one with nice hands?”

“He’ll be here at six,” Lola went on, ignoring me completely. “His name is Paul, he’s nineteen, and he thinks he’s coming to pick up some samples for his mother. But instead he’ll see you, with your beautiful hair—”

“And makeup,” Talinga added.

“And nails,” Amanda said, “if you stop wiggling around, goddammit.”

“—and be completely smitten,” Lola finished. Then she did two more small snips and ran a hand through my hair, checking her work. “God, you had some split ends. Disgraceful!”

“What in the world,” I said slowly, “makes you think I’ll go through with this?”

“Because he’s good-looking,” Talinga said.

“Because you should,” Amanda added.

“Because,” Lola said, whisking the cape off me, “you can.”

“I do,” I agreed. “But it is a free dinner.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good point. But really, don’t feel obligated.”

“You either,” I told him.

We stood there for a second while Lola and Talinga and Amanda, in the next room, were so quiet I could hear someone’s stomach growling.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “Make their day and all.”

“Okay.” He smiled at me. “I’ll pick you up at seven?”

I wrote down my address on the back of a Joie business card, then watched as he walked out to his car. He was cute, and I
was
single. It had been almost three weeks since Dexter and I had split, and not only was I dealing with it, we’d almost finessed the impossible: a friendship. And here was this nice guy, an opportunity. Why wouldn’t I take it?

One possible answer to this question appeared as I was walking out to my car, digging in my purse for my keys and sunglasses. I wasn’t looking where I was going, much less around me, and didn’t even see Dexter come out of Flash Camera and cross the parking lot until I heard a loud clicking noise and looked up to see him standing there, holding a disposable wedding camera.

“Hey,” he said, winding the film with one finger. Then he put the camera back up to his eye and bent back a bit, getting me from another angle. “Wow, you look great. Got a hot date or something?”

I hesitated, and he took the picture. Click. “Well, actually . . .” I said.

For a second, he didn’t move, not winding the film or anything, just looking at me still through the viewfinder. Then he took the camera away from his eye, then smacked his forehead with one hand and said, “Ouch. Oh, man. Awkward moment time. Sorry.”

“It’s just a setup,” I said quickly. “Lola did it.”

“You don’t have to explain,” he said, winding the film, click-click-click. “You know that.”

And then it happened. One of those too-long-to-just-be-a-regular-pause-in-conversation pauses, and I said, “Okay. Well.”

“Oh, man, awkward. Double awkward,” he said. Then shrugged his shoulders briskly, as if shaking this off, and said, “It’s okay. It’s a challenge, after all, right? It’s not supposed to be easy.”

I looked down at my purse, realizing my keys, which I’d been digging for this whole time, were in fact in my back pocket. I pulled them out, glad to have some kind of task, however stupid, to focus on.

“So,” he said casually, pointing the camera over my head and taking a picture of Joie’s storefront, “who’s the guy?”

“Dexter. Really.”

“No. I mean, this is what friends discuss, right? It’s just a question. Like asking about the weather.”

I considered this. We had known what we were getting into: eating ten bananas wasn’t easy either. “The son of a client here. I just met him twenty minutes ago.”

“Ah,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “Black Honda?”

I nodded.

“Right. Saw him.” He wound the film again. “Looked like a nice, upstanding guy.”

Upstanding, I thought to myself. As if he were running for student council president, or volunteering to help your grandmother across the street. “It’s just dinner,” I said as he snapped another picture, this one, inexplicably, of my feet. “What’s with the camera?”

“Defective shipment,” he explained. “Somebody at the main office left the box out in the sun, so they’re all warped. Management said we could have them, if we wanted them. Kind of like the tangerines, you know. Can’t turn down free stuff.”

“But will the pictures even come out?” I asked, noticing now, as I looked closer, that the camera itself was bent, warped, like the VCR tape I’d accidentally left on my dash the summer before. It didn’t look like you could even get the film out, much less develop it.

“Don’t know,” he said, taking another picture. “They might. Or they might not.”

“They won’t,” I said. “The film’s probably ruined from the heat.”

“Or maybe,” he said, holding the camera out at arm’s length and smiling big as he snapped a picture of himself, “it isn’t. Maybe it’s just fine. We won’t know until we develop it.”

“But it’s probably a total waste,” I told him. “Why bother?”

He put down the camera and looked at me, really looked at me, not through the lens, or from the side, just me and him. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s the whole problem here. I think they just might come out. Maybe they won’t be perfect—I mean, they could be blurred, or cut off in the middle—but I’m thinking it’s worth a shot. That’s just me, though.”

I just stood there, blinking, as he lifted the camera up and took one more shot of me. I stared straight at him as it clicked, letting him know I got his little metaphor. “I have to go,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and smiled at me. “See you later.”

As he walked away, he tucked the camera into his back pocket, darting between cars as he headed back to Flash Camera. Maybe he would print out the pictures and find them perfect: my face, my feet, Joie rising up behind me. Or maybe it would just be black, void of light, not even an outline of a face or figure visible. That was the problem, after all. I wouldn’t waste the time on such odds, while he jumped to them. People like Dexter followed risks the way dogs followed smells, thinking only of what could lie ahead and never logically of what probably did. It was good we were friends, and only that. If even that. We never would have lasted. Not a chance.