Anywhere but Here (9 page)

If this were an alien flick, this is when we'd get abducted.

“C'mon,” Hannah says, so I follow her to the trunk and she passes me a flashlight, a blanket, and a backpack. Then she picks her way toward the bandstand, where the announcers call the action during the annual demolition derby. That's when drivers with rusted-out beaters try to sideswipe other drivers with rusted-out beaters and the one with the better beater wins the prize. The derby's the only other time I've ever been here.

Hannah uses her own flashlight to guide us up the bandstand stairs. Then she tugs the blanket from me and spreads it on the stage. The backpack yields a thermos of spiked hot chocolate along with crackers, cheese, chocolate, and three kinds of sausage.

“Wow. You know how to pack a picnic.”

“Thanks,” she says, settling herself in the middle of the bounty.

“Have you done this before?”

“What kind of question is that? This night is all for you, Cole.”

We don't get to the snacks right away.

The evening air has finally started to cool. A tiny breeze moves over us as Hannah's lips trace hot circles down my neck to the base of my throat. Beneath the blanket, I can feel the warped slats of the wooden floor. In the space between the railings and the roof, small bat shapes swoop. Hannah puts her hand on my
thigh and her lips on my ear and then, because I can't let her keep taking charge all the time, I get up on my knees and tug off her shirt, then I toss my jean jacket and T-shirt to the side.

I have this thing about girls with long hair, preferably with their shirts off. It's probably from some cinematic sex scene that got burned into my brain. Anyway, Hannah's hair is long. And now her shirt is off. In the almost-perfect dark of the bandstand, her skin glows faintly and her eyes glisten. Not that I'm looking at her eyes. She slides down beneath me and reaches up to draw me closer and for a few minutes, I can't remember where we are, or how we got here, or even my name.

A while later, though, she's tugging at my boxers with her teeth.

I've lost focus.

In my mind, every guy I know is screaming that I'm an idiot. I
am
an idiot. No question. Here's the problem: I can't get Lauren out of my head. Just as Hannah's tongue is tracing my waistband, I get a flash of Lauren sitting on her couch, arms wrapped around herself as if she's trying to keep her insides in place. As Hannah's breath creates a circle of heat against my skin, I hear the hurt in Lauren's voice after she realizes there's another girl in the idling car outside.

Lauren and I broke up. That was a good decision. Whether or not there are hurt feelings, I did the right thing. You'd
think that knowledge would make me immune to moments like this.

Apparently not.

“Wait,” I whisper to Hannah as her mouth slides downward. Then I have to resist banging my head against the wooden floor because who in his right mind says “wait” to Hannah Deprez?

Thankfully, Hannah thinks I'm being a gentleman.

“That's sweet,” she says. “Not necessary, but sweet.”

“Next time,” I say into her neck.

It takes a while for my breathing to become normal again and my red blood cells to return to their rightful routes. Eventually, we haul ourselves up to sit cross-legged and I turn on the flashlight, standing it on end like a lantern. Hot chocolate and garlic sausage go together surprisingly well, I discover. This girl knows how to choose food.

I find myself gazing at Hannah as she pours a fresh cup from the thermos. A wisp of steam seems to glow in the dark as it floats past her cheekbone. I'm thinking again about the things that Lauren said.

“How come you don't get along with the other girls in our class?” I ask.

Her eyes remain on the hot chocolate. “We get along,” she says.

“You don't hang out.”

Glancing up through her eyelashes, the look she gives me is assessing. It's the quick, perceptive look of the spy femme fatale in a James Bond movie. It's not the look of a bimbo.

“How come you pretend to be so . . .” I search for something less offensive than ditzy, or flighty, or dumb. “. . . focused on fun all the time,” I finish, “when you're actually smart?”

She laughs a little. “It's a tough crowd here.”

“Who's a tough crowd?”

“Everyone. You've all known each other forever. The girls decided I was a slut as soon as I got here. Dallas was really the only one who was nice to me, for months. And then everyone said I was sleeping with him.”

I blink. It never occurred to me that Hannah
hadn't
slept with Dallas.

“Hang on,” I say. “Hold that thought.” I pull my jacket off the floor and scrabble through the pockets until I find my camera. Framing Hannah's silhouette in the viewfinder, I press record. Her dark hair blends into the background of bandstand boards and night sky, her pale face floating.

“All right,” I say. “Tell me what you've experienced of Webster.”

“The real story?” She smiles. “Are you sure?”

“Completely.”

“You're not going to post it online, right?”

“I promise. No local viewers.”

“Here's the reality, then. One on one, the girls around here are okay. In a group, they're vipers.”

I laugh at the exaggeration, trying not to shake the camera.

Hannah nods, wide eyed. “I'm serious. You should be glad you're a guy.”

“Guys are easier?” What am I saying? Of course we are.

“Yeah.” She smiles. “You're easy.”

“Great. So you're hanging around with me because I'm easy.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No complaints.” In fact, everyone should have such simple reasons for hanging around with me. “Tell me more, though. Tell me what it's like to move here.”

“Dallas and I have talked about that,” she says. “We're the new kids. You guys all know each other. You know who peed on the teeter-totter in kindergarten and whose dad slept with the receptionist at the dentist's office, and you know the entire dating history of every single high school student.”

This is true.

On the view screen, I watch the way she squares her shoulders. I wish I had a professional-style reflector so I could soften the flashlight beam on her skin.

“You're not used to explaining yourselves,” she says. “And
you don't ask others questions because you're not used to having to work to understand them. Maybe you
want
to build friendships with new people, but everyone in town already gets you, so you haven't learned how to reach that stage with a stranger.”

I wince a little at that one. Because she's right. I've been spending time with Hannah for weeks, and I barely understand who she is. Is she right about the whole theory of small-town relationships too? Thinking about it makes my head feel overstuffed. This is deeper than I expected from Hannah.

“I admit,” I say, “you're more complicated than I thought.”

She smiles.

Then a clear thought crystalizes. “The rest of us only
think
we understand each other. We change. Or at least some of us change.”

“And everyone else goes on assuming you're still the same,” she says.

I nod. “Exactly.”

“Sometimes,” Hannah says, ruining my shot by moving to lean against me in the dark, “it just feels good to have people you can talk to, you know?”

It's surprisingly similar to what I thought my mom would say—the mom of my imagination who was cutting onions in the kitchen a few weeks ago.
When you break up, you lose the person you tell things to.

Which is what I'm supposed to be doing, according to my new life plan. I need to cut people loose, not start relationships.

I put down the camera.

“I'm worried that I might become the person you talk to, and you might become the person I talk to, and then I'll leave for Vancouver next year and everything will be complicated,” I tell Hannah.

There must be something about this bandstand that heightens communication skills. I've been spilling my guts here.

“I just ended things with Lauren,” I continue. “I don't want to start anything that could become . . . messy.”

“It will only be messy if we make it messy.” Hannah's smile is back in place, and when she looks up at me through her eyelashes, my resolutions melt a little.

“We don't have to worry about the rest of the year or leaving town,” she says. “We've got lots of nights left this summer.”

It's more of a question than a statement.

Apparently, my communication skills were temporary. I can't figure out how to respond. It's possible that one of Greg's little green aliens has beamed itself inside my skull. He's banging his tiny green fist on my cranium and shouting that getting attached is not only a bad idea, it's downright dangerous. He's saying something about film school, and Uganda, and people always leaving you, so why the hell bother, and . . .

It's difficult to give the alien my full attention because Hannah is kissing me again. Then she is doing other things. In one last burst of concentration, I manage to hear the green man say something about wooden bandstand floors and splinters in my ass. But who the hell cares about splinters when Hannah's body is pressed along the length of mine?

•  •  •

Sunday is the one-year anniversary of my mom's death. I haven't told anyone this. I suppose if I'd told Hannah when we were in Nester, she could have squished my head against her breasts and made sympathetic noises. Or if I'd told Greg, he could have gotten me mercilessly drunk.

Neither of those options seemed quite right. Weirdly enough, I've been wanting to call Lauren. I suppose it's because she spent all those hours with me at the hospital. That's the trouble, though. When we left the hospital, she was the same person and I wasn't.

So I can't call my emotionally unstable ex-girlfriend.

I need another option.

I decide that the times I've felt closest to Mom—since she died, I mean—they all had to do with food. So in her honor, I'm going to cook.

From the shelf above the fridge, I pull down the cookbook that looks most worn, thinking the creased cover might indicate
commonly cooked recipes. And it does. Almost every page has food splattered on it, or a bent corner, or a note saying “not so much sugar” or “good if you add chicken.” It feels strange to read my mom's handwriting. It's like thinking I see her in a crowd when she's not really there.

Some of the recipes in here are familiar to me, like Hunter's Chicken and Seafood Pot Pie. Others are completely foreign: Chicken Tangine. The recipe introduction says it's a Moroccan favorite. There's no picture, so I can't tell if I've ever eaten it. I pass it by, eventually. It reminds me too much of Sheri's paella.

Finally, I come to a recipe that Mom marked “super easy.” There's even a bracket she drew around most of the ingredients with a scribbled “just use spaghetti sauce.” We have spaghetti sauce in the cupboard. By some miracle, we have the other two ingredients too: a can of chickpeas and a tray of breakfast sausages. The recipe says Italian sausages, but I figure they can't be too different.

I'm supposed to stir together the tomato sauce and the chickpeas and put the sausages on top. Super easy, just like the note says. I run my fingers across her words. I can see her face. I can see the way she would smile with one corner of her lips higher than the other, brushing her bangs out of her eyes.

The real introduction to the recipe says, “Every cook needs a weeknight standby. Something you can throw together when
the day gets away from you.” Or when life gets away from you.

The sausage dish goes in the oven for forty minutes. The recipe says thirty, but Mom crossed it out. “Depends on the size of the sausages,” she wrote.

“Doesn't everything.” My dad would grin as he squeezed into the kitchen to check out the action.

“Gross. I'm in the house, you know.” That would be my eleven- or twelve-year-old self. I can see the whole scene, choppy as if it were edited the old-fashioned way, with a sharp pair of scissors.

When I was little, before I even started kindergarten, Mom and Dad lived in an A-frame on the outskirts of town. Seriously. An A-frame. I vaguely remember it. I remember dark, paneled walls. I remember the huge vegetable garden in the backyard. And I remember the corduroy pants that Mom sewed for me, the ones that were two sizes too big and made terrible swooshing sounds with every step.

They must have been going through a back-to-the-land phase. It seems kind of romantic when I think of it. Were they romantic, or am I pulling my memories from bad seventies films? I rack my brain for examples. I remember them holding hands, window shopping. They went out to dinner every year on their anniversary. Does that count?

Then there was the hospital, of course. Once Dad drove to
Burger Barn just as they were closing and convinced them to reopen to make Mom a chocolate milk shake because she wasn't eating and for some reason he thought a chocolate milk shake might solve all her problems.

Supposedly, smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory. Maybe that's why, as the sausages heat up, I'm wondering about my parents' marriage. Were they in love, still? I think they were. Then again, I'm basing my conclusions on a chocolate milk shake.

It's not exactly something I can ask Dad. Even if I managed to spit out the question, I can't imagine him coming up with a coherent answer.

“Course I loved her. What the hell kinda question is that?” he'd say.

The sausages are delicious when they're done. Crispy on top with the sauce thick and rich below them. I leave the dish bubbling on the counter while I boil noodles, and then I kind of hang around and wait for Dad to get home. I guess I'm fishing for a repeat of his chicken dinner reaction.