Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (13 page)

My site’s not down—is it? I type in the URL and it comes
right up.
“Rose,” Tracy says, exasperated, trying to get my attention.
“Matt called me.”
I’m still trying to figure out why Vicky thinks my site is down
when Tracy’s words sink in. There’s only one reason Matt would
call Tracy right now, and it’s not to wish her a Merry Christmas.
“He saw us?” I ask, turning around.
“I don’t know. But he said to tell Conrad that he’s dead.”
“How does he know it was Conrad?”
Tracy tilts her head at me. “Conrad might as well have signed
his name.”
The door to Peter’s room slams shut with a bang, making
both Tracy and me jump. Tracy looks over her shoulder at Peter’s closed door.
“Girls! Dessert is on the table,” my mother calls from downstairs, her voice tight with the strain of trying to pretend, in
front of her celebrity guest, that her son did not just come home
from a prestigious northeast college and announce that he’s been
kicked out for drug use.
“We should tell the police,” Tracy says.
“That’ll just get Conrad arrested, and get Jamie and Angelo
in trouble, too.”
“Conrad won’t get arrested, not after he tells them about the
party.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I snap. “Vandalizing a car like that?
It can be considered a felony.
Why
he did it doesn’t matter.”
“Girls?” my mother calls again, slightly more desperate this
time.
My head is starting to vibrate with exhaustion—I can’t go
back down there.
“Tell her to start without me. I’ll call Jamie and tell him about
Matt.” Tracy is about to argue with me but I cut her off. “Go check
on Peter,” I say, finally giving in to the urge to slam my door.
“Nice, Rose,” Tracy says in the hallway.
I hear her clacking down the stairs and saying something to
my mother. Then the front door opens and closes.
I guess she’s not up for dessert after all.
I reach for my phone just as Vicky’s name pops up on my
caller ID.
“Rosalita! Merry Christmas, girl! Y’all having a white one up
there?”
I love talking to Vicky. I don’t even have to say anything most
of the time because she’s got enough to say for both of us.
“Hi, Vicky. No, no snow yet.”
“You get my latest?”
“Nice antlers,” I say. I sit down on the bed, and then fall backward, sinking into my comforter. It feels like the most comfortable place in the entire world.
“I worked real hard on those, honey. Made ’em just for you.”
“Thanks, Vicky.”
“You okay, hon? You sound blue.”
“Holidays. You know.”
“Oh, honey, the holidays can be meaner than a skillet full
of rattlers,” she says. “Hey, what’s goin’ on with your website? I
couldn’t post. Got one of those darn error messages.”
“There haven’t been any posts in a while. Everybody forgot.”
“No way, honey. Not possible. You go on and give tech support a call. They’ll tell you what’s wrong. But trust me, no one
forgot your daddy.”
Maybe she’s right. It could just be a technical glitch. Maybe
so many people posted on the site that it just crashed. Although
that kind of thing only happens when celebrities die and people
go crazy, writing messages about how much they loved someone
they never even met.
I wonder how many hits Dirk’s website—which I was looking at around four o’clock this morning—would get if he died.
Probably more than my dad’s. If my dad had been a
film
actor
instead of an engineer, the number of hits on his memorial site
would definitely be higher.
And my mother probably wouldn’t already be interested in
someone else.
“Are you there, hon?”
“Yeah, sorry, Vicky.”
“You missin’ your pops?”
“Yeah. You miss Travis?”
“Every day. Every day. But we’ll be okay, sweetie, you just remember that. Even if it feels like you’re movin’ backward, time
is still movin’ forward and it heals all.”
I can hear people at her house in the background—someone
is making a racket with pots and pans.
“I gotta go fix my antlers and be nice to my guests. Now you
go have yourself a good Christmas with your momma, okay? And
remember that she’s missin’ your pops, too. God bless, honey.”
By the time I hang up with Vicky, I can’t get off my bed. I
lie there listening to the Christmas carols playing downstairs,
the clink of forks on dessert plates, and Peter on his phone in
his room, probably telling Amanda what idiots my mother and
I are. Dirk says something and Holly and Robert laugh, but I
don’t hear my mom. I try to picture her putting on a good face
and entertaining them all when she’s probably dying of embarrassment that neither of her kids bothered to show up for
dessert.
The mature, Christmas-y thing to do would be to go downstairs and help her—with entertaining everybody, with clearing
the table, with washing the dishes after everyone is gone.
That’s what my dad would want me to do—even if she does
have a crush on some other guy.
It’s the last thought in my head before my eyes close without
my permission.

I wake up with a start.
I forgot to call Jamie.
I grab my phone. It’s 2:00 a.m. Too late to call.
But it could be an emergency.
I’ll text. I write, Matt called Tracy. He knows it was Conrad.

I watch my phone for a minute to see if anything’s going to
happen. When it doesn’t, I tiptoe into the bathroom to brush
my teeth and get rid of the taste of Christmas-Eve-dinner-gonewrong. I’m halfway through when I hear my phone ping.

I run back into my room, toothpaste spilling out of my mouth
and down the front of my shirt.
His reply says, Not sleeping?
Not really, I write back.
Can I come over? he asks.
Here we go again.
I look at my phone just to make sure I didn’t read the time
wrong.
I didn’t. It’s 2:13.
Outside? he writes before I can reply.
Back door, I text back.
Fifteen minutes later, after trying to salvage the makeup that I
slept in and changing out of my toothpaste-stained shirt, I hear a
car park in front of the house. I lift up the window shade a crack
and see Jamie. My breath catches in my throat as I think about
the last time I saw him in the middle of the night.
No way that’s going to happen again.
I open my door and step into the hallway. I have no idea if
I can pull this off—the stairs to the first floor are right next to
my mother’s room, and I’ve never paid attention to whether or
not they creak. I start tiptoeing down, and I’m happy to discover
that these stairs are practically silent compared to the ones at
Tracy’s house.
I pause for a second to see if anyone else is up, but the house
is silent. I slip through the living room and the kitchen to the
back door, and there he is, underneath the brightest stars I’ve
ever seen, wearing his army jacket and no hat or gloves, even
though it’s twenty degrees outside. He doesn’t even look cold.
Carefully, quietly, I unlock the back door and hold it open for
him. He doesn’t move.
“I can come in?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “We just have to be quiet.”
He still doesn’t move.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t wanna get you into trouble,” he says.
“It’s fine.”
“Not if you’re having me come in the back door, it’s not.”
I shiver as the cold air pours in through the open door. “It’s
just, my mom wouldn’t like you being here.”
He jams his hands in his pockets. “That’s why you wouldn’t
let me pick you up.”
I’m puzzled for a second. The date—he’s talking about the
date.
When I see it through Jamie’s eyes, I realize this is the second
time I haven’t let him into my house in a normal way.
I’ve hurt him.
But technically, he shouldn’t even be here. He’s the one who
told me I deserve someone else.
“I didn’t let you pick me up because I didn’t know if it was a
date,” I say, forcing myself to look him straight in the eye. “And
it turns out it wasn’t.”
There’s no way he can argue with that, unfortunately for me.
Jamie looks like he has something else to say, but doesn’t say
it. He takes a careful step across the threshold, like he’s expecting an alarm to go off. I lead him through the mudroom and
into the warm kitchen.
“You’re dressed,” he says, looking at the thermal shirt I pulled
on, which doesn’t really go with the black skirt and patterned
wool tights I was wearing at dinner. For once, I couldn’t care
less. “Thought you were trying to sleep.”
“I fell asleep in my clothes for a little while.”
I take two glasses out of the cabinet and fill them with water.
When I turn to hand him his, he studies my face so carefully
that I have to look away. When Jamie stares at me like this, I can
only enjoy it for a moment before I start to feel sort of ashamed.
I wish I were prettier, for his sake. I wish that he had a beautiful
face to look at instead of mine.
I’m not one of those girls who walks around telling her friends
how ugly she is. It’s true, I don’t like mirrors, and I do know that
my closest friends are prettier than I am, but it’s not really an
obsession for me like it is for some people.
But when Jamie Forta is looking at me, I wish with every bone
in my body that I were beautiful.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” I say, conscious of the black circles
under my eyes. “I guess I can’t tonight, either.”
He puts his glass down on the counter where we’re standing
side by side without taking a sip. Our silence is punctuated by
the ticking of the clock hanging on the wall. Only the stove light
is on, and I don’t want to turn on anything bright, so I reach over
and plug in the Christmas lights that my mother strung over the
sink. The kitchen glows a little.
“Why can’t you sleep?”
I shrug. “I can’t stop thinking.”
“About?”
“Everything. Peter came home tonight. He got kicked out of
school for drugs. I sort of already knew, I guess.”
“Did your mom know?”
“I think she’s been trying not to, if that makes any sense.”
“You worried?” he asks.
“I’m mad at him,” I say, without caring how that sounds. One
of the things I love about talking to Jamie is that nothing is a big
deal, nothing freaks him out. He just stays calm and doesn’t get
worked up. It makes me feel like I can tell him anything.
Jamie looks over his shoulder at the Christmas lights above
our heads. He reaches up and adjusts the one that’s blinking on
and off, trying to get it to stop. It does.
“So, like I said, Matt knows,” I say. Jamie nods, as if to say he’s
not surprised. “Jamie, did you know what Conrad was going to
do that night?”
“He said he was gonna need help with something. But he didn’t
tell me what until we got there.”
“It looked like you tried to talk him out of it.”
Jamie smiles a little as he reaches over and brushes a strand of
hair off my face, surprising me. His fingertips barely touch my
skin but I can feel the exact path they took as if they were tracing it over and over again. “You spy on me now?”
I blush a little.
“What were you doing there?” he asks.
“Following you.”
“Why?”
“I told you—I’m worried. About you.”
He watches me with that faraway look, like he’s appraising
me from a distance. There’s a lot of silence in conversations with
Jamie. Sometimes it means he’s trying to figure out how to say
something. Other times it means he has nothing to say at all.
The only way to find out which it is, is to wait.
“I worry about
you,
” he finally says, the words awkward in his
mouth, like he’s never said them aloud before.
Jamie takes my glass of water and sets it down on the counter
next to his. Then he faces me, putting his hands on either side
of me on the counter. He’s so close I can see the gold flecks in
his hazel eyes and smell December on his jacket.
A tingling sparks low down in my stomach and my breath
gets shallow.
How does he do this? How does he get this reaction from me
within three minutes of walking in the door without even touching me? All he’s doing is just…being him.
I guess that’s my answer.
I try to speak but my mouth is dry. I swallow and try again.
“Why do you worry about me?”
“You’re sad. Not always, but a lot.”
Is he right?
At the beginning of the year, I had plans, plans to really be
somebody, to find my thing and have friends and be liked and
be sassy—Rose 2.0. I was happy about that. But it all just felt
like too much to maintain.
Tracy has The Sharp List; Stephanie is basically a one-woman
show, popular with the entire school at this point; Robert and
Holly have performing, and each other. So where does that leave
me?
Doing musicals didn’t turn out to be my thing—I’m not sure
what I’m supposed to do about singing now. I put all that work
into the website and nothing’s happening with it anymore. And
I didn’t even take the PSAT like I planned. I’m nowhere.
No. Not nowhere. Even though he’s not supposed to be here
for a whole bunch of reasons, Jamie Forta is in my kitchen in
the middle of the night, looking into my eyes and telling me he’s
worried about me because I’m sad a lot.
That’s something—that’s more than something.
“Can I ask you a question, Jamie?”
“Yeah,” he says, his eyes roaming my face and landing on my
mouth. I feel my cheeks getting hot.
“Why do you feel guilty about Mr. Deladdo, when he was
doing what he was doing?”
“Now they have nobody. Because of what I did.”
I can’t wrap my head around his logic. “Not because of what
you did—because of what
he
did.”
Jamie shrugs. I can’t tell if what I said doesn’t make sense to
him or he just doesn’t agree.
“I thought it would fix things, making him leave.”
“He’s not hurting them anymore.”
He shakes his head. “But things got worse. Regina with Anthony, all this shit with Conrad. Mrs. D. won’t leave the house.”
“She won’t leave the house? Like, at all?”
Jamie shakes his head slowly.
“What did you say to him, when you…had the gun?”
“I said I knew. And he had to go.”
“And he did?”
“He’s a chicken-shit coward, that guy.” Jamie looks down,
examining his construction boots. “I knew, for a long time. Regina made me promise not to do anything. I never shoulda listened to her.”
“How did it go on for so long?”
“Guys like that hit only where no one can see.”
“So how did you find out?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, “I saw her bruises.”
I know that I should feel sympathy for Regina, not extreme
jealousy over Jamie, but it’s so hard for me to think about him
being with her.
I lean away from him—reaching for my water even though I
couldn’t take a sip right now if someone paid me—but he doesn’t
move his arms. I’m trapped.
“Rose.”
I take a deep breath and give up on my lame diversionary tactics, meeting his eyes.
“It was a long time ago,” he says, and then he leans in and
kisses me so gently I can’t breathe.
For a moment, only his lips are touching me, and I think that
I can extract myself, that I can figure out a way to get out of this
kiss that shouldn’t be happening.
Then his arms close around me and I can’t help myself.
There’s something simultaneously great and awful about kissing a guy who can melt you in a heartbeat. It’s exciting to be powerless when he touches you, but it also sort of sucks to be a slave
to attraction. Suddenly you’re going against decisions you thought
you’d made, and doing exactly what you know you shouldn’t.
This is one of the many things about all this that I haven’t
figured out yet. Why does being attracted to someone make it
almost impossible to make smart decisions?
This kiss is different than the others. It doesn’t feel totally out
of control and reckless and on fire. It feels soft and sweet and
warm and safe.
Which makes it even more dangerous.
There’s no fanfare when Jamie slips his beautiful, warm hands
under my shirt and slides them up my ribcage. I don’t know what
I was expecting—a voiceover announcing that I was about to go
to second base for the first time? One moment his fingertips are
grazing the bottom of my bra, and the next his hands are sliding up and over the fabric.
“Okay?” he whispers against my lips, his voice seeming to
come from inside me somehow.
I nod, having lost the ability to talk as his fingers slide over
my bra and then behind my back to find the clasp. It’s happening so fast I have to brace myself on the counter so I don’t slide
to the floor.
When he unclasps my bra like it’s nothing, like he’s done it a
million times, I tense up for a second. I thought there was a whole
stage to second base that involved contact
over
clothing, before
the clothing started to come off or get unclasped or whatever.
He senses my hesitation and keeps his hands on my back, giving me time to change my mind. When I don’t, he slowly slides
them around to my front to explore my bare skin.
And suddenly I don’t care if Jamie’s unclasped a million bras
before mine. There just aren’t any words for how good it feels to
have someone you like—someone you love—touch you like this.
Love. Is this love? Do love and attraction feel like the same
thing? How do you figure out the difference?
Wait, wait, wait. That’s not the right question. The right question is, if we’re not together, why is this happening?
Why am I
letting
this happen?
“Jamie,” I whisper as he kisses my neck, his thumbs tracing
circles on my sensitive skin, making it hard for me to speak. My
head is tilted back and my eyes are closed. I can’t seem to open
them. “Why are you doing this?” I manage to say.
His hands go still, though they stay where they are. Then he
laughs a little—I feel his exhalation hot on my neck.
“Guess I’m not doing it right.”
I force myself to open my eyes and look at him. “No, it’s… It
feels… You’re so…”
I’m breathless. I can’t finish the sentence.
Jamie’s hands slide down my stomach and out from under my
shirt. He puts them back on the counter on either side of me but
doesn’t meet my eyes.
“I mean, I thought… You said… Did something change?” I ask.
“No, Rose. Nothing changed. I’m sorry—”
I put my hands on his chest to stop him. “Please don’t. It’ll make
me feel like we…shouldn’t have. I mean, I guess we shouldn’t have,
but it wasn’t
wrong.
It didn’t feel wrong, did it? It didn’t to me.”
Jamie leans forward and kisses the top of my head. “No wonder you can’t sleep,” he says into my hair.
Feeling self-conscious about how lumpy my unclasped bra
looks under my thermal shirt, I reach behind me and adjust it.
Jamie stays where he is, perfectly still against me, like he doesn’t
want to move.
Then he steps back and reaches inside his jacket, pulling out a
thick, light blue scroll tied with a red ribbon. He hands it to me.
I take it from him uncertainly. “For me?”
He nods. “Merry Christmas.”
A gift. He brought me a gift. I hold it in my hands, not wanting to open it. It’s perfect just the way it is.
“You open it like this,” he teases after a minute, pulling on
one end of the ribbon.
As the ribbon loosens, the scroll unravels, and it turns out to
be an old musical score of some kind. The cover says
Panofka:
The Art of Singing, 24 Vocalises for Soprano.
I open it, and on the inside page, in tiny, neat handwriting, is
the name Sylvie Durand. Under that is a date from twenty years
ago, with a list of notes that say things like “Mark phrasing” and
“Practice with encyclopedias” and “Internalize tempo.”
It’s a book of increasingly difficult vocal exercises, and they’ve
all been marked up with breath marks and phrasing. Someone
worked very hard on these.
I’m not a soprano, but I don’t care—it’s still a cool gift.
Jamie reaches over and flips the pages back to the inside cover
where the notes are written. “My mom was a singer, too.”
I’m looking at the name Sylvie Durand for a good ten seconds
before I catch on.