Girlfriend Material (21 page)

I tried to read, but I couldn’t focus on the words in front of me. Divorced. My parents might get divorced. Who would I live with, my mom or my dad? Before this trip, the answer would have been a no-brainer (
Hello, Dad!
), but now I wasn’t so sure. I thought of how he hadn’t called me back after our fight, how he’d been too busy to talk almost every time I’d called him from Cape Cod. Maybe my mom and sister were right. Maybe he was a little selfish.

What if they did some kind of joint-custody thing and I had to change houses every few days? Where would I keep my stuff?

Just as I was wondering if my mom would stay in our house and my dad would get an apartment, or if it would go the other way around, Jamie’s invitation to my mom rang in my ears, and I realized just how big my parents’ geographic split could potentially be.
Do you ever think about coming back East?
What if my mom decided not to move across town but across the country?

I couldn’t believe I was lying there trying to figure out what
state
I’d be living come September—this wasn’t possible. It wasn’t happening.

I needed to talk to someone. I dug my cell out of my bag to call Laura, but then stopped before I could dial her number. It wasn’t just Brad that made me not want to talk to my best friend. So much had happened since the last time we’d had a conversation—I’d have to tell her about everything: the fight my mom and I had, which meant explaining about why I’d been in such a bad mood, which meant explaining about Adam. Just thinking about getting her up to speed felt exhausting.

And then, almost without consciously deciding to call her, I dialed Meg’s number.

“Hey,” she said, picking up on the first ring. “Long time no talk.”

“Hey,” I said. “Did you know that Mom and Dad might get divorced?”

Meg took a long deep breath. “I knew Mom was really unhappy,” she said. “I knew she’d come East to try and decide what to do.”

“I knew that too,” I said. “But I didn’t
know
it. I mean, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t believe it.”

I thought Meg was going to say something about how I should have listened to Mom more carefully, but instead she laughed. “You know something, I don’t think I believed it either.”

“Really?” I was totally surprised.

“Really,” she said. “I still don’t believe it. I still hope they’re going to work things out.”

“Well, Mom said they might. She said they both want to.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Katie.” I felt a tiny bit irritated by her saying that. I mean, she didn’t
know
. Then again, maybe if I’d listened to her assessments of my parents’ marriage earlier, I wouldn’t have been the victim of a drive-by reality check in the laundry room earlier.

“I’m kind of mad at Dad,” I said. “We had a fight a couple of days ago, and at the end I was crying, and he didn’t even call me back or anything.”

I immediately regretted telling Meg. I knew she was going to say something mean about Dad.

But to my surprise she just said, “I’m really sorry, Katie. That sucks.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It does, doesn’t it?”

We talked a little more, not even about Mom and Dad, just about what I was reading and the class she was taking, and then we said good-bye.

And for the first time in as long as I could remember, after we hung up, I was glad I’d called her.

***

I read for a while, and I’d just decided to go to sleep (it was only around nine o’clock, but it wasn’t like I had anything to stay up for) when there was a knock on the door. It was spooky, actually. My mom and Tina and Henry hadn’t gotten home yet, and I didn’t think Sarah had either. What if there was some kind of serial killer on the loose? I made myself a little smaller on the bed, trying to remember if the door was locked or not. There was another knock, and I realized I didn’t even know the address of the house I was staying in. How could I call and just tell them I was in the Cooper-Melnick house somewhere by the bay?

I was so dead. “Kate? It’s me.” It was Adam. My heart started pounding even harder than it had when I’d thought I was about to be the victim of an ax murderer.

“Just a sec,” I said. Of course I looked like total crap. My hair was up in a tight ponytail, and I wasn’t exactly supermodel chic in my sweats. If life were a romantic comedy I would have had a face mask on for good measure; but as I now knew, it was not. A romantic
farce
, maybe, but not a comedy.

I opened the door. Adam looked impossibly cute in a dark blue fleece and a pair of ancient Levis with a patch on the knee.

“Hey,” he said. He was smiling our secret smile.

“Hey,” I said as casually as I could.

“How come you guys didn’t come by the Shack?” he asked, clearly assuming I’d been playing mini golf with Jenna and Sarah.

It was too complicated to explain that I didn’t know why Jenna and Sarah hadn’t come by since I hadn’t been with them, so I just said, “You know, I just wasn’t hungry.”
Because that’s the kind of cool, casual, love-it-or-leave-it kind of girl I am. Sometimes I’m hungry for lobster, sometimes I’m not.

“I wanted you to meet my brother. He came in this afternoon.” Adam looked really happy about his brother’s arrival. All I could think of was how there had been a time I’d been shocked to have kissed a guy who had a brother I didn’t know about.

If only a brother had been the one thing I hadn’t known Adam had.

We were still standing in the tiny vestibule. I was simultaneously so happy and so sad to see him—it was like he was something precious and beautiful and delicate of mine that I’d recently discovered had a huge crack running down the middle of it.

“Come with me,” he said, blissfully unaware of my thoughts.

What was I supposed to say? I mean, it wasn’t like I could claim a prior obligation. “I’m—” I gestured vaguely at what I was wearing, wishing I were in something more officially pajamay so I could plead inappropriate attire.

“Come on,” he said, pulling at my hand. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” I said. I slipped on a pair of flip-flops that were right in the entrance area, not realizing until I’d pulled the door shut behind me that they were my mom’s and, therefore, about a size too small. I could feel my heels hitting the gravel as we walked down the driveway and headed for the woods.

No doubt there was symbolic meaning to be found in this, but if so, I wasn’t in the mood to find it.

It was incredibly quiet and dark in the woods, though every once in a while bright moonlight would break through the trees and a patch of ground would be illuminated as clearly as if it were spotlit. Neither Adam nor I spoke, leaving the vaguely creepy silence intact. I thought of this line from a poem we’d had to memorize freshman year. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” It was a perfect description, and I thought I remembered our teacher saying the author was from New England somewhere. I wondered if he’d been talking about woods in Massachusetts, woods like the ones I was in right now. Adam led me down the lane that went from the driveway out to Route 6. But instead of going left, the way I’d always gone, we went right. A couple of hundred yards after we turned, he turned again, this time onto a tiny narrow path.

“Stay close,” he said. “There’s poison ivy.”

I could barely make out his shadow even though he was only about two feet in front of me; but within just a few steps, it started getting lighter. Less than a minute after his warning about the poison ivy, we were standing in a little clearing. I took my eyes off Adam’s back and realized we were by the side of a large pond.

“Oh wow,” I said. The full moon was reflected in the surface of the perfectly still water. Looking up I saw the sky, impossibly busy with stars made pale by the brightness of the moon’s light.

“I know,” said Adam. “It’s amazing, right? This is my favorite spot on Cape Cod.”

I could see why. After the impossible immensity of the Atlantic Ocean and the dreamy beauty of the bay, the pond was intimate and safe. It reminded me a little of places I’d come upon hiking in the mountains around Salt Lake City. Though we were at sea level, this could have been a mountain pond. Suddenly I felt a wave of homesickness. When I realized that the home I was missing might never be what it had been, I felt dizzy with sadness.

Adam pulled me in front of him and put his arms around my waist. He nestled his chin on my head. “My house is right over there,” he said, pointing across the lake. “If it were day you could see it.”

“Really?” I said.

“Well, if it were day and there weren’t any trees.” He thought for a second. “And you had a telescope.” He laughed. “And X-ray vision.”

This is so romantic, I thought. This is the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.

“If it weren’t freezing, I’d say we should go skinny-dipping,” he said. “As it is, I’m way too much of a wimp.”

He turned me around gently, and we started kissing. It felt so great to be kissing Adam. Who cared about my parents’ marriage? Who cared that I was never going to be Adam’s girlfriend?

But then he slid his hands up my back and hugged me close to him, and instead of feeling great, I felt like I was going to start bawling.

Apparently this good-time girl wasn’t having such a good time.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling away. “I can’t do this.”

Adam had his hands in my hair, so our heads were still really close together. “Can’t do what?” he whispered.

I didn’t say anything for a second, just put my hands on his wrists and pulled them out of my hair. “This,” I said. “I want us to stop … hanging out.”

“Oh,” he said. Then he said it again. “Oh.” He took a step back from me. “Did I do something?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I just … think … I mean, I
don’t
think …”

He didn’t wait for me to finish my sentence. “Why?” he asked.

What was I supposed to say?
Because I’m not as cool as you think I am. Because I really, really like you and I can’t spend one more second pretending not to care that even if you like me too, you also like somebody else. Because I just had some really bad news about my family and I don’t want to kiss somebody if I can’t tell him about it.

Did the sad fact that I couldn’t manage to act like Lady Brett Ashley mean I had to be her polar opposite: Lady Kate Loser?

“No reason,” I said. I hoped my voice didn’t betray the fact that I was about ten seconds away from crying.

He didn’t say anything for a minute, and I took a couple of quiet deep breaths. If this went on much longer, I was definitely going to lose it. Finally he looked up at the sky and gave a little laugh. “Not having fun anymore, hunh?”

“Right,” I said, nearly choking on the word.

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” he said.

Please, argue with it.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll take you home,” he said. I followed him back the way we’d come. The walk to the house felt much shorter than the walk to the pond had. Neither of us spoke this time either, though it was a very different silence from our earlier one.

The trees thinned and then we were walking up Tina and Henry’s driveway. An outdoor light was on next to the main house, and the lamp I’d been reading with cast a glow through the glass doors of the guesthouse.

“Here you are, safe and sound,” he said. Despite the lights and the moon, it was too dark to see his face clearly.

“Thanks,” I said. “I—” What was I going to say,
I had fun tonight
?

Um, not.

But he was already walking purposefully toward his car, about as upset about our “breakup” as he would have been by a badly cooked lobster. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” I said. I’d been going for breezy, but my throat was a little too tight for that.

I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING
to the sound of the shower running. I felt about as low as I had all summer. I thought about my parents. I thought about Adam. I missed him already. Less than twelve hours had passed since I’d told him things with us were over, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day without seeing him. Not to mention how, if and when I did see him, I wasn’t going to
see
him. We’d just say
Hello
or
What’s up
and go our separate ways. Maybe I hadn’t been his girlfriend before last night, but at least I’d been his … something. Being Adam’s nothing felt way worse than being his something had.

My mom came out of the bathroom in her robe, her hair wrapped in a towel.

“Morning,” she said. “Did you sleep well?”

“I guess,” I said. “Did you have a good night?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said. Then she looked at me a little more closely. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, not trusting myself to talk. My mom came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Is this about me and your dad?” she asked.

“Kind of,” I said. “And Adam.” I told her about breaking up with him last night. If you could even call it a breakup, what with our never having been officially going out.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. She just sat there for a minute stroking my hair. Then she said, “You know what I think? I think you really like this boy. And I think you shouldn’t worry so much about what’s going on with that other girl. He obviously likes you a lot. Why don’t you tell him how you feel? Maybe he’ll surprise you.”