How to Build a House (10 page)

“Harper, hey, I’m sorry I said that thing about wanting to be alone with you. Maybe that sounded creepy. I don’t know.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I didn’t mean to make any assumptions. Really, I didn’t. Let’s just watch some fireworks. From wherever suits you best.”

I unbuckle my seat belt. I hear an explosion. At first I think it’s coming from inside me, but it’s not. It’s in the distance. The fireworks are starting.

I slide closer to Teddy. I turn to him.

I put my hands on his shoulders. I slide them onto his bony chest.

He takes my face in his hands. He reaches back for my hair.

We collide.

HOME

One Saturday night in January, Tess invited me to sleep over at Avi’s. Rose was still home from school.

One thing I’d learned about college from watching Rose go away was that you have vacations that never end. The other thing I learned was that when you go away to school, you get to start your own life, and whatever happens back at home is something that’s happening to other people.

Rose seemed unfazed by the divorce. She shrugged in her typical Rose way and tossed her long dark hair to the side and said something about it being the inevitable outcome of any relationship confined by the draconian societal construct known as marriage.

“It’s a prison,” she said. “Eventually, the smart ones figure out how to escape.”

We were sitting on the beach drinking lattes, still in our pajamas. Avi and his girlfriend, Lynn, who lived together now, had an early tennis game. It was sunny and clear and hot, too hot for a January morning. But in this new world, heat in January is a way of life.

I looked out at the ocean and the sand; I turned around and looked at Avi’s condo complex and the hundreds like it up and down the coast as far as my eyes could see. I imagined it all gone, underwater, swallowed up by the rising oceans.

There was nowhere, no place, nothing, that felt safe anymore.

“Anyway, they’ll be fine. It’s probably better this way. They’ll move on, find new lovers, have new experiences. Live their lives.”

Rose seemed to have aged ten years in the five months since I’d seen her.

In high school she’d been a romantic. She pined over this gorgeous boy with dark hair, olive skin and a necklace made of white seashells who surfed and played the drums. I used to watch her get ready to go out to parties where his band, Sex Wax, would perform. Fruity-smelling skin lotions. Carefully applied eye shadow in earthy tones. Outfits assembled to appear as if they’d been thrown together.

The only thing she wanted was to be his girlfriend. For him to love her. She was never able to look at anybody else.

Then she went to college. She dated somebody her freshman year, but ever since then she’d been having only casual relationships and lots and lots of sex. She liked to talk about the liberating world of sexual encounters unadorned by any effort to define them.

I still couldn’t bring myself to tell either of them that I’d been having sex with Gabriel off and on since October, encounters unadorned by any effort to define them, and that it was anything but liberating.

I didn’t understand. There was Sarah Denton. There was me. Who was I to Gabriel? Were we still friends? Who was I to anyone? What had happened to all the relationships in my life that mattered?

“Tell me, Harper,” Rose said. “How’s Art these days?”

I looked quickly at Tess. I couldn’t help it. It was our tacit agreement never to talk about Dad. I wasn’t sure why I’d allowed this in the first place, but it had become a part of our new relationship.

Tess stood up and said, “I’m going in for more coffee. Anyone?”

We shook our heads.

“He’s okay, I guess,” I said to Rose. “He’s goofier around Cole. Always trying to come up with some crazy activity for the two of them to do together when it’s Cole’s time at the house. Trying to be the cool dad. Other than that he’s just seeing patients, cooking barely edible meals and pestering me about my homework.”

“And his love life?”

I buried my hands in the sand until they disappeared.

“I don’t know. I don’t really ask. If I had to guess I’d say nonexistent.”

“You sure about that?”

“No, I just said I don’t know. That I don’t ask. Anyway, I don’t see when he’d have the time.”

“Oh, there’s always time.”

I suddenly found her college-girl wisdom intolerable and infuriating. But at the same time, I envied the distance from which she was able to view everything.

I wanted to go away. I wanted my own fresh start. My own new world where the things from home seemed smaller, like they do from an airplane window.

It would be a year and a half until I could go away to college.

But there was the summer, I thought. I’d find somewhere to go in the summer.

HERE

When I get back to my room after being in Teddy’s truck, Marisol is propped up in bed reading a magazine.

“So, how were the fireworks?” she asks.

“You saw them, didn’t you?”

“Yes,
I
saw them. But the question is, did
you
?”

I smile. “Sort of.”

The truth is, when I realized we were missing them I muttered something about that in between kisses, and then Teddy whispered, “Come here.”

He turned his body so that he was leaning against the driver’s-side door, and he stretched his leg out along the bench of the truck, and he pulled me to him so that I was leaning with my back against his chest. He covered my eyes.

“Just listen to them,” he said softly in my ear. “We’re not missing them at all. Fireworks have a sound that gets lost when you watch them. Just listen to the percussion. The radical rhythms. Pop-pop-poppity-pop-pop-pop. It’s music.”

And then he took my hair and moved it off my neck and began kissing me there and I listened to the faraway explosions.

“C’mon, Harper, don’t make me sound like your mother, don’t make me say something like ‘Where have you been, young lady?’” Marisol says.

For a minute I freeze up inside, but then I take a breath and it melts away. Not even the mention of mothers can ruin the allover body buzz I have right now from being with Teddy.

I sit down on my bed and kick off my flip-flops.

“Okay, okay. I was with Teddy.”

She jumps up. “Don’t. Say. Another. Word. Not one more.”

She slowly opens our door and peers outside.

“I’m pretty sure the coast is clear,” I say.

Linus just finished making the rounds. I caught him at the end and said, “Sorry I’m late getting back.”

“Do you have a good excuse?”

When I stammered, he smiled and said, “I can see that you do. Happy Fourth of July.” Then he headed toward his room.

We sneak into the hallway and tiptoe down a few doors to Frances’s. Marisol taps three times.

“Yeah?” comes a quiet, almost squeaky voice.

“It’s us.”

The door opens and there’s Captain.

“Whew. Frances is in the bathroom and I didn’t know what to do.”

“I totally bought you as a girl,” says Marisol. “I’ll double-check with Frances later, but by the sounds of things, you seem to have no balls.”

He lets us inside. Frances’s roommate, Liz, is gone. She’s best friends with the Chicago Sisters and doesn’t seem to mind crashing in their room from time to time so that Frances and Captain can have some privacy.

Frances comes out of the bathroom wearing a T-shirt of Captain’s.

“What’s the word?”

“Ask Harper,” Marisol says.

I’m not so sure I’m up for this. I know they’re just being friends, and friends want details, but I don’t want to look like a total fool for sounding all romantic about my night with Teddy when tomorrow he’ll ignore me and they’ll all be around to watch it happen.

“What’s the word, Harper?” asks Frances.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” says Captain. “And I can prove it. Exhibit A: You were nowhere to be seen during the fireworks. Exhibit B: You have this look of happiness on your normally surly face. Exhibit C: You’re here in Frances’s room after lights-out, standing in the way of me getting laid. That adds up to something. So sit down and spill.”

I do. I sit down and I tell them all about my magical night of listening to the fireworks with Teddy. And then I say that tomorrow it’ll all be over.

“What makes you say that?” asks Marisol.

“I know certain truths about life.”

“Whatever that means,” says Captain. “Listen, I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’m a guy, and I know certain truths too, and I know Teddy’s into you. Don’t forget about the pie. Guys don’t bring pies to girls they aren’t into. In fact, guys don’t bring pies to girls, like, ever. That’s kind of a sissified thing to do, but I’ll let it slide ’cause I think Teddy’s cool. Now, can you two get out of here so I can be alone with my hot girlfriend?”

He kisses each of us on the cheek, and so does Frances, and we say goodnight to them and tiptoe back to our room, where I go to bed and dream of invisible fireworks in an endless night sky.

When I wake up I don’t remember where I am.

The room has changed shape. The bathroom entrance is on the wrong wall and my bed is facing the opposite direction. The curtains aren’t right. It’s too dark. The smell is off.

I sit up and shake my head, and slowly the room falls into place. Everything shifts around like pieces of an oversized jigsaw puzzle.

This isn’t my room at home; it’s my motel room in Tennessee. The breathing I hear coming from the other bed is Marisol. It isn’t Tess.

This is now. Today.

I settle back into bed and pull up the covers. I don’t want to get up.

Not just yet.

I want to remember last night and kissing Teddy. I want to hang on to these precious minutes before the day begins and I see him again and all the confusion takes hold.

We sat in his truck and he pulled me close. My face. My neck. My hair.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been touched like that since the last time I was with Gabriel, and that was five months ago.

Or maybe it’s been never.

HOME

It was early February. Sarah Denton was on the outs. I don’t know why, because Gabriel and I never talked about Sarah Denton, I just know that there was a party at her house and he didn’t want to go. We went to a movie instead. And then back to my house.

Dad was out. It was Cole’s weekend at Jane’s.

Afterward we threw our clothes on and went down into the kitchen and ate pistachio ice cream. The cold stole the flush from my cheeks.

It was easy to see why Sarah Denton and all the other girls like Sarah Denton were drawn to Gabriel. He’d grown handsome. And sure of himself. He had a way of smiling and saying something playful, and with that look and those playful words he could make any awkwardness vanish.

Sometimes it was hard for me to remember the younger version of Gabriel—my friend from Mr. Ratner’s math class, the movie geek with the ridiculous good-luck dance, who used to love comic-book heroes and dreamed of discovering he too had powers. Gabriel the Great, bigger and better and somehow more special than his average twelve-year-old self.

But he had finally developed a power, or at least a power over me. He had the ability to make it seem as if everything were normal. He made it seem as if there were no questions to be asked about the nature of our relationship. We were friends. Sometimes we had sex. No big deal.

I might think about asking him as we were lying there just after:
What is this? Who am I to you? Do you even want me? Could I be just anybody?

But then he’d deliver a big smile. An inside joke. Maybe a friendly shove. His way of saying:
See, what’s so weird about any of this?
And then I’d think maybe he was right. Maybe none of those questions mattered.

In my kitchen, with the pistachio ice cream on the counter between us, I remember we talked about colleges. He was going on a trip with his father over spring break. Up and down the East Coast for interviews and tours. He wanted to go somewhere not too far outside a city. He wondered if when it came time to pack up and make the move, his car would survive the cross-country trip.

There was nothing confusing, it was just talk.

It was simple.

And it was one of the last conversations we ever had.

HERE

Teddy is late to work.

This isn’t like him. He’s usually here before we arrive, but today there’s no sign of him.

Of course I assume the worst. He’s avoiding me.

So when I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to find myself staring into a small bouquet of wildflowers, their stems wrapped in tinfoil, I’m so shocked I jump back, like a hornet might be hiding in there. I guess another word for what I do is
recoil
, which is not really what you want to do when the boy you’re hot for hands you flowers.

I take them.

“Hey there,” he says. He digs his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts and rolls back on this heels.

“Hey there yourself,” I say, and immediately wish I’d said something smarter. “You’re late.”

“I am.”

We stare at each other. A saw grinds away in the distance.