How to Love (5 page)

“Yeah,” I interrupted. She wasn’t listening to me. “I know. That’s my point.”

“Well, where does that leave me?” Allie asked, huffing a little. “
They’re
my friends, too, Reena. I like them. They’re not, like, bad, shady people. They’re nice.”

“I never said they weren’t nice,” I argued. “I never even said they’re the reason you totally dropped off the face of the earth this whole summer, which—”

“I told you I’m sorry!” Her voice rose a little, almost whining. “If you could quit making it so hard for me to include you—”

“Maybe I don’t want to be included in this stuff, Al! I hate this stuff! I just want to do normal stuff, like always—”

“Card games and
Bringing Up Baby
?” Allie frowned. The air was swampy out here, oppressive. I wanted to hop on my bike and speed away. “Is that what you want to do, really? Is that still fun to you? Come on, Reena,” she prodded when I didn’t answer. “People like you. They all just think
you
don’t like
them
.”

“I mean,” I said. “I
don’t
like them, generally.”

“You don’t even know them!” she exploded, then, nastily: “You like
Sawyer
.”

And
that
—God. That stung.

“Okay.” I stood up then, wiped my clammy palms on the rain-wet backside of my jeans, because nope,
nope
, we were not going to have that conversation, not now—not when I was already feeling weird and lonely and homesick, embarrassed by everything I wanted and didn’t have. I glanced up at the row of palm trees at the property line, trying to keep it together. Suddenly even the backyard felt sinister, familiar places gone threatening and strange in the dark. “You want to win this fight, Al, you can win this fight, that’s cool. I’ll see you.”

“You’re right,” she said immediately, getting up and following me across the lawn. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be bitchy.”

“Oh, really?” I stopped and stared at her, hands on my hips. I wanted to hit rewind on this night and on this summer, for this bizarre alternate universe to bend over on itself again and for everything to go back to the way it was supposed to be.
Ever wish you were eight years old?

“No!” she exclaimed. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you. Jesus! I miss you! I want to talk to you about stuff.”

“Really,” I repeated coldly, and Allie rolled her eyes. “Like what, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, almost helpless, skinny hands fluttering in front of her like dragonflies. “You know
what I mean. He’s … I don’t know. He’s not what we thought he was.”

“He’s a vampire?” I deadpanned.

That made her mad. “Okay,” Allie said angrily. “
You
want to win this fight, Reena? You can win it. You can ice me out. But I’m just trying to be honest with you. I know you think I’m this horrible person, and I know you think I did this horrible thing, like I
stole
him from you or something—”

“I never said that—”

“But I did you a favor. If you can’t handle coming to my house and playing flip cup with Lauren Werner, you definitely couldn’t handle having sex with Sawyer LeGrande.”

I reeled for a second. I stood there. I thought, very clearly, of the word
devastated
.

“Look, Reena.” As soon as it was out there Allie knew she’d crossed some boundary, some line of demarcation so clearly marked that once she’d breached it our lives would always be divided into when we were little kids and when we weren’t, neatly bisected into the then and the now. I looked at her for one more moment, and then I turned around. Thunder rumbled over my head, loud and ominous, a storm about to break.

“
Reena
,” Allie called behind me, more forcefully this time, but by then I was already gone.

One thing about living in South Florida is that everywhere you go is violently air-conditioned, the tabernacle included. It’s sixty-five degrees inside Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal when we walk into church on Sunday, has been since God invented HVAC. Forever and ever, amen.

We’re church families, the LeGrandes and us: christenings and confirmations, spaghetti dinners and Sunday school. My father and Soledad were married in this building. In middle school I used to stop in to light candles for my mom. Even at my most miserable and lonely and pregnant I sat right behind Sawyer’s parents every weekend in the seventh pew on the right, and though I think that at this point his family and mine love and hate each other with
equal intensity, the Profession of Faith is just one more thing we’ve always done together, world without end.

Today I’ve barely gotten Hannah’s sausage-link arms into the sweater Soledad finished just this week when Sawyer sidles in flanked by Roger and Lydia, his hands shoved deep into his dark jeans and sunglasses hanging from the
V
of his button-down. Everyone, even Sawyer, wears a collared shirt to church.

“Hey, everybody,” he whispers, as they slide into the row in front of us. My father ignores him. My brother only glares. His wife, Stefanie, is gaping a little in a way that makes me want to smack her across her round, curious face:
Yes, Stef, he’s good-looking. Yes, Stef, he’s back.

Jesus Christ, everybody. Pull it together.

Soledad is apparently the only member of my family with a modicum of grace, not that this comes as any kind of revelation. “Hi, Sawyer,” she says to him, voice tempered as always by traces of a childhood spent in Cuba. Beside him, his mother is glowing, radiating light, and why shouldn’t she be? Just like the story promised, her prodigal returned. “It’s good to see you.”

He kisses Soledad’s cheek before he turns to look at Hannah, and for nearly a full minute they stare at each other, silent. There is a moment when I do not breathe. Sawyer has always been full of nervous habits, perpetually tapping his fingers or rubbing hard at a muscle at his neck—it’s part of what makes girls fall in love with him—but now he goes still as winter, like the blood has dried up in his veins.

Lydia clears her throat. Hannah fidgets. Sawyer looks at me like I’ve broken his beating heart.

“Nice work,” is all he says, and I laugh.

Back when we were together I used to spend my Sunday mornings in church poking Sawyer in the back, waiting until no one was looking and quietly snapping the elastic on the boxers peeking out the rear of his pants. He’d reach behind and grab my hand, the two of us thumb wrestling until Soledad or Lydia noticed and elbowed one or both of us in the side. “Pay attention,” they’d hiss, and then turn back to the priest and pretty much leave us to our own devices.

We were sweethearts. It’s a thing that happened. It’s over now. It’s fine.

Halfway through the psalm and Hannah’s wriggles turn to whimpers; her body is thermal and heavy in my arms. She’s crabby, is all. She didn’t sleep well last night—neither of us slept very well last night, if you want to know the truth—but in this second it feels like she’s on to me, all terrifying toddler intuition. In this second it feels like she knows.

I scoop her up and head for the aisle, because in another second we’re both going to lose it, right in the middle of a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:
Behold, I tell you a mystery.
We burst through the doors at the back, straight into a blinding shock of light.

“I never liked Paul much anyway,” I tell Hannah once we’re hidden away in the courtyard outside the church, a
flagstone patio peopled by half a dozen life-size statues of angels and saints, like some kind of weird religious cocktail party hosted by the apostle Bartholomew. I set Hannah on her feet and let her walk. Summer in Broward County is brutal and haunted, all palm trees and the green tangle of sea grapes wound around the grotto on the lawn. Hannah grabs at a cluster of Spanish moss with her pudgy starfish hands. “Oh, boy,” I say. “Whatcha got over there, chick?”

“Oh, boy,” she repeats, and I grin. Hannah’s a hugely beautiful kid, dark-haired and sloe-eyed, even taking into account the fact that I grew her inside my body and therefore might possibly be a little prejudiced. Strangers stop and say she’s beautiful all the time. “Oh,
boy
!”

I sit down on a wooden bench to watch her. A taciturn Virgin Mary holds court on top of a dried-up fountain at the edge of the patio, a missing chunk of plaster where her veil should meet her dress. I think of my own mom, whom I hardly remember—just a waterfall of dark hair and the faint smell of lavender—and wonder if she’d have any secrets to share. I run my thumb over the jagged edge of stone, waiting. Soledad prays to Mary for virtually everything and swears that Mary answers every time, but if either this mother or mine have any advice to dispense, at the moment they are holding their tongues.

“Fat lot of help you are,” I tell them, and jump up to catch my kid before she falls.

I had no friends in tenth grade.

Okay, that’s dramatic. I had friends. I didn’t eat lunch alone on a toilet seat or anything. Mostly, I just didn’t eat lunch. I went to the library. I hung out on the bleachers and read. When I did go to the cafeteria, I sat with Shelby, the new hostess at the restaurant. Shelby was a junior; she’d just moved from Tucson with her mom and her twin brother, Aaron, although he’d only needed about two days in the pestilent swamp of South Florida to decide there was absolutely no way he could ever live here. He’d fled to New Hampshire to live with their dad before school had even started. Shelby had hair like a flaming neon carrot and a
mouth like a merchant marine; she wore tiny silver hoops all up the side of her left ear and was dating the captain of the girls’ soccer team. I’d automatically assumed she thought I was too boring to breathe air until the day she plopped her tray right next to mine and demanded to know what was up with the food in this godforsaken place like maybe we’d been friends all our lives.

“It sucks,” I told her, blinking in grateful surprise. “That’s … basically what’s up.”

Shelby grinned, handed me half the Kit Kat she was unwrapping. “Looks that way.”

She was giving me a ride to work one afternoon, nineties girl rock blaring from the speakers in her decrepit Volvo wagon as she pulled out of the parking lot, when she snorted and gestured out the windshield with her chin. “Is that the bartender?” she asked, squinting a little. “From the restaurant?”

I followed her gaze to the side of the building, half hidden by a row of dry, browning shrubs: In the shadow cast by the overhang above the side door of the gym, Allie and Sawyer were pressed against the concrete, his palm sliding steadily up her skirt.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. For a second it felt hard to breathe, like there was something unfamiliar taking up space in my chest beside my heart and lungs. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“People gettin’ at it in broad daylight,” Shelby said
brightly, pulling out into traffic. “That’s how you know the terrorists haven’t won.” Then she looked at me, her pale eyebrows knitting together. “What?” she asked. “Shit, sorry. Are you one of those people who’s really sensitive about terrorist jokes?”

That made me laugh. “I’m not particularly sensitive about anything,” I lied, glancing out the window for another half a second before tilting my head up to stare at the fat, heavy clouds.

*

The year ground on in that way—Halloween, Thanksgiving. I finally got my learner’s permit. I spent a whole lot of time with my journal. Soledad watched me carefully, cataloging the narrowing parameters of my teenage life like an anthropologist conducting a field study:
school, work, home. Rinse, repeat.
I didn’t tell her about Allie and Sawyer—never told her about Allie and
me
—but that didn’t stop her from knowing. “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked me once, Saturday night and three episodes into a
Bridezillas
marathon on cable.

I shrugged like I didn’t have the slightest idea what she meant. “Talk about what?” I wondered blandly.

Soledad rolled her eyes.

*

I called Allie once, for the record. She didn’t pick up, and I didn’t leave a message.

Also for the record: She didn’t call me back.

The answer, I always thought, was to get out of town. I’d always liked to read about foreign places—I’d been getting
National Geographic
since I was ten—but that winter I was absolutely insatiable, camped out on my bed surrounded by travel books from the library, their cellophane jackets sticky with dust. I plotted. I made lists. I stayed up all night clicking through blog after blog, stories and pictures of women who spent years in Morocco and Tanzania and the South of France—then mapped my own itinerary, tracing my route with a silver Sharpie like some kind of imaginary Silk Road.

I wanted so, so badly to leave.

“Where you going tonight?” my father asked me one evening, hovering in the doorway of my bedroom, tonic and lime in his hand. He’d been playing the piano downstairs, and somewhere in my head I’d dimly registered the quiet, the way you notice the dishwasher kicking off.

“Chicago,” I told him cheerfully, looking up from the pictures of Oak Park on my laptop. He’d had a heart attack a couple of years before, my father, collapsing in the parking lot outside my eighth-grade graduation; I tried to be cheerful with him whenever I could. “Or possibly Copenhagen.”

“Chicago’s a pretty good music town,” he told me, nodding like he was thinking about it, like it was a place I might actually be headed. “You might want to lay over in the kitchen first, though. Soledad’s making pesto.”

I smiled and closed my computer, rolled myself off the bed. “Be right there.”

*

One morning that spring I got a note in homeroom saying I needed to go to Guidance by the end of the day, which left me feeling startled and uneasy. I’d never been called to the office before. I wondered if I was in trouble for something I didn’t know I’d done, or if some well-meaning Samaritan had expressed concern about my ability to cope with the tyranny of high school in general. “We’ve noticed you’re socially inept,” I pictured the counselor saying, her jowly face tilted to the side to show how well she was listening. “You stare out the window constantly. You’re obsessive, and you spend too much time in your own brain.”