Just You (22 page)

“Well, it happened, and I’ve been regretting
it ever since. It was a mistake, okay? It didn’t mean
anything.”

I looked away, out the window, toward the
choppy water in the distance. “It didn’t mean anything to you,” I
said, “but it obviously meant something to her. She doesn’t care
that you don’t want her, Michael. She doesn’t even care that you
have a girlfriend. She’s just waiting for the day when I’m not
there so she can move in and take you away from me.”

“She’ll never take me away from you.” He
gripped the steering wheel hard, like he was suppressing the urge
to touch me, scared of how I might react. “No one will.”

I didn’t answer because I wasn’t quite ready
to believe that. Maybe I never would.

“Did you think I cheated on you with Elena?”
he asked. Something in his voice made me look up, and I could see
the hurt in his features. “You really think I’d do that to
you?”

“I…” My throat closed over, and two seconds
later I was doing something I swore I’d never do—I was crying in
front of a boy. Letting him in.

Michael wrapped his arms around me and I
sobbed into his shoulder, sobbed until my throat ached and my eyes
swelled and his leather jacket felt slippery under my cheek. “I
should have told you about Elena,” he said, rubbing circles into my
back. “I guess I didn’t want you to know what an ass I was to
her.”

I pulled away, dabbing at his jacket with my
sleeve. “We all have our ass moments,” I said. He smiled slightly,
and I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Will you promise me
something?”

“Anything.”

“Don’t keep things from me. I want to know
things, and not just stuff about your past. I want to know about
what’s going on with your father and Josh and college and your
plans. Full disclosure, okay? You never have to pretend to be
perfect around me.”

He reached up to clear away the tears I’d
missed. “It’s a deal, but only if you promise
me
something.”

“What?”

“Stop expecting me to disappoint you. I get
enough of that already from my dad.”

“I promise.”

“Then I promise too”

“Let’s shake on it,” I suggested, and then
kissed him instead.

****

When I got to Dad and Lynn’s house on Friday
evening, the door was locked. I’d forgotten my key, so I sat on the
steps to wait for Leanne and Jamie. I figured they must have gone
to the store. Or maybe, I thought, they decided to go stay with a
relative for the weekend and forgot to tell me. But no, Leanne and
I had this weekend all planned out. She’d called me during the week
to discuss things like what food to get, little details like that,
and I’d been pleasantly shocked at how fun and funny my stepsister
could be when she opened up. We weren’t exactly close yet, but we
were starting to become friends. At last.

I’d been sitting there about fifteen minutes
when the minivan pulled into the driveway. The side door slid open
and Jamie jumped out. “Xbox!” he yelled, and raced toward the
house, grabbing the keys from his sister’s outstretched hand on the
way. Leanne got out of the driver’s seat and circled toward the
back, where she proceeded to unload about a dozen bags of
groceries. I went over to help her.

“Mom left me a hundred dollars for food,”
she said as I fell in beside her. “So I stocked up on munchies. Oh,
and some milk and bread and stuff too.”

I held up a bag stuffed full with three
two-liter bottles of Coke. “Sure you got enough sugar and trans
fats?”

“Don’t forget salt.” She showed me the jumbo
bag of Cheetos she’d bought.

Together, we hauled the groceries into the
house. Once everything was put away, we started preparation on
tonight’s dinner—tacos. Jamie’s choice.

“Did your mom have any problem with you
being over here without your dad around?” Leanne asked me as she
dug out the big frying pan.

“She let me go with just a warning to
behave. Luckily Emma has that art show this weekend,” I said,
hunting through the fridge for a tomato. “Are you sure Jamie won’t
tell? About Michael being here, I mean?”

She dumped a pound of ground beef into the
pan and shook her head. “Jamie’s no tattletale. Besides, I promised
him he could play his new video game until nine if he kept quiet
about it.”

For the next few minutes we worked together
on dinner. With a common goal to bond over, it became easier to
relax around each other. After a while, I even felt comfortable
enough to go beyond small talk and ask her some questions. Even
though we’d been periodically living under the same roof for the
past three years, we still barely knew each other.

“Did you have fun skiing a few weeks ago?” I
asked as we stood side-by-side at the counter, chopping veggies. “I
had no idea you skied. You’re a lot braver than me.”

“Skiing?” She handed me the cheese grater,
her face scrunched in confusion. “Oh, skiing. Right. It wasn’t
exactly a pleasure trip. This therapy group I go to? Every once in
a while they make us do something totally out of our comfort zone.
Last fall it was camping out in the wilderness. I’d take skiing
over that any day.”

Again, I had to contain my shock. Therapy
group?

“It was the camping trip that really got to
me,” she said, her eyes on the lettuce she was shredding. “When
you’re out there with nothing, no comforts, no family, you sort of
have to learn to trust the people around you. And yourself too. You
know?”

My mind flashed on that day last fall when
she had come into my room, all cleaned up and surprisingly
friendly. Right after she’d been gone for a few days, supposedly
with “friends”. I guess I’d never thought enough about my
stepsister to recognize what was really going on. But I got it now.
She’d had to deal with the fallout of Dad and Lynn’s affair too.
She’d been hurt and betrayed too. And her childhood had been far
more dysfunctional than mine.

“When you came back,” I said, a rush of
boldness coming over me, “you were different.”

Her lips turned up in a faint smile. “Yeah,”
she said. “I was. Perspective is a funny thing.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I nodded
anyway. “It sure is.”

She gave me a long look, as if something
about me had surprised her. It must have been a welcome surprise,
because she smiled at me full-on. It totally transformed her face.
“We should probably get these shells in the oven. Want to go get
Jamie?”

After dinner, Leanne helped me clean up and
then left for her concert. While I waited for Michael to arrive I
took Leo out for a run around the backyard. Ten minutes later, when
he was satisfied he had peed on every tree and every shrub in the
yard, we went back inside for a drink.

I was standing at sink, filling his water
bowl, when a pair of arms suddenly grabbed my waist from behind. I
jumped in surprise, causing the water to slosh onto the counter and
floor. I whirled around to see Michael’s smiling face. “Sorry I’m
late,” he said after kissing me hello.

My heart raced in my chest. “What are you
trying to do, send me into cardiac arrest?”

“Jamie let me in,” he said, ripping off some
paper towel to help me clean up the puddles. “I couldn’t resist
sneaking up on you.”

Leo started whining from the laundry room.
Obviously he’d caught sight of Michael, who he had grown to adore.
The feeling was mutual; Michael could never resist Leo’s plaintive
squeaks and grunts for attention. As I disposed of the wet towels,
Michael leaned over the gate to give the dog a scratch under his
ears, a move guaranteed to invoke a drooly doggy grin.

“Why are you late?” I asked, glancing at the
clock. It was twenty minutes past when he said he’d be here.

“Had some stuff to do at home.”

Now that I had slowed down enough to focus,
I noticed he looked tired, distracted. “Everything okay?”

He forced a smile. “Fine.”

“Let’s go in my room and talk for a while.
Jamie’s probably back to blowing up aliens or robots or whatever
those things are.”

“Later,” he said, steering me out of the
kitchen. “Don’t worry about me.”

We watched a movie in the living room and
then popped some popcorn for Jamie, but it was evident the whole
time that Michael’s heart wasn’t really in it. At ten, Jamie went
to bed and Michael and I shut ourselves up in my room, alone at
last. I locked the door behind us and settled in beside him on the
bed, my head on his shoulder. As he slid his arms around me, the
tension in his body was palpable.

“What’s going on at home?” I asked, running
my fingers over the collar of his shirt.

“Fight with my dad.”

When he said that, I knew immediately what
was wrong. This past Wednesday, Michael had gotten acceptance
letters from both Kinsley and Avery. As of last night he’d been
planning on talking to his father about going to Kinsley, at least
for this year, and maybe getting a job too. He wanted to be near
me, sure, but that wasn’t all. Kinsley was what
he
wanted. I
tried to be noncommittal about it, although the possibility of his
staying here thrilled me. But Michael had predicted his father’s
reaction, and it looked like he was right.

“What happened?”

“The usual,” he said with a hopelessness
that made my heart ache. “I’m so tired of fighting with him. Tired
of trying to be everything Josh isn’t. Tired of all of it.”

I shifted closer to him, pressing my
forehead into the space between his shoulder and neck. “So it
didn’t go well,” I said, my tone giving away my disappointment.

For what felt like forever, Michael just
stared up at the ceiling, one hand resting on his chest as the
other hand traced patterns on my upper back. “I’m going to Avery in
the fall,” he finally said.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to leave you.” He seemed
desperate for me to understand this. “But I have to get out of my
house.”

I silenced him with my eyes. “I know. You
don’t have to explain.”

He held my gaze for a moment, memorizing my
features as if he had to leave me in five minutes instead of in
five months. “Nothing’s going to change,” he said, his dark eyes
almost black in the muted light. “Right?”

“Right,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. How
could things
not
change with him at Avery for months at a
time and me stuck back here?

My breath caught as he touched my cheek and
then lowered his face to mine. Our kissing felt tinged with
urgency, as if someone had pushed a button somewhere, starting a
countdown of what little time we had left. We both knew the next
five months would fly by even quicker than the first.

Later, as we lay nestled in my bed,
Michael’s chest flush against my back, it got so quiet that I was
sure he’d fallen asleep. But then, out of nowhere: “There something
I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“What?” I said, yawning.

“Will you go to my prom with me?”

I smiled. “Of course.”

His arm grew heavier on my waist and within
five minutes, he really did fall asleep. But I stayed wide awake,
my mind racing like a movie on fast-forward as I contemplated the
future. Our future. In an attempt to calm myself, I brought my hand
to my mouth to give my thumbnail a nibble, like old times. But it
didn’t help this time. Nothing did, until I started concentrating
on the feel of Michael’s breath on the back of my neck. I closed my
eyes, letting the soft rhythm of it, along with the familiar
cinnamon scent, lull me into nothingness.

Chapter 21

The next night I was in my room, doing math
homework and biting my nails down to the quick.

Well, I wasn’t actually
doing
my math
homework. I was
looking
at my math homework, but not
concentrating. My mind was fully focused on the sound of my mother
nagging at Emma to brush her teeth and go to bed. Then, I knew, she
would make herself a chamomile tea and plant her behind on the
couch. Relaxed and unsuspecting.

I listened as my sister flushed the toilet,
ran the water in the sink, and shut herself up in her room. Then I
listened some more as my mother opened and shut cupboards, boiled
some water, and hummed along to the theme song of the sitcom
playing on the TV, which blared from the living room. Humming meant
she was in a good mood.

Not for long
, I thought as I threw
down my pencil and left the safety of my room.
Here goes
nothing.

At first I just stood in the doorway to the
living room and watched her as she curled up on the couch with her
mug. She sipped her tea and pressed buttons on the remote, unaware
of my spying. When she did notice me, I hastily rearranged my
facial features to look less stricken.

“How’s the math coming along, honey?” she
asked, placing the remote on the coffee table.

“Fine,” I replied automatically. The gutless
side of me yearned to back up, back into my room, far away from the
living room and my mother and the truth. But I refused to chicken
out. If Michael could fight with his big scary father, then surely
I could do
this.

“Mom?” I said, sinking into the chair beside
her. “I need to talk to you.”

Something in my voice must have signaled her
to panic because her face drained completely of color. She set the
cup of tea down next to the remote as her other hand fluttered to
her chest. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. She looked terrified, as
if she was waiting for me to tell her I was on drugs or pregnant or
something else equally as appalling.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “I mean, it’s
not…I’m okay. I swear.”

She let out a breath and her face pinked up
again. “What is it then?”

“First you have to promise me you won’t
freak out.”

She pulled the hem of her shirt down over
her stomach and then folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t
promise anything. Just spit it out and then we’ll deal with it as
best we can.”