Sarah Dessen (31 page)

“Oh no!” Lissa cried, finally catching on. “Not Paul. Not yet.”

I shrugged, sliding my beer in a circle on the table. “It makes sense,” I said. “The time I have left, I want to concentrate on being with my family. And you guys. There’s no point in dragging it out so there has to be some big airport scene with him.”

“Good point,” Chloe agreed. “He definitely hasn’t been of airport status.”

“But I like Paul,” Lissa said to me. “He’s so sweet.”

“He is,” I said. “But he’s also temporary. As I am for him.”

“And so, he joins the club,” Chloe said, holding up her beer. “To Paul.”

We drank, but even as I did so I flashed back to what Dexter had said to me in the parking lot of the Quik Zip, about how he’d end up no different from the guy before, or the guy after. And he wasn’t, really. Just a blip between Jerk Jonathan and Perfect Paul, one more summer boyfriend who was already fading from memory.

Or was he? Dexter had been on my mind. I knew it was because things had, in fact, ended badly, regardless of our efforts.
He
was one thing that didn’t get done as planned, and I couldn’t check him off the way I wanted to.

Paul, on the other hand, had been inching that way for the last few days. But honestly, I hadn’t really been in it from the get-go. It wasn’t his fault. Maybe I was just tapped out and needed a break instead of starting something new. But so often I’d felt like I was going through the motions, moving mechanically as we talked, or went to dinner, or hung out with his friends, or even made out in the darkness of his room or mine. Sometimes, when we weren’t together, I had trouble even picturing him clearly. It seemed, in light of this, the right time to end things neatly and totally.

“The boyfriend club,” Jess said now, leaning back in the booth. “God. How many guys has Remy dated?”

“A hundred,” Lissa said instantly, then shrank back when I looked at her. “I mean, I don’t know.”

“Fifty,” Chloe decided. “Not less than.”

They all looked at me. “I have no idea,” I said. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Because it’s topical. And now, as you are about to leave to spread your dating experience across not only this town but also the
country
—”

Jess laughed out loud.

“—it’s only fair that we run through a greatest hits, if you will, of your past just as you embark on your present.”

“Are you drunk?” I asked her.

“First!” she said, ignoring me. “Randall Baucom.”

“Oh, Randall,” Lissa sighed. “I loved him too.”

“That was sixth grade,” I pointed out. “God, how far back are we going?”

“Next,” Jess said, “seventh grade. Mitchell Loehmann, Thomas Gibbs, Elijah what’s-his-bucket . . .”

“The one with the jug head,” Lissa added. “What was his last name?”

“I never dated anybody with a jug head,” I said indignantly.

“Then we had the six months of Roger,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “Not a good time.”

“He was an asshole,” I agreed.

“Remember when he cheated on you with Jennifer Task and the whole school knew but you?” Lissa asked me.

“No,” I said darkly.

“Moving on,” Chloe sang out, “we get to ninth grade, and the triple whammy of Kel, Daniel, and Evan, as Remy methodically works her way through the offensive line of the soccer team.”

“Now, wait just a second,” I said, knowing I was getting defensive, but God, I had to stick up for myself sometime. “You’re making me sound like a total slut.”

Silence. Then they all burst out laughing.

“Not funny,” I grumbled. “I’ve changed.”

“We know you have,” Lissa said earnestly, patting my hand in her sweet way. “We’re just talking about the old days here.”

“Why don’t we talk about you guys, then?” I said. “How about Chloe and the fifty-odd people she’s dated?”

“I cheerfully claim every one of them,” she said, smiling at me. “God, Remy. What’s up with you? Lost your touch? Not proud of your conquests anymore?”

I just looked at her. “I’m fine,” I said.

The count continued, while I tried not to squirm. There were guys I didn’t remember—Anton, who’d worked selling vitamins at the mall—and guys I wished I didn’t, like Peter Scranton, who’d turned out to be not only a total jerk but also involved with a girl from a school in Fayetteville who’d made the two-hour trip to town specifically to kick my ass.
That
had been a fun weekend. And still the names kept coming.

“Brian Tisch,” Lissa said, folding down a finger. “He drove that blue Porsche.”

“Edward from Atlantic Beach,” Jess added. “The two-week required summer fling.”

Chloe took a deep breath, then said dramatically, one hand fluttering over her chest,
“Dante.”

“Oh, man!” Jess said, snapping her fingers. “The exchange student. Remy goes international!”

“Which leads us,” Chloe said finally, “to Jonathan. And then Dexter. And now . . .”

“Paul,” Lissa said sadly, into her beer. “Perfect Paul.”

Who was now, as I watched, walking in the door of Bendo, pausing to get his ID checked. Then he saw me. And smiled. He started across the room, the same way Jonathan had, unaware of what was about to happen. I took a deep breath, telling myself that by now this should be second nature, like falling into the water and instantly knowing to swim. But instead I just sat there as he approached.

“Hey,” he said, sliding in beside me.

“Hey.”

He took my hand, wrapping his fingers around mine, and suddenly I felt so tired. Another breakup. Another end. I hadn’t even taken the time to figure out how, exactly, he’d react, the kind of prep work that had always come naturally before.

“You need a beer?” he asked me. “Remy?”

“Look,” I said, and the words came on their own, no thought required. It was just process, cold and indifferent, like plugging numbers into an equation, and I could have been someone else, listening and watching this, for all I felt. “We need to talk.”

“And,” Lola said, louder than either of them, “for all the days she just wouldn’t put up with our mess. . . .”

A pause. Talinga sniffled, then wiped her eye with one very long, bright red, perfectly shaped nail.

“. . . To Remy,” Lola finished, and we let our glasses knock together, champagne sloshing onto the floor. “Girl, we’re gonna miss you.”

We drank. It was all we’d been doing, toasting and drinking, since Lola had officially closed down the salon for appointments at four o’clock, two hours early, so we could celebrate my leaving in high style. It had hardly been a workday up until then, anyway. Talinga brought me a corsage, which she insisted I wear, so I’d spent the day answering the phone and looking as if I was waiting for my prom date to pull up in his father’s car. But it was a sweet gesture, as was the cake, the champagne, and the envelope that they’d given me, which held five hundred bucks, all mine.

“For incidentals,” Lola had said as she pressed it into my hand. “Important stuff.”

“Like manicures,” Amanda added. “And eyebrow waxing.”

It was almost enough to choke me up, but I knew that would only set them all off. Joie girls loved a good cry. But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.

The signs were everywhere. I was getting tons of stuff in the mail from school, forms and last-minute To Do lists, and my room was now lined with boxes, clearly labeled for what was going and what would stay behind. I did not entertain any notions about my mother keeping my room as some sort of a shrine to The Remy That Had Been. The minute my plane took off she’d be in there poking around, trying to figure out if the new bookshelves she’d been wanting to build a proper library around would fit within my walls. When I came home everything would be different. Especially me.

Everyone was getting ready to go. Lissa was the weepiest, even though her trip was only one across town, with the steeple of the church on her block visible from her dorm room window. Jess had a job lined up at the hospital, doing administrative stuff in the kids’ ward, and started night classes right after Labor Day. And Chloe was busy with her own boxes, buying new stuff to take on her trip to a school just far enough away to provide new boys who didn’t already know about her reputation as a pure-T heartbreaker. Our in-between time, which had once seemed to stretch into forever, was ending.

The night before, I’d dug out my CD Walkman from the back of my closet, then sat down on my bed with it, carefully removing my father’s CD from it and sliding it back into the case. The Walkman I was taking, but when I went to put the CD in the box with the others, something stopped me. Just because my father had left me a legacy of the expectation that men would let me down didn’t mean I had to accept it. Or carry a reminder of it across the country. So instead I put it in a drawer in my now empty desk. I hadn’t taped up the box yet, however, so there was still time to change my mind.

“Okay, ladies,” Lola said now, picking up the bottle of champagne, “who wants a refill?”

“Me,” Talinga said, handing over her glass. “And let’s have more cake.”

“You don’t need more cake,” Amanda told her.

“I don’t need more champagne, either,” Talinga replied. “But damned if that’s going to stop me.”

They all laughed, and then the phone rang and Lola scurried off, still holding the bottle, to answer it. I picked a rose off the top of the cake and popped it into my mouth, feeling the sugar melt on my tongue. I was supposed to be saving my appetite for the dinner my mother was having tonight, one of the final family celebrations before I left. The mood she’d picked up in Florida still seemed to be lingering, making her work extra hard at playing Don’s Wife. Her novel had clearly come to a lurching halt, and I wondered where Melanie was now. It wasn’t like my mother to walk away from a story, especially so close to the end. But each time I felt that anxious pull, I reminded myself that she would be okay. That she had to be.

I walked to the front window, sipping my champagne, and looked out at the parking lot. Across the way I could see the door to Flash Camera was open, and I was feeling the champagne as I leaned into the glass, pressing my forehead against it. Truth Squad had come back a couple of days earlier. I’d seen Lucas from a distance, eating a bag of potato chips in front of Mayor’s Market, but knew better than to go up and ask him how things had gone in D.C. Ever since the day I’d driven away from the yellow house, with them all out in the yard behind me, I’d felt more clearly than ever that their fate was in no way entwined with mine.

Still, I did keep thinking of Dexter. He was the one loose end that still remained, and I hated loose ends. Making things right wasn’t an emotional thing. It was more that I didn’t want to go across the country feeling like I had left the iron on or forgotten to turn off the coffeemaker. It was about my mental health, I told myself. As in, necessary.

Just as I thought this, I saw him move across the open doorway of Flash Camera, recognizing him immediately from his gangly, crooked walk. Well, I thought. Perfect timing. I downed the rest of my champagne then checked my lipstick. It would be a good feeling to deal with this one last thing and still be home on time for dinner.

“Where you going?” Talinga called after me as I opened the front door. She and Amanda had now turned on the stereo we kept in the shampoo room and were dancing around the empty salon, both of them barefooted, while Lola helped herself to more cake. “You need more champagne, Remy! This is a party, after all.”

“I’ll be back in a sec,” I said. “Pour me another glass, okay?”

She nodded, then poured herself one instead, while Amanda cackled, swaying her hips wide and bumping into a display of nail polishes. They all burst out laughing, the door falling shut on the sound when I walked out into the heat.

My head was buzzing as I crossed the parking lot to Flash Camera. When I came in, I saw Lucas behind the counter, working the developing machine. He glanced up at me and said, “Hey. When’s the prom?”

I started at this, then realized he was talking about my corsage, which was now hanging kind of limply, as if it, too, had consumed a bit too much champagne. “Is Dexter around?”

Lucas pushed back his chair, which was on casters, and rolled a bit, sticking his head through a door in the back. “Dex!” he said.

“What?” Dexter yelled back.

“Customer!”

Dexter came out, wiping his hands on his shirt, with an easygoing, can-I-help-you kind of smile. When he saw me it shifted, but just a bit. “Hey,” he said. “When’s the homecoming dance?”

“Weak,” Lucas mumbled, pushing himself back to the machine. “And late.”

Dexter ignored this, coming up to the counter. “So,” he said, picking up a stack of snapshots and shuffling them, “what can we do for you? Need some pictures developed? Perhaps an enlargement? We’re running a special on four-by-sixes today.”

“No,” I said, talking over the sound of the machine Lucas was working, as it made chunk-chunk noises, spitting out someone’s precious memories. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay.” He kept messing with the pictures, not really looking at me. “Talk.”

“How was D.C.?”

He shrugged. “Ted threw a fit, the whole artistic integrity thing. Stormed out. We managed to sweet-talk them into another meeting, but for now we’re stuck doing another wedding tonight while we’re left hanging. In the lurch. Happening a lot lately, it seems.”

I just stood there for a second, gathering my words. He was being kind of a jerk, I decided, but pressed on anyway. “So,” I said, “I’m leaving soon, and—”

“I know.” Now he looked at me. “Next week, right?”

I nodded. “And I just wanted to, you know, make peace with you.”

“Peace?” He put the pictures down. The one on top, I saw, was of a group of women posing around a quilt, all of them smiling. “Are we at war?”

“Well,” I said, “we didn’t exactly part well the other night. At the Quik Zip.”

“I was kind of drunk,” he admitted. “And, uh . . . maybe I wasn’t dealing with your Spinnerbait relationship quite as well as I might have.”

“The Spinnerbait relationship,” I said slowly, “has now been terminated.”

“Well. Can’t say I’m sorry about
that.
They are, like the biggest suckjob band, and their fans—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I know. Hate Spinnerbait.”

“Hate Spinnerbait!” Lucas mumbled.

“Look.” Dexter leaned across the counter at me, “I liked you, Remy. And maybe we couldn’t be friends. But, God, you sure didn’t waste any time, you know?”

“I never wanted it to be ugly,” I told him. “And I did want us to be friends. But it just never works. Never.”

He considered this. “Okay. I think you’re right. Maybe we’re both a bit at fault here. I wasn’t exactly honest when I said I could deal with us being friends. And you weren’t exactly honest when you said, you know, that you loved me.”

“What?” I said, a bit too loudly. It was the champagne. “I never said I loved you.”

“Maybe not in so many words,” he said, shuffling the pictures again. “But I think we both knew the truth.”

“No way,” I said, but I could feel it now, that loose end slowly winding up, closer and closer to tied tight.

“In five more days,” he decided, holding up his open hand, “you would have loved me.”

“Doubtful.”

“Well, it is a challenge. Five days, and then—”

“Dexter,” I said.

“I’m kidding.” He put the pictures down, and smiled at me. “But we’ll never know, right? Could have happened.”

I smiled back. “Maybe.”

And there we had it. Closure. The last item of so many, eliminated from my list with a big, thick check mark. I could almost feel the weight of it lifting, the slow, steady feeling as all my planets aligned and everything, at least for now, was right with the world.

“Remy!” I heard someone yell from outside, and then turned around to see Amanda standing in the doorway to Joie, wearing a dye cap on her head and snapping her fingers. “You’re missing the dance party!” Behind her, Talinga and Lola were laughing.

“Wow,” Dexter said as Amanda continued her bump-and-grind, unaware of the elderly couple passing, carrying a bag of birdseed and eyeing her disapprovingly. “Looks like we work at the wrong place.”

“I should get back,” I said.

“Okay, but before you go, you should check these out.” He pulled out a drawer, then took out a stack of glossy prints, spreading them on the counter in front of me. “The last and best shots for our wall of shame. Just look.”

They were pretty bad. One was of a middle-aged guy posing bodybuilder style, flexing his muscles while his potbelly pooched over a very small Speedo bathing suit. Another featured two people standing on the bow of a ship: the man was grinning, loving it, while the woman was literally
green,
and you just knew the next picture featured vomit. Depravity and embarrassment was pretty much the theme of the collection, each one sillier or more disgusting than the last. I was so caught up reacting to a shot of what looked like a cat trying to mate with an iguana that I almost skimmed past a picture of a woman in her bra and panties, posing seductively, entirely.

“Oh, Dexter,” I said. “Honestly.”

“Hey.” He shrugged. “You do what you gotta do. Right?”

I was about to answer this when I suddenly realized something. I
knew
this woman. She was dark-haired, lower lip pouting seductively, sitting on the end of a bed with her hands on her hips so that her cleavage was enhanced, considerably. But even more importantly, I knew what was behind her: a large, ugly tapestry, depicting biblical scenes. Right over her head, to the left, was John the Baptist’s head being served on a plate.

“Oh, my God,” I said. It was my mother’s room. And this woman on the bed was Patty, Don’s secretary. I looked at the date stamp at the bottom of the picture: Aug 14. The previous weekend. When I’d been staying at Lissa’s and my mother was in Florida, deciding that everything was now going to be okay.

“Really something, huh?” Dexter asked me, peeking over the top of the picture. “I knew you’d like that one.”

I looked up at him, everything now falling into place. Closure. Yeah, right. This was Dexter’s little revenge scheme, his way of poking me back when I wasn’t even protecting myself. Suddenly I was so mad I could feel the blood rising in my face, hot and flushed. “You
asshole,
” I said.

“What?” His eyes widened.

“You think this is some little game?” I snapped, throwing the picture at him. It hit him in the chest, the corner poking, and he stepped back, letting it fall to the floor. “You want to get back at me and you do
this?
God, I was trying to leave things right, Dexter. I was trying to be beyond this!”

“Remy,” he said, holding up his hands. Behind him Lucas had pushed his chair back and was just staring at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. “All this talk about faith, and love. And then you do something like this, just to hurt me. And not even me! My family—”