Someone Else (8 page)

Next I expected her to say no and then ask to take a message, like a good little receptionist, but instead she said “Yep, just a sec” and a second later, Michael was on the phone.

“Hey.” He sounded just as cheerful as his message service girl.

“Hi,” I said, the end of the word lilting up a little, like a question. As in,
who the hell is this and why is she answering your phone?

“Oh, hi. How was your day?”

I couldn’t answer right away. My mind was too busy processing the tone of his voice. The way he phrased his words, he could have been talking to a distant aunt. “Fine,” I said, finally, and at this point I could hear other voices in his room, male as well as female. This made me feel better, but not much. I cleared my throat. “Who answered your phone?”

“Lauren. She lives in my dorm.”

As he said her name—this girl who obviously felt so at home in his room—I had an image of them sitting close together on his bed, her shapely thigh pressed against his. She sounded like the girls who used to hang around Michael and his friends in high school, the ones with bleached-white teeth and tans in the dead of winter. Girls I never felt I could compete with. Michael always claimed he wasn’t attracted to that underfed, overdone type (which was why he liked me, I guess) but I figured almost anyone would start to look good after several weeks without sex.

“Friend of yours?” I asked. My hand started throbbing and I realized I was squeezing the phone. I eased up on my grip.

“Yeah, I guess.” As he spoke, tinkling female laughter drifted through the phone. It sounded close. Like right-next-to-him close. “Everything okay?” he asked after several seconds of silence on my end. When I didn’t answer, the laughter and voices grew distant as he moved away from his friends, presumably out into the hallway, where it was quieter and more private. “What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding louder now that the background noise had faded.

“Nothing,” I told him. Then I remembered our promise to always be honest with each other. “I guess I don’t like the idea of some girl answering your phone.”

In the pause that followed, I could hear people yelling back and forth. No wonder he found home so peaceful in comparison. “She’s just a friend,” he said in a hushed voice, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear this predictable statement, one that has been said by guys to girls—and vice versa—since the beginning of time.

“Okay,” I said, none too convincingly.

“What, am I not allowed to have friends here?”

I focused on the digital clock on my night stand, trying to keep the red numbers from blurring. “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just…”

“I’ve always had female friends. Why is it such a big problem for you all of a sudden?”

“Just forget it, okay?”

“What is with you lately? It’s like you don’t trust me anymore or something.”

“It’s not that,” I said, kneading my forehead with my fingers. What the hell was I trying to do with all this insecure-possessive-freak crap? Push him into Lauren’s arms myself? “Forget I said anything. Please. I don’t want to fight.”

“Me either.” He let out a sigh. “Sorry for getting so defensive.”

“Me too.”

We moved on to other topics after that, all the while trying to pretend like everything was back to normal. Like everything was fine. Even though we both knew by now that it wasn’t.

And so, it was perfect timing that I got that invitation from Robin. The last thing I wanted to do that night was sit at home, alone, obsessing over every word Michael had said, every word I had said, and the echo of Lauren’s sparkling laugh. Blocking it all out seemed like a
much
better idea. At the time.

I packed an overnight bag and drove over to Robin’s house in Redwood Hills. The drinks were already flowing when I got there. I dumped my bag in Robin’s room, headed out to the kitchen where she and a few of her friends had gathered, and asked her to make me a drink. A strong one. She grinned at my unexpected request but then, seeing my expression, her smile slipped. I shook my head, indicating that I did not want to get into it right now. She nodded and made me a drink.

The party was like any other I’d been to in Redwood Hills with Michael, only with a new cast of characters. Robin, it seemed, had turned into
the
girl to know around school. She was in her element with all these upper class kids. She’d always fit in here, even when she was living in a dilapidated bungalow with her mom. Now she was unstoppable.

My drink was lethal. I hadn’t paid any attention to what Robin put in it, but it tasted like a combination of lemon juice and Windex and it immediately made me feel warm all over. After drinking the first one, I no longer cared about Dylan’s cute dimples or Michael’s new friend. I no longer cared about anything.

After two drinks I was one of the gang, as comfortable as if I were hanging out with my own group of friends. Robin’s friend Isabelle was hilarious, I decided, especially when she started swallowing colorful pills and acting crazy. And the guys? So charming, even when I looked down to find a hand on my knee.

Three drinks in, things stopped being so funny and I wound up in the main floor powder room, crying. Some girl I didn’t know found me there and went to get Robin, who came right away. She locked the door behind her and sat down on the floor next to me.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

I shook my head. I wasn’t sick, yet, but I had reached the point at which laughter turned to tears on a dime. Robin handed me a wad of toilet tissue and I wiped my eyes. “Michael doesn’t love me anymore,” I told her.

“Now I find that hard to believe,” she said, slurring the words a little. “He’s crazy about you.”

I sniffled. “I’m not enough for him anymore.”

“Bullshit.” She pushed some hair off her face, which was flushed and sparkling from the glitter gel she liked to rub on her cheekbones and around her eyes. “If anyone can make this long-distance thing work, you guys can. Michael loves you, Tay. He’s not gonna just stop.”

“Everything’s different now. He’s changed. We’ve changed.”

“Well, yeah. He’s at Avery and you’re here. You see him once every couple of months instead of every weekend. Of course you’ve changed.”

My eyes burned with fresh tears. “Robin?”

“Yeah?”

“How will I get through four years of this?”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me. “I know it sounds corny, but you have to take it one day at a time. It’ll get better.”

“You honestly believe that?”

“I honestly do.” She stood up and dragged me to my feet. “Now let’s fix your face and go get another drink.”

Another drink was the last thing I needed right then, but I had one anyway. After that fourth one, everything got fuzzy. The next day, all I could remember from the night before was eating very spicy pizza (which did not taste nearly as good coming up as it did going down) and talking for what seemed like hours to Isabelle on the living room couch. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in Robin’s bed at four in the morning and puking into a garbage can that someone had kindly placed beside me. After about an hour of that, I fell back to sleep and woke up again at eleven with the kind of headache that felt like someone had reached into my head, grabbed hold of my brain, and squeezed. It hurt to blink.

After downing two Advil and the largest cup of coffee on earth, I felt good enough to go home and face my cell phone. Only one message waited for me, from Michael, sent about an hour ago. When I saw it, the same feelings I’d tried to bury under alcohol last night came rushing back to the surface. Still feeling a dull throb in my temples, I called him back.

“Just checking to see how you’re feeling,” he said, sounding about as hungover as I felt. “And to apologize again for last night. I acted like an ass.”

“I was the one who acted like an ass.”

“How about we forget it ever happened?”

Thoughts of last night’s phone call nudged through the clouds in my head. That girl’s voice, answering my call. Her laugh, so close in my ear. “I’ve already forgotten,” I said, knowing somehow that it wouldn’t be the last lie I’d ever tell him.

Chapter 7

On Monday I wore black dress pants and a fitted white blouse to school. My job interview was at four-thirty and I planned to go straight from school. I even brought some makeup to put on later, which thrilled Jessica. She loved having a preening partner in the girl’s john.

“Bronzer,” she said as we gathered our things after French. “That’s what you need. If you don’t have any, you can borrow mine.”

I could safely say I didn’t have any bronzer, as I had no idea what it was. My makeup bag consisted of eyeliner, lip gloss, and that mineral foundation that Jessica had given me weeks ago.

“It’ll give you a healthy glow,” she said. “No offense, but you’re looking kind of washed out today.”

I didn’t mention the monster hangover I’d been nursing all weekend. “I guess I’m just nervous.”

“Oh, you’ll do great. I bet he’ll hire you on the spot.”

I gave her a smile. Jessica may have been “shallow and flakey”, as Ashley had claimed, and she may have been a little hypercritical, but deep down, under all that eye shadow and conditioner and cool indifference, there was a big heart. Ashley didn’t see it, but she also hadn’t seen Jessica’s face when she spoke about her mom dying, or when she gushed about her fish, or when she described something funny her little brother had said or done. She showed me what she kept hidden from most people, and that was why we were friends.

We made a pit stop in the washroom because Jessica had to check out her hair, which according to her was “sticking up in one spot despite half a tube of gel”. By the time we got to the chemistry lab, McDowell had already started setting up. He glared at us as we scurried to our table. Well, I scurried while Jessica casually strolled.

“We have a lot to cover today, people, so let’s get started,” the teacher said as I slid onto a stool next to Dylan, whose dimples were nowhere in sight. Surprisingly, he hadn’t followed Ashley’s lead and ditched us too.

McDowell explained today’s lab, which had to do with transforming common metals into gold. After a boring Power Point presentation on the history of alchemy, we got our supplies: pennies, galvanized nails, and drain cleaner. I could see this as being potentially disastrous for my outfit, so I figured I’d stick with writing down the observations and leave the dirty work to Jess and Dylan.

That was pretty much how it happened anyway. Dylan did all the heating and adding and rinsing while Jessica examined her manicure and I wrote stuff down. And through it all Dylan did not look at me once. I found this strange, especially after feeling the weight of his gaze all last week. It seemed he only watched me when I was safely far away.

“Seventy-nine,” he said at one point during the lab.

These were practically the first words he’d ever spoken to me, so I sat there stunned for a moment. “What?”

He looked at me, finally, and I saw that his eyes were a light, golden brown. The color of weak iced tea. “The atomic number of gold.”

“Oh. Right.” I jotted the answer down, pressing on the pen extra hard. These days, being around him distressed me so much that my manner toward him bordered on hostile. He sensed it too—I could tell by the tension in his back whenever he sat near me.

The bell rang and I let out a sigh of relief. Then I remembered it was lunchtime, and I’d have to sit near Dylan again. But there would be more people there, and noisy conversation, and food to concentrate on instead of the unsettling awareness of how nicely some guy who was not my boyfriend filled out his jeans.

Miraculously, I managed to get through the whole lunch hour without feeling awkward
or
staining my outfit (I’d eaten only a package of pre-sliced apples) and the rest of the afternoon flew by. When the final bell rang I sprinted to my locker, where I’d agreed to meet Jessica for our makeup consultation. She wasn’t there yet, but someone else was. Dylan stood in front of his open locker, trying to shove in an oversized book that did not want to fit. The second I saw his head start to turn toward me, I ducked behind my locker door.

The Dungeon was quiet for once, and as I picked through my notes I could plainly hear him struggling with that book, all the while cursing under his breath. Finally there was a loud clunk, so loud that I couldn’t stop myself from peeking over. The book was no longer in his hands, and his usual scowl had been replaced with a triumphant smirk. I assumed this meant he’d won. I averted my eyes again.

“Ready?”

Startled, I spun around to see Jessica beside me. “Oh. Um, yeah.”

“You didn’t forget, did you? I found my bronzer.”

“No, I didn’t forget.”

“Good.” She peered over my shoulder. “Hey Dylan, Austin’s waiting for you by the gym.”

He nodded, hitching his backpack over one shoulder as he passed us. Then he turned and caught my eye, his dimples appearing for a split second and then disappearing just as quickly, like a flash of sun on an otherwise dreary day. I wondered if I’d really seen them at all. “Good luck with your interview,” he said, and he walked away before I had time to grasp that he’d spoken, let alone thank him.

“Let’s go,” Jess said, taking my arm and steering me away. Halfway to the washroom, I looked over at her and saw that she was smirking.

“What?”

A snicker escaped her lips. “Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought.”

I charged ahead into the washroom, hoping Jessica had a foundation in that magic bag of hers that would help camouflage a blood red face.

****

Mr. Moretti was nothing like I pictured. My expectations of him probably stemmed from the TV portrayal of Italian men as being fat and loud, with heavy accents and possible ties to the mob. But Mr. Moretti was a thin, soft-spoken man in his mid-forties, with only a trace of an accent. As for mob ties, I doubted it. This man wasn’t the whacking type. He had a warmth about him that made me like him right away.

The restaurant was virtually empty in the late afternoon, so we sat at a table and talked over steaming cups of the richest coffee I’d ever tasted. He asked me questions and I answered them; it was all very casual, even as his questions got harder.