Through to You (13 page)

“You're going out with him on a school night. And you were obviously upset about him earlier.”

I curse myself again for telling her about what happened at the carnival. But when I came into work, it was impossible to hide it. She asked me what happened, and I gave her an
abridged version. She was actually very cool about the whole thing—she didn't even say anything about me skipping school.

“I wasn't
upset
,” I say. “I was just annoyed.”

“You seemed upset. You
said
you were upset.”

Did I say that? I can't remember. “Well, I'm over it now,” I say. “Aren't you always telling me not to overanalyze things? That I need to just relax and let everything be breezy?”

My mom frowns and looks at me like maybe I'm a little crazy. “No.” She shakes her head. “I don't remember ever saying that to you.”

“Well, you should have,” I say, putting my phone back into my bag. “I'm obviously, you know, wound very tight.”

My mom's face darkens. “Is that what this boy is telling you? That you're wound tight?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Is he pressuring you in any way?” She looks out the window to where Penn is sitting in his truck, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to whatever song he's listening to. I catch my breath again at just how cute he is. My mom is glaring at him. “Harper, sex is a very important—”

“Mom!” I say, cutting her off. “I know that! And he's not pressuring me.”

“Are you sure?” She's still giving Penn the evil eye through the window, like she's half expecting him to come in here and just start ripping my clothes off.

“I'm sure!”

She relaxes her shoulders. The CD that's been on in the studio, a slow mix of rumba songs, stops playing, and there's just silence now. I'm not sure what to say.

My mom apparently thinks Penn is some kind of sex-crazed maniac. And actually, now that I think about it, do I really know that he's not? I mean, he kissed me the very first night we hung out. And it's not like Sienna Malcolm has the best reputation. Not that there's anything wrong with having sex. But I don't know if—

“Still,” my mom says, breaking into my thoughts. “I should meet him. If he's going to be driving you around tonight, I should meet him. Properly.”

I start to open my mouth to protest, but I can see the look in her eye. It's the look she gets when she's not going to back down from something. I take in a big deep breath and let it out.

“Fine,” I grumble. “I'll go get him.”

I push through the front doors of the dance studio, wondering if there's any way Penn is going to refuse to come in and meet my mom. I knock on the driver-side door, and he lowers the music and then rolls down the window.

“Hey, cutie,” he says sexily. Oh God. His voice sounds all hot and melty, the kind of voice that makes you want to cuddle up and lose your senses.

“Hi,” I say.

“You ready?”

“Ready for what?” Jesus, now my mom's got me thinking all sorts of crazy things about Penn's intentions. The most innocent things he's saying are making me have all kinds of bad thoughts. I take a deep breath. I'm totally overthinking this. I really am wound tight, it turns out. Penn is being completely normal, and I need to just calm down.

“Ready for whatever,” he says, this time even sexier. Okay, so maybe he's not so innocent.

“So the thing is,” I say, “is that my mom wants to meet you.”

“I already met her.” He glances toward the dance studio, where my mom is trying to pretend like she's going over Kaitlyn and Jeremy's dance notes and not stealing glances at me and Penn through the window.

If he looks like he's putting up a fight, or doesn't want to do it, she's probably going to be that much harder on him. I take a few steps to the side, making sure to block her view so that if he does give me a hard time, she won't be able to tell.

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “But she probably wants to talk and get to know you a little bit more.”

“Why?” He doesn't say it in a smart-ass way. He sounds like he really does want to know.

“Because you're going to be driving me around, and she gets uncomfortable with me being driven by people she doesn't know.” I'm definitely not going to mention the fact that she thinks he's a sex maniac. I want them to get along, and I don't think that would start them off on the right foot.

“You go out with strange guys a lot?”

“No!” I say automatically, before realizing I probably protested too quickly. I mean, why shouldn't I go out with strange guys? I don't want Penn to think that while he was busy ignoring me for two weeks, I was sitting at home crying. He should be thinking that I was out with random men, dancing the night away and doing other scandalous things. Of course, any men
who were really that strange and dangerous probably wouldn't have consented to coming in to meet my mom, so I wouldn't have been able to go out with them anyway. “I mean, sometimes I do. I mean, not a lot, but, you know.”

He smiles and shakes his head, like he's onto my game. Then he reaches over and turns the engine off. He swings his long legs out onto the pavement. “Okay,” he says, and shrugs. “Let's get this over with.”

* * *

It goes better than planned. Except for one extremely awkward moment when my mom asks Penn if he plays any sports, and Penn gets all broody and says “no,” and then my mom asks him if he's one of those guys who thinks that all people who play sports are preppy losers, and then Penn has to explain that no, he doesn't think that, he used to play baseball until he got injured.

And then my mom starts to ask him what happened, and Penn sort of shuts down, and then I have to say that he's still working on maybe getting his shoulder fixed, but that it's getting late, and so we should probably leave.

So then my mom kind of relaxes and is like, “Okay. Well, have a good time.”

When we get to the car, Penn's all quiet.

“Your mom asks a lot of questions,” he says finally.

I shrug. “She's just a mom.”

He shakes his head. “
My
mom doesn't even ask me questions like that.”

I look at him, surprised. “Really?”

“Really.”

“She doesn't care who you're seeing or what you're doing?”

His face hardens a little, and then he shakes his head. “So,” he says, “what should we do?”

I swallow. I don't know what I want to do. Actually, that's not really true. I do know what I want to do. I want him to take me somewhere. Not to some rinky-dink batting cages, not to some stupid carnival in the middle of the day, not to some park where we sit and things get all weird.

I want to go somewhere real.

“Take me somewhere real,” I say.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

I shrug. “You know, like somewhere normal.”

“You mean like a date?” He sounds sort of shocked, like the thought never occurred to him.

I nod.

“Okay,” he says slowly, and then smiles. “The Sailing Burrito?”

“Great.” I settle back in my seat. The Sailing Burrito is perfect. But for some reason my stomach does a flip, and a feeling of trepidation rises up and into my throat. But I push it right back down. I mean, it's just dinner. What could happen?

This is definitely a mistake. Somehow I have agreed to take Harper out to the Sailing Burrito. The Sailing Burrito is this Mexican place that's close to our school. It's only open for dinner, and the food there is pretty disgusting.

But at night everyone from our school shows up there. It's almost like a big cafeteria, with everyone moving from one table to the next. When it's warm out, like it is tonight, they open up their huge outdoor patio. I guess the original idea was that the patio would be used mostly for happy hours—they'd play music and serve piña coladas and daiquiris. But almost immediately after the place opened, the high school kids started to take over, and after a while the owner kind of just went with it. The food isn't really good enough to attract the
after-work crowd, and so now everyone from school hangs out there and drinks virgin margaritas on the deck.

Showing up with Harper is kind of like making a public declaration. It's like a declaration that we're . . . not together, but at least, you know,
together
.

I look over at her. She's twirling a strand of hair around her finger, her head tilted slightly as she looks out the window.

All those questions her mom was asking threw me. Who asks questions like that? Especially the one about how she could be sure I wasn't going to leave her daughter tonight the way I had earlier at the carnival. I mean, really? How was I supposed to answer that? And why did Harper tell her mom about that anyway? God, she's so sexy, though.

I watch as she pulls her leg up onto the seat and sort of leans her chin against her knee, and I so want to kiss her. Her hair falls over her face in soft waves, and I resist the urge to reach over and run my fingers through it. Her T-shirt hugs her in just the right places. I shift on the seat and try to keep my thoughts a little more innocent. But she smells so damn good that it's difficult.

“You're being quiet,” I say. “Don't you want to talk?” I need something to keep my mind off the impure thoughts running through my head.

“Yes.” She turns to me and pushes her hair behind her ear, and I notice she's wearing sparkly purple flip-flops. Her feet are tan, and her toenails are painted light purple. “Let's talk about how you freaked out earlier and ditched me.”

“I didn't ditch you.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No. ‘Ditching' would mean that I left you at the carnival. Which I most certainly did not. I dropped you off at home, safe and sound.”

She shakes her head. “ ‘Ditching' means that you left me. ‘Stranding me' would be if you left me at the carnival.”

I roll my eyes and pull into the parking lot of the Sailing Burrito. We have to pass by the deck to find a spot, and the place is packed. I shut off the engine, pull the keys out of the ignition, and flip them around my finger. “You ready?” I ask.

“Yup.” She unhooks her seat belt and opens the car door.

As we're walking across the parking lot, Harper does this little skip thing, almost like a little kid, and it's so adorable that before I know what I'm doing, I reach out and grab her hand.

I see her sort of stiffen in surprise, but then she turns and looks at me and gives me a smile, and Jesus Christ, how did I stay away from her for two whole weeks? This shouldn't be happening. This shouldn't be working. We're so different. She's this innocent, smart, beautiful girl, and I'm just . . . I don't know exactly what I am.

I used to. But I don't anymore.

We head into the restaurant, still holding hands, but when we get inside, I feel suddenly exposed, like showing up here with Harper is making a statement I'm not sure I'm ready for. It's an overwhelming feeling, and so I drop her hand. I make
sure not to look over at her while I do it, because I'm not going to be able to take it if she seems disappointed.

Miraculously we somehow find a table over on the far side of the deck. There are a bunch of paper lanterns strung up on the wall, and the light shines down and illuminates Harper's face.

“You hungry?” I ask, picking up one of the paper menus that are on every table.

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Kind of?”

She smiles. “I am hungry, but I don't know if I'm hungry enough to actually eat the food here.”

“We can get piña coladas. And the chips usually aren't that bad.”

“Chips and salsa, def,” she says. “And maybe a veggie burrito. I don't trust the meat here.”

“Sounds good,” I say.

The waitress appears at our table a second later. It's Kalia Spinelli, who I may or may not have hooked up with last year. “Oh,” she says when she sees me. “It's you.” She says it like she's surprised to see me. Which I guess she probably is, since I never called her after we hooked up.

“Oh, hi, Kalia,” I say politely. “It's nice to see you.”

“Yeah, well, it's not nice to see you,” she says. She poises her hand over her pad and sighs. But she doesn't ask to take our order or anything.

“Um, I'm going to have a virgin piña colada,” I say.

She purses her lips and then makes this big show of writing it down, like it's a huge imposition. Her pen is pushing so hard into the paper that I'm afraid she's going to push it right though and into her hand.

“And what would you like to drink, Harper?” I ask.

“I'll have the same,” she says.

But Kalia doesn't write it down. Instead she just flips her pen over and taps it against her pad. “Who are you?” she asks.

“Me?” Harper looks confused.

“Yeah.”

“I'm Harper.”

Kalia purses her lips and looks at Harper, like she's thinking about this. “Well, Harper, I'd be careful if I were you.” She points at me. “This one's kind of an asshole.” And then she turns around and walks away.

I sit there for a moment, stunned. Obviously I've had girls be upset with me before. But usually I'm able to talk my way out of it, and if I'm not, it's not a big deal. I mean, if a girl says something rude to me, it usually doesn't matter. I've never had a girl confront me about being an asshole right in front of a girl I wanted to impress. Actually, I've never really wanted to impress a girl before, so I guess it makes sense.

I give Harper a smile. “So,” I say, “are you definitely set on what you want to eat?”

“Who was that?”

“Kalia Spinelli,” I say. “She's in our grade.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Oh.” Then why did she ask?