Through to You (20 page)

I've been steering clear of them since our blowup the other night. Not that it's been hard, since they haven't been around, and not like I would tell them anything anyway. No way I want them to know I'm going to this appointment. The more people who know, the more people I'm going to have to tell if things don't work out.

It's bad enough that Harper knows.

When she pulls into my driveway and honks the horn, I'm already standing on my porch waiting for her. The morning is surprisingly chilly and overcast, and she's wearing this soft pink sweater that makes her skin look fresh and clean. I lean over and kiss her, instantly feeling better.

“Hi,” she says. “You seem like you're in a good mood.”

“I am now,” I say, buckling my seat belt. I reach down and move the seat back so that I have more room for my legs.

We drive into Boston, not really talking much. That's one of the things I love about Harper. Most girls—or people in general, really—would feel they had to fill the silence, that they needed to say a bunch of stuff to try to make me feel better, or just make small talk in an effort to relax me. But Harper's not like that. Harper can just
be
. Just her presence is comforting—she doesn't have to say or do anything special.

We park in the garage across from Mass General, then walk across the street to the medical building. The receptionist points us to the sixth floor, room 612, and we cram into the elevator with a bunch of other people. My stomach drops as
we fly up through the floors, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm nervous or because that's just what happens in elevators.

Room 612 turns out to be a waiting room for people who need X-rays.

“I've already had X-rays,” I explain to the receptionist after I'm done filling out the insurance paperwork. I'm slightly annoyed. I didn't know this was going to be a whole big thing. For some reason I just assumed I'd be whisked right in to sit down with the doctor, that I'd tell him about my condition and let him know what the other doctors said, and then he'd tell me if he could help me or not.

But of course he's going to want to look at X-rays. And I didn't call my other doctor to have the X-rays sent over here.

“Dr. Tamblin likes to have new ones done,” the receptionist says cheerfully. “You can take a seat and we'll call you soon.” She points to the chairs against the side of the room.

I sit down.

Harper sits down next to me.

My leg starts to jitter. I don't like just sitting here. I feel like I need to keep moving, that if I'm just sitting here like this, I'm going to have too much time to think, too much time to start running through every single possibility of what's about to happen.

“You okay?” Harper asks.

“I'm fine.” I pick a magazine up off the table next to me and start flipping through it. Colors go flying by in a blur of ads and articles, but I'm not seeing anything.

“Hey.” Harper reaches out and puts her hand on mine. I turn and look at her for the first time. “Whatever happens, it's going to be okay.”

I want to ask her how she knows that, how anyone can know that, when they call my name.

“Penn Mattingly?” the nurse asks. “We're ready for you.”

There's nothing left to do.

I give Harper a kiss.

And then I get up and follow the nurse through the door.

As soon as Penn disappears with the nurse, my phone starts ringing.

I look down and see Anna's number on my cell. Shit. I texted her last night to tell her I was going home with Penn, but she never replied.

“Hey,” I say, making sure to keep my voice quiet so as not to disturb everyone else in the room. Even so, a woman sitting in a chair across from me gives me a little bit of a dirty look. “Sorry I didn't call you last night. It's just that—”

“Harper,” she says, and her voice sounds a little . . . strangled.

“Anna?” I ask. “Are you okay?”

“Noooo.” She's wailing now.

“What's wrong?” I sit up straight in my seat. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I'm not hurt. At least not physically.” She's gone from wailing to full-on sobbing.

“What happened?”

She starts to talk, but she sounds muffled, almost like she dropped her phone or something.

“What, Anna? Anna, I can't hear you!”

She comes back, but she's still fading in and out. “. . . and then we . . . and now he said . . . I can't believe . . . a mistake!” And she's crying again.

“Anna, I can't understand you. You need to slow down.”

She starts to talk again, but before I can figure out if I can finally hear her, someone taps me on the shoulder.

I turn around to see the receptionist standing there, looking at me disapprovingly. “You're not supposed to be on your phone in here.” She points to a sign that's on the wall. “The cell phones interfere with the medical equipment.”

“Oh,” I say. “I'm sorry. I didn't know.”

She glares at me. “Yeah, well, there are signs all over the place.” She tugs on a piece of her hair. “You could kill someone.”

I roll my eyes. “I highly doubt I could kill someone just by talking on my cell phone.”

“Then why does it say that it interferes with medical equipment?” the girl sitting next to me asks. “Because my dad is in here for a very important heart procedure, and he can't be having his machines interfered with.”

“Relax,” I say. “Your dad is going to be fine.”

“My dad?” Anna yells in my ear. “What are you talking about, Harper?”

“Look, you're going to have to leave this room,” the receptionist says. “I'm sorry, but you're being way too loud.”

Which isn't even true, but whatever. “Fine.” I roll my eyes and then say, “I'll call you right back” to Anna. I hang up on her mid-wail and then leave the waiting room and head for the elevators.

Once I'm outside the medical center, I call her back. “Hey,” I say when she answers. “Sorry about that. I was . . .” I'm not sure if Penn wants me to mention the fact that he's at the doctor's, so I just say, “I was somewhere that I couldn't talk on the phone.”

“Like where?” She sounds suspicious. But before I can come up with a plausible answer, she's already talking. “Harper, it was awful. I mean, it was amazing, but it was awful, too.”

She's not crying anymore, but I'm still having kind of a hard time hearing her. Her breath is coming in short gasps, and she's sniffling a lot, probably from all the sobbing.

“What was?”

“Last night.” She takes a deep breath, and I can tell she's trying to calm herself down. “I told Nico.”

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I'm a horrible friend. I completely and totally forgot about the fact that she was planning on telling Nico she liked him last night. “Good for you,” I say automatically, before realizing that if she's crying, it probably didn't go so well. “Um, how did it go?”

“Horrible!” she says. “Well, no, that's not true. At first it went amazing.”

“I'm confused.” I sit down on one of the benches outside and bend my knees, sliding my feet up next to me. The day is still a little drizzly and cold, and I pull my sweater tighter around me. “It was good or it was bad?”

“Harper,” Anna says. “I had sex with him.” She sounds stunned.

“You had sex with who?”

“Nico.”

“You had sex with
Nico
?!”

“Yes. Oh God, Harper. What have I done?” She's about to start wailing again. Yikes. I've never heard her this upset before.

I try to stay calm. Me getting all worked up isn't going to help the situation. Someone has to be the voice of reason here, and obviously it can't be Anna. “Just relax. Now tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

“Okay.” She takes in a deep shuddering breath. “Well, we were at the party, you know? And we were drinking a little bit, and talking, and by the end of the night, all his friends had gone home and it was just us, you know?”

“Okay.” So far it doesn't sound bad. In fact, it sounds completely normal.

“And so I told him that I'd been thinking about how I'd freaked out the other day about my music, and how nice he'd been to me.”

“Okay . . .” It still doesn't sound that bad. But I'm waiting for the point where this banal story morphs into Nico and Anna having sex and things going horribly wrong. And then amazing? Isn't that what she said? That it was horrible and then amazing? Or was it amazing and then horrible?

“And so he said it was no problem, that he was always going to support me no matter what. So then I said that I really appreciated that, which was one of the reasons I thought he was such a good friend.”

“Good.” This story really has a slow build. I know I told her to start at the beginning, but does she really need to get into this kind of detail? I hope when she gets to the sex part, she doesn't start getting all into every little thing that happened. The last thing I want to hear is all the details of my best friend losing her virginity. Well, of course I want to hear the details. Just not the way gross ones.

“So then I said that when he kissed me on the head that day, my feelings for him kind of changed.”

Now I'm confused. “Why'd you say that?”

“Because you said I should tell him I like him as more than a friend!”

“No, I mean . . . you said that your feelings changed for him when he kissed you. But that's not true. You liked him before that. For a long time.”

“Well, yeah, but I didn't want
him
to know that.”

Something tells me that Anna beginning her confession by not telling Nico the whole truth probably didn't give her the
best chance of starting things off on the right foot. But I'm not going to say that to her. I mean, it's too late now. She can't change it.

“So then what happened?” I ask.

“So then he kissed me. Like, a real kiss. Not on the head. On the mouth.”

“Oh my God! Just like that?”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “And so then we were kissing some more, and then he asked me if I wanted to go back to his house, and so then I said yes, and then we went back to his house, and his parents were already sleeping and we went into his room and we had sex.”

“Wow. So was it . . . I mean, did you like it?” I know I said I didn't want to hear all the details but now I actually sort of do.

“Yeah. I mean, it kind of hurt at first, but then it started feeling really good.”

“So then why was it awful?”

Her breathing starts getting all raggedy again. “It . . . it started getting bad this morning. When we woke up, it was all awkward. And, like, his parents were downstairs, so I had to sneak out the back door. And then he called me, and it was just . . . He doesn't . . . I mean, he's not sorry it happened. But basically he doesn't feel the way about me that I feel about him.”

“But he had sex with you!”

“Harper, having sex with someone doesn't always mean you have romantic feelings for them.” She says it like I should
know this, even though the grand total of people I've had sex with is zero.

“I know that,” I say, because let's face it, you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. “But it's just weird that he would sleep with you if he didn't at least feel
something
.”

“He said that he was attracted to me, but that his feelings weren't that deep. That he wasn't sorry it happened, but that he thought maybe we should try . . . to . . . to just . . . to just go back to being friends.” She's sobbing again now.

“Oh, Anna, honey,” I say. “I'm so sorry.” I understand why she's so upset. And I can also see where the confusion came in. Anna didn't tell Nico that she's had feelings for him for a while, that she's been practically in love with him since the day they met. So when she said her feelings had just changed a couple of days ago, he probably thought it was new and that maybe he should just give it a try. Still. He definitely acted like a douche.

“Can you come over?” she sobs. “I just . . . I don't want to be alone right now.”

“Of course,” I say. “Just let me finish up what I'm doing.”

“How long?” she wails. “Actually, can I come over to your house? I don't want to be at home right now. My mom's here, and I know she can tell something's up. She's so nosey and she might ask me about it, and if she does, I really might crack and tell her. And then she's never going to let me talk to Nico again in my life because she'll . . . she'll . . . she'll hate him.”

I'm kind of starting to hate him too. Nico and I were never
that close. The only reason I even hung out with Nico in the first place was because Anna was such good friends with him. But now that I'm thinking about it more, it's actually a pretty shitty thing to sleep with one of your friends and then basically tell them it didn't mean anything to you. I mean, seriously, where does he get off?

“Of course you can come over,” I say. “Just let me get home first. I'll call you in a little bit, okay?”

“But how long? Where are you?”

“I'm . . .” I sigh. I don't want to lie to her. And besides, Penn never explicitly said I couldn't tell anyone. “I'm at the hospital. With Penn.”

“The hospital?” Anna shrieks. “What happened? Oh my God, you're not pregnant, are you!”

“No, I'm not pregnant. Jesus, Anna. You have to have sex to get pregnant.” The words are out of my mouth before I realize that's probably not the best thing to say to her. I mean, she just had sex last night. Oh God. “You used a condom, right, Anna?”

“Of course I used a condom,” she says. “What do you think I am, stupid?”