Trade Me (24 page)

Tina works so hard; she never has time for me.

Tina is missing out on life; she isn’t even dating that nice boy.

It hurts. It really hurts. I’m here, aren’t I?

My mother comes back to the car thirty minutes later, beaming and happy, filled with all the latest gossip. I’m reining my emotion in as best as I can.

“You shouldn’t have left so early,” my mom says as she pulls out of the lot. “You’re so serious. Why don’t you ever have any fun?”

“I don’t know,” I snap back. “Why do
you
think I never have any fun? Maybe it’s because I’m the only one who has any sense of responsibility in this family.”

Mom goes silent. The light turns green, but she’s a few seconds too slow, and she misses her turn onto the freeway despite the angry honking of the cars behind us. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t pay the electric bill,” I say. “You barely make rent. Every month, it’s one thing after another. You don’t get Mabel’s meds, you don’t see a doctor until everything is at its worst. You don’t take anything seriously and so
I
have to do it instead. Why do you think I’m working all the time? It’s not because I love work so much. It’s because you can’t afford for me to stop.”

“Tina…”

But now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop talking. “Do you think I
want
to be a doctor? I don’t really care. But I have to do something to take care of you guys. All I want is to not worry.”

Her face sets in grim lines—furrowed forehead, flattened lips.

“I wish I was fun, too,” I tell her. “I wish that I
could
just forget myself and have fun with Blake. But I can’t, and it’s your fault. You take care of everyone but yourself, and
I’m
the one who has to clean up your mess.”

My mom looks straight ahead. “I didn’t know you felt that way. How was I supposed to know? You never said anything like this before.”

“I don’t know,” I snap. “You know what everyone else needs. It’s just your own daughter you never pay attention to.”

She sighs. “I never asked you to do any of those things. I thought you wanted to help.”

I bite back tears. I do. I did. But I also sometimes wish that I was allowed to need her instead. I wish that it was just help, that I didn’t resent her as much as I loved her. I wish I could let myself relax instead of worrying, that I could stop being the responsible one. But I’m the only one who is responsible. I can’t stop. We can’t trade places, her and me, because everything would fall apart. But I’m not going to get my wish. And worst of all, more money hasn’t made it hurt less. I still worry.

“Never mind, Ma,” I say, my throat raspy. “Forget I said anything.”

But she just sits straight in her seat. “I can’t forget,” she says stiffly. “I don’t forget. You should know this about me already.”

15.

TINA

I don’t think the rest of the weekend could get any worse, but it does. When I ask Mabel how much a saxophone of her own—as compared to the dented one she has on loan from the school—would cost, my mother interrupts me.

“That’s not your worry,” she says. “It’s
my
worry.”

Blake is still barely eating my mother’s food, even though he does a valiant job of moving it around on his plate.

My fight with my mom infects everything. I thought it would be better if she didn’t embarrass me, but it’s not. She’s silent, and that cold silence cuts more deeply than any embarrassment.

I try to apologize to her on Sunday morning before we leave.

“Did you mean it?” she asks.

And—because I did—I pause.

She shakes her head. “Don’t say sorry, then, when you’re not.”

By the time I get in the car with Blake, I’m not sure if I’m relieved to be leaving this mess behind me or if I’m heartbroken that I’ve fucked things up so badly with my mom. I wait until we swap our loaned Toyota for his Tesla.

“We should stop and have lunch,” I say. “And breakfast. You must be starving.”

He’s driving when I say this. I can see his face go still. His fingers close on the wheel.

“I’m not hungry.” His tone is casual, but there’s a tightness to his face. “Your mother fed me really, really well.”

“Come on, Blake,” I say. “You don’t need to lie to me. I was watching you the entire weekend. You ate about as much as I did, and you’re a foot taller than me.”

“I’m not a foot taller than you.”

“Nine inches. Whatever. And Dad says you went on a two-hour run on Friday when we were at the hearing. It’s okay. You’re not going to offend me if you don’t like my mother’s cooking. It’s an acquired taste.”

“There was nothing wrong with your mother’s food,” he says quietly.

“Oh, so you eat like that all the time?” I say sarcastically.

This is met with silence. His jaw sets. I rummage through my memory, looking for evidence that he’s lying. But what I remember instead is…

Blake at our first lunch together, eating a handful of bean sprouts. Blake at lunch with his father, taking a spoonful of rice and some dal. Blake telling me he won’t let me cook for him because it would be cheating. I can remember him eating apples occasionally. And… And…

“Oh my God,” I say, this time with no sarcasm at all. “You eat like that all the time.”

His eyes stare ahead. His face is too still.

“Blake…”

I look over at him.

He exhales.

“Blake. Are you okay?”

For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. He just drives, his jaw set in a hard line.

“No.” When he finally speaks, his voice is hoarse. “No. I don’t think that I am.” His hand opens on the wheel and then clenches once more. “I have a problem. I’ve been…trying to fix it, but that hasn’t really worked.” He lets out a long breath.

“Does anyone know?”

“You.”

There are now only two weeks until the launch. Two weeks and then I walk away. I’m not supposed to care about him.

Not
caring, not worrying—these are not things I can do on command. And I’ve been lying to myself, pretending that it will be bearable to watch him walk away. No. Here’s one thing that will hurt more: knowing that I had the chance to make him feel a little better, and I chose not to.

“I know.” He swallows. “It’s stupid. It’s so fucking stupid, I’m mad at myself. I know it’s stupid. I know I’m stupid. How hard is it to fucking eat more?” His voice is shaking. “But I don’t. I can’t. And when I try, when I make myself—I end up going out for a run.”

“You need to talk to someone about this,” I say.

“I should be able to fix this myself. Dad thinks I can run a company. I can’t even fucking control myself.”

“Blake. It’s okay.”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s not. You know what? That day in class—that day you got so mad at me? Afterward, you said you didn’t have time for my bullshit apology. And I was so fucking jealous. I wanted to not have time for my bullshit, either.”

“Hey.” I reach over and take his hand.

“You were right,” he says shakily. “I thought your life would be magic. Like it would somehow make this better. That if I just had what you had, I wouldn’t…do this. But we’ve never traded, not really. None of this has done a damned thing. It’s not my life that’s fucked up. It’s me.”

I don’t want to care. I don’t want to hurt because he hurts. But here I am, caring anyway, and it scares me. It scares me, but still, I squeeze his hand. He glances down, as if realizing for the first time that I’m touching him. That our fingers are intertwined. That the current of electricity is arcing between us uninterrupted.

And then he lifts his head and truly looks at me. There’s a raw hunger in him, something bigger than what he’s just admitted.

There’s a lot of truth in what my mother told me. I
don’t
let myself have fun. I pull away from people who could be my friends. I refuse to let people help me. And right now, I realize that Blake and I have a lot in common—a lot more than either of us can admit.

“Do you remember when you told me that you’d bought something ridiculously luxurious, and it was a mango?” he asks. “I was so fucking jealous of you. I wished that I could feel what that was like. I wanted to want something like that. I wanted to have that so badly.”

I don’t have answers to any of his problems. I don’t even have solutions to mine. But this one thing? This, I can handle. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get some mangoes.”

We pull off the freeway a few miles later and follow the computer’s directions to a little grocery store. Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in a rest stop, cutting our mangoes to bits.

“Here,” I tell him. “Trade me. Pretend you’re me. Let me tell you what it was like when I had that mango.”

He shuts his eyes obligingly.

“I didn’t have a lot of money,” I tell him. “And that meant one thing and one thing only—fried rice.”

He smiles despite himself. “Kind of a stereotype, don’t you think?”

“Whose stereotype? Rice is peasant food for more than half the world. It’s easy. It’s cheap. You can dress it up with a lot of other things. A little bit of onion, a bag of frozen carrots and peas. A carton of eggs. With enough rice, that can last you basically forever. It does for some people.”

“It actually sounds good.”

“If you have a decent underlying spice cabinet, you can break up the monotony a little. Fried rice with soy sauce one day. Spicy rice the next. And then curry rice. You can fool your tongue indefinitely. You can’t fool your body. You start craving.”

He’s sitting on the picnic table, his eyes shut.

“For me, the thing I start craving first is greens. Lettuce. Pea shoots. Anything that isn’t coming out of a bag of frozen veggies. And fruit. If you have an extra dollar or two, you buy apples and eat them in quarters, dividing them throughout the day.”

I slide next to him on the table. The sun is warm around us.

“But you get sick of apples, too, pretty soon. And so that’s where I want you to imagine yourself: sick to death of fried rice. No respite. No letting up. And then suddenly, one day, someone hands you a debit card and says, ‘Hey. Here’s fifteen thousand dollars.’ No, I’m not going to buy a stupid purse. I’m going to buy this.”

I hold up a piece of mango to his lips. He opens his mouth and the fruit slides in. His lips close on my fingers like a kiss, and I can’t bring myself to draw away. He’s warmer than the sun, and I feel myself getting pulled in, closer and closer.

“Oh, God.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “That’s so good.”

I feed him another slice, golden and dripping juice.

“That’s what it felt like,” I tell him. “Like there’s a deep-seated need, something in my bones, something missing. And then you take a bite and there’s an explosion of flavor, something bigger than just the taste buds screaming, yes, yes,
this
is what I need.”

I hand him another piece of mango. He bites it in half, chews, and then takes the other half.

“That’s what it felt like,” I say. “It felt like I’d been starving myself. Like I…”

He opens his eyes and looks at me.

“Like there was something I needed,” I say softly. “Something I’ve needed deep down. Something I’ve been denying myself because I can’t let myself want it.” My voice trails off.

I’m not describing the taste of mango anymore. My whole body yearns for his. For this thing I’ve been denying myself. For physical affection. For our bodies joined. For his arms around me all night.

It’s going to hurt when he walks away.

But you know what?

It’ll hurt more if he walks away and we leave things like this, desperate and wanting, incomplete.

My voice drops. “It’s like there’s someone I’ve been denying myself. All this time.”

“Yes.” His voice is hoarse in response. “That. Always that.” And he slides his arm around me, pulls me close, and kisses me. He tastes sweet like mango. Like he’s bigger than my taste buds, like he’s precisely the luxury I have been craving. I let my eyes shut and tilt my head back, falling into his embrace.

And I know, despite all the constellations placed in the sky as warning, why all those Greek maidens gave it up in the end. It’s because all the pain is worth it for this one moment.

His tongue is sure against mine, touching me with insistent strokes. His hand clamps around me, holding me in place. And he holds me like I matter, like I’m the entire world.

“I can’t touch you,” I say. “My hands are sticky.”

“That,” he says, “is what washing machines are for.” He reaches out and takes hold of my fingers and then, very deliberately, he wipes them on his shirt. The sun is hot against my shoulders; Blake is sweet to the taste and tempting to the touch.

I’m not sure how long we stay there, kissing in the sun and the wind, stopping only long enough to feed each other bites of fruit. Long enough for me to touch him all over, to feel his body hard and lean through his shirt. Long enough for me to lose all sense of safety.

The air smells of new beginnings—crisp and clear, untouched by any worries. He touches me like the middle of the story, strong and sure. But despite the mango on his tongue, he tastes almost bittersweet, because the end is coming. It’s coming, but it’s not here. Not yet.