‘Go help your saviour-complex girlfriend,’ Conrad says. ‘Leave me the hell alone’

I’m trying to figure out who the saviour-complex girlfriend is and why she needs help when I’m lifted straight out of the pool and set down—dripping wet, mascara running, silk T-shirt and white capris probably see-through—on the deck. The warm hands feel familiar on my arms, and I know who it is instantly. But even though I’ve been waiting an entire summer to see him again, it still takes me a second before I can look up into the beautiful, furious face of Jamie Forta.

Books by Louise Rozett from MIRA INK

CONFESSIONS OF AN ANGRY GIRL

Find out more about Louise Rozett at www.miraink.co.uk and join the conversation on Twitter @MIRAInk or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MIRAInk

Confessions
of an
Almost
Girlfriend
Louise Rozett

www.miraink.co.uk

In honour of the fifteenth anniversary of

Matthew Shepard’s death

For Matthew Shepard and Tyler Clementi and young people

everywhere who are just trying to be who they are

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS TO MY AMAZING EDITOR, NATASHYA WILSON, and the MIRA Ink editorial team, T. S. Ferguson and Annie Stone. Thanks for the awesome karaoke, you guys! (Oh, yeah, and all the support, too!)

Thanks also to my wonderful agent, Emmanuelle Morgen, without whom I would not sleep at night.

And a very special thanks to my parents, my brother and Lester, who keeps me honest.

SUMMER

homophobic (noun): scared of homosexuality (see also: the Swim Thugs, and half of Union High)

1

“JUMP, FAGGOT! JUMP!”

And just like that, summer is over.

Symbolically, anyway.

I’ve been at this party for sixty seconds and already the tyranny of the swim thugs is so suffocating, it’s like I never even had summer break to detox from freshman year.

Not that summer can really be considered a break when you spend the whole thing either folding clothes at the Gap or in therapy. With your mother. Talking about how you had every right to go behind her back and build a memorial website for your dad.

Who’s dead.

Obviously. Hence, memorial.

“Come on, homo! Let’s go!”

Mike Darren’s backyard is packed with students from every level of Union High’s caste system, but it’s obvious that this is a swim-team-initiation party. As Mike struts around checking the beer level of the bottomless red plastic cups that were given only to the prettiest freshman girls when they skittered through the tiki-torch gauntlet, Matt Hallis and the rest of the swim thugs are lined up on the edge of the pool like a firing squad. A freshman swimmer dressed in a red polo shirt, rolled-up white jeans and loafers with no socks stands on the diving board, backing away from them, inching closer and closer to the end while looking down at the water every other second. Matt ceremoniously raises his arm in the air and then shows off those leadership qualities that got him elected swim captain even though he’s just a sophomore: he fires the first shot, hurling his cup of beer at the freshman.

Thanks to the fact that Matt is an annoyingly talented athlete whose parents paid for him to spend the whole summer in a weight room, it’s a perfect throw with a ridiculous amount of force behind it. The beer splatters on the freshman’s blond head, the impact nearly knocking him backward as liquid pours down his cheeks, nose and neck, drenching his perfectly pressed shirt. His legs shake a little with the force of the blow and he jostles the diving board. For a second I think he’s going to fall—loafers and all—into the kidney-shaped pool with blue floodlights shimmering just beneath the waterline. He throws his arms out to the sides and steadies himself, and I can tell by the relieved expression on his face that he thinks he survived, that the hazing wasn’t so bad after all.

He slowly lowers his arms and takes a defiant step toward the firing squad. The relief on his face disappears as Matt’s underlings lift their cups in the air to follow their leader’s example.

“Jump or die, fag!” yells Matt, his drunken slurring making his speech sound even less intelligent than usual, which is hard to do. The cups nail the freshman like a spray of bullets, and he staggers backward, arms pinwheeling as he tries to cope with the beer in his eyes and mouth. He missteps and falls into the water on his back. The thugs cheer as loafers pop up and float on the pool’s surface.

Ironically, “Take it Off” by Ke$ha starts playing.

“What are we doing here?” Tracy asks next to me as she watches her ex-boyfriend parade around collecting high fives. It occurs to me that this is exactly the kind of party that Matt spent time at last summer, before freshman year, which is probably what turned him from the nice guy he was in eighth grade to the total jerk he is now.

I look at my best friend. A year ago, all she could talk about was how she couldn’t wait to be at parties like this in her cheerleading uniform with her swimmer boyfriend. Now, she’s dressed like a normal person—well, a very fashionable normal person—and she can’t remember why she wanted to be here in the first place.

I’m so proud of her.

“‘We are putting in an appearance at the biggest party of the summer so we can start sophomore year on Tuesday with our heads held high,’” I say, quoting her.

“What a dumb idea,” she replies.

The freshman hauls himself out of the pool with no help from anyone. He is shivering a little in his soaked clothes, probably trying to figure out whether he should fight back, leave or grab some beer and pretend everything is cool. There’s a radius around him of about 10 feet, as if being the swim thugs’ target of choice is a communicable disease. He takes a towel off a wicker stand and tries to dry his shirt.

“He picked the wrong team—in more ways than one,” Tracy says. “Not that being gay is a choice,” she quickly adds, repeating what our health teacher from last year, Ms. Maso, drilled into us, even though she probably could have gotten fired for stating as fact what some people think is just a belief about homosexuality. As far as we can tell, Ms. Maso’s the only teacher at Union High who is actually interested in giving kids useful—aka truthful—information.

Matt stumbles over to kiss Lena, the new captain of the cheerleading team who he had sex with a lot last year while claiming he was a virgin in order to get Tracy—his girlfriend at the time—to sleep with him.

Which, eventually, she did.

I glance at Tracy to see if she cares that Matt and Lena are making out in front of half of Union, but she’s not looking at them. She’s watching the freshman as he leans over the water with one of those long-handled nets for cleaning the pool. He nabs his shoes and lifts them, dripping, out of the water. “The chlorine is going to totally trash that leather. God, those look like Gucci, don’t they?”

I’m about to remind my fashionista friend that I wouldn’t know a Gucci loafer from a loaf of bread when suddenly Kristin is standing right in front of us. In her uniform. With her pom-poms.

“Tracy! You can’t quit! We can’t do it without you!” she shrieks. Or actually, screeches. Kristin, the only freshman to make “The Squad” last year besides Tracy, has a voice straight out of a nightmare. In fact, at Tracy’s big Halloween cheer party, she dressed up as some sort of weird demon fairy, with creepy little wings sprouting from her back. It really suited her.

“Now that Regina’s off the squad for good…” Kristin trails off, her eyes finding their way to me as if it’s my fault that Regina Deladdo made my life a living hell last year and then got kicked off the squad, even though she was supposed to be the new captain.

I wonder if being captain was going to be the pinnacle of Regina Deladdo’s high school career. Or maybe her whole life. I try to muster up sympathy for her but I can’t. It’s hard to feel anything other than deep dislike for someone who spent half the year writing 911 Bitch on all my desks and lockers after I sort of blew the whistle on a homecoming after-party.

Regina should have written Boyfriend Stealer instead, since that’s what she was really mad at me for. Not that I stole her boyfriend. All I did was like him. And it sort of seemed, for a minute there, that he liked me, too.

But that was just me, being an idiot. Because Jamie Forta does not like me.

How do I know? Two ways. 1: I haven’t seen or spoken to him all summer—not since Regina got him arrested right before he was supposed to pick me up for his junior prom. The last I heard from Jamie Forta was a note, delivered by his best friend Angelo, that said, Rose. Like I said. I am not right for you. I’m different. Believe me. Be good.

Whatever that means.

2: Jamie only became my friend because my brother Peter asked him to. Peter was worried about me when he left for college—or actually, maybe it was my mother he was worried about. Anyway, Peter wanted someone to “keep an eye” on me. Which Jamie did.

And then…there was some kissing.

But he’s not my boyfriend. I think his note made that pretty clear.

So, what is a guy who broke up with somebody else and asked you to the prom? Who spent a whole year looking out for you? Who gave you the best first kiss in the history of kissing?

I can see every second of that kiss like I’m watching a movie. It happened in the parking lot during homecoming. He was at the dance with Regina. I was there with Robert. But still, somehow, Jamie and I ended up sitting in a car together. And then he kissed me. This junior I’ve had a crush on since the first time I saw him play hockey when I was in seventh grade.

It was surreal.

It was also the only good thing that had happened to me since my dad died right before I started at Union High.

I miss Jamie. I missed him all summer, even though I tried not to. What’s the point in missing someone who tells you flat out that he’s not right for you?

“This year?” Kristin is saying to Tracy, looking a little manic, like if she doesn’t lock Tracy down, the world as she knows it is going to implode. “We want you to be our choreographer! Wouldn’t that be perfect? I mean, look, last year was kind of lame. But we’re actually going to dance this year, with totally hot moves.”

Kristin says this as if choreography is a novel concept for a cheerleading team.

“You don’t need me,” Tracy says. “It’s not like we’re a competition team. Even with a choreographer, we’ll still just be bouncing around in bad polyester blend.”

Kristin scowls, looking seriously offended by the idea that her cheers are just bouncing around.

“What’s the problem, Trace? Is it that Lena’s with Matt? Because they’re just hooking up. It’s not like she’s his ‘girlfriend with a capital G.’” Kristin uses her pom-poms to make little air quotes as she says this, and I consider grabbing them and throwing them in the pool.

I wonder if I actually made a move to do it because Tracy shoots me a look. Tracy has had a lot of talks with me about my anti-cheerleader stance, reminding me that not all cheerleaders are like Regina, citing herself and a bunch of other nice, smart girls on last year’s team as examples. While I see her point, I still haven’t managed to let go of the idea that, in general, cheerleaders suck.

I recognize that this viewpoint may be indicative of a character flaw on my part, and I’m okay with that.

In a fake, buttery voice, Kristin says, “Trace, let’s go talk in private for a sec, ’kay? Official business,” she barks at me as she threads her arm through Tracy’s. Tracy looks at me and rolls her eyes as Kristin yanks her toward the patio, her thick blond ponytail swaying with determination. My hand automatically goes to my hair, which is doing what it always does—hanging limply around my shoulders, straight and thin and mousy brown.

I take out the hand-me-down iPhone that Peter gave me before he went back to Tufts, even though I know I have no messages because the only person who has ever called or texted me since I’ve had it is Tracy. And my mother, of course. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about these phones, it’s that they can make you look busy when you have absolutely nothing to do.

Normally, when I’m trying to look busy, I click on my vocab app and study for the PSAT, which is six weeks away. This year is just a practice run, but I need to totally rock it so I can show my mother that I’ll be able to get scholarships and go to college even if she never sees the insurance money my dad’s company promised and somehow hasn’t managed to deliver yet. But the idea of getting busted studying for the PSATs at a party is kind of horrifying, so I click on “Photos” instead and continue my project—deleting all the pictures Peter left on the phone when he gave it to me.

At first I was annoyed that my mother insisted Peter give me his old iPhone—which looked like it had been drop-kicked multiple times—rather than letting me get a new one with my own money. But when I synced the phone to my laptop for the first time and the computer asked if I wanted to erase everything on it, I realized that Peter’s phone contained all sorts of information about his life that he had stopped sharing with me the minute he set foot on a college campus and got a girlfriend.

There are over 800 photos on his phone, and my plan is to look at every single one before I make room for mine. I’m hoping it’ll give me an idea of just how bad things are with him. So far, I’ve learned that he smokes and drinks a lot, and takes pictures of his friends smoking and drinking a lot. No surprises there, I guess.

I get through ten pictures of Peter’s friends having a much better time at a party than I currently am. Then I look up, see people talking to other human beings, feel like a dumbass and decide to go find something to drink.

I push past the freshman girls huddled together for safety as the swim thugs circle like sharks, and find my way to a cooler that’s filled with all sorts of things we’re not allowed to drink yet, and soda. It takes me a full minute to find a Diet Coke buried under all the ice. I can barely feel my hand when I pull it back out.

“Wouldn’t you rather have some Red Bull and vodka, Rose?”

It takes me a second to recognize Robert, probably because he looks happier than I have ever seen him look in four years. It could also be because he let his hair grow long and he seems somehow…cooler. Or maybe it’s just because he has his arm around one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen, and she’s smiling. At him. Like he’s a god.

“Holly, this is Rose Zarelli. Rose, meet Holly Taylor. She just moved here from L.A.” I postpone studying the beautiful new girl by noticing two more things about Robert: he is calling me Rose instead of Rosie—which he’s been calling me since the day we first met in sixth grade—and he is sipping his drink in a way that suggests he’s at a cocktail party at a swanky country club, not a kegger in a backyard.

When I can no longer put it off, I turn my attention to Holly. You’d think I’d know better than to shake hands with someone at a high school party, but because I’m a little intimidated by the amount of beauty in front of me, I stick my hand out like a giant dork. Holly graciously does the same, and she doesn’t even wince when my hand—frozen and wet from my arctic Diet Coke expedition—touches hers.

Not only is she pretty, she’s classy. No wonder Robert has that idiotic grin on his face.

“Hi!” she says. Her teeth are shockingly, blindingly white, and they immediately make me sure that I’ve got spinach stuck in mine. “I’m new at Union. My dad’s teaching drama at Yale.”

The reply that immediately comes to mind is: I’m not new at Union. My dad was blown to pieces in Iraq. It’s accompanied by some horror-movie images that I can’t seem to keep out of my head these days.

“Hi,” I say too cheerfully, trying to drive away the carnage in my brain. I know that I should offer Holly some interesting piece of information about myself but I’m unsure of what, exactly, that would be.

Definitely not the thing about Dad. Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than telling someone your father was killed by an IED in Iraq.

Holly, it turns out, has totally perfect, long, dark hair that’s super thick and looks like it’s been flat-ironed by a professional. Her eyes are huge and brown, I can’t even tell if she’s wearing makeup and she smiles like she does it for a living. She has on lots of silver jewelry that clanks and jingles when she moves, and she’s so petite that I actually stop inhaling in order to feel smaller.

“Rose is the…friend I told you about,” Robert adds meaningfully, with a slight hesitation before the word friend. Holly nods, and I wonder what he told her—I used to think I was in love with Rose or Rose treated me like crap last year or Rose is the one with the dead dad. “Holly and I got cast opposite each other in the drama department’s summer show,” Robert says. “Leading man and leading lady hook up—total cliché, right?” He smiles down at her and plants a kiss on the tip of her perfect nose.

If Robert weren’t standing here with his arm around Holly, there is no way I would ever believe that she was his girlfriend. First of all, Robert has some problems with telling the truth—he likes the things he makes up more than he likes reality. Second of all, Holly Taylor seems out of his league. Like, way out of his league. But here they are, all entangled and entwined and so very couple-y.

“Did you see the show, Rose? Robby was the best Joe in the history of Damn Yankees.” Holly is literally beaming up at Robert.

“And Holly was the hottest Lola,” he says, grinning at her like she’s the only girl in the world.

I’m torn between irritation at her calling him “Robby” and embarrassment over all the hours I spent at the beginning of summer daydreaming about getting cast as Lola. Last spring, after my mom took me to see the opera La Bohème, I decided that I want to be a singer. Not an opera singer, though I did learn this summer, when no one else was around, that I can sing really loud. Just…a singer. Of some kind. So I considered auditioning for Union High’s summer musical. I wanted to sing my heart out onstage as Lola—a vixen in a red dress and heels—and make everyone see me in a totally new way. But now, standing here with the person who actually played Lola, I’m suddenly so mortified that I feel like I have to leave the party immediately. I mean, how dumb could I be? Lola is beautiful and sexy, and the whole point of her character is that she can seduce anyone and get anything. Her big number is literally called, “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.”

I can’t even get the guy I like to call me back.

Standing here in front of Holly Taylor in an outfit that my best friend put together for me with things from her closet, I’m painfully aware that I ain’t no Lola.

“Holly’s dad is a stage, TV and film actor,” Robert says, obviously proud of himself for using the word film instead of movie. “You’d totally recognize him.”

Holly looks embarrassed and quickly changes the subject. “Do you act, Rose?”

“Rose is a runner. She plays the French horn, too,” Robert answers for me, like I’m a kindergartener who needs positive reinforcement for her cookie choice at snack time.

It pisses me off.

“Actually, I’m not playing French horn this year. I’m trying out for the musical,” I tell Holly.

Robert could win an Academy Award for the series of looks that cross his face in the next five seconds. First startled, then stunned, then irritated, then worried and then falsely happy. I feel like I scored a point or something.

I believe that would qualify as petty.

“You’re auditioning? That’s great!” Holly says. “Maybe we’ll all be in it together. It’s Anything Goes. Do you know it? Maybe you could be Reno Sweeney! Can you tap dance? Reno’s the best part. Although Hope is a great part, too. Ooh, but then there’s the funny one…what’s her name? She has that great number, right, babe?”

It’s then, when Holly turns to Robert, that I see Regina. She’s with Anthony Parrina, the huge hockey player she’s dating just to make Jamie mad. For a second, I’m worried about retaliation. But then I just feel…shame.

After Regina had Jamie arrested, I decided to finally tell Principal Chen that Regina was my graffiti stalker. The principal personally stopped Regina and Anthony at the entrance to the prom. I heard Regina threw a fit in a sequined blue tube dress and four-inch heels, and it actually caused her up-do to fall down. It must have been some fit, considering how much hairspray she uses. She was suspended and banned from cheerleading, and she missed finals and had to go to summer school so that she’d be able to graduate on time this year.

The thought of Regina leaving the prom in disgrace made me smile for a few hours. Then it made me feel pathetic, like I’d just gone running to the principal. Which I had.

When Regina turns toward me, my first instinct is to get a very important phone call. But it actually doesn’t matter what I do because she doesn’t notice me. She’s staring at the freshman who is now pinned against the house by the garden-hose-wielding swim thugs, who claim that they are helping him by rinsing the chlorine off his clothes.

Anthony bursts out laughing so loud that some of the thugs turn to see who’s making all the noise. When their eyes land on Regina, they actually step back, like they’re trying to distance themselves from what’s happening, terrified of facing the Wrath of Regina. But Regina is standing stock-still, her face frozen.

“Do you want some, Rose?” I hear Holly ask.

Holly hands a joint to Robert as she exhales. The smoke settles in a kind of halo above her head as I decide not to remind Robert that his stepmother once said she’d kick Robert out of the house permanently if he ever came home smelling of pot again.

Robert takes a hit off the joint and then gives it back to Holly, intentionally bypassing me.

“Rose isn’t that kind of girl,” he says, giving me a condescending wink.

I want to punch him. I’m actually considering it—even though my mom’s therapist, Caron, told me I need to start curbing my violent instincts and redirecting them to “a positive place”—when a howl rises up from the crowd.

Matt has grabbed the hose from his teammates and redirected the water so it hits the freshman right in the mouth. He is choking and sputtering, trying to move his face away from the stream so he can get some air, but Matt keeps walking toward him, bringing the hose closer and closer to the freshman’s mouth as if he intends to jam it in there.

Suddenly, Regina’s frozen face cracks. She’s in front of Matt in two steps, shoving him backward as she yanks the hose out of his hand. She tosses it away, spraying the cluster of freshman girls, who shriek and scatter in every direction, their hands flying up to protect their hair. Matt lands on his butt, unsure what just happened.

“Who is that?” Holly asks, her big brown eyes already redrimmed from the pot.

“Rose can tell you all about her, can’t you, Rose?” Robert says drily.

Matt grabs the hose off the ground and struggles to stand up, nearly falling into the pool. He loses track of the spray, drenching his own shoes.

“Conrad, are you really gonna let your sister mess with your initiation?” he asks, staring at Regina.

His sister? The party punching bag is Regina’s brother?

Matt looks back at Conrad.

Conrad says nothing.

Matt turns the hose on him.

Regina goes for Matt but Anthony catches her, pinning her arms and spinning her around. He leads her away and she doesn’t put up a fight, her face blank, her body slack as he talks into her ear, his dark eyes hard.

I can’t believe Regina is walking away while the swim thugs are drowning her brother. If anyone could take them on, it would be her. What’s she doing?

Matt and two thuglets grab Conrad and hurl him back into the pool, even though he’s still choking. As soon as Conrad hits the water, Matt spits out one final “Faggot!” then loses interest and wanders off. His brainless underlings trail after him.

“What’s with all the homophobia?” Holly asks, looking up at Robert for an explanation. “Is it always like this out East?”

“Union’s special,” Robert answers. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Um, shouldn’t we do something?” she says, turning toward the pool.

“We’ll just end up in there with him, and you’re too stoned to swim, darling,” Robert replies. I nearly gag for multiple reasons, not the least of which is Robert calling his girlfriend darling like he’s a 1940s movie star. “The guy’s a swimmer,” he continues. “I’m sure he can find his way to the surface of a pool without our help.”

“Okay,” Holly says uncertainly.

I follow her gaze to the water and see that Conrad is making zero effort to swim—in fact, less than zero. He’s letting himself sink.

“See ya, Rose,” Robert says, taking Holly’s hand.

I look at the cup Robert’s still holding. “Wait, you’re not going to drive right now, are you?” I ask.

For a second, I see the old Robert, the one who was always looking for my approval, even after I kept not giving it to him. But the new Robert surfaces quickly. “Holly’s driving the vintage Mustang tonight.”

I look at Holly, who seems embarrassed again, then at Robert. “So she’s too stoned to swim but not to drive?”

“It’s okay,” Holly says. “We can just walk to my house from here.” Holly glances one last time at the pool. “So cool to meet you, Rose! See you at school on Tuesday,” she adds as Robert pulls her into the crowd that has no interest whatsoever in the fact that Conrad Deladdo is intentionally drowning himself.

Although, to be honest, drowning oneself is not a surprising response to one’s first Union High party.

I should do something.

The thing is, after last year, I want to keep a low profile, and I definitely do not want to be the party buzz-kill again.

Plus, he’s not really drowning—he’s just messing around.

Right?

I look at the pool. I can’t see him anymore from where I’m standing.

I wait a second for him to come up. I wait another second. Nothing.

I go to the edge of the pool and look in. Conrad is still drifting down, as if he’s being pulled to the bottom by some current I can’t see. He looks up at me and it seems like our eyes meet through the water for a second. Then his close.

I drop to my knees and reach into the water to grab him but of course I can’t get to him. I lean forward a little more, and the inevitable happens.

From across the pool, Tracy yells my name but it’s too late. Someone shoves my shoulder and I fly face-first into the glowing blue water.

My first thought is, I’m destroying the dry-clean-only silk T-shirt Tracy lent me after practically making me sign a contract in blood, promising that nothing would happen to it.

My second thought is, I didn’t realize how much the noise of the party was making my brain hurt until I ended up in the pool. It’s so peaceful down here—all the music and the yelling get lost beneath the sound of my pulse and the blood in my veins. It’s perfect.

I haven’t felt this calm in more than a year. For a while after my dad died, I had these weird episodes that my mom said were panic attacks—they felt more like rage attacks to me. They’re mostly gone now, but sometimes, out of the blue, I’ll be doing something totally normal when suddenly I see these crazy-violent images. I have no control over it.

Here, under the water, I don’t feel like that can happen. Maybe I need to spend my life floating around in a pool.

Conrad looks like he feels the same way. But he also looks like he might be turning blue from lack of oxygen.

I swim down to him and reach for his arm. He yanks it away and gives me the finger.

So much for underwater tranquility.

What did I ever do to him?

I grab his arm and pull as hard as I can. Conrad fights me for a second but then lets me win. As we break the surface, a crowd of people at the edge of the pool is watching Tracy calmly shred Matt, who, of course, is the one who pushed me. I know that without having to watch the instant replay.

“…and get her and that freshman out of the pool or I’ll throw you in myself.”

A big chorus of “Oohs” goes up from the crowd. Matt is too drunk to formulate any kind of retaliation, so he just does as he’s told, stumbling to the edge and reaching for Conrad. Conrad is lifting himself out of the pool for the second time in less than an hour when someone shoves Matt aside, sending him sprawling again, and holds out a hand. Conrad looks up and half laughs, half snorts, like he’s disgusted.

“Go help your savior-complex girlfriend,” he says. “Leave me the hell alone.”

I’m trying to figure out who the savoir-complex girlfriend is and why she needs help when I’m lifted straight out of the pool and set down—dripping wet, mascara running, silk T-shirt and white capris probably see-through—on the deck. The warm hands feel familiar on my arms, and I know who it is instantly. But even though I’ve been waiting an entire summer to see him again, it still takes me a second before I can look up into the beautiful, furious face of Jamie Forta.

dissidence (noun): conflict; discord; warfare (see also: the general state of being in Union)

2

IT’S A STRANGE FEELING TO BE STANDING IN A DRIVEWAY at a keg party, fully clothed but soaking wet and wrapped in an oversize towel, talking—or not talking, as the case may be—to the guy who may or may not like you and who you haven’t seen in months, who is standing next to your worst enemy, who may or may not be his ex-girlfriend. Throw in the pacing, wet victim of a Union High hazing and a few onlookers, and you’ve officially got a three-ring circus.

I’m shivering as I wait for Tracy to get our stuff so she can drive me home. Jamie Forta is two feet away and he looks totally different. He’s tan, his arms are super cut and his hair is sort of dark gold—he looks like he spent the entire summer at the beach. He looks…beautiful.

I imagined a bunch of scenarios for when I finally saw Jamie again, but I didn’t think he would ignore me, which is what he’s been doing for the past few minutes. But why would I think that he’d do anything else, when that’s exactly what he did all summer?

He didn’t return my calls after the night he spent in jail, and he wasn’t allowed to come back to school to finish the year. After a few weeks, I started to think that I’d imagined him. I could almost convince myself I had, until I thought about the kiss. That kiss was the most real thing ever—there’s no way I could have made that up.

Which takes me back to wondering why he didn’t call. It’s infuriating.

But no matter how hurt or mad or whatever I’m feeling, Jamie looks amazing and I can’t stop staring at him.

Neither can Regina, which Anthony Parrina has just noticed as he heads up the driveway on his way back to the party from a beer run.

He doesn’t look too happy about what he sees.

Anthony puts down the case of beer he was balancing on one massive shoulder and wraps a possessive arm around Regina. “What, no chain gang for you tonight, jailbird?” he says to Jamie. “Oh, right, they only let the juvie kids work road crew during the day. I honked at you once on the highway in your little orange vest, but you didn’t wave to me,” Anthony says, making a fake sad face.

I can’t tell if there’s any truth to what Anthony is saying because Jamie’s face is a mask. Jamie’s dad is a cop—a cop who left his son in jail overnight to teach him a lesson—and I wouldn’t be surprised if he arranged for Jamie’s community service to involve spending his whole summer in the blazing hot sun fixing the town’s potholes.

I look at Regina. She is staring hard at Jamie, as if she’s trying to tell him something, but Jamie keeps his eyes on Anthony. I have no idea if Jamie and Regina have talked about what she did to him. But they do live next door to each other, so that probably answers my question.

“What, you got nothin’ to say, Forta?” Anthony challenges.

Jamie and Anthony have unfinished business. Jamie used to play hockey for Union with Peter until he got kicked off the team during the big Union vs. West Union game for high-sticking Anthony in the neck. I saw it happen, and I always figured it was some stupid trash-talking thing. But now I’m starting to think it was something bigger.

And Anthony is dating Regina, who Jamie grew up with and has…what? Liked? Gone out with?

Been in love with?

Jamie slowly turns to Regina, not taking his eyes off Anthony until the last second. When his gaze meets hers, concern fills his face. How can he possibly look so worried about her after what she did to him? What is going on?

“You okay?” Jamie asks Regina in a low voice, as if they’re the only two people in the driveway. That weird, blank look comes across Regina’s face again as Anthony tightens his grip on her and smiles like he won a prize.

“She’s fine,” Anthony answers for her. “It’s Conrad who don’t look so good.” He sort of chuckles.

Anthony is a total meathead.

Jamie turns to watch Conrad pace back and forth on the same spot, water still dripping off his rolled-up jeans.

“Conrad,” Jamie calls out.

Conrad stops. “Don’t you fucking talk to me.”

“Don’t swear at Jamie,” Regina warns. It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak all night.

“Oh, that’s great, ’Gina, stick up for the guy who treats you like shit. Should I start calling you ‘Mom’?”

Conrad is shivering in his wet red shirt, which is bleeding pink streaks on his white jeans. His eyes land on Anthony, and I’m hoping Conrad will just keep his mouth shut, for his own sake. I can’t tell whether he has tears or pool water on his face, but the overall effect is the same—with the bleeding shirt and the streaked face, he looks like he’s slightly out of his mind.

“Take him home,” Jamie says to Regina.

“You know what, Forta?” Anthony interrupts. “You don’t get to tell her what to do anymore.”

Jamie takes a step toward Anthony. “And you do?”

“Stop acting like you actually give a shit about us, Jamie,” Conrad snaps.

“I said watch your mouth,” Regina says.

“All right, kids, don’t make me send you to your rooms.” Anthony suddenly sounds annoyed and bored. “I’ll drive you home. Just don’t get my interior wet.”

“Why would I get in a car with you? You’re even more of an asshole than Jamie.”

“Conrad, if you don’t stop talking shit about Jamie—”

“Why you gotta defend Forta, Regina?” Anthony asks.

I can answer that. Because she loves him.

But of course she’s not going to admit that to Anthony.

Regina goes mute again. Anthony grabs her arm hard enough to change the color of her skin, forcing her to turn toward him. For one weird moment, I actually want to pry his hand off her.

“Let go of her,” Jamie warns.

“Fuck off, Forta,” Anthony says. He takes a step toward Jamie, his chest puffed out, fire in his eyes.

Jamie doesn’t budge. It occurs to me that someone who has just finished community service probably can’t afford to get into trouble again. I should get between them, like Jamie did for me last year with Regina. But based on the way Anthony just grabbed her, I’d say the presence of a girl between him and the person he wants to punch isn’t much of a deterrent. So instead I just blurt out the first thing I can think of.

“Conrad, your shirt is staining your pants.”

Everyone turns to look at me as Conrad looks down at his pants. The red is now more of a general pink wash than individual streaks. “How symbolic,” he says.

“Tracy and I can drive you home if you want to get those in the wash before they’re ruined.”

The wash? I’m talking about washing pants right now? What is wrong with me?

He snorts. “You are the reason this all got so fucked up in the first place,” he says, waving in disgust at Regina, Jamie and Anthony. “I’d rather walk.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Anthony says, looking at Conrad. “What are you talkin’ about? Who’s the reason everything got so fucked up?”

Conrad gestures to me with his chin. “Her.”

Anthony points at me, his eyes practically bugging out of his head. “This is Forta’s little freshman? The girl who went screamin’ to the principal?”

He looks like he can’t figure out whether to laugh or punch me. In my head, I’m telling him that I’m actually a sophomore now, which, if you pass your classes, is what happens after you’ve been a freshman, generally speaking. But in reality, I’m totally embarrassed and freaked out. It never occurred to me that someday I’d be face-to-face with West Union’s hell-on-ice star hockey player and would have to answer for getting him thrown out of the prom after he went to all the trouble of taking off his skates and putting on a tuxedo.

I wonder if Jamie will come to my defense if Anthony decides to kill me here and now.

“Matt just passed out,” Tracy says as she comes around the corner of the house with our bags. She takes one look at Conrad’s now-pink pants and visibly cringes. “Were those Marc Jacobs?” Then she looks up at his face. “Are you okay?”

I don’t realize I’m expecting Conrad to smile at Tracy gratefully and thank her for asking until he glares at her like she’s an idiot. “Do I look like I’m okay?” he asks.

I want to tell him that I know how it feels to be targeted. But I know it’s not the same thing. I kissed someone I shouldn’t have kissed. Conrad, on the other hand, was just being himself at a team party—a team that he’s supposedly a member of.

“Is somebody going to drive you home?” Tracy asks.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” he snaps.

“Probably because no one wants to fish you out of the pool again,” she says.

“Well, I’m not getting in a car with either one of them,” he replies, referring to Jamie and Anthony, who are still standing face-to-face with about an inch of space between them.

It is simultaneously totally hot to see Jamie like this—is that weird?—totally depressing to know that it’s not me he’s defending and totally awful to think that the school year hasn’t even started and already Jamie is in a situation that could land him in serious trouble.

“Fine. I’ll drive you home,” Tracy says. No one moves. Tracy looks around at our cozy little group and then back at Jamie. She raises her eyebrows in surprise and possibly approval of the new-and-improved version—Jamie 2.0, I bet she’s going to say later—that she didn’t notice by the pool because she was too busy yelling. Without taking her eyes off him, she asks, “You coming with me, Rose, or…?”

Jamie turns away from Anthony and makes eye contact with me for the second time tonight—or rather, for the second time since June. I can’t read anything in his expression to give me a single clue about where I stand with him.

What else is new.

“Uh…” I eloquently begin.

Jamie looks at Regina and says, “You call me if you need me.” He gives Anthony another long, hard stare, and Anthony bares his teeth in what’s supposed to be a grin. Jamie heads down the driveway. Regina watches Jamie go, a flicker of desperation in her eyes as if she wants nothing more than to go with him. Anthony grabs the case of beer at his feet, slings his arm over her shoulders and drags both the beer and Regina back to the party.

Jamie gets in his car, slams the door hard enough to set off the alarm on the SUV he’s parked in front of, and takes off down the street.

I watch his taillights get smaller and smaller.

The first time I rode in Jamie’s old, green car was when he drove me home on the third day of school last year. He did it only because Peter had asked him to look out for me, but I didn’t know that at the time and I thought maybe, just maybe, Jamie Forta might think I was cute or something. It was kind of a terrifying prospect. I babbled like an idiot the whole time.

When I realized Jamie knew where I lived without me having to tell him, my stomach dropped out like I was on a roller coaster. Sitting close to him made me so nervous I couldn’t put a sentence together, but I still managed to memorize every detail I could about that ride. The car smelled like rain. The hood had been polished with something shiny and when the sun hit it, the glare was so bright it hurt my eyes. The seats and the floor were clean enough to eat off. It was clear that Jamie loved his car.

Now that I think about it, I bet Jamie cares more about that car than most of the people in his life.

Possibly more than all of the people in his life.

But definitely more than me.

“I already said I’m not getting in a car with her.”

Conrad, standing next to the red Prius that Tracy’s dad got her for her sixteenth birthday in July, points at me. Tracy rolls her eyes and leans into the backseat, clearing away some junk. Tracy wouldn’t appreciate my calling her magazines junk, but they’ve been stomped on and sat on, and pages have been torn out and folded over and marked up, so they’re junk in my book. Last year was all about Teen Vogue and Lucky, but this year Trace is reading Vogue and Elle, with the occasional InStyle thrown in, “because not everyone gets couture.”

Thanks to my trusty PSAT app, I surreptitiously learned that couture means custom-made, high-fashion clothes. I have to admit that there are some occasional topic-specific gaps in my vocabulary. My dad—Mr. Vocabulary himself—would not have been pleased. But the fact that I have a PSAT app on my phone would have gone a long way toward redeeming me in his eyes, I’m sure.

“Conrad,” Tracy says as she extricates herself from the backseat to move her magazines into the trunk, “Rose ended up in the pool for you. So maybe try a little gratitude. Sit,” she commands, pointing to the mostly clean backseat and dropping several torn-up GQs in the process. “Love your shoes, by the way. Stuff paper towels in them when you get home so they dry in the right shape. They’re Gucci, right? And those pants are Marc Jacobs, aren’t they?”

Conrad doesn’t miss a beat. “Stop talking about my clothes. You’re making me self-conscious.”

Tracy looks shocked, like she can’t conceive of a world in which Conrad wouldn’t want to talk about fashion. I think this is actually less about stereotyping and more about Tracy forgetting that not everyone cares as deeply and passionately about fashion as she does. Whatever she’s into takes over her entire worldview. She was like that with cheerleading last year. And Matt, unfortunately.

Getting dumped by Matt after she lost her virginity to him was the best thing that ever happened to Tracy. Well, okay, not the best thing. Actually, it was terrible. But as soon as she was forced to accept what a loser Matt had become, she realized she was spending too much time worrying about what he—and everyone else—thought of her. She vowed never to do that again, and she hasn’t looked back since. Her obsession with fashion isn’t just about magazines and being pretty. Tracy wants to be a designer someday, or an editor at a fashion magazine, or a…something. According to her, her education has already started. She reads every fashion magazine she can get her hands on, follows about twenty different blogs, and spends more hours on Lookbook than most gamers spend playing Call of Duty 17, or whatever number they’re up to.

I envy her. She found her thing and is already figuring out how to do it.

Actually, if I think about it, I’m not that far behind her—at least not in terms of knowing what my thing is. I just have to…start doing it.

When I was thinking of auditioning for Damn Yankees, I sang in front of the mirror and discovered that I look like a giant freak. When my mom’s shrink, Caron, asked why I hadn’t auditioned after I’d said I was going to, I just shrugged. Then she declared that I’m depressed.

Brilliant, right? But Ms. Shrinky-Dink had a point. I was excited about auditioning. And I was disappointed—in myself—when I chickened out. So I’m going to that Anything Goes audition, even if I look like the world’s weirdest weirdo when I sing.

“What are you doing with all this shit?” Conrad says, looking down at the issues of GQ that Tracy dropped.

“I like fashion,” Tracy answers, sounding a little peeved as she grabs the magazines and puts them on top of her pile. She dumps the magazines in her trunk and takes out the blanket from the monstrous roadside emergency kit that her dad bought for the car—there are enough supplies in there to survive simultaneous natural disasters. “Here,” she says, handing it to him.

Conrad wraps the blanket around himself and with one more nasty look at me, slides into the backseat. Tracy slams the trunk shut and gets into the driver’s seat. I barely have my seat belt on over my wet towel when Conrad starts in.

“So was it guilt that made you pull me off the bottom of the pool?”

Tracy eyes Conrad in her rearview mirror. “If anyone should feel guilty, it’s your sister. She was the psychotic maniac last year.”

“That’s not what I heard,” he mutters.

“Two sides to every story,” I reply.

“All right, let’s hear your side. How did someone like you manage to steal my sister’s boyfriend?”

Conrad’s question rings in my ears as I turn off the air-conditioning that came on full blast when Tracy pushed the car’s power button. My teeth are chattering because my skin is still wet. I hope my mother isn’t waiting up for me when I get home. If I have to explain to her how I ended up fully clothed in a pool at the party, she’ll probably call Caron to schedule an emergency midnight session. That’s Kathleen for ya.

I’ve been calling my mom by her first name—Kathleen—in my head. It makes me feel better for some reason. Less “depressed,” you might say.

“Hello?” Conrad says, still waiting for an answer.

If I were a different person, I would see this as an opportunity, as Caron likes to call complicated situations. An opportunity to tell my side of the story, or something like that.

But really, it just sucks to hear Conrad ask a variation on the very question I spent most of the summer asking myself: What would a hot guy like Jamie Forta ever see in someone like me?

“I think the real question is how did you end up in a pool with the swim team trying to drown you?” Tracy asks.

“Oh, please. I saw the YouTube video of your initiation last year, pretending to be Beyoncé in your bra in the freezing cold after homecoming. You don’t need me to explain a damn thing to you.”

Tracy didn’t see that coming. Conrad is giving her a real run for her money, and she’s not used to it.

“Dancing in a parking lot and practically being killed by your teammates are kind of different, don’t you think?” I ask.

“Being straight in Union and being me in Union are kind of different, don’t you think?” he mocks in a high, girly voice that sounds nothing like me. Then he sighs, more annoyed than defeated. “Your ex went the extra mile with me because the thought of me looking at him naked in the locker room scares the panties off him. God, what a fucking cliché.”

Tracy doesn’t respond. Neither do I. Ms. Maso would not be pleased with our inability to be supportive of someone who just came out to us. Even if he did do it in a way that was carefully crafted to make us feel as stupid as possible.

Conrad misinterprets our silence. “I’m gay,” he says with exasperation.

“We know,” Tracy responds with ice in her voice.

“You mean someone in Union actually has gaydar? Shocking,” Conrad grumbles. “Although if anyone would have it, it would be the girl with back issues of GQ and Vogue in the trunk of her Prius. Everything about Union is so typical.” Conrad slouches down, jabbing his knees into the back of my seat. “So, Rose—that’s your name, right?—are you and Jamie together or is he just doing his usual dark-and-brooding, now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t thing where he shows up at your door every once in a while and does something sexy just to make sure you’re still dangling on the line, waiting for him?”

Tracy and I are both stunned into silence, for different reasons. I’m sure she’s not surprised by my inability to keep up with Conrad, but it’s pretty rare for Tracy to be without a good comeback. I’m also marveling at Conrad’s ability to go right for the sweet spot and stick a knife in it. It’s a gift. Must run in the family.

Suddenly, I’m angry. Sure, it’s true that Conrad was just humiliated in front of half of Union High, but that’s no reason for him to take it out on me, especially after I just dove, fully clothed, into a pool for him. Well, okay, I was pushed. But the whole reason I was close enough to get pushed was because I was going to dive in.

Snark doesn’t come naturally to me, but I just happen to have some deep inside. I take a breath and let it fly. “I have no clue what’s going on with Jamie because we haven’t talked since your batshit-crazy sister had him arrested for committing the apparently horrific felony of attempting to take someone like me to the prom.”

Tracy takes her eyes off the road to look at me. She stops just short of giving me a thumbs-up. I feel Conrad’s knees in my back again.

“So, Jamie didn’t call you once this whole summer? After standing you up for the prom?” He lets out that angry laugh again that sounds like it should come from someone a lot older. “Wow, that is cold. Well, he was busy chasing after ’Gina in summer school.” Conrad pauses, knowing full well that this is information I didn’t have. “Of course, she was busy throwing herself at that puck-head Anthony, just to drive Jamie crazy. And it worked. He totally wants her back. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave.’ Is that Shakespeare? I think that’s Shakespeare.”

“Sir Walter Scott,” I correct, trying to sound unfazed although my brain is reeling.

So Jamie was avoiding me all summer and hanging out with Regina. That’s fantastic. Well, at least now I know why he doesn’t want anything to do with me. Apparently, the way to Jamie’s heart is to have him arrested. I’ll have to remember that.

But what about Anthony Parrina? If Regina just wanted Jamie back and now Jamie wants Regina back, what is Regina still doing with Anthony?

This is all so far over my head it’s not even funny.

“Where am I going?” Tracy asks Conrad impatiently.

“Take Hill to Barry and turn left. My house is halfway down the block. Next to the Fortas,” Conrad says pointedly.

All three of us fall silent, which is kind of a relief. We leave the fancy part of Union, where all the houses are huge with perfectly edged bright green lawns, and we drive into the next neighborhood, where the houses are smaller—some nice, some not so nice. We pass one with dark metal siding and an American flag hanging over the front door, with a “Support Our Troops” banner tacked up beneath the windows, practically glowing in the dark because of all the floodlights trained on it. If Conrad weren’t here, I’d ask Tracy to stop so I could take a picture for Vicky, who likes to post photos of troop-support banners from all over the country on her son’s memorial site.

Kathleen hates it when I say it, but Vicky is my friend. Her son, Sergeant Travis Ramos, was one of the people who died with my dad when the convoy they were traveling in blew up. I discovered Travis’s memorial site last fall, and it inspired me—eventually—to start designing the one for my dad. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I posted a comment on Travis’s site, explaining who I was and asking for advice about how to—and whether I should—launch my site. And that’s how I met Vicky.

She emailed back right away, full of reasons why a memorial site is a great way to honor someone. It was Vicky who suggested I launch the site on the first anniversary of the explosion, and Vicky who later contacted everyone on her mailing list to let them know that there was finally a site up for Alfonso Zarelli, which is how I ended up getting tons of posts on the anniversary. And how I learned that my dad had decided to stay in Iraq for a year, when he’d promised me that he was coming home after six months.

I kind of got a little obsessed with the posts for a few days, but Vicky and I emailed a lot, and she helped me. She understood what I was going through.

The day after the anniversary, my mother came to my room and flipped out about Vicky, claiming that I didn’t need to expend my “emotional resources” on a grown woman who was grieving. I knew right away my mother had been reading my emails, which wasn’t hard for her to do—she’d set up my account for me in middle school, and I’d never changed the password. I’d never thought I needed to.

She doubled our therapy sessions that day.

To be honest, I think my mother was jealous that I’d said more to Vicky about missing my dad than I’d said to her. That’s probably why I didn’t change my password right away after I found out she was reading my email. In a way, I sort of liked that she was jealous.

Sometimes it’s just easier to talk to people you don’t really know.

When we pull up in front of the Deladdos’ place, it takes exactly one second to figure out which house is Jamie’s. The house to the left of the Deladdos’ is perfectly maintained and lit up like the Fourth of July. I can see a TV on the wall and a dog bouncing up and down on the couch, barking and wriggling furiously as we idle on the street in front of his territory.

The house to the right of the Deladdos’ is small and rundown. The lawn is scraggly with bald spots where grass refuses to grow. Brown shutters droop on their hinges and white paint has peeled off the house and landed in half-dead shrubs, creating a dirty-snow effect. The gutters are bursting with dead leaves and branches that look like they’re sprouting from the house itself. There are no lights on and no one seems to be home.

This is where Jamie lives with his dad.

Jamie turned eighteen this summer. Technically, he doesn’t have to live here anymore. And considering what his father did to him when he got arrested, it’s hard to believe that he’d want to. But I’d be willing to bet that Jamie won’t leave his dad alone unless he has to.

Jamie can be loyal to a fault.

I wonder what Jamie’s mother would say about his father leaving him in jail overnight.

I saw Jamie’s father from a distance last Thanksgiving at a restaurant, and he seemed way more interested in the football game that was on than in talking to Jamie. I don’t know a lot about him—I know that he’s a cop, and that he went a little crazy for a while and Jamie actually had to live with the Deladdoses for a few months, which I try not to think about because it drives me crazy.

But I know even less about Jamie’s mother. Only that she didn’t live with Jamie and his dad because she was in some kind of institution near Boston. I also know that it was soon after she died that Jamie got kicked off the hockey team.

Which is when he became one of my mom’s patients.

Yes, I am the very lucky daughter of an adolescent psychologist who is in therapy herself. No wonder I avoid conversation with her at all costs.

It drives me nuts that my mother knows more about Jamie than I do. Although, at this point, that would be true of anyone who actually had a conversation with Jamie this summer—the cashier at the grocery store, the guys he worked with on the road crew, his probation officer.

Regina.

“What do you want me to do with this blanket?” Conrad asks, unbuckling his seat belt. Before Tracy can answer, the Deladdos’ front door opens. A woman looks out at us, her hand hovering over the screen-door handle as if she’s unsure what to do. She shields her eyes against the glare of the light above her front steps in order to see us better.

“Shit,” Conrad mutters. He runs his hands through his hair and looks down at his ruined pants and his red shirt, which now looks vaguely tie-dyed.

“Just leave it there,” Tracy answers.

Without another word, Conrad gets out of the car, slams the door too hard and starts up his front walk. As I watch him, he seems to physically transform, like he’s trying to become invisible. He ducks his head and looks at the ground, pulling his shirt down as far over his pants as he possibly can and then giving up and jamming his hands into his pockets. The woman holds open the screen door for him and he slides in sideways so as not to touch her or let her touch him. She asks him something and he shakes his head while moving past her as if his life depends on it. She watches him take the stairs two at a time and then, after he has disappeared from her sight, turns back to us. She lifts one hand to shield her eyes again, and then gives us a hesitant wave before slowly closing the door.

expiate (verb): to make up for doing something wrong (see also: Jamie…apologizes?)

3

“MATT IS A TOTAL SADIST.”

“Trace,” I say, pretending to be shocked. “Did you finally open that vocabulary study guide I gave you, like, a year ago?”

She rolls her eyes at me. “He is.”

I’m tempted to remind Tracy that I spent almost all of freshman year telling her that Matt had turned into a sadistic jerk, but we’ve been getting along so great, the last thing I want to do is say I told you so. Even though I kind of do want to say it.

Tracy pulls a pair of super-soft yoga pants and a blue T-shirt that she knows I love out of her dresser and hands them to me. “Here. And don’t forget the leave-in conditioner. There is nothing worse for your hair than chlorine. Matt’s hair felt like straw all the time.”

“Gross,” I say as I pull her silk T-shirt over my head. I know it’s ruined—it now feels more like Styrofoam than silk. As soon as I get it off, Tracy rushes it into the bathroom to begin a special washing ritual in her sink involving a “delicates” soap—I had no idea there was such a thing—that comes in a black bottle shaped like a corset.

“I’m really sorry about your shirt,” I say as I follow her slowly. I hate Tracy’s bathroom. I try to avoid using it because the entire thing is full of mirrors—there is literally no escape from looking at yourself, unless you’re in the shower. And looking at myself is not one of my favorite things to do. I actually took the mirror off the back of my closet door this summer because I was constantly checking my hair and my face to see if anything good was finally happening.

It never was.

Tracy, on the other hand, has what Caron would call a “healthy sense of self-esteem.” She checks herself out constantly to make sure that the outfit she put together works from every angle and that her hair and makeup are achieving maximum effect. When I watch her do this, I don’t think, my best friend is vain, like I used to. Instead, I think, What is it like to actually enjoy looking at yourself? I mean, it’s not that I expect to look in the mirror and see Giselle. But there’s got to be something in between “I’m so gorgeous” and “I’m so hideous.” Right?

There’s got to be.

“Don’t worry about the shirt,” Tracy says as she swishes it around in the water over and over in a figure-eight pattern. Unfortunately, I can tell she just doesn’t want me to feel bad. I know it’s totally killing her that the shirt got trashed before she even got to wear it once.

“I’ll get you a new one if it’s ruined, okay?”

“Uh-uh. If it’s ruined, Matt is getting me a new one. And he’s also getting Conrad some new pants.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I say.

“I should threaten to call his mother. She always liked me. I bet she’d love to know he was trying to drown a freshman for fun.” She lifts the shirt out of the sink, gives it a sniff and puts it back to soak some more. “Blackmail might work. And if it doesn’t, at least I’ll get to tell his parents that he’s having sex, and his birth control method is to say to the girl, ‘You worry about it.’”

I look at Tracy in the mirror. “I thought you said you guys used a condom.”

Tracy sighs. This is a conversation we had over and over last year, when Matt kept trying to convince Tracy that she should be on the Pill, and I kept telling her that she had to make him use a condom. “We did, Rosie. But only because I had them. He was only thinking about himself. So not worth it. Be glad you’re still a virgin.” She points at a bottle sitting on the edge of the tub, knowing that of course I had already forgotten all about it. “Don’t forget to use that leave-in conditioner.”

Tracy closes the door behind her, leaving me standing in the room of mirrors in my bra and the loose-fit white capris I borrowed from her—I couldn’t get my runner’s thighs into her skinny jeans if I covered them in cooking oil. I turn to face the shower curtain and peel the damp clothes off, trying not to catch a glimpse of myself—I don’t feel like seeing my naked body in the mirror while wondering if it’s weird that I’m still a virgin.

I’m a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore—it shouldn’t be weird that I haven’t had sex yet. But somehow, when Tracy points out that I’m a virgin—which has happened more than once since she slept with Matt—it feels weird.

Once the water gets hot enough, I stand under it for at least 10 minutes, feeling the heat soak into me. It’s the warmest I’ve felt since Jamie pulled me out of the pool, his hands hot against my skin, his eyes practically on fire with anger.

Is he mad at me? He’s the one who stood me up, I keep reminding myself. So what is he so pissed off about?

Caron says I have to stop feeling like everything is my fault. And she follows that up with a question about whether I feel like Dad’s death was my fault. My mother always looks like she’s going to vomit when we get to that part.

I turn off the shower and dry myself while I’m still standing behind the curtain. Then I put on the yoga pants and T-shirt and get away from those mirrors as fast as I can.

Tracy is on the floor, meticulously working her way through Vogue with a Sharpie in one hand and a pad of Post-its in the other. I sit down next to her and get to work on a back issue of Elle, carefully tearing pages out that Tracy has marked by folding the corner down.

I have no idea why she wants some pages and not others, because all the models and outfits look pretty much the same to me. But as Tracy carefully explained when I first started helping with her magazines, each outfit is an individual work of art that needs to be studied. When I looked skeptical, she reminded me of the monologue Meryl Streep has in The Devil Wears Prada, where she smacks down Anne Hathaway for laughing at a bunch of magazine editors who are trying to describe the specific shade of blue on a belt. I knew the speech she was talking about—when I first heard it, it made me see fashion as a kind of art, and I’d never thought of fashion that way before.

As I play the role of Tracy’s assistant, I take a look around the room. A year ago, I would have been on her orange shag rug and she would have been in the beanbag chair, asking me whether or not she should sleep with Matt. Now, the shag has been replaced by a flat black rug with gray lines that I think are supposed to be flowers, and two clear plastic armchairs sit where the beanbag used to be. And we’re doing something meaningful—or at least, meaningful to her.

To be truthful, I don’t actually know what we’re doing.

Tracy’s walls are covered with magazine pages and blog photos, but they’re not just taped up as part of a collage, like they would be in most girls’ rooms. She has painted one entire wall with special magnetic paint so she can use these tiny magnets to hang up the images, which she moves around daily and covers in different colored Post-its. Sometimes she’s written a word or a phrase on the Post-it like “Bubble!” or “Blue sky”; other times, just letters.

If I ask her what she’s doing, all she says is I’ll find out soon enough.

We’re not supposed to be keeping secrets from each other this year, but she looks so happy when I ask about her project that I decide not to remind her about that.

“So, Peter went back to school?” Tracy gets up, disappears into the bathroom, and comes back with the leave-in conditioner I forgot to put in my hair.

I nod.

“Back to what’s-her-name? That rich pot freak?”

Tracy—who has had a crush on my brother for most of her life—knows what Peter’s girlfriend’s name is. She just can’t bring herself to say it. I get it. Sometimes I can’t bear to say that girl’s name, either.

“Yup, back to Amanda.” I take the bottle from Tracy and squeeze some of the conditioner into my hands. It smells like tomatoes fresh off the vine. “And I’m sure she just couldn’t wait to get him high,” I add, the words sounding funny—for a whole bunch of reasons—as they come out of my mouth.

It’s hard for me to think about Peter getting high. I never thought that my brother would be one of those guys who would get into drugs just because his girlfriend liked them.

Caron says that people’s reasons for using drugs are “often very complex.” It’s the one thing she says that doesn’t get an instant nod of agreement from my mother. Mom and Caron know each other really well—they used to be in the same practice together—so I usually feel ganged up on when Caron is talking and Mom is just nodding at everything like a bobblehead. But when Caron talks about Peter’s “complexity of motivation for using,” Mom gets very quiet and looks at the floor.

I don’t think there’s anything complex about it. I think he’s doing it because Amanda wants him to, and he’s desperate to impress her because he’s never had such a beautiful girlfriend in his life. He’s never really had a girlfriend at all, now that I think about it.

“So how is Peter doing?” Tracy asks after a pause that is meant to make the question seem way more casual than it really is. “Have you talked to him?”

I shake my head.

“Well, you’re going to call him, aren’t you? To check on him?”

“At some point.”

“You’re still mad.”

I nod.

“Maybe you should be worried, not mad.”

“And maybe you should just call him yourself if you want to talk to him so badly,” I tease.

“It’s not that I want to talk to him,” she says too quickly, though we both know she does. “It’s just that I’m worried.” She fixes me with her most serious stare. “And you should be, too.”

About a week before they had to go back to school, Peter and Amanda came to visit. They’d been working in a hotel on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, and the first thing I noticed was that they looked like they hadn’t been in the sun the entire time. What’s the point of dealing with snotty, demanding hotel guests on Martha’s Vineyard if you’re not going to go to the beach?

Then I thought maybe they were just being really conscientious about sunscreen. Amanda definitely seemed like the type to want her pale skin to stay as pale as possible.

But that didn’t explain the bags under their eyes.

It was the first time my mom and I met Amanda, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. I was still pissed that she’d invited Peter to go to her house last Thanksgiving, even though she knew it was our first Thanksgiving without Dad. When Peter had called to tell me he wasn’t coming home, I’d actually hung up on him.

So Amanda and Peter drove up in her hand-me-down silver Mercedes convertible that her father—who is also a shrink, by the way—gave her when he upgraded, and they looked like they hadn’t showered in weeks. When I said something about it to my mom, she said that that’s what college students do. Something about rebelling against their parents’ enforced hygiene rules once they finally get out of the house.

Amanda is definitely pretty—there’s no getting around that, no matter what Tracy says about how she’s so super skinny that her head looks too big for her body. She wears baggy clothes that are supposed to make her look like she doesn’t have any money, but they’re so nice that you know she totally does. She has super-long blond hair and green eyes, and when she smiles she looks like a sleepy cat.

Or a high cat.

For a few days after they got home, I actually believed that they had just been working really, really hard, and Peter was too exhausted to speak. He barely deigned to acknowledge my existence until he said that he was giving me his old iPhone because Amanda had gotten him a new one. That was on the third day of their visit.

Not talking may be normal for some brothers and sisters, but it’s not for us. Peter and I were really close. He used to look out for me, and he was even nice to me in public. Maybe that’s because we’re four years apart—we were never really interested in each other’s toys when we were little, or each other’s friends when we got older.

I could go to him if I needed advice for practically any situation. And when he came home with Amanda, I was planning to tell him how nervous I was to go back to Union after ruining Regina’s life, and that I needed some real “coping strategies,” as opposed to the ones that Caron and Mom were coming up with in therapy that involved telling Regina how her actions hurt me, by filling in the blanks of this sentence: “Regina, when you blank, it makes me feel blank.”

The first—and only—time I’ve ever laughed in therapy was when I tried to imagine saying that sentence to Regina.

Anyway, there was no way I was going to ask Peter for advice on anything while he was walking around with such a huge superiority complex. When he gave me his stupid iPhone, he actually patted me on the head and called me “kiddo.” And Amanda gave me a weird little sad-face smile and told me I was just unbearably cute. “Pete, what’s it like to have a little sister?” she said in front of me, using a voice that most people reserve for talking about puppies, kittens, or babies. “Oh, look at her—how sweet. It must just be so fun!”

Of course, now I know that they were both totally high at the time. The only thing I don’t know is what else they were on besides pot.

It’s really the last thing I want to talk about.

“So, did Jamie even say hi to you tonight?” Tracy asks.

Actually, it’s the second-to-last thing I want to talk about.

I shake my head without looking at her. She leans over to turn up the Feist album she’s been playing nonstop since I told her to get it, and she doesn’t ask me anything else.

I’ve been lying on the trundle bed in Tracy’s room for more than an hour, trying every trick I know to fall asleep, when I hear it.

At first I don’t even recognize the sound.

And then I do. It’s my phone, vibrating.

Somebody’s calling me.

I look at the clock. It’s 1:00 a.m.

I look at Tracy, who falls asleep in all of about three seconds and can sleep through anything. She’s passed out.

I feel around to find my phone, which has vibrated itself off the rug and is now practically jumping up and down on the hardwood floor, probably waking up the entire house.

As my hand closes around it, a familiar tightness creeps into my throat. My heart starts to skitter and skip beats, and my breathing gets shallow. Supposedly once a person recognizes the symptoms of a panic attack, she can sort of wrangle them and keep them under control. I haven’t mastered that fine art yet, but at least now a part of my brain stays rational as my airway tries to close, and instead of screaming, “Am I dying?” it can ask, “Why now?” which is apparently a much more constructive question.

Caron would say—Oh, forget Caron. I’m tired of hearing her in my head all the time. I feel like she crawled in there and installed a whole bunch of automatic scripted responses to things. I don’t need her to tell me why I’m on the verge of a panic attack—I already know why. It’s because the only reason anybody ever calls anybody at 1:00 a.m. is if something is wrong. Terribly, hideously wrong.

The phone is now vibrating in my fist and I know with every fiber of my being that this is the call about Peter that I’ve been expecting. Amanda probably crashed that stupid fancy convertible into a telephone pole and Peter got thrown from the car, smashed headfirst into a tree and is dead or paralyzed. Either that, or he overdosed on whatever stupid drugs she forced on him while they were at a party.

All I know is, if Peter leaves me all by myself with Kathleen, I’ll never, ever forgive him.

I try to take a deep breath, fail and then look at the phone. It doesn’t say Boston Mass General Hospital.

It doesn’t say Mom.

It says Jamie.

I blink. I’m dreaming.

It can’t be. Can it?

“Hello?” I whisper, my voice scratchy and rough from lack of air.

There’s a pause, and then, “Hey.”

As soon as I hear his voice, I feel Jamie’s hands on my arms again. The warmth begins to travel up into my neck, across my face, under my hair. It drives away the tightness in my throat and my lungs, and everything seems to open up again, to take in the feeling that is now suffusing my entire body. “Hey,” I manage to say.

“You okay, after what Hallis did?”

“I…” I’m trying to sound as calm and normal as possible, but I’m embarrassed that he witnessed me getting pushed into the pool, mad that I haven’t heard from him and so happy to talk to him that I can barely even form a sentence. I don’t know where to start. What I should do is hang up on him. But I’ve been waiting for more than two months for this call.

I need to know things.

“Can you come down?” he asks.

“Now? Wait—where?”

“Outside.”

“I’m not at home,” I say.

“I know.”

“You—How?”

“Rose.”

“I can’t just—”

“Please.”

Wow. I’ve never heard Jamie say please before. My stomach does a crazy little flip. It’s hard to say no to Jamie Forta. But saying no to him when he says please? I wonder if any girl in history has ever been able to do it. Even as I’m thinking that there’s no way he deserves to call me at 1:00 a.m. and have me get up and go outside simply because he wants to see me, I’m getting out of bed and putting on my wet shoes. I hate that he has this power over me.

But it’s also sort of thrilling. Or…however you say it. Hot, I guess.

Yup. It’s hot.

Which I know is dumb.

But I’m new to this whole hot thing, and I find it kind of irresistible.

“Okay, I’ll try,” I say. But he’s gone, as if he knows that I’m already halfway out the door.

What am I doing? I saw the way he came to Regina’s defense tonight. There’s definitely still something between Regina and Jamie, no matter what Anthony Parrina thinks or says. But he also came to my defense.

I have to talk to him. To straighten things out once and for all.

Yeah, because that’s how it works with Jamie Forta. All it takes is one conversation, and everything is suddenly super clear.

Uh-huh.

I know that I’ll have no problem getting out of Tracy’s room without waking her up, but I have no idea what it’s like to try to get past her parents. Tracy does it all the time, but I don’t know what her technique is. I guess if I get caught, I can just cry and say I’ve been sleepwalking ever since my dad died, and no one will even consider questioning my story.

Dad didn’t tell the truth all the time—why should I?

I take two steps and realize that I shouldn’t have put my shoes on yet. Not only are they loud on the wood floor but they’re so waterlogged that my feet squish around and make weird sucking noises. I take the shoes off and leave them on the floor, tiptoeing out into the hall.

The front door is at the bottom of the staircase. I grab on to the banister and make my way down the steps, staying as far away from the center of each stair as possible, in case it’s squeaky. I make it down without a sound, only to be greeted by the site of a glowing green light next to the front door.

The alarm system.

Once upon a time, the code to the alarm was Tracy’s birthday—0729. But they could have changed it. And if I try to disarm the system with the wrong code, will it set off the alarm?

When my phone vibrates in my hand again, it nearly gives me a heart attack. I silence it and look at the screen. It’s a text that says, “0729*.”

I smile.

Tracy’s not Jamie’s biggest fan—and I guess she doesn’t sleep as deeply as I thought—but she’s helping me anyway. I’m sure she didn’t even have to look out her window to know who called me.

I punch in the code, step outside, make sure the door can’t lock behind me…and there he is. Across the street, leaning against the door of his green car, waiting for me.

He’s beautiful.

I am not.

I’m barefoot in yoga pants and a T-shirt, also known as pajamas. I have no idea what my hair looks like, and I don’t have on any makeup because I undid all of Tracy’s expert work two hours ago with her expensive remover.

So what? A voice in my head says. He’s not your boyfriend.

He could be—you don’t know that he’s not, says another voice.

Don’t be an idiot. He didn’t want anything to do with you all summer. Forget him. You shouldn’t even be here.

Why are you so hopeless all the time? It’s lame.

As if two warring voices in my head weren’t enough, Caron chimes in, telling me to ignore the noise and just be present.

I hate to admit it, but it’s good advice.

My feet carry me forward until I’m standing right in front of Jamie. He stares at me with those perfect gold-flecked hazel eyes that don’t blink. Somewhere inside me I find the confidence to be quiet, to not fill the silence. He called me, he asked me to come out—he can talk first.

I stare right back, my arms folded across my chest. The silence goes on and on. He starts to look a little uncomfortable. It’s kind of gratifying.

“Thanks—for helping Conrad tonight,” he finally starts. I still don’t say anything. I think it’s the first time I’ve had any kind of upper hand with Jamie. Ever. “Rose, look, I’m sorry,” he says with so much remorse that I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling him everything’s fine and he shouldn’t worry about it.

Instead, I say, “Why didn’t you call?”

“You got my note?”

“The one that said you’re not right for me? That you’re different? That one?” I sound hostile. Jamie looks at the ground for a second and then up at the dark sky.

“Yeah,” he says, shutting down. I don’t want him to do that—when Jamie shuts down, he disappears, even if he’s standing right in front of you, and there’s no getting him back, no matter what. I’ve waited too long for this opportunity. I force myself to drop the hostility.

“You know Angelo gave it to me,” I say as calmly and normally as I can manage.

“That’s why I didn’t call.”

I shake my head and step closer to make my point as clear as possible. “If you don’t like me, Jamie, just say it. You don’t have to get all cryptic and write notes about how it’s not me, it’s you.” The hostility is back. The voice that’s coming out of my mouth is angrier and more hurt than I want it to be. But I can’t shut it up.

“Who said I didn’t like you?”

“You did. You sent me a note that didn’t explain anything, and then you ignored me all summer. And tonight, you didn’t even say hi. You pulled me out of the pool, but you looked mad. And on top of that, you still didn’t talk to me. That means you don’t like me. Actually, what it really means is that you don’t respect me. And if you don’t respect me, then I don’t have any time for you.”

The warring voices in my head are shocked into silence. I am finally telling Jamie what I’ve been thinking these past few months, and it feels so good to see that he wasn’t expecting any of this from sweet little Rose, who is always so nice to him. Yeah, well, check it, Jamie Forta. Sweet little Rose has been replaced by new Rose, and she isn’t going to let you jerk her around.

Turns out Jamie’s not the only 2.0 in town.

My plan is to make a dramatic exit, to just leave without saying another word, but as I turn to go, Jamie catches my arm and pulls me back around to face him. He steps toward me, leaving about an inch of space between us. In a strange and exciting turn of events, even this doesn’t intimidate me.

I like this 2.0 stuff.

“I was mad about Hallis—what he was doing to Conrad—and you getting pushed into the pool,” he says. I can see that he’s telling the truth, but only partly. There’s something else going on behind his eyes, but I suddenly find that I have too much pride to ask him what it is. I’m not going to beg him to tell me his secrets. If he wants to be all taciturn and mysterious, that’s on him.

“Oh, you were mad on my behalf? So, what are you? My bodyguard? My boyfriend who I’m not allowed to tell anybody about?” I demand. “Just make up your mind, Jamie, and stop messing with me.”

Pain flashes across his face as if I’ve slapped him, and then suddenly his lips are on mine, hard and fast, knocking the air right out of my lungs. His kiss ricochets throughout my entire body in a nanosecond. He grabs my arms and turns me, practically lifting me off the ground as he backs me up against his car, pinning me to the driver’s-side door with his body as his tongue flashes across my lips and into my mouth. It’s like he’s been waiting for this to happen again as long as I have.

But that can’t be true.

I’m just a sometimes delusional girl who has a crush on a guy who…is currently kissing me as if his life depends on it.

His arms wrap around me, and they feel different now than they did the last time we kissed—it’s not just that he’s stronger, it’s that he’s solid and immovable, like a brick wall. And it feels to me like he is 100% committed to kissing me—he’s not holding back. One hand is in my hair, the other sliding down my lower back. I literally feel my limbs going weak like some stupid fairy-tale princess. Once upon a time, I would have loved having weak, swoony limbs, but right here and now, in this moment, it pisses 2.0 off.

Jamie doesn’t get to do this to me again. He doesn’t get to just show up and take over my body for the time it takes to kiss me and then disappear. I think about what Conrad said—how Jamie shows up whenever he feels like it and kisses a girl so he can keep stringing her along.

Is that what he’s doing right now?

I’m just about to make him stop when the hand on my back finds the bottom of my shirt and then slides under it and up, touching bare skin that he’s never touched before. My head falls back against his car as my whole body starts to tingle. We both freeze for half a second when we realize at exactly the same moment that I’m not wearing a bra. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing for a guy to discover—what does it say about a girl if she’s not wearing a bra when she’s making out with a boy against his car in the middle of the night? Anything? Nothing?

Slowly—with my body practically vibrating, begging him to touch every place he’s not supposed to touch—he slides his hand back down and around to my waist and leans forward, burying his face in my neck. He still has that beautiful clean smell but there’s something new under it—something that is just him, I guess. When he takes a step back and the weight of him leaves me, I lift my head and open my eyes. I can’t catch my breath, but I see that he’s a little out of breath, too—and when my eyes land on the front of his jeans, I can see why.

My face heats with embarrassment. I can’t believe it. After all this time of thinking that there was nothing between us, that I imagined the whole thing, it turns out I was wrong.

Jamie is as turned on by kissing me as I am by kissing him.

I feel a rush of…something. Power? But the feeling drowns in confusion and fear. What do I do now? Am I supposed to do something about his…condition? If I don’t, am I a tease? Or am I only obligated to do something about it if I’m his actual girlfriend? And if so, what, exactly, would that something be?

Wait—there is no obligation when it comes to this stuff, right? You’re just supposed to do what you’re comfortable with and nothing else?

That’s what Ms. Maso drilled into our heads last year. It all made so much sense in health class. Now it doesn’t seem so clear.

I realize that I’ve been staring at the front of Jamie’s jeans for way too long to pretend that my gaze just fell there by accident.

I force my eyes up to his face, and I’m expecting him to be embarrassed or apologetic but he just gazes back at me with that same steady look, as if what’s happening is totally normal. Which, I guess, it is. Although I can’t imagine any of this stuff will ever feel normal to me. If anything, it feels like one big freak show.

He runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head as if, once again, he did something he shouldn’t have. And 2.0 gets mad.

“Let me guess. You regret it already, right?” Right. Touching me was a complete and total mistake.

He shakes his head.

“Then what?” This roller coaster is making me insane.

“I wasn’t gonna do that—”

“Don’t bother, Jamie. You don’t have to explain—”

“I do. There’s a lot of stuff I gotta explain,” he says, his eyes locked onto mine.

The fact that he knows he owes you some explanations means something. My anger starts to deflate. But where the hell was he all summer? Did it take him months to come up with these explanations he claims he now has? My anger balloons up again. Well, so what if it did? Not everybody knows how to explain how they feel. You have to cut people slack sometimes. Now my anger just sits still, not knowing what to do. Suddenly I find the entire situation…funny.

“Did you just say you’re going to explain something to me? Seriously?” I tease. “You mean, I’m finally going to get some actual explanations out of Jamie Forta?”

After a moment of what looks like confusion, a little smile crosses his face, and I feel a shift. I don’t know how to explain it in a normal way. It’s like we’ve always been standing on two different levels, with him above me. But just now, the levels moved closer to each other and we’re not so far apart anymore. We’re almost—but not quite—on equal ground.

I guess another way to say it is that Jamie doesn’t hold all the cards. I actually have a few of my own, and I like it.

“Next Saturday,” he says.

Next Saturday. Next Saturday? As in, Saturday night?

“Dinner,” he adds.

Last year, Jamie and I had covert conversations in his car in various locations, hidden away. But we never spent any time together around other people.

“Are you finally going to be seen with me in public?” I say, pretending to be astonished. “We better not tell anyone or we’ll both end up in jail this time.”

His smile gets a little wider and he actually laughs—that beautiful, delicious laugh that feels like a reward whenever it’s let out. It practically makes me giddy. And it dawns on me that Jamie likes it when I make fun of him. That’s why the playing field is leveling out. Because I’m teasing him.

“I can’t believe it,” I say. “Jamie Forta and me, on an actual date.”

“You don’t have to keep saying Jamie Forta, Rose.”

“Oh, sure I do. In these big moments, when explanations are being promised and public outings are announced, it’s important to address you by your full name. The occasion calls for it.”

His smile makes me want to get into his car and go anywhere with him. It’s a little intimidating to feel that for someone. It makes you wonder if you’re going to do something you don’t really want to do, or shouldn’t do. I mean, I haven’t seen or talked to Jamie in months, and after one kiss and a couple of moments of me being really mad, I’m ready to have his hands on my bare skin again. Because that was amazing. That felt like…everything.

But I guess the point is, even though I’m feeling what I’m feeling, I’m not getting in the car with him. Although, why is that? Is that just because it’s late at night and I’m staying at my friend’s house and I don’t want to get in trouble with her parents, or get her in trouble? Or is it actually because I have enough respect for myself not to drive off in the middle of the night with the guy who didn’t bother to call me all summer?

I push off the car to show him—and myself—that I’m going back inside now.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” 2.0 answers. I feel all sassy as I walk past him, even though what I said doesn’t exactly make sense—you don’t really see someone call you. But I don’t care. I look over my shoulder and Jamie’s still smiling, looking at me like he’s seeing me in a different way. A new way. A way he likes.

It was worth torturing myself all summer long just for that one look.

disinter (verb): to uncover or reveal (see also: getting grilled in therapy)

4

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE ISSUE HERE, ROSE?”

What I want to say is, the issue is that I should be eating Saturday-morning pancakes with my best friend and telling her about what happened with Jamie last night, not sitting on a therapist’s couch with my mother for Saturday-morning therapy. But I’ve already been told that sarcasm has no place here.

Caron’s office is nicer than my mother’s. The couch is squishier, the tissues are softer and the view of the backyard is more interesting. The room smells a little bit like wet dog, but I like dogs, so I don’t care that much. Not that I’ve ever seen Caron’s dog. I hear it snuffling around on the other side of the door every once in a while, but that’s it. For all I know, it’s just a tape of a dog, and the smell is some kind of weird incense—my mom says therapists do all sorts of things to their offices to make their clients feel comfortable. Even all the neutral colors serve a purpose—they’re supposed to keep patients focused.

From my point of view, the only thing wrong with Caron’s black-and-brown-and-cream office is what goes on inside it. What has been going on inside it every other Saturday—or sometimes more often, depending on the level of drama in the house—since June.

“The issue?” I repeat, trying to prove to them that I’ve barely been listening.

“The problem,” Caron says, stressing the word problem as if I need a synonym for issue. If she thinks I’m confused about the meaning of the word issue rather than just plain old baffled that we have to hash this topic out yet again, she’s clearly forgotten my father, who she knew well. Dad started using vocabulary flashcards with Peter and me before we could talk.

Caron and my mother actually look like they could be sisters. They are both tall with dark brown hair and light blue eyes, and they’re skinny and wear what I think of now as shrink clothes—earth tones that blend into the office furniture, with a colorful necklace or scarf. Maybe it’s a kind of uniform. They both wear tortoise-shell glasses—my mom’s spend a lot of time on her head functioning as a headband, but Caron’s are always on her face. The difference between them these days is their energy, I guess you would say. Caron is calm; my mother seems totally wired, like she’s fighting really hard to stay in control of things. Things like me.

“Do you understand why your mother has a problem with the memorial website?” Caron asks. “Why she wants you to take it down?”

I know that I’m supposed to say yes—after all, we’ve been going around and around on this topic all summer long. And I could just do that, because technically, I do understand the problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy. I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.

But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.

I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him. Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.

Which, of course, is exactly why I do like it.

“Rose, are you still with us?” Caron asks. She usually gives me about three seconds to think before she makes a comment implying that I’m not paying attention.

“I guess I don’t really get it, no,” I lie.

“The problem, Rose,” my mother says, her overt patience communicating just how impatient she is with this conversation, “is that you went behind my back after I specifically asked you not to, and you got Peter involved by using his credit card.”

“Can you tell Rose how that made you feel?”

“Betrayed. Betrayed at a very vulnerable moment.”

I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I know that would probably also be betraying my mother at a very vulnerable moment. It’s not that I don’t care that she feels betrayed, it’s just that I think her reasons for feeling that way are ridiculous.

Maybe that’s the same thing as not caring. I’m not sure.

“It also scares me,” she continues. “There are a lot of people out there who prey on those who are grieving. And Rose is now having interactions with people she’s never even heard of before, who claim to know her father. It’s dangerous in many ways, including emotionally.”

“Can you explain to Rose what you mean by that?”

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That’s Shake-speare for here we go again.

“Rose launched the website on the anniversary of her dad’s death in June. Within a few hours, there were nearly fifty comments on the site about him. Some were nice, some were odd, some were from people who obviously didn’t know Alfonso at all and just wanted to make themselves feel important and involved. It would have been extremely confusing and painful for anyone, but it was especially so for a teenage girl missing her father. Rose didn’t leave her room for three days.”

That’s not entirely true. I left to use the bathroom and to eat occasionally.

“I was just reading the comments and writing back to people,” I say. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“That’s part of what you were doing, Rose. You were also having an emotional breakdown as a result of being assaulted by all the information that didn’t reflect back to you the person you thought you knew—”

“Kathleen,” says Caron in her special voice. This is some kind of code they’ve established, because every time Caron says her name like that, my mother looks guilty and then stops talking.

So what if I’m in touch with people we don’t know who knew Dad? So what if some guy he knew for, like, two days in Iraq posted about how they’d had a beer together and how he could tell that Dad was the “genuwine article”? Why is that less valid than my story about him showing me his twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary for the first time?

I don’t really know how Kathleen and I got here. I feel like things were fine, and then suddenly they weren’t. We had this heart-to-heart conversation last year on my birthday and it seemed like everything was finally going to be okay between us. She apologized for “abandoning me to my grief,” explained that she needed help and asked if I would come to therapy with her. I said I’d think about it.

What a mistake that was. Two months later, I launched my dad’s site and when I refused to take a shower after sitting in front of the computer for a few days, she practically dragged me by my greasy hair to see Caron for the first time.

“So, Rose, when you hear your mother talk about feeling betrayed by you and scared for you, what do you feel?”

This question has come up before, but I guess I didn’t answer it right. Maybe I’ll try telling the truth today.

“I feel annoyed,” I answer. This is a very different response from my usual I feel bad.

Caron’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Annoyed?” my mother repeats very slowly.

“I don’t understand why we have to keep talking about this. It’s starting to get annoying.”

“We have to keep talking about it because you refuse to take the site down, even though you are unable to explain why you want to keep working on it when it clearly upsets you to be in touch with those people.”

Those people. She means Vicky.

I just got an email from Vicky this morning, reminding me to have fun on my last free weekend before school starts on Tuesday. Vicky checks in on me from time to time, emailing me little inspirational sayings or pictures that she’s scanned as part of her ongoing project to scan every photo she ever took with a pre-digital camera. She only sends me funny photos of herself, like from Halloween or from some party where she did something big and crazy with her hair. Vicky is from Texas, and she’s a hairdresser, so she’s had a lot of practice making big hair. Every time she sends me a new photo, it’s the biggest hair I’ve ever seen. When I told her I had the lamest, flattest, straightest, most boring-est hair in the history of humankind, she said I needed to “hightail it on down” to Texas and let her take a crack at it. “When I’m done with you, honey,” she wrote, “you won’t even recognize yourself.”

Vicky raised her son—the sergeant, Travis—and daughter alone. A “good, single Christian woman” is how she describes herself. She’s never told me anything about the father of her children, although I read a letter Travis’s dad wrote to him that she posted on the website. And she doesn’t say much about her daughter. I kind of get the feeling that she and her daughter don’t talk much. But she loves to write about Travis, and she always ends every email with, Your dad is watching over you, just like my Travis is watching over me. God bless, honey.

I was raised agnostic, bordering on atheist, but there’s something about the way Vicky writes God bless, honey that makes me feel safe from all the awful stuff that goes on inside my head and out. When Vicky says she’s praying for me, I believe it, and even though I don’t think there’s a god who pays attention to us, I like when she says it because I know she does think he’s up there.

Of course I can’t tell any of that to my mother.

“It doesn’t upset me to be in touch with those people. Why do you hate Vicky so much, anyway?” I ask.

Kathleen sighs like she’s the weariest person in history. “I don’t even know Vicky, Rose. I just feel like you give her more than she gives you. And frankly, you don’t need to take care of anyone but yourself right now.”

“Rose, do you feel like you’re taking care of Vicky?” Caron asks me. My mother looks at her sharply. Caron, to her credit, keeps her eyes on me and doesn’t acknowledge the death rays that Kathleen is staring at her.

“We just email about stuff. She sends me funny pictures of her hair. Is that taking care of somebody—sending each other emails?”

“It is when she’s sharing private details regarding how she’s coping with the death of her son,” my mother cuts in, sounding jealous and protective at the same time. “She’s a grown woman. She shouldn’t be burdening a child with her feelings under the guise of helping her.”

“I’m not a child, Kathleen,” I say.

I clamp my hand over my mouth. I had no intention of calling my mother “Kathleen” to her face. Well, no conscious intention, anyway. I can’t imagine that it’s going to go over well.

My mother’s face changes color several times and I feel like steam is about to come out of her ears but she’s doing her best not to lose it. I actually feel bad. I didn’t do it on purpose. It just came out.

It probably hurts to hear your child call you by your first name, although I can’t really say why.

But why do I have to worry about her feelings?

Because there’s such a thing as basic human kindness, says one of the voices in my head.

Caron is watching my mother to see if she wants to address what just happened. When it’s clear that my mother is taking the high road, Caron asks, “Is it easy to write to Vicky about how you’re feeling, Rose?”

I don’t like having to talk about Vicky in here like she’s an issue. “I don’t think about it—I just do it. She asks me questions and I answer them, and then I ask her questions. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. She’s just a sad woman with a dead son. And I’m a ‘depressed’ girl with a dead dad.”

My mother closes her eyes and twists her wedding ring on her finger. Then she finally says, “Please don’t talk about your father that way.”

“What way? He’s dead, so I get to say that he’s dead. Isn’t the whole reason we’re here so we can say whatever we want out loud?”

“It’s the way you’re saying it, Rose. You’re saying it in a way that is disrespectful to your father and designed to shock and hurt me. And I know why you’re doing it—”

“Kathleen,” Caron says again, with a little more force than before.

This time my mother is the one to roll her eyes, which I think is pretty funny. I guess she’s sick of Caron telling her what she can and can’t say. She stares out the window into the backyard and looks…hopeless.

“Why do you keep stopping her from talking if we’re supposed to be so open?” I ask Caron. Mom looks at me.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for your mother to be a patient, which means things get a little uneven—”

“Rose, just tell me why it’s important to you to keep that website up, even though it could send you into a tailspin at any moment,” my mother interrupts, obviously not liking where Caron is going. I see a flicker of annoyance on Caron’s face.

I know it seems to my mom and to Caron that I’m keeping this information from them, but I just haven’t come up with the right way to tell the truth yet. For example, if I said, “Sometimes the site feels like my only connection to Dad,” Kathleen might ask why she isn’t that connection for me. I don’t know how to answer that without hurting her. Also, when I was building the website, I liked that it was a way for me to connect with Dad directly, not through her or anyone else. And when I launched it and all those people started posting things, it became my favorite way to connect to him. And I definitely can’t say that.

So I go with the easiest answer. “It’s important to me to keep the site up because I’m learning things about Dad that I didn’t know before.”

My mother is so frustrated by this that she can barely stay seated on the couch. “What could you possibly learn about your father from people who barely knew him?” she snaps.

I snap right back. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that he was going to stay in Iraq for a whole year.”

Her irritation turns to shock. She shakes her head and then says to Caron, “See? This is exactly the kind of information Rose shouldn’t be getting out of context.”

“Kathleen, you’re shutting Rose out of the conversation. Tell her, not me.”

Mom stares at the ceiling for a few seconds before she turns to me and tries to ask very calmly, “Who told you that?”

“Not you. And not him,” I mutter. “He told me he was only staying for six months.”

“There wasn’t time to tell you,” Mom says, tears filling her eyes. “He made the decision right before it happened. Who told you?” she asks again.

“One of the guys he worked with. He wrote that he was glad when Dad said he’d signed up to stay for more time because playing chess with Dad was one of the only things that made life there bearable.”

My mother starts shaking her head again. “He felt like it was worth it financially, Rose. Adults have to take all sorts of factors into consideration when making decisions.”

I know that my mother feels guilty about encouraging my dad to take the contractor job in Iraq. And I also know that she encouraged him to do it because he’d lost his job as an engineer, the money in Iraq was really good and she’d been freaking out about their finances because of college tuition. The nice and smart and generous thing to do would be to let the matter drop.

But I can’t. I just can’t. I have to pour some salt in the wound. Actually, I have to pick up the saltshaker, take off the top and dump the whole thing on her raw soul.

“He felt it was worth it? Or you did?”

The tears that have pooled in her eyes spill down her cheeks and she stands up, pulling down the hem of her brown pencil skirt and straightening her peach silk shirt. It’s the outfit Tracy always compliments her on, and which she wears whenever she needs help feeling good.

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