All Our Yesterdays (5 page)

I tick off the numbers in my head, drawing them out. Three, four . . . five.

Nothing.

I reach for my phone and dash off a text to our friend Olivia, who’s in Switzerland with her parents for break. She invited me to go with them, but I decided not to just so that I’d be home when James got back. I’m so stupid. Wherever he is, James isn’t jittering with anxiety over seeing
me
again, running his mind over the moment three weeks ago where his mouth lingered an inch from mine before drawing away. I’m popular and reasonably smart and very independent; I don’t need to be obsessing over some boy like this, like such a pathetic little
girl
.

Tamsin and Sophie stay over until my mom comes home from her planning meeting for the symphony benefit and slams the front door behind her. The sound echoes up the stairwell, and suddenly the air is tense and thick, like Mom brought a thunderstorm in with her. It doesn’t take my friends long to decide to clear out. I only wish I could go with them.

“Text me later, okay?” Tam says at the front door. “I want to hear what happens.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

Sophie kisses my cheek. “Go get him, tiger!”

“Oh my God, you’re such a dork,” I say, even though my stomach tightens. I push her out the door and wave as they climb into Tam’s Cabriolet. She shouldn’t be driving without an adult since we’re not old enough for licenses yet, but she always sneaks it out of the garage when her parents aren’t home. I close the door gingerly behind them, trying not to make a sound, and lunge for the stairs.

“Marina?” Mom calls from her studio at the back of the house.

I groan and stop on the fourth stair. So close. “Yeah?”

“Don’t yell across the house; come here!”

I roll my eyes savagely and barely avoid calling back that
she’s
the one who started the yelling. I tromp back to her studio, where she makes paintings that no one wants to buy and which inevitably end up hanging in one of our guest bedrooms. I think she actually dreamed of being a great artist once, but the closest she gets now is hosting fund-raisers for the National Gallery.

“What is it?” I say.

“Watch the tone,” she says, blending a couple of reds on her palette. “Have you talked to your father today?”

You’d think in this age of e-mail and cell phones they wouldn’t need to use
me
as a communication medium, but lately they only seem to talk to me as a means of passing messages to each other. “No.”

“Can you call him, please, and ask him if he plans to be home for dinner?”

“Why can’t you?”

She levels a look on me over the top of the canvas. “I’m working here, Marina.” Like her painting is so important to her. She’ll spend hours planning parties for some museum or hospital, or at the salon getting her hair highlighted, but the second she gets home she has to lock herself up in her studio.

I think she just can’t stand to be near me.

“Fine.” I turn to leave.

“Don’t text him!” she calls after me. “You know he never replies!”

I dial Dad’s office line as I take the stairs back to my room. It always takes him forever to answer, so I put the phone on speaker and rest it on my dresser as I change into pajamas. Mom hates it when I wear pajamas to dinner. These were a gift from Luz, and my skin sighs in relief when I slip out of the suffocating skinny jeans Tamsin insisted
I buy and into the cheap, soft fleece. I feel a brief pang as I remember Luz’s face when I snapped at her. Questionable taste in pajamas aside, I do love the woman. She’s one of the few people who doesn’t make it a total secret that she cares about me, even if that means she embarrasses the hell out of me every chance she gets.

After about fourteen rings, Dad finally picks up the phone. “What is it, honey?”

“Mom wants to know if you’ll be home for dinner.”

“I don’t think so.” I can hear him typing in the background. “The lira has gone straight to hell today. Italy’s going to need someone to bail them out, but Germany’s not biting. Thank God the euro never went through; the whole continent would be screwed.”

He’s not really talking to me anymore, which is fine, because I’m not really listening. “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

“We’re leaving early tomorrow,” he says, “so I may not see you. I spoke to Luz, and she’s going to stay while we’re gone—”

“Dad! We talked about this!” My parents take off for Vail for a few weeks after Christmas every year. I thought they might skip it this year since they’ve been fighting so much, but they decided it would be a good opportunity for them to “reconnect.” Gross. I wander to the window and look out over the Shaws’ driveway. “I’m not a little kid anymore. I can stay by myself.”

“I’m sorry, honey, but I’m just not comfortable with that. Luz will be . . .”

I stop hearing him as headlights sweep the yard and a dark car pulls into the Shaws’ driveway. The rah-rah-girl-power I’d summoned earlier evaporates in a rush of adrenaline.
James is home.

“Okay, Dad,” I say, cutting off some explanation about post-Christmas burglaries and high school parties. “Gotta go, bye.”

I run down the stairs and jam my bare feet into my snow boots, which Luz has wiped down and laid beside the door. I grab my coat from the closet and wrestle it on, suddenly clumsy.

“Going next door!” I cry back to Mom before closing the front door behind me.

I creep carefully down the icy front steps and then run across the yard through ankle-deep snow, slipping on the wet grass beneath, to the Shaws’ front door. I press the doorbell twice, which I’ve always done, and stick my hands into my pockets as I wait.

The door opens, and there’s James, all tall, dark, and gorgeous. It’s still kind of a shock to see him like this. A couple of years ago, he was just the gangly science kid with oversize ears who was more interested in puzzling out math equations than partying and hooking up with the rest of his classmates. Even though he was a Shaw, I was usually the only one who sat with him at lunch.

Then, practically overnight, James shot up six inches, grew into his ears, and became
hot
. Everyone wanted his attention, because apparently people can overlook your extreme dorkiness once you’ve been profiled by
Vanity Fair
. Luckily for me, he’s just as weird and antisocial as ever.

The girl I was a few weeks ago would have thrown herself into his arms as soon as he opened the door, but I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself. Staring at the lips that came so close to mine, I feel like I’ve become one of those corn-husk dolls we made in elementary school, brittle and fragile to the touch. Everything’s different now.

James pulls me into a hug and ruffles my hair. “Hey, kid!”

Okay, not so different. Maybe the almost-kiss never happened. Maybe I imagined it.

I’m so
stupid
.

James pulls back and grins at me. “Nice pajamas.”

I punch him in the arm and force a smile. “Shut up. They were a Christmas present from Luz.”

“What are they, dancing reindeer?” He bends down to examine the garish pattern more closely. “I like them.”

“Are you going to invite me in or not? It’s freezing out here.”

He steps aside and ushers me in with a sweep of his hand.

“That you, Marina?” James’s brother, Nate, calls from upstairs.

“Welcome home, Congressman!”

I follow James through the foyer to the kitchen at the back of the house. Once there, James pulls a gallon of double-chocolate ice cream from the freezer, and I smile. He has a whole mouth full of sweet teeth. “Isn’t it a little cold for that?” I say.

“Never.” He hands me a spoon and lays the tub on the counter between us. “So how are things, Marchetti?”

You’d know if you’d spoken to me in the last three weeks.

I walk around the island counter to stand beside him. “Stand still. I want to look at you.”

He grins and straightens, throwing his shoulders back. He’s a good eight inches taller than me, with long limbs that made him the best swimmer at Sidwell for the fifteen minutes he was there. His dark hair is a little longer than I remember but perfectly neat as always, and his light brown eyes are so bright when he smiles down at me that I swear my knees weaken.

“Yep,” I say, turning to dig my spoon into the softening ice cream. “Still ugly.”

He laughs. “Thanks.”

“You don’t look any smarter, either. Are you sure that fancy school is doing anything for you?”

James blushes—actually
blushes
, which hardly anyone really does—because not only is he a genius, but he’s a humble one. He doesn’t like people pointing out how very special he is, how he graduated high school three years early, and now, not even eighteen, is already working on his PhD at Johns Hopkins.

“Actually,” he says, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

I’m that empty corn-husk doll again, the slightest breath making me rustle and crack. Maybe Tamsin was right after all. He’s only trying to pretend everything is the same as it’s always been because he’s nervous—James isn’t exactly a model of social well-adjustedness—but he wants to tell me how he really feels. I just need to help him along, make the first move.

“Yeah?” I say. “Me too.”

He looks relieved. “You first.”

“Okay,” I say.

Then my mind goes blank.

I should have practiced this. I should have gotten Tamsin and Sophie to tell me exactly what to say. I spend precious seconds replaying what happened in my head. It was the night of the winter formal at school, and James was leaving for Connecticut the next day. The dance had been a disaster. My heel broke ten minutes after we arrived, Sophie drank too much spiked punch and spent half the night throwing up, and Tamsin broke up with Asher in a suitably dramatic fashion before the first slow dance was even over. After that, my date—Will Denby, who I didn’t want to go with in the first place, but of course James was too busy with school to take me—became, like,
physically incapable
of not hitting on her, and I ended up sitting alone at a table in the corner of the room, watching the two of them dance. I fled to the parking lot in my bare feet, holding my broken shoes in one hand and my cell phone in the other.

I knew he was in the middle of a big project for Dr. Feinberg, but I called James anyway.

“Sorry,” I said when he picked up the phone. “I know you’re working—”

“What’s wrong?” he whispered. He must have been in the library. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, my choked voice giving me away.

“Come on, Marina.”

“Well . . .” I took a deep breath and the story poured out of me. “Sophie’s sick and Tam’s dancing with my date, and everything’s terrible! Plus I broke my shoe.”

“Stay there. I’m coming to pick you up.”

I didn’t feel the gravel against my feet anymore. I was floating. “James, you don’t have to—”

“Twenty minutes.”

He showed up in a cab fifteen minutes later with a tube of superglue in hand. He fixed my shoe while the cab drove us to the Diner in Adams Morgan, where James wheedled until I split a stack of chocolate chip pancakes with him. After an hour and more calories than I cared to think about, the tight, queasy feeling in my stomach had dissolved, and I felt happy. Just happy.

Then James hugged me as we parted on the sidewalk outside our houses, and he paused with his face just inches from mine, staring at my lips. The air between us was suddenly electric, and I could feel the heat radiating off of his body. But he pulled away and the moment passed. We said good-bye, and that was the last time I saw him.

It
couldn’t
have just been me, could it?

“James . . .” I croak.

“Yeah?”

“I . . .” Oh God oh God oh God. “Did you miss me?”

I could just
slap
myself.

He flashes me his most dazzling smile. “Of course.”

“Then why didn’t you call?” I say, in a voice roughly similar to one a kicked puppy would use if it could talk.

“That’s just it.” He moves closer to me, catching my sleeve between his fingers and rubbing his thumb over one of the reindeer in a Santa hat. I can’t breathe. “The thing I need to tell you about—”

The chime of the doorbell interrupts the moment. I start, and James drops my sleeve.

“That must be Abbott,” he says. “I texted him when we landed.”

I try to smile and feel my lips stretch uncomfortably tight across my teeth. “Great.”

James trots to the front door, so eager to see his
other
best friend, the one he
texted
. I stay in the kitchen, nursing a giant spoonful of ice cream because I’m disgusting. I can faintly hear the two boys greeting each other in the foyer, no doubt engaging in one of those strange boy half hugs or some kind of almost-manly fist bump. I knew from the moment I caught the two of them shooting hoops and talking computers when James came to Sidwell to meet me after tennis practice last year that he was going to be a problem, and I wasn’t wrong.