Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend (3 page)

“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 bot
tle 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.