Everyone We've Been (22 page)

“Your mom is
nice
!” Zach whispers as my mom heads up the stairs. After weeks of me hanging out with Zach, Mom has finally insisted I bring Zach home to meet her. I think she's been fairly lenient because Caleb gave her a decent report about him and because she knows his dad.

When he came in, Zach shook her hand and introduced himself. She asked all these questions about his family, and everything was going okay until Zach mentioned that his older brother's wife just had a child and he tried to bring out his phone to show Mom a picture of baby Russell. I could have sworn her face crumpled just a bit, and then she mumbled something about having work to do and raced upstairs. It turned out Zach didn't have a picture on him, but I have no idea why she reacted that way. She tends, in general, to leave a wide berth around little kids at the mall and stuff, and when I ask her about it, she says it just feels like a long time ago since me and Caleb were little. Or she says kids are draining, too energetic. I know this can't be totally true, since sometimes I catch her dabbing her eyes during diaper commercials.

Still, if Zach noticed her strange behavior, he didn't say anything.

But he is right; she
was
nice to him. I doubt Dad is going to meet Zach anytime soon. I've seen my father once this summer, for the joint birthday-graduation dinner, and I can't even imagine maneuvering the here's-my-boyfriend meeting with him. Too much awkward in one place.

“You made me think she was scary. You were freaking me out!” Zach is saying.

I laugh. “She's both. I mean, she's fine. But she can get weird sometimes.”

“In what way?” Zach asks, flopping down on the living-room couch.

“Like, completely overprotective. You know how I've been biking around the entire summer?” Zach nods, his hair falling against the brown sofa, as he stares up at me. I pop a movie into the DVD player and go back to the couch. “Two days ago, she freaked out about me ‘incurring a head injury' while biking and why couldn't I drive like a normal person. I don't even have a car!”

“And isn't driving more dangerous than riding?”

“Exactly!” I say. “I mean, I always wear a helmet. Tomorrow she'll have a problem with driving,
too,
but the point is that she just up and decided it was too dangerous and I can't do it anymore, and I was like, ‘I've been doing it all summer.' I know everyone thinks their parents are a little insane. I think mine actually might be.”

Zach laughs. “And your house isn't as depressing as you made it sound.”

“What did you expect? Black walls and emo music?”

“Pretty much,” Zach says. It's true that the house is significantly less depressing than it's been this summer. Caleb is even out with some friends today. I rest my feet against the center table—hoping Mom stays upstairs awhile. He rests his head in my lap.

“Hey, Zach,” I say, playing with his hair. It's so soft I wish I was small enough to burrow in it. “About last night…”

“Sorry about making us leave in such a hurry.”

It's okay,
I'm tempted to say, but it's not. As a rule, we don't really talk about Lindsay. I hate thinking of Zach kissing her, doing mundane things with her. I hate thinking that Zach's power to wake me up, make me feel special, worked on her as well.

I texted Katy this morning telling her about Zach's reaction to seeing Lindsay last night. Katy had never met Zach but she'd heard about him since she and Lindsay have been in community theater together forever. It was only when I texted her that she put together that my Zach is her theater friend's Zach.

She seems nice,
I said, trying to find something neutral, a gateway for further conversation that was respectful of the fact that Katy and Lindsay are supposedly friends.

Always so PC, Sullivan. I know what you meant by that was: Holy shit she's hot af what do I do?

I texted back,
That was not what I meant!…You think she's hot af ?

She's not my type ;)

What were Zach and her like together?

Umm…Never saw them together, but all the Meridian kids say they were joined at the hip. He was always picking her up in his super old car and stuff, and judging by how bummed she's been about the breakup (even though SHE initiated it), he's a good one. You're lucky! Is his friend single???

LEAVE RAJ ALONE.

But is he???

Addie??

Ugh, you're no fun. Whatever. I'm still texting, like, four guys I met on the road trip ;) Though I'm now concerned one of them had ringworm??!

“Are you still in love with her?” I ask Zach now, because I need to know.

“Of course not,” Zach says, almost too quickly. Maybe because he knew I would ask. “I mean, we have history. We always will, but that's all it is.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling more at ease than I have since last night. And then, because I'm a masochist, “So what's she like?” I ask. “Lindsay?”

All Katy had for me was that Lindsay is good at improv (though sometimes slow to her mark) but bad at physical comedy and has killer taste in boots. I guess spending a couple of hours a week together makes them friends, but not super close.

Zach sits up and looks at me. “Why would you ask me that?”

Because I'm a masochist.

Because sometimes she feels like a ghost, haunting us.

I shrug. “I want to know. You've known her your whole life, right?”

“Since third grade,” he says. He pauses a second, like he's debating whether to tell me more, then finally he sighs. “She was nine going on nineteen at the time. Her parents are lawyers; they let her stay up late with them, watching documentaries about genocides and global warming and old Hollywood movies, and she'd come to class and bring them up during discussion time. It blew my mind—all our minds.” I feel the hairs on my body stand up as he talks about her. There's a mixture of wariness and pain and respect in his voice. “She was the kid that got put in charge when the teacher stepped out of the classroom for a minute. But it wasn't just that grown-ups treated her like an adult; she
acted
like an adult. She wanted to be taken seriously. She always has.”

“Is it true that she doesn't like your friends? Raj said that.”

Zach looks surprised.

“I don't think she…I mean, she…she doesn't
hate
them. But yeah, she thinks they can be a little immature. She thinks
I
can, too, but fortunately—or unfortunately—she was in love with me.”

She was in love with me.
There's no doubt in his mind, no questions; he knows she loved him.

“So why did she break up with you, then?”
And why is she still sad about it?

He runs a hand over his face. “In eighth grade, people hooked up or went out for a couple of days and then broke up and made out with other people. Lindsay wasn't interested in that kind of relationship, and I wasn't, either, really. I liked her. I wanted to
be
with her. I knew that.” Now it feels like something sharp is grating the inside of my chest. I hate the certainty with which he talks about her. “So we were instantly serious. We made plans. We talked about our lives and our families and, well, it was serious….” His voice fades. “But when everyone was starting to
really
think about college for the first time and Lindsay started looking into college drama programs, it was like she freaked out. She suddenly realized she—we—are sixteen. It hit her how much life would change in a couple of years and how much time she had spent trying to be an adult, trying to be older. How serious her whole life and high school experience had been, how serious
we
were. And I guess…well, I guess it stifled her.”

After a few seconds, Zach shakes the glazed expression and says, “She was probably right. I mean, what do you know about love or relationships in high school, right?

“But enough about Lindsay,” Zach says. He goes back to lying down, head in my lap.

“Did I mention,” he says, purring a little bit as I start running my hand through his hair again, “that you're my favorite person? Especially with whatever it is you're doing right now.”

I tell myself his saying this has nothing to do with the conversation we just finished having about his ex-girlfriend.

“Finger combing is your turn-on? Who would have thought?” I say, and we both laugh.

“How am I doing in the rankings, by the way? Am I anywhere near the top of your list?” he asks. “Or am I still top three?”

“Top two,” I say.

Zach feigns despair. “Who is this mystery person I'm competing with, anyway?”

“William Primrose. Famous violist.”

“Old?” he asks.

“Dead,” I say. It's not true that Primrose is in my top two favorite people; I'm just being difficult. The truth is, I don't know how I'd rank the people in my life. Apart from Zach, I mean, and he's doing much better in the rankings than I let on.

I hit play and we start to watch what I refer to as my New York Experience. Really, it's
New York Stories,
an anthology of films made and set in New York by famous directors; the 1954 version of
Sabrina;
and everything Nora Ephron ever made. “My mom loves them, too,” I explain about my love of Nora Ephron films, “but I think she likes to come off as having superior taste, because she
always
opts for some schmaltzy foreign stuff even though her eyes are so bad she can't even read the subtitles.”

I look around to make sure she's not lurking close by, eavesdropping, and when Zach laughs, my whole lap shakes.

The other thing about the foreign movies is that my mother always remarks that she wants to go to
that
place, or that she's heard the food there is excellent, or that Greece has the most perfect weather in the world, but when I ask why she doesn't just go, then, she'll say something about how dangerous it is or ask what will happen to my brother and me while she is gone, like we're four and six instead of sixteen and almost nineteen.

We're finished with
Sabrina
and on to
New York Stories
(payback for all the Cianos, I tell Zach) when Mom does come back downstairs, causing Zach to bolt upright. She acts like she's looking for something, but it's obvious she's spying. She must be satisfied with what she sees because she goes back upstairs and shuts her door.

I go to the kitchen and come back with snacks and cold drinks.

While we're eating, Zach says, “I read this editorial Ciano wrote last year about hating all those throwback trends that are coming back. Handhelds and Super 8s. Directors are doing that just to get the vintage label.”

“It's nostalgia,” I say, though I know nothing about handhelds or Super 8.

“That's exactly Ciano's point. Nostalgia is a form of pretentiousness.”

“Maybe they just like that style,” I say, offering a counterpoint because I like to hear Zach's voice. I love how passionate he gets about movies. And
horrodies,
for that matter. It never occurs to Zach to not be ecstatic about the things he likes.

“But that's the thing—it's
before their time.
You can't be nostalgic for something you didn't experience. How do you miss something you don't remember?”

“You don't have to have been there to appreciate something, though,” I say, taking a sip of soda.

“Exactly!” Zach says, beaming as if I've just made his point. “That's precisely Ciano's argument. If you like something, pay homage. Don't try to cheapen it by, like, re-creating it.”

And even though that wasn't my point at all, I let the conversation end there because we're up to some of my favorite parts of the movie. I'd warned Zach earlier that it wasn't the stories I loved this movie for, but the fact that it was a total New Yorkasm, as Katy puts it.