First There Was Forever (18 page)

“W
hat makes something wrong?” Hailey asked.

We were sitting in her mom’s parked car in the big gated parking lot of their apartment complex the following weekend. Hailey and I always hid out in the car to talk in private when her mom was home.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Hailey put her hands on the steering wheel and glided them around as if she was driving. “Like, why is it wrong
for me to drive without a license? I know how to do it. I’ve already finished driver’s ed. So is it wrong just because it’s illegal?”

“I don’t know,” I said, nervous about where this was going.

“It doesn’t hurt anyone,” she said, “to break that kind of rule.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“But, cheating on your boyfriend or girlfriend,” she continued, “is wrong because it can hurt people.”

I couldn’t look at her.

“Like, all the lying and stuff that must go into an affair,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Like, it’s not just the big lie of ‘Oh, yeah, I’m, like, fucking my secretary,’ but the millions of little lies. Like, when you ask someone about their day, and they just leave out this whole part of it because it involved the other person.”

I knew she was thinking about her dad and Rachel, but it felt as if she was talking about me and Nate. And she was so right. That was how I felt all the time, buried in the small lies.

I turned and looked right at her, and I braced myself for her to tell me that she knew. Maybe Ryan had told Skyler that Nate and I had disappeared that night at the twins’ house.

Hailey looked at my expression, and something twisted and inscrutable passed over her face. Suddenly, she grabbed the car keys, stuck them in the ignition, and turned the car on.

“Hailey, what are you doing?” I practically shrieked.

Hailey started laughing while the engine roared. After a few long seconds, she turned the car off again and dropped the keys in her lap.

“Sorry, I’m just messing with you. You looked so serious all of a sudden!”

I tried to smile, but my heart was racing. All of her actions seemed motivated by her knowing the truth.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. Her voice had turned suddenly soft. “I’m a mess right now. I’m so, like, ugh about my dad.”

“I know,” I squeaked.

“It’s just confusing,” she said. “I’ve been thinking so much about him and Rachel because of this whole wedding thing. You know how I’ve always hated him for being a cheater?”

I nodded.

“The thing is,” Hailey said, “even though Rachel is a zero, she and my dad really love each other. I mean, they’re getting married. They’re, like, for real in love. I think they’re, like, more meant-to-be than my mom and my dad.”

Hailey was doing that opening up thing again that made me feel all stiff. Like anything I said would sound trite and awkward.

“So what was he supposed to do?” she went on. “Rachel is, like, the love of his life. I’m sure it sucked to meet her when he was already married, but, like, I believe in following your heart. What if he was actually just being true to himself? What if he did the right thing?”

I looked at Hailey. Was she really asking me, or was this a rhetorical question? I felt certain she knew about me and Nate now. This was all code. My face was burning. My palms were sweating. I knew I was supposed to say something, but I was buried so deep in my own pit of guilt that I felt a million miles away.

Finally, I managed to speak.

“What your dad did was not the right thing, Hailey,” I said. “He could have done it differently.”

“How?” Hailey asked. And then, suddenly, tears spilled out of her eyes.

To my surprise, I felt hot tears in my eyes, too. “Because of you. Because he made you feel like he was choosing Rachel over you, too.”

Hailey’s sob caught in her chest. She kind of choked a little and squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m so mad,” she said. “I just get sick when I think about their baby. It makes me sick.”

I was crying now, too. It was a million things. It was the queasy feeling I got thinking about Rachel and Hailey’s dad, and it was how much I loved Hailey, and how immeasurable that kind of love was. It couldn’t be weighed against Nate or anything else in the world. I knew right then, no matter how shitty of a friend Hailey had been, that she never for one second did anything to deserve the pain that she was going to feel when she found out about me and Nate.

I
t rained on and off the whole week before spring break. I’d been studying for the big chemistry test every night, but my mind was like a sieve. I felt as if all I thought about anymore was Nate and Hailey.

I was running flashcards during lunch the day before the test when Lily appeared in front of me. She had on an orange-and-white-checked vintage dress, like something a waitress at a retro diner might wear.

“Hi,” I said. I almost never saw Lily at school, and we had never spoken in public. We seemed to have an understanding that our friendship was bonded to the twins’ house.

“Have you talked to Meredith lately?” she asked.

“Not since the weekend,” I said. “Why?”

Lily pursed her fire engine red lips, thinking.

“She hasn’t been at school in a few days,” Lily said, dropping her voice. “And she hasn’t been returning my calls. Can you try and call her?”

I pulled out my phone and dialed Meredith. She answered after a few rings.

“Hey, Lima,” she said. “Whatcha doin’?”

“I’m at school. You know, high school? Like, where we’re all supposed to be right now?”

Meredith sighed. “Oh right. School. School is so bourgeois.”

“She’s fine,” I told Lily after I hung up.

Instead of seeming relieved, Lily just frowned.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing, that’s all. Thanks,” she said, straightening up. She pivoted and left the library, her Mary Jane heels rapping softly on the carpet.

Rain sloshed against the window of the library and I tried to refocus on my chemistry cards. Tomorrow’s test was the most important one of the year. Due to the fact that there were so many seniors in Honors Chem, the class was going to wind down in intensity after spring break. This was basically our final exam.

For us non-seniors, it was crucial to do well because it would determine who could take AP Biology next year. I didn’t care about taking AP classes just for the sake of it, but I was dying to take AP Bio because of the trip. Every year, the twelve students in the class went to Costa Rica to watch the sea turtles hatch. People who went said it was the most amazing week of their lives.

My phone beeped.

Staying after school for meeting with dean. Can you stay late?

Nate
. I hadn’t been alone with him since the night we kissed. I bit my lip.

Say no.
I looked down at my chemistry cards, but now they looked scrambled, underwater, remote. My thoughts were way too tangled up in images of Nate to focus on anything else.

N
ate said he’d meet me in the computer lab at three forty-five, but it came and went. I tried to study while I waited, but my concentration was terrible. I stopped every two minutes to look at the clock, and kept losing my place in my work.

When I saw it was already four thirty, I began to worry. I hadn’t memorized a single chemical formula in a whole hour. And on top of that, I’d begged mom to pick me up at five, even though I knew it would to screw up her whole day. And for what? To sit in the cold, damp computer lab, hungry and distracted?

“Sorry I’m late.”

I jumped. Nate was standing in the doorway.

“It’s okay,” I said. His hair was damp.

He dropped his backpack and shrugged off his jacket. Then he grabbed a wheely chair, swiveled it around, and sat down in front of me. He grabbed the arms of the chair I was in and pulled it closer to him, so close that his knees touched mine.

“What are you working on?” he asked softly.

“Science. Chemistry. We have a test tomorrow,” I replied, biting a nail.

“Are you nervous about it?” Nate asked.

“Super-nervous,” I replied quickly.

I let my hand fall to my lap and sighed. And then Nate reached out and picked up my hand. He held it between his own two hands and inspected it carefully, as if it was a seashell he’d found on the beach. I stayed perfectly still on the outside, barely even breathing, but on the inside, my heart was pounding.

“It’s not raining anymore,” he said after a minute. “Do you want to go up on the roof?”

I nodded.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Swatches of bright blue sky broke through the cloud layer like fault lines in the earth. New, perfect clouds, white and bright as porcelain, hung low across the sky.

“I love it after it rains,” I said, my teeth chattering in the chilly post-rain air. I shivered and folded my arms around my chest for warmth.

I turned to Nate. In this light, colors appeared extra vivid. The blue of Nate’s eyes, the lavender circles underneath them, the red of his lips were even more saturated than usual.

“Sorry it took me so long to get to the computer lab. We had to go over all my progress reports,” he said.

“How were they?” I asked, but I was detached from my words. All I could think about was that we were alone.

“They were fine,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said.

He took a step toward me so we were less than a foot apart. My eyes rested on the collar of his shirt. I lifted my face up toward him, careful not to knock my nose against his chin, and he looked down at me. We still weren’t touching, not even our sneakers, or our knees. The space between us felt pressurized and heavy. Being this close to Nate made my whole body hum. I felt like if I had to wait another second to kiss him, I was going to literally explode.

I reached for his hand at the exact same second that he pulled me toward him and then we were kissing. I wrapped my arms around his neck and then moved my hands down his back so that I could actually feel the back of his rib cage through his shirt with my fingertips. I stopped feeling cold as time melted away.

Suddenly, my phone vibrated in my pocket and I got slammed back to reality: We were on the roof, we were still at school, it wasn’t even dark out yet. The sounds of the world returned. I had gone temporarily deaf while we’d been kissing. Now, I could hear people talking on the patio below. A door slammed. A car horn beeped.

The text was from Mom.

10 mins

When I looked up at Nate, my face must have been full of disappointment, because he looked like he understood. His hair was a mess from my hands being in it, and I imagined that mine was, too.

“It’s my mom.”

He nodded and shook his head like he was shaking something off, and then he ran his hands over the front of his shirt to smooth it.

“Do I look okay?” I asked. “I feel like she’s gonna know.”

“Know what?” he asked.

I was about to answer him but when I saw the amused flicker in his eyes, I laughed.

“That’s not helpful,” I said.

“Stay still,” he said, suppressing a smile. He took a step toward me and combed my hair clumsily with his fingers.

“You’re probably just making it worse.” I giggled.

He laughed a little and backed away.

“So,” I said. “Are you hanging out with Ryan this weekend? Like maybe going to Meredith’s house one night?”

He blinked. “I’ll probably see Ryan. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I usually see him.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m going over there on Friday.”

Nate’s eyes strayed from mine and he looked out into the space behind me, his face clouding over in thought. I wanted him to promise me that I would see him on Friday night. We hadn’t talked on the phone since Santa Barbara, and I was tired of waiting, of just hoping we’d have a chance to be alone together.

“So?” I said again. “Friday?”

Nate snapped back to reality and looked at me. “Right, yeah. I’ll ask Ryan.”