Holly and Her Naughty eReader (14 page)

The way he looked at me while he
talked—part of me wanted to run away, but another part wanted to jump into his arms
and kiss him on the lips.

“I’ve changed too,” I said.

“I’ll call you as soon as I find
something.”

“Oh…yes,” I said, shaking off my
daydream. “Call me soon.”

Max walked me to the door and
reached across my body to open it. As he did, his arm brushed against my
shoulders, ever so briefly.

I remembered being a high school
senior, crushing hard on this guy.

“Speak with you soon, Holly.”

“Bye, Max.”

Chapter 14

Two hours passed from the time I
left Max on Vivian’s front porch to the time he called me with news. During
those two hours, I performed a manic, confused search on the Internet for
information about Vivian. I learned all that Google had to tell me about her,
mostly stuff from her days in law school. She edited the law review. She
participated in mock trials. She did pro bono work for various charities. There
was nothing to find about her personal life. No clues as to where she might
have run away with my Kindle.

I was researching various
private investigators in the Albuquerque area when Max called.

“I’m looking at her credit card
statement online,” Max said. “She had the user name and password written on a
post-it note in the drawer of her computer desk.”

“What? Where is she?”

“Last night she reserved a room
at the Holiday Inn and Suites in Durango.”

“Durango?” I said, acting
surprised even as my mind told me it made total sense. Durango, a quaint little
mountain town in Southern Colorado, was half a day’s drive from Albuquerque. If
Vivian left in the early morning, she’d be there by midday. She could hole up
in a hotel room with the Kindle for the rest of the day.

Or the rest of the week. Or the
rest of her life.

“I’ve got the phone number of
the hotel if you’d like to call them,” Max said.

“No need,” I said. “I’ll go up
there. I’ll leave right now and find her. Thank you Max. You’ve been so
helpful.”

“Holly, you can’t drive up there
alone,” Max said.

“I’ll be fine. I know where I’m
going.”

“You looked very tired when I
saw you this morning. A long drive is a dangerous thing to do when you haven’t
slept.”

“I can do it,” I said. “Don’t
worry about me.”

But as I spoke the words, I
wondered. It was true that my body was off-kilter after my two-day bender with
the Kindle. I was full of energy at the moment—the thought of finding Vivian in
a hotel room and stealing back my Kindle had woken me up—but how long would the
energy last? How would I feel after a couple hours on the road by myself?

“I will take you,” Max said. He said
the words not as a suggestion or an offer, but as a command. He had no way of
knowing it, but that was exactly what I needed to hear. I longed for my sweet,
precious Christoph, for the strength of his voice, for the clarity my life took
on when he told me what to do, and Max’s little bit of bossiness was a welcome
sound to my ears.

And it was a good idea. I needed
to take this seriously. Vivian wanted that Kindle as badly as I did. I needed
to get some rest before I took it from her. With Max driving, I could sleep on
the way, and have the advantage over Vivian when we had our inevitable
confrontation.

“Okay,” I said.

“I will pick you up at your
hotel in thirty minutes,” Max said. “Then we’ll be on our way.”

*****

Max was right on time, pulling
up to the front of the hotel in a Ford Explorer. As I approached, he ran around
to the passenger side and opened the door for me.

“Thank you Max,” I said. It
would be the first of many times I thanked him.

There was a fast food bag
waiting for me next to my seat. The scents that came from that bag were heavy
with nostalgia for good days gone by.

“Oh my God, did you buy me Taco
Bell?”

“You do like this, don’t you?”

“Are you kidding? This is my
guilty pleasure food!”

I looked inside the bag. A taco,
nachos, and a Diet Coke. It was like he knew my order.

“How’d you know to get this,
Max?”

“It seemed right,” he said with
a smile. “Enjoy. Do you need anything else before we leave?”

“No, I’m good, thanks.”

We were looking in each other’s
eyes for a second, and I swear it seemed like….

Nah. I needed to get that
thought out of my mind and fast. Max Brody was my high school crush who broke
my heart. Nothing more. Nothing less. His apology this morning was a good one
and I was ready to forget about my grudge with him, but I was not ready to
rekindle old interests, and neither was he. Lest I forgot, while I was on this
trip on the lookout for a Kindle, he was here because his girlfriend had dumped
him with a goodbye note.

But it was funny that he bought
me Taco Bell.

Taco Bell. Oh Max, if you only knew.

There were three Taco Bells and
a hundred other fast food joints close to the campus of Highland High School in
Albuquerque’s southeast heights, but it was the Taco Bell at the intersection
of Gibson and San Mateo Boulevard where the girls and I hung our hats. This was
a place where we knew we could be free from eavesdropping ears and sightings
that might lead to gossip later. It was just far enough away that nobody else
went there, and just close enough that we could make it back in time for fifth
period. The words “Taco Bell” became a secret code between me, Michelle, and
our gang. If you received a “Taco Bell” message by text or handwritten note (my
high school years were right at the beginning of the texting revolution), that
meant you had to drop whatever else you were doing for lunch and gather with
the gang, usually because someone was having boy trouble or some other
existential crisis.

I was mostly there to listen.
The only time I ever called a Taco Bell meeting was the last semester of senior
year, after a surprisingly eventful astronomy lab.

It was an outdoor lab that
started at seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. We met at the football field. Mr.
Guiliani passed out star charts, telling us that we each had one portion of the
sky represented on our chart. Our job was to look in the heavens, find our
piece of the sky up there, and then answer some written questions on the backs
of our papers. We worked in groups of two.

Max and I were partners.

At that time, Max was a guy I
sort of knew but never thought of as a prospect for me. He had spent all of
junior year and half of senior year in a relationship with Carrie Romero. He
was one tier above me on the social ladder. His bright blue eyes were a
frequent topic of conversation among the girls at school and I always thought
of him as being out of my league.

But on the night of our
astronomy lab (dare I say it?) the stars were all aligned.

Groan if you want. I’m a
romantic.

There were four things that were
happening that night that made it all work. The first was that we had trouble
finding our piece of night sky. The second was that some other groups had
chosen to lay down on the grass, setting a precedent that everyone followed by
the end of the night. The third was that Mr. Guiliani was letting people leave
when they finished their labs, and as the night went on, it grew more quiet and
intimate for those of us left behind.

The fourth was that Max was in
no hurry at all to finish.

He and his dad had been in an
argument before Max came to lab, and Max wanted to talk to someone about it. By
the time we decided to lay in the grass like everyone else, Max had already
blown off the assignment and wanted only to talk.

So we lay there, side by side,
looking up at the stars, talking about life. That alone was enough to make me
fall for the guy. But here’s the kicker. When we finally finished the
assignment and left, Max walked me to my car and hugged me goodnight. And he
said, “Why is this the first time we’ve ever talked?”

To which I said, “I don’t know,”
and I giggled.

The next day, I called the girls
together for a meeting at Taco Bell.

“I think I like Max Brody,” I
announced.

My friends all knew that this
weak, hedged way of expressing my crush really meant
I am head over heels in love with Max Brody.

And I was. Or, I thought I was.
You know how it goes when you’re a teenager. One minute Max was that cute guy
at school who meant nothing to me. The next, he was my everything. I remember
driving myself home from that astronomy lab and being so lost in my excitement
about Max that I pulled into the driveway of my house having no idea how I’d
gotten there. I had a hard time falling asleep that night, and when I did, I
dreamed about him.

Rhianna, who was a fan of
chicken soft tacos, encouraged caution.

“You’re getting yourself all
knotted up over him and graduation is three weeks away,” she said.

“That’s three weeks she and Max
could be together,” said Michelle between sips of her Sprite.

“Plus the whole summer,” said Yvonne,
who was nibbling on cinnamon twists. “For all you know, it might be the most
magical summer of your life.”

“It might be too magical,” said
Rhianna. “You worked hard to get into SMU. But then you fall in love and you
decide to stay in Albuquerque and you get pregnant and have to drop out of
college and the next thing you know you’re a single mom working at
Wienerschnitzel to pay the bills.”

Thinking of that conversation
with my girls made me smile. Rhianna hadn’t been serious with all that
pessimism, but it turned out to be good advice. She was warning me of the
dangers of letting a boy be the focus of my life, which was a mistake I made a
few years later when I fell for Derek.

Max flirted with me off and on
for the final three weeks of school. It was maddening. One day he’d find me at
my locker, walk me to my car, and hug me goodbye. The next day he’d pass me in
the halls and act like he never saw me.

At Clarissa’s graduation party,
Max slow danced with me to
Faithfully
by Journey. Our dance started in a light, friendly hug. By the end, we had
pressed ourselves together in a way that was more than friendly. We danced and
danced. Oh my God did we dance. We barely talked. We just stayed together on
the dance floor, doing slow songs and fast songs and getting closer and closer
to kissing. I was just waiting for Max to ask me to take a walk outside with
him. Waiting and waiting and waiting…

Clarissa was the girl whose
parents thought it was best to let the kids drink on graduation night. Perhaps
you’ve been through this divide in your own experience. Some parents think it’s
sending a bad message to let underage kids drink; other parents think that
they’re going to drink anyway, so you might as well have them do it in a
controlled environment.

As such, the rules of Clarissa’s
party were that anyone who wasn’t spending the night at the house had to leave
by midnight, because at midnight the booze came out and the car keys got taken
away. Max’s dad was not at all of the let-them-drink camp, and at midnight, he
had to go.

We exchanged phone numbers and
hugged goodbye. What a disappointment that was. There were people around
watching us, there was a sense of urgency to get the non-drinkers on the road
so the fun could start, and Max chickened out. I guess I did too. For years, I
lamented that I never took the initiative and kissed him.

The goodbye was made more
awkward by the fact that we had to exchange phone numbers, and in those days,
entering someone into the contacts of your cell phone required you to play a
sonata on the nine-digit keypad.

It was so stupid that we weren’t
already talking and texting every day by that point, but that’s how it went
with us. Those last days of school between my emergency Taco Bell session and
Clarissa’s party were downright goofy.
Does
he like me or not? I don’t know, he didn’t talk to me today! I can’t bear to go
talk to him! Maybe I’ll write him a note. No, maybe I’ll just smile at him
during lunch. No, that’s too forward. I think I’ll just avoid him and stalk him
from behind when he isn’t looking.

With all my friends watching,
Max and I ended Clarissa’s graduation party with a goodbye hug. That was it. A
hug. LAME! But cute. Max Brody, who lived on a giant pedestal of beautiful and
cool in my world, was scared to make a move. He was just as nervous as I was.

I went inside. I started
drinking with everyone else. We sang along to
Bohemian Rhapsody
, my phone fell out of my pocket during the
headbanging part and I didn’t notice it and spent an hour in a panic that I’d
lost my only chance to ever speak to Max again. I found my phone an hour later
(actually, Vivian found it for me), I drank some more, and I got a text from
Max.

It was really cool dancing with you tonight
, was what the text said.

It was two in the morning. He
was lying in his bed. He couldn’t sleep because he was thinking of me.I know
all this because we texted back and forth for twenty minutes. At the end of
those twenty minutes, Max wrote:

You wanna go out tomorrow?

The rest is history. Holly at
the Outpost Ice Skating Rink, by herself, Max never returns her calls or her
texts, Holly has a lousy summer and holds a grudge for ten years.

And to think it started with me
calling the girls together for Taco Bell. Driving north on I-25, Max in the
driver’s seat, my Kindle somewhere in Durango, I took a bite out of my taco and
decided if it started with a taco, it would end with a taco too.

Sitting there, crunching away in
silence, I forgave Max Brody for standing me up all those years ago. I washed
down the taco with a big slurp of Diet Coke and moved on with my life.