How to Love (4 page)

“What?” he asks, going to work on the bell peppers. The pruners click neatly in his hand.

I snap to attention. “Hmm?”

“You’re smirking.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t even realized he was looking. Something tells me he wouldn’t be as amused by the mental image as I am. “I don’t mean to.”

I told my father I was pregnant and he didn’t speak to me for eleven weeks. I only blame him a little: His own parents died when he was seven, and he was, quite literally, raised by the nuns in Saint Tammany Parish in Louisiana. He fully intended to become a priest until he met my mother; he confesses every Friday and keeps a Saint Christopher medal tucked inside his shirt. In his heart he’s a musician but his soul is that of the most serious of altar boys, and the fact
that he didn’t send me away to some convent until I had the baby is probably a testament to the mercy of the God that we’ve always prayed to in my house.

It got better once Hannah was born—better, I suspect, once I wasn’t so visibly, aggressively huge—and in the last year or so we’ve reached an uneasy kind of truce. Still, the anger he reserves for Sawyer is damn near bottomless, and it doesn’t surprise me that I’m going to catch the overflow now that my proverbial boyfriend is back.

Penance. Right.

“I was going to read out here for a while,” I say finally, for lack of anything better. I’m still clutching my textbook in one arm.

My father frowns. “It’s dark for that, Reena.”

Go away
is what he means. I don’t know why I feel compelled to try. “It’s dark for aphid-picking, too,” I point out.

He sighs again, like I’m being difficult on purpose, like I’m deliberately missing the point. “Well,” he says after a moment, and when he finally turns to face me, it’s so quiet I can hear the neighbors’ sprinkler hissing endlessly next door. “I suppose you’re right.”

“I suck,” was the first thing Allie said when I picked up the receiver, her number appearing on the caller ID for the first time in almost a week. I was sitting on my bed reading the travel magazines Soledad had picked up for me at the bookstore, imagining myself wandering the markets of Provence or sitting on the beach in a cove in Kauai. “I totally owe you a phone call.”

“You don’t suck,” I told her, although the truth is she sucked a little. It was the end of the summer. Sophomore year started in a few days. August had seeped away in a kind of weird, lonely fugue state: I’d played an awful lot of solitaire. I’d spent a lot of time alone. “You’re busy. I get it.”

“No, I do,” she argued. “I’m the worst. I miss you
desperately. Come over. My parents have some law-firm benefit thing tonight. Come on,” she said, when I hesitated. “It’ll remind you how much you love me.”

I thought for one mean second about turning her down, claiming other plans and spending another night watching
Law & Order
reruns with Soledad, but in the end that was too bleak to contemplate, and besides: I missed her desperately, too.

“Yeah,” I said, after a minute. I got to the end of
Travel + Leisure
, flung its glossy pages onto the floor. “Of course.”

*

I biked the familiar streets that led to Allie’s parents’ development, everything green and rain-forest-damp. My tires skidded slickly against the blacktop. I leaned my bike against the side of the garage and scratched idly at a mosquito bite on the jut of my collarbone as I waited for Allie to open the door.

Lauren Werner opened it instead.

“Serena!” she said in a voice like a Fruit Roll-Up, tart and vaguely sticky, nothing organic there at all. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

I stared at her for a minute, her slinky top and honey-brown hair. “Yeah,” I said eventually. I was wearing stretched-out jeans rolled up into capri pants, a white Hanes undershirt that might have belonged to my brother at some point, and a pair of Birkenstock clogs. “Ditto.”

“Allie’s around here somewhere,” she told me, leading
the way into the front hall like this was a place I’d never been before, like I’d need to be pointed in the direction of the bathroom and told where to hang up my imaginary coat. I followed dumbly. In the living room were half a dozen kids I recognized from the hallways at school, maybe a grade or two ahead of us—a girl from my chem class, a guy who worked the counter at Bump and Grind. I could see a couple more people hanging out in the kitchen: not a big party, definitely, but still, being there felt like being in a dream where you’re someplace you recognize but it looks weirdly different, everything just a degree or two off from true north. “I always forget you guys are friends.”

“Uh, yup,” I said vaguely, doing my best to ignore her garden-variety bitchiness and still trying to get my bearings. The
AC
wasn’t working, and the air in the hallway was tepid and aquarium-damp. “We’re friends.”

Just then Allie appeared, flushed and grinning, throwing her skinny arms around my neck. “Hi!” she said, and in that second she looked so happy to see me that I forgot myself and smiled back. That was the thing about Allie, one of the reasons I loved her so much: When she made you the object of all her terrifying, kinetic energy, it was like standing in a puddle of sun. “You’re here!”

“I’m here,” I said, letting her spin me around on the tile in a swooping little dance. “You know,” I said, once she’d dipped me and, deciding that was enough dancing for now, begun to yank me gently down the hall, “maybe you could
have mentioned on the phone that half of school was going to be at your house so that I could have, you know, bathed.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning. “You look adorable.”

“I look twelve.”

“You look arty and cool.”

“Okay.” I snorted. “I do not look
arty
or
cool
—”

“Hey, Reena.”

I startled, looked around, and tried not to gasp too audibly: There was Sawyer standing behind me, in jeans and a T-shirt, leather cord looped around his wrist. A plastic cup dangled by its lip from his hand.

“Hey,” I said.

I saw Sawyer pretty often, actually, hanging around at the restaurant or sitting in front of us at church on Sunday, at my house taking lessons from my dad. However much I thought about him—and I thought about him a
lot
—I was reasonably adept at keeping it together when he was around, careful not to tip my hand and thereby make my entire life completely unbearable.

I had never seen him in Allie’s kitchen before. I had never seen him slide a casual arm around her shoulders, one hand sifting through her wispy hair. Seeing it now felt slow and painful, like a muscle tearing. I had no earthly clue where I should look.

In the end it didn’t matter, because already he was leading her away without even trying; he just stepped back and
she followed, like a magnet or a high-frequency sound. “Get a drink and come down to the basement,” she called to me, distracted. “We’re gonna play flip cup in a minute.”

And then she was gone.

I stood there for a second. I tried to look very, very calm. Finally I slipped past the two girls at the counter, out the sliding door, and across the covered patio, avoiding the bright patch thrown by the floodlight affixed to the back of the house. I made straight for the swing set, wet from this afternoon’s rainstorm, the air still so humid it felt like breathing spiderwebs.

I sat.

I wasn’t shy, exactly. That’s never what it was. I just didn’t know how to
do
this, is all, the clang and chatter of high school. And more than that, I didn’t particularly want to learn. My whole life Cade had teased me for my total inability to handle more than one or two friends at a time; ten minutes in Allie’s crowded kitchen left me feeling like some wild animal dropped into a completely foreign habitat, a tiger in the tundra or a penguin in the woods. I wasn’t unpopular, exactly. I was just … unequipped.

It was one thing when I had Allie around to help fight my wars, I thought as I sat there. She could do all the talking when I was feeling tongue-tied, vocalize feelings on behalf of both of us:
Reena and I thought that movie was stupid. Reena and I would love to go.
Lately, though, not only did it feel like she didn’t have the time or patience to parse my silences,
but on top of that she’d taken the person I wanted most in the entire world.

It was my own fault, I thought again, swinging slowly back and forth without much of a long-term plan. I didn’t know how to open up to people. I didn’t know how to be the kind of person who did. I couldn’t figure out how Allie—

“What are you doing?”

Sawyer sidled across the damp, hissing grass, hands in his pockets. I hadn’t seen him coming. He’d edged around the floodlight, too.

“Um.” I groped around for plausible deniability and, finding none, had to settle for the truth. “Hiding.”

Sawyer raised his eyebrows, paused against the slide. He was barefoot and casual-looking, like someone who just lived in his body sort of carelessly, all muscle and bone. “From anything in particular?”

Everyone
, as a matter of fact, but it didn’t feel like the kind of thing I could say to Sawyer LeGrande. “That,” I began instead, stalling, “is a very good question.”

“Well.” Sawyer sat down on the swing next to me and rocked back and forth a little, long legs planted, just normal, like we did this all the time. “You suck at hiding, because I found you in, like, one second.”

“Were you
looking
?” I blurted, and then, before he could answer: “I wasn’t so much doing it as a game.”

Sawyer considered that. “No,” he said eventually. “I guess not.” He swung for another minute, quiet. We’d never
been alone like this before. “This isn’t really your scene, huh?” he asked.

“What’s that?” I asked, just this side of defensive. I felt my spine straighten up, a reflex: He’d hit a little close to the artery. My fingertips curled tightly around the edge of the swing. “People having a good time?”

Sawyer laughed like he thought I was clever, like I might have a secret to share. “That’s not what I mean. Bunch of slacker types screwing around. I don’t know. Lauren Werner.”

That got my attention, as if he hadn’t had it already. I squinted a bit, trying to gauge the expression on his face. It was frustratingly dark out here; fine for brooding, sure, but for all the world I wanted to pull him into the light and just …
look
. “I thought you and Lauren Werner were friends.”

Sawyer shrugged. “We are, I guess. But she’s … I mean …” He stopped. It looked like he was thinking about it, like he hadn’t totally decided how much he wanted to reveal. “You know.”

“I really,
really
do,” I told him, and the way I said it cracked him up again. I grinned. I tried to remember the last time I’d made him laugh—a long time ago, definitely, back when we were still little kids running around with my brother, playing tag in the grove behind his house. It used to take them forever to catch me back then. I’d freeze and go quiet among the trees.

We sat there for another minute, swinging. I could hear the frogs calling out above my head. Inside Allie’s house something crashed to the floor, followed by a spray of laughter. I winced.

“You ever wish you were still, like, eight years old?” Sawyer asked suddenly.

I blinked at him, startled: It felt like he could open up my head and see inside. I took a beat to recover, slid my feet out of my clogs and rubbed them cautiously through the cool, damp grass. “Nah.” It felt weirdly dangerous to look at him, like staring at the surface of the sun. “I only ever wish I was old enough to leave.”

Sawyer didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity. Finally I glanced up and found him looking back. Something weird and new and personal charged between us in the darkness, a gaze too long to be an accident. Another moment passed before he grinned. “For what it’s worth,” he said, and here he bumped the hard knob of my bare ankle with his own, gentle, “I think you look arty.”

“I don’t—” I started, but then there was Allie crossing the lawn, a dark swath through the pool of light Sawyer and I had both avoided so carefully, like a stage actress finding her mark.

“There you are!” she called brightly—so pretty even in jeans and a tank top, curves and curly hair. Of course he would have chosen her. “My two favorites.”

“Here we are,” Sawyer agreed, eyes on me for a single
beat longer before turning his attention to Allie. “Reena was hiding.”

“That’s ’cause she’s mad at me,” Allie said, subtle as a border collie, reaching for the chain link and giving my swing a little shake. She smelled like malt lemonade and her mother’s perfume.

Sawyer cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know about that,” he told her, getting to his feet. “I’ll see you inside.” He glanced at me one more time, quick. “Later, Reena.”

“What were you guys talking about?” she asked when Sawyer was gone, taking his place on the swing set and winding around in a circle so the chain twisted up, then letting herself go in a dizzy rush. “You and the boy king.”

“Nothing,” I told her, shrugging. I slid my shoes back onto my feet a little urgently, as if I might possibly need to run someplace in the immediate future. “He just wanted to know what I was doing out here.”

Allie looked at me sideways, face screwing up a bit, like she didn’t quite trust me to tell her the truth. “What
were
you doing out here?” she asked.

“Seriously?” I gaped, a hot little flare of annoyance inside my chest. “I mean—
seriously
?”

Allie blinked, her gray eyes wide and innocent—her
I don’t know how that stuff got in my purse
expression, normally reserved for her parents and shopping mall security guards. I didn’t like her turning that look on me. “What?”

“You totally blindsided me with those people in there!” I
couldn’t get a foothold with her lately. It felt like I was hanging on by my nails. “I came over to watch TV and eat pizza or something, not play flip cup with a bunch of strangers.”

“They’re not
strangers
,” she corrected sharply. Heat lightning flickered in the distance, there and gone again. “They’re all from school. And I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you Lauren was going to be here, so—”