If I Can't Have You (4 page)

We’re both going to the same college next year, and we’re extremely lucky that we were able to room together, so at least we have another four years together, but who knows what will happen after that. I like to think we’ll always keep in contact, but you never know.

I’m pulled from my thoughts when the door to our room opens abruptly. I stare at a pair of hot pink flip flops and work my way up the person who’s wearing a hot pink terry-cloth sundress to match. Sadie, the Marshall’s daughter.

Sadie and I are the same age and we used to play together when we were kids, but as we got older we started distancing ourselves from each other. She’s more shopping, and tanning and gossiping and I’m more reading, and studying, and laid back. Her parents probably made her come over here to say hi.

Sadie’s heavily highlighted hair is tucked back into a low ponytail and her fingers are frantically pounding on the keys to her iPhone.

“What’s up, Sadie?” I say zipping up my now empty suitcase.

“Nothing.” She doesn’t even look at me. She keeps her eyes zoomed in on her phone.

“Just came to say hey.”

“Hey,” I groan. Then Whitney clears her throat and I glance over my shoulder as she gives me the “introduce me already” look. “This is my friend Whitney.”

Sadie still doesn’t look up. “Nice to meet you.”

I sit down on my bed and glare at Sadie, hoping that she’ll leave sooner rather than later. Finally Sadie meets my gaze and shrugs. “Well, I’ll see you around.” Less than a second later she walks out the door.

Whit gives me an odd look and shudders. “Frigid.”

“Tell me about it,” I scoff. “At least you haven’t had to spend every summer with her since you were a toddler.”

“No because I would have killed myself way before I reached my pre-teen years.” I laugh. Whit’s sarcastic comments always make me laugh. “Spending a summer with that
thing
must have been torture.”

“Meh. She wasn’t always like that.”

I remember one summer in particular where Sadie and I made the biggest sand castle ever. We laughed and swam, collected seashells, and spent every waking minute together. But the last time we’d spent time like that together we were ten. People change. We changed. She got into boys and I got into school. As we got older we didn’t have anything in common anymore.

“So,” Whit says, standing up. “Why don’t we go watch the sunset?”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say with a smile.

****

The sand glows a mixture of yellow and orange. The water looks violet instead of blue from the afterglow of the sky. The beach is deserted. Just the way I like it.

I pull a beach towel out of my bag and spread it out along the sand. Clinking glass echoes in the night air and my head snaps toward Whitney as she pulls two wine coolers out of her purse. My mouth gapes open and I glance over my shoulder at sign two feet away from us. Then my eyes widen as Whitney meets my gaze. “Where did you get those?”

“I ganked em from your mom’s stash. She had like fifty of em. It’s like she’s addicted to them or something.”

I point to the sign over my shoulder. “The sign says no alcohol on the beach.”

“What are you, the party police?” Whit shakes her head and reaches into her bag, pulling out two red cups. “Live a little Robs. It’s our last summer of freedom.”

“I just don’t want to get caught.”

“Ree-lax. This isn’t the prohibition-era.” Whitney opens a bottle and pours half of a wine cooler into a red up and hands it to me. “If we get caught, we’ll tell them its juice or something.” I glance at the cup then back at her face. She shoves the cup closer to me. “Just take the cup.”

“What if my mom notices that they’re gone?”

“Did you not hear me? She’s got like fifty more in the fridge. She’ll never know, unless she’s an alcoholic. And I’ve known your mom as long as I’ve known you. I don’t get that vibe from her.”

I take the cup warily. “Fine.”

Whit pours herself a cup and snuggles in next to me. “You’ve got to loosen up, Robs. How in the heck are we supposed to party it up in college if I can’t even get you to have fun now?”

It’s not that I don’t like to have fun. It’s that I don’t like the consequences that accompany having fun. I don’t have good luck when it comes to having fun. Right after graduation one of the football players in our graduating class threw a party. I let my hair down then and had a few drinks and had a great time. The down side… The party got busted and the cops brought me home. Whit wasn’t there to witness the look on my dad’s face. It was a fun killer.

Then I got the two hour “I’m so disappointed in you, I thought you were smarter than that” lecture. I don’t want to go there again.

I take a sip from my cup, watching the tide roll in. Whit scoots closer to me as a cool breeze whips through my hair and hers. She laces her arm through mine. “You were right about this, Robs. It’s beautiful.”

“I told you.”

Another gust of wind blows and tousle’s the edge of the towel and an orange piece of paper sticks to Whit’s feet. She sets her cup down and picks it up. “What’s this?” I lean over, glancing at what appears to be a flyer. Whit squints, trying to make out what it says. The sun is almost beneath the horizon and it’s starting to get dark. “I need a light or something. I can’t read it.” She digs through her purse and whips out her cell phone. She presses a button and the phone lights up. Then we read the paper. “Oohhh!”Whit squeals. “It’s a frat party!”

I snatch the paper from her hand. “Give me that.” Whit leans in and holds her phone over the orange flyer so I can read it clearly. “A frat party in the summer seems odd doesn’t it?”

“Not really,” Whit replies. “Some people take summer classes.”

“The Start of Summer Bash,” I say aloud. I scan the address and crumble up the paper.

“Hey!” Whit protests with a frown. “What are you doing? We should totally crash that party!”

“It’s like five miles away. How will we get there?” There’s no way I’m walking five miles to go to some party for an hour if that.

“I’m sure your rents will let us borrow the car.”

“Sure. Hmmm. Yeah, dad. I’d like the car so I can go to a frat party,” I say with sarcasm. “I’m sure that will work out wonderfully.”

“That’s why we lie, silly.”

“Whit, you know me better than that. I don’t have one deceptive bone in my body. Plus you know I’m a terrible liar.”

Whitney exhales and gives me a quirky grin. Then she picks up the balled up flier and stuffs it in her purse. “We have all day tomorrow to work on your skills. Trust me, babe. You’re learning from the best.”

That’s true. Whitney is great at dreaming up random fabrications and making them believable. She could tell my mom that aliens were going to invade earth tomorrow and that the entire human population would be random test subjects and somehow make my mom believe the whole thing.

Her whole lying bit started in the sixth grade. Her parents had always been strict. No, more than strict. They kept her on lock down. Whit calls them ‘The Dictators’ and they made the rules my parents set up seem lax. Like my twelve o’clock curfew. Whitney’s mom would frown at that. “A young lady doesn’t need to stay out past ten thirty,” Whit’d say, mocking her mom. “Only harlots and drunkards roam the street after that time.” Then we’d laugh and she’d say, “Who in the hell talks like that? I swear my mom is medieval.”

In the sixth grade Whit really wanted to see a movie that was rated PG-13. Well, up until that point her parents wouldn’t let her see anything above a G rating. So Whit lied to them and told them she was seeing something else. She even went as far as memorizing bits and pieces of the other movie, from the previews so if her parents asked any questions, her lie would sound believable. Pretty soon she’d gotten so good at lying to them about everything that they were clueless. I can’t imagine the look on her mom’s face if she ever found out her daughter wasn’t a virgin.

I think my parents actually learned a little bit from Whit’s. What happens when you’re too strict with your kids? They rebel. I shudder when I think about what Whit’s going to do when we get to college and she has freedom. She’s going to go crazy. Like doing strip teases at parties and smuggling beers into the campus library in your purse crazy. I bet she’ll be thankful for my party police attitude then because my attitude might just keep her from flunking out of college. Or at least I like to think so.

“Let’s just say, hypothetically that my parents do let us take the car. How are we supposed to get home if we drink? You know I’d never ever be cool with drinking and driving.”

Whit scratches her chin and makes her “I’m thinking” face. “I’ll do it. I’ll sacrifice one night of fun to take one for the team.”

I roll my eyes and giggle. “How generous of you.”

“Hey.” Whit punches my shoulder playfully. “You’re always the one who stays in the right frame of mind so I can let loose. It’s about time I returned the favor. Besides, you never know who might be at this little swaree.”

Blood rises to my cheeks. I’m blushing. And I’m thankful that it’s dark out because I’m certain I look like a ripe tomato. “He probably won’t be there.”

“Oh, I’m gonna bet he will be,” she teases. “He’s in college. It’s a college party. And from the way you’ve described him in the past, he doesn’t sound like you and he have the same agenda when it comes to fun.”

Whitney knows so much about Drake I’m sure she feels like she knows him already. I tell her anything and everything about him. Every time I saw him in the past years I called her. Told her what he did. Asked her what his actions meant. I’m clueless when it comes to guys and their flirtations or hidden innuendos.

“So. Even if he is there it doesn’t mean he’s going to talk to me. Or maybe he’s finally forgotten me all together.”

That’s a lie. I know he hasn’t forgotten me. Last summer I actually spent time with him. Like apart from me seeing him at random and him calling me “kid.” He still called me “kid”, but last year he actually stuck up a conversation with me a few times. One of the times, I had gone into town to the local CD shop and he brushed past me as I was walking through the door. He stopped mid-step when he saw my and spun around. “Fancy meeting you here, kid.”

He flashed me a brilliant smile and my heart hammered against my ribcage. I could feel it beating everywhere. In my throat. In my ears. Even in my temples. And then I bashfully looked at the floor. “Yeah…eh. Fancy.”

My insides were a mess. Finger paints. Red, blue, and green on a toddler’s hands smeared on the wall mess. I couldn’t even mumble coherent words.

When I lifted my head. He glared at me with a puzzled look. A look I had memorized over the last three years because it was one of my favorites. I loved his puzzled look. Where he’d scrunch his eyebrows together and bite his bottom lip just the slightest bit. “Huh?”

I swallowed hard and fidgeted with my fingers. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“So.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his board shorts and rocked back and forth on his heels. “You enjoying your vacation so far?”

“Yeah. It’s vacation. What’s not to enjoy?”

He smirked. “Very true.”

Sydney appeared next to him and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I’m ready to go, babe.”

He smiled at her lovingly and my heart sank. Sydney flashed me a sincere smile. “Hi again. Having a good summer?”

I nodded, but didn’t respond because I was afraid if I did Sydney would hear the fractured emotion in my voice.

During that moment all I wanted to do was run to one of the corners in shop, crouch down, and cry. And I couldn’t help but despise, Sydney. I knew I had no reason to because she was so nice. It wasn’t a fake nice either. She was genuinely nice and I’d witnessed her kindness on a few occasions when she’d help an elderly person across the road, hold doors open for people, or even cover an extra for shift for another one of the lifeguards. Mom always says that genuine people are hard to come by and it’s because of that, that I couldn’t hate her all-together.

What I didn’t like the most about Sydney is the fact that she was perfect, too perfect. With her shiny, black patent leather hair, proportional symmetrical smile, clear olive skin, and her perfectly applied Ruby Roo MAC lipstick. More than anything I was jealous because girls like Sydney; the perfect girls, seemed to always get everything. Once, just once I wanted everything.

And to me, that everything was Drake.

“I am thanks.” I smiled back, trying to be genuine, but inside I’m shrieking at the top of my lungs and thinking about how I’d like to claw at Sydney’s face, damaging her Neutrogena clear, skin.

“I’m sure we’ll see you around, kid,” Drake said.

“Bye,” Sydney said, adding a small wave.

Just as they turned to walk away I watched Drake lean in and plant a kiss on the side of Sydney’s head with his full pink lips. At that moment, I had to look away. Witnessing that loving gesture between them was more than I could handle.

For the longest time after he saved my life, I thought about the way his lips felt against mine. The soft, gentle brush of warmth that followed him pumping life back into me. I remember how the heat from his mouth seared through me like shishcabob’s being cooked on a charcoal grill. I never forgot the way his lips felt against mine because that memory was the only thing that got me through that moment outside the CD shop in one piece.