The Start of Me and You (6 page)

I shut the door behind me and made my way across the street, down the slope, and across the tiny stream to the neighborhood that backed up to mine. It was this same in-between space where I met Tessa when I was seven, a few weeks after each of our families had moved to Oakhurst. I was reading
Anne of Green Gables
at the base of the hill when I saw a tiny blond figure splashing in the stream farther down. The path, like our friendship, had become worn in over time. Now, nine years later, I could have walked the path to Tessa’s with my eyes closed, and it hadn’t failed me yet.

“Hey,” Tessa said, glancing up for a moment as I walked in the side door. She looked back down, digging through her purse. “I was just leaving to get you.”

She stood next to the kitchen table, wearing a summer
dress and tall wedge heels that closed the five-inch height difference between us. Her blond hair fell forward, halfway to her waist. Tessa McMahon didn’t even own a blow-dryer, and her apathy was rewarded with teenage-years Taylor Swift hair. Because life is not fair.

“Can I borrow something to wear?” If I was going to face all of my classmates after what had just happened, I needed to at least
look
confident.

“Of course. Aha!” She produced a container of lip balm from the depths of her purse and looked up at me.

“Whoa,” she breathed. She stepped toward me, squinting to get a better look at my undoubtedly blotchy face. “Hey. What’s going on?”

“Let’s find me something to wear and then I’ll tell you. Okay?”

I riffled through Tessa’s walk-in closet until I found a dress that I’d almost borrowed once before. Shopping in Tessa’s closet was difficult for two reasons. Her miniature clothes rarely fit totally-average-down-to-my-size-eight-shoes me. And, secondly, Tessa’s sense of style only really worked on her. There was a sort of bohemian feel to her wardrobe, effortless and comfortable. Even though most of her clothes and accessories were expensive, she thought exposed labels were tacky. This was part of the reason why she’d never quite fit in with the popular crowd, no matter how many times they’d tried to recruit her.

The dress still fit snugly, a bit too tight in the chest, which was why my mother hadn’t let me wear it out earlier in the summer.

“That looks good,” Tessa told me when I emerged from the closet. She leaned back on a pile of pillows on her bed, crossing her arms. “I thought you didn’t like that dress.”

“I like it. My mom just wouldn’t let me wear it that one time.”

“
That
is cute,” Tessa cried, gesturing at the dress. “Why didn’t your mom like it?”

“Too skimpy,” I said, making air quotes.

“
Ew!
It is not! That is rude of your mom to say!”

I snorted. Only Tessa could turn parental restriction into a personal offense.

“Whatever,” she said, shaking her head. “Tell me what’s going on.”

I took a deep breath. “My parents are dating.”

She pursed her lips. “That’s okay, right? I mean, they’ve been divorced for a long time now. You had to figure that they would eventually start—”

I held up my hand to stop her, as my mother had done to me just minutes before. Stringing together the next sentence was like jamming mismatched puzzle pieces together—forced and awkward and wrong. “My parents are dating
each other
.”

“Wait,
what
?” Tessa gawked, sitting up.

“Dating each other,” I repeated. “Day-ting.”

I held up both my index fingers and touched them together, as if this somehow symbolized “when one’s divorced parents date each other.” The American Sign Language linguists would have to make up a whole new vernacular for my screwed-up family life. Tessa’s eyes boggled in confusion. She was there when my parents separated and divorced. She’d heard me complain about the arguments and even heard a few in person, from the confines of my bedroom during sleepovers.

“Well,” she said after a few moments. “That’s … pretty weird.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “I know! God! Everything is going to happen all over again. They’ll both wind up unhappy,
again
, and Cameron and I will have to live through it
again
.”

Tessa twisted the ends of her hair, apparently not ready to offer advice. And suddenly, it all struck me as so
absurd
that I started laughing—but not the laugh of a person who was cracking up. The laugh of a person who was just plain cracking.

“Are you …,” Tessa trailed off. “Is this a weird joke?”

“Nope!” I said, gasping for air as I wiped under my eyes. My nitrous-oxide giggling continued. “This is so real. It’s totally fine. My parents are dating each other. Whatever! It’s okay!”

“It
will
be okay.” She looked me right in eyes. “It will.”

My laughter dropped off.

This was not the first time Tessa had sworn to me that everything would work out. After Aaron’s funeral, I went to change into my pajamas when it hit me that the funeral wasn’t happening. It
had
happened. There was nothing left to do. There was only his unending absence. I fell to my knees on the carpet in my half-unzipped black dress, hysterical, and Tessa pulled me into her arms. As I sobbed, she repeated, over and over, the same words in a rhythmic way that somehow calmed me:
It will not always feel like this. I promise. It will get easier. You will not always feel this way, Paige. I promise.
She never tried to rationalize my pain or fix it. But she planted this idea, that someday it might ease.

“Okay. Okay.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. My skin felt ruddy, and I turned to examine the toll that crying had taken on my complexion. I stared at my face in the mirror, thinking of that picture of the four of us from the collage. Same green eyes, same light-brown hair at my shoulders, same everything. Other than a few inches of height and the hint of curves, I looked exactly the same as I did in eighth grade. The sameness suffocated me, like the walls were closing in around me. Inside, I’d changed so much—even in the past year. Yet here I stood, same old Paige. I needed to break free of her.

“Will you cut my hair?”

I glanced back at Tessa in the mirror as her mouth formed the word: “No.”

“Just bangs.” Turning around, I gave her my best pleading look.

“You want me to cut bangs into your hair?”

“Yes.”

“You realize that I have never cut anyone’s hair in my life?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

I groaned. “You’re supposed to be my best friend.”

“I
am
your best friend,” she told me, avoiding my gaze. She was still on her bed, picking at her nails. “Which is why I won’t let you make hair-related decisions when you’re this upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Okay,” she said sarcastically.

“I need a change, Tess.” I whined.

“Then change mascaras or something,” she said. “Your hair is fine.”

“If you don’t do it, I’ll do it myself.” I reached over to her desk, plucking a pair of all-purpose scissors from the drawer.

When she only stared at me, I took the front panel of my hair between my two fingers, sectioning it off.

“God,” she muttered after a moment, climbing off the bed. “Fine. Give them here.”

I stayed still, unwavering. But this one gesture—this simple, snipping motion—moved me forward all on its own. I stood, breath bated, ready to be changed in even the smallest way.

Chapter Five

On our way to Morgan’s house, Tessa and I didn’t talk. The bangs tickled my forehead, and I couldn’t stop staring at myself in the car’s side mirror. This girl, with her new hair and the “skimpy” dress, could handle the next few hours. The radio played over us, and I sang along to myself.

My friends’ music preferences diverged and overlapped like a four-part Venn diagram. Kayleigh liked pop and hip-hop, with some classic rock. Tessa also dabbled with classic rock but generally preferred low-key indie music. She enforced a zero-tolerance policy for schmaltz, which always made for bickering if Morgan was in charge of song selection. Morgan favored the kind of lite rock my mother listened to and, also like my mother, disapproved of Kayleigh’s
hip-hop. We had a house rule that stated you got to pick the music when everyone was at your house or in your car. There were two exceptions: on birthdays or during a life crisis, the other girls abdicated their DJ rights.

House rule was easiest on me. I liked most of the songs my friends did. My only quirk was a shamefully enthusiastic love of pop ballads, which I tried to reign in.

But that’s what Tessa played now, a girl-pop anthem that I had always liked. I knew she was quietly enforcing the Crisis Amendment, allowing me this one song as my family life shifted under my feet.

“Hey,” I said to Tessa, after she pulled into Morgan’s driveway and honked. “I’m not going to tell them yet. About my parents.”

Tessa nodded as the front door opened and Kayleigh emerged. Kayleigh is only three inches taller than I am, but with much better curves and a confident sway to her walk, even in heels.

“Morgan!” Kayleigh yelled from the top of the driveway. “Come
on
.”

Morgan ducked out the door, calling good-bye to her parents before it shut. She walked to the driveway in her typical perfect-posture way—shoulders back, chin slightly raised.

“Geez, Kayleigh.” I could hear them through the open windows. “I was coming.”

Morgan and Kayleigh acted more like sisters than any two people I knew, including me and my actual sister. When Kayleigh’s mom died, her dad and three older brothers started attending Morgan’s church. Morgan was only five at the time, but she took Kayleigh by the hand and guided her to their Sunday school classroom. They’ve been best friends ever since.

Kayleigh and I clicked in fifth grade, each intuiting that our lives were harder than other kids’. We didn’t talk about my parents’ chilly silences or her mom’s death, but we sensed that hurt the way that only broken-home kids can. She introduced me to Morgan, whose parents were utterly normal, and somehow, with Tessa, our individually weird lives gelled together and stuck.

“I thought your mom wouldn’t let you wear that dress,” Morgan said to me, shutting the car door behind them. Her memory contained the entire school’s gossip and all four of our wardrobes.

“Well, I’m wearing it anyway.” I glanced at Tessa for affirmation, and she gave me a decisive nod as we pulled out of the driveway.

“Wait,” Morgan said. “Turn around. Do you have bangs?”

“Yeah, she does!” Tessa said this like a cheer, rallying me as she turned the radio up.

“Okay, seriously—why is the world so weird in here?” Morgan raised her voice over the song. “Paige changed her
hair for the first time in human history, and this is
not
Tessa music.”

“I like this song,” Kayleigh said, drumming on the back of my seat.

“Is there a crisis?” Morgan demanded. “Why are we listening to this in your car?”

“Because we can!” Tessa yelled, giving the volume dial another turn. I glanced over at her, hair wild against the open windows, and smiled, despite the chaos filling my life.

I needed all three girls that night, steeling me. They’d always been my closest friends, but after Aaron died, I folded myself into them completely. We camped out at Tessa’s for weekends at a time, with rented movies and Morgan-made snacks. They were normal when I wanted to be normal, and they held me when I wanted to cry. When it all closes in, there are only two kinds of people: best friends and everyone else.

Two hours into the party, Tessa had reminded me at least four times that we could leave whenever I wanted. We’d been working our way through the house, pausing to mingle, and I thought I was doing well. No sign of Leanne Woods and her new college boyfriend. Ryan Chase was around, and, having observed him for an embarrassingly long chunk of my life, I could tell something was different.
His body language sang with even more confidence, like he’d finally discovered his good looks. Maybe it was an attempt to shrug off rumors of Leanne-linked depression, but Ryan Chase seemed fine. Just fine.

After a while, I separated from my friends to socialize on my own and prove I was also fine. Besides, I had a personal score to settle: me versus me. I was going outside to the deck, which overlooked Maggie’s pool, and I was going to watch my classmates swim. If I was going to swim myself again someday, I might as well get used to it.

I ran into Maggie herself on my way outside. She was wearing a white cotton dress and cradling a two-liter soda bottle in the crook of her arm.

“Hey, Paige,” she said. “I’m so glad you came! Great dress.”

“Thanks. It’s a great party.”

From somewhere inside, a glass shattered.

“Shit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Better get in there. Hey—I hope you have a good time. Really.”

She gave me one last meaningful look—that “really” proving that she knew, as much as anyone could, what the past year had been like for me. Maggie, whose grace and directness had gotten her elected class president every year since seventh grade, would never give me That Look.