Who Do You Love (13 page)

“Your skin is so soft,” he whispered. I thought about whispering back, something about my moisturizer, but instead I just made another noise, a pleased little coo, and reached across his body, and he tucked my small hand in his big one.

•••

That night, after dinner, he came to my table and stood there quietly until Marissa and I looked up. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. Wordlessly, I got to my feet, and he took my hand and led me out the door. There were trees on campus, dotting the grassy lawns, places I imagined the college students probably sat to do their homework, and that was where he took me. We sat side by side, leaning against a tree trunk, looking up at the sky.

“In Philadelphia, you can't see the stars like this,” he said.

“I went to Cape Cod once, and it was so dark there that you could see everything, hundreds of stars.” I didn't want to talk about the stars, or the city versus the country. I turned toward him, seeing the shape of his face in the darkness, feeling the warmth of his hand around mine, thinking
I
f
he doesn't kiss me, I'll die.

“Will you save me a seat at breakfast tomorrow?” he asked, as the campanile rang ten o'clock and kids started streaming back to their dorms.

“Unless I meet someone I like better,” I said. A hurt look flickered across his face. For the second it took him to realize I was teasing, he looked like he was eight years old again, his lips pressed together and his brown eyes sad. I remembered how alone he'd been that night in the hospital, how his mom seemed more interested in embarrassing the nurses than in making sure Andy was okay. A boy who'd grown up the way he had probably had less tolerance for teasing than someone like me.

Then he slipped one hand behind my neck, the other around my waist, pulling me so close that I could see the long lashes I remembered, curling up at the tips. His hand was so big and warm at the base of my skull, cradling me with ease. “Good night, Rachel,” he said. I shut my eyes and tilted my face toward his and then I felt his lips on mine, warm and gentle and unhurried, sweeter than any kiss I'd ever had before.

•••

I drifted into the dorm room, barely seeing the bunk beds, the desks, the closet made of honey-colored wood, with a handful of empty metal hangers dangling from the rods. I pulled my nightgown out of my monogrammed pink-an
d-­o
range duffel bag. Lyrics from a dozen love songs were running through my head, and every single one of them, every word about longing and desire and not being able to live if living was without you, felt like it had been written specifically for me.
Don't stop believin',
I hummed.
Hold on to that feeling
.

I was still humming Journey when Marissa came charging through the door, with Bethie galumphing along behind her.

“What's going on?” Marissa demanded.

Bethie pulled out a book from one of the two plastic Piggly Wiggly bags in which she'd packed her stuff.

“He kissed me,” I said.

“Oh my God! Finally!” I grabbed her hands, and we bounced on the bed, squealing, barely noticing when Bethie, carrying a tiny tube of Crest, a toothbrush, and a threadbare white towel, went waddling out of the room, then came waddling back, with her damp hair staining the back of her nightshirt. We talked—“tell me everything,” Marissa kept saying, and I was happy to oblige—while Bethie read a library copy of
A Wrinkle in Time,
which I remembered fondly from sixth grade, lying on her side underneath the skimpy brown blanket that she'd brought from home. Her evening finery was an oversized baseball-style shirt with a glittery unicorn cavorting across the rolls of her belly and chest, and a pair of pale-blue sweatpants so tight that it looked like they'd been spray-painted on her thighs.

I thought that I would never fall asleep, especially because Bethie insisted on leaving her desk light on. I didn't care. I wanted to stay awake all night, remembering everything about Andy—his warm hand on my waist, his long legs in his jeans, what he'd said, what I'd said, the low rumble of his voice, the way he'd smelled. The way his lips had felt against mine.

I woke up the next morning on the bottom bunk bed, dust motes dancing in the bright morning light, already feeling the humidity through the brick walls.
It's a dream,
I thought. Then Bethie Botts pushed her way through the door.

“Something for you!” she said in her high, toneless voice. She dropped a plain white envelope on my sleeping bag. I saw my name, written in the tiny, crabbed black letters that I remembered from all those years ago. I slit the flap open with my thumb and found a single sheet of paper. “Rachel,” said the note. It was folded around a red paper clip that had been bent into the shape of a heart.

I leaned against the wall, feeling faint, holding the heart tight in my hand, while my own heart hammered in my chest, until Marissa came back from the bathroom and climbed onto my bed. I smelled Finesse shampoo and the apricot scrub that she used as she leaned close. “What is it? Let me see? Oh my GOD,” she squealed, when I opened my hand to show her.

“I know.” I couldn't believe he'd done something so romantic and sweet, something that made me want to jump, and run, and cry with happiness. I took a record-breakingly short shower and practically waltzed back to the room. I dried and styled my hair, applied my makeup, pulled on a pair of light-blue jeans, a long-sleeved red shirt with tiny buttons at the collar. Then I rummaged in my bags until I found the Star of David pendant my nana had given me for my bat mitzvah. Carefully, I worked the charm off the gold chain and replaced it with
Andy's
heart, adjusting it so it hung against the hollow of my throat.

•••

Too soon, there were only two days of the week remaining. I carried pieces of lumber, and watched
Andy's
face and his arms as he sawed. He was nothing like the boys I'd known, with his dedication to his running, and his single mom in the city, and his friend Mr. Sills, and his stories about how he'd won the Catholic League's cross-country championship, and how his buddy Miles was supposed to be on the trip but had gotten suspended for throwing another kid's backpack out the school bus window.

“What's it like, being biracial?” I'd asked him once, shyly, during one of our lunch breaks under the tree. He'd been peeling the slices of turkey from the bread, rolling them up and eating them first, the way he always did.

Andy shrugged. “I've never been anything else. I only know what it's like being me.”

I thought I understood. When people asked me what it had been like to grow up with my heart thing, to have had all those operations, I could talk about missing school and birthdays, but the truth was that I couldn't say what it was like because I'd never known anything different.

I wasn't expecting Andy to expound on the topic, but he surprised me. Looking down at the ground, where there was nothing to see but dirt and twigs, he said, “It's like being two people.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I'm with my mom or my . . .” I heard his throat click when he swallowed. “My grandma, I was going to say, but I haven't seen her in a long time. They're white, and when I'm with them, people think that I am, too, so sometimes I get to hear what they really think about black people.” He gave me a rueful look. “Which is pretty rough. I usually think the black guys on my track team don't think I'm black enough, or they think I'm trying to be white, or trying to sound white . . .” He plucked a blade of grass from a patchy clump and rolled it between his thumbs. “And then there's all the questions. People ask what you are, where you're from, and you can't ever just say America or Philadelphia. Then you catch them looking at you sometimes, trying to figure it out.” He tied the piece of grass in a knot, flicked it into the dirt with his index finger, and pulled out another piece. “You don't ever just get to be . . .” More grass-twiddling. “Normal, I guess. Just a normal person where people look at you and they know what you are. You always have to decide—who you're going to be with, who you want to be that day. That hour, even. The people who know me don't think of me like that. But other kids . . .” He shifted his weight, rocking side to side like he was getting ready to stand up and walk away. “I wish sometimes I knew more kids like me.” Then, in a voice so quiet I almost couldn't hear, he said, “I wish I knew my dad.”

I wanted to tell him that I understood about wanting to feel normal, about wishing that there was someone like you in the world, someone who'd been there, in the place where you were, and could talk about it, and would tell you the truth. But I'd never told anyone about Alice—not my parents, not Nana, not anyone. I didn't have the words. I thought that maybe I'd kiss him—he looked so sad, with his eyes half shut as he looked at the ground. What I did was touch his arm, then slip my hand in his.
I know,
I thought, and he looked up like he'd heard me.
I know.

•••

Then it was Saturday, our last night in Atlanta. “You did good,” said Alex as we crowded into the framed-out house. It was still unfinished, all rough plywood and bare walls, with stacks of PVC pipes for the plumbing piled up high, but it was undeniably on its way to being a real house, with rooms and walls and staircases and doors. And bedrooms. I wondered if Andy and I could miss the bus on purpose and find a blanket to spread across the splintery floorboards, that we could be there together when the sun went down. When the evening sky was pansy-purple, and all you could hear was a symphony of birdsong and crickets.

Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking, because he took my hand, holding me back as the rest of our crew filed out of the house and into the yard. It was dim in the house, and it smelled like fresh lumber. Andy pulled me against him, slipping his hands around my waist.
I love you,
I thought . . . but I didn't say it. Girls should never say it first.

“What if this were our house?” he said.

I joked about how it wouldn't be ideal, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. I could hear the other kids laughing as they got on the bus, and Alex grumbling as she gathered discarded canvas gloves. Andy hugged me, and I rested my head on his chest, remembering a cartoon I'd seen, a Lynda Barry comic where a girl, grotesque and freckled, sat in her bedroom and watched the boys play basketball in the twilight, how she stared at the boy she loved and thought,
We are married, secretly we are married now.

We are married now,
I thought, and Andy took my hand and squeezed it, and we walked slowly, side by side, out of the doorway and into the twilight.

•••

To celebrate our last night, there was pizza for dinner, and they showed a movie in the gym,
The Princess Bride,
one of my favorites. If there hadn't been chaperones stationed at all of the doors, Andy and I would have found a way to get out of there and be alone. As it was, we found a spot in the deep shadows in the corner and sat together, Andy with his back against the wall and me leaning against him, my back to his chest, pressed so close it would have been hard to slip a piece of paper between us, kissing and kissing until the taste of his mouth was as familiar to me as the taste of my own.

When the movie ended, Andy walked me to my dorm. “Can you stay awake?”

I nodded. I'd never felt less like sleeping. I would stay awake all night, all week, if that was what it took.

“I'll come get you,” he said. I nodded again and kissed him, standing on my tiptoes, not caring when kids walked past us, calling, “Get a room!”
Maybe he'll take me back to the house,
I thought. There was no way that could happen, of course—the site was twenty minutes away, there were no cars, no cabs, no buses. But that was what I imagined, Andy carrying me in his arms, the two of us alone together in the empty rooms.

“Are you sure?”

I touched his cheek, then squeezed his hand. “Yes.”

•••

I hurried back into my room, stripped off my clothes and jewelry, wrapped myself in a towel, and trotted to the showers, where I scrubbed everywhere I could reach, washed my hair twice, then stood in front of the mirror with my mousse and blow-dryer, wondering where we would go, wondering if we'd go all the way, and if it would hurt, feeling my heart gallop like a pony. I was so glad that I'd waited, that this hadn't happened with Derek or Scott or Jason or Troy, that I had held out for true love.

When I came back to the room, my heart necklace wasn't next to my clothes on the dresser. I looked on the floor to make sure it hadn't fallen. I shook out my sleeping bag and each piece of clothing that I'd worn. I searched the drawers and the floors, checked my overall pockets, then ran back to the bathroom to make sure it wasn't there, on the shower floor or the edge of a sink. Marissa was still out—she'd been spending a lot of time with a guy from Baltimore named Pete. Bethie Botts was lying on her bed, in a cloud of misery and funk, paging through Cynthia Voigt's
Homecoming,
another one of junior high's greatest hits.

“Bethie,” I said, still out of breath from running back and forth, “have you seen my necklace?”

“What necklace?” asked Marissa as she loped into the room. Her cheeks were pink, and there was a single dogwood blossom stuck in her hair.

“My heart,” I said, feeling frantic and a little sick. “I left it on the dresser and I went to take a shower and now it's gone.” I went over to my duffel and emptied it onto my sleeping bag, jamming my hand into the front pocket, praying that my fingers would find the heart. Marissa, meanwhile, had walked over to the edge of Bethie's bed. She held out her hand.

“Give it up.”

“Go away,” said Bethie, without raising her eyes from her book.