Anywhere but Here (13 page)

Greg has chosen a spot on the long bench by the trophy case, halfway between the main office and the student council's snack stand. Other than the glass case, the entire lobby is covered in orange terra-cotta tile. It must have been in style when they built the school, but now it looks like the basketball team ate barbecue chips, then threw up on the walls and the floor.

That's what Greg's lunch looks like too. Now that his dad's moved out, his mom's gone vegan. Which means that he's unwrapping a sandwich stuffed with alfalfa sprouts and chickpea paste. I pull out last night's leftover pizza and pass him a slice.

We're here because rain is pissing down outside as if it might never stop. It seems like half the school is milling around. For a while, I pan in on the drama students practicing some sort of lip sync at the bottom of the staircase. Then I film the point guard of the basketball team as he attempts a backward standing jump directly onto the counter of the snack stand. When he succeeds, there's a gaggle of cheering fans around him as if he just made the NBA.

I focus the camera on the counter, wondering if I could jump it. Maybe. But I don't understand why you would
want
to. I'm getting that feeling again—like the entire world's gone a little bit crazy or like everyone's speaking a dialect I don't understand. I wonder if that's part of filming, part of being a detached observer instead of a participant.

When I pan across the lobby again, my lens finds a cluster of eighth-grade girls down the bench from us, giggling their way closer. I turn off the camera so it doesn't encourage them. In my current mood, I'm likely to say something biting about their general inanity, and they'll look at me with injured eyes, and I'll feel horribly guilty for the rest of the afternoon.

Maybe I wasn't designed to be a participant.

“I think they're after you,” I tell Greg.

He doesn't even glance their way. “Does Lauren look okay to you?”

I look over to where Lauren, Lex, and a few other girls are knotted together in a corner, whispering.

“She was fine the other night. A bit weird, maybe.”

“She looks tired.”

With a sigh, I look again. I already know what I'll see—Lauren'll be wearing yoga pants and one of her dad's old sweatshirts. Her hair will be pulled into a ponytail. She's stopped
taking care of herself lately, as if she's depressed. I can't help worrying that it's my fault.

But what am I supposed to do about it? The cloud of guilt hovering over me seems unfair.

“Maybe she has a thyroid problem,” I tell Greg.

“You're an insensitive bastard sometimes, you know?” Greg shakes his head.

I thought that maybe, after our sit-in-a-ditch night, things with Lauren would improve. No signs of that, though. She still ignores me, streaming around me in the school hallways as if she's water and I'm a rock.

Greg is still staring, first at her, then at me. My guilt grows.

“Since when are you so concerned about Lauren?”

Silence.

“I'm serious. What's up?”

“I just want to make sure she's okay,” he says finally. “You don't need to be an asshole about it.”

“Well, go ask her.”

“I did,” he says. He stands and peers at Lauren again, like he's considering crossing the lobby. Instead, he scuffs one toe against the floor as if he's five years old.

“What'd she say?”

“She said she's fine.”

“Great.” Then we can change the topic before I start banging my head against the bench in an attempt to fix things that can't be fixed. Like my brain.

“I don't think it's true,” Greg says.

“You're kinda scaring me, bud.”

Greg lowers himself onto the bench again. He puts his elbows on his knees and laces his fingers together, like a lawyer about to make his case. He's looking at his feet, though. And I'm staring at him like he may have been abducted and replaced by a Greg imposter.

“I think I want to ask Lauren out.”

“Like on a date?”

“Yeah.”

He turns to face me and I suddenly realize this is big. This is something he's been waiting to tell me for a while. This is an official announcement.

Greg has obviously been thinking hard about the Lauren issue, looking for the right moment to tell me.

“So ask her out,” I say, shrugging, glancing away in case my face looks like I just got sucker punched. I accidentally make eye contact with one of the giggling girls, which causes a squeal and a small commotion.

“It wouldn't bother you?” Greg sounds relieved.

“Why would it bother me?” Of course it'll bother me. I feel like my brother just asked if he could have sex with my sister. Which they may as well do with me in the room because I've known them both so long that I can imagine every minute of it. The way Greg will lay on the moves. The way Lauren will
laugh with the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.

I shudder, trying to shake away the images before they go too far.

“I think it'll bother you,” Greg says.

“It's not going to bother me!” It comes out louder than I plan, and the eighth-grade girls scoot away from us. Greg raises his eyebrows.

“How long have you been thinking about this?” I ask. Briefly, I close my eyes. I wonder how long it would take me to study Zen meditation and learn universal acceptance.

Too long, probably. When I open my eyes, Greg looks uncomfortable.

“Seriously. It's no big deal.” Except that Lauren's mine, even though she's not really mine. I'm with Hannah. Sort of. In an unofficial, casual kind of way.

The thought of Greg touching Lauren still bothers me. “I'm just curious. How long?”

“Sometime over the summer, I guess.”

I'll bet he's lying. No wonder the guy hasn't had a girlfriend in ages. He's probably spent years lusting after mine. Not that Greg would ever act on something like that. Not in a million years. And knowing that—knowing he's done everything right and I'm the one being unreasonable here—makes my stomach clench even tighter.

In the official friendship handbook, I wonder what the allotted time is between “Point A: You Break Up” and “Point B: Friend Hooks Up.” Especially after two years together. I'm pretty sure it's longer than three or four months. Maybe it should be equal to the duration of the actual relationship. Two years sounds about right. And that time should start from the afternoon of the red sundress, too, not from the breakup conversation.

Which is ridiculous. Objectively, with the part of my brain that's not longing to bang itself against the bench, I do realize how unreasonable this is. But that doesn't make me feel any less betrayed.

•  •  •

When Lauren and I broke up, it wasn't a screaming, name-calling, vase-throwing fight. As they say in the movies, no animals were harmed in the making of the scene.

No, we broke up the same way the ice melts off Mallard Lake every spring. One week, you're ice skating and the next week, you're smelling mud instead of snow. At first, there's open water only in the center. Then it creeps its way toward shore until all that's left of the ice is a crackling around the edges of the reeds.

Lauren and I were like that ice. We used to be so solid together that you could have jumped up and down on us and we would never have cracked. But slowly a gap appeared between us, and it grew.

When my mom passed away, Lauren tried to stay close to me. She really did. But somehow, I couldn't feel the same way about her. Maybe because I couldn't feel anything at all.

We broke up just after sunset, on Lauren's back porch. It's all Walt Disney perfect out there. A porch swing to sit on and clumps of puffy purple flowers around us. I could hear an occasional car on the road at the bottom of the hill. A siren swelled, then faded. Lauren's pocket dog was curled in her lap and the neighbor's German shepherd snuffled on the other side of the fence. He didn't bark. He was used to us being back there.

Lauren leaned her forehead against my chest and I breathed in the green apple smell of her shampoo.

“You know that I'm right,” I said. “We're not the same anymore. We're not together in our heads. We're just pretending.”

“It's those damn movies you've been watching,” she muttered, half into my shirt. I'd been making her watch an endless stream of documentaries, and the dolphin killings in
The Cove
hadn't been a big hit. But Lauren was wrong about the sequence. We hadn't stopped talking because I was watching movies. I'd started watching more movies because then we didn't have to talk.

It wouldn't help to explain this, so I stroked her hair and said nothing.

Lauren was perfect, really. Smart. Pretty. Kind. I just couldn't be part of a perfect couple anymore. I'd spent months pretending
to be okay until everyone else, including Lauren, seemed to think things really
were
normal. But every day still felt like a damn ice field that I had to pick my way across without falling into a crevasse.

I needed to stop trying so hard.

After a few minutes of quiet, Lauren asked, “Who am I going to hang out with?”

She sounded so sad, I wished I could take everything back. I wished I were strong enough to keep pretending, forever. “We can still hang out.”

“It won't be the same.”

I held her for a little while as she cried, then her mom started doing dishes—loudly—on the other side of the kitchen window. Lauren's mom is one of those tightly wound types, skinny from constantly worrying about whether she's planted the tomatoes too early or whether half an hour is too long for a sixteen-year-old to sit on the deck alone with her boyfriend.

Her ex-boyfriend.

I slowly extracted myself. Stood. Then, just for a moment, I swayed. The reality of not having Lauren to call, not having Lauren to lean on, hit me like an avalanche and I turned back to her. She had her eyes closed tight and her pointer fingers pressed to the bridge of her nose. It made my own throat close up. I almost fell, onto the swing and into her arms.

This was its own kind of death. I was killing something between us.

Lauren wants to have kids. Tons of kids. And she wants to be a stay-at-home mom until they're all in school so she can take them to the park and bake chocolate chip cookies and all those other things she thinks good moms do. After dating for two years, you know certain things. And I knew, as I stepped away from that porch swing, that she was thinking about her imaginary herd of kids and how they might not have my shoulders, or my chin, anymore.

Families don't always turn out like you plan. Sometimes they fall apart when you're not the least bit ready.

I kissed Lauren on the cheek, then I took a deep breath and held it as I walked away, leaving her on the swing, arms wrapped tightly around herself. I made it all the way back to my truck before I cried.

•  •  •

In the school foyer, one of the younger girls has finally minced her way in front of us.

“I just wanted to s-say . . . she likes you,” she stutters.

I can't tell whether she's talking to me or to Greg, and I have no idea which one of her gaggle of friends is “she.” Both Greg and I ignore her until she skitters away.

“Lauren and I broke up months ago,” I tell Greg. “If you want to ask her out, talk to her, not me.”

“Yeah . . . maybe,” Greg says, as if it doesn't matter one way or the other. Which is irritating because if he's going to talk to her, I'd at least like to know when. That way I can turn on strobe lights and blast some music so I don't have to imagine seeing or hearing them together.

When the girls start giggling again, I get off the bench.

“I have to get out of here for a while,” I say. “Screw the rain.”

But it's torrential. It's
Inconvenient Truth
, climate-change-level rain, and there's really no way to disregard it. I end up huddled against the doorway, staring at the parking lot and feeling like crap.

•  •  •

When Friday night finally rolls around, I'm driving with Hannah, and the only thought in my head is this: Lauren is out with Greg. Right at this very moment. Probably also driving somewhere. Somewhere in the shadows, maybe up a steep gravel road like this one, lit only by headlights, curtains of evergreens leaning in from either side.

“We should name this truck,” Hannah says. As if sensing my discomfort, she's put on her best and brightest bimbo act.

“Guys don't name trucks. That's a girl thing.”

“I'm thinking Hank. Hank's a good name.”

“Hank.” The trouble with women is their need to have conversations about nothing. In all those girl magazines—the ones that apparently teach them how to put on eye makeup and how to get guys to call them back “the day after”—they should have articles about how not to talk about nothing.

“Save Your Relationship: Speak Substance”

“Trade Your Flapping for Focus”

“Take Back the Yap”

“Hank is a good name,” Hannah says again. “It has that forestry dude personality. Hank. The truck of love.” She reaches across the console and playfully traces a finger up my thigh.

What if Lauren is naming Greg's car right now?

I think the problem is this: There are only three people I like to hang out with. Greg, Lauren, and Hannah. Despite the pressure of her fingers on my thigh, I am doing my best to keep Hannah at arm's length. So if Greg and Lauren become a unit, together, separate from me . . .

But that's what I want, right? Distance. No attachments, no strings. Freedom to be my own man, make my own decisions, and leave town at the end of the school year. It's what I want.