Nothing Like You (4 page)

Nils relented. “If you died, Holly, I would probably call Frank Gellar, sure.”

I softened. “I just mean, what if she’s trying to contact me and we can’t connect because I don’t know what’s important and what’s not. Like, what if she’s sending me signs and I’m missing them?”

“Holly.”

“Nils.”

The phone rang. Nils feigned surprise. “Maybe that’s a sign right there!”

I punched him hard in the arm, then lunged for my cell. It was Paul. I sent the call to voice mail.

Nils got back up on his stepladder. “Who was that?”

“No one,” I said, picking back up my paintbrush. “I expected more sensitivity from you.”

He turned to face me. “I loved your mom, Holly, you know that. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna support you giving a whole bunch of money to some quack who’s just gonna exploit your loss and feed you a bunch of hippie bullshit.” He got back down off the stepladder, coming up behind me and slipping his hands around my waist. “Seriously, Hols, anything you need to do to feel better about your mom, I’m here for you. I just think this guy sounds like a joke.”

“We don’t know anything about him, though.”

“Holly.”

“He could be totally legit.” I turned around and faced Nils and his hands slipped from my waist back down to his sides. “It was just a thought,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Forget I even mentioned it, okay?”

“Holly—”

“Forget about it, it’s done. Go finish the lights.”

Before she got sick
, about four years before she died, Mom and I took a trip to sunny San Diego to visit a friend of hers who lived with her new husband by the ocean. We left Jeff at home. We wore one-piece bathing suits and swam in the cold sea and ate Taco Bell, which she never would have let me eat had we been stuck home with our soy cheese/granola/salad-for-supper diets. Astrid, her friend, liked Taco Bell. She liked cigarettes and the beach and tan skin and young men. So for one whole day and night Mom and I lived like Astrid. We got pink in the sun and ate nonstop: Taco Bell and ice-cream bars and shaved cherry ice from a stand in the sand. At night we listened to Bob Marley and made chiles rellenos with black beans and our own tortilla chips that we fried in a shallow pan filled
deep with boiled oil. Astrid’s son Jason came by to help us cook. He looked about the same age as Astrid’s husband. I was twelve and he was blond and tan and after dinner he danced me around the room to Van Morrison’s “Warm Love.”

Then we watched an old movie on a tiny television.

Astrid fell asleep midway through the movie but Jason stayed alert, watching my mother watch TV. His eyes would dart between the screen and her face and when the credits finally rolled, he stood up, grabbed my hand, and said, “Let’s make you a bed.”

He fetched sheets and an afghan from a cupboard in the hallway and fixed me a bed on the couch with three silky pillows from the orange loveseat that I liked. Mom and Astrid were now in the kitchen. I could hear the water running and the clanking of dishes and silverware.

I slipped under the covers and he pulled the sheets taut on either side of me. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Good.” I nodded and watched as he reached for the light switch.

“You okay? You want water or something?”

“No,” I said, studying the long swoop of bleached hair that hung down across his forehead. He smelled like chlorine and cologne. “How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty,” he said.

“Do you have a girlfriend?’

“Why, you interested?”

I felt my cheeks blush hot. He winked at me and flipped the light switch on the wall. The room went dark.

“You know, you really look a lot like your mom,” he said. My stomach went warm. I’d heard it from others before but seeing the way he looked at my mother, then hearing him say those words to me made me feel really great. “Thanks,” I whispered, my eyes acclimating to the dark. I could see his outline now, shuffling back across the carpet toward the kitchen. He was backlit and beautiful looking and only ten yards from my makeshift bed. “One day,” he said, lingering in the doorway, “one day I bet you’ll be her spitting image.” He moved a hand across his forehead then, sweeping his bangs and all that bleached, shaggy hair, to one side.

Lunchtime
.

Saskia was two tables over from me, thoughtlessly picking at a plate of french fries and salad, while the girl across from her, Sarah something-or-other, talked and waved her hands around, punctuating points in her story by jabbing Saskia in the shoulder with her finger.

I ate my avocado sandwich alone at my regular table. Nils had late lunch on Wednesdays, so once weekly I ate on my own. Bagged lunch and homework. Or bagged lunch and a book. This time it was bagged lunch, my Spanish workbook, and Saskia Van Wyck. I was obsessed. Suddenly. How could someone who spent years loving shiny, willowy, well-adjusted Saskia be even slightly interested in someone like me?

I tucked some of the fabric from my dress up under my
bra and it stayed there, stuck to my sweaty skin. The temperature hadn’t dipped below ninety in four days. We were indoors with AC and still, I felt as if I couldn’t escape the heat.

Somehow, impossibly, Saskia looked fresh as a buttercup. Cool and put together but more importantly,
dry
. I pulled my dress loose from underneath my boobs and straightened up. Certain my face was shiny and pink, I tucked my head down, skimming my worksheet and wondering why I felt so nauseated. When I looked back up, she was staring back. We caught eyes for a second or two, then she turned back to her friend.

Gym. I considered skipping but then didn’t. My grades had been crap after a shitty last spring and an uninspired fall, and since college applications were due in less than three months, I figured an easy A in Phys Ed couldn’t hurt. So I sucked it up and went. I changed into my stinky gym shirt and shorts in the toilet stall off the changing room and hauled myself out onto the crispy, beige-colored field where the grass felt like straw beneath my sneakers. I played forty-five minutes of soccer in ninety-two-degree heat with a bunch of blond girls who seemed equally unexcited by team sports, then I dragged my sweaty self off the field and back to the locker room, where I took a twenty-five-second ice-cold shower before slipping back into my dry dress and sneakers.

After that, I walked to my car. I was trying to get the hair
off my neck, scooping it all up in one fist and twisting it into a rubber band, when suddenly, there was Paul right next to me, matching me step for step. He wasn’t saying anything. I looked at him and he looked at me and then we just kept walking. So I stopped. I turned sideways and said, “Can I help you with something?” And he cracked his knuckles and said, “Come with me.”

After forty-five minutes of soccer, I said yes to a hike. I told him I had to stop home and get Harry, so we picked up the dog and drove up the mountain to Red Rock Canyon. Harry hung his head out the window and I chewed at my nails and wiped sweat from my forehead and watched Paul while he drove. He smoked two cigarettes, sang the chorus to a song that was playing on the radio, and every now and then he’d lean toward me as if he were trying to brush against me or something but the armrest and the stick shift were getting in his way.

We parked. We got out of the car and walked for a while. We walked and we walked and we didn’t really say much, we just got hot in the sun and breathed hard, eventually stopping to sit on a rock.

Paul said, “I’m kind of obsessed with you, Holly.”

I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t imagine anyone really, really liking me. “You’re a liar,” I said.

“I’m not.” He put his hand in front of his face to block out the sun. “Remember when your mom died?”

“No,” I said.

It took him a long minute before he got the joke but then he laughed so hard his eyes disappeared. “You’re funny,” he said.

“You think?” I pulled on my dress, now stuck to my skin. I was wearing an old gauzy cotton dress of Mom’s and it occurred to me, suddenly, that I might be able to catch cancer through her clothes. I shifted around, then ran a hand discreetly down the side of my boob. No lumps.

“How come you seemed so fine afterward?”

I shrugged. They’d made such a spectacle at school when Mom died. They’d made an announcement over the PA system and I got tons of cards from teachers and even a few from students I’d never talked to. “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. I didn’t know. I’d been so sick before she died. I’d lost weight with her, couldn’t sleep like her, felt nauseated when her stomach hurt … I cried
all the time
. And then she was gone and all my sick feelings went with her. Charred up. Burned alongside her in the cremation oven.

I stared at him and he looked back at me and I wondered why he cared so much. I thought about that night at the beach. I pictured his mouth on my mouth and wondered if we would ever kiss like that again. If it would be better than it was before. I pictured his hands up my shirt, then his hands down my pants and wondered what it was, exactly, that he saw in me.

“Is that guy Nils your boyfriend?” he asked. He was tugging on a dead weed.

I said, “No.”

“Do you want him to be?”

“No,” I said again.

Paul looked at me for a long moment. “I think you’re really special, Holly.”

“Do you?” I asked, exhilarated.

He picked up a twig and threw it a few yards off. Then we got up and walked back to the car. Harry ran ahead, kicking up dust along the way. Paul kept behind me as we navigated past tangled roots, loose rocks, and the occasional pile of dog shit.

He never even tried to touch me.

When Harry and I got home it was just before six. Jeff’s car was in the driveway.

“Helloooooo!” I hollered, coming up the steps. I kicked off my shoes and dropped my book bag, my gym bag, and Harry’s leash on the chair by the door. “Anyone home?”

“We’re in here,” came Jeff’s voice, which I followed into the kitchen. There he sat with Nils, two bottles of Pacifico and a deck of cards between them.

“What’s this?” I picked up Nils’s beer and took a sip.

“Gin rummy,” said Nils.

“And underage drinking.”

“He only gets one,” Jeff countered, smoothing his hair with the flat of his palm.

I bounced across the tiled floor toward the fridge. “What’s for dinner?”

“There’s some salmon in there. And there’s leftover squash from last night.”

“Yum,” I said, fishing through the vegetable drawer for a few stray zucchini.

“You’re in a chipper mood,” said Nils. “Where were you, anyway?”

“Hiking. With Harry.” I took out the fish and a cutting board and set the oven to broil.

“Are you crazy? You went hiking? How could you hike in this heat?”

“I like it,” I lied, pulling a wad of drenched, bunched dress-sleeve loose from under my armpit. Holding an ice cube from the freezer to my neck. “Movie night?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Again?”

“Again, yes,” I said, holding a green squash in the air gleefully.

After dinner, we drove to the video store and picked something dumb to watch, a romantic comedy with a wedding
and
an explosion, and that whole night was great and the weekend that followed was great too, not because anything really fantastic happened, just because I finally felt a
little happy and my future seemed somewhat less dismal and there was a person out there somewhere in the world who really thought I was something special.
Maybe things are on the up-and-up,
I thought.
Maybe now I have something good to look forward to.

By Monday I’d worked myself into a near delusional state of bliss. I was back at school, all but skipping and whistling, and there was Paul, down the hall, leaning against his locker. I waved but he didn’t see me because there was this whole huge group of kids blocking his view/my view, so I pushed past them, rehearsing my hello over and over in my head. I’d say, “Hey you,” real casual sounding like it was nothing, just,
hey you …
which seemed so unremarkable but was really, so very intimate.

But as I got closer I saw what I hadn’t seen before. He was attached to something. A girl. A blond, skinny Saskia Van Wyck. He was backing her into his locker. Within seconds my eyes were blurry with tears, which, to be honest, was probably best. Blurry was better. I turned and ran outside to my car. For most of first block I just sat, stuck to my hot leather seat, crying. I know it sounds so stupid because it’s not like Paul was my boyfriend or anything, to be honest I wasn’t even sure I really
liked
him; but something inside me said this was
it
for me: my life in turnaround. I’d paid my bad-luck dues with Mom back in May, and now it was time for something good. Or maybe luck doesn’t work like that. Maybe I wasn’t owed anything.