One Lonely Degree (25 page)

When Mom picks me up, I make her drive me to Blockbuster for DVDs and popcorn. At home we cook frozen salmon with canned asparagus, and she tells me that Daniel called earlier and said he was having a great time. “He wants to go back for another weekend in a couple of weeks,” Mom says with an uneven smile. “Maybe you’ll want to go too.”

“I already told Dad I can’t. Not with my hours at work.” I frown at her. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Of course not.” Mom pinches her earlobe as she watches me. “But I know you must miss him.”

“I’m fine.” I’m not doing this two nights in a row. She can say whatever she wants, but I have other things to think about—like Jersy coming over in an hour. “I’ll see him when he’s around. It’s not like he’s moved to New Zealand or something.” That’s what Dad said about Audrey. I could’ve used the line on him last night, but he got to me; all that stuff about being around for Daniel and me worked like magic. Sometimes I’m so easy.

“He told you about finding an apartment,” Mom says quietly. “He told me he mentioned it.”

“He told me,” I confirm. “It sucks.” It’s easy to be mad at him when he’s not around. Especially when I’m choking on Mom’s sad vibes.

“It does.” Mom smirks. She guides a forkful of asparagus into her mouth and chews mechanically.

“Does that mean we’ll have to move out too?” We’ve lived in this house since I was five. I can’t imagine the three of us someplace else. I never thought I’d live here forever, but I assumed this house, and my parents, would always be around for me to come back to.

“Maybe.” Mom rubs her eyes. “I don’t know, Finn. I don’t have any answers.” She pats my arm affectionately. “I’m sorry I
brought it up. Nothing’s been decided yet for sure. I don’t want you to worry.”

“That’s reassuring,” I say sarcastically. “Thanks.”

Mom clenches her jaw and throws her right hand into the air. “I don’t like this any better than you do. I’m doing my best, Finn. I don’t know what you expect.”

“You act like everything’s falling apart and then tell me not to worry. I don’t know what
you
expect!” I’m sorry as soon as I’ve said it. I watch Mom carry her plate over to the sink, square her shoulders, and face the window.

“Jersy’s gonna be here around eight,” I say. I’m not angry with her anymore. I just want her to turn around.

“I remember,” she says to the window. “Do you want me to stay out of your way?”

“No.” I can’t believe she just said that. “What’s that supposed to mean? We’re just hanging out.” My cheeks are burning.

Mom turns to face me, only I don’t want her to look at me anymore. “Does every single thing have to be a battle?” She sighs loudly, turns on the tap, and begins washing her plate. I bring mine over along with the glasses and cutlery.

“I’ll dry,” I offer.

Mom shakes her head. “Go on. Get ready.”

For what? My stomach lurches as I walk away. The guilt is worse now that she knows. Months ago she would’ve asked me for details, stuck bamboo under my fingernails until I confessed, and then salivated over the specifics. This is what she’s been waiting for. Some guy to stroll into the picture and make me a regular girl.

In my room I switch on the stereo and brush my hair. My skin’s pretty clear at the moment, and if I put on some eye shadow and foundation I could look okay. I could do lipstick, mascara, and the whole bit, but then Jersy wouldn’t recognize me. It’d be like that
night in September all over again. I still have Kaitlynn James’s purple pill buried in an old backpack in my closet. I could give it to Jersy to prove I’m not a control freak. We could get out of our heads together, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about what we’re going to do tonight.

Shit. My legs feel like they’re going to buckle underneath me. I’m sweating like a pig and stomping around my room like a rabid elephant. It’s ten to eight. Why didn’t I go to the cottage with Daniel? This is wrong.

And it’s worse at eight and worse still at ten after. Then, somewhere between twenty after and eight-thirty, I start to get mad. Maybe Jersy went to a party with his friends and forgot all about me. Do I need this kind of shit in my life?

“Finn,” Mom shouts, knocking on my door, “Jersy’s here.”

“Coming,” I call. No makeup after all. Plain old me in a sleeveless red print T-shirt and scruffy jeans.

I hurry downstairs and into the family room, where Jersy’s sitting on the carpet, petting Samsam. “Hey,” he says, looking up at me. His eyes are greener than I’ve ever seen them. I love the way they change color with the light. My breath catches in my throat. Every ounce of irritability melts away in an instant. “How was work?”

“The creep, you mean?” I sit down on the couch.

“Everything,” Jersy says with a shrug. His tan knees are poking out from under his long shorts. I can’t stop checking them out.

“Boring,” I tell him. “The usual. How about you?”

He only works weekdays, but from what he told me before, it’s exhausting manual labor. “It’s okay.” Jersy smiles. “I won’t miss it. I can tell you that. The guys I work with make me look like a genius.”

“Me too.” I smile back. “Only I feel like I’m losing brain cells by the hour while I’m there.” I pull my legs up onto the couch with me and cross them, yoga-style. “What was my mom like at the door?”

“Normal.” Jersy stretches out sideways on the ground. “Why? Something going on?”

Something’s always going on. I tell him about our dinner conversation. The last part’s the hardest, and I hesitate before adding, “She thinks something’s up with us. I can tell.”

“What’d you say?”

It’s my turn to shrug. “Not much. I mean, there’s nothing going on, right?”

Jersy squints at me like he’s trying to read the fine print. “I don’t know. That depends on you.” I shake my head like I don’t know either, and Jersy gets to his feet and says, “Do you drink coffee?”

“Sure.”

“You want to check out the new coffee place down by the lake?”

“Yeah. They have tables outside, right? We can bring Samsam.” That way I won’t have to walk him later.

I knock on Mom’s bedroom door, and when she opens it I surprise her by throwing my arms around her neck and hugging her. “I’m sorry about before,” I tell her. “We’re going for coffee. We’ll be back later.”

Mom hugs me back. When she pulls away, I see that her eyes have softened. “So it’s safe to come out?” she jokes.

“It was never unsafe.” I force myself to smile. “You have an overactive imagination, is all.” Mom shakes her head at me but she smiles.

Jersy, Samsam, and I set out for the lake, and it’s so humid that
my hair instantly sticks to the back of my neck. “No wonder you shaved it all off,” I tell him, pushing my hair off my face. “I wish I could do that.”

“No, you don’t.” Jersy lightly cups the back of my head. “You’re a long-hair kind of girl.” It’s hot as hell, but I shiver anyway. I can’t believe we can be like this together, that he can make me feel like a better me by doing the simplest thing. “Sorry.” He sinks his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t think.”

“It’s not that,” I tell him. If anything, it’s the opposite, but my conscience steps in and adds, “You’re still with Audrey. This is just one of those summer things. It wouldn’t stick.” It’s not fair that the person I can feel like this about belongs to Audrey. It’s not fair on any of us.

“You think so?” Jersy sounds so sincere that my stomach drops. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since Sunday, and I haven’t even e-mailed her this week. I think I knew when she left that it was only a matter of time until we broke up. It felt … like it was ending.”

“That’s crazy.” The part of me that’s Audrey’s best friend is upset on her behalf. “You guys liked each other so much. Being apart for two months shouldn’t change that.”

“It’s not just about the two months.” His eyes sparkle in the sun. “It probably would’ve ended this summer anyway.” He pauses to search for the right words. “I think we ended up liking each other more because we weren’t supposed to. All the sneaking around and stuff, it keeps things interesting.” Jersy looks past me like he wishes he could take that back. “I don’t want to say anything bad about Audrey.”

“So it’s only fun if there’s drama?” I say quickly. “What does that say about you?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Jersy stops in the middle of the
sidewalk. “And what does kissing me say about you?” He sounds angry, and that makes me mad too. I speed up, not sure whether I want him to follow, and he matches my pace and adds, “Look, I really like you, and it’s not about drama or Audrey being away. I don’t know where this is going, and I know it’s not going to be easy, but if you tell me …” He stops walking again. “If you tell me what we can do and when and I promise to listen, don’t you think we could work things out?”

“Maybe,” I whisper. “I don’t know.” There’s a big difference between kissing someone on his couch once and really being with him. “Sometimes I just don’t feel right,” I confess. “It’s like … I don’t know how to be like I was before.”

Jersy bows his head towards mine, so close that they’re almost touching. “You could talk to someone. It could help.” His hand brushes against my arm.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah,” he says under his breath. “I do. It’s like with Christina.” His eyes are so near that they’re out of focus—just splotches of shining black. “A really bad thing happened to her in Kingston.” He touches his forehead and folds his arms in front of his stomach like he’s going to be sick. “It was bad,” he repeats. “And it made things bad for all of us.”

It’s still bad. I can feel it off him the same way I felt it with my mom, and I drop Samsam’s leash and fold my arms instinctively around Jersy’s neck. He puts his arms around me too, and we stand frozen in a knot in the middle of the sidewalk, breathing and holding tight, and I think that if I can be with anybody, it must be him. I don’t even think I know how to do without him anymore.

“I’m too attached to you already,” I complain. “I thought cutting your hair would help, but it didn’t.”

Jersy smacks his lips against my forehead. “You were killing me in that swimsuit on Sunday. Fuck.” He shakes his head. “Sorry.”

“No, tell me.” I want to hear this. Already his words have transformed me into liquid sunshine.

A slow grin creeps across Jersy’s lips. He looks so good that I’ll never be over it. “No,” he says decisively. “I’ll sound like a pervert.” He scratches his neck and adds, “I don’t even think you know how beautiful you are.”

With my frizzy hair, scruffy jeans, and albino skin. Ha. I almost laugh at him, and he touches my arm again, leans forward, and says, “Can I kiss you?”

It’s funny to be asked, and a laugh escapes as I lean forward to meet him. We kiss soft. Like he’s afraid to hurt me, and I wish it didn’t have to be that way—that I could be normal for him—but this is me now. This is how it is.

Samsam waits for us all the while, and I reward him with a dog bagel from the pet bakery when we get downtown. The new coffee place has two seats left on the patio outside. It’s like fate or something, and Jersy goes in to order our iced cappuccinos.

He smiles as he sits down next to me with the coffees, and I want to smother him in kisses and tell him how amazing he is. Instead I sip my iced cappuccino and stroke Samsam’s ears. Jersy watches me in silence, until I can’t take it anymore and burst into an enormous grin. “So what’re your friends doing tonight?” I ask, cheeks puffing out like a chipmunk.

“Nothing special,” he says. “Hanging out.”

“Billy’s cool,” I tell him.

“Yeah, he is. They’re all okay. You just don’t know them that well.”

“You think we’d get along?”

Jersy flashes an incomplete smile that seems to concede my point. “Probably not, you’re just different types of people.” His hands swim through the air as he searches for the words. “You’re focused. You know exactly what you want to do and what you don’t.” He looks down at Samsam. “Audrey’s like that too.” He takes a sip of his coffee and touches my hand under the table.

Neither of us has ever mentioned what we’re going to do about Audrey. It’s eerie. I let Jersy thread his fingers between mine, to test out how it feels. I’ve never held hands with anyone except my family. It’s such a weird feeling that it blocks out everything else.

“How was the thing with your dad last night?” he asks.

I tell him about the Anti-Me almost crying and how my dad wore me down in about three seconds with his cheesy speech. “It kills me that I’m so easy,” I groan. “He gets to have everything his way.”

“Not exactly,” Jersy points out. “You didn’t go to the cottage with him.”

“That’s true.” I nod. “And I’m not going to.”

The sun sets while we’re finishing our coffee, and afterwards Jersy, Samsam, and I walk back to my house. I put on one of the action movies I rented and sit next to Jersy on the couch. He’s yawning already and I hit him on the arm and say, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not as much as I should,” he admits. I wonder if that has anything to do with Christina and what happened to her back in Kingston, but I don’t want to drag the conversation back there again. “Where’s your mom?” he asks, twisting his neck so he can glance into the hall.

“Probably asleep already.” We haven’t seen her since we got in. “She goes to bed early.”

“She’s okay with us alone here like this?”

“She doesn’t seem too concerned.” I could get away with murder at the moment. No one would notice.

Jersy smiles that easy smile of his. “That’s a change.”

It’s more freedom than we can use. Sitting next to Jersy on a Saturday night with no one around is a definite temptation, but I know we have to go slow. So we watch the movie and then sit on the floor and play with my brother’s Xbox, Jersy instructing me in the fine art of destruction. I feel like Vin Diesel with estrogen and more facial expressions, and I can’t believe I can lounge around shooting things with him like we’re buddies while inside I’m sparkling like a thousand constellations.

But that’s one of the things I like about him too. It seems like maybe we don’t have to just be one thing.

In the end it’s me who starts to nod off around two-thirty. My head bobs as I grip the joystick. “I think I’m done,” I say.