Rhymes With Cupid (10 page)

“That’s because you dated one of
them
,” he said.

“One of who?”

“One of the ninety-eight percent. Look, when I was talking to Dina in the hallway today, she told me about what happened with your ex last year. She said you ran into the guy today at American Apparel. So, probably this”—he lifted a rose and let it flop, too—“wasn’t the greatest timing.” He squinted his eyes shut for a second. “When Dina told me what happened, I should have come out to the car and thrown the flowers out before you could see them. I could have bought more later. They were only twelve fifty.”

“Honestly, Patrick,” I said. “It wouldn’t have mattered. I’m just . . . off the market right now.”

“Right,” he said, staring out the windshield. “Okay. I get that. You can’t rush these things.”

I had a feeling this was going to be a long, long driving lesson. “But hey,” I went on as brightly as I could manage. “We’re still friends, right?” I waited anxiously for him to answer. It was weird, but in the week or so that I’d known him, I’d already gotten used to having Patrick around. I liked his sweet, yet sometimes annoying ways; his cool, mellow music; his quirky sense of humor. I was even starting to think his strange obsession with finding the perfect pen was sort of charming. I didn’t want to lose him altogether or have things be weird between us. “Plus, we’ve only got eight days left before my road test,” I went on, “and I can’t do a three-point turn to save my life. So what are we doing sitting around having awkward conversations?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Still friends.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “And you’re right. We should get going. We need to make you into . . .” He paused, thinking.

“The Tchaikovsky of three-point turns,” I helped him out.

“Exactly.” He turned the heat up. “And when we’re done that, you can work on becoming the Hemingway of highway merging.” I let my head fall back against the seat. He knew I hated highway driving more than anything—more than parallel parking, even. Clearly, he was punishing me for not wanting to be his girlfriend.

“So, are we driving, or are we sitting here all day smelling the dead roses?” he asked.

I checked my rearview mirror. “We’re driving,” I said, backing oh-so-carefully out of the space.

Chapter 10

H
aving (narrowly) survived my high-speed highway merging lesson—not to mention the weirdness with Patrick in the parking lot, and the horror of running into my ex while wearing a see-through dress and reindeer bra—I was relieved to turn the key in the lock and step into my very quiet house that night. My
very own, very quiet
house. I hung my coat up and walked into the kitchen, flipping on the light and feeling free. What should I do first? Eat chocolate for dinner? Turn the stereo up so loud the walls shook? Close all the curtains and dance around naked?

In the end, I settled for heating up one of the microwave dinners my mom had stocked the freezer with, sinking down onto the couch, and reading the book I was assigned for English class. Yeah. I’m wild and crazy like that. The phone rang a moment after I’d finished chapter three and scooped the last bite of pasty mashed potatoes out of the plastic tray.

“Elyse! We just arrived at the hotel here. How are you?” My mom’s voice sounded crackly and far away. “Is everything all right with the house, sweetie?”

“Everything’s great,” I said, “except for this one wall that caved in.” Even from halfway around the world and over a bad phone line, I could hear the unmistakable sound of my mother
not
laughing. “It’s fine, Mom.” I tried to reassure her. “No problems. I just got home from my driving lesson. I merged.”

“That’s wonderful, honey.” I could hear music in the background now. And somebody laughing. “And how was work?”

“Great,” I lied. There was no point telling her I’d seen Matt and Tabby. I wanted her to enjoy her vacation, not worry about me having an emotional breakdown. “Dina and I are selling lots of stupid Cupids.”

“Oh. Just a second, Elyse.” I could hear Valter’s voice asking a question. “Yes! Why not? I’d love a margarita, thanks,” my mom answered. “Did you remember to double-check that all the doors are locked?” she asked me, coming back on the line. “And the windows, too?”

“I’ll do it before I go to bed,” I said.

“Oh, good. And you’re sure you’re okay? Because, you know that if you need anything, you can call Auntie Sarah, or Carolynn, or ask the neighbors.”

“I’m okay, Mom. Go. Drink your margarita. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Okay, honey,” she said. The music was getting louder now. Maracas were shaking. Someone whistled loudly. Where was she, anyway? Some kind of nightclub? If so, it had obviously been Valter’s idea. My mom was usually in bed by ten. “I miss you,” she added.

“I miss you, too,” I said. “Good night.” I hung up the phone and sat back down on the couch. It was so quiet in the house now that I could hear the faint rumbling of the furnace cycling on in the basement; the creak of the sofa springs when I shifted my weight; the windowpanes rattling ever-so-slightly in the wind. I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flipping through the channels, past the crime-scene investigation shows that were guaranteed to freak me out. The only relatively nonscary thing I could find was
American Super Model
. The girls were wearing metallic bras underneath gauzy dresses that, come to think of it, looked a lot like the ones Dina and I had had on earlier that day. They were gluing peacock feathers to their faces for some kind of strange photo shoot in a rain forest. The models were all bitching and complaining about the mosquitoes, but I didn’t care. I just needed some background noise.

In fact, I turned the volume up high, filling the house with their whining (the girls’, not the mosquitoes’), before heading to the kitchen. When I got there, I washed my fork and drinking glass and set them in the drying rack, then swept the kitchen floor. See? I thought to myself as I emptied the dustpan into the garbage. Easy. I
so
had this running-a-household thing under control.

As a reward for being totally on top of everything, I took a bag of microwave popcorn out of the cupboard and popped it, breathing in the warm, buttery smell. I walked back to the living room where I ate the whole bowl by myself while the twiglike models made pouty lips and posed with chimpanzees.

The host and her assistant—that guy with the jet-black hair and scary-white teeth were critiquing the models on their poses. “She’s way too stiff,” Scary Teeth was saying. “She looks like a frightened sparrow, not a proud peacock. If she could just relax into the pose . . .
own
the outfit . . . really
become
the bird.” Easy for him to say, I thought. I’d bet a hundred dollars nobody had ever made
him
wear a see-through dress before.

I sighed and stared miserably at the TV, shoving handful after handful of popcorn into my mouth. It had been a long, strange day and, try as I might, I couldn’t get the image of Matt Love’s face out of my mind; or Tabby’s. I kept picturing the way she’d walked out of that dressing room. The way she’d reached for his hands and wrapped his arms around her waist, tipping her head back to look into his eyes—like it was the most natural thing in the world—exactly like I used to do.

How could I have been so stupid back then? I wondered. When Matt started flirting with me in chemistry and following me around the school asking me out, I thought he’d singled me out because I was special, because he’d cared about me. When really, all along, I’d been replaceable: just a girl who fit into his arms as well as any other girl would fit. But that was most high school guys for you. Pretty much anyone who was female, decent looking, and willing would do.

The scared sparrow had stepped aside now, and a new model with shockingly red hair had taken her place. She peeked out from behind a tree with sultry eyes as the cameras flashed, then held one hand up over her mouth in a strange way. “Gorgeous,” the host was saying. “She’s got it. She has so much confidence. She makes peacock look sexy.” Seriously? Except for the hair, I couldn’t tell the difference between her and the last girl, but then, what did I know about modeling, or anything, really? Maybe there
was
something I was missing; some crucial difference between the sexy peacock and the scared sparrow—between Tabby and me—some very obvious (to everyone else) reason why Matt Love loved her, but didn’t love me. She just
had it
. I just didn’t.

Well, big deal! I clicked the TV off and carried the popcorn bowl to the kitchen. So what if I didn’t have it? If being a sexy peacock was what attracted guys like Matt Love, maybe I was better off being a scared sparrow, anyway. I had other things to focus on, I decided, as I came back to the living room and gathered up my school books.

And, as for Patrick, and his inexplicable crush on me, he’d survive. Give him a week, or a couple of days, even. He’d see that there was nothing special about me. And then he’d be willing to take the next decent-looking girl who came along. . . . And so much the better if that decent-looking girl just happened to be Dina.

In fact, it seemed like he was already getting over it. All things considered, he’d been remarkably chill during our driving lesson. He’d even had me pull into a drive-through where he’d ordered fries. While we’d waited our turn in the line of cars, he’d gathered up the dead roses and casually climbed out to toss them into a nearby trash can. “I don’t get why girls like flowers so much, anyway,” he’d said when he returned. “They kind of stink.” And, because I was still feeling bad about rejecting him, I didn’t say a word about the fact that they only stank because they were dead, or about the greasy fries smell that soon filled the car, mixing with the lingering dead roses stench to form a supersmell that was easily ten times worse.

When we got home, he’d even offered to help me shovel the walkway, which was gallant of him and everything, but totally unnecessary. He had his own to do, after all. “What? You think I can’t lift a little snow?” I’d said. Then I’d done it myself, working extra-fast so I’d finish ahead of him. “Night,” I’d said casually, tossing the shovel into a snowbank, my muscles already burning.

It was 9:30 now, and what had started out as a vague muscle pain had turned into a full-fledged throbbing. I tried to stretch out my shoulders, but it didn’t do much good, so I decided to take a hot shower instead before heading to bed. But, first, true to my word, I did the rounds of the house, checking that all the doors and windows were locked. I started in the basement with the small sliding windows—stepping around the giant wardrobe, which was still lying facedown on the floor. It was creepy being down there alone at night, so I worked quickly, switching on all the lights first to reassure myself that there weren’t any monsters or bad guys hiding in the corners behind the cardboard boxes and bags of lawn fertilizer. Then I switched them all off again, feeling like a baby for being freaked out enough to check in the first place. I worked my way upstairs from there, checking the ground-floor windows and doors and even making sure that all the burners on the stove—which I hadn’t even used—were shut off. Then, reassured that the house was safe and secure and that my paranoid mother would be proud, I went upstairs, showered, and went to bed.

It wasn’t until I woke up at three thirty
A.M.
that I knew something was wrong. My first clue was the fact that I was awake at all. I’m usually a really sound sleeper. My second clue was my nose: It was numb.

I pulled an arm out from underneath my duvet, then quickly pulled it back in again. The air was the temperature of a chilly fall day. My first instinct was to curl up in a ball for warmth, and try to go back to sleep. But, then, that wasn’t an option. The house was my responsibility. Forcing myself out of bed, I stumbled over to the radiator and lay my hand on it. That’s when I knew for sure that I was screwed. It was three thirty in the morning, in February. I was completely alone, and the furnace was broken.

I grabbed my robe from the hook on the door, stuffed my feet into a pair of slippers, and went downstairs. “Furnace, furnace, furnace,” I muttered, scanning the three-page note my mother had left on the kitchen table. It listed numbers to call and procedures to follow in the event of any and all emergencies. If the key got stuck in the lock, I was supposed to call Jay at LockWorks. If a light burned out, I’d find bulbs under the sink. If my toast was too dark, I should turn the setting to “light.” My mother had thought of everything, really. Everything
except
what to do if the furnace died.

I sighed as I switched on the light at the top of the basement stairs. If I was lucky, the furnace would turn out to be one of the many appliances my mother had attached a sticky note to, like the one on the fridge: “If freezer leaks, defrost,” or the one on the blender: “Close lid firmly before blending.”
I wasn’t lucky. The furnace had no such helpful sticky note.

My next stop was the computer where I Googled “Furnace Repair, Middleford.” Five company sites came up. Only one of them—Hot Stuff Furnace Repair—offered twenty-four-hour service. I dialed the number. The phone rang five times before someone picked up.

“Yeah, what?” a woman’s voice answered groggily. I guess you couldn’t really expect stellar customer service at that hour of the morning.

“Um. Hi,” I said, suddenly feeling like I was ten years old. “Sorry if I woke you up. My name is Elyse. And my furnace is broken. Is this the right number?”

I could hear bed springs creaking. “Dan,” the woman shouted, obviously trying to wake her husband. “Danny. A broken furnace.”

“You can come?” I said, relief washing over me.

“Sure we can. Where you located?” I gave the woman my address. “You understand,” she went on, seeming more awake now that it was time to talk cash, “we charge an up-front service fee of one hundred and seventy-nine dollars for an after-hours emergency call. And the rate is seventy-five dollars an hour after that, plus whatever’s needed in parts.” I gulped.

“A hundred and seventy-nine dollars? Just to show up?”

“Cash is best. Check is fine, too.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice going small. “My mom’s out of town. I can’t write a check. I don’t even know if we can afford that.”

The woman sighed, like my existence was annoying her. “Well, if you can hold on till morning, the daytime price drops. Seventy-nine for the service call and sixty an hour after that.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure.” I could pay the $79 with my last paycheck, and if I was lucky, it would be a small repair that I could cover with the emergency money my mom had left. She wouldn’t even have to know about it until she got home.

The furnace woman told me a few things I should do in the meantime, like turning on a tap and letting it drip so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Then she said they’d be by in the morning. I hung up and hugged my bathrobe tightly around me. The house seemed to be getting colder by the second. I thought about calling my aunt Sarah, to see if I could stay there, but she was all the way across town, and I didn’t want to wake her up. Plus, if I called her, she’d make me call my mom, and that was the last thing I wanted. I’d told my mom I could handle taking care of the house on my own, and I intended to do it.

I glanced out the side window—toward Patrick’s house—on my way back up the stairs. He’d probably let me in if I knocked on the door, get me some blankets, and let me sleep on the couch, but how weird would that be? I liked him. We were friends. But I’d only known him a week. Plus, I’d just rejected him that afternoon.

So, instead, I went to my mom’s room, pulled her bathrobe on, on top of mine, then scrounged around in the linen closet looking for the electric heating pad I used for period cramps. I plugged it into the power outlet in my room, arranged it near my feet, pulled the blankets over my head, and went back to sleep.