The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (24 page)

He shrugged. “Well . . . yeah. Kind of. Or, you know, on their way to it.”

I shook my head. “She’s sixteen years older than he is. Plus, he has a girlfriend. Well, sometimes. They’re on and off a lot. Her name’s Skye. She’s a screenwriter. She tweets a lot.” Who was the one rambling now?

He shrugged. “Okay.”

I so wanted to ask him what the “Okay” meant. Was it “Okay—I understand now and I believe you,” or was it “Okay—you sound like a crazy person so I’m going to figure out a way to change the subject”?

Instead, I took out my iPhone and took a shot of the moon reflecting on the river.

“You like photography?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. It’s kind of my thing.”

He pointed at the phone. “Can I see some of your stuff?”

I hesitated. I always felt weird showing it to people. I handed the phone over, trying not to squirm as he scrolled through the photos.

“Wow. You are
good
,” he said, impressed.

I shrugged. “Not really. It’s just different filters, you know, from Instagram, Hipstamatic . . . stuff like that.”

“Those things scare me,” he said. “I was never good at math.”

“What do camera apps have to do with math?” I asked, confused.

He shrugged. “I have no idea. It just seems . . . mathlike to me. But seriously—these are really cool. They’re . . . different. He smiled. “Like you.”

Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I was glad it was dark so he couldn’t see me blush. “So tell me about your family,” I blurted.

His smile vanished. “I’d rather talk about math,” he said wryly.

I laughed again.

He went on to tell me about how he was the youngest of two kids (“My sister did the smart thing and moved across the country for college and stayed there”) and he had grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His mother was a book editor, and his father was a novelist and a professor at NYU. They lived in the city until his parents got divorced. (“The thing my father hates more than anything in writing are clichés,” he explained, “but then he went and turned into one when he started having an affair with one of his students and bought a Harley.”)

They had originally started coming upstate on weekends when his parents were still married, but after the divorce, his mom had moved them up full-time, and he’d finished his last two years of high school here. (“You know you’re no longer in the city when your classmates drive pickup trucks with NRA bumper stickers and spend their weekends hunting for deer instead of private-school girls.”) He had lived on campus this past year, but was back at home for the summer with his mom.

“I’m surprised you’re not sleeping yet,” he said. “My life story has a way of doing that to people.”

“Are you kidding? I love it. It sounds so . . . normal.”

“Yeah, don’t worry—I can promise you it most certainly is not,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I should probably get you home.”

“Yeah, I guess.” I hoped I didn’t sound as disappointed as I felt.

He smiled. “You’re really easy to talk to.”

I smiled back.“I know.” I cringed. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant is that
you’re
easy to talk to.”

“I knew what you meant.”

I smiled. That was the great part. I felt like he really did.

We pulled up to the house to find a royal-blue pickup truck in the driveway.

“Sweet ride,” Matt said. He put his car—an old silver Volvo station wagon (“The other official upstate car, after the Subaru,” he had explained when he opened my door for me; it took a few tries because, as he said, the car was so old it had arthritis)—in park and turned off the ignition.

Even with my limited (read: zero) experience with dating, I had to believe that turning the car off instead of letting it idle was a good sign. Like he wanted to keep talking. That, or he was really conscientious about saving gas.

“Is it yours?” he asked.

“No, it’s Billy’s,” I replied. I knew this not because I had seen it in person, but because I had seen a picture of it on SimonSez the day before. Apparently, what car Billy Barrett drove while on location was news.

“Ah.”

Again, I refrained from asking what the “Ah” meant. “Ah,” as in “You
say
nothing’s going on with them, but if he’s still there at twelve forty-five, that ‘nothing’ is soon going to be a ‘something’ . . . if it’s not already,” or just a regular old “Ah”? And had I been this neurotic prior to the last four hours, or had it always been there, lying in wait? And did everything that entered my brain have to be in the form of a question from now on?

We sat there staring at the dashboard. Was he going to kiss me? Did I want him to kiss me? Exactly how much of what I had eaten had garlic and onions? And when would the question thing stop?

“So,” he finally said.

“So,” I repeated.

“So I should probably let you go in.”

“Yeah. I guess,” I agreed, really not wanting to. At least until I looked at the house and saw my mother’s honey-colored head behind the curtain in the window watching us. “Oh, God,” I said out loud. And then, as if she could hear me, she moved the curtain aside and actually
started waving
.

He laughed. “That’s sweet.”

I looked at him as if I had eaten a piece of bad fish.

“In. . . . some . . . alternate . . . universe?” he suggested.

“Yes. In a galaxy far, far away,” I replied. I looked back at the window to see that now Billy had joined her at the window. “Okay, I really should go,” I said quickly, grabbing for the door, only to find it stuck.

“It gets . . . stuck from the inside, too,” he said, reaching across me to open it. “Hey, so are you going to give me your number?” he asked as he jiggled it.

I was so relieved, my spine felt like it wanted to melt. Asking for my number meant he’d call so we could see each other again. Unless he didn’t call. Which, I knew from movies (and Mom), was a very good possibility. “Sure. It’s—”

“Maybe wait until I get this open and take out my phone—”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, still jiggling. At this point his chin was somewhere around my boobs, but I didn’t dare move for fear of the situation becoming even more awkward than it was at the moment.

“Sor—” I started to say again before catching myself.

“Annabelle?”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

My spine snapped back to attention. We hadn’t even gone out again, or even talked on the phone, and he had decided that already. And
told
me. Which I guess was better than his not telling me, but still. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, I’m only here—”

He let go of the door and sat up. “I’m going to have to open it from the outside,” he announced as he started to open his own and get out.

I shook my head as I watched him walk around the car. There was no way my nervous system was going to be able to handle this. Finally, I was out of the car. After glancing over at the window to see if Mom and Billy were still spying on us, I gave him my number, and we stood there.

“I’m really glad you came out tonight.”

“Me, too,” I agreed.

“It was fun.”

“Totally.” If this turned into something, was I going to be like Mom and just agree with the guy about everything?

He put his hands on my shoulders and started to lean in. He was going to kiss me? Right there? With my mother and Billy watching? He aimed for my cheek. Which was sweet, and would have been even sweeter if I hadn’t decided to move my head at that exact second so that the kiss—and his chin, and somehow his teeth—ended up in the middle of my skull.

“Ow—” he said.

“Oh God—I’m so sorry!” I cried.

And then, as if things couldn’t get more awkward, the front door opened.

“Annabelle, do you want to invite Matt in for some tea?”

I patted my head to check for blood, while Matt felt his tooth to see if it had chipped. “We’re good, Mom!” I called back.

“Or some of that lemonade? With the ginger and the honey? I know it’s not good to have sugar so late, but it’s really good.”

“Did you want lemonade?” I asked, not wanting to be rude but hoping he’d say no.

“Thanks, but I should—”

“I know it’s not really a summer thing, but I think I saw some hot chocolate packets in the cupboard,” Mom went on. “Unless Matt doesn’t like preservatives. I don’t either, you know, but with some things I think it’s okay. Like hot chocolate.”

“—go,” Matt finished.

“Yeah,” I agreed quickly.

“I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

He leaned in to kiss me on the cheek again, but then seemed to think better of it and just squeezed me on the shoulder instead. I stood there as he pulled out, a smile plastered on my face as if I did this kind of thing all the time. I gave one last wave before turning around and going into the house.

You would’ve thought, as actors, Mom and Billy would have at least
pretended
they hadn’t been watching me, but there they were, still at the front door.

“That was so
cute
, the way he went to kiss you and missed!” Mom exclaimed as I walked in. She turned to Billy. “Wasn’t that so cute?”

To his credit, he looked uncomfortable. “Ah, I guess so?”

I tried not to think about what they’d been doing, or how late it was and the fact that he was still here.

I walked toward my room. “Good night.”

“But I want to hear all about it!” Mom called after me.

I was sure she did. As I got ready for bed, I was relieved to hear the sound of Billy’s truck on the gravel as he drove off. A few minutes later, once I was settled in my bed with my notebook, I heard Mom stop in front of my door.

“Annabelle, are you still awake?”

I kept quiet.

“Bug?”

Still quiet.

“I can see the light underneath the door,” she said. “But in trying to not be codependent and respect your boundaries I’m just going to leave you alone. But if you
do
want to come tell me about your evening, I’ll be up for a little while, so feel free to crawl into bed and tell me.”

“Crawling into bed with you is not very respecting boundaries–like,” I called out. “In fact, most people would probably consider that kind of creepy, Mom.”

“Fine. Well, maybe you’ll want to talk about it in the morning. Good night.”

“Night,” I replied. After I heard her walk away, I picked my notebook back up to make a list.

REASONS NOT TO GET OVERLY EXCITED ABOUT MATT, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SUPER-EASY TO TALK TO HIM AND HE SEEMED TO BE AS INTO ME AS I WAS INTO HIM

• I’m here for only six weeks, which means that even if he
  did
  call, and we
  did
  hang out again, there’s really no future in it, and therefore it would just make it that much harder when it was time to leave, and then I’d go back to L.A. and spend way too much time Facebook- stalking him.
  
• He probably thinks that because I’m from L.A. and my mother is an actress, I’m a slut and therefore, if he calls, it’s probably just because he thinks I’ll sleep with him.
  
• If we did hang out, and it
  did
  start to get physical, once I told him I wasn’t going to sleep with him—because to sleep with someone you already knew you had a limited shelf life with felt dumb—he wouldn’t want to hang out anymore.
  
• Because he seemed like a smart guy, he was smart enough to know that Mom was an equal opportunity embarrasser, and therefore, if we ever spent time in front of her, he’d be in her line of fire.
  

My phone dinged with a text.

At the risk of being shunned and stoned by the male race for not waiting at least 12 hours—or even 1—to send this text, I was wondering if you were busy tomorrow afternoon, and if not, if you wanted to hang out.

I smiled.

Sure, there were a million reasons
not
to get excited.

But I still couldn’t help myself.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I woke up the next morning to find Mom in the kitchen, dressed in running clothes and cooking something. And not just pushing-buttons-on-a-microwave cooking, but something that included a pot and a spoon and a flame on a stove.

“What’s going on?” I asked warily as I watched her move the pot and almost light her arm on fire.

“Good morning, sleepyhead!” she chirped as she turned to smile at me. “You finally decided to get up and join the living, huh?”

I took the ground coffee and milk out of the fridge and went over to the coffeemaker to brew it, only to find it already brewed. “Mom, it’s only eight.” I poured myself a cup and took a sip. She had even done the thing I had taught her, where you put some cinnamon in the coffee before you brewed it. “Wait a minute—did you even go to sleep last night?”

“Of course I did,” she said, ladling out whatever was in the pot into two bowls. “And I couldn’t sleep so I got up at five thirty and went for a run and then decided to make breakfast.”

Okay, who was this body snatcher and what had she done with my mother? She placed the bowl in front of me before taking the seat across from me. I couldn’t believe it. My mother had made
oatmeal
. From scratch, not from a packet. My whole life I had dreamed of her making me things like oatmeal and rice pudding and mashed potatoes—things that weren’t fancy but smacked of comfort and would keep you anchored when everything around you was swirling and you were worried that you were going to float away. And not only that, but she had added walnuts and berries and a spoonful of brown sugar.

“That’s how you order it at John O’Groats, right?” she asked. “With the berries and the walnuts and the brown sugar?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. I felt my eyes start to fill. All that time when she was drinking, when I thought she was so out of it she never noticed anything, she had. I stood up and started to walk to my room.

“Annabelle, where are you going? What did I do wrong?” she called after me, confused.

I came back with my camera. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I replied as I took the lens cap off and focused in on the bowl, pleased that the light that was coming in from the window highlighted the texture of the oatmeal, and the grains of the sugar, and the little bumps on the raspberries.