Who Do You Love Read online

  “What’s up?” I asked. It was Friday night and I had plans to meet up with my friends on the beach.

  Without answering, she came and perched on the very edge of my bed, like she didn’t want to get comfortable. She crossed her legs, fiddled with her rings, and then gave me a stiff little speech about how I was now, “in some senses,” a woman; that I’d be making my own choices about my body and she and my father hoped that I’d make good ones. “I don’t have to tell you how much it matters,” she’d said with a sad smile, which was true. The year before, Jonah had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. There’d been a weekend of phone calls, worried looks, and fights conducted in whisper-shouts in my parents’ bedroom. I could hear my dad saying, “Helen, forget it,” and could hear her saying, “Bernie, calm down.” All of this had culminated in a Sunday-night sit-down: Jonah and my parents, his girlfriend, Greta, and her mom and dad in the living room, and me, hiding just out of sight on the second-floor landing, where I could hear every word. On Monday morning, Greta had gone to the doctor’s. Jonah declined to accompany her, and by the end of the week they were broken up. That was what I knew about sex—that it could feel good, but it could also get you in trouble, could ruin relationships, shame your parents, end in all kinds of disaster.

  I’d tried masturbation. Marissa had been doing it since she was twelve, had described it enthusiastically, and had even, one night when we’d each had three wine coolers, offered to do a show-and-tell. But my attempts had been halfhearted failures. Even though I’d read dozens of sex scenes and seen at least as many in the movies, I had a hard time imagining what it would actually feel like, and my solo efforts just left me with a sore wrist and the same vague, crampy feeling I’d have the day before my period arrived. A whole lot of nothing, I would think, rolling onto my side. Maybe it was all a lie, something people made up to sell books and movies.

  Still, I was as romantic as any teenage girl. I’d play UB40’s “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You” on repeat until my dad yelled “Enough!” down the hall. I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way.

  “Hey!” Marissa elbowed me, then passed me the bottle again. I glanced at the chaperones at the front of the bus, then drank, savoring the glow in my belly, and with it, the knowledge that I was breaking the rules, being a bad girl . . . which was to say, a normal girl. The bus driver had put on Back to the Future, which almost everyone was ignoring. Kids were talking, or were sneaking sips from water bottles filled with liquids that were not water, or were smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, in spite of the NO SMOKING sign. Rabbi Silver was up front deep in conversation with Melissa Nasser’s mom—something about Israel, I guessed, which was Rabbi Silver’s number-one topic. In the very back of the bus, a few couples were making out. As I watched, Patti Cohen positioned herself on Larry Mendelsohn’s lap, and Larry slipped his hand up the back of her blouse. I watched him work his tongue in and out of her mouth for a moment, then said, “I bet I know how he looks when he’s plunging a toilet.”

  “That’s disgusting,” squeaked a high, childish voice from the seat behind us.

  Marissa shoved the Gatorade bottle into her Gap tote, then glanced over her shoulder. Bethie Botts gave her a wide, empty smile.

  “Another planet heard from,” I whispered, and we both rolled our eyes.

  Every high school has its hierarchy. Every totem pole has its girl or guy at the bottom, the kid who even the most acne-plagued nerds or socially inept grinds or unhappily closeted homosexuals can look at and think, There, but for the grace of God. For as far back as my memories of school went, our low girl was Bethie Botts. Aka Big Bethie. Aka Beth the Blob. Bethie was enormously fat, which was one of the reasons no one was sitting next to her—there wasn’t room. Her thighs bulged against the seams of her nylon slacks (no jeans or pants for Bethie, what she wore could only be called slacks); the flesh of her belly and breasts and upper arm wobbled over the dividers to jiggle against the velour of the empty seat.

  Bethie’s face was wide and round as a pie, greasy and studded with clusters of whiteheads, blackheads, and cysts in various stages of eruption. Her hair was lank and brown and hung limply on her shoulders. She wore argyle sweaters in unflattering pastels, and old-lady sneakers, wide and white, without the desirable Nike swoosh or the less popular but still acceptable Adidas stripes. Bethie met the world with a flat, incurious stare, and when she spoke, it was in an off-putting simper. Her nails were ragged, her cuticles frequently bloody. She’d waddle along the hallways of Clearview High School, her nylon pants swishing, her eyes fixed on nothing, a smirky smile plastered on her face.

  Then there was her smell—awful, enveloping, and seemingly permanent, surrounding her like her own personal weather system. In elementary school, there’d been notes of urine mixed in with the scent of unclean flesh and unwashed clothing. As she’d gotten older, the pee had been replaced with eye-watering body odor, a stink that was like what Mark Twain said about the weather—everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything. In Bethie’s case, people had tried. Well-meaning teachers had pulled her aside, suggesting antiperspirant or deodorant or soap. Less kind classmates like Mikey Henderson or Joel Marx would say, “Jesus, Botts, take a shower! You fuckin’ reek!” One December, Rabbi Silver had given us all little Chanukah gifts, and Bethie’s was a collection of soaps and sample-size perfumes. None of it worked—not the gifts, not the insults. Bethie’s smile never wavered. She never looked hurt. But she never smelled any better.

  “What’s her story?” Marissa had asked after her first week of junior high. Marissa had gone to a different elementary school than I had. We’d been assigned seats next to each other in homeroom on our first day of school, and we’d quickly become friends. “Is she retarded or something?”

  I shook my head. “She’s not retarded. Just weird. And she’s always been like that,” I told Marissa. “She’s like Stonehenge, only stinkier. She never changes.”

  Things might have been different if Bethie had been nice, if she’d made an effort with her appearance or her manner. Certainly there were other fat kids in Clearview, even a few other kids with bad skin or cheap clothes, but they had friends, a circle, a place to sit at lunch. Not Bethie, who was actively unpleasant. If you tried to start a conversation with her, she’d ignore you or answer your questions with non sequiturs or snotty replies.

  “What are you reading?” Marissa asked Bethie that first morning in class.

  Bethie looked up, that dumb smile in place, as always. “A book,” she said, in her incongruously sweet, girlish voice.

  Marissa looked at me, to see if she was being mocked. I shrugged. With Bethie, you never knew.

  At six o’clock, the bus pulled into KFC. The kids from Beth Am sat in groups of threes and fours, except for Bethie, who sat by herself until Rabbi Silver took the seat across from her. Back on the bus, Marissa and I polished off the spiked Gatorade. I leaned my head against the window. Marissa flipped open The Bridges of Madison County, which everyone was reading that spring. “Listen to this,” she said, and read, “ ‘The leopard swept over her, again and again and yet again, like a long prairie wind, and rolling beneath him, she rode on that wind like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.’ ”

  “Oh, puh-leeze,” I groaned. “How can a leopard be like a wind? Aren’t leopards, like, furry and heavy? And how can a fire be compliant? And—”

  “Hush,” said Marissa, and continued. “ ‘This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.’”

  I pu
rsed my lips and made the whistling noise of a bomb plummeting to earth. “Falling for years. It’s going to hurt when he lands.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that instead of fixing your heart, the doctors accidentally removed it?” Marissa asked, pulling out her lip gloss from her own Bermuda bag and using the wand to slide another coat of shiny pink over her lips. The bus groaned and lurched around a corner, then up a steep drive toward the plush green lawns and white-brick buildings of Emory University. We climbed off the bus, collected our duffels and suitcases and sleeping bags from the sidewalk where the driver had arranged them, and followed Rabbi Silver into the auditorium.

  “They’d better not make us wear hard hats,” said Marissa, giving her permed curls a pat. “Finding cute overalls was bad enough.”

  “Safety first,” I said, feeling a pang of worry. When they’d signed the permission slip, my parents had included an entire page about my medical history, but what if whoever was in charge hadn’t read it and had me on a crew that was doing heavy lifting? I patted my own hair, thinking that I’d do what I always did in situations like this: say I had my period, then sit on the bleachers or in the shade. I’d packed my Walkman and my copy of Wuthering Heights, as well as the latest issue of People, which I’d swiped from our mailbox, with “Mariah Carey’s All-Star Wedding” on the cover. If I ended up on the sidelines, I’d be fine.

  Marissa pitched the empty Gatorade bottle toward a trash can. It bounced off the rim and fell to the ground, but she was halfway up the path and didn’t notice. Sighing, I picked up the bottle and threw it away. When I turned around, a guy was looking at me, a guy with broad shoulders and very white teeth and brown hair cut short. He wasn’t doing that overt checking-me-out thing. Instead, he was staring like he recognized me, and the weird thing was, I felt like I recognized him, too.

  Rabbi Silver called, “Rachel! Come on!” I hurried into the auditorium just as a middle-aged woman with shiny platinum hair pulled back like a ballerina stepped to the front of the crowd and held up a hand for silence. “My name’s Darcy Edelman. I’m the director of the local chapter of Home Free, and I want to thank you all for your service,” she said. “If you’ll head up here to find your nametags, please. The color of the tag is the color of your group.”

  I found my tag, which had a blue border. The guy who’d been looking at me had a blue tag, too. He was tall but not too tall, thin but not too skinny, with the contours of muscles in his arms and chest visible underneath his plain blue T-shirt. He had a narrow face, a high forehead, brown eyes, straight, thick eyebrows, and a dimple in his chin. Even though it was cut very short, I could tell his hair was curly, and his lips were beautiful, full and almost pursed, like he was waiting to give someone a kiss. No braces, I noticed . . . then I saw that he was looking at my nametag.

  “Rachel?” he said. He had a nice, deep voice.

  “Don’t tell me that’s your name, too,” I said, smiling up at him, thinking of how proud Marissa would be that I’d already caught the eye of a cute guy.

  “Rachel Blum,” he said. His eyes moved from the tag to my face. “Were you ever in the Miami Children’s Hospital?”

  I studied him more closely. “Yes. Only half my life. Why?”

  He smiled, just a brief flash of his teeth. “You told me a story.”

  I stared up at him, feeling my heart give another hiccup, feeling like the lights had dimmed and the auditorium had gone silent. “You wrote me a note,” I said, trying to connect this handsome guy with the kid I’d met in the emergency room. “I sent you a letter, but it came back.” This was true. I’d written to Andy to ask if his arm had indeed been broken, and if he’d gotten to go back to the ocean before he and his mom had gone home, and if his friends had signed his cast, but the letter I’d worked on so carefully had come back a week after I’d mailed it, stamped UNDELIVERABLE and NO FORWARDING ADDRESS.

  His eyebrows drew together, and he looked down at his sneakers, plain blue-and-white Nikes; running shoes, not the puffy white schooners that came with their own inflation system that the boys in my school favored, whether or not they’d ever held a basketball. “My mom and I moved right after we got back from that trip.”

  “I can’t believe it!” I said, still looking for traces of the hurt eight-year-old in this cute boy, and noticing that he was taking as careful inventory of me as I was of him. “Isn’t this crazy?” I could feel my heart pound, and I felt breathless, the way I remembered feeling when I was six and had pleurisy, only this time it felt wonderful.

  “Crazy,” he confirmed, looking me over like he couldn’t believe I was there, like I’d disappear at any moment, as the Home Free woman clapped her hands.

  “In the morning after breakfast you’ll all find your team leaders and be directed to your work sites. For now, get a good night’s sleep.”

  “I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” I said.

  Andy smiled at me. “See you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Great.” The back of his hand brushed my arm as he walked away, and I felt his touch echo inside me as I stared after him, his broad shoulders and narrow hips, tanned skin and close-cropped hair, feeling like a girl in a movie or a book, a girl who’d been through all kinds of adventures and trials, and had finally glimpsed her reward.

  •••

  The next morning Andy nodded at me as he boarded the bus with a bunch of other guys, the ones from his school that he’d sat with at breakfast. I thought he was going to walk right past me, but at the last minute he dropped into the seat next to mine. I thought I looked good. I’d woken up early, even before the alarm I’d set, which gave me time to take a long shower, spritz on peach-scented body mist, and put my hair in hot rollers. Back in the room, I’d spent fifteen minutes rifling through everything I’d packed to find the right long-sleeved white shirt to go underneath my distressed denim overalls (even in the summer heat, the Home Free people had insisted on long sleeves to keep us safe from I wasn’t sure what). I wondered if he’d put any thought into his clothes—a purple T-shirt with the words HOLY CROSS on the front in gold, and a pair of jeans that fit him just right.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  He turned to me. “Rachel Blum. Bloom like flower, even though it’s spelled blum like plum.” The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.

  Pleasure flooded through me. He’d remembered! “Well, clearly, you’ve spent the last eight years thinking of me nonstop.”

  “I did take a break every once in a while. For the PSATs. Stuff like that.”

  His teasing gave me an excuse to ball my hand into a fist and punch him playfully on his upper arm, which felt as solid as it looked.

  “Don’t lie. I’ll bet you were even thinking of me during the PSATs. I’ll bet no other girl you’ve ever met could tell ‘Hansel and Gretel’ as well as I did.”

  He shook his head, with the smallest smile on his lips and his thick brows drawn together. “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”

  “Not really. I can just tell when a man is obsessed.”

  He stretched his long legs into the aisle. I pulled out the tube of sunscreen I’d stuck in the front pocket of my overalls.

  “Sunscreen?” I asked. He took it and sniffed.

  “Is this peach scented?” He turned the tube around in his hands, frowning at the price tag. “Eleven dollars?”

  “Ten ninety-nine.”

  He shook his head in mock incredulity, thick eyebrows drawing down, the corners of his eyes crinkling again.

  “What, you don’t think I’m worth it?” I grabbed the tube back and squirted some lotion in my palm. “It’s got restorative nutrients. Vitamin E. That’s an important one.”

  “Of course.” He watched as I dabbed my finger in the gel and spread it on my cheeks and nose. If I’d known him a little better I would have smoothed the leftover sunscreen on his face, but inste
ad I used it on the backs of my hands. When we reached the work site Andy stood up.

  “Time to work, Ten Ninety-Nine.” He took the tube out of my hand and tucked it back into my overalls pocket, and I followed him off the bus.

  Our “house leader,” a young woman named Alex, who was taking a year off between college and law school to work for Home Free, gave us an orientation, telling us about the neighborhood, showing pictures of the family who would be living in the house, and then explaining that we wouldn’t actually be building a house in a week. “The majority of the work’s going to be done by actual trained construction workers, which, believe me, is for the best,” she said. “What we’re going to do is get everything ready so that they can come in and do the job fast.”

  Getting everything ready meant clearing the lot of trash and debris, sorting screws and bolts into their proper piles, carrying lumber and sacks of concrete from a truck onto the work site, and culling piles of donated clothes and kitchen tools. I was hoping Andy and I would be assigned to the bolt-sorting station, but instead, Alex gave each of us a contractor-­sized trash bag and a pair of canvas gloves, signaling that I’d be spending my first day of summer vacation as a trash-picker. When Alex gave us the go-ahead to start, I was careful to position myself right near Andy, so it was natural when we headed off in the same direction.