Who Do You Love Page 12

  I thought that I would never fall asleep, especially because Bethie insisted on leaving her desk light on. I didn’t care. I wanted to stay awake all night, remembering everything about Andy—his warm hand on my waist, his long legs in his jeans, what he’d said, what I’d said, the low rumble of his voice, the way he’d smelled. The way his lips had felt against mine.

  I woke up the next morning on the bottom bunk bed, dust motes dancing in the bright morning light, already feeling the humidity through the brick walls. It’s a dream, I thought. Then Bethie Botts pushed her way through the door.

  “Something for you!” she said in her high, toneless voice. She dropped a plain white envelope on my sleeping bag. I saw my name, written in the tiny, crabbed black letters that I remembered from all those years ago. I slit the flap open with my thumb and found a single sheet of paper. “Rachel,” said the note. It was folded around a red paper clip that had been bent into the shape of a heart.

  I leaned against the wall, feeling faint, holding the heart tight in my hand, while my own heart hammered in my chest, until Marissa came back from the bathroom and climbed onto my bed. I smelled Finesse shampoo and the apricot scrub that she used as she leaned close. “What is it? Let me see? Oh my GOD,” she squealed, when I opened my hand to show her.

  “I know.” I couldn’t believe he’d done something so romantic and sweet, something that made me want to jump, and run, and cry with happiness. I took a record-breakingly short shower and practically waltzed back to the room. I dried and styled my hair, applied my makeup, pulled on a pair of light-blue jeans, a long-sleeved red shirt with tiny buttons at the collar. Then I rummaged in my bags until I found the Star of David pendant my nana had given me for my bat mitzvah. Carefully, I worked the charm off the gold chain and replaced it with Andy’s heart, adjusting it so it hung against the hollow of my throat.

  •••

  Too soon, there were only two days of the week remaining. I carried pieces of lumber, and watched Andy’s face and his arms as he sawed. He was nothing like the boys I’d known, with his dedication to his running, and his single mom in the city, and his friend Mr. Sills, and his stories about how he’d won the Catholic League’s cross-country championship, and how his buddy Miles was supposed to be on the trip but had gotten suspended for throwing another kid’s backpack out the school bus window.

  “What’s it like, being biracial?” I’d asked him once, shyly, during one of our lunch breaks under the tree. He’d been peeling the slices of turkey from the bread, rolling them up and eating them first, the way he always did.

  Andy shrugged. “I’ve never been anything else. I only know what it’s like being me.”

  I thought I understood. When people asked me what it had been like to grow up with my heart thing, to have had all those operations, I could talk about missing school and birthdays, but the truth was that I couldn’t say what it was like because I’d never known anything different.

  I wasn’t expecting Andy to expound on the topic, but he surprised me. Looking down at the ground, where there was nothing to see but dirt and twigs, he said, “It’s like being two people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I’m with my mom or my . . .” I heard his throat click when he swallowed. “My grandma, I was going to say, but I haven’t seen her in a long time. They’re white, and when I’m with them, people think that I am, too, so sometimes I get to hear what they really think about black people.” He gave me a rueful look. “Which is pretty rough. I usually think the black guys on my track team don’t think I’m black enough, or they think I’m trying to be white, or trying to sound white . . .” He plucked a blade of grass from a patchy clump and rolled it between his thumbs. “And then there’s all the questions. People ask what you are, where you’re from, and you can’t ever just say America or Philadelphia. Then you catch them looking at you sometimes, trying to figure it out.” He tied the piece of grass in a knot, flicked it into the dirt with his index finger, and pulled out another piece. “You don’t ever just get to be . . .” More grass-twiddling. “Normal, I guess. Just a normal person where people look at you and they know what you are. You always have to decide—who you’re going to be with, who you want to be that day. That hour, even. The people who know me don’t think of me like that. But other kids . . .” He shifted his weight, rocking side to side like he was getting ready to stand up and walk away. “I wish sometimes I knew more kids like me.” Then, in a voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear, he said, “I wish I knew my dad.”

  I wanted to tell him that I understood about wanting to feel normal, about wishing that there was someone like you in the world, someone who’d been there, in the place where you were, and could talk about it, and would tell you the truth. But I’d never told anyone about Alice—not my parents, not Nana, not anyone. I didn’t have the words. I thought that maybe I’d kiss him—he looked so sad, with his eyes half shut as he looked at the ground. What I did was touch his arm, then slip my hand in his. I know, I thought, and he looked up like he’d heard me. I know.

  •••

  Then it was Saturday, our last night in Atlanta. “You did good,” said Alex as we crowded into the framed-out house. It was still unfinished, all rough plywood and bare walls, with stacks of PVC pipes for the plumbing piled up high, but it was undeniably on its way to being a real house, with rooms and walls and staircases and doors. And bedrooms. I wondered if Andy and I could miss the bus on purpose and find a blanket to spread across the splintery floorboards, that we could be there together when the sun went down. When the evening sky was pansy-purple, and all you could hear was a symphony of birdsong and crickets.

  Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking, because he took my hand, holding me back as the rest of our crew filed out of the house and into the yard. It was dim in the house, and it smelled like fresh lumber. Andy pulled me against him, slipping his hands around my waist. I love you, I thought . . . but I didn’t say it. Girls should never say it first.

  “What if this were our house?” he said.

  I joked about how it wouldn’t be ideal, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. I could hear the other kids laughing as they got on the bus, and Alex grumbling as she gathered discarded canvas gloves. Andy hugged me, and I rested my head on his chest, remembering a cartoon I’d seen, a Lynda Barry comic where a girl, grotesque and freckled, sat in her bedroom and watched the boys play basketball in the twilight, how she stared at the boy she loved and thought, We are married, secretly we are married now.

  We are married now, I thought, and Andy took my hand and squeezed it, and we walked slowly, side by side, out of the doorway and into the twilight.

  •••

  To celebrate our last night, there was pizza for dinner, and they showed a movie in the gym, The Princess Bride, one of my favorites. If there hadn’t been chaperones stationed at all of the doors, Andy and I would have found a way to get out of there and be alone. As it was, we found a spot in the deep shadows in the corner and sat together, Andy with his back against the wall and me leaning against him, my back to his chest, pressed so close it would have been hard to slip a piece of paper between us, kissing and kissing until the taste of his mouth was as familiar to me as the taste of my own.

  When the movie ended, Andy walked me to my dorm. “Can you stay awake?”

  I nodded. I’d never felt less like sleeping. I would stay awake all night, all week, if that was what it took.

  “I’ll come get you,” he said. I nodded again and kissed him, standing on my tiptoes, not caring when kids walked past us, calling, “Get a room!” Maybe he’ll take me back to the house, I thought. There was no way that could happen, of course—the site was twenty minutes away, there were no cars, no cabs, no buses. But that was what I imagined, Andy carrying me in his arms, the two of us alone together in the empty rooms.

  “Are you sure?”

  I touched hi
s cheek, then squeezed his hand. “Yes.”

  •••

  I hurried back into my room, stripped off my clothes and jewelry, wrapped myself in a towel, and trotted to the showers, where I scrubbed everywhere I could reach, washed my hair twice, then stood in front of the mirror with my mousse and blow-dryer, wondering where we would go, wondering if we’d go all the way, and if it would hurt, feeling my heart gallop like a pony. I was so glad that I’d waited, that this hadn’t happened with Derek or Scott or Jason or Troy, that I had held out for true love.

  When I came back to the room, my heart necklace wasn’t next to my clothes on the dresser. I looked on the floor to make sure it hadn’t fallen. I shook out my sleeping bag and each piece of clothing that I’d worn. I searched the drawers and the floors, checked my overall pockets, then ran back to the bathroom to make sure it wasn’t there, on the shower floor or the edge of a sink. Marissa was still out—she’d been spending a lot of time with a guy from Baltimore named Pete. Bethie Botts was lying on her bed, in a cloud of misery and funk, paging through Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming, another one of junior high’s greatest hits.

  “Bethie,” I said, still out of breath from running back and forth, “have you seen my necklace?”

  “What necklace?” asked Marissa as she loped into the room. Her cheeks were pink, and there was a single dogwood blossom stuck in her hair.

  “My heart,” I said, feeling frantic and a little sick. “I left it on the dresser and I went to take a shower and now it’s gone.” I went over to my duffel and emptied it onto my sleeping bag, jamming my hand into the front pocket, praying that my fingers would find the heart. Marissa, meanwhile, had walked over to the edge of Bethie’s bed. She held out her hand.

  “Give it up.”

  “Go away,” said Bethie, without raising her eyes from her book.

  “Bethie, do you have it?” I asked. My voice cracked. “Or do you know where it is?”

  “Oh, she knows,” said Marissa. A coolness was slipping over her face, making her look very adult and very frightening. “Bethie,” said Marissa. “Beth-eeee. Come out, come out, wherever you are, and give Rachel her necklace.”

  Bethie didn’t answer, but her greasy moon-face looked flushed. Her knees were propped up under the covers, and she started to move her thighs back and forth, in, then out. In a single swift motion, Marissa grabbed the top of her blanket and yanked it toward the bottom of the bed, exposing Bethie’s unicorn nightshirt and powder-blue sweatpants. The pants had no pockets that I could see.

  “Leave me alone!” squeaked Bethie. She was cringing, pulling her legs toward her chest, and all I could think of was a worm whose rock had just been kicked over, squirming away from the sun.

  “I’ll leave you alone when you give Rachel her necklace back, you fucking thief.”

  I held my breath. I’d never heard Marissa say the word fucking to someone’s face.

  “It’s just a stupid paper clip!” Bethie said, in her high, babyish voice. “Maybe it got lost.”

  “It did not just get lost, Jabba the Hutt. What’d you do, eat it?”

  “Marissa,” I murmured. It was one thing to call Bethie Jabba the Hutt in private. Saying it out loud was taking things to a place where I didn’t think I wanted to go.

  “Give it back,” Marissa said. She grabbed the shoulders of Bethie’s nightshirt and pulled her upright.

  Bethie scowled at Marissa. “Let me go or I’ll tell Mrs. Nasser.”

  “I’ll tell Mrs. Nasser,” Marissa repeated, in a savage falsetto. “What are you, in kindergarten, you fucking tattletale? Give it back!” She punctuated her words by giving Bethie a hard shake. Bethie jerked away and glared at me.

  “Probably you just lost it,” she said. “No big deal. Your parents will just buy you a new one.”

  “It was a present,” I said. “And it was handmade. My parents can’t buy me a new one.” My face was flaming, and I was close to going to her bed and shaking her myself. I knew that she’d taken it. I was positive. Seeing me this happy was more than miserable Bethie Botts could stand. “I didn’t lose it. It was right there,” I said, pointing to the dresser. “If you know where it is, please just tell me.”

  She gave me that same smug look and opened her book again. I walked over to her bed and looked down at the top of her head, her greasy hair, the strip of white skin where she’d parted it.

  “Did you throw it out? Did you flush it? Did you eat it?” I had never talked to anyone that way, but I was furious. That heart meant more to me than anything else I had, even the diamond earrings my parents had given me as a bat mitzvah gift, or the afghan that Nana had knitted that I’d taken to the hospital for every operation.

  Bethie didn’t say a word. Marissa stalked over to the corner where Bethie had put her plastic bags and grabbed them both.

  “Hey,” Bethie whined, “hey, don’t!”

  Ignoring her, Marissa tore the bags open and dumped them out on Bethie’s bed. Two giant pairs of white cotton briefs. A pair of stretchy black leggings with a hole in the knee. Tiny sample-sized bottles, clearly swiped from a hotel, of shampoo and mouthwash. A sliver of something—soap, I guessed—wrapped in toilet paper. A raggedy gray stuffed elephant that was missing one eye. Marissa picked it up.

  “Is this, like, your spirit animal?” Marissa asked.

  “Put it down,” said Bethie, who was starting to look scared. “I didn’t take your stupid heart, so don’t you touch my stuff!”

  “Like I want to be touching it,” said Marissa. “I’m going to need to disinfect my hands after going through your mess.” She gave the sad little pile a derisive poke.

  “Tell me where my heart is.” I snatched the stuffed toy from Marissa. “Give it back or I’m flushing this.”

  “Don’t!” Bethie said. “He’s special!”

  I used my thumbnail to pop out the elephant’s remaining eye. It pinged against the floor, and lay there, a brown glass circle that seemed to gaze at me accusingly. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel my chest heaving, and I was shaking all over, from fury and shame and from a strange kind of excitement, the thrill of going all the way over to the dark side, where my worst, most hurtful impulses reigned.

  “Cut it out!” Bethie cried. “Don’t hurt him!”

  “Give it back,” I said.

  “I don’t know where your heart is!” Bethie shrieked at me.

  The words neither do I zipped across my consciousness, and were gone in an instant.

  “Give him back,” Bethie said, and held out her hand.

  “Why do you care?” I asked. “Your parents’ll buy you a new one.”

  “I don’t live with my parents,” said Bethie. “I’m in a foster home.”

  “Boohoo, poor you,” said Marissa. Her eyes were shining; her color was high. Was she enjoying this like I was? She certainly seemed to be having some strange kind of fun. “Did your parents kick you out because you stole their stuff, too?”

  Bethie bent her head so that her chin touched her chest. She was crying now, big, gaspy, unlovely sobs. I threw the elephant at her, as hard as I could. “Next time, steal some deodorant,” I said. “Steal some clothes that don’t look like they came from the clearance aisle at Goodwill.” I was going to go on, to tell her to steal some shampoo, steal some Clearasil, when a voice behind me said my name.

  I turned. Andy was standing in doorway of our dorm room. He had my necklace dangling from one hand. “It was in the hall,” he said.

  I slumped against the wall, trying to calm down, wondering how much he’d heard, feeling my face flame as I remembered. “Oh, thank God,” I said.

  Bethie was still crying. I felt dizzy, almost sick with shame, worse than the time my dad had caught me sneaking a look at the Penthouse I’d found under his mattress, worse than when I was six and my mom had refused to buy me a candy bar at the grocery st
ore, so I’d slipped one in my pocket, and the cashier had seen. I picked the stuffed elephant’s eye off the floor and walked to Bethie’s bed. “I can fix it for you,” I said.

  “You can’t,” she said. She had her knees pulled up tight against her chest. One hand was yanking her hair, hard enough that it had to hurt. “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t,” she said, pulling her hair with each repetition.

  “Sure I can,” I said, and made myself touch her shoulder. Her flesh felt hot and loose under the nightshirt. “And I can give you some other ones, too. I’ve got a million Beanie Babies, from when I was in the hospital.”

  Bethie kept rocking and pulling. “You don’t even get it,” she said. “I don’t want new ones. I want Tyler. He’s the only thing left.”

  Left from what? I wondered. Left from her parents, probably. I felt so small then, as small and low as I’d ever felt. The happiness that had filled me when I was in the shower was gone, along with that odd, savage joy that had animated me when I was calling Bethie names and hurting her things. I wanted to climb under my covers or shut my eyes like a little kid.

  “Bethie,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “I’m sorry I was mean.”

  “Everyone’s mean to me,” she snarled. “You’re not special. You think you’re special but you’re not.”