Nothing Like You Page 12

  The thought of another night out with Paul was terrifying to me. Besides, Friday would be exactly one week since we’d last spoken. So we were due. “Maybe,” I said. “I dunno, not exactly in the partying mood …”

  She kicked my leg. “Come on. This is it. After this year, no more bonfires … good-bye, Topanga … you know? You have to come.”

  I took a long chug of my water bottle. “We’ll see.”

  And then it happened. I suppose it was inevitable. Just a matter of time before Paul, Saskia, and myself all stood face-to-face. We were on the ground, she and I. And then all of a sudden there he was, hovering overhead.

  “Babe.”

  We both looked up. My whole body went rigid. I waited for him to say something shitty.

  “Hey!” she squealed, reaching up and grabbing his hands. “Sit!” She patted the grass. “You want fries?”

  Paul looked at me. “That’s okay. I’m gonna eat inside with Pete and Broder.”

  Saskia swallowed a big gulp of Coke and threw her hands in the air. “I’m sorry, so rude. Do you two even know each other?”

  “Not really,” Paul said, real quick, extending a hand for me to shake. “I mean, I know you, but I don’t know you.”

  I took his hand. It was limp.

  “Paul, Holly, Holly, Paul.”

  Paul nodded and squatted down next to Saskia. “I’m going,” he said. Then he pulled her forward, leading her by the chin with one hand into a kiss. It was a long kiss, fifteen seconds long—I swear it. At one point he totally opened his eyes and looked at me sideways, just to make sure I’d been watching. I had.

  “Really nice meeting you Holly.” Paul waved lamely and headed back toward the cafeteria. Saskia looked a little dazed. “What the F? That kiss? Totally for your benefit. He never kisses me like that anymore.” She leaned into me. “Hang out more often. Please.”

  I took a huge bite of cold fried egg.

  Chapter 32

  So I went to the bonfire. I wasn’t going to go but then Nils wanted to go. “Hols, it’ll be fun,” he’d said, giving me a similar pitch to the one Saskia had thrown at me earlier: Good-bye Topanga hello big world. Let’s go let’s go let’s go. So I let him talk me into it. I let him kiss me and promise me nice times. I told myself that Paul had been bluffing and drunk the week before, and that tonight would be just another party at the beach. Bonfires and beer. No big deal, I said to myself.

  So Nils drove. Nils barely ever drove, but that night he did. We took his dad’s truck and parked in the same parking lot that Paul and I had been to a few times, and right before we got out of the car, Nils kissed me. He slid across the seat of his dad’s pickup and pulled me into his lap. He touched my face with his hands and pressed his lips to my lips. He said, “I like it like this. You and I like this together.” My stomach went warm. Then we got out of the car. We followed a trail of smoke toward the party. A cluster of kids were huddled together in sweatshirts drinking who-knows-what out of sippy cups in front of the fire. I spotted Nora. Then Paul and Saskia, soon after that.

  “Drinks?” I asked Nils, squeezing his hand and heading off in search of beer.

  “Drinks.” He nodded. Following close behind.

  We grabbed two Tecate cans out of a small red cooler by the fire. We drank those, side by side, sitting in a chilly little spot in the sand. Nils made circles on my ankle under my jeans with his pinkie finger. We drank two more Tecates. We watched the others drink and talk and dance and kiss, then we drank another two beers and presto—chango ! Like magic, we were drunk.

  From this point on, things get kind of patchy. I drank a lot, Nils drank a lot, and I can’t remember much about the night other than how we all ended up in the end. Here’s what I do remember:

  Sometime around ten, a crying, drunken Nora pulled Nils away toward the ocean. They sat on a rock and I sat on another rock, alone, until Saskia came by with more beers. We drank those. We danced around the fire. I watched Paul watch me and periodically I would turn backward and watch Nils and Nora but I didn’t care much about anything. I wanted to dance. I danced and danced and sometime around midnight Nils came over and said, “I’m fucked, Nora’s driving me crazy. I’m gonna go sleep in the car.” And I said okay. And then I can’t remember how much time lapsed but suddenly Saskia was gone, most of the party was gone, and I’d been asleep on a towel for hours. Paul woke me up.

  “Time to go, Holly.”

  “Hmm?” I was half asleep still. I sat up, spinning.

  “I’m gonna drive you home, okay?”

  I let him take my hand. We stood up. “What about Nils?” I asked. “Where’s Nils?”

  “He left,” Paul said. And that was that.

  We ended up back at The Shack. I don’t know how. I don’t know if I told him to take me there or what. Maybe I thought I’d wait there for Nils. I don’t really know now. All I know is there we were, Paul and I, and it was dark and I was drunk, and I let him undress me. I let him take all my clothes off and kiss me and it’s not like I told him no or anything, I was into it. I remember that part. I remember undoing the buckle on his pants and I remember that he kept his shirt and his shoes on. I can’t tell you why I did what I did. All I know is hours later, when I woke up alone with my pants in a ball on the floor by the futon, I wanted to die. It was light out and I was halfway sober and I knew what I’d done and felt nothing but shame. I opened my mouth to cry but no sound came out and then I pulled my underwear back on and picked my jeans up off the ground. I got dressed and walked back to the house.

  Chapter 33

  In my dream, Mom was my age and wearing that gauzy cotton dress of hers I wore the first time I went hiking with Paul. Ballanoff was there too, dressed up in that stupid fuzzy cardigan he’s always wearing in the auditorium on really cold days. Mom was kissing Ballanoff, only I was the one feeling the kisses—soft and exhilarating and similar to how it felt kissing Nils in The Shack that one night. Mom had her arms wrapped around the back of Ballanoff’s head and his hands were gripping her waist. Jeff was there too, as were Nils and Paul and Mom’s old boyfriend Michael. They were all there, watching from the sidelines as if kissing were a spectator sport. Like tennis. Or golf.

  But then Mom was alone. No Ballanoff or Jeff. Mom was alone and all the love I’d felt between her and Ballanoff had vanished. Then the room changed shades. It went from dark to light, then from light to white, and Mom was suddenly see-through, drifting up and away, dissolving into the clean white walls, fading like a soft stain or an old photograph.

  Chapter 34

  I sat in front of the TV and tried to watch something about bowhead whales on the Discovery Channel but couldn’t focus. I just sat there watching the screen lights blink and tried to keep myself from crying. Harry hugged my ankles while I thought about Nils and Saskia and how I could never take back what I’d done. Then I heard a rattling at the front door and didn’t turn around because I figured it was Jeff, who’d been out in the yard all morning planting annuals.

  “You’re here. What happened to you last night?”

  It was Nils. My fingers went tingly. I twisted around so I could see him. He looked adorable. His hair was all mussed from sleep. Looking at him made my heart hurt. “Hey.” I stood up. “I’m here, yeah, I’m fine. Saskia drove me home,” I lied. “Someone said you’d left and I was so messed up, Nils, I couldn’t even walk straight… .”

  He moved toward me. “I woke up at, like, five thirty, in the backseat of the pickup and I was still at the beach. And I couldn’t find you and I flipped.” Now we were hugging. He’d buried his face in my neck and was kissing me. “You smell so clean,” he said, running a hand through my wet hair.

  “I just showered.”

  “You feel nice,” he said, rocking me from side to side. “I was so scared, I thought something really bad had happened.”

  I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. Tell him, I thought. Tell him tell him tell him what you’ve done. I wiped my eyes and pulled backward so we
were face-to-face.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, scrunching his brow.

  I opened my mouth to say it. I’m a horrible person, I thought. I don’t deserve you, I thought. And then my cell rang. Nils dropped his arms to his sides and I stepped forward to check the caller ID screen on my phone. It was Saskia. Saskia. I turned to Nils, and my face must have looked really weird because he said, “What’s wrong with you? Who’s calling?”

  I just stood there and thought, Saskia knows. Soon Nils will know too. Tell him, Holly, before he finds out some other way. But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to have him for as long as I could have him before he realized what a horrible person I was. “No one. I’m just so tired. Come sleep with me?” I took him by the hand and led him down the hall toward my room. “Let’s just get into bed and sleep for a while? I’m so tired,” I said.

  So that’s what we did. We kicked off our shoes and crawled into bed together and then we just slept. Side by side, Nils’s body curled around my body from behind.

  When I woke up around five, it was already almost dark out. Nils was gone. I checked my phone. Three new messages. I didn’t check my call log to see who they were from. Instead, I dropped my phone back on my bed and shuffled in my socks down the hall to the kitchen. There was a note from Jeff on the fridge that he’d gone to the store. Harry was with him. I sat back down on the couch and turned on the TV. I watched the last half of Agnes of God on Showtime, then grabbed my book off the coffee table and headed out back to The Shack to read.

  The lights were already on inside. I could see a thin line of soft yellow creeping out from beneath the old, tin door. I pressed my book to my chest and went inside. There was Nils, sitting on the futon with his head down. Clutching something little and plastic and blue.

  “Hi,” I said. “You left. Where’d you go?”

  He held the little plastic thing up high above his head. “I came out here, to read. This was on the bed.” It was a condom wrapper. A condom wrapper. I hadn’t even checked The Shack when I’d left that morning. Stupid stupid stupid, Holly. I looked down at Nils and plucked the little plastic wrapper from his fingertips. I felt like someone had socked me in the chest.

  “You wanna tell me what that’s about?” he said. He was still looking at the ground.

  “It’s … mine, I guess.” I sat down next to him. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. “Will you look at me, please? I have something to tell you.”

  “I don’t want to look at you.”

  My eyes blurred. This is it, I thought. Six years of friendship, wrecked in a blink. “I didn’t mean to do it. I can’t even remember half the night, Nils… .”

  He moved away from me. His head was still down.

  “Can you look at me? Please?”

  He shook his head. He said, “The thing is, it’s not that you were with someone else, even though that kills me. Because it’s not like we had a title. It’s not like we were committed or anything.” He laughed but it sounded so sad, his laugh. “The thing that makes it bad is that you brought him here. And this is our place. And you promised.”

  I wanted to die. He was right. What’s worse than a broken promise?

  “Who was it?” he asked, biting his thumb. “Not that it matters. But I’d kind of like to know. Is it that same guy you just ended stuff with?” He glanced over at me. I nodded.

  “So? Who is he? Do I know him?”

  I nodded again and bit the insides of my cheeks. “Paul Bennett,” I said, looking down at my lap.

  Nils exhaled. “You’re really something, Holly.”

  “I know,” I said, tears burning my cheeks.

  “Paul Bennett.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Paul Bennett? Holly, I hate that guy.”

  “I know.”

  “That guy’s a total asshole—”

  “He is.”

  “And he has a girlfriend.”

  “I know …”

  “She’s your friend , right? Ever since Stein’s class, you guys have been, like, madly in love, right?”

  “Sort of. Yes,” I said softly.

  His face was red. He looked at me and I made myself hold his gaze. “Where’s your heart ? How could you do that to someone you care about?”

  “I don’t know. I’m horrible. I told you, I’m awful, remember?” I clutched his arm. “But you promised you’d always be my friend. You swore it.”

  He looked at my hand on his arm. “Please, don’t touch me.”

  I let out a cry and pulled back. I dropped my head to my lap and shook. Tears soaking the knees of my jeans.

  Nils stood up. “I feel sorry for you.”

  I continued to cry.

  “Really, you’re just … pathetic,” he said, pushing past me.

  I heard the door swing shut and felt my heart split in two.

  Sunday night I finally checked my voice mail. Three messages from Saskia, each of them hang ups. One was from Paul: “Hi. She knows. For the record, it wasn’t me who told her. Sarah Wehle saw us leave together Friday night.” Click. Sarah Wehle , of course. I could never remember that girl’s last name.

  I thought about staying home Monday, but I figured eventually I’d have to go back and face everyone. I hadn’t spoken to Nils since Saturday night in The Shack. I hadn’t called Saskia or Paul back. So this was my shining debut. My big day back.

  I got up that morning and put on a clean shirt and a pair of jeans I hadn’t washed in three weeks. I put kibble in Harry’s bowl and scratched behind his ears like I did every morning before I left for school. I got in my car and didn’t turn on the radio. I drove and I drove and then I parked in my usual spot and just sat there, my car idle. I stared at the soccer field. It was seven forty. Time to face the execution squad.

  At first, everything seemed pretty status quo. Same kids, same corridor, just another miserable Monday morning, everyone sleepy-eyed and slurping out of enormous paper coffee cups. Then I spotted Paul dumping a pile of books into his locker. Then Saskia down at the end of the hall, surrounded by a group of blondes in peasant blouses with designer stitching on the butts of their jeans. They didn’t notice me at first, I skated past their group and nobody seemed to see me until I reached my locker. There, in pretty purple cursive, the word “whore” marked my door. Perfect penmanship. Someone had really taken the time to make that awful word look gorgeous.

  Here’s the weird thing. I didn’t feel anything. Not sad, not guilty really, I felt as if I were hovering outside my own body, watching the whole sorry scene unfold in slow-mo on prime-time TV. I can only liken the feeling to my mother’s memorial, where I felt like the lead character in a Lifetime movie about motherless daughters. I’d drifted down that auditorium aisle toward the life-size ugly poster board picture of Mom at the beach, and there was Jeff, at my side. Dozens of grief-washed faces watching us walk. Poor little girl, I heard them thinking, poor motherless Holly. Me, though, I hadn’t felt a thing. This was the same, only different. This was no pity party. Persecution party, maybe. Which sounds so dramatic, because really, I’m no victim. I’m the villain here.

  I undid the combo lock on my locker and unloaded the contents of my book bag, leaving only my World History text and a spiral notebook for next class. That’s when I heard a soft, raspy echoing. A singsongy chorus. “Holly Whore,” they sang, over and over. I spun the lock on my locker and started back down the hall toward class. I hummed a few bars from “Holly Holy” softly to myself, trying to drown out their voices. Then the chanting died down. I heard a couple of kids laugh. Someone threw something at my head. A balled-up piece of paper, maybe? It was light, I don’t know. I didn’t turn around to look.

  Saskia wasn’t in World History even though I’d seen her in the hallway that morning. I went through all four periods before lunch feeling perfectly, contentedly numb. Then, on my walk out to the back patio with my brown bag at lunch, Nils came careening around the side of the building. We collided, knocking heads. Then quickly, without
warning, I was weeping. Hysterical. My body folded over. I clutched my stomach, trying to catch my breath. Nils took me by the arm and led me around the bend to a private little grassy patch by the science wing.

  “Holly, stop it.” He held me at arm’s length by my shoulders. “Seriously, stop crying. You have to stop. You’re making a scene.”

  I stood up a little, nodded, and held my breath. “I was fine all morning,” I huffed. “I couldn’t feel a thing.”

  Nils sat down on the ground and pulled me down next to him. “I saw your locker.”

  I nodded.

  “Holly … why ?”

  I bit my lip. “I don’t know. I liked him. It sounds so stupid, but I actually thought he cared about me. And then I met her and I ended things. And he got so mad. And then stuff started happening with you, and I don’t know. I don’t know why I did what I did.” I looked at him. “I really don’t.”