Nothing Like You Page 13

  Nils stuck his thumbnail in his mouth and bit down. “Just … why’d you have to go and wreck everything?”

  I shrugged. “This is, like, my worst nightmare. You know that, right? The whole world could hate me, I wouldn’t care … but you? I can’t handle you hating me, Nils.”

  He looked down at the ground and pulled at a patch of grass. “Did it mean anything to you? The other night? With me, in The Shack?”

  I leaned forward and grabbed his hand. “It meant everything to me.”

  He snapped his hand back and stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry about your locker, Holly. I feel bad for you, I do. But I can’t see you for a while, okay?”

  I nodded, my chest tightening.

  “You should talk to Saskia,” he said, readjusting his backpack. “You should tell her you’re sorry.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t even look at her. I can’t even be in the same room as her.”

  “I saw her on the lawn by the auditorium before I saw you. She’s alone down there, Holly. You should go.”

  So I went. I went because Nils told me to go.

  She was lying on her back in the grass in the sun. I was about to ruin everything.

  “Hi,” I croaked. I was standing over her now.

  She blinked her eyes at me. She said, “I called you three times this weekend.” I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Hysterics? A beating? I’m not sure what. I just didn’t expect her to seem so cool and together.

  “I know.”

  She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at me. “Are you going to sit down or no?”

  I dropped down on my knees next to her. She looked at me and I looked down at the ground. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? For what?”

  “For …” I took a breath. She was going to make me say it.

  “What’s wrong, Holly? What’re you sorry for?” She was staring into me. Her expression was blank.

  I looked to my right, at a cluster of her friends watching us from the patio. “I’m so sorry … for what happened between Paul and me.”

  “Right.” She shrugged. “So, like, what specifically happened that you’re so sorry for?”

  My stomach lurched. I deserved this. I did what I did. I should be able to say it out loud to Saskia’s face. “For being with him,” I whispered, closing my eyes.

  “Could you look at me, please?”

  My eyes fluttered open. I looked at her.

  “So … you’re sorry for screwing my boyfriend? That’s what you’re saying?”

  I thought I might hurl. I nodded.

  She got up on her knees and picked up her book bag. “Well, I don’t accept your apology.”

  I felt the familiar sting of tears, then watched as she walked across the lawn and back toward her friends. One of them flipped me off.

  Paul was waiting for me outside by my car after school. He was leaning against my driver side door, smoking a cigarette.

  I scowled. “Move, please? I wanna go home.”

  “Exhausting day, huh?”

  I mashed my lips together and stared at him. He was still leaning against my car door. “Move. Please.”

  He took a drag and slowly stepped away. I stuck my key in the lock.

  “For the record,” he said, “I wasn’t planning on telling her. I mean, had she not asked …”

  I turned around to face him. “You said—I mean you basically told me flat out last week you were gonna tell her if I didn’t keep having sex with you.”

  “I was drunk. I didn’t mean it.” He softened a little. “She asked me what was going on. I couldn’t lie.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sure, you could’ve. You’ve been doing it all year long.”

  “Well, look at it this way: It’s all out there now. No guilt.” He touched my waist. “Nothing to feel bad about anymore …”

  “You wrecked my life.”

  He grimaced. “You wrecked your life. I didn’t hold a gun to your head. I didn’t make you do anything.”

  “You took advantage.”

  “Take. Responsibility. Holly.” He leaned into me. “I didn’t. Have sex. With myself.” His arms were resting against the hood of the car, locking me in on both sides of my body. I heard the door handle pop. He pulled open my car door, bumping my butt forward. I jumped.

  “How’re things between you and your little boyfriend? By the way.”

  I threw my book bag across the seat and got into my car. I kept one foot on the pavement. “You feel good about yourself when you go to sleep at night?”

  Paul shrugged.

  “Yeah. Me neither.” I slammed my car door shut.

  Chapter 35

  Nils had gone to Hawaii with his family for the holidays. I spent my break watching the wall. Hiking with Harry. Watching TV. Doing macramé.

  Sometime around day nine I was sprawled out on the carpet of my bedroom floor, listening to Mom’s Neil Diamond CDs, searching for something to occupy my mind, when I saw something white-ish and square underneath the bed. I pinched it between my fingertips. It was Frank Gellar’s card.

  I have nothing, I thought. No friends. No mom. I have this, though. I grabbed my cell out of my bag and dialed.

  He picked up. “Hello?”

  “Is this Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Holly Hirsh.”

  “I remember you. You’re the girl who cancelled on me. Twice.”

  I winced. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me. You’re finally ready to reschedule.”

  “I promise to show up.”

  “It’s ninety for the half hour. You don’t give me a twenty-four-hour head’s up before canceling this time, I have to charge you, anyway.”

  “I understand. And I won’t cancel this time. I swear it.”

  Frank Gellar’s place was small and brown. Lots of dark wood, lots of furniture. The tabletops were cluttered with trinkets and crystals and the shelves were stacked with books on spiritual this and metaphysical that. I waited in the living room while he puttered around his office, arranging things. “Holly, you want to tape the session?” He held up an ancient recorder. “Okay.” I nodded, standing up.

  “Come on in,” he said, waving me forward with both hands.

  I took a seat on the dingy cream-colored couch in the corner. Frank sat down in an overstuffed green chair a few feet away. He was a big man, middle-aged, with a white beard and a bland, friendly face. He looked a lot like how I thought god might look to a kid. Minus the ponytail and the green khaki shorts.

  “So, I’m just going to ask you to take a few deep breaths.” He pushed the red button on the tape recorder.

  I nodded and inhaled a couple of times in a row.

  “Don’t forget to exhale. Breathe.”

  I giggled nervously. I tried again. Inhale, exhale.

  “Good.” He closed his eyes and took a raspy, loud breath. Then he didn’t do anything for a little bit. He just breathed with his eyes shut. I watched him, halfway expecting he’d start talking in tongues, but after a minute or so he just looked at me and said, “Yes and no answers only, okay?

  I nodded.

  “Keep yourself open. You may have someone specific you’re hoping to hear from, but someone else might come through with a message instead.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Wait, though. Wait?”

  He looked up.

  “I don’t want to be told anything bad. Like, when I’m going to die or anything. Can you not tell me that kind of stuff?”

  “This isn’t that sort of reading. I promise. Nothing bad, okay?”

  I relaxed a little.

  Frank took a few more breaths, then started with, “I’m getting the letter A.” He said it sounded like an A , like the name Anne or Annie and did that make sense to me? And yes, it made sense. Mom’s mom’s name was Anna, and she’d died the year before Mom from a stroke in the tub.

  “The A name has
a male K with her. A contemporary. Meaning a brother or a husband or a friend.” Quite possible, since my grandmother had eight siblings, but I’d only known one: Auntie Jean, who’d died when I was eight from a massive coronary. She’d been alone at the time. My grandmother had found her on the floor clutching a rolling pin.

  I didn’t know any Ks, though.

  “There’s a cancer death,” he said next. My heart sped up. I leaned forward, put my hands on my thighs, and said, “That’s right, yeah, cancer.” And then he said Mom’s name. Well, not her name, exactly. At first he just said, “Bear.”

  “That’s close,” I whispered. And he went on to say it two or three different ways as if he’d heard it wrong the first time. Then, finally, after a few deep breaths—a few eye blinks and cracked knuckles—he said Barrett. Mom’s name. Barrett. I got teary and hot. Which is so embarrassing, crying in front of a complete stranger—a middle-aged man with a beard, no less—but that’s the way it happened, so hey.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a tissue. Then, “Look, she’s telling me to bring up the dog.”

  Harry. Harry. I grabbed another tissue from the Kleenex box and pressed it to the corner of one eye. Frank looked at me blankly and took another breath. This was the last thing he said: “You are very loved.” He raised a glass of water to his skinny lips, hidden beneath acres of scruffy beard. “You need to work harder at loving yourself.”

  Chapter 36

  Amazing, what you can grow used to.

  “You can’t eat that in here, you know that, right?”

  February, and I’d finally acclimated to all the shittiness at school. At long last I’d worked out the perfect system for keeping myself invisible: open blocks on the back patio, lunches in the library stacks, reading cheesy mystery novels.

  “Eat what?” I asked, my mouth full, shoving my sandwich behind my back, covering my face with the paperback I’d been reading.

  “Come on, Holly. No food allowed. You know that.” Ms. McGovern was standing over me, clicking a pencil against her top two teeth. “Take that out to the cafeteria.”

  “No, look, I’m done,” I said, swallowing, then rewrapping my sandwich and shoving it back in my bag. “No more eating, I swear. Just reading.” I flashed a smile and waved my book around overhead. McGovern tugged on the waistband of her rayon slacks, then backed away, leaving me to my books and solitude. I made sure she’d returned to her station at the circulation desk before getting up and moving farther back, to another spot by the computer lab that seemed much more secluded.

  I dumped my things in a pile by the printer and relaxed back against the leg of one of the vacant desks. I opened my book back up. I took my sandwich back out of my bag.

  Kneeling in the hallway, fishing through my bag for a tube of lipstick or a pen or maybe my new book, I spotted Saskia. She was just a few yards off, leaning against her locker, talking to Sarah Wehle, who was doing some sort of animated song and dance, trying to elicit a happy reaction from Saskia, who just looked so sad, standing there, chewing her sandy blond hair. We hadn’t spoken since December. I felt a sick pang in my gut, then sprang to my feet, rushing forward. I was going to make a move. I was going to say something. I can undo this, I thought. I can make everything better.

  But as I got more near, Sarah’s eyes were suddenly on me, narrowing. Soon after, Saskia and I were locked in a stare-off. I froze, midstep, watching them watch me. My impulse to say something, to make some big overture or gesture, instantly faded. I turned a quick pivot, then walked swiftly in the opposite direction. What could I possibly say now, anyways? Everything had already been said.

  Nils was ten yards away, approaching fast.

  “You look good,” I said. These, the first words we’d exchanged since he’d gotten back from his trip, in early January.

  “Thanks,” he whispered, smiling tightly, passing me quickly in the hallway on his walk to the auditorium.

  He was taking a class with Ballanoff this quarter. I’d done some investigative work and discovered this. I loved the idea of Nils doing those weirdo acting warm-ups alongside Ballanoff. Somehow, it kept me feeling connected to him, still.

  And he did look good. His hair looked longer, like he hadn’t bothered with a cut in the last month or two. Maybe the new girlfriend likes it long, I thought. New girlfriend. Barf. Eleanor Bishop. Hurl.

  They’d been inseparable since January. Typical Nils. Barely a breath between women. But she was smart, Eleanor, nothing like Nora. She wore understated clothes and cared about important things like stray dogs and global warming. I hated her. I hated her small, boyish body and her square black glasses. I hated watching Nils hold her hand in the hall. Sometime, somewhere, I’d heard someone say she was saving herself —for what, I’m not sure. But she had principles, was the point. She had virtue. Two things I’d had once but had lost along the way.

  “Okay, well … see you!” I cried insanely, calling after him. He turned awkwardly and nodded a quick “Sure thing” before pushing past the big double doors to the auditorium.

  Nora asked me for rides home, still. Once she’d heard that Nils’s and my friendship had completely dissolved, she felt bad for me, I think.

  “Have you guys talked at all?” she asked.

  We were in my car after school driving home. Nora was wearing her favorite oversize sweatshirt and a pair of lowwaisted pale jeans.

  “Not really. No.” She looked so sympathetic. I loathed thinking Nora and I might be feeling something similar. Two peas, same pod, that sort of thing. “What about you?” I asked.

  “Same thing.” But it wasn’t the same. Nils’s and Nora’s short-lived romance could never compare to the six years I’d spent with him. Not ever.

  I smiled and turned up her driveway. “Here you go. Door to door.” I pulled the car to a stop.

  “You wanna come in?” she asked, unbuckling her seat belt and turning to face me.

  I appreciated the invite. I did. She was the one person at school who was still making an effort, and that meant loads to me. Still … “Not today. I have to take Harry out for a run. Thanks, though.”

  “Okay,” she said, stepping out onto the gravel. “It gets easier, you know.” She was bending down now, watching me through the open window on the passenger side door.

  “Time heals, right?”

  She gave a firm nod. “Exactly. All wounds.”

  Chapter 37

  One Saturday morning in early March, I wandered out of my room half asleep and stopped when I heard something coming from inside Jeff and Mom’s bedroom. I cracked the door and poked my head inside. Jeff had two huge cardboard boxes on the bed and was weeding through Mom’s closet.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Hols, honey, hi. Come in here, will you? Do you want any of this stuff?”

  “What is this?”

  “Anything you want, take. The rest of it I think we should just drop off at Goodwill.”

  I walked forward and sat down on the bed, next to a pile of Mom’s dresses. I rubbed some silky material between my fingertips. “You’re really getting rid of her stuff?”

  Jeff sat back, pushing a chunk of hair off his forehead. “She’s not coming back, Hols, you know? What am I going to do with nine hundred dresses and a billion different face creams? Especially with you leaving? I can’t hold on to this stuff forever.”

  “No, I know.” I looked down at the silky cream-colored dress I was running back and forth between my fingers. “I want this one, though, okay?”

  Jeff nodded. “Of course. Whatever you want.”

  “Her perfume, too. And just, don’t get rid of any of her really old stuff until I get a chance to go through it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Jeff squeezed my shoulder. Then he turned back toward Mom’s closet and pulled out this black puffy number made from velvet and crinoline. The black-tie bar mitzvah dress. Big hit at weddings, too.

  “I hated that thing.” I sniffed, grabbing the dress by its stiff skirt, walkin
g it over to the full-length mirror and holding it up to my body. “Can I keep it?”

  Jeff stood up. “You do this: Whatever you don’t want, we’ll get rid of.” He kissed the top of my head and walked out into the hallway. “I’ll make the eggs,” he said.