Someone Else (2 page)

“I trust you too,” I told him. It was true. It wasn’t that I was worried about Michael cheating on me, or me on him, while he was away. If he wanted to cheat, he probably would have by now. He’d had plenty of opportunities. Girls liked him, and not just because he was hot. He was also nice and totally unpretentious. I worried a lot about girls. Other girls. College girls. Older, prettier, determined girls who refused to give up until they got what—or who—they wanted. They were bound to want him, and without solid, physical evidence of a girlfriend around, they would no doubt stop at nothing.

Oh yes, I trusted Michael. It was the girls I didn’t trust.

“We’d better go,” Michael said now. “I told my mom I’d be back in an hour and I still haven’t finished packing.”

There were several things I still wanted to say, but I held my tongue as we left our private sanctuary. Maybe over the phone would be a better way to discuss such things, when I wasn’t distracted by his body next to mine. And besides, all I wanted to do at the moment was go home and cry myself to sleep.

“I guess I’ll call you tomorrow, when I get in,” Michael said once he’d parked the car in my father’s driveway.

My throat suddenly felt very tight. “Okay.”

“And I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

I nodded, trying to smile. I could see how hard this was for Michael too. He wanted to leave home, but he didn’t want to leave me.

“I wanted to give you something before I left,” he said, reaching across me to the glove compartment. He dug out a small velvet box and handed it to me.

“A present? My birthday is three months away.”

“It’s not a birthday present.” He nudged my leg. “Open it.”

I eased it open. Inside was a ring, a beautiful, white-gold ring made up of two hearts, joined in an infinite loop. I sat there staring at it, too stunned to take it out. After a minute Michael did it for me, slipping it on the ring finger of my right hand. It fit perfectly. I wondered how he knew my size.

“I asked your father for your ring size,” he said before I could ask. He touched the daughter’s pride ring on my left hand, a gift from my parents two Christmases ago. “I knew he gave you this ring. He couldn’t remember your size, so he said he’d ask your mom and get back to me. But first he made me swear I wasn’t giving you an engagement ring.”

I laughed so I wouldn’t do what I really felt like doing right then, which was cry. Too late. My eyes started burning anyway. I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t snivel like some pathetic, clingy loser, but there was no stopping once I’d started. As the tears spilled over, Michael put his arms around me.

“I didn’t get a gift for you,” I said into his shoulder. I didn’t think what we had done when we first got to our private parking spot counted as a going-away present.

“Wear the ring until I get back. That can be my gift.”

“I will. I promise.”

And that was that. After another extended hug, I climbed out of the car and watched him drive away. When I could no longer see the headlights, I sat on the front porch for a while, on the same bench Michael and I had shared many times before, and thought about him. About us, and what lay ahead. And whether or not we could do this long-distance thing… if
I
could do it. I honestly didn’t know. It was still so early, he had only just left, and at this point I still had plenty of hope.

I sat on the bench until my eyes were sufficiently swollen and then trudged inside. My stepmother Lynn emerged from the living room as I passed by on my way upstairs.

“You okay, honey?” she asked gently.

I nodded and continued up to my room. I didn’t want sympathy right now. I didn’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone. I just wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and hibernate till spring.

Chapter 2

Four days later, I started my junior year.

As I pulled Stella into a narrow space in the jammed school parking lot, I couldn’t help but note the differences between this day and my first day of school last year. Then, Michael and I hadn’t even met yet, and I was dating my childhood friend, Brian, who’d ended up cheating on me with a little blonde named Kara Neilson. Rumor had it, they’d broken up over the summer. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a tiny spark of satisfaction when I heard that.

“Ready?” Ashley said from her spot in the passenger seat.

I let out a sigh and reached into the back seat for my bag. “As I’ll ever be.”

“It’s going to be a great year. Believe in the power of positive thinking.”

I glared at her, silently cursing myself for offering to drive her to school today. And every day, all year. I’d known Ashley since we were four, and sometimes I wondered if we had stayed friends all these years purely out of habit. Or it could be because she was a huge gossip and knew way too much about me.

“Did you hear about Mrs. Crane?” Ashley asked as we crossed the parking lot and headed for the main doors.

Mrs. Crane had been the school vice-principal for many years. “What about her?”

Ashley kept me in suspense until we reached the school entrance. “Her husband left her for a woman from New Zealand that he met on the Internet.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“We go to church with her cousin.”

I nodded my head as if to say
of course
.

“Anyway,” she said, “she’s not coming back this year. I heard she had a nervous breakdown and moved to Florida.”

“Let me guess, you heard that at church too.”

“No…” She paused for a moment to say hi to some girl she knew from band. “These two women were talking about it in line at Superstore the other day.”

“And you just happened to overhear them.”

“I was right behind them. I couldn’t help it.”

Before I had a chance to come back with a derisive remark, we ran into our friend Brooke Smithson near our classroom. Brooke was standing with Alex Singleton, the boyfriend she’d acquired over the summer break. Alex was a senior and Brooke’s male counterpart: tall, blond, and striking. Together they looked like a walking advertisement for Colgate.

“Hey, guys,” Brooke said, flashing her toothy smile as we approached them.

Alex greeted us with his own Crest-Whitestrips grin before kissing Brooke on the cheek and then taking off for his own class. When he was gone, engulfed in the crowd, Brooke’s pale cheeks flushed and she bit her lip shyly. I knew that look—and the feeling behind it too—very well. First love.

“Did you hear about Mrs. Crane?” Ashley asked her, but Brooke was still off in la-la land.

“Crayon? What?” She stood on her tiptoes, trying to catch one last glimpse of her man.

Ashley sighed. “I miss Erin. At least she cared about important current events.”

“You mean important current gossip,” I said. I missed Erin too, even if she did like to feed off Ashley’s inner catalog of scandals. Last spring her father had landed a new, better paying job, which unfortunately involved moving his entire family halfway across the country. We still emailed and IMed, but being here at school without her just wasn’t the same.

Ashley pulled a pack of gum out of her pocket and shook several pieces into her palm. She handed a couple to me, and then offered her palm to Brooke.

“Thanks,” Brooke said, still in a lovesick daze as she took a gum, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. The peppermint seemed to electroshock her back down to earth because suddenly she turned to me, her long-lashed eyes filled with pity. “Taylor, are you okay?” she asked, holding my hand gently as if I’d just been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.

“I’m fine,” I said with a slight edge to my voice. This recent outpouring of sympathy was starting to get on my nerves. Ever since Michael left, my friends and family had been treating me like a grieving widow. But I really was okay. I talked to Michael every night on the phone or computer, and he still loved me and missed me. He’d met some people there, even found some he knew from high school, so he wasn’t dying of loneliness. Neither was I, yet. I thought maybe I could do this long-distance thing, after all. Maybe everything would work out fine.

Or maybe I was just fooling myself.

The bell rang, and the three of us piled into our first class, chemistry. Back in the spring when I was picking classes for this year, I thought I’d try to get all my math and science-related credits out of the way early. Smart. If math didn’t kill me before January, chemistry surely would. And, as icing on the cake, the teacher looked like he preceded the invention of the wheel and smelled like my mother’s antique cedar chest. Ten minutes in, I knew this class would prove to be a thorn in my side. No, make that a two-by-four.

The morning passed quickly. We got our locker assignments, and Ashley and I agreed to share again this year. But unlike tenth grade, this year’s locker wasn’t in a prime location such as across from the cafeteria, or even next to a washroom. This year, we’d been relegated to a sectioned-off alcove in the farthest corner of the basement, an area of the school I had never seen or even knew existed. It housed twenty lockers that looked brand new (meaning no dents, dried gum, or graffiti). When I first walked into this dismal little nook, I got the feeling that I had stepped into a vortex from which I’d never escape.

“Is this even considered part of the school down here?” Ashley said while we were stashing our books before lunch.

“It’s like a dungeon.” I dropped my fifty-pound chemistry book into the bottom half of the locker.

“Yeah, a dungeon,” Ashley said, and from that moment on, that was how we referred to our locker cubby. The Dungeon. As in “Meet me in the Dungeon after class” or “Wait a sec, I just have to drop off my books in the Dungeon.” The nickname fit.

A familiar chicken-nugget-and-bad-pizza smell greeted us as we wandered into the school cafeteria. Behind the counter I could see Candy, everyone’s favorite lunch lady, hefting a large tin of mashed potatoes. The line-up was already curling around the vending machines.

“I’ll meet you over there,” Ashley said, gesturing across the room to our usual table, the same one we’d staked out in the middle of last year. Brooke and Alex were already there, staring longingly into each other’s eyes over trays of congealed pizza.

I got the least offensive thing on the menu, chicken soup, and made my way to the table, skillfully dodging people so as not to upset my tray.

“Taylor, how
are
you?” Bridget Ross asked as soon as my butt hit my chair. Bridget was Brooke’s friend and I didn’t know her well, but obviously she’d been caught up on the story of my life.

“She’s fine,” Ashley said, extracting a sandwich from her lunch bag.

I smiled. Out of everyone, Ashley was the only person who hadn’t made a fuss over my precarious mental state after Michael left. She just carried on like normal, and I loved her for it.

“You must be so lonely,” Bridget said, giving me the inoperable-brain-tumor look.

I shrugged and dove into my soup. I wasn’t lonely, really. I was quite used to not seeing Michael for days at a time, so I’d decided that would be my strategy for this year—take it one day at a time. I tried not to picture him as being hundreds of miles away at Avery instead of a mere twenty miles away at Redwood Hills High. Instead, I thought about later, and hearing his voice, and dreaming about him during my restless sleeps.

Brooke came to my rescue. “Drama’s gonna rock this year,” she said. “We’re doing
My Fair Lady
in the spring. It’s a musical.”

“Is it about you?” Alex asked, reaching up to tuck a strand of white-blond hair behind her ear.

Ashley glanced at me and made a disgusted face. I stifled a giggle. I only hoped that Michael and I hadn’t been that sickening when we first started dating.

“No, it’s about Eliza Doolittle,” Brooke said.

“Are you going to try for that role?” I asked, sending her a grateful smile.

“I wish. That part will probably go to a senior. Besides, I’m not a very good singer. I bet Morgan Radcliff will get it. She’s got an amazing voice.”

“You’re a great singer,” Alex said, loyal as a dog.

She just shook her head, as if she didn’t believe she was good enough, though everyone but Brooke knew this wasn’t true. In addition to being gorgeous and talented, she also oozed humility. If I didn’t know the real Brooke, the insecure one who suffered through body issues and messed-up parents like everyone else, I probably would’ve hated her.

After lunch I had French. No one I knew took French. I liked it, mostly because the French teacher was a senile old lady who called everyone by the wrong name, even several weeks into the semester. Last year, she was convinced my name was Tina no matter how many times I corrected her.

Now, as I ambled into the classroom a little early (this class happened to be in close proximity to the Dungeon), I could tell that Madame Bedeau hadn’t changed a bit over the summer. Same gray hair pulled back in a bun, same old stodgy housedress, same twisty mouth with orangey lipstick branching out of the edges of her lips.

“Mademoiselle Tina,” she said, nodding at me. Same bad memory…

Madame Bedeau started by explaining to us, in French, what we could expect this semester. I only caught about one-third of it, and most of the people around me looked just as clueless. It wasn’t as if we had practiced our
vocabulaire
over summer break.

About ten minutes into class, the door opened and a girl entered the room. She had the shiniest hair I’d ever seen and wore lots of eye makeup. Everyone turned to look at her, and the teacher stopped mid-sentence to study her as well. The girl, who I suddenly recognized from my chemistry class that morning, didn’t appear to notice all the staring, nor did she seem to care that she had interrupted the lecture. She glanced around the room in search of an empty seat and chose the one next to me. I slid my chair over a couple of inches to make more room for her, and she sat down without acknowledging me.

“
Quel est votre nom, la Mlle?
” Madame Bedeau asked. She hated tardiness.

“Jessica Foley,” said the girl, her tone one of utter boredom.