Someone Else (22 page)

He was being so sweet, so comforting. I knew this was part of the post-fight honeymoon period, but in my vulnerable state it felt like it might go on forever. I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his sweatshirt. The fabric-softener scent of it reminded me that I’d never returned his black hoodie, the one my mother had found in my room. It was still there, buried under a bunch of junk in my closet. It probably didn’t even smell like him anymore.

We stood there hugging until a teacher walked by, spotted us, and yelled at us to break it up and go home before he had us both suspended. It kind of ruined the mood.

Since I was still grounded and had to go straight home, alone, to wait for my mother’s check-in call, I dropped Dylan off at his house. Before getting out of the car, he leaned over, kissed me, and said, “I feel like I can finally relax.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled. “The fact that you’re still with me after everything that’s happened means you’re not going anywhere.”

I thought about that the whole way home.

****

Two days later, I was still replaying Dylan’s words in my head. Only now they had taken on a new weight.

I didn’t hate my cell phone anymore, but apparently it still had it in for me. I realized this on Wednesday night after work when I climbed into my car, snatched up my phone, and brought up a text message I had viewed at least twenty times in the past twenty-four hours. I knew every word, every letter, every curve of every letter, and for the life of me I could not bring myself to delete it.

Stupid cell phone, tempting me with its cheerful “reply” button.

I studied the text again, deliberating, contemplating, trying to decipher a hidden meaning in one short, to-the-point question. Like always, each word was typed carefully, capital letter at the start, punctuation at the end, free of the shorthand text-speak most people used.

Can we talk?

Such a simple question. Or it would have been, had it been posed by anyone other than Michael.

It had arrived in my inbox the night before as I was working on an English paper in my room. When I first saw it, I thought I was hallucinating. How many times had I dreamt of receiving a message exactly like this one, from exactly this person, in the past four months? Now here it was, and I was totally freaking out. So I did the only thing I had the wits to do at that moment—I ignored it, told no one, and hoped it would disappear overnight, like a pimple.

But it was still there in the morning, taunting me, making sure I didn’t hear a damn word that was said in school all day. Or at work tonight, for that matter. Which was why four customers got regular Coke instead of diet.

Can we talk?

We
can
, I thought, trying to push back the painful twinges that rocked my stomach every time I read that text, but I don’t think we
should
. Why on earth did he pick last night to contact me? And what did he
want
?

Desperate for guidance, I called Robin’s cell.

“Brody?”

“Um, no. Taylor.”

“Oh. Hey, Tay. What’s up?”

She sounded half-baked. At nine-thirty on a school night. “Who’s Brody?”

“No one. Just some guy. So what’s up? Where are you?”

“In my car outside of Moretti’s. Listen, I want to get your opinion on something.” I hesitated, not completely sure I wanted to share this information with a girl who had obviously been drowning her sorrows. Since finding out about her mother’s pregnancy, she’d been in total self-destruct mode. Still, I was frantic. “I got a text last night from Michael.”

“No shit? What did it say?”

I told her. “What should I do?”

“You mean you didn’t text him back or call him or anything?”

“No. I can’t. I mean, it wouldn’t be…right.” I thought about Dylan and how nice he’d been this week.

“Tay, he might just want his stuff back or something. You won’t know unless you talk to him. Look, you want me to text him and see what gives?”

“Will you?”

“Call you back.”

I waited there for five minutes, and then started driving home. My hands were so sweaty it was a miracle they stayed on the wheel. I had to wipe them on my pants before making turns. What was taking her so long?

Robin didn’t get back to me until after ten, at which time I was in the middle of an acute nervous breakdown.

“I talked to him,” she said, her words slurring together even more than before. What was she doing, pounding shots between calls?

“And?”

“He said, and I quote, ‘I want to talk to her about something but I understand if she doesn’t want to talk to me.’ End quote. When I asked him what he wanted to talk to you about, he told me to stop being so nosy.” She laughed. “God, Taylor, don’t you miss him? I do. I miss you guys together.”

The ache in my chest told me I missed him too. Missed us together.

“I guess I’ll call him then,” I said, sounding like I’d just agreed to dig hairballs out of the bathtub drain.

“Good,” Robin said. “And don’t worry about…uh…”

“Dylan?”

“Right. Dylan. Don’t worry. He doesn’t need to know.”

“I don’t plan on doing anything wrong,” I said, which was bullshit. Calling ex-boyfriends was an unjustifiable offense in Dylan’s eyes. Contacting Michael
was
wrong—just like driving by his house that time had been wrong—because Dylan would be upset if he knew I did it, and enraged if he knew I did it
and
covered it up. Especially now, when he was finally starting to feel comfortable.

It took me another thirty minutes to work up the nerve to call Michael. He picked up on the first ring. “Hey.”

I was caught off guard by how fast he’d answered and then again by the sound of his voice after all these months. He sounded…exactly the same. I cleared my throat, hoping my own voice would come out normal.

“Hi,” I said. Not bad. Casual, with only a slight trace of hysteria.

“Thanks for calling me back.” In the background I could hear voices, laughter, as if he had just walked into a party or a bar. The sounds got louder and then started to die off as he apparently moved to somewhere quieter. When I heard the thump of a door being shut, I realized he’d been walking through the dorm to his room. Now, in the sudden quiet, he said, “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. God, this was awkward. I was perched on the end of the bed, shoulders stiff, body leaning forward like I was about to launch into the ceiling. My neck ached from stress and anticipation.

“I guess you’re wondering why I called you.”

I didn’t answer because it was obvious, and because I’d just noticed that he did sound a little different. Subdued. I still knew him well enough to decode his various tones, and the one he was using now told me he hadn’t called last night to play catch up.

“Josh is missing,” he said.

I sat up straight, feeling my vertebrae pop. “Missing?”

“Yeah, since Saturday. He’s gone missing before but never for this long. My mom is freaking out. She’s called everyone he knows and every place he’s ever gone, and nothing.”

“Did she call the police?”

“My dad did it last night. That’s why I called you…so you’d hear it from me instead of seeing it in the paper or on the news.” His voice broke a little, and I could tell it killed him to think about his brother’s picture on the evening news.

“Where do you think he is?” I asked. I didn’t want to say what
I
thought, that there were so many ways for an addict to get hurt or disappear or worse. But of course he already knew that.

“Who knows?” Anger sneaked into his voice. “He could be staying away on purpose to punish us for something. He could be passed out in a ditch somewhere, drunk or beat up or dead. You never know with him. He’s got more lives than a cat.”

I thought of all the car accidents and overdoses and bouts of alcohol poisoning he’d survived over the years. Still, even a cat’s luck had to expire at some point.

“So that’s the news,” Michael said with a tired sigh. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thanks for telling me. And if there’s anything I can do, for your mom or whatever, feel free to call me. Okay?”

“Thanks. I really…” He paused, as if reorganizing his next words. “I really appreciate it. I can keep you updated too, if you want. Or is that a bad idea?”

“No,” I said, too quickly. “Please keep me updated. Of course.” Perfectly acceptable, I told myself. Just because we broke up didn’t mean I had to stop caring about his family. Or him.

After our phone call I tried to study, but gave up when I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, absorbing nothing. Instead I went to bed, where I lay staring, unblinking, at my alarm clock. My brain was stuck on the first time I met Josh, the night of Michael’s parents’ Christmas party, when the three of us sneaked away to play pool. Parts of that night jumped out at me—Josh’s whiskey breath. The warmth of his big hand over mine on the pool cue. Michael’s disappointed face when we dropped Josh off at Kelsey’s afterward. And then the conversation in the driveway, the one that marked the beginning of the end for Michael and me, and the beginning of everything else with Dylan.

Dylan
. I grabbed my phone off the night stand and texted him a quick good night, my fingers fumbling over the keys in the dark. He was still in his Good Dylan phase, so he wouldn’t be calling me again tonight. I lay back on the pillows, my blood buzzing in my veins, and figured it was just as well.

Chapter 20

“Come on. Just for an hour.”

“We can’t.”

“A half hour?”

An irritated prickle danced up the back of my neck. Dylan had been bugging me for days about going to my house after school. We hadn’t been there in two weeks, since the day Mom busted me. He couldn’t get it into his head that my mother wasn’t some pushover who turned a blind eye on rule-bending.

“Dylan, we can’t,” I repeated, crouching down in front of my locker to hunt for the book we’d been assigned for English class. It seemed to have disappeared overnight. My section of the locker was such a mess. Not that Ashley complained about it anymore, seeing as our relationship had been reduced to chilly, monosyllabic conversations whenever we were in forced proximity of each other. She didn’t call me anymore, stopped asking for drives to school. We may as well have been strangers.

“She’ll never know,” Dylan said. He was unrelenting, like a spoiled child who wouldn’t take no for an answer. “We did it for weeks without her knowing, remember?”

I stood up, giving up on my book search. I must have left it at home, or in the car. “She wasn’t looking for it then. She is now. If we go there, she’ll know.”

He looked away, his expression hardening. I felt another prickle, this one a warning. “Since when are you the perfect daughter? This is the only time we have to be alone and if you really wanted to be with me, you wouldn’t think twice about breaking a few rules.”

I took a deep breath, feeling my back molars scrape against each other. Three Cs, I reminded myself. Calm, cool, and composed. A few people still remained in the Dungeon and I wasn’t in the mood for giving them a free show.

“I do want to be with you,” I said, which wasn’t exactly the truth, especially not at this precise moment, when his mere presence made me want to slam my head against a locker. “But my mother would ground me until graduation if we got caught. Is that what you want?”

He slid his hand across my waist, exactly the wrong thing for him to do to me right then. “You know what I want.”

I jerked away from him. “Dylan, you’re not listening to me.”

His hand dropped and he stared at me, a flush creeping up his cheeks. He’d been regressing back to his old ways for the past couple of days, and now, as his eyes flashed angrily, I knew we were headed back to square one. And we
both
knew what that meant. I’d made it quite clear after the puking episode.

“What is your problem?” He leaned into me, close enough to invade my personal space “You’ve been acting weird all week.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. It’s like you’re somewhere else when I talk to you. You’re distant and distracted. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were about to break up with me.”

My math book tumbled to the floor. I leaned over to retrieve it, my face burning. “That’s silly.” I concentrated on my book, smoothing out the crumpled pages.

“Really?” He took the book from me, clapped it shut, and dropped it back into my locker. “Then let’s go to your house so you can prove to me how silly it is.”

That was when the three Cs decided to take a much-needed vacation. “Don’t you get it? I don’t
want
to go to my house with you. How many ways do I have to say it before it finally sinks in?”

I could feel curious eyes on us now, taking in Dylan’s face as it went from pink to pinker to a scary, furious red.

“You don’t have to be such a fucking bitch about it,” he said, his voice bouncing off the walls of the Dungeon. He moved toward me, his shoulder bumping mine as he passed, causing my backpack to jar loose and slide down my arm. He didn’t seem to notice that—or the three girls watching a few feet away—as he stormed off, taking whatever redeeming qualities I’d once thought he had along with him.

“You all right?” one of the girls asked after he was gone. I was still standing there by my locker, backpack dangling from my hand.

“Yeah,” I said, jolted into motion. I moved in a daze, returning my backpack to my shoulder, locking my locker, giving the gawkers a strained smile, as if my boyfriend physically intimidated me and called me nasty names all the time. No big deal. “I’m fine.”

And I
was
fine until I got in my car and noticed my hand was shaking too much to hold my keys still. It took me three tries to get the right key into the ignition, something I usually did subconsciously. With the car finally started, I tipped my head back onto the headrest, closed my eyes, and focusing on breathing until my heart returned to its normal rhythm. Then and only then did I reach for my cell phone and power it up, eager to catch a glimpse of the one thing I’d been waiting all day to see. The real reason I preferred to be alone after school these days.