Someone Else (4 page)

“Tay,” Robin said outside as we climbed into my car. “You’re never going to get through this year if you don’t get out and have some fun once in a while. You think Michael’s staying in every night?”

I ignored that and started the engine. She was watching me, about to say something else, when her cell phone rang. Looking away, she reached into her purse and brought out her phone. “Hey, girl,” she chirped. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward Redwood Hills as she chattered away. “Yeah, I’m on my way now…I know…Totally…Okay, see ya soon.”

“What street?” I asked after she’d hung up her phone and returned it to her purse.

“Meadow Lane. Turn left at the stop sign, then keep going straight.” She turned to me again. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? A few drinks might do you some good. You can crash at Izzie’s, no problem. I always do. Her parents don’t care.”

“I’m sure.” I swerved onto Meadow Lane. Michael’s house was only a few streets away. Just being in his neighborhood made my chest ache. “What number?”

“One-oh-eight. There it is, the brick one with the red doors.”

I glanced out the window at the party house, which was a typical mini-mansion. Even from a few yards away, I could hear laughter and voices coming from the inside. Dark shadows floated across the well-lit windows, and cars spilled from the double driveway onto the street.

“Last chance,” Robin said, pausing with her hand on the door handle.

I shook my head, and she leaned over to give me a quick hug before climbing out of the car. “Have fun,” I said.

“You too.” She winked at me, shut the door, and glided toward the house, her Catwoman boots clicking along the pavement. The second she was out of sight, I gunned it out of there and headed for home.

Natalie—my sister and stepbrother’s regular babysitter—was there when I arrived. I paid her with the money Dad kept on the hutch in the dining room—the full amount, even though she’d only been here for a couple of hours. After she left, I corralled the kids and sent them upstairs to brush their teeth. They balked, as usual, but as keyed up as I was I knew I could outlast them this time. My energy level at the moment easily exceeded that of two eleven-year-olds.

When all was quiet in their rooms, I changed into my pajamas, washed my face, and made my way into my father’s study. I sat down in the plush leather desk chair and flicked on the lamp. Dad’s desk, as usual, was a disaster area. Empty coffee cups, uncorrected papers, and several stacks of Post-it notes were strewn about. The computer was already on, its friendly floating fishies screen saver brightening up the otherwise gloomy room. I jiggled the mouse a little to get rid of the fish and then double-clicked the instant messenger icon. Dad knew I used his computer for email and IMing, but he didn’t quite understand how it all worked. The only time he ever used the computer was to check and send email, and I had to help him with that half the time. So I had no worries about him checking up on my online activities. Not that he would think to do that, even if his computer knowledge did go beyond turning the machine on and off. He trusted me, sometimes too much, according to Mom.

It wasn’t like I did anything
bad
on the computer. But there were certain things in my IM history—such as some, uh, rather graphic conversations with Michael—and I would have died if anyone else happened to read them.

Speaking of Michael, he wasn’t online tonight. No shock there. I wondered where he was and what he was doing. Before my brain could conjure up any distressing images, a cheerful
bing
told me I had a message. I smiled at the screen. Erin. I hadn’t spoken to her in over a week.

“Hey you, what are you doing home? Not out partying tonite?”

I typed in a quick response. “I could ask you the same.”

“Got me there. So what’s new?”

“Nothing. You?

“Not a freaking thing. What’s been going down at OH?”

OH was our—well, my—high school—Oakfield High. “The usual,” I typed. Then sent a second message right after: “Not the same without you, as you know.”

She made a frowning smilie, followed by: “I miss you guys so much. My new school is full of snobs and the drama department sucks ass.”

I told her about Brooke and
My Fair Lady
, and how Alex had convinced her to take voice lessons to help build her confidence enough to try out for the lead role.

“She’ll get it,” Erin said. “There are no actresses like Brooke at my shitty school. They’re all so fake…polished. Like pageant queens.”

“Sounds like you’d fit right in.”

A raised-eyebrow smilie appeared on the screen. “Yeah, right. I’m a regular Miss Universe around here. They’ll nominate me prom queen, I’m sure.”

I typed in the code for a grinning smilie. Talking to Erin had cheered me up already.

“How’s it going with the long-distance thing?” she wrote.

“Fine,” I tapped out. The cursor hovered indecisively over the send button for a moment, and then I hit the backspace key a few times, erasing the word. Taking a deep breath, I tried again. “Hard. Not sure if I can make it though the year.”

Another frowny face. “You need to talk?”

There wasn’t a smilie in existence that could have expressed the gratitude I felt toward her right then. “Yeah,” I answered back. Then the flood gates popped open and I started typing. Erin responded in the exact way that I needed: she read everything, commented little, and let me get it all out. She didn’t tell me to go out and have fun. She didn’t treat me like a mourning widower. She just listened.

Afterward I felt about fifty pounds lighter, and I told her so.

“Anytime,” she typed, and then she had to sign off for the night. I could hear Leo, our golden retriever, whimpering in the kitchen, so I decided to shut down too.

I let Leo out to pee and then headed for my bedroom, counting each creak my footsteps produced as I climbed up the weathered hardwood stairs. Lynn had grown up in this old house, and then inherited it after her parents died. When my father moved in they’d started renovating, adding a huge master bedroom with an en suite and Dad’s study. And they weren’t done yet. In July they’d decided to finish the basement and put in an extra bedroom, another bathroom, and a games room. My father had visions of pool tables, home theater systems, and wine cellars. Lynn was just happy he’d moved on from the idea of a hot tub in the backyard.

Contractors had been tramping in and out of the house since early summer, but not much had been accomplished so far. Mostly a lot of banging, measuring, and dust. Still, we all had faith that the house makeover would be fully completed by Christmas. I had grown to realize that some things—even strong, solid things—had the ability to change drastically in a very short period of time.

Chapter 4

Jessica Foley and I had become friends.

It all started during the second week of school. We were sitting at our table in French class, waiting for Madame Bedeau to get there, and I’d finally gathered enough nerve to ask her the question I had been wondering since the first day of class: “Why fish?”

She had looked down at her notebook, which was adorned end to end with fish doodles. Dozens of them. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, long ones, ones with big, bulging eyes, ones with string-like fins...

“I like them,” she’d said shortly.

“Oh.” She wasn’t as friendly and easy to get to know as I’d once hoped. In fact, she’d barely spoken three words to me since she’d sat next to me that first day, aside from some perfunctory “Hi”s and the occasional “Can I borrow a pen?”

Then, she spoke again. “Have you ever gone to the pet store and stood in the aisle with all the aquariums?”

“Sure.”

She looked at me, and her heavily-lined eyes seemed almost dreamy. “I can’t think of anything more relaxing. The sound of the bubbles, the light reflecting off the water, the silent little fish swimming around with nowhere to go…and the colors. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

I tapped my pen on the desk, a little wary now. “I’ve never really thought about it before,” I said. I mean, fish were fish. They swam, they died, they got flushed down the toilet.

“I have a fish tank in my room,” she told me, sliding her long nail over one of her drawings, a round fish with stripes. “A twenty-gallon. I want a bigger one so I can get more fish, but tanks and filters and stuff are so expensive.”

“What kinds of fish do you have?”

“Just danios and tetras right now. I’ve considered adding some gourami but they tend to be aggressive.”

I pretended to sift through my French workbook. “Um…I have a dog.”

“You think fish are boring, right? Because you can’t pet them and take them for walks?”

“No,” I lied. “I just don’t know much about them.”

Her chocolate-brown eyes met mine again, but this time her gaze was appraising, almost challenging. “I can tell you about them, if you’re really interested.”

The vibe between us felt friendlier now, so I said, “Okay.”

And in the weeks ahead, we did talk about fish a lot. Well, she talked and I listened. Before long I knew more than I ever wanted to know about ammonia levels and algae and cycling. We talked about other things too, like our families. I told her that my parents were divorced and that I lived with my mom and little sister, Emma, in Oakfield. She told me that her mother had died of cancer eight years ago, and that she had a younger brother named Cameron who was in the ninth grade. Their father was an electrician and had never remarried. The three of them—plus Jessica’s fish—lived in Rocky Lake, one of the several small towns whose junior high populace had bled over into Oakfield High. Rocky Lake was more rural than Oakfield, and the kids who lived there had to bus to school unless they had their own cars.

We also talked about our boyfriends. Jessica’s boyfriend, Brent, was a junior too, and they had been dating for eight months. I vaguely knew him from a math class we’d had together last year. He played soccer on the school team. This explained why Jessica and I had never crossed paths—she hung out with the jocks.

I told her all about Michael and our increasingly-strained long-distance relationship. Jessica claimed she admired me for sticking to it, that she could never do it. “I’m too jealous,” she said. “Kind of spoiled, too. Brent says I’m high-maintenance.”

Though I didn’t know Jessica very well yet, I had to agree with Brent there. Jessica spent more time in the washroom than anyone I’d ever met. Every day after class, she’d head straight for the girl’s john, where she’d touch up her makeup, brush her long, gleaming hair, and make sure her clothes hadn’t somehow gotten stained or rumpled during class. She performed this ritual at least five times a day. Her purse must have weighed fifty pounds with all the crap she kept in there. One day she confessed to me that she got up at five-thirty every morning just to give herself enough time to get ready before the bus came at eight. I asked her what she did that took two and a half hours.

“I have to iron my outfit for the day, shower, straighten my hair, do my makeup, paint my nails if they need it, pack my purse, feed my fish…” She ticked each item off on her fingers while my jaw dropped in disbelief. I woke up every morning at seven-thirty and was out the door by ten after eight. I’d given up on taming my thick, frizzy-in-humidity locks years ago, I rarely ventured beyond eyeliner and lip gloss, my nails were bitten down to the knuckle, and my clothes could benefit from a good ironing more often than not. Sometimes I wondered if my new friend secretly believed that I was a mess of epic proportions.

She did give that impression a lot. For example: One day during the first week of October, as we were walking together to my locker after class, she told me I could really use some mattifying foundation to even out my skin tone.

“It gives me zits,” I said as we descended the stairs to basement. There were some chemistry notes in my locker that I’d promised to let her copy. She came late to class at least twice a week, so Mr. McDowell, our mothball-scented teacher, had started sending her to the office every time she waltzed in five minutes past the bell. As a result, there were several chunks of notes missing from her binder. I’d told her she was taking a leap of faith with my notes, considering I only understood about half of what was going on in chemistry.

“You must be using the wrong kind then,” she said, following me into the Dungeon. “Hmm, wait a sec.” She dug around in her bottomless purse and pulled out a small clear jar. “This is an all-natural mineral foundation. It won’t clog your pores.”

I took the jar and mumbled a half-hearted, “Thanks.” Jessica seemed bound and determined to fix me.

“Wear it tomorrow so I can see if it’s a good shade for you.” She surveyed the dim quarters of the Dungeon. “This area has horrible lighting. I’ve only been down here once, with Brent. We met Dylan here the other day. His locker is right there,” she said, gesturing to the locker four doors down from mine and Ashley’s.

“Dylan,” I said, twirling my combination lock. “The guy in our chemistry class, right? The one who’s always so serious?”

“He’s not like that all the time. I’ve known Dylan since seventh grade. He’s Brent’s friend too…they’re on the team together.”

“I’ve seen him down here. I didn’t realize you were friends with him.”

Then it occurred to me that this Dylan was the same guy Ashley had commented on about a week before. We’d been getting our books together at our locker at the end of the day when she’d suddenly elbowed me in the ribs.

“Ow,” I’d yelped. “What?”

She’d leaned in close and whispered, “He’s cute, isn’t he?”

“Who?”

She shushed me and cocked her head to the left of us. I followed her gaze to the nicely-built blond boy a few feet away, bent over his combination lock. I recognized him from chemistry as the guy who sat in back and never smiled. Or spoke. He was cute, if you liked the athletic type. Which Ashley obviously did. And Ashley rarely noticed members of the opposite sex. She was usually too busy with school, the millions of clubs she’d joined back in September, and her church youth group. I hadn’t seen this kind of spark in her eyes since we were twelve, when we watched
Dirty Dancing
on TV one night and she developed a massive crush on Patrick Swayze.