Just You Page 2
I missed her sometimes. The old her—the one who’d made my new way of life seem bearable.
I’d met Robin during one of my first scheduled visits with my dad. She and her mother lived just down the street in an equally old but much smaller house. When I first started spending weekends at Dad’s new residence, the entire house vibrated with tension so thick I think even the dog felt it. My new stepsister Leanne made me anxious, so when she was around I’d taken to sitting out on the front porch with a book, keeping a low profile, or going for walks by myself around the neighborhood.
One day as I was heading home from one of these walks, I noticed a girl about my age sitting on a blanket in front of a white bungalow-style house, holding a gray kitten in her lap. She had long, straight reddish-brown hair and milky-white skin. Something about her intrigued me, and I slowed my pace as I passed her. She glanced up, noticing me.
“Hey,” she’d said in a friendly tone, one I wasn’t used to hearing from girls who looked like her. “Want to pet her?” She held up the kitten.
I nodded shyly and made my way over.
“I’m Robin,” she said when I stopped in front of her. She was really pretty up close, with big, long-lashed blue eyes and a pert little nose. “And this is Nermal. You know, like in the Garfield comic?”
“Right.”
She slid over, making room for me. I sat down and ran my index finger over the cat’s head. Its fur felt like silk, barely there.
“What’s your name?” Robin asked, crossing her legs. She had long, skinny legs and no curves to speak of, while I already filled out my jeans and T-shirts to the point of embarrassment.
“Taylor.” I pointed toward Dad and Lynn’s house. “My dad lives over there.”
She smiled at me, and that was that. Instantly we were friends. We had nothing in common beyond our ages and one crucial thing—we both wanted to escape from our houses as much as we possibly could. Me, because of the tension. Her, because of the silence.
The strain had eased up in Dad’s house since then, but not in Robin’s. She was still trying to escape, only now she had more efficient methods: parties, dates, and boys with cars.
“We should double date sometime,” Robin said now as we waited for Devon outside on her front step. “We’ve never done that, even while you were going out with Cheaty McAsshole.” This was the nickname she made up for Brian after I’d called to tell her what happened.
“What, you and Devon and me and my imaginary boyfriend?” I’d meant to be facetious, but a sly smile appeared on her shiny pink lips.
“Why settle for imaginary?” She finished her cigarette and squished it under her shoe. “You’re single now and the fish are jumping, baby.”
She sounded suspiciously like my aunt Gina during her self-affirming lectures to Mom. Before I could come back with a response, a car skidded to a stop across the street and Robin started toward it. It was too dark and far away to see the person in the driver’s seat. She glanced over her shoulder at me as she strutted down her driveway. “We’ll finish this tomorrow, Tay. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling suspicious all of a sudden. I knew that mischievous look of hers all too well. It usually only meant one thing: she was about to get me into trouble.
****
Nothing exciting happened that weekend, however. Robin went out with Devon again on Saturday night (it was love at first kiss, again), and I stayed in and watched The Breakfast Club on TV. This lack of excitement only intensified my crappy mood.
It deteriorated even further on Monday, when I had to watch Brian and Kara Neilson walk hand-in-hand through the school halls all day long. My sympathetic friends rallied around me, pissed off on my behalf. They assumed I felt hurt—and I did, in my ego at least—but mostly I just wanted to forget him and move on. Having the happy couple shoved in my face several times a day wasn’t exactly helping.
“Start going out with someone else,” Erin said at lunch. We were huddled around a table in the cafeteria, discussing my love life over bad pizza and skim milk. Well, they were discussing it. I was there to eat. “Make him jealous.”
“I don’t want to make him jealous,” I said, picking the shriveled pepperoni off my slice. “And I don’t want to go out with anyone else.”
“Aw, Taylor,” Ashley said. She gave me an I-feel-sorry-for-my-pathetic-friend smile and patted my arm. “He’s not the only guy in school, you know.”
“No, I mean…” I dropped my pizza back onto its grease-stained paper plate. “I don’t want to date anyone, period. I’m done with boys.”
Erin’s dark eyes grew wide. “Switching teams is a little extreme, don’t you think?”
I glared at her and she jostled my leg with hers, smirking. I smirked back. Erin still dated Brian’s friend Mitchell, though their relationship was what our English teacher might call tumultuous. They broke up and got back together every couple of weeks, it seemed.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Ashley said, her brow furrowed.
“Joke about what, Ashley?” Erin fluttered her eyelashes and leaned into her. “Oh, you mean about being gay? Lesbians? Homosexuals?”
I laughed, and Ashley shot us both the stink eye. As a dedicated, church-going Christian, she didn’t take kindly to being teased about her beliefs. But that never stopped Erin from poking at her.
“So you don’t plan on going out with anyone for the rest of high school?” Ashley asked me, ignoring Erin altogether.
“Maybe I’ll join a nunnery.”
She nodded solemnly. “Devote your life to God.”
“I’ve already devoted mine to reckless immorality,” Erin said, positioning a pointed index finger at each side of her head to mimic devil horns.
“Erin, shut up,” Ashley said.
I pushed my tray away and scanned the cafeteria crowd. Despite my determination to forget and evolve, my gaze found Brian and Kara as if there were spotlights trained on them. They sat at the opposite end of the cafeteria with a group of their friends—people who used to be my friends too—and Kara was talking into Brian’s ear. As she spoke, her hand slid up his shoulder to rest on the back of his neck, and he reached up to gently brush back her hair. Something about this intimate display made my chest ache, and all of a sudden I needed to get out of there, fast.
“Be right back,” I told my friends as I jumped up. Without even dumping my tray, I tore out of the cafeteria and into the nearest girl’s washroom, where I locked myself in a stall. I wasn’t crying, but I felt on the verge. I was too confused to cry.
Why did it bother me to see them together when I’d never loved him in the first place? It wasn’t jealousy, exactly, but this odd longing that I didn’t completely understand. I didn’t want Brian back. That I knew for sure. But maybe, deep down, I wanted what he’d found in Kara, that part of her that wasn’t afraid to love back.
Chapter 3
My mother was on to me.
Despite the fact that she could sniff out trouble like a trained police dog, two weeks had gone by before she realized something was different about me, that something had changed in my life. To be fair, she’d been buried in work lately, putting in extra long hours at the bank, where she worked as a financial advisor. Meanwhile, I kept to myself. Mom had never been the easygoing type, and she had a well-documented history of overreaction, so I’d learned over the years to steer clear of certain topics. Especially personal topics. It was just easier that way. I’d been doing a great job of it too, until the day she rose out of her work fog long enough to zero in for an inspection.
It was Monday, the second week of October. Due to teacher meetings, schools were closed for the day. I slept in until ten-thirty and then shuffled out of my room, still half-asleep, to find my little sister in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor in her pajamas and watching Jerry Springer.
“Emma!” I yanked the remote from her hands and changed the channel to something less obscene. “You’re not allowed to watch that.”
“You are not allowed to watch that,” I said again. “You’re supposed to sit quietly and work on your drawing while you’re waiting for me to get up, remember?”
“I have drawer’s block,” she said, and then laughed at her own joke.
Emma was your typical ten-year-old in most ways, but she happened to have an amazing talent for art. She drew unicorns and dragons, mostly. Mom had her in a drawing class every Saturday, and she was supposed to practice the techniques she learned there at home.
“Well, watching trash TV isn’t going to help.” I deposited the remote onto the coffee table. “Did you have fun with Aunt Gina yesterday?”
She nodded and picked up her sketch pad. Emma had spent the previous day with our aunt, helping out in her bakery while our mother worked from home for a few hours. “We made lemon squares,” Em told me. “I brought some home.”
My appetite roused, I headed for the kitchen. A large Tupperware container rested on the counter, full of delicious-looking squares. I ate two for breakfast and then set about tackling the chores Mom had assigned last night. To remind me, she’d made a list before she left and stuck it on the fridge, where I was sure to see it. As if I could forget my role in this family, even for a minute.
The older I got, the more my mother harped about responsibility. As she’d been reminding me daily since I was twelve, she was a single parent now and needed me to step up. So I had. With her working overtime and weekends to keep up with the bills, cooking and cleaning and babysitting were duties I’d come to accept. Still, there were times I just wanted to lay around the house and goof off, like I used to do before everything changed. I missed the days when my mother was home by four o’clock, followed closely by my father, who was never too tired to hear about our days at school. There were also times, like when I found empty beer cans in the bushes by our driveway or felt the draft seeping through my warped bedroom window, that I missed our old house more than anything else. I could close my eyes and still see the precise layout of it, hear the loud creaking sound the stairs made, smell the flowers that grew in our garden each summer. I missed it even more than having my father around every day. After all, he was the reason we no longer lived there.
The day we left the house I’d grown up in—the only home I had ever known—was pretty high up there on my list of “worst days of my life”. After dumping my mother like a week-old bag of garbage, Dad had wasted no time moving into Lynn’s house in Weldon, a city about a twenty-minute drive from where my mother and sister and I still lived, in Oakfield. Two months after he left, Mom had no choice but to relocate us too, to an older, smaller house in a less desirable part of town, the kind of place that made our old neighborhood look like a safe, sparkly paradise.
But that was only the second worst day of my life. The first was the day my father left, when I’d come home from the pool to find my mother at the kitchen table, crying into a fistful of napkins. Several more surrounded her, crumpled up like little snowballs. She didn’t want to say what was wrong at first, but eventually I got it out of her. My father had fallen in love with another woman, he’d left us to be with her, and he wanted a divorce. Mom had seen it coming, she said, but I’d had no clue. This was my father she was talking about, the one person I trusted to never let me down. But there, in that warm kitchen with those soggy napkins dotting the table and floor, my image of him—along with life as I knew it—suddenly shifted.
In all my twelve-year-old innocence, I actually thought he’d come back. He made a mistake, I thought, and when he realizes it, he’ll come home. But he didn’t, not that day or any day after. Still, it didn’t sink in that my father was gone for good until about a year later, when I stood next to my sister in a gazebo at Crawford Park and watched him exchange vows with our new stepmother in front of all their friends and a few wandering ducks. Only then did I realize how foolish I’d been. My father definitely wasn’t coming back. He loved Lynn, and they’d started a whole new life together. She and her kids were here to stay. So the way I figured it, I either had to accept it or cut my dad out of my life altogether. I chose to accept it. Or at least try to.
Now, two years after the wedding, our relationship was still far from mended. It would never go back to the way it was before, we both knew that, but at least now I could look at him without my stomach clenching into a knot. For me, that was progress. For him, it was a miracle. He’d had Emma’s forgiveness within weeks, but I made him work for mine.
In fact, he still worked for it. His methods were simple…he just carried on like the kind, devoted father I’d known all my life. The same man who always walked through the door with a smile. The same man who’d chased away my closet monsters and bandaged my scraped knees and coached my soccer team when I was eight. He tried so hard to show me that even though he’d done a rotten thing, he was still my dad. And it worked too. Over the past year, my anger toward him had melted down to a residual sting, and I began to think that maybe he’d had a good reason for skipping out on a fourteen-year marriage and shattering a family. And maybe he wasn’t as evil as my mother liked to claim. And maybe—just maybe—not all men were lying, selfish pigs.
Of course, this was before Brian decided to cheat on me and dump me. After that, I went straight back to being pissed at every male in existence.
****
When Mom got home at five, Emma was watching The Simpsons while I sat cross-legged on the chair next to her, going over my French.
“Did you get everything done that I asked you to do?” was the second thing to come out of her mouth, after a hasty hello.
“Yes,” I said, keeping my eyes on my workbook.
“Mom, I have a headache,” Emma said in a pitiful voice as she lay slug-like on the couch.
No wonder, I thought. She’d been zoned out in front of the TV for going on four hours now.
Mom sighed and put down her briefcase before coming over to examine my sister. “You’re not feverish,” she said, her palm against Emma’s forehead. “Why are you still in your pajamas?”
“Taylor said I didn’t have to get dressed.”
My mother sighed again, this time even more wearily. I glanced over at her and was struck by how exhausted she looked. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her skin was dull and saggy. Even her hair seemed limp. Lately I’d been worried about her, wondering if what my aunt Gina said all the time was true—my mother really did need to get out and have some fun. Since the divorce she’d been plowing through life like a machine. Work, kids, groceries, house, bills, work. She didn’t go out with friends, or go shopping for herself, or go to the gym like she used to. And she certainly didn’t date. After divorcing my father she had sworn off men, despite Gina’s endless lectures about Moving On (ie; meeting men). Aunt Gina had been through a divorce herself, so she considered herself an expert. But Mom wouldn’t hear of it. She was done with men. Period. To me, this didn’t seem like such a sacrifice. I mean, she’d recently turned forty-two—that’s old. What did she need a man for at her age? Aunt Gina had some ideas, but I always bolted from the room whenever she started in on that.
Now, Mom went to get some Advil for Emma, plodding down the hallway like there were bricks tied to her feet.
“Faker,” I whispered after she’d left the room.
“I am not!” Emma yelled, making a big show of kneading her forehead with her fingers. “Dumbhead.”
“Pest.” Fighting the urge to stick my tongue out at her, I closed my workbook and got up, leaving the little troublemaker to giggle at Homer’s antics all alone.
After dinner I helped with the clean up. When my mother opened the dishwasher to find it empty, she smiled. “The list was helpful, I see.”
I kept quiet and continued to rinse the dinner plates. I could sense her eyes on me, tracing my every movement.
“Is there something on your mind
, Taylor?”
“No, Mom.” I stacked plates in the dishwasher with a little more force than was necessary. “I’m fine.”
“Everything okay with school?”
“Yep.”
She picked up a sponge and started wiping the counter. “Any problems with your friends?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing bothering you at all?”
You are, I felt like saying. But instead I answered, “Nothing.”
For a minute, the only sound in the room was the swish of the sponge as she pushed it along the counters. I sprinkled soap into the dishwasher cup, my stomach clenching as if it knew subconsciously what was coming next.
“You haven’t been spending time with Brian lately,” Mom said, running the sponge under the tap. “Did something happen?”
There were so many ways to answer this question, but I settled on, “We broke up a couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple of weeks ago,” she said in a Where the hell was I? tone. “What happened? And why did you not tell me?”
I closed the dishwasher door and turned it on. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why it happened or you don’t know why you didn’t tell me?”
My sigh mimicked hers—long and weary. “I know why it happened, and I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s not like we were serious or anything.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’ve known Brian for years. His mother and I were on the PTA together in elementary school. I thought you really liked each other.”