Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend

Of course, now I know that they were both totally high at the time. The only thing I don’t know is what else they were on besides pot.

It’s really the last thing I want to talk about.

“So, did Jamie even say hi to you tonight?” Tracy asks.

Actually, it’s the second-to-last thing I want to talk about.

I shake my head without looking at her. She leans over to turn up the Feist album she’s been playing nonstop since I told her to get it, and she doesn’t ask me anything else.

I’ve been lying on the trundle bed in Tracy’s room for more than an hour, trying every trick I know to fall asleep, when I hear it.

At first I don’t even recognize the sound.

And then I do. It’s my phone, vibrating.

Somebody’s calling me.

I look at the clock. It’s 1:00 a.m.

I look at Tracy, who falls asleep in all of about three seconds and can sleep through anything. She’s passed out.

I feel around to find my phone, which has vibrated itself off the rug and is now practically jumping up and down on the hardwood floor, probably waking up the entire house.

As my hand closes around it, a familiar tightness creeps into my throat. My heart starts to skitter and skip beats, and my breathing gets shallow. Supposedly once a person recognizes the symptoms of a panic attack, she can sort of wrangle them and keep them under control. I haven’t mastered that fine art yet, but at least now a part of my brain stays rational as my airway tries to close, and instead of screaming, “Am I dying?” it can ask, “Why now?” which is apparently a much more constructive question.

Caron would say—Oh, forget Caron. I’m tired of hearing her in my head all the time. I feel like she crawled in there and installed a whole bunch of automatic scripted responses to things. I don’t need her to tell me why I’m on the verge of a panic attack—I already know why. It’s because the only reason anybody ever calls anybody at 1:00 a.m. is if something is wrong. Terribly, hideously wrong.

The phone is now vibrating in my fist and I know with every fiber of my being that this is the call about Peter that I’ve been expecting. Amanda probably crashed that stupid fancy convertible into a telephone pole and Peter got thrown from the car, smashed headfirst into a tree and is dead or paralyzed. Either that, or he overdosed on whatever stupid drugs she forced on him while they were at a party.

All I know is, if Peter leaves me all by myself with Kathleen, I’ll never, ever forgive him.

I try to take a deep breath, fail and then look at the phone. It doesn’t say Boston Mass General Hospital.

It doesn’t say Mom.

It says Jamie.

I blink. I’m dreaming.

It can’t be. Can it?

“Hello?” I whisper, my voice scratchy and rough from lack of air.

There’s a pause, and then, “Hey.”

As soon as I hear his voice, I feel Jamie’s hands on my arms again. The warmth begins to travel up into my neck, across my face, under my hair. It drives away the tightness in my throat and my lungs, and everything seems to open up again, to take in the feeling that is now suffusing my entire body. “Hey,” I manage to say.

“You okay, after what Hallis did?”

“I…” I’m trying to sound as calm and normal as possible, but I’m embarrassed that he witnessed me getting pushed into the pool, mad that I haven’t heard from him and so happy to talk to him that I can barely even form a sentence. I don’t know where to start. What I should do is hang up on him. But I’ve been waiting for more than two months for this call.

I need to know things.

“Can you come down?” he asks.

“Now? Wait—where?”

“Outside.”

“I’m not at home,” I say.

“I know.”

“You—How?”

“Rose.”

“I can’t just—”

“Please.”

Wow. I’ve never heard Jamie say please before. My stomach does a crazy little flip. It’s hard to say no to Jamie Forta. But saying no to him when he says please? I wonder if any girl in history has ever been able to do it. Even as I’m thinking that there’s no way he deserves to call me at 1:00 a.m. and have me get up and go outside simply because he wants to see me, I’m getting out of bed and putting on my wet shoes. I hate that he has this power over me.

But it’s also sort of thrilling. Or…however you say it. Hot, I guess.

Yup. It’s hot.

Which I know is dumb.

But I’m new to this whole hot thing, and I find it kind of irresistible.

“Okay, I’ll try,” I say. But he’s gone, as if he knows that I’m already halfway out the door.

What am I doing? I saw the way he came to Regina’s defense tonight. There’s definitely still something between Regina and Jamie, no matter what Anthony Parrina thinks or says. But he also came to my defense.

I have to talk to him. To straighten things out once and for all.

Yeah, because that’s how it works with Jamie Forta. All it takes is one conversation, and everything is suddenly super clear.

Uh-huh.

I know that I’ll have no problem getting out of Tracy’s room without waking her up, but I have no idea what it’s like to try to get past her parents. Tracy does it all the time, but I don’t know what her technique is. I guess if I get caught, I can just cry and say I’ve been sleepwalking ever since my dad died, and no one will even consider questioning my story.

Dad didn’t tell the truth all the time—why should I?

I take two steps and realize that I shouldn’t have put my shoes on yet. Not only are they loud on the wood floor but they’re so waterlogged that my feet squish around and make weird sucking noises. I take the shoes off and leave them on the floor, tiptoeing out into the hall.

The front door is at the bottom of the staircase. I grab on to the banister and make my way down the steps, staying as far away from the center of each stair as possible, in case it’s squeaky. I make it down without a sound, only to be greeted by the site of a glowing green light next to the front door.

The alarm system.

Once upon a time, the code to the alarm was Tracy’s birthday—0729. But they could have changed it. And if I try to disarm the system with the wrong code, will it set off the alarm?

When my phone vibrates in my hand again, it nearly gives me a heart attack. I silence it and look at the screen. It’s a text that says, “0729*.”

I smile.

Tracy’s not Jamie’s biggest fan—and I guess she doesn’t sleep as deeply as I thought—but she’s helping me anyway. I’m sure she didn’t even have to look out her window to know who called me.

I punch in the code, step outside, make sure the door can’t lock behind me…and there he is. Across the street, leaning against the door of his green car, waiting for me.

He’s beautiful.

I am not.

I’m barefoot in yoga pants and a T-shirt, also known as pajamas. I have no idea what my hair looks like, and I don’t have on any makeup because I undid all of Tracy’s expert work two hours ago with her expensive remover.

So what? A voice in my head says. He’s not your boyfriend.

He could be—you don’t know that he’s not, says another voice.

Don’t be an idiot. He didn’t want anything to do with you all summer. Forget him. You shouldn’t even be here.

Why are you so hopeless all the time? It’s lame.

As if two warring voices in my head weren’t enough, Caron chimes in, telling me to ignore the noise and just be present.

I hate to admit it, but it’s good advice.

My feet carry me forward until I’m standing right in front of Jamie. He stares at me with those perfect gold-flecked hazel eyes that don’t blink. Somewhere inside me I find the confidence to be quiet, to not fill the silence. He called me, he asked me to come out—he can talk first.

I stare right back, my arms folded across my chest. The silence goes on and on. He starts to look a little uncomfortable. It’s kind of gratifying.

“Thanks—for helping Conrad tonight,” he finally starts. I still don’t say anything. I think it’s the first time I’ve had any kind of upper hand with Jamie. Ever. “Rose, look, I’m sorry,” he says with so much remorse that I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling him everything’s fine and he shouldn’t worry about it.

Instead, I say, “Why didn’t you call?”

“You got my note?”

“The one that said you’re not right for me? That you’re different? That one?” I sound hostile. Jamie looks at the ground for a second and then up at the dark sky.

“Yeah,” he says, shutting down. I don’t want him to do that—when Jamie shuts down, he disappears, even if he’s standing right in front of you, and there’s no getting him back, no matter what. I’ve waited too long for this opportunity. I force myself to drop the hostility.

“You know Angelo gave it to me,” I say as calmly and normally as I can manage.

“That’s why I didn’t call.”

I shake my head and step closer to make my point as clear as possible. “If you don’t like me, Jamie, just say it. You don’t have to get all cryptic and write notes about how it’s not me, it’s you.” The hostility is back. The voice that’s coming out of my mouth is angrier and more hurt than I want it to be. But I can’t shut it up.

“Who said I didn’t like you?”

“You did. You sent me a note that didn’t explain anything, and then you ignored me all summer. And tonight, you didn’t even say hi. You pulled me out of the pool, but you looked mad. And on top of that, you still didn’t talk to me. That means you don’t like me. Actually, what it really means is that you don’t respect me. And if you don’t respect me, then I don’t have any time for you.”

The warring voices in my head are shocked into silence. I am finally telling Jamie what I’ve been thinking these past few months, and it feels so good to see that he wasn’t expecting any of this from sweet little Rose, who is always so nice to him. Yeah, well, check it, Jamie Forta. Sweet little Rose has been replaced by new Rose, and she isn’t going to let you jerk her around.

Turns out Jamie’s not the only 2.0 in town.

My plan is to make a dramatic exit, to just leave without saying another word, but as I turn to go, Jamie catches my arm and pulls me back around to face him. He steps toward me, leaving about an inch of space between us. In a strange and exciting turn of events, even this doesn’t intimidate me.

I like this 2.0 stuff.

“I was mad about Hallis—what he was doing to Conrad—and you getting pushed into the pool,” he says. I can see that he’s telling the truth, but only partly. There’s something else going on behind his eyes, but I suddenly find that I have too much pride to ask him what it is. I’m not going to beg him to tell me his secrets. If he wants to be all taciturn and mysterious, that’s on him.

“Oh, you were mad on my behalf? So, what are you? My bodyguard? My boyfriend who I’m not allowed to tell anybody about?” I demand. “Just make up your mind, Jamie, and stop messing with me.”

Pain flashes across his face as if I’ve slapped him, and then suddenly his lips are on mine, hard and fast, knocking the air right out of my lungs. His kiss ricochets throughout my entire body in a nanosecond. He grabs my arms and turns me, practically lifting me off the ground as he backs me up against his car, pinning me to the driver’s-side door with his body as his tongue flashes across my lips and into my mouth. It’s like he’s been waiting for this to happen again as long as I have.

But that can’t be true.

I’m just a sometimes delusional girl who has a crush on a guy who…is currently kissing me as if his life depends on it.

His arms wrap around me, and they feel different now than they did the last time we kissed—it’s not just that he’s stronger, it’s that he’s solid and immovable, like a brick wall. And it feels to me like he is 100% committed to kissing me—he’s not holding back. One hand is in my hair, the other sliding down my lower back. I literally feel my limbs going weak like some stupid fairy-tale princess. Once upon a time, I would have loved having weak, swoony limbs, but right here and now, in this moment, it pisses 2.0 off.

Jamie doesn’t get to do this to me again. He doesn’t get to just show up and take over my body for the time it takes to kiss me and then disappear. I think about what Conrad said—how Jamie shows up whenever he feels like it and kisses a girl so he can keep stringing her along.

Is that what he’s doing right now?

I’m just about to make him stop when the hand on my back finds the bottom of my shirt and then slides under it and up, touching bare skin that he’s never touched before. My head falls back against his car as my whole body starts to tingle. We both freeze for half a second when we realize at exactly the same moment that I’m not wearing a bra. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing for a guy to discover—what does it say about a girl if she’s not wearing a bra when she’s making out with a boy against his car in the middle of the night? Anything? Nothing?

Slowly—with my body practically vibrating, begging him to touch every place he’s not supposed to touch—he slides his hand back down and around to my waist and leans forward, burying his face in my neck. He still has that beautiful clean smell but there’s something new under it—something that is just him, I guess. When he takes a step back and the weight of him leaves me, I lift my head and open my eyes. I can’t catch my breath, but I see that he’s a little out of breath, too—and when my eyes land on the front of his jeans, I can see why.

My face heats with embarrassment. I can’t believe it. After all this time of thinking that there was nothing between us, that I imagined the whole thing, it turns out I was wrong.

Jamie is as turned on by kissing me as I am by kissing him.

I feel a rush of…something. Power? But the feeling drowns in confusion and fear. What do I do now? Am I supposed to do something about his…condition? If I don’t, am I a tease? Or am I only obligated to do something about it if I’m his actual girlfriend? And if so, what, exactly, would that something be?

Wait—there is no obligation when it comes to this stuff, right? You’re just supposed to do what you’re comfortable with and nothing else?

That’s what Ms. Maso drilled into our heads last year. It all made so much sense in health class. Now it doesn’t seem so clear.

I realize that I’ve been staring at the front of Jamie’s jeans for way too long to pretend that my gaze just fell there by accident.

I force my eyes up to his face, and I’m expecting him to be embarrassed or apologetic but he just gazes back at me with that same steady look, as if what’s happening is totally normal. Which, I guess, it is. Although I can’t imagine any of this stuff will ever feel normal to me. If anything, it feels like one big freak show.

He runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head as if, once again, he did something he shouldn’t have. And 2.0 gets mad.

“Let me guess. You regret it already, right?” Right. Touching me was a complete and total mistake.

He shakes his head.

“Then what?” This roller coaster is making me insane.

“I wasn’t gonna do that—”

“Don’t bother, Jamie. You don’t have to explain—”

“I do. There’s a lot of stuff I gotta explain,” he says, his eyes locked onto mine.

The fact that he knows he owes you some explanations means something. My anger starts to deflate. But where the hell was he all summer? Did it take him months to come up with these explanations he claims he now has? My anger balloons up again. Well, so what if it did? Not everybody knows how to explain how they feel. You have to cut people slack sometimes. Now my anger just sits still, not knowing what to do. Suddenly I find the entire situation…funny.

“Did you just say you’re going to explain something to me? Seriously?” I tease. “You mean, I’m finally going to get some actual explanations out of Jamie Forta?”

After a moment of what looks like confusion, a little smile crosses his face, and I feel a shift. I don’t know how to explain it in a normal way. It’s like we’ve always been standing on two different levels, with him above me. But just now, the levels moved closer to each other and we’re not so far apart anymore. We’re almost—but not quite—on equal ground.

I guess another way to say it is that Jamie doesn’t hold all the cards. I actually have a few of my own, and I like it.

“Next Saturday,” he says.

Next Saturday. Next Saturday? As in, Saturday night?

“Dinner,” he adds.

Last year, Jamie and I had covert conversations in his car in various locations, hidden away. But we never spent any time together around other people.

“Are you finally going to be seen with me in public?” I say, pretending to be astonished. “We better not tell anyone or we’ll both end up in jail this time.”

His smile gets a little wider and he actually laughs—that beautiful, delicious laugh that feels like a reward whenever it’s let out. It practically makes me giddy. And it dawns on me that Jamie likes it when I make fun of him. That’s why the playing field is leveling out. Because I’m teasing him.

“I can’t believe it,” I say. “Jamie Forta and me, on an actual date.”

“You don’t have to keep saying Jamie Forta, Rose.”

“Oh, sure I do. In these big moments, when explanations are being promised and public outings are announced, it’s important to address you by your full name. The occasion calls for it.”

His smile makes me want to get into his car and go anywhere with him. It’s a little intimidating to feel that for someone. It makes you wonder if you’re going to do something you don’t really want to do, or shouldn’t do. I mean, I haven’t seen or talked to Jamie in months, and after one kiss and a couple of moments of me being really mad, I’m ready to have his hands on my bare skin again. Because that was amazing. That felt like…everything.

But I guess the point is, even though I’m feeling what I’m feeling, I’m not getting in the car with him. Although, why is that? Is that just because it’s late at night and I’m staying at my friend’s house and I don’t want to get in trouble with her parents, or get her in trouble? Or is it actually because I have enough respect for myself not to drive off in the middle of the night with the guy who didn’t bother to call me all summer?

I push off the car to show him—and myself—that I’m going back inside now.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” 2.0 answers. I feel all sassy as I walk past him, even though what I said doesn’t exactly make sense—you don’t really see someone call you. But I don’t care. I look over my shoulder and Jamie’s still smiling, looking at me like he’s seeing me in a different way. A new way. A way he likes.

It was worth torturing myself all summer long just for that one look.

disinter (verb): to uncover or reveal (see also: getting grilled in therapy)

4

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE ISSUE HERE, ROSE?”

What I want to say is, the issue is that I should be eating Saturday-morning pancakes with my best friend and telling her about what happened with Jamie last night, not sitting on a therapist’s couch with my mother for Saturday-morning therapy. But I’ve already been told that sarcasm has no place here.

Caron’s office is nicer than my mother’s. The couch is squishier, the tissues are softer and the view of the backyard is more interesting. The room smells a little bit like wet dog, but I like dogs, so I don’t care that much. Not that I’ve ever seen Caron’s dog. I hear it snuffling around on the other side of the door every once in a while, but that’s it. For all I know, it’s just a tape of a dog, and the smell is some kind of weird incense—my mom says therapists do all sorts of things to their offices to make their clients feel comfortable. Even all the neutral colors serve a purpose—they’re supposed to keep patients focused.

From my point of view, the only thing wrong with Caron’s black-and-brown-and-cream office is what goes on inside it. What has been going on inside it every other Saturday—or sometimes more often, depending on the level of drama in the house—since June.

“The issue?” I repeat, trying to prove to them that I’ve barely been listening.

“The problem,” Caron says, stressing the word problem as if I need a synonym for issue. If she thinks I’m confused about the meaning of the word issue rather than just plain old baffled that we have to hash this topic out yet again, she’s clearly forgotten my father, who she knew well. Dad started using vocabulary flashcards with Peter and me before we could talk.

Caron and my mother actually look like they could be sisters. They are both tall with dark brown hair and light blue eyes, and they’re skinny and wear what I think of now as shrink clothes—earth tones that blend into the office furniture, with a colorful necklace or scarf. Maybe it’s a kind of uniform. They both wear tortoise-shell glasses—my mom’s spend a lot of time on her head functioning as a headband, but Caron’s are always on her face. The difference between them these days is their energy, I guess you would say. Caron is calm; my mother seems totally wired, like she’s fighting really hard to stay in control of things. Things like me.

“Do you understand why your mother has a problem with the memorial website?” Caron asks. “Why she wants you to take it down?”

I know that I’m supposed to say yes—after all, we’ve been going around and around on this topic all summer long. And I could just do that, because technically, I do understand the problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy. I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.

But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.

I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him. Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.

Which, of course, is exactly why I do like it.

“Rose, are you still with us?” Caron asks. She usually gives me about three seconds to think before she makes a comment implying that I’m not paying attention.

“I guess I don’t really get it, no,” I lie.

“The problem, Rose,” my mother says, her overt patience communicating just how impatient she is with this conversation, “is that you went behind my back after I specifically asked you not to, and you got Peter involved by using his credit card.”

“Can you tell Rose how that made you feel?”

“Betrayed. Betrayed at a very vulnerable moment.”

I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I know that would probably also be betraying my mother at a very vulnerable moment. It’s not that I don’t care that she feels betrayed, it’s just that I think her reasons for feeling that way are ridiculous.