Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (8 page)

“I am?”

“Yes. You were totally wrong.”

“About what?” I asked.

“You’re exactly like Paris.”

***

There was nothing in the kitchen. We had eaten every last can of soup, every box of mac-n-cheese. We had run out of food and run out of money.

“I think this is how the Donner Party started,” I said.

Cruz had the refrigerator door open, and he was staring inside it, as if he expected something to magically appear.

“Is your mother a member of Costco?” he asked.

“Yes, but we can’t afford Costco.”

“Did she leave her card here?”

Her Costco card was in the utility drawer. We took the bus to Costco and flashed the card to get in.

“When are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” I asked him. I have to admit I thought he planned to rob Costco. I was imagining him pretending to have a gun in his pocket and ordering them to hand over a giant bag of rice, a twelve-pack of tuna cans, and a six pound package of ground beef. It wasn’t the most logical place to commit a robbery.

“We’re going to eat,” he said. “We’re going to sample.”

It was Friday evening, and Costco was packed with people and packed with employees handing out free samples. We pushed our cart to the first sample lady, who was handing out cheese and crackers. I ate two, and she gave us a dirty look.

“Do you think they’re on to us?” I asked Cruz. We didn’t look like typical Costco shoppers. First off, we were teenagers.

“We have to fit in. Put that box of Cheez Its into the cart.”

I threw the box in, and just like that we looked like Costco shoppers. We circled the entire store, throwing whatever our hearts desired into the cart. Soda, cookies, pasta, and socks.  We filled our cart like millionaires preparing for a nuclear holocaust. It was great to pretend that we had enough money to pay for it all.

In between our fake shopping, we sampled everything. We ate chips and salsa, hot wings, burritos, and cheesecake. We nibbled on egg rolls, brownies, and pulled pork. After we hit all the sample tables, we made another tour around the store.

An hour later, we were stuffed, and so was our cart. We stashed it in the aisle with the golf bags and bicycles and skipped out, expecting them to run after us and arrest us for sampling under false pretenses.

We ran through the parking lot and burst out laughing when we got to the bus stop. “That was the best meal I’ve had in ages,” I said, trying to catch my breath from all the laughing.

“If I had had any money, I would have bought a bag of wings,” he said, wistfully.

“You ate six of them.”

“I couldn’t get enough.”

The bus arrived, and Cruz took my hand. At his touch, I felt my insides melt like ice cream on a hot day. We flashed our bus passes to the driver, and we took a seat near the back. Cruz didn’t let go of my hand, and I noticed that all the women on the bus checked him out as he walked by.

Every female wanted him, but he didn’t seem to notice them. He was with me.

“Tell me more about Paris and writing,” he said.

I did. All the way home, sitting together and holding hands, our bellies full and forgetting that we needed three thousand dollars by next week, I told Cruz about Paris and writing.

I told him about Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. About Gertrude Stein and the Café de Flore. I told him about the Sorbonne. Then I told him that I had been writing stories since I learned to write my name. How crafting a story was like breathing for me.

How writing was essential to live.

Cruz hung on every word. He leaned toward me, his face only inches from mine, studying my eyes and my mouth as I spoke. He was captivated by every detail, not bored at all by my dreams. I had never told anybody what I told Cruz that day on the bus. With every hope and goal and desire pouring out of me, they became even bigger, just by sharing them with Cruz.

He made my dreams more important, if only because he thought they were worthy. He also thought they were attainable.

“You’re going to do it,” he breathed. “You’re going to do all of it.”

***

We walked home from the bus stop, hand in hand. The street lights turned on, and a gentle breeze blew. In that moment, I was truly happy, and I felt for the first time in my life that everything I wanted was possible.

We arrived back home, and it seemed so had everyone else. The curb in front of the house was crowded with parked cars.

“There he is,” announced a beautiful man in a gray suit. It was like Vogue magazine had thrown up all over our street. At least fifteen models were there, waiting for Cruz.

“Where have you been?” his friend Eric asked him.

“I was out shopping with Tess,” Cruz said.

They noticed me for the first time, surprised that I was there. I had gone from being the center of Cruz’s attention to the invisible girl, again.

“Get dressed,” Dana ordered Cruz. “We’re heading over to Bump for drinks and dancing.”

The mob of models herded Cruz inside the house and got him prepared for their night out. When they were done, they paraded him downstairs. He was gorgeous, of course, dressed in tight black slacks and a fitted shirt. His hair was gelled, and he smelled delicious.

“I’ll be back by midnight,” he said to me, as he walked to the front door.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said one of the models. I had seen her before. Blond, tall, rail thin, and perfectly beautiful. She took Cruz’s face in her hands and kissed him long and hard.

They stayed like that for a minute, grinding against each other and swapping spit. I could see their tongues battling it out with each other when they opened and closed their mouths like big mouth bass or opera singers.

I felt my face go hot, and I wished to be really, truly invisible, to disappear into the floor and never return.

When they finally broke off their kiss, Cruz wrapped his arm around her and she nestled her head on his shoulder. They walked out that way, like they were born for each other, leaving me with my dreams slightly battered, and my possibilities minus one.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”

--Emily Dickinson

There was a whole string of beautiful models who stuck their tongues down Cruz’s throat. A different one every night. Sometimes groups of them.

I hate models.

Every stick-thin, cellulite-less, clear skinned, hair-extensioned, long-legged, well-dressed model.

Slightly less than Nazis but a whole lot more than brussels sprouts... Hate.

Here’s what I learned about models while I lived with Cruz. First of all, they don’t eat. I mean, nothing. I thought the up side to having the house invaded by swarms of twenty-somethings watching TV and gossiping was that they would at least bring chips and dip or a bucket of fried chicken. But there was a logical reason why they were so skinny (and boy, were they skinny!). Calories didn’t pass their lips.

I saw one freak out once because she had eaten too much lettuce, and she had a shoot the next day. No lie.

The other thing I learned about models is that they travel in packs, like wolves or Mormons. Sometimes it was only Eric and Dana, who took turns driving Cruz around, but they were inevitably joined by at least five other fashion divas.

They would spread out on the couches and chairs in the living room--their little tushies taking up three or four inches of space—with the TV on to an entertainment show like Fashion Police or TMZ, and they would gossip about people in the industry. They had terrifying stories about things that happened during shoots that wouldn’t have been out of place in soap operas or Dexter.

It sounded like a horrible way to make a living. Starving and dealing with predatory and abusive producers, photographers, and casting directors didn’t sound glamorous to me.

But they were glamorous. Always done up, put together, and beautiful.

And they loved being models. They loved being thin and fabulous and having their pictures taken.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t sitting on the couches with them, soaking up their stories and asking for more. I wasn’t watching Fashion Police or discussing Milan’s fashion week with them. As far as they were concerned, I didn’t exist, and as far as I was concerned, I didn’t want them to know I existed.

They scared me.

It would have been ridiculous for me to sit with them. I wasn’t in their league. I wasn’t even in their solar system.

But they were in my house, and I would catch snippets of their conversations when I had to go through the living room to get to the kitchen or when I was walking downstairs, and I happened to hear their voices when I paused on the staircase. I might have even eavesdropped once or twice. Or pretty much every day.

It wasn’t that I wanted to get to know them or join them or be like them. I just wanted to know what Cruz was saying and what they were saying to him. Was he truly one of them, or was he just fitting in so that he could become a model? I didn’t know. He was one person with them and another with me. But lately he was less and less with me.

After they hobnobbed on the couch, they inevitably went out clubbing. In a month, they had already made the rounds among the hottest clubs in Southern California. They were the barometer of hot clubs. I heard that the Kardashians followed
them
to find out which club was in.

The group of models was sort of incestuous, trading off girlfriends and boyfriends almost daily. I lost track of the girls’ names who latched onto Cruz and let go just as suddenly. There were at least four Tiffany’s and I don’t know how many Summer’s. So, I numbered them.

By November, I recognized numbers one through eighteen, gorgeous models that had slobbered all over Cruz, and he had slobbered all over them. I thought he was going to get serious with four, twelve, and sixteen, but he moved on after all of them.

Cruz never spoke about his women to me. Our conversations were limited to the house, eating, survival, and dreams. He didn’t talk about his model friends and ditto about the landlord.

I never saw Mr. Stevens after that day on the front porch. I assumed Cruz got him his money, and I didn’t know how that was possible. But if he didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want to ask him about it.

We were managing pretty well. The rent was paid, and the electricity was almost paid for. We were coming up to a shutoff date for our water, but I knew we could come up with enough money to keep it flowing. Otherwise, we ate peanut butter for almost every dinner. Cruz’s model friends gave him designer clothes to wear, and I had a pretty large wardrobe of men’s undershirts to keep me going.

As long as we didn’t get sick or something didn’t break, I thought we might make it. I was counting off the days until I graduated, and I think Cruz was doing the same. We had sort of given up on seeing our parents again.

Not that I missed my mother, but I wouldn’t have minded her missing me, even just a little. I wouldn’t have minded her calling me, even just once.

What can I say? Even a bad parent is a parent. I wanted one. I didn’t know how many other kids had been abandoned by their mothers, but it wasn’t probably that many. Deep inside me, I wondered if I didn’t deserve to be abandoned, if my mother wouldn’t have been a bad parent to a better daughter.

Besides that, I wondered about day-to-day problems. For instance, I was wondering if we were going to eat peanut butter for Thanksgiving. The holiday was coming up fast, and I didn’t care if I skipped a year of candied yams, but Thanksgiving also meant my college applications had to be done.

“Have you thought of Princeton? It’s lovely,” Mrs. Landes, the college advisor, told me, gently handing me a Princeton pamphlet, as if it was a priceless treasure.

Princeton? Who was she kidding?

True, I wanted to go the Sorbonne in Paris, which was a, who-am-I-kidding school, too. It was such a pipe dream, that I didn’t dare tell her or anyone else that that’s where I intended to go, and that’s why I hadn’t applied to any schools, yet.

I was already in the college advisor’s office for over an hour, even though school ended forty-five minutes ago. Luckily, I didn’t have babysitting today, but I could think of a million places I would rather be.

Mrs. Landes was at least three hundred years old and felt that every high school student should go on to college. It was a noble position to take, but at Hoover High, she was rolling that optimistic boulder up a steep hill.

She had been after me for weeks to come in and see her. “Do you realize you haven’t applied anywhere?” she asked me in the hall. “Do you realize you still haven’t taken the SAT?”

She hounded me until I couldn’t say no any longer.

“You’re such a good student,” she said, taking the Princeton pamphlet back. “Normally good students are excited about college.”

“I’m excited,” I said, but my voice came out in a whisper, which was hardly an excited kind of voice.

“Don’t you want to go to college?”

“Well—“

“It’s hard to make a living without a college education these days,” she said. “Besides, you’re smart. You want to learn.” Mrs. Landes leaned back in her rolling chair, making a creaking sound. “You do want to learn, don’t you?”

It was kind of a do or die moment. Yes, I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn to write. And I wanted to do it in Paris, France while I wore a beret, ate croissants, and drank café au lait. It was my ultimate dream, what I had been waiting for  years.

Impossible.

They would never accept me. I could never get there.  I had no money. I couldn’t afford the croissants and café au lait, let alone the plane ticket to France.

I felt ridiculous. I couldn’t tell Mrs. Landes what I wanted. My mouth wouldn’t work. It was like someone glued my lips together. There was no way I could tell her I wanted to be a writer and study in Paris. She would laugh at me. She would think I was delusional and call the white coats to take me to the funny farm where I would be locked away in a room with mattresses on the walls. She would point at me and tell me I was a crazy dreamer. Crazy. Nobody else at Hoover High wanted to go to the Sorbonne.