Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (9 page)

I was odd.

I was strange.

I was fooling myself.

“I want to be a writer,” I said, finally. “And I want to study in Paris.”

I gasped in surprise. What did I say? Where did those words come from? It was like someone was talking for me. It was like my mouth had a life of its own. And even more surprising, it wasn’t finished. The words kept flowing.

“I want to go to the Sorbonne, even though I don’t speak French. I want to be just like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. I want to write books. Lots of books. Books that win prizes; books that people want to read. I never want to stop writing. I want to write in the Notre Dame cathedral, in the café de flore. I want to write everywhere in Paris.

“And yes, I want to learn. I want to learn how the words fit together, how to convey emotion, how to make people laugh and cry and want to turn the page. I want it all. Mrs. Landes, I want everything. But I can’t afford the Sorbonne or a plane ticket to France or an apartment in Paris. I can’t afford food. I can’t afford any college, not even community college. I don’t have money, and my mother has made it perfectly clear that she will never help me. She doesn’t even believe in college.”

I said it all in one big breath, and with the words finally out of me, I gasped for air. I flinched and shut my eyes, waiting for Mrs. Landes to start laughing or yell at me for being a really stupid girl.

But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t yell. In fact, she didn’t say a word.

I slowly opened one eye to see if she had left the office. Nope. She was still there, sitting across from me with a big smile planted on her ancient face. She wore bright red lipstick that escaped her lips in little craggy lines. Her eyelids were painted blue and drooped over her eyes. She wasn’t an attractive woman, but that was almost a relief since I had been surrounded by too much beauty, lately.

“I think that’s a perfect idea,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“You’re going to go the Sorbonne in Paris and write great novels. I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time.”

“You do?”

“Don’t you?” she asked me.

“Well—“

“You mustn’t be wobbly, Tess. Dreams remain dreams if you get wobbly. It should be full steam ahead. Man the torpedoes.” She shook her fist at the sky and bounced up and down in her chair, making it creak.

“The torpedoes?”

“Tell me what you’ve done so far.”

“Done?”

“To get in. How’s the application process going?”

Application process? What was she talking about? Hadn’t she heard me? I didn’t have any money. There was no way I could go to Paris.

Mrs. Landes cocked her head to the side. “You went away there, Tess. Come back to me. Focus.”

I was focusing. Focusing on how impossible my dream was. Wobbly? I was so wobbly I had already fallen over.

“I can’t go to Paris, Mrs. Landes.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t afford it.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

“Stuff and what?” I asked.

“Balderdash. Claptrap. Twaddle. Tripe. Drivel. Of course you can go to Paris.”

“But—“ I started.

“No buts. You’re going to research everything about studying at the Sorbonne, and so am I, and then we’re going to meet back here on Tuesday during fifth period. Got it?” She penciled my name on her desk calendar and waved me out of the room.

I stood outside the office and took a deep breath. It was warm for November, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I felt a kernel of hope pop inside me. Could I really make my dreams come true? Could I really make it to Paris, after all?

For the first time in a long time I was optimistic, but the optimism wasn’t alone. It was kept company by a big dose of fear. There’s nothing scarier than hoping for something and not getting it.

On the other hand, Mrs. Landes seemed very sure. She wasn’t scared at all. And more than that, she didn’t laugh at me. In fact, she thought it was a great idea. She told me I shouldn’t be wobbly.

It dawned on me that my best choice for happiness rested in the hands of an old lady with droopy eyelids and red lipstick. That sort of made me happy.

***

I walked out of the college advisor’s office to a quiet school and an empty quad. It was a long way across the campus to the exit. The nice weather and my new hope kept me company and made the walk enjoyable. I planned on getting on my mom’s computer and researching everything I could the minute I got home. It was great to get permission to turn my dream into reality.

I walked through the school’s front gate. There were only a few cars in the parking lot, but hovering at the entrance were about five kids, talking around a white Challenger. I recognized them: Three football players and two of the meanest of the mean girls.

I would have to pass them to walk through the lot toward home. I took a deep breath and scrunched up my courage. I knew it could go one of two ways. Either they would ignore the invisible girl, or they were bored and would use me as a distraction.

It turned out to be the second option.

“Look, it’s the freak,” one of the girls announced.

Their heads turned toward me in unison. It was like they were watching a tennis tournament, and I was the ball.

Great. Just perfect.

Two of the football players blocked me from passing them. They were huge, at least six-feet-tall with thick necks and bulging biceps.

“Where do you think you’re going, freak girl?” One of them demanded. I think his name was Ralph, but he could just have as easily been called, Tank or Butch.

Or Killer.

Gulp.

“Who do you think you are, eating lunch every day with Dahlia?” A cheerleader demanded. “She doesn’t want to sit with you, you know.”

My breath hitched, and I choked back a tear. Could that be true? Dahlia really didn’t want to sit with me? Is that what she told her cheerleader friends?

“I think freak girl is going to cry,” Ralph said, obviously overjoyed.

“You’re getting all your freak girl germs on Dahlia,” the cheerleader continued. “You’re bringing her down. You get me?”

She punctuated her question with a shove. Two hands right to my chest. She was stronger than she looked, and I flew back a couple feet. The third football player got behind me and pushed me back in the other direction.

“Please…” I began, which made them laugh and seemed to spur the cheerleader into shoving me again.

It occurred to me that I might die there, beaten to death by the school’s popular kids just as I had a glimmer of hope of making it to Paris. How typical.

Ralph spit in my face, and the cheerleader shoved me again, this time much harder, and I fell to the ground with the wind knocked out of me. I looked up into their faces and read the determination there. I started to really cry. Big tears streamed down my face. It wasn’t so much the pain of being pushed down or the fear of being hurt that got me sobbing. It was the humiliation—a lifetime of humiliation culminating in this moment—that broke me. And I knew something else:

They weren’t done.

They weren’t close to done.

There was a loud popping noise, like a gun going off. I checked my body to see if I had been shot, but I was okay. The others turned around in the direction of the noise.

A tiny car with more dents than not came chugging into the parking lot. It had two doors and a crushed hood. It sounded like a wind-up toy when it moved.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been put together with three paper clips and a rubber band.

It clacked right up to us, stopping just behind the Challenger. That’s when I recognized the driver, and my heart skipped a beat.

And I died a little.

Died in a good way.

He either turned off the car, or it stopped running on its own. Either way the engine choked and sputtered until it was quiet. The driver’s window slowly opened with a tortured squeal. He stuck his arm out and found the door handle, opening it from the outside with a creak. The door sort of dropped a couple inches when it was fully open, and I half-expected it to fall off altogether.

Cruz hopped out of the car. He was tall and built, handsome as ever in jeans and a t-shirt. He was also pleased as punch, his mouth stretched in an ear-to-ear smile that could stop traffic and rev girls’ hearts for miles.

“Tess, look what I got!” he shouted with pride.

The popular kids turned toward me, and their faces said it all: shock, surprise. Why was the most beautiful, perfect boy on the planet talking to the invisible girl?

Cruz’s face said it all, too, when he realized I was on the ground, surrounded by football players, my hair and clothes disheveled, and my cheeks most likely stained with tears. I had never seen his face like that: fighting mad.

Capable of murder.

“It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.”

--Emily Dickinson

Cruz stared right at me, his eyes never wavering, as he made a beeline toward me. He elbowed the others out of his way until he reached me. He bent down, took my hands, and pulled me up.

“All you all right?” he asked, holding my hands with his face inches from mine. He spoke softly and clearly, his voice coming from deep in his chest and sounding ominously like a growl.

“Yes,” I said and started to cry again. It was either the relief of seeing Cruz there or realizing what almost happened that made my emotions bubble up and spill over.

Cruz wiped the tears from under my eyes with his thumbs and held my head in his hands. He pulled me forward and he leaned down until our foreheads were touching. He closed his eyes and breathed deep.

In. Out. In. Out.

I didn’t know if he was trying to calm himself or trying to build his energy.

After a few seconds his eyes flew open, and he stepped back, dropping his hands to his sides. He nodded and then faced my attackers.

“Who’s responsible for this?” he demanded. “I want to know who I’m going to kill.”

His threat was real. Waves of anger wafted off him. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who could feel the pure animal aggression crackling in the air like an electrical storm. Ralph shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if he was deciding which way to run. The two mean girls chewed on their lower lips and stepped backward.

But the other two football players stood their ground. They seemed to welcome the threat of a fight, and they probably reasoned—wisely--that two beats one, especially two giant football players against one thin, yet well-defined, model.

They were wrong.

Cruz marched over to the biggest football player and got in his face. They were about the same height, but the other guy was much bigger than Cruz.

“You are so dead,” he told Cruz.

Cruz didn’t respond. His hand formed into a fist. He cocked his arm back and let it fly into the football player’s face. It landed with a crack that sent him flying backward into the Challenger. Blood shot out of his nose, as if a hose were turned on inside his brain.

I was sure Cruz had broken his hand, but he seemed unfazed and ready to knock out the next guy in line. The girls had run off with Ralph the second their friend’s nose started to bleed, but the other guy was hopping in place, ready to fight nine rounds.

I clutched onto Cruz’s arm. “Please,” I said. “Stop. They’re not worth it.”

Cruz refocused his eyes, looking at me as if he had forgotten I was there and was surprised by my presence. “They’re not worth it,” he agreed. “But you are.”

I stopped breathing. Time stood completely still. I looked around and saw everyone frozen in place: The bad guys ready to fight. Cruz, the good guy, who cared about me.

Was that right? Did he care about me?

I sucked in air and time moved on once more.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” I told Cruz. “I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

I had visions of a dead and broken Cruz, of a Cruz in handcuffs on his way to jail. I couldn’t bear the thought of him hurt or in trouble. And I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone without him.

“Please,” I repeated.

“Are you all right?” he asked me. “Did they hurt you?”

“No. Let’s go home.”

Cruz nodded, and that’s when the football player sucker punched him. Cruz pushed me out of the line of fire, and he ducked in time so that the punch didn’t have much impact. Still, he would have a black eye in the morning. That was for sure.

If I had been Cruz, I would have run away crying, but he seemed fired up by getting hit. Without skipping a beat, he stomped on the football player’s foot and punched him square in the stomach.

Everyone had had enough after that. The guy with the nosebleed jumped into the Challenger and started it up. The other guy hopped into the passenger seat, and they peeled away from the curb, racing out of the lot with their tires squealing.

Cruz and I stood in place and watched them go. We could hear them speeding in the distance long after we could no longer see their car.

I took Cruz’s hand and inspected it for damage. His knuckles were cracked and dotted with blood.

“It’s nothing, Tess.”

“Can you move your fingers?”

“Of course I can,” he said and opened and closed his fist several times to show me.

I touched his cheekbone. “How about your face? Are you in one piece?”

“He barely touched me. Don’t worry. I’ll still be beautiful.”

He winked and smiled. I was so relieved that he was all right that I wrapped my arms around his waist and squeezed him tight. Just as I became aware that I was hugging a beautiful model who probably didn’t want to be hugged by the likes of me, he hugged me back.

Cruz hugged me like I had always dreamed of being hugged. His arms wrapped around me, and he drew me even closer to him. The length of our bodies touched, and he rested his chin on the top of my head.

I don’t know how long we stayed that way, but I never wanted to leave his embrace. I discovered that day that once I was in Cruz’s arms, I never wanted to leave.

***