If You Really Love Me (3 page)

I’m not getting much, but it takes a while for me to make my way through the store because I have to navigate around all the other shoppers and their carts. The burst of warmth I got coming through the doors has worn off, and I’m starting to feel cold again. My bed back at the apartment is pulling at me now like a big magnet. I get in one of the express checkout lines, twenty items or less, but they seem to be moving as slowly as the regular lines. When it’s finally my turn at the register, when I’m unloading my cart and the cashier is scanning my items and passing them off to the sacker, I see him.

At first, my mind sort of plays tricks with me.
He looks familiar.
The guy is wearing a bulky black leather jacket, loose blue jeans, and black sneakers. His back is to me, and his hair spills down to his shoulders in black curls. This is the last place I would have expected to see him, and so it takes a few seconds for my brain to accept the fact that Saul Brooks is standing at the front of my neighborhood supermarket.

I freeze for a second. Anxiety spreads out from my chest like a shiver. It’s definitely him. I can tell from the don’t-give-a-fuck way he stands there. He’s looking over the magazines lined up on the racks next to the greeting cards. My heart is beating harder and harder because I really want to go over to him, but I haven’t got the first clue as to what I could say once I got there.

I don’t take my eyes off him, even when the cashier finishes ringing up my groceries and announces the total to me. I pull two ten-dollar bills from my pocket and hand them over. The loud, solid
schoonk
of the cash drawer sliding open barely registers with me.

“Sir? Your change….”

The annoyance in the cashier’s voice finally makes me turn away. I look at her and smile apologetically. “Sorry,” I say. I take the one-dollar bill and coins she is holding out, stuff them in my pocket, and grab up the plastic bags with my groceries, three in each hand. Quickly, I move away from the register to make room for the customer behind me. When I turn back, I expect that Saul will be gone, because I
have
to be hallucinating, but he’s still there.

I can see his face in profile now. The stubble on his jaw is thick, which makes him look sullen even though his expression is blank. He reaches out suddenly, grabs a magazine, rolls it up, and stuffs it inside his jacket.

My mouth almost drops open. My heart definitely stops. He didn’t even look around to see if anybody was watching, and that’s why I hold my breath, because he’s going to get caught. He strolls past the customer service counter, where people are lined up to buy stamps and money orders, and he heads for the exit, not even walking fast. Any second now, a security guard is going to grab him, or a cashier or a sacker is going to yell for him to stop. Only none of that happens, and he sails through the sliding doors.

I follow like some kind of robot. When I get outside and spot him again, he’s not running; he’s not trying to slip away among the other shoppers heading out with their purchases. He’s standing about thirty feet from the entrance, just standing there. He’s staring off across the busy street with its rushing, honking, fuming traffic. The look on his face is weird and hard to read, sort of like he wants to cry, sort of like he wants to curse, and sort of like he wants to laugh, all at the same time. I stand there too, totally shocked that he’s in my neighborhood, only a few blocks up the street from my apartment, and that he just stole a stupid magazine.

People flow around us, moving to and from the parking lot. It takes almost a minute for him to move again. He lifts his head, as if sensing something, and then he turns and looks right at me. My heart starts pounding harder, and I get a sudden urge to pee because he’s caught me staring at him and I don’t know what to say or do now. It’s best that I just go on home, but I’d have to walk past him to do that, so I look down at the ground and just keep standing there.

I look down at the ground forever, and then he says, “Ellis, right?”

I raise my head, amazed.

He walks toward me. “I’m not good with names, sorry.”

“No, you were right. I’m Ellis Carter.”

“Okay. I’m Saul.”

“I know. Um, I mean… hi.”

He’s standing right in front of me, looking at me. The rolled end of the magazine is poked up under the collar of his jacket. Beneath the jacket, he’s wearing a really nice brown pullover sweater. We’re just about the same height. Up close, he doesn’t look as lean as he does in school. For the next few moments, neither of us says anything. My mouth is dry, and it feels like I’m going to choke because I’m so nervous, but he doesn’t seem bothered at all. His face is a blank.

He looks down at the bags in my hands. “You need a ride?” he asks.

“Um… yeah.”
Shit! Why did I say that? What are we going to talk about once we’re in his car?

He motions with his head and takes off into the parking lot. I follow.

He pulls a set of keys from his pocket. I look down at his butt as he walks. His jeans aren’t tight, but I like the way they hang over his butt, sort of flowing with the rolling motion of it. I like the way he walks. Then the fear of having to talk to him comes over me again, and I look away. The idea pops into my head to tell him that I don’t need a ride after all, that I live just down the street and can walk home. Before I can say anything, he presses down on one end of the keychain with his thumb. Straight ahead of us, the lights flash once on a shiny gray MINI Cooper Roadster, and the trunk pops open.

Saul pushes the lid of the trunk all the way up. “Put your stuff in here.”

I put my groceries in the trunk, and he slams the lid down. Then we climb into the car. The first thing he does is pull the magazine—the current issue of
People—
out of his jacket and throw it onto the backseat. There are two other magazines back there,
Good Housekeeping
and
Seventeen
. None of that stuff seems to be his cup of tea, which is how Cary’s granddad would put it. There’s also a big green duffel bag on the backseat. He slips the key into the ignition and fires up the engine. A second later, the loud squall of rock music fills the car. I flinch. He nudges a button on the steering wheel and the volume goes way down. “Where to?” he asks.

“I live down the street a few blocks, Cascade Apartments. That way.” I point.

He puts the car in gear, drives across the lot, and hangs a right onto Edgington Avenue. He drives fast, weaving from lane to lane to get around vehicles moving too slowly for him. His eyes stay on the road and his face stays blank and he doesn’t say anything, so I just stare straight ahead, too. He doesn’t seem to require anything from me, and I relax a little. It hits me how intimate this is, the two of us breathing the same air here inside his car, cut off from the rest of the world. He’s so close that if I put out my left hand just a few inches, it will be touching his solid-looking thigh. The scent of him is clean, no cologne, just sort of polished and scrubbed. I can smell the spicy manliness of his soap and shampoo radiating from him. That gets me worrying about how I smell to him. I rolled out of bed this morning and wiped my face and under my arms with a soapy towel before throwing on the same jeans and jersey I wore yesterday and rushing out of the apartment. On top of that, I worked up a sweat helping Mr. Luigi.

All too soon, we’re riding through the gates of the Cascade complex. I point the way to my building, and Saul pulls his car right up to the main entrance. He shifts the gear into park and presses the button at the end of the keychain. There’s a dull little thump behind us as the trunk opens itself.

I glance at Saul. For the first time, my presence seems to affect him in some way. He doesn’t look nervous, exactly, but just sort of… not calm. He turns away and swallows in a loud gulp.

“Well, thanks a lot for the ride,” I say, and I reach for the door handle.

Saul runs his fingers through his hair three times. “Hey. You got anything else you have to do right now?”

I look over at him. He’s looking at me in this strange way that, again, is hard to read. It makes me want to hold his hand or hug him or something. Before running into him, I’d planned to make myself a fried egg sandwich and climb back in bed so I would be out of Mom’s way. “No,” I reply without even thinking about it.

“You want to hang out for a while?”

“Sure. But I have to get those groceries inside.”

He shuts off the engine. “I’ll wait.”

There’s this rush of excitement in my chest. I get out of the car fast, grab my bags, and close the trunk. I go into the building and take the stairs two at a time until I reach the second floor, where I hurry down the hall to our apartment. Here I slow down. I unlock the door quietly. I don’t know if Mom is home, but if she is, she’s most likely asleep, and it’ll be hell if I wake her. I close the door behind me and go to the kitchen like a mouse. I put the groceries away, making as little sound as possible. I stuff the empty plastic bags in the drawer where Mom keeps them.

I ease my way down the hall. Mom’s still not home; her door is open, and her bed hasn’t been slept in. She wouldn’t hang around with her girlfriends this long. She must have met a guy. I rush to the bathroom where I wash my face, wipe under my arms again, put on more deodorant, and brush my teeth really fast. I get paper from my backpack, write a note telling Mom that I’m out with a dude from school, and pin the note to her door. Then I run back downstairs.

It’s a relief to see that Saul is still parked right in front of the building. He doesn’t look at all concerned about the signs saying that area is a fire lane and no parking is allowed there. He turns as I fast-walk toward the car. His face stays empty, but in his eyes there’s a flicker of something, and I think maybe he’s relieved to see me too.

When I’m in the car with him again, he says, “You get done with everything?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.” He starts the engine, and we drive off.

For a while, there is nothing but the sound of rock music from his radio and the muted traffic noises from outside. Not talking puts me on edge, and I feel that I have to fill the silence between us, but I can’t think of anything to say. How do you talk to a person when you don’t know anything about him? He doesn’t seem bothered by our not talking. He drives as if I’m not even there, looking around occasionally at the sights. So I settle back in the seat and try to relax.

Finally, he says, “You don’t talk much. In class, I mean.”

That’s a funny way to start a conversation.
“Neither do you.”

He shrugs. “We have that in common.”

Maybe. Maybe not. We’re both social outcasts at school, but for different reasons. I’m a loner because people avoid me. He’s a loner by choice.

So why does he want to hang out with me?

“You kind of blow it all off, don’t you?” I ask. “The classwork and tests and stuff.” I wonder what Mr. Corde will do when he sees the doodle Saul left on his test sheet.

He shrugs again. “I do what I have to to keep my parents off my back. My GPA stays around 3.0.”

Suddenly I feel amazed. I’m in Saul’s car, and he’s talking to me. This mysterious guy with his dark edge and pimply but good-looking face, this guy I’ve been sort of crushing on for a while now, is talking to me. There’s so much I want to know about him. “Where do you live?” I blurt out. “Can I ask that? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“No big deal. I live in Uptown.”

Uptown is a gated community about twenty miles north of where I live, on the lake. “You drove a long way to go to the store.”
Stupid. Stupid thing to say. Now he’ll be mad.

If the comment pissed him off, he doesn’t show it. “I felt like taking a drive downtown,” he replies, a little too casually. “That store was a stop on the way.”

I look at him, just to make sure he isn’t angry and trying to hide it. His face reveals nothing, but he has a great profile. His nose is a straight slope except at the tip, where it turns up just a bit. He’s wearing three stars along the outer curve of his right ear. Not solid stars. They’re like tiny strips of gold that have been folded into star shapes, like a symbol or something.

“I like your earrings,” I say.

“Thanks.”

“Do the stars mean something?”

“They’re Stars of David. A birthday present from my dad. It’s his way of making himself feel I’m protected.”

He glances at me. From his reaction, I can tell the confusion I’m feeling is showing on my face. “I’m Jewish,” he says, but that doesn’t really clear things up for me.

“What’s a Star of David?”

“It’s a symbol of Judaism. The same way a cross is a symbol of Christianity.”

“Oh.” And now I feel stupid again. Sometimes I ask the dumbest questions.

Saul keeps driving in his no-big-deal way, which makes me feel better. “This is the middle of Shabbat,” he says casually.

“I hate to keep asking dumb questions, but what’s Shabbat?”

“Ellis, are you Jewish?”

“No.”

“Then the questions you’re asking are not dumb. Shabbat is our day of rest. We avoid doing a lot of things, spend time at home with family and friends, eat a lot, and go to synagogue.”

“But you’re out here, driving around.”

He shrugs. “I’m not observant anymore. Just my parents are.”

“Oh.” That brings another question to mind. “What’re your parents like?”

“My old man’s an electrical engineer. He designs and builds electrical systems for big projects like stadiums and skyscrapers. He’s worked on buildings just about everywhere in the country—New York, San Francisco, Honolulu—and he’s won all kinds of awards for his designs. There were so many projects coming his way he couldn’t handle them all himself, so he started his own firm. He still turns down a lot of requests because he always wants time for my mom and synagogue and stuff. And my mom’s a traditional Jewish housewife, taking care of home. She says that after I’m out of the house, she’s gonna go back to school and finally have a life of her own, but I’ll believe that when I see it.”