manicpixiedreamgirl (25 page)

I say nothing for ten full minutes as I hold Becky in my arms until they are cramped and rigid, but I will not let her go. I feel drops of tears, snot, and spit drip onto my bare ankle, and I don’t care. I will not move.

Eventually, she pulls away from me. Slowly. Wraps the robe around herself and scoots to one side. With the bottom edge of the robe, she wipes off her face, which is red and damp.

She picks at the thin white skin of her forearm. I move to face her. I will wait. I will do anything she wants. Leave, hold her again, die, live forever. She has only to speak it.

Which makes her next words a shock to my already spinning head.

“Everyone thinks I’m a slut.”

I shake my head quickly. “I don’t think that.” Which is an embellishment; many times the past couple years, that thought has crossed my mind, but only when I was mad, and I never let myself really believe it.

“Everyone
else
thinks I’m a slut,” Becky says.

“What do
you
think?”

She holds her breath for a moment.

“That’s way too deep for me right now.” She drags one sleeve of the robe beneath her nose and sniffles.

“Okay.”

The room gets quiet again. For a long time. I don’t care.

“When I was in eighth grade,” Becky says quietly, “I was friends with this guy Derek. Knew him from
the club
. We’d gone to school together since kindergarten. And one Saturday, we were at some kid’s house for a pool party. He took me into the pool house and asked me if I’d … do something. For him.”

She raises a shoulder, as if to hide behind it.

“So I did. Stuff I didn’t even know the names for back then. I didn’t want to do it.”

My hands clench. “Do you mean he …”

“No,” Becky says. “I mean, nothing that would hold up in court. I just didn’t say …”

She turns to look out her window—or
at
her window, rather, since the curtains are drawn and it’s dark outside
anyway. The glare of headlights from a passing car slowly brighten and abruptly fade as she stares.

“I never say no.”

My stomach relaxes, but then gets
too
relaxed. Loose and full and rumbling. I don’t want to hear whatever she’s going to say next.

Somehow I have to.

“So, Derek went and told all his asshole buddies,” Becky says, sighing. “And they started coming up to me at school. You know. Asking me to do stuff with
them
. So I just did. One of them was in Drama One with me freshman year, and he must have told one of the guys, and it just … kept happening.”

“Why didn’t you say something? Tell them to stop?”

Her head swivels from her window to her closed door, eyes slitting, jaw set. And without a word she says volumes.

You stupid, arrogant pieces of shit
, I think, willing the thought to travel into the hall, into her parents’ bedroom. Sorry, bedrooms, plural.
You have no idea what you’re doing to her, do you?

“I don’t chase anyone down, you know,” Becky says suddenly, turning away from her door. “I don’t put notches in my headboard. I’m not
always open
.”

I wince, recalling Sydney’s words from earlier.

“That’s what they call me,” Becky adds. “
Open for Business Becca
. I don’t even go by Becca.”

“I know. I hate when people call you that. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Not like Mustardseed?”

“Not at all like Mustardseed.”

“Thanks. You’re sweet.”

It’s a phrase she’s used any number of times:
you’re sweet
. It always bugged me before. I knew she didn’t mean anything by it.

Does she now? I can’t tell. Does it matter? I don’t know.

Becky sniffles again, then gets up, grabs a tissue from the bathroom, blows her nose, and comes back out, leaning against the bathroom door frame.

“So, I guess this is pretty awkward,” she says, rolling her eyes a bit.

Strangely, I find myself smirking back at her. “Maybe.”

She takes a step, then stops. “What’s that?” she asks, bending down.

Before I can think to stop her, she’s plucked the folded magazine from my jeans.

“The Literary Quarterly Review,”
she reads. “Is your werewolf story in here?”

Here we go. Or have we already gone?

“Not exactly,” I say. “A different one.”

“Yeah?” She thumbs through the pages.

“Page seventeen,” I say. My voice sounds like an echo bouncing down a dark tunnel.

Becky goes to the page and starts reading. I sit back against the headboard, letting my eyes close for a minute. When I open them, Becky’s expression is curious.

“This sounds like our school.”

“Pretty much. You might want to read the whole thing.” I’m way too out of it to attempt reading it to her.

Becky comes back to her side of the bed, sits, and reads the entire story all the way through. When she’s done, she closes the magazine. Her fingers curl around the edges, wrinkling the cover.

“What the hell is this?”

I blink rapidly, trying to catch up to her mood shift. “It’s a story … about …”

Her fingers graze the star tattoo, a detail I
may
have included in the story.

“Is this supposed to be me?”

“It’s
based
on you.…”

Becky throws the magazine. It hits my chest with a splash, paper-cutting my ribs.

Of all the possible responses I’d ever dreamed of getting after telling Becky how I felt, good and proper, this one never crossed my mind.

“Becky, what’s wrong?”

“What’s
wrong
? Shit,
fuck
, Tyler! That isn’t me! That won’t ever be me!”

Feeling like the most melodramatic asshole in the known universe, I can’t help but say, “But it could be.”

“They’d never let me.”

“Who?”

“Anyone. Everyone! This is who I
am
now, I’m stuck with it, and …”

She hesitates, then pulls the magazine off my lap. She flips back to the first page of the story.

“… and it hasn’t made any difference.”

I stay quiet. Becky thumbs through the story again, not appearing to really read it, but absorbing it all the same.

“Tyler,” she says finally, “why the hell didn’t you say something before? If this is how you see me, why didn’t you say so?”

“I was too scared,” I say. “You’re one of my best friends. We hung out, we talked … I didn’t want to risk losing what I had. I thought you’d freak out.”

“So that’s why you said you loved me?”

“You mean you really didn’t know?”

Becky bites her lip. Still, even in this moment: so damn sexy.

“I mean, when Sydney told me to stay out of her way, I kind of wondered,” she says. “And when you looked all mad when you saw me and Ross, it crossed my mind, but … well, hell, man, you were with Sydney. All the time. You seemed happy. And you were cool with me, and talked to me, and I just figured it was because you were a nice guy. When did this happen?”

“The first day I saw you in the cafeteria. Freshman year. You sure you didn’t know? Because according to Sydney, everyone else on the planet did.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious. You were reading
Night Shift
and eating
animal crackers. Some of them, anyway, you were sort of separating them.…”

I can’t help but be amazed at the sudden ease with which this conversation is happening. Maybe it’s because in so many ways, physical and otherwise, we just don’t have anything to hide. I mean, I’m in my
boxers
.

“God,” Becky says. “That’s what Sydney was talking about? About staying out of her way?”

“It’s, uh, been a bit of a trip,” I tell her.

“Yeah,” she goes. “I can see how it might be.” She reaches for my hand. Hers is soft. “Tyler, I’m sorry … you must’ve thought I was totally leading you on or something.”

“Actually, I never thought that,” I say. Believe it or not, it’s the very first time it’s ever occurred to me that she even
could
lead me on. “I was happy we got to be friends.”

She withdraws her hand. “Guess that’s sort of over with, huh?”

Panic strikes. “No!” I say. “No, hey. I don’t want that.”

“Look at me,” she says, flapping one corner of her robe. “How could you want to hang around me after this?”

I take a deep breath. “I already told you the answer to that a few minutes ago, I think. But I don’t want to say it again right now, because honestly, it kind of flipped you out.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Sorry about that.”

“I don’t mind.”

Another silence.

“You should probably go,” Becky says. “It’s really late.”

“Do you want me to?” I ask. “Go, I mean?”

“I don’t know. Yes. But only because …”

I wait.

“I need to think about some stuff,” she finishes. “I’ve never even dated anyone before. I mean, ever. I’ve only ever …”

She trails off. We both know what she means. But what I’m really interested in is the whole “dated” thing.

“So … just to be clear … are you saying that we could try it? Um, dating, I mean?”

“I don’t know, Ty. I truly do not know.”

I consider this. It’s not a no, at any rate. Maybe that’s enough.

And maybe now’s not the time anyway.

As I think about the expression on her face tonight, lying beneath me—think about her face when Matthew was doing his thing to her, the look she gave Scott in the hallway—she wasn’t
into
it. Like she said, she
let
people do things to her, didn’t stop them, never said no.

I don’t want to be with her like that.

Plus, there’s Sydney. My recently ex’d girlfriend. Oh, holy hell, I really did screw her over. It’s not a news flash, this little epiphany, but now that there’s a glimmer of hope with Becky, I don’t need to make things worse by showing up at school with a new girlfriend. Even if it is the one I’ve been dreaming about.

I get off Becky’s bed and start pulling my clothes back on. When I’m done, I take a wandering look around her room, not sure what to do next.

“So … can I call you tomorrow?” I ask.

“Yes,” Becky says quietly.

“All right.” I pat my pockets, make sure I have everything. “And I won’t say anything,” I add. “About … anything.”

She smiles, her eyes tired. “I know.”

I want to hug her again, but I don’t. I move toward her door. When my hand falls on the knob, her voice stops me.

“Sparky?”

“Yeah?”

Becky seems to be searching for words. When they come, they sting.

“This … didn’t mean anything,” she says carefully. “What I did. Well,
tried
to do. It wasn’t about you. I don’t know if I
can
be anything but friends with you. If you’re serious about what you said—how you feel—then I have to tell you that right now.”

I shock the hell out of myself by saying, “You might change your mind.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then that would suck for me,” I say. “But I can’t not hang out with you. Tried it. It doesn’t work.”

“What if I hurt you?”

“You already hurt me. No, I’m sorry, I take that back. I already hurt myself. It’s okay.”

She watches me carefully, and I return her gaze without a flinch. Slowly, she gets up off the bed and comes over to me. Puts her hands on my chest. Leans up.

Kisses me. Once.

Her breath glides over my own, eddies and spins between us. Her lips stun me with their shape, how they blend into mine. I can’t stop myself from gently biting her lower lip as she slowly pulls away.

Becky takes a step back, appearing to think over what she just did. Me, I’m floating, my head bouncing around her ceiling like an errant helium party balloon. I can’t tell if my heart has stopped or is beating so fast I just can’t feel it anymore.

“I’ve never done that before,” she says softly. She gives a short laugh. “My god, Sparky. You were my first kiss.”

And, well, the hell with it. I grab the belt of her robe and pull her back, kissing her again. Longer. Not too hard. Not too soft.

Then I let her go. She stares up at me, eyes wide.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mustardseed,” I say.

“Okay,” she whispers.

I let myself out, walking softly through the house and closing the front door as gently as possible.

Just as I’m unlocking my car door, I see something shoved beneath the windshield wiper.

The Literary Quarterly Review
.