Nothing Like You (7 page)

It’s true. Jeff claims Ballanoff was really into my mother in high school.

You should have seen his face. Frozen deer. Spotlights. Or headlights. Or whatever. “He says that, huh?”

I nodded. “Is it true?”

He fished his keys from his jacket pocket, then he undid the lock on the door. “Come on in. Stay a while.” We both
dropped our books onto his messy desk. “You want iced tea?” He bent down by the mini fridge.

“Sure.”

“Diet?” he asked, grabbing two Snapples.

“Fine by me.”

He tossed me my drink, then sat down across from me. “Yes. True. I had a crush on your mother.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

This was amazing to me. I loved the idea of my mother existing pre-Jeff. There’d only ever been one other guy I knew anything about, hairy Michael, Mom’s college boyfriend. But now there was this, too. “Did you do anything about it?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Did you tell her? Did you
pursue
her?” He just looked at me, so I leaned forward and said, “Mr. B, did you
date
my mom?”

He half laughed/half coughed, as if he were clearing his throat. “No, Holly. I didn’t date your mom.”

“Did you ever kiss?”

“Holly.”

“Come on, you’re giving me nothing.”

He shifted around in his seat, pursing his lips. “Once. When we were your age, about. It wasn’t anything. I don’t think she was really that into it, to be honest.”

I blinked. “Were you sad when she died? I mean, I would have been so sad if someone I’d really liked once had died.”

“Yeah, of course. I was very sad.” And then he really looked it. I could be wrong, but I swear to god his eyes got a little wet.

“I want to go see a psychic,” I blurted.

“What for?”

“You know. I wanna see if I can make a connection. Just so I know she’s okay.”

Ballanoff shifted around in his seat.

“Know any good mediums?” I joked, babbling on. “I got a card from this lady at the bookstore in town. That newagey place right next to Nature Mart? She gave me the card of her friend.” I paused a second and when Ballanoff didn’t say anything, I said, “You think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all.”

And then we stared at each other for a minute, which kind of freaked me out but I think Ballanoff just got really sad, suddenly. “You look so much like her,” he said. Everyone says that. All the time people say that and I know it should make me feel really great but all it ever truly does is turn my gut. Same hair, same skin, same violin dimples on the small of my back. And if I look like her, who’s to say I won’t die like her?

“Heard it before. Dead ringer,” I said, rolling a split lock of tangled hair between two fingers.

Paul and I
had figured out a system for seeing each other. Mainly school nights, after midnight. After Jeff and Nils and Saskia were asleep, he’d drive over and tap my window and I’d run down the hall and open the front door and then he’d crawl into bed with me.

“Ballanoff and my mom kissed once, when they were, like, seventeen.” I slid my arm across Paul’s waist.

“Shut up.”

“It’s true,” I whispered. “He told me today. After class.”

“Doesn’t that creep you out?”

“I think it’s nice. I like thinking about my mom when she was my age … like, I like the idea of her doing things before she was my mom or Jeff’s wife. You know?”

Paul nodded and put a hand on my head. “Why do you call Jeff Jeff?”

“Sometimes I call him Dad to his face. But I dunno, when I was little I just thought it was really funny, calling Dad, “Jeff.” I think I wanted to be grown up already. And it seemed like a very grown-up thing to do.”

He moved his hand from my head, sliding it down so he was holding my hair. “What did you call your mom?”

I bent my head back so I could look at him. “Just Mom.”

He laughed.

“Why’s that funny?” I bit his shoulder and wrapped my leg around him under the covers. “I kinda can’t wait for you to meet him.”

“Who?”

“Jeff. Duh.” I pressed my nose to his armpit. He smelled like a muted mix of Right Guard and BO.

“Holly,” he said, getting up on his elbows to face me. “I can’t meet Jeff.”

“Why not?”

“Well, what’re you gonna say, ‘This is my friend Paul, he’s not my boyfriend but we sleep together sometimes. Oh, also, he’s got a girlfriend.’”

“Well, I wouldn’t have to say any of that. I could just say you’re my friend. That’s the truth.”

“Yeah but, what if he knows Saskia’s parents or something?”

“Saskia’s parents? He doesn’t.”

“You can’t know that for sure. What if he does?”

I sat up. “So you’re never gonna meet my dad? What about Nils? You know he’s already started asking questions and I don’t know how much longer I can hide this from him—”

“What do you mean, he’s asking questions?”

“Well, you know, I think he’s noticed how happy I am.”

“If you tell anyone about us, I swear to god, Holly—”

“You swear to god
what
?” I pulled on the sheet, hiking it up under my arms the way naked women sometimes do on daytime soaps.

“I’m just saying, no one can know. They just—they
can’t
.” He lowered his voice a notch. “Saskia would die if she knew. We can’t ever tell anyone.”

“Well, what if you guys break up? We can’t be together then? Like out in the open, for real?”

He softened. “If we break up, yeah, I guess then we can talk. But you can’t tell anyone, Holly. You can’t. No one can ever know about this, okay?”

I nodded, but I wanted to cry. Instead I sucked it up and lay back down and tried to remember why this whole thing felt so great to begin with.

He nuzzled up next to me then, resting his head on my chest. “I love being with you. I do.”

“I know,” I said, lacing my fingers through his fingers.

He went on. “It would be a real shame if somebody found out about us and all this had to stop.”

My stomach churned. I flexed my fingers so that our hands were no longer entwined. He bit my earlobe and slid his free hand between my thighs. “Your hair smells so nice. Like roses.”

“Different shampoo,” I mumbled, rolling away from him and onto my side.

As if on cosmic cue
, the next day in World History, Saskia and I got stuck working together on this horrific group project—an Ancient Mesopotamia–themed collage.

“Do you have any clue what we’re supposed to be doing?” She was staring at me, brushing her fingers over the tips of her hair.

“Not really,” I said, giggling like a nervous twit. “Feels more like fourth grade arts and crafts.” I stood up and circled around to the back of my desk.

“So we just, like, collect a bunch of images and paste them all together?”

We were pushing our desks together and all I could think was
this so isn’t my fault but Paul’s gonna kill me
. “Yeah, basically,” I said. “I guess we can photocopy some stuff from
the library. And there’s stuff in our books we can use too.”

Saskia plopped down in her seat. “I mean I know we know each other, so it seems stupid me introducing myself to you, but I don’t think we’ve ever officially …
talked
. I’m Saskia.”

“Holly.” I said, checking the clock on the wall.
Crap, fifteen more minutes of this. Tick. Tock. Tick.

“You went to my elementary, didn’t you?”

“Same sixth-grade class.”

“Ms. Shapiro?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I totally remember.”

Saskia leaned forward, lightly touching one of my dangly silver earrings. “I love these,” she said. “Whenever you wear them I always stare. Have you noticed? I stare at people way too much.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” I wished I had.

“Where’d you get them?”

“What?”

“Your earrings. In L.A.?”

“Oh. They were my mother’s,” I said. And then that kind of killed the conversation because she totally knew about my mom. Everyone knew. No one ever knows what to say.

We poked through our textbooks for the last ten minutes of class. I zoned out somewhere around page four hundred, rereading the same picture caption over and over,
thinking about was how nice Saskia seemed, and about how Paul would freak if he ever found out about this—she and I paired up for class. Then I pictured Mom on her cloud. Then the bell rang and we pushed our desks back into place and Saskia turned toward me and said, “So, you wanna just bring a whole bunch of photos to class next time and I’ll do the same and then we’ll just start pasting stuff together?”

“Sounds like a plan, “ I squeaked, grabbing my book bag and bolting for the exit.

“Hey, wait!” she yelled after me. “We didn’t even divvy up the time line! Which half do you want?”

I was already out the door. “Whichever,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “I’ll take invasion of Greece and everything after!”

“Okay!” she said, waving good-bye. And then that was it. Another secret to keep. Saskia Van Wyck: my brand-new best girl friend.

“Where to?”

Paul and I were driving into L.A. His idea. He said he was taking me somewhere great.

“It’s not a place, exactly. I mean, it’s a place, it’s just not like, a
place
place.”

We drove all the way up Sunset, away from the beach into the sticky city. We drove with the windows open and the music blaring and the air got hotter each mile we clocked on
the odometer. We didn’t talk much on the drive there, which was fine because I didn’t really feel like talking, and then Paul finally stopped the car on this pretty little residential street somewhere in Hollywood.

“Where are we?”

“Hollywood and Sierra Bonita.”

I looked at him, perplexed.

“It’s haunted,” he said. “Supposedly. I figure we could sit here for a little while, just to see.”

“See what?”

“You know. Maybe if you concentrate really hard, you’ll be able to, like,
feel
your mom. Or something.”

And that’s when I realized that this was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I flung my arms around his neck and instantly wanted to cry but didn’t, I just held on to him, letting him rub my back, and then I sank back in my seat and looked across the sky at the sun, which was setting. He slipped a hand around my neck and turned the car off.

I closed my eyes and I thought about Mom, but no more cloud fantasy. I thought about how she looked when she was still young and pretty, before the cancer had corroded her body. I pictured her healthy and perfect and then I said what I wanted to say to her from inside my head. I said,
I miss you Mom I love you Mom nothing’s the same with you gone.
I told her about Jeff and how sad he’d been these past few months, how the closets were still packed with her clothes and how
the house still really smelled like her. I told her about how Jeff had said even Harry had cried the morning she died. And then I talked about school and about Paul and I told her how guilty I felt
but isn’t he great because he’s brought me here
.
Maybe it’s all worthwhile,
I thought,
because really he’s brought me to you
.

And then I smelled smoke and looked to my left and Paul was smoking a cigarette, his feet kicked up on the dash, his eyes wide open staring out the window. And I said, “Hi. What’re you looking at?” And he just turned and smiled at me and said he wasn’t looking at anything.

“Did you feel something?” he asked. And I said I did and then I grabbed his hands and said thank you a million times over and then I told him about the medium I wanted to see. I told him about the lady in the new-age shop in Topanga and how I wanted to see if her friend could bring me a message from my mother. “Will you come with me?” I asked.

“You really want me there?” he said.

And I said yes, and he said, “I’d be honored.”

And I just knew right then that what we were doing was really okay. That I wasn’t a bad person and that as nice as Saskia seemed, that this thing with me and Paul was bigger than either of us had expected it to be. I thought,
Saskia’s sweet but she’ll have to step aside
. And then Paul started the car. He threw his half-smoked cigarette out the window
and laid into the gas and then we were driving; back down Sunset, all of L.A. going dark in Paul’s shiny rearview mirror.