Nothing Like You (9 page)

Saskia took out a piece of paper and scribbled something down. “Here.”

“Hmm?”

“You should call me sometime.”

“Call you?” I was confused. Why would I possibly call her?

The bell rang. She handed me the little slip of loose leaf. “My number. If you wanna hang out ever. Go to the beach or something.” She stood up.

“Yeah, sure. Okay.” I stood up too, stunned, watching as she pushed her desk against the wall before waving quickly
and circling out into the corridor. I fingered the little slip of loose leaf between my thumb and pinkie finger, then slipped it into my back pocket before swinging my desk back into place.

Tap tap tap.

I sat up and stared groggily at Paul’s face, which looked to me as if it were hanging in midair, floating around without a body.

I rubbed my eyes, then pressed a palm to my bedroom window. Paul kissed the glass.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked. He shook his head and plugged his ears.
I can’t hear you,
he mouthed. So I got out of bed and tiptoed down the hall, past sleeping Jeff, and Harry, who was up, wagging his tail. I cracked the door. “It’s Monday,” I whispered. He pushed past me, worming his way inside. “What’re you doing here?” I asked. He put a finger to his lips and spun me around, pushing me back down the hall toward the bedroom, slipping my shirt over my head and then off with my pajama bottoms. “Are you still mad at me?” I asked, shoving my bedroom door shut with my elbow. He clamped a hand over my mouth and went back to undoing the buttons on his fly. “Mad?” he asked, kissing me again, sliding his free hand along the waistband of my orange cotton underwear, sending a warm jolt up my spine.

He pushed me backward onto the bed and bit my top lip. “Ow.”

“Did that hurt?”

I touched my throbbing mouth, then shook my head.

“Good.”

Afterward, when we were through, we lay there like statues. I fell asleep for a bit, then woke up to some rustling around in my bed.

“Paul?” I heard my bedroom door click shut. I sat up. He was gone. So I got up on my knees and looked out the window. Paul was jogging down my driveway to his car, which he always parked on the street by our mailbox so no one would hear him coming and going.

I walked over to my stereo, slipped Neil Diamond into the CD player, and skipped to track nine. The first few bars of “Holly Holy” played softly as I fell backward onto my bed. Paul always spent the night. Always. He’d never left before without a quiet kiss or sweet good-bye.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to cry. I tried and I tried until finally, I fell back to sleep, sometime around four thirty, about an hour and a half before I had to get up for school.

The psychic called back
.

It was after lunch on the way to Calc when my cell rang.

“Is this Holly?”

My hands shook, so stupid, I don’t know why they were shaking, but I pressed the phone close to my ear and said, “Yeah, this is me.”

“Frank Gellar.” He sounded exactly like he had on his outgoing voice mail message. “You wanted to set up an appointment for a reading?”

I stopped moving and backed myself into the hallway wall. I had an immediate impulse to check my boobs for lumps but resisted the urge. “Yeah. Yes. I have, um … well, you’re, like, a medium, right?” I pulled a notepad and pen from my backpack. “Like, I have someone that maybe I
want to talk to—could you do that? Help me talk to that person?”

“I can certainly try.” He coughed. “Did you want to book an hour session?”

“Is that what people normally do? How much is an hour?”

“One seventy-five.”

I nearly choked on my spit. He didn’t mean a dollar seventy-five, and I maybe had, like, tops, a hundred bucks stashed away in the sock drawer in my dresser. I knew I could’ve asked Jeff for the money but then Jeff would have asked me what I needed it for and I’d have to tell him
I’m trying to talk to Mom
and then what if he got mad like Nils did or worse, what if he cried?

“How much time could I get for a hundred bucks?” I asked.

“A half-hour session is ninety.”

“Can we do a half hour then? This weekend?”

“I could take you on Saturday. At four?” I said four p.m. was fine, that it would work great and then he gave me the address to his house/office, which was pretty close by in the Palisades.

After that I felt absolutely great. I spent all of Calc thinking up questions I might want to ask come Saturday. Questions like,
where are you? what does it look like where you are?
And
please don’t tell me how I’m going to die because I really don’t want to know
(that last one isn’t a question,
I guess). Then with five minutes left of class to spare, I drafted a note to Paul that said:

Hey you. I made an appointment for this Saturday at 4 pm with that psychic guy. Can you come, still? xoxo. Holly.

It was important to me that I seem warm and not angry after he’d left the night before without spending the night or saying good-bye. He’d promised to come with me to this thing and if he thought for a second I was mad or hurt he might retract his promise and I couldn’t let that happen because I was scared to go alone.

“I’m hungry.”

“Holly, come on. Focus.”

We were in Ballanoff’s office drinking diet Snapple. He’d promised me extra credit in exchange for a thorough reading of
The Crucible
.

“Abigail Williams, right. Is she the witch?”

“Did you even read the play?”

I sunk down onto Ballanoff’s desk so my upper arms and chin were flat against the tabletop. I picked up my copy of the play, then let it drop back down. “Sort of.”

“
Okay, so, themes, then. Go.”

I blinked. “Witches?”

“Holly.”

“What?”

Ballanoff clicked his pen against his top teeth, then rolled his eyes. “Fear.
Paranoia
. Power plays a significant role, here, don’t you think?”

“Power, absolutely.”

“So what does the John Proctor–Abigail Williams affair do for Abigail? How is she able to gain leverage, manipulate her town? What roles do power and sex and sexual repression play in the text?”

My stomach turned over. Words like “affair” and “sex” and “manipulate” now made me squeamish. “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t really read the whole thing, okay?” I sat up, abruptly, and shoved my copy of the play back into my bag. “Can we talk about something else instead?”

Ballanoff clucked his tongue, nodding unenthusiastically.

“Okay, good.” I sat back, relaxing slightly. “Let’s talk about …” I drummed my fingertips against his desktop. “How’s about we discuss … you and my mom, again?” I winked.

“Again?”

“Again, yes,” I said, leaning forward. “But this time, more details.”

Ballanoff put one foot up on the edge of his desk and pushed backward in his chair. “Seriously, Holly, there’s nothing to tell. It was
one
kiss.”

“Yeah, but you knew her, right? What was she like back then? I mean, was she popular? Dorky? Did she have boyfriends? School spirit? What? Tell me something I don’t know.”

Ballanoff swallowed. “She was like … you know. She was like …
you
. I mean, she looked like you. Dark hair, pale skin. She was everyone’s friend.”

I snorted. “Oh yeah, just like me. Miss Congeniality.”

“So true.”

“Har har.” I kicked the leg on his desk. “So?”

“So, what? So that’s it.”

“That’s it? No more?” I darted my eyes down.

“She was just … she was really warm. And sincere. And people really responded to that, I think.”

I looked back up. He was staring at me.

“Are you sure all you did was kiss?”

Ballanoff shifted around in his seat. “Holly, come on …”

I stared back, searching his face.

“There’s no secret romance, here.”

“Sure thing,” I said, pushing my hair behind my ears, straightening up. “But, so … did you keep in touch? After graduation, I mean.”

“Not really, I mean, I’d see her around on holiday breaks.”

“With Jeff?”

“With Jeff, yeah.” He nodded, downing the last of his diet iced tea.

“What’s this about?”

Just home from my hike with Harry, and Jeff had the huge cardboard photo of my mother from her memorial
service propped against the living room couch. I circled around it, touching its pointed edges.

“I don’t know what to do with it. I was thinking maybe you and Nils would want it out in The Shack.”

I looked at him with crazy eyes. “It’s huge. It’ll take up an entire wall in there. It’ll be like a
shrine
to Mom.” I kicked off my sneakers and padded across the kitchen floor in my socks. “No thank you.”

He threw a chopped pepper into a hot wok. Smoke and oil flew up in front of his face. “Well, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s been in the bedroom for the past seven months and it’s starting to make me agitated.”

I walked over to the stove and picked up a slice of carrot. “Can I eat this?”

Jeff nodded.

“So why not just throw it out?”

He shook soy sauce over the vegetables. “I can’t throw that out, Holly—it’s huge. It’s your mother.”

“It’s not her. It’s a big piece of poster board.” I took another carrot. “Besides, the picture is ugly. She was so beautiful and I love you, but your taste in photographs, not so good.” I went on, my mouth full. “Please, don’t ever do that to me. If I die, I want a nice photo that makes me look really great.”

“Don’t even joke, please. The thought of losing you …”

I grabbed Jeff’s arm. “Oh, I’m kidding, come on.” He
kissed my cheek and I took another carrot. “Why don’t we stick it in the garage for now?”

Jeff nodded. I picked Mom up by her pointy corners and carried her down the front steps and around to the garage. I slid past Jeff’s car and searched for a place to put her. On the other side of the washer there was a little bit of wall space. She’d fit perfectly. I propped her up against a big copper pipe and bent down to kiss her one-dimensional lips. “You’ll have fun down here,” I said to the photograph. “See you next time I do a load of whites.”

After school, I watched
from the grassy hill above the parking lot as Paul approached his car. He was alone. I waved, loping forward.

“Holly,” he said, only he didn’t seem excited to see me.

“Did you get my note?” I asked, breathless from the downhill run.

He stuck his key into the car lock and opened the driver’s side door.

“What note?”

“I left a note in your locker on Tuesday. About the psychic? It’s tomorrow, my appointment.”

“That’s great.” He got into his car, shut the door, and rolled down his window. “Thanks, but—I asked in the
note if you could come with me. Remember you said you would come?”

“Oh, yeah, but I can’t. Saskia’s birthday is Sunday and I’m going with her family to Catalina for the weekend. It’s gonna be awesome. We’re camping.”

“Oh.”

He looked so happy about his dumb Catalina plans. Camping with Saskia and her sick brother and I just wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kick him and hurt him and make him cry, but instead I just stood there, eventually blurting, “But I don’t want to go alone.”

“So take Nils.”

“Nils doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Well, Holly, I can’t go. I mean I really feel for you, but you should have asked me before scheduling the appointment if you wanted me to come so bad.”

“But I did ask you. I left you that note.”

He started the car. “Well, I dunno, maybe I just didn’t get it.” But that was a lie. I was sure he got the note.

“Well, if I cancel and reschedule, will you come with me then? When would be better for you?”

“I really don’t know. Just not tomorrow, okay? Next week’s bad too.”

I smiled but I didn’t feel happy. I felt shitty and desperate but I said, “Okay,” anyway.

So I cancelled the appointment and rescheduled with
Frank Gellar: Psychic Medium, for Saturday, the weekend after next
,
at three p.m. And I felt like a real pussy doing it but I wanted what I wanted. I wanted Paul there.

“I’m eating with you today,” Saskia said, sticking a fork into her chickpea-iceberg lettuce salad and sitting down. My eyes darted to her usual table, where her friend Sarah something-or-other sat with a whole bunch of Saskia-types, eating and looking conspicuously happy. “Won’t your friends miss you?” I asked, gesturing to her table.