Sometimes It Happens (17 page)

I think about how different my summer would be if she was here. We’d be at her pool every day, hanging out and reading magazines, gossiping about celebrities, and listening to music. Maybe we would have even prank-called Sebastian a couple of times, or spray-painted something on his lawn. I wouldn’t be here in the sweltering diner, listening to Lacey talk about her bug bite, and wondering if Noah is mad at me or if Sebastian is coming back.

My phone rings again. Ava. Again. She tends to do that—keeps calling if it goes to voicemail, hoping that you’ll think it’s an emergency and pick up the phone. Whenever I
do give in and pick up, she always just says, “It’s about time” in a really annoyed voice, and then I get annoyed with her
and
with myself for falling for her trick. But what if she did talk to Noah? What if Noah told her how weird I was acting, and now she’s calling to yell at me? What if it really is an emergency this time?

No
, I tell myself again as firmly as I told Lacey her spot is just a bug bite. That’s crazy. I send the call to voicemail, but the phone starts ringing in my hand almost immediately. I sigh.

“I have to take this outside,” I say.

“Sure,” Lacey says. “Take your time, I got it in here.” Noah, of course, shows no sign of hearing me.

“Hey,” I say into the phone as I push through the door of the diner and go outside to the sidewalk. I force myself to sound bright and cheerful, like
haha, nothing to see here, I wasn’t fantasizing about your boyfriend
. “What’s going on? How are you? I miss you?” The last one comes out as a question, which sounds weird, even to me.

“Why are you being weird?” Ava asks.

“I’m not being weird.” I plop down on a bench, then reach down and roll up the shorts I’m wearing so that they’re a little shorter than they already are. If I thought it was hot in the diner, it’s about a million times hotter out here.

“Yes you are,” Ava says. She sounds exasperated. “You’re being all falsely cheerful, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“You’re lying,” Ava says. “Noah told me all about it.”

“He did?” I croak. I blink hard a few times, my vision getting all spotty from the hot sun that’s beating down on me. For a second, I wonder if I’m going to faint, and I put my head down between my legs.

“Yeah,” she says. “About how Sebastian showed up there this morning, completely blindsiding you.” Oh, thank God! She’s asking about Sebastian, not Noah. Which means that she doesn’t know, which means that Noah might not know. But if he doesn’t, then why is he ignoring me? Unless he knows and just didn’t tell Ava? Jesus, this is horrible. What the hell am I going to do?
Nothing
, I tell myself.
You’re going to do nothing
. Big deal that you had a weird moment with Noah. Well, a couple of weird moments. A couple of weird moments that included him telling me about his screenplay, him telling me not to let Ava know that we were hanging out, and me getting completely turned on when he took my hand. Not to mention how I felt when we were sharing French fries last night. Wow. That’s really a lot more than a couple of moments.

“Hello!” Ava yells. “Are you there?”

“Sorry,” I say, trying to collect my thoughts. “Um, yeah, Sebastian showed up here this morning, saying he wanted to talk to me.” I realize that with all my Noah-obsessing, I haven’t properly obsessed about Sebastian. What did he
want exactly? Does he really want me back? Does he know I drove by his house? Does he know that I called him three times and hung up right after we broke up? (I totally
^*
67’d my number to block it, but with technology these days, you never know when someone’s going to invent a way to get around that. Nothing’s private anymore, you know?) Do I even care?

“What happened?” Ava asks. “Tell me everything.”

“I sent him away, of course. In fact, I gave him a total attitude.” I feel like Ava should be proud of me for this, that she should tell me I did a great job, that she can’t believe how strong I am. I mean, when she left I was a complete mess, just days off of my meltdown in Jenna Lamacchia’s bathroom. Now here I am, sending Sebastian away. It’s like I’m a completely new woman.

But there’s just silence. Then, “Are you going to call him or anything?”

“No,” I say. “Why would I call him?”

“Don’t you want to hear what he has to say? Just in case he wants you back?”

I frown. What the hell is she talking about? All Ava has been saying since the night of Jenna’s party is how much of a jerk Sebastian is, how I’m way too good for him, how I need to move on and upgrade, and blah, blah, blah. “No-ooo,” I tell her. “I don’t want to hear what he has to say. Besides, I thought you said that I hated him. That
we
hated him.”

“We do,” she says, “I mean, we did. When he dumped you. Now that maybe he wants you back, it’s kind of a different story.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she says, sounding uncomfortable. “It just is.” It sounds kind of like she’s implying I’m not going to do any better. So as long as Sebastian broke up with me, it was fine to say he was a loser, but now that he might want to get back together, I should go for it because I’m not going to do any better.

“Are you saying that I can’t do better?”

“Hannah, don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “I would never say that.” But she doesn’t deny that she’s thinking it.

I’m about to press her on it, when Lacey comes running out of Cooley’s. “Hannah!” she yells. “I have to go to the hospital!” I roll my eyes and am about to tell her that I really cannot deal with her freak-outs right now, but she shoves her arm in my face. Her bite, which just a few minutes ago was the size of a dime, is now the size of a half-dollar, with an angry red border all around it.

“That doesn’t look so good,” I say honestly.

“I know!” she says, panicked. “Noah said I should probably have it looked at.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” she says. “But it kind of itches.” She looks confused. “In fact, my whole body kind of itches.” She lifts up her shirt and starts scratching.

“Who’s that?” Ava asks. “And what did she say about Noah?”

“It’s Lacey,” I say. “She works with us.”

“Lacey Adams?” Ava says. “Ugh, the one who can’t get over Riker? I can’t stand that girl.”

“I have to go,” I tell Ava. Lacey’s still scratching, only now, her stomach is covered with angry-looking red bumps.

“Wait!” Ava says. “Can you tell Noah that—”

“Ava,” I say. “I have to go.” And for the first time in my whole life, I hang up on her.

Ava laughs. A big, loud laugh that echoes off the walls of Cooley’s. I’ve just told her that I’m the one who’s been seeing Noah, and she’s laughing. Of course,
seeing
isn’t really the right word, I guess. Neither is “sleeping with” since that implies it’s been going on for a while, and it wasn’t. But it was building all summer, and although I’m probably not the reason he broke up with her, I must have at least had something to do with it, even if I was just a symptom of some problem they were having.

“What did you say?” she asks finally, when she realizes I’m not laughing back.

“I said,” I tell her quietly, “that Noah and I were together this summer. Not, like, the whole summer. We just . . . it happened last night.” Last night, in the back, here, up against the counter, on the floor, Noah’s hands in my hair and on my back, and . . . I take a deep breath and hope Ava can’t hear how fast my heart is beating from just thinking about it.

“Tell me,” Ava says, gripping her fork, “that you’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

A look comes over her face then, one I haven’t seen since the sixth grade when Ava found out that Andrea Benson’s mom was trying to make a move on Ava’s dad. She found Andrea on the playground and started screaming at her, calling her mom a slut and a whore. She had to go to the school psychologist for the rest of the year, that’s how crazy it was.

“I see,” Ava says quietly. “Well. I guess that explains what happened when you two came to visit me this summer.”

“Nothing was going on then,” I say. Now that I’ve said it, that I’ve put it out there, I want to take it back. But now that I’ve told her, that I’ve done it, I can’t. It’s like, in the one moment I wanted to hurt her, I’ve ruined everything. I feel sick to my stomach, the French fries I just ate churning around and making me nauseous.

“Nothing was going on then?” She’s talking really quietly, which is unnerving for some reason. I want some kind of yelling or screaming. I want her to ask me why, to call me a bitch and a traitor, something, anything other than talking quietly.

“No,” I say. “Nothing is even really going on. It just . . . Last night something happened.”

“What?” she asks. I don’t answer, just look down at my napkin. “What happened?” she says again, this time her voice rising.

“We . . . we were here,” I say. “At the diner. We were closing down, it was late, and . . . one thing led to another.” I swallow and hope she doesn’t ask me what I know she’s probably going to ask me.

“Did you guys . . . Did you
sleep
with him?”

For a second, I think about lying. I wanted to tell her, I did, but now all I want to do is take it back, and so my first instinct is to do damage control and stop what I’ve started. But something inside me tells me that if I lie, it won’t really matter. The damage is already done, and now the best thing I can do is get it all out there and hope that she can maybe forgive me.

“Yes,” I whisper, looking her right in the eye. Ava looks back, her eyes blazing. And then she reaches across the table and slaps me.

I never realized how scary hospitals were until now. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever really been in a hospital unless you count when I was born. Of course we’re not actually in the
hospital
, we’re just waiting in the emergency room, which for some reason actually seems scarier. I mean, the hospital at least has people who are already sick and diagnosed. The room out here is for people who have no idea what’s wrong with them. Like, it could be
anything.
Or nothing, which I guess is the better way to look at it.

“What do you think’s taking them so long?” Lacey asks from the seat next to me. Her leg is jittering up and down, and I reach over and put my hand on it. Lacey reaches out and squeezes my arm.

“Well,” I say, “they obviously don’t think it’s a big deal or they would have carted you right back there.”

“Or,” Lacey says, “they probably know I’m going to die and so they’re leaving me out here because they need to help the people who actually have a chance.”

“Lacey,” I say. “Did you see them bringing in the guy who was bleeding profusely from the head?”

“Yes,” she says.

“If that guy has a chance, then you definitely do.”

“True,” she says. “Still, I feel like I’m going to faint.” She puts her head down between her legs, and the tips of her red curls brush against the floor, which is definitely not sanitary. Who knows what kind of blood and guts have been on this floor.

“Sit up,” I say. “Don’t you want to watch
Judge Judy
?” I point toward the corner, where a flat-screen plasma TV is mounted on the wall. “You love her.”

“I do love her,” she agrees, fixing her eyes on the TV. But I can tell she’s still nervous. I wish Noah were here. He went to park the car after dropping me and Lacey off in front so we could sign in and get seen as soon as possible. Not that there’s that many people here. Besides the man with the gaping head wound (which was so not the visual we wanted when we first got here, let me tell you), the place is pretty dead.

The nurse comes out and looks at Lacey. “Lacey Adams?”

“Yes,” Lacey says, twisting her hands in her lap nervously, and then standing up. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Should I come with you?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I’m okay. I’ll text you if I need you.” Then she kisses me on the top of my head and follows the nurse to the examination room.

I pick up a
Parents
magazine that’s sitting on the table in an effort to distract myself from the yuck hospital smell, and page through an article about how to throw the perfect birthday party for your toddler. Which is completely pointless, since I don’t have a toddler. I don’t even know any toddlers. But you never know when that kind of thing could come in handy (and honestly, a lot of the sweet-sixteen parties I’ve been to have been almost like toddler parties, what with the crazy cakes and streamers and people pitching fits), and I kind of like that the emergency room has such fun reading. It’s like they want you to be happy and keep your mind off everything, which I can totally appreciate even though Lacey probably just has hives or something. But if that man with the gaping head wound has any relatives that show up, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the cheerful reading material.

“Hey,” Noah says, loping into the waiting room. “Is she okay?”

“I don’t know.” I set the magazine back on the table as Noah slides his keys into his pocket and sits down next to me. “They took her to the back.”

He nods, then reaches down and picks the magazine up. The same one I was just reading. Which is kind of rude, when you think about it. I mean, he doesn’t know for sure that I was done with it. Maybe I was just taking a reading break.

“There’s a great article in there about how to throw a birthday party for a two-year-old,” I tell him.

“Oh yeah?” He keeps reading. And doesn’t laugh.

“Yeah,” I say. “You could throw one for a toddler you know, like if you had a little cousin.”

“Thanks.” Still reading.

“Are you mad at me or something?” I ask, because I don’t really want to sit out here not talking, and also because I’m sick of driving myself crazy wondering if he’s mad and what I did that’s so bad he won’t even say a word to me until we’re in the waiting area of an emergency room.