The Opposite of Me (57 page)
Up until then, everything I knew about Mike came from the whispering I’d overheard.
The mother just up and left,
Brenda had told a customer through the bobby pins she held in one corner of her mouth while she fashioned an upsweep.
Course, I might, too, if I was married to that S.O.B. But can you imagine leaving your childr—
Then Brenda had caught sight of my wide eyes and quickly begun talking about the new yellow Lab puppy she’d just adopted.
It was the blessing and the curse of a small town; most people knew you, but everyone thought they knew all about you. Yet I hadn’t understood the first thing about Mike.
Later that day, as he walked me home from Becky’s, he acted nonchalant, but his eyes swept from side to side more vigilantly than any Secret Service agent’s. A few times he even spun around to look behind us. No one would ever sneak up on me with him around, I realized, and for what seemed to be the first time in a long, long while, I breathed deeply and felt my hands uncurl out of fists at my sides.
“Becky was in a car accident, right?” Mike asked as we turned the corner onto my street. It was dusk by now, but the day still held on to some of its earlier warmth, and a few yellow crocuses bloomed like little spots of hope in the yards we passed. “I remember hearing about it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Her mom was driving, and it was icy out, and they skidded into a tree. She wasn’t speeding or anything. It was just one of those awful things.”
We reached my house, and Mike walked me up our concrete front steps. Most of the homes in our town were small but tidy, with neat yards and bright flower bed borders and trimmed hedges. Mine used to be, too, but now the gutters were still clogged with fall leaves and a shutter had come loose and was leaning there lopsidedly, like a party guest trying to hide the fact that he’d had a few too many martinis.
I paused on the top step. I hated to be rude, but I couldn’t risk inviting Mike inside. Not even after everything we’d been through together. Mike glanced at the front door, then at me, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he already knew; most people did by now.
“Is Becky going to walk again?” Mike asked, casually sitting down and leaning back on his elbows as he stretched out his legs, like it was completely natural to carry on our conversation out here rather than inside.
“She thinks she will,” I said as I plopped down next to him. “But I don’t know what the doctors say.”
“Jesus.” Mike let out his breath in a long, whooshing sound, then winced and clutched his side, despite his claims that his ribs didn’t hurt. “Being in a wheelchair is the worst thing I could imagine. I’d go crazy.”
“I guess you don’t know until it happens,” I said. “Becky handles it really well, especially for a kid.”
“No. I’d go crazy, Julie,” he repeated. “To not be able to move? To have to depend on other people for help?”
He suddenly sprang up and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, like he was reassuring himself he could still control his body. Mike was in constant motion. I hadn’t noticed it at school, but that afternoon I saw: His leg jiggled, or his fingertips thrummed a beat on a table, or his hand wove endless paths through his curly, dark hair. That was probably how he stayed so skinny, despite the fact that he’d gobbled most of the ice cream and raided the refrigerator to make himself two turkey-and-cheese sandwiches at Becky’s.
Already, I was learning his mind was as hungry as his body. Mike told me he’d read half a dozen books about self-defense, not because he was worried about being attacked but because he read
everything.
That’s how he knew about the vulnerable spot in the middle of the throat: Hitting it hard enough with the side of a rigid hand would stun just about any assailant.
Mike tore through his homework, devoured books at the library, and gobbled up newspapers and biographies of business leaders and World Book encyclopedias. He even read the ingredient lists on the packages of everything he ate (alas, this little habit of his ruined my love affair with hot pink Hostess Sno Balls). He’d skipped third grade, and he’d completed all the high school math courses by the end of tenth grade.
Everything about Mike was quick. Weeks later, when I lay my head on his bare chest for the first time, I thought he was nervous because I could feel his heart beating so rapidly. But that was his normal heart rate; Mike was just wired differently than anyone I’d ever met.
Maybe I would’ve fallen in love with Mike anyways, because of the unexpected parts of himself that he’d revealed the day Jerry attacked me: his bravery, and the way he’d joked about how brilliant I’d been to hang on to the chocolate ice cream: “I mean, if you’re going to use something as a weapon, for God’s sakes, use the strawberry! Strawberry’s kind of scrappy, but chocolate’s too mellow. It’s always getting stoned and sitting around listening to Led Zeppelin. You never want chocolate to have your back in a fight.”
But there was something else—something he said that day on my front steps—that seemed to pierce me all the way to my core.
Mike frowned at the horizon, as if it wasn’t really me he was speaking to. “Someday I’m going to have enough money to do whatever I want. I’m going to have my own company, and my own house, too, not something the bank owns. I’m not going to end up in this crummy town like everyone else.
Nothing’s
going to stop me.”
I stared at him, unable to speak. Mike had just put into words everything
I
desperately wanted, like he’d peered into my brain and scooped out my deepest, most secret wish. It wasn’t so much the money, though at that point I couldn’t even imagine owning a house. Funny, because now we have two—in D.C. and in Aspen, Colorado. But the security that came along with money . . . well, I ached for it. The sick, unsteady feeling I’d had ever since my dad had changed—the sense that quicksand was inching closer and closer to me, biding its time before it could suck me down and cover my head and suffocate me—disappeared as Mike spoke.
I looked at him, this scrawny, twitchy guy with crazy curls and jeans with a ragged hole in the knee, and a rush of certainty enveloped me like a warm blanket: With Mike, I’d always be safe, in every way possible.
“See you in school tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got that history test.”
He nodded, then looked down at his feet. “You always sit by the window, right?”
“Right,” I said, surprised.
“Except last week.” He took a deep breath, like he was gathering himself, then lifted his blue, almond-shaped eyes to meet mine. “Shelby Rowan took your seat first. You looked at her for a second, then you went to the back row. You were wearing a white sweater that day.”
I stared at him, speechless. Mike had been watching me? He remembered what I wore? He hadn’t shown any fear when he attacked Jerry, but right now, he looked nervous. He was worried about my reaction, I realized with a jolt.
“You sit in the front row, too, right?” I finally said.
Mike shook his head. “I’m right behind you, Julie. I always have been.”
Like today, when I desperately needed him there.
I felt a hot rush of shame. “Sorry.”
Mike shrugged, but I saw hurt flash across his face. “If you don’t play football, no one notices you. God, I hate high school. Do you know how many days until we graduate? Four hundred and thirty-eight if you count holidays and weekends and summer vacation. I’ve been counting down for years.”
It was true; our school did revolve around football, and half the town came out for the Friday night games. Suddenly I remembered: Mike had two older brothers. And they’d both played football; I’d heard their names being chanted by cheerleaders during games.
“I’ll save you a seat tomorrow,” I blurted.
“Good,” Mike said, and then he smiled. His teeth were a little crooked, but on him it was appealing. “I should get going. Will you be okay?”
I nodded. “The sheriff said Jerry’s probably already left town. Apparently he was planning on leaving anyway. He just ran into me first. So”—I gave a tight little laugh—“I don’t have anything to worry about.”
But I was still scared. The touch of that finger was seared into my skin like a burn. And somehow, Mike knew.
The next morning at seven-thirty, he was outside my house with his overstuffed backpack on his thin shoulders, waiting to walk me to school. From then on, we were inseparable.
“High school sweethearts?” people always exclaim after they ask how we met. “How wonderful!”
And it was. For a long time, at least, it really was.
When three very different young women end up sharing an apartment in New York City, they learn that, though family secrets may shape us all, our friendships may just be the thing that can save us.
Cate is sleek and sophisticated—at least on the outside—and has just been named the features editor of a glossy lifestyle magazine at the age of thirty. Her new roommate, Renee, is also her co-worker, and vying for the plumb job of beauty editor. Despite their growing friendship, each is struggling with feelings for Trey, a charming, globe-trotting journalist—whose sister has just become their third roommate. Once a bubbly, ambitious woman living in Washington, D.C., Abby is now a recluse. No one knows what shattered her—or why she abruptly fled to New York. But helping Abby heal forces Cate and Renee to share parts of themselves they’ve kept carefully hidden, and eventually each woman begins to see that there are some obstacles we simply can’t overcome alone.
Read on for a look at Sarah Pekkanen’s
These Girls
Coming from Washington Square Press in April 2012
Excerpt from
These Girls
copyright © 2012 by Sarah Pekkanen
1
“HOLD IT!” A
voice commanded.
The elevator was already crowded—at a few minutes before 10:00
a.m.
, everyone was heading for the upper floors of the Manhattan skyscraper that housed office space for a half dozen glossy magazines—but Cate Sommers instinctively reached out and prevented the doors from closing.
“Thanks.”
The air crackled with energy as Trey Watkins stepped inside, and Cate saw one young woman nudge another. Trey wore faded jeans, hiking boots, a green henley shirt, and his cheeks were slightly windburned, as if he’d just finished scaling a mountain. Which he probably had, right before he’d started a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and, Cate thought as she managed to avoid rolling her eyes, possibly shimmied up a tree to save a stranded bear cub.
“Excuse me.” Trey was standing to Cate’s right, and he reached an arm around her, enveloping her in a half hug. She blinked up at him in surprise.
“Nineteenth floor,” he said, grinning as he pushed the button. She leaned away from him, irritated with herself for being unoriginal enough to fall, even momentarily, under his spell. Trey was a legend around this building, and not just because a six-foot-three, single, straight, employed man was more coveted and rare in New York City than a rent-controlled one-bedroom.
Sure, he was gorgeous, but Cate couldn’t get distracted by his presence, even if they were pressed together as close as it was possible to be without touching at the moment. This was her first month as features editor of
Gloss,
the magazine battling
InStyle
to nab a shrinking audience of consumers in their twenties through forties who liked a spirited mix of articles about celebrity, home, and style. She had photos of Will and Jada Smith’s new swimming pool to consider, headlines to tweak, and a profile of a young wife who’d left a polygamous marriage to shepherd through the editing process (the wife, surprisingly sexy with a new short haircut and a wardrobe with even shorter hemlines, had just won a bit part in a Quentin Tarantino film; otherwise the magazine never would’ve been interested). Plus she needed to weed through a stack of submissions for the first-person back-page column. All before noon.
The doors opened and Trey held them, politely gesturing for two other men to get out first, then they all headed toward the double glass doors etched with the words
the great beyond
. Cate could’ve predicted this would be their stop: The guys all wore sneakers, and one even sported a backpack instead of a briefcase.
Gender and dress identified who belonged to which floor long before the elevator doors opened: The young women in miniskirts and bright tights with sassy streaks of pink or blue in their hair all left for
Sweet!
on the twenty-fifth floor; the women in sensible gray or black suits picked up their equally sensible briefcases and headed into
Home & Garden
on floor twenty-two; and all the guys were disgorged on floor nineteen, which churned out manly features yet spotlighted a gorgeous girl—or, more accurately, her cleavage—on every cover.
“Mmm.” The girl who’d nudged her friend rolled the sound around in her mouth as the doors slid shut, and the other four women in the elevator all laughed. Except for Cate, who flinched.
The sound was nearly identical to the one made by
Gloss
’s editor in chief, a Brit named Nigel Campbell, who—apparently following the trend set by the cover models for
The Great Beyond
—always left one too many buttons undone on his shirt. The troubling thing was, he’d made the intimate, yucky noise two days before he promoted Cate. She didn’t react, and now she couldn’t stop beating herself up about it. Later that night, in bed, she’d formulated the perfect response: an arched eyebrow and a pointed “Excuse me?”
But she’d frozen, and he’d walked on by, and it was as though the moment had never existed. She kept trying to convince herself that she’d misheard him, that he was clearing his throat instead of admiring her as she leaned over her desk to reach a file folder.
Except she still heard that sound whenever she met with him—she was always on the lookout, ready to put him in his place—but he’d never repeated it.
The elevator lurched upward and Cate glanced at her BlackBerry, tapping out a message to Sam, the writer responsible for the polygamist wife story.
Can we meet in my office at 10:30?
Cate had worked until nearly midnight making notes on the piece, which wasn’t quite right. She needed to coax a rewrite from Sam, who’d worked for the magazine for a decade, without alienating him. She wanted her first issue on the job to be special, to sparkle with wit and depth and perfectly packaged information. This issue had to shine brightly enough to quiet the voices of the colleagues who’d wanted her job, those who resented the fact that, at the tender age of thirty, Cate had nabbed one of the plum positions at the magazine.
But, most important, to quell the whispers in her own head that told her she wasn’t good enough.
At least she dressed the part, in a black-and-red color-block dress and black slingbacks. Her long auburn hair was blown out straight, and mascara highlighted her wide-spaced, gray-green eyes, her best feature. Cate thought of clothes and makeup as her armor some days, a glossy veneer that protected and hid her true center. Since fleeing Ohio to start over in New York, she’d rebuilt her image. No one—not even her roommates, Renee and Naomi—knew about what had happened there.
Cate wasn’t close to Naomi, a photographic model who was always traveling or at her boyfriend’s place, but she’d hoped by now, after six months of living together, that she and Renee would have moved beyond a casual friendship. It certainly wasn’t Renee’s fault that they hadn’t. She was outgoing and kind, always flopping on the couch and offering Cate some of her cheap Chinese take-out dinner, saying, “Save me from my thighs!”
A few times they’d rented movies together, and Cate had tagged along with Renee on her girls’ nights out a couple of times—the woman was friends with everyone in New York; even doormen greeted her by name as she passed by—but so far, the kinds of confidences Cate yearned for eluded her. She was private, always had been, and couldn’t slip into the sorts of confessions other girls seemed to share as easily as trading a lip gloss back and forth.
The elevator stopped at the twenty-seventh floor, and Cate stepped out into the airy, lush space. Sunlight streamed in through the oversize windows of the private offices rimming the perimeter, while dozens of cubicles with desks for the editorial assistants and copy editors filled the center of the room. Past covers of the magazine lent splashes of bright color to the walls, and the blond wood floors gleamed.
“Morning!” the receptionist called.
Two women were clustered around the receptionist’s desk, and Cate paused, wondering if she should join them. But one of the women was gesturing animatedly, and the others were hanging on her words and laughing. Cate waved and kept walking toward her new office, her shoes clicking briskly against the floor.
Just as she opened her door, Sam’s response pinged back:
No can do. At a press conference all morning.
“And thanks for suggesting a different time,” Cate muttered as she dropped her briefcase onto her desk with a thud.
She sighed and forced herself to focus on all she needed to accomplish today, on the words and meetings and phone calls filling her to-do list. But she couldn’t erase the sound of illicit admiration—that half moan, half growl—that relentlessly wormed its way into her brain.
HALF A BANANA.
It was an outrage.
Who, other than a premature baby monkey, could nibble a few bites of banana and call it breakfast? Renee Robinson reached past the remaining half, which Cate had enclosed in Saran Wrap like a gift-wrapped package, and grabbed the sugar bowl, rationing a teaspoon into her travel mug of coffee. She rinsed out the coffeepot, then bent to pick up the shoes she’d kicked off the previous night and tossed them through her open bedroom door. Renee wasn’t naturally neat, but their Upper West Side apartment was so tiny that if the shared living space wasn’t kept completely clutter-free, it would quickly turn into a candidate for the
Hoarders
TV show.
Other than three minuscule bedrooms (the apartment originally held two, but a flimsy partition halved the bigger one), there was a bathroom with a shower that was more temperamental than the fashionistas Renee worked with, and an optimistically named kitchen-living area that barely managed to contain two stools and a love seat. It was filled to bursting—kind of the way Renee felt right now in her boot-leg black pants and lavender silk shirt. She sighed, wishing elastic waists would suddenly roar into vogue. Or muumuus. The muumuu was highly underrated in the fashion world, in Renee’s humble opinion.
Renee picked up her purse and headed out into the crisp fall morning, sipping coffee and trying not to stare enviously at the Starbucks cups everyone third person she passed seemed to be carrying. What she wouldn’t give for a caramel latte right now—sticky sweet and foamy and rich—but it wasn’t only the fat grams she couldn’t afford. Her thirty-eight-thousand-dollar salary as an associate editor at
Gloss
would go so much further in her hometown of Kansas City, but here in New York . . . well, the thick stack of bills she was carrying right now said it all.
Renee stopped at the corner mailbox and reached into her purse for the envelopes. Her Visa balance—she flinched as her check was greedily gulped by the mailbox—was even worse than she’d expected this month. Her goal had been to keep it under four figures, since at least that way she had a chance of cutting it down to zero someday, but working at
Gloss
meant looking the part. She shopped sample sales, swapped clothes with friends, and purchased cosmetics at Rite Aid, but even a jar of peanut butter in New York was shockingly expensive.
Renee fed the rest of the envelopes through the slot, then reached into her purse, digging through the mess of receipts and makeup and spare change, to make sure she hadn’t missed one. Her fingers closed around a piece of paper, and she pulled it out.
She stared at the words on the robin’s egg blue sheet of stationery for the dozenth time, trying to discern clues about the author from the graceful sweeps of the
g
’s, the
l
’s that tilted slightly to the right. Renee had been carrying the letter around ever since she’d received it, a week ago, and already the edges were soft from handling.
. . . You must be shocked to learn about me. I’m reeling from it all, too. But maybe we could correspond, sort of like pen pals? And I was hoping to come to New York so we can meet in person . . .
Warmly,
Becca
Warmly.
That was the word that threw Renee. She hadn’t responded to the letter yet because she had no idea
how
to respond. She didn’t feel warmly toward Becca yet, even thought she wished she could. Learning she had a half sister who was just a year older was strange enough. The fact that her father had had a one-night stand right after marrying Renee’s mother? Her sandals-with-socks-wearing, History Channel–loving, henpecked father, engaging in a tawdry fling? It defied the imagination. Which was a fortuitous thing; Renee didn’t want those images renting space in her brain.
Her parents were such a
couple,
two halves of a matching pair, which made it even stranger. Their names were Maria and Marvin, and everyone referred to them as M&M. They had dark curls that were rapidly graying, were the same height when her mother wore her one-inch Naturalizer heels, squabbled almost constantly, and finished each other’s sentences. Actually, Renee’s mother finished most of them—her father had a habit of getting distracted by the television or sports page and letting his half-finished sentences dangle in midair, like fishing lures for her mother to snap on to.
Renee had thought her dad’s idea of high excitement was buying a new wrench at Home Depot; their conversation about his decades-old indiscretion had been searingly uncomfortable. He hadn’t known about his other daughter’s existence until recently, either. Since then, Renee knew, her father had gone out for lunch with Becca. He was figuring out how to navigate this new relationship, too, while trying to repair the damage to his marriage.