The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  Everything was great, until right before we left the restaurant after dinner. Suddenly Brooks got very, very serious.

  “Lanie, I wanted to see you before I left, because I wanted to apologize.”

  “To me? For what?” I asked. And then I got nervous.

  “For a few things, going a long way back. I’m so sorry about the night at the party at my house, the night when we…when we were up in Scarlett’s room.”

  Let me die. “Nothing happened,” I said, and looked at the tablecloth.

  “Well, I kissed you, which was not a good thing.”

  Let a lightning bolt come down from the sky and strike me, now. “I don’t even remember,” I lied to the tablecloth.

  “I do, and I shouldn’t have done that. I’d had way too much to drink and most of that night is pretty blurry, but I remember kissing you, and I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t anything.” No, it had been everything to me at the time, and sadly, it kind of still was.

  Brooks shook his head. “The whole thing was just wrong. I never, never should have agreed to pretend that we were going off together, never. I was older than you—I am older than you, and I should have known it was a terrible idea.”

  “You did know. You told me that,” I assured him. “I begged you and you were really drunk. You just kissed me because you felt sorry for me or something. It was a pretty pathetic situation.”

  He looked so ashamed of himself. And upset. “Some of the guys I was with at the bar last night said that you got a lot of crap at school for being upstairs with me. Lanie, I did not know any of that. I feel terrible.”

  Please, Earth, open and let me fall in to a bottomless crevasse. “How could you have known?” I asked, and I sounded very reasonable to my own ears. “You left for school right after we did that in Scarlett’s room. After we didn’t do that in Scarlett’s room. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge. Dead and buried. Old hat. Dead horse.” I stopped. “No need to go down memory lane.” Now I really stopped.

  “The least I could have done was tell people that it wasn’t true.” He winced. “For you to get shit for something that didn’t even happen…”

  “I think you saying anything like that would have made it worse,” I answered. “Don’t worry about it. Really, over and done with.”

  “What the guys last night were telling me…it made your life at Starhurst sound pretty bad.” He hesitated. “Really bad. It sounds like it was hellish for you for the next three years.”

  “Well, there’s hell and there’s hell. As you said before about my student, I had resources way beyond what most kids have. No one was physically hurting me, I was just getting teased.” And my wallet thrown into a toilet, and water poured down my back, my laptop stolen, my labs in Chem and hideous art projects destroyed, things like that. Oh, shit. I was going to cry. No, no, no, don’t cry. Where was a bottomless crevasse when you needed one?

  “Oh, Lanie, I’m so sorry,” Brooks said. “I suck, I really do.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and I hid in my napkin for a moment before I got it back on track.

  “No, you don’t suck.” I dabbed around my eyes. I should have worn waterproof mascara, because the one I had on from my mom’s last year’s “Ojai Nights” collection was probably all down my face. “You thought you were helping me that night, I thought I was helping me that night. What I had to deal with afterwards were just unintended consequences—and I think those words sum up the teenage years, right? We all did dumb shit and sometimes we suffered from the results. So let’s not talk about it anymore, because it’s not a big deal after all this time. We’re all adults now, and everyone has moved on.”

  I thought of Coco, glaring at me across the conference table in Shirley’s office that afternoon. Mostly everyone had moved on, maybe some people a little less than others. I had, definitely. I wasn’t that frightened, awkward girl, not anymore. Mostly.

  Brooks kissed me on my cheek again to say goodbye after he walked me to my car, just a brush of his lips across my skin, whisper-light. “Have a good trip back,” I told him. “See you over Christmas?” Because suddenly, I really, really wanted to.

  “I won’t be coming back for a while,” he answered. “Maybe spring.” He paused. “Lanie,” he said, then paused again, and shook his head. “Goodbye.”

  He watched me drive away and I watched him in my mirror in the darkness. It had gone better than the last time I’d seen him, but I was still left with the feeling that I had missed a chance. And when would I see him again? Spring. Maybe. I sighed. Better to put him out of my mind, I told myself. So at a red light, totally breaking California traffic laws about even holding a phone while in the driver’s seat, I deleted him from my contacts. I had been acting silly and I was moving on. That was what I told myself as I kept the phone in my lap and checked a bunch of times to see if I was getting any messages from the 917 number that I knew to belong to Brooks.

  There was nothing from him, but my mom had been texting me repeatedly, all day, wanting to discuss a new wardrobe for me. Ava had been wearing the cutest outfit, she wrote, and it had made my mom think that we should go shopping. I knew that she hated how I dressed; she never said too much, but I got a lot of pained, unhappy looks. We did usually have a pretty good time when we shopped, but the specter of Ava and her cute clothes would hang over me the whole time. At the next red, I briefly glanced at the string of pictures my mom had sent, examples of what she thought I should wear, multiple shots of models in clothing that was nothing like anything in my closet.

  Instead of answering her, I turned off my phone, and instead of going into the main house to talk to her when I got home, I did the cowardly thing of turning off my headlights and putting my car in neutral to let it drift down the driveway so she wouldn’t hear me. I just wanted to hide out for a while. I softly closed the car door and snuck around the side of the house, not even using the flashlight on my phone. I stopped dead when I heard voices on the back patio: my mom and her husband, Kristian. I refused to consider him in the role of step-father when I was two weeks older than he was.

  “Think of how nice it would be, Juliette,” he said, speaking in that accent that I could never quite place (and in fact, he was from the Central Valley, the farmland that ran through the middle of California, so he and I should have been talking exactly the same). “It would be wonderful to have that artistic presence around us!”

  “Kristian, darling,” she said, and I heard some kissing sounds. Wretch. Vomit. Hurl.

  “You’re always talking about supporting the arts,” Kristian went on. “This is a way you can tangibly do that!” My mom already tangibly supported the arts—hundreds of thousands of dollars of tangible support of the arts. What was he blabbing about? “She’s desperate for a place to live. You know she can’t afford rent in the city and that loft she’s sharing in Oakland just isn’t habitable.”

  “We have so many guest rooms,” I heard my mom answer. “Nusha is welcome to any of them.”

  It took me a moment to remember who Nusha was: the artist my mom had thrown the party for. I hadn’t actually met her but my mom had been in raptures about her talent.

  “She needs her own space to create,” Kristian argued. “The guest house would be perfect.”

  “Krissy, I can’t make her leave the guest house!” my mom protested, using the voice she employed only with him. Like she was a silly little girl rather than the cutthroat CEO who had an iron grip on her company, her charities, and everything in her orbit except her young husband.

  Wait a minute. What were they talking about?

  “You would think that Lanie would want to be on her own and support herself,” Kristian grumbled, which was rich coming from a man who had never lived on his own, or had an actual, paying job, as far as I could tell. “She must be able to see that she’s in our way here. De trop.”

  It was my house first. I had been there first, before this little jerk showed up on the scene.

 
; My mom sighed. “She’ll go, when she’s ready. She’s like the little cuckoo bird not ready to leave her mother’s nest.”

  My mom knew nothing about nature, but my dad had been a bird guy. Cuckoos didn’t even build their own nests. But that was a little beside the point. My mom wanted me to move out?

  “I think it’s sweet that she still needs to be close to me, as old as she is,” my mom said. “But I’ll make sure she’s ready to go off on her own. I can help her transition to the next stage of her life.”

  More kissing noises, moans. Could there never be a sudden, torrential cloudburst when you needed one?

  “Can you talk to her soon, Juliette? Just to move things along. She needs to leave her nest. Now.” Kristian’s voice changed from sweetly cajoling to hard on the last word. “Darling,” he added, going back to the sweet.

  They talked more about their artist friend, and Kristian repeated several more times in different ways that Nusha should move into the guest house. My house. When they finally went inside, I crept the rest of the way in the darkness to find that Maisie had eaten one of my running shoes to show how pissed she was at being left alone for so long. I hugged her anyway, burying my face in her short fur, and taking all the dog love she could give me.

  Chapter 4

  I tilted my head, wondering. “A snake?” I ventured, then I closed my eyes for a moment and lifted my face to the sun, glad the December rain had let up so we could get the kids outside. We all needed to play a little.

  “Nope!” Quaid answered.

  I opened my eyes and watched as he writhed on the ground, arms at his sides, tongue out. I was fairly certain that, although the rain had stopped, Quaid was going to be a little damp after whatever he was doing down there. “You should stand up, bud. You’re going to get wet,” I told him.

  “I won’t get wet. Guess again!”

  “Um, a worm? No? A slug?” I tried.

  “No! Ms. March, you don’t guess animals very well. I’m a penguin!” he told me.

  Something was definitely wrong with that poor penguin. “Oh, I get it.”

  “Watch now, I’m a zebra.” Quaid turned and I got a good view of his wet butt as he stuck it in the air. Then he crawled off, roaring.

  We were going to have to do another nature unit soon. “Mrs. Rosse, I’m going to take my break now,” I said to the aide.

  She sniffed. I was allowed to take this time away from the class while my students were out at recess, and if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t have another chance to pee until lunch, but Mrs. Rosse usually made me feel like I was slighting my duties or something. “Go ahead, if you feel you must,” she told me now. Sniff.

  As I was about to wet my pants after the enormous cup of coffee I had drunk that morning, I felt I must, and I hurried toward the gate of the kindergarten playground to free myself.

  “Mrs. Rosse, guess what I am!” Quaid called as I opened it, flapping his arms and jumping.

  “A snail,” she said, and of course, that was right. We were going to study animals for sure.

  After I made the necessary stop in the ladies’ room (reserved for adults only so it was safe to walk on the floor without having to wonder about what you were walking through, and you were unlikely to find something already in the toilet), I went back to my classroom, yawning. I needed more of that coffee.

  I hadn’t slept very well the night before after eavesdropping on my mom and Kristian. I had thought and thought about it. It was just funny, because when I was finishing college, considering moving to another town, or at the very least, finding an apartment of my own and maybe some roommates, my mom had been the one to suggest that I live in the guest house. And like all her “suggestions,” it was actually a plan of action that she expected me to follow. “It will be like your own apartment, except you won’t have to pay rent,” she had coaxed. “And an easy move, from your bedroom straight across the yard!” Then she had decided: “That’s where you’ll live, Lanie,” and that had been where I’d lived. I had thought that maybe she was lonely, without my dad, and maybe it would be better if I did stay close to her. It had been nice to think that she needed me.

  It was just about a year ago now, on a January weekend warm-up trip to Palm Springs, that she had met Kristian, who was doing God-knew-what down there in the desert. He had moved north, in with my mom, almost immediately.

  Kristian and I hadn’t liked each other from the very beginning, but at first, I had really made an effort. He had not. In and out of earshot—mostly out of earshot—of my mom, he mocked everything about me. “Oh, Juliette, I thought your daughter would look just like you,” he’d said when we met, then shrugged at me with an exaggerated sympathy face, as if to say, “Sorry, sucker.”

  “Lanie takes after her father,” my mom had explained. And it was then that I had glanced above the fireplace where the portrait of my dad had always hung. There was a new picture there, and I had seen the writing on the wall. Well, the overpainted photograph artwork on the wall, anyway. Kristian had been there to stay. Just as quickly as he had moved in, they went to Las Vegas and got married. My tacky-phobic mom had gotten married in Vegas because Kristian had wanted it! That was how I knew she really cared about him.

  I stared a little blankly at the planning book on my desk. I needed to do something. I needed to take some initiative.

  Jolie stuck her head in through the door to my room. “Music class is my favorite class of the day,” she told me. We all loved the “special” classes for our students because they were our free periods, unless you were me and Felix kept getting asked to leave art and music, language and PE, and you had to hang with him. “What are you up to? Please tell me you’re not planning.”

  “I’m thinking of doing something, making a big change,” I heard myself say, and just by voicing the words, it got more real. I should. I really should.

  “Like leaving five minutes of next Thursday unscheduled?” She laughed, but I was totally serious.

  “No, bigger than that.”

  She stared at me. “What are you talking about? Please don’t tell me you’re going to start one of those food restriction things so we can’t eat lunch together anymore.”

  “If you’re talking about what most people call a diet, then no. But I’m moving out of my mom’s guest house,” I said, testing the waters.

  And I did not get the reaction I had hoped for. “Really?” Jolie asked, and made a face. “You have such a great set-up, though.”

  “I live with my mom and her new husband who hates me.”

  “You live in a gorgeous neighborhood in your own place that you don’t have to pay for,” she reminded me. “With a gardener for your yard and a security system.”

  I didn’t mention to Jolie that my mom’s housecleaner did my guest house, too. “Don’t you think I should be on my own, though?”

  “I guess. But do you know how much of my salary goes to rent? And I know you recognize how much my apartment sucks.” She sat down in one of the tiny kindergarten chairs.

  “I could get a roommate.” I had other resources, too, but I always felt bad—uncomfortable—about discussing that part of my life.

  Jolie made another face. “A roommate? That’s rough. I can’t imagine living with another adult that I don’t know at this point in my life. I mean, living with my ex was bad enough…”

  “I could find someone I really get along with. Someone who likes small, annoying dogs.”

  “Oh, your new place will have to be pet-friendly, too! Cheap, close, safe, accepts pets.” She blew out a big breath. “Do I have to tell you how hard that will be to find here in Marin? You’re going to have to look really, really hard. Like, going everywhere, a no-stone-unturned kind of a thing, a lifetime of searching.”

  “Maybe I’ll stumble over the Arc of the Covenant while I’m at it.”

  “It might be easier to find a lost Biblical treasure,” Jolie told me. “Why this sudden urge to leave the nest?”

  There it was again, th
e nest. “It isn’t actually sudden. I’ve been bothered by some things for a while. And then I found out that I’m not the only one who’s not happy with the current situation.” I told her what I had overheard from my mom the night before, about how she was tolerating me but both she and Kristian wanted me gone.

  “Ok, so you know how I complain about motherhood sometimes,” she said when I finished.

  “Yes. Maybe now and then.” But I knew she didn’t mean it, because she loved her daughter more than anything.

  Jolie laughed. “I just think you should know, and it even seems ridiculous that I have to say it, that your kid should come first. First over a man who you met last year, I mean. A man who is your kid’s age and who…never mind. Let’s just say I don’t agree with your mom about kicking you out.”

  “She’s not kicking me out,” I defended her. “She hasn’t even said anything to me about leaving. But now that I know she feels that way, I need to go. I need to go anyway. I’ve been thinking about being on my own, and I should. Even if I do acknowledge how nice it is to come home and someone has changed my linens and folded the end of the toilet paper into a cool fan thing.”

  “What? Someone makes your toilet paper fancy? Bitch, you’re crazy to move!” she exclaimed, but then shrugged. “But yeah, I agree, you should. I’ll help you look for a place if you want, during our break. Only seven more days.”