Every Other Weekend

by Abigail Johnson

  “Sorry,” I said when Dad handed my phone back.

  “Might want to rethink your wake-up call.”

  “I thought you were Jeremy.”

  “He offered to take the couch.”

  “Yeah. I got that,” I said, ending the longest conversation Dad and I had had in weeks. I left him to get up or go back to sleep or whatever. Jeremy was sitting up on the couch and scratching himself when I walked through the living room/hall.

  “What was that about?”

  “It’s about you being an ass,” I said. “Call Mom.”

  Jolene

  The doorbell rang as I was looking over the footage I’d shot on the balcony yesterday and trying to decide if the poor lighting was a cool stylistic feature or if I’d ruined the shot. I was about to hit Pause on my laptop when those last few seconds, the ones of Adam peering at me from his balcony, began playing. The fading sunlight lit only half his face, revealing a slight pinch between his brows that said he was curious despite his annoyance.

  The lighting, I decided, had been perfect.

  With a sigh, I went to answer the door. It was way too soon for the Chinese food I’d ordered, unless they had a time machine. I didn’t really expect it to be my lunch when I opened my door, but nearly as surprising as time-traveling delivery guys was the person actually standing there.

  “Come to bum a smoke?” I asked.

  Adam started to blush, and unlike the night before, I didn’t find the muddled red color marching up his neck to be that appealing. “I have a favor to ask.”

  I leaned my shoulder into the doorframe. “Yeah, no. You were a punk yesterday, so I’m not inclined to do much of anything for you.”

  “You owe me,” he said, his blush continuing to spread until his ears glowed pink. “For the cigarette.”

  “Wrong. Try again. No one forced you jump onto my balcony and take that cigarette from my hand. I certainly didn’t make you smoke it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. What do you even want anyway?” I asked, curiosity winning out over the smug superiority I was feigning. Adam’s lips thinned, and my interest rose. He was not at all excited about what he was going to ask me.

  “I need to take a picture of you.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”

  Adam was looking everywhere but at me.

  “What kind of picture?”

  “A normal picture.”

  “Why?”

  I hadn’t thought he could get any redder, but he did. “It’s for my mom.”

  “I don’t even know what that means, but forget it.” I started to close my door, but Adam caught it.

  “Look, I’m not trying to be creepy—”

  “Well, you totally are, so let go of my door.”

  “I’ll do something for you in exchange. I’ll smoke as many cigarettes as you want, whatever.”

  Our tug-of-war with my door halted. He was serious. His hazel eyes were focused on mine, and even though he wasn’t really preventing me from jerking my door free if I wanted, he was desperate. For a picture of me. My skin prickled. “Fine, I’m listening.”

  “Yeah?”

  When I nodded, he let go of the door. So trusting. I was tempted to slam it in his face as a learning experience. I didn’t though. My cigarettes weren’t going to smoke themselves.

  “I told you last night that my parents were separated—”

  “You told me many things last night.”

  “And I’m going to apologize about most of those things, just let me get this out.”

  I could have told him that leading with an apology when you wanted something was always a better idea but I waved him on.

  “My mom likes to pretend that she’s fine—both my parents do—but it kills her that we’re here. She’s not great with being alone.” He swallowed, and I wondered for a minute if he was going to tear up. The prospect made me step back. I couldn’t imagine feeling my mother’s pain so keenly that it became my pain, too. “I think she’s worried that Jeremy and I are going to pull away from her, too, and decide we like it better over here with our dad.” He shook his head like the idea was ludicrous.

  I crossed my arms. “Sounds like you need to send her a picture of your apartment.” No one would willingly spend time at Oak Village unless they were legally forced to, like for a court-mandated custody agreement in my case, or if you were trying to convince a judge that you were too broke to pay more alimony like in my dad’s case.

  “It’s more than convincing her I want to stay with her,” Adam said. “She can’t think I’m miserable over here either, or she’ll feel worse and blame herself for putting me through it. I don’t want to her upset if I can help it.”

  Now I was getting pissed. My skin was still prickling but it was growing hot. This was heading into “Gift of the Magi” territory, and I could already feel something rising in my throat. “Get to the point of the picture, Adam.”

  “I told her I met a girl. You.”

  “You did meet a girl. Me.” I was being deliberately obtuse, but it seemed only fair to make him suffer a little while his parents both fought over him because they actually wanted to see him. The rising bile lodged itself in my throat and burned before I could push it—and the thought that caused it—down again.

  “I led her to believe that things went a little better between us than they actually did.”

  “You mean you didn’t tell her about calling my family messed up and denouncing my pettiness?” I wagged my finger at him. “You shouldn’t lie to your mother, Adam.”

  “Thank you for the morality lesson. The point is I told her about the girl in the apartment next door, and it made her happy. I like making her happy, and it will make her really happy if I show her a picture of you.”

  “Why me? Why not find a picture of a girl online and tell her it’s me?” Then I rolled my eyes at his nonverbal reaction. “Do you have a condition? You blush a lot.” Of course my comment only made him redder.

  “You’re...unique-looking.”

  Ah, so he had tried to find a random girl online. I swished my waist-length braid over one shoulder in a dramatic flourish. “Beauty is its own punishment sometimes. I’m constantly told I could be a model if I were taller and had a different face and body.” When he didn’t so much as crack a smile, I dropped my arms with a sigh. “I believe I was offered an apology.”

  That same uncomfortable look thinned his mouth again. Apparently, apologizing ranked up there with asking for favors. “I don’t know anything about your family, so I was wrong to make assumptions about them.”

  We both stared at each other for several seconds.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Do you ever get in trouble?”

  “What?”

  “Forget it. You obviously don’t, because you suck at apologizing. You should have just told me you were sorry that I was offended. That way you take no responsibility.”

  He waited for me to say something else and when I didn’t, his nostrils flared and he turned to walk away, obviously deciding that putting up with me wasn’t worth his mother’s happiness.

  I tried to remember how I’d felt when my family first imploded. A volatile mix between fragility and... Nope, it was all fragility back then. The thick skin I’d had to develop over long months volleying between lawyers, bitter accusations, and even uglier admissions until I found that indifference served me much better than the hot and cold emotions ever had.

  Adam was clearly in the kill-all-humans stage of the process, so pushing his buttons the night before probably hadn’t been the wisest course of action on my part. And to be fair, I didn’t know anything about his family either.

  If I let him storm off, I’d be stuck alone until Shelly came back, and that was reason enough to call out to him. Or it should have been, except there
was an uneasy sloshing in my stomach reminding me that he wasn’t the only one who’d overstepped last night. “Look, I’m sorry, too, okay, for the crack about your dad getting a girlfriend.” I shifted my jaw to one side and willed my insides to settle. I sucked at apologizing, too. “Just take your picture already.”

  Adam stopped but didn’t come back.

  It nagged at me, how quickly he’d managed to reverse our situations. I was the one apologizing to him. “Will it help if I promise to be nicer in the future?” At least I could try. I was always trying.

  Adam did come back, if somewhat reluctantly.

  “And maybe we should avoid talking about our parents,” I said.

  “Fine by me.”

  “So are we gonna do this thing?”

  His phone was out in a second, and his thumb hovered over the screen. He didn’t take a picture.

  “Could we go outside or something?” He looked around, gaze snagging on the flickering light bulb a few yards away. “It’s...”

  “Super bleak and depressing in this hallway?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

  As if I had any more promising offers in my dad’s equally bleak and depressing apartment. “Can you drive?”

  Adam shook his head. “I turn sixteen in February.”

  “My birthday’s in January,” I said. “What about your brother?”

  “I’d rather stay in the hallway.”

  “For real?” Adam didn’t even respond. “Okay, then we’re on foot. There’s a good cheesesteak place a couple blocks—” I started to point, but he cut me off.

  “We can just find the nearest tree or something.”

  I shrugged. “It’s your photo. Let me grab a jacket.”

  I snagged my camera, too, and followed him to the stairwell. We played the quiet game the whole way down; me because all the things that I thought of saying were probably not, strictly speaking, in the nice category. I was going to have to watch myself around Adam. He, on the other hand, seemed to have the nice thing on autopilot. He even opened the front door for me.

  Weirdo.

  ADAM

  For a place called Oak Village, there were surprisingly few oak trees on the property. Dad had mentioned something over dinner the night before about landscaping plans but that the building itself had to come first.

  We found a tree half a block away, and Jolene kicked it and turned to face me. “What’s my motivation?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Forget it. Is this fine?” She leaned against the oak tree and dipped her head a little to one side. When she smiled, her gap showed, and I kinda liked that she didn’t try to hide it.

  I lifted my phone and took the picture.

  “Here, let me see.” She pressed into my side and I inhaled the soft scent of honeysuckle from her hair as she peered around my shoulder at my phone. “Did you close your eyes while taking this?”

  “What?” I felt like I was saying that a lot around her. “No.”

  “That’s like the worst photo anyone has ever taken of me.” She took my phone and held it out in front of us. “Smile.” I heard a click. “There. Much better. See how it doesn’t look like I only have one eye in this one? Wow, we actually look good together. Huh.”

  She tilted the phone so I could see the picture. Of the two of us. She’d taken it so quickly that I hadn’t really had time to feel uncomfortable. When she’d pressed into my side, she’d smelled sort of sweet and sort of like the tree she’d leaned against. So in the picture, she was smiling and I was looking at her with an unguarded expression. “Yeah, I can’t send that to my mom.”

  “Why not?” She pulled the phone back to study the picture.

  “Right now, you’re just a cute girl I met. If she sees that, you’re suddenly this girl I’m taking pictures with and—what are you doing?” She was doing something with my phone.

  “Sending the picture to your mom. I’m assuming she’s the contact marked ‘Mom.’ Wow, you call her a lot.”

  I ripped my phone away from her, but I heard the send swish sound. “Why did you do that?”

  “You said you wanted to make your mom happy. That’s the picture that will make her happy. I mean, look at it. How cute am I, and how cute are you noticing how cute I am?”

  “Right. Thanks,” I said in a clipped tone. The delivered note displayed by the text mocked me while I started trying to figure out how to explain the picture to Mom and defuse the situation. I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “I’ll see you.” I started back down the street. I made it like two steps before Jolene pulled me to a stop.

  “Pissy much? It’s just a photo. It’s not like I was licking your face or anything.”

  “You don’t get it.” I tried to shake her off, gently at first, but with a little more force when she persistently hung on. “Can I have my arm back?”

  “So you can storm back to your apartment? No.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her as if to say, Are you serious? In response she raised her own eyebrows.

  “Get over yourself for two seconds and explain why you’re all butthurt that I sent that innocent picture of us to your mom.”

  “Of us,” I said, relaxing my arm so that she might follow suit. “She’ll think you’re more than just the girl next door.”

  “Are you saying I’m not?”

  I felt my face heat. “I appreciate the photo, but that picture... It was supposed to be of you, not us. You were just supposed to be a distraction so she wouldn’t dwell on the fact that she was alone in our house for the first time since—” I swallowed, feeling needles behind my eyes. I puffed out a breath, focusing on the chilly air when I refilled my lungs until I got myself together. “This is way more than that now, or it’s going to look that way to her.” I pulled out my phone again and brought up the picture. “You really don’t see the problem?”

  Her eyebrows drew together and she tugged on her bottom lip, studying me, not even glancing at the phone. “You’re saying I should have licked your face?” Then she laughed when my jaw tightened. “Wow, you’re uptight. I’m kidding. And yes, I see your probably too-anal point.” At last she dropped my arm. “So you’re in a pickle, and it’s my fault.” She eyed me sideways for confirmation. I folded my arms. “Honestly, I think you’re taking a much too narrow view of all this. You want to distract your mom. Great. Cute girl next door—” she pointed to herself and gave a little curtsy “—in and of herself is good for, what, two weekends of distraction, maybe three? What happens when the novelty of my mere existence wears off? Granted, I am awesome and very cute, so maybe you eke out four weekends, but even I have my limits. So what’s your plan after that?”

  She barely paused before continuing. “See, this is why you need me for more than my off-the-charts photogenic properties. Me alone, I have a limited shelf life. Me and you—” she bounced her palm between our chests “—us, why, the sky is the limit.” She leaned into my side and waved her hand across the sky as though arcing an invisible banner above us. I was smelling her hair like a complete psycho so I jerked away, feeling my face flush.

  When I just stared at her fake sky banner, she dropped the showman facade. “Look, all I’m saying is that maybe I did you a favor. If your mom is really having a rough time, then the idea of a reciprocated crush is going to do a lot more for her than your one-sided one. You wanted to give her a picture. Instead, you gave her a story.”

  I couldn’t help but consider the potential upside when she put it like that. Things were only going to get harder for Mom as Jeremy and I spent more weekends away. Maybe that picture wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Jolene smiled wide when she knew she had me.

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks, I think.”

  “Oh, but I am not done with my benevolent acts for the day.”

  I started to object when she pulled out
her camera and pointed it at me, but fair was fair, so I let her film me, then her, then us, talking and framing her shots all the while.

  “Even though you offered, I decided that giving you lung cancer just so I can piss off my dad and Shelly is perhaps a tad on the petty side.”

  I laughed. It startled me. A couple minutes ago, I had nearly gotten lost in a memory that would have broken me right in front of her. “I didn’t really mean the petty thing. And I get it. Having met Shelly, I get it. But yeah, that’s good.”

  She angled her head to the side of her camera, and I watched her chew her lip before a sudden grin forced her to stop. “You’re actually kinda sweet, Adam.” When my face heated, she moved back to my side and held the camera out in front of us. “And look at me being all nice.”

  My mouth kicked up on one side and I gestured at the camera. “Are you one of those post-every-second-of-my-life-on-social-media types?”

  “No, I’m one of those capture-the-moments-so-I-can-tell-the-story-I-want types, aka a filmmaker.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering Shelly mentioning something about a film school program the night before. “So you make movies?”

  “I make great movies. Just short ones so far, and nothing scripted—more slice-of-life type stuff—but full-length feature films are my future.” With a sigh she lowered her camera. “Real but better, because I get to control the outcome, cut out what I don’t like and frame the rest the way I want.”

  “Wow, that’s cool.” Because it was, but also somehow sad. I gestured with my phone. “And thanks again. For being nice, and not just to me.”

  “The famous mother. Tell me something, why do you care so much about making her happy?”

  “Besides the fact that she’s my mom?”

  Jolene nodded, scrutinizing me in a way that made my answer more transparent than I intended.