Things Change

by Patrick Jones

I just nodded my head; I didn't have the energy to speak anymore.

  Paul wrapped his arms around me, pulling me toward him. "I think they should be together . . . we should be together. I don't think I could live a year without you. I don't see how I've lived almost eighteen years without you. You're the most important thing in my life. This is my late Christmas present to you. I won't go to Stanford. I will stay here for you."

  I closed my eyes, pretending like I was asleep and this was all just a dream. Because I had dreamed it, but dared not speak it. I had dreamed this speech from Paul, dreamed him saying that I was the most important thing in his life. I dreaded the day he would leave. The past months had been the best of my life. I loved him more than ever, but I knew. Again he said all the right things, but for all the wrong reasons.

  "Joha, what's wrong? Why the tears?" He reached down and gently touched my face again, wiping away my tears. He licked the end of his fingers. "If your grandmother were here, what flavor would she say these are?"

  I tasted these tears, bitter tears of sadness running down my face.

  I never even looked up. "Tears of joy," I said.

  EIGHTEEN

  "Do you want to explain this?" My mother asked as she barged into my room.

  I was on the computer, responding to an E-mail from Paul about plans for the Valentine's Day dance, which was under a month away. I knew he hated dances, and anything "formal and normal," as he called it, but this was special to me. Two and a half years, and I'd never been to a school function like this. I wanted to see how the other half lived.

  "Are you listening to me?" My mother's voice raised on each word, no doubt made louder by the silence of my response. "I asked you, young lady, have you seen this?"

  She brandished my third-quarter report card like it was a rock she was going to bash over my head. I knew this was coming. I can't say that I blamed her for being upset with me. She wasn't the only one concerned. My teachers, in particular Mr. Taylor, were worried about my falling grades. I knew there was no way I could make them understand that pleasing Paul was more important to me than passing every class with straight As.

  "Paul! Paul! Paul! Is that all you can think about anymore?" I could tell she was furious. Normally, when she was raving like this, she left a trail of smoke behind her, like a jet engine; but she must have run up to my room between cigarettes.

  "Are you going to say anything?" Her impatience was evident, if not unexpected.

  My new approach to her query bombardment was to wait until the final question. That way, I could maybe get away with ducking a few of the questions I knew she wouldn't like the answer to, or questions that I just couldn't give a response to, for both our sakes.

  "I am talking to you, young lady." She was shouting at me, but I was letting the words bounce off of me without leaving a mark. I guess Dad was toughening me up after all.

  "What has happened to you, Johanna Marie?" My mother followed me as I got up from the desk and headed over to my bed. There was no place for me to run. I was trapped, but she was the one acting like the caged animal.

  "Please, just leave me alone." I said it through tears, the words grinding out through those teeth my parents paid to have straightened. That is when they were happiest: when they were straightening me out.

  "No, I will not leave you alone, not until I get some answers." Her voice was down one decibel, now only audible within a one-square-mile radius. She tossed the report card down in front of me. "Are you ready to explain this to me?"

  "Mom, I know. I need to do better." I almost laughed as I thought of all the happy households where my classmates were bringing home report cards worse than mine and getting hugs. It was that my report card didn't have the As stacked like firewood. There were only two of them; but they were surrounded by two ugly B's that buzzed in the middle and a C in physics sticking out like a broken thumb.

  "Do you know what your father is going to say when he sees this?" I had an idea.

  "I know." I was lying on the bed, face-down because I couldn't face any of this.

  "You know why your grades are suffering, don't you?"

  I didn't answer. I knew the answer; so did she. And I knew she would tell me.

  "You're spending too much time with Paul. We thought we could trust you to show good judgment, to manage your time." Time management was yet another thing my father drilled me on. He had made me read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. He told me to avoid what he called "time bandits," which are people who wasted your time. In his mind Paul should be indicted for grand theft. My mother raved on. "It looks like we were wrong, doesn't it?"

  I was burying my face in my pillow; I couldn't answer any of these questions. They were right, but they were also wrong. So very very wrong.

  "If you're not spending time with him, then you are talking with him on the phone. Do you know how much time he is stealing from you?"

  That wasn't fair. "He isn't stealing anything."

  "You're right; you're giving it away. You should be studying now, but there you are on the computer writing him."

  "What am I doing so wrong?" I sat up in bed and clutched the pillow in front of me. A question like this was as close to a confrontation as I got with my mother.

  She laughed. "You don't study. You don't wear the nice clothes I buy for you; instead, you look like a walking Goodwill ad. You've made too many changes too fast that we are not happy with."

  I took a deep breath, then inched closer to the edge of the bed. I made sure I looked at the floor, avoiding direct eye contact. That would be suicide. "Well, I like them, and so does Paul."

  "It doesn't matter what he thinks. He doesn't own you, does he?"

  I wanted to jump up and shout, "Neither do you," but I couldn't go that far. Instead, I said nothing.

  "You wear his clothes. That's his parka there on the door. Those sweatshirts are all his. You wear his class ring. You listen to his music. What is happening to you?"

  "I can handle it." I still couldn't look at her when I spoke.

  She came back to the bed, standing over me. I could see the tension eating away at the corners of her eyes and mouth. "You only have time for him, and nothing else."

  I was exhausted. My mother's constant questions wore me down.

  I got up off the bed and reached for Paul's parka hanging on the closet door. I had to escape. I had to see Paul. I needed his reassurance that I could get through this. I needed to hear him say "Everything is going to be okay." I started toward the door. "Can I go now?"

  "We are not done here." My mother grabbed my desk chair and pushed it right in my path toward the door. "Sit."

  As I eased into the chair I had a bad muscle memory. This was one of my father's favorite punishments when I was a child, making me sit still in a chair when I did something wrong. He would demand I sit quietly sometimes for up to an hour. If I started to cry, he would say nothing; but the look, the look was so hard and so cold. I think that's when I learned to shut down, and I vowed never to cry in his presence, or in public.

  "You will spend more time on your studying, agreed?" She pointed at the report card.

  "I know, I know." I shook my head, half in anger at her, half in disgust at myself for falling short of my goals and for failing to have perfect grades.

  My mother grabbed the report card off the bed, dropping it on my lap. "Good, I am glad we agree. You'll start by spending less time with Paul, beginning tonight."

  I knew this was coming. They had grounded me, discouraged me, but this was the first outright ban. This was my moment of truth.

  "No."

  "What?"

  "I said no." I didn't move a muscle. I didn't shed a tear. I was almost calm, even if inside I was shaking like an earthquake had struck my heart.

  "What did you say?" She was pretending to be hard of hearing, but she wasn't blind to the fact I was standing up to her—even if I did so by remaining perfectly seated and positively calm.

  She paused. I think she w
as so used to my giving in, she really didn't know what to do. She walked away from me and sat on the edge of my desk. She sat there for the longest time, shaking her head in disgust.

  "Johanna, you shouldn't spend so much time with one person at your age," my mother said, her tone shed of the heat of hostility, replaced now with the warmth of motherly wisdom; but I wasn't fooled. "Your father and I want you to be happy. You need to spend time with other people."

  "I don't want to see anyone else."

  "What about your friends?"

  "Mom, I don't want any other friends." I wanted to remind her that I didn't really have any other friends. I wanted to say, "Mom, I can't do everything," but that ran counter to what my parents and even some of my teachers, believed.

  "How about Pam? She used to call and come over all the time. What happened with her?"

  "Pam and I had a falling out," I said, sadness and shame creeping up my throat. "Anyway, I just want to spend my time with Paul; that's all that I want."

  My mother moved from the desk toward me. She reached out and touched the side of my face. "Johanna, you're still very young. You think you're grown-up just because you can do grown-up things like kiss, but you are only sixteen. You'll have lots of time later to worry about boys after high school or college. That can wait. What you need to focus on now is things like getting good grades in school, right?"

  "What I need is Paul," I repeated, thinking about how happy he made me, thinking how my mother wanted to take away the only thing that really made me happy. The good grades, the award-winning projects, my parents shared those things with me; Paul was all mine.

  She stood up, the gentleness vanished from her voice when she realized the new and nice tactic wasn't working either. "I'm talking about important things."

  Those words were more painful than anything she could have done to me physically. "And Paul isn't important?"

  My mother took a few steps behind me. She must have known how deep her words had cut me. She was trying to sneak away from the chalk outline she had left of me on the floor. "No, he cannot be as important as your grades. You have to learn to put things in perspective. One day you'll see that I am right."

  "That's not fair."

  She walked past me, leaving me sitting there in the chair. "We're done discussing this. I will not tell you that you cannot see Paul. We trust that you will come to that conclusion for yourself. But you will see less of him. That is what is best for you."

  My fingers clawed at the chair. "That is what is best for you, not for me."

  She put her hand on the doorknob. "One night a week, that is all. Starting now."

  I started to cry; she had won. She had won again, damn her. "That's not fair."

  I was turning the chair to sawdust with my fingers; I was grinding my teeth to the root. I was doing everything I could do to not scream in total defiance.

  "You have to trust us on this. We love you, Johanna, and want only what is best for you."

  "You tell me to trust you; then you hurt me like this," I said, tears welling in my eyes. "You say you love me, but you hurt me."

  My mother never turned around. She opened the door; she never bothered to close it. I guess she wanted my dad to know that she had reduced me to a crying little girl.

  NINETEEN

  Paul slowly turned the car into the school parking lot. We were late, of course, so there was no parking up close, and worse, someone had the nerve to take Paul's special spot.

  "I'll park behind the cafeteria, although I'm afraid the smell will rot the paint off the Bird," Paul joked.

  "But that's so far to walk in this cold." The temperature was around zero with the windchill around minus ten.

  "I'll keep you warm," Paul said, giving my knee a squeeze, then reaching into a large paper bag he had brought with him. "And I'll keep you cool."

  He showed me the pint of chocolate-chip ice cream, which would not be melting in this frigid weather. I smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

  "I'll keep my engine running," Paul said as he pulled the car into the almost deserted parking area. "And maybe I'll get your engine started."

  I rolled my eyes; it was becoming my most common reaction to Paul's fondness for sexually suggestive double entendres.

  Paul placed a small package, wrapped with shiny red paper on my lap. "I decided to burn a CD for you as a Valentine's Day gift. So when we're apart, you'll have our songs."

  My gift to him, a new Springsteen biography, seemed so lame compared to this. I vowed to myself to do better next year; but I had just been so busy with getting my grades up that as much as I thought about Paul, I just never got my mind around a gift, and I didn't want to ask my parents for the money. Besides, he always seemed happier giving gifts than getting them.

  I reached for the ice cream. "Open the gift first," Paul directed me.

  I was very careful about taking off the paper; I could sense that Paul was getting impatient with how long it was taking me. He probably had never noticed, but I was keeping everything. Every time he gave me a gift, I kept not just the gift, but the box, the wrapper, the bow, the card, anything and everything. This archive had been a great source of comfort to me for the past few weeks since the once-a-week rule had gone into effect. I think my parents were surprised that I picked Wednesday nights rather than the weekend. What they didn't know was that while Paul's mother was attending church, we were doing our impersonations of Adam and Eve in his bedroom. Or as Paul liked to call us having sex: "visiting the grandparents."

  "I want you to think about me when you listen to these," he said.

  While I looked at the list of songs Paul had typed up on the cover, he pushed in the disc. As the first song, "If I Should Fall Behind," played, we started steaming up the windows.

  I was lost in his touch, the pressing of our bodies against each other and the texture of his lips. Paul and I were spending as much time together as we could. If my parents' goal was to pull us apart, it had backfired. Our time together grew even more intense. I was beginning to feel it was Paul and me against the world, with my parents representing the world. They were wrong about Paul, and I was going to show them.

  I found myself drawn closer to Paul, even though he lied to me about Stanford. It didn't matter why Paul was staying, and I could understand why he didn't tell me the real reason. The important thing was that he wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't be happier.

  "C'mon, let's go in," I said. As much as I was enjoying Paul's touch, I wanted to get inside.

  Paul pushed the CD out of the player, stuck it back in the cover, and then dropped it into his pocket. We locked up the car, then locked arms walking toward the gym.

  "I'm going to get him to play one of your songs." No sooner had Paul and I dropped off our coats than he raced off toward the DJ. I knew that Paul was going to try to charm him into playing the songs on my CD and get the Boss shaking the rafters.

  I smiled and gave him a mock salute, as if wishing him luck on some important mission. These things mattered to Paul; he could be so passionate about his music, it was useless to try to talk him out of it. Better just to let Paul be Paul than to try and change him.

  I looked up toward the front of the gym. Paul had the DJ laughing, which was a good sign. I just shook my head and started looking for somewhere to sit. Pam was there with Dylan Baxter, a geeky nice-guy who was in honor's physics with us. Kara and Brad hadn't arrived yet. I saw Mr. Taylor talking with a few students near the door, but I was doing my best to avoid him. I didn't want to talk with him, mainly because I was afraid of what I might tell him. What was going on between Paul and me didn't need to be shared with anyone, for any reason.

  "Johanna, over here!" The voice came from one of the back tables.

  I turned around. There was Marcus, a new student who transferred in last month. He was a great photographer, and we were lucky to have him join the newspaper. I had gone out of my way to talk to him, remembering how alone I felt my first few months being the new k
id in school.

  "Hi, Marcus." I walked over to him. He was sitting with only his camera for company.

  "Smile." He dropped down to one knee, flashing my picture over and over.

  "Hey, that film is expensive!" I joked, grabbing a seat next to him.

  "Don't worry, Chief, it doesn't belong to the paper," he responded. He had adopted Brad's nickname for me by his second day in class. "I'm taking pictures for the junior class. Only five dollars. That's a two hundred percent markup, but it's for a good cause. 'Cause us juniors need the money."

  Marcus had a great sense of humor, an engaging smile, and was doing 200 percent better at making friends than I did my first year.

  "If I can ever get Paul to come sit with me, maybe I'll take you up on that," I said.

  "That's cool. So, what's he doing?" Marcus said pointing at Paul, who high-fived the DJ and was headed back toward the table. "Does he have a part-time job as a DJ?"

  "No, he's just being Paul. That's a full-time job." I stood up and started waving toward Paul. He worked the crowd a little while Marcus and I small-talked.

  "So, what's with the new boyfriend?" Paul said, when he arrived at the table.

  I just shook my head. "This is Marcus; he works for the paper. I've told you about him."

  Paul slapped him on the arm, then pointed to his camera. "Nice, but not a digital, huh?"

  "No, old school."

  "Should have gone with the digital, Marcus," Paul said, slip ping behind me and putting his hands over my shoulders. "No one has to see them, so you never know what might develop."

  "I'll remember that," Marcus said, rising from the table.

  I laughed and waved good-bye. Paul didn't acknowledge Marcus as he left the table.

  "Success?" I asked, pointing to the DJ.

  "I think so," Paul said as he sat down next to me. "So, is he the backup boyfriend?"

  "What?"

  Paul leaned against me, putting his hands over the top of mine, squeezing them tight. "Since you only see me one night a week, maybe you got somebody for the other six nights."