by Dani Irons
“I have secrets,” I say, but it sounds like I’m trying to be mysterious rather than full of disclosure.
“I bet you do,” he says, and if he were any other person, he’d wink. “You seem like the kind of person with gobs of them.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” I want to disappear, to be sucked into a magical portal so I don’t have to have this conversation. I want to ask something general to see where he falls in the opinion of abortions, but I doubt do you believe in a woman’s right to choose would go over well. And anyway, it’s one thing to believe it and another entirely to want to date someone who’s used that right.
“Are you worried about what I will think of you if I knew your secrets?” he asks cautiously.
Surprised he might possess the ability to read minds, I nod, slowly.
“Whatever it is, I couldn’t possibly love you any less.”
My insides tighten in an embarrassed cringe. “Could you do me a favor?”
His gaze presses into mine. “Anything,” he says heavily, as if he’s offering me one of his kidneys.
I roll my eyes. “Could you...not be so intense?”
“Like how?”
“Could you stop saying you love me or say anything that might imply you’d jump off a bridge if I told you to? I mean, I ask you for a favor and you telling me you’d do anything like you just did gives me the creeps.”
“But I’ve been holding these feelings in for years and...” He shakes his head. Hesitates. Begins again. “I know you and you wouldn’t ever tell me to go jump off a bridge. I know you enough that if you need a favor, I’m going to do whatever is in my power to deliver the goods.”
“Deliver the goods?” I laugh. “You sound like a gangster.”
He cocks an eyebrow. “Well, maybe I am. I have secrets too.”
“Oh, do you?”
His eyebrow falls. He sighs. “No. Unfortunately, I’m an open book. What you see is what you get.”
If I had any feelings for him, I’d be a lucky girl. I would love those long limbs wrapping around me and those lips dragging down my neck. My eyes close and I start to get warm again. Okay, maybe there is something, deep inside me, that feels something for Wyatt, but my brain doesn’t remember what that is.
“Friends?” I ask with some trepidation.
He seesaws me down. “It would be my absolute pleasure.”
A thrill tingles my spine. I seesaw him down. “So you’ll promise you’ll back off a little?”
His smile goes all sideways and twisty. “Yup. But you can’t control what goes on in my brain. I’ll be telling you I love you a million times a day.”
My heart warms and I fight a smile that would give the budding of new feelings away. “I don’t remember you being so confident,” I say. “Is this a recent thing?”
“Actually, it is. If you actually showed me any actual attention, I would probably shut down again.”
“You said the word actual like three times.”
“You have that effect on me.”
I tug on a chunk of my hair until it hurts.
Wyatt notices I’m uncomfortable. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just that now my feelings are out there, it’s difficult to rein them in.”
I nod, but the gesture is empty.
We check on Charlotte again and it looks like she’s slowing down. She’s walking around the playground alone—all of the other kids have gone—and she’s kicking up rocks.
“So friends can call each other every day, right?” Wyatt asks, returning his attention to me.
I shrug. “I don’t talk to Chloe that much.”
“But we’re going to be special friends,” he says, smirking. “Ones that call each other every day.”
I return his smile against my will. Even though I’m kind of looking forward to those calls, I say, “We’ll see about that.”
Chapter Seven
A few days later, driven by wanting to be done with days upon days of severe laziness, I make a decision: figure out what it is that I want. School, friends, boys, life. Easy, right? I just need to make a decision. Or two. Or a million.
I’m sick of being dependent on other people and I’m going to officially be an adult soon and I want to be able to say that I’ve accomplished something, anything, on my own. And right now I can’t say that.
School is looming so closely in the future, so I will conquer that first. My parents have enough to deal with right now, so I’m on my own.
After poring over a student loan packet that I picked up at the library while eating M&M’s—wondering when I started eating refined sugar—I realize I don’t want to go back to L.A. There’s nothing there for me. I finally understand why my parents were so ticked with me about my indecision—it wasn’t cheap. I fly off my bed and up the stairs to the computer. After I pull up a search engine, I type colleges in Santa Barbara and I realize it might be a better option for me to take classes down here. I spend hours researching each school, settling on the city college because the credits are the cheapest. I’d hate to throw away all those credits I’ve already completed at UCLA, but maybe I can transfer some of them.
I print off their course book. If I decide to go to school here I won’t see Chloe as much, but I would get to see my family. And Wyatt. My stomach tightens when I think about him. I take a deep breath. My eyes scan the pages, and Marketing and Photography stand out. Those are things that I think I would interest me.
For fun, I write out what classes I would have for my first semester, and it looks doable. I could work two jobs—one for my parents and the debt and one for tuition—and go to school. It’ll be really hard work, but I’m feeling confident about it. When I search on their site to figure out when the deadline is to enroll, I freeze. Tomorrow. I have to decide before tomorrow if I’m really going to make this big change.
I have all the paperwork—transcripts and such—that I would need. I could go down there today. Right now.
I go back to my room and finish the rest of the bag of chocolate while I think.
* * *
About an hour later, I’m driving from the city college fully registered with a list of all the books and supplies I need for my new classes. There are still a few weeks before school actually starts, so I can find a second job, make some money and buy this stuff myself instead of asking my parents for a loan. I’m so excited and proud of myself and the first person I want to talk to about it is Chloe.
When I get to her house, she’s already packing.
“What are you doing?” I ask when I get to her room, which is still covered in posters of the hottest celebrity boys. I wonder when she’ll grow out of them. She’s sporting a pair of cotton shorts, a plain tank top, and her hair is a mess on her head. “You look cute today.”
She rolls her eyes at the compliment, like I’m teasing her, and then changes the subject. “I’m probably going to head up to school this weekend, maybe tomorrow.”
My excitement dies a little in my chest.
“You want to come up with me?” she adds. “We could help each other set up rooms!” She folds a pink shirt and adds it to her overflowing black bag.
I hesitate, and then shake my head. “You’ll have to go without me,” I say.
“What do you mean? Do you need to take medical leave or something?” she throws a pair of heels into the bag.
“I’ve decided to go to school down here.”
When she looks at me, I suddenly feel so guilty. Why wouldn’t I run this idea by her first? But then she cracks a smile. “Why on Earth would you decide that?” She pokes me in the arm.
Confusion sweeps through me. I thought she would be upset. “What do you mean?”
She bats her eyes. “Got a new guy on tap?”
My lips are still tw
isted in confusion when I finally get it. She means Wyatt. I laugh and shake my head. “No. I mean, I did not make this decision because of some boy. It’s what I want to do. It’s cheaper, and since I have to pay for it myself, I figured school is what you make of it, not the amount you pay.”
“Wow, that’s kind of deep, Liv,” she says and we sit on the bed next to each other.
I smile at her. I like the nickname Liv. Chloe started calling me that a few years back after a party at Tyler’s house where I took off my bra, hung it on the ceiling fan, and commenced to dance on the coffee table. She said I knew how to live. That girl on the table without a bra is kind of embarrassing to think about now, but I have to remind myself that she was a part of me and I shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed about someone who I was. It’s not like I’m done having fun, I just need to redefine what that word means.
“Maybe I can come to school down here with you!” she says.
“No way. I wouldn’t let you give up that full scholarship.” Chloe and I are similar in the brains department, but she surpasses me in motivation. She worked towards great grades while I worked toward getting into James’s pants.
She sighs. “Yeah.”
“We can see each other on the weekends. I can come up there sometimes, you’ll come home for holidays. It’ll be like a long distance relationship—but this one’s gonna work.”
She nods, slowly, and curls a loose chunk of hair around her finger. I might have to curl her hair one more time before she goes.
When my phone trills in my pocket, I pull it out. Wyatt.
What are you doing today?
I write back, Talking to Chloe.
When you’re done, you want to bring her and Natalie to Bob’s Bouncy House? Charlotte is here and we’ve decided there’s no one else we’d rather bounce with than you.
I smile and force my heart to stop trying to think for me. I need time, dang it. But I will go hang out with him.
Sure, give us a few minutes.
* * *
Later, when I’m in the air watching Wyatt’s hair bounce and Natalie and Chloe and Charlotte giggling and laughing and falling over each other on the World’s Largest Bouncy House, Wyatt’s eyes meet mine and I know I won’t be able to fight him off much longer.
I feel it down to my toenails.
Chapter Eight
A few weeks later when I’m unpacking my clothes, I realize that community college is probably going to be a lot different than I thought—more grown up, maybe, than a big university. Maybe it’s the higher population of non-traditional students—older than the typical college age—that many times have kids and families and careers. Also, there’s no housing, so I had to look online for apartment listings and the only one I could afford with the job I recently acquired at Albertson’s was a kind of mother-in-law place off my landlord’s house.
It’s a bit awkward, like I moved out of my parents’ and into someone else’s parents’ house, but they leave me alone for the most part. I have a bedroom loft, a small kitchen, and a living room with an old TV that sometimes only shows gray tones instead of full color. The previous tenant left it, a ratty couch and some old pots and pans. I told the landlords—a youngish couple, cute and outdoorsy-looking—that I wanted to keep all of it when they offered to throw it out. I have plenty of room for my clothes—if I don’t need all of them hung up. It’s rough learning to not be so picky about stuff like that, but I remind myself that even though it’s not perfect, this place is mine and I earned it.
Chloe went back to L.A. and I miss her, but we agreed to take turns driving to see each other every weekend. It’s going to be odd not having her around all the time to cheer me up.
Someone knocks on my door. When I answer it, I see Wyatt is standing on my porch step in a white T-shirt, jeans and his worn Converse, awkwardly gripping a computer monitor like it might slip and land on his toe at any moment.
I open the door wide and let him in, even though I have no idea why he’s bringing a monitor into my apartment. “What’s...up?” I ask.
“Well, you’re going to need this,” he says, rolling it not so gracefully onto my couch, “if you’re going to keep up with your end of the contract.”
I’m getting ready to argue with him, about to say that he can keep his computer because I don’t do much more than tell Wyatt when he’s made a typo on the website, which is rare. Sometimes I think he makes one on purpose just to give me a reason to call him. But instead I ask a different question. “Why did you tell the Scouts that I was the brain behind the website when you did most of it?”
He sits next to the monitor and drapes an arm over it, like it’s his best bud. “The answer, I’m afraid, goes against your guidelines defined under ‘friends.’ I’m not allowed to say things that remind you of my feelings. Remember?”
A heat rises in my cheeks, but I press on. “I need a more detailed answer besides you love me. That doesn’t even make any sense.”
He sits up and gives me a look that could warm muffins. “I wanted to see you, first and foremost. I wanted you to see your parents and fix whatever it was between you. I wanted something to keep you around.” He hesitates and then adds, “The only reason I ever went to L.A. was on the off chance I’d see you. My friends up there aren’t super important to me. They’re nice, I guess, but they aren’t worth the two-hour drive. But possibly getting to see you? Definitely worth it.” He takes a breath, looking me over. I feel self-conscious for no reason and cross my arms in front of me. “That’s actually why I was up there the night of your accident. I’d heard around that everyone was going to be at Pink Dollars. I was hoping I’d get to see you.”
My insides squeeze. That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for. I was hoping he’d say that I was the real creative genius for the website—even though I know I wasn’t—and that I earned the recognition. But we both know that he did all the work and I just plugged the Christakos Creatives info into the right places. Pushing away the butterflies that have exploded in my belly, an unwanted feeling of disgust comes over me. I’ve earned nothing on my own in my life up until now. If I’d done better in high school, I would’ve gotten a scholarship. If I had come up with the idea for the website on my own, I’d feel better about collecting the paycheck. I used to sign them over to Wyatt, but he never would take them. So I started giving them to my mom. She was hesitant about taking them too; she only wanted the money I earned with her to go towards the debt, not what I earned with the Scouts, but she gave up after I got a job at Albertson’s too.
I guess the only thing I have is my grocery store job and this apartment that I truly earned myself. They’re small things, but I earned them completely on my own. But now I have to figure out how to repay Wyatt for practically giving me that contract. I’m not sure what it will be yet, but I’ll make it great.
Wyatt falls back into the couch, more relaxed, replacing his unrequited love mood with his friendship one. “Getting settled in?” he asks, a weird smile on his face.
“Yeah, I think so.” It feels awkward slipping into regular conversation after his declaration, but I don’t know what to say. My feelings for Wyatt may be blossoming a little with how kind and cute he is, but even if I give a go with him, he’ll always be ten steps ahead. And that makes me nervous. What if I’m just beginning to fall for him when he decides to pop the question or something? I shake my head. I’m getting ahead of myself.
“You never told me why you chose to go to school down here instead of in L.A.” His weird smile goes crooked, like he knows something I don’t.
“Uh, yes I did. I believe I told you the credits were cheaper—that I could actually afford them—and that it was closer to my family.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I mean, I know at first I’d wanted to go away to college to get away from my family, but now things are different. The
y need me. And I need them. I’d miss Natalie and, well, you. You’ve become a good friend.”
His eyes smile. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Don’t give me that noise,” I say, fighting the smile that will give away my feelings. “I mean it. We’re just friends.”
He stands. “Yeah, but I get a feeling I’m wearing you down a little bit.” He walks outside without waiting on my response and I watch him at my curb, unloading a keyboard and mouse.
I allow myself a huge smile in the privacy of the living room and then put it away. “Let me help you,” I yell, going after him.
Chapter Nine
My parents’ new office-slash-workshop is barely bigger than my new apartment but it has a downtown location, which will bring in streams of customers. Natalie seems to love it though, because there’s a back room with a TV that she can watch while Mom and Dad are running the store.
I’ve had a few blossoming feelings for Wyatt in the last two weeks, but they grow even more when he offers to help out with the move and lifts office chairs or boxes of paint and sweats while doing it, looking oh-so-manly. I know, so feministic. But my hormones can’t help themselves. It’s not like I was very feministic when I was dating James. He was my lowest point, I realize now. He continually made me feel shitty about myself, but I kept going back to him. The person he once was had disappeared somewhere along the way and I was too blind to see that. Worse, I was too blind to see Wyatt.
Being on my own for a while has taught me what I want. I want someone who will love me no matter what, who will accept me for whatever choices I’ve made and lets me be who I want to be. So for now, I know that I can’t have a relationship with Wyatt until I tell him my secret. Truthfully, I don’t know if he has it in him to accept that about me. If he’ll still love me. Maybe hearing my secret will at least knock him down a peg or two and we’ll have to start over, on a level playing field.
Mom comes up behind me as I’m unpacking boxes of wooden plaques. “Do you have enough dishes at your place?” she asks, rubbing my arm.
