Or Rob Samuels, blond-headed wonder boy, and in that case you’re thinking about me.
“Hey, Stone!” He jogs up to me after school, as I’m headed out toward the parking lot. He grins at me, really big, in a way that nobody has really been grinning in the past week at all, and it’s rather like shouting in a church.
In the middle of a funeral.
I cringe at the thought.
“Hey, Rob.”
He falls into step beside me. “So, um, I had fun the other night chilling with you guys.”
“Um, that’s cool. Me too.”
“Is it okay if I walk you to your car?” he asks as he walks me to my car, past everyone else still walking with their heads down, voices muted.
I frown. “That’s fine.” I stop at my car, feeling awkward. “Um, thanks, Rob. I appreciate it.”
He still has that big, shouty grin on. “Sure.”
“Um, thanks.” I make to get in the car, but Rob sort of looks around and moves his feet over the ground, but doesn’t leave.
“Riley,” he says, “are you okay?”
I frown at him. “Why do you ask that?”
He kicks at the gravel in the street and leans up against my door, but he doesn’t meet my eyes. “You’ve just seemed different lately. And not different like everyone else is being different, just, like, lately. But different different. Not to seem creepy or anything, but I notice you. I pay attention to you. You’re a smart person, and you’re a good person to take note of, but I can tell something is wrong, Riley. And I just wanted to see if I could, you know, help in some kind of way.” His cheeks flush a little.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from tearing up. Someone noticed. Rob Samuels, out of everyone, actually noticed.
I hug him, right there, in front of all the students still walking out of the school into the parking lot. Let them think whatever they want.
I needed that.
“Why do you care?” I ask. My words sound mean, even to my ears, but I don’t intend it that way. I really want to know. It’s not like I’ve treated him all that well. It’s not like I deserve it.
“I just do.”
I look at him, just standing there, and his smile has lessened a little bit, so it’s just . . . nice. Maybe I should have a boyfriend. It couldn’t hurt. Especially not now. Maybe it would even keep . . . people . . . from looking at me suspiciously.
“Do you want to come over and hang out?”
The question is out before I fully consider it, and Rob looks at me, his eyes big and shiny and the loud smile back. “Yes.”
I let him follow me to my house in his car and make him park at the curb instead of in the driveway, and when he follows me in I take him down to the basement, where we have a big-screen TV and an old L-shape couch that’s perfect for long movies and cold days.
“I didn’t bring any snacks,” he says, and he looks miserable, like he has let me down in some unforgivable way.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’ll go get something from the kitchen.”
My parents aren’t home. I’m hoping if they see his car when they get off work they’ll just think it’s one of the neighbors being annoying or something. They hate it when someone parks close. I’m not ready to explain Rob to them just yet anyway. I run upstairs and grab a bag of my mom’s Lite Butter Skinny-Woman Popcorn before tossing it into the microwave.
I watch it turn. The microwave hums and rattles where the plate isn’t set quite right.
What am I doing?
Why am I doing this?
The bag slowly starts to inflate, the kernels cracking and popping. I make myself turn away. I am a hostess, aren’t I? So why don’t I care right now? Why aren’t I excited that there’s a guy downstairs who really, really cares about me?
I grab two cans of Coke from the fridge and pull a couple of paper towels from the roll before grabbing the popcorn out of the microwave and walking it back downstairs. Rob has moved from the couch to the television, where he’s checking out my parents’ DVD collection.
“Die Hard 2 and The Notebook?” he asks. “This is a tough choice. What do you want to watch?”
I lift a shoulder and open the bag of popcorn, my fingers burning a little from the steam that escapes from the top. I set it down and blow on them.
Rob stands and catches my hand in his.
“Let me,” he says.
He raises my fingers to his lips and blows, very gently, but the air from his lips is warm. His fingers are rough on my palm.
It doesn’t feel right.
Nothing feels right.
I pull away without meaning to.
“I’ll just run them under cold water for a second, okay? Choose a good movie. Um, maybe an action movie.”
I don’t wait for his reaction. I run off to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Maybe this was a bad idea. He wants me, and I know he wants me, and I’m just using him again. I have to hold him far away, because I can’t make myself be with him.
I shove my fingers under the cold water even though they don’t hurt anymore and count to twenty. And then I dry off my hands and walk back into the little den.
Where the opening credits for Pride and Prejudice are playing on the TV.
“I thought you’d like it,” Rob says, looking a little guilty.
I sigh and sit on the opposite end of the couch. “It’s fine.”
He scoots a cushion closer, and I stick my feet out so he can’t sit next to me.
“Do you want popcorn?” he asks.
I stand up and grab a handful from the bag and a can of Coke, then return to my seat. “I love this movie.”
“Me too,” he says.
But for someone who loves Pride and Prejudice, he spends more time watching me than Keira Knightley.
THIRTY-THREE
Struggle
“So tell us more about this Rob boy,” Mom says. “He seemed so sweet! I don’t know why you haven’t brought him around before, honestly.”
Of course Mom loved him. And I wouldn’t have even had to introduce Rob last night if he hadn’t stayed after the movie to clean, insisting that we’d left crumbs on the floor from the popcorn.
“Kernels are so hard to get out of carpet,” he’d said, and then actually started opening closets and stuff until he found my Mom’s fancy new Hoover she ordered off the Home Shopping Network, and even though I’d told him “please, no,” he started vacuuming the floor and folding up throw blankets and putting the DVD into its case and doing stuff he most definitely did not need to do.
So of course my mom came downstairs to see what the hell her daughter was doing vacuuming so late at night (or at all), and saw Rob, who of course ma’am-ed his way into my mom’s heart immediately, and I’m relatively certain she had him mapped out as my prom date and possibly as my husband before he’d left.
Rob does that to mothers.
I remember in fifth grade, he’d always be first to volunteer to help the class mothers hand out birthday cupcakes. Back then, he was stocky and cute and his blond hair was always getting in his eyes, and no matter whose birthday it was, he would always save me the cupcake with the most frosting.
Of course, now he’s the kind of guy who would be cast in an after-school special. If I want to avoid being engaged by the end of the year, I’m going to have to figure something out.
Today is Saturday and the heat is broken. Apparently, while doing a major renovation on the house at the end of the street, the construction workers accidentally messed up the gas line, and now the entire neighborhood is waiting for the gas company to get it fixed. As a result, my mother got this idea that we should all have breakfast in the living room together under blankets and be a family. So she talked my father into making waffles and bacon and eggs and called Ethan and now we’re sort of comfortable, weighted down under huge piles of old throws that smell just a bit dusty, with heating pads plugged in underneath. The sky outside is a deceptive blue, too light for the odd wea
ther.
Even Esther is here, sharing a recliner with my brother, the swell of her stomach hidden under the pile of blankets. They have one plate of food between them, and her head is on his shoulder and he’s smiling.
The TV is on, quietly, and for just a little bit, I feel happy, with me and my family and Esther, while we talk quietly and eat our waffles with extra butter and syrup and I realize I can’t remember the last time I felt this content with them.
“Your mother says you had someone over last night,” Dad says.
“He was very nice.” Mom glows. “His name was Robert Samuels. He’s a good boy.”
Good boy. Good girl.
How fitting.
My dad opens his mouth to say something else, but Ethan interrupts, leaning forward and nearly spilling Esther out of his lap. He wraps his arms around her, and she grabs on to the plate, but the fork falls onto the rug.
“Turn that up, okay?”
The TV shows a picture of a pretty blond reporter holding a stack of papers. A picture of Alex, taken at the last school photo day, his HARTSVILLE HIGH tag clipped to his shirt, is shown in the upper right-hand corner. His smile is practiced and smooth, and his face is neatly shaven.
“. . . possible signs of a struggle at the Belrose residence. Mrs. Belrose was taken into custody for questioning, but has been released. The police chief is asking that anyone with any information about this case please come forward immediately.”
My heart feels like paper that has been lit on fire and is blackening and curling up from the edges.
It’s a strangely familiar feeling.
She killed him. I know she killed him. But it’s not like I can just go down to the police station and be like, “Hey, I just happen to know my sort-of boyfriend teacher probably got slaughtered by his wife.”
Was it my fault she did it? Or did Alex actually grow the balls to ask her for a divorce and maybe she just flipped out?
Am I going to be brought in next?
“What about your grades?” my dad asks. “Now that he’s out, who’s going to fix them?”
Mom puts her hands on her chest. “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that. Should we call the school? This is bad, Riley, isn’t it? He was going to help you.”
Of course. Alex is missing and my parents are worried about my grades. They’re not worried about him possibly being dead or the fact that he was most likely murdered by his crazy wife.
“Um, I did extra credit. So it’ll be fine.”
I don’t mention that the bad grades were all bullshit anyway, and that I checked the grade book because the substitute is completely lame and bought my story when I said I needed to check that Belrose had recorded a grade for the essay I’d turned in before he’d disappeared.
He’d never actually recorded a single bad grade. Not one.
But I’d known that anyway. Of course.
“This is so fucked up,” Ethan mutters. “What has it been now? A week and a half? And nothing?”
Esther pushes his hair back. “Were you guys in touch?”
Ethan mumbles something. Because they weren’t. He is just one of those people, hanging on to an old connection, wishing he’d called or texted or something before his friend went missing.
And then everything is weird and quiet and I can hear my dad chewing his bacon, which he likes black and burnt.
“Rob is great,” I say into the quiet. “He’s really cool.”
“Are you going to see him again?” my mother asks.
I nod. “Yep. Definitely.” I take a sip of the coffee my mother made as her contribution. It’s not very strong and could use sugar and creamer. Suddenly I’m hot. Too hot for all the blankets and the plate in my lap and waffles and coffee. I push them off and head for the kitchen.
“Where are you going, honey?” Mom asks, like I’m going out into a blizzard and not just a cold house.
“I need sugar.”
Instead of going back to the living room, I stand in the kitchen. The floor is icy.
The cops obviously aren’t taking Jacqueline seriously. And maybe that means I will have to.
And if Jacqueline isn’t above killing, maybe I’m not either. And that goes double if Alex told Jacqueline anything about me.
Oh my God.
What if Alex told Jacqueline something about me?
I’m stirring sugar into my coffee, hopping back and forth on the cold tile floor, when the doorbell rings.
“I’ll get it,” I yell into the living room. The rest of my family is still likely cocooned into their blankets, so I run to the door, wishing I’d made it back to my bedroom for socks. I wiggle my toes into the softness of the rug and swing the door open, hoping it’s the repairman, telling us our heat will be kicking back on shortly.
It’s not.
It’s Neta and Rob.
Neta bursts in without even saying hello. “Did you just see the news?” she asks. She lowers her voice. “We had to come over. Like . . . holy shit.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “You chose the wrong house. Heat is out.”
Rob smiles at me. “We don’t care.”
Neta fake-grins. “Yeah, we don’t care.” She imitates Rob and gives me this huge fake wink.
I lead them downstairs, away from the family meeting in the living room, and pull the remaining musty blankets out of the closet under the stairs. I find an old space heater and plug it in, and when I turn back Neta is on one end of the couch and Rob is on the other.
So I sit in the middle.
And cover up with the thinnest blanket.
“Do you want to share?” Rob scoots a little closer.
“I’m good.”
The space heater starts to make an odd metallic noise. I hope it’s not going to explode. My mom is always going on about space heaters exploding and starting stuff on fire and everyone dying.
“So do you think he’s dead?” Neta asks. And she looks sad, actually. She wraps her arms around herself. “I just—I can’t. I can’t deal. But if there are signs of an actual struggle—”
“Then why are they just now finding them?” I interrupt. “This is all too weird. Why is this all just now happening?”
“Sometimes the cops don’t release stuff right away.” Rob pulls the blanket around his shoulders, and I turn on the television to a pop music channel to cover the sound of our voices. I don’t want my parents to try to eavesdrop on our conversation, and since they’re suddenly interested in Rob, they might actually try.
Weird that it took a guy for them to notice that their daughter was here, around, a sentient being instead of a picture to straighten on a wall. Weird that I wasn’t enough on my own when I was being the perfect child and pinning awards and ribbons to my dream board and filling my bank account I can’t touch with grants and my future with scholarships. It took a boy and bad grades to even get them to look at me.
Weird that being accepted to the right colleges wasn’t enough. Weird that all my friends want to do is talk about men and what it takes to get them to look at you and what happens when they touch you and all the things you might have done wrong when they don’t.
At the end of the day, that’s really all that’s important. And who are we without male approval?
And look what I have with Rob on my arm.
Approval.
Attention.
Weird.
Ethan was right.
“Why don’t they release anything?” Neta asks. “I mean, that doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense about this. Why would anyone kill Mr. Belrose? He was perfect.”
“If they put everything out there and someone comes forward with information they haven’t put out, well, then they know that person is involved with the crime somehow, you know?”
It makes sense.
Which means I can’t say anything about Jacqueline.
Anything.
“Maybe there wasn’t even a crime,” I say. “What makes you so sure there was a crime? Maybe it was a
n accident. Maybe he just got stressed out. Maybe he just left his wife.”
“I’m sure the police are investigating all of that. But they have to face the facts.” Rob’s hand appears from under his blanket and rests on my leg, and moves back and forth. “They haven’t found a trace of him. And usually that means—something really bad is going on. The longer he’s missing, the more likely it is he’s dead.”
I swallow hard. I want to move away. I want to push him away. I want to be anywhere but here. The blanket is thin enough that I can feel the pressure of each of his fingers. My skin feels strange and dirty.
“But it’s Mr. Belrose,” Neta says. “He’s just—it’s just—he can’t be.”
I stare at Rob’s hand.
“He can’t be,” I repeat. “He’s probably just lost or something.”
Rob’s hand moves.
I hate him.
I’m using him. I hate myself. And I’m using him. I need to end this, and I need to end this now, and I need to stop gossiping about whether Alex is dead, and I need to get him away from me and get him to quit touching me.
I am going to scream.
Neta draws her legs up on the couch. “How do you know so much about everything, Rob?”
“Law and Order addict. I’m an expert about this kind of stuff.”
I stand up, and Rob’s hand slides off my leg. “Do you guys want anything from the kitchen? Drinks? Coffee?”
“I can get it,” Rob says, hopping up. “Do you want a Coke, Riley?”
“Something hot. A cappuccino, maybe,” I suggest, knowing the machine isn’t hooked up and it’ll take him at least ten minutes to get it going.
“Me too,” Neta says.
Rob runs up the stairs toward the kitchen and Neta focuses on me.
“You can’t get rid of him,” she says, reading my mind. “He’s basically perfect. And you need a good guy, right?”
I stare at her. Of course. Women need men.
A good guy.
“Sure, Neta.”
Weird.
THIRTY-FOUR
Such a Good Girl Page 17
