Saving Myself For You

by Teresa Hill

  * * *

  Peter

  I don’t think Dana’s dad said anything to her about finding us together on the couch, then kicking me out of her house. She doesn’t say anything about it, just thanks me for helping her and asks more than once if everything is okay.

  What am I supposed to say to that?

  Your dad hates my guts.

  He’s outraged at the possibility of anything happening between us.

  No, actually, he just went straight to growling that he would never stand for it, period. Which did not surprise to me. Deep down, I always knew he’d have a fit if I ever tried to be more than Dana’s friend.

  But even knowing that, I kept trying to fool myself, kept drifting closer and closer to her, thinking somehow, maybe, just maybe, we’d get a chance to be together.

  But now I know.

  Not gonna happen.

  Not if her dad has anything to say about it. Which he will.

  Tons of girls wouldn’t care what their dads say about who they date, if their dads are even still around, but Dana isn’t one of them. Her dad is totally there, all the time, and she’s crazy about him. Her whole family’s tight, and with the exception of her dad, they’ve all been really good to me. Better than anyone else ever has been, to me and to Julie.

  I don’t want to mess any of that up. Not for Dana or me or Julie. I don’t want Dana fighting with her dad, and I like working with him and Sam whenever I can. I want to keep doing that, so I can save money, just in case.

  And Julie? I owe her big-time for coming back here and keeping me out of that awful group home social services sent me to at first. You don’t pay someone back for something like that by messing up her life. Julie’s happy. Cautious sometimes even now – Zach’s been trying to convince her to have a baby, but she’s too scared to do it – and I get that, totally. Sometimes I still feel like disaster is right around the corner, especially now that Grace’s husband died.

  Stuff just comes at you. That’s what life is, awful things coming at you. You’re in your car, on the interstate, driving home from work, maybe a little too fast, maybe taking a call on your cell phone, and the next thing you know, you’re off the road and heading for a tree. Zach told me that’s what the cops think happened to Luc.

  That kind of shit could happen to anybody, at any time, and knowing that, how stupid would I be to walk right into trouble? Like making Dana’s dad hate me even more?

  So I’m trying to pretend like nothing happened. Like we’re still friends, kind of, just not as close as we used to be, because I can’t be that close to her all the time and not say or do anything. It’s like torture. So the only option I have is to be friends, but not such good friends.

  She doesn’t understand. I can see it in the way she looks at me, the questions in her eyes that I keep trying really hard not to let her ask. I change the subject or walk away every time I see the question coming. What else can I do?

  She’ll be okay. Everybody loves her. Her family would do anything for her, and she has so many other friends, plus all those guys who want her.

  I keep telling myself that through the crazy days after Luc’s death. Julie, Zach and everybody else are coming and going constantly. The women want someone with Grace at all times, which I understand, but I can’t figure out what the men are doing. They say taking care of everything they can, so Grace doesn’t have to.

  But I feel like something else is wrong. I’m used to adults lying to me, but not Zach or Sam. I always try to have as little to do with Dana’s dad as possible, but still … I don’t think he’d lie to me, either. So I don’t know what’s going on.

  The day of the funeral comes. We’re in Luc’s mother’s town for the burial, because that’s what Luc’s mother wants and Grace agreed to it for his mother’s sake. And because they hadn’t been married long and hadn’t lived in any one place for long. She met Luc in France, where he was born and raised by a French father and an American mother. But his father’s dead now. His mother remarried and is living in Ohio, a few hours north of us. So here we are.

  It’s easier to avoid Dana at the funeral home -- more people there. At the graveside service, I decide to stay in the back off to the side and out of the way, hiding basically. But at some point, I find Dana standing beside me. I guess she moved so quietly I didn’t hear her. Or maybe I was just too caught up in my own thoughts. I can’t bring myself to be sorry she’s there, either. Not right then.

  It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve seen her, since I’ve been anywhere near her, which is not true. I see her at school every day. But that’s how it feels.

  She’s wearing a pair of tall, black boots, a skinny black skirt that ends a couple of inches above her knees and a big, dark sweater the color of a plum. Even wrapped up in her heaviest winter coat, she looks cold.

  And miserable.

  I ease a bit closer, hating how alone and sad she looks. She turns her face toward mine, and for a moment, I see tears glittering in her pretty brown eyes. Then she turns back toward Grace.

  “She looks like she still doesn’t understand,” Dana says. “Like she still can’t believe it really happened.”

  “I know.” Grace sits oddly still, almost frozen, the women of the family sitting by her side, the men standing behind her, looking like they’re her bodyguards, ready to take on anyone who dares try to hurt her. That’s the way it is in their family.

  “Do you believe there’s one perfect person for all of us? Just one that we’re supposed to be with? To love?”

  God, I hope not.

  Because if that’s true, I’m screwed. Right now, it’s like I can’t see anybody but Dana, like every other girl in the world fades into the background next to her. If it stays this way forever for me …

  I can’t hold out anymore, and I slip my hand around hers and hold on tight.

  “If that’s true for Grace, it’s all over,” Dana says. “She found him, the man she loved, the one she was supposed to spend her life with, but that turned out to be three years. Three years is nothing. And now she’s going to be alone and unhappy for the rest of her life?”

  “I don’t know, Dana. I just don’t know.”

  “I believe that, the one perfect person for everybody thing, but right now, I don’t want to. I don’t want it to be true, for Aunt Grace’s sake.”

  “No. Me neither.”

  If there’s hope for Grace, maybe there’s hope for me, too. Although, how can I hope to find someone better than Dana? Who fits me better? Who makes me laugh harder or challenges me more? I can’t imagine wanting anyone more than I want her. And I know no one will ever believe in me more than she does, which feels absolutely amazing. I need that. I need her. It’s like she sees none of my flaws, only what she believes I can be. No one has ever seen me like that before.

  Somehow, I manage not to say anything else, and Dana doesn’t either. But she looks so sad, and when tears start to roll down her pretty cheeks I let go of her hand so I can put my arm around her and pull her into my side.

  She feels cold and somehow slight, and it’s like I can feel the misery radiating from her. She needs me right now, I tell myself. She won’t always, but right now, she does. I’m here, and I’m going to hold her, dammit.

  It’s a funeral. Somebody died. Surely it won’t be the end of the world if I have my arm around her. I need that. I need her close again. I need some time to get used to this, to not having her, not even pretending that someday I will.

  But it’s like her dad has some kind of radar where I’m concerned, because he looks up and finds us at the back of the crowd. That hard, angry look flares in his eyes, and I let her go, step away.

  She turns and looks up at me. I can see the question so clearly on her face. Why? What happened? What’s wrong?

  But I don’t have any answers for her. None that she’ll accept or believe.

  So I don’t say anything. I just leave her standing there, alone and miserable, with her tears and all of her
unanswered questions.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  Peter

  It isn’t easy, and I can’t say I’m handling it well, but I stay away from her as much as I can, given the fact that we go to the same school, even have some classes together, and we’re kind of part of the same family.

  But I’m not happy. I’m really pissed off and living on the edge.

  It’s not exactly news to anybody that I have anger issues. Who the hell wouldn’t, given what my life used to be like? I try to not let it take over – the rage. Maybe one day, I’ll tame that beast for good. Maybe I won’t.

  Fighting is a problem for me, the problem being that I like it. I like to hit things. I really like to hit people. Or I should say, some people, sometimes. It isn’t like I’ll just be walking down the hall at school and pick somebody at random to punch. I’m not a bully. I don’t think I’m even mean. Not an easy person to deal with, but not mean.

  Still I have to admit, I’m not exactly unhappy if some guy starts giving me shit, especially if he hits me first. I used to never back down from a fight. If the other guy hit me first, I looked at that like a freebie. He started it, I’d say. I was just defending myself.

  Right.

  Happily defending myself.

  But it’s a problem for the adults around, the teachers and the assistant principal who hand out suspensions, and especially my sister.

  If I come home with bruises, Julie gets that look on her face. The one that says, He’s never going to get it. He’s never going to figure it out. His life is always going to suck, because he’s always going to be screwing it up.

  Then she’ll cry, and Zach will get pissed.

  First rule of our household: Don’t make Julie cry.

  Me fighting always makes Julie cry.

  I’d been doing a lot better for a while now with the whole anger/fighting thing, but ever since that run-in with Dana’s dad, I’ve been living in the red zone. I’ve gotten into a few scuffles here and there. Nothing big. As long as I don’t get hit in the face hard enough to leave a bruise or a cut, I can usually hide the fact that I’ve gotten into it with someone.

  But I’m itching for a real fight, to take out some of the anger and frustration I feel over Dana’s father and his this-is-not-going-to-happen decree. Over me trying to accept that she’ll never be mine.

  One day, I’m leaving the gym after fourth period, headed to fifth -- AP Calculus, with Dana. Math is the only academic subject where I can keep up with her. She even asks me to explain things to her every now and then in calculus. Standing at a bunch of lockers just down the hall from my classroom is this guy named Ben who loves to give me shit about my mom. His dad manages the bank where my mom used to work, the one she stole from.

  Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything left he can say that I haven’t already heard a hundred times by now. Your mom goes to prison and you live in a small town, everybody knows and some of them will give you shit. That’s just the way it is. There aren’t enough hours in the day to fight all the guys who give me hell about her. I learned that the hard way when I was fourteen. It’s a miracle I ever made it to high school.

  But that day, as I walk by Ben’s little group, he raises his voice and says, “So, Mom’s finally getting out of jail, huh?”

  I freeze right there. Suddenly, I’m so cold and still, it’s like my body morphs into a block of ice. When I can manage to -- after what feels like an eternity -- I turn to him and ask, “What?”

  All his asshole friends laugh like it’s hilarious. Three of them, plus Ben? I figure I can take them all if I have to. I’m mad enough.

  But the important part of this is the possibility that Mom’s getting out.

  I think for a minute I’m going to throw up right here in the hallway at school. Man, the shit kids like Ben would give me if I did that, if they ever knew how freaked out just the possibility makes me.

  Jesus, she’s really getting out, and nobody told me? Warned me?

  Ben smirks. “Just think of all the things she learned that she could teach you. I hear you come out of prison a better criminal than when you went in. You’ve heard that, right? I bet she learned all sorts of skills that could be useful to you.”

  Little shit.

  I get up in his face until our noses are practically touching, and he looks a little scared. I like that, that I can make him look scared. And then I say, “I don’t think there’s anything I need to be taught to be able to kick your ass right now.”

  I have him backed up against his locker by then. The guy has nowhere else to go. I’m seconds away from hitting him so hard he’ll go through his locker door, hell through the wall and into the classroom behind it. I’ll get expelled, but I don’t care. If I have to go back to live with my mother, I don’t care about anything. My life will be shit no matter what.

  And then there’s a hand low on my back, a soft, easy touch I feel down to my core. I know right away who it is. I don’t need to hear her say softly, “Peter?”

  “Dana, get out of here,” I say without turning around, not wanting to get sucker-punched and maybe knocked into her. I don’t want her getting hurt in any way because of me.

  She grabs a handful of my shirt and tugs hard, as if she could move me. “Class is starting. Come with me.”

  Another thing about her, she’s fierce about protecting her family, the people she loves, and me. I don’t know what she would have done or what Ben or I would have done in the next few seconds, but I never get to find out.

  The bell rings. Kids dart into classrooms, clearing the hallways. Dana tugs on my shirt again, hard. Our math teacher comes into the hall to grab his door to close it, and he sees us, then stops to stare.

  Clearly, he’s not moving until we do.

  Ben and his friends go one way. Dana and I go the other as she grabs my arm and drags me into the classroom. I can hear the whispers start as we move to the far side of the room, see the look the math teacher gives me. He was highly skeptical when I showed up on the roster for this class. He pulled me aside after the first day and asked if it was a mistake, me in this class.

  Dana, yes. Not me.

  I thought I’d won the guy over by this point. I’m pulling a B+, and not because Dana’s carrying my ass. But the thing is, once you have a rep for being a bad kid, a troubled one, a violent one, it’s damned hard to ever get away from it. That bit he saw in the hallway, that few seconds of me pissed off and in a kid’s face -- a rich, popular kid -- is all it takes to change his opinion of me. It tells him I am exactly what he always thought, despite everything I’ve shown him over the past few months in his class.

  I’m trouble, he remembers. It was bound to show sooner or later. He’ll treat me differently from now on.

  That’s the way the world works. People get an idea in their heads about who or what you are, and it’s almost impossible to change their minds.

  I know that.

  Dana doesn’t.

  She doesn’t get it. She thinks if you change how you act or change your hair, your clothes, your words, people will forget. They’ll believe the you standing in front of them, instead of the person they always believed you were.

  But then, people have always adored her and expected the best of her. They always will. She could never really understand me and my world. Hell, I don’t want her to. I don’t want her to know the things I’ve been through with my mom, the things she did to me, the way I lived, the way people treat me. I want her to go right on believing the world is a great place.

  As I sit down in my seat behind her, she turns around and whispers, “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” I say, a stupid, bald-faced lie. She looks hurt that I even try it with her. I try again. “Nothing happened. You saw that.”

  Which is not to say that nothing will happen later, when class isn’t starting and teachers aren’t looking. It’s basically saying nothing, and she knows that. She’s mad about it, too. Me, trying so pathetically to a
void her question.

  I don’t have it in me right now to try harder. I’m too freaked out by the idea of Mom getting out of jail.

  Maybe I should just run right now. I have a stash of money saved up for a day just like this one. A day when Mom gets out or Zach and Julie get sick of all my shit and kick me out. One or the other’s coming sooner or later. I’ve always known that, should have been better prepared for it. And I would have been, if I hadn’t gotten so caught up in Dana, this beautiful, unattainable girl with gorgeous brown eyes that are glaring at me right now.

  “Don’t do that,” she tells me.

  “Do what?”

  “Claim that nothing happened, that nothing’s wrong, when I can see for myself that clearly, obviously, something is wrong.”

  Yeah, nobody gives me shit like she does. Nobody challenges me like she does. Nobody does to me what she does, and it has to stop. It has to. She short-circuits my brain so I can’t see all the reasons why we’ll never work as a couple, leaves me nothing but all the reasons I want her. She gets me ignoring everything I’ve always known to be true about myself and lets me see myself as who she believes I could be.

  No way I’ll ever be that good. I just hate the possibility of her ever really knowing that. It burns a hole in my gut, just thinking about it.

  God, this girl makes me so stupid, I deserve whatever I get.

  “It’s fine,” I tell her.

  “No. It’s not. Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “I’ll handle it. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  She cocks her head to the side and stares at me some more, irritated as hell. It’s like she thinks she has the right to be in my life, to know if something’s wrong, to try to help fix it. She’s always been like that with me. And yeah, the girl thinks she can fix anything, no big deal. If not by being smart, then by being tough, fearless, insistent, determined. She thinks there’s nothing she can’t handle.