Through to You

by Lauren Barnholdt

  “Well, it wasn’t air allergies,” I say at the same time that Anna says, “Well, she had a condition.”

  “It was, um, food allergies,” I say. “A condition of food allergies. Like, really bad ones.”

  “But why did she have to go to Florida?” the nurse persists. What is she, some kind of crime-scene investigator or something?

  “Um, well, she was getting all these hives,” I say.

  “From clams,” Nico says.

  “Yes!” Anna’s all over it. “Clams! And since there’s so much clam chowder in New England, she just had to go.”

  “It was very serious,” I say. “She might have died if she even got in contact with a clam. Or anything that, you know, lived in a shell.”

  “Yeah,” Harper says, apparently feeling confident enough to start chiming in on her own imaginary fate. “It’s like those kids who can’t be around peanuts.”

  “Huh,” the nurse says. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. Well, thanks anyway.” She shakes her head and walks away, mumbling about food additives.

  Once she’s out of earshot, the four of us look at each other and then immediately start laughing.

  “Oh my God,” Harper says. “That was epic.”

  “I seriously thought you were busted.” Nico shakes his head. “Food allergies? Jesus, I can’t believe she bought that.”

  “Good one, Penn,” Anna says. She gives me a grudging smile.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Harper beams at me.

  I reach out and take her hand. Her fingers wrap around mine, and I’ve never felt anything better.

  Harper

  Okay, so that was pretty awesome. Not only did Penn completely and totally win Anna over, but he was somehow able to save me from the school nurse. (And seriously, when did the school nurse become such a stalker? I mean, I understand she’s just doing her job, but really? Coming outside and asking people if they know me? That’s kind of taking things to a whole other level. That’s, like, restraining-order territory.)

  Once Anna and Nico head to first period, Penn leans me up against the side of the school and kisses me. It makes my heart pound just as fast as it did last night. Everything about him is exciting. Last night it was exciting because he was finally letting me in. This morning it’s exciting because he’s kissing me right here at school, out in the open where anyone can see.

  “I missed you,” he breathes into my hair.

  “I missed you, too,” I say back.

  * * *

  But it turns out I don’t have to miss him.

  Because we’re together after that, every moment pretty much, for the next three weeks. At school we meet between classes and do our homework together at lunch, stealing kisses in between math problems. After school Penn will drop me off at the dance studio, then head to Whole Foods, where he buys snacks. Then he keeps me company in the office while we eat whatever delicious treats he’s picked up that day. When I’m done with work, sometimes Penn goes home, but usually he’ll come back to my house. We sit out by the fire pit and eat s’mores and then make out after my mom goes to sleep. Weekends are reserved for our real “dates”—we’ll go to dinner, see a movie, or take long walks. One Saturday we go to the beach, staying there all day until our skin is sunburned and our shoes are filled with sand.

  Everything is going great until Anna starts to freak out.

  She shows up at my house on a Friday morning before school. Her hair is disheveled, her face is flushed, and her eyes are wide. She’s holding a cup of Starbucks coffee in each hand.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it your mom?” Anna’s mom had breast cancer a few years ago. She’s totally fine now, and in remission, but there’s always a chance that the cancer could come back.

  “What? No, my mom’s fine.” She shakes her head.

  “Okay.” I walk out of my house, then turn around and lock the door.

  “Ride with me to school?” Anna asks.

  “Sure.” Lately I’ve been riding to school with Penn, so I pull my phone out and text him to let him know that Anna’s going to take me today.

  “So something happened last night,” she says once we get into her car.

  “What kind of something?”

  “The kind of something that . . . I don’t know, the kind of something that’s making my head all confused.”

  “It’s making my head confused too,” I say. My phone beeps with a text.

  Penn.

  C u at school beautiful.

  My heart flutters in my chest. He’s called me beautiful before, but I’m still not used to it. How can you really get used to something like that? A hot guy calling you beautiful when you’ve never thought of yourself that way? Not that I have low self-esteem or anything. But I’ve always thought of myself as kind of average. Or maybe a little bit—

  “Hello!” Anna says. “Can you focus on me for once?”

  “For once? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I have something to talk about, and all you can think about is texting with Penn.” We’re at a stoplight, and she reaches down and pulls her coffee out of the cup holder and takes a sip. She’s obviously pissed off at me, though, because she does it all herky-jerky and some of the coffee spills out of the top of the cup and onto her hand.

  “That’s not all I can think about.” I reach into the glove compartment and pull out a napkin.

  I hand it to her, and she wipes at the coffee angrily, then balls up the napkin and throws it into the backseat. “Yeah, it is,” she says. “You’ve been spending every single second with him lately.”

  “Whoa.” I shake my head. “We need to start over. If you want to talk about me and Penn, that’s one thing. But you showed up at my house this morning saying something weird happened.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a second, just reaches over and rolls down her window. Her hair blows softly in the breeze. “Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just freaking out right now, and I’m probably looking for someone to take it out on.”

  “Okay,” I say, shrugging and deciding to let it go. Anna doesn’t usually snap at me, and I can see how she might be a little annoyed that I’ve been spending all my free time with Penn. “But, Anna, what are you freaking out about?”

  “Well, last night . . . I’m not sure exactly what happened, but basically . . . I mean . . .” She licks her lips. “Nico and I kissed.”

  “What?!” I scream so loud that Anna winces.

  “Shhh!” she says. “Jesus, Harper, you’re going to blow out my eardrums.”

  “Wait, you guys kissed?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I mean, sort of. I don’t know! It was weird.”

  “Tell me every detail.” I cannot believe she didn’t call me last night. Not that we’ve really been talking much on the phone lately. But still. She could have at least texted me.

  “Okay, so we were at my house, and I was running through my music for my audition. He was listening to me practice, you know, like he usually does. And it was just horrible, Harper. Completely horrible.”

  “Him listening?”

  “No.” She shakes her head again. “My singing.”

  “Okay.” I know better than to refute this point. Anna goes through these phases where she gets all emotional about her music and insists she sounds like crap. If you tell her she sounds great (which she does), she yells and says that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that you don’t have an ear for music. Which is actually true in my case. I’m completely tone deaf. Every time I try to watch those singing reality shows, I always think someone sounds great, and the next thing I know the judges are talking about how awful the person sounds.

  “Anyway, I started freaking out about it, because my audition is this weekend, and I really need to make sure I’m on point. So Nico was trying to console me, and then he gave me a hug.”

  “And then?” God, this is
torture. It’s like trying to pull teeth with her. Why doesn’t she just spit it out?

  “And then he started stroking my hair. And then he kissed me.”

  “Oh my God!” I screech. “Anna, this is huge! Was it good?”

  “The kiss?”

  “Yes, the kiss!”

  “Well, it wasn’t the kind of kiss that could be considered good or bad.” We’re pulling into the school parking lot now, and she guides her car into our parking spot.

  “What do you mean?” I unbuckle my seat belt and start pawing through my bag. I left in such a rush this morning that I’m not sure if I remembered my math homework.

  “It was on my head,” Anna says. She turns the car off. I look over at her, and she’s staring out the windshield toward school.

  I frown. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that he kissed me on my head.”

  “Oh.” I try to keep the deflation I’m feeling out of my voice. He kissed her on the head? That doesn’t sound like it’s that good a story. I was picturing it more like she was crying and he started to, like, kiss her tears away, and then before she knew what was happening, his mouth was on hers and they had to tear themselves away from each other before they had sex and ruined their whole friendship.

  But kissing her on the head? That definitely sounds kind of lame. Then again, what do I know? Up until recently my experience with kissing was zero. Maybe Nico wanted to kiss Anna on the mouth but she panicked and turned her head, and so he had no choice but to kiss her forehead. And now she’s freaking out because she really did want to kiss him and she thinks she missed her chance.

  “Well,” I say slowly. “Maybe he wanted to kiss your mouth, but you turned your head.”

  “I didn’t turn my head.”

  “Oh.”

  We sit there for a second, both thinking about this. Her car is making this sort of pinging noise it always makes when she turns it off, almost like the engine isn’t quite ready to calm down yet.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Anna says.

  “That’s impossible. I don’t even know what I’m thinking.”

  “You’re thinking it’s totally ridiculous for me to get worked up about this, that it was just a forehead kiss.”

  “I don’t think it’s ridiculous for you to get worked up about it.” I’m not lying—I don’t think it’s ridiculous. If I were her, I’d probably be getting worked up about it too. I mean, a guy she’s been secretly in love with since, like, forever, kisses her? Even if it’s just on the forehead, it’s still something to get crazy over. It’s not like Nico goes around kissing her on the forehead every single day. This is definitely a new development.

  “Good,” Anna says. “Because I swear, Harper, there was something behind it. It was like, I don’t know, tender or something. Like he wanted to do more but he was afraid.”

  I perk up. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s definitely possible that Nico wanted to do more but was afraid of freaking Anna out or messing up their friendship. Although. I did read this magazine article once that basically said guys are pretty much never afraid of ruining friendships the way girls are, and that if they want a girl, they’ll go for it no matter what. It was backed up with some kind of scientific study or poll or something. But whatever. Who really listens to magazine articles anyway?

  “So, what are you going to do?” I ask. “Just ignore it?”

  “I don’t know.” Anna reaches out and pulls at the fluffy pink steering wheel cover she bought a few months ago during one of our epic all-day mall trips. “I know I should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s easier.”

  “True. But sometimes the easiest thing isn’t always the best thing.”

  “What do you think I should do?” Anna asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But if you were me, what would you do?”

  I don’t say anything for a second and instead just look through the windshield at all of our classmates wandering around on the grass. Some of them are laughing, some of them are scowling, some of them look completely indifferent to what’s going on. I think about how each of them has a story, something inside themselves they’re keeping hidden from the world. I think about Penn, and how he still hasn’t told me anything else about his shoulder, how even though we’ve spent almost every second together for the last few weeks, everything is still so surfacey.

  “I think you should tell Nico,” I say to Anna.

  She turns to me. “You do?”

  I nod. “Yeah. I think you should tell him how you feel.”

  “What if things get weird between us?” she asks.

  I shrug. “If things get weird between you, then they get weird between you. But at least you’ll know.”

  “At least I’ll know,” she repeats softly.

  A niggling thought tugs at the back of my mind, telling me that sometimes knowing isn’t the best thing. But I push it away. Because sometimes you have to take chances, no matter what you might risk losing.

  Penn

  Jackson comes up to me before homeroom.

  I’m standing at my locker, waiting for Harper, and when I see him, it’s like a punch to my gut. I haven’t talked to Jackson since the whole incident at the Sailing Burrito—or, as I like to call it, Glassgate.

  “Here,” he says, slamming a Post-it up against my locker. “You’re welcome, even though you don’t fucking deserve it.”

  There’s a phone number written on the paper, along with a date and time. Saturday, 9:30 a.m.

  Has Jackson gotten me a date? We used to have a scheme we’d run, where one of us would go up to a cute girl and tell her the other one wanted her number. The one who wanted the number would stand in the corner and give the girl a timid little smile, like we were too shy to approach her on our own. It was actually very effective. Not only would we get the number, but we’d have the girl thinking we were the kind of guys who didn’t do that type of thing very often, when in reality we did it constantly.

  “I have a girlfriend,” I say, ripping the note off my locker. The words sound foreign coming out of my mouth. Is Harper my girlfriend? I’ve never really had a girlfriend before. But we’re spending almost every second together, so then what else can she really be? “And besides, nine thirty is a little early for a date.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Jackson says. “It’s a doctor’s number. You have an appointment at nine thirty on Saturday. And again, you’re welcome.”

  My pulse speeds up, and I look at the Post-it, resisting the urge to crush it with my fist and toss it onto the ground. “Dr. Marzetti?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Is the appointment with Dr. Marzetti?” I can’t help it, but hope blooms in my chest. Is it possible that somehow Jackson has gotten me an appointment with her? Jackson’s dad is rich, and he knows people. Maybe he pulled some strings. Maybe he was somehow able to—

  “Who’s Dr. Marzetti?” Jackson asks.

  I shrug. “No one. Just this doctor I’ve heard of who does shoulders.”

  “Well, whatever. This guy’s name is Dr. Tamblin, and he’s one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country.”

  I’ve heard of him. He does a lot of work on shoulders, yes, but he doesn’t specialize in sports medicine. He works more on people who’ve experienced trauma to their limbs—car accidents, that kind of thing. But I don’t want to get into all of that with Jackson. In fact, I don’t want to talk to him at all. I just want him to go away. You’d think he’d know that, after I almost threw a glass at his head the other night. But he apparently didn’t get the hint. Because he keeps talking.

  “I know he doesn’t do much sports medicine, but he said he might be able to help you.”

  I look down at the paper again, the phone number and time staring back at me in Jackson’s familiar handwriting. I never told him exactly what was wrong with my shoulder. Maybe my parents told his parents. Or maybe my coach told the team. I don’t know how ever
yone found out or what exactly they were told. I don’t even know if Jackson knows enough about what’s wrong with me to even know if this doctor can help.

  “Thanks,” I say, shoving the note into my pocket.

  “That’s it?” he asks. “Just thanks?”

  I shrug. “You did me a favor, so I said thanks. What more do you want from me? I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  Jackson shakes his head, his eyes blazing. “You’re a real fucking asshole, you know that, Mattingly?”

  Then he turns and walks away. I watch him go, angry at him for giving me that number, angry that it’s something I have to think about now. Why can’t everyone just mind their own fucking business? I’m not a charity case.

  “Hi!” Harper says, bounding down the hall toward me.

  She looks cute today. She’s wearing a light blue T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts that show off her long legs. But the good mood I was in this morning when I thought about seeing her is gone.

  “Sorry,” she says, leaning in and giving me a kiss. “Anna was having drama. Actually, I can probably talk to you about it. You’re a guy. If a girl liked you, would you want her to tell you? Even if you were good friends with her?”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about, and if I’m being completely honest, I don’t care. I can’t really concentrate on whatever it is she’s saying. All I can think about is why Jackson would think it was okay to do something like that. I mean, calling a doctor and making an appointment for me? Isn’t that against the law?

  “Hello,” Harper says. She bumps her hip against mine playfully. But I’m not in a good mood, and my thoughts are racing. “Earth to Penn, I asked you a question.”

  “Listen, I need to get out of here,” I say.

  She bites her lip, and her eyebrows knit together in a frown. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.” I open my locker back up and throw my books inside, then slam it shut. “I just . . . I need to get out of here.”

  “Okay.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot. “You want me to come with you?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “It’s fine. I just can’t deal with school today, you know?” I give her a smile so she knows it’s not about her, but everything inside me feels jumpy like I want to crawl out of my skin.