You Don't Live Here

by Robyn Schneider

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Lily said. “He set up a whole station in the kitchen. Mise en place, like an actual restaurant. He was not messing around. And then he climbed onto this little faux balcony, bellowed ‘GRILLED CHEESE,’ and tossed them into the crowd.”

  “It was amazing,” said Adam. “People called him the Grilled Cheezus for months. He even grew out his hair.”

  “That’s commitment,” I said.

  “That’s Ethan,” Lily said, shaking her head.

  “It’s too bad he hangs around with such doucheholes,” said Adam, giving Lily a significant look.

  “Adam!” Lily scolded. “Those are Sasha’s friends you’re talking about. Right, Sasha?”

  She was staring at me in the rearview, a slight smirk playing over her lips, daring me to say it out loud. And I wished I didn’t have to. Because they’d been nothing but nice to me, and okay, maybe I sometimes got the impression that they weren’t that way to everyone, but it wasn’t like they were actively making anyone’s life miserable. At least, not that I saw.

  “Right,” I said. “They’re my friends.”

  Chapter 14

  AN UNEXPECTED SIDE EFFECT OF TWISTING my ankle in Phys Ed was that Cole seemed genuinely concerned the next day. He even offered to give me a ride to the homecoming game.

  When he pulled up, dressed in his varsity jacket with shoeblack across his cheeks in warrior streaks, I was surprised it was just the two of us. I’d thought it was more of a carpool, not a one-on-one situation.

  “Where’s everyone?” I asked.

  “Just us,” Cole said. “For a change.”

  “So Whitney made Ethan take her to dinner?” I guessed.

  “Yep,” Cole admitted. “We could have joined, but I kind of wanted a break from hanging with them. Hope it’s okay.”

  “Are you apologizing for not taking me to dinner?” I asked, charmed.

  “Only if you would have said yes. To dinner.” He glanced over at me, as though gauging my reaction. It was like one of his text messages. All suggestion but no substance.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Because in order to answer a question, someone has to ask one.”

  Cole shook his head, grinning.

  “Touché,” he told me.

  Was he flirting? Was I? I couldn’t figure it out. Any of it. Why we were alone, why Cole was staring at me like that, or what I should do if he was finally trying to make something happen between us.

  Go for it, I supposed. It would cement my place at their lunch table, and maybe then I wouldn’t have to panic so much about whether Friya and Whitney wanted me around. And it would certainly delight my grandparents.

  “Also, you’re welcome,” Cole said.

  “What for?” I asked, buckling my seat belt. His car smelled like boy—like expensive cologne and fast food and sports equipment and air freshener.

  “Brought you a school sweatshirt,” he said, gesturing toward a sky-blue hoodie balled up in his back seat. It was actually a nice gesture.

  “Is it clean?” I asked, only half-teasing.

  “It’s definitely been washed in the past six months,” he said, grinning.

  I gave the sweatshirt a tentative sniff, but thankfully he was just messing with me, and its cleanliness was acceptable.

  Everyone was already at the game when we got there. The stands were filled, like the game was actually a big deal. And it wasn’t just students, either. There were so many adults, and almost all of them were wearing school sweatshirts or varsity jackets. Some had even brought little kids.

  “Wow,” I said, looking around.

  Cole’s hoodie was hilariously massive on me, but he insisted it looked cute.

  “Hey, Ariana Grande!” Friya called, waving us over. “Nice sweatshirt.”

  We huddled onto the bleachers, sitting on a blanket Ethan had brought. He produced a flask, too, from the pocket of his varsity jacket, passing it down the row. I didn’t want them to make fun of me for skipping it, so I tilted the flask to my lips, tasting something strong and harsh that might have been whisky.

  “God,” I said, coughing, pretending I’d taken a larger swig.

  Cole, meanwhile, passed around a vape, and I was slow on the uptake that it was weed this time, and not just dessert-flavored tobacco.

  “Um, I’m fine,” I said when he offered it to me.

  He’d pushed up the sleeves on his own sweatshirt, and I could see a bruise on his arm.

  “What happened?” I asked, frowning at it.

  “Soccer practice,” he said, shrugging. But he tugged down his sleeves anyway, acting self-conscious.

  The game was more exciting than the girls had made it out to be. There was a new player this year, a freshman, six-two and built like a brick wall, who was killing it on the defensive line.

  People were losing their shit for him. I thought they were screaming MOOSE, which couldn’t have been right. And then I saw the back of his jersey and realized they were shouting RUSSE.

  Cole and Ethan were getting hammered. They had some elaborate drinking game set up that they couldn’t begin to explain. After the flask was emptied, Ethan mostly slouched down in his seat, watching the game with laser focus and making the occasional comment like, “Sports is such a metaphor, you know?” while Cole got more and more worked up.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” he yelled, surging to his feet.

  “I didn’t realize you were so into football,” I said after the ball went out of play.

  “I’m not. But a couple of these guys played with my brother. He only graduated two years ago.”

  Cole twisted around, flicking his chin a couple rows back in the stands. Archer was here, wearing an old letter jacket that he was practically bursting out of. It had barely been a month since I’d last seen him, and it looked like he’d been doing nothing but guzzling down protein shakes and hitting the gym. Even next to his muscled friends he was intimidating.

  “I think he ate another Hemsworth,” I said.

  “Better them than me,” Cole said cynically, and before I could really process it, he’d draped his arm around my shoulders.

  I stiffened in surprise. God, he was warm. Like a furnace. The boy smell was back, and was practically intoxicating. Before I could think about what I was doing, I leaned toward him.

  He felt so nice and soft. And then our team completed a pass, and Cole shouted at an earsplitting volume, surging to his feet.

  “Get it! Get it!” he yelled.

  We were about to score a touchdown. Everyone around me screamed, jumping up. People were losing it. Whitney was even filming it on her phone.

  The other team intercepted at the last possible moment, and our stands let out a collective groan. Except for Archer, who was screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, even after everyone else quieted down.

  Next to me, Cole winced. He reached for the vape again, and I stood up, needing a break.

  “Um, I’m going to get a Coke,” I said. “Anyone want anything?”

  “I’ll have a Diet Coke,” Whitney said sweetly.

  “Same,” Friya said.

  “You know what I could take down right now?” Ethan said, his pupils enormous. “Truffle mac ’n’ cheese.”

  I waited to see if he was joking, but he stared back at me, completely serious.

  “Um, I don’t think they have any,” I told him, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

  As I made my way down to the concession stand, I really hoped, for the sake of my wallet, that they weren’t serving truffle mac ’n’ cheese. I’d had a shock the first time I went through our school’s lunch line and saw the menu included sushi.

  “Alice?” It was a woman’s voice, soft and tentative. “Alice Bloom?”

  I found myself face-to-face with a plump blond lady around my mom’s age, whose energetic five-year-old son was covered in blue cotton candy.

  “No,” I said, my throat dry. I felt a little sick at the accusa
tion. “Um, that’s my mom.”

  “You look just like her,” the woman said, staring at me. “Is she here? I’d love to say hello. It’s been, god, eighteen years?”

  The woman swiveled her head, searching for my mom in the crowd.

  I swallowed, trying to keep from falling apart. It was almost unbearable to talk about her like this, here, with some complete stranger.

  “She’s, um, she’s not here,” I said.

  “What a shame,” the lady said. “Does she have Facebook? I didn’t realize she lived in town.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I said.

  I needed to get away from this eager, friendly woman whose questions felt like knives going in and twisting.

  “Well, what’s her email then?” the woman pushed. “I just moved back—had to get this little one into a good school district, you can’t imagine how hard that is. Anyhow, I’d love to reconnect.”

  “She passed away,” I blurted.

  “Oh my god,” the woman said, her mouth hanging open, frozen in this little round tunnel.

  She blinked at me, as though it was my fault that she wasn’t having a joyous reunion with her old classmate. I stared back, wanting to be anywhere else. The woman’s eyes darted into the crowd, searching for a way out. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I—well, we should be going. Come on, Atticus. Let’s find Daddy.”

  The woman bustled away with her sticky kindergartner, and I stood there, my chest heaving, trying not to cry. I wasn’t going to cry at a football game. That was even worse than crying at school. But it was too much all of a sudden. Too many parts of my mom, and her life, and the ways they were never supposed to intersect with mine. These adults who were at the homecoming game—they were my mom’s classmates. People who had known her when she was my age, who had sat in her third period and stood in front of her in the lunch line and signed her yearbook.

  I hadn’t realized before, but I certainly realized now. Here, among her old classmates, I was just asking for more confrontations like the one I’d just had. I looked like her. Everyone always said so, calling me “mini-Alice” or “her twin,” even perfect strangers.

  And probably someone else, who wasn’t lonely and new in town, with a sticky kindergartner plastered to her leg, might have reacted better, but I didn’t want to find out, because places like homecoming games were supposed to be safe. They weren’t supposed to be filled with reminders of my dead mom.

  I darted into the concession line. It took me a moment to recognize the familiar peacoat and high ponytail in front of me. Lily.

  I froze. She was so close, her back only inches away, her hair swinging with each shuffle forward so it was practically in my face. I could smell her shampoo, herbal and tangy. She had a mini Kanken backpack on, sky blue, with a Hermione Granger keychain hanging off it, and enamel pins that represented everything from political slogans (“nasty woman” “black lives matter”) to a cute cartoon dumpling colored like a rainbow. It looked almost like a pride flag, but was probably just some weird joke from Adventure Time. She also had a NASA pin, and an anthropomorphized avocado, and a tiny gray Totoro.

  She twisted around, noticing me.

  “Hey,” she said. “How’s the limp?”

  “Cured,” I said. “Experimental procedure. My DNA is now half hedgehog.”

  She laughed, her whole face lighting up. If Cole was stained glass, she was a lighthouse.

  “You know, hedgehogs are illegal in California,” she said. “They might kick you out.”

  “One can only hope,” I said drily.

  It never ceased to surprise me how I could do this. How I could be falling apart one moment and full of witty remarks the next. How my brain and mouth could function just fine through utter despair.

  “So, you enjoying the game?” I asked.

  “Ryland is,” Lily said with a shrug. “He’s very into—what’s it called?—when you’re pleased by someone else’s misfortune? Schadenfreude.”

  “Damage-joy,” I said, and Lily stared at me. “That’s the literal translation.”

  “Weird,” she said. And then she glanced down at her phone, which was lit up with a text conversation.

  I watched her type, her ponytail sliding over one shoulder, her lashes fanning against her cheeks.

  “I love Harry Potter,” I blurted, like an idiot. Lily looked up, confused. “Your keychain,” I explained. I wanted so badly to impress her.

  “It was like my entire childhood,” Lily confessed. “I had the biggest crush on Emma Watson.”

  For a second, I thought she actually meant a real crush, because I’d definitely had a thing for Hermione. But her mouth was twisted into this ironic smirk, and I got that she was making fun of herself.

  “Didn’t everyone?” I retorted. “I mean, her eyebrows are iconic.”

  I wondered if I should have admitted that, but Lily just smiled.

  “‘It’s Leviosa, not Leviosa,’” she quoted, doing a surprisingly good impression.

  My mom had gotten me the first book on tape when I was seven. We’d done a chapter each night, like a bedtime story, except better, because she’d crawled into bed with me, and we’d closed our eyes and listened together, under my glow-in-the-dark stars.

  “You okay?” Lily asked, shaking me back to the present. “You seem kind of sad.”

  I was surprised she’d noticed. My friends never did.

  “I was thinking about my mom,” I confessed, and somehow, with her, it wasn’t painful as I explained about the bedtime audiobook.

  “What happened to her?” Lily asked, point-blank.

  “She died last spring,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry,” Lily said. But she said it like it was okay, and not weird or uncomfortable to be talking about. “It gets easier to live with, if you’re wondering.”

  I stared at her, wondering how on earth she knew that.

  “My dad died when I was four,” she confessed.

  I had about a million questions, but before I could ask any of them, Whitney and Friya showed up.

  “What’s taking so long?” Whitney complained.

  “For real, you totally disappeared,” said Friya. And then they spotted Lily.

  “Oh,” Friya said. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Lily said, her smile strained.

  We lapsed into awkward silence. Somehow, the four of us didn’t work at all. It wasn’t like Lily and I could pick back up our conversation, and Whitney was complaining about how completely wrong her horoscope had been for today, and trying to show it to Friya.

  I’d never been so relieved to reach a concessions window.

  Chapter 15

  I WAS TREMENDOUSLY NERVOUS ABOUT Cole’s party. I didn’t know how these things worked, or if it was okay to show up alone, but Whitney and Friya hadn’t texted me about going together, and I didn’t want to be needy, so I didn’t ask.

  Instead, I panicked over the one thing I could control: my outfit. And then I spent far too long trying and failing to pile my hair into a messy topknot before looking it up on YouTube and realizing I needed more than just bobby pins and hope. They never tell you that part, how the simplest-looking makeup and hair is actually insanely complicated and full of hidden parts. The moment I realized the girls with perfect ballerina buns were going around with socks balled up on their heads broke me.

  “Sasha?” my grandfather said, poking his head out of his home office when I came downstairs. I could hear the television blaring in the background. The president was vowing to build a border wall between the US and Mexico. “That’s quite an outfit.”

  “You don’t like it?” I asked, frowning. It was just an army jacket over a floral sundress and some boots.

  “You look like your mother.” He smiled wistfully, and my stomach twisted. “Where are you headed in that getup?”

  “Cole’s having some friends over,” I said. “Grandma already knows about it.”

  My grandfather nodded, and then took out his money clip, peeling o
ff a twenty.

  “Grandpa, no,” I protested. They already gave me an allowance.

  “You should always have cab fare to get home,” he insisted, and then tapped the side of his nose. “I expect I’ll forget I gave this to you in the morning.”

  Before I could even say thank you, he disappeared back into his office.

  Cole lived in the same subdivision, a couple of streets up. His house was enormous: white and modern, with this weirdly sculptural aesthetic where you couldn’t tell if something was a piece of art or an expensive chair. The street was piled with cars, and as I stood there, double-checking my makeup in my phone camera, a group of girls staggered out of an Uber, giggling.

  “It’s like we’re back in high school,” one of them shrieked in delight.

  I waited for them to go in first. I knew this was actually Archer’s party, a get-together consisting of whoever was in town for the homecoming game. That Cole had only gotten to invite people because he’d threatened to tell their parents.

  But I had a secret: I’d never been to a house party before. And now I was at one full of college students wearing USC hoodies and reeking of pot.

  The party sprawled through the huge, echoing house, each room revealing another cluster of people I’d never seen before and was pretty sure didn’t go to our school.

  In the kitchen, I finally found a familiar face: Ethan. He was with a group of drunk senior boys from the soccer team, who were sitting on the floor in a pile of broken, uncooked spaghetti.

  “It’s wild,” Ethan kept saying, shaking his head.

  “It’s spaghetti,” I told him.

  “Watch this.” He held up a stick between his hands, and then bent it until it snapped. “Three pieces,” he informed me, picking them up. “Spaghetti never breaks into two pieces. Always three or four. Can you believe it?”

  One of the guys, who was actually wearing a hemp poncho, broke another strand of spaghetti to demonstrate. Four pieces this time. The boy next to him, who was filming it with his phone, howled.

  “Spaghettiiiiii,” he hooted.

  “Cool, well, I’ll leave you to your work,” I said, backing away slowly.