Forever for a Year(15)

“It DOES make sense,” I said, and I was sooo happy I called Kendra, and was sooo excited to have a new friend, especially one who was really smart and gave good advice.

“Have you done the history homework yet?” Kendra asked, which was great, because it let us talk about school and not just boys, but then we talked about boys again, and Kendra said she had only kissed three boys, which was two more than I’d kissed. And the one I kissed was in sixth grade when kids still had birthday parties, and I was still invited, and we played Spin the Bottle, even though it was a shoe not a bottle, and I kissed Nicholas Durant, who was not very cute. Everyone calls him Licker now, and I don’t even know why. It was fine that it was my first kiss, I just wish it wasn’t my only kiss.

I wondered if Kendra had done more than kiss boys. Shannon Shunton, supposedly, had had sex with a senior over the summer, but I only heard it once from Peggy, who heard it from one of Katherine’s friends, who hates Elizabeth Shunton, so it might not be true. But it was definitely true that Shannon and the other popular girls had done more than kissing, like letting boys go up their shirts and down their pants. But I didn’t ask Kendra about this because I worried I would want to talk about it forever, and I would never get my homework done, and then I would fail out of school and not be able to see Trevor Santos ever again.

So we said good-bye and then I ran upstairs to talk to my mom, but she wasn’t on the couch anymore. She was watching TV in bed, which made me think she was missing my dad, and I felt bad because if it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have to be missing him.

Yep. Okay. Gosh. Okay.

Maybe tomorrow morning I would tell her it was okay to let Dad move back in.

*

I went back to the living room to finish my homework, except I couldn’t stop thinking about the new boy. Snap out of this, Carolina! You must do your homework! You are a good student! You are not going to become one of those dumb girls who only feels good about herself because boys like her!

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. I so wished I could. But I couldn’t.

Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would stop with the boy obsessing. I really would. It was a new vow. I never broke two vows in a row.

So I signed back on to Facebook and went through and looked at all of Trevor’s pictures, even though he had, like, only twenty, and most of them were grainy, and some not even of him or people, just dead birds in front of windows, but there was this one picture where he was sitting with a little girl—his sister, Lily, the caption said. And he had this look in his eyes, facing the camera, that he just could see through you and everyone and was probably the most interesting person ever born. Plus, he looked sooo attractive. Like he could be a model for some mysterious new designer. But even better than that, because he was probably smart and deep.

I wanted to message him that I was in love with him and for him to message me back and tell me he loved me too. But then I realized I would never do this, and if I did, he would never message me back: He would laugh at me and tell Henry McCarthy and the rest of the stupid boys that always hated me and made fun of me. And then I realized Trevor Santos was probably a horrible person just like them, and that I should just do my homework.

I also realized no way—NO WAY—would I let my mom let my dad move back in. Never. Never. Never.





10

Trevor doesn’t want to hear it

None of the boy cross-country runners showered after practice. Strange. But whatever. So I didn’t either.

First thing my mom says to me when I get in her SUV? “You smell, Trevor.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Do they not have showers at the school?”

“My first day at school was great, Mom. Thanks for asking,” I said.

“I’m sorry. How was your first day?”

“Can we just go home, please.”

“I’m sorry. Please tell me about your day,” she said as she started driving back toward our house. Except I refused. She kept asking me to talk, saying sorry over and over, but I just ignored her. Sometimes that was the only weapon I had against her.

*

My mom went to Riverbend High School. She was a legend twenty-five years ago. A cheerleader when it was still cool to be a cheerleader. Lead in the musical. (They did My Fair Lady just because of her.) She got straight As. She didn’t win homecoming queen, but trust me, it wasn’t because she wasn’t pretty, but probably because she was a bit of a snob. She was valedictorian, and she gave a speech about how life is too precious not to believe in your dreams and follow them no matter what. Everyone in our family, and everyone in this town, expected her to become a famous novelist or the first female president, except she wanted to be an actress. She didn’t go to Princeton University, even though her parents wanted her to. Instead she went to New York University and eventually dropped out to move to Los Angeles because she wanted to be a movie star and that’s where people move to become movie stars.

Nobody has ever told me this, certainly not her, but I think she just assumed she would be this super-famous actress-celebrity right up until she was about twenty-nine. Then, boom, I think she panicked she would never make it, so she found my dad, who was this boring but successful business guy, and she quit acting, got married and pregnant with me before she turned thirty.

My mom told me the reason she stopped acting was that her first love, before high school, was writing, and she wanted to get back to that. I’ve seen her scribbling in a notebook a bit but she’s never finished anything except a couple short stories that she won’t let me read. So I think my mom tried to kill herself because she knows she failed. She gave this big speech at the end of high school about following your dream, yet she gave up following hers. And knowing that made her want to be dead.