Who Do You Love(46)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“Please.” He kept walking. “Andy.” I grabbed his sleeve, like a little kid.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” Marni Marmelstein singsonged as she walked by. I pulled Andy around a corner where no one could see us.

His face was serious; his dark eyes were sad. “I should get on my bus.”

“I need to say something.” I was desperate to defend myself, to not have him look at me that way, with disappointment, with disdain, like he didn’t want to know me anymore. “You don’t know Bethie. She’s awful. She walks around with that dumb smile on her face, and she smells bad, and she’s mean. She’s rude if you try to talk to her. It’s not like people haven’t tried to be nice to her, to be her friend. I’ve tried,” I said, which was technically true, even if the real truth was that the last time I’d extended any kindness to Bethie had been at my bat mitzvah, when my parents had insisted I invite her.

“What happened to her? What happened to make her that way?”

“I don’t know.” The truth was, I’d barely spared Bethie Botts much thought in all the years I’d known her, except to wonder how she could care so little about the things that worried me so much—how to look pretty, how to smell good, how to wear the right clothes, be friends with the right girls, never say anything or do anything that would mark you as different.

“She’s poor,” said Andy. His voice was low and toneless. “She doesn’t dress like you and your snotty friends because she can’t afford it.”

“I’m not snotty!” The words burst out of me. After all the years of pretending that I was the same as my classmates, here I was, desperate to claim my status as different. “You don’t know what I’m like!”

“I know what I see,” said Andy. I hung my head. I knew what he saw when he looked at me. A girl with designer jeans and fancy sneakers, a big house with a pool out back. A girl with her own bedroom, her own car and phone and phone number, a girl whose parents had told her they’d send her to whatever college she wanted to attend and whose grandmother had promised her a graduation trip to wherever she wanted to go. How did that look to a guy who’d gotten free lunch and wore secondhand clothes?

“I was awful last night. I know I was. But I’ve never done anything like that before. I just wanted my heart . . .” My voice caught.

Andy’s voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it. “I thought you were different.”

I looked up at him, fist clenched, waiting until he met my eyes. “I am different. I’m the girl who missed six weeks of school for three years in a row because I was in the hospital, and when I came back I had to carry an oxygen tank around. I’m the girl who’s had so many operations that the anesthesiologist sends me a birthday card, and I still wake up with my mom standing over my bed and crying because she thinks . . . she thinks . . .” Words were spilling out of my mouth, unplanned and unstoppable. I’d never told anyone this, never talked about it, hardly even to myself. “I had a friend in the hospital once, her name was Alice, she was the only one who ever told me the truth about stuff, about what it’s like to be that sick, to get that close to dying, and then she died, she died, she died when I was eight, the time in the hospital when I met you, and she was the only one who understood and I never even got to say goodbye to her, so I know, I know what it’s like to feel . . .” I stopped, gasping, trying to catch my breath. Tears were sliding down my face, my nose was running, I was sure that I looked awful, but I didn’t care and I couldn’t stop. I wiped my eyes and lifted my head. “To feel like you’re the only one.”

He made a noise then, a sort of angry sigh, and closed his eyes. I saw his lashes resting on his cheeks, and his scalp peeking through his cropped curls. His hands were balled into fists, hanging at his sides, but he didn’t push me away when I hugged him.

“Andy,” I whispered. It was like his whole body was a fist, hard and unyielding. I pressed against him, pushing my chest against his chest, fitting my head beneath his chin, until I heard that same angry sigh, like he didn’t want to be near me but he couldn’t make me leave.

I kissed the spot underneath his ear, kissed the hollow at the base of his neck, kissed his cheek, and pressed my cheek against his. “Please,” I whispered, and he made a sound like a nail being pulled out of wood, and bent his head down and kissed me. His lips were cool at first, but I cradled the back of his head, holding him close, opening my mouth to let his tongue touch mine. He groaned again, this time more softly, squeezing me hard, pulling me up against him until my feet left the ground. “I wish,” he whispered in my ear, and I knew what he was wishing for—to turn back time, to have it be last night, to be in a room by ourselves, a room with a bed and a door that locked.