I’d never had sex before, not with Jeremiah, not with anybody. When I was younger, I used to picture my first time with Conrad. It wasn’t that I was still waiting for him. It wasn’t that at all. I was just waiting for the perfect moment. I wanted it to feel special, to feel exactly right.
I’d pictured us finally doing it at the beach house, with the lights off and candles everywhere so I wouldn’t feel shy. I’d pictured how gentle Jeremiah would be, how sweet. Lately I had been feeling more and more ready. I had thought this summer, the two of us back at Cousins—I thought that would be it.
It was humiliating thinking about it now, how naive I’d been. I’d thought he would wait as long as it took for me to be ready. I really believed that.
But how could we be together now? When I thought of him with her, Lacie, who was older and sexier and more worldly than I’d ever be, at least in my mind—it hurt so bad it was hard to breathe. The fact that she knew him in a way I didn’t yet, had experienced something with him that I hadn’t, that felt like the biggest betrayal of all.
A month ago, around the anniversary of his mom’s death, we were lying in Jeremiah’s twin bed. He rolled over and looked at me, and his eyes were so like Susannah’s, I reached out my hand and covered them.
“Sometimes it hurts to look at you,” I said. I loved that I could say that and he knew exactly what I meant.
“Close your eyes,” he told me.
I did, and he came up close so we were face-to-face and I could feel his Crest breath warm on my cheek. We wrapped our legs around each other. I was overcome with this sudden need to keep him close to me always. “Do you think it will always be like this?” I asked him.
“How else would it be?” he asked.
We fell asleep that way. Like kids. Totally innocent.
We could never go back to that. How could we? It was all tainted now. Everything from March to now, it was tainted.
chapter seven
When I woke up the next morning, my eyes were so puffy, they were practically swollen shut. I splashed cold water on my face, but it didn’t really help. I brushed my teeth. And then I went back to bed. I’d wake up and hear people moving out of the dorms, and then I’d just fall back to sleep. I should have been packing, but all I wanted to do was sleep. I slept all day. I woke up again when it was dark out, and I didn’t turn on the lights. I just lay in bed until I fell asleep again.
It was late afternoon the next day when I finally got up. When I say “got up,” I mean “sat up.” I finally sat up in my bed. I was thirsty. I felt wrung dry from all the crying. This propelled me to actually get out of bed and walk the five feet over to the mini fridge and take one of the bottled waters Jillian had left behind.
Looking across the room at her empty bed and empty walls made me feel even more depressed. Last night I wanted to be alone. Today I thought I would go out of my mind if I didn’t talk to another person.
I went down the hall to Anika’s room. The first thing she said when she saw me was, “What’s wrong?”
I sat on her bed and hugged her pillow to my chest. I had come to her wanting to talk, wanting to get it out, but now it was hard to say the words. I felt ashamed. Of him and for him. All my friends loved Jeremiah. They thought he was practically perfect. I knew that as soon as I told Anika, all of that would be gone. This would be real. For some reason, I still wanted to protect him.
“Iz, what happened?”
I’d really thought I was done crying, but a few tears leaked out anyway. I went ahead and said it. “Jeremiah cheated on me.”
Anika sank onto the bed. “Shut the front door,” she breathed. “When? With who?”
“With Lacey Barone, that girl in his sister sorority. During spring break. When we were broken up.”
She nodded, taking this in.
“I’m so mad at him,” I said. “For hooking up with another girl and then not telling me all this time. Not telling is the same as lying. I feel so stupid.”
Anika handed me the box of tissues on her desk. “Girl, you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel,” she said.
I blew my nose. “I feel . . . like maybe I don’t know him like I thought I did. I feel like I can’t trust him ever again.”
“Keeping a secret like that from the person you love is probably the worst part,” Anika said.
“You don’t think the actual cheating is the worst part?”
“No. I mean, yeah, that is horrible. But he should have just told you. It was turning it into a secret that gave it power.”
I was silent. I had a secret too. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Anika or Taylor. I had told myself that it was because it wasn’t important, and then I had put it out of my mind.
The past couple of years, I sometimes pulled out a memory I had of Conrad and looked at it, admired it, sort of in the same way I looked at my old shell collection. There was pleasure in just touching each shell, the ridges, the cool smoothness. Even after Jeremiah and I started dating, every once in a while, sitting in class or waiting for the bus or trying to fall asleep, I would pull out an old memory. The first time I ever beat him in a swimming race. The time he taught me how to dance. The way he used to wet down his hair in the mornings.
But there was one memory in particular, one I didn’t let myself touch. It wasn’t allowed.
chapter eight
It was the day after Christmas. My mother had gone on a weeklong trip to Turkey, a trip she’d had to postpone twice—once when Susannah’s cancer came out of remission and then again after Susannah died. My father was with his girlfriend Linda’s family in Washington, D.C. Steven was on a ski trip with some friends from school. Jeremiah and Mr. Fisher were visiting relatives in New York.
And me? I was at home, watching A Christmas Story on TV for the third time. I had on my Christmas pajamas, the ones Susannah had sent me a couple of years back—they were red flannel pjs with a jaunty mistletoe print, and they were way too long in the leg. Part of the fun of wearing them was rolling up the sleeves and ankles. I had just finished my dinner—a frozen pepperoni pizza and the rest of the sugar cookies a student had baked for my mother.
I was starting to feel like Kevin in Home Alone. Eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and I was dancing around the living room to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” feeling sorry for myself. My fall-semester grades had been eh. My whole family was gone. I was eating frozen pizza alone. And when Steven saw me that first day back home, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Wow, freshman fifteen, huh?” I had punched him in the arm, and he said he was kidding, but he wasn’t kidding. I had gained ten pounds in four months. I guessed eating hot wings and ramen and Dominos pizza at four in the morning with the boys will do that to a girl. But so what? The freshman fifteen was a rite of passage.
I went to the downstairs bathroom and slapped my cheeks like Kevin does in the movie. “So what!” I yelled.
I wasn’t going to let it get me down. Suddenly I had an idea. I ran upstairs and started throwing things into my backpack—the novel my mom had bought me for Christmas, leggings, thick socks. Why should I be at home alone when I could be at my favorite place in the world?