“He broke up with me,” I told her. It was more complicated than that, but when you boiled it all down, that was what had happened. It had happened because he’d wanted it to. It had always been his call—his decision whether or not we were together.
Susannah took my hand and held it. “Don’t hate Conrad,” she said.
“I don’t,” I lied. I hated him more than anything. I loved him more than anything. Because, he was everything. And I hated that, too.
“Connie’s having a hard time with all of this. It’s a lot.” She paused and pushed my hair out of my face, her hand lingering on my forehead as if I had a fever. As if I was the one who was sick, in need of comfort. “Don’t let him push you away. He needs you. He loves you, you know.”
I shook my head. “No, he doesn’t.” In my head, I added, The only person he loves is himself. And you.
She acted like she hadn’t heard me. “Do you love him?”
When I didn’t answer, she nodded as if I had. “Will you do something for me?”
Slowly, I nodded.
“Look after him for me. Will you do that?”
“You won’t need me to look after him, Susannah, you’ll be here to do it,” I said, and I tried not to sound desperate, but it didn’t matter.
Susannah smiled and said, “You’re my girl, Belly.”
After lunch, Susannah took a nap. She didn’t wake up until late afternoon, and when she did, she was irritable and disoriented. She snapped at my mother once, which terrified me. Susannah never snapped at anybody. Nona tried to put her to bed, and at first Susannah refused, but then she gave in. On the way to her bedroom, she gave me a little halfhearted wink.
Jeremiah came home around dinnertime. I was relieved to see him. He made everything lighter, easier. Just seeing his face took away some of the strain of being there.
He walked into the kitchen and said, “What’s that burning smell? Oh, Laurel’s cooking. Hey, Laure!”
My mother swatted at him with a kitchen towel. He dodged her and started looking under pan covers playfully.
“Hey, Jere,” I said to him. I was sitting on a stool, shelling beans.
He looked over at me and said, “Oh, hey. How are you?” Then he walked over to me and gave me a quick half hug. I tried to search his eyes for some clue as to how he was doing, but he didn’t let me. He kept moving around, joking with Nona and my mother.
In some ways, he was the same Jeremiah, but in other ways, I could see how this had changed him. Had aged him. Everything took more effort, his jokes, his smiles. Nothing was easy anymore.
chapter eleven
It felt like forever before Jeremiah spoke again. I was pretending to be asleep, and he was drumming his fingers along the steering wheel. Suddenly he said, “This was my prom’s theme song.”
Right away I opened my eyes and asked, “How many proms have you been to?”
“Total? Five.”
“What? Yeah, right. I don’t believe you,” I said, even though I did. Of course Jeremiah had been to five proms. He was exactly that guy, the one everyone wanted to go with. He would know how to make a girl feel like the prom queen even if she was nobody.
Jeremiah starting ticking off with his fingers. “Junior year, I went to two, mine and Flora Martinez’s at Sacred Heart. This year, I went to my prom and two others. Sophia Franklin at—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You’re in demand.” I leaned forward and fiddled with the air conditioner control.
“I had to buy a tux because it was cheaper than renting over and over again,” he said. Jeremiah looked straight ahead, and then he said the last thing I was expecting him to say. “You looked good at yours. I liked your dress.”
I stared at him. Did Conrad show him our pictures? Had he told him anything? “How do you know?”
“My mom got one of the pictures framed.”
I hadn’t expected him to bring up Susannah. I’d thought prom would be a safe subject. I said, “I heard you were prom king at your prom.”
“Yeah.”
“I bet that was fun.”
“Yeah, it was pretty fun.”
I should have brought Jeremiah instead. If it had been Jeremiah, things would have been different. He would have said all the right things. It would have been Jeremiah in the center of the dance floor, doing the Typewriter and the Lawn Mower and the Toaster and all the other stupid dances he used to practice when we watched MTV. He would have remembered that daisies were my favorite flower, and he would’ve made friends with Taylor’s boyfriend, Davis, and all the other girls would have been looking at him, wishing he was their date.
chapter twelve
From the start, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get Conrad to go. He wasn’t a prom kind of person. But the thing was, I didn’t care. I just really wanted him to go with me, to be my date. It had been seven months since the first time we’d kissed. Two months since the last time I’d seen him. One week since the last time he’d called.
Being a person’s prom date is definable; it’s a real thing. And I had this fantasy of prom in my head, what it would be like. How he would look at me, how when we slow danced, he’d rest his hand on the small of my back. How we’d eat cheese fries at the diner after, and watch the sunrise from the roof of his car. I had it all planned out, how it would go.
When I called him that night, he sounded busy. But I forged ahead anyway. I asked him, “What are you doing the first weekend of April?” My voice trembled when I said the word “April.” I was so nervous he’d say no. In fact, deep down I kind of expected him to.
Warily, he asked, “Why?”
“It’s my prom.”
He sighed. “Belly, I hate dances.”
“I know that. But it’s my prom, and I really want to go, and I want you to come with me.” Why did he have to make everything so hard?
“I’m in college now,” he reminded me. “I didn’t even want to go to my own prom.”
Lightly, I said, “Well, see, that’s all the more reason for you to come to mine.”
“Can’t you just go with your friends?”
I was silent.
“I’m sorry, I just really don’t feel like going. Finals are coming up, and it’ll be hard for me to drive all the way down for one night.”
So he couldn’t do this one thing for me, to make me happy. He didn’t feel like it. Fine. “That’s okay,” I told him. “There’s plenty of other guys I can go with. No problem.”
I could hear his mind working on the other end. “Never mind. I’ll take you,” he said at last.
“You know what? Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “Cory Wheeler already asked me. I can tell him I changed my mind.”
“Who the hell is Corky Wheeler?”
I smiled. I had him now. Or at least I thought I did. I said, “Cory Wheeler. He plays soccer with Steven. He’s a good dancer. He’s taller than you.”
But then Conrad said, “I guess you’ll be able to wear heels, then.”
“I guess I will.”
I hung up. Was it so much to ask him to be my prom date for one freaking night? And I had lied about Cory Wheeler; he hadn’t asked me. But I knew he would, if I let him think I wanted him to.
In bed, under my quilt, I cried a little. I had this perfect prom night in my mind, Conrad in a suit and me in the violet dress my mother bought me two summers ago, the one I had begged for. He had never seen me dressed up before, or wearing heels, for that matter. I really, really wanted him to.