39
jo
Laurie’s room was a mess. It always had some type of chaos sprinkled around—a T-shirt hanging over the side of the headboard, or a day-old decaf coffee sitting in a chipped mug on his desk. But today, it was an absolute mess. An old-food odor and a musty smell that I’d rather not think about describing dominated the space.
“What the hell happened in here?” I asked him, kicking my way through a pile of clothes.
He was pacing around the bedroom like a madman. His long hair was hanging down, curling at the ends the way I liked. He looked like someone out of a novel. The stereotypical New York writer, born in Boston, or somewhere big. Not quite as big as the juicy, red Big Apple, but bigger than this little bubble of a town. Laurie, with his long golden hair, dressed in an oversize sweatshirt with patches on the elbows. He looked so smart, like he would write essays about climate or gun control, but still take your virginity after driving for hours to bring you to a field of flowers you Tumblred a picture of once.
His forehead was creased with a deep crinkle that made him look a little like Old Mr. Laurence, and like his dad from the array of pictures hanging in this big house.
“Hey,” he said, not explaining the mess. “How’s it going?” He lifted up a stack of magazines and put them back down on the desk.
“Shitty, actually.”
He continued rummaging through his messy bedroom and moved toward the window, through which the sun poured, paling the walls and his skin. When I took off my cardigan and draped it over the back of his chair, he looked up at me.
“So, Meg is pissed off because I never told her that Shia came looking for her back when she was in New Orleans with John Brooke, months ago, the day my dad was hurt.”
Laurie was listening, I could tell, but he was still moving around the room. It was making me restless, so I kept talking.
“It’s just that when those assholes were talking about her yesterday, she’s blaming me because she won’t say shit to Shia or Bell.” I sat down on the bed.
Laurie sat down next to me. “And this is your fault, how?” He always took my side in everything. I liked that. He would debate me after if he didn’t agree, but his initial reaction was always to take my side.
“Exactly. She’s always the victim. I get that she’s pissed about what happened at the festival. I’m pissed, too!” I was mad—I didn’t want my sister to be harassed by a bunch of dicks who peaked in high school, but she was acting like it was my fault when I wasn’t the character assassin here.
I picked at the hole in the knee of my jeans. “It’s like she thinks Shia coming to the house would have changed things.”
“It would have, I think.” Laurie paused when I gave him a look. He lifted his hands up, covered by the long sleeves of his sweatshirt. “Hear me out. He came to the house, then went to the Quarter, right?”
I nodded.
“If Meg likes Shia the way Shia likes her, then it was probably pretty important for her to hear what he had to say.”
“But they did talk, eventually.” I shook my head at Laurie. “Besides, he’s engaged.”
“You always see everything in black and white, Jo. Sometimes there’s some gray in there.”
I sighed. “Engaged isn’t really a gray area. Either you’re going to marry someone soon, or not.”
“Either you’re dating someone or you’re not.” Laurie looked directly into my eyes.
My chest tightened and I pulled at the strings of ripped denim. “Yes . . . and no. Sometimes it’s more complicated than that.”
“Like with us.”
I looked away from his eyes, down to where his hands stretched his sweatshirt, down his fitted sweatpants and clean white socks, to the floor of the dirty bedroom.
“This isn’t about us,” I said.
“When will it be? You know my mom wants me to come back home.”
I felt his words wrap around my throat and squeeze a little. Home wasn’t across town or across the United States. Home was across the ocean. “No. I didn’t know that.”
“She does.” His eyes were trying to keep hold of mine, but I avoided them. “Why can’t we just talk about it? I thought we would by now. You’ll be applying to colleges soon. What then?”
Why was he choosing this exact moment to bring this up? Wasn’t there supposed to be some tiptoeing around the subject, a couple more makeouts? Meg never explained this to me. By the time she and I were starting to grow closer, my dad came back and she stopped talking to me about things. We weren’t close anymore; it was almost like we never were.
“Jo,” Laurie urged me. I looked up at him and he moved a little closer to me. The big room felt so small, and Laurie’s fingers were pulling at his sleeves. “If you don’t want to, fine. Just tell me. I’m not going to force you. I just want to know what you’re thinking. I never know what you’re thinking.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Not about me. About everything else, yes. But never about me.”
“You talk. I don’t know what you want to say, or want me to say. You talk.” It was true, I didn’t know where to begin or end this conversation.
“Fine.” Laurie rolled his eyes. He tucked his hair behind his ears and licked his lips. “Do you want to date me?”
“Is that how this goes?”
“Stop being sarcastic. I’m serious.” His voice sounded small.
I took a second to think before I spoke. Something I knew I needed to do more often. “Sorry. I don’t know how to be serious during this. I’ve never done this before, remember?”
He jerked his shoulders back. “Ouch.”
I quickly raised my hands. “No, not what I meant. I wasn’t insinuating that you have. I just meant that I literally haven’t.” I paused for a second. “Like, ever.”
“If it’s that uncomfortable for you—”
“No, it’s not.” I moved toward him when he backed farther onto the bed. “Just talk. Say stuff and then I’ll say stuff.” I was losing my breath. “Just go first.” I bit into my lip a little too hard, and I caught Laurie’s black eyes on my mouth just before he looked away.
“Okay.” He dragged a long sigh through his lips. “My mom’s been asking if I want to come back home. My dad got orders to stay in Korea longer, and she misses me now that my sister has friends.”
I kept my mouth quiet while my head spun.
“The only reason I would stay here is if you’re going to be around . . . I’m not saying that we have to agree to get married or move in or anything anytime soon, just that you’ll be around . . .”
“I would be around.” My voice was practically a whisper.
“What about New York?”
“Well, yeah. I would be in New York . . .”
Laurie’s whole upper body sighed. “Yeah, so I would be here in Louisiana, and you would be in New York City?”
I nodded. “We would talk every day and come visit each other.” People did it all the time. Right?
“So a long-distance relationship, then?”
He didn’t sound particularly excited about this idea. I honestly wasn’t expecting him to want a commitment type of thing with me. I thought we would stay friends, close . . . best friends, and maybe date someday when I was out of school, and his dad was home, and my dad was better, and I had time to worry about boys and matching bras and panties.
“I guess so. People do it all the time.” I shrugged. “We would visit on the weekends.”
“It’s a three-hour flight, not to mention the cost of flights, and the drive is twenty hours nonstop.” He had done his research.
“So, what do we do?” I asked.
Laurie shook his head, and I thought about the first time I met him, and the time when I slid down the driveway and flipped him off. The time outside the community center with Meg and Reeder. Laurie seemed so mysterious then, the classic heartbreaker.
He was so much different in my eyes now. He was my best friend. I liked him more than that—I knew I did—but it also scared me. I didn’t want to be like Meg when River fucked her over. I wanted to go into my first relationship with my eyes open.
“Do you one hundred percent want to go New York? Vice has offices all over. One in Venice Beach, basically LA, one in Toronto . . . all over.”
“I want to go to New York, I think.” I’d never thought about Los Angeles. Toronto, yeah, but realistically it was hard to go outside the country for school. “You could come to New York.”
“Could I?”
“Yeah? Right? I mean, why not? What are you doing here that you couldn’t do there?”
He leaned back against his palms on the bed. “I don’t know, but I don’t want to live in New York. I hated staying there for longer than a few days. You haven’t been, it’s not as great as you think.”
“Yet. I will be going soon,” I told him, even though my parents still hadn’t given me a clear answer if we could take a tour of a few campuses there. My grades were good, but I wasn’t guaranteed to get into any of the colleges I wanted. Even after getting in, I still had to worry about paying for it, and my dad’s G.I. Bill money could only go to one of us. It had never been discussed which one of us, though.
“I think the long-distance thing would be fine,” I told Laurie. “If I go to New York and hate it, we can figure it out then.”
“So, what if I go back to Italy? I’ve got a friend in Milan I could crash with for a while. I would be closer to my mom, but still only a flight from you.”
He really did his research. Almost too much . . .
“So you’ve been planning this?”
“Not planning, really.” He scratched at something on his forehead. “Just thinking about it. Haven’t you thought about it?”
“Yeah, I mean, a little. I didn’t really think about it too much, but I kind of just thought you would stay here and I would go to New York and come home for holidays and stuff?”
“I don’t know . . . What about boys in college? And the distance would probably eat at us. It usually does.” Laurie sounded like he was digging for reasons for this to fail.
What I wanted to say was that statistically the person you’re dating when young isn’t who you end up with when you’re older. Out of all the married couples I knew, grown-ups included, most of them were on their second marriage. Laurie was a part of me, and I knew it would rip out chunks of me when this stopped working—it wasn’t an easy pill to swallow, but it was reality.
“I’m not concerned about boys in college,” I said.
He smiled at me and reached for my hands. His skin was always so warm. He lifted my palm in front of his face and spread my fingers out, pressing them gently to his mouth, and I shivered all over. It was something, the way he made me feel. The way he made the blood roar behind my ears and popcorn pop in my stomach.
I leaned into him and he pulled me onto his lap. Each time we were alone, we crossed another line, made another move toward the dream of what we could be.
“We are so good as neighbors, nearby each other,” he said inches from my face. My thighs were on either side of his lean waist; his thick sweatshirt was all droopy between us.
God, he made my head fuzzy. It pissed me off.
“Are you sure you want this? You won’t be able to have Shelly Hunchberg come over and talk about fund-raisers when I’m in another state.”
“Oh, shut up.” He smiled. His warm hands were on my back. I could feel the heat of them through my thin tank top. “You will be the one falling in love with coffee boys and professors.”
“No. I don’t have time for them.”
“You barely have time for me,” he said, almost kissing me.
I didn’t want to lie. “I know.”
“You’re important to me, Jo.”
I looked at Laurie’s face and counted the little batch of freckles just below his eye. His thick eyebrows were dark blond, relaxed, and his lips, they were carnation pink.
“ ‘Kiss me, and you will see how important I am,’ ” I said as some cool girl who quotes poetry possessed my body.
“I read those journals. The Sylvia Plath—”
I kissed him to shut him up and decided maybe Laurie was right: there was so much gray.