Hiding Page 7

  Anyways, the next time I saw Suzie was at a party near her house, down in the woods at the end of the street. I guess her mom was out of town on business or something.

  This was one of the first times we’d ever had any beer around. Some kids had raided their parents’ stash or gotten their older brothers to buy it for them, I don’t know, but all the kids were sitting on this concrete wall that ran along the stream in the woods, and a few of them, the ones with the beer, had dunked it in the stream behind the wall to keep it cold and hide it, even though we were far enough from the street that we could have put it anywhere and not be seen with it unless somebody came walking up really close.

  When I arrived it was already dusk. Suzie was there standing around in a crowd of other girls and we said hi and were friendly enough.

  But there was a sort of look in her eye when she saw me.

  It was the first thing I noticed.

  I thought maybe she was a little angry with me. She looked a lot like Carol had the day he came back from New York, this kind of hard, squinty look in her eyes, and later on when we sat next to each other on the concrete wall I noticed the same look.

  It was pretty late by then, maybe eleven. We’d both had a few beers, which tasted nasty, and we were pretty much drunk, I guess, because we’d both never had beer before in our lives—at least I hadn’t.

  We started talking, and her voice was slurred, and I saw for the first time how pretty she was.

  More than pretty.

  She was totally beautiful, and even though she had beer breath, it still smelled very fresh and nice, and she held her face close to mine, I mean really close, and after a few minutes of talking, she put her arm around my back. I thought she did it to keep from falling backwards off the wall. And then she closed her eyes, and her head dropped onto my shoulder.

  “Do you mind?” she murmured, right in my ear. “I’m just sooo tired.” You should have heard her voice—it’s like she was cooing.

  I just sat there.

  I think I sat there for, like, fifteen minutes, frozen.

  It’s like I was in sort of a daze.

  What woke me out of it was this stubby kid in a flannel shirt, Tommy Werks, who was sitting next to me on the other side. I remember he looked over at me with genuine shock in his eyes and said—gasped, really—“Jesus! I can’t believe you!” and jumped down off the wall to get away from me.

  After that Suzie came out of it. She raised her face off my shoulder. “I’ve got a headache,” she said. Then she looked at me sort of sadly, told me good night, and walked out of the woods to the street.

  I stayed sitting there.

  A few minutes later Tommy Werks came back up. He was a lot shorter than me, but about a year older.

  “I can’t believe you!” he said again. He actually sputtered it, really sputtered, because except for his beady little eyes, his face was all nose and lips. “You had her! She was waiting for you! Why the hell didn’t you do anything! You make me sick!”

  He didn’t even wait for me to answer. He just turned on his heel and stomped off through the trees.

  I didn’t know what to think.

  I’m not an idiot.

  I sort of knew what had happened.

  That day Carol had done the squeezie thing.

  That had changed everything.

  It was like hanging a sign with ten-foot letters: WE CAN SEE THEM!

  Carol, in one fell swoop, had brought all this sex—I mean like a tsunami of sex—into our friendship.

  Even into mine and Suzie’s.

  And I don’t think that either of us knew what to do about it.

  When she had been sitting so close with her face so close, I knew that maybe she wanted me to kiss her.

  Or maybe not.

  And maybe I wanted to kiss her—or maybe not.

  Maybe we really were attracted to each other in that way now.

  But I wasn’t sure. And I couldn’t risk ruining what we had.

  So I couldn’t just kiss her and stick my tongue in her mouth and feel her up sitting there on that wall. And I sure didn’t want to do it with everybody else—all the other kids and Tommy Werks especially—standing around and sort of getting their jollies seeing us make out. That’s just not something I’m particularly into, although I must admit that old Suzie didn’t seem like she would mind at all.

  I blew my chances with her, as stubby Tommy Werks would say.

  That’s true.

  I still sort of blame Carol. If he hadn’t done what he’d done, things wouldn’t have been so accelerated. But it happened just like I’m saying.

  Anyways, I’m still friends with Suzie.

  But that moment never came again. Sometimes I wished it would.

  She’s still around. Carol is too. It isn’t like I stopped being friends with him. And of course I still see him on TV sometimes.

  You know, in one way, old Tommy Werks was right.

  I really did blow it.

  Because one thing you have to know is that if you are friends with a girl who becomes as incredibly beautiful as Suzie Perkins, you need to keep in mind that there are other boys around.

  Lots of them.

  Tons of them.

  It wasn’t a week before I saw her on the street walking under the trees with another guy.

  And then one night at a party she was tipsy again, and letting this super handsome jock scratch her all over in really inappropriate places—inappropriate for public perusal, I mean. It sort of made me sick, especially how the jerk grinned up at me while he was doing it, as if all he really wanted to do was just show off what he could get away with.

  Anyways, by the time I finally met Laura, I had the experience with Suzie under my belt.

  I won’t say it was a lot of experience, but I learned that if you are really great friends with a girl, you have to accept that sex can change everything and might ruin everything. That’s another thing my mom told me, and I know it sounds corny and obvious, but when it’s actually happening to you, it’s not corny at all. I must admit that I found that really hard to deal with. I knew Suzie so well. Had I fallen in love with her, it would have been great.

  Or maybe not.

  I’ll be honest: I couldn’t hide around Suzie. I doubt she’d have ever let me hide. If we’d fallen in love, I bet we’d have been all over the place, probably making out on every wall in the neighborhood.

  Laura had let me hide. She had come looking for me only as far as I wanted her to. But Suzie knew everything about me. I’d told her everything until there were no more secrets, but there was no more mystery, either.

  I guess I wasn’t in love with her.

  I don’t want to sound stupid, but maybe you can’t know everything about the person you fall in love with, at least at first.

  Maybe in a way you need to hide.

  Maybe it’s hiding that makes you feel less awkward.

  I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think it’s true.

  It’s sad, but I think it’s true.

  Chapter

  Seven

  When I woke up I had no idea what time it was.

  Early.

  I saw sort of bluish morning light coming in where I lay, behind the brown paper curtain.

  I didn’t even get up. I just listened.

  I really had no idea where I was, either.

  At least not at first.

  I just lay there looking up at the underside of the boards.

  The whole thing reminded me of a story I once read in grade school, one of those Edgar Allan Poe stories I’d found in the library, about a guy who’s afraid he’ll get buried alive because he falls into these weird comas sometimes, so he goes about building this really elaborate tomb that has all these bell pulls and spring-loaded doors and stuff like that, so in case he does ever get accidentally buried, he can just pop right out like a jack-in-the-box. But then he goes on this camping trip with his friends, and of course it rains really hard so they can’t sleep in
the open, and the only place the guy can sleep is in this sort of coffin-size box in a cabin, and when he wakes up he’s forgotten how he got there and he screams his head off, thinking he was buried alive.

  Well, I didn’t have any bell pulls, so I stayed there, looking up at the wood. I guess I was still pretty drowsy, because I just couldn’t get it together.

  But then I smelled dog and that did it. I tightened my hands on the plush under me.

  It all came back.

  At first I was sort of confused, because all that stuff about Suzie was still on my mind. I guess maybe I’d dreamed about it or just thought about it while I was still half-asleep. But when I realized I was in Laura’s house—that I had actually sneaked in and fallen asleep on her dog’s bed in the basement—I must admit I felt pretty freaked out.

  What bothered me most, though, wasn’t that I had come in, even though I know it’s about the weirdest thing I could possibly have done.

  What got me was something hidden in my mind; I was really busy sort of mentally factoring some problem I hadn’t figured out, a problem that had to do with both Suzie and Laura.

  I didn’t know why I’d thought so much about Suzie, because to tell the truth, she and Laura had nothing much in common with each other at all. They hadn’t even ever met each other, because they had never gone to the same school or anything, and girls from The Oaks rarely came down into Ivy Hill, and vice versa.

  I don’t even think I’d ever mentioned Suzie to Laura, because I’m not really into talking about girls to girls—I mean telling them about other girls I had liked—because I don’t know what the benefit would be, unless I just wanted to make them jealous, and I’m not a big proponent of doing that, and I don’t think I’d do it even if a girl asked and was curious about other girls I’d been into. I didn’t even know Laura when I had hung out with Suzie, because I hadn’t even met her yet.

  Still, there seemed to be some sort of connection between them in my mind, some sort of very close connection, which I know sounds crazy, and I really thought it was, so I just sort of stopped my mind from thinking, really just told it to shut up for a little while, and I leaned up on the dog bed and listened.

  There wasn’t any sound upstairs.

  No footsteps or noises.

  I didn’t even hear Dobey up there, which sort of surprised me, because dogs are usually pretty good at sniffing out intruders.

  All I could think about was how I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  I got up very quietly and went over to where I’d stood the night before, right in front of the sink. I looked around. Certainly nothing had changed; there was no special evidence that anyone other than Jack had come downstairs during the night or anything.

  I raised my leg over the sink and very carefully climbed up on it until I was on my knees. I held on to the faucet for balance. It had two spigots attached to it, on one of which was the attachment fixture for the hose that had been strung out the window, but that Jack had disconnected the night before.

  I looked outside. All I could see was a green glow under the still sort of bluish morning light, and a bit of the yard through the bushes I’d hidden behind last night before I climbed in.

  Kneeling there like that I realized I was pretty hungry. And I had to pee. But not too badly, thank god, because if I did I’d have to do it in the sink and then I’d have to turn the faucet on, and it would make noise all throughout the house.

  And really, what if somebody upstairs just happened to come downstairs and caught me peeing in their sink?

  So I sort of gave up on the idea of relieving myself—at least until the coast was clear.

  The window was locked. I saw the lock, just a little plastic lever shaped like an L. No key or anything. I could open it, for sure. It would of course set off the alarm. But this time I might just make it. Climbing out in the daylight would be easier. I’d be able to make it to the back alley fast, and from there I could just hide somewhere; that would be extremely easy for me. They might not catch me, and because there was no evidence I’d been inside, there was even a possibility they might just think it was a system malfunction or something, and never even realize I’d been there.

  I thought about doing it for a second. It sort of made me smile. Even Jack wouldn’t be fast enough to catch me—he’d have to get dressed, for one thing, or at least put his pants on. I think it was imagining him rushing to get into his pants that made me smile.

  But I just couldn’t see waking them up that way. It’d be too much of a shock for them to have to bolt out of bed thinking there were intruders in the house. Anyways, I didn’t even have my shoes on.

  I climbed down and got my shoes out from behind the curtain. I checked to see how wet they were; they were still a bit damp. Dirty, too, even though I’d wiped a lot of the mud off. I couldn’t put them back on without leaving tracks, I was sure.

  I really didn’t know what to do, and right then, like a very distant chime, I heard an alarm clock go off.

  Oh boy, I thought.

  As fast as I could, I crept under the curtain and lay back on the bed.

  I can’t tell you how badly I needed to pee. It was like that alarm clock had sort of activated it.

  I lay there listening, and in no time the upstairs was full of noises. Not that the floor creaked or anything like it would have at my house, because back there if you were down in the basement—or cellar, really, because I don’t want to, like, ennoble my house to make it sound anything like Laura’s—you’d have heard, like, the whole floor creaking and shrieking like an earthquake was on its way.

  All I heard were the little thumps of footsteps, and it was pretty easy to distinguish, by what you could call almost the weight of the sound of the footsteps, who was walking around up there, which was obviously Laura’s dad and her brother, Jack, because they had, you know, more thump to them, and then Laura’s mom, with a little less thump, but I must admit certainly some thump, and then last of all Laura, who of course had almost no thump at all, because she’s actually quite graceful.

  “I used to study gymnastics,” she had told me one night when she was baby-sitting. We lay piled on the sofa in the game room, taking a break from making out. “Since I was five. I guess I’m okay at it.”

  That’s all she ever told me about it, and I was surprised she downplayed it, because she really did always brag about almost everything else, her family especially. But I knew she was very good, because she used to do these crazy flips in the park when we’d go for walks, and she was actually incredibly good at it, at least in my opinion. She’d just sort of grin at me and say, “Hey, watch this!” and then whoosh, she’d run over the grass and suddenly, she’d literally be upside down in the air, and then back on her feet again like she’d just stepped off a curb or something. I must admit I was always very impressed by that, and these were also some of the few times that I ever saw her really seem to feel good, like she’d done something special that only she could do.

  Now, you probably won’t believe it, but all I wanted to do was get out of that basement.

  First of all, I will admit it was actually very exciting being down there on the dog bed and knowing Laura was upstairs. I mean, I can’t deny that.

  But despite all the undeniable excitement, I was worried.

  I really did begin to worry pretty badly, because despite everything I’ve already said about how it would be impossible to ever be unhappy in this sort of house and how all your problems would just be sort of fun, the truth is, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know that maybe everything wasn’t perfect in this house.

  I didn’t want to eavesdrop, for one thing, because I knew how terrible that would be to do, and my only real wish was that Jack had forgotten to shut the window and turn on the alarm, so I could just climb the hell out of there.

  Because to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to be disappointed. And I had the feeling I would be.

  I mean, I knew I had all these kinds of illusions
about Laura, because for one thing, I totally loved her, and for another thing, she wanted me to have them.

  She had, I must admit, always bragged about how rich her family was, especially her dad, who she said managed a hedge fund, and I for one, not being much up on financial matters, really had no idea what that even was and at first thought it was maybe some kind of joint bank account for landscapers.

  But she let me know that actually it meant he was, like, the big cheese for a whole huge group of investors and subinvestors and sub-subinvestors, and the whole thing sounded so complicated that I never really could get my head around it, except that she said, “He makes about two million a year.”

  That part I understood.

  I was like, “Wow. Your dad makes two million a year.”

  And she said, “He’s buying a house in Buenos Aires next year. He does a lot of building down there with developers. My dad’s from Argentina, you know.”

  We had been standing by a fence in a park, the one by my old elementary school. It was twilight. I don’t know why, but she seemed sad. I mean, here she was bragging about her dad and how rich they were, and telling me all the details, but it didn’t really seem to make her smile. If anything, she seemed a little angry.

  But she didn’t stop there. She went on and told me about their boat, called the Esmeralda or something, which sounded like a really great boat with, like, six sleeping cabins in it, and how she was going to get a Jet Ski, which was certainly something that I’d always wanted.

  I asked her if she would let me ride it.

  She said, “Sure. If you can get to Buenos Aires.”

  That crack made her smile a little, which she almost never did when she was around me, so I was glad she’d made it. Like the times she did the flips, I really liked to see her happy, even if this time it was at my expense.

  What’s weird about this is you might think, you know, that by making that sort of joke—because I obviously would never be able to get myself down to Buenos Aires unless I walked, and that would take probably five years—she was being mean to me and maybe didn’t like me. But this whole time she was holding my hand, really holding it tightly, as if her life depended on it. It actually even hurt a little, and I could feel her fingernails sticking into my palm. Holding her hand made me feel so glad I was with her, even more than seeing her face, which I thought looked so beautiful in the dusk, with those liquid eyes she had looking at me and seeming to search me for something without ever finding it, but hoping to find it, and her round face that I thought was so beautiful and her shiny brown hair that fell across her forehead like a wing.