It’d been cold out the last couple of weeks, too cold to find escape in their empty field, not that they would be out there, anyway.
Her dad called her a tomboy, teasing that she always wanted to be outside, playing in the dirt and climbing trees.
But really, she just wanted to be near him.
She quieted her feet as she flattened her back to the wall and slid farther down the hall. It was wrong, she knew, eavesdropping on Jared and Christopher as they talked in her brother’s bedroom, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. Shielding herself from the conversation happening on the other side of the door seemed impossible because she felt drawn. As if she had to hear. As if she had to know.
Still she’d never believed hearing something could cause her so much pain.
For years she’d imagined being thirteen would make her feel mature. Grown-up. She’d studied herself in the mirror as her body had begun to change and thought maybe Jared would begin to notice her in the same way she noticed him.
But now that she was just a few months from turning fourteen, the only thing she felt like was a stupid little girl.
On the carpeted hall floor, she slid her bare feet a little farther down, coming right up to the outside of Christopher’s door. Anxiety twisted her stomach into heavy knots that made it hard to breathe. Or maybe it was the pain in her chest that made her feel as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t tell.
She only knew it hurt.
She swallowed over the pain that lodged in her throat and tried to still her shaking hands.
Christopher’s door was barely cracked open, but she could make out the back of her brother’s head from where he sat on the floor in the middle of the room. Loose sheets of homework and a textbook were spread out in front of him. Every few seconds, Aly would catch a glimpse of Jared’s face whenever Christopher leaned to the side.
She inclined her ear, keeping herself hidden as she subjected herself to their hushed words.
“Oh man,” Christopher said through suppressed, envious laughter. “In her parents’ bed? Dude, that is messed up.”
Jared chuckled as if the whole conversation was absurd. Aly saw him press his hands to his face, then drop them to his lap with a one-sided shrug. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. It was weird, anyway… . I don’t even like her.”
“She’s hot, though,” Christopher pointed out.
Suggestive laughter fell from Jared’s mouth. “That she is.”
Those knots tightened in her stomach, and she was sure she was going to be sick.
“What about you and Samantha?” Jared asked, resituating himself as he pulled a textbook to his lap. “That girl is wound up so tight I don’t know how you’re ever going to undo that.”
Christopher shook his head, his shaggy black hair brushing over his shoulders. “Nah… Samantha is cool. She wants to wait until she turns sixteen… six weeks.” He laughed almost as if he were embarrassed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I like her a lot. I mean, like, a lot.”
Christopher lowered his head, and Aly caught sight of Jared’s curious expression.
“Yeah?” he asked, completely without ridicule.
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool, man. I want that someday.” Then Jared cracked a smile, wide and cocky. “Just not when I’m sixteen.”
Christopher crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at his head. “Fuck you.” He laughed, unrestrained. “You just can’t stand it that I have to drive your sorry ass around all the time and I have an awesome girlfriend.”
“Hey, man, two weeks and I’m free.” Jared looked up with a grin.
“Yeah, and I bet the second you get that car your parents are giving you, you’ll have Kylie in the backseat.”
Aly felt sad, a sadness she didn’t know how to deal with. It was as if this disease crawled over her flesh, pressing down, seeping in, taking hold. She wanted to scrape the feeling from her skin, purge it from her mind.
She wasn’t one of those girls. She’d never been able to understand the packs of girls gathered around one another in the bathroom while one girl cried because the boy she liked didn’t like her back. Inevitably, she liked a different boy the next week and suddenly the world was right.
It wasn’t as if Aly really thought badly of them. Most of them were her friends. She just didn’t understand the shift, the distraction from one boy to the next in the matter of seconds, the fleeting attraction that never lasted. Because the only boy she’d ever wanted had been one and the same. She forced out a ragged breath from her lungs and tried to blink away the pounding in her head.
Aly froze when Jared suddenly lifted his face and caught her eye as she stared at him openmouthed through the sliver in the door.
He kicked Christopher on the sole of his shoe to get his attention. “Shh… ,” he hissed in warning. He announced her presence to Christopher with a gesture of his chin. “Your little sister is right there.”
She stepped back, shaking, hating that she’d managed to make herself the fool.
“Aly?” her mom called from the living room.
She hurried to the end of the hall before she allowed herself to speak. “I’m right here.”
Her mom both smiled and frowned. “I thought you were running to your room to get the picture? Helene is dying to see your first-place winner.”
Jared’s mom, Helene, twisted around her seat, smiling at Aly from across the room. “I knew you’d do it, Aly, baby.” Her blue eyes shone with warm affection, her long natural blond hair pulled to one side and flowing down her slender shoulder. “I’ve never seen anyone who can draw like you… ever since you were just a tiny thing… always drawing.” She smiled knowingly at Aly’s mom.
“Let’s see it, sweetheart,” her mom said.
“I couldn’t find it,” Aly lied, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She’d been too busy spying on Christopher and Jared. “Let me look a little more.”
Aly rushed to her room, slammed the door shut behind her, and rested her back against it as she fought against the tears.
Jared’d had sex with some girl and she’d never so much as held a boy’s hand.
She’d been waiting for him.
Anger pulled at the knots in her stomach, knitting them tighter. She stomped across her room, knew she was acting like a baby, like one of those stupid girls at school with a stupid crush and even stupider tears, but she couldn’t stop them. They flooded down her face. She just wanted to curl up in her bed and die.
Instead she jerked up the hem of her shirt and used it to harshly dry her eyes.