The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing Read online

  I got over Jacob, high school parties, and the entire concept of sex in one night. That’s how the party was. But I sigh and say, “Annoying. People drinking too much and acting like idiots.”

  Dad looks impressed with my maturity. “Well, it sounds like we don’t have to worry about you too much, doesn’t it?” He spots his keys on the counter next to a container of dried pasta and sweeps them into his hand.

  No one would’ve thought to worry about Devin before either. Maybe you can never do enough worrying. “Where are you going?” I ask him.

  “Home Hardware,” Dad says. “I have some work to do in the upstairs bathroom and I can’t find my caulking gun.”

  Some things went missing while Devin was home. Neither of us mentions this possibility in relation to the caulking gun. Dad goes off to Home Hardware and I shuffle upstairs and listen to my cellphone messages. The first thing I hear is Jacob shouting into my ear above the din of a Kanye West tune, demanding to know where I am. If he sounded worried maybe I’d soften, not enough to keep seeing him but enough to wonder if he cared a little.

  Jacob doesn’t sound worried. He sounds like the same pissed off, drunken dickhead he was last night. I’m glad that the next two messages are hang-ups, but when I press end my cell rings in my hand. I freeze at the sight of Jacob’s phone number. What would a girl in a movie do? What would Morgan, who expects everyone to like and respect him, do?

  “Hello,” I say quietly.

  “That’s all you have to say?” Jacob says. “Hello?”

  “Pretty much.” I try to sound like I never cared about him in the first place. This is what you get for expecting another person to be your magical, special thing. Consider me educated.

  “Shit, Serena.” He grunts into the phone. “You take off in the middle of Wyatt’s party and now you give me attitude. What’s with you?”

  “You really don’t know?” How can that be possible? My heart jumps against my rib cage.

  “How could I?” he asks. I wait for him to go on, but there isn’t any more.

  It’s humiliating to have to say it. I can’t believe I let myself get twisted up in this. What happened to the guy I sat with on the same side of a booth kissing? Is he still in there somewhere along with asshole Jacob?

  I think back to how we were in the beginning. How tender Jacob’s voice got whenever he thought I was feeling sad, the way he was always telling me how beautiful I was and how good I made him feel when we were touching each other.

  “The way you see me …” I pinch my lips together and pace my bedroom, my fingertips sliding across the contents of my dresser like they’re Braille. “The way you see me isn’t right. It’s all about you. It’s like I’m not even a …” I stop moving and drop my voice. “It’s just sex. That’s the only thing that matters to you.”

  I loved making out with him, and when he’d tease my breasts and say how gorgeous they were. It’s true, I was always ready to whip off my top for him and let him do it. But Jacob seemed to get bored of those things more easily than I did. He wanted more, so I tried.

  The first time I put it in my mouth I almost gagged and had to pretend my jaw hurt instead. The main thing was, he liked it and told me I was good. Sometimes he’d say really dirty things while I was doing it. Some of them made me feel good because I knew he wanted me and some I didn’t want to hear because they made me feel wrong and almost … I don’t know … like ashamed or something. The thing was, back then it was never just the bad things on their own, there was always the nice things too — amazing kissing and Jacob’s awe-inspiring basketball player arms, him nuzzling my breasts and talking to them like they each had beating hearts of their own.

  “C’mon,” Jacob says, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing through the phone. “We’re not even having sex, Serena. There’s never been any sex.”

  I’m quiet. He doesn’t see that the balance between good and bad things has been weighing on the wrong side for too long already — him saying nasty things into my ear, always trying to convince me how much closer doing those things would make us. Or maybe he does see it, but it doesn’t make any difference to him.

  “We were just kidding around last night,” he continues. “You know that. Why do you have to blow it all out of proportion? Nothing even happened, did it?”

  Nothing happened because Aya upchucked and I pulled a disappearing act. Otherwise Jacob would’ve been quite happy to sit there next to me and watch Aya and I put on a show for all his friends, no matter how shitty I felt about it.

  “I’m just sick of it, Jacob, okay?” My voice is whiny. I want to sound self-righteous, but I can’t stop feeling sorry for myself. “I’m tired of things being wrong.”

  Jacob makes a frustrated noise into the phone. Then he says, “If it was just about sex I wouldn’t be with you, would I? So, look, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, Jacob, okay?” For some reason I can’t stop saying “okay.” “This just isn’t happening anymore. We’re done. I’m tired of you pushing me, telling me what you want, making me feel like a slut — or not enough of a slut. I’m never just …” My tongue trips over my teeth. “… me.” A single hot tear squeezes out of my right eye.

  Jacob coughs out the same aggravated noise he made earlier. “You like when we’re together too, Serena. You can’t pretend you don’t. If you took things too seriously last night … hey, that’s not how it was, so I’m sorry you got it wrong.”

  “I’m not looking for an apology,” I tell him. “Not that that actually was one.” Yay for me, it turns out I can pop out some decent, movie girl lines after all.

  “Hey,” Jacob says, and now he actually sounds slightly worried, “I was loaded last night. I hardly knew what I was saying. If it was worse than I thought, I didn’t mean it. I know you’d never do anything you didn’t want to anyway. You’re not like that.”

  Aren’t I? I rub the tear off my face and act like it was never there in the first place.

  “Do you want me to come over later?” he asks in a mushy tone. “We can watch that Emma Stone DVD you wanted to see. I can stop at the mall and pick up some of that almond popcorn you like first.”

  That sounds nice, but if I follow it through in my head I know it will always turn out the same way, maybe not tonight, if he’s being good, but eventually. If I could cut out the things about Jacob that I like and keep them I wouldn’t be left with anything close to a whole person. The whispering to my boobs, holding my hand when we walk, and telling me I’m beautiful just isn’t enough.

  “I can’t, Jacob.” My throat hurts but there are no more tears. “You should call someone else.” I can’t resist a final movie girl line. “And be nice to her, all right?”

  I hang up before he has the chance to say something I don’t want to hear. I switch my cell off, climb back into bed, and wait for high school to be over.

  ***

  In some ways breaking it off with Jacob is like taking a step back in time. I’m still semi-popular at school (I’m still Morgan LeBlanc’s sister and I’m still thin) but I’m not a hotshot point guard’s girlfriend anymore. What’s more, I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend (or anyone’s FB either) and I let that be known, in subtle ways, to the guys who think I’m a fresh opportunity. Mostly I’m back to hanging out with Izzy and Marguerite, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. I know they talk about things to each other that they don’t discuss with me, and neither of them calls me at night unless it’s about homework or TV.

  Jacob gives me the evil eye in the school hallways but says nothing. Twice Wyatt calls me a bitch. One time Jacob’s next to him and looks away. The other time Wyatt’s with Chaz and Orlando, and Chaz tells me I’m damn cold. Nobody else seems mad at me, but I feel less important. Is it dumb to miss hearing someone tell you how pretty you are with a special kind of tremble in his voice when being pretty isn’t supposed to matter a
nyway?

  Dad seems to take my breakup with Jacob as inevitable. Mom asks if I’m okay and then zones out when I answer. Why do I bother when I know the only thing she wants to think about anymore — the one thing that seems to make her feel better — is shutting herself in the den to make eBay bids on retired Swarovski figurines to add to her collection? I always just end up feeling guilty for mentally interrupting her.

  But if Devin (the old Devin, that is) were around he’d congratulate me on ditching Jacob’s ass. He’d probably call me shallow for being tempted by basketball player arms in the first place but who is he to judge? And anyway, I’m not sure the old Devin even exists anyplace outside my head anymore.

  Since he left I can’t seem to get through two weeks without having a dream about him. I wouldn’t mind except there are only two dreams that I have about Devin and both of them are bad. In dream number one he’s on a shouting rampage. First he takes on my parents and then he turns on me. The dream Devin says scathing things I’ve heard him yell in real life, but he yells other awful things too. His mean streak is a mile wide and bone deep. It makes Jacob’s selfishness seem like a walk in the park, like wildflowers and baby bunnies. When I wake up from that dream I feel like a hollowed-out egg, but the other dream is worse and that’s the one I shake myself awake from tonight, a chill at the base of my spine.

  The dream starts like a typical scary movie scene. It’s night, and a young woman (me) is scurrying under a decrepit-looking city bridge. There aren’t any stars or moon but somehow I can see my feet on the cement. It’s not any particular temperature. I don’t feel hot or cold and there’s no wind and no traffic either. Quiet. Dark. Alone. My heart thumps frantically at the sound of footsteps behind me. Heavy. Slow. Like whoever or whatever it is knows it will get me in the end. I sprint for the other end of the bridge, where it should be lighter but isn’t, and anyway my legs can’t work up enough speed to escape. I run in slow motion, like I’m fighting air, until I’m sick to death of trying. I’m a goner and I know it.

  I turn to see what’s behind me, expecting my heart to stop in fear. I’m positive it will be a psycho killer with a knife or some ancient horned evil, but it’s neither of those things. A version of Devin’s standing there under the bridge with me. He’s gotten so skinny that he looks like something from a medical journal. His head doesn’t sit right on his shoulders and his anorexic arms are stiff like a zombie’s. I know in an instant that he wasn’t chasing me and doesn’t mean to harm me. He doesn’t even know I’m there.

  He’s gone. Lost.

  I stare at the empty person in front of me and watch him walk. He thuds right by me, into the night, his eyes dull in their sockets and his face expressionless.

  That’s the moment I wake up, alone in the dark missing a brother. He could be anywhere. He could be dead. I shiver and sweat at the same time, thinking about that.

  Back in mid-July a jogger in Newmarket stumbled across a body near a running path in the woods. The newspaper described it as a young white male, fully clothed. My mom’s hands started shaking and my dad kept saying there was no reason for Devin to be in Newmarket, no reason. We live about an hour away from Newmarket, but I’ve never been there and I’d never heard Devin mention the place either. Like my father said, there was no reason for Devin to be in Newmarket.

  Only maybe he hadn’t started out in Newmarket. He could’ve been kidnapped or gotten himself in the middle of a drug deal gone bad. Maybe he was screwing some married woman and her husband found them together and got violent. My mind raced as my mom’s hands continued to shake. You never knew with Devin. He’d become the kind of person anything could happen to.

  By the time he left us, he’d already lost touch with lots of his old friends. The only people I saw him with were ones who either wouldn’t look you in the eye or would stare for too long and make you want to take a step away from them. There were random girls too — one who wouldn’t stop shouting while they were in his bedroom and who later stumbled out having forgotten to button up her jeans and another whom I caught a glimpse of him having sex with (her miniskirt hitched up and her thong around her ankles) through the wide open bathroom door before I realized what was happening and took off for Izzy’s house.

  “There’s no reason at all for us to assume it could be Devin,” my dad repeated, his face pale. “This article gives next to no details. The description probably fits a million people in this country.”

  My mother said we should call the Newmarket police department, and the suggestion made my dad raise his voice. “No one’s calling the police department,” he insisted. “Devin’s not a missing person. He left of his own free will. We can’t ring up police departments across the country every time we open the newspaper, for God’s sake.”

  My mom scrunched up her eyebrows. “We’re talking about our son,” she said hoarsely. “If I have to call police departments across the country, I will.”

  Mom snatched up the cordless and dialled information to ask for the number. Dad listened to her without offering another word of protest. The two of us sat there trying to piece together details from the half of the conversation we could hear. Mom’s fingers trembled worse than ever as she hung up. She said that the body had just been identified as a young man from Quebec but that the police wouldn’t reveal any more as the family had yet to be notified. I silently cursed my brother for making us miserable, even as relief clawed at my throat.

  My mind sifts through it all again as I roll over in bed — dream Devin, missing Devin, the Devin who would’ve applauded me for calling it quits with Jacob and the one who raged at my mother, accusing her of trying to make him fat when she was only trying to get him to eat some pot roast and peas.

  It makes me so sad to think about that I can hardly stand it. Does anyone bother to coax Devin to eat dinner anymore?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ~

  MS. YUEN PAIRS ME up with Aya Yamamoto for a conversation exercise in French last period. It’s the first time we’ve spoken to each other since that night at Wyatt’s but neither of us mentions it. Aya’s French is almost as good as her English and that makes me angry with her. She’s too smart to act like a skank for people like Wyatt and Orlando. What was she even doing at Wyatt’s party? The people she usually hangs out with play the flute and top the honour roll.

  I don’t say goodbye to her when the bell rings. I’m not holding her fully responsible for that night but she’s not innocent either. Now that I’m unattached I could easily spend too much time thinking about things that don’t really matter, like why people do the things they do, but I’ve decided that I won’t. What I need is to keep busy, and I’ve settled on the idea of a part-time job.

  Last spring I started thinking that I’d like a baby blue scooter to cruise around town in. I could change my mind long before I have the money to buy one, but at least it’s something to think about that doesn’t involve high school guys or serious amounts of talent in an as yet undiscovered area.

  If I had a scooter now I could hop on and be home in a couple of minutes rather than the fifteen it takes me to walk. Izzy’s mom picks her and Marguerite up almost every day, but my house is in the opposite direction and since we’ve just started hanging out together again it doesn’t seem like a good time to ask for a favour. Actually, even if I had a scooter I’d sooner ride in something with a roof this afternoon because it’s starting to rain.

  I pull my hoodie over my head as I step outside. Not only is it raining but it’s cold. I bury my hands in my pockets and consider searching out Izzy after all. Her mom usually picks her up by the south doors near the office and I’m about to head that way when my eardrums pick up on Nicole Lapatas screeching at some lanky junior guy I don’t know by name.

  She’s only six feet away and I can’t avoid hearing her scream, “You’re disgusting! You’re going to be one of those guys whose best friend is his hand forever and who’s s
till living in his parents’ basement when he’s forty because no girl will go near him!”

  The lanky guy laughs, stares intently at his phone, and intones, “Ooh, you’re sexy when you’re mad, Nicki.” I can’t see the image on his cell from where I’m standing but the noise from it is clearly audible. Some guy’s shouting encouragement to Nicole, telling her she’s the hottest thing he’s ever seen and oh yeah, baby, YEAH, Nicki, baby, that’s it …

  The guy looks up from his cell, a dirty grin stuck on his lips as he says, “You got some nice moves here. Why don’t you want anyone to see them?”

  Nicole grabs for his phone, but she’s not fast enough. He yanks it into the sky above his head and laughs again as she jumps for it. “You are a frisky one, aren’t you?” He whistles low but flicks his eyes away from mine when he sees me staring. His laughter turns embarrassed and then stops completely. “Okay, okay — there,” he says, slipping the cell into his backpack. “Happy now?”

  “Fuck you,” Nicole declares, worry lines etching into her forehead. She reaches for his backpack this time, sliding the zip halfway down before he fights her off.

  “Calm down,” he tells her. “Ree-lax, Nicole. Just chill, would you?”

  Nicole hasn’t given up. Both her hands lunge for his backpack, all her weight and energy focused on it like she means business. The guy pulls back fast, spinning away from her and upsetting her balance. He doesn’t glance back to see her crumple to the ground. He’s halfway to the football field by the time I realize it’s up to me to do something.

  Nicole Lapatas is lying across the littered cement, one of her legs folded under the other and her skirt askew. I step towards her, realizing as I do that someone else is hurrying in her direction too. I bend down in front of Nicole and say, “Are you okay?”