“She, not he,” Dom said. “And I didn’t look at her real close.” Which meant she wasn’t pretty. “You could try asking Laurie. She was in last night. I saw her talk to them for a minute.”
Laurie, a senior at Ridgedale University, was the only student who worked at Blondie’s. Laurie came from nothing, needed the job to pay for tuition. So far, it was taking her a couple extra years to make it through. She was twenty-three and a few credits away from graduating, but she swore she would. Sandy believed her, and it gave her hope. Laurie was proving it could be done even when you started at less than zero. Laurie lived in an apartment a few blocks away with her roommate, Rose, who was in Blondie’s all the time, even lately, when she was super-pregnant. People gave her crap about it—pregnant and in a bar—never bothering to notice that all Rose ever drank was water.
“Okay, thanks,” Sandy said. “If you see Jenna, could you tell her to call me?”
“Of course we will, kiddo,” Monte said. “And if she doesn’t turn up soon, you come back here, okay? We’ll help you find her.”
“Okay,” Sandy said, though she already knew she wouldn’t. Asking for help never ended up being worth the humiliation.
As Sandy headed for the door, she got another text—not from Jenna. But at least it wasn’t from Hannah. It was Aidan. Meet up after lunch?
Don’t you have class? Sandy wrote back.
Nah, that’s in the fuck-it bucket.
That bad?
Worse. Come on. Hang out with me. I’ll let you share my bucket.
Sandy laughed a little. Even with everything else—Jenna being MIA, getting kicked out of their apartment, and, well, that most-fucked-up thing she was working real hard to forget—Aidan had made Sandy laugh. That was why she liked him so much. It was right after Sandy met Aidan that she’d started thinking about tomorrow and even the day after that. It was a fucking risk for sure. But it was nicer than she’d thought it would be.
Not like Sandy and Aidan were Romeo and Juliet or some shit. Sometimes it even felt like there was this huge hidden canyon between them. Like one wrong step to the left and one of them would disappear forever. Because it was one thing when your fuck-it bucket was filled with stupid, worthless crap like Sandy’s, but if she’d had even a quarter of everything Aidan did—the house, the money, the perfect future—she wouldn’t have ever joked about trashing it.
Sandy had no idea how different their lives were until she went over to Aidan’s house for the first time. It was like not knowing you’d stumbled into a foreign country until you couldn’t understand a fucking word.
“Come back to bed,” Aidan had said that day.
He was lying naked on the bed, hands tucked behind his head against the pillow, a woven bracelet on his wrist and a faint tan, both souvenirs from his family’s summer in Nantucket. He was watching Sandy walk around his room in just her panties and his plaid shirt. She was checking out all his fancy kid stuff: trophies for basketball, swimming, tennis, the books on his shelves, the pictures and certificates tacked up on his bulletin board.
“Super-sporty, huh?” she asked, like it was something he should be ashamed of.
Really, she was jealous. Ever since she’d bought her bike at the Salvation Army and had it tuned up, Sandy had seen this glimmer of what might have been. She was fast as shit on that bike. And strong. And that was without any training or the right kind of gear. Who knew what she could have been if she’d had all the opportunities that Aidan did? And there he was, shitting on them. She reached forward to finger a frequent-customer card from Scoops, the local ice cream shop, tacked to Aidan’s bulletin board. It was half filled with stamps but faded and wrinkled. “Really holding out for that free cone, huh?” Sandy asked.
Her eyes moved on to a postcard from Barcelona signed Much Love, Aunt Eileen, and three pictures of some boys jumping off a dock into a lake, then huddled in a smiley pile under a bunch of towels. Aidan was in the center, with the biggest smile of all.
“My dad and I go there when he visits,” Aidan said. His voice sounded weird. Weird enough that Sandy turned to look at him, but he was staring up at the ceiling. “It’s been a while.”
“Oh, that sucks,” Sandy said. And now she felt like an asshole.
She wasn’t trying to make Aidan feel bad about his deadbeat dad. She could be too casual about dads in general. It was because she’d never had one of her own. He’d been a marine Jenna had dated for a few months before he died in a car accident on his way back to his base. Jenna didn’t find out she was pregnant until after the funeral.
“Whatever,” Aidan said. “Fuck him.”
“Yeah,” Sandy said. She wanted to make it better, but she had no idea how. “Listen, I should go. Your mom’s going to be home soon.”
“Whatever. Fuck her, too.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m the one she’ll bitch-slap.”
But it wasn’t what Aidan’s mom would do that worried Sandy. It was the way she’d look at her. Like she was a piece of shit. People looked at Sandy that way a lot. That included the men who wanted to fuck her and the women who wanted her to go fuck herself. Hard to say which was worse.
“Why do you care what she thinks?” Aidan said.
“Right, and you don’t? Seems like you want me to stick around just to piss her off.” Sandy hoped that wasn’t what Aidan was doing. She’d been trying to stop herself, but she’d already started liking him. “Tell me something. What the hell’s so bad about all of this?”
Aidan had surveyed his room for a minute. “Looks can be deceiving,” he’d said finally, his face serious when he turned back to her. “You should know that better than anybody.”
Sandy read Aidan’s text again. He wanted to meet, but seeing him wasn’t what she needed right now, no matter how much easier it would have been to pretend that it was.
Stay in class, Sandy wrote back. Text me when you’re done.