Katie Cotugno: How to Love

I held the necklace out in front of me like it was radioactive, pendant swinging. “Did you steal this?” I demanded, and even to my own ears I sounded shrill.

Allie let go of the jungle gym. Her whole expression changed in a way I’d never seen before, almost accusatory, a security grate going down. “Were you going through my stuff?” she asked.

“Was I what ?” I was startled. We went through each other’s stuff all the time, Allie and me, no problem. She could have recited the contents of my desk drawers off the top of her head. “I was looking for the Risky Business.” Allie blinked. “Oh,” she said, and just like that she looked normal again. She dug the tube out of the back pocket of her shorts. “Here.”

“Thanks.” I put it on, still staring. The silver moon bounced off my knuckles, and when I handed her the lip gloss back, she took that, too, out of sight like a sleight of hand. “So?” I prodded. “Did you steal it?”

“Did I steal it?” she repeated. “What do you think? I’m some kind of freaky klepto?”

“Oh, like you’ve never stolen anything before.”

Allie cocked her head to the side like, fair point . “I stole that lip gloss, actually,” she admitted.

“ What? ” I said. “At the mall? I thought you paid for it.”

“I just told you I did.” She shrugged. “It was when you were smelling the perfumes.”

Oh, for God’s sake. I sat down hard right in the middle of the lawn, flopping backward and looking at the clear, unforgiving sky. The air felt like a wet blanket. “You gotta knock that off.”

“I know,” she said, and lay down beside me. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I could hear her stomach growling and the faint sound of wasps nearby.

“Al,” I said eventually, trying to keep my voice even, not wanting to sound as slightly hysterical as I felt. She’d been my best friend since we were four. “Where did you get that necklace?”

Allie sighed like a white flag waving, like I was just going to torture the truth out of her anyway and it was easier to tell me the truth. “I didn’t steal it,” she said.

I felt all the breath whoosh out of me, dizzy even though I was already lying down. “I didn’t think so,” I told her, and as it came out of my mouth I realized it was true. “He gave it to you?”

Allie nodded. She rolled over onto her side, propped herself up on one sharp elbow to look me in the face. “I was going to tell you,” she said finally. “I didn’t know how.”

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes, colors exploding like fireworks, like something detonating inside my head. “Sawyer LeGrande gave you that necklace,” I repeated, and I almost cracked up laughing, that’s how ridiculous it sounded out loud. “Since when are you hanging out with Sawyer LeGrande ?”

There was that edge in my voice again, that crazy shrillness, but Allie just shrugged. “Few weeks?”

“A few weeks ?”

“Three?”

“ Three? ” I sat up fast, and now I really was dizzy. In the yard it was very, very hot. “And we’re only just talking about it now ?”

“Oh, come on, Reena,” she said, getting up herself, red-cheeked and with a hint of a challenge in her voice. “Like you’re the easiest person in the world to tell stuff to. Especially this.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true, and it’s not fair to—”

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, recalibrating. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it to you.”

“Should have mentioned it to me?”

“Okay, can you stop repeating everything I say?”

“I’m not re—” I caught myself just in time. “Al, this isn’t some random person, this is Sawyer Le—”

“What do you want to know?”

What did I want to know ? I stared at her, openmouthed and stupid. I had no idea what questions to ask. I felt, absurdly and with some panic, that I might be about to burst into tears.

“Come on,” she said softly, and after a moment nudged at me with her knee. She hated having people mad at her, Allie; had almost no tolerance for it at all. “Don’t look at me like that. Not you.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I told her. “I’m just … looking at you.”

“Your face is doing a funny thing.”

“It is not!” I laughed, a weird little bark that didn’t sound anything like my normal laugh, even to me. “This is just what I look like.”

“It is not what you look like,” she corrected. “Stop. We’re just hanging out. He’s friends with Lauren. I saw him one day at Bump and Grind and he asked if I wanted to, you know—”

“If you wanted to what , exactly?”

“If I wanted to hang out! It’s not a big deal.” Suddenly Allie looked at me a little more closely, like a thought was just occurring to her. The tips of her ears were red from the sun. “You’re not, like, really upset, are you?” she asked me. “I mean, I know we always joke about how hot he is and stuff, but you don’t actually, like … I mean, if you really care—”

“I don’t ,” I protested immediately, like if I could deliver the lie with enough emphasis, it would somehow make it even a little bit true. In the back of my head I knew Allie was right: I was famous for keeping my emotions to myself. If she didn’t realize how much—how hugely —I felt whatever it was I felt for Sawyer, then chances are it was my fault for never letting on.

It was too late to tell her now, though, sitting there in the yard like I had on a hundred other summer mornings—not if Sawyer had already chosen her. Not if they’d already chosen each other. The only thing to do now was to protect myself with the lie.

“It’s fine,” I continued, shrugging nonchalantly. “You guys should do whatever makes you happy.” I probably would have kept going—offered to help them pick out a china pattern for their wedding, maybe—but thank God there was Mrs. Ballard back at the screen door, voice like a Klaxon across the empty yard.

“Girls!” She sounded annoyed this time, impatient. I wondered how much she’d heard. “Do you want these or not?”

“We don’t want ’em, Ma!” Allie yelled, and then turned back to me expectantly. But I was already getting to my feet, brushing my shorts off, and arranging my face into a mask of easy, artificial calm.

“I want them,” I said, even though I didn’t really. I crossed the grass, the sun beating down on my dark curtain of hair. “I’m coming,” I called, leaving Allie behind.

After

I wander downstairs once Hannah is in bed for the night, thinking I might do some school reading at the picnic table in the yard. It’s humid and swampy out, the air thick with mosquitoes, but frankly it’s not worse than any other night and I feel too big for these walls anyway.

I spend a lot of time out here in the evenings, tethered to the house with one ear out for the baby, feet up on a lounge chair and the odd lizard scurrying up the trunk of the orange tree. The damp air curls the pages of my books. I’ll do schoolwork or click around on Facebook, talk with Soledad if she’s feeling chatty. I used to try to write out here sometimes, before I finally gave up and stopped tormenting myself—the blank screen like a sweeping accusation from the person I used to be back in high school, everything I said I was going to do and didn’t.

Tonight my father’s beaten me out here, though, already hard at work in the garden he’s kept since Cade and I were babies, pulling the aphids off his tomato plants. He’s listening to Sarah Vaughan through the kitchen window. Soil is caked into the creases of his palms.