Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby

Of course my friends all thought I was crazy. Two days after we’d broken up, I’d gone with them to Bendo, and Dexter had come over and chatted with me. When he’d left, I’d turned back to a row of skeptical, holier-than-thou faces, like I was drinking beer with a bunch of apostles.

“Oh, man,” Chloe said, pointing a finger at me, “don’t tell me you guys are going to be friends.”

“Well, not exactly,” I said, which only made them look more aghast. Lissa, who’d spent the better part of the summer reading the kind of self-help books I normally associated with Jennifer Anne, looked especially disappointed. “Look, we’re better friends than dating. And we hardly dated at all, anyway.”

“It won’t work,” Chloe told me, lighting a cigarette. “Crutch for the weak, the whole friends thing. Who used to say that?”

I rolled my eyes, staring up at the ceiling.

“Oh, that’s right!” she said, snapping her fingers. “It was you! You always said that, just like you always said that you should never date a guy in a band-”

“Chloe,” I said.

“-or give in to a guy who really pursues you, since they’ll just lose interest the moment the chase ends-”

“Give it a rest.”

“-or fall for someone with an ex-girlfriend who is still hanging around, because if she hasn’t gotten the message he probably isn’t sending it.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “That last one has nothing to do with this.”

“Two out of three,” she replied, waving her hand. “My point is made.”

“Remy,” Lissa said, reaching over and patting my hand, “it’s okay. You’re human. You make the same mistakes as any of us. You know, in that book I was reading, Coming to Terms: What Love Can and Can’t Do, there’s a whole chapter on how we break our rules for men.”

“I am not breaking my rules,” I snapped, hating that I’d ended up on the advice-receiving end of things, jumping from Dear Remy to Confused in Cincinnati all in one summer.

Now, at Toyotafaire, Chloe and I left my mother chatting with another fan and headed over to a patch of grass for some shade. At the microphones, Truth Squad was almost totally set up. Don had told us over dinner a few days earlier that he’d hired them to play an hour-long set of nothing but car-related songs to really push the idea of fun, freewheeling summer driving.

“Okay, so I’ve got some prospects for us,” Chloe said as Truth Squad launched into “Baby You Can Drive My Car.”

“Prospects?”

She nodded. “College guys.”

“Hmm,” I said, fanning myself with one hand.

“His name is Matt,” she continued, “and he’s a junior. Cute, tall. He wants to be a doctor.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s too hot to date.”

She looked at me. “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“You,” she said, “are so not one of us anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

She crossed her legs at the ankles, kicking off her shoes, and leaned back on her palms. “You say that you’re single and ready to be out there with us again.”

“I am.”

“But,” she went on, “every time I’ve tried to set you up or introduce you to anyone, you beg off.”

“It was just the one time,” I told her, “and that was because I’m not into skaters.”

“It was twice,” she corrected me, “and the second time he was totally cute and tall, just the way you like them, so don’t give me that crap. We both know what the problem is.”

“Oh, we do? And what is that?”

She turned her head and nodded toward where Truth Squad was in full swing, while two little kids in KaBoom T-shirts were dancing, jumping around. “Your ‘friend’ over there.”

“Stop,” I said, waving this off as ridiculous, which it was.

“You still see him,” she said, holding up a finger, counting this off.

“We work two feet from each other, Chloe.”

“You’re talking to him,” she said, holding up another finger. “I bet you even have driven past his house when it wasn’t even on your way home.”

That I wasn’t even going to honor with a response. God.

For a minute or two we just sat there, as Truth Squad played a rousing medley of “Cars,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Born to Be Wild.” There were only a certain number of songs related to automobiles, but already they seemed to be grasping a bit.

“So, fine,” I said finally. “Tell me about these guys.”

She cocked her head to the side, suspicious. “Don’t do me any favors,” she said. “If you’re not ready to be out there, it’ll show. We both know that. It’s not even worth the trouble.”

“Just tell me,” I said.

“Okay. They’re all going to be sophomores, and…”

She kept talking, and I half listened, noticing at the same time that Truth Squad was stretching the theme considerably as they started playing “Dead Man’s Curve,” not exactly the kind of song that fired anyone up to plunk down five figures on a shiny new car. Don picked up on this too, glaring at Dexter until the song was cut short, just as the curve was about to get really deadly: instead, they segued, a bit clumsily, into “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”

I could see Dexter rolling his eyes, between verses, back at John Miller, and felt that twinge again, then quickly shook it off, not wanting to risk another set of told-you-so’s from Chloe. It was time to get back on that horse, before I’d done permanent damage to my reputation.

“… so we set it up for tonight, seven o’clock. We’re all meeting at Rigoberto’s for dinner. It’s free breadstick night.”

“Okay,” I said. “Count me in.”

The thing about Out There that you always forget is how, at times, it can really suck.

This is what I was thinking that night around eight-thirty, as I sat at a table at Rigoberto’s, chewing on a stale breadstick and wishing my date, Evan, a chunky guy with tangled shoulder-length hair that desperately needed washing, would shut his mouth when he chewed.

“Tell me again,” I said under my breath to Chloe, who was already cuddled up close with her date, the only good-looking one in the bunch, “where you found these guys?”

“The Wal-Mart,” she said. “They were buying trash bags, and so was I. Can you believe it?”

I could. But this was because Evan had already told me that the day they’d met Chloe they had been on their way to pick up litter. Their fantasy game club had adopted a stretch of highway and spent one Saturday a month cleaning it up. The rest of their time, apparently, was spent drawing up sketches of their game “alter egos” and combating strange trolls and demons by rolling dice in somebody’s basement. In just an hour, I’d already learned more about Orcs, Klingons, and some master race invented by Evan himself called the Triciptiors than I ever cared to know.

Chloe’s date, Ben, was cute. It was clear, however, that she had not taken the trouble to look past him when making these plans: Evan was, well, Evan, and the twins David and Darrin both were sporting Star Wars T-shirts and had spent the entire dinner so far ignoring Lissa and Jess completely while discussing Japanese animation. Jess was shooting Chloe death looks, while Lissa just smiled politely thinking, I knew, about her KaBoom coworker, P.J., and the crush she had on him that she thought wasn’t obvious. This, basically, was Out There, and I realized in the last four weeks I’d not missed it one bit.

After dinner the brothers Darrin and David headed home with Evan in tow, clearly as smitten with us as we had been with them. Jess begged off by saying she had to put her little brothers to bed, and Chloe and Ben stayed at the table, feeding each other tiramisu, leaving just me and Lissa.