If You Loved Me Read online

What else? I have a highly developed sense of smell, which isn’t always a good thing. Like once my gramma had this guy, Lloyd, who was sort of in love with her, but he was always letting little silent, sneaky farts. He thought no one knew, but I could smell him clear in the next room. I told my gram about it, and then it got so every time I caught his scent I’d get the giggles. Which would get Grams started. Poor Lloyd. He didn’t last long at our house. He ended up marrying some woman he met in a bar. She was a chain-smoker, which was probably to Lloyd’s advantage because she’d smoked away her sense of smell. But I suppose knowing about Lloyd is sort of like knowing about having mumps in the third grade—not too important.

  Here’s another thing that’s way important, though, because it made me think seriously about my life. You don’t know me unless you know my gram and I discovered a newborn baby, about two hours old, under a bush, up in the foothills. That totally changed the way I thought about certain things.

  The timer goes off and it’s as if I’m roused from a deep dream. At first I can’t get my mind off that baby, all sticky and covered with dirt, a long, bloody cord, thick as a rope, still attached to its belly.

  “What’s something we can’t know you without, Zack?” Harper asks.

  “You can’t know me without you know I have the mind of Einstein and the body of Hercules.”

  “Mmmmmm,” Harper says, looking unimpressed.

  “Conrad?”

  “I have six older brothers.”

  “Yes . . .I can see that such a family dynamic would definitely be a major factor in one’s life,” Harper says.

  “Lauren?”

  I glance at the spokes of my circle. I’m embarrassed to talk about how much I love Tyler. And the business with my mother, the dead druggie? That’s kind of private. My good friends know, like Tyler and Amber, but it’s not exactly the kind of thing I want to announce to a whole classroom. And everybody knows about the baby discovery ’cause it was front page news in the Hamilton Daily Times for weeks.

  My face is growing hotter and hotter as everyone sits waiting for me to answer Mr. Harper’s question. I scan my paper one more time.

  “I’m a Virgo?” I manage to squeak out.

  Everyone laughs, or groans, except Kelsey.

  “Wow! Really? Me, too,” she says, as if she’s gained new respect for me.

  “Okay, okay,” Harper says. “Remember how when you were first learning to swim, it was terribly frightening to put your face in the water? And then to float like that? Head submerged? That’s how this topic is. It takes courage to go below the surface, but you can’t get anywhere without doing it.”

  Chapter

  2

  Hanging around talking with Tyler after creative writing doesn’t make for getting to first period on time. I rush through the door to peer communications just as the tardy bell rings. Ms. Woods glances at me but doesn’t say anything.

  Zero period and first I’ve got the two best classes and the two coolest teachers at Hamilton High. After first period? Things get pretty blah.

  I take my seat behind Amber, who waves her hand back at me without turning around. I reach out, stick my hand in front of her face and wave back. She turns and smiles.

  Amber is my best friend in the whole world, except for Tyler. They’re different friendships, though. I mean, Amber’s the kind of friend who I couldn’t care less how I look when I see her, and I can say whatever I want without worrying that she’ll think I’m stupid.

  When we were nine years old, we decided to become blood sisters. I think we’d seen it in some old movie, maybe “Stand By Me,” where these kids, boys, decide to be blood brothers. Anyway, one day when Amber was at my house, we got into Grams’ first-aid drawer and found the needle she always used to get splinters out with. Grams was out pruning roses, or planting flowers, or some garden kind of thing, and we knew she’d be outside for a long time.

  We took the book of matches from the drawer and I lit a match and held it to the needle’s end to sterilize it, the way I’d seen Grams do. My hand was all shaky because I knew Grams would go ballistic if she found me with a lit match. After just a few seconds I blew out the match and waited until it was cool enough to touch, then dropped it into the wastebasket. Then we took the needle into the kitchen and sat close to each other at the kitchen table. I sat holding the needle, staring at it.

  Finally, Amber, who’s the bravest about seeing blood, took the needle from me and started poking herself on the tender inside of her left wrist, until little drops of blood surfaced. Then she handed me the needle.

  “Hurry up, before I stop bleeding,” she’d said.

  I took the needle and scratched gently at my wrist. Nothing happened.

  “Harder!” she said, squeezing her wrist, getting a tiny bit more blood up. “Hurry!”

  I stuck myself harder and I must have hit a vein or something because blood started oozing out. The sight of it made me feel sick. But Amber quick put her wrist over mine and we said the words we’d already memorized.

  “On my honor, I promise to always be there for you, for better or worse, and to always be honest and true. And the more we get together, the happier we’ll be.”

  Looking back, I can see that our blood sister promise was kind of a combination between the Brownie pledge and mar­riage vows, but it meant a lot to us then and it still does.

  After our ritual, we went to the bathroom and found band-aids. My wrist was still bleeding but Amber assured me it was nothing. She put a band-aid on tight and made me promise not to look for two days.

  “Okay, Sister Blondie,” I told her.

  “Okay, Sister Kinky,” she said.

  Those were our secret names for each other, chosen because of our hair. But we never used the whole names in front of anyone else. Amber was S.B. and I was S.K. Which was fine, until one day Amber’s mom heard me call her S.B. and thought I’d said S.O.B., which meant we couldn’t play together for a month.

  “Lauren? Are you with us?” Ms. Woods—Woodsie—asks.

  “Now I am,” I say, wondering if this is the first time she’s said my name. Sometimes I get totally lost in a daydream or a memory, like just now, when I was thinking about the old days with Amber. Usually I don’t daydream in peer communications though, because it’s almost always interesting. I sit up straight, ready to pay attention.

  “Okay. Let’s do a little brainstorming here,” Woodsie says. “For the next several weeks, we’ll be exploring current issues that affect us all. We’ll bring in guest speakers, you’ll do projects, we’ll develop useful lists of resources such as counsel­ing services and hot lines . . . Now, what issues face you, as young people, and all of us, as a society?”

  Woodsie waits at the chalkboard, chalk in hand, ready to start writing.

  Silence.

  “Come on, now. I know it’s early. Even so, I’ll bet you’re aware of at least one issue that needs work. Scott?”

  If I were a teacher, which I plan never to be, I’d call on Scott, too. He always has an answer.

  “AIDS,” he says.

  Woodsie writes AIDS on the board.

  “Asshole cops,” Mark, a skater, calls from the back of the room.

  Woodsie stands with chalk poised, not writing.

  “Mark, might you think of a way to rephrase that so if my uncle, who’s a police officer, happens to visit, he won’t be insulted by a stereotype?”

  “That’s what they are!” Mark says.

  “How about police brutality?” Amber says.

  That’s something I forgot to say about Amber earlier. She hates conflict, so she’s always trying to get people to agree.

  Woodsie writes “police brutality” on the board.

  “Whatever,” Mark says.

  Finally, the class gets warmed up and people are shouting out topics faster than Woodsie can write. Teen pregnancy; drunk driving; gangs; homelessness; gay rights; school violence; Dr. Kevorkian; kids who do drugs . . .

  “Parents who do dr
ugs,” Shawna calls out from behind her hair.

  We end up with a list of more than twenty issues.

  “Mark, could you copy these topics from the board for me? Then we can get duplicates made for everyone.”

  Mark gives Woodsie a look that indicates he’d rather eat kitty litter, but he takes out a sheet of paper and starts writing. Woodsie kills me, the way she gets everyone involved. Mark’s already been kicked out of the math class for defiance of authority, but here Woodsie’s got him doing a teacher’s pet kind of thing.

  When Mark’s finished with the paper, Woodsie brings it to me and says, “Would you take this to the office and get thirty copies, please, Amber?”

  Amber and I both look at her a bit strangely. Woodsie slaps her forehead with the palm of her hand.

  “Oh, no! I’ve done it again!” she says, with an embarrassed laugh.

  Amber and I laugh, too, then I take the paper and go to the office where the line for the copier is about a mile long.

  The funny thing is, a lot of people get me and Amber mixed up. It’s not unusual for someone I don’t know very well to call me Amber. And people sometimes call her Lauren. That is so weird. Because I’ve got my black dad’s dark, curly hair, dark eyes, and full lips (which I like). And Amber has straight blond hair, and blue eyes, and really thin lips (which she hates). We both have dimples in our chins. That’s about it. Well, I guess we have similar tastes. We trade clothes back and forth, but still, no way do we look alike.

  Tyler says people get us mixed up because we’re always together and we have a lot of the same mannerisms. Amber pulls at her hair when she’s thinking, and so do I. And we both put our hands on our hips when we’re irritated. I never even knew that. Tyler pointed it out to me one day, when I was complaining about how the substitute volleyball coach had called me Amber.

  I get back to class with copies of the list just as the passing bell rings.

  “Thank you, LAUREN,” Ms. Woods says with a smile.

  Turning toward Amber she says, “See you tomorrow, AM­BER.”

  We both laugh.

  On our way to English, I ask Amber why she’d missed volleyball practice yesterday.

  “Coach Terry practically had a seizure about how one person missing a practice lets the whole team down. Really, I thought I was going to have to hold her down and use a tongue depressor.”

  Amber laughs, but not like her heart’s in it.

  “I couldn’t go,” Amber says.

  “She was mad at me because I’m your friend. Like it was my fault you weren’t there and why couldn’t I just magically produce you.”

  “Sorry,” Amber says.

  “Why weren’t you there? We do need you.”

  “I know. It’s just . . .”

  I keep waiting for her to finish the sentence, but she turns away from me and I realize she’s about to cry.

  “Hey. Amber? What’s wrong? It’s not that big a deal—just one practice,” I say.

  “It’s not that.”

  “Well, what then?”

  She’s got big tears gathering in her eyes and I know things are serious because Amber never cries. I was with her when she fell off the play structure and broke her arm, back in the fifth grade. She didn’t even cry then—she just gritted her teeth until the nurse came, and then she said, all calm, “This hurts bad.”

  “C’mon,” I tell her. “I’ll buy you a cinnamon bun.”

  She nods and we walk away. Hamilton High is supposed to be a tightly closed campus, but there’s this one wimpy security guy, Homer, who guards the back gate and who takes any excuse from any girl.

  “My friend has terrible cramps,” I tell him, and he opens the gate.

  We walk the three blocks to Carole’s Coffee Shoppe without talking. I know from our years of friendship that Amber will tell me what’s bothering her, but I can’t be pushy about it. I order two small cappuccinos and a huge cinnamon bun and take them to the table where Amber sits staring out the window.

  “We shouldn’t be cutting class,” she says. “I’ll be grounded for months if my mom finds out.”

  “I know,” I say, thinking about how Mr. Snyder is already mad at me because I hadn’t finished the Jane Eyre reading assignment for Friday.

  “I never thought anything like this would happen to me,” Amber says.

  “Like what?”

  “This herpes stuff.”

  “I thought it was gone. That was months ago, wasn’t it?”

  She nods her head. The tears are flowing full on now.

  “It doesn’t really ever go away. It just hides out for a while. And then, when you think everything’s okay, it comes back.”

  “But, you haven’t done anything . . . been with anyone . . .?”

  “See, that’s the thing,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I can be celibate for the rest of my life, and I’ll still have herpes.”

  She wipes at her nose now, too. I go to the counter, pick up a handful of extra napkins, and give one to her.

  “Yesterday, in sixth period, I started feeling this tingling ache in my . . . you know, down there,” she says, kind of half-nodding downward. “And my butt felt fiery and my legs hurt. I knew I had to get home, into a hot, baking soda bath. But God, why me? I only had sex once, and with a clean guy, too. At least, I thought he was a clean guy. And now I ’ve got this herpes curse for the rest of my whole life. I should have stayed a virgin. Like you.”

  Amber wipes her nose and eyes again, still crying. Blake comes in, as usual at this time of day. He says it’s against his principles to attend P.E. classes. Noticing us, Blake starts over to our table. Then he gets a good look at Amber and goes back to his usual spot at the counter, where he sits watching the street, jotting notes in his journal—observations of life, he says, whenever anyone asks.

  I turn my attention back to Amber.

  “They’ll probably find a cure for herpes pretty soon,” I say.

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  Amber’s tone is so angry, I don’t know whether to stay or go. I sit rearranging the little packets of fake sugar in their green glass container. After a while, sort of a long while, really, Amber tells me she’s sorry.

  “It all seems so unfair to me. I’ve got this stuff for life, and it can just flare up whenever it wants to. Like right now, no way can I play volleyball until it’s under control again.”

  “I don’t get what it’s got to do with volleyball,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to go into a lot of nasty detail about oozing sores in private places, but trust me, it’s gross. It hurts to pee and I have to keep putting on this ointment stuff. And my mom wants to know why I’m taking five baths a day. Can you imagine me telling my Sunday School teacher mom, ‘Oh, I bathe a lot because it soothes my STD?’”

  Amber shakes her head and starts crying again.

  “Didn’t they tell you the outbreaks are usually less frequent after the first year?”

  “Yeah, but you know what? I’ll always have it, whether it’s acting up or not. And if I have a baby, it could be blind, or retarded, because of herpes.”

  With this Amber puts her head down on the table and lets out huge, heaving sobs. A few people look at us, then glance away. I catch Blake looking at us once, but then he quick looks back down at his notebook. He better not be writing about us!

  I pull my chair around the table, close to Amber, and rub her back. I don’t know what else to do.

  It was stupid of me to tell her maybe there’d soon be a cure. She’s got to deal with how things are now, and with how there may never be a real cure. I feel so sorry for her I get all teary eyed. I don’t think she deserves this. It’s not like she’s some sex-crazed slut.

  Amber raises her head. She wipes her eyes and nose with the last of the napkins. Her eyes are red and swollen.

  “Thanks, S.K.” she says, giving me a weak smile.

  “For what?”

  “You know. For listening. For not walking out on me whe
n I said you were stupid. For caring enough to cut class.”

  “You’d do the same for me, S.B. That’s what I know.”

  I guess it’s kind of silly, high school seniors calling each other by secret initials. But it’s what we’ve been doing since we were nine, and it reminds us of how we’re always there for one another. When we’re thirty, I think we’ll still be S.K. and S.B. to each other. I hope so, anyway.

  Chapter

  3

  “Keep the pressure on! Don’t let up!” Coach Terry yells from just outside the volleyball court where she paces back and forth, five feet one way, five feet back.

  “If we’re going to beat Hacienda Hills we’ve got to stay aggressive. Everyone! Pretend you’re Lauren!” she yells.

  “You never let up,” she told me once. “I wish all of my players had your heart.”

  Coach Terry doesn’t know where I get my power, though. It’s not heart. It’s the power of anger. The volleyball is my mother—every time she comes close to me I jam her over the net. Hard. Spike her down to the ground. Hard. Serve her at top speed. Hard. For what she did to me. For what she didn’t do for me. For loving drugs instead of loving me. For the hurt and rejection I still feel, no matter how far down I bury it. When she comes flying high overhead, I leap upward, arms stretched long, fists closed. POW! She’s down. Bystanders cheer.

  “Amazing strength,” some say. “Great control of the ball.” But it’s not the ball I’m controlling. It’s my druggie mother.

  I don’t tell anyone where I get my power. It sounds too crazy.

  But I know where it comes from and I use it whenever I step onto the court. When I step off the court, I leave it behind, except for those times I get thinking about things. Like in today’s writing assignment.

  After volleyball practice I shower away the sweat and grime and anger. Then I drive to Greener Nursery and Fountains where Tyler works, and sit in the car, waiting for him to come out. Everyone who works here wears red and white checked shirts and bib overalls, like they’re supposed to be farmers. Too much! But Tyler likes working here because he loves plants and gardens. He plans to be a landscape architect, and he’s learning a lot from Mr. Schaefer.