It took a long time to fall asleep in my empty, echoey room, and I even considered calling Jake back, but squashed the thought before it could really take root. My own company was never that intolerable.
Chapter 6
The next day dawned brighter than I expected, and Mom and Thorsten already had my window cranked open and primer rolling before I rolled off my mattress. I put on old clothes and pulled my hair up in a messy ponytail, then got to work.
Mom and I had picked a robin’s egg blue for the accent wall behind my new bed, which was a dark wood frame with a high headboard that had a deep shelf on the top. The bedclothes had bright red poppies on a cream background with brown accents and pillows. The other three walls were painted a caramel-type color. There was a large blue and brown rug with swirling flowers. I had a new desk with a roll top and a set of hung shelves with glass doors. There was also a tall bookshelf with glass doors on it and shelves underneath. We fitted a new organizing system into my closet and moved all of my new clothes into it. The old clothes that had clogged up my closet got put in a pile for Goodwill. Thorsten hooked up a cream colored chandelier that hung with long swaths of red crystals. I put together several paper lamps, a few oblong and a few spheres, and hung them from the ceiling, where they shined light on the floor and cast a soft glow. We hung the paintings: Cassatt’s Girl in the Blue Armchair and Chagall’s Wedding Portrait. Mom helped me pick the prints based on color and what I liked. We hung a bamboo shade and curtains with huge red and cream flowers.
By early evening we were finally finished and just stood in the middle of it.
“Thank you, Mom.” I laid the hugs on thick. “Thank you, Fa.”
“Let’s take a picture!” Mom grabbed her camera and analyzed angles. We snapped a few shots, and I asked if I could borrow the camera. “Sure honey. What for?”
“I told some of the people at school that we were doing this, and they were curious about what it would look like. I just wanted to post them.” I flipped through the shots on the screen.
“Is that safe, all that picture posting?” She had a mom’s neurosis about the internet, basically seeing it as a huge pool where pedophiles swam and lured unsuspecting children in their little floaties to the scary deep end.
“It’s just pictures of the room, Mom.” I tried to sound comforting. “I would never give out my address or anything.”
“Okay.” She looked a little guilty. “Honey, Thorsten and I were thinking of going on a date tonight. Would it be too weird to leave you to hang here?”
“No! I just got those new books I ordered and look at this room.” I gestured around. “Go out. Have fun. It will be totally fine. And, remember tomorrow is a day off, so you can stay out late.”
Thorsten smiled and gave me the thumbs up behind Mom’s back. I gave him a conspirator’s thumbs up back. She was a worrier, and we both loved her for it, but it made life hard to live sometimes. Poor Thorsten! Mom still acted like I was in elementary school. The man could hardly get a date.
I sat in my room and uploaded pictures to Facebook. There was nothing interesting going on online, so I clicked my laptop off and grabbed a new book. A big, thick Barbara Kingsolver was waiting for me. I promised myself I would reread the assigned Lord of the Flies chapters in a few hours. Monday morning at the latest.
Mom ordered me a pizza and fretted over me before she and Thorsten left, but they finally did go, and I was happy to watch them pull out of the driveway. They were good together; loving, respectful, kind. It gave me hope that people could get married and still be in love years later.
I turned my mind off of love! I didn’t want to think about any of it. The conversation I had with Jake the night before left me feeling dizzy, but I couldn’t think about it too much or my mind would go crazy obsessing. I lay in my room, and the delicious new décor made it feel so much more my own. I got completely dragged into Kingsolver’s world when I heard the whine of an engine outside my window. It sounded almost like a weed whacker, but those weren’t exactly used much in New Jersey in the autumn.
For a split second I experienced the kind of panic that comes from being a gullible weenie about horror movies. I’ve told myself a thousand times that the point of a horror movie is to try to scare the person watching it, I’ve watched the behind the scenes stuff and read interviews the (living) actors gave about their gory onscreen death scenes, but they still scared the crap out of me and there was no getting around that.
So for a long, cringe-worthy minute, I was sure the whine I heard was a chainsaw and a thousand blood-splattered images blew through my mind.
Then I saw a dirt bike. It sailed out of the woods behind my house and landed neatly in my back yard. The driver parked under my window and pulled his helmet off.
Jake!
I opened the window and stuck my head out. My bedroom was on the first floor, but the bottom sill was still a good five feet off of the ground.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped. “You didn’t ride your dirt bike all the way here from the lake, did you?”
He smiled at me, and my heart melted into a puddle inside my chest. I loved his sweet smile, his never-neat hair, and the rough skin on his hands. I wasn’t going to go so far as to say I loved Jake, but put together everything about him that I loved and you got a pretty intense emotion.
“I finished work and thought I’d come over. I don’t want to bother you. Or your parents.” He looked from side to side, and chewed the inside of his cheek, obviously nervous to get caught here.
“My parents aren’t home.” I realized once the words fell from my mouth that they were pretty much the standard ‘come in and have your way with me’ words in the realm of teenage romance, but I didn’t mean them that way.
Something flashed in Jake’s eyes, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“I just wanted to say hello.” He offered me his crooked smile.
“Wait here.” I moved through the house, my heart thudding like mad, positive my mother and Thorsten would absolutely in no way approve of this, and I promised myself that I would make sure Jake only stayed for a little while. I opened the front door and waved him in.
He stood in the front hall and looked around. “Nice house.” His eyes took it all in slowly.
While he looked around, I took the opportunity to look at him. I appreciated the way I could see his muscles under his clothes. I noticed he had kicked the dirt off of his boots before he came in, and I could also tell from the way he shuffled his feet nervously that he wanted me to ask him to take them off so he didn’t have to track mud through my house, but I didn’t. Just in case Mom and Thorsten came home early, Jake was going out my window, no questions asked, no booted evidence remaining.