The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [34]
“You liked it too.” She looks up at me, smiling. “I have a picture of you eating it. You’re covered in tomato sauce.”
I should stop asking questions before she gets upset, but I want to know more—even just a little, but more. “If I was covered in tomato sauce, I must have been pretty young in the picture, right?”
“Yes. I guess so.”
“So it was when Dad was still alive?” I press.
“I don’t remember,” she says, and she’s looking at her plate again, not at me.
“I think,” I say carefully, “that you must have stopped cooking after he died. Maybe you just forgot.”
“Maybe,” she answers, still not looking at me. When she speaks again, she changes the subject. She looks straight at me and her face is bright: “Will Jeremy be coming over tonight?”
“I don’t know.” I suspect it’s the doormen who’ve been telling her that it’s him—otherwise, how would she know? It could be anyone, for all she knows.
“Well, you can invite him up. We have a terrace, you know.”
I shrug.
I find it surprising that she’s acknowledging that we’re smoking—the doormen, I guess again—but doesn’t seem to mind it. I suppose that the fact that Jeremy is a Cole makes up for his smoking. I wouldn’t want Jeremy coming up. Jeremy and I smoke downstairs. But my mother doesn’t need to know that I feel that way, especially since I can’t explain it. He’s been up to study often enough. But the smoking, my coming downstairs, all of that—it’s our ritual. Or maybe there’s something about having him come up when I’m in my pajamas, ready for bed, that makes me nervous.
We’ve finished eating. I ask for the check, hoping to speed up our exit; to get back to my room, where Mom usually doesn’t bother me. I don’t want to talk about Jeremy. I don’t want to tell her about our friendship, about Kate’s illness, about what I’ve found out about my father. If it’s okay for her to keep something like that a secret from me, then I suppose I’ve earned the right to keep pretty much anything secret from her.
My mother and I never fight. I can’t remember any major fights or childhood temper tantrums. She never assigned me a curfew and I never came home late until the other night, after Brent’s party, and then she didn’t ask where I’d been. We get along fine this way.
13
“What’s your middle name, Connelly?” Jeremy asks me later, when we’re smoking. He hasn’t explained why he wasn’t in school today, and I don’t ask.
“My middle name?”
“Yeah. In the handbook, it just says Connelly J. Sternin.”
“What’s your middle name?”
“I asked you first.”
“I asked you second.”
“Staddler.”
“Jeremy Staddler Cole?”
“Yeah. My mom’s maiden name.”
“Mine’s Jane.”
“We have the same initials,” Jeremy says, exhaling smoke.
“CJS.”
“JSC.”
“That sounds like the name of a college.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, like … Junior Southern College.”
“Doesn’t sound like it’s a particularly good school.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Yeah, it’s where the students who got rejected everywhere else end up.”
Jeremy puts on a fake newscaster voice. “Yes, at JSC we say YES to YOU.”
I giggle.
“You know, it’s funny, I keep thinking about applying to school next year,” he says.
“Well, we know you’ll get into JSC.”
He smiles. “At least I have my safety all set.” He lights a second cigarette, but doesn’t offer me one because he knows by now that I only smoke one, and more to keep him company than for anything else. “I just mean … I keep thinking about applying. I’m not worried about where I’ll go and things, but I just keep thinking about doing the applications.”
Well, of course Jeremy isn’t worried about where he’ll go. Royalty is very well connected. He’ll get in wherever he wants.
“I keep thinking about it because everyone around me is worried about it, studying hard for the SATs, going on college visits, calling in favors, all of that. So here’s this thing that’s still a year away and everyone is thinking about it and so am I, even though it’s a year away and I don’t want to think that far ahead. But I can’t stop.”
I wonder for a minute why he’s trying to stop himself from thinking so far ahead. I figure it out just