Meeting Mary Jane Read online

  MEETING MARY JANE

  Part One

  By Amy Sparling

  Copyright © 2014 by Amy Sparling

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Image from BigStockPhoto.com

  Cover fonts from fontsquirrel.com

  First Edition March 10, 2014

  Also by Amy Sparling:

  The Summer Unplugged Series:

  Summer Unplugged

  Autumn Unlocked

  Winter Untold

  Spring Unleashed

  Deadbeat

  Phantom Summer

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 1

  Ben isn’t home. The taxi driver hesitates by the curb, perhaps not wanting to leave me at this huge house with overgrown grass and a driveway full of old newspapers and no cars. For a guy who drives a taxi with postcards of nude women taped to the dashboard, he seems unnaturally concerned about my well-being. I hand him all of my cash, grab my backpack and scurry up to the front door before he can say anything. My pink polka dot key still unlocks the door, so even though no one is home, at least I’m at the right place.

  The stale stench of an empty house fills my lungs. Dad’s business trips keep getting longer. Sometimes I wonder if he still has a job or if he secretly won the lottery and spends all his time traveling for pleasure instead of business. It’s feasible; he’s always loved traveling. But this craphole of a house debunks that theory. Wherever Dad is doesn’t matter right now—I had stormed out of Mom’s house and paid a creepy taxi driver the last twenty bucks I had so I could see my big brother.

  And he isn’t even here. Great.

  I leave the lights off as I feel my way to the stairs and go up to what used to be my room when we all lived here as a functioning family unit. Over the years, Dad started storing random stuff in my room when he had no other place for it. Now my childhood haven is a storage area of boxes, stacks of Playboy magazines, a leather recliner and two old televisions. Funny how when I lived here all I wanted was my own TV. Now Dad has two of them that are wasting space in the forgotten bedroom of the daughter he used to care about.

  I slide stuff out of my way to get to my twin sized bed that has been shoved into the far corner. Sitting on my princess comforter, I look around at the chaos that has taken over my room. There isn’t even space to put my backpack on the floor. This won’t do at all.

  Down the hall, Ben’s room brings a smile to my face. I’ve missed him like crazy in the last two months. We haven’t even seen each other since he announced to Mom and me after his graduation that he was moving in with Dad.

  His room smells like a mixture of his cologne and the pine air freshener hanging from his door knob. In typical Ben style, it’s messy with clothes all over the floor, an unmade bed and a plate on the nightstand with an old pizza crust on it. Ew.

  I toss my backpack on the floor by his bed and take the plate down to the kitchen, flipping on lights as I go. The house is creepy when no one is in here. A fine layer of dust coats the kitchen counters, and again, I think of Dad as a secret millionaire. No, he just doesn’t like being at home. If he secretly had tons of money he would have hired a maid by now.

  Ben will probably come home in the middle of the night after some awesome party like every other eighteen year old with no curfew. I don’t want him to freak out when he finds someone in his bed so I tape a note to the light switch by the stairs. I leave the light on so he’ll be sure to see it.

  Ben, I’m sleeping in your bed tonight so don’t stab me or anything.

  PS- Don’t get your hopes up. It’s Lexie, not some hooker.

  Sprinkles, my fat annoying cat doesn’t wake me up in the morning. I lie in bed with my eyes closed, enjoying the half-asleep, half-awake stupor for as long as possible before I have to open my eyes. Any second now, Sprinkles will leap onto my bed, walk up to my face and purr loudly, begging me to get up and feed him. Why isn’t he here yet? Is he dead?

  Panicked, my eyes fly open and focus on a black ceiling. Reality comes back to me. Sprinkles isn’t here, he’s at home. Mom’s home. And I’m not at home because I had an argument with her. It seems stupid now, fighting over a cell phone. But it would have been so cheap for her to add me to her plan and let me become a normal phone-using teenager like everyone else I know.

  But Mom’s “get a job” antics aren’t the only reason I bolted last night. I had to get out of that house. The house that Ben no longer lived in. The house with the white wrap around porch that Daniel had stood on when he broke up with me.

  Mom is a huge part of the problem too. The only thing she cares about anymore is her stupid computer games. Shortly after the divorce, Mom got shot in the knee by a guy who robbed the bank where she worked. It’s not really as dramatic as it sounds. But she walks with a cane now and she can’t work because of the pain, so she stays at home and plays computer games. I kind of hate her for it. She wasn’t there for me two weeks ago when I cried myself to sleep every night. She probably didn’t even remember that I had a boyfriend at all.

  Mom never does mom-like things with me. And ever since Ben moved out two months ago, things got really bad. I wasn’t allowed to stay out past eight. I couldn’t get a phone unless I got a job. It’s like she unleashed all her wrath on me, not Ben. So that’s mostly why I ran away.

  I was in such a state of sheer anger last night that I had shoved random clothes in my backpack and stomped through the house to where she sat at the computer. “Ben will get me a phone,” I said.

  Mom threw one hand in the air. The other tapped the space bar repeatedly. “Fine. Big brother to the rescue again. What are you going to do when he’s no longer there to bail you out?”

  “Ben will always be there for me,” I said through clenched teeth. No one insults my brother. “He’s never let me down, unlike you and Dad who make it your hobby.”

  Mom flinched but her eyes never left her nineteen inch flat panel monitor. She said two words to me before I slammed the door. “Get out.”

  I crawl out of bed and run through the hall to the stairs. Ben probably slept on the couch last night after he read my note. Ben is just that great of a brother. He’d sleep naked in the cold rain if it meant I had clothes and a warm place to sleep. He will totally put me on his cell phone plan too. I stop short at the stairs. The light is still on. He must have been really drunk when he got home.

  As I descend the stairs, I see my note still taped by the light switch. Slowly, I step down each carpeted stair, listening for the TV or snoring, or some kind of sign that Ben is here. The couch is empty. The kitchen is empty. The answering machine has zero new messages.

  Where is my brother?

  Chapter 2

  The kitchen phone is so old it’s still connected with a curly cord. Talk about dinosaur age. My best friend picks up her phone after one half of one ring. “Hello?” Her voice is desperate. She’s probably mad that I never called her last night. She was supposed to come over and watch the new episode of our favorite reality show in her plan to rehab me out of my bad breakup, but fighting with Mom had put a stop to those plans.

  “Hey Jill, it’s me.” I write my name in the dust on the dining table.

  “Lexie! God, what happened to you?”

  “Nothing, I was just-”

  “It has to be more than nothing,” she says. Pop music plays in the background. “When I ca
lled you last night, your mom yelled at me and said not to call back for a week.”

  “Wow, I didn’t know she was so pissed.”

  “I’ve never heard your mom yell. Like, not ever.” That’s because Mom never leaves the computer long enough to actually talk to, or even acknowledge Jill.

  “Eh, she’s having a hard time with her knee,” I say, looking around the empty house I used to live in. Mom was happier here. Everyone was.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened? Why can’t I call you for a week? Are you grounded?”

  “It’s nothing like that. I’m at Dad’s house.” I hear a car rumble down the street and I look out the window, hoping it’s Ben. A blue Dodge drives past the house and turns into a neighboring driveway. I press the phone into my ear, wishing the bad feelings about Ben would go away. “Can you come over?”

  When Jill walks into Dad’s house forty-five minutes later, her face fills with the same bittersweet nostalgia I had felt last night. We’ve known this house since we were five years old. She used to say that it smelled like cinnamon every time she walked through the front door. Today, not so much. We both haven’t been here in over a year. The place looks exactly the same except for a huge new TV and that awful stale stench.

  I try not to look at the dry erase board calendar in the kitchen, although I often catch myself sneaking glimpses of it. It still has Mom’s handwriting all over it, and a doctor’s appointment from four years ago written on the thirteenth.

  There’s nothing but soda, beer and lunch meat in the fridge. Jill and I grab a soda and sit on the couch in front of the only good thing in Dad’s house—a huge flat screen TV. We let reruns of The Simpsons play in the background while I tell her all about the fight I had with Mom. She also thinks I was stupid for storming out of the house because of a cell phone.

  “It was just wrong of her to say I could get a phone when I turned sixteen and then back out of it,” I say, feeling the anger rise up in me again. I mean, geez, every single sophomore at my school has a cell phone except for me. Even the poor kids.

  “Cell phones aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” Jill says with a sympathetic smile. Then she checks a new text message on her own phone. Ugh.

  “Is your dad even home?” she asks, typing out a reply. She pops open her soda with her fake hot pink and sparkly finger nail and it makes me cringe because I can’t stand the sound of nail on metal.

  Staring at my own grisly unpolished nails, I say, “I guess not. I haven’t seen him. Must be a business trip or something.” As if on the same wavelength, Jill and I look around the room together, taking in the sight of a house that has all the pieces of what a home should be but still manages to look abandoned.

  “Where’s Ben?” she asks, sounding a little too concerned. To cover it up, she takes a huge gulp of her drink and pretends to be really interested in the commercial about car insurance. She can act as casual as she wants, but I’m not buying it. Jill has a bigger crush on my brother than all the cheerleaders who fawned over him in his senior year.

  “I don’t know.” I stare at my fingers. Jill nudges me with her can. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but he didn’t come home last night so I’m worried.” It sounds dumb when I say it aloud, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.

  “Dude, chill out.” She laughs. “He’s college bound now. He probably has tons of parties to go to.” As an afterthought, she adds, “And he’s so hot. I bet he spent the night with a supermodel or something.” She’s in her own little world now, staring dreamily out the window. “I wish I wasn’t so fat.”

  “You’re not fat,” I say, throwing a pillow at her. She may be a tiny bit—overweight, but she’s not fat. It’s not even though for me to notice. When you’ve been best friends with someone for eleven years, you don’t notice their flaws. I would notice it even less if she didn’t point out how ugly/gross/fat she thinks she is on a daily basis.

  We watch a few more shows and I listen to Jill’s stories about how she and Jordan have moved from just hooking up to actually kind of dating like a real couple. Her having a boyfriend will cause catastrophic damage to my very tiny social life, but I’m happy for her anyway. The girl craves attention and is a total drag to be around when she isn’t getting any. Which is just about all the time.

  Just after dark, I think I hear a car door shut in the driveway. My chest goes cold with anticipation. Jill wiggles her eyebrows at me. Even with the metal sound of a key sliding into the deadbolt and twisting, I still can’t help but think that maybe this isn’t Ben. Maybe it’s a robber, or someone at the wrong house. My hand tightens around the remote control as I hear the front door swing open. Ben’s head pokes around the corner, cautiously, his eyebrows crunched together. When he sees me, he relaxes. “Honey, I’m home!”

  All the worries I had about him being in a fiery car wreck or dead from alcohol poisoning vanishes. Ben emerges from the foyer with his arms open and I run into them.

  “Where have you been?” I whine, gripping his shoulders in a hug. He smells like the cologne in his room, minus the pine air freshener.

  “I’ve been around. Lex, you’re choking me.” He makes an exaggerated gagging noise until I pull away from him. “Whose bad ass Jeep is that in the driveway?”

  Jill gets the cheesiest grin on her face. “It’s mine. I just got it.”

  “Damn, girl. You should take me for a ride one day. Rubicons are freaking sweet.” Ben slides his hands over his black button up shirt and shoves the long sleeves up to his elbows. He’s wearing designer jeans and shoes and his hair is in a perfect balance of unkempt yet classy. Jill is probably hyperventilating in her head. I know it sounds stupid, but having a hot brother always boosts my self-esteem. I am popular by association through Ben.

  He plops down between us and stretches his arms around the back of the couch. “So what are you girls doing here? Dad won’t be home till the end of the summer and I know there’s not a damn thing to eat in this house.”

  “I got mad at Mom,” I say in a small voice so he’ll feel sorry for me. He just laughs. Normally I’d get some kind of lecture from him, but he’s in a better mood than usual today. “How can you get mad at someone who never leaves the computer?”

  I tell him about her bait and switch with the cell phone thing. When I finish recounting how I stormed out of the house, he stares at me. “Is that all?”

  “Yeah,” I say, shrugging. Ben grabs the remote and turns it to ESPN. He points the remote at me. “Are you going to get a job?”

  Why would I want a job? It’s the beginning of my summer break. I brush some lent off the couch. “No,” I snap. He gives me a look that’s entirely too parental for a split second. I amend my answer by adding, “Well, I mean, I guess I can. But I don’t have a car and I don’t know any places to work on this side of town.”

  “Wait.” Ben holds up his hand. “This side of town? Exactly how long are you staying?”

  My cheeks flush. “I guess I forgot to tell you that part,” I say. It sounds like a question. Ben adjusts himself on the couch, sitting back in the corner so he can get a better look at me. He crosses his arms and says, “Please do tell me the part you forgot, baby sis.”

  I sigh. It didn’t seem like a big deal when I stormed out of Mom’s house, but now that I’m sitting face to face with him, it feels like a massive deal. Ben never looks as put-together as this. When I pictured asking Ben this question on the taxi ride over here, I had envisioned him laying back on the couch wearing boxers and an undershirt, eating Cheetos or something.

  I bite my lip. Ben raises his eyebrows.

  “I was just wondering if I could maybe spend a few weeks here, living with you and Dad.”

  Ben rolls his eyes like he knew what I was going to say all along. And he probably did, but he made me say it anyway. “You know I don’t care,” he says. “But Dad won’t be here at all this summer so that’ll piss off Mom and, besides—” his head
tilts to the side, “—You’ll be like an hour away from Daniel. How’s that going to work?”

  Jill, sitting on the other side of the couch from me, doesn’t even bother trying to hide her exaggerated motions of slitting her throat when Ben says the thing I had hoped he wouldn’t mention. Ben catches Jill’s mimed warnings and frowns. “What happened to Daniel?”

  I slink down the couch so far that my neck bends at an awkward angle. Even in my pathetic position, Ben’s gaze is unrelenting. He’s going to make me say it even though it’s obvious. I cross my arms over my chest. “He broke up with me.” My voice sounds as weak as I feel. Ben grabs my hand. “Shit dude, that sucks. I liked Daniel.”

  Not exactly the you’re too good for him, it’s his loss reply I was hoping for. I study Ben’s gristly man cuticles as his fingers grip my hand. “I’m over it,” I say, pulling my hand away and praying for a meteor to crash through the ceiling so we can change the subject. Come on Universe, I’ll even settle for a clash of thunder or a lightning bolt striking the transformer and leaving us in total darkness.

  “Daniel had college scouts chasing after him,” Ben continues, more to himself I guess, but it almost sounds like he’s scolding me. “That kid had everything going for him. That sucks that he won’t be coming around anymore.”

  “Yeah asshole, thanks for reminding me,” I say, sitting up straighter on the couch. “He had everything going for him except his stupid girlfriend. Good thing he thought to get rid of me on his way to the top.”

  “Oh shut up,” Ben says, exchanging another knowing glance with Jill like they are both members of the Knowing How to Ride out Lexie’s Drama Fests Club. “You’ll bounce back. I’m sure I’ll love your next boyfriend as well.”

  My jaw stiffens. I’m not really mad, but I feel like pretending to be mad just a little longer. It calms me, making Ben feel like the bad guy. “I’m not ever getting another boyfriend. That’s why I came here, so I can be alone.”