For once, Tibby was right smack in the middle, and she could see a lot better from here.
Her mother was at work and Krista was asleep and the Morgans were at the beach and Bee was in Alabama and Lena was at the store and Tibby was in Virginia and Carmen was sitting in her closet.
Her closet was so full of crap it was a walk-in in name only. Carmen loved shopping, but she hated throwing anything away. She loved beginnings, but she hated endings. She loved order, but she hated cleaning.
Most of all, she loved dolls. She had a collection that could only belong to a solitary female child of guilt-ridden parents.
She loved dolls, but she wasn’t good at taking care of them, she decided as she pulled out the three cardboard boxes of them that lived under her hanging clothes. Throughout her childhood they had been dear to her. She had played with them long after normal girls had stopped. But her efforts at washing and grooming and dressing and improving them, her many eager makeovers, had left them looking like veterans of a long and grueling war.
Angelica, with the brown hair and the mole, had a crew cut from the time Carmen had tried to crimp her plastic hair with a curling iron. Rosemarie, the redhead, had two black eyes from the time Carmen had applied eye makeup with a Sharpie. Rogette, her favorite doll of color, wore a hideous half-stitched rag from the time Carmen had taken up sewing in imitation of her aunt Rosa. Yes, Carmen had loved them, but they couldn’t have looked worse if she had set out to mangle them.
“Carmen?”
Carmen jumped. She dropped Rogette. She squinted in the darkness of her room.
“Sorry to surprise you.”
She picked up Rogette and stood. “Oh, my God. Paul. Hi.”
“Hi.” He had one of those large, outdoorsy backpacks over his shoulders.
“How did you get in?” she asked.
“Krista.”
Carmen winced. She chewed on her thumb. “She’s awake? Is she all right? Is she mad at me?”
“She’s eating Frosted Flakes.”
That seemed to answer all three questions. Carmen was still holding Rogette. She held her up. “Meet Rogette,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I was cleaning out my closet.”
He nodded.
“I’m pretty much a social whirlwind. You know, things to do, people to see.”
It took him a long time to register that she was kidding.
“Did you tell your mom?” Carmen asked.
“She knew,” Paul said.
“Everything’s all right? You think Krista is okay?”
He nodded. He didn’t look worried.
“So … how’s school?” she asked.
“Good.”
She’d imagined college would make Paul more relaxed and less polite, but from the way he stood in the door of her room, she doubted it had. She pictured him as the sole sober pledge of Delta Kappa Epsilon.
“Summer school fun? Soccer? Good?”
He nodded. Paul was to chitchat what Carmen was to self-restraint. Silence descended.
“You?” he asked.
Carmen sighed and took in a lot of air to start her answer. “Oh, it’s kind of a mess.” She waved her hands around. “I ruined my mother’s life.”
Paul looked at Carmen the way he often looked at Carmen. As if she were the star of a Discovery Channel special.
Krista appeared at the door behind Paul. She was holding Carmen’s copy of CosmoGIRL! She flapped it a few times. She didn’t seem in the least annoyed that Paul was there. “I’m going out to get us milk shakes.”
“Okay.” Carmen waved. “You need money?”
“No. I got.”
Paul looked amused. Krista was teaching herself to talk like Carmen too.
Carmen pointed to her bed. “Sit.” She pulled herself up onto her desk, sitting and swinging her feet in the air.
Paul did as he was told. Awkwardly he moved a pile of clothes out of the way. He didn’t take to sitting on a girl’s bed as easily as some guys did. He sat there, feet on the ground, shoulders square. She felt proud of how handsome he was, tall and strong, with his sweetly long, dark eyelashes fringing his navy-blue eyes. He never acted like he was handsome.
She wasn’t going to wait for Paul to restart the conversation. She’d be waiting till next week. “Paul, remember the guy David I e-mailed you about? The guy who liked my mom?”
He nodded.
“Well, he really liked her. Like, loved her. And she was falling for him, too.” She looked up at him. “Unbelievable, right?”
Paul shrugged.
“Okay, well.” Carmen pulled her heels up onto the desk with her and hugged her knees. “This is the part of the story where Carmen is bad.”
Paul looked patient. He knew of several such stories.
“I just got crazy. I can’t explain. My mom was out all the time. She was dressing like a fourteen-year-old. She even borrowed the … Never mind. Anyway, I felt like she had all this happiness … and I had nothing.”
Paul nodded more.
“And I just … I yelled at her. I told her I hated her. I said all these mean things. I ruined it for her. She broke it off.”
Paul’s face was earnest. His eyes were squinched up in concentration, like he was trying his hardest to understand the inscrutable Carmen.
How good it was having a guy like Paul. He had witnessed her at her absolute worst last summer, and still he hung in with her. Granted, he didn’t say much, but over the past year he had become her true, devoted friend. He never ignored an e-mail, never forgot to call her back. He had real things to worry about. His father was such a severe alcoholic he had been in and out of rehab since Paul was eight years old. Before Carmen’s father had married Paul’s mother last summer, Paul had taken care of his mother and sister as though he were the head of the household. And yet, no matter what nonsense Carmen rattled on about, he always listened like it mattered. He never groaned or looked horrified or told her to shut up.
“You were jealous,” he said finally.
“I was. I was jealous. And selfish and small.”
Big tears were suddenly shivering in Carmen’s eyes. They warped the face of poor Rogette, discarded on the floor. Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.
“I didn’t want her to be happy without me.” Carmen’s voice came out wobbly.
Making very little noise, Paul appeared beside her, sitting next to her on the desk. “She would never be happy without you.”
Carmen had meant to say that she didn’t want her mom to be happy without Carmen getting to be happy too. But as Paul’s words bumped around in her brain, she wondered if maybe he’d understood something she hadn’t.
Had she been jealous of her mother? Or had she been jealous of David?
Paul linked his arm with hers. Carmen cried. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it felt like everything.
Kostos did come for her, but not when she expected. Lena wished for and wanted him through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but he didn’t come until she was already in bed. She heard the acorn against her window.
Her heart rising up nearly out of her chest, she went to the window and saw him there. She waved and rushed down the stairs and out the back door as fast as she could. She practically threw herself at him. He pretended to fall backward. He staggered a few giant steps and pulled her down with him.
“Shhhh,” he told her as she was laughing.
They found the most private place they could find in her yard. It was at the side of the house under the thick-leaved magnolia tree. If her parents found out, not even the dazzling Kostos could save her.
She was in her nightgown. He was more properly dressed.
“I’ve dreamed about you all day,” she told him.
“I’ve dreamed about you for a year,” he told her.
They started out slow, kissing. That was all they needed for a long, long time, until she put her hands inside his shirt. He let her explore his chest and his arms and his back, but at last he pulled away. “I have to go,” he said miserably.
“Why?”