The Street Where She Lives

She wanted to reach out and touch it, all right, but she wanted it for herself.

“I was not crying.” Rachel tipped her head back, stared at the ceiling. “I was just…I don’t know. Feeling sorry for myself. End of story. And anyway, it was weeks ago. You know what? I’m ready for those dirt-flavored cookies.”

Ben shook his head. “You should have come to me.”

“You playing the hero now?” Melanie laughed into the silence. “That’s my job this weekend, bud. So…” She clapped her hands together and tried to look hungry. “Let’s go get the cookies and see if we can’t doctor them up. Say with chocolate syrup. Something fattening.”

She’d need something fattening to get over the hot, intensive looks Ben kept shooting Rachel. She’d need an entire bakery.

EMILY PLOPPED DOWN on the crowded school bus. As other kids walked by, she clutched her backpack in her lap and stared straight ahead, deciding she didn’t care if anyone sat down next to her. She didn’t care one little bit.

She hated school. She hated her teachers, though they’d be shocked to hear it. They loved her because she knew the material, because she was quiet and never gave them any trouble.

But they didn’t see her. No one at school did. She’d thought it wouldn’t matter, that this year she was old enough, mature enough, not to care that she was different. Turns out she could be wrong.

“Can I sit here?”

She looked up. And up. It was the tall, skinny kid from her history class. He kept to himself and was a brainiac, too. She’d wanted to ask him about that, ask him if he felt as out of place in this school that seemed to favor athletes over scholars, but she’d never had the nerve.

“Emily? Can I sit here?”

He knew her name. “Uh…” Tongue-tied? She was tongue-tied? How new and awful was that? She settled for lifting a negligent shoulder, biting her lip when he sat.

“I’m Van,” he said, tossing his backpack to the floor at his feet. “We have history together.”

“Yeah.” Yeah? Was that all she could come up with? She clunked her head back on the seat and wondered if a thunderbolt could just strike her dead and get it over with.

Van had a disk in his hand, which meant he could operate a computer, and her heart started to pound. She started to sweat, too, which really grossed her out. Please, don’t notice. Trying to swipe at her upper lip without catching his eye, she managed to knock his disk out of his hand and onto the floor.

“Oh!” She dived for it. “I’m so sorry!”

He bent, too, and they clunked heads hard.

“Ouch,” he said, rubbing his forehead, but he was smiling.

She wasn’t; she wanted to die. She brushed the disk off on her jeans, going beet red as the two girls behind them started to snicker.

It was official. She was a loser with a capital L.

“It’s no biggie.” In spite of the red spot over his eye, he kept smiling. “It’s just a copy.”

Just then the bus made a sharp turn, and she plowed into him. Her shoulder to his chest this time. Ohmigod, could it get worse? Mortified, she looked up into his face, but his smile turned into a grin.

She found herself grinning, too. Helplessly. Talk to him. Ask him about the disk. Mention your computer. Say something, say anything!

It took her five minutes to figure out what to say. She’d decided to ask him if he ever went to the computer lab after school, but the bus stopped and he got off.

Loser.

Double loser.

She had three more stops before she could drown her sorrows in chocolate milk with Patches. Unzipping her backpack, she reached in and cracked her laptop open enough so that she could just barely read the screen. She couldn’t get e-mail yet, but she could reread what she’d downloaded this morning.

Alicia had written her, lamenting that her parents sucked, school sucked, life sucked.

Amen to that. She hit reply, and glancing around to make sure no one was looking at her-as if!-she began to type: “Alicia, Yeah, everything sucks here, too.”

She didn’t want Alicia to feel left out. Besides, school did still suck, but at home, things were…interesting. She’d been working on her parents, who still hadn’t figured out they were supposed to be together. Jeez, talk about two stubborn people! They were circling each other like caged bears, but there did seem to be a lot less snarling.

And her dad did get really grumpy whenever Adam-the-accountant showed up, which always made Emily want to laugh and hug him at the same time. Her mom, though…she wasn’t trying as hard as her dad to get along. Emily was really mad at her for that.

But it just didn’t feel cool to admit such things. Emily didn’t want to get ditched for being such a wimp as to want her parents married.

But God, she wanted that, so much. She’d done everything she could, including not going to her mom in the mornings when she’d called out for help, biting her fingernails to the stubs in guilt, but relaxing when she’d hear her dad go running instead. Twice she’d “accidentally” hung up on Adam when he’d called rather than bring the phone to her mom. Best yet, she’d managed to convince her aunt Mel, who was coming down today for the weekend, to take her out to the latest DiCaprio movie tonight, which would leave her parents alone.

What she’d planned would add to her crimes, but she didn’t care. If it worked, it’d be perfect.

She hoped.

The bus pulled up on her street. Excited, she shut the computer, zipped up her backpack and got off the bus, and didn’t even stop to glower at a single kid.

RACHEL LEANED AWAY from the easel and drew out a careful breath. The paper was still blank, pathetically blank. Ironic, given that today she actually felt good enough to skip all her pain meds.

Which meant she was on the road to recovery.

Good.

But she’d apparently lost her ability to come up with a Gracie cartoon to save her sorry life.

Bad.

It wasn’t just work, she had to admit. It’d been a rough day all around, starting with this morning when Emily hadn’t wanted to get out of bed. Rachel knew she’d stayed up too late on her damn computer, but pointing that out had only started a feud.

Ben had stepped in, sweetly coaxing his daughter out of bed with the promise of McDonald’s on the way to school. When Rachel had suggested that maybe he could try something other than bribery, as in her opinion, Emily needed to learn responsibility, the feud had turned to all-out war.

Ben’s eyes had gone a little hard as he’d backed off, and she could mentally smack herself now, because she understood she’d inadvertently undermined his authority in front of Emily, but damn it, she wasn’t used to sharing the day-to-day responsibility of raising their daughter.

Wasn’t used to anything when it came to Ben, including the way he always seemed to touch her, look at her.

Kiss her.

Naturally, Emily had leaped to her father’s defense and, between the dog yelping for attention and Emily yelling and Ben’s extremely loud silence, Rachel had ended up with a headache.

She was getting tired of wondering when Ben’s wanderlust would get the best of him. She’d seen him writing, muttering, playing with his camera. She’d seen him reading the world events in the newspaper, seen the wheels turning in his head. She’d heard him on the phone just yesterday, talking about some future job in Siberia or somewhere. And he’d been pacing in his bedroom at night like a caged mountain cat.

Always when she woke up, she figured this would be the day he’d be gone.