THE OTHER GUY

MY PUMAS WERE SOAKED through to my socks. The brown-and-purple suede looked almost black as I shook off a chunk of slush clinging to the toe. “This is ridiculous.”

“Tell me about it,” Caleb mumbled.

“I mean, if it’s going to snow then snow. Enough of this melty-slush crap. The bottoms of my jeans are always wet and now my feet are icicles.” I leaned back in the Adirondack chair on his mom’s screened-in porch and showed him my wet shoes.

“Oh, that.” He got up from the chair beside me. “Yeah, it’s too warm for the snow to stick, I guess. But if you’re cold, we can go inside.”

“What did you think I was talking about?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“I said ‘this is ridiculous’ and you were with me, then I brought up the weather and you were all lost guy.”

He sighed. “I’m cold too. You wanna go inside?”

“Isn’t your brother home?”

Caleb’s voice lowered. “What does that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” I backpedaled. “I just, I can’t go home smelling like a hookah den again. My dad’s going to start leaving those pictures of diseased lungs on the refrigerator soon.”

“Then let’s go to your house. Your parents don’t get home from work for a while, right?”

“It’s my birthday, remember? They’ll be home early.” I paused. “My mom’s been staying at my aunt’s house, but they agreed to spend my big one-seven together.” I don’t know why I kept dumping my familial dirty laundry on him. I guess I had to tell someone, and it seemed like he understood in a way my friends, with their perfect families, wouldn’t be able to. “Plus, they’ll no doubt be competing for my love with elaborate gifts that I’ll have no choice but to resent. Can’t miss out on that.”

“Speaking of, I made you a little somethin’ somethin’.” He reached into his bright orange backpack and pulled out a brownie wrapped in pink cellophane and about ten different colors of ribbon.

“Caleb, you didn’t have to do this.”

“I wanted to give you something special to celebrate your birth.”

I gave him a sideways look. “Is this…?”

“You might want to eat only half since your tolerance is right around zero.”

My mouth dropped open. “I’m not getting high with you. It’s a school night,” I added in an admittedly goody-goody tone.

He chuckled. “I know it’s not your thing, but I thought it might help…” He stopped to scratch his head. “Never mind.”

I twisted the curlicued ribbons around my fingers, thinking about what Aimée would say if she knew I was considering sampling psychotropic baked goods. Then I thought how awkward and fake and unhappy my birthday would become as soon as I got home. I unwrapped a corner of the brownie and took a bite.

Caleb grinned when I offered him the rest. He finished it in two bites. “Y’know, living in a house with only one parental unit has its advantages. Certain freedoms.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.

I knew he was trying to make me feel better about my family falling apart, but his blasé attitude made my throat tighten. He must have noticed how uncomfortable I was because his expression changed and he snuffed out his cigarette in the ceramic candy dish he’d brought up from the basement to use as an ashtray. Our first-grade class made them as Father’s Day gifts at the end of that school year.

“I can’t believe you still have that.” I pointed at the crudely formed heart, wondering why it was at his mom’s house and not his dad’s.

“I’ve learned to hold on to what I can.”

My brain started swimming with images of Caleb holding on to every single childhood memento he owned like they were balloon strings in a windstorm.

“The idea of it sucks,” he started again, snapping my mind back to reality. “Your parents don’t love each other anymore, which makes you wonder if they could stop loving you too someday.”

“Yes,” I blurted, immediately feeling self-conscious about agreeing with him, followed by an intense urge to laugh.

He gave me a nod of commiseration and continued in this voice that made my drug-induced giggles subside. “It took my friends ten days to stop inviting me for dinner and sleepovers like my house was the site of a bacterial outbreak. So you’re probably looking at a full month.” He picked up his cigarette like he was going to relight it, but smashed it into the dish. “My friends are emotionally inept.”

“I haven’t told—”

“Ethan?” I drew back at the way Ethan’s name sounded coming from Caleb’s smooth monotone.

I could almost see the letters disassembling as they rolled out of his mouth. E … t … h … a … n …

I blinked the image away and corrected him. “Anyone really. Especially Ethan. His family is Brady Bunch perfect. He wouldn’t understand.”

The quiet hum that only sounds in early spring filled the porch. It surrounded me like a fluffy white-noise blanket. I was perfectly content with letting it cloud my mind because I didn’t want to think about my parents anymore and Caleb was one of the few people I knew that I could simply sit with, not having to fill the silence. He’d always been like that, even when we were little. I kicked at the pile of melting slush dampening the porch floor, wondering what he was thinking.

As if reading my mind he asked, “What are we?”

“Uh, humans?” I gave him a smile to cover the way I’d startled at his question. The look he gave me made my smile wither.

“Us.” He ticked his finger between my chair and where he stood, leaning against the screen door. “Me and you. What are we?”

“Caleb.” I turned my face away. I couldn’t say what we were because once someone said it out loud it would be real. I would be cheating on Ethan and there would be no going back. “Can’t we, I don’t know, hang out and not label this, or whatever?” I felt like the guy in this situation. I guess that made him the girl. I’d never been that girl, but Aimée had and Madison perpetually was. I understood how it felt. It was crappy. “I like you, but—”

“But you have to leave by five o’clock and I can’t say hi to you at school.”

“I never said you couldn’t say hi to me.” I jumped as my phone vibrated in my pocket. Pulling it out, I had to blink my slow-focusing eyes to see that I had three texts from Ethan. He wanted to know if my birthday dinner was still on.

I sighed. I’d been trying to figure out a way to politely uninvite him without mentioning my family drama for days, and now I was out of time.

Caleb waited until I looked at him. His face was as sober as I abruptly felt. “I’m not going to be the other guy, Cassidy. Not anymore. It was fine when we first started chillin’ again. A couple kisses between old friends, I get that. But what we have now goes deeper than friends and you have a boyfriend. So what are we?” His voice sounded mechanical, like he’d rehearsed this speech before I showed up, like this was the hardest thing he’d ever had to say to anyone.

I tried to pull my eyes away, but his were like magnets holding me in their gaze, screaming Answer me!

I swallowed hard. “I don’t know.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“You want me to choose between you two?”

He put his hands in his jeans pockets and nodded once.

“Caleb, you know my choice. It’s Ethan.”

“Is it?”

“Of course.”

His brown eyes flickered with an emotion I couldn’t read. “Then why have you been skipping ballet to come here? And why do you slide me a secret smile every time we pass in the halls? You could be texting him back, but you’re here with me.” He exhaled a long breath and dropped his mechanical tone. “Why did you say yes to partnering with me for Wirlkee’s class?”

“Because!” I stood, my toes digging into the soggy soles of my shoes. The fluffy haze from the brownie drained from my brain, leaving behind a sharp ache. “I said yes because everyone thinks you’re this pothead loser and I know that’s not you—not the real you. I thought you had changed when your parents split up and you started getting high all the time, but you didn’t, and I feel awful for not being your friend when you needed me most. And I come here because—”

“Cassidy.” He pushed off the door and walked toward me.

I held my hands up. “No. Let me finish.” He stopped a foot away from me. My heart was beating so fast and hard I thought for sure he could hear it. I couldn’t decide if the rise in my blood pressure was the brownie or nerves. “I come here because everything with my parents … you get it in a way no one else does.”

“It isn’t your fault we stopped being friends. I did more than my share to make that happen.”

My mouth opened to tell him that even though he understood what I was going through, I couldn’t be this person. I couldn’t use him and hurt everyone else in the process. I didn’t want to be this new liar-me anymore. But before I could say a word of that, my mouth closed around his and my arms dropped and he pulled me closer and I let him.

When he finally stopped kissing me, he whispered, “You’re a good friend.”

I meant to frown at him, but I smiled instead. “I thought you said we weren’t friends anymore.”

He let out a short laugh and bent down for another kiss. I closed my eyes and wondered how much longer I could keep this up, why I was keeping this up.

“You have to make a choice, Cassidy.” His lips were soft against mine as he spoke, but his voice hardened. “I won’t let you get away without making the right one.”