I'll Be Here

eyes swing down the hall to Taylor’s disappearing back.  Our classes are in the same direction.  I have to go that way anyway…
    And just like that I am running to catch up to her. 
    “How long?”  My voice is high and breaks her stride.  She turns to me.
    There is silence even though the hallway is clogged with students chatting, humming, stomping.  The silence exists in the four feet between Taylor and me.   
    Taylor cringes as if this scene is actually bothering her. 
    “Since that party at Finn Perry’s house.  I think that you were with your dad,” she says finally.    
    “Huh.”  I do some quick calculations.  That party was just before Valentine’s Day so that means that Dustin and Taylor were going behind my back for over two months.  And Dustin got me flowers on Valentine’s Day.  Red roses.  A whole dozen in a crystal vase spliced with Baby’s Breath and green ferns. 
    “What can I say Willow?  I’m sorry.”  Taylor is looking at me closely.  Probably she’s working out if I’m going to freak out or cry or something. 
    “Whatever” I mumble. 
    And as I walk to my first period class hoping that I make it through the door before the bell rings, I realize that all the feeling that I can muster up really does amount to that one word.  Whatever .

 
     
    Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.
    ~Jerry Spinelli

 
    CHAPTER FIFTEEN
     
    The sex question comes up a lot lately.
    Laney asks.  Nate asks.  Colleen asks.
    Like all of a sudden it matters.
    Had we done it?
    Well, yeah.
    We had.
    Dustin and I dated for almost two years. 
    We were prone to teenage hormones.
    Neither of us was from an uber-religious family.
    Yes, we’d done it.
    It happened last summer in the spare bedroom at Adam’s house while a party raged outside the locked door.  I know that’s cliché and I wish the story was better—more romantic—but in light of current events maybe it’s fitting.
    We’d talked about it before—for months actually.  Dustin was ready, eager.  Maybe even a little desperate.  I was a virgin.  He was not.  He’d lost his virginity at the beginning of sophomore year when he was fifteen to Melanie Kwarcinski who was a senior at the time.  To say this intimidated me would be a gross understatement.
    Melanie Kwarcinski had been Homecoming Queen and captain of the pep squad and was considered by nearly everyone to be the most popular girl at Northridge.  Melanie was Taylor before Taylor was Taylor if that makes any sense. 
    I assumed that she was also experienced sexually and considering the fact that I had seen her body flex and flip in a tight top and short skirt at many sporting events, I think that my nervousness was warranted. 
    It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex with Dustin.  I did.  It had almost happened over Christmas break.  And then again that June when my mom and Jake had taken Aaron on a weekend trip to visit Jake’s parents in Miami. 
    I always stopped it.  Dustin would tell me that it was okay, but I kind of felt like it wasn’t.  He’d lean back and sigh through his nose and we wouldn’t touch again after that.  At all. 
    I hated that I was making such a big deal out of the whole thing.  Sex was just sex.  Everyone did it.  Every living being on the planet.  I understood the basic mechanics.  How hard could it be?
    Mom had always made a point that she was liberal on the matter.  She’d been talking to me about sex since before I’d had my first kiss, and her openness embarrassed me.  I didn’t want to “communicate” my feelings with her.  I didn’t want to ask questions and I especially didn’t want to hear her answers.  It mortified me that my mother could use words like “condom” and “oral sex” in my presence without her skin blistering with red splotches.  
    When mom got diagnosed with cancer and her hair fell out and she started to worry about dying, she pushed me even more.  It was like she was afraid that we were running out of time for all the hard stuff.
    “Tell me about it,” she’d say when I came home from a date with Dustin. 
    Are you being careful?
    You know that you can come to me.
    I won’t judge.
    But by that point in her treatment I’d stopped talking to her about my life or boys or about anything that mattered.  I knew that she felt it—the distance that lay there like a wet towel on the floor between us. 
    She would come into my room at night and perch at the