Nothing Like You by Lauren Strasnick Page A

quipped.
     
    “No one’s around, come on.” He dragged me forward by the waistband on my shorts.
     
    “Don’t.” I squirmed, pulling at his fingers.
     
    “You look great, though … all sweaty.” He grinned and ruffled my hair. “Let’s go to the beach. Come on, I’ll drive.”
     
    I took a step back. “I can’t go to the beach with you.”
     
    “Why not?” He lit a cigarette, inhaled extra deep, and slipped the lighter back into his shirt pocket.
     
    “I just don’t feel good about it anymore. I want to stop.”
     
    “Stop what?”
     
    I darted my eyes down. I thought if I looked at him for too long I might not be able to say what I had to say. “Seeing each other. We can’t see each other anymore.”
     
    Paul wasn’t saying anything, so I glanced up.
     
    He was fidgeting with the lid on his Zippo. “Why not?”
     
    “A lot of reasons.”
     
    “Like?”
     
    “Like … it’s not really good for me, I don’t think.”
     
    “What about me?”
     
    “What
about
you?”
     
    “Don’t I get a say?”
     
    “You have a girlfriend. You don’t need me.”
     
    He wrapped one arm around my waist and pulled me into him. “Maybe I want you.”
     
    “I see you
once
a week,” I scoffed. “You don’t even talk to me anymore.”
     
    “Is this about the psychic?”
     
    We were still standing close, his arm around my hips. “I just think it’s wrong.”
     
    “Wrong.”
     
    “Yes.
Girlfriend
,” I said again, slow and loud, hoping he’d hear me this time.
     
    He leaned forward to kiss me. And I’m not sure why, but I let him. Then I stepped backward, pulled my keys out of my book bag, and said, “I have to go.”
     
    “So that’s it?”
     
    I got into my car and slammed the door shut. Then I rolled down my window and looked at him.
     
    He said, “You think this is over, but it’s not.”
     
    You’re wrong,
I thought. Then I turned the ignition and put the car into first. “See you around,” I said, laying into the gas pedal.
     

Chapter 24
     
    Saskia and I were in the hills by my house, winding up a narrow, dusty path covered with dry brush and pricker bushes. It was dark out.
     
    “What time is it?”
     
    “I dunno. Not late. Eight?” I guessed.
     
    Saskia skipped around me and ran up ahead toward a clearing at the top of the hill. “You wanna sit for a bit?” she asked, breathless from the climb.
     
    “Okay.” I nodded, hiking up the extra ten yards or so. She was kneeling in a puddle of dusty dirt. I dropped down next to her. For a minute or two we just sat side by side, breathing dry air.
     
    “We’re lucky, huh?”
     
    “Why’s that?” I asked, pulling on a dead root, rippingit out of the ground and snapping it in two.
     
    “All this?” she pointed at our view: mountains, ocean, dry grassy hills and valleys. “We lived in New York when I was a kid. Until I was, like, six or so? Suburbia. Nothing like this. I mean, there were beaches, but they were different. And it was flat.”
     
    I nodded. I’d never been to New York. I’d only ever lived here and couldn’t imagine life outside Southern California. I broke my dead root into fours.
     
    “Look, planes,” said Saskia, pointing at the tiny blinking lights floating over the ocean. There were four or five at least, small specs of light that barely looked as if they were moving. “They look like fireflies,” she said, sinking further down to the ground.
     
    “I’ve never seen a firefly,” I said.
     
    “Yeah, we don’t have those here, do we?”
     
    “Nope.”
     
    “Well, they look like that,” said Saskia, pointing at the glowing dots of light speckled over the sea. “Exactly. They’re small and they blink like planes do. That’s the one thing I miss. Bugs”—she laughed—“that glow.”
     
    “They sound unreal. Like magic critters.”
     
    “They are,” she said, turning to face me. “That’s exactly what they are,” she murmured, pulling on a lock of long,