He crinkles his nose. “I can’t have this conversation with you while you’re still in that hot dog suit.”
My ears burn. “Right. Give me one sec.”
I grab my clothes out of my locker and dart into the changing room. I get dressed as quickly as I can, tugging my Magic Castle T-shirt over my head and pulling on the bright orange shorts I came in with. Yeah, I know they’re hideous, but they’re comfortable, okay?
I have a half-second flash of fear about looking totally ridiculous in front of Nick, but then I remember, at this point, he’s already seen me sweaty and pukey and everything in between, so the bloom is off the rose or whatever. Nobody looks up when I walk over to the first aid box, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I grab a wipe and a Band-Aid and perch next to Nick on the table.
“What happened to you?” He nods toward my leg.
“Skinned my knee.” I smirk. “Obviously.”
“How?”
“I fell.”
He leans over for a closer look. “We’re the regular walking wounded around here.”
“Pretty much.”
“Anyway, I don’t hate you.”
“I would hate me,” I say. “I do hate me, actually.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t say that. It was a dick thing to blurt it out like that, but I get it. Honestly, how long did you know? Like, how embarrassed should I feel right now?”
“Only a couple days.”
He takes the Band-Aid out of my hand, unwraps it, and puts it on my knee himself.
Naturally, Jessa chooses that exact moment to walk in, along with about eighty billion other park employees because, shit, one shift just ended and I didn’t even realize it.
“What the hell?” Jessa shrieks. “Are you guys hooking up now?”
And of course that’s when Seeley trails in, just in time to catch the end of what Jessa said. She lets out this kind of grunt-sigh thing, and shakes her head before disappearing into the bathroom.
“Seeley.” I jump up but Jessa blocks my way.
“Haven’t you done enough already? Who knew you were such a snake, Elouise.”
“It’s not like that, Jessa,” Nick huffs.
“Right, Elouise is sitting here like the cat that got the cream, while you kiss her knee or whatever you were doing, and it’s totally platonic. I’m sure the fact that she told you about me and Ari right after Seeley ‘dumped her’ is a total coincidence, right? Come on, Nick, she planned this!”
I look up in time to see his face fall. The wariness is back, the distrust, and god I fucking deserve it, I do, but I can’t handle it, not right now. Not with Seeley on the other side of that wall and me still stuck out here.
“Is that true?” Nick looks at me, his eyes hard, like he’s trying to see right inside my brain.
I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath. “Is what true?”
“Is everybody I know lying to me?” He chews the inside of his lip, hurt and anger radiating off him in waves.
And yeah, I suspected this would all unravel eventually, but not right here, right now, when a thousand million other park employees are filtering in to clock out.
“No.” Okay, so maybe some of it was a lie, but . . .
“Is that why you told me about Jessa? Because you wanted me to go out with you?” It’s the way he says it, the way he says “you,” as if liking me would be some big impossible thing, that twists me hard. I know it shouldn’t, I know my heart’s really on the other side of that concrete wall, tucked away in the bathroom, but I guess Seeley left me with just enough of it to break a little more.
“No.” I roll my eyes back to keep from crying. “I didn’t tell you because of that. I don’t have some big ulterior motive here.”
“Sure.” Jessa sneers. “Like I believe that.”
“Do you ever shut up?” I whirl around, pointing my finger right in her face. “You act like you’re the victim, but you’re the one cheating! The only reason you’re not with Nick anymore is because of you, not me. And I’m sorry if people finding that out messes with your perfect image or whatever, but that’s on you. Nick is a great guy, a really great guy, and you cheated on him like it didn’t even matter. You did that. Own it.” The room goes all quiet then, no more shuffling or lockers shutting or random laughs. Just dead silence as everybody waits to see what happens next.
Jessa scowls and crosses her arms. “Not until you admit you’ve had a thing for Nick all along.”
I bury my face in my hands and groan so loud it hurts my ears. “Will. You. Just. Stop.” I drag a shaky hand through my hair. “You win. I admit it, okay? I used to like Nick. But who cares? And yeah, you got me, Seeley and I weren’t really together in the beginning.”
“See?” Jessa waves her arm, staring at Nick. “I told you it’s all fake.”
“No,” I say, cutting her off. “It’s not, or it wasn’t, at least not at the end. At least not to me. So yeah, you don’t have to worry about me and Nick. Because the only person I want to be with is Seeley. But I probably fucking blew it, so—” But the rest of my rant dies in my throat because Seeley is back again, standing right behind Jessa, staring at me. And if I wasn’t wishing for the floor to open up and swallow me whole before, I definitely, definitely am now.
“Lou?” Seeley steps forward, trying to get around the crowd.
“Sorry,” I whisper, and I bolt, the hot burn of tears pricking at my eyes. I don’t look back to see if they’re all still watching. I’m sure they are . . . but Seeley doesn’t come after me and that’s all that really matters.
CHAPTER 38
“Lou, honey.” My dad calls up from downstairs, but I’m buried under three miles of blankets, sobbing into my mattress, and I don’t intend to move. “Elouise.” This time it’s a bit louder, a bit closer to the door. His knock feels inevitable now.
I burrow down, wiping at my eyes and tugging the blankets tighter around me. It’s hot, and I’m sweaty, but this is the closest I can get to disappearing, and oh god I want to disappear. My phone has been buzzing nonstop since I left work, but I’m not about to answer it. I can’t right now, simple as that.
My door clicks open, the sound quickly followed by my dad’s heavy sigh. Pillows and blankets are lifted away, and the air feels cool on my clammy skin when he pulls back the last one. “Lou, you have a visitor.”
My heart pounds in double time, and all the air goes whooshing out of my lungs. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not ready. There is no manual for how to navigate this big of a cluster, no matter how bad I wish there was. Maybe I should write one later, when there’s time, when it doesn’t feel like my heart is leaking straight out of my eyes.
“I can’t see her right now.” I wipe away some of the snot dripping from my nose and pull the blanket back up. “I can’t do this.”
And his face is kind, and his face is sad, and I know the words that are about to come out of his mouth before he even says them. “It’s not Seeley, honey.” He puts his hand on my arm, and I didn’t know anything could hurt this bad, but it does.
“Oh.” I look down at my blankets and will myself to not start crying all over again. “Who is it, then?”
“It’s a boy. A very blond, very tan boy. And—” He hesitates for a moment. “He has a lot of cake mix with him for some reason.”
“Are you serious?” I take a shaky breath.
“Do you want me to send him up?” Dad glances at my mess of a room before leveling his gaze back at me. “Or are you coming down?”
“I’ll come down.” I sniffle. “Just, just give me a minute, okay?”
“Take two,” he says, pulling my ponytail holder from where it’s tangled up on the side of my head. “Should I give him access to the kitchen or keep him corralled in the living room?”
I take the hair tie back and set to work smoothing it down. “Livi
ng room.”
My dad smiles and then heads out the door, his footsteps disappearing back downstairs. I take a deep breath and push off my bed, frowning at my puffy red eyes in the mirror. I think about putting on some makeup, some concealer to hide the fact that my heart is broken in a million places, but Nick can probably relate anyway, and besides, who cares? I run my finger over one of the pictures of Seeley and me that’s up on my mirror; we are sunburned, with smiles that take up our whole faces. Her arm is slung around my shoulder, and mine is around her waist, two interlocking pieces, always . . . and I shatter all over again.
* * *
• • •
“Hey.” I step off the bottom stair, having spent the last ten minutes trying to piece myself back together.
Nick’s eyes widen at the sight of me, and I guess my swollen eyes and raw runny nose have definitely registered. My dad glances between us and excuses himself, telling us he’ll be right upstairs if we need him. I don’t know if that’s a threat or a promise, but the way he squeezes my shoulder when he walks by makes me think it’s the latter.
Nick rubs his hands up and down the legs of his jeans. He is a jumble of tight energy perched on the edge of a couch cushion. “Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bake sale’s tomorrow.” He nods his head toward the piles of boxes and pans he’s brought with him. “We gotta get baking.”
“There’s not going to be a bake sale.” I drop into the chair across from him, kicking my legs up over the side.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no point.” I sigh and dangle my head off the other end. “Because Mr. P is selling the place so he can go live with his granddaughter who has cancer, and that’s actually a really good reason. Because our GoFundMe is a joke. And because it was messed up of me to try to scheme my way into keeping the park open. It was messed up to try to scheme anything.”
“That’s a lot of becauses,” he says.
I flick my eyes to his, puzzled. “Why are you really here?”
“I’ve got nowhere else to go.” Oddly, even though the words are sad, his voice isn’t. It’s more like open, resigned, accepting.
“Doubtful.”
“Really,” Nick says. “I can’t go to Jessa’s, obviously, and most of the pirate squad are now desperately scheming to get with Jessa, which also rules them out.” He flops back on the couch and looks at me. “And I didn’t want to be around anybody tonight, you know?”
“So you came here?”
“I figured you didn’t want to be around anybody either.” He shrugs. “I figured we might as well not be around anybody together.”
“I can get that.” I search his face, settling on the blotchy purple welt roaring up from his cheekbone. “How’s your eye?”
“It feels strangely like it got punched. Why do you ask?” he says, dropping his head over the back of the couch. “I should probably be furious with you, you know?”
“Yeah.” I watch him sit there, and I feel—nothing really. A week ago, I would have died to have him sitting on my couch, but now it’s hard to imagine ever feeling like that. I wonder if someday, I’ll think the same thing about Seeley. If she’ll just be a blip on the radar.
Doubtful.
If there’s one thing I learned from watching my dad pine over my mom, it’s that there are some people you don’t get over, ever. Some people get in so deep, they just stay with you, holding part of your heart hostage long after they’re gone. You can move on, sure, I’d love it if my dad did, but they’ll still have that little piece of you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think Seeley is that for me.
Nick lifts his head up enough to look me in the eye. “Did you really only date Seeley to get with me?”
“Yeah,” I say, low and resigned because there’s no sense in hiding it anymore. “At first.”
“How was that supposed to work? I don’t get the mechanics of it.”
“I didn’t really either.” I sigh.
“But why me?” He chuckles, and I can tell he thinks it’s totally ridiculous that anyone would go through all the trouble.
“Have you seen you?” I ask, because now that the urgent, desperate need to have him is gone, it’s easier to talk honestly.
“Yeah, I’m a dumb blond who jumps off stuff for a living.”
“Or,” I say, “you’re a hot, sweet, diving pirate–slash–future college boy with a knack for cupcake baking.”
“You give me too much credit.”
“You’re a good guy, Nick. I could tell the moment I met you.”
He tilts his head. “Then how come you spent all last year avoiding me?”
“I did not!”
“Yeah, you did. I practically had to chase you down in the hallway at school just to say hi.”
“Oh, give me a break.” I laugh. “Why would you want to hang out with me when you had Jessa, anyway?”
“I did want to, you know,” he says, and his cheeks get all pink. “I was trying to ask you out or whatever, that time with my car.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, but after that day you pretty much avoided me the whole rest of the summer, so I figured you weren’t interested.”
“You are not serious.”
“I am, sorry. I feel like I’m letting you down over here.” He snorts. “But yeah, I was trying to ask you out with that whole ‘We should hang’ thing. I’m not really as cool as you seem to think I am.”
We both get all quiet for a minute, and I try to wrap my head around the fact that I built up an entire idea of a person in my head based on a pile of misunderstandings.
“I’m sorry.” My words come out slow and heavy, like they’re burning up on the way out. “For whatever it’s worth.”
“What are you sorry for?”
I stare down at the threads of the chair. “For trying to manipulate you and stuff, for trying to make you into something you weren’t.”
“S’okay,” he says. “You weren’t very good at it anyway.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“No, it doesn’t.” He bites his lip a little, like he needs to chew on whatever’s coming next. I watch him, content to wait.
He shoves his hair back off his forehead and sighs. “If we’re coming clean, I guess I should tell you that things with me and Jessa were already falling apart anyway.”
I kick my feet and let them bounce back up from the side of the chair. “You guys seemed pretty happy from the outside.”
Nick shrugs and stares down at his feet. “I’m not how people think.”
“Nobody is, apparently.”
“No, but I’m really not.” Nick scratches the back of his neck and exhales for what seems like an eternity. “I was a massive loser before I moved here.” He looks up at me, and I hope I don’t look as confused as I feel.
He kind of crinkles his forehead and looks down at the floor. “I have this thing that makes it hard to read, so I would get extra time on tests and extra help with my homework. Plus, I used to have a really bad lisp, and I spent pretty much all of elementary school doing intense speech therapy. It still comes up when I get nervous, but I can mostly deal, and when I can’t, I play it off like I’m joking or doing it on purpose. But yeah, I was a nobody at my old school, and I was treated like it every day.”
“That doesn’t make you a loser,” I blurt out before I catch myself. “I, for one, love your lisp!”
“Fuck,” he groans. “I knew it was coming out more, but I’d hoped no one noticed.”
“I don’t think anybody really has; I was just kind of creepily tuned in for a minute there.”
Nick smirks and shakes his head. “Anyway, we came here because the bullying was so bad at my old school that my mom got scared.”
“Seriously?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah, that’s why I’ve taken judo since I was a kid. My mom wanted me to be able to defend myself.” Nick gives me a sad little smile and tucks his arms behind his head. “But yeah, I spent the whole time before we moved hitting the gym, buying new clothes, and doing everything I could think of to fit in.”
“At least it all kind of worked out,” I say, and instantly regret it.
“Do you know how strange it is to wake up every day and know that the kids I hang out with now are the same kind of kids who made my life hell at my old school?”
“Then why do you?”
“Wouldn’t you? Honestly? It feels good to be liked.”
I drop my head back and shut my eyes because, yeah, I guess we all do weird things to get what we want sometimes.
“Then Jessa came along last year, and it got even more complicated.” He swallows hard and looks up at me. It’s a little bit surreal to have him confiding in me like this, but a good surreal, like it turns out that Nick-the-friend is better than Nick-the-crush that I’ve been imagining in my head all year.
“I don’t know,” he says, running his hand through his hair. “I’m rambling. I’ll shut up. Your turn: Are you really in love with Seeley? No games?”
His question stabs me straight in the belly. Yes, I want to say. Always have been probably. And now it’s ruined. But I just shrug and tip my head to face him.
“I’m going to go ahead and take that as a yes,” he says, and then we get all quiet again. “All right, enough whining for both of us.”
I eye the various boxes of cake mix peeking out from the plastic bags surrounding him. “What happened to homemade?”
“Time crunch.” He laughs. “Plus, I didn’t know if you were going to go for it, so I opted for something transportable and returnable—which I guess was the right call since there’s no point in making cupcakes now.”
I nod, lost in thought, and then sit upright in my chair. “But what if there was?”
“I think we’ve had enough of your scheming for one summer,” he says, frowning.
Hot Dog Girl Page 20
