Leah's Song

by Daphne James Huff

  Chapter Seventeen

  I followed her out of the gym, calling after her. She didn’t turn around but headed upstairs to the second floor. She was walking really fast. I had to pick up the hem of my dress to run after her. Well, walk quickly; I didn’t want to break my face in the heels I was wearing.

  She finally turned to face me once we were inside the bathroom. I didn’t know why she had come up here when there were bathrooms downstairs. Then she started yelling.

  “I can’t believe you kissed him!” she cried, her face red with fury, with her fists balled so tightly that I was worried she’d draw blood with her nails. I stepped away in case she decided to start swinging those fists. “I thought you said he just dropped you off that day. But you were in the car for ages.”

  “He did just drop me off,” I said, confused. “Nothing happened. We were just singing in the car.”

  “So when was the kiss?”

  “Who said we kissed?” I asked, wondering how she even knew. Not that it mattered. I wouldn’t try to deny it.

  “Luke,” she said, her eyes never leaving mine. “He told me a few days ago.”

  That stupid rat jerkface! This was all because I’d told mom and dad about my bike and he got grounded. And he had seemed so nice tonight, but he was just throwing me off his trail. He’d be grounded until he graduated if I had my way.

  “It just happened. It was months ago,” I said, my hands thrown up in the defensive. “I told him I couldn’t go out with him. I said that we’d agreed neither of us could.”

  “Oh, so he just asked you out, just like that?” she said, her voice growing louder by the second. I could hear excited chatter on the other side of the door. People must have followed us up here, eager for some drama.

  “Is that so hard to believe?” I was starting to get angry, too, but kept my voice low.

  Lilly made a face that made it clear just how unbelievable she thought it would be that he’d actually picked me over her. I felt my blood start to boil and my own fists began to clench.

  “We’re both friends with him,” she said. “He could have asked me out, too.”

  “But he didn’t,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. We’d never yelled like this at each other. I really didn’t like it. I wanted to discuss this calmly and figure out a plan like we always did. “He picked me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You never hung out with him outside of school without me?” she asked, eyes still blazing.

  “Like you never did?” I shot back. I didn’t know if this was true, but it stood to reason if she’d been trying to make him jealous that she would have tried to see him on her own as well.

  She pressed her mouth into a thin line. Ha!

  “Not as much as you,” she said finally with a touch of sadness. “You got to see him in choir every day. That’s why we agreed…”

  “We agreed we wouldn’t try,” I reminded her, holding up a finger to silence her. “I didn’t try. I just talked to him normally. No flirting. Nothing intentional. I swear.”

  She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears.

  “You still kissed him,” she said. “You could have not kissed him.”

  I looked at my best and oldest friend, and my heart sank. It was true. I could have not kissed him. But I had wanted to kiss him.

  “Well, what about Jeff?” I said, changing the topic away from my own indiscretions. “I thought you liked him now.”

  “When did I say that?” she said, but her cheeks were tinged with pink.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Do you see how you are with him tonight? And you’ve been out with him a bunch of times with Amanda and Jason.”

  “Well, you’re spending all that time with Brandon,” she countered.

  We stared at each other. I guess she’d been hoping I liked Brandon, just like I’d been telling myself she liked Jeff. But we both still wanted Josh.

  “I wasn’t trying to use Brandon to make Josh jealous, though,” I said, my voice starting to get angry despite my best efforts. “Or Hot Blockbuster Guy.”

  “Well you…you...” she trailed off. Tears were pooling in the corner of her eyes. I hated seeing her like this. I hated fighting with her, especially in public. Well, as public as the second floor girls’ bathroom could be. I could still hear whispers in the hall but prayed Amanda had come up and was shooing them away.

  “You could have any guy you want,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Jeff seems really into you. Why don’t you like him?”

  “I do,” she said, the tears starting to fall. “I like Josh, too.”

  “But he doesn’t like you,” I said, using my softest, gentlest voice. It was the one I used on crying kids. It usually worked wonders.

  Unfortunately it didn’t seem as effective on angry and betrayed teenagers.

  “And whose fault is that?” she said, her voice rising and her hands balling into fists again. “I thought I could trust you, but you kissed him! No amount of me trying to make him jealous would ever compare to that.”

  I knew she was right. I had nothing left to say. So I let her stare daggers at me for another minute and didn’t run after her when she finally burst out of the door into the hallway. I heard a few shocked gasps mixed with the click of her heels as she ran back down the hall.

  “How was the dance?” Jenn said, coming into my room unannounced the next morning.

  I groaned and rolled over, my pillow over my face.

  “You were there. Don’t you know how it went?”

  “Well, I wasn’t really paying attention to your drama,” she said, sitting down on my bed. I could feel the weight of her on my feet. It was reassuring rather than annoying. She used to do that when we were little. For months, I couldn’t fall sleep unless she was there on my feet. “I only heard rumors. I’d like to hear your side of things.”

  I sighed.

  “Lilly got mad at me for dancing with Josh.” There, that was pretty simple, without making me sound like too much of a bad person.

  “Brandon didn’t mind?”

  I sat up and looked at her. Her face was blank and unreadable.

  “Why would he mind?”

  “You didn’t go with him?”

  I shook my head.

  “He went with Melissa. Who said I went with him?”

  “Oh, no one, I mean…” She trailed off, looking down at her hands, her face turning red. “Someone said he was taking a junior girl from choir. I assumed it was you.”

  “Why do you care?”

  She didn’t answer, but her face turned even redder. Suddenly it clicked.

  “You like him.”

  Again, she didn’t answer, but this time I could read everything in her face. The longing. The fear of rejection. The embarrassment of liking someone who didn’t like her back. It looked a lot like Lilly’s face had the previous night, only Jenn’s was sad instead of angry.

  I couldn’t believe it. My sister had spent all this time crushing on Brandon, furious that I was spending time with him, and hadn’t been able to tell me.

  “If I’d have known, I would have told you there was nothing going on,” I said. “I mean, I did tell you that, but you kept pushing. I thought you wanted me to like him or something.”

  She blinked back the tears in her eyes. She never cried unless someone kicked a ball in her face. And even then, it was only a few tears.

  “You always seemed to almost hate him or something,” I went on, trying to understand. “Whenever I saw you, you looked at him like you were mad at him.”

  “I was mad,” she said. “At him. For liking you.”

  “And you were mad at me because you thought I liked him?”

  She nodded.

  I let out a groan and flopped back on my bed. First Lilly and now Jenn. At least, with Lilly, it was for something I had actually done.

  “He liked me for like, a minute,” I said, staring up at the ceiling. Another star had fallen off since Lilly’s last sleepover. “
He dropped me like second period math when I messed up that solo.”

  “He likes star performers, I heard,” she said. “Sorry it wasn’t you.”

  I sat up, shaking my head.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I like Josh… Even though I’m not supposed to.”

  She wrinkled her nose. I laughed, despite everything. I knew that football players weren’t really her type.

  “Why aren’t you supposed to like him?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her everything. But she was being pretty open with me for once, so maybe I could do the same. She did know both Lilly and me pretty well. And there had been all sorts of drama in her group of friends last year over a guy. She might have some insight on the situation.

  “Lilly likes him, too.” I sat up on my arms and looked at her.

  Jenn rolled her eyes. She liked Lilly about as much as Lilly liked her.

  “So what? It’s not your fault if he likes you more and kissed you.”

  “You did hear what happened at the dance!” I flopped back on my bed, this time placing the pillow over my face before groaning.

  “Yeah, maybe I heard more than just rumors. The whole school kind of knows.”

  “Great.” My voice was muffled by the pillow.

  “It’ll be fine, Leah,” she said, giving my legs a gentle shove.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it anymore. I sat up again and narrowed my eyes.

  “Where were you this summer when we thought you were out with Mark Richmond all those nights?” I figured if she was going to be honest, I might try to get answers to something that had been bugging me for months.

  “Oh, that,” she said, her eyes darting around the room. She bit her lip. “It was this whole initiation thing for the freshman on the soccer team. We had them sneaking into places and stuff like that. It wasn’t anything really bad, but I didn’t want mom and dad to know, just in case they overreacted. They were already super pissed about me losing my license.”

  They were mad at her? I never saw it. It was nice to hear that she also had to deal with at least some parental disapproval.

  “So, Brandon,” I said, enjoying this new sense of closeness with her. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Do? Nothing!” she cried, her walls coming back up as she stood up quickly. My feet felt cold without her comforting weight. “It doesn’t matter, we’ll both be off to college soon. It was just a stupid crush. I hated seeing him like you better than me, that’s all.”

  “But if he didn’t know you liked him, it’s not like he was picking me over you,” I explained. She shook her head. She didn’t want to listen to logic right now. I sighed. “Fine, I won’t say anything.”

  “Thank you, Leah.”

  As she walked out, I thought about ways I might be able to do something without telling Brandon outright that my sister liked him. It would be a good distraction from my own hopeless situation. Maybe I could invite him over for some reason while she was here, and then I’d leave and they could talk…

  I stopped before I got too far. Lilly was the planner, not me. I thought about it a little longer, but didn’t have any good ideas. I sighed and rolled over, thinking I’d just take a nap instead. I’d need to be well rested to be able to face whatever was waiting for me at school the next day.

  I was just starting to drift off, my traitorous thoughts imagining a very different ending to the night with Josh if Lilly hadn’t gotten mad, when my cellphone rang. I let out a loud, exasperated sigh for no one to hear and picked it up. Why was everyone bothering me today when all I wanted was to disappear?

  “What?” I said, tired and annoyed.

  “Geez, hello to you, too,” said Amanda, sounding more amused than angry.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting up in bed. I picked at a hole in my sweatpants. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, just wanted to see how you’re doing,” she said, not able to hide the curiosity in her voice behind her breezy delivery.

  I rolled my eyes even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

  “Not too great,” I said. I wondered if she’d already called Lilly to ask her the same thing. I really wanted to ask her, actually. But I’d thought enough about Lilly’s feelings for now, and wanted to focus on me a little bit.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh.”

  There was silence on the phone. Amanda was being really nice by calling me and not totally abandoning me. I wanted to tell her how much I appreciated it, but everything sounded so lame in my head. Instead, I thought I’d ask her advice on the Brandon/Jenn situation. She might have some ideas.

  “I figured out why my sister’s been so mad at me lately,” I said.

  “Ohhh, why?” She sounded relieved to have a change in subject.

  “She likes Brandon.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Yeah, and she thought we were, like, together, and that I went to the dance with him. She was really disappointed.”

  “Huh,” she said thoughtfully. “I guess you guys did hang out a lot, before…”

  “Yeah, before I totally messed up at the concert,” I said. “She said he does that. Likes to go out with stars. Which I guess I was before, and now I’m not. Now, Melissa’s the star.”

  “Well, Jenn’s a soccer star.”

  “True…” I was starting to form some sort of idea, but it kept slipping away. I sighed. “She asked me not to say anything to him. But I want to help if I can.”

  “Why do you want to help her? She’s been so mean to you all year.”

  “Yeah, but she’s still my sister,” I said. I thought about Lilly. A few days ago, I could have said the same thing about her. I felt the tears that had been threatening to fall all day start to build again, but I blinked them back. I was focusing on Jenn right now, not Lilly.

  “I guess you have a point.” Amanda had an older brother, so she sympathized with the sibling drama better than Lilly ever had. “So what were you thinking?”

  We spent a good hour plotting and planning without coming up with anything that we thought would really work. I didn’t worry about the minutes as much as I usually would, since I’d clearly be using less with Lilly so mad at me. Plus, it was nice to be able to focus on something else for a while, and I knew I’d go right back to my pity party as soon as we hung up. So I extended the conversation as long as I could, asking her about Jason, and band, and her family. For a brief moment, I was able to pretend this was just another Sunday afternoon and that tomorrow, at school, would be like any other Monday.

  When we finally hung up, I was faced once again with all my thoughts swirling around, unable to control the constant replay of the previous night. I decided to finally take that nap and let myself forget everything until the next day.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next few weeks at school were some of the worst I’d ever had. Not that I’d ever had too hard of a time at school, but Lilly had always been at my side. It was hard to go so many days without talking to her. We’d had fights before, but nothing like this. Other fights had been like driving down a familiar road at night without headlights. I was pretty sure I’d figure it out, but it was still scary. This was something else entirely. This was walking alone in a forest in a foreign country.

  There was still a month until the choir competition, and I spent my lunches in the choir room instead of the cafeteria. Amanda would come down with me sometimes. She didn’t come every day; she was still friends with everyone else at the table, who, as faithful band-mates, were completely siding with Lilly. It was hard to tell who Amanda sided with more at first. I avoided talking about the situation for a few days but, eventually, I explained the whole agreement I had with Lilly. Then she saw things in a different way.

  “Lilly still tried to make Josh like her,” she said one day. “Even without outright flirting, she still totally broke the rules.”

  We were eating our sandwiche
s on the floor of the choir room. We weren’t the only ones in there. It was kind of a haven for the band and choir nerds who didn’t really have many other friends and didn’t want the stress of having no one to sit with at lunch. I didn’t know how I’d become one of them so quickly. I hadn’t realized how many of my friends were Lilly’s friends, too. I barely had any that were only mine. I’d gone through two and a half years of high school just following her lead. At least thanks to choir, I now had somewhere to go to forget about everything.

  “She really likes him,” I said, still trying to defend and justify her behavior.

  “Leah, you like him too,” said Amanda. “She should have realized that what she was doing would affect you.”

  “Yeah, and I should have realized the kiss would affect her,” I said miserably. “I did realize, and I did it anyway. That makes it way worse.”

  “You can’t keep beating yourself up about this,” said Amanda. “It happened months ago. You didn’t pursue anything after that. Do you think she would have done that?”

  I shrugged. Amanda knew Lilly almost as well as I did. We both knew how serious Lilly was about things she wanted.

  “Well, I still shouldn’t have danced with him.”

  Amanda pursed her lips.

  “She was really having a good time with Jeff until that moment,” she pointed out. “It’s making me crazy how she’s so back and forth with him.”

  “Does he really like her?”

  She nodded.

  “Jeff is Jason’s best friend,” she said. “We all hang out together all the time. He’s always asking about her.”

  Just like with Jenn and Brandon, I tried to think of ways to help Lilly and Jeff finally get together. It seemed almost as impossible as helping my sister, though. And I didn’t even know where to start with helping Luke.

  I hoped that the more I thought about it, the more I might figure out a way. All these people were unhappy because of me. There had to be a way to fix it.