“Don’t hate.” I sniffed the pea.
“You’re not really going to eat that.”
I shrugged and took a bite. “Yeah, this could use some Ranch dressing.” I tossed the rest in a trashcan. “He really lives on stuff like that?”
“He comes from a long line of vegetarians. And has a lot of willpower.”
I fished a piece of gum out of my bag to replace the good-for-you taste. “Yuck. All right, let’s play again.”
As he shuffled, I ran through the events of the night before: a basketball game where I endured a good two hours cursing the uniform I was forced to wear with a seagull plastered across my chest while pretending to care if we won or lost. (We won. We had an unfortunately competitive team, which meant we were probably going to the play-offs this year, which meant more torture for me. Fun times.) After the game, a party at Adam’s. I spent three hours sitting on a couch in the basement, watching the guys pretend to be LeBron James on NBA Live while Sarah went on about Mike. He was supposed to have picked her up after the game, but he’d disappeared in the crowd with his parents and had been nowhere to be found the entire night. He hadn’t returned any of her calls or texts. The more she replayed the events of the night, the more she was convinced this was the end. I patted her back while she cried. Speaking of disappearing acts, Amber and Lori had left me alone to deal with her.
“You know what’s sad?” I asked Jack as I situated my cards. Oh—a four, five, and six of diamonds in the first deal. Nice.
Jack studied his cards with equal intensity. “The Iraq war, world hunger, the fact that I will never see Alice in Chains live?”
“No. Well, yes. I guess. I don’t know who she is.”
He slowly shook his head. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Anyway, I was going to say that I have such a better time playing cards with you guys than I do hanging out with my friends.”
He looked up over the top of his cards, narrowing his eyes like he was annoyed. “Why’s that sad?”
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. I just wish I liked my friends more. I wish we liked the same things. Different from what we do now.”
He focused back on his hand. I placed two cards down, and he gave me two new ones. Nothing good. “Like what?”
I shrugged. “Go to the movies or a museum, maybe. All we do is sit around, having the same conversations with the same people. And none of them are interesting.” Unless you considered a ranking of the girls in our grade from most hot to least hot compelling, which I did not, and which was actually a conversation that had taken place the night before.
We paused for a second as Jack won that hand. “What do you and your friends do together? Besides trespassing on private property?” We shared a smile.
Instead of dealing another, he shuffled for a long time. “When we’re not practicing? We scout out music stores, not that there’re many left, but there are a few. One in Kenmore Square I go to as much as possible. I don’t know, sometimes we drive out to Western Mass. There’s a lot of stuff to do out there.”
“Really? Like concerts?”
“Yeah, and rock climbing, zip lining. Good cliffs for jumping. Way better than here.”
“You jump off of cliffs for fun?”
“Sure do.”
“Seriously? That is so—”
“Ruggedly dangerous?”
“I was going to say stupid.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, probably. But we’re in high school. We’re supposed to do stupid stuff.”
“The only stupid thing I’ve done in the past four years is go to that lighthouse with you.” And it’d been the best thing I’d done in the past four years, too.
As if he was reading my thoughts, he said, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Not going cliff jumping.”
“Calm down, Science Club. We’re going to see a show in Worcester. The Anagram Theory. Really cool indie band?”
I shook my head. Never heard of them.
“It’s standing room only. We’re getting tickets at the door. Three o’clock, if you’re interested.”
I watched his hands as they shuffled the cards and thought about how they looked when he was playing guitar—like he knew what he was doing. I swallowed. I had promised Sarah I’d go out for coffee, but I didn’t feel like listening to her whine about Mike all afternoon. I’d have to come up with some sort of story to tell my parents.
Jack was watching me, a doubtful expression on his face as if he was sure I would say no.
So I said yes.
…
He picked me up in the library parking lot. I chose the spot because none of my friends had been to the library since kindergarten story hour, and also, it felt like a little bit less of a lie, since I told my parents I was going to study at the library and then meet up with some friends for dinner. Technically, I had gone to the library. Just not to study. And then I was meeting up with a friend, and we would probably pick up dinner on the way. So, really, not a lie at all. Either way, they barely looked up, my dad from Newsweek and my mom from her crossword. I’d spent so many years being the perfect good girl, they’d never expect me to be bad.
My time in the library proved productive—in the bathroom, I replaced my sneakers with brown boots and carefully applied dark eyeliner and mascara. I never wore eye makeup, but it seemed appropriate for a concert. Plus, the girls who sat with the band at lunch always wore it.
I slipped a thick black cardigan over a tank top. Layers, in case it got hot inside the Palladium. That’s where we were going. I’d never heard of the place. It was in downtown Worcester, about two hours from Stonebury, and Jack said a lot of famous groups had played there. He rattled off a bunch of names, but all I could think was how, at the lighthouse, he’d said that taking me out to a club would hurt his street cred. We’d kind of been flirting at the café, but we’d never done anything in front of Reid or Travis, and as far as I knew, they were oblivious. Now we were going out together. Did it change things? Or was it like the four of us hanging out at the café, at a different location?
Just. Stop Thinking. I vowed to try something new tonight: to not to worry about it. To have fun. When I opened the car door, the handle nearly fell off in my hands. I closed it gently. I started to reach for the seat belt before remembering it didn’t exist. I’d been in his car many times—he always drove me home from the café now, under the ruse of protecting me from creepy bus drivers—but I still kept reaching for the belt. It might not be cliff jumping, but for me, this was fairly risky behavior. “Are you sure this car is going to make it all the way to Worcester?”
Jack started to answer but then stopped dead when I turned to him. “What?” I touched my face, my hair. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. You look different.”
I felt my face heat up. “Oh. Yeah. Different makeup. Is it bad?” I turned down the passenger side visor, but of course, there was no mirror.
“No. No, not at all. I like it.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Jack took the back roads out of town, bypassing Main Street, and soon we were on the highway. “What did you tell your parents?”
“That I was studying.”
He nodded. “What did you tell your friends?”
“Nothing. I don’t check in with them, you know.”
Not technically true. I knew Sarah would be upset when I backed out of our coffee plans, so I told her my parents were making me stay in to finish up my college entrance essays. Of course, I’d already finished them weeks ago.
Now that Jack had brought up my friends, I felt like I had to say something. I’d been wanting to over the few months that the two of us had been hanging out, but I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. I glanced at him. God, his profile…where the hell had I been the past four years? Unless he’d just gotten hot two months ago. No, it was me not noticing. Not wanting to notice.
Anyway. I looked away from the distraction, sta
ring straight ahead at the road. “I’m really sorry about the whole Coke machine thing,” I blurted out. It had happened again last week, but Jack walked away before it got too heated.
It took a second before he said anything. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because they’re stupid, and because I was standing there. I didn’t want you to think that I agreed with it or thought it was okay.”
“Access to soda machines is every American’s God-given right, after all.”
I put my hand on his arm, and he looked at me quickly before turning back to the road. “I’m serious. They’re awful people, really…” And I’m standing with them.
“Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t bother me.”
I let my hand drop to my lap. I had finally understood what an awesome person he was, but he was still a person. How could it not bother him?
“Maybe you should hit him. He’s a meathead, that’s all he understands.”
“What, and sacrifice these money makers?”
When I sighed, he laughed. “Stop, Science Club. We’re having an adventure here. Have you been to a concert before?”
“If I tell you, do you promise not to laugh?”
He nodded.
“I’ve been to one concert. When I was twelve, my parents took me to see the Backstreet Boys at TD Garden.”
True to his word, he didn’t break a smile. “And was it a life-changing experience?”
“Sadly, no. We were in the nosebleeds and I couldn’t see them dancing, and I didn’t get to meet Nick Carter after the show and become his girlfriend. All in all, I’d say it was quite tragic.”
“That sounds tragic.”
“What was your first concert?”
“Funny enough, I was twelve, too. My dad took me up to New Hampshire and we saw The Rolling Stones. Now that was life-changing.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. He’s getting kind of down about this being my last year at home, but when I remind him of all the killer shows we’re going to see in the city, he feels better.”
It made no sense at all, the heaviness that settled in my chest when he talked about leaving. I wanted to get out of here so badly, too, but Stonebury was the only place I’d ever lived. Like it or not, it was home. Where was I going to be a year from now?
I cleared my throat. “It sounds like you’re really going to miss him.”
“Yeah. I guess he’s kind of like my best friend.”
I smiled, even though he couldn’t see me. Who would have thought the guy with the piercings considered his dad to be his best friend?
“My mom’s cool, too, but she doesn’t really get the whole music thing. She’s actually pretty pissed I’m not going to college.”
“Pissed? My parents would be…I don’t know, how angry do you have to be to spontaneously combust? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what they would do if I said I was going to move to New York City and become a photographer or something.”
“You should be a photographer one day. But I agree with them. You shouldn’t waste that beautiful mind.”
I laughed while my insides twisted a little. Was he calling me beautiful? No—my mind. Not me. Completely different. And anyway, he was being sarcastic.
“I have another question for you, Science Club.”
“What?”
“Why’d you take your hand away?” Slowly, he smiled.
I put my hand back on his arm, and we drove.
We parked in a side street parking lot and walked up a hill to Main Street. There were three or four trailers parked on the side of the road and beside them, crowds of kids dressed for a rock concert, most of them in all black. People clustered in groups, smoking and talking, and even with the eyeliner, I felt out of place. I held on to Jack’s arm as we made our way up the sidewalk. “There they are,” he said.
Under the Palladium scroll, near the front of the line, were Travis and Reid and a couple of guys I’d never met. And girls. There were two that I recognized from Jack’s table in the cafeteria: Talia Roberts, a natural blonde who dyed the tips of her hair pink, and Gwen Thompson, who had been in my advanced reading class in the fifth grade but who was now barely passing. Last year, my friends and I had teased them mercilessly when they wore studded dog collars as necklaces. If Sarah and Amber and Lori knew I was hanging out in a group with them, they would die.
Something occurred to me then—the strange little secret life I’d been living, separate from my friends. I didn’t want them to know about Jack for obvious reasons, but this one wasn’t so obvious. In this life, I could do whatever I wanted, talk to whoever I wanted, wear whatever I wanted. In this secret life, I was actually free.
“You came,” Reid said. He had his hair slicked back and wore a black hoodie. He looked cute.
“She didn’t want to die with the Backstreet Boys being the only concert she’d ever been to,” Jack said.
I swatted his arm. “I told you that in confidence, jerk.”
Travis handed me my ticket. “Here you go. And because of that, it’s on me.”
“You really don’t have to—”
Jack put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, quickly. It sent a shot straight down to my toes. “Let him. You’re opening your musical horizons. That’s payment enough.”
“All right. Thanks.”
A couple of the guys I didn’t know came over and did that boy-handshake thing with Jack. They started talking about the band and other concerts they’d been to, and I stood there awkwardly, listening. It was cold. I was shivering in my sweater while Talia and Gwen and several other girls stood around in short skirts. They’d been doing this for a long time, though—they were probably used to it. Talia and Gwen turned and caught me watching them. They exchanged a glance, not bothering to conceal their distaste for me. I looked around quickly for Jack, but he’d disappeared somewhere in the crowd. Talia and Gwen had positioned themselves so that one stood on either side of me, and my stomach twinged with panic. I’d bullied them for years, but I was on their turf now.
Talia crossed her arms. “You go to Stonebury High, right?”
I nodded.
“Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at a knitting club meeting or something?”
Talia and Gwen smirked at each other. I knew from experience that their question was rhetorical. I wondered if this whole thing had been some sort of set up. Maybe Jack didn’t really like me. Maybe he’d lured me here, to this weird club with these people who I clearly did not fit in with, so I could get a taste of my own medicine.
But then Talia said, “You’re here with him?”
I turned around to follow her gaze and saw Jack talking with Travis and Reid and some other guys. He glanced at both of us but directed his smile at me. Relief pushed all of my bad thoughts away, and I smiled back.
“Yeah, we, uh, work together.”
Talia wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was still looking past me, at Jack, who had gone back to his conversation. Her face wore a blank expression, but I could see her eyes change as she looked at him. It was as if she was near tears, but her eyes were dry. When she turned back to me, her nostrils flared the tiniest bit. “I thought you were, like, a cheerleader?”
I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the fact that I worked with Jack or anything at all. It didn’t matter, anyway. She wasn’t waiting for answer.
The entrance doors swung open, and Gwen took Talia’s skinny arm and they moved toward the door. Everyone converged at once. For a moment, there was no one around me I recognized. Then, out of nowhere, Jack laced his fingers through mine. “So I don’t lose you in the crowd,” he said, right up against my ear. And then he led me inside.
The Palladium was incredibly dark. “They keep it like this because it looks better with no lights on,” Jack said.
From what little I could see, I understood what he was saying. There were a few rows of seats near the back, but with at least two or three seats in each row that were missing. I made the mistake
of looking up at the balcony, which sagged like it was going to fall down on us at any minute. The floors and walls were dingy. This was most definitely a place I wouldn’t want to see with the lights on.
After five minutes on the floor, pressed among hundreds of kids, I was sweating. I took off my sweater and tied it around my waist. Not my best look, but better than dying of heatstroke. My phone buzzed, and there was a text from Sarah: Turned out Mike’s not mad at me, his grandma just died!! And then a smiley face.
“Everything okay?” Jack asked.
I stuffed the phone into the back pocket of my jeans. “Some stupid drama.”
There was an opening act that, by my estimation, wasn’t very good. The lead singer screamed more than sang, and their songs didn’t have much melody, not like the Kerouacs. There were no catchy choruses, and none of the songs made me feel anything. Not that I was an expert.
“They sucked,” Jack said as soon as they were off the stage.
I turned toward him. We had no choice; we were close together. I was also close together with the guy next to me, who looked like he was pushing fifty and had a ZZ Top beard. Even this close, I had to yell to be heard. “You guys should play here.”
“Our crowd wouldn’t look like this,” he said, but he sounded pleased.
“You’re so much better than those guys.”
He leaned in closer. “What?”
“I said you’re so much better than those guys!”
He shook his head, still unable to hear me. I put my hand on his waist, stood on my tiptoes, and leaned into his ear to say it again, when he moved quick and caught my hands and kissed me.
Oh. My.
Jack had one hand on my waist while the other stroked the side of my neck under my ear. His lips were hot, soft, perfect, the pressure of his mouth and tongue just enough to ease the growing ache and keep me wanting more. The kiss was different than any of our others—deeper, more urgent. When we parted, I was dizzy, off-balance, but I had him to lean into. His mouth moved back to my ear, and when he spoke, I heard him perfectly.
“I didn’t know girls in Science Club could kiss like that.”
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 12
