“So I’m not the only one who thought that? Yeah, she is. She told me she keeps in touch with you and the band. What are Travis and Reid doing now? Do you see them a lot?”
He smiled at the mention of their names. “Trav’s in Connecticut doing something with numbers. Reid’s a music teacher. He lives a few blocks from me. We hang out all the time. He’s doing well. They both are.”
I loved the thought of a grown-up card game, where they could bet with actual money instead of vegetables. “How about your parents? Your dad must be freaking out.”
Jack’s jaw twitched. “He passed away a couple years ago. Heart attack. He was always so active, but it was one of those fluke things, I guess. It was right after he retired, too, and they moved to Florida. Didn’t even get to see one southern summer.”
His dark eyes got darker and I looked down at the dirty floor. I hadn’t been there for him. That was all that mattered. Everything else was details.
“I’m so sorry. I—”
“It’s not your fault, just a simple act of God.”
I shook my head. “Not only for that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did to you.” I managed a smile. “You’re on my list. My biggest apology.”
I waited for him to say something—I forgive you or too little, too late—something, anything, but he didn’t. I reached across the table, but this time I didn’t have the guts to grab his hand, so mine simply sat out there, as useless as my apology.
Jack got up abruptly and reassessed the fruit tray. An incredible heaviness settled over me. I had to fight through it to stand up and go over to him.
“Do you know,” he said, taking a bite of an apple, “that by this time tomorrow, I’m going to be in Philadelphia? Then DC, Atlanta, Jacksonville. Next week is Chicago and Omaha and Houston. By the end of the month, I’ll have been to Seattle, LA, and San Diego. Not bad for a kid who just wanted to get to New York City.”
We were both looking at the fruit tray. “The first time I ever heard you sing at Nona’s, I realized there was something special about you. I felt so stupid for never seeing it before. Now the whole world sees it.”
He wanted to keep on eating his apple, to keep his defenses up, I saw it in his eyes. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to. But I couldn’t let him.
I took the apple from his hands and set it on the table so that he didn’t have anything to focus on except for me. I waited until he looked at me again, and then I said, “Please. I’ll do anything to fix things. To make it up to you. Tell me what I have to do. I’ll do it…”
I sounded desperate, a little crazy, and my voice broke at the end. Jack stood there, watching me, and I had no idea what he was thinking. “Okay,” he said. “I accept your apology.” He didn’t shrug, but he may as well have. The curt way he spoke stung a little, and I took a step back. He leaned against the table. “That’s what you want to hear, right?”
Of course. I’d waited years to hear these words, but now I wasn’t sure they meant anything. “Not if you don’t mean them,” I said.
He laughed humorlessly, throwing up his hands. “What exactly is it that you want?”
What I really wanted from him, I could never ask for. “I just want…I just want to be friends,” was all I managed to say.
He glanced down at the floor, then back up at me, and I swore that I recognized disappointment on his face. I’d failed him again, though I wasn’t sure why or how. He started to speak when his phone buzzed, vibrating loudly on the table next to the fruit. He read the text, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from his phone. “Apparently, there’s a reporter here from Rolling Stone. They came to interview Force of Nature but they want to see me, too. I have to be at the Boston Harbor Hotel in fifteen minutes.”
He ran his hands through his hair, grabbed his phone, and put it in his pocket. His eyes brightened with anticipation, and it was like catching a glimpse of the old Jack—signing autographs at Nona’s Café, breaking into the abandoned lighthouse for his stupid notebook. It reminded me of myself then, too, when everything seemed new and possible.
So before he could walk away, disappear into the Boston Harbor Hotel and out of my life again, I stood in front of him. I pulled a piece of paper out of my bag. I opened his palm, holding his warm hand for as long as I could. His dark eyes were uncertain but curious. I put the paper in his hand and closed his fingers down over it.
“If you’re ever in town again,” I said.
I released his hand, and he opened the piece of paper, where I’d written my phone number and home address. Not that he couldn’t have gotten it from the internet or by calling the Gazette, but this felt like a statement. I don’t want this to end.
Jack stared at the paper for longer than it would’ve taken him to read it. Then he folded it up, putting it in his pocket. For a second, he didn’t move. A little spark of hope lit me up inside as he studied my face. I watched his eyes as they traveled from my face, down my neck to my collarbone, and then back up to my eyes. He was only looking, but I swore I could feel it like a touch. His phone buzzed again, he said he had to go, and the hope fizzled out.
Before he reached the door, he turned back to me. “All I wanted,” he said, “was for you to want to be with me more than you were scared of what your friends would think.”
I’d always known this, but he’d never said it so plainly, and whoever said that words couldn’t hurt had obviously never been in love.
There were some thing you couldn’t apologize for. Like making someone who trusted you, who confided in you, who treated you like something special, feel like they weren’t good enough. Things like that stayed with you for life.
It was the stuff songs were made of.
“So there’s nothing I can do?” I blurted out as he walked away.
This time when he turned around, he looked sad. “Can you go back in time?” he asked. Then he opened the door.
Gillian nearly fell through the door when he pulled it open. Jack nodded at her and she said, way too loudly, “Oh! Hi!” as if his dressing room was the last place on earth she’d ever expect him to be.
I waited in the doorway, giving him a head start, and Gillian watched him go. Then I grabbed her and hurried down the hall. Music throbbed through the walls; it was the middle of the Yellow Chevys set. There were a few people hanging out in the halls, the occasional group of midriff-baring girls clutching rolled-up posters and giggling to one another. We turned down a long hall and passed a man with shoulder-length brown hair and a cowboy hat, his arms draped around two blonde women. He looked both Gillian and me up and down, then nodded as he passed. He was gone before I realized it was Alex Stone, family-man-with-a-heart-of-gold lead singer of Force of Nature.
It wasn’t until we were safely in Gillian’s car before either of us spoke.
“So?” she asked.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I told her everything. “And then…he just left.”
She rested her puffy hair against the back of her seat and sighed. “Men.”
I thought I’d have some sort of closure after tonight, but I was only more confused. You held my hand a few weeks ago…it was awkward and over too fast, but it happened! You accepted my apology, but it didn’t sound like you meant it. You could have asked me to come with you to the hotel, but you didn’t. You left. Now you want me to turn back time to before I screwed everything up, but that’s impossible. You didn’t touch me, but you looked like you wanted to. What does it all mean? Did my apology mean anything to you? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?
The thoughts ran through my head like some sort of demented Celebrity Weekly article.
“Well,” Gillian said slowly, “at least he didn’t throw it out. I mean, he put it in his pocket. That’s good! If he hadn’t—”
“It wasn’t enough,” I said.
Gillia
n was looking at me, but all I could do was stare straight ahead at the parking garage’s gray concrete walls. “I have to do something else,” I said. It was the one thing I was 100 percent sure of. “I can’t turn back time, but I have to do something. Something big, so he knows I’ve really changed.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Like what?”
I closed my eyes again. I wished that if I kept them closed long enough, I’d wake up as someone else. Someone better. “I have no idea,” I told her.
Chapter Fourteen
Five Years Earlier
No matter what I say
Or how I say it
How close we get
You’re still too far away
—Jack Moreland, “Breakdown”
It was as if I was living a double life.
On Friday nights, there were basketball games and parties at Adam’s house afterward. On Saturdays, it was work. Playing cards and making pastry trays. The band, music. Jack.
He never said anything to me about what I’d said to Talia in the hall, and I never brought it up to him. I’d been stupid, mean, jealous. Jealous. How could I be jealous? This wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t anything, just fun. But lately it seemed like the rest of my life, everything I’d been so into for what seemed like forever—studying and getting good grades and my friends and everything else—was merely a way to pass the time between kisses. And I couldn’t even tell my friends. Not that I was sure I wanted to anymore. The deeper I got in with Jack, the more I wanted to remain the person that I was when I was with him. That was the real me. The other girl, the one walking around the halls of Stonebury High School like she owned the place, that was the imposter. Everyone else might not know it, but Jack did. I wanted to keep her, the real Natalie, and him out of reach of everyone else.
The middle of December was basketball season. Which meant going to class on Friday in my cheerleading uniform. Which meant humiliation. I was the only girl on the team to wear a cardigan over it to hide the stupid seagull staring out at everyone from my chest. Later, in the gym doing warm-ups, I scanned the bleachers for Jack. Not that he’d ever show up to a basketball game. He hadn’t even been in school that day.
“Looking at all your adoring fans?” Sarah asked, bumping me with her hip.
“Yeah right.” I looked at the way the uniform fit her, perfectly tight on top, straight through the hips. I wanted to look like her.
She touched her fingers to her toes and came back up. “So, I’ve been thinking about something,” she said, way too casually for it to be a casual remark. Before she could go on, Amber and Lori sauntered over from the locker room.
“I thought I smelled something burning,” Amber said.
“Ha ha. This is serious.”
“Really?” Lori perked up at Sarah’s tone. The four of us formed a small circle, the stance we found ourselves in most often, containing ourselves to each other. There were other girls on the squad, but they were what Amber called peripherals—on the outside looking in.
“Yes, it is.”
“Let me guess.” Amber rolled her eyes. “It’s about Mike.”
I’d had just about enough of being a spectator of their roller-coaster relationship. The whole thing was giving me a headache.
Though, a part of me did finally understand her need for him, the desire to be one half of something. Last Saturday, in the break room before the show, Jack had kissed me in the closet among the boxes of sugar packets and chamomile tea, and all I wanted was to melt into him. To stay like that forever.
“So what’s going on?” Lori demanded.
“Well, he found out he got in early acceptance to Sienna.” She bit her lip, her eyes welling with tears. He’d surprised everyone by applying there, to a school in Upstate New York, when his friends thought he’d be going to UMASS or UNH like everyone else.
“Yeah?” Lori said, sounding bored already. Who was going to what school wasn’t intrinsically good gossip, unless some idiot who only applied to one school didn’t get in, which is what happened to one of the peripheral boys on the basketball team last year. He’d spent what should have been his freshman year in college hanging around Stonebury, looking depressed.
“So, I’ve been thinking…maybe I’ll apply there?”
Amber burst out into her raspy laugh, and Sarah’s lower lip trembled. Lori started rambling off a list of names of people who’d made their college decision based on where their boyfriend or girlfriend were going and how, in almost all cases, that had led to a breakup. Sarah just looked at me, her eyes searching mine for an answer.
“You’ve been wanting to go to Bay State forever. Remember the folklore class you read about in the catalog? You’ve wanted to take it since seventh grade.”
“That’s a stupid reason to choose a college,” she said, trying to be discreet as she wiped her eyes. The bleachers were filling up, and at any second, the team would be running out onto the court for tip-off.
I put my hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at me. “No, it’s actually a good reason. They’ve got classes that interest you. Going to school somewhere because that’s where your boyfriend is going is a stupid reason.”
She shut her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, she nodded. “I know. You’re right. It’s just, it’s all becoming so real now. What am I going to do without him?”
As if that were their cue, the team entered the court as “Lose Yourself” by Eminem began to play through the loudspeakers. We both turned at the same time to look at Mike, happily oblivious as he caught a pass and took a shot at the hoop.
“You’re going to be fine,” I told her, though I wasn’t quite sure I believed it. Mike’s shot missed.
…
The next day, I woke up with a splitting headache and it took me a minute to remember why.
I lowered myself out of bed and walked downstairs for a glass of water and about a thousand Advil. Thank God my parents were at a faculty breakfast, because I was pretty sure I looked drugged out. My head was foggy because I’d barely slept, but the events of the night before were taking shape in my mind. The basketball game. Sarah and Mike had argued about Sienna. We went to a party afterward, and they had a fight to end all fights, yelling and slamming doors, and one of Adam’s mom’s expensive vases ended up in pieces on the back porch. Then there was Amber, turning to me as if it was the two of us against the world. “We have to do something,” she’d said.
I managed to walk back upstairs and crawled into bed. I was curled up, my head against the pillows, when my phone lit up with a text.
Jack: Reid’s got the flu. No show tonight.
Me: That sucks.
Jack: I bet Darcy would give you the night off.
Me: What would we do?
Jack: Fun! Adventure ;)
I smiled into the phone, as if he could see me.
Apparently, there was this amazing used record store in Kenmore Square called Nuggets.
“My dad’s been going there since he was our age,” Jack explained as he drove. He had one hand on the steering wheel, the other on my knee. All the local bands in Boston hung out there, and it was the place to go to find all the obscure stuff Jack loved. Even now, when he could get anything he wanted in two seconds from the internet, he liked to go to Nuggets. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I’ve met there, and when my dad comes with me, it’s like he knows everyone.”
Even though my head still hurt, I loved to hear him talk. “I don’t know why, but I didn’t think you’d get so amped up about meeting new people.”
He glanced over at me, sliding his hand up my thigh as he did. “Are you kidding me, Science Club? I live for it.”
I rested my head against the seat, angling myself so he didn’t have to reach so far to touch me. It had somehow become second nature to us now. When we were together and not touching in some way, something seemed off.
“Are you all good?” he asked.
I sighed. “I don’t really want to talk ab
out it,” I mumbled.
“Okay, so I don’t know much about girls—I mean, I know a little,” he added, smirking, “but I’m pretty sure when girls say that don’t want to talk about it, it means that’s all they want to talk about.”
“Not me.”
In my head, I could see Amber motioning for me to talk to her, alone, and so the two of us kicked some junior girls out of Adam Dixon’s den and shut the door. “We have to do something,” she’d said.
Why did I love it so much when she acted as if I was her best friend, the only one who was truly her equal?
“She can’t keep going on like this. She is going to be a total mess next year, and nobody’s going to want to put up with her.”
The whole time we talked about her, we never said Sarah’s name.
“We have to do something,” she’s said again.
“But what can we do? She’s obsessed.”
Amber looked thoughtful for a couple minutes. Then she said, “We have to make her think it’s her decision. It’s the only way.”
“Did something happen last night?” Jack asked.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked him if he ever went to a basketball game.
That made him laugh.
“Didn’t think so,” I said.
“I like it when you wear that uniform to class though.”
I covered my eyes with my hand. “Oh God. That thing is the bane of my existence.”
He smirked. “It’s made me look forward to Fridays for quite some time.”
I dropped my hands to my lap, covering one of his hands with mine. “Really? How long have you been watching me, stalker?”
He shrugged, suddenly very intent on paying attention to the road.
I started to laugh. “Seriously, how long?”
“You probably don’t remember this, but we were in the same study hall sophomore year.”
Sophomore year? All I remembered about sophomore year was how I’d gotten a seventy-nine in Biology one semester. “I don’t remember,” I said softly.
“Well, we did. Third period. And you wore that uniform every Friday, and every Friday, I didn’t cut until at least fourth period.”
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 16
