Wow. Okay, that was kind of mind-blowing. “We never talked to each other,” I said.
“And yet here we are,” he said.
Jack found a parking spot on a side street near Fenway. The huge Citgo sign overlooked the streets, an iconic picture of the city, yet one I’d only ever seen on TV. My dad was never big into sports, and my mom was never big into the city, so even though we lived barely an hour from Boston, I could count the number of visits I’d made on one hand. Jack seemed to know the city well, at least where we were going. It was a cold, gray day, the sky looking dusky at one in the afternoon. But I wore a fleece zip-up and a scarf and gloves and didn’t mind at all. It was nice to be out in the fresh air on the streets of a city. We could never walk together like this at home.
As soon as we stepped inside the store, I understood why Jack loved it so much. There was almost too much to look at, with the amount of CDs and records and posters and T-shirts hanging everywhere. There were a lot of customers milling about. I had no idea so many people still bought music at stores like this.
A couple of people said hello to Jack, both older guys who either worked there or were regulars. “Friends of my dad’s,” he said. He was clearly on a mission, sifting through a stack of CDs in the discount bin. “There’s this group from the eighties that my dad loved, The Lawn Gnomes.”
“And here I thought there couldn’t have been a dumber band name than Dirt Soup.”
He messed up my hair, and for a second, I leaned into him. Nothing had ever felt as good as being close to him. “Anyway, they’re really old-school synth-pop, and they released a live album that my dad’s never been able to find…”
We headed over to a section called Rarities and started sifting through. “Can’t you ask those guys if they have it?”
“I could. But the thrill’s in the chase. Adventure, right? Plus, I’m pretty sure they don’t have an idea of half of what’s here.”
We continued looking through, Jack stopping every once in a while to read the back of a CD or set one aside. Twenty minutes later, he hadn’t found The Lawn Gnomes, but he did find seven CDs for his own collection.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked once we were out of the store.
“I don’t know. Walk around. See what’s what. Do you ever have an afternoon that’s not scheduled?”
“Not so much. Hey, I’m in a lot of clubs, as you know, and I have a job.”
“Busy woman.”
I kind of liked a schedule. I liked the satisfaction that came with getting something done and crossing it off the list. I liked to know what was going to happen. But this was nice, too. We got two coffees to go at a hole-in-the-wall diner, then walked down Commercial Avenue. There were lots of statues and historical things to look at, and even though it was December and the leaves had died off all the trees, the park was still pretty. I imagined it lit up at night for Christmas, all twinkling white branches in the dark. It would make a pretty picture. “I want to live in a city someday,” I decided.
“Yeah, me too. New York.”
“Have you ever been?”
“A few times. Shows with my dad.”
“It’s so big, though, isn’t it? Much bigger than here.” Looking around, I thought that Boston must be the most beautiful city in the world.
He took a sip of coffee from his Styrofoam cup, licking some off his lips. “That’s what’s so great about it. No one knows you. You can be whoever you want and no one cares. I can’t wait to get out of Stonebury. Leave everything behind.”
I caught a glimpse of his chipped black nail polish as he replaced the little cover on the cup. I didn’t blame him at all, obviously. I was excited to leave, too, but scared at the same time. Jack wasn’t conflicted at all. He was going to leave it all behind—did that mean me, too? A prickly panic rose in my chest at the thought, and I caught myself. So this was how Sarah must have been feeling.
Last night after their fight, Sarah had left. “I need to take a walk. I’ll be back in a little while.”
I’d asked her if she wanted me to go with her and she shook her head. It might have been the first thing she’d ever done to really surprise me. “I need to be alone.”
When she was gone, Amber’s eyes met mine. “When she gets back, we’ll tell her.”
Jack and I walked all the way to the Common. I’d been here once or twice before with my parents, a long time ago. It was the start of the Freedom Trail, I remembered that. We went during the spring, when it was warm, and there were a bunch of vendors out selling food and T-shirts and a couple old guys playing the saxophone. Today it was nearly empty except for a couple of people walking with hoodies and earbuds. We found a garbage bin to throw away our empty cups. Jack said, “Let’s take the T back to Kenmore.”
I had never taken the T before, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Plus, I was pretty sure he already knew. He used the machine to pay for our passes and let me go through the turnstile first. The park had been desolate, but the train was packed with Christmas shoppers and their bags. We pushed through, Jack’s hand on the small of my back, until we found a spot. The conductor said something that was so muffled I couldn’t make out any words. “They should probably fix that,” I said, turning to Jack, just as he shifted toward me and took a piece of my hair and put it behind my ear. I still couldn’t figure out how something so simple could make me feel like melting into him.
He put his arm around me. It’s kind of scary to think that this goes underwater, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know it did. Thanks a lot.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He grinned. “Actually, I don’t think it does. There’s a tunnel that does, though.”
“Jackass.”
“You’re such a mean girl, aren’t you?” he said. But as he said it, he studied my face and sounded as if he meant the opposite.
But I was.
After Sarah had returned to the party, Amber and I sat her down in one of the unused spare rooms, and I watched as Amber lied. “Listen, we didn’t want to tell you this,” she said. Sarah turned her gaze to me, and I let mine fall to the floor. “We were out shopping a couple weeks ago and we saw Mike. With another girl.”
Sarah stared at her without blinking. “Out where?”
Amber didn’t flinch. “Natalie and I went to the mall out in Burlington. I’m sure he thought no one would see them there together.”
Sarah turned to me. “When did you go to Burlington? You never go there. You didn’t tell me.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Amber took over. “It was a spur of the moment trip, and neither of us said anything to you because we weren’t sure what to say. If we should say anything.”
“How did you know…maybe it was his sister’s friend…”
Amber sat beside her on the bed and put her arm around her. “It wasn’t a friend,” she said softly. “It was pretty obvious.”
“I—I don’t want to know.”
“We didn’t want to say anything at all, but once you started talking about Sienna, we knew we had to. You need to end it now. It’s either now or in six months. You should at least finish the last few months of senior year happy.”
Wow. She was starting to convince me, and I knew the truth.
Sarah said she wanted to talk to Mike. We followed her as she very calmly got up and walked downstairs to find him. We watched as Mike handed the video game controller off and, looking miserable, disappeared into the exercise room with Sarah. The door shut behind them and, twenty minutes later, opened again. Mike, pale-faced and glassy-eyed, reclaimed his controller and continued his game.
The three of us found a quiet place in one of the upstairs bedrooms. “He said he didn’t do it,” Sarah told us, pulling on the loose thread of an afghan. “But then he said that it was all getting too intense, and we should break up anyway.”
She told us this very calmly. She wasn’t crying. I told myself this was a good thing.
Jack and I got off at Kenmore Station
and stopped in at a couple of shops. Inside one store, I found a coffee table photography book, thick glossy pages packed with pictures of Boston and interviews with local photographers. “I need to get this for Darcy,” I said, even though the book cost me about a month’s pay.
Back in Jack’s car, I flipped through the pages of the book. The lack of heat coming through the vents barely registered anymore. “And who needs a seat belt anyway,” I was saying, when I noticed a strange look on Jack’s face. “What—?” And then the smell of something burning.
“Shit,” he said.
He managed to pull the car over into the breakdown lane. He got out and lifted the hood. “Well?” I asked when he got back inside.
He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “I have no idea. I’ve seen people look under the hood before, so I thought I should do that. I got nothing.”
We were still in the city, though I had no idea where exactly, in his poor, little broken car that seemed to possibly be on fire. Then it started to snow.
I laughed. And once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. My side literally felt like it was going to split in half, and I couldn’t breathe. A couple of minutes later, my laughter had subsided and I started to cry.
Maybe I was the one having the breakdown.
“What—um, are you okay?”
I nodded. I wasn’t a hugely dramatic crier. But there was no mistaking the tears.
He reached out and touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “I know a guy…”
“It’s not that.”
“Oh.”
I pulled myself together after a couple of seconds. I hardly ever cried, and I never cried in front of people. Not even my mom. Crying always seemed so weak to me, something girls like Sarah did, not me. But there was something about Jack that made it seem okay to cry in front of him. That was probably very, very stupid, but it was the way I felt.
“I’m a bad person,” I said. “And a bad friend.”
“What happened?”
I shook my head, wiping away stubborn tear remnants. “You don’t want to know.” I don’t want to tell you.
He took both of my hands in his. His were cold, too, but somehow, they managed to heat mine up. Then he brought my fingers to his mouth and kissed them.
I shivered and tried to lean in closer, but it was difficult to do in a car. Why did he even like me? He shouldn’t. “I have to tell you something.”
He brought our hands to his lap and held them there. “You sound so serious.”
“My friends…they call you Jack Moreland and His Traveling Guitar,” I mumbled.
To my surprise, he laughed. “That’s so…not funny.”
I blinked back more tears. All I wanted was to snuggle up to his side and breathe him in. He always smelled so good, the soapy scent of someone fresh out of the shower. Amber was such an idiot. “Nothing they say is funny, they just think it is.”
“You want to know why I take my guitar with me everywhere?”
I nodded.
“Sophomore year, we used the band room after school a couple of days a week to practice. One day, we took a break and walked to Wendy’s for some fries. When we came back, I saw that someone had cut all the strings on my guitar.”
“Someone?”
“Adam, obviously. He said something about it to me the next day.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, a teacher or something?”
“Please. I had no proof, and no one’s going to believe me over him.”
“He should have to pay for it!”
Jack laughed. “It was just strings. Not a big deal to replace. But the thought of him touching it…” He stopped as if he couldn’t stand to think about it.
It wasn’t fair that someone like Adam ran the school and someone like Jack, who was better in every way, got treated like garbage. It wasn’t fair, yet I was as much to blame as anyone that our school was the way it was.
The car was getting cold—really cold. Jack took out his phone and called someone. “This guy, Paul, he knows a lot about cars.” But Paul didn’t answer. “I guess I’ll have to call a tow truck.” He sighed.
“I’ll pay for it.”
He laughed. “I didn’t tell you the story about the guitar to make you feel guilty, Science Club. Not all my money went into strings.”
“Why did you tell me?”
He touched the side of my face with the back of his index finger. “Tell me something no one knows about you. Besides the fact that we’re…friends.”
Is that what we were? I swallowed as his fingers ran down my face and shoulder and arm and side, where they stayed, curving around the space where the end of my sweater hit my jeans. “Um…well, I’ve already told you about the Backstreet Boys concert, and that was pretty major. Okay, sometimes I think that I don’t really want to go to Brown. But my parents both went there, and I know they’d be really upset if I didn’t go. Plus, it’s what I’ve been working toward for four years, so it would be a huge waste if I didn’t go. I probably won’t even get in, so none of this will even matter anyway.”
“What would you do if you didn’t?”
I shrugged. “Safety school, I guess.”
“No, I mean, what would you do? If you could do whatever you wanted.”
Stay with you in this car forever and die of hypothermia sounded a little bit too extreme, though I could no longer feel my legs and it didn’t seem like a completely horrible way to go. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “That’s why I need to get in.”
He smiled at that, and I shifted toward him. “You know your song, ‘The Sun in Summer’?” I said. “You told me that you wrote it because you were mad that your family didn’t go on those trips anymore. Why don’t you?”
He hesitated for a second. “My mom has this thing. Sometimes she gets…sad. And for some reason, that place is like a trigger. So we don’t go anymore.”
“Oh.”
I had no idea what to say to that. He blinked his long lashes, and then his phone rang. It was Paul. Jack explained the situation, then got out of the car and under the hood again. A couple minutes later, he was back in the car. “All right, let’s try it. If this doesn’t work, we’re gonna get towed.”
He turned the keys and the engine started. He let out a little whoop, and a part of me was relieved. The other part, disappointed. Our truth session had ended. We were leaving the city, heading back home, where Sarah and all the other mistakes I’d made still waited for me.
Chapter Fifteen
Spending a Saturday morning at the coffee shop was not the way I wanted to start out the weekend, but I felt I had no choice. I couldn’t let everyone in town think I was hiding out because Adam Dixon had rejected me. Of course, I knew the new and improved me shouldn’t care about what these people thought, but this was just too egregious. I marched inside, ready to defend myself, and found the three of them were already seated and deep in conversation. A familiar thought cut through my mind: maybe they’re talking about me.
Before I even sat down, I said, “Everything Adam said was bullshit.”
Sarah grabbed my hand and pulled me into the booth beside her. “We all know that,” she said. She glanced at the others. “Right?”
Lori nodded emphatically, while Amber said, “Of course,” while giving me a look that meant the opposite.
Sarah put her arm around me and squeezed. She still smelled like the lemon verbena pillow linen spray she used to use in every room in our apartment. Across from us, I saw Lori glance at Amber before smiling brightly at me. Amber shifted her braid from one side to the other and rolled her eyes. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen you. We thought you’d moved back to Boston,” she said in her phony I’m-just-joking voice. I couldn’t believe I’d put up with it for so long.
“No such luck,” I said, as artificially sweet as aspartame.
I ordered a coffee and sipped it as the conversation revolved, of course, around Amber’s impending nuptials. The b
anana dress still hung in my closet, an ugly reminder of all the bad choices I’d made. Agreeing to be in Amber’s wedding was one of my worst, but I could see no way out of it without me looking like the bad guy. Maybe that was something else I shouldn’t care about, but I did.
It turned out I didn’t need to worry about the last event in Amber’s wedding extravaganza. As we were walking out, she abruptly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around, and put on her best sad face. “Oh, did Natalie tell you guys? She won’t be able to come to my bachelorette party weekend.”
Lori didn’t look surprised, but Sarah turned to me, frowning. “What? I thought we were rooming together.”
Amber couldn’t be a normal person and have a bachelorette night out in the city or something. Instead, she’d booked us all rooms at a resort spa in the Berkshires for more than five thousand dollars. I hadn’t told her I wasn’t going.
I only had a second to figure out how I wanted to play this. I put on my most innocent face. “What do you mean?” I asked Amber. “I didn’t say that.”
Amber’s mouth dropped open the slightest bit before she collected herself. “I thought you said you had to work? The freelance thing? Oh, wait, maybe you didn’t get that job? I know you’ve had trouble booking work.”
If only I didn’t value my freedom and the sanctity of human life. Because at that moment I could’ve strangled her. “Actually, I have gotten some jobs lately, but not on that weekend.” (I hadn’t, but in this case the lie was justified.) I glanced at Sarah, who was watching us, completely confused. Maybe it wasn’t nice to play her, but this could have been my one chance to show her the kind of person Amber really was. So I bit my lip, crossed my arms, and tried to look hurt. “If you didn’t want me to come, you could have called me. You didn’t have to say it in front of everyone.”
“Why wouldn’t you want her to go?” Sarah asked, genuinely upset. For her part, Lori simply watched with interest, most likely trying to hide the pleasure from her face at our small mini-drama on Main Street.
For the first time in quite possibly her entire life, Amber had a hard time finding words. “Me? I didn’t— I guess I got the date wrong.”
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 17
