She doesn’t appreciate that quite as much.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Sorry about last night,” I say as we walk down Vine in the morning. “It was already pretty late and I wasn’t really in the mood to talk.”
Zoey shrugs, eating her apple. “Whatever. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. It’s fine.”
Clearly it isn’t fine. If it were, she’d be begging me to tell her all about my date with Chris, because I know she’s dying to know. But her pride is getting the best of her at the moment, and so she’s doing that passive-aggressive thing that girls sometimes do where in order to make you feel bad they pretend they don’t give a shit about anything when the shit they actually do give is the size of that giant dinosaur turd Laura Dern digs her arms into in Jurassic Park.
And it’s working. I am feeling pretty bad, but it’s not having the effect Zoey is going for. She probably wants me to throw myself at her feet and tell her I’m ten times sorry, but I’ve got my own pride to cater to, and our natural sibling rivalry commands me to stand my ground on this one. It’s not like she’s the only one who’s got a reason to be mad, and someone ought to let her know.
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t,” I say. “My date with Chris wasn’t off to a great start, in case you’re wondering.”
“Oh yeah?” Zoey says, taking the bait. “Why is that?”
“He wasn’t too crazy about your outburst at Jack. And it wasn’t too difficult for him to figure out that the information about Jack’s family situation could only have come from me, so …”
“Oh, that. Yeah, well, Jack is an asshole, so my compassion for him is really pretty limited. He deserved to hear what I said.”
“This isn’t about Jack,” I say. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Jack. The problem is you made me look bad in front of Chris, because I told you something I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”
“Well excuse me, but how is that my fault? It’s not like I waterboarded you or anything.”
“No, but if you had kept it to yourself, Chris never would have found out.”
“And if you had kept it to yourself, there wouldn’t have been anything for him to find out in the first place. Sorry, Matt, but you can’t pin that on me. Man up and take some responsibility. You’re not twelve anymore.”
“Wow,” I say, stumped by her makeshift logic.
I sulk for a while until Zoey finally breaks the silence.
“So how’d the rest of your date go?”
“All right,” is my extensive answer.
“Good.”
“Yep.”
Zoey sighs. Then she drops her apple core on somebody’s front lawn and looks at me. “Look, Matt, I get it. You’re mad at me because of what I said to Jack. But I was really upset and I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t do it to make you look bad. Not everything is about you. Get over it.”
I look back at her. “This is probably the closest thing to an apology I’m gonna get from you, isn’t?”
“Pretty much. So can you forgive me? Just this once?”
“Well, I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
“Oh well.”
She grabs my arm. “You know what, it’s that whole damn secrecy thing that will be all our downfall, I’m telling you. You still haven’t told Alfonso, have you?”
“No.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? He’s your friend. He deserves to know.”
I sigh. “That’s exactly what Chris says.”
“And he’s exactly right. The longer you put it off, the harder it gets.”
“I know,” I say. “And it’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s just awkward for me because—”
“Because he’s a guy?”
“Yes! I mean, it would be a whole lot easier for me if he was a girl.”
“Yeah well,” Zoey says, “he isn’t, and he’s not gonna have a sex change to make things less awkward for you, so …”
“Yeah, I get that. But even so, I’m just so scared that things will change between us because he might think I’m hitting on him or something.”
“Well, are you?” she asks.
I scowl at her. “Hell, no! I mean, he’s not unattractive or anything, but he’s so totally not my type.”
“You can tell him that now.” Zoey nudges me with her elbow and nods toward the street corner where El Niño is waiting for us on his bike like a brooding storm, and he’s not alone. Standing next to him is Hurricane Sandy.
“Not a word to Alfonso,” I hiss at Zoey’s we approach him.
Zoey snorts. “Please. Give me some credit.”
“Maybe I would if you hadn’t pulled that stunt with Jack.”
“Oh get over it already!”
“¡Hola chicas!”
“Hi, guys!”
Sandy throws herself around my neck and kisses the air next to my ear while Zoey hugs Alfonso. Then Alfonso and I fist bump, and I immediately notice something’s off. His eyes are fixed on me. Of course they are—he wants an explanation. He wants an explanation I don’t have, so ignore his prying looks as we continue on our way to school and Sandy starts a major rant about the intricacies of the Chinese language—or, in fact, languages.
“O-M-G, guys, did you know that the Chinese speak like a million different dialects? Okay, maybe not a million, but they have like ten major dialect groups and each of them has like dozens of different dialects, and sometimes even people who speak different dialects from the same dialect group have no idea what the other one is saying, yet they all use the same writing system. Mrs. Li—that’s our teacher—Mrs. Li says it’s like if someone from New York and someone from L.A. had a copy of the New York Times, they could both read it, but if the person from New York were to read it out loud, the person from L.A. wouldn’t understand a word of it, can you believe that? Oh, and don’t even get me started on the tones! Words can have several completely different meanings, depending on how you pronounce them. Like, the word ma can mean mother, but it can also mean horse. That’s so super confusing. Imagine getting the pronunciation wrong and accidentally referring to someone’s mother as a horse!”
Sandy is clinging on to my arm, but she’s mostly talking in Zoey’s direction while Alfonso is holding onto my shoulder to keep his balance as he’s rolling along on his bike at walking speed. As Sandy keeps rambling on he squeezes my shoulder a little harder to get my attention and says in a low voice, “So you want to tell me what happened yesterday?”
“It’s nothing,” I say, shaking my head. “I did something stupid. I’ll tell you later, okay?”
For a few moments it seems okay, but then Alfonso lets go of my shoulder, stops his bike and says, “You know what, actually no, it’s not okay.”
I stop and look at him.
“I don’t know what it is, but something is clearly wrong. You’ve been acting all weird recently.” He looks at Zoey, then back at me. “Both of you. Do you really think I don’t notice when you’re having an animated discussion about something, and the moment I show, up you fall dead silent? Look, if you want to have secrets like two little schoolgirls, fine. But at least have the decency to say so and don’t treat me like some little kid who’s too stupid to notice.”
“Hey,” Zoey says, throwing up her hands in defense, “don’t look at me. I’m sworn to secrecy against my will, and apparently I’ve said too much already.”
Alfonso turns to me. “Well?”
I’m taking too long to think of a reasonable reply, because such a reply doesn’t exist.
“You must have done something pretty stupid to get yourself grounded.”
“Woah, what?” Zoey takes a step back, purses her lips and stares at me.
And there’s your classic dilemma. Do I admit to having lied to Alfonso or do I double down and draw Zoey into this and force her to play along with my lie? I can see in her eyes that this is not something she will appreciate.
“Look,” I say to Alfonso, “I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m not grounded. Something came up but I couldn’t talk, so I lied to you.”
He stares at me for a few long moments before he says, “And?”
“And I’m sorry.”
Apparently, my response fails to satisfy him.
“Right,” he says. “Well, if you should ever feel like telling me what the hell is going, you know where you can find me.”
He gets on his bike and dashes off.
Sandy, who has been following our altercation with her eyes wide open, looks at me and says, “Was it something I said?”
I shake my head and look her right into the eyes. “You have done no harm.”
My cryptic reply seems to confuse her even more by the look on her face, which, in turn, confuses me. I was quoting 2-b-pretty quoting Macbeth, and no matter if she’s aware that I am the person she has come to know as Mattoid2002 or not, surely there should have been some sort of reaction if she is, in fact, 2-b-pretty.
A twinkle in her eyes, a twitch in the corner of her mouth.
But instead, nothing. Just a befuddled frown as she says, “Right, um … okay. So what happened? Why’s he so mad at you?”
“Because I royally messed up.”
“Aw,” Sandy says and rubs my arm with her hand. It’s a clumsy gesture full of ignorant sympathy, but it’s actually kind of sweet.
“Yeah, it’s a long story,” I say. “Never mind. I’m going to fix this.”
“You better, Matthew,” Zoey says, the look in her eyes grim and demanding. “You damn well better.”
* * *
Fixing it—and that’s not even coming as a big surprise—is easier said than done. Alfonso ignores me for the rest of the day, and he’s doing an excellent job at it too. When I ask him for an eraser during geography class, he takes it out of his pencil case. I reach out my hand but he ignores it and slams the eraser on my desk without looking at me. When I want to return the eraser, he ignores me again. I offer it to him with my arm stretched out until the teacher finally says, “Just put it on his desk, Matthew.”
During lunch, Alfonso chooses not to sit at our table. He sits at a table across the cafeteria, directly in my field of view.
“Where’s Alfonso?” Sandy asks when she notices someone’s missing from our regular line up.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Philip, who’s sitting next to me, points at him and says, “He’s sitting right over there.”
As Sandy turns her head to look, I glare at Philip until he lowers his head to admire his lunch.
“Did your boyfriend break up with you, Maddie?” Steve asks and nudges Jack with his elbow to prompt him to laugh which he dutifully does. Albeit it not as heartily as he would have done before the Track & Field incident the other day. Chris doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even smile or smirk. He just throws me a sad, almost pitying look. His cobalt blue T-shirt reads Blue in white lettering.
When I met him in the hallway before the first period he asked me, “How did it go?”
I had to hurry to class so I just said, “It didn’t. I’ll explain later.”
Now that Alfonso is so obviously shunning me, Chris must think that my coming out to Alfonso didn’t go too well. I have yet to tell him that it didn’t even happen in the first place. It’s not until Track & Field when Coach Gutierrez snatches Jack away to coach him on his starting posture that Chris and I finally have a brief moment of privacy away from the others.
“Okay, talk to me,” he says, still out of breath from our last race. “What happened?”
I shrug. “Nothing.”
He frowns.
“I mean, literally nothing. I chickened out.”
“You chickened out? How? I mean, why? I mean …”
“I called off our meeting because something else came up.”
“Right,” Chris says. “That’s sort of a relief, to be honest. I thought he’s mad at you because you finally came out to him or something.”
“No, it never got to that. I told him I couldn’t meet him because I was grounded. Then he found out I wasn’t grounded, so yeah.”
Chris groans. “Okay, no offense, but that was pretty stupid.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Honestly, I’m beginning to doubt how close a friend he really is. I mean, to you. First you don’t want to tell him the truth, then you lie to him …”
I sigh. Him—or anyone, for that matter—questioning my friendship with Alfonso is the last thing I need right now. “Look, I messed up, okay? No need to rub it in!”
Chris throws up his hands in defense. “Hey, I was just saying.”
I have no further response, but I’m saved by the bell. Or by Coach Gutierrez’s whistle, really.
“Let’s go,” Chris says. “We can talk later.”
* * *
After Track & Field, I skip the shower—again. I’m still not comfortable with the idea of getting naked with Chris—at least not in front of an audience. I don’t have a problem with my body or anything. I’m neither too skinny nor too chubby, and for my height all my body parts seem appropriately sized. What worries me is how my body—or specifically a certain part of it—might react when Chris is standing in front of me in his birthday suit. On any given day it takes much less to give me a boner, and I simply can’t take the risk of my dick taking my coming out in its own hands.
Figuratively speaking.
My dick doesn’t have hands, obviously.
That would be hilarious, though—the thought that it could rub itself while I just sit back and relax.
Anyway, I wait until everyone’s in the shower, then I quickly change into my street clothes and rush home. I still haven’t heard back from 2-b-pretty, and it’s beginning to worry me. Did I scare her off when I told her I think I know who she is? Either way, I need to get on my computer because I want to tell her about the disastrous twenty-four hours I’ve been having since we last spoke.
Mom pounces on me the moment I’m through the front door.
“Oh there you are,” she says, her hands in dirty rubber gloves. “I need some help in the garden. Can you …”
“Not now!” I snap at her and run up the stairs.
She scoffs. “Matthew!”
My phone chimes the second I enter my room, announcing the message I’ve been anticipating. It’s very short.
2-b-pretty:
My dear Mr. Mattoid,
you know me, but you don’t know who I am. And I’m not sure if you even want to. I’ll say no more until next time. If there is a next time, as I hope there will be. Your story is too intriguing and must go on. Online or off.
xoxo
“Matthew!” I hear Mom call from down below. “Will you help me in the garden now?”
“I’ll be down in a minute, mom!” I shout back over my shoulder. Then I look back at the screen and read 2-b-pretty’s message again, trying to make sense of it. I know her, but I don’t know who she is? What does that even mean? And why wouldn’t I want to know who she is?
“Matthew!”
I slam my laptop shut and rush out of my room, down the stairs, past my perplexed mom, out of the front door and into the garage where Greg is oiling the chain of his bike. I grab it, jump in the saddle and dash off.
“My bike!” Greg shouts as if I don’t know whose stupid bike it is.
“It’s an emergency!”
“You’re an emergency, asshole!”
I don’t even have time to hate Greg for always having a good comeback on his lips. Setting a new personal record and possibly breaking the speed limit, I pedal the heck out of Greg’s bike and make my way to the library. When I turn the corner to the library’s main entrance I nearly hit the weird figure standing in the middle of the sidewalk. With screeching brakes I manage to stop just inches in front of him.
“Phil!”
Without a flinch he turns his head, looks at me, and says, “Yes?”
“What the he
ll are you doing here?”
“I’ve been working on my term paper. If you had told me you’d be coming I would have waited for you, but you said you didn’t have time.”
“I don’t!” I say. “I’m not here to … never mind. Have you seen Sandy?”
“Sandy?”
“Yes! Sandy. Have you seen her in the library?”
He slowly shakes his head. “No?”
I dismount the bike and hand it to Phil.
“Hold this for me,” I say and rush past him into the library. As always, the second floor is sparsely crowded. Maybe eight or ten people populate the computers and seating areas. None of them are Sandy. I look at my watch. Less than ten minutes have passed since 2-b-pretty messaged me from here. She must have left right afterward.
Disappointed and exhausted I make my way back down. Phil is still waiting by the roadside holding Greg’s bike.
“Are you sure you haven’t seen Sandy?”
“Yes,” he says, “but—”
“Does the library have a second exit or something?”
“No, but—”
“But what?” I snap at him.
He looks at me. He looks at me for a long time, but it’s not his usual blank stare. There is something in his eyes, something he wants to tell me, so why doesn’t he just say it? Because I don’t have time for this.
Then, out of nowhere, out of the blue, out of the blue nowhere that is left field, a terrible, horrifying thought occurs to me.
The username 2-b-pretty is not a description.
It’s the expression of a deep-rooted desire.
“No,” I say in a low voice, looking at him.
He keeps staring at me with his big brown eyes like a maniacal, psychopathic deer, and suddenly I know it’s true. From one moment to the next everything is falling into place and making sense and tearing my whole world apart.
“No, please no! Say it ain’t true!”
“You know it is,” he says with his obnoxious, disgusting twang.
I guess that also takes care of my theory that 2-b-pretty is driving a Tesla. Which means that Nicole Tesla is probably a special agent assigned to surveil me after all.
Cupid Painted Blind Page 13
