by Jen Klein
I focus on making my book fit until I hear his voice.
“Heads up,” Ardy says. “I might not be very good at this.”
I finish zipping my book away, straightening to my full height. “Which part?” I ask him, making a valiant attempt to channel the Ghost of Lark Past. The one who doesn’t get nervous about a boy. “Lockers? Mornings? Calculus?”
“This.” Ardy makes a gesture that seems to indicate our whole situation. He accompanies it with a look I believe is meant to be pleading. “Showing up at your locker,” he continues. “Or not showing up. I don’t know the rules.”
Ah.
“I think we get to make the rules,” I tell him.
“That’s so much responsibility.”
“I know, right?” I smile up at him, because that’s what you do when the boy you like is so close and so adorable. “I could meet you after second period, in the first-floor east stairwell.”
Ardy cocks his head to the side. “Why there?”
I open my mouth and then snap it closed.
For making out.
But of course I don’t say that. I only stare up at him, flummoxed by what to say. Finally, when neither of us has moved for at least a full minute, I come up with something. “I don’t know if you’ve dated anyone at this school—”
“I haven’t.”
All right, then.
“It’s one of the places where people go.” Aaaaand now it’s awkward. “When they want to be, like, alone.”
Ardy nods, getting it. “I have a different idea,” he tells me.
“Okay…?”
Although I don’t have any expectations about what he’s going to say, what I definitely don’t expect is for him to take a step toward me and drop his mouth onto my own. I also don’t expect him to run one hand into my hair and the other around my waist, pulling me into him. But what’s most surprising is what I do in return.
I kiss him right back, totally ignoring everyone in the hall who may be watching. Like we’re a legit couple. Like this means something.
When we break apart and I open my eyes, he’s smiling down at me. “I don’t have anything to hide,” he tells me.
I stretch up to give him a final peck. “Me either.”
Except for how we got here in the first place.
* * *
I briefly consider not going to the cafeteria at lunch, just to make Ardy wonder where I am, but then I remember what he said about not knowing what the rules are. Hiding out would be a deliberate attempt to confuse him, to keep him on his toes, and I don’t want that. It all began with that stupid game, but now that I’m in it, I don’t want to play games.
Besides, if I didn’t go to the cafeteria, I wouldn’t see Ardy.
And all I want is to see Ardy.
As usual when I arrive, Ardy and #Heaven are already seated. I plop down and everyone smiles at me, but Ardy doesn’t make any extra movement in my direction. It again makes me wonder what Hope knows about us. I mean, if he’s willing to be so open with all the public displays of affection in the hallway, surely that means Hope’s got a clue, right? But as we engage in our traditional griping about the food, she doesn’t give me any sort of nudge-nudge or wink-wink.
“By the way, congratulations,” Evan says to me. “On hosting the Not-Prom. Your parents must be happy.”
“I don’t know if congratulations are in order, but thanks.” I don’t share the story about my parents’ warfare this weekend. It started with the Not-Prom but somehow devolved into a screaming fight about something from when they started dating in high school.
So, y’know…relevant.
Next to me, Ardy sets his spinach wrap down and lowers his right hand beneath the table. It floats onto my leg, just above my knee, barely touching. Almost hovering. I take a mini-scoot toward him, letting him know that his touch is welcomed. The slight weight of his hand increases, and his thumb moves in tiny circles against the outer edge of my knee. He’s very discreet, and what he’s doing is not at all obvious to anyone else, but it drives every other thought out of my mind. Which becomes obvious when I hear Hope say my name and I suddenly realize it’s not the first time.
“Lark? Hello?”
“Sorry.” I shift my focus to her. Or at least I try to. “What?”
“Will everything be open at Wheelz? Unlimited driving and arcade games?”
“I don’t know. Probably?”
“Hey, guys.” It’s Wade Collins, looming over our table. “You know why I’m here, right?”
Since my last interaction with Wade was yesterday, when I interrupted him and Keeshana under the stairwell, I have no idea.
“Doing my team duty,” Wade continues. “Encouraging you all to come to the soccer game on Friday.” Oh, right. That. The sportsball players are constantly trying to drum up support for their teams. “We’re playing Verdugo High,” he says. “It’s a big one for us.”
Hope looks at me—“Do you want to go?”—and I remember that I’m supposed to spend the night with her on Friday. If we go to the game first, maybe Ardy will come, too.
“Okay.” I look at Wade. “We can do that.”
“Thanks, Lark.” He beams down at me. “You always were cool.” He points to Ardy. “You should come. Isn’t that your old school?”
Ardy nods, chewing, and Wade heads off for another group of people. Hope addresses our table. “Boys? Come with?”
“Not me.” Ardy shrugs. “I don’t like soccer.”
So much for thinking he would want to go because of me.
I realize Evan is looking at me. “Didn’t you used to have a thing with Wade?”
Why is he asking me this?
“Barely.” I immediately feel Ardy’s hand coming away from my knee. He brings it up above the table and resumes eating his spinach wrap. I don’t know if it’s coincidence or if he doesn’t want to touch me while discussing my past romances.
“It’s nice that you guys are still friendly.”
“Life’s too short not to be, right?” I say it as casually as I can, but I’m overly aware of Ardy sitting beside me. Eating his spinach wrap and not saying a word.
* * *
Cooper is waiting on the hood of my car when Leo and I arrive. As we reach him, my phone shivers, and Cooper waves his own phone. “That’s me,” he says. “Three names.”
“Names of what?” Leo asks.
“Songs,” I tell him. “Cooper and I are making a playlist.”
“Worst.” Leo gets into the passenger side and slams the door. I turn back to Cooper, lowering my voice.
“Three girls?”
“Yeah, from Verdugo High. See what you can find out.”
I look at Cooper for a long time. “How’s Ian?” I finally ask.
“Fine.” Cooper’s gaze drops to the ground. “We’re going to Buffalo Wild Wings on Friday to watch college basketball.”
“You hate basketball.”
“I know.”
“He should know,” I say scathingly, and watch Cooper wince.
Whatever.
* * *
I wait until I’m home and in my room before reading the text from Cooper. Three names: Krista Willis. Elle Campbell. Trissa Jefferson. Three girls, purported to have had “bad” breakups with Ardy. I stare at the names, hating the possibility that there’s a side to Ardy that I won’t like.
I grab my laptop and hop onto my bed, scrunching my pillows up against the headboard so I can lean against them. Before I start investigating these girls, it seems like maybe I should find out a little more about Ardy himself.
I already know that Ardy doesn’t have a huge presence on social media, which is fine. Not everyone’s into that. I quickly look at what’s out there but don’t find anything of interest. I do spend some time staring at a picture of Ardy posi
ng on a beach in swim trunks. In it, he’s flexing one of his biceps, looking at the camera and laughing. He’s clearly making fun of guys who pose on the beach in earnest, but I can’t stop looking at his image. Even though it’s a joke, he still looks amazing.
But then it crosses my mind to wonder who took the photo. Was it Hope?
I click away from the beach picture and go to Verdugo High School’s website. It takes me a few minutes, but eventually I find an archive folder with links to old photographs from clubs and activities. I go back three years, to when Ardy was a freshman, and after scrolling through the art and ASL clubs, I find him in a small group of kids making funny faces and holding a banner that reads BOWLING CLUB. I make a mental note to tease him about it later, and I enlarge the photo so that I can see him better. Freshman Ardy is not quite as tall, and his hair is shorter and spikier. But he has the same dark eyes and gentle half smile, the same vintage style. My heart twists in my chest at how young and earnest he looks. He can’t actually be Undateable.
Can he?
In ninth grade, Ardy was apparently also involved in the creative writing club, the National Honor Society, and student government. Busy guy. I click to the next year, discovering that although Ardy left bowling and student government behind as he aged, he picked up the paintball and game clubs. He also grew at least four inches.
I find eleventh grade—junior year, Ardy’s last at Verdugo High—and start looking through the pictures. I scan down the entire page but don’t see Ardy’s face anywhere. I go back to the top, thinking maybe I scrolled too fast. But nope—no photos of him.
Except…I catch sight of his name under the creative writing club picture. Not pictured: Ardy Tate. I go to the honor society page, where I find the same notation. Paintball, too.
Huh. I wonder why he didn’t get his picture taken for any of the clubs. Was he sick that day or something? I click back a year so I can look at his tenth-grade photos. He’s wearing different clothes in every picture, so Verdugo High must not take all the club photos on the same day. Which means Ardy missed a bunch of days, not just one, in eleventh grade.
Weird.
I decide to move along to the internet at large to investigate his ex-girlfriends. It’s easy to narrow down the hundreds of Krista Willises to the one who goes to Verdugo High. She’s short and pretty, with thick jet-black bangs over darkly lined eyes. She looks very emo, very intense.
I find myself feeling jealous, even though that’s ridiculous. This is a girl from a year ago. Surely she’s not in his life now, and if she is, I don’t have a leg to stand on. Not with my dozens of exes waving at me in the hall and inviting me to soccer games and giving me mall discounts. But that’s not why I’m jealous of Krista. I’m jealous because she knows Ardy. She knows things about him that I don’t, like who he was before he appeared at REACH. And I’m jealous because—presumably—she’s tilted her head up to kiss him, the way I did this morning. And maybe he looked at her the way he looked at me, like she was something he’d never seen before.
I do some more online stalking, eventually finding references to Krista’s after-school job at the used-book store downtown. It makes sense. Of course someone who looks emo and intense would spend their afternoons surrounded by literature. And of course Ardy would like that.
There’s the jealousy again.
In good news, assuming she still works there, it ought to be easy to find Ardy’s ex-girlfriend and see what she is willing to spill about him.
My plan is to pull away, to keep Ardy at arm’s length until I can talk to Krista, but…
But Ardy.
I keep forgetting about the Krista thing because instead I’m paying attention to him, to us, to how in the first few days, people would turn, surprised, when we walked past holding hands…but then they stopped. Or maybe it was that I stopped noticing.
Or caring what they thought.
The only person who said something blatant was Cici Belle. She cornered me with a snarky look on the way into English. “Surely there are at least a couple of dateable options you haven’t kissed under the bleachers yet.”
I froze, feeling the anger boil up inside me. But I squashed it down, instead turning my high-beam smile on her, the one I’d learned from Hope. “I haven’t kissed Ardy there yet, but now that you mention it, maybe we’ll hit it up after school.”
“No, what I meant was—”
“Unless you wanted to reserve it for you and Darren?” I watched as redness crept up Cici’s neck. Darren is her second cousin, and there was a rumor going around last year that they’d had sex. I’m sure it’s not true, but neither is Ardy’s Undateable quality.
So screw Cici.
I left her in the hallway and walked into class with my head held high.
Other than that moment, everything at school is perfect with Ardy. I’m hyperaware of the details that make up him. How he sketches animals on the front covers of his notebooks. And how he often gets songs stuck in his head, like he’s living the soundtrack of his own life. And how that thing he was doing against my knee in the cafeteria the other day—moving his thumb in circles against my skin—it’s something he does when he’s touching me. It seems to be his way of letting me know that even when we’re only holding hands in the hall, he’s not checked out. He’s aware of me beside him.
Also, it kind of makes me melt.
He’s doing it in the middle of the week after school when we turn a corner and Hope nearly mows us down, she’s moving so fast. She skids to a stop when she sees us, her eyes darting to our intertwined fingers, then back up to our faces. She smiles—and I think it’s genuine, though I can’t be sure—but all she says is “Sorry! Late to French club!” before taking off again.
I want to ask Ardy if he’s already told Hope about us or if the sight of our linked hands was new information for her. But I don’t, because he’s pulling me in for a kiss.
“You are very friendly at school,” I tell him when we come up for air.
“I’m friendly everywhere,” he says. “What are you doing this weekend?”
“Soccer game and spending the night at Hope’s on Friday,” I remind him.
“I happen to live next door to Hope.”
“I happen to know that.” We grin at each other. “Maybe we’ll run into each other.”
Later, Christopher Connor is at the locker next to mine when I’m getting a textbook. He looks over at me. “You dating Ardy?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” Christopher closes his locker and spins the dial to lock it. “See you later.”
See, the word’s gotten around…and it’s fine.
* * *
I’m on the schedule to help out at Wheelz more than usual this week, so it’s Thursday afternoon before I’m able to go to the bookstore. I planned to drop Leo at home first, but when I stupidly tell him where I’m going, he wants to come along. I can’t think of an excuse to say no, so I allow it.
Other stores have come and gone, but BeBe’s Books has been here as long as I can remember. The aisles are narrow, and the shelves are tall and packed with paperbacks. The smell reminds me of my grandparents’ basement on the East Coast: a little musty, a little familiar.
I spot Krista Willis immediately. She’s on a step stool in the romance aisle, cramming books onto an already full shelf. Leo wanders off to the fantasy and sci-fi section, and I make a beeline to Krista. She looks down at me. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a good romance.” At least that’s somewhat true.
“What kind?”
“Um…” I clearly haven’t thought this all the way through. “Maybe something with pirates?”
Krista’s eyes brighten. “Ooh, I just shelved a bunch of swashbucklers. Hold on.” She finishes stocking the books and then descends to my level. “Do you like a lot of sex?” I stare at her and s
he laughs. “When you’re reading, I mean. Or do you want it to be mostly implied?”
“Oh. Maybe split the difference?”
“I’m with you,” she says, making her way down the aisle. “I like heat, but nothing too graphic.”
Did you have heat with Ardy?
Obviously, I don’t ask the question. Instead, I ask a different one as I follow her. “What high school do you go to?”
Krista turns around and gives me an overly dramatic look of disappointment. “What, you don’t think I’m in college or something?”
I let my gaze travel over her heart-shaped face and upturned nose. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would believe it if you said you were still in middle school.”
“I get that a lot.” Krista laughs. For an emo girl, she’s very friendly. “I’m at Verdugo. How about you?”
“REACH.”
“Do you know Will Hartsook? He used to be my boyfriend.”
He used to be my not-boyfriend, but I don’t tell Krista that. “Yeah, he’s in my biology class.” I figure it’s a harmless piece of information to give out. “Do you know Ian…” Crap, I can’t remember his last name.
“Ian Charnock?” Krista says. “That’s the only Ian I know.”
“Yeah, one of my friends…” (stupidly dates him) “…is friends with him.”
“We’re in English together,” Krista says. “He’s that guy who always knows the answer but doesn’t raise his hand first because he doesn’t want to be that guy.”
And yet as far as I’ve seen, Ian is totally and absolutely that guy.
“Cool.” The good news is that even if I didn’t have a secret agenda here, this would be a totally normal conversation to have in Burbank. Everyone’s interrelated in some way. I watch Krista look through pirate romances for a minute, and then—like it just occurred to me—I throw out another name. “Oh, Ardy Tate goes to my school. I think he used to go to Verdugo, right?”
