Emily looked at me uneasily. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m just kidding,” Alivia said.
I thought about mentioning Logan’s questionnaire. He’d slipped it through the vents of my locker. When I packed up my bag after school, I’d found it next to a smushed pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups I didn’t know I had. But I decided not to say anything. It would be a better surprise that way.
“Hey, Clara!” Joey called. I shifted from foot to foot but didn’t turn around. I pretended I didn’t hear him.
“I was thinking I might sign up for dance with you guys next session,” I said.
“Clara!” Joey shouted again.
“I think that guy’s calling your name,” Danielle told me.
“Oh.” I turned around and waved to Joey. “Hey,” I said.
“Do you want me to wait for you to walk home?” Why was he talking so loudly? I could feel Alivia’s eyes poking the back of my head.
“That’s okay,” I answered. “I’m good.”
“Okay, see you.” Joey waved good-bye but then went back into school again.
I turned back to the group to see four pairs of eyes staring at me.
“Who was that?” Kacy asked.
I waved my hand in the air like I was waving Joey away. “Just my next-door neighbor,” I said.
“Do you like him?” Emily asked, a sweet smile sneaking up one corner of her mouth.
“Joey?” I shook my head. Hard. “Definitely not. I’ve known him since we were babies.”
“Who do you like?” Alivia asked, tilting her head at me.
I shrugged. “No one.”
Alivia raised one eyebrow at me, like she didn’t believe what I was saying.
“Really,” I said.
“Well, who would you want to dance with at the Hot Chocolate Social?” Danielle asked.
“I don’t know. Seriously. I make matches for other people, not for myself.”
“I saw you talking with Logan and Mateo at Alivia’s party,” Kacy pointed out.
“But not because I like them!” I held both hands in the air as if I were at gunpoint.
Just then, Alivia’s mom pulled up in her giant black SUV. Thank goodness. I waved good-bye to my friends as they climbed inside, and then I scurried across the school yard.
When I reached the corner, I stopped, shivered, and looked around. Alivia’s car was nowhere in sight, so I zipped up my coat and pulled my earmuffs out of the front pouch of my backpack. By that point, I was so cold it barely mattered.
“I guess you’re the one who waited for me,” Joey’s voice said behind me.
I turned to look at him. “I’m definitely not waiting for you.” I hoisted my backpack back over one shoulder, but then I really did wait for him to catch up.
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, falling in step beside me. “I forgot. When we’re at school, you have to pretend you don’t know me.”
I gave him a sideways wrinkled-eyebrow look. “I don’t have to pretend I don’t know you!”
He clapped his gloved hand to his heart. “Then it’s even worse than I thought. You choose to pretend you don’t know me. The math geek next door: You’ll talk to him only if no one else is around.”
“You’re not a math geek!” I protested, but then I blushed because that was exactly how Alivia and a lot of other people at Austen actually saw Joey. “They just don’t know you. You’re cool. And I never even see you at school. Hardly ever anyway. We’re in different grades.”
“First of all, you don’t have to lie to make me feel better. I am a math geek and I’m cool. I’m just not the right kind of cool for you and your friends.” Joey bumped shoulders with me as we walked. I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose or by accident. “I see you at school all the time. It’s weird how you’re never looking in my direction.”
Joey and I turned the corner onto our street, and I couldn’t meet his eyes. I stared up at the ice-coated tree branches. It’s possible I’d pretended not to see him once or twice. But it wasn’t because I didn’t want to talk to him. I just didn’t want my friends to get the wrong idea.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Then I turned to face him as we walked. “Here, I’ll look at you now to make up for it.” Joey turned to me too, shaking his head in a pretend exasperated way, and for the first time, I noticed how long his eyelashes were. And how soft they looked. Like paintbrushes.
And then I stepped on a patch of ice that I didn’t see because I wasn’t looking at the sidewalk, and I slipped and nearly fell.
“Whoa!” I screamed, arms flailing. Joey grabbed me and held me up while I steadied my feet.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Even in the cold, I could feel the heat of my blush from my cheeks all the way down my neck. “That was your fault,” I said.
“Right,” he agreed, nodding. “I made it snow, then I made it melt a little bit and freeze again so there would be ice right there.”
He gestured to the ice on the ground with his head, and I realized he had to use his head because both his arms were still wrapped around me! Why were his arms still wrapped around me?
I straightened up, and he let go. We started walking again. “It’s your fault because you made me look at you,” I explained.
He clasped both hands behind his back under his backpack. I called that his lawyer walk. He only did it when he was trying to prove a point. “You were looking at me because you felt guilty about the way you ignore me at school. So really, it’s your fault.”
“I don’t ign—” I started to say, but stopped when a yellow Holy Cross van drove by us. I could see Sofia in the window, but she was looking straight ahead. I could tell she had seen us, though. It’s pretty obvious when someone is only pretending they can’t see you.
I looked at Joey, glad he couldn’t read my thoughts. I didn’t need him to point out the irony.
The van stopped a couple houses up ahead, and Sofia climbed out.
“Hey, Sof!” Joey called out.
She turned and waved at him. I wasn’t sure what I should do, so by the time I waved too, Sofia had already turned back toward her house and didn’t see me.
“Man.” Joey whistled. “You guys don’t even say hello to each other anymore?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “I just go to a different school now.”
“I used to go to a different school from you, and we talked all the time.”
“Sofia and I grew apart.” Sort of. Sofia and I were never really that close, despite being each other’s only friends.
Joey and I walked past Sofia’s house, almost to the end of our block. He didn’t say anything the whole rest of the way, and I knew it was because he didn’t believe me.
When we got to our driveway, Joey kept walking toward his front door. For some reason, I didn’t want us to go inside our own separate houses with the whole Sofia conversation being the last thing we talked about. Thinking about it made my breath come in short puffy gasps that looked like tiny clouds floating up from my mouth.
“Oh! I forgot to tell you,” I said, and Joey turned around. Instantly my breath calmed down.
“I thought of my business.”
“What did you pick?” he asked. “Jewelry making? Lemonade stand?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to do a matchmaking business. To help people figure out who they should dance with at the Hot Chocolate Social.”
Joey tilted his head at me, and the winter sunlight made his eyes look like amber. “Call me crazy,” Joey said, “but shouldn’t everyone dance with the person they feel like dancing with?”
“You just gave me the best idea!” I swung my bag to the ground, rummaged through it until I found my red folder, and handed Joey a questionnaire. “Fill this out, and I’ll tell you who your match is!”
He took the questionnaire but shook his head. “I don’t need help figuring out who I like,” he told me, glancing over the sheet. “Besides, do you really think liking the sa
me food means two people would like each other?”
I zipped my backpack and swung it back up on my shoulder. “I do,” I said, “and I’m going to prove it. I’m about to get to work on my first match right now. When you see how happy they are, you are definitely going to change your mind. Don’t worry. I won’t rub it in. I’ll even give you a discount.”
“Your middle name is Crazy, isn’t it?” He folded his questionnaire, stuck it in his back pocket, and walked inside. “Clara Crazy Martinez,” I heard him mumble just before his door slammed shut.
I shivered, then raced into my own house. I couldn’t wait to match Logan and Emily. Cupid Clara was going to be the best business ever.
I grabbed a handful of tortilla chips from the kitchen, then raced up to my room to get started. I settled onto my bed, pulled the red Cupid Clara folder from my backpack, and a tingle rushed up my arms. This felt so different from matching random strangers at the mall. It was real. It mattered. I opened the folder and pulled out Logan’s questionnaire. It was creased in a couple of places from how he had folded it, so I smoothed it against my bedspread and began reading.
When I got to the end of Logan’s questionnaire, my eyes raced back to the top so I could read it again. I couldn’t believe it. I really thought he’d have more in common with Emily. I pulled her questionnaire out of the Cupid Clara folder and laid it next to Logan’s just in case my memory wasn’t working too well.
But when I looked back and forth at their answers, my answer was clear.
Logan and Emily weren’t a perfect match.
My heart sank to the level of my belly button. I’d been so sure Logan was right for Emily that I didn’t pass out any other questionnaires. And now there wasn’t enough time to find a different guy for her before the ABC started. Besides, there wasn’t really anyone else I knew that seemed right for her. If I didn’t match Emily with someone cool, Alivia’s prediction about their friendship might come true. And where would that leave me?
Not to mention the fact that if I didn’t do a good job on my business, that would affect my report card. And I might not even be going to Austen Middle School anymore. Papi might decide I was too much trouble to take care of. I didn’t want to move in with my mother and start at a new school!
I stood up and began to pace back and forth around my room. To make a match, I needed to get a handle on the basic facts. To go over everything I knew about Logan and Emily and human nature.
I sat down and made a list.
I didn’t love it, but the basic facts seemed to point in a very clear direction. If I told Emily and Logan that they were perfect for each other, they’d believe me. At least long enough for Alivia to see that Emily was cool and for customers to know that Cupid Clara worked. So they’d probably break up eventually, but that was likely to happen anyway, and if they’d never been right for each other in the first place, the breakup wouldn’t hurt so badly. I was actually doing them a favor.
Plus this would be a real test of my matchmaking skills. It was one thing to match up two people who were obviously going to like each other, but only a true matchmaker could fix up people that didn’t have much in common.
Everyone thought that people had to have some kind of magical sparkle or connection, but attraction was scientific; it was chemicals in the brain. I just had to make the right suggestions here or there, and let chemistry take care of the rest.
It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was an okay match. And once they were broken up, I’d find each of them a new, better match and middle school would continue on happily ever after, at least till the end of the school year.
At school the next morning, I was so distracted, I had to redo my locker combination five times before it opened. I was still formulating my plan for how exactly to get Emily and Logan together. I couldn’t decide if I should drop hints myself, or if I should make it seem like they already liked each other. Finally my fingers were able to twist the lock without fumbling, and a red piece of paper that had been stuck in my locker vents fluttered to the ground by my feet.
I picked it up and unfolded it. The border of the paper was lined with sticks of gum in shiny silver wrappers. In the center, someone had typed up a message.
When I finished reading the note, my heart was slamming around inside my chest as though someone was bashing it like a piñata. I looked up and down the hallway, trying to figure out who sent the note and if it was a big joke. If I was the big joke.
The hall was crammed with people, everyone grabbing their things out of their lockers before the first bell rang. Nobody seemed to be looking in my direction at all, let alone pointing, laughing, or flashing me cruel smiles.
I read the note again. It was kind of goofy, but it sounded real. Like there was actually a boy in this school who liked me. My heart stopped slamming and instead started dancing a crazy fast rhythm. A tiny smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. Somebody liked me? I folded the note back up, put it in my backpack, and then I shut my locker and spun around, feeling like a princess on my way to a royal ball.
Then, suddenly, thank goodness, I came to my senses. A princess? I was ridiculous. This was why I was never going to let myself get swept away by my feelings. I didn’t even know who’d sent me the note or if it was real. It could turn out to be a joke after all, or it could be from someone completely wrong for me. Besides, even if it was from a perfect match, I wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. So it didn’t matter.
A crush couldn’t find me if I wasn’t looking. I was the matchmaker, the Cupid launching the arrows. I was not the target. I took a deep breath and made a pledge to myself as I walked to science. No boyfriends.
Later that morning, someone tapped my shoulder as I was walking from gym to math. I turned to my left, and there was Mateo, matching my pace. His cheeks were bright red.
“Hi, Clara,” he said, his face getting even redder.
“Hi,” I said, confused. Mateo and I had talked a couple of times when we were hanging out as one big group, but he had never tried to walk with me one-on-one in the hallway before. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to ask your advice about something,” he said, looking down at the ground.
We stopped in front of my math classroom. We still had a minute or two until the bell would ring, so I didn’t go inside. “Okay, what is it?” I asked.
He looked up and down the hallway, then brushed the hair out of his eyes. “Um, it’s kind of a secret. I don’t want anyone to know just yet. It would be embarrassing if anyone found out.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said, but I was curious. Mateo was one of the coolest guys in our grade. What could he have to be embarrassed about?
“I don’t want to talk about it at school. Maybe I could text you?”
“Sure,” I said, starting to feel exasperated. Why didn’t he just text me to begin with?
A huge smile of relief burst across Mateo’s face. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re the best.”
I walked into math class shaking my head. So far this had been the weirdest morning of my life. I sat down in my seat and pulled out all the budgeting worksheets we’d had to fill out for the ABC, when Logan flopped down into the chair next to me.
“Did you find my thing in your locker?” he asked, pulling out his math folder.
“Your thing?” What was he talking about? The note? ¡Dios mío! Was he trying to tell me he was my secret admirer? This was terrible! “What thing?” I asked, my voice wobbling.
“You know, my questionnaire.” Logan nodded his head encouragingly. “You said you were going to find me a match.”
Right! He was talking about his questionnaire. I was going crazy. Of course Logan wasn’t crushing on me. He was just after me about his future crush. I took a deep breath. “Oh, yeah, I got it. Thanks.”
“So who’s the lucky girl?” He chuckled at his own joke.
“I’m still working on it,” I told him just as the bell rang and Mr. Bersand asked if anyone was willing to le
t him put their budget up on the Smart Board as a case study. A girl named Kate raised her hand, and I tried to pay attention to what Mr. Bersand was telling us about the difference between fixed costs and variable costs, but my mind kept drifting back to the secret admirer note.
When math class ended fifty minutes later, I was still in a daze. As I walked out the door, I grabbed the note from my backpack and shoved it to the bottom of the garbage can. I wasn’t going to let a tiny piece of paper take over my brain.
The next morning, I slid into my seat in science one second before the bell rang. Luckily my seat was next to Emily, and she was the one person I really wanted to talk to.
Mrs. Fox, our science teacher, told us to get out our binders since we were going to watch a video and she wanted us to take notes. The video was all about some guy who grew peas and tried to see if he could make the flowers and peas be a certain color. It was hard for me to pay attention because Emily and I had a lot to discuss.
“I found him!” I whispered as soon as the classroom got dark. I was moving ahead with my plan of action to convince both Logan and Emily that they’d be perfect for each other. That way, when they found I’d matched them, they’d only see what they expected to see.
“You found who?” Emily asked, eyes wide and confused.
“Your match,” I explained. “Your slow-dance dream guy.”
Emily started to squeal but quickly covered her mouth with her hand so it sounded like a squeak. Even so, Mrs. Fox made an announcement from the back of the room, “There shouldn’t be any talking right now. I want to see pencils moving.”
Okay, fine, I thought. We’ll take this old school. I turned to a blank page of loose-leaf at the back of my binder and wrote a note for Emily at the top.
That part, at least, was true. I quietly tore the page from my notebook, folded it, and passed it to Emily. She read it, wrote an answer, then checked the back of the room about a hundred times to make sure Mrs. Fox wasn’t looking at us before she passed it back. I guessed she didn’t know the first rule of note passing. The more you look at the teacher, the more likely they are to look at you.
Playing Cupid Page 4
