by E. E. Cooper
“No hard feelings, okay?” Brit gave me a quick squeeze. “I’m doing what I think is right. It’s the same call Beth would have made.”
I nodded because if I opened my mouth to talk I was pretty sure I’d start crying. I picked up the extra balls and the plastic cones we’d used for drills and dragged them back toward the gym.
As I walked inside, Chester, our school janitor, waved and smiled like she was thrilled to see me. Chester isn’t her real name. I’m not sure any of us know what it is. We call her that because she likes to wear her dad’s work shirts. He works at an auto repair place and his name, Chester, is embroidered over the pockets. Chester doesn’t have it easy at our school. A mentally slow, chubby janitor is easy prey in a high school, but it never stops her from being incredibly positive about everything. I always try to be nice to her. As Beth once said, it seems like the least a person can do is be nice to the people who really deserve it. It’s being nice to the questionable ones that’s hard.
“You need help?” Chester asked. “I have lots to do, but I don’t mind helping.” Something about her being so kind made me want to throw myself into her arms and let her tell me everything was going to be fine. Then I could add “freaking out the school janitor” to the list of things I’d screwed up.
“No, thanks. I just need you to let me into the equipment room, if you don’t mind.”
“Okey-dokey.” She pulled her elastic key ring from her belt and let it snap back before walking over to unlock the storage room.
I pulled an old towel off the hook and started to dry the balls off. Having a mindless task to focus on helped me calm my racing thoughts, until I realized I was giving each ball six wipes. When I was stressed I tended to fall into these patterns. I’d have to do everything six times or in a certain order. If I didn’t, I’d get more anxious and have to start all over again.
I made myself stop and take a deep breath. My hands were shaking. Chester patted me on the back.
“You sad ’cause your friend is gone?” Her face wrinkled up in concern.
I dropped a ball and picked it back up. “What do you know about Beth?” I said.
Chester blushed and looked away. “I know you’re special friends.”
I watched her carefully, trying to figure out what she meant, or if she meant anything at all. Had she seen us together? Noticed the spark between the two of us? Sometimes when I walked down the hall with Beth it seemed like everyone must be able to tell that we were falling in love. That neon hearts floated above us and trailed in our wake like bubbles in a cartoon. Of course, maybe all Chester had seen was me mooning over Beth in a delusional love cloud. “Yep, I miss her,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. I put the dry ball in the rack.
“Maybe she went down the rabbit hole,” Chester said.
I stared at her. Rabbit hole? “Where did you hear that?”
Chester shrugged and pushed her mop and bucket toward the bathroom. “Dunno. Something she said once.”
I felt a stab of jealousy. I hated that Beth had shared her love for Alice with anyone else. I hated that she’d asked me to disappear with her and instead of just saying yes, I’d given her every reason why I couldn’t. If I’d said the right thing maybe she would still be here, or have taken me with her, or at the very least told me where she’d gone.
I shivered as I watched Chester walk away. I was still wet from the rain, and grass was stuck to my calves. With my luck I’d get sick and die before Beth came back, or bothered to send me a text. I tossed the remaining balls into the rack. I didn’t care if they were wiped down anymore. I reminded myself that doing something any particular way wasn’t making things better, or safer, it was just an obsession. A stupid obsession. It did nothing but waste my time.
The last ball hit the metal rack and knocked a spider onto my arm. The spider skittered across my sleeve.
I stumbled out of the equipment room, shaking my arm and spinning around, trying to get it off me. I whirled into Zach.
“Interpretive dance!” Zach called out. His shoes squeaked on the wood floor as he jerked around, copying my moves.
“There’s a spider on me.” I whipped around and saw something dark move up my shoulder. “Oh god, don’t let it get in my hair.”
“Hold still,” Zach said. I froze. Zach moved behind me and lightly brushed my back.
“Did you get it?” My heart started to slow down. Zach could always calm me. He’s like Valium in a sweatshirt that smells like clean laundry mixed with cedar trees.
Zach showed me his cupped hands. “Got him.” He opened his hands slightly so he could peek inside. “Good thing I was here. He looks like a killer.”
I shuddered. “Why are you holding him?”
“If I leave him on the floor, he’ll get squished.” Zach loped over to put his new eight-legged bestie down under the bleachers. He brushed his hands off on his jeans and held them up for me. “Look, no spider cooties.”
“Thanks.” I shivered again and Zach yanked off his hoodie and wrapped it around me, pulling me into a hug. I let myself melt into him. His hoodie was still warm, like he’d just pulled it out of the dryer. Zach was always warm.
“I went to watch your scrimmage, but Brit said you were in here.”
I wondered if she had told him I’d nearly decapitated Amy Chan. Zach wasn’t an athlete and couldn’t care less how I played, but I still didn’t want anyone to know. Field hockey was one of the few things that I knew I did really well. At least, I used to do it well. “I couldn’t focus on the game. I keep thinking about Beth.”
He wrapped his arms tighter around me. I pressed my lips together, afraid I might spill everything. I needed him to comfort me, even though it was totally unfair.
“It’ll turn out okay. She’ll come home when she’s ready,” Zach said.
“So in the meantime I’m not allowed to be sad?” I snapped. No one got it. They didn’t know what had really happened: she’d left me. “Everyone needs to stop telling me to chill out.”
Zach took a step back at my harsh tone. I winced.
“Sorry,” I said. I opened my mouth to try to explain, but I couldn’t. Not without crushing him too.
Zach kissed me gently. “It’s okay. Of course you’re worried. I love that you’re such a good friend.”
Shame flooded through me. Zach was one of the best people on the planet. The guy saved spiders, for crying out loud. He didn’t deserve my lies. I didn’t deserve him.
“Hey, come here.” Zach pulled me close again. “This sucks. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’ll hear from her soon.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. I tilted my face up to kiss him. I meant it to be a quick kiss, but it turned into something else. Hotter. Needier. I pressed against him, wanting his warmth to touch every part of me. I felt Zach respond and Beth’s face flashed in my brain. I pulled back quickly. A couple freshmen coming out of the boys’ locker room whistled.
“Oops,” I said. “I lost track of where we were.” And who we were, I thought to myself. I hated my body for betraying Beth. For reacting.
“Damn my irresistibility.” Zach smiled and threw his arm around me. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
As we walked out of the gym, I felt Chester staring after us. I was too ashamed to meet her eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
I was packing my lunch the next morning when my dad burst out of the basement, his eyes wide with excitement. Or it might have just looked that way due to the fact that his eyebrows were practically gone.
“Is your mom around?” He bounced from foot to foot.
“Dad, did you burn your eyebrows off?” I didn’t mention again. It was implied. I couldn’t wait to tell Nadir about it. Dad and his eyebrows were an ongoing family joke.
His hand went to his face. “This? A bit. Nothing much.”
Other people have dads who play golf or spend their weekends puttering around the yard. Mine makes robots in our basement. I was genetically doomed to be odd. “Aren�
��t you supposed to be at work?” I asked.
Dad’s eyes darted over to the clock on the microwave. “Soon. I woke up this morning with an idea of how to fix my latest project and I decided to tackle it before heading into the lab. I want to show your mom.”
“She left for the pharmacy already.”
His shoulders drooped a bit, then he straightened. “Do you want to see? I’m calling it Rover.” He whipped a robot the size of a Kleenex box from his side and put it on the floor.
“Named after the Mars rover?” I asked. It appeared to be a perfect scale model. In addition to being crazy about robots, my dad was a NASA nut. He’d build his own space shuttle if our neighborhood association wouldn’t put up a fuss about the launch pad in the backyard.
“Nope. Watch this.” He walked around the granite island and the robot followed him. “Sit,” he commanded, and the back end of the robot lowered. “Beg.” The robot balanced on its back wheels, its front wheels spinning in the air with a mechanical clicking sound.
“You made a robot dog,” I said. Dad walked in a zigzag and the robot followed. “Any particular reason?” I tossed an orange in with my lunch. I wondered what it would be like to have normal parents. The one upside to my dad’s robot obsession was that he hadn’t noticed the huge dark circles under my eyes that broadcast I’d hardly slept. Around midnight Beth had finally returned one of my thousand texts.
K! Don’t worry about me. I’m taking some time off. It’s what I need to do.
She didn’t say a thing about the two of us. Nothing about missing me. Nothing about when she might come back. Nothing about why she didn’t even bother to tell me before she left. I’d immediately hit CALL to try to catch her and hear her voice, but she didn’t pick up. I didn’t even know what to think.
“No reason. Just wondered if I could.” Dad looked down at the robot with pride. “The voice recognition was the hardest bit. We humans take for granted what a complicated process communication turns out to be. It’s not just about what’s said, but what’s heard, and from that, understood.”
My heart recognized the truth of what he was saying. Once again it felt like my emotions were in free fall, looking for something solid to grab on to. Beth had been my gravity. Without her around I’d lost my grounding. “I don’t take it for granted. I can’t figure out what people mean half the time, and in theory I’ve got better sensors than that thing,” I said.
He winked. “I don’t know. I did order top-of-the-line sensors. Those are no off-the-shelf RadioShack specials.” Dad draped an arm around my shoulders. “Go easy on yourself, kid. Once you get beyond the basic sit, stay, and heel, communication gets complicated. With a robot I can lay out exactly what I mean to say in code and the robot makes sense of it. We’re rarely that clear with each other.”
I turned his words over in my head. There were times when I felt so in sync with Beth, as if we were speaking to each other in our own private language. I didn’t need to interpret her—it was as if part of me was connected to her. But now that connection was severed and communication had stopped and I didn’t know why it had happened. It made me doubt I’d ever really understood.
I still wanted to believe there was a chance that we could fix things. But her text hadn’t given me much hope. I trusted her with everything, and she didn’t even trust me enough to tell me where she was. And she didn’t love me enough to say good-bye. I swallowed hard so I wouldn’t start crying.
“Well, I suppose we should take off,” Dad said.
I looked up. He was holding my lunch bag out in front of him. He shook it slightly. I took it from his hands.
“Thanks.”
He smiled. “As much as I’d like to talk robots all morning, if we do we’ll both be late.” He gave Rover a pat on the head and went to give me a pat too, but I ducked out from under his hand. He blew me a kiss and headed out the door. I glanced at the clock. I needed to get going.
I ran up the stairs and grabbed my bag. Beth’s copy of Alice in Wonderland fell out. I’d forgotten I still had it.
I flipped through the pages, wondering like a crazy person if it somehow held the key. Maybe there was some kind of message or hidden meaning in the parts she’d underlined. A code of sorts. If I could figure it out, I might be able to make sense of what she’d been thinking when she made the decision to take off. I couldn’t escape the idea that if I could just understand why she’d left it would make it better.
Last night when I’d been tossing and turning it had occurred to me that it really came down to two options. Either Beth’s leaving had nothing to do with me, or she’d left because of me. Neither was good.
I tossed the book aside. If I wanted to know what was really going on with Beth, there was only one person who could tell me, and it wasn’t Alice. I needed to talk to Britney.
Going to Brit’s house is like stepping into an issue of Elle Decor magazine. Everything, from the cream-colored Italian leather sofa that’s as soft as a baby’s butt, to the ice-blue Turkish silk rugs, was absolutely perfect and in place. I suspected dust spontaneously combusted before it was allowed to fall in that house. Even in the fridge things were lined up and color-coordinated. Green Perrier water bottles sat next to a bowl of bright red apples that looked ready for their close-up. You’d think with my compulsion for order I’d love it, but it made me tense. The house even smelled sterile.
“You want anything?” Brit asked. She grabbed a bottle of water for herself. “No, thanks.” I was certain I would spill it or leave it somewhere, making a water ring on an inlay table that would turn out to have belonged to Napoleon or the queen of England. “Should we head down to the basement?” I suggested. It was the only part of her house that didn’t make me anxious.
The basement was like our personal clubhouse. We rarely hung out at Beth’s because of the tension at her place, and while my house was okay, it couldn’t compete with Brit’s. When her parents built the house the basement was the nanny suite. When Britney grew up, the nanny moved out and Brit took over.
Unlike the rest of the house, the basement looked like an actual home instead of a movie set. Fashion magazines were piled on the floor and bottles of nail polish were scattered on the coffee table. There was an oversized sectional sofa that seemed to hug you when you sat on it, and a pile of unmatched pillows. There was a huge flat-screen TV, a pool table, built-in bookcases filled with every board and video game you could imagine, and even a wet bar with a microwave and fridge. The basement had its own entrance, which meant Jason could sneak over without Brit’s parents knowing. The only sign that it wasn’t solely Brit’s domain was a huge walk-in wine fridge that her dad had installed when he’d been on a wine-as-an-investment kick a few years back. It was like a temperature-controlled vault. Then he’d decided he wasn’t interested in wine anymore and started collecting some kind of Old West prints that hung in his office upstairs. Now the only things in the vault were a few cases of wine and Britney’s perfectly chilled Diet Coke. Brit’s parents didn’t care that we hung out down there. It was soundproofed from the main house, so they didn’t have to listen to us blasting music or giggling.
“Nah, I don’t want to go downstairs.” Britney motioned to the stacks of paper she’d lined up on the dining room table. “I already got everything set up here. We need to make a packet for everyone on the student council.” She sighed as if she couldn’t believe that her role as secretary required actual work.
It was clear to me that when Britney said “we need to do X,” what she really meant was that someone other than her needed to do it while she watched. I didn’t mind. I sat down at the table and started pulling together the information on next year’s elections. Brit leaned against the black granite island and flipped through a Vogue.
It felt somewhat weird to be with Britney, just the two of us. Normally Beth was the one that connected everything. Maybe Brit didn’t want to go down to the basement because it was a screaming reminder that everything was different since Beth had
left.
Even though she was acting like everything was fine, I knew it had to be bothering her that Beth was gone. When I’d told her earlier about Beth’s text last night, she’d given me a small hug and said, “See? I told you she’s fine,” but she clearly hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Just like she hadn’t wanted to talk about why she hadn’t been in school today. “Mental health day,” she’d said with a shrug. It was fine if she didn’t want to confide in me about her emotions, but I needed to get her to talk.
“How come you aren’t running for student council? They’re taking applications until the end of the week for next year’s slate.” Britney popped a cashew into her mouth.
I stapled a stack and set it aside. “I’m not really interested in that kind of stuff.”
“Who cares if you’re interested? It looks good on college applications. You should volunteer for everything you can now. Next year will be too late.” She pointed at me with a perfectly manicured nail. “You can’t afford to sit back, unless you have your eye on beauty school . . . or Ohio State.” She winked like we were in on the joke together. Britney never missed a chance to make fun of where Beth was going. Britney believed anything below the Ivy League was a waste.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Brit had told everyone that she’d been accepted everywhere she applied, but Beth had told me the truth. Britney hadn’t gotten into any of her top schools except Cornell, and she wouldn’t have gotten in there except for the fact that her grandfather had donated something like an entire engineering building with a telescope to make it happen.
Before I could respond, Britney’s mom bustled in. “Excellent advice. If you’d taken it yourself, then your own applications would have been stronger.” She blew a kiss at Britney as if she was joking, but my heart still hurt for my friend. Brit’s parents never missed a chance to imply she wasn’t quite up to their standards. What else they wanted in a daughter was a mystery to me.
