When I got to Cameron’s party, Michael was already there and he and Shondra and I talked for half an hour about the first week of school and which classes were going to be hard and which teachers needed to retire. Then Michael left us to talk to some guys from the cross-country team and I realized that I had started shaking a little. Party-induced palsy? Or had my time in love limbo affected my muscle control?
“You’ve got to talk to him, George,” Shondra advised as she ushered me over to a couch and motioned for two girls in miniskirts to make room for us. “Like, now.”
But I waited another hour, during which I talked to everyone who came by, as if I were the unofficial ambassador to the Republic of Cameron’s Couch. My mom would have been delighted to see me being so friendly and I could tell my sudden affability surprised everyone else. But when I saw Michael was leaving the party I knew my stalling time was up and I followed him out to his car.
“Hey!” I called as he was opening the driver’s side door. He looked up and I asked, “Can I talk to you?”, each word coated in gravel as it rose up my throat.
He slid into the car and my heart plummeted to the tops of my sandals. But then he opened the passenger’s door for me, so I got in.
“What’s up, George?” he asked. Something about the casual, careless way he asked it made me do an emotional one-eighty, spinning from abject to angry. Obviously this whole breakup was causing me a lot more pain than he felt.
“‘What’s up?’” I snapped. “I don’t know, Michael. You tell me.”
He slumped a little in his seat and sighed.
“I don’t know.”
“Really? ’Cause it looks like you’re no longer ‘thinking things through.’ It looks like you’ve moved on with someone else. I guess I just didn’t get the memo about it.”
He turned to me now and looked genuinely confused.
“What are you talking about?”
“You and Diana. You seem happy together.”
“We’ve gone out once,” he informed me with the kind of smile you’d see on a dentist holding a long needle. “And she’s a really sweet girl.”
If a heart can explode then I was pretty sure mine had splattered all over my ribcage. Groping for the door handle, I managed to say, “Then I hope you’re really happy together,” and was prepared to run—to the Pacific Northwest, if necessary—but Michael reached across me and pulled the door shut again. The shock of this sudden movement and once-familiar physical intimacy, his arm against my chest, reduced me to warm pathetic tears.
Michael slumped back against his seat, reached out an uncertain hand toward me, then slumped again. And that gesture, that split second of his wanting to comfort me and deciding not to, made me want to stab myself with the nearest sharp object because that would have hurt less. That’s when I knew for certain that it was over. There was no us anymore. And somehow I felt small, diminished, like without us there was less of me.
“I miss you,” I whispered through my tears. “And I deserve to, because of what I said, because I laughed. I don’t know … I just miss you.”
He said, almost apologetically, “I couldn’t keep going the way we were.”
“What ‘way’? You mean the not-having-sex way?” I snorted. “Are you going to give me some kind of 1950s lecture about how young men have ‘needs’ and girls have to understand those needs or the men will get blue balls or whatever it was called—”
“That!” Michael barked, practically lifting himself out of his seat. “I couldn’t take any more of your saying stuff like that! You make such a big deal out of things sometimes!”
“Well, sex is a big deal! Or at least, it should be. I mean, I have no problem, people hooking up—”
“We weren’t exactly hooking up, George,” he interrupted through clenched teeth.
“No. Because I’ve never done that. Not like you and Catalina.”
“No,” he groaned. “Not this again.” He turned the key in the ignition, and a blast of reggae music burst from the speakers. I realized this was my cue to go, but the sound made me so sad I couldn’t move.
Instead I asked, “Do you remember last New Year’s Eve? We were sitting in your car after another party, listening to Bob Marley … ”
“This is Jimmy Cliff,” he corrected as if part of the fundamental flaw in our relationship had been my inability to correctly identify reggae artists. As we sat looking at each other, I knew he could tell that I knew he was being deliberately obtuse, so he ducked his head, kind of embarrassed, and said, “Look, George—”
“It’s okay,” I assured him because I knew that if I spent one more second in that car I would expire, right there in his passenger seat. I opened the car door again, but I paused before climbing out onto the sidewalk. Without looking back at him, I said, “But I want to say this: Maybe this is immature and unsophisticated, but my first time was so important to me that I got really nervous … and I blew the whole thing. I didn’t trust you—no, I didn’t trust us enough, didn’t trust us not to change. I knew everything would be different afterward, and I was so happy then, I didn’t want to risk that.” I slid out of the car with one foot on the sidewalk and looked over at him. He wasn’t looking at me now but was sitting very still, either absorbing my words or working hard to tune them out. I couldn’t tell and I couldn’t stand being there long enough to figure it out. “I just want you to know that I’m sorry that anything I said or did that night hurt you. I still wouldn’t want to hurt you, ever.”
I got out, closed the door behind me, and walked away. I know he was sitting there in the car for a few moments; at least, he was there the whole time I walked up the driveway and into the party, frantically drying my eyes with the back of my hand before I went in to find Shondra. But first I had to find a bathroom because I was pretty sure I was going to throw up.
10 Getting By
On Monday, I so dreaded seeing Michael in European History II I was actually relieved that a pop quiz took up most of the period. I preferred staring at my lined sheet of paper and thinking about Archduke Ferdinand to looking at Michael and contemplating how ridiculous I had sounded outside Cameron’s party. And I knew that two periods later, lunch wouldn’t provide any relief from my embarrassment with him, unless I moved myself to another table, which would mean (1) abandoning Dave and Gary and Shondra and (2) looking like a chastened puppy hiding in the corner and hoping no one noticed that I had piddled on the rug. So I made myself march in to the caf, opened up my lunch bag, and unveiled my avocado and baked tofu wrap like the uncrowned queen of the lunchroom. I was ready to dig in when Gary burst into a guffaw.
“It’s been a whole week, Georgia, and you still haven’t said anything!” he taunted. “I can’t believe it!”
Great. Something else was going on right in front of me, just like the budding romance between Michael and Diana. Only whatever this was, I had failed to notice it. Probably because I was too busy noticing Michael and Diana, who hadn’t arrived yet. Whatever this new shame was, at least Michael wouldn’t be there to witness it, for once.
“What?” I asked.
Dave shook his head, looking at Gary. “It’s like she didn’t even notice,” he said.
Shondra tapped my elbow and gave me a hint. “Look around at everybody’s lunch trays. What do you see?”
I frowned and scanned the room, but I was still really confused. It looked like everyone was still carrying the same slabs of mystery meat and congealed SpaghettiOs and talking and shouting and grouping themselves into little power cliques as usual.
“Oh, right,” I tried. “The zombie apocalypse. I forgot that was this week.”
Gary clucked his tongue in disappointment and announced, “There’s not a vegan item on one of those trays. Because there are none available. Despite your articles in The Alt and the promises you got from administration last year.”
“Oh. You’re right.” I glanced up as Michael pulled out his chair and sat down with Diana right behind him. At least they
weren’t holding hands in public yet. Still, I felt my face grow hot as I remembered how I had bragged to his grandmother about winning vegan lunch choices and thought of how happy she would be to see her grandson with someone as winsome and candy-coated as Diana DeBourgh. I pushed both thoughts away and admitted to Gary, “I guess I didn’t notice.”
“I told you,” Gary said to Dave, who replied, “I still don’t believe it,” and put a palm to my forehead to see if I was running a dangerously high temperature. “She must be delirious,” he concluded.
I took a sip of my bottle of iced tea and said, without looking even remotely in Michael’s direction, “I guess I’ve been … kinda preoccupied lately.”
“I guess!” Gary crowed and leaped up from his seat to put both hands on the back of my shoulders, like a manic and probably irresponsible Little League coach. “So get! Fired! Up! Let’s get the old Georgia Barrett back! Let’s write some incendiary articles for The Alt. Let’s throw a Molotov cocktail at the food services truck when it backs up to the school cafeteria filled with meat and dairy products!”
Shondra raised a fist and encouraged, “Viva la Revolucion!”
“What’s going on?” Michael asked, and Gary caught him up on my lack of attention to the cause I had championed last year, much to Michael’s amusement.
“She’s been, uh, ‘preoccupied,’” Gary finished. “Can you believe it? Come on, Georgia,” he coaxed as he ran a hand across his purple spikes. “There are chickens to be saved!”
I shot him a look and he blanched, which was totally unfair, so I dug out the oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I had baked and passed him the whole bag.
“I think there should be more options, and healthier ones,” Diana chimed in with a swish of her ponytail. Her old boarding school probably had a salad bar sponsored by the Canyon Ranch Spa, but I guess it was nice to have her support. It should have been nice, at least. I knew that.
“A new recruit,” Dave said to me. “You guys can storm the admin building together.”
Kind of shyly, Diana offered, “I would go and complain with you if you wanted. My mom knows some people on the school board.”
And through it all, Michael sat back and picked at his soggy French fries, smiling, no doubt basking in the glow of Diana’s generosity of spirit.
“There you go! We have a new foot soldier in the fight for freedom,” Gary enthused. “You guys can go to the admin building after school.”
I shook my head without thinking, but since everyone was looking, I explained, “I, um … told Leigh I’d run lines with her after school. She’s trying out for Maria in The Sound of Music next week,” grateful to have an excuse. Normally I’d be all for holding some businessman-turned-town-selectman hostage while I ranted about hormone-fed beef and appalling farming conditions and gestation cages, but not today. And not with Diana DeBourgh.
“Your sister has a great voice,” Michael said then and I gawped at him in surprise.
“And she’ll get to play a nun, which should be kind of natural for her,” Shondra teased with a playful bump of her shoulder against mine.
“Are they letting anybody try out?” Diana asked, her eyes even bigger and brighter than usual like someone had turned on a light bulb in her skull. She explained, “I was in all the shows at my old school,” then turned to assure me, “I wouldn’t try out for Maria or anything.”
“I think you should try out for whatever part you want,” I told her and, with a glance at Michael, I offered, “Do you want to meet me after school, at my locker, and we can go find Leigh and she can tell you all about it? LHS’s productions are actually really good, and there are some really talented people here. So you should go for it.”
She beamed like a little kid who is told they can get a lollipop for such good behavior and cried, “I would love that! Thanks!”
“No problem.” And then, because I felt like everyone was staring at me, especially Michael, I told him, “This is how I indoctrinate them. First, musical theater. Then, the Animal Liberation Front. Next thing they know, they’re releasing tigers from a zoo,” and everyone laughed, but Michael kept looking at me for a while until a slow smile spread across his face, lifting the skin over his sharp cheekbones. For some reason it made my face burn again, even as I felt a little triumphant.
As we left the caf, he caught my elbow and said, “That was really nice of you, George. To invite Diana over like that.”
“I’m not exactly Vlad the Impaler, you know. I can use my forked tongue for good as well as evil,” I told him as I tried to ignore the rush I got from the feel of his fingers on my arm.
He sighed, rolled his eyes, and walked away as Shondra laughed and nudged me off to the Spanish classroom.
So when the final bell rang, I hurried to the juniors’ hallway to catch Diana and invite her home with me so she could look over the script and the music that Leigh had borrowed. She actually squealed in surprise and excitement, even though she appeared to be the kind of person who could make a million lifelong friends anywhere from preschool to a penitentiary. I remembered how hard it is to be the new kid at school.
And this tiny gesture of decency made me feel better, too, because she and Leigh and I actually had a good time reading over the lines. The Sound of Music is one of my mom’s favorite movies; I find it kind of annoyingly saccharine, but the actual Broadway play is much darker. There are all of these Nazi sympathizers and the whole von Trapp family is basically going to be crushed under the fascist steamroller that levels Austria unless they escape to the mountains. The three of us ate chips and drank diet soda in the living room while Diana read the part of Liesl, the oldest von Trapp girl, the one who sings You are Sixteen, which is a pretty nauseating song, but I could already tell that Diana could play the part as someone genuinely sweet and innocent and not a total moron in love with a future stormtrooper like Liesl is in the movie, while Leigh read Maria’s part. I read every other part, but I really liked being the snotty evil baroness, Elsa, the best and put on a ludicrous approximation of a German accent that cracked Diana up as I did so. I was actually starting to like her, and not just because she’s an easy laugh. Disliking her was like disliking that first day you know spring is really here, when the snow has finally melted and birds are chirping and the grass is new and very green.
Afterward, when we were waiting on the porch for her mom to pick her up, Diana thanked me for about the fiftieth time for inviting her over and said, “It’s hard to be in a new school. Everyone else already has their friends … ”
I nodded and felt guilty for even wanting to dislike her.
“That is exactly what I thought when I moved here three years ago,” I said. “And what I thought after the move before that. And the move before that. My dad’s a professor who keeps getting one-year positions at schools, so we moved around a lot.”
“Wow. You’ve been through this a lot,” she said. I was about to point out that getting a boyfriend like Michael Endicott in your first week at a new school had to be a clue that you were going to be just fine—in fact, you were crushing it—but she pushed an acorn cap onto the top step with the toe of her ballet flat and asked, “Can I ask you something?”
“Uh, yeah … ” I answered, bracing myself to have to lie that I did not mind at all that she was seeing my ex-boyfriend.
“You and Michael used to go out, didn’t you? Until recently?”
I bit my lip and nodded. “Yeah, we did. But it’s over, and I know you guys … ”
“I was just wondering because … ” She paused, choosing her words. “Well, he seems so sad to me lately. And I was wondering if that’s why, if he’s so sad because you guys split up.”
I shrugged, trying not to look as wounded as I felt because as much as I liked the idea that he spent his date time with Diana pining for me, I didn’t believe it. Not after our conversation at Cameron’s party.
Her mom pulled up to the curb in a Prius just then and Diana waved to her and said as s
he walked toward it, “Our new apartment’s not far from here—it’s in that big house on the corner of Summer Street? You can come over anytime.”
I wasn’t sure I was ready to have a sleepover at Michael’s new girlfriend’s house, so I nodded and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
When I went back inside, Leigh was still at the piano practicing My Favorite Things.
“Diana’s really nice, isn’t she? I’m glad you asked her to come over,” she said. “It was really nice of you to do that.”
“You have no idea.”
Leigh laughed and closed the lid on the keys. She said, “She’ll get the Liesl part for sure. The trick will be getting enough boys to be in it again. Spencer will be Captain von Trapp, of course, but there are still a lot of von Trapp boys to cast. And Nazis.”
Remembering her problem from last year’s production, I raised my eyebrows as I flopped on the couch and asked, “Is Alistair okay with you cavorting onstage with Spencer again?” Her missionary’s-son boyfriend, Alistair, had almost demanded she drop out of the production when he’d learned that the leading man was gay, when he should have been thanking Jesus for that since Spencer is really cute and talented, so any girl would have been happy to sing romantic duets and dance with him. Leigh and Alistair had almost broken up over it, but somehow they had worked it out.
“It’s onstage cavorting.” Leigh laughed. “And Ali’s accepted that if I’m okay with Spencer—and anyone else—then he has to be, too.”
“That’s awesome, Leigh. Way to lay down the law.”
She hit me with a throw pillow and walked out of the room laughing. I burrowed into the couch pillows and thought about how Leigh was so different this fall from the last. She’d been the first freshman ever to get a lead role in the spring musical last year, and she would almost certainly get the lead again. Last spring, Leigh and Alistair had worked it out. He accepted who she is and what she believes and didn’t try to make her change (much) or walk away from her when she didn’t.
Snark and Stage Fright (Snark and Circumstance Book 5) Page 10
