“I didn’t know Bolsheviks still existed,” Michael marveled.
“Let alone ones that can code,” I added, and he laughed. I missed the sound of his laugh, and something in the sound loosened me up a little. After some time, I felt more focused and knowledgeable and less nervous.
When I had managed to get through a whole hour without crawling across the kitchen island and into his lap, I yawned and, just to prove that I had accumulated my share of research points, asked, “So would Kerensky have supported smashing the oppressive domestic life of women, offering abortion on demand, available daycare, and equal access for women as full citizens and comrades?”
He smiled and said, “I haven’t looked into that.” Then he smirked with suspicion as he thought about the list. “What are you writing about?”
“Well, I thought I might look into people who were important leading up to the revolution and I think I might focus on Sofya Perovskaya, who shot Tsar Alexander II.”
Michael’s laugh now startled me so much I almost spit out my last sips of tea.
“So, once again, you’re going to focus your work on a woman who tried to kill a man.”
“When have I done that before?” I asked, thinking of our first group project for English class last year. “The Wife of Bath never killed any of her husbands—she just outlived them.”
He grinned, pleased with his superior memory, I suppose, and said, “What about Charlotte Corday? Your history paper for Mr. Franklin last year?”
“Oh. Well.” He remembered everything. I bit my lower lip and tried to look like I was fascinated by something on the laptop screen as I explained, “Sofya was part of a group of revolutionaries, the Nordnaya Volya, the People’s Will; they attacked the tsar’s carriage with bombs. Oscar Wilde wrote an unsuccessful play about someone like her, which is kind of cool.”
“Just imagine what she could have done to the sexist pigs on the St. Petersburg high school football team—if they had a football team. Or a high school.” Michael laughed as his dog, Harry, came bounding in, more thrilled to see me than any human has ever been. It felt good to be teased by Michael again. In all the lunches I had had with him and Diana, I had never seen him tease her about anything. I guess that was our thing.
I concentrated on scratching just the right spot behind Harry’s ears and said, “Last night Dave told me the entire history of British versus American punk. Sofya would have made a great punk. Today, she’d be in that punk feminist band Pussy Riot.” I noticed Michael frown, so I added, “He also said if I were a superhero I’d be called the Vegan Avenger. Still, I bow to your superior standing as feminist crusader. You’re the hero of the day around here, not me.”
“Dave said that? Last night? When?”
“I don’t know, around nine fifteen?” I frowned slightly because I could not imagine why he was upset or demanding precision in the timing of the remark. “I said the snarky thing about your being a hero, so don’t be mad at him. And it reminds me—I’m supposed to say a big ‘thank you’ to you from Cassie. You are her hero and if you participated in a more violent, bone-crunching sport than cross country she would be on your front porch right now, gazing longingly inside, mooning around for just a glimpse of you.”
Michael snorted and turned to his own laptop. But he wasn’t done yet. I could tell from the set of his jaw that he was not cool with this topic of conversation. So don’t play the hero, I thought, if you don’t want fangirls.
“So … you were with Dave last night?”
“Um, yeah. We went out for pizza in Ashworth. He knew this place that serves vegan pizza and he actually ate the cheese—spelled with a ‘z,’ by the way—without making jokes or gagging noises. Imagine that.”
“Well … it sounds like it was a successful first date then,” he said, eyes on his laptop screen. “Assuming it was a first date.”
“I can’t imagine why that would be of any interest to you,” I snapped. “I’m not keeping count of your dates with Diana.”
“Whatever,” he sighed.
Now I felt my brows come together in frustration because Michael never says stuff like “whatever” and gets irritated with people who do. And what business did he have judging what I was or was not doing with Dave in the first place? Why was he so bent out of shape all of a sudden?
“What difference does it make to you?” I demanded.
“No difference at all. Unless it makes you unhappy. And then I would be disappointed for you.”
“Maybe we should just work separately on this project,” I said as I calmly closed the lid of my laptop and slid off my stool. I needed to get out of there before I slapped the smirk off his face—or started crying again.
He looked at me for a second before bending back over his keyboard, saying, “I guess there’s no real reason for us to work together, in the same room.”
“No, I guess there isn’t.”
“We can email each other stuff. You do your part and I’ll do mine.”
“We can put our two pieces together when it comes time to turn in the project,” I said, as I put the laptop in my backpack and buckled it up. “Or not, because … well, our parts don’t go together anyway. Maybe they don’t make sense together.”
He nodded and I had the awful feeling—it was a bit like falling off a diving board—that we were speaking metaphorically now.
“You write your part, I’ll write mine, and we’ll see what happens,” he agreed, so I just patted Harry goodbye, called a farewell to Michael’s mother in the living room, and was about to walk out the door when Michael came up behind me and grabbed my wrist. I whirled to face him, so startled I almost dropped my messenger bag.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t go away mad. You’re still angry about my letter in The Alt, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not. I’m just wondering why you decided to interrogate me about how I spent my Saturday night. I thought we were getting along together just fine and then you got snippy.”
He frowned and leaned a shoulder against the gleaming white wainscoting I had first seen last spring on a tour of historic homes my mom had dragged me on. That experience had been humiliating—and had taught me that Michael and I lived on very different planets, ones that barely shared an orbit. I shouldn’t be surprised that we were back to fighting again. Maybe our whole romance had been just an unusually long ceasefire that would continue until we went away to separate colleges, separate lives.
He crossed his arms and asked, “Why did you make that joke about your sister ‘mooning’ over me?”
I gasped a bit. In the heat of our argument, I had forgotten that I’d even relayed Cassie’s message to him. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes as I explained, “I was just trying to convey a rare feeling of gratitude on Cassie’s part. She asked me to tell you ‘thank you’ so I did. Promise fulfilled.” I readjusted my bag on my shoulder and took another step toward the front door. “Believe me, she’s not going to be stalking you or camping out on your front porch. I know my sister’s not good enough for you—any more than I am.”
“Georgia.”
I heard him say my name as I closed the door behind me, but I didn’t turn back. I got on my bike and rode home, trying not to cry again.
16 Loveworn
After the fight in his kitchen, I mostly went through the hours of my life, going to classes, eating lunch with my friends, painting sets and hanging with the kids at rehearsals, and filling out college applications, like I was playing the part of Healthy High School Senior in the world’s most boring movie.
One welcome distraction from school applications and heartache turned out to be working with the kids on the show, even if I was getting a little of sick of The Sound of Music. Having had to listen to the songs and the dialogue over and over again for the past month, I knew the show so well that I could perform it myself in a boredom-induced coma. I was starting to really like all of my little von Trapps, even Leila. I’d learned that Maddie loved rabbits and could sing a so
ng that named all the fifty states in alphabetical order—in fact, sometimes you had to beg her not to. Topher was obsessed with the New England Patriots and boy bands in equal degrees, and Oliver made mind-blowing Lego robots with movable parts. When I’d exclaim over how amazing they were, his face would turn the color of a watermelon, he was so happy. Who needed a boyfriend or a college acceptance letter or a working knowledge of the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks when you could chase a robot bug around an auditorium?
And when the younger kids weren’t onstage now, I had them helping me paint a mountain backdrop for the set because mountains didn’t require a lot of precision and Ms. Duvall said she was going for “impressionistic Alps” anyway. She had seen some of my work in the art room and had liked my logo for the Cryptic Pigs so she had suggested I take a bigger part in the set design.
Diana helped paint sets, too, since she was one of the von Trapp kids, after all, and all of her little pretend siblings were in love with her, like she was some kind of combination of Mary Poppins and fairy princess because she’s so pretty and kind and never got impatient when they screwed up one of the kids’ numbers, forgetting the lyrics or lines, even when it meant Diana had to do it over and over again with them. Kids are usually good judges of character, actually. Unless they’re really young, they can tell when someone is fronting and they knew Diana wasn’t fake nice to them, like some of the high school kids were. They knew she was genuinely kind. I couldn’t blame Michael for falling for her. That was just nature, like a wave finding the shore.
Rehearsal time got even better because Dave and Gary came now to play with the pit orchestra. Strangely, despite our date weeks before, Dave wasn’t treating me any differently. It was as if we had telepathically agreed not to mention it ever again, like we had some unspoken magical understanding that I chose not to examine because when I did I realized it was kind of improbable. I ate lunch with him every day, along with Shondra, Diana, and Michael, and the only weird tension there was between Michael and me.
One day after leaving the caf, I saw Michael and Diana in the hallway. She was holding both of Michael’s hands between hers and speaking to him earnestly; he nodded once in response before she had to bounce off for the science hallway. He saw that I’d been watching them and hurried away as if he’d just noticed a rabid bear in the hallway and hoped it hadn’t noticed him.
Suddenly, all the cool I had been furiously cultivating in regard to seeing the two of them together melted like a Popsicle in the sun. Blinded by the tears threatening to slide down to my chin, I turned and plowed right into the pink-shirted chest of Spencer Hyland, LHS leading man, and potential cover boy for The Gay Preppie Handbook. He put an arm around me and whisked me back into a corner of the cafeteria as it was refilling with a new crowd for sixth-period lunch.
He looked at me, his head cocked like a puppy’s, then handed me a napkin from the table next to him.
“Boys,” he sighed. “Am I right?”
And I had to laugh a little because more boys should be like Spencer.
“I’m okay,” I lied after I blew my nose into the scratchy paper napkin and tossed it into a disturbingly full trash can.
“I know you are,” he said. “But let me walk you to class. I’ll even carry your books and we can pretend we’re in a 1950s sitcom. We’ll be the Boy and Girl Next Door.”
I held on to my books, but as we walked back out into the hallway, Spencer said, “You should have tried out for the show, you know.”
I squawked like a chicken in surprise. “Me? You’re the actor—and apparently you have a flair for comedy to even suggest this.”
“I mean it. You have a decent voice, you know.”
“Don’t tease me in my fragile state.”
He dodged a pack of boys with lacrosse sticks and said, “I’ve heard you sing with the kids and you have a nice voice.”
“Compared to Curt’s, maybe,” I conceded. “But compared to Curt, a drunk billy goat caught in a wood chipper would have a nice voice. This is my stop,” I added, gesturing with my head to the door to my classroom.
“Chin up, George,” he said as he walked away, backward, saluting me. “And try out for the spring musical, ’kay-’kay?”
I don’t know why the jocks get all the credit for agility. Spencer’s smooth navigation of those congested hallways, backward, was an effortless act of physical beauty.
I hope there’s at least one boy in Longbourne who can appreciate that.
***
The next day in history class, when Mrs. Parker had to run to the principal’s office for something, she left us to discuss the group projects that were due right after Thanksgiving break. Michael turned to me and began, “So … ” He leaned back and swung his legs out from under his desk, pointing them more companionably toward me. “Our project.”
I guess we had to talk about it sometime, but since he hadn’t spoken much to me since I’d fled his house, I was annoyed.
“I thought we’d decided that we don’t really have a project, not one together, anyway, didn’t we?” I pulled some typed sheets out of my folder and added, “But don’t worry. I have an actual draft here on actual paper. Six pages so far.”
“Me, too.” I chanced a look over at him in time to see him bite his lower lip for an instant, something I have never seen him do. He hesitated before he said, “I’ve been thinking about our not really having a project that works together … ” But his voice slid into silence, so I nodded and busied myself with putting my pages in order, because I knew what he was getting at: my official dismissal as his project partner. He had probably already talked to Mrs. Parker about working with someone else.
“Yeah, it’s not going to work as planned, but I think it’ll be okay,” I agreed before he could say it. “I don’t mind working alone.”
Mrs. Parker hurried in then and started talking, rapid-fire, determined to make up for lost time. I heard Michael let out a sigh beside me, but I was grateful to end the conversation. Later, as we walked out of class, he stopped me and asked, “Will you be by the auditorium again after school today?”
I nodded, saying, “Yep. Me and my little brood of fake Austrians.”
“I’ll meet you there,” he promised and took off down the hallway.
Even though I wasn’t exactly eager to hear him bring an end to our last official partnership, I wasn’t able to focus on my last two classes and after school ended I hung around the auditorium doorway, just waiting for the axe to fall, instead of going right in to meet the kids. When Leigh walked into the auditorium, I assured her I’d join them soon and she promised to deliver the message. A minute later, Michael came by, dressed in a pair of crisp khakis and a denim-colored Oxford, not his running clothes.
“Is cross-country over for the season?”
“Just about. We’ve got Regionals, and then we could go on to State but … ” He shrugged and set down his black messenger bag. “I wanted to talk to you. About the project.”
Now it was my turn to bite my lip.
“I know,” I said, bracing myself and wondering why, if it was so hard to work with him, I still didn’t want to lose this last tie to him. Probably because it was my last tie to him.
“Here’s what I’ve been wondering,” he began as Curt and two of the von Trapp boys pushed past us. Michael took my arm and pulled me into the auditorium and led me up the stairs to the very back, what we call the Peanut Gallery, where the seats are dark and empty. He sat down and I slid next to him into an aisle seat, my legs shaking like I had just run a four-minute mile, something Michael could probably do without breaking a sweat. He said, “Our projects could work together, you know. We’re not so far apart, I think.”
I should have been relieved, but I raised my eyes from his face to the darkness above because I had the feeling I was going to cry again. I must’ve been setting the world’s record for most pronounced case of PMS or something because I always seemed to be on the verge of tears lately—esp
ecially when I was within fifty feet of Michael.
Before I could find my voice, Diana came running up to us dressed in an adorable costume with a flared skirt, tight white bodice, and lederhosen, calling, “Costumes came in today! What do you think?” She twirled for us.
Michael swallowed deep in his throat and told her, “You look great, Di. Really.”
I nodded and forced out, “Yeah. Super cute. At least you don’t have to wear a habit and wimple, like Leigh and the other nuns.” Though, at the moment, I sort of wished she did.
Diana giggled and looked back toward the stage, where some of Leigh’s fellow nuns were trying on their costumes and attempting to twirl like Diana had but getting very little swirl out of their black robes. She turned back to us and looked at Michael with her perfect blue-green doll’s eyes, round and shiny.
“So, Michael,” she sing-songed. “That thing we were talking about earlier … ?”
Michael shifted in his chair a bit and said, “I haven’t forgotten,” then ducked his head for a moment, as if embarrassed.
“You promise? I gotta run! George, I’ll keep an eye on Leila and Andy for you. They want to know if they can finish up the clouds on the mountain backdrop?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Put them to work. But watch Andy with anything breakable.” Hands shaking, I tried to pick up my bag from the floor, but it seemed to be glued there.
Diana bounced away as I felt like all of the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see Michael’s face, saying, “Look, I know it’s not going to work, our project, the same way you and I were never going to work. You’re a reasonable, moderate, Alexander Kerensky kind of guy and I’m Sofya Perovskaya, a half-baked Bolshevik. Like you said yourself, I get fired up about stuff and at crunch time, I’m totally ineffective.” I sighed, rubbing my clammy palms on the knees of my jeans. “I throw bombs that don’t go off. Or just blow up in my face. Like both of my feminist crusades on behalf of Cassie. Kaboom. You get things done, though. And you’ll get the project done better with someone else.”
Snark and Stage Fright (Snark and Circumstance Book 5) Page 15
