I was talking so fast, and I couldn’t stop myself. I was ashamed, and embarrassed about what I’d done, and now I couldn’t see any way out of it.
“The red shirts,” Mia reminded me. “It’s pretty clear.”
“Right, so maybe we should just leave,” I suggested. “Katie disappears. No one knows what happened….”
Mia put her hands on my shoulders. “Justine. Stop.”
I needed to be talked off the ledge.
“Let’s go in,” she said in her soft, trying-to-stay-calm voice. “We started this. We are finishing it.”
I’d always heard people say that you never regret things you do; you only regret things you don’t do.
But in this case, that wasn’t true at all.
I was regretting the things I’d done.
I was regretting everything.
MIA
We finally went in. The hostess sat us at a booth in the back, and we ordered cheese fries—mozzarella, of course—and a vanilla shake. We sipped our waters while we waited for the food. We played with sugar packets. We doodled on the place mats—rainbows, our initials, stars, hearts—with the complimentary crayons like we were seven years old again.
This wasn’t our diner, but it was close enough. They were all pretty much the same. Everything felt normal, like all the other nights we’d spent eating cheese fries.
Until it wasn’t.
Justine was telling me this story about what happened after Uncle Rick won the lottery, and how every person he’d ever known, pretty much, asked him for money. And at first he gave away a ton, but then it got out of control. I was listening to every word, because I still found the whole thing so fascinating.
And then I heard his voice.
“Oh, I’m just meeting someone here.” He sounded nervous, hesitant.
“Take a seat wherever you’d like,” the hostess said. Her long nails clicked on the computer keyboard in front of her.
I didn’t look over. I couldn’t make eye contact with him. Justine was still telling the story. Did she not notice he was here? I kicked her under the table.
Seth walked around a little. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. His Yankees hat. A faded Heinz ketchup T-shirt. That swagger.
I guessed he was trying to get a good spot—a good table for him, and for Katie. Maybe somewhere secluded, somewhere quiet.
He walked right past us, and for a second, I was happy about that. We could see him sitting there, across the diner, waiting forever for Katie to show up. And then he’d feel pathetic. The girl didn’t even show, he’d think. He would be too sad to even notice us or our red shirts.
And maybe he’d walk out of the diner with his head down.
He’d never know we had anything to do with what had happened
But we’d know the truth.
Sure, there wouldn’t be any confrontation. But maybe it would be better that way.
Then he stopped.
I guessed he saw us out of a corner of his eye, too.
It was almost like I could see everything that had happened flash across his brain. I could see him putting the pieces together, one by one.
“Mia?” he said. His voice shook a little bit. I looked up, but after that I froze. I opened my mouth to say Hi, Seth, but nothing came out. I sat there with my mouth open.
Justine looked up too. But he didn’t say her name. And she didn’t say anything either.
In all honesty, it was probably only about five seconds. Five seconds of the three of us staring at each other—well, really Justine and me staring at him, and him staring back at us.
It felt like forever, though. Like time stopped right then and we were all frozen.
“What the—?” He stopped himself, and then he said, “You guys are sick.”
I could handle that. Really. I thought he’d walk away, leave the diner, end the whole thing. I was okay with that.
“You’re sick,” he continued. “Like, seriously deranged. Insane, actually.”
We just sat there, listening to him, unable to speak.
I was ready for him to stop.
The waitress came over. “Is everything okay?”
He ignored her. “You guys are insane,” he said again and again, his voice getting louder.
Everyone in the diner turned and stared at us. They all looked confused and kind of scared.
“I’m going to need to ask you to leave,” the manager said to Seth.
Justine and I looked at the short man in the bulging button-down shirt. We glanced over at Seth.
We covered our mouths with our hands.
Seth stayed there, in front of us, but he quieted down.
We were speechless. I couldn’t find a single thing to say. Justine looked down at her place mat. She turned it over to the blank side and folded her arms on the table.
“Forget this,” Seth said. “Why am I standing here? Why am I even talking to you two? You’re sick!”
“Seth, you seem so upset” was all Justine managed to say. She laughed a little and bit her lip.
I stayed quiet.
The manager put a hand on Seth’s shoulder. “I’m not sure what’s happening here. But you need to leave now, or I’ll have to call the police.”
“I’m leaving,” Seth said to no one in particular.
We watched him walk away.
Goodbye, Seth.
This was the end.
It took us a long time to get here because I couldn’t face it, because I didn’t want it to be the end, because I would have done anything to hang on.
But this was it.
We had set him up.
We had humiliated him.
But only a tiny piece of me felt victorious. The rest of me felt humiliated too.
JUSTINE
We stayed to finish the cheese fries.
“Did that really just happen?” Mia asked me. I knew exactly what she meant. It had happened so quickly, and he was literally only in front of us for a minute. It was so fast that it almost seemed like we’d imagined it.
“I think so,” I told her.
“So we did it?” she asked.
I nodded and put a napkin over the ketchup blob on my plate.
“Should we feel proud now?” she asked me.
“Yes!” I yelled, and a few people nearby turned around. This was definitely the craziest night the Oakridge Diner had ever seen. “We lured him in, and got him to show up, and we convinced him Katie was a person worth knowing, and he fell for her…when it was us all along.”
“Right, and I mean, we totally humiliated him,” Mia said, kind of like she was trying to convince herself, like she was trying to convince me, too. “Because he was super into her…”
“You’re one hundred percent, completely over him now, right?” I asked her.
She hesitated and said, “Yes.”
Still. After everything that had happened, I wasn’t sure she was telling the truth.
I started to wonder if everyone had at least one person in their life, one love, that just crept right into their brain and their heart and stayed there, like, permanently. Maybe because he was her first boyfriend, the first one who paid attention to her, and sought her out, and made her feel like someone.
He didn’t take up her whole heart anymore, now he was only a tiny freckle, but he was still there. Maybe he’d always be there.
Maybe no matter what—we could never totally get over that first person.
“I feel like we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish,” Mia said. “But I don’t feel great. Ya know?”
I nodded. I knew what she meant. I wanted to feel different, but I felt just as shaky as she did. “I know, I mean, it was a psychotic thing to do. We knew that going into it.”
“Are we totally evil?” Mia asked me.
I hesitated before I answered. “We’re a little evil.” I paused. “But here’s the thing—we can take something from what we did. We can take something from the fact that he broke your heart,
and we got back at him, and you healed!”
Mia nodded and leaned forward on the table like she was listening to me.
“We can help others heal too!”
“Huh?” She moved back. “I don’t think we can keep making up fake Internet personalities, Justie.”
“Okay, no.” I chewed the end of my straw. “We can’t, but, like, maybe we can be those people who others go to when they want to get over a breakup. I don’t know. We can prove that girls don’t need to just take whatever guys throw at them; they can stand up for themselves! We can empower them!”
Mia’s eyes bulged. “Okay, I get what you’re saying, but…”
I played with my straw and tried to turn it into a heart shape. “Here’s the thing we need to remember. We did it. We achieved what we wanted to achieve. You didn’t just stand by and feel sad all summer. You took action.” I slammed my hand on the table. Mia startled.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I’m done with this, Mia!” I yelled. “We did it. We humiliated the crap out of Seth. He hurt you, and we hurt him back. We got him back!”
“We did. I know we did.”
“We did a bad thing, but we can make something positive out of it. We can feel awesome about ourselves and how we can learn from our mistakes.”
Mia was quiet then, but I knew she was listening.
“Let’s just never do that again, obviously, and also feel awesome about ourselves from now on, okay?” I felt like a motivational speaker. So much so that my throat was getting dry and I needed to sip my water. I was fired up. I wanted to stand on the table and tell the whole diner what we’d done. I wanted to tell the whole world what we’d done.
“Is it that easy?” Mia asked. “Even if we feel awesome about ourselves, will we still feel invisible?”
I paused and thought about it. “I think it is that easy. I think if we work at it, it can be that easy.”
She waited for me to say more. I slurped the last little bit of milk shake. “We’ve felt crappy about ourselves for a while. And I’m just done with it. We’re awesome.”
“We’re awesome,” she repeated.
“And we can do things! Take action! We don’t need to just let stuff happen! I mean, this was a crazy thing, and it wasn’t the nicest thing to do to a person. But it just proves that we’re capable of so much! We can go to protests and marches and stuff!” I yelled, almost wanting everyone to hear me. “We can do whatever we want to do!”
“Yes, we can!” Mia laughed.
She walked around the table and came to sit next to me on my side of the booth. It was a little awkward, and I think the rest of the people at the diner thought we were some new lesbian couple who was planning to come out any minute. She put her arm around me. “I love you, Justine.”
“I love you,” I said in a half-jokey voice.
“No, but really,” Mia said. She still had her arm around me. She smelled like ketchup. “I really do. I’m so grateful for everything you do for me. And I know I don’t always say it. But I am. I really am.”
I liked what she was saying, and it made me feel good, but I wanted her to stop. It felt like too much.
“Thanks, Mia. Thanks for saying it.”
She finally pulled away and went back to her side of the booth.
We motioned for the waitress that we wanted the check.
We overtipped that night because in some weird way, it felt like Nancy, the middle-aged waitress, was also part of our victory. It felt like everyone at the diner that night was part of our victory.
We walked out to my car.
“He really did show up, though, right?” Mia asked me again.
“He did,” I replied.
I was almost positive.
MIA
Justine dropped me off at home after the diner. We needed to sleep in our own beds that night.
I heard my phone buzz on my night table and had no idea what time it was or what was going on.
“We should tell Justine. I don’t like secrets.”
Dennis.
“What?” I mumbled.
“Are you asleep?” he asked me. I was surprised he couldn’t tell. There was a huge difference between awake Mia and asleep Mia.
“Yeah. I fell asleep watching TV, I guess.”
“I want to tell Justine how I feel about you…how you feel about me. I want us to be a thing.”
My heart pounded. A thing? Was I ready to be a thing with Dennis?
“Can we discuss this tomorrow?” I paused. “I’m really asleep, Dennis. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, uh, okay.”
I fell asleep again while holding the phone.
“Bye, Mia.”
“Bye.”
—
The next morning, I woke up and only had a vague recollection of the Dennis conversation. I also had a text from Seth.
I don’t know what the hell you and Justine thought you were doing but it was totally messed up. I thought you were a normal girl. And I’m sorry we broke up. But that’s just mad crazy. I want to tell everyone how insane you are, but I won’t. I’ll keep it between us. You owe me one, though.
I owed him one? Yeah, right.
Seth was shrinking. From an elephant to a poodle to a frog.
He was a mosquito now.
I needed to get rid of him completely. Once and for all.
If I was ever going to figure out how I felt about Dennis, I needed to give him a fair shake, a true chance, one hundred percent focus. This whole time, he’d been there, and I’d been into him, but Seth had been there too.
—
Justine picked me up on the way to work.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” I told her as I got into the car.
“Yeah? We’re never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy,” she sang along to the playlist.
“I think that may be the theme of our summer, by the way.” I looked at her. “That song.”
“Oh, yeah.” She shimmied her shoulders. “You’re right! Wait, so what were you thinking about?”
I turned the music down a little. “Just that we are awesome. And we do need to feel great about ourselves.” I sipped my water. I was dreaming about the kale-mango-raspberry-coconut smoothie I was going to make as soon as we got to the shop. I didn’t have a name for this one yet. It was going to have something to do with revenge. “But I still feel guilty about what we did.”
“Me too,” Justine added. “But I need to admit something.”
My insides twisted. “What?”
“I was so tempted to log in as Katie last night,” she said. “But I didn’t. Obviously. And then I felt kind of sad. Katie’s dead.”
“She is dead,” I replied. “But she was never really alive.”
“She kind of was alive to me.”
I knew what she meant. “I know, because, like, when we were Katie, we could say stuff we wouldn’t normally say.”
Justine slow-nodded. “I know. We were brave when we were Katie.”
“We’re still going to be brave. As ourselves,” I replied. “Maybe that’s what we need to take from this. Whenever we feel uncertain, we can channel Katie in real life!”
She stopped at a red light and pulled her hair up into a bun. “Yes! Whenever we’re feeling shaky or unsure, we’ll think Channel Katie. We’ll remind each other of that in moments of panic!”
“Exactly!” I stretched out my legs. “Seth texted me, by the way.”
“And?” she asked.
“He just said we were so messed up, basically. And that he could totally tell everyone how insane we are. But he won’t.”
“Of course he won’t!” Justine yelled, and slammed on the brakes at the stop sign. I grabbed on to the door handle. “Because that would humiliate him, too. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I nodded. “Yeah, totally. But that’s why your plan was so brilliant, because he was humiliated. He can’t tell anyone!”
“I kind of want to te
ll people,” Justine admitted. “It was terrible but I’m also proud of it. It’s like this black-and-white cookie of a thing, you know?”
I shifted in my seat. “Exactly. I feel like we accomplished something, but it was a bad thing to accomplish.”
“How can we stop feeling guilty about it?” Justine asked me. “The whole time we were doing it, all I could think about was getting him to show up and think Katie was real, but I didn’t realize how crappy I’d feel after it happened.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Yeah, exactly. It’s like a twinge of crappiness after the sweetness of success.”
“So poetic.” Justine laughed. “Strawberry-vanilla smoothie with a kick of sour lemon that hits you at the end?”
“We can call it When Life Gives You Lemons?” I suggested, giggling.
“Yes!” Justine screamed.
I did a little dance in my seat. “Right! When life gives you lemons, you make up a fake online personality and get revenge on your ex-boyfriend, and create a smoothie business, and basically take charge!”
“Yeah,” she said. “We need to keep reminding ourselves that the Katie thing wasn’t our only success this summer. Hello, secret smoothie business!”
“I know,” I replied, shifting in my seat. “And that kind of happened out of the blue. Imagine what we can do when we’re actually, like, trying?”
“World domination!” Justine yelled.
We cracked up the whole way to work, making up new life mantras, singing along to the playlist.
I loved Justine and me. I prayed silently that things would always stay the way they were in that moment.
JUSTINE
We’d sold over fifty smoothies the next day and we would have sold more, but we ran out of ingredients.
“I’m disappointed,” one lady told us. “I needed my Radical Change today. I’m going through a divorce, ya know?”
We tried to be sympathetic. “Our distributor was closed this week due to a family emergency,” I lied. “So things have been a little crazy.”
She nodded like that almost made things better, but not quite. “Well, I guess that can happen. I’ll try to find my Radical Change somewhere else, I suppose….”
I met Emmett at the bank after we’d returned the truck, and I told him about all the customers.
“These ladies really need you,” Emmett said after I told him the story about the ladies from the Temple Sinai Sisterhood who were obsessed with Wake Up and Rise Up, our newest creation. They told us they were letting the rabbi know about it because it felt so spiritual to them.
Kale, My Ex, and Other Things to Toss in a Blender Page 15
