Tease

by Amanda Maciel

  Of course, now things are really bad for Tyler. He’s actually in the most trouble of all of us. But that is completely not my problem.

  “We’ve established that Sara’s boyfriend was very close to Mr. Chang,” Natalie’s saying now, “which I think gives us plenty of access to that neighborhood for other reasons. If Miss Putnam saw Miss Wharton or Miss Greggs in either the white Honda or the silver . . .” Natalie shuffles through some papers, searching for the make of Brielle’s car.

  “Mercedes,” I supply. Natalie looks up and flashes me the briefest of smiles, then turns back to Hot Intern. Who has a real name, too. David.

  “Mercedes,” Natalie repeats. “If the girls were spotted, they certainly had cause to be on that block. And it’s not a big city, after all.

  Several Elmwood students live in that area.”

  “But it was Emma’s mom who saw us,” I can’t help but point out. “I mean, that time we—you’re talking about the Valentine’s Day thing, right?”

  Natalie and David look back at me, surprised that I’m actually being helpful. Or maybe not helpful, I don’t know—I’m not even sure why I’m here today, since so far they’ve just been talking to each other. I came in half an hour ago and all I’ve done is drink another Diet Dr Pepper and try to stay out of the way of the piles and piles and piles of papers everywhere. Natalie’s office is huge, with a couch and chairs and a table and everything, but there’s not even a place to sit anymore—I’m leaning against the wall, trying to not knock over the plant next to me or the diploma hanging behind my head.

  “Yes, that’s what we’re talking about,” she says, crossing to the other side of the table to find another stack of papers. She riffles through them before pulling one out, squinting at it, and saying, “February tenth?”

  I shrug again, but then I nod, too. I know just what they mean, and they know I know. And I’m bored, and I just don’t see the point of standing here like an idiot anymore. Maybe if I just talk to them, they’ll finally tell me what I’m supposed to do about all this.

  I’ve done one other thing since getting to Natalie’s office—I’ve found out that we’re definitely going to trial. Natalie said she’d be discussing “our options” with my mom, who of course isn’t here, but that for now they’re expecting a trial date to be set in the next few days.

  The guys, including Dylan, have all deferred their real colleges for a year; Dylan and Tyler are going to community college in the meantime, I heard. All of our lives are on hold. Or I don’t know, I guess all of our lives might be over. Mine feels like it already is—just when I think it’s over, it’s more over. My mom is sleepwalking through all of this and my brothers are home with the babysitter and my best friend isn’t allowed to call me and my boyfriend isn’t my boyfriend. I spend my days with delinquents and lawyers, and I’m so. Freaking. Tired. Everyone thinks I’m a terrible person, and I guess they’re right. I mean, everyone spends every day talking, in detail, about what an awful person I was, and it’s too late to change anything, or anyone’s mind. Or anyone’s life.

  And any way you spin it, February tenth wasn’t my best day. Or February fourteenth, or basically any other day that week. Month. Year.

  Plus all that stuff is already on the record, thanks to Emma’s mom. I mean, thanks to both of Emma’s parents, I have a record.

  Natalie’s squinting at the paper again. She has reading glasses on top of her head, but I guess she’s forgotten about them. Before I can make another helpful observation, she says, “You’re right, Mrs. Putnam did see you. She said you and Miss Greggs placed a large heart-shaped sign in the Putnams’ front yard. And this was . . .” More page flipping. “. . . a school tradition?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “For the Valentine’s dance. I mean, usually a couple weeks before the dance. The guys were supposed to ask the girls by doing something big, you know, like wearing a tux to school or putting a sign up on the Douglas Street overpass or whatever. And then sometimes they’d make another sign or something that week.”

  “But this sign wasn’t from a boy, it was from you and Miss Greggs?” Natalie turns her squinty stare toward me.

  “Allegedly,” I say.

  David laughs suddenly, like a bark, and Natalie cracks another very quick smile, but she’s looking back at her papers. “Allegedly . . . ,” she murmurs, flipping another page in her hands. “And the sign did not say something nice.”

  “No,” I admit. Finally, David grabs a box from the chair next to his and moves it to the floor, pointing at the seat. I take it, sinking down a little bit. “We just . . . It was Brielle’s idea, you know. Seriously, Emma was hooking up with everyone. We just wanted her to stay away from Dylan. It was a joke.”

  Natalie looks up again, and this time she really does seem surprised.

  “I mean. Not, like, funny, just . . .” I trail off. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

  “Okay,” Natalie says, and she finally sits down at the table too, though she has to shove another box aside to be able to see me and David. “But this sign was still pretty bad, and it was on her property—not at school. We’re lucky that only Mrs. Putnam can testify to it, and that Emma apparently destroyed it. The stuff online and at school will be harder to deny, since we have more witnesses to that. And you were reprimanded.”

  “Sort of,” I mutter.

  “And there was another incident at Miss Putnam’s home—” David starts saying.

  Natalie holds up a hand, stopping him. “Let’s just deal with Valentine’s Day first.”

  When Natalie found out about the Valentine’s Day stuff, back at our first meeting in May, I thought she was going to turn and walk out of the room, not take my case at all. She’s really composed most of the time, and all these months later I know how unusual that reaction was, when we were just going over the major points of the lawsuits Emma’s family filed against me, Brielle, Tyler, Jacob, and Dylan. Natalie’s face had gone several shades paler when we got to the number of roses Brielle and I had sent to Emma.

  “Fifty?” she’d said, like she was sure she hadn’t heard me right.

  Next to me, my mom had gone really quiet and still. Before that part she’d been sitting beside me on the couch in our living room, her hand on my back, very alert. But as I looked at my new lawyer’s dropped jaw I realized my mom wasn’t touching me anymore. She had moved a little farther down on the couch. Putting an ocean of cushions between us.

  “It was just . . .” At the time I’d tried to explain. It was a lot, okay? But it’s not like we beat her up in the school parking lot or something.

  And now, Therapist Teresa is making me talk about it too. It’s fresh in my mind, since I just got here from Natalie’s office, where we rehashed everything about Valentine’s week.

  Something about Teresa’s room brings back that pit in my stomach I’d had during the whole thing. I tell her how I’d been sort of excited about the flowers until I’d seen Emma’s locker, and then I’d gotten dizzy.

  “You felt good at first?”

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “It was funny. It was just so many roses, you know? It looked ridiculous.”

  “You wanted Emma to look ridiculous?”

  “She’d been making me look stupid,” I point out.

  “How so?”

  “With Dylan.” God, Teresa can be stubborn.

  “Mmm,” she says.

  “But we didn’t do the thing to her locker,” I say. “They freaked out about the sign, because Mrs. Putnam allegedly saw us in their yard or whatever, and they started blaming us for everything.”

  Emma’s mom hadn’t called the cops about the sign; she’d called the school. Natalie thought that could work to our advantage, because if you saw some kids in your yard and thought they were vandalizing or stalking, why would you wait until the next day and call the school?

  But of course, calling our school that week was the worst possible timing for me and Brielle. By Wednesday, you really couldn’t ignore that someone
was hassling Emma. The sign, the locker, the roses—Emma was only too happy to help the principal decide who was responsible for her shitty Valentine’s Day.

  Teresa gives me a look. “And you say you’re definitely going to trial?”

  I nod.

  I shift on the couch, pulling my sweater around me.

  “You must be worried,” she says.

  “Who, me? Nah,” I say.

  Teresa’s serious look turns into a smile. “You can be very charming when you want to be,” she says, and I think it’s supposed to be a compliment. “But this must all be incredibly stressful, despite your jokes.”

  “Well, I guess some people just deal with stress better than others,” I snap. Teresa stops smiling and I look down at my hands, my face suddenly hot. After a long pause, I hear her writing something on her notepad. It probably says Shows no remorse. Is terrible person. No one would disagree with that. Not even me.

  February

  I GUESS IT’S weird, but we never get in trouble—for the Facebook thing or the locker room. No follow-up from Schoen, no phone call to our parents, nothing. I don’t realize until a week later that that was Brielle’s whole plan, to show Emma what happens when she tries to fight back. Emma couldn’t get us in trouble for making the Facebook page, so she didn’t even try after the locker room. Neither did anyone else. Coach Jenks didn’t see it, and the other girls are acting like they didn’t see it either. Of course, I happen to know that most of them hate Emma too. There were a lot of people friending Fat Beyotch before it was deleted.

  I start making sure I meet Dylan between classes. I’ve had his schedule memorized all year, but now I’m not shy at all about being at each door, holding his hand as we walk to his locker. I get to my own classes later and later, but it’s worth it for the jealous but defeated look Emma gives us when we walk by. And by the end of the week, I stop worrying about her so much. I have other things on my mind—the Valentine’s dance, mostly, and whether Dylan is going to want to have sex again afterward. When he tells me he got a hotel room for an after-dance party and only a few other people are invited, I figure that means he does.

  That’s how he asks me to the dance, in fact. We’re making out in his car, again, but he has to run to practice in ten minutes, so I know we can’t take things very far. And then with five whole minutes to go he pulls back and says, “I got a room at the Hyatt. After the dance. Tell Brielle to bring somebody cool.” He goes right back to kissing me and my mind spins out, thinking about the dress I’m planning to wear, and whether I can wear it to an after-party, or if I now have to worry about another outfit, and sexy underwear too, and what my mom’s gonna say, and . . . and, you know, what the hell this all means.

  Maybe it’s stupid, but I hadn’t really thought past the part where I slept with him the first time. Having sex almost seems scarier now, like I’m definitely going to get pregnant, or he’s definitely going to stop liking me if we only do it, like, once a month. There hasn’t been a good time or place to hook up since Brielle’s party, but it has to happen eventually, right?

  I have to pick up the boys from school, but as soon as Mom gets home I go over to Brielle’s. Her parents are out at some fund-raiser thing, as usual. She always calls herself Poor Little Rich Girl—she has a tank top with that bedazzled on it—and everyone knows she’s bragging. Once my mom said she felt sorry for Brie, that she seemed lonely. But she never seems lonely to me. Besides, I’m almost always here. Tonight we sit at the counter in her kitchen, putting maraschino cherries in our Diet Cokes.

  “How often are you actually supposed to . . . do it?” I ask, stuffing three cherries in my mouth as soon as the words are out.

  Brielle pushes a cherry off its stem, into the fizz of her soda. “Don’t you want to all the time?” she asks. There’s a teasing ring to her voice, like she’s suddenly my much older, much wiser sister. “I mean, it’s D-Licious! How can you keep your hands off him?”

  I roll my eyes, but otherwise I’m not sure how to respond to this. I use a trick I’ve seen my mom use on my little brothers and turn it around, saying, “Did you want to all the time with Diver?”

  That’s the guy she slept with last summer. We never use his real name, for some reason. It’s a cool one, too—Kiefer, like the actor—but Brielle came home from swim camp just calling him Diver. He was the diving coach at camp, going to the university on a diving scholarship, apparently. So it stuck as a nickname at camp and beyond, between us.

  “Oh, totally,” she says, but she’s kind of just staring at her soda, not really looking at me. She never really talks much about Diver. Back when it happened, while she was still at camp, she’d used some of her online minutes to email me that she’d lost her V-card to this cool older guy. And since she’s been home she’s mentioned it casually, sounding very nonchalant and mature about it. I wasn’t even sure if they’d done it more than once. Something about the way she’s concentrating on pulling another cherry out of the jar, though, keeps me from asking her to go into more detail now.

  I know she hooked up with Rob a lot last fall, but I’m pretty sure they never did it, did it. Now she’s not really dating anyone. For a second I wonder why I don’t know more about my BFF’s love life. I used to know everything—when a boy would so much as brush his hand across hers in class, or like when Chris Simmons kissed her at that party in ninth grade, right before he asked Tiffany Martin to go out with him. When Rob first started flirting with her I was there—last semester we all took the Visual Art elective together—but now—

  “Dude, don’t stress about it,” she says. She pushes off her stool, twisting the cap onto the maraschino jar and putting it back in the fridge. I wasn’t done with them, but Brielle’s mom has weird rules about food, so I guess we ate all the ones we were allowed to already. “Dylan’s a nice guy, he’s into you. You’re not gonna get pregnant.”

  “I’m not gonna have an AIDS baby?” I ask. It’s this dumb joke we have, that the worst possible thing will happen to us if we’re not careful. Usually the worst thing we can imagine is having a baby with some terrible disease.

  “Oh, no, you totally will,” she says, turning around and leaning on the fridge door. “But it’ll be cured, and Dylan will play for the NFL, and he’ll have to marry you forever because you had his magically cured AIDS baby.”

  “That sounds nice,” I say, even though of course it sounds ridiculous.

  “As long as you take me with you to all those NFL parties so I can marry Tom Brady, I promise to help with your sick baby,” she says.

  “Okay. I think he’s married, though.”

  “Whatever. I’ll be the hot young second wife.” She comes back to the counter and points at my Coke. “Are you done? Let’s go find Valentine’s dresses in my closet. Or better yet, my mom’s closet.”

  Upstairs, we spend at least an hour inside her parents’ crazy room-sized walk-in, but in the end everything looks too old or is way too fancy for a school dance. Brielle already has a dress, anyway, and technically I do too. By ten thirty I’ve gotten four Where are you texts from my mom, so I finally go home.

  I text with Dylan a little. He doesn’t have much to say—he never does, especially on days he has practice. It’s always about his coach, like Briggs killed us, or just Dead, but then he adds Ur cute or Sweet dreams. Tonight he writes Take that sexy ass to bed followed by xo, and I’m smiling as I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

  But once I’ve gotten cleaned up, I don’t go to bed. Instead I open up my laptop and check Facebook one last time, scanning the new posts on my wall. I go over to Dylan’s page and can’t help smiling at his photos. I’m sure I’ve looked at them all, but he’s so cute, and soon I find myself in his older albums, the ones from last year. There are a lot of shots of him with this girl Caysie he was dating then, and I swallow back a lump of jealousy as I flip through. I wish he’d take these down, but I know I can’t ask him to; that would be pathetic. Caysie goes to a different school, the Catholic all-g
irls’ academy, so I don’t see her in real life. In photos she seems really happy, one of those girls with shiny hair and an easy smile—like she’s really smiling at you, even if she’s looking at a camera. Like she means it.

  I scan forward again, trying to find pictures with me in them. I have a few on my wall, but the only one Dylan has is a group shot, and that’s only because someone else tagged him in it. I’m not tagged, even though I’m standing next to him, up on my toes to see over Jacob’s big shoulder. It was after a game and the guys are all wet-haired from the showers. It’s not, like, a couples shot—it’s just a bunch of people who happened to be outside the school, on our way to a party at Kyle’s house.

  My fingers hover over the scroll pad. Do I click on it, add my name to the tags? Will that show up in the feed and make me look like a loser? It will. “Sara Wharton tagged herself in Tyler Chang’s photo because she is an insecure lame-o and she needs you to know that she’s totally dating Dylan Howe, so back off.” Shudder. I click back to the Photos of Dylan page quickly.

  And then I see it. Another group picture, but with fewer people. Three, actually—Dylan, Tyler. And Emma in between them. Sitting together on a bench. A bench that’s in Tyler’s backyard. At night. Each of them is holding a plastic cup. It’s definitely a party—besides the cups, all three of them are a little glassy-eyed. And it must’ve been not too long ago, because they’re all wearing winter coats. I’ve seen Emma in that pea coat, in fact. The first time I saw it I couldn’t help but feel jealous, because it’s this really pretty aqua color that looks amazing with her hair.

  It looks amazing in this photo, too. This photo where Dylan is leaning his head close to that hair of hers, so close you can’t tell if they’re touching. Tyler is laughing, but Emma and Dylan just look happy. Comfortable.

  I was definitely not at that party. I have to take a deep breath before I look down, at the date on the photo. It’s another one of Tyler’s, so maybe he’s just loaded some new ones or something. Because it must have been taken earlier in the winter, before Dylan and I started going out officially in early December.