“Has hell frozen over?”
He cocks his head to the side. “Yeah, it has,” he says. “But it’s kind of a nice change from this sauna of a summer.”
“Is there something you need?” I ask, impatient. I want to get back to Rob. To tell him, absolutely and definitively, I want to be with him.
Len shrugs. “Need? Nah. I just wanted to ask what’s up with your man.”
“My man?”
“Cut the act. I’ve seen the groping.”
We have not been groping, have we? “There hasn’t been any groping.”
“You know, you’re right. It was nothing compared to what’s going on up there.” He gestures above the courtyard.
“Up there?”
“Look, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He gives me a little salute with two fingers and then stuffs his hands into his pockets, walking backward and away.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s a jackass,” Len says, turning. “You heard it from me first.”
“Who?” I mutter stupidly, but he’s off the breezeway already, and if he’s heard me, he doesn’t answer.
I glance around the courtyard. Charlie and Jake are swaying together, although it looks a little like Charlie is leading. Ben and Olivia are completely tangled up in the corner. It’s impossible to see whose limbs are whose. I can’t seem to spot Rob, but I still feel dizzy. It’s making it hard to focus.
I weave in and out of people on the dance floor. Couples, swaying. Matt and Lauren are locked in an embrace, and I wonder, briefly, if they’re together. Stranger things have happened, I guess.
I’m standing in the middle of the dance floor when instinctively I look up. And as soon as I do, I understand what Len meant.
There’s this little balcony over the breezeway that was part of the old mansion and that the school kept, even though it serves no practical function. It’s small, probably seven feet by four or something, and it’s covered in ivy.
Rob’s up there. His brown hair is falling slightly into his eyes, and the collar of his shirt has come undone. He’s swaying to the music, just like I imagined. He looks handsome and strong and charming all at once, and I want more than I ever have to be in his arms. The problem, though, is that somebody else already is.
He’s holding her. His arms are around her back and her head is on his shoulder, and they’re swaying slowly, so slowly they look like they’re not even moving. The girl in his arms should be me, but it’s not, not even close. The girl he’s swaying with is none other than Juliet.
There’s something in the way that he’s holding her that makes me stop in my tracks. It’s not friendly and it’s not platonic. He’s holding her like she’s a leaf, like she might just at any moment blow away in the wind. She looks like a ballerina in his arms, so small and delicate and fragile. And then I see him lean over and smell her hair, and it’s like someone has just knocked the wind out of me. I just stand there, gaping. They’re so close together, you couldn’t even fit a feather between them.
I blink, but they’re still there. She doesn’t pick her head up off his shoulder. He doesn’t move his hands from her back. They could be a statue, that’s how still they are standing together.
Is anyone else seeing this? Olivia and Ben are still smothering each other, but I don’t see Charlie. I suddenly desperately don’t want her to know. I don’t want anyone to know. I want to take back the last forty-eight hours, to avoid this humiliation. I want to run as far away as I possibly can from here and never look back. I want to reverse time. I want to do a million things rather than stand here, watching them.
I finally look away from them, and Len’s face comes into view. He’s looking at me, and I expect him to smirk, to roll his eyes, but he doesn’t do anything. He just looks away.
Then Charlie is there. Her red hair has fallen out of its bun, and it’s hanging around her face like braches on a weeping willow tree. She’s seen them too, and she’s looking at me, her expression mirroring mine. She crosses over to me in two paces, and I feel her take my hand in hers. She squeezes it twice, the way she did on our first day of high school in the car when I was nervous. The way she always does when things get to be just a little bit too much. It’s her way of saying, “I’m here.”
And then, still holding my hand, she leads me away. Off the dance floor, through the breezeway, past Cooper House, and out to upper, where she opens the door and helps me inside Big Red. It’s only once we’re pulling out of the parking lot that I start to cry.
Act Three
Scene One
I wake up before my alarm. All night, all weekend, I’m actually not sure I have been sleeping at all. I’ve been in and out of consciousness, hoping for something to change but knowing it won’t. My chest hurts, or is it my heart? It’s hard to tell. People are always throwing around the term “broken heart,” but this is physically painful. So much so that as I lie in bed, waiting for the buzzer to sound, I press my hands over my heart, like if I apply enough pressure, I can keep the pieces from drifting apart.
“Charlie’s here,” my mom calls.
Obnoxiously early, again. Except when I glance at my clock, I see that it’s 7:10. We’re already late. I have no idea if my alarm went off. Maybe I never even set it.
“I’ll be right there.” I leap out of bed and throw on yesterday’s jeans. I pull on a white tank top and a blue cardigan that’s dangling over my desk chair.
I’ve been avoiding Charlie’s calls and texts. Olivia’s, too. I don’t really know what to say to them, and I don’t feel like hearing how sorry they are for me. Especially since I haven’t heard it from Rob. He hasn’t called me or come over. Which makes me feel like he isn’t going to apologize, because whatever happened Friday night is just the beginning of something else.
The worst part is, I’m not even sure he was home once this weekend. I stayed up Friday night, almost until morning, just to see if he got in. He never did. No tires on the gravel. No bedroom light. Nothing.
“Everything okay?” Mom asks when I come drudging into the kitchen. I know I probably look like a mess. I haven’t washed my hair since Friday, and I didn’t even bother trying to find my makeup bag this morning.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You sure? You’ve been really quiet.” She puts her hands on her hips and peers at me, the way she does when she knows I’m not telling the whole truth. I’m surprised she even noticed. She and my dad have been locked in his study whispering for most of the weekend.
I perk my voice up and give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” My dad is sitting at the kitchen counter, and he taps his cheek with his index finger. I go over to him, and he pulls me into a hug. “Knock ’em dead, cookie,” he whispers to me. There’s no reason for him to say that today, but I’m not surprised. He has always known when something’s not right, and how to make it better. And today, more than anything, I wish I could go back to being a little kid, when my dad calling me cookie could turn back time and erase anything that was wrong. Instead I put on a smile, steal a sip of my dad’s coffee, and head out to Charlie’s honking car.
Olivia is in the back, her arms looped around the front seat. Twice in a week. We’ve definitely hit a new record.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry I’m late.” I slip in and click my seat belt into place. Maybe if I act normal, the world will play along.
“How are you?” Charlie asks. She’s turned to me wearing this grave expression, her features all set in a row. I expected her to be pissy about my being nonresponsive all weekend, or at least about my being late this morning, but if she is, she’s not acting like it.
“Um, fine. Are we going?”
Charlie glances back at Olivia.
“He’s an asshole,” Olivia says.
“She’s a bitch,” Charlie says.
I shrug. “It’s fine.”
“It is not fine,” Charlie says. She ha
s that tone she uses with Jake when they’re about to get into a fight. I suddenly have the intense desire to bolt from this car. To run back into my house, curl up under my covers, and just never come out.
“It’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything,” I say.
“What?” Olivia interjects. “That’s so unfair.”
“It’s true,” I say. “We weren’t together together. And she was his date and all. . . .” My voice trails off, and I look out the window. We’re rolling out of my driveway. In the rearview mirror I can see my parents in our doorway. My dad is reaching up to the light fixture on the porch, and my mom has a hand on his back, holding him up for balance. I purposefully keep my eyes trained on my house as we pull away. I don’t look to the left, to Rob’s.
“I mean, I thought she was a bitch for asking to go with him,” Olivia says, “but this is too much. Kissing him? She’s your cousin.”
They kissed?
“We’re aware,” Charlie says. I can feel her glance at me, but I keep my eye trained on the passing trees. Of course they kissed. They were practically glued together when we left. But the thought of his lips on hers makes me feel like someone is trying to suck my stomach out through my belly button and shove the whole thing back down my throat.
“It’s fine,” I force myself to say. “Honestly.”
None of us says much more after that. We drive in silence, aside from the music that creeps steadily from the stereo. Something low and dull that I don’t recognize.
When Charlie broke up with Matt, her sophomore-year boyfriend and the first guy she slept with, it was bad. She listened to crappy R&B love songs on repeat for, like, a week. And she didn’t even love him, I don’t think. Once, she said she liked that he wanted to be a doctor, but that was the only time she talked about anything besides the way he looked in a sweater.
The truth is that I feel humiliated and betrayed. How could Rob have been standing there, holding her, when just a few nights ago he was holding me? The entire school saw them together, dancing and kissing, and now I’m what? Yesterday’s hookup? The idiot who believed her best friend wanted to be her boyfriend? And who trusted that her cousin wanted to be a friend, rather than a backstabber?
When we get to upper, I try hard not to look for Rob’s car. I don’t want to see him. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll either fall apart, beg him to change his mind, or say something that will cut him out of my life forever. I want him gone, but I also want him here. That’s the worst part. The fact that I want him to make this better. That I need him to make this better. He’s the only one who can fix it. Whenever there’s a problem, Rob’s the one that handles it. I need him to handle this, too. For him to call himself a jerk, maybe even punch himself in the face, and then bring himself back to me.
Olivia makes a move to head over to Ben, who has driven her car and is now waiting for her, but Charlie grabs her by her MIAMI book bag, and the three of us make our way down to assembly with Ben trailing behind.
But we’re late, of course, because of me, which means assembly has already started and there is no way for us to get to senior seats. We actually have to stand in the Trenches. We’ve never stood here, not once, and all of the things that are wrong with this day sort of congeal into the fact that I don’t have a seat. That I’ve been kicked out of my whole life.
I see Rob in his usual spot on the far side, and my stomach flips so badly, I think I’m going to be sick. I hate myself for still thinking he looks perfect. Jeans and a green T-shirt, the one with the tree on it that I love, and for a second I think maybe he wore it for me, that when he was picking out his clothes this morning he saw it and thought of me. That he wanted to be wearing it when he tells me Friday night was a mistake, that he was only humoring Juliet, and where did I disappear to after we danced.
But then I know that is never going to happen, because sitting next to him, in a black skirt and pink candy–colored tank top, is Juliet.
Charlie puts her arm over my shoulder. Olivia stands on the other side, arms crossed, Ben behind her. They’re flanking me, like human pieces of armor.
Rob can’t see me from this angle, which is worse than if he could, because it means I can stare as hard and as long as I like. He whispers something to her, and she laughs, then brings her finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet. But it’s in that cute way certain girls have that lets everyone know they don’t really mean it. That she wants him to go on bothering her forever. Even while turning him down she’s inviting him. Forget the lip biting. This is definitely her power move.
He’s leaning so close to her that it takes everything in me not to run right over and tear them apart. And part of me wants to. Part of me wants to fight. To tell him to pick me. To beg him to stop what he’s doing, erase the last three days, and just come back. But I’m already fading into the background, like a house in the rearview mirror. I can feel myself getting smaller and smaller, shrinking, so that when Mr. Johnson says, “Have a great day, everyone!” I think I might have just disappeared.
And then assembly is over and students grab their bags and descend from the bleachers. We start getting trampled, jostled to the side. Olivia yells, “Owww!” pushing back against the crowd, but I let it shuffle me outside.
I feel like a pebble in the river—small, smooth, and sinking. I don’t even have enough weight to settle, though. I’m just kicked forward by gravity.
Someone’s hand is on my shoulder, and I turn around. It’s Charlie, and she buries her chin into my hair and whispers, “She is so going down. Don’t worry.” I wish there really was something we could do to fix this. That ostracizing Juliet would in some way keep them apart. More than that, though, I just wish this wasn’t happening. That she’d never invited him. That he’d never said yes. And that it hadn’t taken me so long to realize he was the one I wanted to be with.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It is not fine,” Charlie says again.
“Listen, I’m going to be late for calc.” I wiggle myself out of her grip. “I’ll catch up with you at lunch?”
“Okay,” Charlie says, but she’s squinting at me, trying to read something off of my face. “Hey, Rosie,” she says. The sound of my nickname startles me. Rob is the only one who usually calls me that.
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to be okay.” She says it firmly, like she’s trying to convince herself as much as me.
“I know,” I say, but it’s not true. For the first time it feels like nothing is going to be okay. Like something went very, very wrong. That the course of things, the natural order, has been tampered with. As I trudge up to the math cubicles, I can’t help but keep thinking, This isn’t how it was supposed to go.
The day moves absurdly slowly, like it’s dragging its heels. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion, like I’m falling backward, except I never hit the ground. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be from now on. If I’m going to be stuck in high school forever.
AP Bio is even worse than last week. Mrs. Barch gives us a pop quiz at the beginning of the period that I haven’t done the reading for because I’ve been moping around my room all weekend like somebody died.
I literally do not know the answer to a single one of these questions. I’m sandwiched between Lauren, who is bent down intently, methodically working through the problems, and Len, who is scribbling animatedly, like he’s trying to piss me off. I feel beyond pathetic. Even the class joker is managing to ace this thing.
The worst part is that after we’re finished, Mrs. Barch makes us grade each other’s quizzes while she runs an errand. Since it’s an AP class, we’re supposed to “use our sense of merit” while she’s gone. Of course, since Len’s my lab partner, we’re meant to swap quizzes.
He gives me that lopsided smirk and rubs his hands together. “Hand it over, Rosaline.”
He tosses his to me freely, like he’s Charlie passing me a sparkling water at lunch. I look it over. I’m surprised to see his handwrit
ing is actually neat and his problems look fairly organized.
“Since when have you shown any initiative?” I ask, holding it up.
He shrugs. “I was in the mood to study this weekend.”
“Right. Sure. You just felt like it.”
He smirks. “Why so blue?”
“Mrs. Barch is ruining my life,” I mutter.
“She’s not so bad,” he says, knocking me on the back. “You know she runs drama?”
“How is that relevant?”
He makes a face like, Yikes, and holds his hands up. “You get extra credit if you help out with one of her plays.”
“For bio?”
Len nods. “So are you going to show me that thing?” He gestures to the quiz that’s still tucked neatly under my elbow.
“I didn’t . . . ,” I start, but I’m not sure what to say, so I give up and hand it to him.
He whistles. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Are you kidding me?” I hiss. “I couldn’t answer a single question.”
“I know,” he says. “Ballsy.”
“Not ballsy. Incompetent.”
“Relax,” he says. “It’s a quiz, not the goddamn SATs.”
“Relax?” I say, my face getting hot from frustration. “Do you know quizzes are twenty percent of our grade? If I get an F on this one, that means that even if I pull As on all the rest, the odds of still getting a B in this class even if I work and study constantly for the rest of the semester is very likely. And a B is a 3.0. Do you know what Stanford’s admission average is? It’s like a 4.3.”
“Breathe.”
I exhale and fold my head down onto my desk, knocking my forehead on the wood. When I look up, Len is smiling.
“You’re so dramatic,” he says. “The way I see it, it’s not that big of a deal. But if it really means that much to you, fine.”
He takes his quiz out from under my hand and erases his name, putting mine in its place. Then he takes my quiz and erases mine, writing his own.
When You Were Mine Page 11
