I quickly set my phone on the counter, facedown. “I did add it up. I’m not stupid. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“Because you didn’t get the same answer twice in all of your Total tallies.”
“Why does everything have to be so exact all the time?” I said, staring at the first round of perfectly sized snickerdoodles as Zach slid them onto the cooling rack. He stopped, sighed, and handed me one.
“Thank you,” I said, and took an eager bite. The snickerdoodle was every bit as delicious as it looked. Zach took one and went back to the sheaf of papers. Under the counter, I went back to my phone.
To: nmccullz
pearl-drop moon on velvet sky
waxwane different every night
le lune est un femme
“Well, it seems like we have somewhere between zero and one hundred dollars,” Zach said. “How much do we need to hand over as a deposit again?”
Sebastian really did see poetry in everything, even if his French was still kind of bad—he made all the nouns masculine when they should be feminine, which is literally French 101. I locked my phone and snapped my head up. “Five.”
“Dollars?”
“Hundred,” I said, snorting. “If the buy-in to sponsor a dance was five bucks, even the anticapitalists would go for it.”
“Nothing anticapitalists love more than Winter Formal,” Zach said.
“Whatever.” I forced myself to unhand my phone and nibbled at my cookie instead. “You’re going, right? So that’s one hundred percent of the anticapitalists I know.”
“I guess.”
“What do you mean you guess? You can’t not go.”
“I can probably retally these by tomorrow, if you want,” Zach said.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. For some reason, it bugged me that Zach was going through all this effort when he didn’t even care about the dance that much. That didn’t seem like him. “Are you thinking about not going?”
“Why do you care so much about this dance all of a sudden?” Zach said. He bent down and scratched Bacon behind his ears, which triggered a frenzied leg-scrabbling on the tile floor.
“I mean, doesn’t everyone?” I said. “I thought we all did.”
“Yeah, everyone who’s invested in getting crowned prom king and queen, or whatever.”
“Prom isn’t until the spring, and I’m pretty sure there will only be a gender-specific court over Tess’s dead body.” With Zach out of eyesight with Bacon, I took the opportunity to sneak a look down at my phone at message number four.
To: nmccullz
god these tacos are so good
mango salsa is a revelation
It was accompanied with a picture of tacos. What was I supposed to say to that? Uh, yeah, looks great? I debated typing it out, then stopped. Sebastian just wanted to talk—talk to me, which gave me that familiar melty feeling in the pit of my stomach. And even though I needed—well, wanted badly—to know what the band was doing with the album, especially since the haunted house incident, I couldn’t just barge in with some question like Why is your song suddenly everywhere? I didn’t want to be yet another desperate teenage groupie with no sense of chill like the Meredith Whites of the world; I wanted to be mysterious. The kind of girl whose feed is just beachy hairdos, minimalist flower arrangements, and macarons. Because Sebastian had chosen to confide in me for a reason, and I just couldn’t let myself screw that up by being lame.
To: sebdel
looks great
Message sent, I realized the kitchen had been silent for a while, and it was probably my turn to say something to Zach. About the dance.
“It’s just supposed to be fun,” I said. “The dance.”
“Yeah,” Zach said. “Really fun.” He gave Bacon a few belly thumps.
My finger itched to unlock my phone again, but I didn’t give in. “What?”
Zach let out a short laugh. “I just love dressing up in societally acceptable clothes to take selfies for Pixstagram so everyone can know how great my life is.”
I clamped my phone hard in my hand. “Oh please, Zach the Anarchist. You’ve never taken a Pixstagram selfie in your life.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Um, yeah, I do?” I said. “The only apps on your phone are, like, a guitar tuner and a calculator.”
“Well, I’ve been in them,” Zach said. “With other people.”
“Oh,” I said. Right. Mia. Zach kept petting Bacon, and I chewed my lip. I knew I had no right to feel this way, especially given the dumb thing I’d said about her, but the fact that Mia was still bothering Zach bothered me. I wasn’t jealous—there was no way I was jealous—but I guess I didn’t like seeing him sad, and especially not about this.
“Are you doing okay?” I said before I could stop myself. “About . . . her?”
Zach kept his gaze fixed on the dog. “I don’t know. I guess. I know you didn’t like her, Nattie, but—”
“I did!” I squeaked.
Zach ignored me. “—but I did. I mean, past tense. But it wasn’t . . . I don’t know. She didn’t go to our school. She didn’t fit in with you guys, so, like . . . how much of a future were we really going to have?” He shrugged. “And we only dated for the summer. It’s not like she broke my heart or anything.”
A jolt zapped through me. Was he intentionally referencing the song? There was no way. He’d only heard it once; he couldn’t have memorized the chorus. And Zach wasn’t one to play mind games. Right?
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“Yeah.” Zach said. “So I’m fine. But, um, thanks for asking.”
He stopped petting Bacon and looked up at me. Right up at me, with those very blue eyes. Without even meaning to, I clenched my fingers around my phone.
Bacon made a little yip noise, and then, because I had literally zero idea how to continue that conversation, I switched back to a topic I knew even less about than romance: economics. “Well, um, at the rate I’ve been buying cookies, I think I’ve single-handedly increased our net income by—”
“Gross.”
I bristled. “Um, I am not.”
“No,” Zach said. “I meant gross income, Nattie.”
I stared at him.
“As opposed to net?” he went on. “Gross is the raw amount of what you take in, and net is after you subtract your liabilities.”
“Oh,” I said. “I knew that.”
“Remind me why you’re not taking econ again?”
“Because I wanted to take two foreign language courses and they let me out of the requirement.” Luckily for me, Owen Wister Preparatory Academy was the kind of place where you could not only take two languages at once, but also avoid something soulless and full of math like econ at the same time. Behind me, the timer dinged on the second round of cookies. “Which, by the way . . .” I took out my Latin notebook.
“Huh?” Zach had sheathed his hand in a frog-shaped mitt and rotated the two hot sheets of cookies from top to bottom. They smelled like cinnamon and vanilla, with little craggy tops and chewy-looking bronzed edges.
“Latin,” I said. “Remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Zach cranked the kitchen timer to five minutes and shuffled over. I’d put an apron on over my T-shirt, but Zach was working unprotected, a couple streaks of flour running down the black length of his “Fat Wreck Chords” shirt.
“Do you want to start?” He jumped onto the stool next to me and pulled out his notes.
“Oh,” I said. “Um, no. You go and I’ll, like, course-correct.”
“Okay.” Zach pushed a bunch of pages around until he found Catullus 5, the middle of which we’d been assigned for homework. “Da. The?”
I gave him a look. “It’s imperative.”
“Imperative what, that I get this right?”
“An imperative verb,” I said. “Da. From do, dare, dedi, datum—give. Like, uh . . .” I tried to think of a cognate. “Data, I guess. Next.”
“M
i,” Zach read. “Uh, me?”
“Did you know that, or just guess it because it sounds exactly the same?”
Zach shrugged. Our elbows were touching.
“Fine.” I licked my lips and didn’t move my arm. “Next.”
“Mille is a thousand,” Zach said. “And centum is a hundred.” He moved his finger to the next line. “Mille again—thousand—then another hundred, then another thousand again, then a hundred.”
I squinted at the page. He was right.
“You’re just getting those right because it’s math,” I said. Zach didn’t meet my eyes, but he did kind of nudge my elbow with his.
“Told you.”
“Yup,” I said. “I mean, um, nope.” I’d looked back at the first line, and started tapping my pencil against the page a bunch of times.
“So what should we write in Themes?”
“You haven’t even translated the whole sentence yet,” I said.
“Oh.” Zach looked back at the page. He scrunched his mouth up when he was thinking. Not that I was looking at his mouth, except normally, as a normal part of his face.
Not that I was looking at his face, either.
“Basia,” Zach read, “is . . .” He paused, and turned to me so that our heads were practically touching. Our heads, and all the other parts of our faces. “What’s basia mean?”
I swallowed. “Kisses.”
“Oh.”
Zach blinked, and I blinked, and we sat there with our heads close and our kissing-obsessed Latin homework between us for what could have been forever but was probably less than five minutes, because just when things were reaching peak awkwardness—
Ding.
“The cookies,” I practically yelled, and then almost fell off my stool.
“Huh? Oh.” Zach put down his pencil. “Right.”
As he clambered over to the oven, I attempted to retain a grip on academic seriousness and dispassion, which was made even more difficult by the fact that Sebastian had immediately replied to my last message.
To: nmccullz
thanks ;)
i know ive sent u like a thousand msgs
your so easy to talk to, natalie
you make this shy guy smile
Underneath that was a selfie, or half selfie, of Sebastian’s stubbly chin showing a black-and-white grin. I clicked my phone dark as fast as I could, heart thudding. Maybe over Pixstagram message I was easy to talk to, but in real life I was having considerable difficulties.
“So, um.” My dumb voice sounded like a squeaky Muppet. Focus. Worksheet. Don’t think about Sebastian’s mouth. “Themes. I’m just going to write, uh . . .”
“Addition,” Zach said.
I ignored him and wrote romance. “Okay. Devices.”
“Hyperbole.”
“What?” I looked up to where Zach was shoveling cookies onto a cooling rack.
“Dude’s talking about her kissing her a bajillion times,” he said. “That’s totally exaggeration.”
“It’s romantic!”
Zach scrunched up his forehead. “It’s . . . kind of annoying.”
I pinched my pencil hard between my fingertips. “Maybe he just likes kissing.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Zach chipped at a cookie. “So does, like, everybody, pretty much, right?”
At that, my heart thumped against the front of my ribs. I didn’t know whether to nod or shrug or say “yeah” or what. Why was everybody obsessed with kissing? Was this even appropriate for high-school students to discuss in a homework-related context?
I took a deep breath, but my heart kept pounding so hard it almost hurt. Because I had this weird feeling that, if I hadn’t just been reading messages from Sebastian, if I hadn’t been thinking about everything so much, this would’ve been the perfect time to kiss Zach the Anarchist. If I wanted to.
Did I?
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure I had anything else to say, so I just wrote being annoying? under Devices. It was almost time for the train, anyway. “Well, thanks for the spreadsheets, and everyth—”
“Sorry.” Zach stopped moving cookies. “Sorry. In case you can’t tell, I’m just not a big, like, kiss-and-tell kind of guy.”
“Oh,” I said. “I mean, yeah. Me neither. Not at all.”
And then it was over, whatever moment we had or hadn’t just had. Zach went back to moving cookies, and my phone hummed against my leg.
To: nmccullz
i just feel like i can tell u anything ;)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That Friday night, when I finally got a long chunk of free time, I spent it poring over the internet for anything Young Lungs–related. I looked them up again and saw, to my horror, that the Web results had more than tripled since we saw them on Endsignal’s computer. The band was turning up on more and more music blogs, and their record label’s YouTube had released a few more concert clips, in which, from what I could tell, Sebastian’s wrist position did not seem to have improved. They even got what looked like a feature story in one of the Philadelphia alt-weekly newspapers.
Each new click sent a fresh ripple of fear through my chest. This wasn’t like the secretive fun of listening to my song over and over again on the internet behind my bedroom door. This was like a terrifying and ever-widening portal to the Young Lungs’ ascent to fame. Sebastian’s Pixstagram was full of new comments, mostly from girls and mostly with angular self-portrait profile shots.
pumpkinbaby
Heard you guys on KPLEX this afternoon. CanNOT wait for the album!
xxAnna_bellaxx
new faves! u guys have 2 come back to portland soon!!!
livelifelove228
dancing in my chair!!
He had 11,729 followers. If things kept going at this rate, soon maybe millions of people would know my name. Well, they wouldn’t know it was my name, but still.
I stayed up until it was officially Saturday morning, clicking and searching and watching his Pixstagram rack up more and more fans. As a result, I didn’t open my eyes until it was officially Saturday afternoon.
I put my phone in my sweatshirt pocket, clambered out of bed, and headed for the kitchen. The fortunate thing about having one parent who’s got early rising in his DNA is that there is always coffee waiting for you by the time you get up, and coffee was definitely the first step to recovering from emotional trauma. Maybe I’d even unfreeze some Eggos while I read the paper. Have a normal Saturday. Act like there wasn’t a Sebastian Delacroix–shaped musical bombshell about to get dropped on the unsuspecting radios of the nation.
I could tell something was not normal in the kitchen as soon as I walked in. For one thing, Mom, also still in her pajamas, was standing at the counter. For another thing, there appeared to be no coffee in the pot next to her. In fact, she was scooping out coffee beans into the grinder, which she jammed down as soon as I started to say good morning.
“What?” She had to yell over the whine of the blades.
“I said, good morning.”
The grinder sputtered to a stop. Mom took off the top and dumped it into the awaiting coffeemaker. She looked less than happy.
“I guess it’s not really morning anymore,” I said.
“It’s not really that good, either,” Mom said. She sighed and went to the sink to fill the carafe. “Sorry. I’m just in a bad mood because I haven’t had caffeine yet.”
“I hear that,” I said, swinging up onto a stool at the island. Mom jabbed a button on the front of the coffeemaker and turned to me.
“Your father,” she said, “decided that he would take the car this morning, and of course, for him, morning means seven a.m., and yet he still isn’t back, and it’s . . .”
She craned her neck at the Kit-Cat clock on the wall, which read just past one p.m., and she shook her head.
“He had time to get up early and leave but not to make more coffee. Oh, and at least he brought the paper in!”
“I’ll read the paper,” I said, grabbing the stack
of newsprint and dragging it toward me. “Why do you need the car on Saturday anyway?”
“The glamorous life of freelance frame-building,” Mom said dryly. “I have to get these frames to FedEx by three if they’re going to be in Kansas City first thing Monday morning. I spent half the night shellacking and setting gold leaf to get them done on time and now they’re just going to be late anyway.”
“Why don’t you ship them tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’m shipping them next-day air as it is, which is going to take a chunk out of my commission.”
“I could take them on my bike,” Sam Huang said. “How far is the store?”
“That’s very sweet, Sam, but these frames weigh more than twice as much as you do.” Mom gave him a little smile, and then sighed again. “Honestly. Kids, you know I love your father—host father, whatever—but sometimes I wish he wouldn’t get himself so tied up in these stupid projects.”
“Maybe he just needs a way to be creative,” I said. “It’s probably an outlet for him, or something.”
“I know. I just wish he could take up . . . I don’t know, stamp collecting, or fly-fishing, or something that wouldn’t involve massive trips to Home Depot and pseudo-Buddhist philosophy.” She sighed. “Do you think he even realizes the irony of spending so much money to learn how to let go of material possessions?”
The coffeemaker beeped and saved me from answering. I got us mugs from the cabinet over the sink. It wasn’t that I didn’t see her point, but I also felt like Dad deserved a break. Besides, the yurt seemed kind of cool. It wasn’t a hot tub, but it could still be a place to hang out with my friends, and maybe even get enlightened, or something.
I sipped my coffee and dug the last of the frozen waffles out of the freezer.
Mom took a long pull from her own mug, closed her eyes, and let out a slow breath. “All right. I guess I’ll call the FedEx guys and see if they can do a last-minute home pickup.”
“Okay.” I took another sip of coffee and felt a little more heartened. Waves of cinnamony Eggo smell were drifting out of the toaster, the sun was kind of shining, and WPHL was playing something reggae-sounding that was definitely not the Young Lungs.
Who's That Girl Page 14
