“Of course,” Benny said, loud enough so Callie could hear, her voice dripping with annoyance. “Once a love triangle, always a love triangle. God, it’s so fucking boring.”
Suddenly Callie had no interest in the hearts or the Sweet Heart dance. She just wanted it to be over. She didn’t want to have to choose between the two of them again. She didn’t even want them to fight each other. Maybe she’d been right to break it off with both of them—to stop the madness. All of a sudden, more than anything, she just wanted peace.
But instead, they were counting hearts.
Brandon gripped his box between his hands and tried not to look at the very similar box Easy was holding three feet away from him on Mrs. Pritchard’s other side. He couldn’t believe it. Once again, Easy Fucking Walsh appeared out of nowhere and ruined everything. Like it was his mission on this earth to ruin Brandon’s life.
Music blared from the speakers, and the assembled Owls went back to talking and giggling among themselves. Mrs. Pritchard ushered the two of them to the side of the stage, where they had to hand their boxes over to gratingly perky underclassmen seated at a makeshift table… and then stand there, waiting. Brandon and Easy. Alone. While the rest of the school watched and waited, too.
They stared at each other. Easy had cleaned up for the event. He’d actually, finally made an effort. Brandon couldn’t find a single splatter of paint on his Armani, and with his hair so short and neat, Easy looked like much less of a degenerate than usual.
Great, Brandon thought.
They stood stiffly next to each other while the two freshman volunteers sat at the little table and counted out their collection of hearts. One by one. And with far too much sighing about how romantic the whole thing was.
“So much for my great idea,” Brandon said. He couldn’t help himself at this point, after spending days combing through the most absurd places on campus, thinking he was making this huge, romantic gesture for Callie that no one else—especially not Easy—would ever think to make. Seriously, who even did the scavenger hunt? In the history of Waverly? “Was there, like, an e-mail? Collect hearts for Callie?”
Easy eyed him. Buchanan looked miserable, and Easy knew it was his fault. Just like he had many times before, Easy felt guilty. It wasn’t Brandon’s fault that he was in love with Callie. Of all the people in the world, Easy should probably be the most sympathetic to that particular problem.
“I saw you,” he said, admitting it, because it felt like the right thing to do. He owed it to the guy to at least be honest about it. “Out by the stables. And I don’t know, I had to do it, too.”
Brandon ran his tongue over his teeth. Of course. Of course Easy had copied him. It didn’t even bother him, necessarily. It was just more of the same. “So you were competing with me, but you didn’t bother to tell me that or anything,” he said, frowning. “Nice. I wonder why this feels kind of familiar?”
Easy shrugged uncomfortably. “I know,” he said. “I should have told you.” Maybe it was because he’d seen Brandon’s pile of hearts, and he was pretty sure his was bigger. Maybe that was why he was feeling like he and Brandon should be better friends—or something. Like history shouldn’t matter so much. But maybe that was easier when you were the person who usually won.
“Well, why start now?” Brandon said, but his voice was more wry than bitter, and he actually smiled slightly. It was like the absurdity of the whole thing hit them both at the same time.
“Did you go on any of the roofs?” Easy asked with a sideways look. “I saw a couple of hearts out on top of Richards, but no way was I going out there and getting harpooned by an icicle.”
“Yeah, no way,” Brandon agreed. “It was cold enough on solid ground.” He shook his head. He didn’t know why he was suddenly so comfortable talking to his nemesis, without even the usual urge to punch the guy in the face. “I guess after being dumped in a three-line e-mail, I’m not really accountable for my actions.”
There was a small, charged silence.
“Callie dumped you in an e-mail?” Easy asked, his expression suddenly intense.
Brandon fervently wished he hadn’t said anything. “Um, yeah,” he said. He could feel his ears heat up. Why had he brought that up, of all things? To Easy, of all people?
“That’s funny,” Easy said. He turned so he was looking straight at Brandon, his blue eyes suddenly serious. “Me too.”
Brandon felt his mouth fall open.
“And the even funnier part?” Easy’s head tilted slightly, like he was considering how not funny the whole thing actually was. “My e-mail was three lines long, too, now that I think about it.”
“Huh,” Brandon said, his mind racing. So if Callie had called things off with Easy, did that mean they had been seeing each other behind his back? He knew he should be pissed, and try to find out exactly what Easy meant, but he sort of felt like it didn’t even really matter anymore.
“When did you get yours?” Easy asked.
“Wednesday morning,” Brandon said. Easy gave a quick, curt nod. Brandon laughed in disbelief. “No fucking way.”
“I’m really sorry to do this over e-mail,” Easy quoted, his gaze challenging.
Brandon’s head was spinning, but he knew that goddamned e-mail by heart. “I just don’t think it’s going to work,” he replied, his stomach tensing. How could she have done something like this?
“I’m sorry,” they chorused, staring at each other in disbelief.
“So…” Brandon shook his head. Even for Callie, who could take being callous to practically an Olympic level, this seemed beyond fucked up. “I can’t believe she sent a form letter!”
“She played us,” Easy said, looking furious.
“And we have a winner!” one of the freshmen cried, jumping up from behind the counting table.
“Save it,” Brandon told her. “No one cares.”
Together, they turned around and looked at Callie once again. Beautiful, treacherous, two-timing Callie.
Callie did not need to be psychic to interpret the nasty looks that both Brandon and Easy threw at her. Without another glance in her direction, Easy turned and headed for the door. Brandon looked at her as if she’d ripped his heart out—a look she was familiar with—and then stormed off in the opposite direction.
Callie’s stomach heaved, and her hand crept over her mouth. Maybe she would throw up on her own shoes. Wouldn’t that be just the icing on the whole fucked-up cake?
“Uh-oh,” Benny singsonged. “Trouble! Looks like someone’s not the Sweet Heart after all!”
Callie ignored her and turned to Alan. He was staring at the helium balloons above them as they danced in the pink light.
“Alan!” she hissed at him. “What happened? They were supposed to fight for me!”
“That sucks,” he said, not really focusing on her.
“That sucks?” she repeated. “It was your idea!”
Alan managed to glance at her then. But he didn’t seem at all apologetic. He looked the way he always did: rumpled and stoned.
“Sorry, dude,” he said. “I was totally baked when I came up with that whole thing. Want to smoke?”
Callie fought back tears. What had she expected? Why had she listened to the biggest stoner at Waverly in the first place? She felt her stomach twist again and a prickle behind her eyes that let her know she was seconds away from an unstoppable torrent of tears. She shook her head at Alan mutely and then whirled around. She headed blindly for whatever door she could find, to put as much space as possible between herself and this night.
25
A WAVERLY OWL KNOWS THAT EVEN THE BEST-LAID
PLANS OFTEN GO AWRY.
The lights dimmed in the atrium, and a bright light flickered on the far, blank wall. Everyone quieted down and turned to watch as an ancient picture of Waverly’s chapel appeared onscreen with the words LOVE AT WAVERLY written over it in flowing calligraphy. The picture started to fade, and then the intro to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I
Gotta Feeling” began to play. Everyone clapped and whistled.
The first photo was a pair of horned owls, the Waverly mascots, looking sweet and cuddly. The grim reality was that they were vicious and shit everywhere and weren’t opposed to injuring any Waverly students who didn’t outrun them. But that was what made them the perfect Waverly mascots, after all. Everyone cheered.
The photos started coming faster as the song picked up. There was one of Callie and co-captain Celine Colista in field hockey gear, arms slung around each other after a match. There was a shot of a party in the Richards lounge. Callie, Brett, Sage, and Benny all sat on a couch, leaning in together and whispering about something. In the next shot, Jenny stood in front of Heath, holding an insulated coffee mug in her hands and smiling up at him. Then, in a bit of editing genius, the very next shot was of Jenny again, performing her famous Heath-bashing cheer from Black Saturday back in September, with the whole field hockey team standing behind her.
While everyone catcalled, Heath took a bow, milking the moment. “Always available, ladies!” he called out.
There were montages of seniors at their convocation in the fall, working on their senior projects and all assembled together in front of Maxwell for their traditional class picture. There were shots of all the sports teams and all the extracurricular teams and clubs. The Waverly paper editorial board. The academic clubs.
There were pictures of freshmen performing silly calisthenics as part of their orientation week. Shots of the Drama Club performing in the black-box theater. And photos of Owls just hanging out, up to their usual forms of mischief. Easy and Jenny with their desks facing each other in art class, drawing on big sketchpads. All the Dumbarton girls in pajamas and sweats, eating bagels and drinking orange juice in the dorm’s common room. Alan St. Girard, Ryan Reynolds, Brandon, Heath, and Julian McCafferty, all kicked back at one of the dining hall tables in front of the fireplace. Tinsley and Julian sitting out on one of the stone benches in the quad, Tinsley’s legs propped up across his lap. Skinny, birdlike Yvonne Stidder and Kara Whalen in the foyer of Dumbarton, holding stacks of textbooks and making silly faces.
There was what looked like a surveillance shot of Kara Whalen lying on her bed, reading a book, with Brett sitting on the floor next to her, frowning at her MacBook. Another one of Callie and Easy standing close together in a hallway, oblivious to the world around them. Two freshmen girls, elbows linked, smiling secretively. A big group shot of the Women of Waverly—plus Heath—all piled on the red couches in the atrium, cheering at the camera. Owls stretched out on blankets and sitting on bales of hay at the Cinephiles screening in front of the Miller Barn—while it was still standing, obviously taken before the barn burned down that same evening. A couple kissing on the steps outside the biology building. A self-portrait of Kara, Heath, and Brett, their faces all smushed together. Brandon, senior Brian Atherton, and Julian all sweaty and brandishing squash rackets on one of the squash courts.
There was a shot of Brandon and Callie sitting next to each other at a table in Maxwell, laughing like best friends. A flock of underclass girls wearing tank tops, sprawled out on a maroon Waverly blanket on the lawn in front of one of the dorms, trying to soak up some late autumn sun before the upstate New York winter hit. A blurry photo of unidentifiable Owls wearing red, orange, and yellow hanging out at the Crater, a bonfire in front of them and Heath Ferro’s heated tents behind them at the Goodbye Us party in the fall. People cheered when that one went up—thankful that no one could get in trouble so far after the fact, because the shot was way too out of focus.
There was an action shot of Celine Colista, Emmy Rosenblum, Verena Arvenal, and Rifat Jones out jogging in the rain, wearing matching maroon Waverly windbreakers over tiny nylon shorts. Heath and Kara on top of the old Waverly Observatory, their legs dangling off the edge of the tower. Jenny dressed in her Halloween contest-winning Cleopatra outfit, next to a grinning Brett dressed as Daphne from Scooby-Doo! Heath, Ryan Reynolds, Lon Baruzza, Erik Olssen, Lance Van Brachel, and Alan St. Girard playing basketball in the Field House. The short-lived Men of Waverly club posing together in the Field House—complete with the usually nonathletic Easy and the old dean, Dean Marymount, who was resoundingly booed. And one of Tinsley, Brett, Callie, and Jenny, dancing in their fancy dresses on a table in Cambridge House, looking like they were in love with one another and the whole wide world.
Tinsley remembered how good that dance had felt, but she was on pins and needles tonight. How many schmaltzy pictures was she going to have to look at before they got to the good stuff?
“Maybe they didn’t include the photos we sent,” Brett whispered nervously from beside her.
They had both ditched their dates once the lights went down, determined to get into the best possible position for Isla’s long overdue unmasking. Brett’s bright red hair shone in the darkness, and her porcelain skin looked luminous in an ice blue one-shoulder David Meister dress that swept from one jeweled shoulder to just above her knees. She stood out amid all the pinks and reds. Tinsley had opted for maximum attention-getting herself, in a silk Nicole Miller multicolored floor-length dress that tucked in beneath her chest and then floated around her long legs. She’d piled her hair on the top of her head and had worn minimal makeup and accessories, knowing that she looked effortlessly cool and elegant—a startling contrast, she anticipated, to Isla’s true, dorked-out face. She could hardly wait for the inevitable comparisons to begin.
“Trust me,” she assured Brett. “The pictures are in. The so-called slideshow committee is two sophomore girls who practically peed themselves when I walked into their room. They would have jumped out their window if I’d wanted them to.”
“Fear is good,” Brett said with a happy sigh.
And then it started. The first shot was one of Tinsley’s personal favorites: It featured Isla with her masses of hair clearly untouched by any hint of product and frizzed out around her like a halo, glasses perched on her nose, her face scrunched up as she stared down at a chemistry textbook. The next was Isla in dorky pigtails and a Jonas Brothers concert T-shirt, clearly performing some kind of spastic dance, complete with a hairbrush clutched in her hand as a microphone. There was one of Isla and Xander, cuddled up on the couch with junk food littered all around them, ferociously concentrating on the video games they were playing. Another one of the happy couple featured Xander in some kind of Harry Potter rip-off wizard costume, with Isla sporting fairy wings and a tutu. Then came the food series: Isla chewing something with her mouth wide open, Isla with a straw up her nose, Isla cramming brownies into her face.
God, it was so beautiful. As victory surged through her, Tinsley couldn’t help but laugh. She’d seen Isla earlier, looking sleek and mysterious as ever, gliding around the party in a short, black Narciso Rodriguez dress. Not so pretty now, are you, sweetie?
Next to Tinsley, Brett waited for triumph to wash over her, but instead, with every shot of Isla in her geekitude, she felt something heavy and cold grow in her stomach. She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth and then sneaked a look over to where Sebastian was leaning against one of the couches to watch the show. She could see the frown on his face and the way his mouth pulled down in the corners. And suddenly she knew what the heaviness inside her was: guilt.
“I have to go,” she whispered, but Tinsley didn’t hear her—she was too busy cackling with glee as the unflattering pictures of Isla kept rolling. Brett headed for Sebastian and didn’t look back.
The lights finally rose as the credits began to play—like anyone cared who the slideshow committee was—and Tinsley was still snickering. It took a few moments of blinking in the pink lights to realize that she was the only one laughing. All around her, people were murmuring to one another and turning to glare at Tinsley once they realized she was the one laughing—and therefore, obviously, the one behind the Isla retrospective.
“Geeks rule!” someone shouted. Someone else picked up the cheer.
They have got
to be kidding, Tinsley thought in disbelief. She turned her head to check out Heath’s reaction, but he was already moving toward Isla.
“You still have that fairy costume?” he asked in his usual lascivious way, which could be heard in every corner of the atrium. “What about that tutu?”
Tinsley didn’t understand the hot jealousy that jolted through her as Heath’s golden brown head tilted close to Isla’s dark curls. She wanted to scream something that would force him to turn around, to see her. She couldn’t believe how much she wanted him to be paying attention to her instead of Isla. But the cold reality sunk in around her, utterly and completely undeniable.
She’d lost.
Again.
Brett followed Sebastian as he walked away from the ball and deeper into ficus and fern territory. When he finally stopped walking—stomping, really—Brett felt like they were standing in a jungle. She glanced over her shoulder toward the lights and the crowd, wondering if anyone could see them hidden in this corner.
But then Sebastian turned to look at her, his dark eyes so cold, and she forgot all about the greenery and the party.
“I know you did that,” he said, his voice hard. He looked so handsome in his sleek, dark suit that all Brett wanted to do was go back in time, cancel the slideshow, and spend the night dancing with him. “What did you do? Stalk the poor girl? What did she ever do to you?”
“Lucky Isla,” Brett threw at him, jealousy clawing at her once again, “that you’re so quick to jump to her defense no matter what she does!”
Sebastian looked at her for an uncomfortably long moment, his expression remote. Tired. Suddenly the jealousy that had burned so intensely inside her seemed to sputter out. It was replaced by something new—something worse. Fear.
Classic Page 13
