by Jodi Picoult
“It’s not like that,” Peter said. “I mean, it’s kind of one-sided.”
“I bet she’s just as nervous as you are.”
He grimaced. “Mom. She barely even registers my existence. I’m not . . . I don’t hang out with the kind of people she hangs out with.”
Lacy looked at her son. “Well,” she said. “Then your first order of business is to change that.”
“How?”
“Find ways to connect with her. Maybe in places where you know her friends won’t be around. And try to show her the side of you that she doesn’t normally see.”
“Like what?”
“The inside.” Lacy tapped Peter’s chest. “If you tell her how you feel, I think you might be surprised at the reaction.”
Peter ducked his head and kicked at a hummock of snow. Then he glanced up at her shyly. “Really?”
Lacy nodded. “It worked for me.”
“Okay,” Peter said. “Thanks.”
She watched him trudge back up the hill to the house, and then she turned her attention back to the deer. Lacy would have to feed them until the snow melted. Once you started taking care of them, you had to follow through, or they just wouldn’t make it.
* * *
They were on the floor of the living room and they were nearly naked. Josie could taste beer on Matt’s breath, but she must have tasted like that, too. They’d both drunk a few at Drew’s—not enough to get wasted, just buzzed, enough so that Matt’s hands seemed to be all over her at once, so that his skin set fire to hers.
She’d been floating along pleasantly in a haze of the familiar. Yes, Matt had kissed her—one short one, then a longer, hungry kiss, as his hand worked open the clasp on her bra. She lay lazy, spread beneath him like a feast, as he pulled off her jeans. But then, instead of doing what usually came next, Matt reared over her again. He kissed her so hard that it hurt. “Mmmph,” she said, pushing at him.
“Relax,” Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach.
It wasn’t the way it normally was, but Josie had to admit that it was exciting. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer.
“Yeah,” he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
“Wait,” Josie said, trying to roll away beneath him, but he clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her. Matt framed her face with his hands. “Jesus, Josie,” he whispered, and she realized that he was in tears. “I love you so goddamn much.”
Josie turned her face away. “I love you, too.”
She lay in his arms for ten minutes and then said she was tired and needed to go to sleep. After she kissed Matt good-bye at the front door, she went into the kitchen and took the rug cleaner out from underneath the sink. She scrubbed it into the wet spot on the carpet, prayed it would not leave a stain.
* * *
Peter highlighted the text on his computer screen and deleted it. Although he thought it would be pretty cool to open an email and automatically have an I LOVE YOU message written over and over on the screen, he could see where someone else—someone who didn’t give a crap about C++—would think it was just downright strange.
He’d decided on an email because that way if she blew him off, he could suffer the embarrassment in private. The problem was, his mother had said to show what was inside him and he wasn’t very good when it came to words.
He thought about how sometimes, when he saw her, it was just a part of her: her arm resting on the passenger window of the car, her hair blowing out its window. He thought about how many times he’d fantasized about being the one at the wheel.
My journey was pointless, he wrote. Until I took a YOU-turn.
Groaning, Peter deleted that, too. It made him sound like a Hallmark card writer, or even worse, one that Hallmark wouldn’t even hire.
He thought about what he wished he could say to her, if he had the guts, and poised his hands over the keyboard.
I know you don’t think of me.
And you certainly would never picture us together.
But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it up with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what’s the point of butter without bread?
(Why are all these examples FOODS!?!?!??)
Anyway, by myself, I’m nothing special. But with you, I think I could be.
He agonized about the ending.
Your friend, Peter Houghton
Well, technically that wasn’t true.
Sincerely, Peter Houghton
That was true, but it was still sort of lame. Of course, there was the obvious:
Love, Peter Houghton
He typed it in, read it over once. And then, before he could stop himself, he pushed the Enter button and sent his heart across the Ethernet to Josie Cormier.
* * *
Courtney Ignatio was so freaking bored.
Josie was her friend and all, but there was, like, nothing to do. They’d already watched three Paul Walker movies on DVD, checked the Lost website for the bio on the hot guy who played Sawyer, and read all the Cosmos that hadn’t been recycled, but there was no HBO, nothing chocolate in the fridge, and no party at Sterling College to sneak into. This was Courtney’s second night at the Cormier household, thanks to her brainiac older brother, who had dragged her parents on a whirlwind tour of Ivy League colleges on the East Coast. Courtney plopped a stuffed hippo on her stomach and frowned into its button eyes. She’d already tried to get details out of Josie last night about Matt—important things, like how big a dick he had and if he had a clue how to use it—but Josie had gone all Hilary Duff on her and acted like she’d never heard the word sex before.
Josie was in the bathroom taking a shower; Courtney could still hear the water running. She rolled to her side and scrutinized a framed photograph of Josie and Matt. It would have been easy to hate Josie, because Matt was the über-boyfriend—always glancing around at a party to make sure he hadn’t gotten too far away from Josie; calling her up to say good night, even when he’d just dropped her off a half hour before (yes, Courtney had been privy to a display of that very thing just last night). Unlike most of the guys on the hockey team—several of whom Courtney had dated—Matt honestly seemed to prefer Josie’s company to anyone else’s. But there was something about Josie that kept Courtney from being jealous. It was the way her expression slipped every now and then, like a colored contact lens, so you could see what was actually underneath. Josie might have been one-half of Sterling High School’s Most Faithful Couple, but it almost seemed like the biggest reason she clung to that label was because that was the only reason she knew who she was.
You’ve got mail.
The automaton on Josie’s computer spoke; until then, Courtney hadn’t realized that they’d left the computer running, much less online. She settled down at the desk, wiggling the mouse so that the screen came back into focus. Maybe Matt was writing some kind of cyberporn. It would be fun to screw around with him a little and pretend that she was Josie.
The return address, though, wasn’t one that Courtney recognized—she and Josie, after all, had nearly identical Buddy Lists. There was no subject. Courtney clicked on the link, assuming it was some kind of junk mail: enlarge your penis in thirty days; refinance your home; real deals on printer ribbon cartridges.
The email opened, and Courtney started to read.
“Oh my God,” she murmured. “This is too fucking good.”
She swiped the body of the email and forwarded it to [email protected].
The door to the bathroom opened, and Josie came back into the bedroom wearing a bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. Courtney closed the server window. “Good-bye,” the automaton said.
“What’s up?” Josie asked.
Courtney turned around in the chair, smiling. “Just checking my mail,” she said.
* * *
Josie couldn’t sleep; her mind was tumbling like a spring stream. This was exactly the sort of problem she wished she could talk about with someone—but who? Her mother? Yeah, right. Matt was out of the question. And Courtney—or any other girlfriend she had—well, she was afraid that if she spoke her worst fears out loud, maybe that would be enough for them to come true.
Josie waited until she heard Courtney’s even breathing. She crept out of bed and into the bathroom. She closed the door and pulled down her pajama pants.
Nothing.
Her period was three days late.
* * *
On Tuesday afternoon, Josie sat on a couch in Matt’s basement, writing a social studies essay for him about the historical abuse of power in America while he and Drew lifted free weights.
“There are a million things you could talk about,” Josie said. “Watergate. Abu Ghraib. Kent State.”
Matt strained beneath the weight of a barbell as Drew spotted him. “Whatever’s easiest, Jo,” he said.
“Come on, you pussy,” Drew said. “At this rate they’re going to demote you to JV.”
Matt grinned and fully extended his arms. “Let’s see you bench this,” he grunted. Josie watched the play of his muscles, imagined them strong enough to do that and also tender enough to hold her. He sat up, wiping his forehead and the back of the weight bench, so that Drew could take his turn.
“I could do something on the Patriot Act,” Josie suggested, biting down on the end of the pencil.
“I’m just looking out for your own best interests, dude,” Drew said. “I mean, if you’re not going to bulk up for Coach, do it for Josie.”
She glanced up. “Drew, were you born an idiot, or did that evolve?”
“I intelligently designed,” he joked. “All I’m saying is that Matt better watch out, now that he’s got some competition.”
“What are you talking about?” Josie looked at him as if he were crazy, but secretly, she was panicking. It didn’t really matter whether or not Josie had shown attention to someone else; it only mattered whether Matt thought so.
“It was a joke, Josie,” Drew said, lying down on the bench and curling his fists around the metal bar.
Matt laughed. “Yeah, that’s a good description of Peter Houghton.”
“Are you going to fuck with him?”
“Hopefully,” Matt said. “I just haven’t decided how yet.”
“Maybe you need some poetic inspiration to come up with a suitable plan,” Drew said. “Hey, Jo, grab my binder. The email’s right in the pocket in the front.”
Josie reached across the couch for Drew’s backpack and rummaged through his books. She pulled out a folded piece of paper and opened it to find her own email address right at the top, the whole student body of Sterling High as the destination address.
Where had this come from? And why hadn’t she ever seen it?
“Read it,” Drew said, lifting the weights.
Josie hesitated. “‘I know you don’t think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together.’”
The words felt like stones in her throat. She stopped speaking, but that didn’t matter, because Drew and Matt were reciting the email word for word.
“‘By myself, I’m nothing special,’” Matt said.
“‘But with you . . . I think . . . ’” Drew convulsed, laughing, the weights falling hard back into their cradle. “Fuck, I can’t do this when I’m cracking up.”
Matt sank down on the couch beside Josie and slipped his arm around her, his thumb grazing her breast. She shifted, because she didn’t want Drew to see, but Matt did, and shifted with her. “You inspire poetry,” he said, smiling. “Bad poetry, but even Helen of Troy probably started with, like, a limerick, right?”
Josie’s face reddened. She could not believe that Peter had written these things to her, that he’d ever think she might be receptive to them. She couldn’t believe that the whole school knew that Peter Houghton liked her. She couldn’t afford for them to think that she felt anything for him.
Even sorry.
More devastating was the fact someone had decided to make her the fool. It was not a surprise that someone had gotten into her email account—they all knew each other’s passwords; it could have been any of the girls, or even Matt himself. But what would make her friends do something like this, something so totally humiliating?
Josie already knew the answer. This group of kids—they weren’t her friends. Popular kids didn’t really have friends; they had alliances. You were safe only as long as you hid your trust—at any moment someone might make you the laughingstock, because then they knew no one was laughing at them.
Josie was smarting, but she also knew part of the prank was a test to see how she reacted. If she turned around and accused her friends of hacking into her email and invading her privacy, she was doomed. Above all else, she wasn’t supposed to show emotion. She was so socially above Peter Houghton that an email like this wasn’t mortifying, but hilarious.
In other words: Laugh, don’t cry.
“What a total loser,” Josie said, as if it didn’t bother her at all; as if she found this just as funny as Drew and Matt did. She balled up the email and tossed it behind the couch. Her hands were shaking.
Matt lay his head down in her lap, still sweaty. “What did I officially decide to write about?”
“Native Americans,” Josie replied absently. “How the government broke treaties and took away their land.”
It was, she realized, something she could sympathize with: that rootlessness, the understanding that you were never going to feel at home.
Drew sat up, straddling the weight bench. “Hey, how do I get myself a girl who can boost my GPA?”
“Ask Peter Houghton,” Matt answered, grinning. “He’s the lovemeister.”
As Drew snickered, Matt reached for Josie’s hand, the one holding the pencil. He kissed the knuckles. “You’re too good to me,” he said.
* * *
The lockers in Sterling High were staggered, one row on top and one row on the bottom, which meant that if you happened to be a lower locker you had to suffer getting your books and coat and stuff while someone else was practically standing on your head. Peter’s locker was not only on the bottom row, it was also in a corner—which meant that he could never quite make himself small enough to get what he needed.
Peter had five minutes to get from class to class, but he was the first one into the halls when the bell rang. It was a carefully calculated plan: if he left as soon as possible, he’d be in the hallways during the biggest crush of traffic, and therefore was less likely to be singled out by one of the cool kids. He walked with his head ducked, his eyes on the floor, until he reached his locker.
He was kneeling in front of it, trading his math book for his social studies text, when a pair of black wedge heels stopped beside him. He glanced up the patterned stockings to the tweed miniskirt and asymmetrical sweater and long waterfall of blond hair. Courtney Ignatio was standing with her arms crossed, as if Peter had already taken up too much of her time, when he wasn’t even the one who’d stopped her in the first place.
“Get up,” she said. “I’m not going to be late for class.”
Peter stood and closed his locker. He didn’t want Courtney to see that inside, he had taped a picture of himself and Josie from when they were little. He’d had to climb up into the attic where his mother kept her old photo albums, since she’d gone digital two years ago, and now all they had were CDs. In the photo, he and Josie were sitting on the edge of a sandbox at nur
sery school. Josie’s hand was on Peter’s shoulder. That was the part he liked the best.
“Look, the last thing I want to do is stand here and be seen talking to you, but Josie’s my friend, which is why I volunteered to do this in the first place.” Courtney looked down the hall, to make sure no one was coming. “She likes you.”
Peter just stared at her.
“I mean she likes you, you retard. She’s totally over Matt; she just doesn’t want to ditch him until she knows for sure that you’re serious about her.” Courtney glanced at Peter. “I told her it’s social suicide, but I guess that’s what people do for love.”
Peter felt all the blood rush to his head, an ocean in his ears. “Why should I believe you?”
Courtney tossed her hair. “I don’t give a damn if you do or you don’t. I’m just telling you what she said. What you do with it is up to you.”
She walked down the hallway and disappeared around a corner just as the bell rang. Peter was going to be late now; he hated being late, because then you could feel everyone’s eyes on you when you walked into class, like a thousand crows pecking at your skin.
But that hardly mattered, not in the grand scheme of things.
* * *
The best item the cafeteria served was Tater Tots, soaked in grease. You could practically feel the waist of your jeans getting snugger and your face breaking out—and yet, when the cafeteria lady held out her massive spoonful, Josie couldn’t resist. She sometimes wondered: If they were as nutritious as broccoli, would she want them so much? Would they taste this good if they weren’t so bad for you?
Most of Josie’s friends only drank diet soda for their meals; getting anything substantial and carbohydrate-based practically labeled you as either a whale or a bulimic. Usually, Josie limited herself to three Tater Tots, and then gave the rest to the guys to devour. But today, she’d practically been salivating for the past two classes just thinking about Tater Tots, and she couldn’t stop taking just one more. If it wasn’t pickles and ice cream, did it still qualify as a craving?
