by Rachel Vail
“Now we’re just haggling about size,” he said.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he muttered. “Go on. You were in the middle of breaking up with me.”
“Oh, George.”
“I never asked you out, by the way. Just saying. But still. Go ahead.”
“See? This is what I mean. I can’t figure all this out if I’m your sort-of unofficial girlfriend, because you are way too nice and funny and it confuses me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll work on being less nice, for future unofficial girlfriends.”
“I know you think you’re doing the moral thing by sticking by me …”
“Yeah, that’s why I’ve stuck with you. Making a moral point. If I get a hundred moral points, I can trade them in for valuable merchandise.”
“George.”
“Toasters, pencil sharpeners, dusting cloths …”
“George!”
“Go on. I’ve stuck with you because … ?”
“Because you are very, I don’t know, gallant.”
“Gallant? Really? Gallant? Like a knight?”
“Yes. And I’ve appreciated it, this whole time, so much, but I just, I have to ask you to stop. Okay? Please understand.”
He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to say something, but stopped before any words came out. We sat there silent for a minute or three, both miserable.
“I just, I need to be alone for a while,” I said. “To be independent, as you once said I was, but you were wrong then, or at least maybe just … optimistic.”
“Okay.”
“This is my mess, so I have to sleep in it. Or whatever.”
“Yeah, or, are you dumping me because now you’ve suddenly got Tess back? So you don’t need me?”
“George, no.” The ice cream was gurgling around in my clenched stomach. “That’s not it.”
“Or maybe,” he said, “you’re giving me the boot because you’re hot for Kevin Lazarus.”
“No!” Wow, that was loud. “No, George. I swear that’s not why.”
He didn’t say anything, so I forced myself to turn and look at him.
“I mean, I’m not. George, come on. Why are you being so mean suddenly?”
He shrugged. “Somebody really smart who I used to love suggested I should be less nice. Thanks for the ice cream.”
He used to love me?
He stood up, so I did, too. My hands were sticky with radioactive-looking melted mint chip ice cream.
“Hey, George … ,” I said, launching into the conclusion I’d written in the margin of my notebook earlier in the day. “I just, I hope you will know someday that this is a new leaf for me, my first step in trying to do the right thing and be a good friend.”
“It is what it is,” George said, and started to walk away. He turned around after about twenty steps and grinned his lopsided grin at me. “Is it bad that I’m feeling happy you paid for the ice cream?”
I smiled back. “No,” I answered. “Not at all.”
eleven
A CAR PULLED into the driveway. I froze at the window in Samantha’s room, where I was hiding while watching Kevin and his friends throw a football around our yard. The car door slammed. By the time Samantha’s light footsteps approached the second floor, I was in my room, pretending to read, casually, on my bed.
That lasted about a minute before I peeked out into the hallway. Samantha was flopped against the wall like an abandoned stuffed animal.
“You okay?”
“Mmmm,” she said, her eyes closed but fluttering under her eyelids.
“Long day?” I asked. “Playdate?”
She reluctantly opened her eyes to slits. “I get worn out by people sometimes.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
Her eyes closed again.
“Maybe you should drink some water.”
“I’m watching the colors,” she said slowly.
“The colors.”
“Funny, huh?”
Kind of funny, I thought. Funny weird. “Uh …”
“I have too many and Kevin has too few.”
“Too few … what?” I asked.
“Colors.”
“Colors?”
She didn’t respond. So I had nothing to echo.
I went to the bathroom and got us each a paper cup of cool water to drink, and sat down next to her. The dispenser of Dixie cups was yet another new addition in my house—but kind of a fun one. Little bitty cups for water, any time you wanted some. I downed my shot of water and considered whether I should leave Sam alone, or call her dad to come upstairs to deal with this.
After a few minutes, Sam took a tiny sip, then stood up. “Do you mind if I go read now?” she asked me.
“Not at all.”
“Thank you for the water.” She took another microsip.
I watched her wander to her room and close her door. I stayed there in the hall until my butt fell asleep, then headed down to the kitchen in search of a snack. I hadn’t finished my ice cream, I internally negotiated.
I was eating another hard pear in front of the open fridge when the gang of boys came in. They all said stuff to me like Hey and How’s it going. They joked about how clumsy Brad was, how he couldn’t catch a cold, never mind a ball, not seeming weirded out at all to have me there, added to the mix, as they chugged water out of glasses Mom and I had bought three years ago. They all nodded a lot, bobbleheadishly. I know girls are the ones who supposedly like to get along, and boys fight—but, it turns out, not so much.
“Hot out,” Kevin said.
“Practically a heat wave,” Tariq joked.
“Hot enough to cook a chicken,” Brad added.
Then they all cracked up, so I did, too, and then they were shuffling out, saying good-bye and See ya and Take it easy and Cook-a-chicken hot.
As he passed me, Kevin’s hand traced a line across my back, about five inches north of the top of my jeans.
It felt like lightning.
He walked out with his friends, but his touch stayed there, with me.
For dinner, Mom made refrigerator salad with the dregs of the wedding leftovers. It was good, one of my favorite kinds of dinner, in fact, but it was hard to fully enjoy with Joe practically moaning about how delicious it all was. Dude, it’s leftovers chopped up. I actually liked the guy a little when he and Mom were dating, but it’s like perfume—a bit is fine, nice, even; too much and your eyes water.
“We have a ton of homework,” Kevin said in an oddly chipper voice as we cleared the table. “We should …”
“Oh, okay,” Joe said. “Hit the books. I’ll do the scrub-up tonight.”
“Um, okay,” I said. On the stairs, going up to our rooms, Kevin bumped me with his shoulder.
“Cool dishwashing dodge,” I said.
“I’m awesome.”
“If you do say so yourself.” I turned my face away because I could feel myself staring at his red, red lips, and also feeling tempted to tell him I’d broken up with George. Which was none of his business and had nothing to do with him. So there was no reason to tell him.
“You want to come in?” he asked at his door. “We could, you know …”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Read Hamlet together. What were you thinking of?”
I laughed. He does make me laugh.
“Because, if you had other ideas … ?”
I shoved him into his room but stayed in the hall and said, “Rain check.”
“Yeah?”
“No,” I said, and walked away, toward my room, feeling him watching me.
Behind me, Kevin groaned like he was in delicious pain.
I closed my door but not totally.
There was no way I could settle down enough to read about Hamlet’s scheming stepfather and how awkward it was for Hamlet to deal with a blended family. Uh, no.
I put in my new earbuds to block out the world and listen to some show tunes while doing math, but that felt
really crappy. I did love those earbuds—which were such a thoughtful gift, and maybe I had made a huge, inexplicable, unfixable error by dumping George—but now I kind of had no moral right to use them. Also, it is very hard to focus on equations with Next to Normal blasting in your ears.
Is everything about weird family dynamics?
I took out the earbuds, hid them under my pillow, and opened my science notebook to today’s page. It was blank other than “Science Fair Project Proposal” and my name. Nothing else appeared magically under it, so I gave up on that and texted Tess:
today at lunch I was happier than I have been
since the night I wrecked everything
or maybe even before that
Over the next half hour of not coming up with any decent science fair ideas, I checked my phone about eighty times. Nothing. I decided to hate myself for texting her such unsubtle, needy, clingy crap and then checked Facebook, in case she was on and wanted to chat. Nope. She was still listed as one of Felicity’s many sisters, and Felicity as one of hers. I had no siblings. Urgh. I signed out and closed my computer. Then I opened it again and shut it off. Better. I closed it, tucked it into my bag, buckled it up, and shoved the whole thing under my bed. I wanted to make it impossible to casually stalk Tess’s page or request that she be my sister, too.
Why was she not texting me back?
I finished my math and moved on to force myself through the Hamlet reading. I was annotating Why would Ophelia put up with that crap from him, even if he is a prince when I almost fell off my bed. I thought it might be an earthquake, but no, it was my phone buzzing.
The text from Tess, which I read until I had it memorized and then a few times more, seemed more poetic to me than anything ol’ Willy Shakes had written in the book in my other hand:
ok good.
hey, i love you okay?
and i forgive you and stuff
obviously
and dont feel bad
if you still do
okay … thats probs it
xoxo
I waited until I had finished doing the Hamlet reading before I allowed myself to text back:
Thanks, Tess. U r the besssssttttt.
She texted back a winking face, and so we went back and forth making faces out of numbers and signs for a while in between finishing our homework, and parsing what George had said and whether I had handled breaking up with him well. She said I just had to move on, because if you aren’t in love with a boy, you shouldn’t string him along.
I guess u r right, I texted her.
She wrote back immediately, I am always right u no that.
I went with emoticons for a response. Because what else could I say? I was just feeling bad. Especially because I had the earbuds in again, so I could listen to music while we texted some more, until Tess wrote that her mom was doing her nightly prowl to make sure she and her sisters were off their phones, so she had to flop down and fake sleep.
I said I would do the same, in solidarity, even though she and I both knew that my mother didn’t do a nightly prowl.
I was surprised when my phone buzzed again, but when I saw the text was from Kevin, I was even more surprised. He’d written:
Is it true you broke up w George?
I texted back yes and waited. Nothing else happened. No follow-up questions, no emoticons, no response.
Usually I am asleep within a minute of head-on-pillow, so it was weird to lie there for so long, earbuds tossed across my room, straining to hear the breathing of the boy just seven steps down the hall.
twelve
TESS WAS WAITING at my locker when I got to school. As I dropped my math textbook in and fished out my slightly crushed spiral notebooks, Tess told me that she had woken up with a brilliant idea to cheer me up from the doldrums of having dumped George. I should have a sleepover party Saturday night and we could all drive Kevin nuts, or maybe he could invite some boys over and it would effectively be a coed sleepover. Because even though Kevin is a jerk-slut, some of his friends are seriously getting hot lately.
“Really?” I asked. “Like which?”
Right then, Jennifer and Brad walked past us, chatting. I appraised Brad from my position on the floor. Not bad, it was true. In middle school, he was such a pudgeball.
“When did that even happen?” I asked Tess.
“Exactly.”
“Are he and Jennifer going out?”
Tess shrugged. I promised I would ask my mom about the party.
At lunchtime, Tess grabbed me by the arm and brought me to the cafeteria table where she’s been sitting with Darlene, Felicity, and Felicity’s constant shadow, Paige. Tess told them I was going to have a sleepover on Saturday, and they all immediately started planning which boys we should get Kevin to invite. I tried to explain that I wasn’t even sure the party was happening, but Tess assured everybody that my mom never said no.
“Is that true?” I asked. “Maybe I just don’t ask for anything.”
“Guess it’s time to start,” Tess suggested.
“Your mom really is nice,” Felicity said. “And cool. Like, not overinvolved in your life. My mom wants to know every little detail of mine. She’s not a helicopter mom. She’s, like, an umbrella. A hat. She’s a hat mom.”
“Not mine,” Darlene said. “My mom said last night she doesn’t want to hear one more thing about my life.”
“Ooo. Did you get another note home?” Paige asked in her squeaky voice.
“Yeah, D-minus in science. My mom says she’s changing my name, legally, to Constant Crisis.”
“Can she actually do that?” Paige asked, her blue eyes huge and round with horror.
“Till I’m eighteen, supposedly,” Darlene said. “So, anyway, yeah, Charlie—you’re lucky your mom is cool.”
“Or doesn’t know about the name-changing thing,” I said.
“Charlie broke up with George,” Tess said, getting out her notebook to write a list of boys I should tell Kevin to invite. “So he’s out. Too awkward.”
“Aw, really?” Felicity asked. “What happened?”
I shrugged. “It just didn’t work out.”
“Too bad,” she said. “You guys were a really cute couple.”
“Thanks,” I said, and slumped like a single parenthesis on the hard bench.
By the time I left school, I was exhausted. Also, my science project was probably going to be rejected, even though I thought it was a pretty interesting scientific question, one a lot more worthy of investigation than how to make something also known as goop.
I walked straight to Cuppa and got there before four. I pressed my face against the glass from the outside, trying to see who was in there, what was going on. Be prepared, I thought, despite my lack of Boy Scout history.
The window was cool against my forehead, but other than that, I didn’t learn much. I stood there squinting, though, determined to figure out something. The level of not knowing in my life had me kind of jittery even before taking in the coffee fumes.
When I mustered the courage to walk through the door, I saw Anya, behind the counter, waving at me as if I were approaching across a field of hay instead of just past the four or five tables between us. “Charlie!” she shouted.
Everybody turned in their seats and stared at me. Ah, my absolute-tippy-top-favorite of all pastimes: being looked at. I backed sideways a few steps, and my sneaker crunched down on something.
Beside me, someone sighed. “Oh, great.”
“Hi, Penelope!” Penelope was a senior. She had edited my few failed attempts at writing for the school newspaper earlier in the year, before I quit.
“I just swept all that,” she said, pointing down at the dust/crumb pile I’d managed to scatter.
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t, um … You work here?”
She sighed. “Can you just … Mom?”
Anya turned her head to look over her shoulder from the cappuccino machine. “Come on back, Charlie!”
“Anya
is your mom?”
“So?”
“That’s so cool.”
I stepped to the side as Penelope sighed behind me. I headed to the counter, past a table of women with strollers, and another of three senior girls I knew by sight but not name, who all had their cell phones out while they chatted and laughed.
Anya handed me an apron. “So there are a bunch of people who want the job, and I can only hire one, so I decided we’ll do a trial run for each of you and see how it goes.”
“Fair enough,” I said, tying the apron tightly around my waist in what I hoped was a winning style.
“Do you know how to use the espresso maker?” she asked.
“Um.”
“The frother?”
“I’m a fast learner.”
“Okay. Well, let’s start at the beginning. How do you like your coffee?”
Wow, this was going well. I should just take off the apron and not waste her time. “I actually don’t drink coffee.”
“You don’t.” More of a statement than a question.
“Well, no. Not really.”
“But you want to work at a coffee bar.”
“Yes.”
“You like cleaning counters?”
“Love it,” I said.
She nodded, then pointed at the huge stainless steel machine beside us. “This is the Big Man. Penelope will show you how to use it, or you can ask Toby. He’ll be in later, and he’s a genius. Has a way with machines. There’s a surprising amount of machine work, in the café business.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Problem?”
“No,” I said. “Though, I can barely staple.”
Anya laughed one ha. “Get tutored by Toby, then, for sure. You and Penelope are friends from school?”
“Well,” I said, “I was on newspaper. Briefly. Last year.”
“Ah, newspaper,” Anya replied, as if that foretold some fortune about me.
“I quit.”
“The hours are rough,” she empathized, handing me a sponge.
“Oh no,” I said. “I don’t mind long hours. That’s not—”
“It wasn’t a trap,” she said.
I followed her back into the storeroom.
“I quit in protest,” I told her, tilting my head to take in the sight of the high shelves, stacked with teetering boxes, all around us. It felt like we’d fallen into a deep, narrow trench.
