The Forever Crush

by Debra Moffitt

  Once we ascended to the top bleacher, our favorite spot, Piper turned to me.

  “Jemma, do you and Forrest ever argue? Dylan drives me crazy sometimes.”

  I knew there was a right answer to this question, but I didn’t know what it was.

  “No,” I said, after a moment’s delay. “Not really.”

  “That’s good,” Piper said. “It’s just weird. You never complain about him and he never complains about you. You’re, like, one of the most together couples I’ve ever met. In eighth grade anyway.”

  It was a compliment, I knew. But I couldn’t take it.

  “It’s all good,” I said, my fallback line.

  But just as Piper was praising our month-long relationship, I saw them. Forrest was walking into the gym with Lauren and Charlotte, the Bouchard twins. They were stunningly beautiful twins and each one had him by the arm, like gorgeous bookends with Forrest in between. Forrest was smiling and leaned in close to hear something Lauren said. Or was it Charlotte? From where I sat, I couldn’t tell the difference.

  I don’t know what hit me first. Was it worry that Forrest would soon break up with me to date one of them? Or it might have been anger—anger that he’d so openly flirt with two girls when I was sitting in the very same gymnasium, where I had saved him a seat next to me.

  I tried to look away, but kept on staring. I hardly noticed when Kate and Brett sat down in front of me.

  “Popcorn?” Kate asked, tilting the cone my way.

  When I didn’t respond, her eyes followed my gaze to the floor of the gym, where Forrest still stood with both twins. I panicked when I saw all three of them start climbing the bleachers.

  He can’t be bringing them up here, can he?

  My heart lurched again when I realized he wasn’t bringing the Bouchard sisters up to where I was sitting. He stopped eight rows below me and the girls sat down on either side of him. I was actually, at that moment, more angry at them than Forrest. Forrest knew we were only in a pretend relationship. But Lauren and Charlotte, on the other hand, knew Forrest had a girlfriend.

  I tried to keep my eyes focused on the basketball court, but I mostly watched them. Kate said nothing and I silently thanked her for not drawing attention to the situation. But ten minutes into the game, Piper noticed.

  “What the heck, Jem? Why is Forrest down there with the sisty uglers?” It was her flip-flopped term for ugly sisters.

  “They’re not ugly, Piper,” I said.

  “Whatever—just trying to make you feel better, girlie. What’s the deal down there? Did I speak too soon? Maybe your first fight will be tonight?”

  “I don’t want to make a scene. They’re friends. He can have friends who are girls,” I said, faking maturity.

  “I know those girls, Jemma. They don’t want to be his friends.”

  I knew it, too.

  At halftime, I walked right by, wanting him to see me. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater. I gave a tight smile to Clem Caritas, who had chosen to join Forrest and his twin girlfriends.

  “Hey Jemma, where have you been?” Forrest asked.

  “Right behind you, Forrest,” I said in an icy tone, and kept on descending the bleachers.

  As I passed by them, I had the weird urge to rip down the man-sized candy cane I had painted with the glittery 43 on its back. But then I thought, what did #43 ever do to me? I used the bathroom time to collect my thoughts. I gathered my courage to tell Forrest how this was just unacceptable. I would tell him, not as his girlfriend, but as a friend, that he had hurt my feelings. Who couldn’t see how embarrassing this was for me?

  But as I took a deep breath and re-entered the gym, Piper caught me.

  “Hey, you. Someone’s in the library.”

  Twenty-seven

  Out in the lobby, Kate was waiting for Piper and me. As we walked toward the library, down dark hallways, Piper explained that she never would have checked the library video cameras if Forrest hadn’t upset me so.

  “I was trying to think of a way to cheer you up, distract you,” Piper said.

  Before we took off in the library direction, she showed us what she saw on her mother’s phone. A small figure working in the dim light of the library with a handful of floppy bookmarks in her left hand.

  “Wait,” I said. “What are we going to do when we get there?”

  “Catch the person,” Piper said.

  “Jem’s right, Piper. It’s not like we can arrest whoever it is,” Kate said.

  “And we can’t tell Principal F. That would kind of defeat the purpose,” I said.

  There we stood outside the closed doors of the library. But we could see inside that there was dim light—was it candlelight?—coming from within the tall shelves.

  “You wanted to catch this person and now she is right behind these doors,” Piper whispered. “Let’s go.”

  Piper tugged on the door, which made a loud thud as she pulled on it. The bookmark bandit would surely be startled by the noise. We squinted as we looked into the window beside the library doors. The flickering light moved quickly in the direction of Mrs. Kelbrock’s office. Kate silently pointed toward the end of the hall and we all quietly race-walked to Mrs. Kelbrock’s office door. Her office could be accessed from inside the library or from the hallway.

  In the hallway, red EXIT signs illuminated long corridors of dusky gray-black. We rounded the corner and faced Mrs. Kelbrock’s office. A sliver of light shone along the floor beneath the door. My heart was thump-thumping in my chest and my mind ran away with itself. I started thinking anyone could be in there—a green-faced monster, an ax murderer, Principal F. himself.

  Then the light under the door clicked off. The sliver of light disappeared and we were left in the clinging darkness. Again, my mind raced in crazy directions. How much time had passed? What if the game had ended and my mother was sitting alongside the curb outside of school right now, waiting for me?

  It was Piper who reached for the doorknob. I grabbed the back of her sweater but she kept moving forward. She turned the knob slowly and inch by inch pushed open the door. Mrs. Kelbrock’s office was small but cheerful, decorated with posters that said things like “Read your heart out!” and “Readers become thinkers.” But in the dark, we could see none of that, just the greenish glow of her computer’s screensaver.

  “We know you’re here,” Kate said in a wavering voice.

  “Come out now and we won’t call the police,” Piper said.

  I looked at Piper and saw her shrug her shoulders as if to say, “It’s all I could think of.”

  The room was perfectly still and quiet, but inside the library, we saw a tiny flicker of light. What if this person had a candle and, because of our pursuit, he or she dropped it and burned down the whole school?

  We moved quickly through Mrs. Kelbrock’s office and into the library, where we tracked the flickering light to the reference section. Then we heard footsteps and the light moved to nonfiction, where I knew the Dewey decimal numbers went from 000 (generalities) to 900 (geography).

  “Just give up already,” Piper said.

  That made the footsteps and light move even quicker than before. I thought I heard a word or just a whimper. Then we watched the back of a figure return to Mrs. Kelbrock’s office. We scurried behind and, again, saw nothing in the office. But Kate pointed to the floor and we saw it. A faint light was coming from under Mrs. Kelbrock’s desk. Piper ran her hand along the wall and found the switch. Immediately, the room was flooded in regular, school-day fluorescent light. We saw the toes of two pink sneakers peeking out from under the desk. It was a girl.

  Kate leaned down under the desk and said, gently, “Oh my, Mimi.”

  Kate extended her hand and helped Mimi Caritas get to her feet. She looked scared like she had been crying but now was just staring at us.

  “I was just looking for a book,” she said in a quiet voice.

  Piper knelt down where Mimi had been, under the desk, and pulled out a stack of an
ti-PLS bookmarks. “Stop the PLS,” “PLS = X-Rated,” and—a new one—“Pink STINKS.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Piper asked.

  “Did someone make you do this?” Kate asked.

  Mimi said nothing.

  I stood there trying to piece this together in a way that made sense. Mimi was the bookmark bandit. Sweet Mimi, who twirled in her tutu and helped me with the dishes?

  “Guys, can you give me a minute alone with Mimi?”

  Kate and Piper hesitated, then walked back into the empty library, leaving us together.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” I said, motioning toward Mrs. Kelbrock’s green desk chair.

  I felt like a police detective with my suspect. Mimi sat but wouldn’t look at me. She was staring stiff-necked at her feet.

  “You don’t like the Pink Locker Society?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Yes or no?” I asked.

  “No.”

  Progress—at least she was talking.

  “How did you know it was me?” she said. “Are you going to tell my parents? Or my sister? Please don’t tell Mrs. Kelbrock. I don’t want to get kicked out of library club.”

  “We’re not going to tell anyone. Probably not, anyway. We didn’t know it was you until tonight,” I said.

  “Do you know about the Pink Locker Society?” she asked.

  “Yes, you could say that. I’m—we’re—the PLS. Piper, Kate, and me. We’re the ones running the Web site.”

  “But you guys are so nice,” Mimi said, more relaxed now.

  “And you made those bookmarks and sent us those messages?”

  She nodded.

  I thought about everything Mimi had written, including her personal attacks on us. It was hard to connect all that to this scared sixth-grader in front of me. Her feet didn’t even touch the floor. She was swinging them now, nervously.

  “Why don’t we go take the bookmarks out of the books?”

  She nodded and guided me over to the fiction section. She pulled out the books and removed more than a dozen bookmarks. She handed them to me, like I was her mother and she was in trouble. Which she was. I told Kate and Piper to go back to the gym.

  “I have it under control,” I said.

  “We’ll tell Forrest you’re talking to two really hot twin guys,” Piper said.

  The entire time we’d been tracking down Mimi I had completely forgotten about Forrest. It stung a little—the thought of walking back into that gym and seeing him with Lauren and Charlotte.

  After we un-bookmarked the books, I asked Mimi more directly why she had done it. She said it was because the Pink Locker Society Web site made her scared and confused.

  “I don’t want to wear bras and go out with boys and get the curse and all that other weird stuff.”

  “Growing up and getting your period is not a curse, Mimi,” I said, feeling a little like a big sister.

  I had been mystified why she had done all this, but now it started to make a little sense. Other girls had written in to the Pink Locker Society with the same concern. Not a ton of them, but a few. Some said they were embarrassed because they still played with Barbies or because their mom said they needed a bra, but they didn’t want to wear one.

  It wasn’t how I felt; I had always wanted to grow up and seem older. But I could see where a girl might feel this way. Mimi and I locked up the library and started walking toward the gym. I tried to use the time wisely. I told her that she shouldn’t call other girls “trashy and cheap.”

  “That hurt our feelings,” I said.

  Mimi nodded.

  I told her we had to keep the Pink Locker Society a secret to keep it running—even though some people were saying just the opposite. And I told her I wouldn’t tell her sister. Then I told her what I knew to be true and she needed to hear most of all—that she wasn’t the only one.

  “Other girls are scared, too. But it will be okay. Growing up isn’t bad and it happens a little at a time,” I said.

  Mimi had caused us a lot of trouble, but something in me wanted to protect her. I had planned on telling Kate and Piper about Mom being pregnant at the basketball game. But so much had happened now, I couldn’t find the energy.

  It seemed much longer, but we had lost only an hour to the Mimi situation. The second basketball game had just begun. I caught Mimi’s eye a few times back in the gym. I could hardly believe this was the same girl who we pulled out from under Mrs. Kelbrock’s desk, the same girl who had been threatening us all this time.

  We all felt a sense of accomplishment at having solved the mystery. It helped me not mind—well, at least not as much—that Forrest continued to sit with the Bouchards until very late in the game. When he did decide to join me, I saw Lauren and Charlotte turn around and watch him walk up the bleachers to where I was sitting.

  “Nice of you to show up,” Piper said.

  “Stop, Piper,” I said, even though I agreed with her.

  Forrest sat alongside me until the game’s end. The Patriots won in a squeaker. But I didn’t have much to say to him. He didn’t even ask where I was the whole time we were involved in the library caper. I wondered if he was seriously interested in Lauren or Charlotte, or both. I wasn’t mad exactly. I guess I didn’t feel much of anything, which was weird because I was so used to Forrest making me feel a whole lot of something.

  Twenty-eight

  The next day, we told Ms. Russo, who told Mrs. Percy and Mrs. Kelbrock, that the bookmark bandit had been caught. They were surprised to learn who it was, but as long as she stopped, they promised not to say anything. The day buzzed with holiday anticipation. We were off for the next two weeks, sailing right from Christmas through the New Year and Ms. Russo and Mr. Ford’s wedding.

  I was so happy to be invited to a real wedding. Most times, only adults are invited. And I was thrilled to have something fun to do on New Year’s Eve. Past a certain age, you don’t want to be kissing your mom and dad at midnight. Though I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be kissing Forrest. I had dreamed of kissing him so many times that I puzzled over our actual kiss. It was fine—a slow and gentle kiss, not a pushy one—but it lacked a certain something.

  For the wedding, I had a sparkly silver dress to wear and medium-high heels. For Christmas, Santa gave me some accessories, including a silver clutch handbag to match my dress.

  The days following Christmas went slowly. My mother was feeling better. She said, “The second trimester is a dream,” which I took to mean she wasn’t barfing up her breakfast anymore. I tried to be helpful and to keep busy. I went for runs most days and I made time for relatives and friends. I had sleepovers with Kate and Piper. One afternoon, I met Bet for tea. Again, I was tempted to just unload my backpack of untruths on her, but I’d been lying so long about Forrest, I couldn’t quite form the words.

  I found out what was worse than Forrest not getting me any Christmas gift. It was Forrest not getting me a present but asking me to tell people that he did. He stopped me at my locker before school let out for the holidays and asked me to tell everyone that he had given me a gift certificate to the Tuscan Oven.

  “No one will know if we actually went to dinner,” he said. “Cool?”

  “Sure, fine,” I said.

  “People will ask what you got me,” he said. “What should I say?”

  “Tell them I made you a huge batch of your favorite Christmas cookies.”

  “What kind?”

  “All sorts, but double batches of iced gingerbread and peanut butter chocolate chip.”

  “That sounds incredible. You didn’t actually do that, did you? ’Cause that would be awesome,” he said.

  “No, maybe next year,” I said, smiling a little. It was the first time I let myself enjoy anything about him in weeks.

  “’Kay,” he said. “I’ll call you about the wedding. To set up rides.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Same to you, Jemma.”

  I woul
d be lying if I said I didn’t think of him on Christmas. Christmas Eve to be exact. It’s just one of those nights that stands out among the rest and makes you wish you were with the people that matter most to you. I love my family, don’t get me wrong, but how cool would it be to spend Christmas Eve with your crush, especially if your crush liked you back?

  I pictured myself at Gibraltar with Forrest and something inside me slammed on the brakes. It had always been so easy to imagine Forrest and me and everything working out beautifully. But for more than a month, I had tried the experiment. We’d spent time together. We’d talked more than ever before. He’d held my hand and put his arm around me at the movies. Forrest had even kissed me. But he didn’t fall madly in love with me. If it hadn’t happened during all this time, would he ever?

  Twenty-nine

  9:45 a.m.

  14 hours and 15 minutes until midnight

  New Year’s Eve stands out among all other days in the calendar because of the big countdown. From the moment you wake up on December 31, the whole day is just tick-tocking away. I love when midnight gets close enough that the hour and minute countdown is inset in the corner of the TV screen. Sometimes I have a friend over to watch the ball drop, but usually it’s Chinese food, sherbet punch, and then a midnight cheer with Mom and Dad. Next year, it would be me, Mom, Dad, and a baby to be named later.

  But that was 365 days away. Tonight, I’d be counting down to the new year at Ms. Russo and Mr. Ford’s wedding reception. What a beautiful relief it was to have somewhere really fun to be on this party night of all party nights. And at midnight, how mind-blowing would it be to have a boy kiss me at three—two—one, Happy New Year!!??

  The anticipation was brutal as I lay in bed with the covers still tucked beneath my chin. I thought time would move faster if I forced myself back to sleep even for a little bit. When I did get up, I hoped my zebra-striped fuzzy slippers were in reach. It had snowed two days before—right between Christmas and New Year’s—and it was icy cold outside. A waste of snow, I thought, because we were already off from school.