Which was a miracle, if there had ever been one.
CHAPTER 12
When I woke up, so late in the afternoon it was almost sundown, the events of the night before slowly sneaked back up on me. Taylor was mad at me. My fury with Nicola hadn’t faded. There was still a chance that Lauren knew I hadn’t been in the dorm by curfew. There was a strong likelihood that Chloe was going to think I was a stupid idiot after I relayed the events of the night to her, too. It was a horrible feeling, knowing I’d made an irreparable mess of my life once again. I ignored the text messages on my phone from Christie about her photo shoot and was a little peeved that my sister still hadn’t touched base.
I trudged down to the cafeteria to see if by any chance it might be open early for dinner because I was starving. Of course, it wasn’t. While I was down in the lobby anyway, I decided to stop by the mail room to see if anyone had sent me anything of interest during the week. I opened my personal mailbox, #612, with its tiny silver key, and was pleased to find a funny postcard from my sister featuring a kitten about to fall out of a tree, hanging onto a branch with one paw above a caption that said HANG IN THERE! There was also a small package wrapped in brown paper, which I opened carefully on the elevator, wondering with excitement about who had cared enough about me to send a gift. I hoped it was something cool from my dad, something from Malibu.
But it wasn’t something cool from Malibu at all. The box contained a red velvet jewelry box from Sinclair’s, a high end jeweler on the Upper East Side, wrapped in bubble wrap. The note tucked into the package was from my mom.
Danko wanted to send you something to show you how proud we are of you. Keep up the good work. Love, Mom.
I stepped off the elevator on the sixth floor, feeling a little sick. Whatever was in that jewelry box, I was pretty sure I didn’t want it if it had been picked out by Danko. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I popped the box open to find a pair of diamond stud earrings, even slightly bigger than those which Nicola had let me borrow.
I stared at them in disbelief in the hallway before I popped the jewelry box shut with a small clap. I would never wear those earrings. As much as I loved them and wanted to have something of my own that was better and fancier than what Nicola had, I knew in my heart that those earrings weren’t given to me to encourage me to keep working hard. They were sent to me to encourage me to keep my mouth shut.
Killing time on the internet until the cafeteria opened for dinner, I realized that Alex had sent me a Friendbook request. Eagerly, I accepted, and then opened his message to me.
Just wondering if you guys made it back alive. Didn’t see you on the morning news. Thanks for the best bus ride ever. AHCP3
It was extra awesome that Kate wasn’t in the room with me at that moment, because I kind of swooned a little bit. I stepped into my closet to confirm that the jacket he had given me the night before was on its hanger, where I had left it earlier that morning.
Whereas the cafeteria served especially delicious items on Friday nights, dinners on Saturday were certifiably awful. There was some kind of mysterious Salisbury steak special, and the ever-present pizza carousel, but I stuck with the safety of the choices at the grill. Armed with my turkey burger loaded up with extra slices of tomato, I sat down across from Chloe and next to the girl with the orthodontic headgear, whose name was Danielle.
“How was the dance?” Chloe asked.
In a split second, I decided to lie to Chloe about the entire turn of events involving the cigarettes, bus, and accidental off-campus adventure. It occurred to me that the fewer people who knew the truth about the mess Nicola and I had gotten into, the better.
“All zit-faced poindexters who can’t dance worth a crap,” Chloe mused, echoing her prediction of what the dance was going to be just twenty-four hours earlier.
“Watch it,” Ramona, the girl at our table with the puffy orange hair and moderate acne across her jaws, cautioned.
I took a sip of my iced tea, and relished the moments leading up to proving Chloe wrong. “Actually, there was one cute guy there named Sam who did this awesome breakdance, and his friend, Alex, sent me a Buddy request on Friendbook.”
“Gawd,” Chloe groaned, taking a giant bite out of her second slice of pizza and chewing before continuing to voice her opinion. “A Buddy request. How juvenile. That’s a little five years ago.”
Chloe was starting to really irk me with her cooler-than-thou attitude about everything. It reminded me a bit of my sister’s dismissal of everything as uncool and lame.
As much as I tried not to, I couldn’t help but keep one eye on the doorway to see if Nicola would come down to dinner. Nala, Renée, Stacy and Ameerah were having an animated conversation, presumably rehashing the events of the previous night. But even after I drifted back into the kitchen to get a refill on my frozen yogurt, Nicola hadn’t surfaced. I didn’t feel comfortable approaching her friends at their table even though I had hung out with them without incident the night before. Dinner rules were dinner rules.
Lauren nodded at me in the dining hall as I left, not giving any indication that she suspected me of having left campus without permission. I was in the clear.
On Sunday morning, when life had gotten somewhat back to normal even though I had stayed up most of Saturday night talking with Kristijan on video chat, I heard a knock on my door and knew without even looking through the peephole that it was Nicola. She had wisely come armed with cupcakes that she had bought at the campus store as soon as they’d opened for the morning.
“Are you still mad at me?” she asked.
“Why weren’t you at dinner last night?” I demanded, blocking the doorway to my room before she could enter.
“My stomach hurt because I knew you were still angry, even though you said you’d be my friend because of Darren,” she said with a frankness that unnerved me.
She just stood there, blank-faced, waiting for my response and blinking.
“God!” I exclaimed finally, stepping aside so that she could enter the room. “Don’t you ever smile, or show any kind of emotion?”
“I feel emotions,” she insisted.
I closed the door behind her and she sat down at Kate’s desk, accidentally knocking a coral cashmere cardigan to the floor and returning it to its place on the back of Kate’s chair.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and bit into a cupcake. “You should work on showing them. Honestly, Nicola, you’re like a robot. I can’t tell if you’re truly sorry about what happened on Friday or not.”
Nicola shrugged. “I have Asperger’s Syndrome. That’s why I go to school here. My father doesn’t want bad publicity in England. According to him, I’m a freak.”
“What the hell is ass burger syndrome?” I demanded. I didn’t think she understood how enraged I was with her. We had come so close to getting caught, and could have been risking expulsion.
“It’s a form of autism,” she informed me matter-of-factly. “My psychiatrist says I have a lack of empathy and an inability to communicate nonverbally. My father thinks that I have control over it and I’m intentionally being rude, just like you do. But I’m not being rude. I’m just being me.”
I stared at her for a moment in disbelief, stupefied. I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not, and that was the main problem with Nicola; she was impossible to read. Those enormous, honey brown eyes just blinked back at me without expression. “Are you fooling around? Because I can’t tell if you’re full of crap or not.”
“Why would I be motivated to lie about this?” she retorted in her posh accent. “I didn’t say a single word until I was four years old and then I began talking in complete sentences. My parents thought I was mentally retarded until then. All of my teachers at my old schools were forced to sign confidentiality agreements so that they wouldn’t go to the press and tell them that Gerry Rotherham’s daughter is mentally handicapped. Teachers at my last school in Manchester told my father that I needed professional help and banded toge
ther to have me thrown out for my own good. That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to have to live in a facility for mentally challenged people and my father refused to consider that option because it would definitely make the papers.”
My jaw was basically hanging open at that point. I was pretty sure that Nicola must have understood to some degree how angry I was with her, or she never would have divulged such highly personal information to me. She looked uncomfortable, but that could have also been from simply talking so much and not just from talking about a difficult topic. I mean, she was certainly weird, but I never would have guessed that she really had some kind of psychiatric diagnosis. I wondered if she’d told Nala and the cool girls’ table in the dining hall all of this.
“It never feels to me like there’s anything wrong with me. But I’ve been told that the way I speak and react to people is unnerving. So, I’m sorry if I make you feel weird.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “You didn’t have to tell me all that.”
“We’re friends,” Nicola said. “At least, I hope we are.”
It was my turn to share something personal with Nicola, something of equivalent potentially embarrassing significance to what she had just told me. Of course, I considered my secret to be just as dangerous. But just as I had longed to tell Taylor, I couldn’t bring myself to confide in Nicola. I promised myself that I would guard Nicola’s secret as closely as I was keeping my own.
“We can be friends,” I told her.
“Good,” she said, and when she didn’t sound relieved or happy, this time I knew she wasn’t just being an impossible snob. “Have you ever been to Puerto Rico?”
In study hall on Monday, I cringed when Taylor and Riddhi walked right past me without saying hello. I definitely had more important things to do (specifically, conjugating French verbs on a worksheet Deirdre had e-mailed to me over the weekend) than apologize for something I hadn’t even intentionally done, but I couldn’t stand the thought of Taylor being mad at me for too long. I packed up my textbooks where I had been sitting and walked over to where she and Riddhi had settled in at a table near windows that overlooked the square.
“Taylor? Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked quietly, not wanting to draw the attention of the library’s fourth floor librarian.
Taylor didn’t bother looking up from her book and instead leaned over it more closely, blocking my view of its pages with her elbow.
“I’m really busy, Betsey. I have a report due tomorrow.”
Defeated, I went back to my own little table and pulled out my notebook. I wrote a long, lengthy explanation in my well-practiced puffy cursive (using stars to dot my i’s) for why I’d been out on the street at such an odd hour on Saturday morning, emphasizing that it had never been my intention to leave campus. Then, upon re-reading it, I tore it up and stashed the resulting shreds of paper in my canvas tote bag. I rewrote it more briefly, not going into any detail at all about how I had managed to get myself off campus. It was irrelevant to Taylor why I was off school property. What she was angry about was that I had earnestly told her I was trying to change my behavior, and to her it appeared to have all been a big, well-intentioned lie.
Dear Taylor,
Without going into all the stupid details about the night of the dance, all I can say is that it hadn’t really been planned that I would end up off school grounds. Now I can understand how you must have felt when we were in Virginia Beach and we made you drive us back to the hotel and you knew your dad was going to yell at you. I’m sorry for everything and I really wish we could be friends.
Betsey
That last part made me hesitate a little, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to put all my cards on the table. I took great care in folding the note into a tight triangle and moments before the bell rang, I briskly walked over to the table where she and Riddhi were sliding their books into their backpacks and handed it to her.
“I’ll understand if you don’t even want to read it,” I simply said, close to tears.
By the time I got to Algebra 3 and turned in my homework, I felt dangerously close to crying. Ms. Hobbs called on me to go to the board and complete a complicated equation, and I felt the tears spilling out of my eyes and down my cheeks as I wrote in chalk with my back to the rest of the class. When I turned around, Ms. Hobbs was baffled by me. I had completed the equation correctly, but was wiping away teardrops from the corners of my eyes.
“Betsey! What’s the matter?” she asked.
I felt the unsympathetic stares of nineteen girls in four rows of desks fall upon me. Even Chloe, planted in the back of the row closest to the windows, raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“I just have a really bad headache suddenly, is all,” I lied.
Out of genuine concern, Ms. Hobbs, who was probably in her late forties but had super funky red glasses frames and wore big, colorful jewelry, wrote me a campus pass and sent me on my way with my canvas bag to the infirmary. But of course, I’d never been to the infirmary before, and even though Ms. Hobbs gave me directions and said I would find it behind the sports center, all I found back there was the landscaping crew’s garage. In my moment of confusion, I heard my cell phone in my canvas bag ring. It was my sister… finally.
“Where have you been?” Bijoux pouted. “I’ve been calling and calling.”
“No, you haven’t! You called once, yesterday, and you didn’t even leave a voicemail!” I corrected her. She was really annoying me; I had reached out to her during a serious emergency and she had ignored my text on Friday night. Now she expected me to be concerned about whatever silliness she was calling about in the middle of my school day.
“OK, fine,” Bijoux relented. “But still! I don’t know what to do. I’m having a crisis.”
She sounded congested, like she, too, had been crying. In a fragile voice she informed me that Tobin had cheated on her when he had gone to Las Vegas with his friends from the cast and crew of his show. He had confessed the whole thing to her because he hadn’t wanted her to hear about it from someone else, and because he claimed he truly loved her and it would never happen again.
Listening to Bijoux hem and haw about whether or not to end things with Tobin and tell him to get out of her apartment, I couldn’t believe the change in her. Where was my man-eating sister, the one who used to bounce from bar to bar, kissing different boys everywhere she went? The old Bijoux, with whom I had flown to Croatia in July, would never have put up with a boyfriend for more than a second who had cheated. Was this what true love did to a girl’s brain? It sounded like she had completely lost herself in her relationship with Tobin.
“Bijoux. You have to throw him out!” I exclaimed. “This second!”
I liked Tobin and all, but cheating was not OK.
“Oh, Betsey, what do you know? What if I never meet anyone like him ever again? I thought he was the one. I thought we’d be together for a few years and get married and have babies,” Bijoux said, her voice cracking. “He’s a nice guy and he’s really smart, Betsey. So smart, and talented. All the TV critics are saying so. Don’t you think I owe it to him to give him a second chance?’
I watched one of the landscaping crew employees ride a big grass mower up the paved path and turn towards the garage. Clouds were rolling in above; it was going to rain and I didn’t have an umbrella. “Boys who cheat always cheat,” I reminded her.
I heard her groan on the other end of the line. “Ugh, why am I asking you? You don’t know anything, piggy.”
“Then ask Mom,” I said, regretful the instant the words left my mouth. Dad had ultimately cheated on Mom, probably more than once, and despite all of the other major problems in their marriage, that was the reason she used finally to file for divorce.
At last, I found the infirmary behind the other sports center, not the one with the big pools where I had Aikido class, but the one where there was a morning yoga class and a place where girls could lock up their bicycles.
The nurse at the infirmary took my te
mperature (normal) and checked my pulse (a little fast, but within the normal range). She ran through a long list of questions about my medical history with me and was delighted to make the realization that somehow my mandatory physical examination prior to enrollment had been skipped. “I’ll have to call your parents and ask them to take care of that the next time you’re home. We have to make sure you’re up to date on all of your vaccinations, as I’m sure you can understand,” she said. Also, when she started asking me all kinds of embarrassing questions about my period, she asked if my mother had taken me for a gynecology exam yet.
I lied and said yes, which seemed to please her. If she typed into her little database that she was going to require my mother to provide some kind of proof of that doctor’s visit, I would actually have to go. Never having been before, I assumed that a gynecologist might be able to tell all kinds of things about me. A visit with the gynecologist was simply not going to happen, whatever it took for me to avoid it.
The nurse let me rest for the remainder of algebra. I stretched out on the cot in the cool, quiet room, enjoying the breeze coming in through the window screen that smelled like earthy scent of the rain outside. Afterward, Nicola and I ate lunch at Rutherford, where I told her about my conversation with Bijoux.
“Tommy will be very happy to hear about this,” Nicola said firmly. “You must tell your sister to end things with this Tobin.”
“Betsey, I can’t take these!” Deirdre exclaimed in her soft, high-pitched brogue when she opened the red box from Sinclair’s in the library later that night, after dinner. Several girls studying around us on the fourth floor glared at her for the unexpected outburst.
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