“I just want a boyfriend,” I said, surprised by the words as soon as they left my mouth. I didn’t really want a boyfriend. When I thought about Bijoux and how having Tobin in her life had turned her into such a pathetic loser, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Boyfriends required a lot of attention, and I didn’t really feel like indulging in anyone else’s needs that much when my own life required such intense concentration. I just wanted to be admired. I wanted someone to think that I was the prettiest, the most fun, the best. Truthfully, I wanted everyone to think those things about me, but I would have settled for just one boy.
“I’m your boyfriend,” Kristijan joked.
“You can’t be my boyfriend. I never even see you,” I whined. “Plus you’re like, a million miles away and you’re practically my cousin.”
“Only on paper,” he reminded me. “You’ll see me in three weeks.”
My heart seized. “What are you talking about?” I knew that he hadn’t mentioned in any of our recent chats or e-mail exchanges that he was planning to come to the Boston area, which could only mean one, terrible thing.
“Your Thanksgiving,” he said in his heavy accent, naturally referring to the holiday as mine, as if Thanksgiving was the personal property of Betsey Norfleet. “You’re coming to Croatia. My mother told my mother you’ll all be in Zagreb for a week.”
Croatia? My mother hadn’t mentioned anything about Thanksgiving in Croatia. We usually spent Thanksgivings in Wilton, Connecticut at Grandmother Von Weurth’s house, with its fancy flocked wallpaper and ugly, platinum-edged china. Her household staff would prepare an admirable feast and it would go largely uneaten other than by me and Aunt Janice’s stepsons, because my mom and Aunt Janice never ate fattening foods. Holidays with my mom’s family were formal affairs, requiring dresses worn with slips (ugh) and a trip to the hair salon the evening before. Bijoux had put her foot down about attending family holidays years ago after Grandmother Von Weurth had admonished her for wearing a dress she did not consider to be suitable for a family affair, but of course, because I was the youngest, I was still expected to go.
But even a long, boring day at Grandmother Von Weurth’s eating canapés and listening to my step-cousins talk about their stock portfolios would be better than going to our house in Croatia, or worse, being in an unfamiliar rented house or apartment in Zagreb, and not knowing if there were locks on the doors.
“She was wrong,” I said decisively, wanting to discourage any expectations that I would be surfacing in Croatia during the month of November. “I only get three days off from school, and I have an Aikido tournament.”
That night, I tossed and turned until dawn. My heartbreak over Alex had already been replaced with my panic over Thanksgiving. This was sort of a relief, because there was seemingly nothing I could do to turn Alex’s interest my way, and the more I thought about him, the more I was going to unfairly resent Nicola. But in so many ways, the potential for having to travel with my mom and Danko was worse than some pompous boy with a pocket square and too many names not having a crush on me. I was going to have to find a rock solid reason why I couldn’t travel with my mother and Danko over the Thanksgiving long weekend, and do all of the investigating to find out what would be open on campus to make my stay possible. I could, of course, beg my father to include me in his plans with Phoebe for the holiday. But even if he agreed, which would have been unlikely, my request to spend a holiday with my father would have definitely raised my mother’s suspicions. As per my parents’ divorce agreement, he only owed me one week of his attention each year.
When I drowsily noticed the sky turning pink with dawn, I remembered how I had spent Halloween the previous year. Christie, Amanda, and I had gone to the Halloween parade dressed as students of Hogwarts. Amanda had a curfew and went back uptown alone at nine, while Christie and I had gone to the bowling party hosted by one of her friends’ from Hastings. Later, we’d met up with Bijoux and her entourage at Veselka for our usual blueberry pie. We had stumbled out of our cab at dawn, and had made a massive pillow fort in the living room, where we had fallen asleep half-way into Friday the 13thbecause Mom and Danko were out of town.
It struck me for the millionth time that autumn as tragically unfair that everything in my life seemed to be so much harder than it was for other people. Why couldn’t I just spend Halloween with a boy who thought I was cute? Why did every boy I meet like one of my friends instead of me? Why couldn’t my mother be married to a normal man who just thought of me as a pesky fourteen-year-old, instead of as a stepdaughter he had every right to torture? Why couldn’t I just do my homework and go to Aikido practice without additionally having to make elaborate plans to avoid my mother and her husband at every turn?
When I woke up feeling poorly rested on Sunday morning, I retrieved my canvas summer shoes from the closet and slipped them on for the walk down to the dining hall. The few grains of gritty sand still hiding in them felt comforting, like summer was just over my shoulder rather than months behind me in the past. I smiled at Kristijan’s golden signature. Had he been kidding about being my boyfriend? He had sounded like it, and he had been smirking when he’d insisted he was, but the mere thought of Kristijan actually wanting to be my boyfriend made my heart hurt with desire. Even though I’d never really felt any attraction to him during our summers together, I felt an enormous fondness for him that was undeniable. I couldn’t even wish for something like his affection, he was too dear to me, and maybe that was why I had felt like I’d never had a crush on him. All of my dreams that were coming true were doing so with considerably unpleasant consequences, so falling in love with Kristijan was a fantasy that I couldn’t dare to have.
CHAPTER 14
“It’s over, Betsey. This time it’s really over.”
By mid-November, Bijoux and Tobin had broken up twice. The first time, Bijoux had gotten half-way through telling him how she really felt about his cheating in Las Vegas when he threatened to move out. She had completely chickened out on the entire point she had wanted to make at the suggestion that he might abandon her. After a full day of arguing, Tobin bought her a new laptop and a Pomeranian puppy and suddenly they were in love again.
Two weeks later, pictures appeared in gossip blogs of him having what looked like a romantic brunch in West Hollywood with a sexy redhead. He was in Los Angeles attending meetings set up by his agent for feature film work, while Bijoux and the new puppy, Foxy, flew to the Bahamas to host an opening party for some new luxury hotel. Bijoux was back in New York first, and was flabbergasted when her girlfriends began emailing blog links to her. This time, everyone was telling her she had to dump him. Kenny, her partner in her handbag line, the one who had secured the initial funding and managed relationships with all of their international distributors, wanted Tobin out of the picture before the release of the new line in Japan that fall. Denise, the manager who booked all of our special event appearances, thought it would be awful for Bijoux’s reputation if she became known socially as a doormat. Bijoux’s girlfriends from private school did not see the point in dragging out the drama any longer. For my sister, being in a bad relationship wasn’t only emotionally draining; eventually it would be bad for business, since her primary product was her own image. Girls who admired her and wanted to dress like her would stop wanting to emulate her if she was presented by the press as nothing more than a sad girl with low self-esteem who put up with a womanizing, humiliating boyfriend.
“Change the locks,” I instructed her. “Ship all his junk to his agent and don’t let him back in, Bijoux! Come on!”
“That’s what Mom’s saying,” Bijoux said, sounding very small and young on the other end of the phone. She broke into a howling sob before continuing. “But Tobin says the girl is just an actress that this director of a blockbuster is considering for a part opposite him. He told me the director wanted them to spend time together to see if they had the right chemistry for the film.”
“That sounds like a big bowl of b
ull and you know it,” I told her. I was in the campus store, standing in the snack aisle, trying to pick out something I could eat for dinner in my dorm room before heading to the library for my French tutoring appointment with Deirdre. Chloe and I were still on bad terms, so I had been avoiding the Colgate dining hall at dinner time since October. Eating an enormous lunch had become my habit, and on nights when I hadn’t managed to finagle an invitation from Taylor to eat at Hartford, I sustained myself on salted cashews, dried mangos and ramen noodles.
This time, when Bijoux had furiously texted Tobin about the pictures of the redhead, he allowed hours to pass before replying. And when he finally did, he was flipping the situation over and pointing the accusatory finger at Bijoux for unfairly jumping to conclusions. He had turned my sister into a skittish, paranoid, self-doubting mess and I hated him for all of it. I hated that I was so far away from New York, and unable to just take a cab to my sister’s apartment to talk some sense into her. I hated Danko for being the reason why I was so far away from my real life, even if my pretend life at boarding school was probably the best few weeks of personal achievement I had ever experienced. I was annoyed that earlier in our conversation, Bijoux had reminded me that Mom was in Paris for the whole month of November. It made me a little sad that she had cancelled our day together after mid-terms, because I hadn’t realized at the time that she was leaving the country for weeks.
“But what if he’s right?” Bijoux howled. “What if I’m paranoid and stupid and I’m just going to accuse every guy I date of cheating on me?”
“And what if you’re not paranoid and you’re really just dating a cheater?” I challenged, raising my voice in the quiet aisle of the store.
Nothing I could say could convince her of the havoc Tobin’s behavior was wreaking on her life. I just could not understand what kind of power Tobin had over her. Speaking with Bijoux was starting to feel like speaking with a stranger, a stranger who I found to be kind of annoying.
Having little time to waste before Thanksgiving, I had contacted Melissa in the administration office the Monday after Halloween about what requirements I would have to fulfill in order to stay in the dorms over the long holiday weekend. As it turned out, staying on campus would be easy. Two RA’s at Colgate were remaining on duty to handle bed checks, and the only major complication would be that the dining halls would be closed, as well as the campus store. A lot of the students from foreign countries remained on campus during the long weekend, since it was barely enough time for them to have flown home and back again.
The major complication was that I’d need my mother to sign a form permitting me to remain on campus during the days when the school was technically closed. I feared that if Kristijan was correct, and plans were being made for a trip to Croatia, my mother might shut down my request to stay home entirely if it was too late in the game. I would need a reason – a good one – to convince her of why I couldn’t travel with my family over the break. Especially because it was all starting to make perfect sense that she’d want to spend the holiday in Croatia since she was already in France.
“Hey, remember when you mentioned that meet?”
Tova was folding up mats from our Aikido class, preparing to drag them back to the equipment closet on the north side of the gym as my classmates trudged off to the locker room to change. My comment startled her, and she looked totally confused.
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“You mentioned a few weeks ago that there was a competition coming up and you thought I was ready for it,” I reminded her, distressed by her blank face. The Aikido competition was my only solid lead on a way to get out of Thanksgiving travels. In the two weeks since Halloween, I had explored alternatives and hadn’t found a viable one, and was kicking myself for wasting valuable time. Piggybacking on Taylor’s trip home was out of the question; she wasn’t going to her dad’s house in New Jersey because he was back in rehab in Malibu and she’d be flying to California with her stepmother. Nicola was taking the entire week of the holiday off from school to go to Thailand with her family, where they were renting a beachfront villa. She had invited me to accompany them for the week, but my feelings were still so hurt over the AHPC3 situation that I couldn’t tolerate the idea of being in her company for such a long time. I also knew it was highly unlikely that my mother was going to offer to pay for my airfare to any destination other than Croatia, if that’s what avoiding my own family was going to require. I had my own credit cards, but knew that my mother would probably be contacted if I purchased anything exceeding my safety limit… like, for example, roundtrip airfare to Bangkok.
“Yes,” Tova said, remembering our pre-Halloween conversation. “But I didn’t say you were ready. I said you were ready to start preparing. There’s a difference, and you told me with certainty at the time that you weren’t up for it.”
I mentally chastised myself. I really was my own worst enemy.
“Well, I think I’m ready now,” I said, trying to sound positive.
“Betsey,” Tova said impatiently, “the meet is in less than two weeks. You can’t possibly think you can prepare in such a short amount of time.”
Clearly, this martial arts instructor had no idea of what I was capable of accomplishing in two weeks.
“Yes, I can,” I insisted. “Plus, I don’t have to be in it to win it. Even the experience of going would be good for me, so I can see what it’s like for next time.”
Her expression seemed to harden at my suggestion that I didn’t care about winning, so I quickly backtracked.
“I mean,” I added, “of course, winning would be awesome. But before I felt like if I wasn’t sure I could win, I didn’t want to try.”
“And now you want to try.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling very on the spot.
In actuality, I was absolutely terrified of being on a mat across from a total stranger from another school whose goal was to flip me over or drop me to my knees. But what choice did I have? It was either the Aikido competition, or unknown horrors in Croatia. Even if Tova’s competition was a battle to the death at the hands of another high school student, I might have been willing to give it a shot.
“Well, Betsey, I’ll have to see if they’re still accepting registrations. And if they are, you’re going to have to train for it, just like Erin. Every morning, before classes.”
I had previously not known that Erin was going to compete, which demonstrated just how much I had been spacing out lately. Erin was a junior nearly a foot taller than me. It was her first year taking Aikido, too, but I had gotten the impression in class that she took it far more seriously than I did. Whatever it was going to take to get my name on the roster for that competitive meet, I would do it.
The Treadwell campus transformed into a wonderland of autumn beauty as the temperatures grew cooler. The forest surrounding our campus seemingly overnight painted itself rich shades of red and orange. The air took on a crisp, smoky scent and when the afternoon breeze rustled the dry leaves outside, it became simply impossible to pay attention in class. Sure, leaves changed color and temperatures dropped in New York, but I had never spent an autumn in New England before, and there were moments when I was walking across campus to class when I was stunned at how beautiful everything looked.
And as the temperature was steadily dropping, boyfriend paranoia was on the rise.
Not only was my sister texting me several times an hour about her ongoing agitation with Tobin’s transmissions from Los Angeles, but Taylor was enduring boy trouble of her own. She had spent Halloween in New Haven, attending a campus party with her boyfriend, Todd. Because he was in college, he had signed her in as a guest to spend the night in his dorm which was big news to our circle of friends. Riddhi and Ruth were convinced that Taylor had lost her virginity that weekend and was lying to us out of some weird insistence on seeming virtuous. They pumped her for details relentlessly at dinners, and she just shook her head in silence. She had been acting strangely since
Halloween, and one Wednesday night when I had been signed into Hartford for dinner, she surprised me by asking me if I wanted to go for a run after dinner.
“OK,” I eagerly agreed, immediately texting my biology tutor, Taniesha, about being unable to attend our appointment that night. I was exhausted, of course, having gotten up super early that morning to get the tar beaten out of me by Erin on the Aikido mats under Tova’s guidance. Training had started before the organizers of the meet had agreed that I could compete. I was in no position to argue with Tova on that; she told me to be at the gym, and I had been there, yawning but ready. But exhaustion was hardly going to keep me from spending time alone with Taylor, a privilege for which I had been waiting the entire six weeks I’d been at Treadwell.
Once we were out on the track in the cold night air wearing our running outfits, I wondered why I had been invited for the evening run instead of Taylor’s two best friends. I sincerely hoped it wasn’t because she thought I needed the exercise the most.
“I kind of suck at running,” I announced, stating the obvious once we had completed one lap and I was winded. I assumed she would continue on without me, but we both slowed our pace to brisk walks beneath the bright flood lights of the track. We were the only students out there after dinner, although Alyssa Ackerman had been wrapping up her night laps as we had been tightening the laces on our shoes and zipping up our track jackets. It was fall by then, almost cold outside, the unexpected week of warm Indian summer weather far behind us. The gentle wind delivered the sweet scent of kindled fires to us from the fireplaces of residential homes miles away, a smell which had escaped through chimneys and crossed the hills of Western Massachusetts to our school grounds.
“So, Betsey, I guess there’s no elegant way to ask this,” Taylor began, sounding uneasy. “But have you ever, like, been with a boy?”
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