Authors: Claire Lazebnik
It was like she had cut off a fatally infected finger: it was painful, but she’d done what she needed to do.
W
ebster greeted me with his usual enthusiasm in astronomy the next day and asked if we could make plans for the coming weekend. “If you’re sad we didn’t get to dance, we could go to a club. I’m the worst dancer you will ever meet in your life, but what I lack in rhythm and grace, I make up for with . . .” He stopped and shook his head. “Nope, I got nothing. But I’d make a fool of myself for you.”
I said lightly, “Maybe you should check your schedule first. I’d hate for you to double-book again.”
He cocked his head at me. “And by this she means . . . ?”
I cocked my head right back at him. “Does the name
George McGill
ring a bell?”
“Ah,” he said with a long, drawn-out breath. “She found out.” He held his hands up in a plea. “I’m so sorry, Elise. I’m a jerk and a coward. I should have just told you right away, but I—”
“Didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I know.”
He paused, and then he said, “Sounds like I made the wrong choice.”
“Yeah, probably.”
At the front of the classroom, Cantori called for everyone’s attention.
“I’m an idiot,” Webster whispered. “I should have told you the second Campbell invited me. But I felt so guilty. And I really
did
want to go to the dance with you, and was worried you’d think I didn’t if I told you the truth. So it seemed more truthful to lie than to tell the truth, if you know what I mean.”
“Not really.”
“Let’s talk more later.”
I nodded, but class went late and I had to run to my next one.
I think we were both relieved not to have to continue the discussion anyway. I know I was. It wasn’t like there was much to say. Webster had lied and we both knew it.
I wasn’t all that hurt and I wasn’t all that angry. It was more that when I looked at him now, his light blue eyes shifted away guiltily.
And that seriously damaged his charm for me.
The next morning, Gifford grabbed me in English class to inform me—with some glee—that Chelsea was back at school and “totally on the warpath” because of what my mom had done to her.
The lacrosse players also returned that day, in time for afternoon classes. I only realized it when Derek and Chelsea walked into astro together. I instantly wondered if Juliana had seen Chase and what had happened with that, but I’d have to wait to find out.
I was idly watching them from my seat when Chelsea noticed me. She whispered something in Derek’s ear, and his eyes flickered coldly to my face as he nodded. He seemed angry at me, as angry as Chelsea. I had no idea if it was for her sake or his own, but it didn’t really matter—I was even more furious at him. I was pretty sure that he had something to do with the way Chase had treated Juliana, and if I ever got definite proof that he had a role in hurting my big sister—the one truly decent person in the world—his dislike for me would be nothing compared to my hatred for him.
Still, it’s never pleasant being glared at. I looked away pretty quickly.
Webster was MIA for some reason, but the way things had been between us lately, his absence was a relief.
I picked up a book and read until class started, at which point Cantori leaned roguishly against the SMART Board and told a jovial little anecdote about how he and “Mrs. Cantori” had gone for an evening walk, and she had been frustrated not to see any stars, and he’d had to explain that it was almost impossible to see them with the naked eye in a city like Los Angeles, where the lights and smog create a practically impenetrable mask.
“But with a telescope it’s a different story,” he said. “So, guys and gals, we’re going to take a field trip! Next Friday, we’ll set up some telescopes on the beach—”
“A field trip to the beach?” one of the girls said. “Oh my God. Where do we sign up?”
Cantori put up a cautionary hand. “Don’t get too excited—it’ll be dark out. No one’s going swimming, and anyone who shows up in a bikini gets sent home. That goes double for you, Billy.” Everyone laughed.
Billy pretended to be disappointed. “Aw, I was planning on wearing my itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini!”
“Save it for the paparazzi,” Cantori said, with a quick glance at Derek. “Anyway, I know this is late notice, guys, but it should be an amazing experience. The stars are aligned, both literally and figuratively. Does anyone have a conflict? Speak now or forever after—” One girl raised her hand and said she had her SAT prep class that night. Cantori shook his head. “Skip it. I promise you this will be more educational in the long run.”
“My parents will freak.”
“Have a friend quiz you on vocabulary words on the bus.” Cantori gestured to the desk behind him. “Everyone grab a bus form on your way out.”
I ran into Juliana on the way to my next class. She looked awful. Her face was pale, and she had dark smudges under her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned.
She shook her head and pulled me over to the lockers, lowering her voice. “He’s back and it’s
awful
, Elise. I’m just trying to stay as far away as possible, but he keeps giving me these looks like he hates me now. And then I saw him laughing with this girl in history—I think she’s probably the one I heard on the phone.”
“Oh, Jules, I’m so sorry.”
“I feel sick. I want to go home.”
“You’re just upset.”
“I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“No one barfs from being sad.”
Half an hour later, Juliana vomited three times in the girls’ bathroom.
Mom officially excused me from my last class so I could drive Jules home. I dropped her off and was about to get back in the car to pick up Layla and Kaitlyn when I was hit by a sudden and intense wave of nausea. I barely made it to the downstairs powder room before losing my lunch.
Juliana and I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the night taking turns throwing up in the hallway bathroom. At about two in the morning Kaitlyn joined us. It was oddly companionable: we were miserable but not lonely.
All three of us stayed home from school the next day. By early afternoon, Juliana and I were significantly better, and Kaitlyn had perked up by dinnertime.
“I never knew being heartsick was contagious,” I joked to Juliana.
“You were supposed to share my dress, not my virus,” she said with a weak smile.
“Stupid me. At least you got to come home like you wanted.”
“I still have to go back next week and face him.”
“You have the weekend to recover.” We both knew I didn’t mean from the stomach flu. “It’ll be easier after that.”
“I hope so,” she said without the slightest trace of actual hope in her voice.
At lunch back in school on Monday, we sat alone far from our old table, and she said to me, “I think I’m okay now. It doesn’t bother me to see him around. It’s fine.”
“Jules—”
“No, really, Lee-Lee.” A pause. “The only thing that’s weird is how angry he seems. I thought he’d feel bad, but instead he keeps glaring at me. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“It’s easier for people to feel angry than guilty,” I said. “Maybe he’s convinced himself he was justified in acting like an asshole—probably with a little help from Derek Edwards who, by the way, keeps glaring at
me
.”
“How could anyone be mad at you?” Juliana said loyally. “He must be as big a jerk as you always said. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you right away. I should have.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you should have.”
A
s the week went on, the glares turned into pretending we didn’t exist, which wasn’t much better, but both Jules and I worked hard to return the favor, tossing our heads and laughing with other people as much as we could whenever we saw Chase and Derek.
Friday evening, Juliana dropped me back off at school for the field trip, and I found an empty seat on the bus next to a sophomore who had a big crush on Cantori. “He’s the best teacher in the whole school,” she said fervently. “He was my adviser last year, and he’d always take us out for french fries.”
The Best Teacher in the Whole School unbuckled his seat belt soon after we left the parking lot, and wandered up and down the aisle, ignoring the annoyed glances the driver was throwing at him in the rearview mirror and chatting idly with the students like the host of a cocktail party, until we were almost at our destination.
Then he walked back up to the front of the bus, faced the rows of seats, and called for our attention. “Okay, so here’s the plan. I was at the beach earlier today, where, with the help of a couple of friends who are still there waiting for us, I set up four telescopes, each of them focused on a different planet or star. I’m dividing you into four small groups.” He fixed a couple of the gigglier girls with a look. “Let me repeat that so there’s no confusion.
I
am dividing you into groups, and there will be no switching. You will stay with your group for the entire evening. You will take turns looking through the telescope, you will discuss what you see, and together you will sketch what you saw and describe it in scientific terms. This is a collaborative project—one finished packet per group.” He eyed those girls again. “And I don’t want to hear that you couldn’t finish your work because one of your teammates wore plaid and you’re wearing polka dots or because you like him and he likes someone else. Try to be grown-up about this, folks.”
Billy Rodriguez raised his hand. “What if one of your team members is just really stupid or lazy? Can you kick them off the team?”
“Don’t you worry, Billy,” Cantori said jovially. “No one’s kicking you off anything.” Laughter from his fans. “Seriously, every person on this bus is capable of pulling his or her own weight, so just make it work, okay? To keep the teams as objective as possible—and, frankly, to make it easy on myself—I’ve grouped you by alphabetical order. Listen closely to your groups. Don’t make me repeat them.” He looked down at the clipboard in his hand. “Group One: Isaac Avenor. Chelsea Baldwin. Elise Benton. Derek Edwards. Sylvie Fine. Group Two: Webster Grant—”
“He’s not here,” someone called out.
“He’s not?” Cantori turned to me. “Is he sick?” I realized he thought I’d know, since I sat with Webster in class.
I just shrugged, distracted. Why oh why did I have to get stuck with both Chelsea and Derek? Could my luck have been any worse? Isaac seemed like a hard worker, but Sylvie Fine was one of the Derek disciples. My only hope was that she and Chelsea would be so busy fighting for his attention that Isaac and I could just plow through the work and ignore the rest of them.
“Oh my God,” said the girl sitting next to me. “You’ve got Derek Edwards in your group!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Want to trade teams?”
“We’re not allowed to,” she said sadly.
As the bus rattled down a steep canyon road in the Palisades toward the ocean, I thought,
Hey, maybe the brakes won’t work and the bus will crash and we’ll all die.
It was a nice thought, but we arrived safely at the beach a minute later.
We filed off the bus, and I said good-bye to my seatmate, who stopped to ask Cantori an unnecessary question. I trudged over to where the two girls on my team were already bookending Derek, and greeted them all. Sylvie said hi, but Chelsea gave Derek a raised-eyebrow look, and they pointedly ignored me. I felt my cheeks burn and looked out at the ocean like it was fascinating. Which I guess it was, being the ocean and all, but I was too uncomfortable at that moment to appreciate its wild beauty.
Isaac came off the bus a few moments later. He was a slight, small sophomore with overgrown curly brown hair, which he tugged on in moments of stress—which seemed to be most moments in his life.
He went straight for the packets Cantori was handing out and eagerly started leafing through the worksheets, while Cantori said, “You, my friends, will be at station number four.” He pointed down the beach a little ways. “Your telescope is set up and pointing right at—” He stopped and shook his head with a grin. “Nope, I’m not going to tell you. I’ll let you figure it out for yourselves. You have all the info you need to ID it in your packet.” Instead of his usual jacket and tie, he was wearing a T-shirt and Windbreaker, all very “cool guy in his off-hours” casual. His hair was ruffling a bit in the wind, and he gave me a wink that suggested he knew that every girl in the class had a crush on him, and he was okay with that.
I said to Isaac, “Let’s go.” We headed toward the telescope, the other three trailing behind us.
It was a beautiful evening, a little cool, but the breeze coming off the ocean was mild and left a salty taste on my lips. Back home—on the East Coast—an October wind could chill to the bone, but here it just gently moved my hair around. The sun had set, but the sky was pink and yellow above the horizon, and it wasn’t completely dark out yet, just twilighty.
It was, I thought—a little wistfully—the perfect setting for a romantic evening. I wished I had someone to share it with.
As if on cue, Isaac spoke. His voice was low and soft. “Do you think he’ll grade us as a team or as individuals?”
Guess our thoughts had been running in different directions.
I said I didn’t know, and we arrived at the telescope that had a big “4” label dangling around its neck. “Let’s see what we need to do first.” Isaac started flipping through the pages of his packet. He glanced up at the sky anxiously. “It’s getting too dark to read.”
“Cantori said we should bring flashlights,” Sylvie said. The three of them had caught up to us. “Did any of you guys bring one?”
Isaac yanked at his hair. “I never heard him say that. When did he say that? Was it in class? I never heard him say that.”
“It was on the bus form.”
“It looks like that group has two.” I pointed to team three. “Maybe they’d lend us one.” I looked at Derek. “They will if
you
ask.” It was true, and since he already hated me, I figured I couldn’t offend him anymore.
“Fine,” he said with a cold shrug. “I’ll ask.”
Sylvie immediately said, “I’ll go with you,” and attached herself to his side.
Outmaneuvered, Chelsea pouted angrily and looked around for someone to take it out on.
And there I was.
“Hey, Elise, how’s your sister doing?” she asked with venomous sweetness. “I haven’t seen her around much lately.”
“She was sick.”
“I see. And that explains why she and my brother aren’t talking . . . how?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s a germophobe.”
“Maybe he’s realizing some people aren’t as nice as they pretended to be at first.”
“That’s so true,” I said. “Your brother
seemed
like such a good guy.”
“Until your sister went all psycho on him.”
“‘Psycho’?” I repeated, genuinely surprised. “Juliana? What are you talking about?”
“We got it!” Sylvie sang out, waving the flashlight triumphantly as she and Derek rejoined us.
“She went totally psycho-bitch on him,” Chelsea said, ignoring Sylvie. “Derek knows all about it, don’t you, Derek?”
“I bet he does,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chelsea asked.
“All I know is that Chase spends a few days traveling alone with his buddy and suddenly he’s like a different person.”
“He’s not the one who cut things off with no explanation,” Derek said in a low voice.
“No,” I agreed. “He’s the one who sent nasty texts about how much fun he was having without her—and with someone else.”
Chelsea said with an abrupt change of tone, “Come on, guys, we should get to work.”
“I can read this now!” Isaac was shining the flashlight on the packet of information. “Who wants to look first? It’s already aimed, so don’t touch it except to focus.”
“You go first,” I said.
He scuttled over to the telescope and squinted into the eyepiece. “Cool! You guys have to see this! It’s incredible.”
No one moved. Derek was staring at me, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Wait—what do you mean ‘nasty texts’?”
“One after another,” I said. “Telling her how happy he was to be away from her.”
“That’s impossible,” Derek said.
“I saw them myself.”
Chelsea tugged on Derek’s arm. “We only have, like, an hour to do all the work.”
“I see it!” Isaac called out, still crouching but now waving a hand wildly. “I see . . . something. Wait, what is that?”
“Let me look,” Sylvie said, and he obligingly ducked out of the way.
“You see it?” he asked, hovering. “You see it?”
“I don’t see anything,” she said. “Oh, wait—I think I’m closing the wrong eye.”
“It’s impossible,” Derek said to me again. He irritably jerked his arm away from Chelsea’s grip without even looking at her. “Chase didn’t even have his phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t have his phone,” he repeated. “People were sexting at the tourney last year, and the coaches from the different schools decided at the last minute just to ban all cell phones this time.”
“But Juliana got a bunch of texts from Chase while you guys were gone.”
“Why is this so hard for you to understand?” Then he said slowly and carefully, like I was a little kid, “He couldn’t have sent any texts.”
I thought for a moment. Then I looked over at Chelsea—who seemed suddenly fascinated by the pink clouds clustered at the horizon. My face got hot with anger. I turned back to Derek, whose own eyes were widening with sudden insight.
“Come here,” he said, cutting off what I was about to say. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me down closer to the ocean, away from the others. Chelsea was watching and took a step to follow us, but Derek flashed her a savage
Stay away
look. She stopped but watched us uneasily.
Derek didn’t drop my arm until the sand was damp and packed under our feet. He faced me. “Okay. Let’s go over what happened. Me first. Chase and I leave on this trip and all he’ll talk about is how fantastic Juliana is. Then we get back and she refuses to talk to him or look at him—and she’s blocked him from her phone. He has no idea why. Okay, your turn.”
“Juliana was missing Chase like crazy, and then she started getting these super-nasty texts—sent from his phone—all about how he—”
He cut me off. “Chase didn’t send any texts. End of story.”
“Yeah, we’ve established that. But someone did.” We both glanced up the beach at Chelsea, who pretended she wasn’t watching us, even though she was.
Derek kicked at a piece of seaweed. “They were pretty bad, huh?”
I nodded. “He—or whoever it was—called her a ‘dead end.’ She thought he didn’t like her anymore, and then, when a girl answered his phone, she assumed he’d found someone else, so she avoided him when he came home to make it easier on both of them. Juliana would never be mean.”
“Neither would Chase.” He groaned. “What a mess.”
“We both know what happened, right? I mean, if Chase left his phone at home, and a girl answered it . . . it’s pretty obvious.”
“I can’t believe she’d do that.” We both looked up the sand again. Chelsea was wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless ruffled top that was too light for a fall night on the beach. She must have been freezing, but she looked great. Derek said, “She can be a total pain in the butt, but she and Chase are close, and this really hurt him.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “My mother had just suspended her from school, and she was mad at Juliana for not doing anything about it.”
He considered that, his expression unreadable as he watched Chelsea moving around the equipment.
“Also,” I said, “people have a way of justifying what they’re doing. I mean, if she looked at it as saving her brother from a really awful family . . .” I hesitated, and then said, “She wouldn’t be the first person to feel that way about us, you know.”
Flashlight beams shimmered in the dark around us like enormous drunken fireflies. “I have nothing against you or your sister,” Derek said quietly. “And I’m sorry if I said anything offensive about your family.”
“It’s okay.” I was surprised to find that I wasn’t angry at him anymore. At least now I knew he hadn’t poisoned Chase’s mind against Juliana.
Someone else had done that.
We fell silent again. I kept sneaking little looks up at his face, though. And caught him sneaking one at mine.
Chelsea unwisely chose that moment to come fetch us. “You guys might want to think about helping out here,” she said loftily, as she picked her way carefully through the sand. She was wearing platform sandals that I guess were better for the beach than her usual spike heels, but sneakers—like mine—would have made more sense. “I mean,
I
don’t mind that you’re not contributing, but the others might.”
“Yeah, all right,” Derek said tonelessly. He headed up the beach but said over his shoulder, “Sit with me on the bus, will you, Elise? I want to finish our conversation.”
“Okay.” I was following him back toward our group when Chelsea caught my arm.
“What did you say to him?” she hissed. “You said something about me, didn’t you? He gave me a weird look. What did you say?”
“Maybe he’s just not that into you,” I suggested, and shrugged loose of her grip.
In the end, Derek, Isaac, and I did most of the work—or, more accurately, Isaac did most of it, and Derek and I helped. Chelsea sulked and Sylvie posed seductively against the telescope and occasionally wrote things down on the worksheets for us in her childishly round handwriting. Thanks to Isaac’s nervous energy and focus, we finished up well before the allotted time, which left the five of us standing around with nothing to do.