Snark and Stage Fright (11 page)

“You need to design a new tat for me, Georgia,” he insisted as he set down his Coke and swiveled, lifting his shirt to reveal the spot on his back where the tattoo would go. “I don’t know about an otter in a top hat, though. Can you do a dragon, maybe?”

“Oh, she can do a dragon,” Shondra assured him.

“What do you think, Endicott?”

Michael shrugged slightly and admitted, “She can draw a mean frog intestine,” because we had split the work fifty-fifty in bio lab last year when we had been reluctant lab partners. He’d thought my refusal to participate in dissections would ruin his GPA. I’d thought he was a grade-grubbing snobhole. That seemed about a million years ago, suddenly. I wished we could go back to bio lab and start all over again. I’d even consider slicing that frog this time. At least the earthworm.

“Sick! How hot would
that
be?” Los asked Shondra, pulling on one of her braids. I felt tears welling up in my eyes because Los and Shondra were still that way and now Michael and I were not.

The impossibility of turning back time became even clearer to me later when I stood between Michael’s silver BMW and my mom’s battered Honda in the almost empty parking lot. He had already gotten into the car and seemed ready to drive off without acknowledging our relationship had changed—or had ever been.

I couldn’t stand one more second of that and tapped his window until he rolled it down. “So what’s going on?” I demanded, sounding exactly like every psycho ex-girlfriend in a very bad sitcom. “Is it over between us?”

He gripped the steering wheel for a second and sighed. When he turned to me, his eyes had this hard-as-flint look like he was a cowboy in some old movie my dad would watch.

“I think I just need some time,” he said, “to think things through.”

I felt like someone had reached down my throat and yanked out all of my vital organs one by one.
What’s to think about?
I wanted to yell.
Either you still love me or you don’t. Shouldn’t you know the answer to that question?
But I was determined to not continue to be Stereotypical Ex so instead I said simply, “Okay.”

A quizzical look crossed his face for an instant like he was surprised by this answer, but he gripped the wheel again and said, “Okay. I’ll call you.”

I didn’t point out that I was still waiting on that first promise to call that he’d made days ago after dropping me off at home. I just got in my car and waved a little as I drove away, focusing on making that wave as offhand as possible and not crying in front of him.

I waited until I was a good half-mile away before I did that.

9 
Broken (up)

The first day of school came, as it always does, too quickly.

While I didn’t want to spend any more time at home wallowing in my own crapulence, I also did not want to return to Longbourne High’s hallowed halls. I knew the second I saw Michael there, I would either run away or throw myself at his feet, wrap my arms around his ankles, and wail like a police siren, as if that would make me appealing again. Fleeing or clinging—either way I would look like an idiot.

To make the return even less bearable, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have Tori with me to take the school year’s first walk down the halls because we’d dropped her off at Williams a week ago. Trey had come along and watching him and Tori say goodbye had made me wonder if it was ever really worth getting close to somebody if you were only going to lose them—or, at best, miss them terribly—eventually. Maybe it was better to be alone.

I was pondering this as I stepped into the senior hallway. I’d watched the movie
Grease
the night before with Leigh and Cassie and there’s a line at the beginning of it that haunted me all the way to homeroom: “We’re seniors. And we will rule the school!” Apparently my classmates felt this way, too, as all the other seniors were swarming around the hall and whooping like they were storming the Bastille, though they had in actuality accomplished nothing more than not flunking out of their junior year.

Worse, as I took my seat in homeroom, I couldn’t help remembering last year’s first day of school, when I’d met Michael for the first time. That day he’d tried to get me to give up my desk because at his old school he’d always sat in that particular seat in that particular row and seemed to think he was entitled to do the same here. I had thought he was a conceited lunatic then; now I was wishing he’d been scheduled for my homeroom again so he could sit next to me, if he
would
sit next to me, but he wasn’t. At least I shared a homeroom with my friend Gary, who was sporting a purple faux-hawk for the first day. He told me all about some gig his punk band the Cryptic Pigs from Hell had played in Ashworth and asked if I’d draw a new logo for the T-shirts his cousin was going to make really cheap to sell at future shows. This, at least, gave me a good reason to doodle demonic-looking swine while I tuned out everything else during homeroom.

Michael wasn’t in my first period class, poli sci, either, but my friend Dave was, and he sat next to me and gave me his own version of how the Pigs show had given all of western Massachusetts the thorough rocking it so desperately needed. As Mrs. Palmer was passing out the textbooks, he pushed his geek-chic horn-rimmed glasses up his long nose and said, “Hey, good news. I got your boyfriend to write for
The Alt
this year. After that anonymous editorial he wrote last year, I had to get him on board. And I got an official ‘yes’ last period.”

Before turning to face the front of the room as Mrs. Palmer started, I asked, “When he accepted your offer … did Michael, um, refer to himself as my boyfriend?”

“What do you mean?”

I shook my head and nodded toward the teacher who’d begun speaking, glad to have a reason not to explain.

I knew I’d see Michael fourth period in European history, and when I got there I hesitated before taking the seat next to him. But when it looked like Sarita Singh was going to take it, I hurried over to claim it as casually as I could.

He looked up from his book and said, “Hey.”

“Hey. I see you got your seat this time.”

He frowned in confusion.

“You know, ‘second row, center’? Like in homeroom last year?”

“Oh, yeah. Our first conversation. And our first fight,” he said, but he smiled, at least slightly.

“It got better, though, eventually … ?” I ventured.

But he didn’t answer. Class started and I kept sneaking looks at him, wondering how I was going to make it through the whole year and if I should have let Sarita take my seat so I wouldn’t have to sit every fourth period all year with him inches away physically but miles away mentally. I looked over at his tanned arm as he scribbled down some notes about the reading assignment. I watched the muscles move under the dark hairs lightened by the sun, and I felt my eyes start to burn when I realized that I would never again be able to just reach out and touch that arm. I no longer had that privilege. Not that I would be all over him in history class, but … How was I supposed to be so close to him every day and never be able to touch him again? If we were just friends now, how would I do that? Would I eventually be able to just hang out with him and not want to put a hand on the back of his neck or brush the top of his hand so that he would wind his fingers around mine like he used to? Would I always feel, every time I was near him, that a part of me was gone, given to him permanently, even if he no longer wanted it? On the night I blew everything, I had thought that having sex with him meant that I would be giving myself away to him, but I was starting to realize that I’d already given everything that mattered.

I was really hoping the first topic of the class would be the Black Death or something cheerful like that. But it wasn’t.

When the bell rang, I was slamming my books together to bolt out of there when Michael asked me, “Do you have lunch sixth period?”

I could feel the hope fluttering out of my chest and into my throat like a freed bird. I chirped, “Um, yeah. Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

I practically bounced to my next class and then into the cafeteria afterward—until I saw him sitting at a round table under the window next to a girl who made Catalina Osbourne look like a sea hag. She was tiny and lithesome, with straight strawberry blond hair held back by a white headband and big blue-green eyes. I walked to the table, set down my hemp lunch bag, and forced a smile.

“Hey, Georgia,” Michael said. “I’m glad you have lunch now because I want you to meet Diana. She’s new here. A junior.”

“Hi, Diana,” I managed as I sat down. “Welcome to Longbourne.”

“Oh, I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “I’m just new to the school.” When Dave and Shondra set down trays and took seats, she smiled at them and said, “Hi, I’m Diana DeBourgh.”

They both said their hellos to this perky little specimen—she was like a happy little cartoon squirrel, only absolutely gorgeous and apparently unaware of it. I didn’t know what to make of her or of her being there next to Michael like they were a matched set, salt and pepper shakers, dark and light, perfectly complementary opposites. The thought that he had found a more suitable replacement for me so quickly made it really hard to eat, so I didn’t. I just tried to follow the conversation and nod and smile at the right times as Michael told Dave that he wouldn’t be at the first
Alt
meeting because he had a cross-country meet. Then he and Dave tossed around ideas he could write about for his first official article, mostly stuff about NSA surveillance of American citizens. I was too busy looking at the perfect elongation of Michael’s neck in his brick-red polo shirt and the delicacy of Diana’s hands as she peeled a tangelo to participate. Through it all, Shondra kept looking at me, then at Michael, then back at me. When Diana laughed at something Michael said and placed her hand on his wrist, very lightly, like a chickadee lighting on a twig, Shondra raised her eyebrows at me like
WTF?

Before I could mouth a response to her, Michael asked, “So, George, are you going to continue the anti-meat offensive this year?” just before biting into the school’s version of a Reuben sandwich.

“Um, no … I … think it might be time to do something else, I guess.”

“Oh, are you a vegetarian?” Diana asked me, her eyes bright as a chipmunk’s.

“Vegan,” Michael corrected her with a smirk, then explained, “That’s
like
a vegetarian, only more militant.”

Dave laughed and Shondra’s eyes widened; I wished that I could eviscerate myself like a sea cucumber, turn my own insides out and shoot away from the table and Michael and Diana, who was smiling so much and had such a sweet voice she was the human equivalent of a marshmallow Peep.

I was relieved when the bell rang and we had to go in our separate directions, but Michael caught up with me and Shondra in the hall.

“Hey, can I ask you two a favor?” he asked us.

“Sure,” Shondra said uncertainly, looking at me to make sure I didn’t spontaneously combust or something.

“I’ve known Diana forever,” he began. “Her mom and mine are really good friends, and Diana’s going to school here because her parents are going through a really ugly divorce and the money for tuition to her old school’s all tied up.”

“Okay?” I said a little sharply, probably because I was not interested in feeling any sympathy for Miss Sexy Woodland Creature at the moment.

“So could you guys just be nice to her, maybe show her around, help her get involved in things? She’s a really sweet girl and she’s going through a really tough time at home. Her mom moved them into an apartment in town.”

That’s when I remembered where I had heard the last name “DeBourgh” before. They own the biggest house in Longbourne, some eight-million-square-foot fake Tudor with an indoor pool and bowling alley and a yard as big as and better groomed than Central Park. Still, I hesitated. It was too weird to see Michael—Mr. Standoffish 2014—acting as a one-man welcome committee.

“I’m not exactly Longbourne’s School Spirit Captain … ” I said.

He rolled his eyes and adjusted his black messenger bag on his shoulder. “I know that, Georgia. I didn’t ask you to adopt her. But I just thought you could be nice to her,” he said as he walked away backward. “For me. Make an exception to your usual policy of xenophobic sarcasm.”

I bit my lower lip to keep it from quivering as he disappeared.

“What the
what
?” Shondra marveled as we headed toward Spanish IV. “I take it you guys haven’t exactly patched things up.”

“No
comprende
,” I admitted, helpless. “Looks like I’ve been replaced with a younger, perkier model.”

“I doubt that. So tell me,” she said as we picked our seats in the front. “What did Michael say to you the last time you saw him, after the movie?”

“That he needed time to think.”

Shondra considered this as she slid into her seat. “Well, that’s not fatal, right? That’s not the end.”

“No, Diana ‘I’ve-Known-Him-All-My-Life’ DeBourgh is the end.”

Shondra shook her head and sighed. “Well, I read some stuff in the paper about her dad and the divorce.”

“Yeah?”

“Her dad is about to be indicted for ripping off investors in some real estate scam he was pulling. Plus, he apparently had at least three women he was keeping in style in different parts of the world, and I guess Diana’s mom just found out about all of it, pretty recently.”

“Whoa. Sucks!” I shook my head in wonder. “So when did you start following local scandals, Shon?”

Shondra grinned as Senora Fletcher entered in a swirl of paisley scarves. “This scandal’s national, George. And I’ll have you know that I am way more knowledgeable about local events than most of you because my brother Tom now writes for the Netherfield
Gazette
. My parents are so proud.”

“I didn’t think newspapers were still hiring. Good for him! Hey, should we recruit Diana for
The Alt
?” I whispered as I handed the stack of textbooks back along my row. “Maybe we could radicalize her—maybe she’s already really mad and ready to bring down her dad’s empire, and all of capitalism. We could totally do it—for Michael.”