Winter's Kiss (26 page)

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Might take my mind off—well, you know.”

“That’s true,” Allie said. “I have a theory about that, actually; I’m calling it the Broody Brain Theory. The idea is that if you’re filling your mind with new knowledge, you won’t have any brain cells left for moping over your love life or whatever.”

I laughed. Normally Nick would’ve joined in. He loves making fun of Allie’s theories almost as much as I do.

But not today. He just sighed deeply and picked at the edge of the table. “It’ll take more than a few vocabulary words to take my mind off Rachel,” he mumbled.

I winced.
Pathetic
used to be the last word anyone would ever use to describe Nick. But these days, sadly, it fit him perfectly. I wished there was something I could do to help him snap out of it, but so far he only seemed interested in wallowing.

That brought my mind back to Cam again. It had been bad enough thinking about breaking things off with him before. I hadn’t been sure I’d have the heart—or the guts—to actually ever go through with it. If I did, I knew it would take some real finesse. Even if we weren’t meant to be a couple, I knew for certain that I always wanted us to be friends. Besides, I didn’t want to mess up our tight little group—Allie and Nick would never forgive me if I did. I’d never forgive myself.

But now, watching Nick brood over his ex, the idea of breaking up with Cam seemed even harder to imagine. Nick was really devastated; who knew how long it would take him to get over Rachel? And he wasn’t anywhere near as sweet and sensitive as Cam. How could I possibly put Cam through that kind of heartbreak? How would I ever be able to stand watching him go through that?

“Lexi, are you even listening to me?” Allie’s annoyed voice broke into my thoughts. “Because I really didn’t think that
ruminate
was that hard a word.”

“Sorry. Um,
ruminate
means to think something over.”

“Right,” Allie said.

Nick glanced over at me. “Way to ruminate your way through that one, science geekette,” he said, once again sounding almost like his old self for a second. “Maybe you’ll be able to get that verbal score within two hundred points of the math one after all.”

I laughed, doing my best to push all ruminations about Cam out of my head, at least for the moment. What was the hurry, anyway? This wasn’t a bio lab with a time limit. Just because I’d identified a possible problem didn’t mean I had to rush out and solve it right away.

One afternoon a couple of weeks later, Cam came over to help me prep for my Simpson Scholarship interview, which was scheduled for the following day. I have to admit, I was a little tense about it. Verging on hysterical.

“What if I screw this up?” I asked him for about the tenth time, pacing back and forth across my living room. “What if I don’t get the scholarship?”

He was splayed out on the big squishy beige couch. My parents were both out, so we had the place to ourselves aside from Blitzen, the family cat, who was sleeping on the couch beside Cam. Sitting up carefully to avoid jostling the cat—she could be cranky when awakened suddenly—Cam gave me that easy smile that always made me feel a little calmer.

“Chill out, Lexi,” he said. “You’re going to do great tomorrow. Mrs. Simpson will love you.”

“But what if she doesn’t?” I argued, still pacing. “I might, you know, forget myself and accidentally blurt out the F-word or something.”

He laughed out loud at that. “Right,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m sure that’s really likely to happen.”

“Okay, maybe not.” I sighed and ran both hands through my hair, even though I knew that always made me end up looking like Bozo the Clown. “This is just so important, you know?”

“I know.”

I stopped pacing and stared down at him. “Do you?” I asked. “I mean, you never really seem to think about the future much. Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“We’ve talked about this before, Lexi.” He reached for my hand and pulled me down until I was sitting beside him. Blitzen woke up and shot me a baleful look before slinking off. “I’ll get my degree, then probably look for a job where I can learn the restaurant business from the bottom up. Maybe open a little place of my own someday.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “but have you ever noticed that your goals and mine—well, they don’t exactly match?”

“I guess.” He didn’t sound terribly concerned. “But why worry about that before we have to? The future will take care of itself. We just need to try to be happy now and figure out the rest when it comes.”

I gritted my teeth. “Are you kidding?” I cried. “That sounds like one of Allie’s crazy theories or something. What if the future
doesn’t
work itself out? What then?”

He just shrugged. “I don’t know. It always does, though.”

Almost everything about Cam was great. But that default attitude of his—
oh well, it’ll work itself out
—always made me crazy, even when he was just talking about finding a parking spot or something. But this time it was much worse. This time he was talking about our whole future.
My
whole future. How could he be so infuriatingly casual about it?

“Did I ever tell you how I decided to go into medical research?” I asked, determined to make him understand for once just how important this was.

“Sure.” He shifted in his seat, slinging one arm across the couch behind me. “It was when your mom got sick when you were a kid, right?”

“That was part of it.” I nodded. “When I was six or seven Mom had a cancer scare, and our whole family traveled to the Mayo Clinic to have it checked out.”

“Yeah, I remember now.” Cam reached down and squeezed my upper arm. “That must have been really scary for you.”

“Uh-huh, I guess.” I stared blankly at the mirror over the fireplace across the room, barely feeling his hand as I thought back to that time. Back then I hadn’t even really understood exactly what cancer was. I’d just known it was something bad. “Anyway, it turned out to be a false alarm, thank God. Everything was benign; Mom was fine. But while we were at the clinic and she was getting her tests done and stuff, there was this one doctor who was supernice to me. He kept an eye on me while Dad was distracted, and even took me on a tour of his lab and let me play with his ultrasound machine.”

“Nice of him,” Cam said.

I nodded. “I’m sure he was busy. All those docs always are. But he took the time to watch out for me, and I always remembered that, even though I don’t even know his name. Ever since then I’ve known I wanted to do what he did. I asked Mom and Dad recently if they remembered who he was so I could mention him in my college application essays, but they don’t remember either. So I just wrote the essays without the name.”

“That’s a great story,” Cam said. “I bet the college admissions people will love it.”

“I hope so. But that’s not my point. I know we all kid around about how driven I am, how I plan out everything in my life and stuff. I guess I’m trying to tell you just how much those plans mean to me.”

He reached over and gently pushed a lock of auburn hair out of my face, smiling down at me fondly. “I get that,” he said, his fingers tracing the outline of my forehead. “I always have, Lexi. It’s part of what makes you, you.”

His expression was so caring and happy that I didn’t have the heart to go on. I did my best to tamp down my own frustration, but it wasn’t easy. If he really
did
understand, wouldn’t he be a little more worried that our futures were so completely mismatched?

three

“So when do you find out about the scholarship?” Nick asked, carefully threading a cranberry onto a piece of fishing line.

“Weren’t you listening? She already said she doesn’t know.” Allie grabbed a pair of scissors from the floor and snipped off the end of the cranberry garland she’d just finished. “But it doesn’t matter, anyway. It sounds like she totally blew them away at the interview. That scholarship is so hers.”

“Don’t jinx me,” I warned her. “Yeah, I think I did pretty well in that interview. Still, Andrew might’ve done even better. You never know.”

But my focus wasn’t really on the Simpson Scholarship anymore. I’d done all I could; from now on it was up to the committee, and I was trying not to stress over it too much. Besides, I had other things on my mind.

I grabbed another handful of cranberries. The three of us were sitting on the floor of Nick’s roomy, yellow-walled basement rec room, stringing garlands. Nick’s mom, my aunt, was head of decorations for the Ball that year, and even though it was still September, she already had us hard at work. There was a ton to do before December 24. At least she’d left us with plenty of soda and popcorn to help us through the day’s task. Then again, maybe we were supposed to turn the popcorn into more garlands. If that was true, she was going to be sorely disappointed when she returned home from that day’s round of committee meetings.

“Listen, guys,” I said to my friends, grabbing another handful of popcorn out of the almost-empty bowl. “I want to talk to you about something. About Cam, actually.”

Allie’s head shot up, and she almost cut her own finger off with the scissors. “What?” she demanded. “You’re not still actually thinking about ending things with Cam?”

“Sort of,” I admitted. “I just keep going back and forth on it, you know? It’s driving me nuts. On the one hand, Cam is great.”

“As I’ve been telling you all along,” Allie put in with a frown.

“I know. And you’re right.” I shook my head. “But on the other hand, where are Cam and I headed, realistically speaking?”

“Homecoming,” Allie put in. “The Ball. The prom.”

“Right. But then what?”

Nick looked a little confused. He’d been so deep into his own heartache that I guess he wasn’t fully up to speed on my love life issues. “Wait,” he said. “You’re not thinking of stringing Cam along until you’re ready to leave for college and then ripping his heart out with your bare hands, are you?”

He sounded a little suspicious. And a lot bitter. Who could blame him?

“Definitely not,” I assured him. “That’s why I’m thinking about this now instead of putting it off. If Cam and I are going to end up going our separate ways next summer, why prolong the inevitable?”

“Because you guys are in love, that’s why!” Allie exclaimed.

I barely heard her. All this time, I’d been moving inexorably toward the only logical conclusion. No matter how many times I went over the facts, checked the variables, ran the numbers, the result was always the same.

“There’s only one answer.” I took a deep breath, ignoring the floppy-fish feeling in the pit of my stomach. That feeling was irrelevant to the facts. “Cam and I need to break up.”

Allie gasped, her scissors clattering to the floor. Even Nick looked kind of shocked.

“Dude,” he said. “Are you sure? Seriously, it’ll kill him if you dump him out of the blue.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to dump Cam at all.” I smiled slowly as a great idea popped into my head. Who says scientists can’t be creative? “No, I’ve just realized there’s a much kinder, gentler way to handle this. I’m going to get
Cam
to break up with
me
!”

“Huh?” Allie looked perplexed. “What are you talking about, Lexi?”

“Yeah.” Nick set down his threaded cranberries and peered at me suspiciously. “Since when do you play those kinds of games? You’ve always been a straight shooter.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Actually, you were the inspiration for this plan.”

“Me?” Nick blinked. “You’re pinning this on
me
?”

“Yeah. Just look at you—Rachel dumped you almost a month ago, and you’re still a mess. And you guys were together less than a year.” I shook my head. “No way do I want to do that to Cam. It’ll be way easier on him if I let him make the decision to end things.”

“I hope you’re not in a hurry,” Allie said dubiously.

“I’m not,” I replied, tossing a piece of popcorn into my mouth. “I won’t rush it. These things take time.”

“No.” Allie shook her head. “I mean, I hope you aren’t counting on Cam suddenly deciding to dump you anytime this century. Because it’s not going to happen.”

“She’s right, Lex.” Nick stretched out his legs and flicked a stray cranberry off the knee of his jeans. “The dude has it bad for you. He never even
looks
at other girls. Not even superhot, half-naked ones.” He licked his lips. “Mmm, half-naked girls,” he Homer Simpsoned.

I rolled my eyes. Maybe there was a glimmer of light at the end of Nick’s tunnel of heartbreak after all.

“Anyway,” he went on, “if you’re really set on ending things, you should just go ahead and do it. Cam is going to be totally devastated either way.”

“Not if I do this right,” I countered, the plan forming more fully in my mind even as I spoke. “All I have to do is set things up so he falls for another girl. That way, he’ll realize for himself that we’ve been growing apart and then
he’ll
break up with
me
.” I shrugged. “He’s too honest to do anything else once he’s seen the light. And that way, no one’s heart gets broken. If I handle it right, we can totally stay friends and enjoy the rest of senior year together without all the complications and wondering where our relationship is going and stuff. It’s win-win. Totally foolproof!”

“You’re nuts, Lexi,” Allie said. “I’m telling you, it’ll never work. Cam adores you.”

“And I adore him.” I sighed as they both stared at me with skepticism written all over their faces. Just because I was able to look at the situation logically, it didn’t mean I didn’t have feelings or that this wasn’t tearing me up inside. “Listen, you guys, I wish I didn’t have to do this. But I’ve been over all the options, and it’s the only way. Cam and I are just too different. That’s okay in high school, but we won’t be in high school much longer. That means it’s time for some tough choices. Like it or not.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “Oh, please,” he said, reaching for the popcorn bowl. “If you keep this up, you’ll have to quit the Science Geekettes of America and join the drama club.”