Love and Other Theories (15 page)

“I
sn’t she off yet?” Shelby whines at Ms. Michel, who ignores her.

I give Shelby and Nathan a
Shut up, you’re making it worse
look. Only Shelby really deserves it. The two of them are sitting at the round wooden table closest to the counter, sipping coffee and waiting almost patiently for me to finish my shift on Sunday so we can leave for the state basketball tournament. Every March, if our basketball team miraculously makes it to the state championship, the seniors are automatically excused from school. If the rumors are true, the parties during the tournament are life changing.

Now that we’re about to leave I’m feeling nervous. It’s really stupid. I should be excited. I’ve never gone on a road trip with my friends and stayed overnight. This freedom of hotels and fast food, and the luxury of spending time alone with Nathan without being in the backseat of a car—or in his room with the constant awareness that his tiny, stealthy mother might surprise us—should have me as thrilled as I was when my parents actually agreed to let me go.

“Oh no. Why do you look like that?” Shelby says. She’s seen my face like this before. It’s the face I make when I’m hiding something—usually nerves.

“What’s wrong?” Nathan asks. He doesn’t know this face of mine, and he never will.

Shelby gives me a pointed stare:
This isn’t over
. She turns to Nathan. “Sometimes she forgets that she already got into Barron and it’s okay for her to let loose and get crazy.” Shelby makes my neurosis sound cool, a little prestigious, even. Only Shelby. It’s the second time she’s mentioned Barron out loud. Maybe in this case it was my only defense.

“I do that too. Forget to let loose.” Only Nathan.

“Well, good.” Shelby slides her sunglasses off her forehead and over her eyes. “Looks like I picked the fun car.”

I watch Nathan smile at her. “You’ve never missed out on a day of fun in your whole life, have you?”

She purses her lips. He’s got her figured out—this part of her, anyway. She won’t give him a smile for it. “Nope,” she says, enunciating that one word to make it seem bigger and bolder than it is.

“Never stressed? Not about tests? Or college? Or money?”

I cringe at the last two questions. I scrub the counter to give myself something to do. How could he? Someone who has as much money as he does—as his parents do—should never ask someone else about their supply of money. This unspoken social rule is why I don’t tell Shelby when my father buys me a box of dark chocolate for no reason. Why I used to avoid talking about getting an A in geometry in front of Chiffon, and why I never say the word
virginity
in front of Melissa.

I wait for him to make it worse. To ask Shelby what college she’s going to, and for Shelby to tell him she’s not going. We have a really good community college. The problem is that once people enroll there, they never seem to leave. That’s the joke, anyway. So Shelby never talks about next year and has definitely never mentioned enrolling in the community college. She’s never told me what she’s going to do.

“I don’t believe in stress; I believe in living,” Shelby tells Nathan. She smiles at the same time that he does. Her attitude is contagious. “Look at Aubrey,” I hear her say.

I push away the hair that’s fallen out of my ponytail and is dangling in my face. I wipe my forehead. It’s sweaty after so much scrubbing.

“Look at her,” Shelby says again, smiling at me like she’s fond of what she sees. “She’s a mess of stress.”

I smile for the simple fact that Shelby rhymed, and smile larger when Nathan adds, “You’re a poet and you don’t know it.”

But Shelby’s right. I need to get away more than ever.

WE’RE HALFWAY THERE when I receive a text message from Melissa telling me that she and Danica arrived ten minutes ago and have already been invited to three parties.

“Only three?” is Shelby’s response.

“You think we’ll have time for more than three?”

Shelby ignores this very
lost puppy
statement of Nathan’s. “Brey, what’s the name of that guy again? The one I’m excited to see?”

“Sam?” Nathan offers.

Shelby gives a small chuckle. She looks at Nathan like she’s thinking about patting him on the head.

“Conrad Malone,” I say.

“Ding, ding, ding—we have a winner!” Shelby leans forward from the backseat to high-five me.

“He was in the news,” I explain to Nathan. “He plays for Victoria High. He’s supposed to be the next big thing.” Whatever that means.

“My next big thing,” Shelby declares.

“Isn’t Sam on the basketball team?” Nathan asks.

Shelby shakes her head. “It’s all about the numbers, Diggs. Did you know there will be fifteen different high schools competing in the first round? Have you even added up how many new hot people we’re going to meet tonight alone?”

Nathan smiles at her through the review mirror. “The mathematics of meeting hot people. Very nice.”

When he glances at me, I turn away and stare out the window. I’m blushing and I don’t want him to see. I’m blushing because I don’t want to meet hot people. All I want is Nathan, and that is embarrassing. It’s shameful, too, because I hope against hope that Nathan doesn’t want to meet hot people either.

W
e attend only one party after all, but it’s the size of three parties. More people. A bigger house. A broader selection of alcohol. The first thing Shelby does is stand nonchalantly next to Conrad Malone, and he doesn’t leave her side the rest of the night.

“He’s the full meal deal,” Shelby tells me on Tuesday before the evening tournament games start. She rattles off everything I already learned about him in the newspaper article. That he’s been playing basketball since he was four. That he’s going to Duke on a full ride. That despite his dedication to basketball, he’s managed to maintain a
perfect GPA. But what I’m most impressed with is how Shelby’s whole face smiles when she talks about him, and how what she has to say about him extends beyond what we can all see for ourselves, how unbelievably attractive he is.

I yawn as the game starts and everyone stands up. If we lose this game, tonight will be our last night here.

To be honest, for me, that would be ideal. It’s taken me only two nights to discover the truly epic part of basketball state championship week: the epic sleeping dilemma. We’re all packed in rooms like sardines. So many people came knowing they could sleep anywhere, because even if we’re from different schools, we’re joined here for the same cause. It’s never quiet, either. There’s always music or laughter or cheering in the distance.

I reach down and grab Nathan’s coffee where it’s resting by his feet on the bleachers, and take a big drink. But it’s not coffee. He winces at me, but I can tell that he wants to laugh. Robert notices and does start laughing, so Nathan lets himself go.

Melissa is jumping up and down, her mouth stained that very familiar cranberry red. Leila is holding her cup close to her, swaying and shouting, “B-E aggressive!” since this tournament excludes cheerleaders. Apparently the party has started.

I’m giggling with Shelby and whispering about
Conrad, whose team is playing on the other court, when Melissa announces in a high whine, “It’s lame here—I want to leave!”

We follow her gaze to the left side of the bleachers, four rows back, to a set of cool blue eyes and strategically messy dishwater blond hair. Chiffon Dillon. She’s weaving her way through the crowd with three guys I don’t recognize and two of her girlfriends. Chiffon meets Shelby’s stare and her eyes narrow.

Chiffon should know better.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Shelby says.

“They just let
anybody
in, don’t they?” Melissa shakes her head. She’s on the verge of tears.

“It’s okay.” Robert reaches across Nathan, Shelby, and me, to squeeze Melissa’s hand. He looks at Shelby, then Danica, then me, and back to Shelby. “You’re not going to say anything, are you?”

Robert should know better.

“Hey, Chiffon,” Shelby calls. “Chiffon!”

“Great.” Robert takes a really long drink from his coffee cup.

Nathan’s forehead is wrinkled.

Chiffon gives Shelby just a second of her attention, waving her hand in the air and widening her eyes as if to say,
What do you want?

“Are you still fucking Zane?”

I don’t know if it really matters that Chiffon can’t
hear Shelby, when all of us can. Melissa’s smiling, Danica’s nodding, Leila’s covering her mouth like she can’t believe it.

“Are you still fucking Zane?” Shelby tries again.

Chiffon has turned her back completely now.

Shelby looks at me. “Is she?”

I feel my face grow hot and out of the corner of my eye I can see Nathan turning to stare at me, the way everyone within earshot is.

“You’ve been hanging at the Chapmans’; is she still hooking up with him?” Shelby asks.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“He probably dumped her ass!” Melissa says.

“We’ll find out, I guess.” Shelby winks at her. “Hey, Chiffon.” She walks up the bleachers toward Chiffon, slinking through the crowd. She holds her phone out in front of her and starts snapping photos of Chiffon when she’s close enough. Chiffon’s friends pull back a little and raise their hands trying to block Shelby’s view of their faces. The boys with them frown in confusion. One of them seems to be saying,
What the hell?

“Just thought Zane might like to know what you’re up to.” It’s easy to hear Shelby’s voice, the way she’s shouting. Shelby leans forward, snapping more pictures. Chiffon slants toward her, too, then, as she says something to Shelby that we can’t hear but know can’t be very nice. The boys who are with Chiffon all go bug-eyed.
Chiffon’s friends smirk and get the confidence to glare at Shelby. And Shelby turns to us, looking like she wants to laugh, shaking her head like,
Can you believe her?

I thought after what she said to me at Trip’s, I’d be glad to see Chiffon put in her place and embarrassed in front of boys she’s with. But I wish more than anything that Melissa hadn’t noticed her.

“Tell your new friends to smile,” Shelby says to Chiffon. “Zane will want to get a good look at them.”

Chiffon stretches her arm out, probably an attempt to knock Shelby’s phone out of her hand, but right before she can reach Shelby, a boy in a purple Victoria High School T-shirt steps in front of her. The boy stumbles forward as Chiffon’s hand hits him in the back, and the two drinks he’s carrying sail through the air, covering Shelby in what looks like red wine or something mixed with cranberry juice. Her hair and the front of her shirt are all dripping red.

The boy apologizes profusely, but Shelby’s face turns to stone and she looks around him at Chiffon. Chiffon is covering her mouth and her eyes are wide. I think for a second she’s surprised, but then I see her friends. They’re covering their mouths too, because they’re laughing.

Shelby shakes her head. “Irrational behavior,” she says, and her eyes light up. There must be a time-out or something, because there’s a lull in the crowd. Shelby knows we can all hear her clearly. “It must be a side
effect of your herpes medication.”

If the boys with Chiffon were bug-eyed before, now their eyes are popping out of their skulls. Chiffon yells something back at Shelby, “Fuck you!” or “Fuck off!” and grabs Shelby by the arm. Shelby wiggles out of her grasp and pushes Chiffon away with her free hand.

I feel Nathan make a sudden movement beside me, and even without looking, I know he is jolting in the direction of the confrontation. The crowd keeps him from taking more than a step. When I do look at him, he’s staring at Chiffon. But Chiffon is only in sight for a second. Her friends are pulling her away. The boys don’t go with them.

Melissa squeals, “That was awesome!” as Shelby returns. “You got her to leave! Oh, your shirt!” She dabs Shelby’s shirt with a paper napkin. Danica joins in, so I do too, even though we aren’t making one bit of difference.

Nathan opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, but he doesn’t. Just runs two fingers over his lips, soothing them from whatever they were about to let slip out.

“What did she say to you?” Danica asks Shelby. She’s standing a row below, facing us, with her back to the game.

“She’s so crazy.” Shelby rolls her eyes, gestures to her shirt, and pushes our hands away. Robert passes her a Big Gulp cup and she takes a long sip.

“What—what was that?” Nathan says. He’s rubbing his chin.

“She’s crazy,” Shelby repeats, her voice dripping in irritation.

“So why go after her like that?”

Nathan doesn’t understand; I was right.

Shelby laughs, like she doesn’t hear the insult in Nathan’s voice. “Relax. Jesus. Live a little, Diggs.”

Nathan looks away, stops fidgeting, licks his lips. His expression is flat when he turns back to her. “Some living, Shelby.”

I know Nathan well enough to know that doing this, saying this, to someone like Shelby terrifies him, but he’s too mad. The alcohol probably makes him brave. I wish it would have this effect on me. I don’t want him to be angry like this. I want him to understand what everyone else understands: What happens between us and Chiffon is just between us. No one else will get it. They shouldn’t even try.

Shelby’s smiling slightly, and she tilts her head a little. I’m familiar with the look. She’s debating whether or not to humiliate Nathan. One quick jab, a Designated Diggs reference to remind everyone that her side is the one to be on. She picks at her thumbnail. This is the only thing that gives her away to me. He’s making her a little nervous.

Melissa’s the one to get mad about someone insulting
Shelby. And over Chiffon, especially. “She’s crazy!” Melissa tells Nathan.

Danica’s not paying attention to Nathan or Melissa. She hasn’t taken her eyes off Shelby. “What did she say to you?” she asks again, leaning forward. “Right before she pushed that guy into you, what did she say?”

Nathan shakes his head at this. He doesn’t think Chiffon pushed the guy in purple. He thinks it was an accident. He looks at me and I look to Shelby, because I don’t know what to think.

Shelby rolls her eyes, but her previous enthusiasm is completely gone. “You know. The usual shit she says to me.”

Danica’s eyes widen for a second, a quick flash of anger pulsing through her.

Nathan looks back and forth between them, and I think that maybe now he’ll see. This isn’t something he can make sense of.

“Why is she crazy?” he asks, like he’s skeptical we don’t have an answer.

That’s the problem, though. We don’t. There isn’t much to say about Chiffon that can’t be explained by how we decided to treat her. I feel my cheeks flush, and my whole body goes hot. I’m so sure someone is going to tell Nathan that for everything horrible about Chiffon, there’s something horrible about us. About me.

Robert offers an explanation. “She told Shelby she
wanted her to die.” His voice is serious.

Now the way Nathan looks at Shelby is different; he’s confused. “What?”

“Yeah!” Melissa says. She stomps her foot. “Chiffon is insane!”

“She’s such a bitch,” Robert says. He doesn’t really know why we hate Chiffon; he understands that what she said to Shelby at Tommy Rizzo’s barbecue last year was wrong. He sees Shelby, in front of him now, her shirt splattered red, the front strands of her blond hair turning pink. Nathan’s expression softens too as he looks at Shelby.

Normally, Tommy Rizzo’s house is a place Chiffon wouldn’t exactly be welcome, but last year she took the risk and came with her group of girlfriends. That night, we decided to apologize to her. There was a little bit of a protest from Melissa. But Shelby had decided and so that was that. We all thought it was best that Shelby be the one to do it.

I was about five feet away from where it all went down, so I can only tell you what I was able to see. Shelby was wearing platform wedge sandals, and she was bad at walking in them. When she was almost directly in front of Chiffon, Shelby stumbled forward, bumping Chiffon into the barbecue and covering her white tank top with charcoal. Chiffon was gripping her arm after it happened—I don’t know if she was bruised or
burned—but her face didn’t reveal that she was hurt. Chiffon’s expression said only one thing: how much she hated Shelby. And then, if her glare wasn’t enough, she said loudly, with gritted teeth, “I hope you die, bitch,” and walked away.

Shelby just laughed, so we did too. What else can you do when someone tells your best friend to die?

Right now, with Nathan’s sullen face, it doesn’t feel funny. I’m still thrown by Robert’s use of the word
bitch
. To Robert, girls are babes, not bitches.

But this is what Chiffon has turned into. Someone who told Shelby to die. Someone so obviously unevolved, there’s no defense for her. That’s why no one challenges Shelby when she says these things to Chiffon. They’re afraid of being like Chiffon too, just like we are. It seems like a million years ago when she really was one of our best friends. We had slumber parties and passed notes in the hall. Chiffon’s notes used to be so funny, we’d read them out loud after school. She loved movies, too, romantic comedies that made her cry happy tears. And she could run faster than all the boys, so they were always asking her to race them. But I don’t think anyone remembers that part of her anymore. It’s no different from what happens when Shelby and Celine fight—how everyone only remembers the mean comment Shelby made and not the subtle insult that caused it.

I think—just for a second because it’s all I can
bear—Chiffon and Shelby are so alike.

Any fragments of frustration left in Nathan’s face disappear and are replaced with worry. I do nothing to correct it. I don’t tell him that that wasn’t the first time one of us had mentioned someone she might have been hooking up with and used it against her, or announced to a roomful of people that she had an STD. No one says anything about all the times we didn’t tell Chiffon we wanted her to die, but we treated her that way.

I watch Nathan stare at Shelby as she crosses the stadium to give a quick hello to Conrad before halftime. Conrad touches the stained front of Shelby’s shirt and grabs a warm-up shirt off the back of one of the seats along the sideline, but she shakes her head, smiling. She blows kisses at him as he disappears into the locker room.