Love and Other Theories (21 page)

I
’ve been through the Detach before. Text messages that once filled up your inbox stop coming. The person who used to linger at your locker before school is no longer there. The spot that used to be saved for you in the cafeteria is gone, just like your ride to the party on Saturday night. On both sides of the Detach, it’s the same. With Tommy Rizzo, I stopped answering his calls and searching him out in the hallway. In August, Trip told me he’d see me soon and didn’t call again until Thanksgiving.

Girls are finally flirting with Nathan Diggs and he’s finally flirting back. Leila touches his arm at lunch. Mary Ann, a junior on the swim team, stops by his locker
before practice. He sits sandwiched between Celine and another cheerleader during the senior assembly. Nathan doesn’t tell me if he’s craving Italian food because all we do is drink Slurpees with everyone at the park. We don’t make out in Drama because now Robert sits with us. We study together in Nathan’s room, but his mom is home, and even if she wasn’t, Nathan’s phone doesn’t stop beeping long enough for him to read aloud to me.

Nathan is free and open and enjoying it, and it’s obvious. I don’t know if he’ll really take advantage of his situation or just relish that there’s a situation for him to take advantage of in the first place.

He might want Shelby because she makes him laugh or Danica because she practically ignores him, or Melissa because she’s so pretty and so innocent. He might want Mary Ann because she’s aggressive. Or Celine because he’s never been very fond of Jared. Or one of the girls who blush just hearing his name, because it would be easy. I was the first girl he met here—the first evolved girl he’d
ever
met—but his time is running out, and now there are others who want to know him before he leaves.

When you’re the first, you don’t get to be the last, too. Not usually.

IT’S NATHAN’S FIRST Friday night as a free agent and I’m missing it. I’m glad. I’m tortured.

THERE’S NOT ENOUGH coffee to serve or doughnuts to glaze the next morning to distract me from all the things I don’t know about last night. No one comes in for coffee. My phone is quiet. Usually this means everyone is still asleep. Usually.

It’s assumption—even if you’re the one doing the assuming—that will screw you every time.

“You can leave early,” Ms. Michel tells me around eleven thirty. There are still a few hours left on my shift.

“Why?” I don’t stop working. I keep moving, twisting dough dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar to be baked for the lunch crowd.

She looks me up and down and I realize that I’m also dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar. A real mess.

“I’ll stay in the back,” I offer.

She shakes her head, pats me on the back. “No, no, go on. You have a friend in the café waiting.”

When I walk out from the back kitchen, I’m looking for Nathan. I find Trip instead.

“What are you doing here?”

Trip smiles, giving me a look like the answer should be obvious. Then he takes a bite out of the chocolate doughnut he’s holding and I think maybe the food is the reason, not me—though I know better.

The door chimes behind us as we walk out. It’s hotter than ever today. Trip helps me peel off my jacket, holding
the neck so I can wiggle my arms out.

“Do you have a test next week or something?”

“No, Housing.” He shakes his head. He doesn’t give me my jacket back when I hold my hand out for it. He keeps it tucked over his arm. “I just came to see you.”

“Okay.” The word is hard and abrupt when it comes out.

“Everything all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Come on.” He puts his arm around my back and turns me toward the street, where his blue-and-white pickup is sitting curbside. He opens the door for me, a formality since his truck is too old to have automatic locks and he’d have to lean all the way across the bench seat to unlock the passenger door for me if he got in first.

I do as he says. I slide in, careful not to scratch myself on the loose spring that has worked its way through the faded blue leather of the bench seat. Without meaning to, I think of Nathan’s BMW. How the spring in Trip’s truck is an obvious warning to those who sit there—
you will get hurt if you’re not careful
—and the BMW is supposed to be safe.

“Take a load off.” He nods at the dashboard. I slink down into the seat and put my feet up on the dash, just like I used to.

“You work too hard, Housing.”

“You don’t work hard enough.”

“You should relax more. I can see the tension on you—it’s everywhere. You’re covered in it.”

“That’s not tension, it’s cinnamon.” I tilt my neck back and close my eyes.

“Atta girl.”

I can’t help but smile. It feels good, smiling, closing my eyes, putting my feet up. Sitting next to Trip in a place I used to love. Trip makes me feel safe, the way I felt around him last year—a way I don’t always get to feel around him or anyone anymore. It’s because of the theories. Trip wasn’t with me because I needed him to be, or because I asked him to be, or because he thought I would cry if he wasn’t. He was with me because he pure and simple wanted to be.

“Why’d you come all the way down here to see me?” There’s a simple answer or there’s a complicated one. I want the truth.

He hesitates for too long, so I sit up slightly and stare at him—telling him with just a look that I know there’s more and I want him to tell me.

He picks at a loose piece of leather hanging off the steering wheel. “There’s a seminar tomorrow. My Comparative Religions professor is speaking. It’s at a church, starts at ten. He’s offering extra credit to all his students that go.”

“So you’re leaving early?” I lean my head against the seat and turn so I’m facing him. “Tonight?” Trip usually
keeps himself here until Sunday night to avoid the temptations of the weekend that, for Trip, leak over into failed quizzes and sloppy essays.

He nods. “Later tonight. You should come over for dinner. We’re making hamburgers.”

I picture hamburgers and chips and peaches. It’s tempting, I’ll admit, but not tempting enough. “I’m going to a party tonight.”

“Of course you are.”

“You’ll be back next weekend?” It’s so easy and casual coming out of my mouth, but my chest tightens. Trip wasn’t supposed to come back—ever. I was never supposed to be sitting in his car with my feet on the dash and my body tilted toward his like this ever again.

He smiles and gives the faintest nod. I think he’s about to say something, but he stops himself. He leans closer to me, just a little, but enough that I can smell the cedar on him. His hand reaches for me, moving slowly toward my face.

I close my eyes. He’s going to touch me, let his fingers run over my lips, and under my chin, and then he’s going to kiss me and I don’t know if I want to stop him.

I don’t feel his fingers against my cheek; I feel the slightest bit of pressure at the crown of my head. My eyes open slowly. Trip takes the loose strands of my hair and tucks them behind my ear. There’s cinnamon and powdered sugar in my hair and I see the tiniest bit of white
powder on his fingers when he pulls his hand away. Trip just tucked away those lonely strands of hair that used to be Nathan’s, the pieces of me he used to tug when he wanted something, or push behind my ear over and over again while he stared at me.

Trip leans away. “Sorry,” he says, so quietly I almost don’t think he really meant for me to hear him.

I’m sorry too. But only because I miss Nathan. I’m glad Trip didn’t kiss me, and that also makes me sorry. Everything was so much easier when that was all I wanted.

I
t’s not really a party Robert’s having, but there are enough people around the fire pit in his backyard that when I walk up the stairs to use the bathroom I’m surprised to hear Nathan and Shelby—I hadn’t even noticed they were gone. And even though everyone watches Shelby, and I am no different, and I’ve been waiting since I arrived a few hours ago for Nathan to touch me or look at me the way he used to, somehow I lost track of them. Or maybe they’re hiding. They made their escape and brushed leaves over their path as they left.

I’m not proud as I lean against the wall outside the kitchen, listening to them. Robert’s house is a split-level.
The entryway leads both upstairs and downstairs. If they leave the kitchen I can escape down the hall, maybe even down the stairs, without them seeing me. I’m really not proud I’ve come up with an Exit Strategy, but I have to know—I
need
to know—what Shelby and Nathan are talking about alone together in the quiet part of the house.

Shelby is sitting on the counter and letting her legs dangle—I know this because I can hear the soft tapping of her heels hitting the cupboards below.

“That was my favorite part of the movie too. Of course. When the guy gets the girl.” Nathan’s on the punch line of a joke I missed.

The way he’s talking to her bothers me, but I also have this stupid desire to laugh at him. It’s like Nathan is trying to find something relatable in Shelby—like when he asked her about stress and college and money. Soon he’ll discover that it’s better that you can’t relate. That Shelby lives in this other world that’s brighter, more colorful, bolder, more daring, more dangerous, and that being around Shelby means you get to feel like you’re somewhere else, somewhere better.

“I lied to you,” he says. His voice is lower now, less excited. “I’ve never been on a motorcycle.” I remember the first day he met Shelby, when she accused him of wearing a leather jacket because he rode a motorcycle. Apparently Nathan remembers it too.

“You never told me you had,” Shelby says.

“You assumed. I didn’t correct you.”

“And now do you feel absolved?”

“I don’t like lying.”

Shelby makes a
tsk
noise, snapping her tongue. “It’s been months and you’re just coming clean. What else do you need to come clean about?”

“If you’re referring to the photos, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t look at them.” I never heard Nathan say this—and I would have remembered.

“Again, with the photos.”

“I’m sorry—I just . . .” I imagine Nathan rubbing the top of his hand along the bottom of his chin to get through the silence.

“Go ahead.” Shelby sounds a little bored, a little annoyed. Exactly the way she’s supposed to sound. “Just say it.”

Nathan hesitates. “I just don’t know how you could be so—”

“What?” She lets out a quick laugh, but her voice is sharp. “Careless? Stupid?”

He doesn’t hesitate. “All of the above.”

There’s a long space of silence, but somehow I know Shelby’s not insulted, or pissed. I think she likes his honesty. “What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done?” she finally says.

He’s quiet again, which means he knows and doesn’t want to say. I think the most dangerous thing Nathan
Diggs has ever done is snap at Shelby Chesterfield. Or accuse her of being unfair to Chiffon. Or tell her how to react to her own naked-photo scandal. Then I have another thought.

“Was it Aubrey?” And once again, Shelby’s mind is tangled with mine.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice a little muffled. “What about you?”

There’s another long silence and I picture Shelby smiling at him and shaking her head because she’ll never tell.

“Okay,” Nathan says. “I think the better question is: What are you most afraid of?”

Nothing
, I think.
Shelby’s not afraid of anything
.

She’s quiet while she must be waiting for him to realize this. Then she says, “The truth?”

“Please, yes. If you don’t mind.” There’s a smile in his voice. I hate that I can hear it.

“You’ll think it’s stupid.”

“I promise to pretend I don’t.”

“A zombie apocalypse. Or a dinosaur apocalypse. Any apocalypse, really.”

It’s just the kind of thing that would make Nathan laugh, and he does. He also sighs. “Come on, Shelby.” That’s all he says; that’s all it takes.

“I’m having dinner with my dad next weekend. He says he has something to give me,” Shelby says, and I’m
shocked. Shelby’s dad left when she was four and Sienna was ten. That’s really all I know about him, except that the only way he ever gets in touch with Shelby or Sienna is by showing up unannounced. Neither of them are ever pleased to see him when he does this. Sandra doesn’t ever see him or talk about him, not even about why he left. I’d always assumed he just left because he felt like it, because he’s a horrible man and he did what he wanted without caring who he hurt or left behind, and that Sandra, Sienna, and Shelby were better off without him. “He gave Sienna money when she graduated, but not as much as he’d told her he was giving her. Half of what he promised. I’m afraid he’s going to lie to me; I’m afraid he already has.” She takes a deep breath. “I only see him for big events.” She laughs a little, one jilted chuckle. “The last time I saw him, it was my sixteenth birthday. It was so horrible I couldn’t concentrate on my driver’s test and failed.”

“Does it help at all to prepare for the worst?”

“I am prepared for the worst. But to be honest, I want his gift. I
need
his gift. And if he’s been lying to me, then I’ll have nothing next year. Everyone will be gone, and I’ll be stuck.”

“There are other ways to—”

“I know there are other ways to get out of here, but all of them require money, don’t they?”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know.” She sounds mildly annoyed. I’m
annoyed too. Nathan doesn’t understand that
getting out of here
doesn’t always mean leaving, it can simply mean changing.

“Remember when you told me you liked it here? Was that the truth?”

Another secret, from another conversation. More that they know about each other that I never knew.

“I do like it here,” she snaps. “But I still don’t want . . .” She clears her throat, like she’s trying to cover that her voice cut out.

I could finish the sentence for her. Everything is going to be different next year, and if nothing changes for you, then you’re left behind. I never thought of Shelby as being left behind just because she wasn’t going away to college. Shelby is always one step ahead, and I knew she would be next year too, somehow, even though I didn’t know about the money.

“I don’t think you should worry,” Nathan says. “There are always options.”

“I guess.” Shelby sucks in a deep breath.

My phone vibrates against my side. It’s Trip. I press ignore, but he just calls back. I ignore him again. That doesn’t work and the vibrations keep going. I ease down the hallway and into an empty bedroom, closing the door gently behind me.

“Trip, what?” I whisper into the phone.

“Aubrey, I need your help.”