The Mosts

Also by Melissa Senate

THEODORA TWIST

For my dear friend
Heidi Wartenberg Calvo-Cruz Cinicolo Caren,
whom I was lucky to meet
my first day of high school.
(You have a lot of names,
but you’ll alway be just Hoodles to me.)

Contents

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

What Happened Next

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

THE LISTS
THE MOSTS

(official list, printed in the yearbook)
Most Popular
Most Beautiful
Most Stylish
Most Hot
Most Likely to Rule the World One Day
Most Hilarious
Most Brainy
Class Couple

THE MOST NOTS

(underground list, voted on by secret committee
and handed out the last week of school)
Most in Need of an Extreme Makeover
Most in Need of a Therapist
Most in Need of Basic Grooming
Most in Need of a Stylist
Most Nerdy
Most Not Cool
Most in Need

Chapter 1

F
or two weeks, I asked everyone I met if they thought long-distance relationships worked. My friends all said yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. “Because when you’re totally in love, that’s all that matters,” they insisted.

My parents and my older sister, Sabrina, who knows nothing about guys or love, said anything was possible, but “I don’t think so.”

Ms. Fingerman, my favorite teacher at Freeport Academy, where I’m a sophomore (for six more weeks), said a romance had once both begun and ended during her first-period English class. And then she quoted some sad, negative poetry about doomed love.

Then there were the strangers I consulted. Random store clerks and people on street corners downtown all said something to the effect that “Most relationships can’t handle a distance of more than twenty minutes. People get lazy. And their eyes wander. Like to the next desk or cubicle or seat on the bus.” The waitress at Yum’s, where my friends and Thom and I spent most of our free time because of their decadent low-fat fudge muffins and no table minimums, told me that her Colby College–bound boyfriend had promised they’d be together forever, and he’d dumped her after a month for a girl in his philosophy class. And Colby College was only an hour away from Freeport.

So did I believe my friends? Or everyone else?

“Believe me,” Thom said, his gorgeous green eyes so intense that I did believe him. For a minute.

And then tears began pricking the backs of my own eyes.

Thom, my boyfriend of two years, was leaving. Moving from the coast of Maine to sunny Southern California, where it never snowed (or rained). Going far, far away in minutes.

We stood in the shade of the calves’ barn on my parents’ dairy farm, the warm May sunshine slanting light on the dark, hay-strewn cement floor. A cute black and white calf named Hermione (my stepfather, Mac, named all that spring’s calves after Harry Potter characters) stood in her corral just a few feet from us, peering at us with her big black eyes. She kept nudging us with her pink nose, which meant she wanted her milk. We fed calves with a giant baby bottle, which was the only thing on the farm I liked doing. Feeding the calves was the job of the high school interns who worked on the farm for school credit; one of them was already here that morning, eight a.m. on a Sunday. Crazy. It wasn’t the most romantic place for a goodbye, for a last kiss. But the calves’ barn was where we’d met. Where Thom Geller had first noticed me two years before. I wanted to bury him under a huge pile of hay and keep him here forever.

“We are
not
breaking up, Madeline,” he said for the tenth time in ten minutes. He cupped my face with his hands and kissed me on the nose.

Which made me burst into tears.

I’d been stocking up on Visine for the past two weeks. Tears streamed down my face at the most random times, even when I wasn’t thinking about my boyfriend leaving. Like the moment I woke up in the morning, before I even remembered. And in the middle of English class (which was why I’d asked Ms. Fingerman her opinion of long-distance relationships, then wished I hadn’t), since we were reading
Romeo and Juliet
, the most tragic teen love story of all. And while walking down the halls of Freeport Academy with my friends, who would immediately pull me into hugs, with “Just because Thom’s moving to California—where girls probably wear bikinis to class—doesn’t mean you guys are breaking up.”

Thom himself had been saying that ever since he’d found out that his dad had been transferred from his big-deal corporate job in Maine to a bigger, better one in California. But California was across the country from Maine, three time zones away. When I’d be eating gloppy tuna sandwiches in the caf, Thom would be hitting the snooze button on his alarm clock for the third time. Our lives would be completely different at completely different times. Out of sync.

“We’ll call, text, IM, e-mail, everything,” he said, tipping up my chin. “We’re us. We’ll always be us, Madeline.”

I really wanted to believe that. I was crazy about him. Thom was my first boyfriend. The first guy I’d ever had a crush on, the first guy I’d ever kissed. The first (and only) guy who had ever told me I was beautiful—and way before anyone would have looked at me and said I was even pretty. Thom liked me
before
—before I went from blah farm girl with no friends to the most popular girl at Freeport Academy. He liked
me
.

“Promise?” I asked. “Even though I heard girls really do wear bikinis to class in L.A.?”

He smiled that smile, complete with popping dimple in his left cheek, that had left me speechless the first time he had ever spoken to me. “No girl in a bikini could ever compare to you, Madeline. I’ve seen you in a bikini.”

Okay, he was making me feel better. Making me believe him. Maybe this
could
work out. “You think three thousand miles can touch us?” he asked, pulling me into a hug. “No way.”

Yum, he felt so good. I loved his hugs. And because we only had a few more minutes before his mom would pull up the drive and honk the horn on the big green Subaru, I didn’t remind him about Carlie and Johanna, my former best friends from New York, where I’d lived before my mom had married Mac and followed her bliss to buy a farm in Maine. The day I’d said goodbye to Carlie and Johanna, we’d sobbed and hugged and written
MCJ BFF!
in hearts on our arms with red Sharpies. Our e-mails and texts lasted as long as the supposedly permanent marker: three weeks. Day by day, the red faded, and finally I didn’t even realize it wasn’t there anymore.

“I’m going to miss you so much,” I said, looking up at him. Thom was tall, almost six feet, and he wasn’t even sixteen yet, not for another two months. “I just can’t believe I’m not going to see your face every day.”

“Ditto,” he said, and held on to me. “This is where we met, remember?”

Like I would ever forget. I’d been in the calves’ barn after school that day two years ago, sitting on a tiny stool in Prince Harry’s small wooden corral. (That spring Mac had named the calves after members of the British royal family.) I didn’t mind the calves’ barn the way I minded—okay,
hated
—the farm in general. I liked the cute, sweet little calves. They were a comfort to me when I was upset about something. That day, I had worked up the nerve to say hello to Annie Haywood, the funniest girl in school. Earlier, she’d told a joke that made me laugh every time I thought about it. I’d planned to tell her that, but when I walked up to her, she looked at me for one second, as though a fly had buzzed near her ear, then turned around and started talking to someone else, blowing me off completely.

I’d looked down at my boxy royal-blue New England Aquarium T-shirt, with its giant comical octopus, and my no-name jeans and stupid, hopeless white sneakers and known that Annie and her friends would never talk to me. I didn’t look like them and I didn’t know how to look like them. Or act like them.

So I was feeling like a real nobody when Thom Geller poked his head in, saw me feeding Prince Harry with the baby bottle, and said, “That is
so
cool. Can I try that?”

Thom was one of the most popular guys at school, boyfriend of a glittering blond cheerleader named Morgan. But he was more than that. He was the boy whose face, whose voice, whose smile had made me stop dead in my tracks when I’d seen him on my first day of eighth grade. Thom was smart and funny and nice, but he never once looked my way, not even when I stared at him so hard I was sure everyone noticed.

Thom lived a few houses down from me, which in Maine could easily—and did—mean a mile away. That day, he’d ridden his bike over to see his friend Sam, who’d recently started interning at the farm twice a week. He’d spoken to me for the first time. Ever.

I’d jumped. I hadn’t heard him ride up, hadn’t seen him standing there, watching me.

And since Sam was still working, Thom stayed with me in the small corral, just four feet by four feet and fenced in on all sides. Me, the
before
me, in my octopus T-shirt and dirty Wellies, the rubber boots you wore unless you wanted your shoes caked with dirt and cow poop.

Thom watched the way I fed Prince Harry for a while and then I gave Thom the bottle. “Is this right?” he asked. When I told him that he was doing it perfectly, that Prince Harry really seemed to like him, the smile Thom shot me, complete with that dimple popping, almost undid me right there.

Then we both just sat on our stools, watching Prince Harry suck. Thom asked what kind of cow he was, and I explained the different kinds of dairy cows and told him that we raised Holsteins—the black and white ones—and had our own milk and dairy products business, complete with a cute label that my mom had designed. It said AnnaBeth’s Farm Fresh milk, cheese, and ice cream and had an illustration of a Holstein calf that my sister had drawn. (She’s a decent artist; I give her that.) I surprised myself by how much I knew, especially since we’d only lived on the farm since the previous August, not even a year then, and I couldn’t stand the place. I figured I’d picked up a lot of info by being forced to listen to farm talk at dinner. Plus if I wanted to talk to my mom, I usually had to follow her around the farm as she did her work on the milking machines. No one with a working dairy farm milked by hand anymore, well, unless you had maybe like two cows. So I learned a lot by just watching.

Thom really listened to me, looked into my eyes as I talked, and asked questions he seemed impressed I could answer, like what the heck a heifer was (a female cow who hadn’t yet had a calf).

And that was when Thom said it, just turned and stared at me for a minute and said it: “You have the prettiest face.”

I almost fainted. It took me a few minutes to say, “Thanks, so do you,” which made me feel like a moron, but he laughed. And suddenly, there in the doorway was his friend Sam, who said something cute like “See? I told you working on a farm was fun.” Thom looked at me one last time and said thanks and bye, and he was gone.

At school the next day, I walked past him and tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t even look my way, didn’t see me. A week or so later, as we were walking out of history class, he said, “Oh, hey, you’re the girl from Sam’s farm.” And before I could get out more than a “yeah,” the glittering, popular girls had surrounded him and pulled him away. And then he just seemed to forget me and look through me—if he looked my way at all—as everyone else did.

When school ended, I went to Rome to stay with my aunt Darcy (my dad’s sister) for all of August. That trip changed my life.

I came back just a week before my freshman year started. Thom had ridden to the farm to pick up Sam after his shift one day, and he didn’t even recognize me when I walked out of the main house. He’d stared at me in my pencil skirt, textured knee-high boots, and fitted white T-shirt, my hair pulled back in a messy bun, a delicate little scarf tied around my neck. Then he said hi and asked if I was friends with the girl who lived here. I laughed the mysterious yet friendly and throaty way I’d seen Italian girls laugh and told him that I
was
the girl who lived here, that I’d just come back from a month in Rome. And he said, “Wow, you’ve really changed.” He asked if I wanted to go to a movie, and a week later, when school started, we were a couple. And I was an entirely different girl.

Honk!

No. It couldn’t be time yet. But when we turned to look out the barn door, there was his mom at the wheel of the familiar green car. Mrs. Geller gave us a sympathetic smile and then turned to her husband, to give us privacy, I assumed.

Thom pulled me farther behind the door and kissed me like it was our last kiss, which both made me happy and made me start crying again.

“I love you,” he said, looking right into my eyes, and there were tears in his own. I’d never seen Thom Geller cry before. Ever.

He squeezed my hand and then ran down the path to the car.

I stood between the open double doors of the barn, two of our huge ducks waddling past me. Tears streamed down my face as Thom took one last look and then got into the car. Suddenly all I had of Thom Geller was his face in the back window, his hand against the glass. And because of the stupid hill on Flying Point Road, that face was out of view in four seconds.

“I love you too,” I called out.

I went back inside the calves’ barn, because I was crying hard. I didn’t want to hear my mom or Mac or my sister tell me that I’d be okay, which was what they’d been doing for the past two weeks. Why would I be okay? I went into Hermione’s corral and sat down on the tiny wooden stool and cried into her short, stubby fur.

That was when I heard a sound like something metal crashing against the floor. I turned around and there was Elinor Espinoza, one of the farm interns. She looked terrified.

“Um, I … w-was just … ,” she stammered, looking at me, then down at the ground, her face bright red. She tugged at her wildly curly-frizzy, square-shaped dark hair.

I jumped up. “Were you back there the whole time?”

“I … It’s … You guys came in kind of suddenly and I was spreading out clean hay and then I didn’t know if I should interrupt to say I was there, and … ”

I just stared at her, but then the tears came back and I ran out of the barn and into the main house. I was halfway up the stairs when my mom saw me.

She looked like a lumberjack in her overalls and work boots, her long, graying brown hair in two pigtailed braids. “Oh, Maddie, honey, did Thom just go? I know it hurts. How about we take you out for breakfast? Eggs, bacon, the works.”

Like I could eat. “I just need to be alone.”

She nodded. “You’re probably going to cry for a while. I’ll come check on you later with some mint chocolate chip, just in case you’re in the mood.”

I ran to my room and closed the door, and of course the first thing I saw was my computer’s screen saver, a shot of the official school award declaring Madeline Echols and Thomas Geller Freshman Class Couple last year.

The end of school was just six weeks away. That meant everyone would be voting for Most This and Most That and Class Couple. Thom and I wouldn’t be in the running for Sophomore Class Couple.