The Pretty App (8 page)

I laughed. “Okay then,” I said, warmed by how seriously he was taking the whole thing. “Maybe you could help me sometime.”

Leo glanced over at me, his hand tapping the wheel
again. “I’d like that,” he said. “And you could always take an on-camera class, too.”

I looked away from him. It was embarrassing to blame my parents, but it was the truth. “My parents would never let me,” I said.

“So don’t tell them about it,” he said. And then he smiled, like he had an idea. “Maybe you just need to be picked as one of the contestants for
The Pretty App Live
.” It surprised me the way the name rolled off his tongue. “Then you could see behind the scenes how TV shows really run,” he said.

“Pia Alvarez is going to be hosting that show,” I said. “She got her start on a reality show, too, and—”

“I know about Pia Alvarez’s career,” Leo said. And then he looked sort of embarrassed that he’d said it. “I’m a dork like that,” he said, laughing, but he was the least dorky person I knew. He was Justin Timberlake compared to the other guys at Harrison.

“Would you want to be on it?” Leo asked as he coasted the car onto the interstate toward Chicago.

“On the reality show?”

Leo nodded. “I think you’d be good,” he said, angling between cars. “You’d cause lots of drama, just like you do at Harrison.”

I laughed. “Of course I’d want to be on it,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?” And then I thought of Audrey. She definitely wouldn’t, and I suddenly felt vain for wanting to be on a reality show about prettiness. “I mean, I’m not saying it’s the most important thing in the world, or anything like that.”

“It’s okay to be honest about what you want,” Leo said. “If you want to be on a show, you want to be on a show. You don’t need to be the cool girl around me.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” I said, but my words sounded untrue.

Leo opened the console between us and pulled out a green pack of gum. He offered me a piece, and when I took one, my fingertips brushed his. He glanced over and smiled, and then he popped a piece into his mouth. “Good,” he said, chewing the gum and filling the car with the smell of mint, “because I already like you.” His gray eyes sparked with something I couldn’t read, and my heart went wild with what he’d said and the way he was looking at me. A smile played on his lips right before he said: “And not just because you’re pretty.”

I
wanted to believe him.

I wanted to believe him so badly that by the time the Chicago skyline came into view, by the time we’d zigzagged past other drivers for miles and miles, by the time Leo pulled in front of Bubby’s Café and Pancake House—I did. I believed him. Totally and completely.

Leo opened my door and offered his hand to help me out of the Mustang. I stood on the sidewalk and took in the blue-and-white tiles framing the door and the diner-style glass windows. Fifties-era red lettering spelled
BUBBY
’
S
across the entrance. A chalkboard announced
All-You-Can-Eat Pancakes!
in blue chalk, and a life-size Marilyn Monroe statue stood above a sidewalk grate and blew us a kiss.

I’d been to Chicago so many times, but I’d never seen this place. My dad always took us to boring, stuffy
restaurants with starched white napkins and crystal water glasses. And any other ordinary guy who was trying to impress me on a first date would’ve taken me somewhere predictable, like the Parker House Hotel or some other fancy place. And even though that’s what I’d been expecting, as I looked through the glass windows to the diner’s red cushioned booths, I felt oddly relieved at Leo’s casual choice. I watched him plink quarters into the parking meter, and I felt like I was seeing him differently.

Leo looked up and laughed a little when he saw me staring at him. “I told you your jeans were okay,” he said, nodding toward the diner. He smiled, hooking his elbow through mine and guiding me toward the entrance. I felt shivers on my skin where he touched me, and I tried to relax, tried to remind myself that this wasn’t a big deal. He was just a guy, and I’d been out with lots of guys before.

Inside the diner, we crossed a black rubber mat and moved toward a freckled hostess with a nametag that read
CANDY
. The fluorescent lighting made her red hair look like it had caught on fire. She batted her lashes at Leo when he gave our names.

The diner smelled like maple syrup, and it was packed. We backed up next to a row of gumball machines.

“So do all girls love you?” I asked Leo when we were out of earshot of the hostess.

“I don’t know,” Leo said, playing dumb. “Do they?”

I felt myself blush, so I pretended to be interested in the gumball and plastic-toy machines. “The hostess does,” I said teasingly. We both looked back up at the hostess typing
away on a keyboard, her fake purple nails clacking against the keys. “She’s probably emailing her friends about you right now.”

“Or she’s finding us a table,” Leo said.

“Or uploading a photo of you to her Public Party Crushes Page.”

“Let’s hack her account and find out,” Leo said, grinning.

I knew he was joking, but I shuddered at the reminder that he knew how to do all the same hacking stuff that Audrey did. “Please don’t ever break in to my computer,” I said, running my fingers over the gumball machine’s cold metal dial marked
25 CENTS
. A skinny waitress flitted by, and I lowered my voice. “I know all about backdoor access capability from Audrey.”

Leo laughed. “Really?” he asked. “Audrey still does that kind of stuff?”

I sniffed. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe you should be more careful around that girl,” he said, his eyes on me.

I shot Leo a questioning look. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I knew Audrey way better than he did, and there was nothing to be careful about with Audrey. She could protect you and your secrets better than anyone else in the world. “And I thought you two were friends,” I said.

The sun poured through the glass windows onto Leo’s shoulders. He suddenly looked uncomfortable standing there with his back pressed against the gumball machine. “We are,” he said. “It just seems like it got contentious between the two of you for a while there.”

“Yeah, well. Things got complicated between our families when Audrey’s dad died,” I said, even though it was so much more than that. But I barely knew how to put it into words. I was still reeling from what had happened between Nic and me back then, and when Audrey’s dad died it was like she lost patience for the mean stuff I’d started doing. But wasn’t that part of high school? Weren’t mean girls supposed to rule with an iron fist?

If they think you’re weak, you already are
, my dad used to say to Nic and me.

I thought of Nic’s text about Sara’s Ugly Page. And then I thought about Sara crying at school yesterday, and I started to feel queasy.

“I’m talking about the Boyfriend App stuff,” Leo said as Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” came on over the juke box.

I raised an eyebrow. Was he really going to bring that up?

Piano chords danced through the restaurant. The old-timey sound made me picture waitresses in the fifties carting around trays of pancakes on roller skates like they did in the framed photographs on the wall.

“I read Public’s press releases, Blake,” Leo said. “You accused her of stealing the idea for the Boyfriend App from you.”

“There were other things at play,” I said, bristling.

If Leo wanted to know what I meant, he didn’t let on. He just stood there, staring at me, and then the hostess was back, smiling at Leo like a commercial for dental work.
“Right this way,” she said, leading us to a booth.

We slid onto the cushioned seats, and Leo changed the topic to a singer named Dave Wanamaker who was coming to play South Bend. “If you’ve never seen him, you have to,” Leo said. He tore the paper off his straw and popped it into his ice water. “There’s this one song called ‘Loveletter’ that will blow you away. His lyrics are amazing, and his band sounds different from anything else out there.”

I watched how bright his eyes got as he talked about the music and how his fingers tapped a rhythm on the table like he was drumming along to one of the songs in his head.

“Sounds like you like music almost as much as computers,” I said, squeezing a lemon slice into my water and licking my fingertips.

Leo nodded. “Definitely,” he said. “Music can take you to another place. You can be in one kind of mood, and then you turn on a certain song and you feel totally different.” He ran his thumb over the spiral that bound the thick menu. “What gets you like that?”

I took a sip of my water. “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I guess, in my house, there’s only one mood, and it’s usually the one my dad’s in. The rest of us just kind of stay out of his way.”

I’d said it quickly and without much thought. But as the truth of what I’d said sunk in, I felt indescribably sad.

Leo considered me carefully. “That doesn’t seem very fair.”

“It doesn’t, does it? But now that he wants to get into
politics, we’re all on an even tighter rein. I overheard him tell my mom that he needs to rehab mine and Nic’s images if we’re going to be a proper political family. He wants us to be his golden daughters or something.”

Leo shook his head. “Have you thought about what it will be like this fall, when you’re free of him?”

I wished it would be that easy. “I don’t think I’ll ever be free of him,” I said. “At least, not in college.” And then I said aloud a feeling I’d had for a long time, one that I’d never given words to. “Notre Dame is an amazing school, but I’ll still be under my father’s eye there. He lives five minutes away from campus, and he knows everyone. He’ll be monitoring what I do there, especially if he gets elected.” Anxiety shot through my body, and I felt my throat tighten with every breath. “I wouldn’t even have gotten accepted without his legacy there. It’s like there’s no escaping him, no matter what I do.”

“What if you just didn’t go to college?” Leo asked. He pinched his straw and jabbed at his ice cubes.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was so outrageous that I couldn’t even imagine what my parents would do if I suggested it. “Yeah, right,” I said. “What about you?” I asked. “Where do you want to go for college?”

Leo shrugged. “Nowhere as of now,” he said. “I might take a few more years off from school.”

“A few more years off?” I repeated, unsure of what he meant. “Have you already—”

“I just mean I need some time to think about what I
want,” Leo said quickly.

“Ready to order?” A waitress approached our table with a notepad, and I realized we’d never even opened our menus.

“What sounds good to you?” he asked me.

“Pancakes with bananas and whipped cream,” I said. It was what I always ordered at the pancake house in South Bend. A sure bet.

“We’ll have two coffees with skim milk and two orders of pancakes with bananas and whipped cream,” Leo told the waitress.

I smiled, feeling my anxiety melt a little. “We were fine when I was younger,” I told Leo when the waitress left. I pushed the long sleeves of my gray top over my elbows. My thin gold bangles jangled together with a soft clinking sound. “My dad and I, I mean.” I was surprised by how much I wanted to talk about things with someone I barely knew, but in some ways, that made it easier. Leo hadn’t known me for years, like the rest of the kids at school. And something about him made me feel like he wasn’t going to hold anything against me.

Leo folded his hands on the table and waited for me to go on.

“It’s almost like it would’ve been easier for him if I could’ve just stayed that way forever,” I said. “Young and pretty and quiet and perfect. That’s all he’s ever really wanted for me: to be a pretty little obedient girl. But I couldn’t always be that. It was like when I became a
teenager, I suddenly became flawed and capable of embarrassing him, and now he can hardly stand to be in the same room as me.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Leo said.

I tilted my chin, unsure of how that could be possible.

“It’s his own shit,” Leo said, running a hand over his jaw. “He’s the one putting that crap into your relationship, not you. You’ll always love each other, but he’s f-ing up the relationship with his baggage. He may or may not learn that, but it’s not your responsibility to fix him.”

He sounded like a teenage Trog version of Deepak Chopra, but he also sounded right. “How do you know stuff like that?” I asked him.

A smile spread over his smooth skin. “I’m from California, remember?” he said. “We take personal growth workshops before we’re in pre-K.”

I laughed. He was catching me unaware, and that hadn’t happened in a while. Everything in my relationship with Xander had followed a routine course. There was the lunchroom together, passing notes between classes, dates, make-outs. After a while, it all got a little boring. Something told me being with Leo would never, ever get boring.

“What are you thinking about?” Leo asked.

I felt myself redden, so I changed the topic back to California and we talked a little about Leo’s favorite places in LA for a while, until a waitress came and set down our pancakes.

Leo cut a slice of pancake even bigger than the one I
did. He dipped it in whipped cream and held it up close to mine. “Cheers,” he said, knocking them together. “To our day in Chicago.”

“To our day in Chicago,” I said as we locked eyes.

Leo let out a laugh. “And to people who surprise you,” he said, smiling that wide smile, his gray eyes bright.

“S
o what about your parents?” I asked Leo when we were back in the car, speeding past the Art Institute.

“Divorced,” he said.

The sun glinted on the car, and I reached for my sunglasses. “And that’s why you moved?”

A funny look crossed Leo’s face—something between embarrassment and impatience—but it was hard to tell if it was because of what I’d asked, or because of the drivers careening into our lane and making it hard for Leo to exit. My hair whipped across my face as Leo took a tight turn and cut off a silver BMW. The driver flipped us the bird and yelled something that sounded like: “
Kids!
”

We cruised into a garage across from Millennium Park. Leo got our ticket, and we didn’t say anything else until we were out of the garage and crossing the street.

“I know it’s a little cornball, but I wanted to do touristy
things with you,” Leo said as we walked into the entrance of the Lurie Garden.

“It’s not corny,” I said. “This is one of my favorite places.” My eyes swept across the urban oasis, the acres of garden flowers and greenery smack in the middle of downtown Chicago. I looked at Leo and saw that he was smiling.

Our feet padded along the wooden planks lining the walkway past a cluster of dark purple tulips. I breathed in the thick smell of grass and flowers. Two girls who looked like art students sat on the walkway with their sketchpads, each one making her own rendition of the tulips.

“My parents split when I was little,” Leo finally said. He opened his dark leather wallet and put the parking ticket inside. “My dad was a hippie.”

“Your dad was a hippie?” I asked, as we moved across a boardwalk that took us over stepped pools and five feet of exposed water.

“Yeah. Not a sixties hippie. A wannabe hippie. It was weird,” Leo said, laughing. He stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his chinos. “Now he sells insurance.”

I wanted to take Leo’s arm and lead him down to the step closest to the water. I just wanted to sit next to him, stare into the glistening pool, and listen to him talk. But I was too nervous to touch him. This all felt so perfect, and I worried I could somehow ruin it. I’d never felt so unsure of myself, or like every little detail mattered, and it scared me to think that someone I barely knew could make me feel this way.

We walked quietly past white daffodils and bright green
wild ginger. I liked how we didn’t need to fill the silence between us, and I liked how when we did speak to each other, what we said had substance. It made me think of how often I just chattered away at Harrison with Xander and my friends: how often I talked without really connecting to anyone. Something about Leo’s interest in me still felt a little off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe I was just being paranoid, or maybe I wasn’t used to someone like him. He felt different.

“So you live with your mom?” I asked. I stopped next to a patch of violet aster flowers and traced the thin, triangular petals.

Leo nodded, not meeting my glance. His hand grazed the flowers carefully, like they might break with his touch.

“And what about her—what does she do?”

“She doesn’t work anymore,” Leo said when we started walking again.

“So then why did you move to South Bend?” I felt nosy asking, but I really wanted to know. “And don’t you miss your friends?”

Leo shrugged. “It was just time for a change, I guess,” he said.

That was his mom’s reason for moving from California to South Bend? I wanted to press him, but I didn’t. Families were complicated: Maybe there was something he wasn’t ready to tell me yet.

The early spring sun was bright as we walked along the Seam, the corridor between the light and dark sections. They were called plates, and they were like two different
worlds of the garden. The Dark Plate was filled with lush vegetation set free to grow wild and unrestrained. It made for a dramatic contrast with the Light Plate, which was filled with bright, controlled landscaping. Last year I tried to write a paper on the Garden, focusing on the plates and the West Hedge, a topiary that told the Greek story of the nymph who escaped from Apollo by becoming a laurel tree. But I couldn’t get into words the way the garden made me feel, the way it took me into its care and ushered me through the four seasons of change like we had a relationship all our own. I got a C on that paper. It made me never want to write about anything meaningful to me again.

“Does it bother you that I’m not smart?” I asked Leo.

It came out quickly, and I couldn’t look at Leo after I’d said it. Still, I felt him turn to me. He stopped walking, but I couldn’t. I walked ahead on the Seam and left him standing there.

“Blake?” he called. I heard his feet clap the wood as he closed the distance between us. Then, more urgently, he said, “
Blake
.”

He grabbed my hand and I whirled to face him. I stared into his steel-gray eyes, searching for my answer there, but I couldn’t find it. I hardly recognized his face so still and hard.

“There are a lot of different kinds of
smart
,” he said, his hand warm around mine.

I was suddenly very okay with how close we were and how it felt to have him touching me.

“You’re still in high school,” he said. He cleared his
throat. “
We’re
still in high school.” His grip tightened. I didn’t want him to let me go. “So you only know about
high school smart
,” he said, “which is how you do on tests, which is totally different from all of the other kinds of smarts there are out in the real world.”

I nodded slowly. A part of me knew he was right—I could feel it, especially here, in the garden, in Chicago, far away from Harrison and my father and my world in South Bend.

Leo lowered his voice. “You just need to think about what you want to be,
who
you want to be.” His hand dropped mine and he stepped closer, gently taking my arms in his grip. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” he said. “But I don’t really get the impression that you even like who you are. At least, not the person you are at school.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. My eyes started blinking fast, and I knew I was a breath away from tears. “But this is who I am,” I said, my voice rasping over the words. “I’ve been this way for so long.” And I could go on being this way for so much longer if that’s what I wanted. I could go to Notre Dame in the fall and be the beautiful, bitchy ice queen for four more years.

Leo shook his head. “Then why are you so different today, here with me, when we’re all alone?”

He’d put his finger on something I couldn’t name. Today with Leo, far away from school, I was the way I used to be with Audrey when we were alone in her room, or the way I used to be with Nic when we were younger. I was unguarded. I was softer. I was kind, even. And I felt
free
. I wasn’t worried about what anyone thought about me, and I wasn’t hanging on so tightly to my place at school.

“I used to be different,” I said, my voice still rough. “I used to be normal. And kind.”

“Normal’s overrated,” Leo said. “But kind isn’t.” He nudged a pebble on the Seam with his shiny brown shoe. And then he pulled me so close I could smell his sweet and salty boy smell. “Change back,” he said softly.

I suddenly felt exhausted. I wasn’t even sure how we’d gotten to this place, to this conversation. I wanted to lean my head against Leo’s chest and close my eyes. But instead I pulled back and looked into his face. “Why do you care?” I asked.

Leo smiled, but he didn’t answer, so I pressed him. “I mean it,” I said. “You barely know me.”

He loosened his grip on my body, which was the last thing I wanted. “I guess there’s something about you,” he said. He gave me a small shrug, and then kicked at the stone again. “You kind of remind me of how I used to be. I used to care so much about being the best programmer that I would’ve done anything to outshine everyone I programmed with—even stuff I shouldn’t have. I did do some of that stuff, and I got into trouble.” He ran a hand through his light hair. “There were these people who got me out of it, and I’m trying to be better.”

A shadow passed over us as the sun ducked behind dove-white clouds. I didn’t completely understand what he was trying to tell me.

Leo gave me a long look, almost like he wasn’t sure how far he wanted to take this with me. But then he let out a breath and started talking. “I was in
a lot
of trouble,” he said. “I was only fifteen—still a kid, really—but doing stuff I wasn’t supposed to be doing. They found out, and they didn’t report me.”

I nodded. I didn’t ask him what he’d done—I didn’t need to know. If he wanted to tell me, he would.

“Maybe we can be each other’s clean slate,” I said. If Leo could change, why couldn’t I?

Leo grinned. “Clean slate,” he said, nodding. “I like that.” But then the grin disappeared. He lowered his voice as a group of elementary school kids wearing neon-yellow T-shirts paraded past us along the Seam. “There are things I should still tell you,” he said. “I mean, maybe not now. But at some point. If we keep hanging out.”

If we keep hanging out.
I loved the sound of it. I wanted to memorize the way he said it, the way it felt to hear the words pour out of him.

Leo held my hand all the way through Millennium Park until we were face-to-face with the Bean.

“Whoa,” Leo said. He took in the enormous silver sculpture and nodded appreciatively, checking out the buildings and people reflected on the surface. “All the surfaces must be convex,” he said.

He looked over at me and I giggled. “What?” he asked.

“That was cute and dorky,” I said.

“Oh, I’m a dork all right,” he said, laughing. He grabbed my waist and pulled me close. “And I plan to dorkify the
coolest girl in school,” he said. He leaned in to whisper, “That would be you.”

His lips brushed my cheek and I shivered.

Tourists sidled next to us, raising their cameras to snap photos and calling to each other in languages I didn’t recognize.

“Let’s go under,” I said. I took Leo’s hand and guided him beneath the cavernous stomach of the sculpture, where it was a lot less crowded. Even in the small space, with him, I didn’t feel anxious. I looked up and saw Leo and me reflected in the Bean’s glossy surface, our reflections warped. The sculpture made me short and round. The angles in my face were all but lost, and I looked like some kind of blob. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t stop staring at the alternate version of myself. I saw Leo reflected, too, and the way he stared back at me in the mirror, smiling at our foreign alter egos. We were barely recognizable. If I’d been born this way, my life would’ve been entirely different, which made it all seem like a total crapshoot. Something so random as genes could make or break your social experience and how other people treated you. Did it have to be this way? Did it stop being this way after high school? After college? Ever?

Our heads were still tilted up, both of us staring into the sculpture, when Leo traced the distorted outline of my face. He was touching my real skin, but we were both watching his hands move over my warped skin in the mirrored reflection. I watched as he inched forward, bent down, and covered my lips with his. And then my eyes closed, and I
suddenly didn’t care which version of me Leo was kissing. My heart went wild as his mouth opened, warm on mine as he pressed his body against me.

“Leo,” I said softly when he pulled away a few manic heartbeats later. I opened my eyes and let my gaze settle on his full mouth. I touched the blond stubble on his jaw and looked into his eyes, seeing shades of blue-gray come to life as he stared back at me.

Schoolchildren paraded beneath the sculpture and chattered away, pointing at their reflections and taking photos, but Leo and I never once broke our stare, not until the kids marched out the other side and left us alone, not until Leo smiled one of his small smiles, different from the others I’d seen, and leaned forward and kissed me again and again and again, until everything around me quieted and the only thing I could feel was us.