Unfriended (4 page)

“He’s good,” I said, and Ruth shook her head, smiling.

“You two,” she said. “So cute.”

“So?” Lisa asked, leaning forward. “Have you said it yet?”

Schuyler frowned. “Said what?”

“One-four-three,” Lisa said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Have you?”

Ruth turned to me and Schuyler hoisted up the brim of her hat, their expressions expectant.

One-four-three was Lisa’s code for “I love you,” derived from the number of letters in each word. We’d been using it a lot around six months ago, when Lisa became fixated on if Dave was going to say it to her, or if she should say it first, and what it would mean if she did, and what would happen if she said it and he didn’t say it back. Finally, she and Dave had exchanged one-four-threes. Lisa still claimed that Dave said it to her first, but we disputed this, as technically she’d said it first to him—just in French.

I shook my head, wishing that Lisa hadn’t brought this up. One-four-three had been on my mind altogether too much lately. When I’d initially asked Lisa how she had known that she loved Dave, she had just shrugged
with one shoulder and told me that she just
knew
. At the time, I’d found it an entirely unsatisfactory answer, but now I finally understood what she meant.

It had happened a little over a week ago. Nate and I had just had dinner at The Good Person of Szechuan, my favorite Chinese restaurant. As we were heading out to his truck, he walked around to the passenger side and held my door open for me, then closed it after I got in. And as I watched him get behind the wheel, buckle his seat belt, and look over and smile at me, I realized that I loved him. It was that simple. Like the fact had just marched into my brain, waving a tiny YOU LOVE NATE sign, and was now refusing to be ignored. It turned out that Lisa had been right—when you felt it, you
did
just know.

“No,” I said, as I realized all my friends were still looking at me, waiting for an answer. “We haven’t said it.”

“But do you?” Schuyler asked, batting her brim away.

I could feel my face heat up as I looked down at the blue-and-white stripes of my towel. “Yes,” I muttered.

Schuyler clapped her hands together excitedly. “I knew it,” she said, turning to Lisa. “Told you!”

Lisa sighed, rummaged around in her purse, and tossed a five-dollar bill onto Schuyler’s towel. “
D’accord
,” she muttered.

“Wait,” I said, staring down at the bill, “did you guys have a
wager
going?”

“So why haven’t you said it yet?” Ruth interjected quickly, clearly trying to distract me. But it worked.

I brushed the sand off my hands, then brushed that sand off the towel. “I don’t know,” I murmured. I looked around at my friends and realized that if I could talk to anyone about this, it was them. “It’s just … things are really great with us right now. And I don’t want to rock the boat.” I saw Schuyler flinch, as she had been doing recently whenever we mentioned anything vaguely nautical. “Sorry, Shy,” I said quickly. “I mean … I don’t want to do anything that might change things. And it’s a big deal, right?”

We all looked at Lisa, the only one who had said it to someone who wasn’t a family member. I braced myself for another
my-relationship-is-beaucoup-mature
lecture, but Lisa just nodded. “It is,” she said softly.

“And also, what if he doesn’t say it back?” I continued. “I totally understand now why Lisa was freaking out so much.”

“I wasn’t freaking out—” Lisa started, a little huffily.

“OMG,” Schuyler said, eyes widening. “If you said it and he didn’t say it back … what then? Is there any way to recover from that? Would you guys have to break up, or something?”

I felt my stomach clench. “Don’t say that,” I said quickly. There had been a moment, during the planning of Promgate, when I’d had to confront what it might be like to lose Nate. And the idea had shaken me so much that I tried as hard as I could never to think about it.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ruth said soothingly. “I mean, you guys have only been together three months. There’s no rush to say it.”

“Right,” I said, trying to smile. But ever since the fact that I loved Nate had taken up residence in my brain, it was getting harder and harder
not
to say it to him. Like every time we were together and I didn’t tell him, it felt like a tiny lie. “But anyway,” I said, trying to change the subject, “maybe I should go say hi to Mark. He’s probably getting lonely.”

“I’m sure there are other people on the beach who can visit him,” Schuyler said, scrolling through her phone. “Like Jimmy or Liz, or—” Her face turned pale, which was saying something, considering she was already sporting a layer of thick white sunblock. “OMG,” she whispered, and I noticed that the ShyPhone was shaking in her hand.

“What is it?” Lisa asked, leaning closer to her.

“Connor,” Schuyler choked out. “He’s at Stubbs.” She looked at us, stricken, and I tried to approximate a suitably horrified expression.

“How dare he,” I said. “Because that was … um … your special coffee shop?”

“It’s not that,” Schuyler said. “Roberta Briggs is there, too. And they’ve
aligned
.”

I felt my expression shift to one of genuine concern. Roberta Briggs had been considered the hottest girl in school since approximately fourth grade. And because of this, most guys were much too intimidated to actually talk to her, so she was consistently, and worryingly, single.

“But maybe they’re just both there,” Lisa said, trying to take the phone away from Schuyler, who was still
holding a death grip on it. “It doesn’t mean that they’re there together.
Pas du tout
.”

“But it
might
mean they’re there together,” Schuyler said, still holding on to the ShyPhone as Lisa tugged harder. “It doesn’t
not
mean that!”

As I watched Schuyler’s stricken, pale face, I realized that this was the problem with Constellation. Because it just gave people’s locations, without any context, it could lead to this kind of jumping to conclusions and worry when it probably didn’t mean anything other than two people happening to be at the same place at the same time.

“Shy,” I said, and as she looked over at me, Lisa took the opportunity to wrest Schuyler’s phone away from her. “Don’t you think that maybe you should talk to Connor? You clearly miss him….”

I heard Ruth draw in a breath, and Lisa frowned at me. We had all tacitly agreed not to bring up this possibility anymore, as the last time we’d tried, it had culminated in a crying jag so intense we’d had to make a midnight run to CVS for tissues and Gatorade, to prevent Shy from getting dehydrated.

“I can’t do that,” Schuyler said, shaking her head hard enough that her braid whacked the side of her face and got stuck in the sunblock for a moment. “You know that, Mad. You know he’d never forgive what … what I did.”

I felt Lisa’s and Ruth’s eyes slide over to me, and I found myself wishing, a moment too late, that I’d just brought this up with Schuyler privately. I kept forgetting
that the Connor breakup had its roots in a secret that only Schuyler and I knew.

Promgate had started, in large part, because of something that Schuyler had done at Choate three years before, involving a cheating scandal. Since Connor prided himself on his “uncompromising ethics”—which he’d even put in his campaign literature when he ran against me for senior class secretary—Schuyler had refused to tell him about what had happened at Choate, knowing that they would break up if he found out. But they had broken up anyway, because he had gotten tired of Schuyler obviously keeping things from him. When I’d seen how miserable Schuyler was after their breakup, I’d begun to suggest that maybe she just tell him what had happened, since at this point it couldn’t really hurt.

“What are you talking about?” Lisa asked, looking from Schuyler to me, eyebrows raised.

“Because of the prom,” I said quickly, looking at Schuyler. “Right?”

“Right,” she agreed a little too emphatically. “Because of the prom.” I saw Lisa look between us again, clearly not convinced. If it had been up to me, I would have told both Lisa and Ruth what had happened. But it wasn’t up to me, and Schuyler hadn’t wanted any more people than necessary to know.

“Speaking of the prom,” Ruth said, lowering her voice, causing all of us to move a little closer, “any … news?”

I knew what Ruth was really asking—if Isabel Ryan had surfaced again. Isabel, who went to Hartfield High,
was connected with Schuyler and the drama at Choate. Promgate had been necessary because she’d blackmailed Schuyler into giving her our prom queen crown. We’d gotten it back, but along the way had realized that Isabel had been working in tandem with Dell—who, it turned out, was her cousin. Isabel had wanted to get revenge on Schuyler, Dell had wanted to get revenge on me—and for good measure, on Ruth as well. Although I’d previously had no issues with Isabel, after Promgate, it became clear that she blamed me not only for thwarting her revenge plans but for wrecking her prom.

Ever since then, I had been living with a kind of low-grade anxiety that Isabel would suddenly pop up at the least opportune moment—like when I was struggling through my AP History final, for example. But the school year had ended without incident. As a precaution, I’d added her to my Constellation list—it made me a little more comfortable to know where she was. Which, since school had let out, was Nantucket.

“No sign of her,” I said, and it seemed like my three friends let out a collective sigh of relief. “I think she’s finally gone back to her cabin of evil, or fortress of solitude, or wherever it is she normally spends her time.”

My phone beeped with a text, and I grabbed for it, hoping it would be my boyfriend, and feeling myself smile when I saw it was.

INBOX 1 of 28
From: Nate
Date: 6/20, 4:45
P.M.
OMG! Double feature tonite at the drive-in. Want to go on a date with me, gf?

I shook my head and smiled again. Nate thought my love of TLAs and slang was ridiculous, and I knew this text was just his way of teasing me. I started to send back an OMG TOTES text, then paused, my hand hovering over my keypad. I had promised to hang out with my friends tonight. We hadn’t planned anything specific, but since our work schedules were all different, it was harder during the summer to get together than it was during the year. But it’s not like we’d had ironclad plans or anything. And I knew they’d understand.

OUTBOX 1 of 34
To: Nate
Date: 6/20, 4:47
P.M.

Sounds like a plan, bf. See u in an hour?

“Don’t tell me,” Lisa said, and I looked up from my phone. “Nate?”

“Nate,” I said. I dropped my phone and sunglasses in my bag. “He wants to see a movie tonight, so I should probably head home to get ready.”

Lisa’s mouth dropped open, Schuyler bit her lip, and Ruth turned to me in surprise.

“I, um, thought we had plans to hang out tonight,” Schuyler said tentatively.

“
Qui
,” Lisa said, frowning. “We did.”

“I know,” I said. “But here’s the thing: I’m always going to have you guys. We’ll be together all of next year. But Nate is going to school in the fall.” I felt a lump in my throat begin to form, but I pushed on past it. “We’re going to be in an LDR.” Schuyler frowned, and I clarified, “Long distance relationship.”

“You’ll still see Nate, though,” Ruth said encouragingly. “Yale’s only forty-five minutes away.”

“But he’ll be at
college
,” Schuyler murmured, like she was only just now putting this together.

“With college girls who put out,” Lisa added.

“Exactly,” I said, but then a moment later, her words hit me. “Wait. What?”

“Go,” Ruth said, smiling at me. “Have fun with Nate.”

“Yes. Abandon us,” Schuyler said dramatically. A second later, her forehead creased. “I didn’t really mean that, Mad. I was just kidding. It’s fine that you go.”

Lisa sighed. “
Allons-y
,” she said. “But just don’t turn into one of those girls,
d’accord?”

I shook my head quickly. “Don’t worry.” We had great scorn in our group for “those girls,” the ones who abandoned their friends whenever they got into a relationship. But I wasn’t being one of those girls. I was just hanging out with my boyfriend while I still could. My friends were always going to be around, after all.

“And I’m going to get a water,” Schuyler said, smoothing out her new five-dollar bill. “Or maybe French fries. So I’ll go to Mark’s stand and say hi for all of us.”

“
Bonne idée
,” Lisa said to her. “But I vote for French fries.”

“Second,” Ruth piped up.

I finished tossing things into my beach bag and was preparing to head out when Schuyler looked at me in alarm. “Mad,” she said. “We were supposed to figure out a date that we could do the bonfire. Remember? We’d planned on figuring it out
today
.”

I sighed inwardly. When Schuyler fixated on something, she didn’t let it go easily. And this summer, that something was The Bonfire.

Putnam Beach closed at sunset every night. But once a month, it stayed open until midnight, and you could reserve your own little patch of beach and have a bonfire, or stargaze, or go night swimming. Because this was super popular, you had to reserve way in advance, and we’d never managed to get organized enough to pull it off. But Schuyler seemed determined that this would finally be the summer of the bonfire. However, organizing this was harder than it sounded, as our extended friend group was big and a little unwieldy, and it was very hard to figure out a date that everyone would be around for.

“Right,” I said. I glanced down at the time on my phone, aware of how quickly it was ticking by. “Let’s figure it out tomorrow, okay, Shy? I don’t want to be late.”

I saw Schuyler’s pale face fall for a moment, but then she nodded. “Sure,” she said. “But we
have
to do it this summer. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“We will,” Ruth said, nodding at her.

“
Bien sûr
,” Lisa said, tossing her sunglasses down
onto her Eiffel Tower towel. She pulled her copy of French
Vogue
out of her purse and opened it, pointing out a picture on the page. “Now. Opinions,
s’il vous plaît
. What do we think of this haircut?”