“Is that your next task?” Cooper asks.
“Yes,” I say. Wait a minute. If I’m already getting what I’m supposed to do next, it means that the 318s must realize that I’ve completed the last thing they told me to do. “Did you tell them I made out with Nigel?” I ask Cooper.
“Yeah,” he says. He shifts in his seat.
“Good,” I say.
“Although I probably should have told them it shouldn’t count as a task, since you seemed to kind of like it.” There’s a sharpness in his voice, and if I didn’t know better, I would think that Cooper was jealous. And then I remember. Cooper always had this … thing with Nigel. One night when we were all hanging out, Marissa let it slip that I used to like Nigel, and ever since then Cooper always seemed super-competitive with him.
“Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot about how you’re jealous of Nigel.” I roll my window down and let the cool night air rush into the car, blowing my hair back from my face.
“Jealous? Of Nigel Rickson, are you kidding me?” Cooper signals and pulls onto the highway. “The kid wears his jeans so low you can see his boxers. How 1990s is that?”
“I think it’s hot,” I say. Which isn’t totally a lie. I did think it was kind of hot at one point, and I’m not sure what I think about it now. Not totally hot, maybe, but it really doesn’t bother me that much either. I mean, it’s his style. He owns it.
“Are you kidding me?” Cooper says again. “So lame.” He shakes his head. From the backseat, I can hear Clarice now on the phone, talking away. There’s silence for a few minutes, punctuated only by Clarice saying, “I know … I know, totally.”
Until finally, Cooper says, “Girls are crazy.”
“Oh, hello, Random Thoughts That Make No Sense,” I say. “I’m Eliza.”
“I mean that girls are crazy if they think that Nigel Rickson is hot.”
“He’s a good kisser,” I say.
“No, he isn’t,” Cooper says. He sounds shocked. I steal a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. His eyebrows are knit together in concentration and confusion.
“How would you know?” I ask. “Have you kissed him?”
“No, I haven’t kissed him,” Cooper says, rolling his eyes.
“Then why did you say he wasn’t a good kisser?”
“Because a guy like that knows nothing about what girls want.”
“A guy like what?”
“A guy who says dope and fly and thinks he’s Eminem,” Cooper says.
“As opposed to a guy who drives a BMW and does whatever his dumb, super-lame friends think? That kind of guy really knows what girls want?”
That shuts him up for a second, and I turn and look out the window again. I think about how it used to feel to be in this car, when Cooper and I would go for rides, to anywhere and everywhere. We’d look up the best places to get ice cream on Yelp, then plug the address into his GPS and go, not caring if we had to drive for miles. We’d give all the sundaes points for taste, size, and flavor. And now … here I am, in the car for what is probably going to be the last time, ever, and it’s for the worst reason ever, and that makes me really sad, and I hate myself for even being sad a little bit about it, because Cooper Marriatti is the biggest jerk in the whole world.
“Does this mean you’re speaking to me?” Cooper wants to know.
“What do you mean?” I ask, turning back toward him. His jaw is set in a straight line, and he’s gripping the steering wheel with two hands, looking straight ahead.
“Well, last time I talked to you before tonight, you said you never wanted to speak to me again,” he says. “And now you’re speaking to me.”
“I am speaking to you, out of necessity,” I say. “Otherwise, no, I am not speaking to you.”
“Ever again?”
“Ever again.”
“Unless it’s out of necessity?”
“Yes. I mean, no.”
“No, you won’t speak to me, even if it’s out of necessity?”
“Yes, because I don’t foresee any circumstances in which talking to you would be a necessity.”
“None?”
“None.”
“But I’ll bet you didn’t foresee this circumstance, so how can you really say for sure that you won’t encounter another circumstance in which you will be forced to speak to me out of necessity?”
“I can’t,” I say. “But I can say with 99.999 percent accuracy that I will not be talking to you again, out of necessity or otherwise.”
“But what if,” he says, “I somehow became best friends with Nigel Rickson?”
“What if you did?” I say. “I would not want to talk to you even then.”
“But what if you needed me to relay a message to him, like if you wanted him so badly that you just couldn’t control yourself, and you needed him to know that you were lusting after him, and so you wanted me to tell him for you?”
“That would never happen,” I say happily. “And if you want to know why, it’s because I have already successfully hooked up with Nigel, and it took me about twenty minutes with no help from you, thank you very much.”
“Okay,” Cooper says agreeably. “But what if you and Nigel fall in love, and Nigel and I become BFFs, and then you guys get married, and Nigel wants me to be the best man, and you and I have to talk about the wedding plans?”
“That would never happen, because since Nigel would be so in love with me, he would have dumped you as a BFF as soon as we got engaged and/or told you you were not allowed to be best man at our wedding, per my wishes.”
“Yes, but—”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Did you just say ‘BFF’?”
“Yes,” he says. He looks at me and shrugs. “I’ve been watching a lot of Disney Channel.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Sarah’s had it on a lot lately,” he says. “And I don’t have the heart to ask her to change the station.” Sarah is his eleven-year-old sister. She is obsessed with all things Hannah Montana.
“Sounds fun,” I say. I roll my eyes and try to sound all sarcastic, but the thing is, it kind of does sound fun. Hanging out with Cooper and his sister, who I adore, watching TV and eating snacks, lip-synching to Hannah Montana songs and critiquing her outfits. Not that Cooper lip-synchs to Hannah Montana songs. Although … he did do that JT song earlier like it was the most natural thing in the world. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and try to picture him doing “The Climb.”
“It’s not as fun,” he says, “as watching hip-hop videos with Nigel.”
“Well, nothing is as fun as that,” I say. “Nigel would teach me how to do all the hip-hop dances.”
Cooper nods sagely. “Probably even crumping.”
“Are you kidding?” I ask. “Especially crumping. That’s, like, the staple of Nigel’s dance knowledge.”
Cooper looks at me and smiles, and I smile back. Are we flirting? Ohmigod. I think we are. For a second, I almost even forgot that Clarice was in the backseat. Which is definitely not a good sign. I can’t just go around forgetting that my best friend is in the backseat; I’m supposed to be staying on task here.
And I definitely cannot just start flirting with Cooper, joking around with him about crumping and hip-hop dancing and all manner of tween shows on Disney!
I look at him suspiciously. This is just what he wants me to do! He wants me to lose my focus, he wants me to trust him, just like I did before, so that at the very moment he has me where he wants me, he can pull the rug out from under me and watch while it all goes crashing down.
I remind myself again that Cooper is despicable, that not only did he date me on a dare, he then turned me in to the school for what I wrote about him on the Internet.
“So what’s your next task?” Cooper asks. But I’m over it and not going to be nice anymore.
“Like you don’t already know,” I say snottily.
“I don’t.” We’re in Newton now, and Cooper’s signaling and pulling down a side street.<
br />
“Is this Tyler’s street?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Cooper says. “We’re almost there.” He’s slowing down now. “So I’ll probably just let you off at the top of the street, so that they don’t catch us together.”
“Fine,” I say, mostly because I don’t have any other choice.
“So what is it?” he asks.
“What’s what?”
“What’s the next thing you have to do?”
“Stop acting like you don’t know,” I say. “It’s not you and me against them; it’s all of you against me.” From the backseat, I hear Clarice say, “Bye, Jamesers, kisses!”
“And Clarice is on my side too,” I say proudly.
“Are we here?” she asks, leaning forward. “Thanks for the tunes, Coop.”
“My pleasure,” Cooper says.
“Stop being nice to him,” I demand. “And yes, we’re here. Well, we’re sort of here.” I look around at where we are. A nice, quiet street in nice, quiet Newton, where everyone has a golden retriever and all the houses look the same.
“Are you going to tell me or not?” Cooper asks, ignoring my remark about Clarice not being nice to him.
“Tell him what?” Clarice asks.
“What the 318s want me to do next.”
“Oooh,” she says, reaching into her purse for a piece of gum. “What do they want you to do next?” She holds out the pack of gum, and I take a slice. For a second, Clarice looks like she’s thinking about offering one to Cooper, but I shoot her a look, and she puts the gum back into her purse without a word.
“Post pictures of myself on Lanesboro Losers,” I say.
“But you already have a picture of yourself on LL,” she says. “It’s that really cute one that your mom took of you at the zoo last year.” The picture in question is me, standing next to a llama who is leaning his head down next to me, licking my face. And it wasn’t at the zoo, it was at this fair my mom dragged me to that just happened to have a petting zoo. For some reason she thought it would be super-funny to get a picture of me next to one of the animals, and the llama just happened to be the closest one.
“It wasn’t at the zoo,” I say. “It was a street fair.”
Cooper snorts next to me, like he thinks it’s funny.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
“I think it’s cute,” he says. “The pic, I mean. Not the fact that you were at the zoo. Well, actually no, the zoo thing’s cute too.”
“Shut up,” I say again. “I was NOT. AT. THE. ZOO. And anyway,” I say to Clarice. “They want something a little more, uh, racy.”
“Oooh,” she says, nodding.
Cooper frowns. “What do you mean, racy?”
My phone rings then, and I check the caller ID. Marissa. “Hello?” I say.
“Eliza!” she says. “Oh my God, where have you been?” Which makes no sense, since we’re the ones who’ve been looking for her. “I’ve been calling you for like three million minutes.”
“I dunno,” I say. “I’ve been right here, maybe my phone didn’t have service or something.”
“Well, what’s going on? I got Clarice’s message and I was trying to call her, but of course THAT didn’t work.”
“Marissa was trying to call you,” I tell Clarice. She checks her phone.
“Oh,” she says. “I guess I wasn’t hearing the beeps while I was talking to Jamie.”
Sigh.
“Anyway,” I say. “We’re at Tyler’s house in Newton, trying to steal my notebook back.”
“How did you get there?” she asks.
“Cooper drove us,” I admit.
“What?!” she screeches. “That low-down, good-for-nothing jerk drove you there? Why?” She’s yelling so loudly that I’m sure Cooper can hear her, but I don’t even care.
“Um, because we couldn’t find you,” I say. “Where are you now?”
“I was with Jeremiah,” she says. “Out on Isabella’s terrace. I’m so sorry, I thought you knew where I was! But he had to go home for a second, and so when I got your message, I started heading for home.”
“We’re on Elm Lane in Newton,” I say. “Come meet.”
“Be there in five,” she says. She hangs up.
“She’s going to come and meet us,” I say.
“All right,” Cooper says. “The more the merrier, I guess.”
“Thanks for the permission,” I say sarcastically.
It’s not the most biting of remarks, but for some reason it seems to shut him up, and we all sit in silence for the next few minutes, waiting for Marissa. Well, except “Clarice’s Jams,” which is still pumping through the stereo system.
I watch the light streaming from a street lamp and try not to think about how I’m going to get the courage to post pictures of myself in a bikini on Lanesboro Losers. Instead, I think about how, if I can somehow figure out a way to get the notebook back, I won’t have to do that.
Finally, after what seems like forever but is probably only a few minutes, headlights pull up behind us, and Marissa strolls up to Cooper’s car.
“Hello, girls,” she says. She ignores Cooper, which makes me happy.
“Hi,” I say. I open the door and get out of the car.
“Hey,” Cooper says, getting out as well. “Where are you going?”
“We’re going to get my notebook back,” I say. Honestly. Why am I so upset about him not being my boyfriend anymore? I mean, he’s obviously ridiculously stupid. He doesn’t even remember the plan and we just made it thirty minutes ago.
“I know that,” he says. “But do you remember what I told you?”
“Yeah, about how his basement window is open,” I say, waving my hand. “How hard can it be?”
“Okay, when you get to his house,” he says, “there’s going to be one window open, on the side of the house closest to us.”
“Okay,” I say.
“There will be a chair underneath the window, so step onto that to get down into the basement so that you don’t get hurt. Once you’re in there, go to the back corner—you’ll see a circle of chairs, and in the middle of it will be a black box. Go into the box and get the notebook.”
“Are you sure it’s there?” Marissa asks, acknowledging him for the first time.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m sure.”
“Wouldn’t Tyler have it with him?” I ask. “So that he would know what to torture me with next?”
“No,” he says. “He figured you’d probably at some point come up with the idea of getting it back, so he decided to keep it at home.” He looks down at the ground. “He, uh, was afraid you might hire one of your sister’s friends to kick his ass.”
Hmm, now that I think about it, that’s not that bad of an idea. “That’s not that bad of an idea,” I say. “Kate has a lot of friends on the football team, guys who do a lot of steroids and have rage problems. Guys who really need to take their aggression out on someone and would probably be happy to take it out on anyone who messed with me. For free, even.” I look him right in the eye and hope he gets that I’m talking about him and not Tyler.
He doesn’t say anything.
“All right,” I say. “If this is a trick—”
“It’s not,” he says. He’s looking right in my eyes, and I have no choice but to believe him.
“Now,” I say, turning to Clarice and Marissa. “One of you is coming with me, and one of you is staying here.”
“Why?” Marissa asks at the same time Clarice says, “I want to stay here.”
“Because there’s less chance of us getting caught if there’s only two of us, and if this is a trick, one of you has to stay here so that she can tell the authorities all the pertinent information when the other two of us end up murdered and/or maimed.”
Clarice gets a shocked look on her face, and her hands fly up to her nose. Clarice had a nose job a couple of years ago, and now she’s super-paranoid about something bad happening to it that would mess it up. I guess a maiming qualifies.
<
br /> Marissa, however, looks unperturbed. “Like they’re going to kill us right in Tyler’s house.” She looks at Cooper, then walks over to him and pokes her finger right into his chest. “You better not be fucking with us.”
He holds his hands up and takes a step back.
“Okay,” she says, sliding the hair tie off her wrist. She gathers her hair in a sloppy ponytail, slides her cell phone into her pocket, then hands her purse to Clarice. “You hold this while I’m gone.”
“And don’t be nice to Cooper,” I command her. “And if you see anything weird, like if Tyler starts coming, or you get spooked by anything, anything at all, call my cell and warn us. Got it?”
“Got it,” Clarice says. She gives me a determined nod but I’m still a little nervous.
Marissa and I start tromping down the street, looking out for Tyler’s house, number 22.
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s number 223. Why the hell would Cooper park so far away?”
“Because,” Marissa says, “he wanted to save his own ass of course, so he parked far away so that no one will see him. He doesn’t give a crap if me and you have to walk and walk and walk.” She doesn’t seem tired, though, and she’s taking long strides, so long that I’m struggling to keep up with her.
The houses go by faster than I thought, and before I know it, we’re standing outside number 22, a white house with a huge sprawling porch with four rocking chairs on it.
“Why do they need so many rocking chairs?” I ask, frowning.
“Dunno,” Marissa says. “Probably so they can all sit out there and pretend to be a big happy family and not even realize that their son is King of the Assholes.”
“Probably,” I agree. Now that I’m here, actually faced with the house and the task that’s before us, I’m starting to lose my nerve. What seemed like a wonderful opportunity, something I could do to get out of this whole mess, now seems like a horrible, scary plan. I mean, think of all the things that could go wrong.
Then I notice that almost every light in Tyler’s house is on, shining out into the night.
“All the lights are on,” I whisper to Marissa.
“Yeah, so?” she says.
“So … maybe he’s here.”