We’re walking toward the food court when Asha grabs my sleeve and says, “Hey.”
She points to a window display where there are Barbie-shaped mannequins lined up, dressed in tight, flashy, fashionable formal dresses.
“Can we look?” she asks. “Just a look. Really.”
I roll my eyes a little but follow her in. This store, Athena, is a hotbed for teen girls looking to catch up on the latest trends. At least eighty percent of my own wardrobe originates from here.
Asha fingers her way through a rack of dresses toward the back of the store. She pulls some out—ranging from the pretty to the god-awful, and all of them way too big for her tiny frame—and holds the hangers up to her chin. One in particular is just a crime against fashion, and for that matter, all laws of nature—this horrible shade of orange with poofy sleeves and a giant bow at the hip. Tacky to the max.
“What do you think?” she asks, trying to keep a straight face but barely suppressing a grin. “Fabulous, right?” She spins in a circle with the dress pressed to her front, and we both laugh.
My laugh stops short, however, when I turn my head and catch sight of Kristen Courteau all of six feet away. She has a few dresses draped over her arm and is staring at me.
The funny thing—not ha ha funny, but, you know—is that she looks shocked. Upset, even. Only for about two seconds, of course, before she masks her expression with her default bitchy face. The perfect look for an ice princess, I can’t help but think nastily.
Except my feelings toward Kristen aren’t all nasty. They’re… complicated, like everything else in my life. Because, stupidly, I miss her. Even with everything that happened. Even if our friendship was never the same after she hooked up with Warren. All I want at this moment is for her to look at me and smile like she used to. The smile that made me feel important, because Kristen is important, because people want to look like her, date her, be her, and she chose me as her best friend, so that had to mean something.
And maybe she meant some of that crap in the article, about how bad she felt about what happened to Noah, and it wasn’t just damage control. Part of me wants to believe she does. I want to believe that I wouldn’t ever be friends with someone completely heartless.
Tessa steps out from one of the dressing rooms. “You should totally buy the pink one,” she says. “It’s so hot. Brendon will die.”
Brendon? That must mean… Kristen is going to the formal with him. As her date. She knew how into him I was.
Maybe she really is that heartless.
Kristen smiles at me, but it’s not like her old one—it’s more of an “I’m better than you and don’t you forget it” smile. The kind that cuts straight through my bones. How many times have I stood where Tessa is standing? How many times have I seen that smile? Too many to count. But this is the first time she has ever directed it at me.
It makes me feel about two feet tall.
Asha steps next to me and says, “We should go.”
I’m shaking as we walk to the parking lot. I hate that Kristen can do this to me without saying a word. I hate her. Except I don’t. Like I said: complicated.
I almost drop the keys twice before I manage to unlock the car. Asha watches me, concerned, and says, “Are you okay?”
I just nod and stick the keys in the ignition. Even if I could speak I wouldn’t have the words right now. I drive out of the crowded lot and shove that nauseous feeling into the pit of my stomach. My phone bloops as I roll to a stop at a red light. I pick it up and flip it open. The text is from Sam.
Hey loser. what r u doing rite now?
I smile.
w/ asha. Mall. U?
Rosies. come over.
I hand the phone to Asha and point the car toward the lake.
* * *
Sam’s practicing ollies on his skateboard outside Rosie’s when we arrive. He sees us coming down the sidewalk and glides over, popping to an abrupt stop. He has this grin on his face, big and crooked, so different from Brendon’s perfect million-dollar smile, and I don’t know why I keep on doing that. Comparing them.
“Look who finally decided to show up,” he teases. He pushes his floppy hair out of his eyes and picks up his skateboard.
“Don’t lie. You’re thrilled we’re here,” Asha says. She leaps onto his back, throwing her arms around his neck as he staggers forward a step, laughing, surprised by the sudden weight. “Mush,” she commands.
He aims that slanted grin at me. “So demanding!”
He gallops her into Rosie’s, me tagging after, and carries her up to the counter. The post-lunch lull means the diner is mostly emptied out. Dex is ringing up some takeout while Andy scrapes the grill.
“This is not a playground,” Dex says, extending a white paper bag to the pretty blonde girl waiting.
“Yeah, it’s a mental institution,” Andy says. “Get it right.”
Dex reaches a leg out and kicks him in the shin, but he’s smiling.
Asha slides off Sam’s back and onto a stool. I sit on the one next to hers. Phyllis, the sixty-something waitress whom I usually never see since she works the day shifts, passes by us with a smile.
“Where’s Lou?” Asha asks.
“Ohio. Her sister’s getting married,” explains Dex.
“Which one?”
“Elizabeth. The oldest one.” Dex laughs. “You should see the bridesmaid dress she has to wear. Hang on. I made her let me take a picture of it.”
He digs his cell phone out of his pocket, presses a few buttons and passes it to Asha. I lean over to take a peek. Sure enough, there’s a pixeled image of Lou decked out in some sea-foam-green monstrosity, flipping off the camera.
“Wow, that’s bad. But it could be worse. Chelsea and I saw some seriously awful dresses today,” Asha says, handing back the phone.
“At, like, the mall?” Sam says in a put-upon Valley Girl accent. He’s behind the counter, washing his hands. “Was it, like, totally awesome, like, oh, my gawd?”
Andy snaps a dish towel at him. “Dude, you’re creeping me out with that voice.”
Sam flicks a spray of water his way, and then they’re tussling playfully. Guess the tension from yesterday is a nonissue.
Boys. I will never understand them. Not even the gay ones.
“I give up,” Dex says, throwing up his hands in defeat.
“So why were you looking at dresses?” Andy asks, Sam’s head locked under one arm.
Sam says, “They want to go to the winter dance…thing.”
They? Incorrect plural usage! Only Asha wants to. I draw an arrow pointing toward her on my whiteboard and hold it up. Sam pushes away from Andy—who smirks, victorious—and rubs at his hair.
“Correction. Asha wants to go,” he amends.
“From the way everyone acts, you’d think I was offering myself up as a virgin sacrifice,” she mutters, then blushes at what she’s let slip. To their credit, Andy and Sam don’t crack any inappropriate jokes.
My rumbling stomach interrupts the awkward silence. Oops. I probably should’ve eaten something today. Everyone looks at me and laughs.
“Get that girl some food,” Dex says as he walks off into the back.
Sam leans his elbows on the counter in front of me and grins. Imperfect though it may be, it is a damn charming smile. “What can I get ya?”
“I want an omelet,” Asha interjects.
PANCAKES, I write. I think for a second, then add, & eggs. scrambled. & orange juice. I draw
a little smiley face underneath the words.
Andy sees my board and says to Sam, “I call pancakes, bitch.”
“Like I’d trust you to make an omelet anyway. Bitch.”
Andy can’t cook as well as Sam can, or make as many dishes as Sam can, but even I know pancakes and scrambled eggs are easy, and they turn out wonderful. Of course, right now I’m so starved that pretty much anything remotely edible would look wonderful.
He sets the plate down in front of me and says, “I think you should.”
Should what? I cut some pancake with the side of my fork and raise my eyebrows.
“Go to the dance thing,” he clarifies. “I mean, you shouldn’t let those idiots stop you from doing what you want to do.”
Asha and Sam trade looks over my head. I know they must be wondering what transpired between Andy and me to make him suddenly care about me standing up for myself.
“Andy does have a point,” Sam says carefully from his place at the grill. “If you want to go, go.”
I push my eggs around on my plate, thinking. Looking at those dresses…it did sort of remind me of how much fun it is. Wearing the kind of formal wear you can’t get away with any other time of year and dancing my ass off to generic pop music.
“You should!” Asha bounces on her stool. “We all should.”
Sam and Andy stare at her as if she’s grown two heads.
“Come on!” she says. “It’d be great! We could all get dressed up and go to the dance and then come back here. You, too, Andy.”
“That sounds like a terrible idea,” he tells her. “Like, monumentally bad.”
Sam runs his knuckles along his jaw. “I don’t know, man…”
Oh, my God, is he seriously interested in going to Winter Formal? I almost choke on my orange juice.
Andy must share my incredulity, because he says, “You can’t actually be considering this. You were the one talking about how much of a waste of time school functions are.”
“I know, but if we all crash it as a group, maybe it would be fun.”
“Yeah, and maybe we’d all get our asses kicked.”
“You shouldn’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do,” Sam says back to him with a pointed look.
Andy stares at him, and then he says, “You’re going to burn the omelet.”
day twenty-four
For the first time in a week, I’m actually home for dinner. The good news is that it isn’t tofu. The bad news is that the reason it isn’t is because Mom stopped buying organic foods since we’re now on a tighter budget. Dad resorted to his old standby: mac and cheese from the box.
“I used to make this all the time when you were a kid,” he says as we sit down at the kitchen table.
I remember. That was when Mom was taking night classes at the business school. The idea was that she’d eventually start her own chain of floral shops instead of just managing someone else’s, but she ended up dropping out before she could graduate. I don’t know why.
“How is school going?” he asks, brushing some lint off his sleeve. I’m so used to him wearing work clothes—button-down Oxfords and ties—that it’s strange to see him like this, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.
I give him a thumbs-up that is far more enthused than I feel. I can’t lie, though—it has become significantly less torturous now that I can glom on to Asha and Sam. I’ve memorized their schedules and made a point of meeting them outside their classrooms so I’m not on my own in between classes. There’s a safety in numbers. People are less likely to mess with me when I’m around them. The worst I’ve gotten lately is some shoving in the halls, pointed glares and snickering from Kristen and her minions, and of course the daily locker vandalizing. I guess that Spanish teacher’s intervention didn’t stop Lowell. Or someone else is picking up his slack. Today through the vent cracks someone slipped in a folded note that read WATCH YOUR BACK TRAITOR BITCH.
I promptly tore the note in half and threw it in the trash. Hey, at least that’s easier to get rid of than the marker.
As I pick at my mac and cheese, I have to admit, after so much delicious diner food lately, all this bland processed cheese is a chore to eat. But I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, so I shovel as much into my mouth as I can bear.
“So, you’re still not speaking.” It’s a statement, not a question, and a displeased one at that. The corners of his mouth are pulled down like he’s sucking on something sour.
I keep my eyes on the orange clumpy mess covering my plate. My appetite is suddenly gone.
“I’m just wondering,” he says. “How long is this going to last? It’s been nearly a month now.”
Dad is supposed to be on my side, not grilling me about this. That’s what Mom is for. I guess, though, that in light of his own problems, mine must look childish and dumb.
“Chelsea,” he presses, “I think it’s time you—”
I’m spared from more lecturing by the phone ringing. Dad exhales, shooting me a this-is-not-over-young-lady look, and answers it.
“Hello?” he says. He pauses for a moment. “Yes, this is he.”
I watch him, stirring my mac and cheese around, but he walks out of the room with the phone before I can hear anything else.
I tell myself that Dad is just stressed out. Justifiably so. He’s been sending out résumés, applying for jobs online, but the economy sucks, and he hasn’t had a single call back. My first paycheck from Rosie’s won’t come for another week or so, but I’m already planning to give the entirety of it to my parents. It’s the least I can do.
I dump the rest of my lukewarm mac and cheese down the garbage disposal and run the tap for a while. I wish I was back at Rosie’s. Or at least out of this house. Six o’clock on a Saturday night and I already have nothing to do but kill time before going to bed. My life is so depressing.
I tear off a page from the refrigerator pad and write, Going out for a drive. I’ll be back later. –C. I stick the note next to Dad’s half-finished plate where he’ll be sure to see it.
I love driving. I love the feel of the steering wheel under my hands, all of that power. It makes me feel in control. In summer I like to open all the windows, the cool air rushing in and pushing my hair off my shoulders, and take off my shoes so that the pedal grooves dig into my bare feet. It’s too cold outside to do that now; the heat is on full blast, the radio low as I try to figure out where to go. Instinct points me toward the center of town and the lake.
I’ve lived in Grand Lake all my life. It’s a small town, yeah, but I’ve always liked that, that I know it inside and out, the way everyone knows everyone. Something about that is comforting, even if a little incestuous. And everyone knows everything about everyone; I should know. I’ve spent the last few years collecting secrets and gossip the way other people collect butterflies or Pez dispensers.
There are never any surprises in Grand Lake—which I think is why what happened to Noah was so shocking. Because things like that aren’t supposed to happen here. Everyone was so defensive, so desperate to downplay the situation. I think they all would’ve been happier if I’d kept my mouth shut so they could stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing had happened. When they couldn’t just ignore it, they were so quick to blame it on Warren and Joey just being two bad apples, because if they weren’t, that meant something more insidious was going on. That kids who grow up here aren’t raised right. That this town could produce that kind of hatred in its chi
ldren. And no one wants to believe that.
I don’t want to believe that.
The problem with small towns is the same thing I like about them—it’s so insular. No one’s thinking about the big picture. Derek and Lowell, they don’t care about Noah, they care about winning at basketball, because for them…what else is there? College, maybe, but we all know they’re the kind of kids who will inevitably end up back here. And they’ll be happy about it. They wouldn’t get to feel so big and important in any other place.
I want my life to be more than this. More than just this town and everything that’s happened in it. I don’t want my high school years to be the best of my life. I want to be better than this, better than the Chelsea Knot who stirs up trouble just for lack of anything more interesting to do. Andy was right—I didn’t see Noah as a person, the same way I didn’t see Tessa as a person, or anyone else I’ve helped to spread rumors about. Their feelings didn’t matter, at least not more than my need for a quick entertainment fix.
I end up at the hospital, underneath the buttery-yellow light thrown from one of the parking-lot lamps. In the daytime the building stands stately and inviting, made of warm red brick, but in the dark it just looks scary. Daunting. Like it could swallow me whole.
I take out my phone.
u busy?
Sam texts back a minute later.
Not rly. whats up?
Im at the hospital.
R u ok?
Fine. Parking lot. Can u come?