It’s hard to figure out how to explain to Asha that I don’t know what my life would be like now if she’d never talked to me that day in detention. How much worse these past weeks would have been. I want to show her how much she means to me—but everything that pops into my head makes me sound like the sappiest sap to ever sap.
Words matter—of course they matter, I know that better than anyone—but just telling her that wouldn’t be enough. If I really want her to be my friend, if I really want to get better at this kind of thing, I have to be better. Walk the talk, or whatever.
Finally I turn to her and ask, “How’s your mom doing?”
She blinks her dark eyes a few times, a little surprised, a little pained. “She’s…okay,” she says slowly. “Some days are better than others. You know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually,” I say. “You want to talk about it?”
So she does. And I listen the whole way through.
* * *
The National Geographic article is taped to my wall, right above my headboard. I put it there a while ago, after I almost left it in my pants pocket and had to salvage it from going through the laundry for the third time. As Asha’s leaving, she runs her hands over the shiny, creased page.
“So that’s where you got the idea,” she says. She looks over her shoulder and smiles. “I’m so glad you’re not actually in a cult.”
I smile back. What else is there to do? I figure if that’s the worst thing people can come up with to say about me, I’m gonna be okay.
After Asha’s gone, I finish up some homework—it’s sort of fun to imagine Mrs. Finch falling out of her chair with shock as she reads this awesome essay I’m working on, complete with sources cited and embedded quotations and even footnotes—and dick around on the internet. I know, I know, gossip is bad, gossip has consequences, all of that, but it can’t hurt to live vicariously reading the celebrity tabloid blogs.
I’m absorbed in a story about some D-lister’s botched boob job when I hear this weird tapping on my window. At first I think it’s a bird, and then I think I have a stalker, but I peer out the window and see Sam standing below, pebbles in hand.
I lift it open enough to stick my head through and hiss, “What are you doing?”
He stares up at me, mouth hanging open. “So it’s true,” he says. “You’re…”
Talking. Yes. And the first thing I’ve said to Sam has been relayed in an annoyed whisper-yell. Not exactly how I envisioned this going.
“Hang on. I’ll be right down,” I say, and budge the window closed.
God, it’s cold outside. I slip out the front door as quietly as I can so Dad won’t hear over the television and run barefoot over the freezing sidewalk, all the way to the side of the house.
“Sam, why are you out here?” I demand. I hop from foot to foot over the snow patches.
“It is true,” he says, softer.
I stop in my tracks. The ice bites into the bottom of my quickly numbing feet. “Yeah,” I say, and open my mouth to say more, but I’m not sure what. So I just stand there, shivering, looking at him.
“Who else knows?” he asks. I don’t know why he’s being so quiet. It’s not like anyone else is around.
“Um, well, let’s see. Lowell was the first—”
“Lowell?”
“Yeah, I know. That’s a story I don’t want to get into right now,” I say. “There’s also Asha. Andy. Lou, I’m pretty sure.” I press my lips together. “And…you. Think that’s the running tally.”
“Oh,” he says. I don’t know what that “oh” is supposed to mean. Like, is he disappointed I didn’t speak to him first? Or that other people knew before he did?
I look from him to my window and back. “How did you even know that’s my room?”
“I saw you through the window.” As if he’s reading my thoughts, he cringes and says, “That wasn’t supposed to make me sound like such a stalker, I swear.”
“What are you doing here, Sam?” I ask. Again. Around chattering teeth, this time.
“The art project…” he starts, and then ruffles a hand through his hair, the way he always does. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“And you couldn’t use the front door?”
“I don’t know…it’s kind of late! I didn’t want to piss off your parents. Besides, it was pretty cool, right? Very John Cusack, minus the radio playing Peter Gabriel.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. “John Cusack? Wait, isn’t that the guy from Serendipity?”
“Serendipity?” His voice rises with his incredulity. “That’s what you associate John Cusack with? Come on! You couldn’t go for, say, Grosse Pointe Blank, or Say Anything, or High Fidelity, or Being John fucking Malkovich, or—”
“Sam.” I stop him in midrighteous (and totally over my head) tirade. “It is, like, negative five billion degrees out here. I have no jacket. Or shoes. Or socks. Come inside.”
I snatch his hand in mine and sneak him in through the side door by the kitchen. At first I start leading him up to my room, but then I stop and sit down on the staircase instead.
“My dad’s cool, but he might not be so cool with me having a boy in my room,” I explain. “You know. Alone. At night.”
“Understandable.” He smiles a little and sits on the step below me. “You’re really okay?”
I start to nod before I remember I can actually answer now. “I am. I think. I mean—” Man. Talking is hard. I’d forgotten exactly how hard. There’s a reason I stopped in the first place. “It’s…it’s been a long day.”
“You talking again,” he says, “that’s a good thing, right?”
I glance down at my lap. “I don’t know. Is it?”
Sam takes one of my hands, and I watch as he plays with my fingers.
He says, haltingly, “I think so. If it felt…I dunno. Like it was the right time. For you.” He looks up at me. “How does it feel?”
“Weird,” I admit. “But good, too.” I curl my fingers around his. They’re all tingly. Probably from unthawing. But maybe not just that.
“I’m sorry about the project,” he says.
I shake my head. “Forget it. I don’t even care.” Sam’s face falls a little, and I quickly add, “I mean, I care, but—it’s not as important as other things.”
What’s important is the time we spent working on it together. What’s important is that Sam is the kind of guy who will trade notes on a sketchpad and teach me how to make tuna melts and drop everything to drive to a parking lot when I need him and throw stones at my window to make sure I’m okay.
And that’s separate from the kissing. Okay. Not totally separate. But Sam is my friend, the kind of friend I’ve never had before. Maybe the best friend I’ve ever had. Is there a way to have that, and the other stuff? The kissing? Can they really coexist? Or is it like asymptotes—two things that can get so close but are never meant to intersect?
I have spent way too much time around Asha if I’m finding love songs in geometry.
“Tomorrow’s the dance, you know,” Sam says, like it could have possibly slipped my mind.
“I know.” I look down at our intertwined fingers. “Were you serious? About being my date?”
“That depends on your answer. See, if you say you don’t want to, I can pretend I was just kidding the whole time, you know, ha ha, oh, that Sam, he’s such a jokester, and thus save a little of my wounded pride, but if you—”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes, I’ll go with you. Obviously.”
Or maybe not so obviously, because the smile he gives me then is so adorably earnest and pleased that it makes me tingle from the tips of my fingers all the way down to my toes.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Awesome.”
“Awesome squared.”
“Awesome cubed.”
“Awesome to the power of infinity.”
“The square root of awesome is—”
“—Asha,” we finish at the same time, and laugh.
I quickly push a palm over his mouth to keep him quiet. Really don’t need Dad to overhear this little visit now.
He takes my hand off his mouth and holds it, his face suddenly serious. “I just need to know one thing. Very important.”
My stomach drops. What now?
“What color is your dress?”
day thirty-three
The thing I mentioned earlier, about cheerleaders not being synonymous with popular? This is true, like, ninety percent of the time. But then there are times they are actually the most popular girls in school, at least for a day, because those days are Game Days.
On Game Days, the cheerleaders get to wear their uniforms to school. And boy, are they teeny tiny. The uniforms. Not the cheerleaders. Well, some of them are, but some of them are on the heavy side. Not judging, just pointing out the fact. I mean, when you think about it, it makes logical sense. Someone has to be strong enough to throw the tiny ones in the air.
I make my way through the sea of cheerleaders gathered around the watering hole—the lockers of five team members, including Lowell and Derek—carrying all kinds of desserts. It’s Game Day tradition for the players to leave their lockers open in the mornings so they can be showered with the gifts they so richly deserve. Namely, goodies. Every cheerleader has something delicious and homemade to present the team members with, cookies and cupcakes and whatnot. One girl even has a custom balloon in the school colors—blue and red—that says GO RED HAWKS! that she’s tying to someone’s combination lock.
If I play my cards right today, there’ll be no more balloons or cookies or fawning cheerleaders for Lowell or Derek.
The question, of course, becomes how to bust these two. There are a few avenues I could take; I could go directly to the principal. I could call the cops myself. I could break into their lockers with a nail file and take photo evidence of the weed they’re most likely holding in there and spread it around, but that tactic is too old-school, and not in a good way. I want to do this in a way that leaves my hands as clean as possible. Lowell and Derek will get the message without me linking myself to it directly. So I’ve come up with an idea.
Ms. Kinsey.
The one teacher in this school who, inexplicably, likes having me as her student. The one teacher I trust. The one most likely to agree to my plan.
The art room is empty when I walk in, except for Ms. Kinsey. She’s standing on a stool, hanging some art piece made out of wire and ribbon from a ceiling hook.
“Chelsea!” She sees me and smiles, one part pleased, one part concerned. “We missed you yesterday.”
“Sorry I bailed,” I say, and she freezes.
“And she speaks!” Great deduction there, I think, and then tell my brain to stop being rude. Ms. Kinsey doesn’t deserve that.
She steps down from the stool and puts her hands on her hips. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday.” I pause. “Um. It’s kind of a long story.” I remember what I came for, and hunt through my bag for the whiteboard. “I wanted to give this back to you.”
“Chelsea.” She doesn’t move to take the board from me, so I’m left holding it out there between us. “I’m very sorry for what happened yesterday.”
“Why? It’s not like it’s your fault.”
“No, it isn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact.”
I get that. It’s like how I told Andy I was sorry for what happened to Noah, even though I knew by then I wasn’t really the one to blame. Sometimes you just have to apologize anyway.
“I want you to know, I’ve graded you on the project,” Ms. Kinsey says. “I thought I’d seen enough beforehand to give a fair evaluation.”
This surprises me. “Oh?”
“Yes. And I think you and Sam will be very happy with it.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
She eyes me curiously. “So tell me, did you learn anything from this period of silence? Spiritually?”
I don’t know if I learned anything spiritually. I’m still not exactly sure what that means. I mean, I didn’t spend any of the time thinking about God or faith or whatever. I spent it thinking about how much I hate myself, mostly. Maybe that makes me a major narcissist, I don’t know. A self-loathing narcissist, is that even possible?
I do feel like I’ve figured some stuff out. Not everything. Not even close. But the not-figured-out stuff feels less scary now. Manageable. It’s like someone opened my eyes and suddenly I’m seeing everything all new—like when Asha explained to me how to solve for x, and something just clicked, and from that point on I wasn’t just looking at a mess of numbers and letters but actual equations with actual solutions. Even if I still couldn’t solve every single one.
“Maybe,” I say, and apparently that’s enough for her, because she nods and takes the whiteboard from me.
“Glad to hear it.” The smile she gives kills me with its kindness. “It’s good to be uncertain, Chelsea. It’s a big world. There’s always more to learn.”
“Ms. Kinsey, I didn’t just come here to give you back the whiteboard,” I say. “I need your help with something. It’s kind of a…sensitive issue.”
“Oh?” She looks more concerned now. “Well, I’ll do whatever I can. What is it?”
“I need to leave an anonymous tip.”
* * *
When Sam comes up to my locker before art period and says, “Let’s cut,” I’m annoyed.
Not at him. I was already annoyed before he came up to me. I’m annoyed because there was a typo on page two of the essay I handed in to Mrs. Finch, but I didn’t have time to dash to the library and reprint it. I’m annoyed because there are some kids down the hall erupting into the school song with plastic mini megaphones in preparation for this afternoon’s pep rally. I’m annoyed because I have no idea if the plan has worked yet, or if it will work at all, or if it’ll somehow backfire and the not knowing is making me all itchy and anxious.
“The narcs,” I point out, but Sam grins and shakes his head.
“I’m parked in the teacher lot,” he explains.
“You’re not supposed to do that.”
“I’m not supposed to do a lot of things.”
It’s such a cliché response, but he makes it work. Maybe it’s because right after he says it, he slips one of his thumbs through my belt loop and pulls me close to him. Close enough that I can see his clear blue eyes perfectly. And his not-so-perfect mouth, a little crooked, a smile that goes up farther on the left than the right, but is somehow even more alluring for that. Perfection is overrated.
I hesitate. I already cut once this week....
“Hail to the Hawks!” the kids chorus. “Hail, hail, hail to the red and blue! Hail to the conquering heroes, proud and true!”
Screw it.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
Sam lets me drive the Cutlass. Not that I really ask. I snatch the keys from him the second we hit the teacher lot and jingle them in my hand as we walk. I’m nervous and I don’t know why.
That’s a lie, I totally know why I’m nervous. Stupid Lowell and Derek and their stupid faces. Their faces are genuinely stupid, not like Sam’s—Sam’s is just stupid cute. Especially when he’s looking at me like he is now.
I buckle myself into the driver’s seat, adjust the mirrors and say, “What?”
“You know how to drive a stick?” he asks.
“Please. My dad taught me on an old-ass Camry.”
I throw the car into first, ease up on the clutch and tap on the gas. The Cutlass bucks a little and jumps forward, and we’re off.
I don’t know where we’re going. Rosie’s would be the obvious choice, but I kind of just want to drive around for a while, getting used to the feel of the car. It’s hard to relax, though, with Sam sitting next to me, playing his fingers over the seat belt, stretching it in and out. I keep thinking about his hands. It’s so distracting that I accidentally let the clutch out too much and stall the car at a stoplight.
I’m waiting for Sam to yell at me for screwing up his transmission, but he just waits for me to restart the car and says, “You’ve got it.”
He is so nice it hurts.
We drive around in silence. Funny how now that we’re both talking, we have nothing to say to each other. Or maybe it’s just habit. As far as silences go, it is pretty comfortable—it’s the kind of quiet shared between two people who don’t feel the desperate need to fill every second with the sound of their own voices.
Eventually I pull down into the park by the lake, take the gear down to First and cut the engine.
“Good,” he says when I set the parking brake. “We don’t need to pull a Risky Business.”