“It’s not that easy.” I hated talking about this. If I actually took Luke’s advice, then I’d tell Lucy and Josie that I was done with the guide. I’d tell them that I wasn’t faking it with Luke. And I’d have to tell Luke that it had all started out as a plan designed to teach him a lesson.
“Actually, it is. So, if you didn’t care what anyone thought, would you still go to Brown?” he asked.
I thought about Luke’s question—really thought about it—before answering. In January, I would have immediately said yes. “No, probably not.”
“Good.” Luke nudged me. “You’re shivering. Come on, I’ll race you back to the car.”
It was just a nudge, but still, I almost took a header right there in the mud. “No way. It’s too slippery. I’ll kill myself.”
“Then you better get going.” Luke started to make a break for it, but I grabbed for his sweatshirt and caught his sleeve.
“No you don’t,” I yelled and tried to pull him behind me so I could get a head start. Of course, Luke had some pounds and inches on me, so even though I’d intended to keep him from going anywhere, all I succeeded in doing was latching on to a guy who was used to running in the mud with a lacrosse stick.
My foot slipped out from under me and I went down, my ass landing smack-dab in the center of a huge puddle.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Luke apologized and reached out a hand for me to take hold of. “I didn’t mean for you to fall.”
If I was going down, I wasn’t going down alone. I reached for his hand and acted like I was about to help myself up, but instead of standing, I yanked his arm and watched him tumble down next to me, where he landed with a splash.
“That wasn’t very nice,” he said and laughed, wiping splattered mud from his face.
“Whoever said I was nice?” I asked, throwing a handful of mud at him.
Luke held his hands up to shield his face. “Not me.”
Then, before I could say “mud in my underwear,” Luke had me pinned down in the puddle, his knees sinking in the mud on either side of my hips.
The ground was freezing, and I could feel my hair grow heavy as it soaked up the grimy water. But that was pleasant compared to the cold ooze seeping into my shirt. Still, I didn’t move. Instead, I closed my eyes and focused on Luke’s warm breath on my neck as he leaned down and whispered in my ear. “So, you want to play dirty, huh?”
I didn’t know if he was trying to be funny or if he was challenging me to try and break free. Before I had a chance to figure it out, his lips were making their way from my mud-caked ear to my mouth.
As our lips parted and our tongues mingled with gritty grains of dirt, my head sunk farther into the mud. And, still, I didn’t stop.
Just when it occurred to me that there may be worms about to use my ear canal as a direct entrance to my brain, Luke pulled away. I opened my eyes, but he didn’t get off me. Instead, he kept his face a few inches from my own, the cloudy gray sky acting as a backdrop.
“You know, I wasn’t exactly being honest with you.”
He wasn’t being honest with me? “About what?”
“When you mentioned the Valentine’s Day chocolates. I do remember sending them.”
“You do?”
Luke nodded and splattered a new layer of mud drops on my face.
“So, why’d you send them?” I asked, curious to finally hear the answer to a six-year-old mystery.
“It wasn’t anything in particular, I don’t think.”
“So it wasn’t my rockin’ sixth-grade bod?” I joked.
“Unfortunately, no.” Luke moved off me and lay on his side. “I just kind of liked you.”
“You liked me? How could you like me, you hardly knew me?”
“True, but you were nice.”
There it was again. The four-letter word that got me into this mess in the first place. Only when Luke said it, it didn’t seem so bad. In fact, it sounded pretty good.
“Besides, you hardly knew me a few months ago, but you liked me.” Luke waited for an answer, but what was I supposed to say to that? Um, Luke, about that liking you part, see, it was really just a game so I could write a handbook about changing you…
Luke reached for a strand of my hair and used it to write something in mud on my face. “Now what are we going to do?”
“I suppose we should go back to your car and try to figure out a way to get home without completely destroying your upholstery.”
This time when Luke extended a hand and offered to help me up, I let him.
“So did you like the chocolates?” he asked, leading the way up the hill.
I could have told him the truth. I could have said that I gave the gross flavors to my mom and wished that they came from Carl Mattingly. But I lied. Not because I’d become so good at it, but because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“I loved them.”
When we reached the car, Luke pointed to the backpack I’d tossed on the backseat.
“Do you have a notebook in there?” he asked. “Maybe we could rip out a few sheets of paper to sit on?”
I had two notebooks in my backpack—my five-section notebook with all my class notes and a brown notebook that I couldn’t let Luke see.
Here was my chance to get rid of the guide once and for all. I could tell Lucy and Josie it fell out of the car into the mud. I could tell them the pages got soaked through and all my notes weren’t even readable anymore. There was no way we could re-create three months’ worth of work in two weeks, so we’d have to come up with something else to put in the time capsule. All of a sudden, a CD and this month’s People magazine didn’t sound so bad.
I wanted to, I really did. But I couldn’t. Josie trusted me. And I’d let her, believing that there was no way something like this would happen. Believing that I was better than all the guys who did stupid things. Better than the people who’d hurt me.
“Why don’t we take the floor mats up and put those on the seats instead?” I suggested.
Luke thought it was a good idea, and the whole ride home, as I sat on a rubber floor mat, I could practically hear the brown notebook on the backseat screaming to me, telling me that even though I’d just done what it would take to keep my friends, I’d also just blown my chance to keep Luke.
Chapter Nineteen
The Guy’s Guide Tip #61:
Don’t lie. It’s not worth getting caught, and, trust me, you will get caught.
“What happened to you?” TJ stopped talking and held the cordless phone against his chest. “You’re a mess.”
“I got caught in the rain.”
I thought TJ would go back to talking to his friend and I could go upstairs and get cleaned up before my mother realized I’d just tracked muddy footprints across the kitchen floor. Instead, TJ held the phone out and waited for me to take it.
“Here. It’s Sean.”
I stood there in the kitchen, my bare feet on the cold tile floor, and stopped in my muddy tracks. Sean. Sean was on the phone. A few months ago I would have killed for this moment. I would have been dancing little muddy toe marks all over the kitchen floor if Sean had called to talk to me.
“Well, are you going to take it or what?” TJ asked.
I reached for the receiver, not even bothering to wipe my hands off first.
“Hello?”
I don’t know which surprised me most, that Sean was on the phone or that he was coming to Boston or that he wanted to see me when he was here. And it didn’t really matter which surprised me most, because what really threw me was how my stomach flipped over as soon as I took the phone and heard his voice.
“I’m coming out to visit,” Sean told me, although I knew he meant he was coming to visit the Boston College campus, and not visit me specifically. “Can you come into the city and meet me?”
There was no “I’m sorry,” or apology for the three months I never heard a word from him. Just an invitation to meet him in Boston. And I didn’t know what to say. Thr
ee months ago I thought I knew what I’d say. I’d wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. I wanted to tell him that I was going out with the hottest guy at Heywood, even if that didn’t exactly explain the entire situation. I wanted to remind him that we weren’t just no longer going out, we were no longer friends. But I didn’t. Despite myself, a part of me still wanted to see Sean. I wanted him to see me. The last time we were together he left me in tears, my eyes red and puffy. That wasn’t the way I wanted to be remembered.
“When?” I asked, turning my back toward TJ, who’d decided to camp out on the kitchen counter and listen to our conversation.
“This weekend. I get in Friday night.”
“Nothing like waiting until the last minute to call me,” I couldn’t help remarking, even though I knew I sounded like a bitch. I think after what he did to me, I was entitled to at least one bitchy remark.
“I know. I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear from me.”
“You were right.”
“So you don’t want to see me?”
I hesitated, but it was more for effect than because I was actually considering my options. “No, I’ll see you.”
Even with my back turned, I could feel TJ raising his eyebrows at me.
“Are you coming alone?” I asked.
“My dad’s coming with me, but he was going to meet a friend for lunch on Saturday. You want to meet somewhere and grab a bite to eat?”
“How about Fanueil Hall at noon?”
Sean told me that would work and then asked me one last question before hanging up. “Are you seeing anyone in particular?”
“You mean, do I have a boyfriend?” I clarified.
“Well, yeah.”
I immediately thought of Luke. But even if I felt like Luke was my boyfriend, even if I wanted him to stay my boyfriend, in a few days it would all be over. The moment I put the guide into the time capsule, Luke and I would be history. “No,” I finally answered. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You don’t have a boyfriend?” TJ repeated after I’d put the receiver down. Of course he’d been listening the entire time, even though he was pretending to read the back of a box of Shredded Wheat. “If you’re telling Sean that you don’t have a boyfriend, why does the entire school think you’re going out with Luke Preston?”
I attempted to wipe my muddy fingerprints from the phone, but all I managed to do was turn the dishtowel a dingy gray. “Look, you wouldn’t understand.”
Actually, TJ would understand perfectly. I’d been playing a game with Luke, a game that was turning out to be way more hurtful than any game he’d played before. The jiggle scale paled by comparison.
Obviously, I couldn’t tell TJ what I was doing, and part of the reason was that even I wasn’t sure what I was thinking when I told Sean I’d meet him in Boston. It wasn’t like I was still pining away for Sean. But it wasn’t like I still hated him, either. At least not as much as I used to. Three months later it was what it was. We broke up and it sucked. Maybe I hoped that seeing Sean would somehow make me care less about Luke. Or maybe I wanted to prove to Sean that I was over him. But most likely I didn’t tell Sean about Luke because I was preparing myself for what it was going to be like from here on in. Life after Luke.
Besides, I knew Lucy and Josie would say I was crazy not to go, so I couldn’t say no. Saying no would mean I had a reason, and that only reason would be Luke. And he wasn’t supposed to be a reason not to see my ex-boyfriend. He was supposed to just be my project.
“No, I understand,” TJ answered. “I understand perfectly. I just heard you tell Sean you didn’t have a boyfriend, which makes me wonder why Luke Preston took you to a Celtics game for your birthday. I guess I just didn’t realize you were such a big basketball fan.”
“The Celtics used a two-one-two zone defense tonight,” I proceeded to tell him. “And the Lakers couldn’t move the ball around the perimeter.”
It was something Luke said while we watched the game, and even though TJ and I both knew I was full of crap, at least it got me out of the kitchen without having to answer any more questions.
“Hey, Mom?” I knocked on her office door. “Can I take the car into the city on Saturday?”
She looked up from her laptop, where I could tell she was working on notes for an upcoming seminar. “Sure. What do you need it for?”
“Sean’s coming into town and he called to see if I wanted to meet him for lunch.”
There was no mistaking the look on my mother’s face. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
She waved me in and pointed to the armchair facing her desk. “Come sit down.”
I pulled my robe around me (I’d showered first—I wasn’t dumb enough to ask my mom while looking like I’d just crawled out of a mud bog) and went in.
“What’s going on with you?”
“What do you mean?” From the tone of her voice I knew exactly what she meant: What the hell is going on with you, alien who’s taken up residence in my daughter’s body?
“What I mean is, I thought you were going out with Luke?”
I shrugged.
“So he won’t mind that you’re meeting your ex-boyfriend for lunch?”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” I told her, quickly realizing it was the wrong answer.
“Really? I seriously doubt you’d feel the same way if it was Luke meeting his ex-girlfriend for lunch.”
I didn’t bother telling her that Luke’s ex-girlfriend was one of the main reasons I was even going to lunch.
“Is that it?” I asked, standing up. “I need to go dry my hair.”
“You know, Emily, eventually it’s all going to catch up with you—the not talking to your father, lying to Luke about meeting Sean in the city. Sometimes it’s best to just tell someone the truth, even if it seems easier to ignore it.”
“Can I go now?” I could already tell my bangs were drying in some funky S-shaped curl against my forehead.
“Think about what I said,” she added. “Denying something won’t make it go away.”
This from a woman who won’t even acknowledge that her husband is living in Chicago. If I was the Queen of Denial, then my mom ruled the kingdom.
I knew I should have wasted no time calling Jackie and Lauren in Chicago to tell them about Sean. Maybe four months ago I would have been on the phone gloating, relishing the idea that Sean wanted to have lunch with me instead of hanging around a college campus checking out the co-ed scenery. Only now that I was over Sean, I didn’t feel like I had much to brag about. Unless you counted the fact that I’d tricked Luke Preston into falling for me even though he was nothing more than an assignment to be completed. And considering how that was working out for me, I wasn’t about to call Lauren and Jackie to brag about that, either.
“I think you should wear jeans,” Lucy suggested when I told her and Josie I was meeting Sean in the city on Saturday. “That way it doesn’t look like you tried too hard.”
“Come over here before you leave and I’ll do your makeup.” For her birthday last year, Josie’s mom had given her a consultation with Newbury Street’s most sought-after makeup artist, and now she had more tubes and tubs and pencils than a department store makeup counter.
“And I’ll do your hair,” Lucy added.
So much for not trying too hard.
That’s how, on Saturday morning at ten o’clock, I ended up in Josie’s palatial bathroom with a towel draped over my shirt and a hot curling iron perched precariously close to my ear.
“Hey, be careful with that,” I warned, pulling my head away from Lucy’s grasp. “You’re going to burn me.”
“I’m just going to give you a little wave. I’m not going to burn you.”
Of course, that’s exactly what she did. “Ouch, that hurt.” I jumped up, pushing Josie’s hand away from my lips in the process, which resulted in a slash of brownish pink lip gloss across my cheek.
“I said don?
??t move,” Josie scolded.
“Well, I said don’t burn me.” I rubbed the sore spot on my neck. “Can you get me some ice or something?”
Josie went into her room and returned with a bottle of Evian. “No ice. Will Evian do?”
Lucy took the bottle and held it up to the hot spot below my ear. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
I knew it was an accident. I also knew that I was going to have one hell of a burn mark. “How bad does it look?”
Lucy removed the Evian bottle and took a look. “It’s not so bad.”
Josie leaned in for closer inspection. “With a little foundation we should be able to cover it up.”
I turned toward the mirror to take a look. “Oh my God.” I gasped. “It looks like I have a big red hickey.”
“It won’t once it scabs over,” Lucy offered, trying to help. “Then it will look sort of like a rug burn.”
“I don’t want a rug burn on my neck any more than I want a hickey,” I practically yelled. “I’m going to see Sean in two hours and I’m going to look ridiculous.”
“Go in my closet and grab a T-shirt so we don’t get powder all over your top.” Josie reached for a vinyl pouch filled with makeup brushes of varying sizes and shapes. “This is going to require some work.”
I got up and went over to Josie’s walk-in closet. “What’s this?” I asked, holding up a Hawaiian-print button-down shirt that looked way too big to be Josie’s.
“Don’t ask. That’s the shirt I got Luke in the Bahamas.”
I rubbed the silky material between my fingers and thought about how good Luke would look in it. “You’re saving it?” I hung the shirt back up and grabbed a blue Heywood Academy T-shirt off one of the shelves.
“I was thinking that if our plan works and Luke and I get back together, I still might give it to him.”
“And if the plan doesn’t work? If he hasn’t changed for good, what then?” I asked, hopeful Josie would say something like, “No big deal, never really liked the guy anyway.” While she was at it, it would also be nice if she added, “And I’d totally understand if you fell for Luke; as a matter of fact, I’d love nothing more than if you and Luke ended up happily ever after.”