“I heard a few seniors were going to go this year,” I lied, leaving out the part about the few seniors being his ex-girlfriend and her two best friends. “I just thought if you were there, we could meet up or something.”
Talk about wimping out. I was supposed to ask Luke to go to the dance with me as my date, and here I was defaulting to meeting up with him. Not exactly a fabulous display of cunning on my part.
“Yeah, we could do that,” he agreed, although not as enthusiastically as I would have liked.
All of a sudden I thought of the chocolates Luke had sent to me in sixth grade. “It will be just like old times,” I joked, attempting to ingratiate myself with someone I found quite loathsome, no matter how cute he looked in a pair of gym shorts.
Luke looked thoroughly confused.
“You know, sixth grade, how you sent me the Valentine chocolates,” I explained, trying to jog his memory.
It didn’t work. Luke gave me a smile like he almost felt sorry for me, and left me standing there wondering if he was really worth all this effort. And I kind of got the feeling Luke was wondering the same thing about me.
After last class I went to find Josie and Lucy and tell them that I’d put the plan into action. When I passed the library, I spotted Lucy through the plate glass window. She was hunched over a table intently reading a textbook. I waited for her to notice me staring at her, but she didn’t. And I didn’t walk in. For the first time I noticed that Lucy didn’t look exactly the same as I’d remembered. Under the fluorescent lights her hair looked like it had light brown highlights woven through it, and if I didn’t know better—if I didn’t know that Lucy was the last person on earth who cared about her hair, much less went to the trouble of getting highlights—I would have thought she’d gone to some high-end salon instead of her usual Super Cuts.
I pushed the door open. “I did it. I asked Luke to the dance.”
Lucy looked up from her book. “And?”
“And he said he’d meet me there.”
Lucy snapped the book shut. “That’s so great. See, we knew you could do it.”
“Do you think Josie is going to freak out?”
“No, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.” She attempted to wave away any concern I had. “I mean, they only went out for a few months, right?”
I only went out with Sean for a few months and I certainly wouldn’t like watching someone attempt to get him to fall for her. Then again, I wasn’t Josie. Maybe Josie was really more into the idea of being with the hottest guy around than actually being with Luke. Knowing Josie’s history with guys, I wouldn’t doubt it.
“Where is she?” I asked, looking down the aisles to see if Josie was somewhere nearby. “We should tell her about my date.”
“She’s in the photo lab developing some pictures.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Why doesn’t she do that at home?” I asked. “She has her own lab.”
Lucy shrugged. “She says she’d rather do it here. I guess she’s just more used to it.”
“So, was it weird when Josie’s dad made all that money?”
“Sort of. All of a sudden her mom wanted her to start doing all these things they couldn’t do before, like the whole horseback-riding thing.”
Here we were talking about Josie’s dad and Lucy had no idea that my dad was still in Chicago. A part of me wanted to tell Lucy that things weren’t exactly perfect at my house, either. But there was no way I could tell Lucy and not tell Josie. And so I didn’t. Not because I didn’t want Josie to know, but because I guess I was still hoping that it was just a temporary situation, and if I actually said anything out loud, it would only make it seem more permanent.
“Should we go get Josie?” Lucy asked.
I nodded and handed Lucy her backpack. “Did you do something to your hair? It looks different.”
Lucy held out a strand and examined it before tucking the piece behind her ear. “Does it?”
“Yeah, it looks lighter than it used to be.”
“I started getting highlights last year. I totally forgot you didn’t know.” She shook her head so her hair fell around her shoulders. Whatever happened to Lucy’s ever-present ponytail? “It’s called ‘toasted caramel,’ do you like it?”
It was hard to imagine Lucy sitting in a salon with foils stuck to her head. In eighth grade she barely had the patience to brush her hair, period. “I do. It looks good.”
“Hey, do you think Owen will go to the dance if Luke is there?” Lucy asked me, collecting her books and heading toward the library door.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
Lucy stopped in the doorway and considered my answer. “I hope so.”
She hoped so? I was hoping Lucy would elaborate, but she just pushed the door open and continued into the hall. And I was left wondering if, in addition to highlights, Lucy was interested in a lot of things I never thought she’d want. Including Owen.
Chapter Eight
The Guy’s Guide Tip #22:
Just because I haven’t shoved every single french fry in my mouth doesn’t mean I don’t plan on eating them all. And it doesn’t give you permission to reach over and take as many as you want. Ask me first. I’ll probably say yes, but I’d at least like the opportunity to say no.
The day of the dance I was a basket case. I couldn’t concentrate in class (which meant I raised my hand but prayed I wouldn’t actually be called on for once), at lunch I could barely eat anything (even though it was my favorite, cheeseburgers and fries—okay, I had a few fries, but I didn’t really enjoy them), and by the time there were five minutes left before the last bell, I was seriously doubting whether or not I could go through with our plan. Or if I could really get Luke to like me.
Here I’d spent my whole life making sure people liked me and up until now it hadn’t been a problem—unless you counted Stephanie Potter, which I didn’t. They say there’s always an exception that proves the rule, and I’d decided that Stephanie Potter was my exception. She transferred to Heywood in eighth grade, and, having spent years watching my mother welcome new neighbors with baskets of muffins and suggestions for plumbers, I took it upon myself to be a one-person welcome wagon. Only instead of muffins and references for handymen, I’d brought a pack of Starbursts and directions to Friendly’s. Armed with candy and a map to my favorite ice cream place, I’d gone right up to Stephanie Potter and introduced myself. At lunch, I invited her to eat at our table and kept the seat next to me open even though I really wanted to sit next to Josie or Lucy. During study hall I offered to take Stephanie to the library and go through the previous year’s yearbook and put names with faces, even though I had homework I could have finished. But even though I made every effort to be Stephanie’s friend, even though I waited for her outside classes and after school for the entire first week of school, she had no interest in me whatsoever. Instead she always gave me some lame excuse (I mean, really, she doesn’t want to go to the library because she had a bad experience with the Dewey decimal system? Come on, who was she kidding?). By the second week of school, I even had the feeling Stephanie was going out of her way to avoid me (it was probably more than a feeling because every time she saw me wave, Stephanie would turn around and walk the other way as fast as she could, her head down like she was concentrating on something terribly important). At lunch she started avoiding my table like the plague, taking the long way around the perimeter of the cafeteria until she reached Carolyn Mills’s table. And then she’d sit with her back to me, just in case I didn’t quite get the hint.
“What’s her problem?” I asked Josie and Lucy.
They just shrugged.
“Doesn’t she realize I’m trying to be friendly?” I asked them. “Maybe she doesn’t get it.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be your friend,” Lucy ventured, stating the obvious.
Josie agreed. “Why don’t you just forget about her, she’s fine with Carolyn.”
St
ephanie may have been fine with Carolyn, but I wasn’t fine without Stephanie. There was absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t have liked me. I did everything right—I was nice and helpful and friendly. I followed every single rule in my mother’s books and Stephanie still didn’t want to be my gym partner. And that only made me more determined. There was no way I’d fail, and no reason I should fail. For the first three months of school, I poured it on, until one day Stephanie just came right up to me and said, “It’s not working.”
“Excuse me?”
“The whole going-out-of-your-way-to-be-my-buddy thing—it’s not working,” she clarified. “You can stop.”
“But I’m just trying to be nice,” I explained. After all, who would actually turn down someone’s attempt to be nice?
“Well, don’t,” she told me.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Stephanie shook her head. “Enough already. I get it.”
“Get what?”
“You want to be my friend. Only I don’t really want to be yours. You try way too hard.” With that, Stephanie turned around and left me standing in front of the science lab, like some experiment gone awry. And I never got an explanation from Stephanie, and she never cared to elaborate further.
As much as it annoyed me, I decided that something must be wrong with Stephanie, not me. Despite her claim, she didn’t get it. She didn’t get it at all.
I should have learned my lesson then, but I didn’t. Like an idiot, I still believed if you followed the rules and did the right things, you’d succeed. I believed it up until the day the letter from the admissions committee at Brown arrived. Up until the morning Sean broke up with me. Even up until my dad dropped us off at the airport. And I should have known better, because I did everything right with Stephanie Potter and it never paid off. She ended up transferring back to public school for freshman year, so I never had a chance to change her mind (and, no, I don’t think that she transferred to get away from me, even though TJ once implied that it was awfully coincidental). Just thinking about it still bugged me.
So if I couldn’t get Stephanie Potter to like me, there was always the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to make Luke like me, either. Even if the circumstances were radically different. Even if I was only pretending to like him. Whether it was my guilty conscience nagging at me about fooling Luke, or my growing lack of confidence in my ability to pull it off, there was a niggling feeling in my head that something wasn’t right (I’d decided to call it Stephanie Potter syndrome). The only thing was, I didn’t know what would make it go away—deciding not to change Luke, or proving that I could.
When I left school on Friday afternoon, I waited for Luke outside the front entrance, hoping to confirm our date.
“So, I’ll see you tonight?” I asked, confirming our plans in the most nonconfirmational way. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on him. I didn’t have a pack of Starbursts or a coupon for a free cone at Friendly’s, but I already had a feeling he was seeing me as quite desperate.
“Yeah, sure.” Luke gave me something that looked like a half wave-half swat and headed to the parking lot. It wasn’t a resounding answer from someone who was supposed to fall head over heels for me in time to put our guide in the time capsule, but it was a start. And, at that point, I’d take whatever I could get.
Damn Stephanie Potter.
I glanced down at my watch: 3:07. I had four hours to get ready, a mere four hours to make myself into someone that Luke Preston would go crazy over, to become someone he’d like. And I wasn’t fooling myself. I’d need every single minute.
But before going back to my locker to collect all my stuff, I stood there and watched Luke walk the entire way toward his car—even if I had to keep reminding myself not to notice his ass.
“You look awfully nice for a Valentine’s dance that even TJ doesn’t think is worth going to.” My mom stood in the bathroom doorway and watched me paint another coat of mascara on my lashes. I was never very good at mascara, something that had to do with reading about Helen Keller in fifth grade and an irrational fear of going blind, but I thought that I needed to pull out all the stops for Luke if this was going to work. My phobia of losing my vision to a brush coated in black dye would have to take a backseat to my fear of being rejected by a guy I couldn’t stand.
“Yeah, well, I’m meeting someone there,” I explained, although, with my mouth open in an O so my eyes were wide enough to keep from stabbing my corneas, it sounded like, “Ell, I eating umone air.”
“Someone?” my mom repeated, coming into the room and putting down the toilet seat so she could sit. I expected a reminder that proper bathroom etiquette required replacing the seat to its closed position after each use, but either she knew it was TJ’s fault, which it was, or she was more interested in finding out about my “someone.”
“Luke Preston.”
“Luke Preston? Wasn’t he the boy who sent you that box of chocolates one year?”
I nodded and wound up dabbing a nice black streak of waterproof mascara under my left eye. Luckily, my vision was still intact, even if my flawlessly prepared face wasn’t.
Mom reached into the vanity and took out a Q-tip and some baby oil. After soaking the small cotton tip with the oil, she handed it over to me. “So, does Sean know you’re meeting someone at the dance?”
I took the Q-tip and only succeeded in turning a small streak into a smudge that ran from the corner of my nose to my ear. If this was a Halloween dance, I’d be all set.
“I doubt he cares.”
“Of course he cares, Emily. He’s your boyfriend.”
“Not anymore.” I watched myself in the mirror as I prepared to say the words out loud. “He broke up with me.” Even though the words still felt like a knife stabbing me in the chest, the reflection in the mirror was surprisingly blood free.
My mom made a sympathetic tsk sound with her tongue. “I’m sorry, Emily. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to talk about it.” I moved the mascara wand to my right eye and concentrated. “He told me the morning we left for Boston.”
“Well, that’s too bad, and I have to admit I’m a little surprised. I thought you’d be the one to break up with him.”
“Me?” I blinked and gave myself matching black eyes. “Why would I break up with Sean?”
“Well, you were the one moving, and I figured you’d want to be able to date someone here if you wanted to.”
“Why would I want to date someone here?”
“Obviously you do, you’re going to the dance with Luke, right?”
I couldn’t tell my mother the real reason I was meeting Luke at the dance, so all I could do was agree with her. No matter how much I didn’t. “Right.”
“I told the guys I’d meet them at Phil’s at six,” TJ told us, appearing in the bathroom doorway. “Hey, nice makeup job.”
I didn’t thank him.
My mom stood up. “Do you need a ride to the dance, Emily?”
I shook my head and reached for more baby oil. “No thanks,” I told her, trying to remove the last remaining mascara smudge. “Josie and Lucy are picking me up.”
“Hot date, huh?” TJ laughed at me. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
I ignored him, but couldn’t help thinking that what I was about to do was exactly the sort of thing TJ would enjoy.
“I can’t believe it’s working!” Lucy gushed, practically levitating as she held open the gymnasium doors for us.
“I knew it would,” Josie replied, letting me walk through first. I was the evening’s entertainment, after all. “You are the last person in the world Luke would suspect of doing something like this.”
By “like this” I assumed Josie meant something so completely calculated and devious. Contrary to everything I’d grown up believing, I actually took it as a compliment.
The dance committee did their best to turn the gym into something resembling a Valentine’s Day paradise, but the
re’s only so much you can do with crepe paper and balloons. The place looked like a Hallmark store gone bad. The bleachers were pushed together so only the first row provided any seating, and the basketball nets were hiked toward the ceiling with pulleys, but even with red-and-white balloon clusters framing the doorway in the shape of a heart, and music coming out of the PA system instead of basketball scores, it was still no place for a senior to be on a Friday night.
“I don’t think he’s here yet,” Lucy observed, glancing around the gym in search of Luke.
I didn’t see him anywhere in sight, but I did see plenty of freshman and sophomore girls dressed in so much red and white they looked like poster girls for trying too hard. Because we knew better, Lucy, Josie, and I just wore the same things we’d wear on any other Friday night, but our jeans and sweaters almost seemed to make us stand out even more compared to the groups of walking candy canes milling around the basketball court.
The last time I went to this dance I was going out with Owen. And I was about to get felt up for the first time. Josie and Lucy and I had discussed the situation at length for weeks before the dance, considering every single scenario that would put me and Owen alone in some dark corner behind the bleachers or in the little alcove leading to the guys’ locker room. Owen and I had been seeing each other for well over two months at that point, and I figured this was the night he’d try to go up my shirt. I’d thought about it for weeks, even though now I’m sure the only thing Owen put any thought into was whether my bra hooked in the front or the back.
All guys seem to think that girls are so lovestruck by Valentine’s Day that they’ll go for anything after getting a bouquet of wilted daisies or some white stuffed teddy bear holding a plastic heart with the words “be mine” in the center. And I’ll admit that I expected Owen to put in some level of effort before reaching for my Victoria’s Secret Angels bra.