“It’s nothing,” I lied, stepping out into the hall. I looked both ways, like a small child crossing a busy highway, and I was relieved that I didn’t see him anywhere. “I’m fine.”
“Oh, okay,” she said without suspicion. “I must be imagining it, then.”
“You must be.”
Jessica tugged at a loose strand of her blond hair that had escaped from the confines of her ponytail. “Oh, Bianca, I forgot to tell you! I’m so excited!”
“Let me guess,” I teased. “This has something to do with Harrison Carlyle, right? Did he ask you where you got your cute skinny jeans this time? Or how you condition your luscious hair?”
“No!” Jessica giggled. “No…. Actually, it’s my brother. He’s coming to visit us for the week, and he should be getting into Hamilton by noon today. He’s going to pick me up from school this afternoon. I’m really excited to see him. It’s been, like, two and a half years since he left for college and —. Hey, Bianca, are you sure you’re okay?”
I stood frozen in the middle of the hallway. I could feel the blood draining from my face, and my hands turned cold and started to shake. There was definite nausea coming on, but I told the same old lie. “I’m fine.” I forced my feet to move again. “I just, um, thought I forgot something. It’s fine. Now, what were you saying?”
Jessica nodded. “Oh, well, I’m so excited about Jake! I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve really, really missed him. It’ll be nice to hang out with him for a few days. Oh, and I think Tiffany is coming with him. Did I tell you they just got engaged?”
“No. That’s great…. I’ve gotta get to class, Jessica.”
“Oh,… okay. Well, I’ll see you in English, Bianca.” I was halfway down the hallway before Jessica got the sentence out of her mouth.
I pushed past the stampeding students, barely hearing them as they bitched at me for stepping on their toes or ramming them with my backpack. The sounds around me slowly faded as unwanted memories flooded into my head. It was like Jessica’s words had broken the dam that held them back for so long.
“So, you’re Bianca? The freshman bitch that’s been screwing my boyfriend?”
“Your boyfriend? I haven’t been—”
“Stay the hell away from Jake.”
My face burned as the memories rushed back. My feet moved so fast I was almost sprinting toward my AP government class. As if I could outrun the thoughts. As if they wouldn’t chase me with a vengeance. But Jake Gaither would be back in Hamilton for a week. Jake Gaither was engaged to Tiffany. Jake Gaither… the boy who broke my heart.
I ran into the classroom just as the tardy bell rang. I knew Mr. Chaucer’s eyes were glaring in my direction, but I didn’t bother to look. I took my seat near the back of the room, trying desperately to focus on something else.
But not even Toby Tucker’s witty commentary on the legislative branch or the back of his adorable out-of-fashion head could tempt my thoughts away from Jake and his bride to be.
I barely heard a word Mr. Chaucer said all block, and when the bell rang, my page of notes, which should have been full of details from the lecture, consisted of only two short, barely legible sentences. God, I was going to fail this class if shit like this kept coming up.
So much drama! If I were a rich Manhattan snob, I could have been a character on Gossip Girl. (Not that I watch that trashy show… often… that my friends know about… ) Why couldn’t my life be a sitcom? Then again, even the Friends crowd had issues.
I slouched toward the cafeteria, and I found Casey and Jessica waiting for me at our table. As always, Angela, Jeanine, and Jeanine’s cousin Vikki joined us. Angela was busy showing everyone her new Vans, so my sulkiness went unnoticed as I slumped into my chair.
“Cute,” Casey commented, grinning at the shoes. “Who got them for you?”
“Daddy,” Angela answered, stroking the toe of her purple shoe. “He and Mom are competing for my love now. At first it was kind of annoying, but I’ve decided to take the high road and have fun with it.” She crossed her legs and tossed back her dark hair. “I’m hoping for Prada next.”
Everyone laughed.
“I didn’t get anything cool out of my parents’ divorce,” Casey said. “My dad didn’t really care if I loved him more, I guess.”
“That’s sad, Case,” Jessica murmured.
“Oh, not really.” Casey shrugged and started picking at her orange fingernail polish. “Dad’s an ass. I was thrilled when Mom kicked him out of the house. She cries a lot less now, and when Mom’s happier, the world is happier. Sure, we don’t have as much money anymore, but it wasn’t like Dad spent his checks on us, anyway. He offered to buy Mom a car she didn’t want, but that’s about the extent of his good nature.”
“Divorces are depressing,” Jessica sighed. “I’d be heartbroken if my parents split up. Wouldn’t you, Bianca?”
I felt heat rush to my face, but Casey was switching the subject, so I pretended I hadn’t heard Jessica’s question. “Hey, Vikki, what happened on Homecoming night? You never told us how that went down.”
Jeanine giggled knowingly. “You haven’t told them yet, Vikki?”
Vikki rolled her eyes and twirled a strand of her curly strawberry-blond hair around her perfectly manicured finger. “Oh my God. Okay, so Clint is totally not speaking to me anymore, and Ross…”
Her voice drifted into the background and my mind wandered. As much as I wanted to stop thinking of Jake, I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in Vikki’s boy troubles. On any other day, I would have found mild amusement in her story, like she was my own personal soap opera, but at that moment her drama seemed so vague and unimportant. So vapid. So indulgent. So empty.
I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty for thinking this. That made me just as self-absorbed as she was. So I halfheartedly tried to listen to the woes of Vikki McPhee.
Then something she said caught my full attention.
“… but I did fool around with Wesley for a little while afterward.”
“Wesley?” I said.
Vikki beamed at me, proud of what she viewed as an achievement. Didn’t she know more than two-thirds of the girls in school had accomplished the same thing? Including me… but, of course, she didn’t know that part. “Yeah,” she said. “After the fight with Clint, I wound up out in the parking lot with Wesley. We messed around in his car for a while, but my mom called, so I had to get home before we could do anything. Sucks, right?”
“Sure.”
My eyes moved across the cafeteria, searching for a few seconds before they located the back of a curly brown head inches above those around him. He sat with a group of friends—mostly girls, naturally—at a long rectangular table on the other side of the room. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt that, while not really appropriate for the frigid temperatures of early February, showed off his perfect muscular arms. Arms that had twined around me… arms that had helped erase my stress…
“Did I tell you guys that my brother is coming to town?” Jessica asked. “He and his fiancée are visiting for the week.”
Casey’s worried eyes immediately turned on me and widened when she realized I was on my feet. “Where are you going, B?”
Everyone at the table looked at me then, and I tried to sound convincing. “I just remembered,” I said. “I need to go talk to Wesley about our English project.” Screw avoiding him. I had a better, more helpful idea.
“Didn’t you finish that on Saturday?” Jessica asked.
“We got started on it, but we didn’t finish the paper.”
“ ’Cause you were too busy making out,” Casey teased, winking at me.
Don’t look guilty. Don’t look guilty.
“Making out?” Vikki raised an eyebrow at me.
“Didn’t you hear?” Jessica laughed, smiling good-naturedly at me. “Bianca is madly in love with Wesley.”
I faked a gagging noise and everyone laughed. “Yeah, right,” I said, making sure that my
voice was full of irritation and disgust. “I can’t stand him. God, I’ve lost so much respect for Mrs. Perkins since she made me work with him.”
“I’d be ecstatic if I were you,” Vikki said, sounding a little bitter.
Jeanine and Angela nodded in agreement.
“Anyway.” I was feeling a little jumpy. “I need to talk to him about getting this done. I’ll see you all later, okay?”
“ ’kay,” Jessica said, waving cheerfully.
I hurried through the crowded cafeteria, not slowing down until I was within five feet of Wesley’s table, where the only other male occupant was Harrison Carlyle. Then I paused for a second, suddenly a little hesitant.
One of the girls, a skinny blonde with Angelina Jolie lips, was rattling on about her crappy vacation in Miami, and Wesley was listening with rapt attention—obviously trying to convince her of his sympathy. Disgust erased my insecurity, and I cleared my throat loudly, getting the whole group’s attention.
The blonde was agitated and angry, but I focused on Wesley, who looked at me casually, like he would any other girl. I turned up my nose and said, “I need to talk to you about our English paper.”
“Is it necessary?” Wesley asked with a sigh.
“Yeah,” I said. “Right now. I’m not going to fail this stupid assignment because of your lazy ass.”
He rolled his eyes and got to his feet. “Sorry, ladies,” he said to the tragedy-stricken girls. “I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll save a seat for me?”
“Of course we will,” a tiny redhead squeaked.
As Wesley and I walked away, I heard Big Lips hiss, “God, that girl is a bitch!”
When we were out in the hallway Wesley asked, “What’s the problem, Duffy? I e-mailed you the essay last night, just like you demanded. And where exactly are we going? The library?”
“Just shut up and come with me.” I led him down the hall past the English classrooms.
Don’t ask where I got this idea, because I couldn’t tell you, but I knew precisely where we were going, and I was sure that this might officially make me a slut. But when we reached the door of the unused janitor’s closet, I had no feeling of shame… not yet, at least.
I grasped the doorknob and noticed Wesley’s eyes narrow with suspicion. I yanked open the door, checked that no one was watching, and gestured for him to go inside. Wesley walked into the tiny closet, and I followed, shutting the door stealthily behind us.
“Something tells me this isn’t about The Scarlet Letter,” he said, and even in the dark I knew he was grinning.
“Be quiet.”
This time he met me halfway. His hands tangled in my hair and mine clawed at his forearms. We kissed violently, and my back slammed against the wall. I heard a mop—or maybe a broom—topple over, but my brain barely registered the sound as one of Wesley’s hands moved to my hip, holding me closer to him. He was so much taller than me that I had to tilt my head back almost all the way to meet his kiss. His lips pressed hard against mine, and I let my hands explore his biceps.
The smell of his cologne, rather than the lonely, stale air of the closet, filled my senses.
We wrestled in the darkness for a while before I felt his hand insistently lifting the hem of my T-shirt. With a gasp, I pulled away from the kiss and grabbed his wrist. “No… not now.”
“Then when?” Wesley asked in my ear, still pinning me to the wall. He didn’t even sound winded.
I, on the other hand, struggled to catch my breath. “Later.”
“Be more specific.”
I squirmed out of his arms and moved toward the door, nearly tripping over what felt like a bucket. I raised a hand to flatten my wavy hair and reached for the doorknob. “Tonight. I’ll be at your house around seven. Okay?” But before he could answer, I slipped out of the closet and hurried down the hall, hoping it didn’t look like a walk of shame.
10
I didn’t think the final bell would ever ring. Calculus was excruciatingly long and boring, and English was nerve-racking. I caught myself glancing across the room at Wesley several times, anxious to feel the mind-numbing effects of his arms, hands, and lips again.
I just prayed my friends didn’t notice. Jessica, of course, would believe me if I told her she was imagining things; Casey, on the other hand… well, hopefully Casey was too absorbed in Mrs. Perkins’s grammar lesson—ha, yeah right!—to look over at me. She would probably interrogate me for hours and guess everything that had happened, seeing right through my denials. I really needed to get the hell out of there before I was exposed.
But when the bell finally rang, I was in no hurry to walk outside.
Jessica skipped toward the cafeteria with her blond ponytail bouncing behind her. “I can’t wait to see him!”
“We get it, Jess,” Casey said. “You love your big brother. It’s cute, really, but you’ve said that… twenty times today? Thirty, maybe?”
Jessica blushed. “Well, I can’t wait.”
“Of course you can’t.” Casey smiled at her. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you, too, but you might want to calm down just a tiny bit.” She stopped in the middle of the cafeteria and looked over her shoulder at me. “You coming, B?”
“No,” I said, crouching down and messing with my shoestrings. “I need to… tie this. You guys go ahead. Don’t stall the reunion for me.”
Casey gave me a knowing look before nodding and pushing Jessica ahead. She started a new conversation to distract Jessica from my lame excuse. “So tell me about this fiancée. What’s she like? Pretty? Dumb as a sack of potatoes? I want the details.”
I waited in the cafeteria for a good twenty minutes, not wanting to chance seeing him in the parking lot. How funny that, less than seven hours earlier, I’d been avoiding a completely different guy… one I was now desperate to see. As sick and twisted as it was, I couldn’t wait to be back in Wesley’s bedroom. Back on my own private island getaway. Back in my world of escape. But first I had to wait until Jake Gaither drove out of the parking lot.
When I felt confident that he’d gone, I walked out of the school, pulling my coat tight around me. The February wind bit at my face as I moved across the empty parking lot, and the sight of my heat-challenged car didn’t hold any comfort. I slid into the driver’s seat, shivering like crazy, and started the engine. The ride home seemed to take hours even though Hamilton High was only about four miles from my house.
I’d just started to wonder if I could go to Wesley’s house a few hours early when I pulled into my driveway and remembered my dad. Oh, great. His car was in the driveway, but he shouldn’t have been home from work yet.
“Damn it!” I wailed, punching the steering wheel and jumping like an idiot when the horn sounded. “Damn it! Damn it!”
Guilt surged through me. How could I forget about Dad? Poor, lonely, barricaded-in-his-bedroom Dad? I worried as I climbed out of the car and trudged up the sidewalk that he might still be in his room. If he was, would I have to break down the door? Then what? Yell at him? Cry with him? Tell him that Mom didn’t deserve him? What was the right answer?
But Dad was sitting on the couch when I walked inside, a bowl of popcorn in his lap. I hesitated in the doorway, not sure what the hell was going on. He looked… normal. He didn’t look like he’d been crying or drinking or anything. He just looked like my dad with his thick-rimmed glasses and untidy auburn hair. The same way I saw him every other day of the week.
“Hey, Bumblebee,” he said, looking up at me. “Want some popcorn? There’s a Clint Eastwood movie on AMC.”
“Um… no thanks.” I looked around the room. No broken glass. No beer bottles. Like he hadn’t been drinking that day at all. I wondered if that was it. If the relapse was over. Did relapses work that way? I had no clue. But I couldn’t help feeling wary. “Dad, are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “I woke up late this morning, so I just called work and told them I was sick. I haven’t taken any of my vacation days, so it’s
not a big deal.”
I glanced into the kitchen. The manila envelope still sat on the kitchen table. Untouched.
He must have followed my gaze, or guessed, because he said with a shrug, “Oh, those stupid papers! You know, they had me in such a fit. I finally thought about it and realized that they’re just a mistake. Your mom’s lawyer heard she’d been gone a little longer than usual this time and jumped the gun.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“No,” Dad admitted. “But I’m sure that’s the problem. It must be. Nothing to worry about, Bumblebee. How was your day?”
“It was good.”
We were both lying, but I knew that my words weren’t true. He, on the other hand, seemed genuinely convinced. How could I remind him that Mom’s signature was on the papers? How could I bring him back to reality? That would only drive him into his bedroom again—or send him in search of a bottle—and ruin this moment of manufactured peace.
And I didn’t want to be the one to fuck up my dad’s sobriety.
Shock, I decided as I walked up the stairs to my bedroom. He was simply in shock. But the denial wouldn’t last long. Eventually he’d wake up. I just hoped he’d do it with grace.
I stretched out on my bed with my calculus book in front of me, trying to do homework I really didn’t understand. My eyes kept jumping to the alarm clock on my nightstand. 3:28… 3:31… 3:37… Minutes ticked by, and math problems blurred into patterns of unidentifiable symbols, like ancient runes. Finally I slammed the book shut and conceded defeat.
This was sick. I should not have been thinking of Wesley. I shouldn’t have been kissing Wesley. I shouldn’t have been sleeping with Wesley. Hell, barely a week earlier I would have thought speaking to him was horrific. But the more my world spun, the more appealing he became. Don’t get me wrong, I still hated him with a passion. His arrogance made me want to scream, but his ability to free me—if only temporarily—from my problems left me high. He was my drug. Seriously sick.