I had not misunderstood Addison. I knew this in my heart.
But Max went on earnestly, “I saw you from across the football field at camp. I thought you noticed me, too. When camp was over, I asked Carter to wait with me so I could try to talk to you on your way out.”
“And Addison talked to you instead,” I griped.
“Well, you got hit in the nose,” he said, gently touching where Addison had clobbered me. “I thought that quieted you down. I was going to try to talk to you at the Varsity, but you got sullen, remember? And then, when you left the table to text your mom, I suggested to Addison that the four of us could go out together. I was afraid if I asked you out by yourself, you’d say no, because we’d just met and you’d mentioned serial killers. I figured if we went out as a group first, I might grow on you, and then I could make my move on you.”
“That’s not what Addison told me,” I said, so frustrated now that I could have cried. “She specifically told me that you had asked her out, and that I had to go out with Carter so her mother would let her out of the house.”
Max shook his head. “I have no idea where she got that.”
I knew where she had gotten it. Addison had seen something she’d wanted, and she’d lied to get it.
Max pointed at me. “But then she came back to the table and said that you thought Carter was fine!”
I stared at Max for a few moments with my mouth open, not quite believing what I was hearing. “I said Carter was fine?”
“That’s what Addison said.” Max glared at me accusingly.
“I did not say that,” I insisted. “When she told me you’d asked her out, she said she wanted me to go out with Carter. She asked me if I liked him. I may have said that I liked him fine.”
He sighed suddenly like he’d been holding his breath. “So she just misheard you. She wasn’t lying.”
“She was totally lying, trust me.”
His brows went down like he disapproved of my comment.
I was so angry that I hardly noticed, and I definitely didn’t care. “How could you believe I said Carter was fine?” I protested. “That doesn’t sound like anything I’d say about anybody. That is a strange expression Addison would use.”
“I didn’t know that. I’d just met you.”
“But Max! Why would you still want to go out with me if you believed I said it?”
“I had my misgivings. But you were too perfect, and I couldn’t let you go just because you thought you liked Carter. I knew he wasn’t into you. He knew I was. And I could tell he had a thing for Addison but didn’t want to admit it. He was too wrapped up in moping about his ex-girlfriend. So I kicked him under the table a few times to make him go along with the plan.”
Max reached out to finger the embroidered GLADYS on my shirt pocket. “Then, in the MARTA station, you said the tile art of the countryside was ironic, and I was hooked again. I had to have you. When we got home, I called Carter and convinced him that if we all went out together, we could switch it up and make it right.”
I took in Max’s handsome, shadowed face, the gold pendant on a red cord around his neck, the chiseled muscles of his arms and chest. After all the weeks I’d pined for him, this revelation was too good to be true, and I did not quite believe it. “You never liked Addison?” I repeated.
“No.”
I thought back to our first date, meeting her and Carter in the shopping center parking lot. “You were staring at her cleavage, Max.”
“How could I help it? Everybody was staring at her cleavage. You were staring at her cleavage.”
I laughed bitterly at that, because it was true. “And this is why you kept throwing darts at me, like at Little Five Points when you made fun of the way I dress. You were mad at me for liking Carter.”
He opened his hands. “Because why would you like Carter instead of me? You were supposed to be with me!”
I felt ill. “This is what you and Carter have been arguing about.”
“Like we didn’t have enough already,” Max grumbled. “Yes. He was supposed to go out with you, if that’s what you wanted, but not to stick his tongue down your throat. He’s been doing that because he knew it infuriated me and I couldn’t do anything.” Max’s eyes blazed fire.
“Why did Carter go out with me tonight, then, when you couldn’t?”
“I told him he had to. It was your birthday. I didn’t want you to get stood up.”
“Thanks, Max,” I said sarcastically, thinking of the heartfelt gift of the slasher film. “Was that ‘I love you’ bear your idea?”
“I told him to give you something for your birthday. His ex-girlfriend gave that back to him, I think.”
Max still sat in front of me, but all I could see was Addison, lips pursed and fists balled in excitement as she told me her great news in the Varsity, every bit of which was a lie to steal my guy.
“I hate Addison,” I said. “I hate her with every fiber of my being. I have never hated anyone like I hate that girl, not even my dad’s girlfriend. I would seriously like to put hair remover in her shampoo.”
I took a long, ragged breath. The anger relented a little. Max stared at me with his nostrils flared like I was some distasteful lower species—the way the cool, popular kids used to look at me when I was younger and I passed by their table in the lunchroom.
“Good to know.” He found his shirt balled on the floorboard, turned it right side out, and jerked it on. “I’m sorry to have put you through all this trouble, Gemma. I can tell now that it’s not going to work out.” He got out of the car.
“What?” Alarmed, I shoved open my door and met him at the hood. “What do you mean it’s not going to work out?”
He kept walking around to the passenger side. “I make girls mad. I make you mad too, but you kept coming back for more. You understood me. That’s what I thought, anyway.” He opened the passenger door. “I fell in love with you, Gemma. I’ve been waiting to tell you that every waking moment for the last three weeks. I love you. And all you can focus on is that you’re angry at Addison!” He slammed the door behind him.
I stood there in a huff, trying to calm down, staring at his scowl through the windshield. With a sharp breath I looked up at the tops of the oak trees towering overhead and disappearing into the starlight. He was right. I was so angry at Addison that there was hardly room in my brain for anything else. She had fooled me and used me and tricked me out of being with the guy I wanted most in the world. But if I didn’t snap out of it, I was going to lose him permanently.
A cool breeze swept through the trees. I shivered, then realized I was standing in a public park with my shirt unbuttoned and my bra showing. I buttoned up, glancing once at Max. He was watching me.
I walked to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. Starting the engine with a roar, I said, “We have got to solve this, Max, but it’s a school night and I have to go.”
He waved his casted arm in the air, dismissing the problem. “There’s nothing to solve.”
“Don’t say that,” I insisted, turning onto the road to his house.
So he didn’t. But he didn’t say anything else, either. We sat in stubborn silence all the way back to his house. My lips still tingled from kissing him. My skin tingled where his hot hand had touched me. I could not believe Addison had made me wait three weeks for Max, and tortured me by making me think I would never have him.
And now I never would.
As I parked in Max’s driveway, I didn’t want my anger to get the better of me. The more times that happened, the angrier I got at Addison, which just fed the fire. I took a deep breath and tried one more time.
“Max. Just because you think you have it all figured out doesn’t mean it’s true. You’re not always right.”
“Really?”
“Really. What we did for the past hour . . . that was real between us. That was not some scheme to get revenge on Addison, at least not on my end. Didn’t it feel real to you? I could not fake that with yo
u.”
He nodded. “So you’ve liked me all this time, from when we first met at camp. You weren’t trying to get back at Addison. You liked me for me.”
“Yes!”
“Just like it was real and you didn’t fake it when you made out with Carter last Friday, and the Friday before that.”
I took a breath to tell him the truth. When I’d been with Carter, I’d been trying to make the best out of a bad situation.
“You’re not going to be with me,” Max said, his voice a sexy, menacing rumble over the roar of the engine. “You won’t win your game with Addison this time. By next year, all the two of you will remember is that you had an argument about some guy, but you won’t remember me or exactly why. I’m not even a real person to you. To you, it’s all about getting one up on Addison.”
“That is not true, Max,” I whispered with tears in my eyes, because it wasn’t. I reached across the car for him.
He opened the door and backed out, pulling away from my hand. “You thought you were hungry, but then you decided, no, you really just wanted something to eat.” He slammed the door behind him.
14
Friday was such a big day for me. That night I would perform for the first time ever as a majorette! I’d ironed my clothes for school several days beforehand, and caught up on my homework so I could sleep as long as possible the morning of my big day. And wouldn’t you know, I hardly slept at all. I woke up hours early, all with one thing in mind: telling Addison off.
By that time I’d obsessed all night and planned the attack carefully. I did not want to wait until band. That would mean I had to live with the anger cycling over and over in my mind for almost the whole school day. I didn’t have any other classes with her, so I had to catch her before the first bell rang, when everybody walked from their cars or the buses and gathered on the grass in front of the school.
I found a parking space—not as easy as it sounded, since it was my first time driving myself to school—and jogged around the building to the front lawn. Addison was laughing with the other majorettes, chatting them up before the vote. That made me even angrier. On top of everything else she’d done to me, when she won head majorette–elect that night, she would officially be the boss of me!
I felt like I was on some trashy, staged reality show as I headed for her, like everybody on the lawn was watching me and laughing at me. But probably nobody was actually looking at me until I stomped up to the majorettes and told Addison, “I need to talk to you alone.”
She looked at me and blinked her eyes innocently. “Why?”
I had been friends with Addison for a long time. I usually knew when she was lying to me. I hadn’t known when she told me that Max had asked her out—maybe because I wasn’t in a mental place where I could believe he liked me then—but I knew now that she was guilty. Something in her eyes gave her away. Either Max had told her about last night, or she had figured out that we were together.
“You know why,” I said quietly.
She gestured to the other majorettes, who looked at us curiously. “There’s nothing you need to say to me that you can’t say to my friends.”
So now they were her friends, not mine.
I glanced at the five of them, watching me expectantly. My gaze rested on Delilah, whose black eyes were huge and full of horror. If Addison wanted me to say this in front of them, so be it.
“You lied to me.” Those words felt so good to say that it was easy for me to keep going. “You told me Max asked you out when he didn’t. You knew I liked him first.” I heard my own voice rising. I sensed people from across the school yard crowding behind me to watch this spectacle, which was exactly what I hadn’t wanted. Some wise-ass yelled, “Fight!”
I knew I was in trouble when Addison looked triumphant. “Your boyfriend is Carter!” she crowed. “If you like Max now, you stole my boyfriend! You have been double dipping!”
The crowd gasped.
“I have not been doing any such thing!” I hollered at her. “That is dirty. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
She put her hands on her hips, uncomfortable for the first time. “Oh yeah? And how do you know all these expressions if you haven’t been doing something dirty?”
“Because I am in band, and I am friends with trumpets!” I must have sounded as crazy as I felt, screaming this at her, because someone stepped behind me and put a steadying hand on my back.
“You are in big trouble, Gemma Van Cleve,” Addison sneered at me. She touched her nose with her fingertip. At first I thought she was reminding me that she’d broken my nose so long ago. Or she was rubbing in how ugly my nose was now.
Instead, she said, “You didn’t keep your nose clean.”
She turned and flounced across the yard and into school. Toward the band room. Toward Mrs. Baxter.
“Ooooooh,” said the crowd.
The person attached to the calming hand on my back stepped forward. It was Robert. “Show’s over, folks. Nothing to see here.” He waved his hands like he was shooing cows. Several of them actually mooed as they dispersed.
He bent to look into my eyes. “Are you okay? What was that all about?”
“Yeah!” The head majorette leaned close, bringing the rest of the majorettes with her. “You always keep calm and carry on, Gemma. If you’re involved in drama, it must be serious.”
I was going to brush it off and tell them, “Nothing,” but that would be a lie. And as I looked around and saw their concern, I realized they really were my friends. I wanted them to know what had happened.
So I told them the bare bones of the story. The truth, so that Addison couldn’t accuse me of spreading rumors about her.
“And she’s going to try to get you kicked off the majorette squad for that?” Delilah squeaked. “She can’t do that!”
“I guess she can,” I said, defeated. “We all knew what Mrs. Baxter’s rules were when we tried out.”
The bell rang, and we hiked up the stairs to the school. As I sat in a series of quiet classrooms, alone with my thoughts except for the occasional Pythagorean theorem or genealogy of the British royal family, I calmed down. I felt better about what had happened. I was relieved that I had confronted Addison. I had accused her of this one transgression, but that was all it took to purge my bitterness about a six-year friendship full of insults and slights. I was gratified that Robert had taken up for me and the majorettes had not abandoned me. I hoped that only a few people had witnessed the fight.
That hope was dashed as I walked from class to class. I was almost late for dance because so many people stopped me to ask if I’d really dated the quarterback and the kicker from the rival team. Technically I had never gone on a date with Max, so I said no. Which felt like a betrayal of him, even though our night together had ended awfully.
I dreaded going to band. Addison would be there, and she would confront me again. Mrs. Baxter would be there, and she would tell me I was off the squad. Expecting something horrible to happen was almost worse than it actually happening. I spent the whole sweltering hour in that excruciating limbo. I was so distracted that I dropped my baton. Twice.
Mrs. Baxter never called me out of the line. But she seemed to scowl at me more disapprovingly than usual. I couldn’t be sure because she and the band director viewed us from so high in the stands. But Addison was only five yards away from me, with the other majorettes gathered around her. She was definitely scowling.
The next time the band ran the drill, we all moved to new positions on the field, and I was a long way from Addison. I looked around for Delilah to ask her what was going on. She was already walking toward me.
“You told us you liked the kicker for East in the first place, instead of the quarterback,” she said. “But you’re not with the kicker now. Are you?”
I tried to read her expression. When we’d gone to the vintage store, she’d guessed that I’d fallen for a guy I was going out with that night. I just hadn’t clued her in that the guy was M
ax instead of Carter. I hoped she understood that I couldn’t have told her then, because Max had belonged to Addison. Or so I’d thought.
“I’m not dating either of them now,” I said. Seven words, and so much behind them.
“Good,” she said. “If you were dating the kicker, I would have been worried. Since you’re not, this is probably good news.”
I doubted it.
“This morning Addison was talking about turning you in to Mrs. Baxter,” Delilah said. “Now she’s talking about getting revenge on the kicker instead. Maybe you’re off the hook.”
“How is she getting revenge on him?” I hated to ask.
“She says he’s really superstitious about game days.”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“She’s sending flowers to his house this afternoon,” Delilah said. “She acts like that’s going to get him good, but I don’t see how it will ruin his game, do you? Are flowers bad luck?”
“Only in context,” I murmured. “He’s superstitious about kicking, and his game day has to go like every other game day. I’d be willing to bet nobody ever sent him flowers before.”
Delilah touched my arm. “You really care about him.”
I nodded as tears filled my eyes. I was not going to cry. Not while Addison was glaring across the field at me and talking behind her hand to another majorette.
“Then you should discuss it with Addison,” Delilah said. “I’m sure she’ll listen to reason. Come on, I’ll go with you.” She tugged at my shirt.
I shook my head. If Delilah thought Addison would listen to reason, she didn’t know Addison very well. “I have another way to take care of it.”
My first idea was to camp out at Max’s house and wait for the florist truck so I could intercept it. But I didn’t know when Max would be home. I couldn’t be there when he arrived. I was the girl he’d gotten together with and made out with and dumped the night before. Finding me in his driveway would probably be even more unusual and traumatic for him on game day than receiving a bouquet of flowers. I didn’t have Dr. Hirayama’s number or the other Dr. Hirayama’s number, but I had Carter’s.