by Cameron Lund
Nobody is talking, and so I wonder if they feel weird too. I’m thankful for the music playing on the radio, because it drowns out some of my anxious thoughts.
It only takes about five minutes to get to Danielle’s house, and when Andrew pulls the truck to a stop in her driveway, I feel the awkwardness expanding—like the truck is a tank filling with water and we’re slowly going to drown.
“You’ll get inside okay?” Andrew asks. Danielle rummages through her bag for her keys, pulling out a key chain with a leopard-print heart. She pulls down the passenger-side mirror and checks out her reflection, using her thumb to wipe the skin around her eyes.
“My parents go to sleep at like nine thirty.” She snaps the mirror shut and turns to us, smiling at Andrew and me with equal dazzle. “But just in case—do I smell like booze?”
She leans closer to me and breathes in my face and I cough. Her breath is sharp and tangy, the remnants of red wine. I start to nod but she leans past me toward Andrew. “You’ve been drinking too, Collins. You won’t be able to smell it.” And then she grabs the front of Andrew’s shirt and pulls him even closer, so her mouth is only a few inches away from his. She breathes again. “All good?”
Andrew laughs and shakes his head. “You smell like a bar.”
“Shut up, Reed,” she says. “Like you’ve ever been in a bar.” And still their mouths are only a few inches apart. She’s leaning over me, her body pressed into mine like I’m not even there, and her hair is in my face. I move it out of the way so I can see them, even though seeing them is making it hard to breathe.
“Thanks for dinner,” she says, and then kisses him squarely on the lips. It’s not a real kiss, just a quick pressing of her lips to his, and it’s over in a second—but it hits me in the chest. Before I can help it, I make a strangled sound and then feel my face turn a brilliant shade of red, because I’m horrified I’ve made any sound at all.
She pulls back and then seems to remember I’m sitting between them.
“Oh, sorry, Collins.” She pulls her hair behind her shoulder so it’s out of my face. “Forgot you were there.” I turn to look at Andrew’s face, to see if he’s embarrassed or excited or sorry, but his expression is blank and unreadable. “All right,” she says, opening the door to the truck and hopping out. “I’ll see you kids later.” And then she slams the door shut and we’re alone.
He doesn’t start the truck right away, and we sit silently beside each other, listening to the radio, which has changed to some local commercial for a grocery store, some silly song about fruits and vegetables. I focus intently on the words of the song, trying not to think about what just happened. I don’t want to process my thoughts, don’t want to think about the sharp pain in my chest, the way my breath felt strangled when I saw their lips touch. I’ve seen Andrew kiss so many girls, in way more intimate ways—tongues and teeth and hands—so this innocent peck on the lips shouldn’t matter. It’s just—this is the first time I’ve seen Andrew kiss a girl since he kissed me.
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and then he reaches out and turns the key. The truck rumbles to life.
“Okay, let’s get you home.”
So he’s not going to talk about it.
He looks behind him and backs the truck out of the driveway. I move into the passenger seat and buckle the seat belt—far enough away from him now so our arms are no longer touching.
“Why didn’t you tell me about that New Year’s party?” I ask suddenly, because I can’t stand the silence between us.
“I don’t need to tell you everything.” His tone is clipped, his posture straight and tense.
“Why are you mad?” I ask, because I can tell. He runs a hand through his hair, further proving my point.
“I’m not mad,” he says. “I just don’t get why you care. That I didn’t tell you.”
“I don’t care.” I realize we’re getting nowhere. We’re going to keep spinning in circles unless one of us starts speaking the truth. “So you’re a thing with Danielle now?” I turn to face him. Our eyes meet and I can’t stand it, so I look away and down at my hands, picking at my nails. I don’t ever paint them, but right now I wish I did, so I would have something to chip off.
“Yeah,” he says.
“What about Abby?” I ask. “You’re just done with her?”
“There was never anything with Abby.”
“Okay then, Cecilia?”
“Cecilia knew it was coming.”
“That still doesn’t mean it’s a very nice thing to do to someone.”
“Because you’re the expert on relationships.” His words sting.
“Some of these girls might actually like you, you know. Have you ever actually liked any of them?”
“Oh they might actually like me?” His tone is sharp. “Thanks for the reassurance. It’s good to know somebody might hook up with me because they want to—not just for practice.”
I feel the guilt of last night suddenly and completely, the stupid, stupid Plan spreading back over us like a virus. Even if we’ve claimed that nothing has changed, there’s no way we can go back to the way we were before. Our friendship is infected.
“That’s not what I meant.” I feel like I’m spinning out of control, like I need to find a handhold to steady myself but am grasping at air. “You’re good with girls, Drew. It’s not an insult. I just think—maybe you’re too good with girls. I mean, Sophie Piznarski really liked you, and you dumped her out of nowhere. And now it’s become this pattern—”
“That was freshman year. Are you seriously criticizing me for something like three years ago?”
“No!” I say. “But you haven’t had another girlfriend. You just move on to a new girl anytime you see something better. You haven’t dated anyone since.”
“Neither have you,” he says, throwing my words back at me. “Unless you’re dating Dean. But I really don’t think you see it that way.” I feel my stomach clench at his words. “And why am I supposed to have a girlfriend? Why are you pushing me?”
“I’m not.” I bring my hands up to rub my face. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I don’t want Andrew to have a girlfriend—especially not someone like Cecilia or Danielle—but somehow my words are coming out all wrong. “I just want you to stop acting like girls don’t matter. It’s insulting!”
“They know what they’re getting into,” he says, his voice rising. “And who are you to say they’re not just as into hookups as I am? You can’t shame girls for liking sex just because you don’t.”
His words feel like a slap in the face. I can feel the impact of them, red on my cheek.
We arrive at my house and he pulls the truck off the road and parks, but neither of us makes a move to get out. He takes a breath and lowers his voice back into a whisper. “And they’re not stupid. They know what they’re signing up for. Besides, I—”
“They know you don’t like them? That you’re just going to ditch them? How could they possibly know?”
“I tell them! I tell them all that I don’t want anything serious.”
I don’t know why I’m pressing him. It’s like I’m picking at a scab. “But why?”
“Because I’m already in love with someone!” His breath is ragged, like he’s just run a marathon. He brings a hand up to his hair, pulling on the ends of it so it’s sticking up wildly.
I feel stomach-punched at his words, like all the breath has been knocked out of me. How could he not tell me he was in love with someone? I thought we told each other everything. That’s what best friends do. We’re here for each other’s weird shit. We handle it.
I guess I’m not as good at reading him as I’ve always thought.
“Which one?” I ask, my voice soft.
“What?” He seems dazed and he’s blinking at me like he’s just noticed I’m there.
“Which
girl?” I ask. “Who are you in love with?”
He scoffs, a short breathy sound that gets caught in the back of his throat. “It doesn’t matter.” All of the energy seems drained out of him.
“No, it does matter,” I say. “I’ve always helped you with girls, haven’t I?”
He laughs a little, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands. “I didn’t mean to tell you this when you were drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.” I feel a little light-headed, but I haven’t been drinking wine now for a few hours. And this conversation has certainly sobered me up. “Have you told her?”
“What?” he asks, lifting his head out of his hands.
“Have you told her you love her?”
“It’s . . . complicated,” he says, and there’s a beat of silence as I think about what he’s said. He turns his head slightly so he’s facing me and rests his hand on mine, giving it a comforting squeeze. I feel my breath catch in my throat, unexpectedly pleased with the feeling of his palm on my skin. It feels like it did last night, back when he pulled me closer to him on the bed, told me to forget the rules.
“I . . .” I begin, but trail off, unsure of what to say. I shake my head, trying to wake myself up from the daze. “You should tell her. You can’t just keep something like that bottled up. You’ll burst.”
“Okay,” he says, taking a quick breath. “You’re right.”
“Will you tell me first?” I ask. “I want to know who it is.” I pull my hand out from under his and tuck my hair behind my ears. Suddenly I remember what Dean told me earlier in the night: I think he has a crush on you. He might be your brother, but you’re not his sister. I have a quick flash of last night, of the fluttering feeling in my chest when his lips first touched mine, of how badly I ached to go through with everything, how much it hurt when he walked out. But I push it away. I feel like everything is mixed up inside of me, and I can’t get my thoughts in order. The thought that Andrew might have feelings for me is terrifying. Things weren’t supposed to go this way. He’s my best friend. We’re just friends. That’s it.
“Wait,” I say, the words tumbling out of me. “Is it me? It’s not me, is it?” I feel my face burning, immediately wanting to take back the words, but they’re already out.
Andrew shifts away from me. He lets out a humorless laugh. “Are you fucking with me?”
“What?” I ask, taken aback. “No. I’m just making sure, I mean I’m just checking . . . sometimes friends end up liking each other and—”
“It’s not you,” he says, the words like an insult. “Don’t worry.”
I feel punctured, like a balloon inside me is slowly deflating.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” I need to say it again. I feel oddly hurt and disappointed. Obviously it’s not me. He basically told me last night he couldn’t keep it up when we were together.
“Okay, so who is it?” I ask. His eyes narrow slightly, and then he clears his throat. His answer is so obvious I don’t know how it didn’t occur to me, even though she was with us only a few minutes earlier, her cleavage pressed against my shoulder as she leaned over me to kiss him.
“Come on, Collins,” he says. “I’m in love with Danielle.”
TWENTY-THREE
I TURN AWAY so he can’t see my face. I shouldn’t be surprised, and I’m not, really. I should have known better. Andrew doesn’t love me—why would he when he has a parade of beautiful girls at his disposal? And Danielle is the most beautiful, the most confident, the most powerful—everything Cecilia, Abby, Sophie, and all the rest of Andrew’s castoffs have ever wanted to be. Why wouldn’t he be drawn to that power?
I shake my head, trying to clear away the thoughts tumbling around inside. It’s stupid to feel upset; I don’t want Andrew in that way. I have James Dean. It’s just that it felt nice for a moment to believe he could see me as one of those girls too, one of the girls like Danielle, who wears her skin like a fashionable coat instead of something that doesn’t quite fit.
When Andrew first started dating Sophie Piznarski, he shared everything with me—that he thought she looked best in her sweater with the pink and blue stripes; how she hated spicy food but loved anything with peanut butter; how sometimes they made out on the couch in the living room while her parents worked late. He complained to me about having to attend her dance recitals, dragged me along to a few of them so we could whisper to each other behind a raised program.
And then after Sophie, I got used to hearing details about the girls he liked, watching as he walked hand in hand with a girl up the stairs, pulling her into a bedroom, or a bathroom, or a closet, their laughter loud and drunk and happy.
But he’s kept Danielle from me. That means she’s special. She wasn’t someone to talk about the next morning over pancakes at Jan’s. She was someone to keep tucked away, someone secret and meaningful.
“You’re in love with her?” I ask, picking at a string that’s come loose from the cushion of the seat. I look up at him and he looks away.
“Yeah.”
“I had no idea.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m . . .” He pauses, running a hand through his hair so it’s standing straight up, like he’s been electrified. I feel just like that hair, shocked and alert, like I’ve been electrified too.
“You could have told me. I mean, before now. You didn’t have to keep it a secret. I get it.” I try to laugh, but it gets stuck in the back of my throat. “She’s Danielle Oliver.”
“Do you think . . .” He trails off.
I fill in the rest of his question in my head. Do you think I have a chance? Do you think she likes me back? Do you think we’ll still be friends after all of this?
“Yeah.” I open the door to the truck. “You’ll be fine, Drew. Like I said, you should tell her. You’re going to prom with her, right? That’ll be the perfect time. You can do something big for her. Really make it count.”
“Yeah.”
I climb out of the truck and walk up the dark driveway and into the house. Then I watch through the window as his truck backs up and pulls away.
It looks like we’re both getting the perfect prom, getting everything we want at just the right time, like the end of some teen movie. But if everything is so perfect, then why does it feel so wrong?
Hannah and I have plans to go prom dress shopping the next morning, so she picks me up in the Jeep and takes us on the long drive to the mall. She’s promised to buy me a Cinnabon if I have a good attitude, so I’m trying to be cooperative, but I don’t think I’ve worn a dress since I was the flower girl in my aunt’s wedding in third grade. Secretly, I’m actually a little excited about everything, even though I have no idea what I’m doing. Luckily Hannah has dutifully taken on the role of my fairy godmother, picking out different styles and colors and holding them up in front of me, pleading with big eyes for me to try something on.
I still haven’t told her about what happened with Andrew on Friday. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about it. I can give him that one thing, now that he’s going to tell Danielle he loves her. I don’t want to ruin that for him.
But I need to ask Hannah about them, need to turn the pebble over in my hands, examining it from all sides. We’re together in one of the dressing rooms at Macy’s, surrounded by so many puffy dresses it’s giving me an aneurysm, when I finally break down and ask her.
“Did you know Andrew and Danielle hooked up?”
Hannah has a pink and white zebra-print monstrosity halfway over her head that I think she must have grabbed as a joke.
“I’m so sorry,” she says through the fabric, and then she shimmies the dress down, reaching her arms through the sleeves. “Junior year at Ava’s New Year’s party.” She turns away from me to look through the rack of dresses hanging beside her on the wall, like she’s inspecting them. Like she’s avoiding me.
“You knew
?” I’m wearing a green dress that makes me look way too much like Tinkerbell because of my whole tiny blond thing. “How did you know before me? Does everyone else know?”
“You went to bed early that night,” Hannah says, turning her back on the mirror to look at me fully. “Everyone saw them making out at midnight—typical Party Andrew. It was no big deal.”
But it was a big deal. If it had been no big deal, we would have laughed about it together the next morning when he woke up at the foot of my bed, his hair sticking up at all angles, the imprint of the rug patterned into his right cheek.
Missed you last night, Collins, was all he said. And then he pulled the blankets off me so that I shrieked in the chilly morning air.
I shouldn’t have been kept in the dark about it for a whole year.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Hannah.
“I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“You didn’t have to protect me,” I say. “I wouldn’t have cared.”
“You would have,” she insists. “I know you don’t like Danielle. You put up with her. You’ve always put up with her because she was my friend. But you don’t like her. And I’ve always wanted you guys to get along. I’ve tried so hard to push you together, because I love you both, and I knew this would ruin that. This would be the thing that made it official, that turned you and Danielle antagonistic.”
“It wouldn’t have been like that,” I say, protesting although I’m not sure I believe it.
“And you’re protective of Andrew,” she says. “Because he’s yours.”
“Hannah, he’s not mine, that’s—”
“And I knew it would hurt you that he went for her.”
“He hooks up with girls all the time, Hannah.”