Not Exactly Lying

by Melody Summers

  We ordered pizza and stayed up late watching a horror movie marathon. Dannika had wanted to watch chick flicks, but Allison and I convinced her that the last thing Delaney needed was to be reminded about men and relationships and this would be far better for taking her mind off of Walker.

  I needed time to think about what I was going to do about that boy. Delaney was my friend, and if I could help her I couldn’t just let things end like this. I was going to have a talk with Walker when I got home and see if I couldn’t get to the bottom of things.

  Chapter Three

  A week later I still hadn’t talked to Walker. Either Mom stayed up too late for me to sneak out, or else he wasn’t at his pool on the nights when I managed to go over. Delaney had come by almost every day to hang out and play games, but while I did my best to cheer her up, I don’t think I was accomplishing much. She still looked just as miserable as she had during the sleepover—hurt and kind of lost, like a puppy someone had abandoned at the side of the road.

  Between the two of us we’d burned through my Mountain Dew stash, so I drove down to the convenience store to pick up a couple of twelve packs with my allowance money. Mom had started me on driver’s education early, handling the driving instruction herself so I wouldn’t be distracted and on edge from being in the car with strangers. While I might end up living as a recluse, she was determined that I was going to be an independent one.

  Over the last year I’d trained myself to go to this convenience store down the block from us. It was small and mostly quiet, so I could get in and out without having to do any more than say “Hi,” and “Thanks.” Today it was empty when I walked in, so I got my drinks and some gum then started poking through the chocolate in case Delaney came by later.

  Just about the time I headed to the register, Quinn came in with Ashton and Dylan. Since they didn’t live in our neighborhood, they had probably come around to hang out with Walker. I stopped short, my eyes locked on Quinn. I couldn’t tear my gaze away, and the butterflies were staging a riot in my stomach the way they did every time I saw him. And he noticed.

  He gave me that cute little smile he usually reserved for his fangirls who gushed over his awesomeness and followed him around like puppy dogs. My face went hot, and my hands started sweating so hard I could barely hold onto my drinks. Why did he have to notice me? That was the last thing I wanted.

  I ducked my head to break the connection and shuffled to the register, horribly self-conscious of every single movement that I made and terrified that all three of them were watching and analyzing me from head to toe. Man look at that hair. Why did she leave the house dressed like that? Who walks that way?

  That got me so worried about how I was walking that I lost my balance and stumbled into the checkout counter. Ashton and Dylan burst into laughter.

  “She must have been trying to chew gum at the same time,” Dylan snickered.

  The cashier gave me a sympathetic look as he started ringing up my items. “Hi, Molly.”

  “Hi.” One word down. One to go.

  The laughter and loud whispers moved off to the side.

  “Did you see her just standing there? I think she forgot where she was.”

  “I’m surprised she doesn’t need a map to find her way back to her car.”

  My face flamed hotter and I started to shake. Usually that kind of thing didn’t bother me, but for some reason knowing that Quinn was there listening made the words cut. I was halfway tempted to just forget the drinks and run out, but that only would have made things worse.

  “I don’t see her headphones,” Dylan said.

  “Headphones?” Ashton asked.

  “The ones that tell her: Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in...”

  Quinn’s voice cut through their laughter. “Guys, knock it off.”

  I couldn’t help myself. My eyes rose to the mirror above the counter, where I could see the three of them standing by the cooler for the sodas. Quinn was facing the others and didn’t look happy.

  Ashton grinned. “Dude, she thinks a quarterback is a refund.”

  “Will you shut up? She’s right there and can hear you.”

  “Oh, who cares?” Dylan asked. “She probably doesn’t get it anyway.”

  The cashier scanned my gum and dropped it into a plastic bag with the chocolate. “$12.73, please.”

  Dylan’s eyes flickered towards the register. “Do you think she can count that high?”

  Quinn sighed in exasperation. “You are such a jerk.”

  “What’s the big deal?” grumbled Ashton. “It’s no different than what anyone else says.”

  “The difference is that they don’t do it right in front of her. She’s a person, Ashton. She has feelings.”

  With a shrug, Dylan tugged open the cooler. “Get over it, man. Everyone knows she can barely dress herself in the morning without help. She has no idea.”

  Glancing back, Quinn caught my eyes in the mirror. I saw regret there, and then growing anger as he noted the stricken look on my face.

  “Just shut up, Dylan. I mean it. Not another word or you can walk home.”

  “Seriously? Have you got a thing for The Ditz or something?”

  And that was enough of that. I dropped thirteen dollars on the counter, grabbed my things, and headed blindly for the exit as quickly as I could force my legs to move. The bell jangled and the door closed behind me, mercifully cutting off any comeback Quinn might have had. It was bad enough having to listen to the others trash me in front of him. I didn’t want to hear him scrambling to deny having a thing for the mentally challenged blonde who almost fell on her face while walking to the checkout counter.

  Mom was out when I got home. Thank God for small favors. I didn’t want to have to explain why I was upset—not that she wouldn’t have figured out the gist of it pretty quickly. All I wanted to do was go to my room and wallow and never leave the house again. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t I just have everyday ordinary neuroses like everyone else?

  If it had just been Dylan and Ashton I would have been okay. Maybe it would have stung a bit, but I would have gotten over it. Now I couldn’t stop worrying about what Quinn must think of me, though, especially since he hadn’t exactly come riding to my rescue. Sure, he’d jumped in to stop them from hurting my feelings in public, but what he hadn’t done was defend me.

  I couldn’t really blame him for that. Quinn could only go by what he saw, and I made sure that everyone saw nothing but what they expected to see. There was an irrational part of my mind that felt like he should have seen more, though, like he should have been able to look at me and recognize the girl in the dumb blonde disguise as the same one he kept asking out. And that was my first clue that I wasn’t going to be able to keep doing this for two more years. Eventually I was going to slip up, and then everything would come crashing down around me when the truth came out.

  I was tempted to talk to Mom about homeschooling again, but if I went that route I’d never see Quinn. What was I going to do? When I’d invented my dumb blonde persona for school I’d had a goal—to be such a nobody that no one would even remember that I existed after I left the room. Now I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore.

  That night when I went over to Walker’s he was actually there. I let myself in through the gate in the fence a little after midnight and headed for the pool, where he was reclining in a deck chair and staring up at the stars.

  “Hey, stranger,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  I tossed him a can of Mountain Dew then plopped down in the chair next to his and leaned my head back to let the night come and gather me in its arms. A balmy summer breeze riffled through my curls, and the cicadas were in full voice in the oak trees. It was the kind of silent, peaceful night we’d used to share before Miss Chatterbox—Delaney—started joining us. Without her there it felt kind of weird.

  Walker shifted in his chair to look at me. “So, did Delaney send you over?”

  “No.”

>   “How is she?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  I couldn’t see his face well in the darkness, but the frustration in his voice came through crystal clear. “Because she won’t talk to me. She blocked me on her phone, and when I go by her house she pretends like she isn’t home. Even when I can see her peeking at me out of the corner of the window.”

  A giggle squeezed out before I could stop it. That sounded like Delaney all right.

  “What happened, Walker?”

  He made a disgusted sound and flung himself back in his chair. “It was stupid. I was jealous.”

  Jealous? Walker Dean had been jealous? Was the world coming to an end?

  “Delaney was flirting with some guy there on the beach, and she knew I was watching when she did it. So I got jealous and figured I’d show her how it felt. London was there with Dylan and I knew how Delaney felt about her, so I sort of borrowed her for a little while to put on a show.”

  I sighed and closed my eyes. “That was really dumb.”

  “Yeah, I know. And London being London, she took it further than I’d intended.”

  It made sense. Certainly a lot more sense than Walker really messing around on Delaney. The boy was flat out crazy about her—you could hear it in his voice whenever he talked about her. I would have given anything to hear Quinn say my name the way Walker said hers.

  “She wasn’t flirting,” I told him. “He was her old boyfriend from middle school. When he asked her out she told him she was taken.”

  “Oh.”

  That was the sound of a boy putting on his I Am the World’s Biggest Idiot hat, and this time he certainly deserved it. I decided to give him a break, though. He wouldn’t have screwed up if he hadn’t been so head-over-heels for my best friend.

  “I’ll see what I can do to patch things up. Give me a little time to work on her.”

  After a couple of minutes his voice broke the silence again. “Quinn came by with the guys today. He mentioned they ran into you down at the Stop-N-Rob.”

  My face went hot with the memory, but I tried to sound nonchalant. “Is that so?”

  He gave a quiet laugh. “I think you’re even worse at this than I am. Why don’t you just tell him the truth, Molly?”

  Leftover anger from that afternoon made me lash out. “And then what? He’s going to date the Dumbest Blonde in Texas while the whole school laughs at him for it? The girl who can barely hold her head up in public, much less put two coherent syllables together? Do you see a Happily Ever After in that? I don’t.”

  It was Walker, though, and we had made a pact to be brutally honest with each other. So I told him the rest, the part that I had just owned up to for the first time that afternoon.

  “Besides, even if he did go out with me, I don’t know how long I could take it. He’s gorgeous, he’s going to be a senior, and he’s our star quarterback. Girls are already going crazy over him, and it’s just going to get worse. He’ll be away at games all the time with girls throwing themselves at him. How am I going to cope with that when I can barely leave the house?”

  For a long time Walker didn’t answer, then he slowly sat up and stared down into the rippling water of the pool.

  “He noticed you right away, you know,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “When you first moved here. He’d see you and get this goofy look like he’d been clocked by a fastball. He told me that you were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he was working his way into a major crush on you—right up until you went all-out on the dumb blonde act.”

  That was just the freaking icing on the freaking cake. “But who wants to go out with her, right?”

  Walker spread his hands. “I’m just saying that the idea isn’t as farfetched as you seem to think.”

  “I wish…” I wished I knew how to make it work.

  “Look,” Walker said reasonably, “you deal with me. You deal with Delaney. You’re learning to deal with her friends. I’m not saying it would be easy, but you’ve seen that you can do okay when you’re around the right people.”

  “And Quinn is the right people, too?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I want to try, but I’m so scared, Walker.”

  He sighed. “You need to figure this out fast.”

  “Why?”

  “Andrea White.”

  My stomach did a slow, queasy flip. Andrea White was part of the town’s upper crust—rich, beautiful, and an honor roll student. There had been rumors last year that she had her sights on Quinn. He was the most desirable guy in school, except maybe for Walker who didn’t date, so that wasn’t surprising. But she had never made a move. Had she finally decided to go after him?

  “She’s been telling people that after the Senior Beach Party he’s going to be all hers. Whatever that’s about, she’s been planning and getting ready for a while. And if she gets her hooks into him, she’s not going to let go.”

  Andrea was Quinn’s perfect match—a model with long, glossy black hair, fair skin, and big, green eyes. Her parents had enrolled her in all kinds of dance and gymnastics classes for years, so now she had the kind of body that belongs on workout ads. She was smart, too—always getting awards and things like that. For her, Quinn would be the ultimate trophy.

  And being smart, she’d know that half the girls in school would be out to steal him from her. She’d be on him every second, watching his ever move. He’d probably have to stop playing games with us so he could spend more time with her. There would be no more of the banter while we played, and no more of the flirting afterwards that left me feeling all warm and shivery for hours. No more of that voice like warm, melted chocolate in my ears to make the rest of the world fade away.

  As long as Quinn had been dating around so much, at least I’d been able to dream. If Andrea got hold of him, though, they’d be going steady until graduation. Maybe even after, if she set her mind on being Mrs. Quinn Morgan. And she might, because everybody knew that Quinn was going places in life.

  The thought of Quinn shackled to that cold, scheming witch made me ill. She just wanted to use him—he’d never be happy with her. A bony hand squeezed down on my throat and my eyes started to burn. She was going to do it. She wanted him and she was going to take him, and steal away even the tiny little crumb of him that I got to have. They’d be the perfect couple, and probably get elected Prom King and Queen. And I’d have to look at them together all year in school and know that I didn’t even try.

  “Easy, kiddo,” Walker said, taking my hand in his and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “She doesn’t have him yet. But if you’re going to do something, you’d better do it soon. The beach party is tomorrow.”

  Panic slammed into me like a tidal wave. Too soon! That wasn’t enough time to come up with a brilliant idea to counter whatever Andrea was planning.

  “What am I going to do?” I wailed.

  “You could try just being yourself and letting him know how you feel.”

  I was shaking all over and I wanted to throw up. “I’m going to have to go to the party. Do you have any idea how hard that is for me? I’m not going to be able to get two words out before I fall apart under a giant panic attack.”

  “Isn’t it worth trying, though?”

  “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to get to him in the first place. I’m not going to be a senior. Someone will chase me out.”

  His teeth flashed in the moonlight as he grinned at me. “Well, you could bring Delaney along for moral support. Then you could tell anyone who asks that she’s there with me and you’re there to make sure she gets home. Enough people have seen us together that you shouldn’t have any problems.”

  I shook my head in exasperation. “You don’t happen to have a little ulterior motive there, do you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “All right. Fair is fair. You’re helping me, so I’ll try to get her there for you.” I squeezed my eye
s shut, but the panic attack refused to ease off. “I need to get home and try to think of something.”

  “Good luck.”

  A million possibilities zipped through my mind as I lay awake in my bed. Unfortunately all of them were hopelessly desperate and impractical and seemed to be based on watching way too many of those 80s teen movies with my parents.

  How could I get him to focus on me long enough to wreck Andrea’s plan, and maybe convince her to give up? I wasn’t far gone enough in self delusion to think that I could keep him. I just needed to keep him away from her.

  Chapter Four

  By Saturday morning I was pretty much a hysterical wreck. I knew that if I had any intention of doing anything about Andrea I had to get myself under control—and fast. I was going to need help, that was for sure. Walker’s advice came back to me. You should bring Delaney along. So that was my first step. I was going to have to convince her to back me up.

  I waited until a decent hour then headed across the street and rang her doorbell. When she answered the door, I didn’t have to fake being upset or desperate.

  “I need your help,” I told her.

  She took one look at me and swung the door wide open. “Let’s go to my room,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  As soon as her bedroom door closed behind us it all came spewing out.

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t do this if I knew of any other way. I can’t do it by myself. I just can’t. And while I like Dannika and Allison a lot, I don’t know them well enough. You’re the only one I really trust and feel comfortable enough with.”