“You’ve done a good job of that already,” he said, and his eyes were like liquid freezing over.
I was normally so good at talking my way out of things, convincing people of whatever it was they wanted to hear, my parents and my teachers and my friends. But I wasn’t going to talk my way out of this. He knew me too well now. He knew when I was full of shit. I put my hand on the side of his face. “I never knew all the things I was missing until I met you,” I said.
He looked at me, hard, and then he put his hands on my shoulders and gently pried me away from him. “This whole thing…it was a mistake. When we first met you, the three of us expected you to be this conceited snob, and you weren’t. But whatever else I thought I saw in you…you’re just not the person I thought you were. And that’s okay. Just not for me.”
My mouth opened, but no sounds came out. If he had some sort of mathematical equation that solved for the worst possible thing he could have said to me, the answer would have been those exact words. “I just think if you gave me a second chance—”
And then his whole calm demeanor dissolved, and I realized that even after everything, he was still trying to be nice. That was over now, as he looked at me, straight into my eyes, so there was no misunderstanding. “I don’t want to see you again. Okay?”
I walked backward into the card table, nearly toppling it over, on my way out the door.
Behind the counter, I tore off my apron and grabbed my purse. Darcy was in the middle of stirring a cappuccino. “I’m so sorry,” I told her, “but I have to go. I feel really sick.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. You’re going to miss the last show! Feel better, okay?”
I raced out the door, nearly taking out a couple with a stroller on the sidewalk. I made it to the bus stop before I started to cry. I hated it, but I couldn’t stop. I hated how weak I felt when I cried, how vulnerable and silly, like a little girl. He’d told me I could be myself around him, but in the end, it didn’t matter. Who cared about a cheerleader who felt like she didn’t fit in? Maybe he had cared, for a second, but that was a second longer than I deserved, and it was all over now.
…
Jack didn’t show up to school at all the next two weeks, and I knew I wouldn’t see him at finals because we didn’t have any of the same classes. Normally, I would have studied for fourteen days straight, but I never gained back my ability to concentrate. Finals went okay, but there were questions I should’ve known that I had to skip, especially on Physics, the last high school final I’d ever take. Once it was done and my head was swimming with all the questions I knew I’d answered wrong, I zombie-walked to my locker to clean it out. The nearly empty corridor was quiet as I dumped my books into my bag and wondered how all of these notes and tests that had seemed so important had suddenly become useless. School was done.
A locker a few rows down opened, and I looked up to see Reid emptying the contents of it into his backpack. There was no one else around, so I walked over to him. “So do you hate me, too?”
His nose reddened as he threw a handful of stray guitar picks into his bag. “No.”
“But he does,” I said.
“I have no idea.” He was a terrible liar. He never had a poker face.
“Is he still in town?”
“For the next couple days. He’s not coming to graduation. I have no idea what went down, and I don’t want to know. Good luck at Brown.”
With that, Reid shut his empty locker and walked away.
After my crappy performance on my finals, I dropped five tenths of a point (that’s a lot in the cutthroat world of overachievers) and graduated number three in my class. Melissa, Fiona Locke’s friend who, up until this point, I’d assumed was mute, made valedictorian. She shocked everyone by giving a speech in front of the entire class, a pretty good one about how when one chapter closes in life another one starts, and how we shouldn’t be sad because all of our previous chapters will live forever as a memory. It was a nice idea, and maybe, if I was in a better headspace, it would have resonated. But then I thought that maybe the older chapters didn’t have to live forever. Maybe we could delete them if we wanted to.
So I decided that high school would be a chapter in my life that I would erase so anything that I’d done to hurt other people and anything anyone else had done to hurt me would have never happened. And it really was as if it had never happened, because the one other person who knew about it had left, and no one else would ever know. Ever.
Chapter Twenty
Jack Moreland was in my kitchen. I was pouring soda into a glass for him, because we had nothing else to drink in the apartment, as he removed his fake mustache and took a seat in my breakfast nook. He removed the glasses, folding them carefully onto the table, then opened the pizza box and pulled out a slice. He was a bit scruffy, with stubble and hair that had started to grow out a little, curving around his ear and the back of his neck.
There was something different about him now than the other two times I’d seen him this year. He seemed lighter, unburdened. The silly disguise added to it, but mostly, it was in his eyes.
I had to giggle, softly so as not to wake up Gillian. This was all so surreal, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming. “There’s actually pizza in there? I thought it was a prop.”
“Hell yes, it’s real. I’m starving.” He took the paper plate I offered him. “What?”
“I guess I’m just confused as to why you’ve shown up here, with a pizza, dressed like…”
“A dad from the seventies,” he said, slightly disappointed.
“Ah, yes. Silly me. If you were really trying to dress like a dad from the seventies, you’d be wearing bell-bottoms, not skinny jeans.”
“You know, I thought of that, but I only had these.” He took a bite of pizza. “You have to admit, it was a pretty good disguise. I stood in line at Stonebury House of Pizza and nobody had a clue.”
I giggled again.
“Don’t you want to eat?”
I sat down and took a small slice. “I kind of like the trucker hat. It’s a good look.”
“You think?”
I nodded. Anything would be a good look, though. Honestly, the fake mustache and glasses were kind of working for me, too.
“Are you…are you in town on business?” I asked.
He sat back, resting his arms on either side of the chair. “No.”
“Oh.”
He was looking at me with those dark eyes, and I cleared my throat, wiping my hands on my yoga pants. I suddenly felt very, very hot.
“So,” he said. “That article took guts, Science Club. I’m proud of you.”
“You are?”
He nodded, and I bit my lip. “So you’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
“Because you didn’t want anyone to know I was the one you were singing about.”
Jack nodded to show he understood, but he didn’t say anything.
“I hope I didn’t do anything wrong or screw up anything with you. I just wanted to…I wanted to do something big. And I know I can never really make up for what I did to you back then, but I needed to try…”
I could’ve rambled on and on, and I would’ve, if he didn’t reach over and touch my wrist. I closed my eyes, leaning into it. His fingers were traveling up my arm when I heard a door open and Gillian padded into the kitchen.
Her eyes were half closed and she was scratching the top of her head where her sleep mask was pulled over her forehead, her hair sticking up in all directions. She had on her favorite Hello Kitty nightshirt and tiny shorts. “Natalie? I heard voices and thought we were getting robbed—” She stopped in her tracks and suddenly became wide awake. “Holy mother of…sweet lord…”
He didn’t have his hand on me anymore, but we were sitting very close together.
“Um, Jack, you remember Gillian. She’s a reporter at the Stonebury Gazette and also my roommate.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling, smooth as always. “How ar
e you?”
“Oh my God,” she said, her hand to her chest. “You’re good, I mean, I’m good. I just, oh my…okay, I’m going back to bed now.”
“Nice seeing you again,” Jack said.
She slowly backed out of the room, then hurried down the hall. There was a thud, which sounded like she’d run into the wall, then the click of her door shutting.
“She seems like a nice girl,” Jack said.
“I’m pretty sure you just gave her a heart attack.”
He smirked. Then he got up and extended his hand to me. “Come on. We’ll check on her later.”
I slipped my hand into his, and he helped pull me out of the chair. “Where are we going?”
“You have a bedroom in this place, right?”
Oh. Oh, yes. I had one of those.
I closed the door behind us and leaned against it as Jack took a look around. My phone was sitting on my desk. He picked it up. “Do you mind?”
“For what?”
“I always have to see what people are listening to these days.”
“Go ahead.”
He scrolled through, making an approving face. “Bruce Springsteen, Damien Rice, Ryan Adams—well now, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had a thing for male singer-songwriters. Look at this, you even have Jack Moreland. I heard he’s all right.”
“Actually, he’s pretty amazing,” I said.
He crossed the room to where I was standing against the door. “Really? That’s a pretty big word to use.”
When I nodded, he touched the side of my face, below my ear, like he had the night we kissed at the Palladium. I leaned into him, but he pulled slightly away.
“I have a confession to make,” he said. His breath was warm on my neck, my face. His lips were close enough to taste.
“What is it?” I asked, my own breath catching in my throat. “Let me guess, this whole time you were lip-synching.”
He smiled. “Yes, I’m the third member of Milli Vanilli.”
“I knew it.”
“It’s actually much more serious than that.”
I swallowed. “Okay.”
“I never read On the Road.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“You know, the Kerouac book I was always carrying around. I never read it. I always meant to. But I didn’t. I just carried it in my bag to make me look smarter.”
I shook my head. It was all I could do. That was his big confession? Plus—really? Who pretended to read books?
“I just loved the idea of it. The romance and the poetry of it all.” He pushed my hair behind my ear. I leaned into his hand. That move never got old.
“I thought he was your hero,” I said weakly.
“Yeah, I know. I read a couple paragraphs about him on Wikipedia.”
All I could do was shake my head. Eventually, I started to laugh. So did he. “The Keroaucs was a brilliant name,” he said. “I’d always wished I’d thought of it myself.”
“Well, you did. According to MuchMusic.”
“True.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “Why did you do it? Why wouldn’t you say the songs were written about me?”
He backed away slightly, and I was afraid he was going to leave, so I grabbed his hand and pulled him back. He sighed. “All right. The truth was, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Any of it. I wrote those songs for me, because I couldn’t write anything else. When I started to play, I was playing for, like, five people a night. I had no idea anyone in the business would ever hear it. And after that, everything happened so fast. I didn’t know what to say. My manager told me to keep it vague, you know, so there was a kind of mystery. If you give everything up right away, people won’t care as much. They want to think there’s a story, but they don’t want to know all of it, because once you know, what’s left to discover?”
So he hadn’t done it to spite me after all.
“But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope when you heard it you’d remember me,” he said.
“Remember you? I’d spent five years trying to forget you. It didn’t work.”
“It didn’t?”
I shook my head.
He closed the tiny gap between us, pushing me up against the door. One hand stroked the skin behind my ear as the other slipped under my shirt, finding the small of my back and bringing me to him. So much time had passed since the last time we’d been like this that I’d started to wonder if maybe I’d made all of it up—how good I felt in his arms, how perfectly we seemed to fit together—but as soon as he lowered his lips to mine, I knew how real it’d been, and if anything, my memories had nothing on the real thing.
We moved together toward the bed, where I quickly gathered up clothes and shoes and unmatched socks and my work bag and tossed them onto the floor. I’d been so thrown over everything that had happened lately, my usual iron-and-hang-immediately laundry routine had been hopelessly abandoned. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting any guests.”
“Well, that’s good for me,” he said.
He sat, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down to him. I took off his trucker hat, tossing it into the pile of my things and settling my knees on either side of him. His hands were everywhere, and it was like I was melting. Slipping off everything came easy to me this time. I wasn’t afraid of what he would see—I wanted him to see it all.
“You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this,” he said, but I did. He trailed his fingers, then his lips, over my ear and neck and collarbone just like he used to, a path well-traveled, down my sides and lower, unlocking all my secrets as he went, until there were no other hidden places to discover and nothing else that had to be said.
At two in the morning, the whole world outside of this apartment could have fallen away, and I wouldn’t have noticed.
“I went to Riverdale this morning,” Jack said, his fingers playing in my hair. His dark eyes were sleepy, his hair messy against my pillow. My pillow. He was here. “I wanted to check out the old plaza, see if Nona’s was still there. A vitamin store? Complete bullshit.”
“I know. It was one of the first places I went when I moved back. Do you still keep in touch with Darcy?”
“Yeah, we email every now and then. She sold the place a couple years ago, moved to California. Next time I’m out there, we’re gonna try to get together.”
I wondered what she looked like now, if she still took pictures. I wonder what she thought of all of this, of me.
“She always knew something was going on with us,” Jack said, as if I’d spoken out loud. “One night, she pulled me aside and told me not to hurt you. I think you were her favorite barista.”
“It’s not like I had that much competition.”
“True.”
“Do you know about the lighthouse?” He shook his head. “It’s gone. Everything from our childhood will be gone eventually.”
He laughed. “Come on, it’s not that bad. We’re still here, right?”
For how long, I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin what was happening in this very second, which felt so delicate that the slightest breeze could blow it away. I wanted to say in this moment forever.
But even in the beat that it took me to have these thoughts, Jack shifted and brought his hand away from my hair, and the moment was lost. Time pushed forward whether I liked it or not. “So, I have some news, too.”
“Oh?” It came out as little more than a breath of air due to the pressure that was currently building on top of my heart. This wasn’t going to be good.
“I’m going to record my second album.”
“You are? That’s great!”
He rubbed the side of his face. “Yeah, I’m excited. The label’s flying me to London. I’m actually leaving in about four hours.”
I sat up straight, as if good posture could somehow protect me from the onslaught of shittiness coming at me from all angles. I tried to smile, but it was like the muscles in my mouth wouldn’t work. “Hours
?”
He squeezed my thigh. “I should’ve said something earlier, but we had other things to talk about.”
“I’m kind of glad you didn’t, actually.” I bit my lip. “When are you coming back?”
I didn’t like the almost-grimace that appeared on his face, not even when he softened it by running his hand up and down my back. “I’ll be back in New York around Christmastime.”
I swallowed, but it wasn’t enough to keep the tears away. “I’m sorry. I’m really happy for you. It’s really, really cool.” I wiped at my face with the back of my hand. It seemed like all I’d done the past twenty-four hours was make half-hearted attempts at being happy for other people.
He brushed off the tears that I missed, then ran his hands through his hair and sighed loudly. Another bad sign. “It’s just that I’m going to be really busy the next few months, with the album and all, and I don’t know—”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say it. Whatever happens, happens. We’re friends, now, right?”
He half smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Friends.”
He kissed me and I tried to focus on his lips instead of the pain spreading across my chest. It was a stupid thing to be upset about. What did I think, that I was going to run away with him to New York City? Well, maybe the thought had crossed my mind. But it wasn’t going to happen. This was closure, that was all. An end to our unfinished business.
Almost.
“I never meant to make you feel that way,” I said, staring into his eyes, making sure he really heard me. “I never meant to—”
He stopped me with a finger to my lips. “No more apologies,” he said, kissing away the last of my words.
I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, even though I knew I had to be up for work by six o’clock. I didn’t care. I would’ve rather gone into work like a zombie than sleep away my last few moments with him. But I hadn’t managed to stay awake, that one simple thing. And when I woke with a start at the beeping of my alarm, Jack was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gillian grilled me for details all the way to work. There were a couple of photographers hanging around the apartment and milling in the bushes across the street from the Gazette offices, but they no longer tried to get me to answer any questions or seemed particularly interested in being here. They would die off soon enough, Gillian predicted, because reporters like this were used to living in New York and LA and were likely on the verge of dying of boredom.
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 24