Triple Shot Bettys in Love

by Jody Gehrman

  “I’m almost out of here. Where did I put my damn keys? Did you get enough to eat? You’re not having a party, are you?” He straightened his tie, using the floor-to-ceiling window as a mirror. “I’ll keep my phone on, in case anything—”

  “Dad, just go!” Hero scolded. “Sharon will be furious if you’re late again.”

  Sharon’s the party planner Uncle Leo hired for Hero’s disastrous birthday bash last summer. She’s not exactly the woman I would pick out for him, but it’s cool that he’s finally dating. He didn’t go out with anyone for ages after Hero’s mom died. Since both Hero and Bronwyn are away at school now, leaving Leo to rattle around in his mansion all alone, it’s good to know he’s got someone to spend time with.

  When he’d gone, I asked Hero, “How do you think it’s going with them, anyway?”

  She looked surprised. “With who?”

  “Your dad and Sharon.”

  Her forehead wrinkled momentarily, then smoothed out again. “Okay, I guess. He says he’s out of practice.”

  “I hope that doesn’t mean what it sounds like.”

  She tossed a pillow at me. “Not with—eugh, I don’t even want to think about—” She made a choking sound. “No, with dating. You know, showing up on time, communicating—all those things women expect.”

  I thought of Dad and Jen, Mom and Mungo, all of them back on the market after decades spent in marriages that unexpectedly just—phhht!—disappeared. How weird it must be to start from scratch, relearn all the old mating rituals in a radically altered world.

  “Forget about Dad, I want to hear about you and Ben!” Hero snuggled deeper into the suede couch and hugged her knees. “You two haven’t gone all the way yet, have you?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Hardly. I would have told you!”

  “Well, I figured, but you’re so weird about guys.”

  “How am I weird? I’m not weird.”

  “Come on! You wouldn’t even admit you liked Ben until we tricked you into it.”

  “Okay,” I assented, “that’s half-true. But I didn’t really know how much I liked him until I realized he liked me.”

  “So, how is it now? Are you madly in love?”

  I thought about it. “I have fun with him. He makes me laugh. I don’t know, though, something makes me nervous about this whole couple thing.”

  She looked confused. “What ‘couple thing’?”

  “Oh, you know, calling him my ‘boyfriend,’ going on ‘dates,’ getting all intense about everything. I mean, he’s still Ben, right? I’m still Geena. I’m not crazy about giving up my autonomy so I can blur into this slimy blob of oneness.”

  She snickered. “‘Slimy blob of oneness’? How romantic.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She studied me, then reached over and plucked up one of the Belgian chocolates Elodie had arranged on a glass plate. “You know what it is? You hate feeling out of control.”

  My instinct was to deny it immediately. I mean, come on, one of my favorite things to do is bomb a hill that’s almost too steep to survive. If that’s not out of control, I don’t know what is.

  Before I could protest, though, another thought hit me: Skating is all about control, actually. It’s about taking on gravity, using everything you’ve got to show it who’s boss. Otherwise it wouldn’t be skating so much as careening wildly on a piece of plywood, plummeting to your death.

  “You can’t control love.” Hero went all annoyingly wise on me like she sometimes does. “It controls you.”

  “Okay, Little Miss Love Guru,” I told her. “If you say so.”

  Monday, January 5

  9:20 P.M.

  Ah, the grind. Winter break is officially kaput, Hero’s back at boarding school, and so far the semester looks excruciatingly grim. Classes have reached a new level of torture:1. First-period PE to ensure I’ll be sweaty and red-faced all day. Thank you, sadistic counselors.

  2. AP Trig, where my brain will jump out of my skull like a jack-in-the-box every morning, leaving me the rest of the day to cram it back in.

  3. AP Chemistry. Just in case there’s any brain left to eject.

  4. Third-year French. Madame Peck is famous for discussing delicious cuisine from every region, which I’m sure my pre-lunch digestive juices will appreciate.

  5. AP History with Ms. Boyle, the civil rights-obsessed Goddess of Flowing Armpit Hair.

  6. AP English. With Bricker. Enough said.

  Sometimes I suspect AP actually stands for Aggravated Psoriasis—just thinking about that schedule is enough to make me itch all over.

  Wednesday, January 7

  10:20 P.M.

  This afternoon I was walking from fifth-period history to sixth-period English when I heard someone calling my name. Okay, “someone calling my name” is a little bit misleading; I knew right away it was Ben.

  The thing is, every day this week he’s stopped me between fifth and sixth period, and every time, we’ve ended up kissing there in the hallway, which is just so totally un-me. I mean sure, kissing Ben is always a peak experience, but in the hallway? The fragrance of multiple generations’ body odor and bad cafeteria fries just doesn’t really get me in the mood. Also, I’m Geena Sloane, and if I have any identity whatsoever at Sonoma Valley High, it’s as a scrappy, slightly boy-hostile skater Betty, meaning I do not make out in the halls like some cheerleader.

  So today I did what any self-respecting non-hallway-kisser would do: I ignored him.

  Except he didn’t get the hint.

  “Hey, Sloane! Wait up.” He actually reached out and touched my arm.

  At that point, I either had to feign a walking-dead-like indifference to human touch, or acknowledge him. I chose the latter. After all, he is basically my boyfriend, right?

  “Oh, hey. How’s it going?”

  He gave me a once-over. “You were really in your own little world there. I called your name like four times. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, I was just—you know—thinking about, um, Malcolm X.”

  “Malcolm . . . X?”

  “American history? Hello, you were there too. Weren’t you listening to Ms. Boyle?” Ben and I have almost every class together; it’s the blessing and the curse of the AP track. All of us college-bound kids move from one grueling subject to the next, like a pack of lemmings.

  He grinned sheepishly. “I was kind of fixated on your braids, actually.”

  “My braids,” I repeated dryly.

  “Yeah.” He reached out and took one of them in his hand. “This one’s got a reddish streak right . . . here.”

  Okay, that was pretty cute. But if I started getting all goo-goo eyed, we’d end up locking lips again, and the whole point of Operation Ignore Him was to nip this PDA habit in the bud.

  “Unless Ms. Boyle suddenly decides to quiz us on the history of hair, I doubt studying my braids is going to help you ace the class. And remember, you do need an A if you want to keep up with me.”

  Ben and I have been vying for top academic ranking since the fifth grade, and every semester we either tie or leap-frog ahead of each other by a fraction of a GPA point. Our competition used to be fierce, but since we got together we’ve been less openly cutthroat. Lately, I almost miss our boldly hostile race for valedictorian.

  He cupped the back of my neck gently with his hand and said, “You let me worry about my grades, okay?”

  I stiffened. His hand on my neck was totally giving me goose bumps, but this was the road to get-a-room-style hallway make-out sessions, and I have to remember that’s not who I am. Don’t I?

  I glanced down at my Pumas. “Ben—I—”

  But it was too late. As soon as I looked up again, his lips were closing in on mine, warm and scented with cinnamon. His other hand found the small of my back, and I could feel everything in me pulling toward him, my heart racing, my head filling with his smell.

  “Bettaglia shoots—he scores!”

  I pulled away, startled, and caught si
ght of PJ tossing us a sly smile over his shoulder. Apparently, I have zero self-control, and will soon be known as SVHS’s newest Hallway Hoochie.

  The bell rang, and we headed for English.

  “Why do you always kiss me between fifth and sixth?” I asked.

  Ben looked mildly offended. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we’ve got like four other classes together. Why is it always before this one that you decide to molest me?” I tried to infuse molest with the perfect mixture of playfulness and Heads-up: I’m not a PDA ho, but I don’t think he picked up on my artful subtext.

  “In history, I sit right behind you. Listening to tales of bloodshed and disaster while staring at the back of your neck inspires me, I guess.”

  Okay, that was also a little cute. Bettaglia two, Sloane zero.

  Our English teacher, Mrs. Bricker, wasn’t slumped at her desk like she usually is, carving red slashes into a stack of papers. In fact, she wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  Oooohh, maybe she died, I thought, and I’ll admit the idea pleased me. Mrs. Bricker is four hundred years old, give or take a century, with hairy moles, crumpled Kleenex that rain from her pockets, and a tendency to break into hour-long soliloquies about the uses and abuses of the semicolon. Her nickname at SVHS is Mobydiculous, referring simultaneously to her pathological obsession with Herman Melville and her famously unrealistic insistence on twenty-page theme papers.

  English is my best subject, but try as I might, I just can’t get stoked about some creepy dude’s love affair with a massive white whale. If only Melville’s editor had used a red pen as liberally on his early drafts as Mrs. Bricker does on ours.

  Since Ben’s last name is Bettaglia and mine’s Sloane, we have to sit at opposite ends of the room in all of our classes with assigned seats. Most of the teachers at SVHS cling to this outdated pedagogy—heaven forbid we should sit near someone we have more in common with than our placement in the alphabet. Unfortunately, this fascist practice makes Ben a sitting duck for none other than Sophie De Luca, who draped herself over Ben’s desk the second he sat down. I hovered nearby, sneaking glances at them while I pretended to sharpen my pencil.

  “What’s up, Benedict?”

  Why does she get away with that? He hates his full name, but it never seems to bother him when she says it.

  “Nothing. What about you?”

  “Same old.”

  I guess this conversation sounds pretty benign, but even from my pencil sharpening station I could see she was using her glamorous insouciance to ensnare him in her web. She looked fabu as usual. She had on a suede tam-o’-shanter, a silk tunic, fashionably distressed jeans, and these high-heeled boots that I just know cost more than the sum total of my college fund. How does she get up every morning and do that—just throw on an outfit of unsurpassed style and intolerable je ne sais quois? I’d pay good money to see her in ratty sweats and a drool-stained sweatshirt. The depressing thing is, she’d probably manage to look fabulous even in that.

  “Moby’s MIA,” Sophie observed, nodding at the empty desk at the front of the room.

  That’s another thing about Sophie: She’s been at SVHS less than a week, and you’d think she’d been here forever. She’s got this uncanny ability to assess the social landscape, memorize its topography, and magically instill herself as ruling monarch before anyone has time to blink.

  Luckily, Principal Hardbaugh shuffled in right then, distracting me from my urge to puke all over my beautiful, charismatic rival.

  “Okay, everyone in your seats, I’ve got some news.”

  We all flew to our desks. A low murmur filled the room, but it ceased when Hardbaugh frowned at us and held up a hand. The wrinkles in his forehead formed ridges that spread from his furrowed brows all the way up to the smooth dome of his bald head. His unwieldy, gray plastic glasses and puke-colored polyester suit were probably cool. In 1973.

  “I’m sorry to say I’ve got sad news. Mrs. Bricker slipped in the shower last night and broke her hip. Fortunately, we were able to secure a long-term substitute at short notice. In fact, Dr. Rex Sands should be here any moment.” He glanced at his watch and tugged at his collar. I couldn’t help thinking, Moby gives this place the best centuries of her life, and it takes them five minutes to replace her.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hardbaugh?” Before I knew what I was doing, my hand was in the air and Mr. H was swiveling his furrowed brow in my direction.

  “Yes, Geena?”

  “Don’t you think a day of mourning would be appropriate? I mean, Mrs. Bricker’s not well. We’re naturally a little shaken.” I looked around at my AP comrades. “We could probably all use a little time to ourselves.”

  Everyone saw where I was headed with this and immediately nodded in assent, doing their best to look stricken with grief. Unfortunately, Hardbaugh also saw right through my suggestion. He pushed his unfortunate glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and squinted at me.

  “Young lady, the broken hip of Mrs. Bricker should not be viewed as an opportunity to cruise in your souped-up cars or smoke Mary Jane.” He reached again for his collar and gave it an irritated yank. “Frankly, the fact that you’d try to manipulate the situation at a time like this is very disappointing, Ms. Sloane.”

  For a second, I actually did feel a stab of guilt, not to mention a flash of concern that Hardbaugh could somehow sabotage my much-anticipated free ride to Yale. Both were fleeting, though, because right then an exceptionally well-built, broad-shouldered, babelicious twentysomething guy dashed into the room wearing a tweed blazer and faded Levi’s.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he breathed. His hair was short and dark blond, his eyes a moody gray.

  “Take your seat, young man.” Mr. H indicated an empty desk with a curt nod.

  The hottie hid a grin, stuck out his hand, and said in a deep, self-consciously professional voice, “Actually, I’m Rex Sands, sir.”

  Mr. Hardbaugh didn’t seem to understand for a moment. He merely blinked at the fabulous specimen before him.

  “This is room twenty-three, right? Aren’t you expecting a sub?”

  Hardbaugh snapped out of the geriatric spell he’d lapsed into. “Mr. Sands? Dr. Sands?”

  The guy nodded. In one rapid movement he pulled his cell from his pocket, stealthily checked the display, and turned it off. “At your service. I hit traffic on the way up—my apologies.”

  When Mr. H finally realized he had an actual person before him—not the subhuman teen variety, but a bona fide adult—his whole demeanor switched instantly from condescending to sycophantic. It was a terrifying transformation. “Dr. Sands, I can’t tell you how happy we are to have you on board.”

  “Oh, thanks.” Sands turned to us briefly, and maybe it was wishful thinking, but the look on his face seemed to say, I’ll get rid of this fossil, just give me a second.

  Mr. H continued to size up hottielicious as he said, “Class, this is Dr. Sands, your sub for the rest of the school year.”

  Every female in the room sucked in her breath, which triggered a barely audible grumble of disgust from the males.

  “Technically, sir, I’m not really a doctor until I—”

  “Dr. Sands has just finished his PhD in English Literature at UC Berkeley, and is currently writing his dissertation on . . . ?”

  Dr. Hottie stuffed both hands into his pockets and said, “Kerouac and the beat poets—Ginsburg, Snyder, those guys.”

  Mr. H flashed him the peace sign. “Hip cats.”

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “Excellent. Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Drop by my office as soon as you’re done, and we’ll go over your contract.”

  As Mr. H finally exited, Dr. Hottie turned to us. He really was beyond gorgeous. He was tall, with the long, ropy muscles of a runner. The gray eyes hinted at brooding intensity and probing intelligence. I felt my heart hammering wildly inside me.

  “So, I guess this is a pretty weird day for you guys. You just heard about Mrs. Bricker?”


  We nodded in unison, entranced. All thoughts of Mrs. Bricker had evaporated.

  “You’re juniors, right?” He pulled a folder from his battered leather messenger bag and leaned against the desk, flipping through pages. “Oh, right, AP English. Cool, so you’re the smart ones.”

  We were too smart to agree to that; instead, we gazed at him in silence.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you.” He ran one hand over his head and the hair sprang up from beneath his palm at odd angles, making him somehow even more adorable. “I never wanted to teach high school—still don’t—but Mrs. Bricker was a friend of my mom’s, and I’ve got to get out of Berkeley for a while so I can stop partying and bang out this damn dissertation. Oh, shit, can I say damn in here?”

  We burst out laughing. Well, the girls did, anyway. The guys, you could tell, were playing hard to get, trying to decide whether to idolize or resent him. Ben shot me a quick look over his shoulder and I bit my lip, suddenly recalling that I have a boyfriend now and shouldn’t be lusting over Dr. Hottie, especially when said boyfriend is just five rows away.

  “So, what are you guys reading, again?”

  “Moby-Dick,” we grumbled.

  “Melville.” He spit it out like the two syllables pained him. “Fine, okay, that’s cool. How far in are you?”

  I raised my hand and he nodded at me. God, he was cute. “We were supposed to finish chapter five by tomorrow. If you ask me, though, putting this book on the syllabus is part of a terrorist plot to make Americans hate literature.”

  He smiled. “What’s your name?”