“This was nice.”
I nod. “I appreciate it.” I am being honest. I do.
Rob pauses, working over something in his mind. I know the look. He’s about to ask me something. Something I don’t really want. “Listen—”
The bell rings, cutting him short.
I pretend to panic, checking my cell phone for the time. “I gotta go. I’ll catch you later, okay, Rob?”
I touch his arm softly and disappear into the library, and when I finally look back, he’s still there, watching me from the glass doors, not caring that he’s late. It doesn’t matter if I’m late to study hall, but I happen to know that football players who are late to class usually have to run extra in their conditioning practices.
But he’s still there, watching me, his mouth a little slack.
I give him a wave, and walk up the stairs toward the study pod, where Kolbie and Neta are waiting.
“What the hell, Ri?” Kolbie says immediately, showing me her cell phone. “Are you hooking up with Rob on the down low?”
There, on the screen, is a picture of me, my arm linked through Rob’s. I’m looking straight ahead, my gaze carefully fixed in front of me, and Rob is looking down at me, like he can’t quite believe I’m there.
“It’s nothing.” I settle into my chair and pull out my French book, like I’m actually going to use the time to conjugate verbs or something. “Honestly, it’s just old friends, walking to class together. And who sent you that?”
“I got two,” Neta says. “This high school is disgusting. And you’d better be careful, Ri. That boy has got it bad for you. If you talk to him one more time, he might fall in love.”
A short “ha” bursts out of Kolbie’s throat. “Are you kidding me? Rob Samuels has been in love with Riley since preschool, when they built that Popsicle stick castle for art and Riley let him kiss her.”
“Whoa, Riley. First kiss in preschool? Who would have thought?”
“It wasn’t even her first,” Kolbie says. “Riley kissed everyone in preschool. I mean everyone.”
I start to laugh. “It was a serious problem. My dad had read me that story about that princess who kissed a frog and it turned into a prince, and I don’t know, I got obsessed with kissing or something, and the next thing you know, both my parents were called in for a sit-down with the guidance counselor.” I giggle. “It was an issue.”
“Perfect Riley Stone, make-out maniac,” Neta singsongs. “All I know is you better get a handle on this Rob situation. If it goes any further, he’ll be hitting up your phone by the end of the week.” Her phone vibrates on the desk, and she picks it up. “Oh look, another one!”
It’s a picture of Rob and me, walking down the hall, with Belrose in the background.
He’s looking away, obviously preoccupied with something else, failing to notice me walking down the hallway with someone on my arm.
Which is fine, of course.
“I’ll handle it,” I tell them.
And so that day, after school, I wait until the girls who have stupid questions about their French homework clear out of Mr. Belrose’s classroom, and then I walk in. I stand in front of his desk for a moment, where he’s sitting, a pair of black-framed reading glasses perched on his nose. They’re very hipster and the frames are a little scraped, and I wonder if he needs them at all or if they’re just for looks.
“Hello, Mr. Belrose.”
He looks up, as if he’s just noticing me, when I know for a fact the heels of my boots clicked very satisfyingly on the tiles when I walked in. “Oh, hey, Riley. Can I help you with something?” His forehead wrinkles, like he doesn’t already know.
“I believe it was you who wanted to talk to me? Last class?” I keep my tone even. This is business. This is something that I need to have taken care of so I can stop thinking about it forever.
“Oh, right.” He snaps his fingers, and pulls open his desk drawer. “I apologize, but I didn’t want to do this in front of any other students. It might cause jealousy, you know. I’m sure you understand.”
Mr. Belrose comes up a moment later with two crisp white pieces of paper, fastened neatly together with a tiny black binder clip. “You’re the only student I’m giving this to, Riley. It’s the Lou F. Durand Scholarship, and it’s only for those who are interested in continuing their education in French in college. It’s only for the most exceptional of students. Now, you don’t have to major in it, but I believe you have to commit to taking at least two college courses, and this will pay for a semester of study abroad. Are you interested?”
My heart twists and beats and burns. This is everything and nothing I expected. A semester in France? More money for college? Of course. I would love a semester in France.
I force my face into a smile. “Oui,” I say. “Merci.”
“Of course, Riley.” He smiles back at me and takes off the glasses. “You’ll get it. I knew as soon as I read it that this scholarship was for you. You’d make a perfect French teacher, you know.”
“Would I?” I ask. I don’t want to be a French teacher. I’m not sure what I want to do, honestly, but it’s not that. I’ve made up a million different things and career paths in my college applications, but I’m not actually sure I mean any of them. Still, he paid me a genuine compliment. “Thank you.”
Mr. Belrose extends his hand toward me, the papers clasped in it, and when I reach to take them, the skin of his hand brushes mine, just for a second.
It’s not electric, like books say. It’s not a shock. But it’s warm, and nice, and there’s—there’s something there. A current, like there’s already a bond. Something that I didn’t feel when Rob intertwined his arm with mine.
“Have a good night, okay?” Belrose says, turning back to the papers on his desk.
Like he didn’t feel anything at all. But he had to. A bond like that is felt between two people, not one. But he’s playing professional.
“You too. Thanks, Mr. Belrose.” I tuck the papers into a folder, slide it into my backpack, and I turn to walk away.
“You and Rob, huh?” he asks quietly, as I’m halfway to the door.
Bingo. I smile to myself. “Maybe.”
And I realize maybe my little plan wasn’t so fruitless after all.
• • •
That night, I dream of Rob. I dream of Rob and me and Popsicles, and we’re talking and laughing and walking, and we’re having fun, real fun, like I thought I never could have with him, and I’m thinking about how his eyelashes are sandy like his hair. But then when he leans in to kiss me it’s not Rob anymore.
It’s Alex.
Not Mr. Belrose.
But Alex, from the booth, who linked pinkies with me and held my hand in the car. Alex, who was nice and a little wild and fun. Alex, who was more a sleepy college student, half awake for class, than my teacher.
And he was nice to kiss.
Things to Know About Riley Stone:
• In second grade, Riley was the starting quarterback for the Pee-Wee football team. Her father was incredibly proud.
• Her mother made her quit in third grade and enrolled her in cheerleading and gymnastics.
• Riley won every spelling bee she ever entered. Every. Single. One.
• By age ten, Riley was so used to winning that she started making participation trophies for all the other students just so they wouldn’t feel bad. She made special ones for her brother, because he never seemed to win at anything he entered.
• Riley always wanted to enter child beauty pageants, but her parents forbid it.
• They did, however, allow her to become a child model when she was discovered at an Applebee’s while adorably covered in ice cream. She was even featured in a national ad at age four.
FIVE
Escape
“You’re here.”
Ethan steps back from his door, his brow furrowed.
“Yeah. Can I come in?” I peer inside his apartment, but it looks almost black inside, like maybe
I’d woken him from a nap. The only light is a soft flickering, probably from the television. “I mean, is Esther here or something?”
He shakes his head. “No, she’s at her parents’ house. Come in if you want. Just . . . what are you doing here?” Ethan stands aside to let me in his apartment.
I walk past him. His modest TV is the source of the flickering, and the whole place smells like stale corn chips and Febreze. “I needed to get out of the house. It was suffocating me.” I settle down onto the couch, next to a pile of laundry. I can’t tell if it’s clean or dirty.
“That’s why I moved out so fast,” Ethan says, grinning. “It’s not like I’m not thankful for our upper-middle-class upbringing, but that house is sometimes the smallest place in the world.”
He understands. My brother understands. I want to hug him. I nod instead.
“Do you want a beer or something?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Water is fine, if you have it.”
Ethan disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle full of grocery store brand water, which I accept gratefully. He flops back into his recliner. It looks about ten years old, which is saying something, considering I’ve never seen it before. And I’ve even been here once, when he first moved in after college.
“I would have straightened up if I knew you were coming,” he says, twisting the top off his own beer. He pitches it in the direction of the kitchen, and I hear it clatter on the floor.
I laugh. “No, you wouldn’t have.”
He grins. “You’re right. Still, I might have pushed the clothes onto the floor or something. Besides, it’s not like you came over here in your Sunday best.” He eyes my sweats and HARTSVILLE HIGH CHEER SQUAD T-shirt.
“Hey,” I protest. “I came straight from cheerleading practice.”
“And you smell like it.”
I resist rolling my eyes. I know my ponytail is a sweaty mess that I’ve sort of pushed on my head and fastened with a hair tie, but he’s my brother. It’s written into the laws of family that unless it’s Thanksgiving, and your great-granny Beatrice who you haven’t seen in two years is visiting, you don’t have to dress to impress anybody because they’re genetically forced to love you. “Whatever.”
“Do you want to watch something on TV?” Ethan offers, trying to be a halfway decent host. He makes to throw the remote at me, but I hold up my hand.
“Whatever is good.” I don’t really watch television. I don’t have time for it, exactly, outside of a few juicy reality shows that you don’t exactly have to keep up with to understand.
I am preoccupied with more important things.
My brother has a basketball game on, and we watch, together, in silence, for a few minutes in his strange-smelling apartment. He’s just happy. Like fully got-it-together, all-the-time happy. It’s not like his job pays him well, or that he’s even figured out how the hell he’s going to help raise another man’s baby, but he loves Esther and Esther loves him back and he’s pretty content with that.
He doesn’t need anything else.
It’s not like he hasn’t screwed up a million times. He has. He’s been in trouble with school, his grades, my parents, the police, but here he is, in his little apartment, with his secondhand (or maybe thirdhand) furniture . . . and he’s completely got it together.
More than I do.
And if you’re going by the book, I’ve got it together. Of course I do.
“Are you okay?”
“What?” I ask.
Ethan’s not watching the basketball game. “You just . . . you look sort of . . . tense, Riley. Is there something going on?”
“I’m fine.” I smooth down my already smooth hair.
“That,” Ethan says, pausing to take a sip of his beer, “is a dead giveaway.”
“Of what?” I demand, forcing my hand back into my lap. I am not fidgeting. I am calm.
“That something is not right.”
“Everything is fine,” I snap. “It’s just, I don’t understand how you can be so happy all the goddamned time with so much stressful shit going on in your life.”
Ethan cocks his head at me. “What stressful shit?”
“A pregnant girlfriend? Not your baby? A job that doesn’t pay enough? A record? I mean, does any of this ring a bell?”
Ethan shakes his head. “Riley. First of all, why does any of that actually matter? My job pays enough to cover my bills and a little extra. I’m saving for the baby. Second of all, my girlfriend makes me happy. And third, it’s not like I was a real criminal. So honestly . . . what do I really have to be worried about, at the end of the day? What’s in my life that actually, genuinely needs fixing?”
He says this all calmly, like I haven’t just accidentally insulted his entire existence. He pauses for a moment, and the sound of the basketball game fills the room: the announcers, the cheering, and the buzzer for halftime and the traffic passing outside. The stoplights shine faintly into the living room window: red, green, yellow, and red again. It’s maddening and calming all at once, the way the lights hit the floor at the edge of the recliner.
Ethan leans forward. “Are you projecting, Riley?”
I lift a shoulder in a shrug, something I’d never dare do in a classroom.
Ethan continues, “Because I think you’re worried you need fixing. And you don’t know how to do it. And maybe you’re not happy. And maybe that’s because you’re in high school, and high school’s hard and it sucks and teenage angst and blah, blah, blah. Or maybe”—Ethan pauses, leans back in his chair, and takes a sip of beer—“you just need to practice not giving a shit for once in your entire life.”
“Um, excuse me?” I say, very quietly. For some reason, I feel strange, and a little drowsy, and completely out of place. Maybe someone’s going to pop out and shake me. No one talks to me like Ethan when we’re alone. No one.
I wouldn’t let them.
“There’s this idea that you have to plan out your life perfectly before you go to college, and it’s like this giant set of dominos: if you knock one over, you’re totally screwed and they’re all gone. But it’s not, Riley. You need to relax every once in a while. And if you let something slide, so what? You’ve got a million other shiny gold stars on your résumé that’ll back you up. They’re not going anywhere.”
I stare at my brother, in his sweats and holey T-shirt, sitting cross-legged on the old recliner. “Are you, like, moonlighting as an inspirational speaker? Or—”
“Shut your face.” He throws a smelly pillow at me. “I’m trying to be your brother.”
I grab his laundry and throw it back at him, mostly so I won’t have to sit next to it anymore. And I ask about his new video game, which is the only luxury stuff he actually spends real money on, aside from things for Esther.
But inside, I think about what he’s saying.
He basically wants me to pull a Sandy from Grease. But I can’t just do the things that everyone else just wants to do. It gives me anxiety. I can’t enjoy it the way other people can, and God, I wish I could. I wish I could just let go.
But my brother is saying it’ll be the thing that’ll make me happy.
But what if I did relax? Just the smallest bit.
“Anyway,” he says, “how’s everything else going? How’s school?”
“It’s kind of boring. Everyone’s still there. Oh, an old friend of yours is teaching.” I say this very casually, because it is, of course, a very casual conversation that I have no stake in.
“Really?” A commercial for detergent comes on, so Ethan switches to another channel. “Who?”
“Alex Belrose. He’s teaching French.”
“French?” Ethan snorts. “Really? I always thought he’d be more of the kindergarten type.” He says it with condescension. Ethan clearly doesn’t remember the Alex who threw him on old clothes because he was too drunk to function and then drove us home, and I’m not about to remind him. I don’t want to chance him remembering—other things.
Hand-holding things.
Past-things-that-need-to-stay-there things.
“Nope. I’m in his class.”
Ethan chuckles. “I bet that’s a goddamned mess.”
“Um, what do you mean?” I keep my tone normal. I don’t care. I shouldn’t.
“He just doesn’t seem like the academic type, that’s all.”
“Really? I mean, I’m in his honors senior French, you know. He doesn’t completely suck. Of course, he’s not exactly the best teacher out there.” I feel a little bad saying that. Mr. Belrose is actually really good. He cares, I think, or maybe he’s just not burned-out yet. He wants everyone to learn and grow and care about the language the same way he does. No one has done anything so horrible during class that it has irrevocably scarred him. Yet. And he’s been tempted by about every girl in the school, and I don’t actually think he’s given in. He’s a good guy.
Ethan laughs. “That’s what I meant. In high school he was just a ladies’ man. He had a new girl, like, every week. And in college he was always too stoned to worry about girls. I lost touch with him. I didn’t know he graduated.” Ethan stops on an MMA channel where two huge guys are pummeling each other. One has blood in his eyeball. “Whatever, I guess. He was just kind of a weird dude.”
I want to ask more, but I stop myself. I cannot give my stake in this away. “Yeah.” I take a sip of my water. The grocery brand is always a little oily and sits on my tongue even after I swallow, but it’s better than tap.
“Side note,” he says, “Esther’s little sister says you’re dating Rob Samuels. I think I should meet him.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “That, you’re wrong about.”
“Meeting him or dating him?”
I don’t meet his eyes. “Both.”
SIX
Bad
The bell rings, the sound dulled only slightly between the thick stacks of books in the library.
Not the first bell. The second one. And this isn’t study hall, where Liam wouldn’t dare mark me late, either. This is Shakespeare, where Mrs. Hamilton is well known for having a rather sizeable stick up her ass.
Such a Good Girl Page 4