“Really?” she pushed.
“No.”
“Look, it’s none of my business . . .”
“No,” I repeated. “It’s not.” I felt my voice crack, that dreaded tightness forming in the pit of my stomach as I desperately fought to remain in control of my emotions.
“But I kind of thought you and Spencer—”
“Please don’t . . . ,” I managed, my voice a whisper.
“Oh.” She paused. “Cassilyn.”
Between Michael Torres and Jesse, I’d managed to forget Cassilyn and Spencer for a few minutes. But now the thought of the two of them together in his studio hit me with its full weight.
I didn’t even realize I was crying until my wet cheeks tingled in the evening breeze. I felt Toile’s arm around my shoulders. She didn’t say anything, just held me until the sobs slowed and finally ceased.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said, for perhaps the first time in my life.
She guided me toward the stairs. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
The lights were on in the kitchen and dining room when I stepped into the foyer of my dad’s house, but no one called out my name or asked me how the dance had gone. Small mercies. Maybe Sheri was still sick and everyone had gone to bed early? That would be perfect. I wasn’t ready to explain to anyone what had happened.
I dropped my clutch on the dining room table and dragged myself into the kitchen. I needed chocolate ice cream. All the chocolate ice cream. I was going to take it to my room and bury myself in my misery.
But the moment I rounded the island into the kitchen, I froze. My dad stood in front of the counter with his back to me, head bent as he embraced a woman. I could see her slender arms, brown skin, and hot-pink fingernails. Though her body was hidden behind my dad’s heavy frame, I knew one thing for sure: it wasn’t Sheri.
I only stood there staring for half a second, 1.5, tops, but it felt like an eternity. After all he’d put us through—his first wife, my mom, Sheri, and even me—and after I’d caught him in the act with Tonya, here he was up to his old bullshit. And this time in our house.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
Instead of releasing his new girlfriend and spinning around, his face a reddened mask of shame and embarrassment, my dad hardly moved. His arms remained wrapped around the woman I still couldn’t see, and he didn’t even look up. “Hey, BeaBea,” he said casually. “How was the dance?”
“How was the dance? Are you kidding me?”
But I never got an answer to my questions. As I spoke, my dad turned, and the skanky home wrecker came into view.
“Mom?”
“Hello, Beatrice.” Her head rested against my dad’s chest, one hand draped around his neck while the other was wrapped around his thick waist. She was barefoot, her heels discarded on the kitchen floor, and the look on her face was one of absolute contented happiness. She didn’t even correct me for calling her “mom.”
Something was horribly wrong.
“No,” I said.
My mom’s head popped up. “What?”
“You guys are not getting back together.” It was a statement of fact, one that I would fight for with every fiber of my being.
My dad laughed. “What are you talking about?”
“No way,” I repeated. “You were miserable with each other. Don’t you remember that? You fought all the time. And I know you’ve both been completely crazy since you divorced, but you’ve also been happier than I ever saw you together. So no. I might be the only teenager in Orange County who doesn’t want her divorced parents to get back together, but this is not happening.”
My parents stared at me for a moment, then my mom glanced up at my dad and both of them burst out laughing.
“Get back together?” my mom said between heaves.
“Bea,” my dad added, “your mom and I are definitely not getting back together.”
Okay. Well, that was good. “Then what the hell is this?”
My mom broke free of my father and held her left hand toward me, fingers downturned, exposing a flashy solitaire diamond. “Benjamin proposed.”
I blinked. “What?”
She nodded, smiling from ear to ear, and for the first time in years, she looked like the carefree mom I remembered from my childhood.
“And your mom came over to tell me because he’s a colleague and she didn’t want me to hear from someone else.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Which was very thoughtful.”
I was still having difficulty wrapping my brain around this turn of events. “But you’ve only been dating for like two weeks. How could you possibly know him well enough to marry him?”
She snorted. “I knew your dad for a year before we got engaged, and look how that turned out.”
“I listened to what you said, Bea.” My dad’s eyes softened. “About how I needed to grow up. Tonya has been reassigned. I have a new secretary. I think you’ll like him.”
Him. Finally.
“I want to apologize to your mom. And to you. I’ve been an ass.”
“True,” my mom said with a nod of her head. “But I’m sorry too. I wasn’t exactly the easiest person to live with.”
My dad lifted my mom’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “You’re going to make Benjamin very happy.”
“And you and Sheri,” she said, “are going to make a wonderful parents to that baby.”
I caught my breath. “Baby?”
My dad beamed. “Sheri and I had an appointment today. Apparently, she didn’t have the flu after all.”
I stood there, stunned. Everything in my life had gone tits up. My friends hated me. My parents didn’t hate each other. And I was going to be a big sister.
None of this was in the Formula.
“What’s wrong, Bea?” my dad asked. “We thought you’d be happy. This is what you were hoping for, right?”
My parents, who, for most of my life, had behaved like spoiled children, had finally taken some initiative toward actual adult behavior. And I, who had always aimed to be practical and rational and completely adult in my decision making, had regressed to a little girl who threw a tantrum when she didn’t get her way, and who ended up hurting those she cared about in the process.
Maybe, for once, it was time to take inspiration from my parents?
My mom had gone home. My dad and Sheri had gone to bed. My ego had gone on vacation.
It was my own fault that I’d lost my friends. Worse, I’d lost myself. I’d tried to hang on to Jesse because I didn’t want to face some scarier emotions lurking within, while my parents, and my friends—for good or for bad—had embraced theirs. Gabe and Kurt. Spencer and . . .
“Spencer and Cassilyn,” I forced myself to say out loud. The words hurt more, piercing my heart in the same way they pierced the silence of my room.
I pushed away my despair. I didn’t deserve it, not after what I’d done. There was a good chance that Spencer and Gabe were better off without me screwing up their lives. It would have been simple just to slip into anonymity and hide from the social interactions at school until I graduated and could run away to college. That would have been the easy way out, but I’d hurt too many people and I needed to take responsibility for my actions. Michael Torres’s article attacked the people I loved. I had to find a way to fix it.
I walked over to my patchwork tote and removed my trusty notebook and pen. There was only one way to figure this out. I needed one last formula.
But as I sat at my desk, pen poised over an empty notebook page, I couldn’t bring myself to write down any numbers or symbols. I’d found so much comfort in my precise, flawless formulas, and yet life wasn’t precise or flawless. Life was a mess. A beautiful, unpredictable mess, and trying to impose some kind of mathematical order on it had only resulted in disaster.
Maybe this time, I needed to trust my feelings.
FORTY-FOUR
MY PLAN FOR Monday’s assembly was actu
ally the least of my worries. I was pretty sure Principal Ramos wasn’t going to expel me for what I was about to do (I mean, she didn’t like me, but I wasn’t going to break any laws, so I felt relatively safe in that regard) and as far as my social standing at Fullerton Hills went, I’d already resigned myself to eight and a half more months of pariah status. (It was part of my penance. Catholic much?) I could live with that. What was stressing me out was making things right for my friends.
I didn’t know if my scheme could save Kurt and Gabe’s relationship, or Toile’s reputation, or make Spencer hate me less, but my calculations suggested that two out of three were certainly within my control.
Live by the Formula, die by the Formula.
I’d managed to avoid my friends all morning, made easier by the fact that Spencer wasn’t in first period again, but I hadn’t been able to escape the whispers.
They were everywhere, following me down the hallways, rippling through my first- and second-period classrooms in undulating waves. Michael Torres had been right: everyone in school had read his article.
No one spoke to me. There were no Hi, Trixies in the halls. I ran into Giselle and Annabelle on the way to class and they studiously avoided eye contact. It wasn’t outright hostility, though—more like I was a plague victim and no one wanted to catch my disease. I cringed at the idea that Gabe and Spencer—if he was even at school—were enduring the same kind of treatment, and only took solace in the fact that by lunchtime, their suffering would be over.
I ducked out of second period early to meet Principal Ramos in the theater as requested. The stage was set with a microphone front and center, and I could see the shifting stage lights moving from blues to oranges to a pleasant mix of the two as the tech cycled through lighting cues from the booth to find a good mix.
“So,” Principal Ramos said. She was pacing the edge of the stage as I walked down the carpeted aisle, her heels clicking against the scuffed wood floor. “Is your speech ready?” No mention of Michael Torres’s article. She either hadn’t read it or didn’t care.
Knowing Principal Ramos, it was the latter.
“Well?” she prompted impatiently.
I cleared my throat. “Yes.” And, oh, what a speech it’s going to be.
“Good. I’ll introduce you,” Principal Ramos said. “Then you’ll have five minutes.” She pointed at me with her forefinger. “Do not go over. We’ve got presentations by the drama department and the cheer squad, and I don’t want to go into the lunch period. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Then she strode purposefully up the aisle to discuss the details of the assembly with the theater tech.
I wandered backstage and found a quiet chair in a corner near the lines that raised and lowered the flies. The area was dimly lit by orange work lights, a good place to stay out of sight until I was needed. I felt like a death row inmate waiting for my last meal. I remembered the day of the election speeches, when I’d kissed Spencer right here in an effort to make Jesse jealous. I would never forget the way I’d felt when his tongued grazed my lips. Now, as then, a shiver went down my spine. If only I’d actually spent some time analyzing what that feeling meant at the time, none of this would have happened.
The bell rang, signaling the end of second period, and things began to move quickly. Cheerleaders and members of the drama class arrived backstage, warming up and chatting about their upcoming performances, totally ignorant of my presence. In the theater, I could hear the dull murmur as students filed in, slowly filling up the seats. The murmur became a roar as the house edged closer to full capacity, then I heard Principal Ramos’s voice through the speaker system, asking everyone to take their seats and quiet down.
I stood up then and slowly walked to the curtain legs near the edge of the stage. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, my brain unable to process a single word until I heard her speak my name.
There was a decided lack of applause as I stepped out onto the stage, with the exception of Principal Ramos, who seemed determined to make up for it with her own raucous clapping as she backed away from the microphone.
This was it. I’d memorized my speech, practiced it all weekend, tweaked it, and now was the moment of truth. Somewhere in the faceless darkness of the theater sat people I loved and who I’d hurt. I couldn’t take back what I’d done, but I could certainly try and set things right.
“Any day, Miss Giovannini,” Principal Ramos growled in my ear.
Five minutes. Right. Not a second over.
“My name is Beatrice Maria Estrella Giovannini, but until recently most of you didn’t even know my name. ‘Math Girl.’ That’s what everyone called me. No name, just a title.
“It hurt, to be honest. The fact that after three years at this school no one even knew who I was. But it shouldn’t have. I had great friends, who accepted me and supported me and probably knew me better than I knew myself. Unfortunately, I kind of screwed things up.”
“What are you doing?” Principal Ramos whispered.
I grabbed the microphone, holding it firm. She wasn’t going to stop me, not until I’d said what I’d come to say.
“So while I’ve got the mic, I just want to set the record straight. Gabe Muñoz and Spencer Preuss-Katt are totally innocent of the charges leveled against them by Friday’s online article in the Herald. The Formula was my idea. I wanted to win a scholarship to MIT, and my friends were just trying to help me. I mean, yes, we’d been picked on since we were freshmen, and I thought if we changed who we were, all of our problems would go away. Only it didn’t work that way, and instead, we just discovered a whole new set of problems.”
I swallowed, my mouth cottony dry, and spoke quickly.
“But we’re not fakes and phonies. Not really. Gabe and Spencer and I are the same nameless nerds you didn’t really know two weeks ago. We may dress differently, or act a little more outgoing, but we haven’t changed deep down inside. I still prefer math to meeting new people, Gabe is still going to pursue interesting and important articles for the Herald no matter who he pisses off in the process, and Spencer would still rather spend time with paint and canvas than a football or basketball. You like us better now because you actually got to know us, not because Gabe came up with a catchphrase and I wore mismatched shoes. My friends are awesome people, and you shouldn’t punish them for my sins. I’m the only one at fault here.”
Principal Ramos grabbed my hand. “Give me that,” she said, trying to wrench the microphone away, but I managed to slip it from the stand and rushed to the edge of the stage. I was almost done.
“Lastly, Toile Jeffries, I apologize for posting those old photos of you. I don’t care if you were playing a role or not, you made a lot of people at this school feel good about themselves. To everyone here, you are very real. So, Principal Ramos and the esteemed student body of Fullerton Hills High School, I hereby resign as ASB president and hand the position over to someone who deserves it a lot more than I do: Toile Jeffries, who rightly should have won in the first place.”
FORTY-FIVE
I’M NOT SURE what I was expecting when I dropped that bomb. Mass hysteria? A pelting with rotting vegetables? An angry pitchfork mob? I certainly wasn’t expecting applause.
It was slow at first, like an ironic golf clap, but grew exponentially faster and louder with each passing second until the entire student body was applauding, whistling, and cheering. I certainly hadn’t anticipated a positive reaction to my speech—there had been a less than 5 percent chance of it. I mean, I’d basically just told the entire school that I’d manipulated them for my own personal gain, and yet everyone seemed to approve. Everyone but Principal Ramos.
“For the love of all that’s . . . ,” she grumbled as she walked across the stage and snatched the microphone from my outstretched hand. “Well,” she said cheerfully after the applause died down, her demeanor instantly sunshine and rainbows, “in light of these unexpected events and keeping in mind that we will not under a
ny circumstances be holding another election at Fullerton Hills, I hereby declare Toile Jeffries your new ASB president. Toile, can you join me onstage?”
I stepped back and watched the shadowy bodies in the theater. After a few seconds, a silhouette moved down a row and into an aisle, then slowly made her way to the stage. Toile wore a look of complete astonishment as she climbed the steps. She paused before me, her eyes searching my face for an explanation.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you deserve it.” I smiled. “And you’ll do a better job than I would.”
She glanced at Principal Ramos at the microphone, then back to me. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
And then, I don’t know why (maybe, for once, I had nothing to say, or maybe it was just a physical manifestation of my blurter nature), but I hugged her. Just a quick embrace, a gesture of thanks and apology and understanding all wrapped up together. Then I let her go and hurried offstage.
Gabe was waiting in the wings, Kurt at his side.
“Oh, Bea,” he said.
Kurt corrected him. “Trixie.”
I shook my head. “No more Trixie. I’m just Bea. Or Math Girl. Whichever you prefer.”
Gabe took my hands in his. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yes,” Kurt said. “She did.”
My eyes darted back and forth between them. “So, you two . . .”
“We talked last night,” Gabe said. “And decided to try again.”
“Bea,” Kurt said, “what you did today. It reminded me of why Gabe is friends with you. And why I’d like to be friends with you too.”
“Of course,” I said with a smile. “If you think you can put up with me.”
“If I can put up with Gabe,” he said, “I can put up with anyone.”
I squeezed Gabe’s hand. “Have you seen—”
“He’s not here,” Gabe replied quickly, not even waiting for me to finish my sentence.
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