by Tiana Smith
He sighed as he sat down.
“You’re a good kid, you know that?” he asked. I shifted in my chair. “Listen, I know we’ve come down hard on you, and the truth is, this is the first time you’ve ever given us serious grief, so I suppose I should be happy about that.” He gave a wan smile. “Are you doing okay? This can’t be easy on you.”
“I deserve it,” I said.
He nodded and placed his hands on his desk. “You think you’ll be ready to leave in a few minutes? How are you coming on your homework?”
“Dad, I’ve been at your office all day with nothing to do but homework. I’m ahead on it all. I only have one journalism article left.” I couldn’t bring myself to work on that. I knew I was only delaying the inevitable, but there was so much pressure to come up with something mind-blowingly amazing for the competition. After all, I’d just destroyed my chances of getting into a good school. This competition was my last chance. But I didn’t think I was capable of writing the kind of article I’d need.
“All right, I won’t force you to come with me to work tomorrow.” Dad smiled. “Think you can call that elementary school about completing some of your community service hours?”
“Does that mean I get my phone back?” I asked.
“Don’t push your luck,” he said. “You can use the home phone.” He stood up. “All right, give me a few minutes to wrap things up. Our head copywriter quit, and I have one more interview before we go home.”
“You need to hire one before you can finish your site redesign, don’t you?” I asked, an idea taking root in my mind.
“Unfortunately,” he said, leafing through a few papers he held.
“I could do it.”
My dad’s eyes snapped up, meeting mine over the top of the papers. “You can’t be our head copywriter. The position is full-time.”
“No.” I stood up. “I want to write your website copy.” This was my answer. The way I was going to pay Robyn back for the money I’d lost her. Finally there was something I could do besides feel sorry for myself. I just needed my dad to agree. “Think about it. I know your advertising company better than any new copywriter could. I know who you’ve worked with before, and I know what you’ve done for them. While your new copywriter is learning the ropes, I can finish the website copy, and that way your site redesign won’t be delayed. You can pay me what you pay your freelancers.” I waited, being sure to keep my hands still by my sides, even though they itched to fiddle with something. “That way you can take your time finding the right copywriter instead of hurrying because of your site.”
My dad gave me a considering look.
“You’re ahead on all your homework?” he asked. I nodded, and he tapped his finger on the edge of the stack of papers. “Let me talk to HR.”
He smiled as he left.
This time I stayed in his office. There seemed to be a few warm fuzzies in here, and I could sure use more of those in my life.
* * *
I didn’t have any problem setting up my community service hours. The elementary school said most of the high school students wanted to help with the after-school program, so they could use the help during the regular school day. I showed up at eight thirty Wednesday morning, ready for a full day of what basically amounted to glorified babysitting.
Athens Elementary had a separate room where they tutored children who struggled with reading, and they lumped all the students together regardless of age. It was like a study hall where kids came and went whenever their teachers were doing a reading unit.
When I arrived, four other people were in the room. An elementary-school teacher, two students … and Logan. He looked up when I entered, but I could barely meet his eyes. Too much had happened. Simply seeing him made me feel like I’d gotten off on the wrong exit and was trying to navigate without any phone or map.
He’d actually thrown punches at Vince, and I could only see him doing that if he was interested in Elena, which made his stance pretty freaking clear. It sucked, but it was time I took a hint. We’d kissed. He’d ignored me. For days. He’d gotten into a fight over someone else. Try as I might to change his mind, a girl could only take so much rejection.
Admitting that felt worse than getting suspended, which was something I never thought was possible. I had a raw, gaping hole in my chest, and I’d already tried filling it with chocolate. Robyn was right—being someone’s second choice was worse than never making it into the running.
I dropped my bag on the nearest desk in defeat. As far as I could tell, there really was nothing to be done. Logan walked over to where I was, and I plastered on my I’m okay face.
“Looks like we had the same idea—to get the community service out of the way,” he said. I gave him a feeble smile.
The teacher walked over to us. “You must be Mia,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m so glad you and Logan could come in today. That means I’ll be able to help out with the math tutoring down the hall.” I must have looked worried, because she smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Students bring a paper with them. It says everything they need to work on, and each tutoring session only lasts thirty minutes. It can sometimes get pretty empty, so you might have a lot of downtime. If you need me, my name is Mrs. Stephens, and I’ll be in room 121.” It wasn’t the tutoring I was worried about but rather being alone with Logan. Too bad Mrs. Stephens didn’t take that into account.
She left, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to Logan. Instead I squatted down in front of one of the students and asked her what she was working on. Logan went to help the other student.
The little girl in front of me studied me quizzically. She was maybe in the first grade, but I wasn’t exactly a kid person, so I was probably a poor judge.
“What are you hiding from?” she asked.
“Hiding? I’m not hiding,” I said.
“Then why are you crouched by the desk?”
I sat in the desk next to her and scooted it close so I could see her paper. She held it out like it was contagious.
“My teacher says I need to practice my sight words.” It was obvious that she put sight words in the same category as things like tetanus shots and cooties.
“Well,” I said, flipping open her practice book. I looked at the name scrawled across the top in child-formed letters. “Chloe, let’s start with—”
“What’s his name? He’s cute,” she said, pointing to Logan.
So much for cooties.
“His name is Logan,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. Logan looked up at the sound of his name, and I put all my focus into avoiding his gaze.
“Are you two married?” she asked.
“No!” I said a bit too quickly. Logan smirked, and I felt my cheeks burn. “We’re only in high school.”
“So is he your boyfriend?” she asked. Would this girl never stop?
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at me with pity in her eyes. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I took a deep breath.
“No.”
“Well, I have a boyfriend,” she said, and I ground my teeth. From his corner, I could hear Logan stifle a chuckle. “His name is Jason, and he pushes me on the swings.”
“That’s … nice.”
“I can help you get a boyfriend,” she said. “All you do is scream and run away when they chase you.”
Now Logan was really laughing. “That’s about right,” he said in between fits. I sent him a glare, but that only encouraged him. From the glint in his eyes, I could tell he was enjoying this immensely.
When thirty minutes were up, it was a relief. Even if that meant I was now alone with Logan. Alone alone, this time. No students came in after Chloe and the other student left, so it was just him and me filling up the small room with our silence.
He leaned back in his desk and turned his upper body to face me.
“So,” he said. “Are we back to square one?”
“What do yo
u mean?” I asked.
“When you wanted nothing to do with me and wouldn’t talk to me even if we were the only two people in a room.”
My cheeks flushed. “What? No, of course not,” I said. “I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your conversation skills are a little rusty.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?” I asked. “I mean, you got into a fight over Elena right after I confessed my feelings for you. Right after we kissed. There isn’t much more for me to talk about.”
Logan grinned. “You’re cute when you’re jealous, you know,” he said. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. I couldn’t help but notice the way it stretched his shirt across his broad shoulders. The room was so quiet, I felt for sure he could hear my heart beating.
I waited before saying anything to make sure I could trust my voice. “Who says I’m jealous?”
Logan raised his eyebrows, and I knew I’d been caught in my lie.
“Fine. Not that it matters to you,” I said, leaning back and crossing my arms.
“Mia.” He stood up and walked over to where I was sitting, choosing a chair across from me. He took my hand in his, and I worried he’d be able to feel my rapidly beating pulse there. “I’m too old to chase you on the playground, so I’m doing my best with what I’ve got.”
“If you’re saying you like me, you’ve got a strange way of showing it.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “I never stopped liking you.”
The jagged edges around my heart softened a little.
“But you asked Elena to homecoming,” I said, relishing the feel of my hand in his. Logan smiled, and I started breathing again. It was the first glimmer of hope I’d felt since I’d ruined everything.
“I asked Elena because Robyn told me to. She thought it’d make you jealous. And it seemed to be working, so I went with it.” He shrugged. “But I wasn’t supposed to kiss you. Robyn wanted me to play hard to get. I worried I’d ruined everything for us and that article she was working on.”
This made me pause.
“What?”
“Come on, Mia. You know how stubborn you are. I think you just needed some time to sort it all out.”
That wasn’t what I was asking. He’d said something about an article, and I wanted to know more.
“Then I was worried you still liked Vince, and I didn’t want to push you. What if you were rebounding? Then I didn’t want to get on Vince’s bad side, and, well, we all know how that turned out. But I’m so sick of letting Robyn, or Vince, control me. They can just deal. I need to be honest.”
“Honesty is usually the best policy, or so I’ve heard.” Especially if it led to confessions like this. I could get used to these. For the first time in a long time, I felt full to the brim with happiness.
“I’m a fan.”
“Of honesty? Or me?” I waggled my eyebrows.
Logan smiled. “Both,” he said, stroking my hand. I was gooey all over, like fresh chocolate-chip cookies.
“I think the only way relationships work is if people are one hundred percent honest with each other. No secrets.”
“One hundred percent?” I asked, the familiar feeling of guilt starting to creep into my stomach. There were so many things I hadn’t told Logan, and some of them might make him hate me. Like how I’d emailed Vince my name and set this whole thing in motion. “Not even little white lies?” I let go of his hand, and he hesitated.
“Maybe the good kinds of lies. The ones people laugh about when they all work out. Like surprise gifts.”
Mine so weren’t that kind. I took a breath and debated my options. I should tell him. I didn’t need this blowing up in my face later. Knowing my luck, it probably would no matter what.
“Logan.” I swallowed, placing my hands on my knees. It was now or never. “All of this was my fault. The suspension, everything.”
“How could this possibly be your fault?” he asked.
The words lumped in my throat. I took his hand again, needing the warmth of it to give me courage. The feeling of his skin against mine gave me second (and third, and fourth) thoughts, but I plunged ahead before he could do anything like kiss me.
“Because I went behind Robyn’s back and matched Vince with me. I sent him the email that started all this.” I explained everything then, leaving nothing out. He looked cautious, which was only to be expected, but he listened to my whole explanation without interrupting. I confessed what I’d really been doing when he’d caught me breaking into the computer lab that day. I told him how none of this would have happened if only I’d listened to Robyn in the first place.
Logan drew in a breath. He didn’t speak for a moment, and I could count each of my heartbeats in the silence.
“Well,” he said. “That sucks.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I guess I already knew you liked him. So even if I hate it, it’s not exactly a news flash.”
He didn’t sound forgiving. It was more like he was trying to convince himself. I felt the despair creeping back in, and I desperately tried to keep it at bay. Now was not the time to panic. My heart was fluttering in my rib cage, and I told my pulse to take a chill pill already. It wasn’t like he was rejecting me outright.
He squeezed my hand.
“I know you didn’t want to make things hard for Robyn’s matchmaking gig. I get it. And you came around eventually. I just had to work a little harder to win you over.”
All wasn’t forgiven, I could tell by the way he took slow breaths and nodded to himself. I remembered what he’d said about bad news, which made my own breathing come faster. How stupid did I have to be, to basically hand-deliver bad news without any sugarcoating? “Just give me a little time to process everything, okay? This wasn’t what I was expecting.”
I nodded quickly. All in all, things could have gone a lot worse. I tried to remind my racing heart of that. I hated not knowing where that left us officially, but I could deal. I had to.
More students came in then, and we separated to work with them. I was helping a fifth-grade boy with his spelling when I ran out of room on his worksheet.
“Hang on, I just need more paper,” I told him, standing up.
Logan was sitting by my backpack.
“I can grab it for you,” he said. As if it was so difficult for me to walk the twenty steps over. But I could tell he was trying to be nice, because of everything that had just happened, so I gave in.
“Thanks. It’s just in my notebook.” I knelt back down and looked over the spelling list again while Logan rummaged in my bag.
A minute later Logan placed a blank sheet of paper on the desk in front of me, his hand shaking. I looked up and watched as he simply walked out of the room.
“Logan?” I called. He didn’t answer. I stood up and walked to the door, but Logan was already halfway down the hallway to the main entrance. I hesitated there. It wasn’t like I could leave the kids here alone. Maybe Logan just needed to use the bathroom.
I finished the tutoring session, but Logan never came back. When I retrieved my notebook and backpack, I understood why.
Lying on top of my notebook was a paper Logan must have found while getting me the scratch paper I’d asked for.
It was my old pros-and-cons list. The same list where I’d painstakingly written down each and every horrible, awful thing I’d ever thought about Logan. That list.
twenty-three
Sweats? Check. Unwashed hair pulled into a bun? Check. Puffy eyes? Definitely a check. Ice cream? Well, that one was nonexistent, since I’d eaten every last bit we owned, including the freezer-burned vanilla that no one had touched since last Thanksgiving. And the other stuff was dairy-free and low calorie, so it wouldn’t fill the gaping hole in my heart.
I wasn’t in school and I’d finished my dad’s website copy, so I should have been happy. But right now, I couldn’t even remember what happy felt like. It was like a dark fog had sucked all that away, leavin
g me with nothing but a sharp emptiness. Each moment with Logan felt glassy, removed and out of reach. All I could remember was this moment now, lying on the couch in front of the television, clutching the stuffed unicorn I’d gotten at the Pier with Logan. I was weighed down with the knowledge, absolute and certain, that we could never come back from this. And because I didn’t have my phone and my parents had kicked me off the internet, there was no way I could explain why I’d written that stupid pros-and-cons list forever ago.
Funnily enough, I actually missed Elena more now than I had in the past several days. She would have made me laugh. She would have done something crazy to take my mind off my imploding relationship. But she was gone, too.
There weren’t many shows to choose from on Wednesday afternoons, so I was left with an overly dramatic sitcom that I didn’t bother trying to follow. I’d already watched everything in my Netflix queue. My mom had dropped me off hours ago from volunteering, but I hadn’t moved recently, except to go to the bathroom when my bladder couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to move from this couch ever again. Moving took motivation, and I had none.
I tried to push myself farther into the couch, begging it to swallow me whole. The fabric was soft against my cheek, but I didn’t feel like I deserved even that small mercy. The roughest, scratchiest fabric in the world wouldn’t have been enough to reflect how I felt inside. It wasn’t just that Logan wanted nothing to do with me, it was what I’d done to him. I had done this. I couldn’t justify it or blame it on someone else. It was all me. Coming face-to-face with this fact was a painful reality to swallow.
When my mom came home a little while later, it was to find me sobbing at the TV, yelling that Kirsten should have forgiven Hayden because it wasn’t his fault his boss had fired him for being attractive. At least, that’s what I thought had happened. It was a little hard to tell, since I hadn’t watched any previous episodes and I kept crying too much to hear the dialogue.