Match Me If You Can

by Tiana Smith

  “Okay,” my mom said as she stood in front of the television. “I was willing to give you some slack when I dropped you off, but this has to stop. Tell me what happened.”

  She put her hands on her hips, so I was supposed to take her seriously, but all I could do was bury my head and cry into a couch cushion, which still hadn’t dried from the last time I’d done that.

  She threw her hands up in frustration and walked into the kitchen.

  “You know you’re supposed to be at Elena’s in an hour?” she called out over her shoulder.

  “What? Why?” Elena’s was the last place on earth I wanted to be. I’d already tortured myself today. I didn’t need my former friend to jump on that train, too. Even if I did miss her, I wanted the old her.

  “She called this morning while you were in the shower. She said she’d like to talk, and I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  My head was pounding. Couldn’t my mom see that this was so not the time to have a little makeup meeting with Elena?

  I turned away, my eyes burning. I vaguely heard my mom doing something in the kitchen, ignoring me. The microwave beeped. She came back a few seconds later with a cup of tea in her hands. She held it out to me, and I took it, mostly so she would leave me alone. But she didn’t. She sat down beside me and pulled one leg up onto the couch.

  “Seems to me like you need your friends now more than ever. What’s this all about?” she asked. “A boy, I’m guessing.”

  I nodded glumly, not trusting the words to come out right.

  “Vince?” she asked, and I had to give her points for remembering his name.

  “No,” I said into my cup of tea.

  She huffed as she relaxed into the couch. “I don’t know why I bother trying to keep up,” she muttered. I heard the garage door open. When my dad opened the door and saw us sitting on the couch, his caterpillar eyebrows practically crawled into his hairline.

  “I’ll, uh, go get dinner ready,” he said, unprepared for coping with teenage hormones.

  “I’ll help,” my mom said, standing up and giving me a look, finally leaving me in peace.

  They banged pots to cover up their hushed conversation, but I could hear them whispering. I turned my attention back to the TV and cried again when I saw that Hayden was at the airport, alone with just his bags. If I kept this up, I’d use up all my tears before going to Elena’s house later, which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad plan.

  Eating dinner with my family was a quiet affair. I’d finally stopped crying, but that didn’t stop my parents from exchanging loaded looks over their spaghetti. Food was the last thing on my mind, but I swallowed a few bites to appease them.

  “Mia, you should probably get going soon,” my dad said, setting his fork on his plate. “Weren’t you going to Elena’s? Do you need to get ready?”

  My scowl must have been effective, because he raised his hands in surrender and pushed his chair away from the table. Mom intervened. “Fine, it’s your decision.”

  It wasn’t much of one. I walked over to Elena’s, kicking a few rocks out of my path while wondering if I’d made the right choice or if I was just a glutton for punishment. I knocked on the door, then hung back in the shadows, hoping to be overlooked. Maybe no one was home.

  No such luck. Elena’s dad opened the door, then called for her when he saw me.

  “Hey, Mia.” She came to his side, then shuffled back somewhat awkwardly, allowing me to enter. We went into their sitting room, and I perched uncomfortably at the edge of the couch, with Elena sitting on the piano bench across from me. Her dad left, thankfully, probably going off to eavesdrop from the stairway landing just around the corner.

  “I’m glad you were able to come tonight,” Elena said, shifting on the bench. “Can I start?”

  I shrugged in what could have passed for acceptance and prepared for another tirade. I was pretty sure I looked like something a cat had thrown up, but Elena was perfectly polished and put together. I never understood how she did that. Like, how did she make her eyes look so large and innocent? Makeup sorcery, that’s what it was.

  “Mia,” Elena said, somewhat shakily, “I owe you an apology.” She gave a faint smile, and it actually looked genuine. Shocker. Maybe all that acting practice was paying off. “I kept blaming you, and I’m sorry about that. I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, and I know now that everything we fought about was really my fault.”

  I almost laughed. Maybe she was feeling warm and fuzzy, but I certainly wasn’t. Especially considering I’d spent the last several hours curled up in the fetal position and Elena wasn’t exactly blameless here. She’d been sending a lot of frost my way lately. Did she seriously think I’d forgive everything she’d done simply because she apologized? Fat chance.

  “Vince and I had a long talk yesterday morning,” she said. This time when she smiled, I knew it was genuine. “We’re together now.”

  I wanted to say Good for you, but I held it back. I wasn’t feeling exactly charitable, though, and it must have shown in my expression, because she flushed.

  “Right, sorry,” she said, giving her head a shake. “That’s not what’s important. What I mean is, I’m sorry I thought you put Vince up to everything, like making him act like he liked me and all that. I don’t believe that anymore, obviously.”

  Against my will, I felt myself softening.

  “I’m glad you guys worked it all out,” I said. “At least that makes one of us.”

  Her face scrunched up a little at that.

  “That’s something I still don’t understand.” She looked toward the stairs and then, seeing her dad nowhere in sight, continued at a slightly lower volume. “Vince told me about the email. But why’d you email him through Robyn’s Cupid thingy if you’re so obviously supposed to be with Logan? I mean, everyone can tell how much you guys are into each other.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. My eyes stung, and I blinked before tears could spill over. Simply hearing Logan’s name brought everything back, and I wondered how long I’d be carrying this burning ache in my chest.

  But did I really want to confide in Elena? She’d apologized, but that didn’t mean the slate was wiped clean. Then again, if I didn’t start behaving like her friend, maybe we’d never get back to where we once were.

  “I was in denial, I guess.” Maybe I wasn’t building bridges yet, but at least I wasn’t burning them down. “I’m sorry about throwing pudding at you,” I said, changing the subject. “Did your shirt stain?”

  She waved her hand and her forehead creased. “It was from last season, anyway. I really am sorry, Mia. I wanted to tell you that I’ve been a complete b—” She paused and very consciously did not look at the stairway landing. “Uh, brat,” she finished. “I’d like to make it up to you.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “I’m throwing a homecoming party on Saturday night, and you’re invited.”

  So I got suspended from school and my parents disciplined me by taking away my phone. Elena got suspended and her parents let her throw a party.

  Life wasn’t fair.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I’m pretty much under house arrest, and a party is kind of the last thing I’d want—”

  “But I really want you to come,” Elena said. “So we can fix things. I’ve missed you.” Her voice wavered a little bit, and I felt my resolve weaken. “It’d be really small. Just those of us who can’t go to homecoming. My mom felt bad that I had to give up the crown, and she thought that was punishment enough. She didn’t think I should miss homecoming, too. We’ll dress up and have everything exactly like they’ll have at the real dance. So it’ll just be you, me, Vince, and, well, Logan…”

  My eyes started to tear up again, despite all my attempts to stem the waterworks.

  “Maybe it’d get your mind off things,” she said. “You could at least ask your parents. It’ll be good for you.”

  Oh, no. No, it would not. Being forced to watch Vince and Elena have fun w
hile Logan glowered at me from the corner was not my idea of a good time.

  “Sorry, my parents took away my phone,” I said, relieved to have an excuse. “So I can’t call them. But I’ll ask them tonight.” Yeah, I had no intention of doing that.

  Elena knew me too well. She pulled out her phone and said, “That’s okay, I have your home phone number programmed in.” And she called my parents. While I was right there. So it wasn’t like I could put up much of a protest with her looking at me like I was a poor stray animal in need of rescuing.

  I shook my head. She’d done this on purpose. I didn’t know whether to feel frustrated or impressed—or both. It was the type of thing she’d pull back when we were on friendlier terms, so I really should have seen it coming. Back then I would have found it inevitable, maybe even charming. I sighed as she handed me the phone, and my dad answered.

  Did I want to put up a fight? Really, what was the use? It wasn’t like my parents would agree, anyway.

  I explained the situation in a minute flat, being sure to use zero inflection, otherwise my dad might think I had schemed with Elena to orchestrate this, and I didn’t need my parents on my case any more than they already had been.

  “So that’s everything,” I said, already preparing to sound disappointed when he rejected Elena’s plan.

  “I think that’d be okay,” my dad said instead, shocking me so much that I forgot to keep my face neutral. Elena saw my expression and her face lit up. Well, that was just great. Now I couldn’t pretend that my dad had said no.

  “Oh … Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ll talk to your mother about it, but I’m sure I can convince her. Oh, and I forgot to tell you earlier, I had accounting make out your paycheck. So it’s your lucky day. See you in a bit.”

  My dad hung up, and I didn’t know what to do. Elena squealed, pulling me into a hug as she took the phone back. I wasn’t prepared for it and froze, unable to return the gesture. Elena seemed genuinely excited, and this only made me more confused.

  “I’d really like to work this out,” she said when she pulled back.

  I didn’t speak for almost a full minute. I couldn’t. My heart and my brain were at war. I wanted to believe her, but we’d both said some pretty awful things, and those were etched in my memory. But there was that glimmer of hope, tantalizing and maybe, just maybe, within reach for the first time in a while.

  “Thank you.” I took a deep breath, then released it. “I’d like that.”

  The rest of the evening wrapped up pretty quickly after that. I told Elena I’d try to make her show, too, in a couple of months. I wanted us to actually feel like friends again, but I wouldn’t allow myself to really get my hopes up. That was just asking for more disappointment, and who needed that? So instead I welcomed the numbness that seeped through my body.

  I made it back home, grabbed my paycheck from my dad, and went up to my room to be alone. I wondered what Logan was doing now. Was he lying in his tree house, looking up, the same way I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling? The comparison made me curious, so I booted up my computer to look at his social profiles. Then I remembered my parents had changed the Wi-Fi password and I sighed.

  A calendar alert at the bottom of my screen blinked angrily. Reminder: Final Article for the Competition Due Tonight. This was the part about school suspensions that no one ever mentioned—I still had to turn in all the work that I’d missed.

  I opened up a fresh document on my computer. Then I stared at it for an hour. I groaned and banged my head on my headboard, which was the cue my mom needed to knock on my door.

  “How’s it going in here?” she asked. I was sitting on my bed with my computer across my lap, so I pulled a pillow across my face and tried to block everything out, muffling my voice in the process.

  “Awful. Go away and leave me to my misery.”

  My mom took that as an invitation, coming in and sitting at the edge of my bed.

  “Sometimes you just have to push through,” she said, pulling the pillow aside. “Even if it’s hard or even if nothing seems right. You’ve heard the expression, ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn’?”

  Call me crazy, but I had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t talking about my article.

  “Things have a way of working out.” She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Hang in there, kiddo. If things aren’t going your way, sometimes you need to look at them differently.”

  She stood up. “Trust your gut, and finish the article. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be great.” She left, and I stared at my computer again, willing it to magically write the sports article for me, my mother’s words swirling around my head. Perfect and great. Those two words had new meaning for me now. Vince was perfect on paper, but Logan was the real deal.

  Inspiration hit me then. I couldn’t text Logan. I couldn’t go on the internet or email him. My mom had even promised to watch over my shoulder as I submitted this article, letting me log on to the internet for only two minutes to do so. But maybe, just maybe, I could explain myself through the newspaper. The only downside was that everyone at school would read it, and all my faults would be … out there.

  I chewed on my lip while I debated my options, but really, it wasn’t like I had much choice.

  Technically, it wasn’t a perfect fit for the sports column. But it was kind of about Vince, in a roundabout way, and that would just have to do.

  All my thoughts about life, love, right, and wrong poured out of me onto the screen.

  Of course, writing it out like this made it super obvious just how wrong I’d been. So that was great. It was also obvious how much I liked Logan.

  I wrote about how I’d betrayed pretty much everyone’s trust. Like how Robyn had nothing to do with Vince asking me out. And I explained the most important truth of all: that none of Logan’s negatives on the pros-and-cons list even mattered to me. At all. I’d tried so hard to convince myself of Logan’s problems that I’d created a monster problem for myself. Go me.

  At the end of the article I made a new list. This one included every single positive thing I should have mentioned about Logan the first time. There were a lot.

  It wasn’t a hard-hitting piece of journalism that uncovered anyone’s juicy secrets, but for the first time in weeks, I was going to do the right thing.

  Before too long, I had a finished article. With my mom watching over my shoulder, I attached the document to an email and hit SEND. Maybe nothing would change, but I could finally live with what I’d done. Tomorrow morning would be better; I was sure of it.

  twenty-four

  My mom knocked on my door at 7:30 a.m. Thursday morning and said that Mr. Quince was on the phone for me. That was my first clue that things weren’t going my way.

  “Hello?” I asked, afraid he could hear the hesitation in my voice.

  “Good morning, Mia,” he said. “I received your article last night. It certainly … wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Quince,” I said. “I know it doesn’t belong in the sports section. I’ll understand if you couldn’t print the article.”

  “Oh, I printed the article,” he said. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up, since you won’t be in class today when I announce the winner of the contest.”

  I sat up straighter in bed, clutching the sheets.

  “I’m sorry, Mia. This was a great article, but Joey won the internship.”

  I stopped strangling my sheets and brought my shaking hands back to my lap.

  “But you’ll still be tallying votes, right?” I asked, hating the waver in my voice. “People who read the paper today will all count until eighth period?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding hesitant. “But he’s hundreds of page views ahead of everyone else.”

  I thumped my head against my headboard. That was it then.

  “Okay.” I swallowed. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “Listen, things aren’t looking gre
at for the future of our school paper. The administration hasn’t made their final decision, but it looks like it’ll either be discontinued entirely or we’ll go down to a monthly or even quarterly issue. If I work fewer nights formatting and editing the paper, they can use the money for the football team.”

  I thought he’d already delivered the bad news, but this made his earlier statement seem downright chipper by comparison.

  “I’ll be telling the rest of the class today, but I thought you should know. Think of this as an opportunity to try new things.”

  I winced. Opportunity. Like that wasn’t a spin word we journalists used whenever we wanted to make something sound more positive than it was. Lost your job? It’s not a failure, it’s an opportunity.

  Still. I needed to be positive. Sometimes life didn’t give you what you wanted, but maybe that was because it had something better in store. If you didn’t shoot it in the foot. Or reject it in a janitor’s closet.

  Someone knocked on our front door, and I started down the stairs. My mom had gotten into the shower after handing me the phone, so I was the lucky one who got to deal with whoever was there. “Thanks again for letting me know,” I said, reaching the bottom step. “Someone’s at our door, so I need to go…”

  “Oh sure, sure,” he said. “Have a great day. And really, you should be proud. Your article was really good.” Right. Just not good enough to win.

  I hung up and opened the door. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Robyn on the porch, even if I’d just received terrible news about the journalism internship and the fate of our paper.

  “Hey, did I wake you up?” she asked, going in for a hug.

  “Nah,” I said, hugging her back. “Mr. Quince did that already.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Quince, so there I was minding my own business, walking into homeroom a little early, when he shoves a paper in my hands and tells me to read the front page.”

  Robyn handed me the paper in question. There it was: my article, front and center. Not in the sports section at all.

  My stomach fluttered as I unfolded it. Underneath mine was an article by Elena, and wonder of wonders, this article actually seemed sincere. At least the title was. Top Ten Reasons I’m an Idiot. Chances were pretty good I was going to read it this time. Robyn raised her eyebrows and stepped inside.