My stomach tightens as Derek walks up carrying three rolls of carpet over his shoulder. He leans them against the wall. “Floor Liquidators gave this to us for free in exchange for listing them in our play brochure.”
“Kick ass,” Greg says, running his hands over the first roll. “This is some quality shit. You rock man.”
I cross my hands over my chest and let out a deep breath of disappointment. “Yeah good job making decisions without consulting the director,” I snap. “What if I don’t want their advertisement in the brochure?”
Derek’s eyebrows draw together. “They’re a family owned business. They also have that scholarship you were talking about. I thought you’d be psyched.”
Anger rolls through my stomach. I told him that when I liked him. How dare he remember it now. Shouldn’t he be remembering things about his own girlfriend? I throw my hands in the air. “You know what? Who cares what the director thinks. Just do whatever the hell you want. Your community service hours are all you care about anyhow.”
Derek’s jaw tightens. Greg kneels and studies the pile of extension cords in the corner, as if that makes this any less awkward.
Gwen yells my name from onstage with a wardrobe crisis that she needs me to fix. For once, I’m grateful for her interference.
A few hours later, I wrap up rehearsal with some bullshit motivational speech and compliment everyone on their excellent acting. Now I know why teachers say stuff like this all the time. Just a few words of encouragement really boosts everyone’s spirit. No one needs to know that I truly don’t care if the play sucks. I just need it to be performed on opening night. I just need my recommendation letter so I can get the hell out of here and make something of my life.
Derek and I normally walk to our cars together after rehearsal. But since he got arrested three days ago, I started parking on the other side of the school. I knew that if and when he came back I would never walk with him again. He may be gorgeous and smart, but he’s bad news. And I won’t fall for liking him again.
I shove my cell phone in my back pocket after switching it from silent back to normal mode. Rehearsal went longer than usual today and I have to squint to block the setting sun as dusk falls over the parking lot.
A warm hand grabs my elbow. I stop as a sharp stab of fear shoots through me. The chances of someone hiding out in the back of a high school parking lot to kidnap me are slim.
That leaves only one other explanation.
“Wren…” Derek’s voice is soft. Unhinged.
I turn to face him, my jaw set. I will not allow his handsome face sway me. I’ve made my decision to ignore him. I will not change my mind. “What?”
He drops my elbow and scratches the back of his neck. “Why are you treating me like this?” The pain in his voice makes my heart skip a beat. “Seriously, Wren. Please talk to me.”
I walk toward my car, focusing on my shoelaces. “Why were you arrested?”
He sighs. “That wasn’t my fault.”
“So you were found innocent? And they let you go because you did nothing wrong?” My voice is all sarcasm but he nods anyway.
“Yes. Sort of.”
My lips press into a thin line and I hold on to my backpack straps like my life depends on it. “Well good. I’m sure your girlfriend will be happy to hear that.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend. I wish you would believe that.” He reaches for my arm again but I pull away.
“I wish I could believe that too,” I snap, dropping my backpack on the hood of my car. The moment our eyes meet, mine fill with tears. I am so glad I parked far away from everyone else. “I liked you, Derek. A lot.”
My words hang in the air. Silence overtakes the space between us and I clench my jaw tight to keep from crying. Derek shoves his hands in his pockets and gnaws on his bottom lip. “But you don’t anymore?”
I shake my head. “How could I? All you do is lie to me.”
He opens his mouth and then closes it, his eyes looking from my left eye to my right one. “What if all the bad you thought about me wasn’t true? What if I could prove it?”
Oh no. Cracks form in the walls of my tough, no nonsense façade. A tiny flicker of hope sparks in my chest. What if he could prove it? What if he could make it so that everything was okay again? I shake my head and pull open the car door, shoving my backpack in the passenger seat.
“It’s too late for that.” I put the key in the ignition and start the car. “You can live your life in an ocean of lies, but I prefer to keep mine honest.”
Derek’s hand grabs my door before I can close it, the other hand rests on the car roof. He leans in enough for me to smell his body spray. “Let me take you to dinner. I’ll explain. If you still want to hate me, then fine. But at least give me a chance to win you back.”
“Back?” I say with a laugh. “You never had me.” It feels good to say those words even if they are a total lie.
Derek smiles. He presses a hand to his chest. “You’re all I think about, Wren. I hope you’ll let me make it up to you.”
My forehead drops to the steering wheel. I wasn’t going to let this happen. I was over Derek. I mean, I am over Derek. If I give him a chance he will just ruin it again with all his crazy little secrets. But he’s so cute. He’s smart and he works hard and he makes me laugh.
I inhale a deep breath and let it out in a huff. “Fine,” I say. “But you’re paying.”
Derek takes us to the Fisherman’s Warf, a two-point-five star restaurant right on the bay. Half the tables are outside on a dock that goes out over the water. The waitresses dress like street walkers but the food is delicious. I like how Derek didn’t ask if I was cool with it—he just took us here. Most guys ask where I want to go and when I say I don’t care, they say they don’t care and then we end up driving all over town being indecisive until the only place that’s still open is the drive thru at Jack-in-the-box.
Our hostess is hot and our waitress is even hotter, and I try not to sneak glances as we walk to our table and listen to the speech about which fish are on special tonight, because if my suspicions are true and Derek is checking her out then my ego will be flattened to the floor and I’ll feel miserable, fat and ugly for the rest of the night. So even though I keep my head down while Miss Boobs takes our orders, I still go ahead and imagine that Derek’s checking her out anyway, because that’s what guys do. They’re programmed at birth to stare at gorgeous women and boobs. Because after all, what guy doesn’t think that his mom is the best and boobs are awesome?
“A cheeseburger?” Derek lifts an eyebrow.
“Yeah, why, what did you order?”
“You were sitting right here, you didn’t hear me?”
“Guess not.” I stare out over the water, seeing a tiny little sail boat in the distance. I wonder what the man on that boat is thinking right now, being surrounded by nothing but water and the sparkling lights of Lawson on the shore. I wonder if he’s ever had nightmares that some kind of man-eating monster squid lives under the water and how it could jump up at any second and swallow him whole. I jump a little, when I realize that our table is just three feet and one rope fence away from the water.
“I wish things weren’t hella weird,” Derek says, stirring sugar into his tea. “I wish we could just go back to acting like we used to.” He pulls a beanie from his back pocket and tugs it over his head. He looks like a dufus, kind of. But it’s also really hot. I never knew I had a thing for long-haired ex-criminals.
Our waitress and her boobs bring us a basket of hot fluffy rolls that are glazed with a layer of butter on top. I grab one and tear off a piece and shove it in my mouth. I don’t groan in pleasure at how delicious it is, but I want to. Derek lifts his eyebrows like I’m supposed to say something, and then I realize I never answered his passive aggressive form of a question about going back to the way things were.
“I wish things would go back to normal, too.”
And at the outer edge of my subconscious, I know I’m being a grade A mo
ron by thinking all of this, but I don’t even care because these are the things I think about and it hurts me deep down, rational or not.
I take another bite of my roll and it’s still delicious even though I’m a little bit upset. A lock of Derek’s bangs fall from his pony tail and he tucks it behind his ear. I realize in this moment that Derek is not like any other guy in Lawson High School.
Derek doesn’t make excuses for who he is or what he thinks. He dresses the way he wants to and he lets his hair get long and he pulls it back like a girl but he doesn’t care. He kissed me without warning on his squeaky futon and he didn’t apologize for it. He took me to Fisherman’s Warf without asking where I wanted to go, and now he’s calling me out on acting hella weird, despite the fact that when you call out a girl on her emotions, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that the rest of your night will be ruined.
He peers at me over the dimly lit table. “What are you thinking about?”
Derek isn’t like any of the guys I know from school. He doesn’t deserve some bullshit answer. “I was just wondering if you were thinking that the waitress is hot and if that made you feel shitty for being here with me, who is like, a one compared to Miss Surgically Enhanced Boobs, who is totally a ten.”
He laughs. His elbows are on the table and he laces his fingers together under his chin. “She’s hot in a showering-and-you-need-something-to-think-about kind of way. But since you’re wondering, I wasn’t thinking that.”
Our waitress pops out of nowhere, balancing a tray of our food on her shoulder. She calls Derek Honey and me Sweetie as she sets down our food and asks if we need anything else. Derek and I stare at each other as she walks away, both wondering if she had heard us talking. “There’s no way she heard that,” Derek says, answering my unasked question.
I cut my cheeseburger in half, a practice Derek seems to think is blasphemous, but I tell him I don’t care because the only way you can eat one of the Fisherman’s bacon avocado cheeseburgers is to cut the thing in half, otherwise everything slides out the end when you take a bite.
Derek starts yapping about the play and it kills the pretend first date mood I’m in. For once, I just want to hang out with him without discussing the play or working on the play or doing anything to do with the play. And maybe there’s something in the water, or my burger has mad cow disease or something, because suddenly I’m saying, “Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?”
He bites the body of a shrimp off, holding the tail between his fingers. With his pinky finger he pushes that strand of hair behind his ear again. “I was thinking that I was going to grab the check when our hot waitress brings it, and that if you tried to pay for your food instead of letting me get it then I’d be crushed.”
“Why would saving money crush you?”
“Maybe emasculate is a better word.”
“So you’re one of those guys who think they have to be manly and the woman is just housewife material who needs to be sheltered and taken care of because she’s so fragile?”
He takes another bite of shrimp. With his mouth full of food, (which for some reason I find sexy) he says, “Never said that.”
“Good,” I say with a bit of a snobby inclination. “Because I don’t want to be a housewife. But… yeah, you’re still buying dinner.” I stick out my tongue and he rolls his eyes.
The Warf’s parking lot is just a bunch of gravel and sea shells, something you’d be pissed off about if you wore high heels and had to walk through it. I’m wearing a pair of glittery flats, which is a hundred times better than heels but the soles are so thin I can feel every sharp edge of seashell digging into my foot. I tell Derek this and he laughs. “Who would have thought that a shoe made of glitter would prove to be impractical?”
“Shut it.” I go to slap him on the arm right as I step in a sink hole the size of Texas, so my slap turns into a desperate grab for something solid to steady myself. That something solid is Derek’s elbow. Derek says how anyone watching us right now would think he slipped alcohol into my drink.
He’s smiling, and then I’m smiling and it’s one of those embarrassingly huge smiles that probably show the metal filling in my right molar. The kind of smile you have in those old photos of Christmas morning when you were five and ripped open the wrapping paper of the BEST PRESENT EVER. I become aware of this the second I let the smile consume my face, but I can’t stop it from happening because at this very moment, I am so freaking happy it’s not even funny.
Maybe it is funny. I love the way Derek’s bare elbow skin feels against my palm and I love the way he’s walking really close to me and letting me keep my hand there. I love that Derek is so abnormally normal and honest and that he paid for my dinner and that he smells like a fresh winter stream.
I don’t love the way someone standing by a car next to us clears their throat. I’ve heard that same throat clearing sound a million times, and it occurs to me how shockingly similar it sounds to Professor Umbridge. But I don’t have the luxury of thinking about that right now. Because I’ve been caught.
“What the fuck is this?” Margot’s shrill, reality-TV-show-rivaling dramatic voice pierces through the air. “You texted me that you were busy.”
I drop Derek’s elbow. The headlights on his car blink as he presses the unlock button. I should lie. No, deny it. No—tell the truth in a denying/lying type of way. “I am busy,” I say. I give her this sarcastic look like it’s totally obvious. “I’ve been working on this play all damn day and just came to get food real quick.”
A woman gets out of Margot’s mom’s BMW, and, oh god, it’s her grandmother. Please, please, god don’t let Margot make a scene. “Hi Grammy,” I say, waving at her. Margot’s hand flies out, stopping my wave. “No,” she says. “No.”
Grammy looks utterly confused, but that’s no different from how she looks every other time I see her. Margot tells her to wait inside and she’ll be there in a minute. When Grammy leaves, Margot slams her purse down on the hood of her mom’s car. Now I know she’s pissed because normally she throws a fit if a fly so much as lands on the precious pearly white paint job. “You knew I was having a boy crisis and you blew me off. And not only did you blow me off, you’re hanging out with—” She glances Derek’s direction. “I can’t even—just—whatever.”
“Margot, I’m sorry. But it’s not what it looks like. I wasn’t blowing you off. I was going to call you later.”
“Fuck you, Wren Barlow.” She grabs her purse. Her face gets all ugly and distorted for a second like she’s holding back tears. “Or let your criminal fucking friend do it for you, I don’t care.”
She storms off toward the restaurant, walking faster than the power walkers in my neighborhood. I watch her go and then I climb into Derek’s car, my metaphorical tail hiding between my legs. Derek doesn’t say anything and I’m grateful for it. I glance back at her as we start to drive away. She’s wearing high heels. And she doesn’t stumble at all. Not even once.
Dead silence accompanies us on the drive back. My arms are crossed so tightly my fingers feel numb.
Derek breaks the silence first. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t help anything. My best friend hates me and this is all your fault.”
“How is Margot my fault? I did nothing wrong by taking you to dinner. You’re the one who lied to her about where you were going.”
I glare at him and he turns his attention back to the road. “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he says quietly. His sad features alternate from shadowed to bright as we drive under rows of streetlights. “The last thing I want is for you to hate me.”
“This is your fault. If you didn’t have to be so damned mysterious and secretive then I wouldn’t have to lie to my best friend.”
“You shouldn’t have to lie to her now!” His palms slap the steering wheel in frustration. “If she cared about you then she would trust your judgment.”
Derek pulls into the school parking lot and parks next to my car. I t
ake a long look at him. “I don’t even trust my judgment.”
“Okay, Wren. I’ll tell you what you want to know. All of it. I just need more time.” His eyes plead with me.
“No. You don’t get more time. You tell me now or we are never talking again.”
Derek runs his hands through his hair and squeezes them into fists. “I can’t.”
“Then we’re done, Derek. I’m not some stupid girl who will put up with lies and manipulation. I can’t be treated like a child and I will not date someone who isn’t honest with me.”
He reaches across the stick shift for my hand, and against my better judgment, I let him take it. He pulls my hand toward him and leans forward, resting his head on mine. His hair is messy and smells like saltwater. I close my eyes as he presses a soft kiss to my hair. I love being close to him. I wish it didn’t have to be like this.
This thumb swirls circles in my palm. “I would never treat you like a child. I don’t mean to keep things from you, but I have to. My life is screwed up right now. It won’t be like this forever, I promise. But I seriously can’t tell you what’s going on.” He bumps my shoulder with his and I look up at him. “I legally can’t tell you. When I can, I will.”
A glance at his dashboard clock tells me it’s forty minutes past my curfew. Mom’s gonna kill me. I grab my things and climb out of his car. He starts to open his door but I hold out my hand to stop him.
“Fine, I’ll pretend not to care about your criminal record. But you have to tell me who that girl is.”
The pain on his face gives me an answer before he does. “I can’t.”
“You can’t?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I throw my backpack over my shoulder. “Let me guess. This girl in your life is also a big crazy secret that I’m just supposed to ignore and pretend she doesn’t exist? I’m just supposed to smile and nod and forget all about how she’s saved in your phone with a heart by her name and how she texts you all the time?”
Understudy Page 9