The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You

by Lily Anderson

  29

  By the time Ben and I left, the rain had let up and Mike was on a conference call with his parents and Harper’s dad. I couldn’t endure listening to his sobbing confession again. While he had called Dr. Mendoza, I’d put in for another favor from Jack. First thing Monday morning, Nick would go into the administrative office and have Mike’s transcripts sent over to Sheldon High. The Donnellys would get the pleasure of knowing that Mike was expelled and Mike would get to test out of school. He was eighteen. There wasn’t any way for his parents to stop him.

  I put my hands in the damp pockets of my jacket. My uniform had mostly dried while we’d been at Mike’s, but my coat was a cold, clammy weight. Thankfully, it was a short walk around the corner. Harper’s car gleamed in the driveway of the big white house. Peter’s minivan was parked on the curb in front of Cornell’s silver hybrid.

  “God, I hope there are cookies,” Ben said as we cut across the soggy lawn. “I would give my left hand for cookies.”

  I nudged him with my shoulder. “I’m the one who solved the case. If anyone gets cookies, it’s me.”

  “Your case, my emotional trauma,” he said, skipping the step up to the front door.

  “Hey, your enemies list is down to just Jack and Ken Pollack. That’s good news, right?”

  I reached in front of him for the doorknob. The door swung inward, letting out the screams.

  “How could you possibly think that I would be happy about that, you addlepated, impetuous jackass?”

  I shoved past Ben and found Harper in the middle of the living room whacking Cornell with a wad of rolled-up paper. Cornell had thrown his arms up to shield his face.

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell him,” Peter said from the couch in front of the window as Harper continued to abuse Cornell.

  “He’s been displaying symptoms of oppositional defiance this week,” said Meg, standing safely back near the fireplace.

  “You thought that I would break up with you over my grades,” Cornell yelped, bobbing and weaving gracelessly as Harper’s paper found purchase on the top of his head. “I had to prove to you that I loved you more than I cared about being valedictorian. You wouldn’t take my calls.”

  “Because I was grounded, you feckless goon!”

  “Oh good,” Ben said, closing the door behind us. “More people pissed about the ranking. Can I go home now?”

  “No,” I said.

  Harper spun around, her glasses crooked on the edge of her nose. She shoved them upward and pointed her swatting papers at me.

  “And you,” she growled. “I told you not to skip school again. I told you not to put yourself into any more trouble. This was supposed to be a nice day. We were going to get Slurpees—”

  “And make a fort,” Meg added.

  “And make a fort,” Harper wailed, waving her paper roll in a figure eight over her head like a lasso. “But, no. You two run off campus together for God knows what reason—”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to use the Lord’s name in vain if you’re going to go to Marist,” Peter said.

  “She’s not going to Marist,” I said, peeling off my jacket. “I just had Mike Shepherd expelled.”

  * * *

  “I would have gone with baking Ben cookies before committing academic fraud,” Harper said after I had finished explaining the events of the day. “But that’s just me.”

  “God, I wish there were cookies,” Ben grumbled.

  “Personally, I think what Mike did was kind of sweet,” Meg said.

  “Trying to get five people expelled?” Peter frowned, stretching out his bad leg with a wince. “That’s way more crazy than nice.”

  “Extreme, not crazy,” Meg corrected. “He didn’t even change his own ranking. It was totally selfless.”

  “Hallmark doesn’t make a ‘sorry I kicked you out of the role-playing club’ card,” Cornell said.

  The Leonard household wasn’t set up for company. Finding seating had taken almost as long as my explanation of what had happened once Ben and I had left campus. I was stuck between Meg and Peter on the couch. Harper and Cornell were a hand span apart on the brick ledge in front of the fireplace. Ben was on the floor with his back against the oak cabinet where the TV was hidden. It was a decent impression of himself—his knees akimbo, his head tilted to examine the room—but his expression stayed blank. I thought about pressing my nose into his cheek, kissing his jaw until his lips turned up in the corners.

  But I stayed where I was.

  “So, Mike framed everyone so that Ben’s mom would come to graduation, Trixie’s grounded again, and Cornell decided to destroy his academic future and possibly bankrupt the entire charter of the student government in the process,” Harper said lightly. “You guys had a busy week.”

  “Leadership is a half-credit class,” Cornell said. “It wouldn’t ruin my entire future. It probably wouldn’t even take me out of the top ten. I just wouldn’t be valedictorian.”

  Harper turned to him with an impish smile. “I thought you were doing it to prove how much you loved me. Now it’s only a half-credit class and a place in the top ten?”

  “When we were in Mendoza’s office, you said that I wanted to be valedictorian more than I wanted to be with you,” he said, scooping up her hands and holding them between his. “I love you more than I love any place on the ranking. I tried to convince my parents to send me over to Marist, but they wouldn’t let me. I could transfer myself after I turn eighteen and flunk out of there, too—”

  “So much intellect, so little common sense.” She rested her forehead against his. “I love you. Don’t flunk anything that you don’t want to.”

  “Okay.” He nodded against her nose. “Does that mean you’ll take me back?”

  “I never let you go, you nitwit.” She tipped her face to kiss him and Cornell’s hand came up to shield them from view.

  After the events of the winter ball, I had expected seeing the two of them together again to fill me with indignant rage. But there was no anger left in my body. They were so strangely comfortable together, even in knowing that everyone was watching them, expecting explanations. Beside me, Meg sniffled.

  Ben didn’t appear to be listening. He was looking up at the mantel, where a dozen pictures of Harper sat between various award statuettes. He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie, blinking rapidly as his eyes adjusted on Harper and Cornell.

  “Harpo, are you going to come back on Monday?” he asked.

  Harper extricated herself from Cornell and pushed her glasses up her nose. “The course load at Marist is much simpler than at the Mess. Really, I could do the same thing that Mike’s doing and test out. It’d take a lot of work to make up for all the religion classes I missed.”

  After days of sleepless nights, frying my brain for answers, ditching school, and constantly fighting off the urge to cry, I had never stopped to consider that Harper could choose not to come back to the Mess. I’d been so desperate to make things right, to bring everything back to proper equilibrium. And what if it had all been a waste?

  Harper flapped her hands. “And if I didn’t come back then you guys could graduate with a higher ranking.”

  “Or we could never talk about the ranking ever again,” Ben said. “That would work, too.”

  “I’m happy being number three,” I said honestly. “Besides, Ben and I haven’t tried to destroy each other in ages. Why bring that back?”

  “Agreed.” Ben yawned, closing his eyes. “The peace has been nice.”

  “Oh, please,” Meg said. “You guys couldn’t destroy each other if you tried. It’s different now.”

  “Meg,” Peter hissed, his eyes shining a warning at her from the other side of me.

  She threw up her hands. “What? Are we really going to keep pretending that we don’t know?”

  “That was the plan,” Cornell said, shooting Harper a nervous glance.

  Ben opened one eye and stared around. “What plan?”r />
  Harper gave a nervous cluck. I turned to Peter, who inspected the ceiling.

  “Margaret?” Ben said. Meg blew a raspberry in return.

  “You know,” I said loudly, fisting my hands in my lap. “Considering I found the way to revoke Harper’s expulsion, I think I’ve earned the right to know what in the hell is going on here.”

  Peter, Meg, Harper, and Cornell exchanged another round of shifty glances. Cornell sat taller, his head tilted with a hint of haughty arrogance.

  “It’s just that you two couldn’t be in the same place for five minutes without going nuclear,” he said with all the diplomacy he usually reserved for ending student council fights. “And if we had to hear about the monkey bars one more time—”

  “See, I needed a test group for my thought experiment,” Meg broke in. “I was planning on using myself and Ishaan, but the more I thought about him, the more I realized that it would be so inconvenient to date someone on the cricket team. Their games are always so far away. But then he got suspended and we were having so much trouble with you guys. There was the harvest festival debacle and the nerd duel and all of those miserable lunches.” She rubbed her feet together as she wriggled into the arm of the couch. “And so we had a meeting.”

  “You had a meeting?” I repeated.

  “A couple of meetings,” Peter admitted.

  “We thought that maybe you’d be nicer to each other if you thought the other person had a crush on you,” Harper said.

  “Enemies to lovers. It’s a very common trope,” Meg said in a rush. “It comes up a lot in regency and Victorian literature. Standoffish man, opinionated woman. I noticed it when I started doing my extra credit for Gender Roles. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, there has to be a psychological basis for this plot.’ And there is! Your putamen and insula light up when you’re being faced with something you love or something you hate. Your brain literally can’t tell the difference without context clues. By rewriting the negative preconceived notions of your prior relationship, you were free to see each other as positive stimuli!”

  Silence.

  “She sold it to us as sexual tension,” Cornell said.

  “Classic Elizabeth and Darcy,” Meg said.

  “I am not Mr. Darcy,” Ben said.

  “No…” Harper laughed. “You’re the Elizabeth.”

  All of the air rushed out of my lungs. I felt like I’d been hit with a semitruck or a wrecking ball or Thor’s hammer. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ben, who was motionless on the floor.

  “The day in the park,” I said. My face felt numb as I remembered being wedged under the tube slide, crying into a damaged comic. “When I heard you and Harper talking about how Ben was on the brink of suicide because he was in love with me—”

  “Suicide?” Ben echoed.

  “You did say you’d kill yourself if you had to spend more time with her,” Peter said weakly.

  “Hyperbole,” Ben snapped. He reached for his backpack and dug around inside for a minute before pulling out a piece of notebook paper that was more tape than anything else. It looked like it’d survived a war. He thrashed it toward Cornell. “Then what in the hell is this?”

  Peter made a choking sound. “You kept the poems? They were in the trash.”

  “What poems?” I asked.

  Ben thrust the paper at Meg, who passed it to me gingerly. The page was covered in handwriting eerily similar to my own. Except I knew for a fact that I’d never written a sonnet, much less six of them. Whoever had written these had a patience for counting syllables that I lacked.

  “What the hell is a devinette?” I asked.

  “It’s French for ‘riddle,’” Ben said.

  “I took three years of Italian,” I said, shoving the paper back at Meg. I didn’t want it near me ever again. “Those poems were obviously written by Mary-Anne. And I’m pretty sure they’re about Jack.”

  “She did an excellent job matching your handwriting, though,” Harper said. “Who knew she was an accomplished forger?”

  “You know,” Ben said stiffly, “I thought that Mike trying to get everyone expelled so that I could be valedictorian would be the worst thing that happened today. Congrats, guys. You really outdid yourselves.”

  “But it all worked out,” Meg said frantically. “You two totally love each other. Under the stress of the last week, you crystallized into a perfect polymer. You surpassed the control group!”

  “Hey,” Cornell and Harper said.

  “Love?” I spluttered, moving as far away from Meg as possible without actually ending up on Peter’s knee.

  “We don’t hate each other, sure, but that’s a little far,” Ben added with a wince.

  Meg muttered something that might have been the word lying. Distantly, I realized the downside of having a giant cat who operated as a polygraph. I never should have loaned her Ben’s copies of Saga.

  “Oh, please.” Harper laughed. “You two are worse than me and Cornell.”

  “No one is worse than you and Cornell.” Ben glowered at her.

  “There’s no point in denying it,” Meg said. “Brandon has been keeping tabs on you. He agreed to help me with the statistics for the paper I was doing on my thought experiment. You really don’t guard yourself with him the way you do with us. He brought back some really interesting data.”

  “She means that he called her screaming when he saw you making out in the library,” Peter said.

  “And in the storage closet in the main building,” Meg said.

  Peter snorted. “And in the girls’ bathroom in the math and sciences building.”

  Ben caught my eye and I felt my cheeks burning. Damn B. Calistero and his superior spying skills. I should have known he would go rogue on me.

  “There may have been some kissing,” I said with as much tact as I could muster with my face on fire. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course not,” Ben agreed. “It’s utterly meaningless.”

  Utterly meaningless? Way to go for the jugular, hobo clown.

  “It was a hormonal impulse giving way to a physical manifestation,” I said, trying to push down the jabs of annoyance cropping up in my brain. “Completely impersonal. It was a high-stress situation. It could have been anyone in that study room. Or storage closet.” I coughed. “Or that bathroom.”

  “A fish,” Ben offered. “Like a really big fish.”

  Cornell laughed. “Wow, you guys are bad at this.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t noticed the long lingering looks you’ve been giving each other,” Meg said, a note of pity in her voice.

  “And the constant texting,” Harper said.

  “Exchanging comic books and sodas when you think no one is paying attention,” Peter added.

  “It wouldn’t be completely unfounded to say that we’re friends now,” I said. I glanced at Ben for confirmation and he gave a rigid nod. “Maybe even friends who have, in the past, kissed one another in regrettably public places. But that doesn’t mean we’re—”

  “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Cornell muttered.

  “How about this?” Harper said, swishing her hair over her shoulder. “If Dr. Mendoza agrees to let me come back to the Mess—and I don’t see why he wouldn’t—I will agree only if you and Ben admit that you have been secretly dating for the last month.” She cocked her head at Cornell for confirmation. “Fair?”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said.

  “That’s insane,” I said.

  “It’s not, really. I would have a lot more free time at Marist. If I decided to go back to the Mess, it would be mostly for social reasons. I want to eat lunch and go to prom and take classes with my friends. But you and Ben continuing to pretend that you don’t really like each other while you’re also secretly dating sounds exhausting. Really, it’s almost as bad as you guys actually hating each other. At least that was honest.”

  “You can’t really be saying that you think we’ve been lying to yo
u,” Ben said. “You guys actually lied to us. You used us as guinea pigs for homework.”

  “Oh, it’s much bigger than homework,” Meg said. “I mean, it is the reason I jumped up in the ranking. Mr. Walsh was really impressed with my rough drafts. He counted it as four extra-credit assignments. But then my dad put me in touch with the editor of one of his journals. It’s going to print in February. Brandon’s name will be on it, too, of course—”

  Harper cut across her. “We didn’t lie to you. We lied within hearing of you. If either of you had actually asked any of us—or each other—about whether we were telling the truth, this never would have worked. You didn’t ask because you wanted it to be true. You wanted Trixie to be in love with you and she wanted you to be in love with her. And now you are.”

  “So, you’re welcome,” Meg chirped.

  “Also, sorry,” Peter said.

  “Mostly you’re welcome.” Cornell grinned.

  The sound of a phone ringing gave all of us pause. Harper got to her feet and padded out of the room. Her voice floated in from the kitchen.

  “Hi, Daddy! Yes, Trixie came to tell me. She was the one who figured it out. Do you think you could call her parents and let them know what happened? Fantastic, thank you … Now? Sure. No, I can take it. I know Marist would be a good fresh start, but I’d like to hear his offer. Okay. Love you.” She poked her head back into the living room, her phone attached to her ear. “Yes, Mrs. Landry, you can patch me through.”

  She looked down at me imperiously and my organs all seemed to shift an inch to the left.

  I was pinned to the spot. I considered how awful it would feel if Ben rejected me in front of everyone. Or at all. The way things were had worked out for us just fine. Why did we need to let other people in? Why invite an outside influence? What if letting other people see us ruined everything?

  Outside input just gets so messy. Your friends judging you, making notes on you, comparing your rankings.…

  I never should have let Mary-Anne into my brain as a phantom voice of reason. But she had made a valid point. If Ben and I were openly a couple, we’d be accepting the fact that everyone would immediately have an opinion about us.