by Trish Cook
“How do you figure?”
“Steven and I just had a big long meeting about how I want to be an art major,” she said. “And he’s the one who set me up for the interview at Mount St. Agnes, which has a great art program. Don’t you see, Trace? It all adds up.”
“No, it doesn’t. Want to know why?” As crazy as it might seem, I’d never gotten around to correcting Brina’s mistaken belief that Bebe was going out with the Starbucks guy and not Mr. Steve. It was just that I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to break it to her after so long. The more I waited, the more pissed off I knew she would be. And now here we were, six months later. How in hell was I ever going to explain this one? This must’ve been just how Bebe felt when year after year she neglected to tell me my dad didn’t even know I was alive.
She shook her head. “I’m going to draw myself closer to him right now. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“Brina, no. Don’t do it.”
“Trace, it’s completely crystal clear.”
“Brina,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “It’s Sully, remember?”
“Says you. Why would Sully write again after I pretty much faced him in LA?” A sad look spread across Brina’s face and she added, “Gosh, I really should apologize to him for that later. But for now, I’ve gotta go meet my man!”
“There’s something I need to tell you!” I yelled as Brina started running down the hall toward the guidance department. She ignored me. I finally caught up to her just as she was throwing her arms around Mr. Steve.
“You are an amazing man,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
There was only one way for this all to end: disastrously.
“Thanks,” Mr. Steve said, trying to pry her arms from around his neck.
She clung on like a baby monkey. “And so creative,” she said, pulling back to stare in his eyes now. “I like that in guys.”
“Brina, have a seat,” Mr. Steve said, finally succeeding at peeling Brina off of him. “Now, what can I do for you?” He had no clue what this was all about. I had pretty much known it all along, but was relieved to see it so clearly in his eyes nonetheless.
“You don’t have to pretend anymore,” she said, gazing up at him in awe. “I know it’s you.”
“Brina, I’m sorry,” Mr. Steve said, more gently now. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The notes,” she said, tears threatening to spill out her eyes. “The poems.”
Mr. Steve knelt down in front of Brina. “Not mine. But whoever your note writer really is, I can tell you one thing about him. He has good taste.”
Brina blushed until she was practically eggplant purple, and sniffled loudly. “Oh, sure.”
“No, really,” Mr. Steve said. “And you’ve got to give the guy credit. I probably would’ve been way too scared to write you notes in high school.” He pulled a book from high on his bookshelf, flipped it open, and pointed to a picture.
“Who’s this?” Brina asked. By this point, she was covered in itchy-looking hives brought on by the severe humiliation she’d just subjected herself to.
“Read the name,” he said.
“ ‘Steven Lee Perry,’ ” Brina read, looking back up at Mr. Steve in surprise. “It doesn’t look like you at all.”
“I was kind of a late bloomer,” Mr. Steve admitted. I looked over Brina’s shoulder and laughed. Mr. Steve looked like a total geek, complete with braces, glasses, zits, and flood pants.
Brina stared down at the yearbook. “What’s an AV aid?”
“I was the guy who wheeled the filmstrip machines around.”
After what seemed like an hour of awkward silence, Brina finally said, “There’s just one thing I still don’t understand. What’s a filmstrip?”
“I am so embarrassed,” Brina said, hanging her head when we left Mr. Steve’s office. “How could you let me do a stupid thing like that?”
“I tried to stop you,” I said. “And anyway, Mr. Steve’s a lot cooler than you might think. He’ll never tell anyone what happened.”
“Since when do you know him so well?”
“Since he’s been hanging around my house every night.”
“You and him?” Brina asked, her eyes growing a size a second.
“No,” I laughed. “Bebe and him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, looking hurt. “Before I made a complete idiot out of myself, I mean.”
“I tried,” I said. “You didn’t listen.” It wasn’t completely true, but she was too distracted to notice.
“Well, I’m listening now,” Brina said, crumpling up the latest slp note and throwing it on the ground. “And you know what I hear? That slp is a big, fuckin’ fake.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked her. “It’s a cute note. Not one of the better verses, but give Sully a break.”
“Trace, get serious. This isn’t from Sully,” she said. “I finally got the joke. There is no slp. Just some prick getting his kicks by torturing me.”
“I can’t imagine that—” I started to say.
But Brina wasn’t having any of it. “And to think, for seven months, I’ve looked forward to these notes,” she said. “I even thought about me and slp falling in love for real.”
I shot her a surprised look. “You did?”
“A girl can dream, right, Trace? But the thing is, I got totally wrapped up in the whole fantasy,” she said. “So wrapped up, I didn’t even look for anyone else.”
I had to point out the obvious. “Well, you did venture into the Lion’s den—”
“Stu Purcell? Only because I thought he was slp!” she countered. “Don’t you see? Slp was playing me the whole time. He only wanted to watch me waste my entire senior year pining away for a goddamn fictional character.”
“I think you’ve got it all wrong,” I told her.
“No, I think slp got it all wrong,” Brina said. “Nobody screws with me and gets away with it.”
“If what you think is true, then he did get away with it,” I had to break it to her. “It’s not like you can get revenge on the Invisible Man.”
Brina whipped out a permanent marker from her backpack. She waved it menacingly in my face. “Look out, slp, ’cause here I come.” Then she turned and ran down the hall the other way.
I took off after her for the second time in an hour, yelling, “Don’t do anything you’ll regret!”
“The only thing I could possibly regret is being a doormat for one second longer!” she yelled back over her shoulder.
I was in a full-blown sweat by the time I caught up with Brina. She’d already started scrawling bold black words on the broken locker next to hers, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. When she was done a minute later, the useless door was practically screaming with venom:No longer are you worth my time
I realized that I’ll be just fine
Don’t be surprised when you see my face, reflecting back without a
trace
You’ll be reminded of these days of old
Begging forgiveness for being so cold
Brina stood back and cocked her head. Then she taped the silver locket slp had given her for Christmas onto the door and drew a noose above it. “That’s more like it,” she said, surveying her work.
“Satisfied?” I asked her.
Brina crossed her arms and stared at her masterpiece. “Very.”
“So who’d you plagiarize this time?”
“My latest musical discovery—a great band called Forte,” she answered, looking extremely pleased with herself. “You know what ‘forte’ means in Italian?”
I shook my head.
“Strong. A force to be reckoned with, just like me.”
I smiled and hugged her tight. At least my spunky best friend was back with a vengeance.
I had been home for days, and still no sign of Zander. My calls went unanswered, my messages unreturned. Things couldn’t have been any worse. That is,
until Bebe slid three very thin envelopes across the kitchen table at me. The return addresses read “USC,” “Santa Clara,” and “Fairfield.”
“Lake-Cook Community College, here I come,” I groaned, my heart doing sick little flip-flops in my chest.
“I’m sure . . . ,” Bebe said, groping around unsuccessfully for something to say, when the doorbell rang and Zander walked through the door. He could barely look at me, his gaze coming to rest on the envelopes in my hand instead.
“What do your letters say?”
Judging by the look on Zander’s face, confronting him about why he hadn’t called me—which is what I had been planning to do when I finally talked to him—seemed too scary. I stared down at the ominous envelopes and I stuck with the topic at hand. “I didn’t even open them,” I said. “What’s the point? They’re too skinny to be good news.”
Zander took the letters from my hands and flipped through them one by one. “You never know. . . .” He trailed off, sounding much less convincing than I’m sure he intended to.
“Fine, have it your way.” I ripped into the USC one and began to read aloud.
Dear Ms. Tillingham:
We regret to inform you . . .
My voice caught as I choked on the words. I looked up at Zander, tears in my eyes. “Told you.”
Next, I tore open the Santa Clara envelope. “Blah-blah-blah, wait-listed. If a space becomes available, blah-blah-blah . . .” I tossed the two letters into the trash, thinking if I got rid of them quickly enough, maybe they would never have existed at all.
“This sucks,” I said, putting my head on the table and sighing. The Fairfield envelope was still just sitting there, staring at me. It was such a slap in the face to be rejected by a school I wasn’t even interested in, so I tossed it aside, not even opening it.
“Yep,” Zander agreed. “And it’s about to get even suckier.”
“That sounds frightening.”
“It kind of is,” he said. “Can we go outside and talk?”
My stomach heaved and I felt like I might throw up my half-digested Balance bar. “Sure,” I said, opening the door and following Zander outside.
“Trace, you know how much I care about you.”
“Oh, Jesus, here it comes,” I said, shaking my head. “Zander, if this is about the verbal screw up I made before I left, forget about it. I didn’t mean it. It just slipped out.”
“Trace, I think you did mean it,” he said. “And I’m completely flattered.”
I brightened about one iota. “Really?”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing. The way it’s looking now, we’re going to be headed in different directions—” We really are all destined to repeat our parents’ mistakes, I thought incredulously.
“So? We’ll always just be a flight away,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as pathetic and desperate as I was feeling. “Isn’t that what we always said?”
“I don’t want you to waste four great years waiting for me,” Zander said. “Or vice versa.”
“I wouldn’t consider that a waste of time,” I said, tears falling like rain down my face now.
Zander gathered me into his chest and hugged me tight. “Trace, I don’t want us to hold each other back,” he said. “We both need to pursue our dreams. So I think it’s best for us to break up now, before either of us gets too attached.”
“Sure,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “Let’s make a pact to hook up in four years and see where things go from there.”
Zander pulled back and smiled at me. “Hey, now, there’s a great idea.”
“I was just fucking kidding,” I said, heading inside. Before I slammed the door behind me, I stuck my head back out. “By the way, I cheated on you in California. And you know what? I should have screwed Dusty while I had the chance.”
I ran up the stairs and flung myself on my bed, sobbing. It wasn’t enough that two out of four colleges I’d applied to so far had dinged me. No. My boyfriend had to go and break up with me, too. What, did all guys read the same book about how to cut their girlfriends loose before college starts?
I heard a soft knock at the door. “You OK?” Bebe asked.
“Nope,” I snuffled. “It seems I’m living your life.”
Bebe gasped. “How far along are you?”
Just for a second, my tears turned into laughter. “I’m not pregnant!”
Bebe put her hand over her heart. “Oh, thank God. I had no idea how I was going to handle that one.”
“What I meant was, Zander broke up with me using the same excuse my dad used on you. How exactly can someone say the reason they’re letting you go is because they care too much about you?”
Bebe smoothed my hair out of my eyes. “Because they’re scared to lose you after it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To forget about you.”
CHAPTER 16
While I was feeling crappy about my college prospects, Brina was one hundred percent pleased with herself about the public exposure of the whole slp sham. “I got him in the end, didn’t I, Trace?”
I looked at slp’s locker. A block of steel gray paint now covered the words Brina had inked in anger. “I guess so,” I said, leaning back against the locker. I heard a little pinging sound, so I stood up and then leaned back again. Same thing.
I pulled the door open and found the tiny silver locket hanging from the grates inside, just like the first time Brina discovered it. Underneath the necklace was a note scrawled directly on the door in fine ballpoint pen.
Brina:
I’m closer than you think, baby
Less than an arm’s length away
We’re closer than you think, baby
Only a heartbeat away
You’ll find me just around the corner of your world
slp
My hand started to shake as I touched the words. “Brina?”
Her head was buried inside her locker, so she didn’t pick up on my freaking out and kept blabbing on and on. “You know how you told me Bebe is being all distant with you? Well, ever since we got back from California, Sully is acting totally distant toward me.” She popped her head out and looked at me. “And you know what? I miss him. I feel like I’ve lost my best friend.”
I was still standing there with my mouth hanging open. Brina took that to mean I was upset. “Oh, Trace. Don’t be mad—you know what I meant,” she said. “You’re still my best friend. It’s just that I felt like Sully and I had a cool connection, and now it’s gone.”
As amazed as I was that Brina was finally, finally, FINALLY admitting she had some sort of feelings for Sully, I couldn’t push aside my curiosity about the latest slp note.
“Let’s get back to this discussion later,” I said, pointing at the locker door. “Right now, you’ve got to see this.”
Brina took a good hard look at the words. “You don’t think . . . ?”
I nodded, my heart racing. “I do. I really do.”
Brina took my hand and we started toward the end of the hall. She stopped short before we got there. “I can’t do this,” she hyperventilated. “What if it’s a setup? What if slp’s a total dork? What if it’s—”
I peeked my head around the corner. “Sully,” I whispered. “I was right all along.”
“Sully?” Brina gasped when she saw him leaning against the wall. “You really are slp?”
He grinned. “None other.”
Brina stayed glued to the ground. “Then I think you have dyslexia.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Peter Liam Sullivan. That’s pls, not slp.”
Sully roared with laughter. “I can’t believe Brad and I never corrected you,” he said. “Pete’s just a nickname. Short for Peterson. My name’s Sullivan Liam Peterson.”
Brina still hadn’t moved. “Get it, Brina?” I said, tapping her on the shoulder. “S-l-p.”
“You . . . you . . .” Brina ran over to Sully with her arm wound up li
ke she was going to hit him, but he caught her midswing. A second later she dissolved into him. Soon, kids began to gather around the two people who had recently melded into one. Everyone was trying to figure out just who was kissing whom.
Brina opened one eye and realized what a commotion she and Sully were causing. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone rob the cradle before?” Brina scolded the crowd. “The show’s over. Move on.”
I turned to leave with the rest of the onlookers. A second later, I turned back around, unable to resist. “Hey, Sully, how did you know we’d look in the locker today?”
Sully managed to pull himself away from Brina for just a second. “I didn’t. I’ve been waiting here after school every day for a week,” he said. “Any more questions before I get back to kissing your best friend?”
I thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah. What was with the poem?”
Sully smiled at me. “It was actually the lyrics to my parents’ wedding song,” Sully said. “When Bebe figured out it wasn’t an original work, I freaked and didn’t write again for a long time.”
“That’s when I thought you’d given up on me,” Brina said. “And I sent you the ‘In and Out’ note.”
“Believe me, it was all I could do not to chase you down and admit everything after that,” Sully said, smiling down at her.
She hit him, playfully this time. “Sex fiend!”
“True dat,” Sully said, just beaming at her. “Now, speaking of lyrics. Your latest Forte locker creation was totally uncalled-for.”
Brina brushed a stray dread from his forehead. “Yeah, I guess it was,” she told him. “But I promise I’ll make it up to you.”
When I got home, I went straight to my room—I didn’t even stop for my usual snack—and checked my e-mail. I took a sharp breath when I saw the mysterious Shamus’s return address. I clicked it up and read it.
Subject: Our meeting
Trace,
I’ve attached the upcoming tour schedule for Born to Run, the band I
manage and Mac plays in. Are you by any chance going to be in the area
for any of the shows? I could put you on the guest list and we can talk