“I know,” I said. “Like I said. I fucked up.”
“You didn’t think something like this could happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This year has just been so crazy. We were doing good things, right? The Invisibles, all the stuff we got from Noel’s journal—I was really proud of all that, you know? Like we weren’t putting up with bullshit anymore, we weren’t going out like that.”
“Yeah, dude,” Anya said. “We kicked ass.”
“And this just seemed like the same thing, right? It was proactive. Creative.”
“Dahlia did amazing fucking work.”
“Amazing, right?” I said. “Ten times better than whatever Skyler would have done.”
“A hundred times. A million. But she didn’t do it.”
Ugh. “Yeah,” I said. “And Chris said she wasn’t even going to do it.”
Anya looked confused. “What? Like he made the whole thing up?”
“No, no,” I said. “I mean … she came up with this plan last year, the whole Westminster Dog Show, all the details. She told Chris, he broke up with her, new school year, you and I hang out, Invisibles, all that shit. I guess at some point she just decided not to do it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Anya said. “She’s done enough shit. I don’t feel bad for her. That’s not the problem. The problem is—”
“That Chris told me in confidence, and I took it and turned it into our prank, totally behind his back.”
“Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”
We stood there for a second. A freshman we knew from chorus popped in to pee, and she was a nice kid, so we didn’t tell her to go down the hall.
I was still feeling sorry for myself, but it occurred to me I was kind of being an asshole—Anya said she was having an emergency, and here I was, making it all The Hailey Show with Hailey, featuring Hailey.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry, what was your thing?”
“It can wait.”
“No, it can’t. You listened patiently and pleasantly to my unending tale of sadness and woe. What’s the deal?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes, almost like she was embarrassed to talk about it.
“It’s Andy,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Okay, so … the Andy and Emily thing?”
I don’t know whether you could call Andy and Emily the sophomore class’s “hot couple”—I would have hoped people would have been calling me and Chris that, at least before today’s nightmare—but they’d obviously been going strong. Emily had stars in her eyes whenever she talked about him, and Andy, as best I could tell, appeared to reciprocate.
Anya seemed to be considering her words carefully. “No, not Andy and Emily. Well … yes, but no…”
“So what?”
“We made up, Andy and me,” she said.
“I know. I was there.”
A long pause. “Okay. I … we … it’s not that kind of made up.”
It just hung there for a while. The bathroom door swung open, two girls we didn’t know, and Anya made them leave. I forget the specifics, but there was something in there about their asses and a cheese grater if they didn’t get out of there right now. Something along those lines. (Cut me some slack. Pretty much everything from that day is a blur.)
Alone again, we just looked at each other.
“So…,” I started.
“Yeah,” Anya said.
“Wow,” I said. “How did this happen? When did this happen? Where did this happen? Why—”
“Last night. He came over, we were talking. We were just talking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Anya said. “And then there was naked.”
“Oh my God!”
“Yeah. It just happened.”
“That doesn’t just happen!”
“Oh, it does,” she said with a smirk. “Look, I told you how things ended with us and you know why things ended with us, but what I didn’t tell you is that before the … situation, we were really happy. Then it got all screwed up, and it really didn’t seem like we’d ever find our way back.” Then she twisted her mouth and shrugged. “But somehow we did.”
“Back up the truck,” I said. “What started this?”
Anya exhaled and chewed on her cheek, the way she does when she’s contemplating a response. Which she does a lot, that whole contemplating-a-response thing. I’m pretty much surprised she still has a cheek.
“Okay,” she started. “This is complicated—”
No shit.
“What are you, a Facebook status? Just tell me what happened!”
“I’m trying to,” Anya said, and the whole thing reminded me of trying to extract the truth out of my mom: If only waterboarding were legal, I could save so much time.
Anya took another deep breath and went for broke: “Okay, fine. It started because I just really needed someone to talk to.…”
“Huh? Why couldn’t you talk to me?”
Anya sighed. “Because it was about you.”
I didn’t think anything today was still capable of leaving me stunned.
“Anya,” I said in my most measured tone. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She sighed yet again, almost like she was getting paid per sigh.
“Hailey,” she said, “I don’t know—sometimes I feel, like, over the last month or two—it just doesn’t seem like what we talked about, the Invisibles, standing up for ourselves, all that—it just doesn’t seem like what we’ve been all about.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “We were getting our asses kicked by Skyler and her crew. She humiliated you and tossed you aside. I only had to spend a few days with her to realize they don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves. We banded together. We used Noel’s journal and got shit done. We—”
“—started acting just like Skyler,” Anya said.
What?
The bathroom door opened—a girl presumably trying to get in a quick pee right before final bell, which Anya and I were obviously going to ignore because we had shit to settle. We both gave the girl a death glare.
“I’ll just go down the hall,” the girl said.
“Good idea,” Anya said.
I was still working through Anya’s words in my mind. Acting just like Skyler? Bullshit! We were just standing up for ourselves! We didn’t start this fight, but we were damn well going to end it! We …
But if I was so proud of what I did, why didn’t I ever tell Mom or Dad what was going on? Why didn’t I tell Chris what I was planning for Skyler and the minions? Why was I just as obsessed with covering our digital tracks, so Principal Dash couldn’t tie us to BitchBook in any way, shape or form, as I was at conceiving the plan in the first place? If you’re doing the right thing, should you really be spending so much time setting up alibis and plausible deniability?
Still, the sneaking suspicion that I might have gone a touch too far wasn’t enough for me to acknowledge it to Anya. Following Noel’s lead had done a lot for me, and I didn’t see any way in hell she’d show any weakness here.
“Well, Anya, I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. “But I don’t see it like that.”
“Well, I do,” she said. “And I didn’t know how to talk about it with you without pissing you off, so I went to Andy. Look, it’s hard to tell your best friend how annoyed you are with so-and-so when that so-and-so happens to be your best friend.”
“Wow,” I said. “So much for trying to help people.”
“Like I said … it’s complicated.”
“Apparently.”
I felt a million things: hurt, confused, angry—okay, mostly just those three things, but on the feelings scale it felt like a million emotions, because I didn’t know which feeling to latch on to.
But that was determined for me when Anya opened her mouth: “Hailey, you’ve kind of been a bitch lately.”
I was steaming. The rocks in my stomach had turned to hot coals. I knew what I wanted
to say, but I held it in check for now.
“Well, don’t hold back, Anya. By all means.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Look, this sucks. And the timing couldn’t be worse with you being upset about Chris, but this all kind of stems from the same thing. I went to Andy to talk about my concerns with what we were doing, and then … that happened, and now I need to confide in you.”
“But, Anya, you can—”
“No,” she said. “I can’t do it without being honest and being honest is just making us fight when I really just needed my friend right now, which is what started it because I feel like my friend is turning into a completely different person. A total bitch.”
I didn’t know what to say. Everything was falling apart. One minute I felt like I was on top of the world, and the next minute I couldn’t do anything right. I didn’t know how I could possibly fix this.
And I felt cold. And hurt. And pissed.
And I looked right at Anya, and I stepped up close to her, as close as Skyler had been when she whispered in my ear, and this is what I said:
“Well, honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that my behavior made you so upset and confused that you had no choice but to fuck your baby daddy, even though he’s dating one of your very good friends, so I’m just thrilled I could be your convenient excuse for that shit. And maybe you’re right. Maybe Skyler and I have more in common than I thought. Because I guess when Skyler was telling the whole school you were a slut … it’s because she was right. It’s because apparently you are a slut.”
And I walked out of the bathroom.
What made us think that we were wise?
—THE VERVE PIPE
“The Freshmen”
CHAPTER
18
After everything I’d just dealt with, I approached the front door of my house with one thing in mind: Go to bed. Go straight to my bedroom, don’t let anything or anyone get in my way. Do not pass Go, and … well fine, if someone wants to give me two hundred dollars I suppose I would be happy to collect it on my way to bed. I needed to relax, and rest, and make some sort of freaking sense out of the completely insane day I was trapped in.
And a half second after I was inside the door, that was all shot to shit.
“Well, well,” her voice rang out.
I recognized her voice instantly. I mean, of course I did. But it was still weird as hell in this context, given that I wasn’t expecting at all to hear the voice of …
“Noel!”
She was sitting right there on the couch, and I couldn’t help but run over and give her a hug, albeit a somewhat awkward hug. Normally I’d be fine hugging my sister, I mean—we weren’t close, but she was still my sister. But I was a bit self-conscious, given all the time I’d recently spent in her shoes. I mean her actual shoes, a still decent-looking pair of Calypso flats on my feet at that very second.
I had no idea whether she knew I was still annoyed by her ridiculously curt response when I reached out to her by email. If she did, she showed no indication of it. Instead, she did a typical Noel move—she immediately looked down and checked out the Calypso flats. Of course she did.
Throughout our youth, she could pick out anything strange or out of place about my appearance from a thousand yards. When I was twelve, I once trimmed my bangs with household scissors. I only took off maybe an eighth of an inch. I didn’t think anyone could tell. Eagle-Eye Noel was on it in seconds: “Your bangs are, like, at a forty-five-degree angle. If your bangs were a table, everything would slide off of it.” A year later, when I tried putting on fake eyelashes for the first time, I swear she knew it before she even saw my face. I was coming down the stairs from my room, and she was at the kitchen table looking the other way. Before she even looked up, she said, “Hailey, lose the eyelashes. They’re way too big. If you blink once you’re going to cause a Category-Four hurricane.”
I swear the girl was psychic. Maybe a witch? That might explain some things. But apparently little had changed.
“Thought I gave those to Goodwill,” Noel said with a slight glance at the shoes. I wished I could click them three times and be whisked off to Kansas. (Although normally I’ve never had any interest in going to Kansas. I mean, no offense if you live in Kansas, but seriously: Kansas?)
“You did,” I managed to utter, feeling the trash-picking shame well in my stomach. “But … I appropriated them when I realized that my whole wardrobe—much like my entire life—needed a do-over. And your castoffs were a big step up from anything I had.”
“Well, I guess it’s lucky we’re the same size now,” Noel said. “You’ve really changed in the last year. Your hair, your posture … and wow, how about your body?”
I braced myself for criticism—I thought my body looked pretty good these days, thank you very much, but I never remembered Noel thinking much of it.
“Hailey, you look great,” Noel said. “Seriously. You’ve lost weight. Your skin’s cleared up too, which isn’t easy at your age. I was fighting World War Zit all through sophomore year. I even named some of them.”
Wow. This was all so unexpected. Not just a visit from Noel, but apparently a very different Noel from the one I’d last spent any time with. After the email disaster, I wondered whether she’d bother giving me the time of day. Now she was being decent, even almost friendly. Which made me suspicious, because seriously, who acts like that? I planted that in my mental file: What’s going on with Noel?
Then again, whatever. I wasn’t complaining. It was great to see a smiling face after the never-ending nightmare of this day. Things were finally starting to look up.
I smiled at my sister. “Thanks, No,” I said, and Noel smiled at the old nickname. “I cut out sugar, well, like, mostly. No more sodas, no more Pop-Tarts for breakfast.”
“No more twelve squirts of ketchup on your hash browns?”
“Hell, no more hash browns.”
I saw her eyebrow raise a little when I said “hell” instead of “heck”—for the longest time, Noel used to punch me in the arm (not powerfully, but not exactly softly either) if I ever said swear words. But this one she let slide. I guess she recognized we were different people now. And “hell” was the least offensive gem in my swear-word arsenal.
“Well, good for you, Hay,” she said, using her nickname for me. “Believe me, it’s tough when you get to college. There’s a reason they call it the Freshman Fifteen.”
It was fun hearing the nicknames we’d used as kids. I’d be “Hay” and she’d be “No,” which led to conversations like:
“Hey, Hay, have you seen the remote?”
“No, No.”
“Hey, Hay, so you don’t know?”
“No, No, I don’t know…”
And so on. All of which seemed pretty funny when we were kids, but seems unbelievably dumb now. I guess that’s just how kids’ stuff works.
Anyway, getting back to the present: Noel didn’t seem to be in a hurry to address the elephant in the room, so I jumped to it:
“Noel, what the heck are you doing here?”
She gave me a strange look. “What? I’m here for the weekend. Mom didn’t tell you I was coming?”
“No,” I said, thinking, That’s weird. God, can’t anything be simple these days? “Why didn’t you send me an email or IM or something?”
Noel shook her head. “I figured Mom would have told you. And you know how busy I’ve been. Speaking of which: I don’t know if you even noticed—”
I did, sis, I sure did.
“—but when you emailed me about all that stuff before, I had a lot going on. I meant to send you back something a little, um, better, but I know how it goes in high school. All that stuff seems super-important, but it’s not. It all works out. Plus, you’re tough.”
I felt myself get a little annoyed that Noel was dismissing high school as not being important—that’s my whole world, and it sure seemed important enough to Noel to write a whole journal about it. Then again, Noel thinks I’m tough? Really? W
hen did that happen?
“Hailey,” my mom said. She came bounding into the room, wearing dark jeans and a burgundy cashmere sweater, her hair swept up with a few pieces hanging to frame her face in front. (My mom really is pretty, I thought.) “I see you found your sister.”
“And I wasn’t even looking for her,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me Noel was coming?”
“Sit down, girls,” she said. She tucked one leg behind her and sat on it, the other leg folded in a normal seated position.
Noel and I exchanged a look, and for once it was like we were on the same side: wondering what was going on.
I sat down next to my mom and Noel sat on a chair. Mom placed a striped throw pillow on her lap and inspected it for a moment, then looked up.
“Hailey, I didn’t tell you Noel was coming because I didn’t want you to worry. And I didn’t discuss what was happening with Noel because I just thought it would be better to talk to both of you in person.”
“Are you sick?” I blurted. The thought washed over me in a sudden flood of panic. I felt sick and my hands started to sweat and my heart began to race. Dizziness overcame me, and I tried to calm myself because if she was sick then I’d be totally selfish having a freak-out when she was the sick one.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
“No,” she said. “I’m not sick.”
“Is Dad sick?” I asked.
“Jesus, Hailey,” Noel said. “Why don’t you just let Mom talk?”
“It’s okay,” Mom said, as I glared at Noel. Mom continued, “Things have been strange around here, Noel, and Hailey’s probably had a lot of questions. And … I haven’t tried to answer those questions because I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
Oh, so it’s that, I thought. I felt oddly vindicated—something weird had been going on, I was right about that—and yet terrified at the same time.
“Jeez!” Noel said. “So what’s the deal?”
(Look who’s the interrupter now.)
My mom swallowed hard, and then looked at me and then at Noel. “Your father has … he hasn’t been faithful.” She looked at me and then Noel and then back at me, trying to gauge our reactions.
Confessions of a Hater Page 25