There’s a scream, and someone on the screen gets their head removed with a machete. I yawn, realizing that it’s late, and there’s a lot more of this terrible movie left.
Only there’s not. Because the next thing I know, I wake up to the sounds of tires crunching along the gravel in front of the bus. Tristan is gone. I sit up in a panic, because my last image was of someone getting brutally murdered in the woods, and I’m having a hard time separating fiction from reality at the moment. Like, did I really curl up and sleep with Tristan? Did that actually happen, or was it all a dream?
Then I see him ambling across the gravel and I know it for sure. I did curl up into him like he was a recliner. Or a boyfriend.
Oh god. Should I be embarrassed? How embarrassed should I be?
He doesn’t say anything as he comes around to the driver’s side door. Finally I just ask.
“Where did you go?”
“Just tossing out some trash,” he says, firing up the engine on the old bus. “You ready?”
“Where’s everyone else?” The space next to the bus where Jason’s truck had been parked is vacant. In fact, we’re one of the last cars to leave the field.
“They already left,” he says.
He doesn’t mention that I’ve been asleep for probably an hour. He doesn’t tease me about snoring or drooling. Which is weird, because that seems like something Tristan would do.
I climb into the passenger seat, and he cranks the radio. Since the windows are rolled up on the way home because of the chill, I can actually hear it. He’s got his phone connected to the tape deck with this weird cord-and-tape thing. I think it’s the Beatles, but I don’t recognize the song, just the voices. He doesn’t say a word for most of the drive.
Did something happen? Did I talk in my sleep? I’m used to Tristan being rude. I’m used to him being downright mean. I’m used to him being silent. But I’m not used to him being so distant.
“Remind me where the turns are, ’kay?” he says as he pulls out of the drive-in. Instead of the usual slow parade of cars, we’re able to drive right out, since everyone else has left.
“Yeah.”
And I do, but he only nods in reply.
When I climb out of the bus, I pause to thank him for the ride. I want to thank him for something else, but I’m not sure how to say it. I had a good time tonight, pantsless tuck-and-roll aside, but again, putting words to it would just make things weird. Or weirder.
And as soon as I slam the door shut, I mean the instant the metal clangs, he’s putting the bus in gear and chugging away from the curb, not even a glance back, no waiting until I’m safely inside.
Maybe it’s not weirdness. Maybe it’s indifference.
I can’t decide which would be worse.
Maybe after Mac I’m just desperate to feel close to someone. Maybe I had a little leftover crush, and like a poorly directed love potion, it landed on whoever happened to be the closest. I tell myself to shake it off. He’s not the one. He’s not even a one. Tristan is a jerk who has moments of greatness, but those aren’t enough to make him someone I’d actually want to spend time with on the regular.
Inside the house, my parents are watching a movie, something slow and dramatic that’s probably in contention for a bunch of awards. It seems like one of those movies that’s three hours long but the script was only six pages because most of the screen time is devoted to characters staring at each other meaningfully. It’s well after midnight, but they’re still going strong. That’s the thing about having young parents. They refuse to act old.
“How was the drive-in?” Dad asks.
“It was good.”
“What was showing?”
“A Mission: Impossible and a slasher flick that I slept through.”
“Who else was there?” Mom asks, her standard questions.
“People I work with,” I reply.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she says. “Was Natalie there?”
“Nope,” I say, putting an end to her fishing expedition. “I’m going upstairs to wash my face.” Which is usually code for I’m done now, good night.
There’s a brief pause, where I can tell my mom wants to ask me more, but instead she smiles. “Okay, see you in the morning.”
But I don’t wash my face. Instead I climb into my bed, still in my clothes, which smell like gasoline and popcorn. I pull out my phone and open SocialSquare. I don’t follow that many people, just my friends, a few celebrities with truly delightful feeds, and some beauty influencers. I suck at makeup, but I do try to wash my face with decent drugstore potions. But not tonight, because tonight I head straight for Natalie’s feed. She’s the most avid social networker of all of us. As much as she denies her mother’s influence, some of that blogging has definitely rubbed off on her. Her feed is always up-to-date, and usually really pretty, too. She knows how to artfully edit a shot and add the perfect caption to make her life (and by extension, ours) appear as if it were designed by J. Crew or profiled by Vanity Fair. It looks like they were all at Tamsin and Colin’s house tonight. There’s a snap of Tamsin holding up a gooey s’more, her face framed by the stone firepit her parents have in their backyard. I swipe, and there’s Cora sprawled out on Eli’s lap, the two of them spilling over the arms of a white Adirondack chair. Next is a picture of Colin and Mac fake sword fighting with a pair of metal skewers, each with a flaming marshmallow on the end of their fork. And last but not least is a little animated photo of Natalie, Tamsin, and Cora jumping jubilantly in front of the fire, their hair flying overhead as the fire flickers behind them.
Another perfect night.
I can’t help but notice that no one bothered to invite me.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Over the break I worked two more shifts at Hot ’N Crusty: Friday and a Saturday double. Twelve hours, and I only saw Tristan twice. Neither time did he do more than give me a brief nod of greeting. Man, between Mac and this, my romance radar is seriously misfiring.
I guess I really was imagining it all.
Back at school on Monday, it’s like nothing has changed. Tristan disappears out the back door of the cafeteria, chips and milk in hand. Julianne is reading in the corner. And I’m back at our round table, two from the middle, sitting next to Natalie while Colin regales us with his wakeboarding adventures and Tamsin flips through pictures of the hot lifeguard she’s stalking.
“Did you do anything fun over the break, Beck?” Cora asks when it’s clear we’re all tapped out on ski stories.
“I just worked. Binged stuff with my parents,” I say with a shrug. “Nothing special.” And for the first time I’m keeping Hot ’N Crusty to myself not because I’m embarrassed, but because I just don’t want to share it. I don’t want to see Tamsin wrinkle her nose at the mention of Julianne or hear the boys say something rude about Frank, Jason, or Greg. And I don’t want to avoid Mac’s gaze when I bring up Tristan or worry that he’s going to bring up the kiss he saw. I’d rather geek out on Apex Galaxy spoilers at our lunch table, and that’s saying something.
The conversation continues around the table, but I’m not listening. Instead I stare down at my lunch, a fluffernutter sandwich my mom made, along with some pretzels and an apple. Yes, my mom still makes my lunch sometimes. And yes, I love it. Even the note she always writes me on my napkin. Today it’s a Dr. Seuss quote: Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind! Oof, easier said than done, Mom.
“I missed you over break,” Natalie says, leaning in so the conversation is just between the two of us.
“I could tell,” I reply. I must still be lost in my own thoughts, because the response flies out before I can stop it. At the last minute I try to mask the tone with a mischievous smirk, but it doesn’t fly with Natalie. She knows me too well.
“What does that mean?” she asks.
I shrug. “I didn’t know you guys were doing a s’mores night over at Tamsin’s.” And as
I say it, I realize how hurt I am. Even though I had a moment with Tristan and I definitely became friends with everyone else. Even though I actually don’t wish I’d missed the drive-in or geek night to make s’mores and pose for filtered pictures. Even then, it still hurts to know that my friends had no problem ignoring me, or worse, simply forgetting me.
“I texted you,” Natalie says.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did!” Natalie reaches in her bag and pulls out her phone, glancing around the cafeteria to make sure Mr. Messer, the asshole football coach who also serves as cafeteria monitor, isn’t looking. His favorite pastime is confiscating student phones during the school day, and I swear he spends his free time in his office, scrolling through your photos. When she sees him across the cafeteria busy harassing a girl over the dress code, she taps at the screen and navigates to her texts. And then she gasps. “Shit. Oh shit, I’m so sorry, Beck. I thought I sent it, but it never went through.”
She flips her phone toward me under the table where I see a text typed out inviting me to Tamsin’s on Thursday night. But there’s the little red exclamation point in a circle next to it, indicating an error. It never actually left her phone. It should comfort me. And it does, a little. But not enough. She still never looked back at her phone after the initial text. She never wondered why I didn’t show up. And she never sent another text to me the entire weekend. I slipped her mind like an errant calculus assignment.
“It goes both ways, you know,” Natalie says.
“What does that mean?”
She stares at me. Hard. “You didn’t text me, either,” she says.
I don’t know what to say to that. Because I didn’t. Mostly because she’s usually the social director of our friendship, and Tamsin is the social director of our friend group, so I’m always the one being invited along. That was just how it worked.
I don’t realize I’m just sitting there silently, staring at my lap, until the electronic tone buzzes to let us know lunch is over. Natalie doesn’t look mad. She seems to have sort of moved past it and is laughing a little too hard at a dumb joke Colin just made. Are we fighting? It seemed like maybe it was just a warning, but what if it’s not? What does it mean if we’re fighting? It would be so easy for us to drift apart. Natalie already has Tamsin and Cora. I could drift away from the lunch table easily. Would I end up with Julianne? Or would I follow Tristan out the back door to wherever he goes? Or would I have to find myself a solo seat and my own big book?
* * *
Things were weird with Natalie for the rest of the day. For the rest of the week, honestly. We didn’t talk about the s’mores night again, or our notable lack of texting. To anyone else, it would look like everything remained the same. We still sat next to each other at the same table every day at lunch, but I’d stopped thinking of it as “our” table. I still got a ride home with her every day after school, but we mostly just talked about school, like the metric ton of college mail that had started arriving in our mailboxes. No crushes, no shared secrets. We didn’t talk about Mac, and it seemed like all things Tamsin had also become off-limits. And I stopped asking her about her crush on Colin. The longer it went on, the higher the wall became. I checked for the three little dots that would tell me she was at least composing a text. I checked a lot. But it was always blank. The further I got from telling her about my night at the drive-in with Tristan, the harder it became to bring it up. The more time that passed, I became less consumed with the kiss and more consumed with what it meant that I hadn’t told her yet. And that conversation scared me more than whatever was going on between Tristan and me.
Which, still, seemed to be nothing.
Tristan wasn’t at work on Tuesday. Instead, Hunter, a stoner kid getting a business degree at the college, took his shift. I wasn’t sure if Tristan was actually sick, or just avoiding me, and I didn’t ask. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did anyway. Tristan isn’t the kind of guy to tell anyone. I was starting to know him enough to be sure of that.
By Thursday, I’m feeling fully adrift. My connection to Natalie feels like it’s fraying by the day, and Tristan seems to want nothing to do with me, despite what happened last week. I have no idea who I am or where I belong. Even Hot ’N Crusty feels a little strange.
“Oh my god, you’re the bathroom baby!”
The screechy voice yanks me out of my fog, where I’ve been taking orders behind the register on autopilot. There’s a woman standing in front of me, middle-aged and rail-thin with curly hair that may have once been that color red on its own, but is now definitely chemically enhanced. She’s wearing heavy eye makeup and dark lipstick, and her mouth is a mile wide.
I hate her immediately.
“You’re the bathroom baby, right? From right over there?” She points over my shoulder toward the short hallway that leads to the bathrooms, and I see that her nails are long and sharp, painted blood red. She’s blinking at me with that enormous smile, waiting for my confirmation.
“Yes, ma’am,” I mutter, trying to maintain good customer service even though I wish the sticky floor of Hot ’N Crusty would open up and swallow this woman whole.
“I knew it! It’s so amazing that you work here now!” She grins even wider, and I open my mouth to ask her what she wants to eat, when she charges on. “Your poor mama. I swear, I had my babies in the nicest hospital in the state with an epidural and a doula and I still hated every second of it. Do you know how disgusting childbirth is? You hear about those women who have home births, and I think after something like that happening in my living room I’d have to burn the whole dang house down. Just torch it up! It’s like a crime scene, am I right?”
I take a long, slow, deep breath in through my nose and out of my mouth, but it does nothing to ease my tension. I can’t believe it’s not radiating off me like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
“I wouldn’t know, not having a whole lot of memories of my birth,” I say with more acidity than I mean. Or maybe I do mean it. Regardless, it bounces right off her.
“Can I get a picture?” she asks, pulling her phone out of her enormous designer handbag.
“Excuse me?”
“Just a quick selfie! I can post it on Facebook and show everyone what a good girl you turned out to be. My friend went into labor real fast, and she ended up having her baby at the county hospital where she didn’t even get a private room, and she’s always worried that something happened to her sweet little Payton after a start like that,” she says with her nose wrinkled up, like her friend was forced to give birth at the town dump. “Seeing how you turned out okay after being born in a bathroom will give her some peace of mind.”
I can feel the creeping tingle of rage starting to make its way through my body, like a fuse that’s been lit and is winding its way toward a major explosion. My mom raised me to be polite, but this, as she herself would say, is a bridge too far. If I don’t get away from this woman, and soon, things are going to get messy. And woe unto her if she manages to snap that selfie.
“Julianne!” I shout back into the kitchen, where I know she’s finishing up her break. My voice is shrill and screechy, and it bounces off all the stainless steel. The swinging door comes flying open, and Julianne practically trips over herself getting to the register.
“What’s going on?” she asks, glancing from me to the woman wielding her iPhone, and back again. I don’t say anything in return, just whip off my Hot ’N Crusty ball cap and clench it in my fist as I stomp back toward the kitchen, trying to put as much real estate between me and her as I possibly can. I stalk through the kitchen, past the prep table and the ovens and the industrial dishwasher, past Del’s office and toward the metal door that leads to the dumpsters. I throw my shoulder into it hard, and as it flies open I hear a grunt and a shuffle.
“Watch it!” comes the muffled voice of the person I’ve nearly pancaked between the door and the brick wall of the restaurant.
Tristan.
Of course.
“What happened to you?” I ask, nodding toward his hand.
“What happened to you?” he asks, gesturing to my entire being.
“Awful customer trying to get a selfie with the bathroom baby to show that despite my filthy birth, I turned out okay. Though I’m not sure she still thinks so after the way I bolted.”
“That’s quite a synopsis.”
I drop down onto the curb and try not to breathe in the smell of rancid garlic that’s wafting out of the dumpster. I drop my head into my hands and take a deep breath, trying to steady my heart rate and bring myself down from wanting to absolutely deck that woman.
“Why do you even care about the bathroom baby thing, anyway?”
“I don’t know, because it’s embarrassing?”
“More embarrassing than wearing this T-shirt?” he says, pulling his jacket open to reveal the catchphrase.
I let out a bitter chuckle. “You forget I’m the reason for the T-shirt.”
“Ah yes, I’ll add that to your cosmic tab,” he says. “But really, it’s not like Del singles you out or anything. And I’m pretty sure that crazy lady is the first person to give you shit about it since you started. Well, and that reporter. And let’s not forget the trauma of the free popcorn. So what’s the big deal?”
It's Kind of a Cheesy Love Story Page 13