Zoe glided up to my locker with a glowing, satisfied look. “Alyssa, guess who’s having a party on Friday?”
Only one thing makes Zoe glow these days. “Joel?” I asked.
“No,” she said, still smiling. “Kent Vogt.”
I pulled out my math book and slid it into my backpack. “You’re over Joel already? That was fast—even for you.”
She tilted her head at me, spilling loose blonde curls onto her shoulder. “I am not over Joel. How could I be over Joel when he’s clearly my soul mate?”
“Uh huh.” Zoe’s soul is apparently like all the white socks in my laundry basket. She keeps thinking she’s found her mate, but on closer inspection it’s never the right match.
“The thing is, Joel will be at Kent’s party because they’re friends. Plus, and this is the best part: Andrea won’t be there. She’s grounded for flunking English. Can you believe my luck? I mean, who flunks English? That takes a special kind of stupid.”
Andrea is Joel’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. I know this because Zoe has been giving me Joel updates for the last three weeks. I know who he hangs out with, where he lives, and who his favorite band is. I know what position he plays on the football team, that he doesn’t like olives on his pizza, and he owns a Jack Russell Terrier named—originally enough—Jack. When Zoe falls in love, she does a thorough job of investigating her victims.
My chemistry book joined my math book, and my backpack immediately grew heavier. “So are you going to Kent’s party?” I asked her. Neither Zoe nor I are the partying types. Zoe doesn’t drink and I see no point in sitting around trying to make small talk with the people who usually snub me during the day. Besides, Kent is a senior and the quarterback of the football team, while we've only been upperclassmen for a month
and a half. I don’t think he even knows who we are. And how humiliating would it be if he turned us away? The thought made me shudder with a mortification so deep that I could imagine it still stinging at our ten-year reunion.
Zoe fiddled with her books while she waited for me. Her nails were bright pink with little white polka dots. “The party is going to be really casual, because it’s his birthday. His parents will probably even be around.”
I stared straight into her Windex blue eyes. “Wait, you want to crash somebody’s birthday party?”
“It’s not crashing if you bring a gift. We’ll get him something nice.”
“We’ll?”
She looked at me imploringly. “Well, I can’t go alone.”
Thoughts of being turned away from Kent’s party and the accompanying mortification rushed back into my mind. I could suddenly picture our high school ten-year reunion. Andrea would be there, wearing a tight black cocktail dress and the two-carat diamond ring her attorney husband had given her. She would smile at me over some fruity drink and say, “Do you remember that birthday party you and Zoe tried to crash . . .”
I was deciding whether to knock the fruity drink out of her hand when Zoe brought me back to the current decade.
“Come on, Alyssa. It will be fun.”
I shut my locker door and hefted my backpack onto my shoulders. “I don’t even know Kent. You can’t show up at someone’s birthday party when you don’t know them.”
She followed after me. “Why not? You could get to know him. Who knows, you might even like him.”
But that’s the problem with Zoe. She doesn’t understand the delicate intricacies of being shy. Zoe is the type who can laugh her way out of awkward situations. Things which would mortify me to the point of no return, she shrugs off like it’s all just another adventure. Zoe’s mother says I’m a good influence on her, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think anyone influences Zoe. She's like a jeep that occasionally goes off road and
plows over rocks, shrubbery, and No-Trespassing signs. You either hang on for dear life, or you jump out of her way.
“You’ll have to get someone else to go with you,” I said. After all, I’m Zoe’s best friend, but she has plenty of others. Zoe makes friends as easily as I make excuses.
“I helped you when you had a crush on Quinn,” she said.
“You mean you stalked him to the point of embarrassing me.”
“I got him to talk to you, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, he asked me why you kept hanging out at his locker.”
“And if you had one flirtatious bone in your body you would have smiled back at him and said, ‘Zoe’s just giving me a reason to bump into you.’”
Right. I never think of witty repartee when I need it, and even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to bring myself to say it.
Quinn had asked me about Zoe as I was leaving calculus—a class he and I shared together but never spoke during. He sat toward the front and I sat at the back of the room where I could admire his broad shoulders and the wave in his dark hair. I imagined his warm brown eyes studying integrals intently. I didn’t have to see the curve of his lips or the strong line of his jaw. I had those things memorized. For me, calculus class consisted of numbers, equations, and Quinn’s serious, thoughtful expression. I didn’t have the courage to actually make eye contact, let alone ever speak to him.
When he had walked up beside me and brought up the subject of Zoe’s recent encampment in his part of the hallway, I’d just stuttered and blushed and dropped my math notebook in an effort to give myself something to do other than answer his question. I hadn’t expected all of my old quiz papers to spill across the floor, especially since some of them had the word “Quinn” doodled in the margins. And I really hadn’t expected him to bend down and help me pick them up.
He handed me back one of my one-hundred-percenters—I save my quizzes to help me study for midterms—with a perplexed look on his face. “Why does this say Quinn on it?”
“Oh, is it one of your papers?” I asked, faking ignorance. “I’m not sure how it got mixed in with mine.”
“No, it’s your paper, but you wrote Quinn on the side of it.” He examined it further. “And you put little bubbles surrounding it.”
They were supposed to be daisies but I’ve never claimed to be an artist. I stared at the paper as though I’d never seen it before. “Oh, that—that’s not your name. See, I was working on my French vocabulary and quinn is actually a French word.”
“Really?” He didn't sound like he believed me.
“Yeah, it means to rush away. As in, I’d love to stay and talk with you but I’ve got to quinn to my next class.”
“Really,” he said again.
I didn’t answer. By that point I was quinning down the hallway as fast as I could.
After that disastrous encounter, I always made sure I was the first student out the door when calculus ended. I didn’t want to chance having to speak to Quinn again. I also told Zoe that I didn’t like him anymore. It wasn’t true, but at least that way I knew she wouldn’t plot to get us together.
She might have done it anyway, but shortly thereafter she fell in love with Joel and that’s taken most of her energy ever since.
“Going to Kent’s party would be good for you,” she told me as we walked out of school. “You really should get out and meet new people now that you’ve decided Quinn isn’t for you. . .” she let her statement drift off until it became a question. I didn’t answer. Some things are best left the way they are.
Typeractive Tales: A Collection of Clean Short Fiction Page 15