Tease

by Amanda Maciel

  Dylan pulls away from kissing my neck and looks at me like I have three heads. His lips are red and a little puffy and his eyes are heavy, like he just woke up—or, I guess, like he’s been wrestling me in the back of his SUV for twenty minutes, because he has. He’s gotten my shirt off and the button of my jeans undone, and I feel ridiculous, sitting there in my bra. But at least we’ve slowed down for a second.

  “What’re you talking about?” he says. Not meanly. Just confused. Which makes sense. I mean, what am I talking about? Why did I think this would be a good time to get all insecure and bring up the Emma thing?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I sort of pet his forearms in what I hope is a cute, sexy way, and smile. “I just, you know, I didn’t know you and Emma were . . . friends.”

  “We’re not,” he says simply, and I guess that’s all he has to say on the subject, because he lunges at me again, pinning me back onto the seat. For a second I feel warm and fluttery, and then the pulling-at-my-pants action starts again, and I kind of tense up and go limp all at the same time.

  Dylan’s mouth leaves mine suddenly, because he’s looking down, trying to figure out why my favorite pair of jeans, which are bright pink and practically glow-in-the-dark on this cloudy winter afternoon, aren’t going where he wants them to go. This makes it possible for me to take another deep breath and say, “God, she’s just the worst. I’m so sorry she’s, like, bothering you.”

  That’s the right thing to say, right? A pathetic girl who gets insecure about every little thing and drives her boyfriend nuts would never say that, would she? I’m not the jealous type. I’m not. But Emma Putnam is . . . stunning. There, I said it, whatever. The bitch is freaking gorgeous. She has all this long red hair with the perfect amount of curl; her skin never seems to break out into anything but a pinkish blush when someone is nice to her (which is always a boy, and therefore never a girl); her boobs are big but not too big. She’s always laughing or smiling or flirting with someone. It’s not really a surprise that I can’t stop thinking about that damn text I found on Dylan’s phone. Even if she weren’t also a total skank, I’d still be worried.

  He’d handed his phone to me so I could write to his friend Kyle that we were on our way to his house last Friday. Dylan is super careful about not texting and driving, partly because he knows it’s not safe, but also (probably mostly) because you get suspended from sports if you get caught doing it. And you don’t even have to be actually arrested, just get caught by a coach or something.

  So anyway, I’d turned on the phone and the last message had popped up and I blurted out before I could think better of it, “You got a text from Emma? Emma Putnam?”

  “I guess,” he said, and then he went, “Oh, dude, call Kyle and put him on speaker, I need to ask him something about practice.” And we’d never gotten around to talking about it for real.

  At the top of the screen it just said EMMA. The text was LOL! with one of those dumb laughing emoji faces.

  Which meant there was a text before it. But I didn’t have time to see the earlier one, and it’s not like I could go snooping through Dylan’s phone, right there in the car, to look at the rest of the conversation.

  And now I’ve opened my stupid mouth about it again. Twice.

  He stops looking at my waistband for a second to smile up at me. “Ooooh,” he mocks. “Somebody’s jealous!”

  “No, I’m not!” I squeal.

  “I think it’s cute,” he says, and just like that, we’re back to kissing.

  He thinks it’s cute! I’m going to stop worrying now. Besides, my problem is with Emma, not Dylan. Like Brielle said yesterday, it’s Emma’s fault she’s a slut, not my boyfriend’s.

  But still, Dylan stops trying to get my jeans off after that, and I’m a little worried. Maybe Brielle is right about the party, too. . . . Maybe I need to make sure Dylan isn’t thinking about anyone but me.

  “Emma Putnam called you a tease.”

  “What?”

  Over the phone Brielle almost sounds like she’s gloating, like she’s just won something. I wish she would’ve just texted this to me like a normal person. Then I could hyperventilate in private.

  “Jacob told me. Apparently she was flirting with him again, isn’t that pathetic? He was totally laughing about it.” Brielle snorts.

  “And?” I press her.

  “Oh. So, yeah, Jacob asked her about texting Dylan, because I’d been asking Jacob about it—”

  “You what?!”

  “Yeah, you knew that! Whatever, we sit next to each other in español, it’s muy boring. So anyway, Jacob was like, ‘I heard you’re all creeping up on Dylan Howe,’ and Emma, like, giggled and goes, ‘He has a girlfriend,’ and Jacob’s like, ‘Yeah, maybe you should back off,’ and Emma goes—I’m not even kidding—‘Maybe he should go out with someone who isn’t a total tease.’”

  I just sit there with my mouth hanging open for what feels like an hour.

  Jacob had a girlfriend too, before Emma came along. He’s also a huge player, but that didn’t make it any less crappy for Noelle Reese when he cheated on her and then broke up with her. He didn’t even end up going out with Emma for real; it was just a couple of weeks of hooking up. And then, like, one more week. It’s weird, but Emma’s like that—guys want to hook up with her, but no one really wants to be the official boyfriend of the slutty girl.

  I can’t believe she’s even talking about me. My whole head feels like it’s on fire, I’m so mad.

  “I. Am. Going. To. Kill her.” My voice is very quiet. It even sounds scary to me.

  “Lady, I am going to help you.”

  We spend another hour on the phone and on Facebook at the same time. Brielle makes up a profile for “Fat Beyotch” and steals one of Emma’s photos for it. She gives me the password so we can both go on to Emma’s page and tag all the pictures of her with the fake name. Then I start friending everyone we hang out with. Brielle and I are laughing so hard at the image of Jacob, Tyler, and Kyle getting Emma’s picture with her new name attached.

  “Send it to Dylan!” Brielle cries. “No, hang on, I’ve got it—”

  “No!” I shout, but she’s still howling and I don’t think she heard me. “Brie, don’t!”

  “Why? He’ll think it’s hilarious. Oh my God, why haven’t we done this before?”

  But suddenly it’s not that funny anymore. Dylan is Facebook friends with basically everyone at school, but I haven’t checked to see if Emma is on there too. Up until a couple of days ago it didn’t even occur to me to check. And now . . . I don’t even want him to be friends with a fake Emma. I don’t want him thinking about her at all.

  “We’re gonna get in trouble for this,” I say quietly, my stomach suddenly tight.

  “God, no, we’re not,” Brielle says. “The administrator might shut it down or whatever, but no one’s gonna know it was us—and who cares? If they do, we’ll just tell them to take a stupid joke. And she started it, anyway.”

  Right. She did. I think about earlier that day, messing around in Dylan’s SUV, and cringe. Am I a tease? Is that worse than being a slut? Does Dylan think it’s worse?

  “She totally deserves this,” Brielle goes on, “and honestly I’m surprised no one’s done it before. Or, you know, something like it. She needs to keep her dirty paws off everybody’s boyfriends already.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but I push away from my computer and flop back on my bed. Revenge is exhausting.

  “Huh, I wonder if we should start a fan page, too, like a Boycott Emma Putnam thing . . .” Brielle seems to be talking to herself about this, so I just grunt noncommittally. A group page doesn’t seem like as much fun—not that this seems like that much fun anymore either. A minute ago I was really into it, but now I just feel kind of nauseous.

  “But seriously,” Brielle is saying, “what’s going on with you and the D-Bag?”

  “Don’t call him that!” I wail, but it’s never any use—Brielle thinks her nickname for Dylan is e
xtra hilarious. She’s laughing about it right now, in fact.

  Finally she gets over herself and goes, “Okay, okay, Dyyyllllan. You gonna rock his world tomorrow, or what?”

  I haven’t told her about that afternoon in the back of Dylan’s car, but now I think about that feeling I had. The feeling that it’s basically now or never, that I can only keep pushing his hands away for so long. And maybe I’m ready too—I mean, if I don’t do it with Dylan, who am I waiting for? He’s going to graduate and go to the university an hour away and meet college girls and I’ll just . . . I don’t know. Be a virgin forever?

  “I mean, you don’t want Emma to be right,” Brielle adds.

  I’m used to Brielle being harsh, but this is kind of a lot, even for her. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.

  “Come on,” she says when I’ve paused a little too long, “you know what I mean! He is totally hot. And he’s been super patient with you, right? For like two months! That’s like ten million in hot-boy years.”

  “Just because I’m not a slut like Emma doesn’t make me a tease,” I protest, finally.

  “Well, I mean, he’s your boyfriend . . . ,” Brielle says. “So it kinda does.”

  July

  “I DON’T WANT to talk about it.”

  “You don’t want to talk about what?”

  “About any of it. No one cares what I think, anyway.”

  “They don’t?”

  Therapist Teresa looks at me over her reading glasses. She has glossy black hair and this ridiculously smooth light-brown skin, and she wears weird, colorful scarves all the time, even when it’s blazing hot outside like it is today. She’s always very pretty and colorful—but jeez, what a pain in the ass with the questions. I can’t say anything without it coming back at me with a big question mark tacked on the end.

  I sigh loudly to let her know I’m on to her trick. “It’s just—whatever I tell them, whatever I say, it’s all, just, like, what’s the point, you know?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Yeah, what’s the point, when everyone’s decided what happened already?”

  “Everyone has decided what happened?”

  I throw my arms up in frustration. “Me and my friends! Everyone thinks we’re assholes—sorry—and that Emma was all innocent and sweet and shit—sorry—and even if I say everything right and it all magically goes away, I still can’t pump gas into my f—my freaking car without getting harassed or—whatever.”

  Teresa doesn’t yell at me for cursing or anything, but I don’t usually do it in front of grown-ups. It feels weird that she just sits there, nodding, not reacting really at all. And then, of course:

  “What would be the right ‘everything’ for you to say?”

  I sigh again and put my hands over my face, hiding my eyes. I didn’t want to go to a stupid therapist, obviously. And when these sessions started, a few weeks after we had to get a lawyer and the lawyer said we had to get a therapist, I didn’t talk at all. Sometimes Teresa actually gets me to start blabbing on and on about the lawyers and my mom and all the crap that is my life now. I mean, there have been a couple of times that I actually talked to her about stuff. But I still hate it. I hate that I have so much stuff to talk about. And zero people in my life who will listen to me talk. Besides this court-ordered therapist.

  Or, whatever, lawyer-recommended. Big difference.

  Too late, I realize I’m probably smudging the hell out of my mascara, whatever might be left after all the sweating I did on the way here. I lower my hands and carefully run my fingers under my eyes, like you would if you were brushing away tears. Except as usual, my cheeks are perfectly dry.

  “I guess, you know, all the stuff they want me to say—that I’m sorry, that we should’ve been nicer to her.”

  “And you can’t say that?”

  “That it’s my fault she killed herself? No.” We’ve kind of talked about this before, but Teresa always acts like whatever I’ve just said is a brand-new thought.

  “But you did call her names,” Teresa says. For once, not a question.

  “Yeah, a couple. But everyone did that. She called me names too!”

  “She called you names?”

  I shake my head. This is exactly what I didn’t feel like talking about.

  “Okay,” she says, settling back in her seat. “I hear you saying that everyone at school was pretty tough on Emma.”

  I nod. Then I add, “On everyone. I mean, it’s high school. You say stuff, people say stuff.”

  “It’s normal, calling each other bitch or slut.”

  With a shrug I say, “If someone’s acting like one.”

  It’s Teresa’s turn to nod. “But you and your friends—people think you took it too far.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say. I stare at my hands, then tuck them under my thighs. It’s cold in here. All summer it’s been getting colder, the AC cranked up higher all the time. I should bring a sweater. Or at least stop wearing shorts everywhere. I wish I had a tan. I wish I wasn’t sitting here. I wish—

  “Why do you think that is?”

  I look up at Teresa again and just stare at her. “Why do you keep asking me dumb questions?” I snap. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  A little furrow puckers between her eyebrows and she looks stung, but just for a moment. I wonder, not for the first time, how old Teresa is. Not old enough to be a good therapist. Not young enough to remember being in high school.

  She shakes her head just slightly and says, “I’m trying to lead you through all of these questions, these things other people see that you don’t seem to see. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” I say flatly. It doesn’t.

  “I think if you could understand where everyone is coming from—Emma’s parents, the lawyers, the kids at school . . .” She holds her hands out, gesturing wide as if she’s talking about the entire universe. “You’re not alone, you know. But you’re very closed off. You’re in your own world, and no one can understand what that’s like unless you let them in.” She pulls her hands back together, forming a little space between her palms. My little world.

  I shake my head. Then I shake it again. Then I stand up, grabbing my bag from the couch.

  “I have to come here, fine. I talk to you, I talk to Natalie. But it’s not my fault that you don’t understand. It’s not my fault that the reporters are a bunch of jerks, that Emma’s parents were obviously totally crappy. I just want my life back. Maybe it was stupid, but it was mine.” I point to her hands, still cupped together, and add, “And it was bigger than that.”

  We stare at each other silently for a minute. Teresa looks at me steadily, and I bet she thinks this is good, that she’s proving some point right now. I want to tell her she’s wrong, but I’m tired of talking, of fighting, of defending myself.

  So I shake my head one last time, and then I walk right past her chair and out the door.

  Alex has been at baseball camp this whole week, and Tommy’s at a regular one, so the house is cold and empty when I get home from Therapist Teresa. My car hadn’t gotten any cooler during my hour of interrogation, so I’m all sweaty again, and the cool air in the house is a relief. So is the shower; as soon as I’m upstairs I just strip, dump my clothes where I’m walking in the hall, and get right into the water.

  It’s so embarrassing to be seeing a therapist. A lot of people at school do it, but not very many of them admit it—and only, like, one or two don’t seem totally pathetic when they do. When everyone found out that Emma saw one, which was pretty much the same week she started at Elmwood, she was basically crucified. It hadn’t taken anyone long to discover that her parents hadn’t just moved across town for a bigger house—the internet is nothing if not useful for dirty details on transfer students. Emma had been a slut from way back. Or, as they’ve been saying on TV, troubled. She knew how to make trouble, that’s for damn sure.

  With a sigh, I wrap a towel around my head and walk back to my ro
om naked, reluctantly picking up the clothes I’d tossed. It’s a nice break, not to be worrying about the boys. But it’s lonely, too. Mom enrolled them in basically every summer activity known to man, just to keep them away from the house and the evening news. At least we don’t get so many reporters these days. Nothing much is going on that’s newsworthy right now, I guess. Even if we go to trial, it won’t be until this fall or even winter. Natalie says that’s really fast, but right now it feels like forever. And the fall was supposed to be about other things; it was supposed to be a time I could look forward to. When Brielle and I were supposed to be enjoying our senior year. When Dylan was supposed to be starting at the university. Last I heard, they hadn’t decided whether to take away his scholarship, but it’s pretty likely they will, especially if all the lawsuits go to trial. All the guys are probably going to defer, Dylan included.

  But I’m not supposed to talk to him anymore either. I mean, things had gotten so weird even before Emma . . . left. And then the lawyers got called and our parents went crazy and everything fell apart completely. Now, things are . . . still weird. Weirder.

  I dump my clothes on my bedroom floor and crawl under the covers on my still-unmade bed. It’s a beautiful summer day, the kind I used to spend at Brielle’s pool or forcing my brothers to go to the park.

  But the only thing I’m good at anymore is sleeping. So I close my eyes.

  “Sara!” Thump thump thump.

  Perfect. What awesome, perfectly perfect timing.

  “Sara, your car is blocking my—oh. Are you sleeping?”

  “No,” I say, my voice muffled by my pillow. And by a couple thousand layers of sarcasm.

  My mom heaves this really big sigh and goes, “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

  I inch back the covers and look at her. Work clothes—the kind of Ann Taylor boringness that you wouldn’t be able to describe to the cops if someone went missing. Reasonably good hair—on the short side, but still a pretty chestnut brown, and not as short as most moms’ (but not too long, like Brielle’s mom’s, who is gorgeous but also trying too hard). Angry face—always, always the angry face.