He shrugged as he took a bite of his hot dog.
“Did you tell her about the buffalo thing?” she asked while grabbing his arm.
“I don’t think so.”
“It was sooo funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We were all at this fundraiser, and Jayson and Brendon had just been to South Dakota with their dad, and Brendon couldn’t shut up about the buffalo burgers they had there. So he’s going on and on about it, having no clue the guy he’s talking to is like the number one guy for beef in the nation. So Brendon basically was talking up this guy’s competition. How embarrassing! Major faux pas,” she said with another wink at him. She was giving him flirtier looks than I did, and I was supposed to be his girlfriend. Yet Jayson didn’t seem to be around whenever she did it.
Brendon and Jayson got called over to meet someone, and the second they were gone, it was like I was invisible to Brooke. She walked away, leaving me standing alone, and I felt stupid, so I went back over to sit with his grandparents. I tried not to enjoy it when Brooke fell while trying to play volleyball in flip-flops, but I couldn’t help laughing when Brendon’s grandma made a comment about not realizing they “made shorts quite as short as Brooke’s.”
Brooke tripped again, and I wondered if it was on purpose as she managed to fall right in front of Brendon. Unfortunately he caught her, and I thought she overdid it grabbing onto him.
“You saved me,” she said to him. “Always the boy scout, always the hero, huh?”
Rolling my eyes, I glanced over to where Jayson had been standing, but once again he was gone.
“I’m going to get something to drink,” I said to Mrs. Agretti. “Would either of you like anything while I’m up?”
“Oh no, but thank you.”
I ran into Jayson in the house when I went to get some water.
“Hey, there’s only one piece of chocolate cake left,” he said. “You wanna split it with me?”
I thought he’d cut it in half, but instead he handed me a fork so we could eat off the same plate. Obviously no one in the Agretti family cared about germs. Their immune systems must have been made of steel. We were almost done eating when Brooke came in to see where he was.
“Oh, hey Emma,” she said as she wrapped herself around his arm. “Love your contacts. They almost look real.”
Jayson’s mouth dropped open, but I just said, “You’re outfit is so cute, Brooke. I love it.” Then I walked away. I love throwing people off when they insult me. I wish I had the nerve to tell her off, but I wasn’t on my own turf, and I didn’t want to look stupid. Margaux would have put her in her place though. In fact, Margaux once told off a girl who had been acting way too friendly with her boyfriend. I remember her going up to the girl, saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, did you just go blind? Because this is my boyfriend you’ve been flirting with, and you obviously lost your eyesight and confused my boyfriend with yours. Or else you’re just completely pathetic. So did you go blind or are you just pathetic? Which is it?”
“Em, I wondered where you went,” Brendon said, coming in. He put his arm around me. “Hey, everything okay?”
I nodded. No point in sharing my humiliation. I wondered if Jayson would tell him later that Brooke had insulted me.
Brendon didn’t mention Brooke being passive-aggressive when he called me the next day. Part of me wanted to say something about how Brooke had been flirting with him, but I didn’t want to give him any ideas and make him start looking in her direction. Sure, he hadn’t encouraged her, but he hadn’t sprayed mace in her face either.
“I have to run out to the pharmacy and get a prescription for my granddad. Want to come along? I haven’t seen you in sixteen hours, and I’m starting to go through withdrawal,” he said, laughing.
“Sure.” I didn’t look my best, but I would have gone to Antarctica if it meant getting out of the house.
Once we were out, neither one of us wanted to go home. Brendon hated seeing his grandfather get worse, especially when he’d start drooling without even realizing it, and I couldn’t stand freaking out every time the phone rang, thinking this was another call saying Grandma had fallen out of bed again. Her falls were getting more frequent, and I couldn’t understand why or how she kept falling out of her bed. They had gates on the side and a pad on the floor, and yet somehow she’d slip out and wind up on the floor. Then my mom would have to go down to the hospital while they did yet another scan to see if Grandma had broken anything.
Since my mom was consumed with Grandma, I was staying with Grandpa as much as I could. She felt she couldn’t take him to the nursing home or leave him alone, so she’d leave in the evenings to see Grandma. However, it was getting harder for me to deal with Grandpa asking where she was all the time. It was one thing to know Grandma was now living in a nursing home full-time. It was another to be reminded Grandpa didn’t know where he was half the time. Plus, it physically hurt having to show him where the bathroom was—every day. My gut felt like it was twisting when he’d ask, “Now where’s the restroom?” like he had never been in my house before, when my parents had lived in the same house for over seventeen years. And hearing, “Where do I sleep?” every single night wasn’t much better. At least he knew we were his family. And he called my parents by their names most of the time. Sometimes he’d call my dad by my uncle’s name, but even that was better than nothing. Although he did call my Aunt Caroline, “Rudy,” a couple of times, which was weird since it was his brother’s name, and Uncle Rudy had died when I was nine. All I remembered about him was he was a bald guy who always gave me candy and he smelled like peppermint and foot spray. Sometimes when I smelled foot spray, it was actually sort of comforting because I always took it as a sign Uncle Rudy was watching me…in a protective way, not in a creepy from-beyond-the-grave way.
“So what do you want to do now?” Brendon asked.
“Don’t you have to get the medicine back soon?”
He shook his head and said it was just a refill. “Do you want to hang out at your house?” he asked.
Yeah, great idea. It would be real fun when Grandpa thought Brendon was his dead cousin and then asked him where his wife was when even Brendon knew.
“I don’t feel like going to my house.”
“Wanna just drive around?”
Brendon wasn’t the kind of guy who opened up and told you everything he was feeling, but sometimes he’d talk about how hard it was seeing his grandfather get worse. Today he didn’t want to talk, and neither did I. I think we both just needed to be with somebody.
Kylie called me later to find out how things went at the Agretti party.
“Okay, but his brother’s girlfriend was way too flirty with Brendon. She did this thing where she literally fell at his feet, and he had to save her—so pathetic,” I said.
“That Brooke chick?”
“Yup.”
“Did he encourage her?” Kylie asked.
“No, but he didn’t walk away either. She made me feel like such an outsider, and I was already irritated she crashed my birthday lunch.”
“You know, you need to say something to Brendon about this.”
“I can’t because I’ll sound like some jealous, paranoid girlfriend—everything John accused me of being.”
“And you weren’t paranoid or jealous then either. You were right on target.”
“Yeah, but back then I had a gut feeling something was up,” I said.
“Do you have one now?”
“Like he’s cheating on me? No, it’s more I feel like I’m being excluded, and she’s pawing my boyfriend.”
“You need to talk to him because I know you, and if you don’t, it’s going to come out in other ways. There’s no way you can hold all those feelings in.”
“Maybe, whatever. So how was your weekend?”
“Emme, seriously. Think about it. If you don’t, you’re going to be getting an attitude with him on the little things. He’s not a mind reader, and I doubt he’d think you were being jealous
. Just share what you feel.”
Chapter 10
When I got to class the next day, my usual seat next to Darren was taken.
“Way to save me a seat,” I said, poking his book as I sat behind him.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he asked without taking his eyes off the page.
“Physics,” I said. “So how was your weekend?”
“Worked. What’d you do?”
I dug in my bag to find a pen as I told him Brendon’s family had a party on Labor Day.
“I wouldn’t have thought you two would have anything in common,” he said, still not looking up.
I asked him why, and he said Brendon seemed “pretty ambitious and driven.”
“And I’m a slug on a log?”
“No, he just seems different than you. Like he’s from a different world.”
Mr. Horowitz came in then and began telling us about his weekend hiking near his cottage in Traverse City, while I thought about what Darren had said. Brendon was driven, but it was one of the things I liked about him. Sure, he set goals and was ambitious, but Darren had made it sound like a bad thing. Maybe it was my imagination, but I felt he meant I wasn’t in Brendon’s league. I was starting to get weird vibes about Darren, but I figured I was just being paranoid about my relationship.
Mr. Horowitz asked us all to write about something we had done over the weekend. My home life was a lot more chaotic than my friends’ right now, so assignments that reminded me of this were not welcome. I went into my own little world as I wrote my essay, and I didn’t look up until I felt somebody touch my arm at the end of class.
Writing about my weekend and feeling like I didn’t fit in with Brooke put me in a funk. The more I thought about Darren’s comment, or overthought about it, the more my self-esteem slipped into the gutter. I was not in a positive mindset by the time my guidance counselor, Mr. Murray, called me down to his office. Every September the counseling department makes all the sophomores and juniors meet with them for an “informal chat.” Yeah, whatever. It was to make sure we could read and had some sort of plan for the future which didn’t include being a “baby’s mama” for some football player. Mr. Murray had the results from a test I had filled out last year. I remembered taking the test in homeroom on the last day of school, and my teacher saying it was “not a big deal, just a fun quiz to find out your interests.” Yeah, now my “fun quiz” was being held up as my life plan for the future. Meanwhile, he had a poster above his desk that said, “Not Every Day is a Good Day.” You’re telling me, buddy.
Mr. Murray read off my results, which basically said I was a loser with no ambition. I had ambition. I wanted to be a writer, own a little boutique, and have my own organic skin care line. So then Mr. I’m-going-to-look-down-on-you-because-I-need-to-feel-like-a-big-man asked me patronizingly if I had a game plan for my store and organic skin care goals.
“If you want to start a beauty cream line,” he said, coughing, “then you’ll need to take a chemistry class. And if you’re serious about owning a store, then you need to take some business classes.”
Yeah, I barely got through the math for dummies class I took last year, so I was sure business classes weren’t going to be a breeze for me. And chemistry? Was he joking? I only got through the intro to physical science class last year because Tyrell Johnston was my lab partner, and he did all the work since I told him I was afraid I’d blow myself up.
“Well, my main goal is to be a writer, and I’m taking creative writing—”
“That’s nice, but those types of jobs are uncertain. You need to have a game plan to fall back on. After all, you don’t want to end up bagging groceries,” he said, touching his nasty goatee. “Besides, they have those U-Scan things now, so bagger jobs are down.”
I walked out with my self-esteem now out of the gutter and into the toilet. And not even one of those nice TV remodeling show toilets, but the gross ones at the beach with no doors on the stalls, a ring of rusty water in the bowl, and the remains from the person who didn’t flush. I should have known the day was going to suck when I saw it was a Taurus moon day, which was my irritating time. I thought the day couldn’t get worse, but then Katia Muniz, the school big mouth, came over and started asking me about Brendon.
“I heard you guys are super serious. Is it true?” she asked.
No, I made it up because I have no life. “I don’t know. We’re just dating. Why are you asking?” I said.
“Um, no reason,” she said, smirking. Now there could have been a ton of reasons why she was smiling all weird: maybe she thought of a funny joke, or she had food poisoning and she wasn’t smirking, but having stomach cramps that gave her a weird expression; or perhaps she was just a jerk who was trying to let me know I was way out of my league. Margaux came over and stared Katia down until she walked away.
“What did Katia want?” she asked.
I said she was asking about Brendon and me, and Margaux rolled her eyes. “I hate how she’s always trying to start drama,” she said.
And Margaux would know all about drama. We became friends when I changed schools in sixth grade. Margaux was the first person who talked to me. My biggest fear about starting a new school was not having anybody to sit with at lunch. However, on the first day she asked if I wanted to eat lunch at her table with her boyfriend, Todd, and all their friends. Her friends didn’t exactly welcome me, but Margaux always made sure to include me, even if Todd complained about me hanging around. He was her first boyfriend, and she told me they had been going out for six months, which actually was still the longest relationship she has ever had. I became part of their group until a few weeks later when Katia told Margaux this guy named Jeff, who she had a huge crush on, liked her. Margaux wrote Todd a note saying they should just be friends, and Todd was hurt, but he seemed to be okay with it—until Katia told him Margaux “dumped his butt for Jeff.” The next day I got to Margaux’s table before her, and suddenly everybody was being super nice to me. And then Margaux walked over with her tray, and Todd told her no one wanted her there. I remember her eyes watering as she stood there, not knowing what to do. When she went to another table, I got up and followed her. She never said anything, but ever since that day, she has always had my back.
“Just forget about her,” she said, snapping me back to reality. “Are you going to Brendon’s locker before class?”
I nodded, and she said she’d call me later. When I got to his locker, I heard Lauren telling him to check his e-mail because she wrote him back. Back. There could be a zillion reasons why he was e-mailing her, like they were on one of his stupid committees together or it could have been a homework question. But I didn’t need my intuition to tell me nothing good could come from his ex and him e-mailing each other. I didn’t e-mail my ex. Of course, partly because John had dated, like, fifty girls after me—and continued to talk to his ex while he was with me—and now he ignored me in the hallway like a complete jerk, but still. I tried to put it out of my mind and tell myself it was perfectly innocent, but all I could think about was how John had told me how “it was no big deal” when he was getting e-mails from his ex, and it had actually been a huge deal. And Margaux always told me exes who can’t let go always get back together. As much as I tried to tell myself I was just paranoid and it was fine, Lauren’s perfect little heart-shaped face kept popping into my head all day.
To add to my lovely day, Mr. Horowitz made us read our essays out loud in class. I felt a hot drip of sweat slide under my arm, and I tried not to make eye contact with him and clutched my bloodstone until it was all sweaty. As I hoped that he’d forget about me, he called on me right after some guy named Tom read his piece about the meaninglessness of life. Mr. Horowitz asked the class for comments when I finished reading. Silence. I hated how no one ever spoke up when I read something. It made me feel so unpopular. Everybody jumped right in when one of the popular juniors read something. If Rory read something, then half the class couldn’t wait to tell her how amazing it
was, but even when I thought I had written something good, no one cared. Finally, Mr. Horowitz had to call on someone to talk about my essay.
“Tom? Do you have anything to say?”
Tom’s head snapped back like he had been in a trance. Rory whispered something to him, and he said he liked the part about me trying to get out of playing volleyball. Then Darren spoke up and said he liked how I wrote about sitting with Brendon’s grandparents when they were left out because of their health. I hadn’t intended to say it, but he had picked up on it. He went next, reading his piece on how he visited his grandmother in a nursing home. His piece described the weird, hospital smell in those places, and it made me feel like I was back in Grandma’s room.
Later, I saw Darren sitting by himself in the lounge, so I decided to sit with him instead of waiting in the computer lab for Brendon.
“Working on our next assignment?” I asked.
“No, this is a short story I’ve been messing with for a while. Do you want to read it?” he asked.
I still wasn’t used to how open everyone in our creative writing class was about their writing. Maybe they had all been taking classes where they had to read out loud so they were used to it. Or maybe they were more confident than I was because they were all better writers. His story was about a girl he had met on a camping trip. The part of the story he had written was basically a description of her. I asked if it was a true story.
“Sort of. I met her last summer, and she dumped me on the Fourth of July. Right during the fireworks.”
“So sad,” I said. I couldn’t imagine anyone dumping him.
“Tell me about it. I can’t stand fireworks now,” he said. “Let me see what you’re working on.”
I handed him my essay on getting over my fear of horses. He read it and said he was impressed I was able to get on the horse after being so scared.
“Actually, I kinda added some stuff to make it sound better. I was actually riding one of those ponies that walk in a circle at a carnival. You know, the ones who are, like, sedated or something and couldn’t hurt a fly?”
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