“Yeah. I guess.”
He shrugs. “That makes you not totally deplorable.”
I stare up at him. “I might be.”
“Look, I have to go. I’m meeting a couple of guys from Central to play in a half hour. Why don’t we meet up at your house in a little? You’re the one on Main Street, right? Is that okay?”
I nod.
He shakes his head, moving along toward his Jeep. “Later?”
I nod again and watch him drive off, the sound of the engine rumbling behind him. I look down at my hands.
They’re still shaking.
28
I text Adrienne that I can’t make it to cheer practice without offering any details. I never used to miss cheer practice before, never would have unless Adrienne told me to. I’d started skipping sometimes after Ryan, and she’d pretended to understand at first.
But I’ve read that psychopaths can only fake empathy for so long.
She texts me back:
This is starting to look really bad to the girls, O. They’re counting on us.
That at least makes me laugh. Then:
Why is everyone in school saying you’re dating Whit DuRant?
I don’t answer.
Mom has left to go to the grocery store by the time Whit comes over. It’s not totally surprising he knows where my house is—Buckley is small enough that everybody knows where everybody lives. But I’m surprised all the same. I thought remembering information like where Olivia Clayton lives would be beneath him.
He’s standing there at the front door, all awkward in his golf shorts and flip-flops, looking the least comfortable I’ve ever seen him. Not that I can really blame him. I let him in and close the door behind him.
“So, this is your house,” Whit says, hands in his pockets, glancing around the family room.
I feel self-conscious. I know he’s always seen me as the girl with all the friends and the popularity and the perfect relationship I didn’t deserve. But now he’s in my crappy house, surrounded by pictures of my dead brother and my unsmiling mom, and I’m this girl, too.
“Don’t tell anybody my house is such a piece of shit.” I figure it doesn’t look so bad from the outside, maybe kind of charming and small, but on the inside, it’s dark and messy. Neither Mom nor I have been particularly invested in housework in the past two months.
His eyes meet mine, a little confused. “I won’t. I mean, it’s not.”
I nod in the direction of the hallway. “Come on. My bedroom is back here,” I say, and he does this typical boy face of “oh really.” So I talk over it.
“When I first moved here, I wouldn’t let Adrienne and Claire come over.” I glance back at him. “I was so embarrassed that it was, like, the three of us in this tiny house. That’s Ryan’s room.” I point. A question crosses his face. So I say, “He’s the dead one.” I walk into my room, wait for him to enter behind me, and close the door.
I guess I feel like maybe if I let him see these little things about me, he’ll understand me. As though maybe I can get him to think I’m not so bad. I don’t know why.
I’m so tired of everyone thinking they know me.
“I heard you were taking that really hard,” Whit says, and then has the decency to look embarrassed. “I mean, not that—I don’t know. It’s none of my business.” He pauses. “I’m sorry,” he says.
I look at him seriously. “That’s a pretty stock response, DuRant.” His face goes from zero to horrified in sixty seconds. That’s when I flash him a smile. “It’s fine.”
“Oh.” He breathes. “Jesus. I see why people are scared of you.”
“Are they? Scared of me?” I ask, honestly curious.
“Seems like it.” He looks at me, interested.
“Still?” I don’t want to sound like it’s important to me, but in a way, it is. What my perception is out amongst the commoners.
“Most people think you’re pretty screwed up. Still pretty scary, but in a more unhinged, less scary way.”
I nod. “I kind of am.”
“But really,” Whit says, no hint of sarcasm in his words at all. “That sucks.”
I nod. Hold my hand out in front of me. “So this is it. The place every Buckley High guy has imagined, after he realizes he can’t get with Adrienne.” I move my hand from side to side as if presenting the grand finale.
Now he looks terrified, clearly wondering whether or not I’m joking. As his eyes travel around the room, a little snicker escapes him. “It is pretty funny, though,” he says.
“What is?” I ask, pushing my hair behind my ear self-consciously.
Whit looks from me to my bed and back. I wait to read all his dirtiest, most horrible thoughts on his face.
Except I can’t read him at all.
“You have,” he says, grinning, “a teddy bear.” Then he laughs, turning his face away from me. “I’m in Olivia Clayton’s room, and she has a teddy bear.”
A slow grin spreads across my face. “What?” I ask.
“You’re supposed to be some sort of untouchable badass. You have a teddy bear.”
I pick up the teddy bear and hug it to my chest. “I’m a person.” I snuggle my chin against the soft fabric. “Not untouchable.” I’m unstable, I think. I’m totally unstable and ridiculous and not untouchable or badass at all.
Whit stops, looking at me, still inscrutable.
I hold out the bear to him. “His name’s Mister Cotton Muffin. Don’t laugh.”
He does anyway, but he takes the bear out of my hand. “Very nice.”
“Don’t tease me,” I say.
“Well.” He gives the bear back to me. “I am your boyfriend.” At that, he looks even more embarrassed. “Did you want me to do that? I’m sorry.”
“I told you to do that,” I remind him. “I thought it was fucking great.” I try to be as cool as I used to feel. That was the Olivia people loved.
And he does love it a little, I can tell. He’s kind of pleased.
“So we just roll with it?” he asks.
I shrug. “Works for me.”
“Don’t you think—I don’t know. That it’s a bad idea? If someone finds out?”
“Why would they find out?” I say. “I’m not going to tell anybody. Are you?”
“No, of course not,” he replies. Perish the thought. “But there has to be a time limit, don’t you think? You know, we’ll work on your SAT stuff and we can do the whole ‘dating’ thing, I think a month. Does that work for you?”
I consider that I don’t really have a choice. After a moment, I nod. “Works for me,” I say again.
“Okay,” he replies. Then, in this totally awkward way, “Can I ask you something? Do you really think I’m obvious? People know what I’m going to do and who I’m going to be before I do it? Like my brother thinks?”
I frown, picking through our past conversations in my mind. Then I remember him and Cason that day at the golf course and realize I have to capitalize on this opportunity—this insecurity. “Maybe,” I say after a minute.
“I can’t believe I said that.” He won’t meet my eyes. He stretches his arms up over his head, exposing the tiniest bit of skin where his T-shirt rides up. This is the moment, I think. If there’s going to be any moment where I can bring him to my side. He wants them all to believe he can be something different. He doesn’t want to care what anyone thinks, but he does.
His brother most of all.
“You surprised me,” I tell him.
He almost smiles.
29
“What are you doing?”
I jump at the sound of Ethan’s voice, deep with an unexpected edge. He’s wearing a Buckley football T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. He’s an intimidating figure even without his pads, his muscles defined under the loose fabric of a T-shirt. I lean against the chain-link fence that circles the edge of the locker room and kick up a foot against the links, my cheerleading skirt hitching up my thigh. My heart syncs up with the marching band’s
incessant beat, their drums banging in post-win elation.
“Just thinking,” I reply, my voice cold.
“About?” He leans next to me on the fence. At the edge of his hair, blood leaks under a bandage.
“What did you do to yourself?” I ask.
“Oh.” He shifts. “I got a cut from my helmet the first game of the season, and it keeps opening back up.” He points at the blood. “Haven’t you noticed before? At other games?”
I shake my head. “Bleak,” I say. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. “I was actually thinking about the first time we met. Cliché, huh?” He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and as if I can’t stand a second of silence, I keep talking. “You blame me for what happened.”
“O…”
“I never thought a guy would actually choose me over Adrienne. Especially not one who was new and interesting. But you did, and we were happy.” I glance at him. “Weren’t we? Before? But you blamed me for changing when my brother died.” I bite the top of my fingernail off and spit it over the fence. “Why am I even saying this?”
I push away from the fence, ready for a dramatic exit, and Ethan grabs my forearm. “What?” I ask.
“Whit DuRant.”
I almost laugh. Finally. What’s the point of getting all up in his face and letting him sweat on me if he doesn’t crack?
I blink. “What about him?”
“You don’t even know him,” Ethan says.
“Dating people I do know hasn’t worked out well for me so far,” I say.
“You didn’t bother to know me.” Ethan shakes his head, then shrugs it off. “I’ve heard you and Adrienne making fun of Whit DuRant. Calling him a tool and shit.”
I shrug. “I like him. He’s not … like us.” It’s true. “No drama. I’ll try to keep the pornographic texts to a minimum.”
Ethan buries his face in his hands. “Look, I didn’t mean for any of that to get out.”
“How convenient.” I look down at my foot. “Are you still hooking up with her?”
When he doesn’t meet my eyes, I let out a laugh. “Pretty low.”
“You don’t get it,” he starts to say, but apparently he doesn’t either because he goes silent. I take that as my cue to walk away. I’ve seen Whit walking out of the stands.
“I’ll see you later,” I say, trailing the chain-link fence out to the parking lot. As I get closer, Whit walks up to me and grabs my hand, nodding to acknowledge Ethan. We cross the asphalt, and Ethan fades into the background.
“What did he want?” Whit asks after we’ve gained some distance.
“I don’t know.” Our feet pound away over the parking lines. “Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem. You are my girlfriend. Where are we going?”
“Cheerleader initiation.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
I grimace. “You’ll see.”
30
The sound of silence is deafening in Whit’s Jeep as we drive out of the parking lot. He turns on the radio and flips it from rap to country, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.
“We’re not very convincing,” I say.
He glances at me. “Am I doing something wrong? I’m going places with you—that’s what couples do.”
I shift in my seat, uncomfortable with my own need for conversation. We don’t know the first thing about each other. “If we’re going to do this for a month, we’re going to have to talk.”
“When we’re alone?” Ouch.
I sigh and lean my cheek into my hand, my elbow at the edge of the window. “No.”
“So where is this ‘initiation’?”
“You know that playground at the Y?”
“Yeah.”
“There.”
“Great,” he says, turning on his blinker. “Trespassing.”
Adrienne has been all over me the past two days. I can hear her voice replaying in my head right now.
Whit. DuRant. Whit DuRant. Is that what all this SAT bullshit is about?
I had lied through my teeth. Said the tutoring had been going on for a few weeks, and I was so embarrassed I’d had to ask someone for help. The thing with Whit had just happened, and honestly, it was really a relief she had slept with my boyfriend so now I was free to follow my heart.
Well, not that last part.
The truth was, I’d almost enjoyed watching it slowly eat away at her. Whit was out of nowhere, completely out of character. She’d never seen it coming. And that—well, it felt like armor. Like my strategy for a coming war had paid off.
Adrienne thought this was the last breeze of a storm she had weathered and survived, bruised but alive.
I knew different. The blowback from the texts would die down; it would have to so everyone would leave Claire alone. But then, I’d end this. She’d find out how not simple I was.
“Should I go around back?” Whit asks, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” I return. We pull into the parking lot of the Y. It’s an old brick building one street over from Main. Whit turns into the driveway that circles around to the playground in the back, hidden from the road. Cars are already parked up and down the edge of the fence, hard to make out under the cover of night.
“Listen,” I say to Whit as he puts the Jeep in park. “I’m not exactly sure what this is going to be like. Every class does their own thing for initiation. I don’t know what Adrienne has cooked up.”
Whit takes that in with what I consider to be an appropriate amount of concern. “What did you have to do?”
“Naked lap at the community pool.” I shrug. “Grade school hazing at best.”
“Maybe for you,” he mutters, and gets out before I can reply.
“Cool, I was hoping you’d do that judging thing every time we’re together,” I call as I slam my door, walking behind him toward the fence. He jumps it before me, grabbing my hips when I’m halfway to help me down, for once keeping his mouth shut. The sound of screaming reverberates across the playground, echoed by our classmates’ laughter. We make our way past the empty swings toward the noise. Past the slides and jungle gym, over to the sidewalk that runs adjacent to the Y building. That’s where everyone is, where Adrienne must have planned something totally absurd.
I see the freshman cheerleaders lined up on the sidewalk, all on their knees in nothing but their underwear, each one dripping with water and shivering, blindfolds covering their eyes. Anna has a water hose and a grin.
“There you are!” Adrienne calls out when she spots me, bounding over. She throws a sideways glare at Whit before putting one arm around me. In her free hand, she has a squirt bottle of ketchup. The other cheerleaders and the boys they’ve brought along are laughing. Renatta has a bottle of mustard, and grocery bags line the ground behind her.
“You almost missed all the fun,” Adrienne tells me, her mouth next to my ear, reeking of alcohol—bad enough to make me wonder if she had been drinking during the game. Her eyes are bright and glassy. “Do it,” she says, gesturing at the girls, pulling me down alongside her. I catch her before she doubles over. “Call the next cheer.”
“Do ‘Who Rocks the House’!” Daniel Smith yells. Claire’s next to him, weary but dutifully holding a bottle of chocolate syrup, too. Of course there are football players here, if only to add to the humiliation. But Ethan didn’t show—he wouldn’t like this at all.
I take a deep breath. “V-for-Victory. One, two, three, V-V!” I yell, and the girls pick up my words. As they cheer, Adrienne and Renatta cover them with condiments and yell “LOUDER!” right in their faces. Adrienne insists one of the girls isn’t enunciating and squirts ketchup into her open mouth. When she sputters, Adrienne laughs even harder.
I glance at Whit, who looks supremely annoyed. Everyone is yelling taunts at the blindfolded girls.
“We’ll never get victory with these sluts!”
“Do you pad your bra or what, Kim?!”
I’m playing right into every cl
iché he ever dreamed up right now.
Fuck it, he doesn’t know how to have fun. I grab the syrup out of Claire’s hand and pour it down the line of girls, then squirt some at Claire with a flourish. She wrestles it back as other girls grab more condiments to throw on the freshmen. The lights around the parking lot are dim, buzzing, but good enough to show off the variety of colors all over each girl. No matter what we throw on them, they never stop cheering.
Adrienne steps in front of a tiny redheaded girl. “Hey, isn’t this the one with the crush on Daniel?” she asks, glancing back at him. The girl misses a line of the cheer, her head moving back and forth, nervously trying to take in the unseen scene. Adrienne crouches down in front of her, smiling. “What would you let Daniel do to you? He wants to know.”
“I—I—” the girl stutters. My heart pounds against my rib cage. Too far. She has to take everything too far.
“Anything?” Adrienne asks. And then, “Say ‘anything.’”
“A-anything,” the girl replies. People start to quiet down, slow down, listening. Every word has a sinister edge to it now.
“Excuse me?” Adrienne says, standing back up with her hands on her hips. “I thought you were a cheerleader? Show him how loud you’d scream.”
“Anything!” the girl yells obediently.
“Hear that, Daniel?” Adrienne asks, turning to him. Laughing out loud, he hands her a plastic bottle filled with something greenish that catches the light. “Daniel brought you a special present from his family’s farm. It’s goat piss. Would you like that?” Whit has a coughing fit next to me. I don’t dare look at him.
It’s pickle juice. Oldest trick in the book. Not that the girl knows that. “Y-yes.”
Adrienne upturns the bottle all over the girl’s head, and she can’t help but scream in disgust. Everyone laughs even harder, but it’s not fun anymore. Nothing about it is fun. “Hand me that peanut butter,” Adrienne yells at Anna.
How to Break a Boy Page 10