My New Crush Gave to Me

by Shani Petroff

  I covered my head with my arms as dirt and flowers and pots rained down on my head.

  “Whoa,” J.D. said, rushing over. “Are you”—he was clearly trying to hold back a laugh—“okay?”

  The jerk was smiling. He was biting his lower lip, but the corners of his mouth were unmistakably drawn upward.

  “This is not funny,” I said, brushing the dirt off my coat. Six of the plants had fallen.

  “Not at all,” he said, while totally letting out several snickers. “Sorry. I really don’t mean to laugh.” He held out his hand for me to take.

  I pushed it away. “I don’t need your help.”

  My little stunt had attracted a crowd.

  “Nothing to see here, people,” J.D. called out while still enjoying his laughing fit. “Go shop. Christmas is coming.” A couple of people still lingered, totally enjoying my humiliation.

  I tried to hide my face from them all. “Stop laughing,” I told J.D., but of course he didn’t. “You’re totally getting coal for Christmas,” I warned him. Although as I looked at the mess surrounding me, I did have to fight back a laugh or two of my own. But I wasn’t going to let J.D. know that. “Stupid poinsettias,” I muttered instead as I started picking them up and putting them back on their stand.

  “Well, it’s not really the plants’ fault, now is it?” J.D. asked.

  J.D., who now had his camera out and aimed straight at me!

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!! Put that away. J.D., I am serious. Stop taking pictures.”

  “Oh, this is great, keep waving the poinsettia at me.”

  “J.D.…”

  “This one is going to looking really good in the Sentinel spread. Maybe I won’t even use any other pictures. Maybe it will just be this one giant image of you.”

  “You are not putting this in the paper,” I told him.

  “Wait. Who has control of this issue? I think that’s me,” he said as he moved to the other side to get a different angle.

  I picked up the last plant and scooped up as much dirt as I could. “The deal is off.”

  “Yeah,” J.D. said. “That’s not how deals work. Besides, I’ve already come up with your first gift for Teo, and it won’t cost you a cent.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “A picture of me looking like a fool?”

  “Nah.” J.D. shook his head. “It’s Secret Santa, remember? And it wouldn’t be fair to share this picture with just one person when it could bring joy to so many. These pictures should be for the whole student body to enjoy, don’t you agree?”

  Jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk. “I swear,” I said, “I should just leave you here.”

  “That’s fair,” he said. “But then you’d never get the Teo gift I was talking about. I’ll only tell you after you drop me off.”

  I seriously wanted to throttle him. Or at least tell him what he could do with his gift idea. But after all this, there was no way I wasn’t getting that present. I’d come too far to back out now. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  When we got back to my car, I looked in the rearview mirror. Dirt was smeared on my face and a red poinsettia petal was stuck in my hair. J.D. picked it out and handed it to me.

  I waved it off. “I’m over poinsettias. My new least favorite Christmas decoration.”

  “But look how nicely they photograph.” He pulled out his camera and turned the viewer toward me, which revealed a pic of me surrounded by all of the plants on the ground.

  I just glared at him.

  My look must have spoken volumes, because it was enough to keep J.D. from opening his mouth the rest of the ride to his house.

  “So what is this brainstorm gift idea of yours, which you could have told me about before I made a fool of myself at the mall but decided to wait until now?” I asked as I parked in front of his house.

  “A playlist,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “That’s your big idea? And tell me, just how do I transfer this playlist to him without giving away my identity?”

  “Ever hear of a thumb drive?”

  Duh. Of course. I could just save the files there, and Teo could transfer them to his phone later. “Okay, fine. Just pick out some songs he’ll like and throw them on the drive. You can get it to me tomorrow or Tuesday. I’m planning on giving him the first gift Wednesday.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” J.D. held up his hands. “Is this a gift from me, or a gift from you? Don’t you think you should have a hand in picking out the songs?”

  He did have a point, and I was curious about Teo’s taste in music.

  “Come on in,” he said. “It won’t take that long.”

  But I couldn’t. I had hit my threshold of how much J.D. Ortiz I could handle in one day. “Not tonight.”

  “Tuesday after school?” he asked.

  “That works. And don’t forget you’re supposed to be helping me spend time with Teo, too.”

  “I remember,” he mumbled.

  “Good,” I shouted out my window as J.D. walked to his door. Because right now, I was spending way too much time with the wrong Ortiz cousin. And that definitely needed to change.

  Twelve

  Monday and most of the day Tuesday, to my disappointment, I had no contact with Teo, and to my delight, just small interactions with J.D. He and I had world history and study hall together, but I did my best to avoid him.

  By the looks of things, the newspaper staff had begun to get their holiday surprises. “Guess what my Secret Santa got me!” Morgan said, waving some sort of stuffed animal at me as I left last period. Her class was right across from mine. “It was waiting on my desk.”

  “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a stuffed dreidel.” Only it had big googly eyes and accordion legs. “And look at this…” She squeezed it, and it started playing “I Have a Little Dreidel.”

  “Okay, that is one of the corniest things I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know, right?” she said. “That’s why I love it.”

  Only Morgan would get that excited over a silly toy. “It’s better than what I got.” I pulled out a candy cane that was broken in three pieces. “I found it before last period. They jammed it in the slit of my locker with a note that said Merry Christmas, Secret Santa.”

  “Well, at least they were thinking about you, and it’s the thought that counts, right?”

  “Okay, Pollyanna,” I said. “I think they just took the candy cane from the jar in the main office.”

  “So what?” she said. “Some people haven’t gotten anything yet.” That was true. I hadn’t given Teo a present. I was meeting J.D. in twenty minutes to go over the first gift. “Your Secret Santa may be just warming up. I wonder who it is?”

  “No idea, but I guess we solved the mystery of who’s your Secret Santa.” There was just one person from the paper in her last-period class.

  “It’s not necessarily Gus,” she said as we headed to our lockers. “Someone else could have snuck in and done it or asked him to help them out.”

  “I think you are giving the people on our staff way too much credit. Besides, if someone was trying to be stealthy, they wouldn’t ask Gus.” Gus was nice and all, and he even managed to come up with some good story ideas, but his lack of attention to the not-so-little things like spelling and grammar made me cringe. He definitely wasn’t the person I would turn to for help.

  “Well, I don’t care,” she declared. “At least he’s trying.” She squeezed the stuffed dreidel again. “And I think this is adorable.”

  “What’s adorable?” Ira asked, coming up from behind.

  “Oh, just another guy trying to woo me with presents.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Does that mean I don’t have to get you anything?”

  She hit him lightly with her new gift. “It doesn’t mean that at all.”

  He put his arm around her and pulled her closer as we continued to walk. She did the same to him.

  When we stopped at her locker, Ira was moving the hair off of the back of her neck
as she put her books away. “Okay, I’m leaving,” I said, before they started making out or something.

  Before I had a chance to make my getaway, Noelle Hawkins stopped in front of me, her arms crossed over her chest. “You have not RSVP’d to my party.”

  “Oh, hey, Noelle. It’s still a couple of weeks away,” I argued. “We practically just got the invitation.”

  “But you’ve known about it forever. And Morgan and Ira still found time to RSVP. So did most people.”

  Noelle and I weren’t amazingly close, but she was one of the few people in this school, other than Morgan and Ira, that I actually called a friend. We had a shared camaraderie over birthdays on major holidays. We commiserated about it on more than one occasion.

  I looked down at my feet. “I’m still trying to figure out if I can go.”

  “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t you?” she asked.

  Because I wasn’t sure if my Teo plan would be successful or not, and I wasn’t going to her mistletoe-infested holiday extravaganza without a date. But I couldn’t really tell her that.

  Not that she gave me a chance to answer. She just kept right on talking. “I already have you down for a tentative yes. With Ajay as your plus-one. You need to be there. You never mentioned not coming. This is going to be the party of the year. You are not missing my birthday. Besides, the theme is Lovers’ Ball, and while I know you and Ajay are just friends now,” she said, her voice getting all singsongy, “this party could change all that. And don’t tell me you’re not secretly hoping to get back together.”

  “Yeah, about that, Ajay and I aren’t really talking anymore,” I confessed.

  “Wait, what?!” She looked more upset than I did about it. “Okay, this isn’t a disaster.” Although her expression was telling me that it was. I knew she was all about the couple thing, but come on. Not that I was that surprised. When Noelle had an idea in her head, she stuck to it, which I both respected and, at the moment, hated. “We can fix this,” she said, her tone getting serious. “I’ll find you a date. You can take one of my cousins. One of the twins. Your choice.”

  “The twins? The ones who’ve been at your party every single year? Aren’t they like fourteen?”

  “Yeah, well,” she hemmed, “if you had told me sooner, I would have saved one of the older ones for you, but I already matched all of them up.”

  “I am not going to your party with a freshman.”

  “What’s this I hear?” Zakiyah said, sidling up to me.

  Seriously? TMZ needed to give this girl a job. It was like she had a sixth sense for where there was dirt to be found.

  “No one was talking to you,” I said, taking a step away.

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t be doing my job as the paper’s gossip columnist if I didn’t check into everything. And you know, I have, like, the most annoying editor, so I better do my due diligence.” She gave me an evil grin. “So tell me, does someone not have a date anymore? I guess you’ll just be a poor, sorry loser then.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Morgan interrupted her. “Not having a date does not make you a loser. In fact, the whole idea of needing one is ridiculous.”

  “Hey!” Noelle said.

  Morgan cringed. “No offense.”

  “Oh, don’t look at me,” Zakiyah said. “They’re not my words, right, Charlie? And just to help me clarify, I was right before, huh? You were dumped? Did he get sick of your self-righteousness, or was it the way you have to have every little thing planned so it goes your way? Because, personally, I’d find them both pretty annoying.”

  “Whatever, Zakiyah,” I said.

  “Great comeback.” She turned to Noelle. “Anyway, good luck finding her a date, ’cause, wow, you are going to need it.”

  I don’t know if it was the smug look of satisfaction on her face or the tone of her voice or that she managed to push my last button, but before I could stop myself, I was up in her face. “I’ll have you know, I ended it with Ajay, because I moved on. I’ll be at Noelle’s party as a couple. And just wait until you see my date. He’s perfect. He’s going to be the best one there.”

  Then I flicked my hair over my shoulder and walked to my locker.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  Why hadn’t I kept my big mouth shut?

  Now Operation Secret Santa had to work. There was absolutely no room for failure. My reputation depended on it.

  Thirteen

  “You know,” J.D. said when I got to his house. “If you were coming here anyway, you could have given me a ride home instead of letting me walk.”

  “Oh, sorry.” It hadn’t even crossed my mind. Ira usually drove Morgan, and I didn’t even think about how J.D. got back and forth to school. It wasn’t like we were friends.

  “That’s okay. It’s all about you, right?”

  First Zakiyah and now J.D.? He may have been joking, but it sure didn’t feel like it, and I had had enough for one day. “First of all,” I informed him, “you could have asked. How was I supposed to know you needed a ride? So don’t put that on me.”

  “You’re right,” he acquiesced, but I wasn’t through with him. I was so sick of people like him assuming I only thought about myself because I voiced my opinions and wasn’t constantly worried about being a people pleaser.

  “Second,” I continued, “you are getting just as much out of this deal as I am, so don’t even start. You are such a—”

  Then I remembered where I was and slapped my hand over my mouth. I wouldn’t want my mom hearing someone bash me, especially in my own home. J.D. watched me look around.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just us. My sister’s still up at college, and my parents—Teo’s aunt and uncle—are at work.”

  Yeah, yeah, he didn’t need to point it out. I remembered he was related to Teo and could make or break whether I got my Lovers’ Ball date or not.

  I let out a sigh. “Are we going to make this playlist or not?”

  “Follow me,” he said.

  We went upstairs. He turned into the room right off to the left and stopped short. “We can actually work on it downstairs if you prefer. I can bring my laptop down.”

  “Why?” I said, sneaking a look past him into his bedroom. “Did you forget to clean or something? Don’t worry about it. I already assumed you were a slob.”

  “No … I just thought you might be more com—Forget it.”

  Then it hit me what he meant. He was worried I wouldn’t feel comfortable being alone with him in his room. I studied his face. That was actually nice of him. Every so often he did something that surprised me. But there was nothing to worry about. I didn’t look at him in any sort of romantic way. The idea of kissing J.D. Ortiz was about as appealing as taking a nap on the bathroom floor. And while I might have thought of him as a pompous, unprepared, pigheaded jerk, I felt safe around him. Being in his room was no big deal.

  He stepped aside from the door, and I went in. It was not what I expected at all. “It’s so neat.”

  “Okay, why do you think I’m such a slob?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Please,” he said, and gestured for me to take a seat at his desk.

  “Just remember that you asked,” I said as I sat down in the chair. “You’re never on time, you always seem to be in a rush, your bag is filled with papers that a neat person would have in a binder, and your hair goes in a hundred different directions—but not in that I’m-trying-to-look-like-I-didn’t-work-on-this-for-hours-but-actually-did way, but in the actual I-woke-up-this-way way. Plus, look at your shoelace—it’s untied again—and then there all those studies that say creative people are messier in general, and you always claim to have artistic vision. So, I’d say thinking you were a slob would be a reasonable hypothesis.”

  He let out a low whistle.

  “It’s not like being a slob is horrible,” I explained after seeing the stunned look on his face. “Morgan’s room is a disaster, and she’s one of the smartest
people I’ve met.” Morgan may have loved reality TV and spending most of her free time baking and with her boyfriend, but she was also kind of a math genius. Enough so that she breezed through calculus our sophomore year and now spent her math period taking an online college-level course in topology, which dealt with geometric properties and spatial relations. Yet when it came to her bedroom, it looked like someone ransacked it. I found myself straightening things up when we were in there, which drove her nuts. As a result, we mostly hung out in her den or kitchen when we were at her house.

  “But I’m not a slob!” J.D. protested.

  “Okay.” I raised my hands. “I can see that. Don’t get so defensive. You’re very neat. There, happy now? I don’t know why you’re getting so upset.”

  “Because you have this messed-up view of me.”

  Why did he care what I thought? “Because you make my job as an editor harder.”

  “I make you better.”

  “Let’s just start the playlist, please.” I did not want to get into another argument with him.

  “Fine. I’m going to go grab another chair.”

  While he was gone, I studied the setup of his room. It was actually pretty impressive. He had a long, white tabletop desk that was almost the length of one of the walls. There were two giant monitors on top, a printer, a sketch pad, and a cup that held pens, paper clips, and such. He also had a bunch of little plastic models, which I’m guessing he’d made on the 3-D printer at his internship, and there were heaping stacks of photos that took over the far left side of the desk. Another wall consisted of just bookshelves, and they were filled with actual books. I hadn’t taken him for a reader, but after the way he reacted to me thinking he was a slob, I certainly wasn’t going to share that opinion. The third wall was all windows, with deep-blue curtains, and up against the fourth was his bed and a little nightstand. Framed photos were overhead.