by Benway,Robin
“Now go get Caro,” Drew said, gesturing off into the distance. “Before she turns into a fire starter or something.”
When she’s mad, Caro becomes an expert speed walker and I eventually had to jog to catch up to her. “Caro!” I screamed. “Would you just stop? Please?”
She stopped so fast that I almost ran into her. “What?” she asked, and the venom in her voice made me take a step backward. “Is there more exciting news? Let me guess, you—”
“Oh, knock it off, Caro!” I yelled. “I got into college and you’re mad at me? That makes zero sense! You’re supposed to be happy for me! That’s what friends do!”
“You know what else friends do?” she said. “They tell each other things! Important things, like the fact that they’re, oh, I don’t know, applying to colleges, maybe?”
“I applied to one!”
“You should have told me!” Caro yelled. “I thought we would get an apartment together, take the same classes!”
“Get an apartment?” I repeated. “Caro, do you really think my mom would let me do that? There’s no way! We talked about it, yeah, but there’s no—”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you were planning this whole new life!” Caro said. “Everyone seems to be doing that, though, making all these new plans without me. Drew’s got his scholarship and a cute barista and you’ve got San Diego and Oliver.”
I tried to interrupt her, but she didn’t stop. “I’m really glad you told Oliver, though. He’s been home, what? Two months? Six weeks? And yet he knows more about you than I do.”
“Oliver? Seriously, Caro? Is that what this is about?”
Caro stalked over until we were less than a foot apart. “It is always about Oliver,” she said, her voice low and venomous. “It’s been about him for years. I thought now that he was home that maybe we could move on, that we wouldn’t just be ‘Oliver’s old friends,’ or whatever the fucking press used to call us. But it’s still all about him.” Caro held up her hands like she was dropping the past ten years at my feet. “So fine. He wins.”
“This isn’t a competition!” I cried. “I’m still friends with you and Drew. I’m just . . . dating Oliver. That’s all.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me about college? Why didn’t you mention it to me? You’re not the only one who wants out of here, Emmy!”
“I didn’t even think I would get in!” I cried. “It just happened!”
“Okay, then here’s another question. Why don’t you call and ask me to do something? Or—crazy thought—ask me how I’m doing!”
I didn’t have an answer for that. It was no secret that I hadn’t been spending as much time with Caro and Drew now that Oliver was home. With Drew, it hadn’t really mattered because he was spending all of his free time with Kevin. But Caro . . .
“Caro,” I said. “Why don’t you hang out with us this afternoon? We were just going to go to the Stand and get dinner, but you should come with us.”
Caro just turned around and started walking away again. “You’ll have to forgive me if I pass on your pity date,” she called over her shoulder. “I know where I’m not wanted.”
“Caroline!” I yelled. “You can’t just walk away in the middle of a fight. That’s not fair!”
“Look who’s suddenly upset when things aren’t fair,” Caro yelled, and kept walking. She walked until she was just a speck in the distance, then she seemed to melt into the horizon. I watched her go, defeated, then turned around and trudged back to school where Oliver was waiting for me near the concrete statue of our mascot, a giant, soaring bird that looked like it was constantly deciding which student to gobble down first. (Go Hawks.) At that moment, I sort of wished he would pick me.
“Hey!” Oliver said. It had gotten cloudy out and he had tugged his hoodie up over his head so that just a few strands of hair were peeking out. “Where’d you go? I saw Drew and he said something about Caroline and stew?”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “Caroline’s not exactly happy about me getting into UCSD.”
“What?” Oliver frowned. “Why? She’s, like, your best friend. I thought she’d be running around the school, yelling at people and lighting firecrackers.”
“Yeah, well,” I said again. “Apparently not.” I didn’t feel like explaining that the problem had everything and nothing to do with him. “Ready to go?”
Oliver eyed me, then slung his arm across my shoulders. He didn’t answer my question; instead, we walked toward my car, with only one place to go: home.
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The silent treatment from Caro went on for a week. My phone had never been so quiet. “Are you still not talking?” Drew said when he saw me at school on Monday, after a weekend with no Caro. “How am I supposed to have two best friends who are fighting? This doesn’t work for me.”
“Learn to adjust,” I told him. “And I’m happy to talk to Caro. She just doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Oliver, while understanding, was equally clueless. “Can’t you just, like, text her?” he said. We were both studying in his room while Maureen made approximately twenty-three separate trips from downstairs to the linen closet, which meant that she passed Oliver’s room every time. “No closed doors, you two!” she said the first time, in a teasing voice that all parents use when they actually mean, “No, seriously, we will strip the skin off your bones if you close that door.”
Luckily, one of the floorboards on the second floor squeaks, so we could always hear her coming. With the twins fast asleep in their room and Rick watching TV downstairs, it was pretty easy to make out between laundry trips. “How many sheet sets do you even have?” I whispered to him as the floorboard squeaked and we sprang apart.
He just shrugged and picked up his pencil. “Yeah, but so then why does cosine . . . ?” he said as Maureen passed. “I have no idea,” he whispered once she was gone. “You know she’s spying on us.”
“No, you want to figure out the tangent,” I said as she walked back, then waited to hear her footsteps on the stairs. I was supposed to be tutoring him in pre-calc since I had taken it the year before, but Oliver didn’t need any help.
“Did you talk to UCSD yet?” he asked once the coast was clear.
“I have until May first,” I told him. “I don’t have to decide until then.”
“So when are you going to tell your parents?”
“Um, hopefully as my car pulls out of the driveway on the way to San Diego.” I wrapped my hand around his, still holding on to the pencil. “That should be a good time, right? They can’t run as fast as the car.”
“I think a lot of people can run as fast as your car,” Oliver said.
“What it lacks in speed it makes up for in personality,” I said. “Besides, all the sand probably weighs it down.”
He laughed and leaned in to kiss me. Who knew geometry could be so romantic? “No, but seriously,” he said after a minute. “You need to tell them.”
“Dude, I know. I will. Just . . . I have to do it on my own time. I know my parents, I know when it’s a good time and when it’s not.”
Oliver regarded me with suspicion. “You weren’t joking about that driveway comment, were you?”
“ANYWAY,” I said. “Focus on geometry.”
“What do I get if I get the next one right?” His breath was warm on my neck, making goose bumps raise up on my arms as I shivered.
“You get a gold star,” I whispered back, then turned around to kiss him.
“Is that a metaphor?” he asked.
“Get it right and see,” I replied, and started to kiss him.
Cccccrreeeeeeaaaaaaakkkk!
“Laundry time,” Oliver muttered as we flew apart again.
“Worst chore ever,” I added, and he could only nod his head in agreement.
Oliver was right, though. The clock was ticking and I ha
d only three weeks before I had to tell UCSD whether or not I would accept their offer. Which meant, of course, that I had only three weeks to tell my parents that there was even an offer to accept. I tried a few times—at dinner one night, while we were all in the car the next—but every time I started to say something, the words seemed to fall apart in my mouth and all that came out was a cough. “Are you getting a cold?” my mom finally asked after the third time at dinner. “You sound a bit wheezy.”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
“You’re not eating very much,” she said. “I thought you liked this pasta?”
It was bow-tie pasta with cream sauce, my mom’s secret recipe that she wouldn’t even give to my grandmother. (And if you don’t think that caused a ruckus at Thanksgiving last year, then you would be very wrong.) And yes, I did love it, but between Caro and school and college and Oliver, it felt like the anxiety boulder in my stomach left no room for food.
“I’m fiiiine,” I said again, suddenly aware that I was whining. “I’m fine,” I repeated, trying to sound like an almost college student and not a three-year-old. “I just have a lot of schoolwork and Caro and I . . .”
Both my parents froze with their forks to their mouths. “Caro and you what?” my dad said. “Don’t leave us hanging. Caro and I are joining the circus? Caro and I have decided to become neurosurgeons? Caro and I have decided to reimburse our parents for the eighteen years’ worth of room and board that they’ve so lovingly provided us?”
“Honey, she and Caro are fighting,” my mom said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“How did you know we were fighting?” I asked.
“Because you’re only sending a million texts a day, rather than two million,” my mom said, but I could tell that she was trying to be nice about it. “What happened?”
She was clearly dying for more information. I wonder if she and Maureen had discussed this at all. “We just had a stupid fight,” I said. “She said some things and I said some things, that’s all. No biggie.”
“You and Caro have never fought before,” my dad said.
“We argued over that My Little Pony doll when we were four,” I pointed out. She won. I was still bitter.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll make up,” my mom said. “You and Caro have been friends forever.”
“Can I be excused?” I asked, wiping my mouth with my napkin in preparation to flee. “Oliver and I wanted to do some homework together.”
My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Where? Here or there?”
“There,” I said. Our house didn’t have any squeaky floorboards.
“Two more bites,” she said, and I swallowed them in one, relieved to be off the hot seat.
For now.
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The high school had an open house on Wednesday night, one of those things where all the parents and their kids can come to the school and show off their work and talk to the teachers about how great/wonderful/abysmal their little darlings are. It’s a big community to-do, and my parents, of course, haven’t missed one ever. Even when my mom had bronchitis, she managed to make a miraculous recovery and show up to discuss my B-plus grade with my eighth-grade history teacher. (My mother thought it should have been an A-minus. She thought wrong.)
Oliver’s mom, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to attend one for ten years, so she was over the moon. “Come on, we’re going to be late!” I heard her yelling that evening as she herded everyone into their cars. I heard this because I was being herded by my parents into our car.
“Emmy, step on it,” my mom said. “If we don’t get there soon, there’s always a line to talk to your AP bio teacher.” Mr. Hernandez was thirty years old and very, um, in demand by most of the moms in our school. Not that my mom wanted to hit on Mr. Hernandez. She was probably the only mom who actually wanted to discuss my participation in class with him.
“Aren’t you tired of talking to my teachers?” I asked them as I fastened my seat belt. “I can just reenact the conversation for you.”
“You’re a poor man’s Mr. Hernandez,” my dad told me.
“Oh my God. Dad.”
“Fasten your seat belt,” my mom said.
“It’s fastened.” Like it always was every single time she asked.
Oliver and I both looked at each other as our respective cars backed out of the driveways. I was about to wave when he suddenly crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me.
I had to laugh. That’s what I had done to him back on his first day of school, back when I could barely imagine talking to him, much less sitting on his lap or wrapping my arms around his neck or sprawling on the warm sand, my head resting against his shoulder as he ran his fingers up and down my back. He had been a friend, then a stranger, and now something more.
And going to UCSD meant that this time, I would be leaving him.
School always seemed so weird on open house nights, lit up in the dark and suddenly filled with parents. It was even weirder hearing your parents refer to your teachers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, like they were students, too. My parents were pretty much on a first-name basis with every other parent there, and my mom shouted “Oh, hell-lo!” at five other families even before we got inside.
I managed to hang in there for about thirty minutes, showing my parents where I sat in French class (“Why are you so far back?” my mom wondered), introduced them to my calculus teacher and let her talk about what a great math student I was, and waited with them in line for the famed Mr. Hernandez. “Emmy is an excellent diagrammer,” he told my parents, smiling at them, and I swear I heard half the moms swoon.
I looked at my dad. He looked back at me. Then we both tried not to laugh.
“How long does this go on for?” someone said into my ear as we headed toward my civics classroom and I turned around to see Oliver standing next to me as our parents all greeted one another. (Rick was at the twins’ future elementary school, probably taking copious notes for Maureen.)
“Forever,” I whispered back, then found his hand and squeezed it. “Hope you didn’t make plans for the next three days.”
“Does this seriously happen every year?” he asked.
“Look at my eyes,” I said, then widened them dramatically. “Does this look like the face of someone who would joke about this?”
“You look deranged,” he said, and we both leaned forward a little before we remembered where we were, and more important, who we were with.
“You must be so happy to be here,” my mom said, and Maureen could only nod as her eyes filled with tears.
“Mommm,” Oliver said. “You promised you wouldn’t, not here.”
“I know, I know,” she said, then waved her fingers in front of her eyes as if to fan away the tears. “I just haven’t been to one of these since first grade, you know?” She started to tear up again, then stopped herself. “It just feels good to be back in the swing of things.” Maureen smiled at Oliver, then reached for his hand. “We’re just . . . we’re trying.”
Oliver nodded, but didn’t let her hold his hand. “Mom,” he said again. “We’re at school, okay?”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said again, then rolled her eyes at my mom as if to say, Teenagers. My mom smiled back and luckily for her, didn’t try and hold my hand, either.
“Do you wanna go walk?” I asked Oliver. “Unless you want to see all of your teachers for a second time today, that is.”
“Um, no,” he said.
“Is it okay if we . . . ?” I asked, pointing down the hall. “We’ll stay on campus.”
My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Only walking,” she said. “No funny business.”
“Got it,” I said, even as I linked hands with Oliver. “No telling jokes or making humorous observations.”
“Oh, get out of here,” my dad said, swatting at my head as I ducked p
ast, and I giggled as Oliver ran to keep up with me.
I don’t know why my mom thought we’d spend our time kissing on campus. To be honest, high school isn’t the most romantic setting. It smells like dirty linoleum and tempera paint, along with paper and burnt coffee and gym socks, and besides, there were probably a thousand students and their parents wandering around. Still, it was nice to wander with Oliver and not have to listen for a creaky floorboard or keep an eye out for the twins, who were forever curious about why we were always studying together.
“It’s gonna be weird to be here next year without you,” Oliver said. “Who’s going to eat lunch with me?”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “I’ll still come back and visit. And who knows, I might not even go.”
Oliver glanced down at me. “You don’t mean that.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s scary, you know? Moving. Leaving my bedroom. Leaving my parents.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you.”
“Well, I left you,” he pointed out. “Think of it as payback.”
“You didn’t leave,” I started to say, but just then Caro came running up. I had seen her at school, but both of us had been going out of our way to avoid talking to one another, and I actually took a step back when she came closer. “Caro?” I said.
“Yeah. Hi. Look, Drew’s upset.”
“Drew is? About what?”
“You should probably just come with me.”
My heart was starting to pick up pace. Drew never really got upset. He had always been the peacemaker between me and Caro, between Kane and his parents, between his parents and himself. “Okay,” I said, then gestured to Oliver to follow me.
“Wait, no,” Caro said. “Just you, Emmy.” She looked at Oliver, her face a protective shield. I knew what she was thinking: Oliver isn’t one of us anymore.
I was about to protest, but to my surprise, Oliver spoke up first. “Caro, wait,” he said, and she sighed and turned to face him, her arms folded over her chest. The campus lights had come on, bathing us in a watery yellow light. Under them, Caro looked tired and concerned and unsure, so unlike her normal self. “What?” she asked.