Just like the guy standing behind me. I’ve forgotten about the ice cream and suddenly it’s pouring all over my hand, spilling out of the cone and onto the grille under the machine.
“Shit!” I yell, and everyone goes silent for a beat.
“Sorry,” Steph apologizes for me. I don’t even have time to feel grateful because I’m too busy grabbing a towel and a new cone and trying to finish this stupid order so I can get out from under this asshole’s eyes.
“Shouldn’t talk like that in front of kids,” the dad says as I turn, finally, and hand over the ice cream.
My hand twitches and I’m genuinely afraid I might slap him. I really could—but then I see the girl, standing just out of her dad’s line of vision, roll her eyes. Steph hands over the Blizzard, rings them up, and says, “Sorry again—it’s been a long weekend for all of us.”
The man’s expression softens. He nods at her, takes another look at my boobs, and they leave.
As soon as the door ding-dings closed I sit straight down on the floor, on the gross rubber mat, and start to cry.
“Wha— Rosie! Are you okay? Don’t worry about it, you just spilled a little ice cream! I think we get a couple of screw-ups waived for every shift, right?” Steph seems to realize she’s babbling because she goes abruptly silent and squats down next to me.
I’m not sobbing, exactly, but I’m crying hard and I can’t stop. My nose is running, and my eyes are all scrunched up. I’m ruining my mascara. I look like a psychopath.
Steph puts one hand on my back, gently. She doesn’t pat or rub or anything, just sits there for a while. When my outburst finally slows down, I hear her sigh.
“This is exactly what I was like yesterday,” she says sympathetically. “Just these little breakdowns every once in a while.”
I nod. If she thinks I’m having sympathy pains, maybe she’s right. Obviously I’m upset about Maddie and the storm and . . . I don’t know.
But the truth is, I don’t know why I’m crying right now. And I don’t know why that scares me so much. But it does.
“Now, I know these don’t match your outfit, but.” Ryan holds out the work gloves, and when I don’t take them right away, flaps them around a little. “They will save your manicure.”
I make a face, but I take the gloves and put them on. They’re as scratchy on the inside as the outside.
“You don’t have to put them on yet,” he says.
I sigh and take them off again. I’m tempted to give Alex an exasperated look. He’s standing right next to me, so he’s the only person seeing what a jerkface Ryan is being, but I don’t think we’ve achieved the knowing look–exchange level quite yet.
It’s just the three of us. Actual set building won’t start for a while, apparently, but Ryan asked for helpers to clean out the backstage area and start prep work. He’s going for Greatest Drama Club Member of All Time, or something. And wants to hang out with the famous new kid, too, I guess.
I thought I might be alone with Ryan and finally find the nerve to ask about his mystery hookup at the football game. But I guess this is fine, since I had no idea how I was going to do that, anyway.
“Safety goggles,” Ryan goes on, holding up two pairs of the most hideous plastic glasses I’ve ever seen.
“Are we supposed to be keeping all this stuff somewhere?” Alex asks. “In our lockers or something?”
Ryan lets out a big, snorty laugh, then looks horrified. Ha, so I’m not the only one who still can’t be normal around Alex Goode.
“No,” he tells Alex. “It’s all theater property, so it stays, you know. In here.” As Ryan turns back to the rest of the “theater property” he flares his nostrils at me and bugs his eyes. Definitely not keeping his chill.
I smirk at him, feeling slightly smug. I’m not that bothered by Alex anymore. Or anything. My head has gone all light and airy, and everything that’s happened since I got to school today has felt distant, removed. It reminds me of last year when I accidentally got a contact high in Paul Maziarz’s car. Same kind of fuzziness, minus all the random giggling.
Even seeing Cory this morning didn’t do anything. He ignored me; I avoided him. He never wrote me back, so when I saw him and Maddie together, clearly together, I didn’t freak out at all. I started to text Ryan, So she dates cheaters now? but stopped myself. First, I know he wouldn’t answer because that would be picking sides. And second, no one needs a reminder that I was the other cheater. Especially me.
Maybe we can all just not talk about it.
And now I’m thrown together with Alex again and—I don’t know. I should probably apologize for never showing up to volunteer. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I still want to impress him, but I’ve forgotten how to try.
If I had the energy to think about it, I’d probably think I’m acting strange.
“I have to go over the safety rules first, before we talk about anything else,” Ryan is explaining. “Because if you get hurt we’re basically all screwed. But I’m sorry, this part is incredibly boring.”
“Yeah, no, it’s cool. Do your thing, man.”
Ryan and I both look at Alex.
“What?”
For the first time all day, I smile. “You just sounded so . . .”
“So Midcity,” Ryan finishes.
“Is that bad?” Alex asks. It sounds like he really wants to know our opinion, and I can feel Ryan getting as flattered by that as I am.
“Not exactly—” I start, but Ryan’s already saying, “Just be careful. Pretty soon you’ll be punctuating every sentence with bro.”
“Or dude,” I add.
“You say dude all the time!” Ryan cries.
“Dude! Don’t rat me out to the new kid!”
Ryan points at me and stares at Alex, as if to say, See what I mean? Alex laughs.
That’s the . . . huh. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve made him laugh. That’s probably healthy. Even if my own laugh sounds more like a raspy kind of bark.
“Okay, okay,” I say to Ryan. “Can you show us some of the stuff we’re supposed to be safe around? You know, the cool stuff?”
“Is there cool stuff?” Alex deadpans.
“He said there was, but I don’t know,” I mutter.
“There is!” Ryan’s face is getting pink with annoyance. “Oh my God, I’m going to need to ask Mrs. Walsh for some less insolent helpers, aren’t I?”
As if we’d rehearsed it, in perfect unison Alex and I shrug in the same exaggeratedly innocent way.
Ryan jerks his head back and goes, “Okay. That was. Cree-ee-eepy.”
And that’s when Alex and I share a look. A smile.
Ryan leads us into the actual backstage area, where there is, in fact, some decently cool stuff. In a Home Depot kind of way. Pulleys and bags of sand, huge planks of wood and particleboard waiting to be turned into sets, dozens of cans of paint and power tools and serious-looking ladders.
Soon we each have planks we have to move around—“Ridiculous fire hazards,” as Ryan calls them—and for a while Alex and I fall into a wordless routine. It’s calming and I think again, vaguely, that things are kind of just . . . okay when we’re together. It’s not like he’s easy to be around. He’s intense and intimidating and he refuses to flirt with me.
But I don’t know, it’s peaceful. It’s dark backstage, and no one is looking at me, making me talk. Even Ryan had to go somewhere else, so he’s not doing that supportive-friend thing where he asks, again, why I haven’t made more of an effort to talk to Maddie. Which means I don’t have to think about that.
Alex hands me another plank, and I move it, and that’s all. It’s enough.
13
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND what that is.”
“It’s supposed to be a kitten.”
Alex angles his head to the right, then the left. “Nope,” he says. “It’s a manatee.”
“So it’s an ocean kitten.”
He nods in that way I’m getting used t
o—that I acknowledge your joke and I’m taking it under advisement way.
“Kitten of the sea,” he offers.
“Right. Now why don’t you keep your eyes on your own clay,” I tell him, pointing to his side of the art table. “Make a mermaid for this . . . ‘manatten.’ She can adopt it as a pet.”
Alex pretends to get right to work on that, but of course he’s already halfway through a really impressive—
“Wait, weren’t you just making a hand?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s joking anymore. “I mean, yes. But it was bad.”
“It wasn’t bad. It was really good.”
“These probably aren’t the words we’re supposed to be using in a serious art class,” Alex says.
“What words? Kitten? Hand?”
He folds his clay carefully, constructing something that definitely isn’t a hand, but doesn’t really look like anything else, either. “I meant bad and good. Aren’t those terribly binary, outdated judgments? Aren’t we to strive for more specific language in our pursuit of fine art?”
I glance up and notice that Mr. Kline is hovering nearby, eavesdropping. I open my mouth to tell Alex that he might not want to make fun of our art teacher right this second, but then I see that Mr. Kline is smiling slightly, then walking away to help someone else. He’s a cool teacher, but I can’t help wondering if I just saw Alex get away with something. On account of being a hero and everything. I’m pretty sure if I openly mocked the exaggerated way Mr. Kline lectures us about fine art within his earshot, I’d at least get a warning look.
“Well,” I say, leaning a little closer to the thing Alex is trying to sculpt. “Throwing around fancy art terms probably isn’t a requirement in Intro. Technically.”
“Why don’t you do something that speaks to your experience?” says the other girl at the table, Fiona. I’ve been calling her Fiona Freshman in my head and mostly forgetting that she’s here, mainly because she never, ever speaks to us and only wears black, even on her lips.
“Oh, uh.” Alex is obviously as surprised to hear Fiona’s voice as I am. He looks up at her with a confused expression. “My experience?”
She glares at both of us from under her black bangs. I think she’s trying to look intense, but instead she just sort of looks pissed.
“With gun violence,” she growls.
I don’t gasp, but only barely. Instead I check Alex’s face again to see if he’s all right—and to my surprise, I find him staring at me. And he seems . . . amused. His lips twitch ever so slightly, and I realize that we’re sharing a moment. Knowing-look level: unlocked.
I twitch my lips back, almost as an experiment, and one of Alex’s eyebrows moves very slightly upward.
But to Fiona, he is all sincerity. “I think art always exposes the soul, don’t you?” he asks her.
It’s the perfect thing to say. Not only does she stop scowling for half a second, she nods so wholeheartedly that I feel this huge surge of affection for all her goth-emo nonsense. And I can tell that Alex—whatever he thinks of some random freshman bringing up gun violence in the middle of seventh period—really wants to be nice to her. He really is the guy who will bring bagels to your church relief effort at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday. He really will stop a gunman and save an entire high school.
Fiona opens her mouth to say something else, but then, from the front of the room, Mr. Kline tells us it’s time to put away our “works in progress” because there are only five minutes left.
I sneak my phone under the table, just to check. I know there won’t be anything—if Maddie was going to text back to any of my messages, she would have by now. The let’s talk texts; the all-emoji lists I thought might make her laugh; the #tbt photo of us from the eighth-grade dance with our stupid pink-streaked hair: none of it has moved her.
So much for her getting a boyfriend making our friendship better.
I don’t even try to time my movements to Alex’s, I just end up walking out the door with him naturally. It feels good—lucky. Even Ryan is starting to seem distant, despite the fact that we spend every lunchtime together in the theater. I didn’t know how much I was going to need a friend like Alex this year.
It doesn’t even bother me anymore that he never looks at me the way boys usually do. I sort of haven’t been thinking about boys that much lately.
My heart beats a little faster, though, afraid I might ruin all the easiness when I say, “I’m sorry about that girl. Fiona? You must get that kind of thing a lot.”
“Not very much,” he says, chill as ever. “Most people don’t actually say the word gun, but pretty much everyone is thinking about it whenever they talk to me. I get it.”
Olivia and Annabelle walk by right then, and Olivia does this weird thing where she glares at me and then looks back over her shoulder, like she’s worried she left something behind. That’s when I see Maddie leaning against a locker, talking to Cory, at the end of the hall.
“Don’t you just want to not have to think about it all the time?” I ask. My voice sounds sharp, desperate, and I try to laugh but that sounds even worse.
“Yeah, of course,” he says, either not noticing my strange tone or letting it slide on purpose. “All I do every day is try to forget about it.”
This confession surprises me so much that my head jerks around toward him, and away from Maddie.
“Exactly,” I whisper.
“It’s not healthy, I mean,” Alex adds. “I have this therapist—bleh, never mind, you don’t want to hear all this.”
There’s an awful moment when I almost say something right, something like Of course I want to hear it, you can talk to me, but then the words don’t come out. And the moment passes.
And then we’re right next to Maddie and Cory, and she looks over and sees us, and her face—God, her face. I might as well be walking along, holding her heart like an apple, taking a bite, laughing at her.
Cory doesn’t look at me at all. He juts his chin at Alex, holds out his fist for a bump, and says, “Practice?”
“Yep,” Alex says.
“Cool.”
Alex gives me a little smile and peels away with Cory, leaving me there next to my betrayed best friend.
“You really have a thing for other girls’ boyfriends now, huh?” Maddie says.
Okay, so I’m not the only one who noticed the girl on Alex’s social pages. I’m sure Maddie also saw that he hasn’t posted anything new in like ten months, but whatever, I get the dig.
I get that I’m the one who messed up here.
“You know I’m really sorry, Maddie. The whole thing was just this giant misunderstanding—”
Her whole face contorts. And still looks beautiful, radiant. “Yeah, except remember, I’m not stupid. I’m pretty sure I understand what happened.”
“Come on. I’m the one who wanted you guys to get together! Why would I go and mess that up?”
“You didn’t mess it up,” she snaps. “We’re fine. Cory explained, and obviously I already know how you are. I wish you would just look at yourself, though. I mean, you didn’t even like him that much, and you still needed to, what, know that he liked you best? What even is that? I’m sorry, but how pretty do you have to be to not be so insecure all the time?”
The words stick themselves into my skin like splinters, and I know they’ll hurt like hell later. But right now all I can register is her eyes, and how they flash from angry to righteous to—to pitying. To superior.
I need to say something. My heart stutters in my chest, aching at how much I miss the Maddie I had a week ago. Or maybe a summer ago. Any version of Maddie who wouldn’t be like this—who wouldn’t forget everything we promised each other about friendship being more important than boys. The Maddie who would listen to me.
“It was dark, he just started kissing me.” My stomach turns completely over and I’m not sure how to say the rest without vomiting. But before she can interrupt I add, “I’m sure he thought I was you!
”
Her forehead wrinkles. “Seriously? Jesus, Rosie.”
I open my mouth, but nothing else comes out. It was a mistake. Wasn’t it? Or it was Cory trying to hook up with me one last time, and I was too drunk to get him to stop. But I was stopping him—why can’t I just say that?
Because I did flirt with him, didn’t I? I did feel jealous of Maddie and Cory, together.
Maddie takes a shaky breath. “I just can’t believe you lied to me,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “You think I’m so helpless without you, but I’m not.”
I can’t breathe. I want to scream that of course not, of course I know she’s not helpless—of course I didn’t lie—of course I’m the helpless one, the one who doesn’t know how to make this better, the—I don’t know, I—
I can’t get my mouth to move.
“I guess I should’ve known that the only thing that makes you happy, Rosie, is being the girl everyone wants. But everything in the world isn’t actually about you. You’d know that if you knew how to be a friend.”
And then Maddie whips her hair around and walks away.
And I stand there, staring at the ugly orange lockers, wondering how I can still be alive if there’s no air inside me. No life.
She’s right, you know, says that awful voice that’s still stuck in my head.
Yes. I know.
“So it’s this whole thing at halftime, and we’re taking donation bins, and it’s basically huge. I mean, they had record-breaking crowds there last week to see Alex Goode; can you even imagine how much money we’re going to raise if that happens again? It could make such a difference. There’re so many people who don’t even have houses anymore. Not just in Emery Woods, but over in South Omaha? Where all the power is still out? There are help centers and stuff but a lot of them are at schools, so the kids can’t go to classes, and it’s a total mess. So Father Matt said we have to do more, and this is totally going to be so much more. And there’s not a lot we can do at night, so I really want to be there. To help. Okay?”
Lucky Girl Page 11