I shook my head. “It’s not that easy, Spencer! I can’t even look at Ms. Bee, never mind everyone else at school. I actually had to hear Ms. Bee in the bathroom, saying the most awful things about me. And they were true, Spencer. They were all true.”
“They are not, and you know it. Quit feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I do feel sorry for myself! I’m mortified. You were right, okay? I built myself up to this impossible standard and I failed. I failed miserably.”
“That’s fine, so long as it’s your judgment and not someone else’s.”
“All right. I’ll just magically forget that the entire school thinks I’m a hypocritical slut and answer to myself. Hmm. Let’s see. I’ve messed everything up with Connor. With Autumn. With Ms. Bee. With you.” Even though I was trying to be sarcastic, tears filled my eyes.
“So that’s the problem? Not the sex.”
I had to think about it for a second. Sure, the reality that everyone at Ross Academy was judging what I’d done with Connor felt awful. But that wasn’t what made my heart break. “No. It’s not the sex.” I sighed. “It’s that I’ve hurt the people I love. I’ve let everyone down.”
Spencer took back my resignation letter and ripped it in half. “I won’t let you give up on something I know you still care about.”
I took a deep breath to say something, but stopped. In fact, in that moment, I stopped everything. I stopped thinking about what the rest of the school thought. I stopped worrying about making Ms. Bee proud. I stopped thinking about Mike Domski’s taunts and the look on my parents’ faces as they trusted me. I turned off all that noise to ask myself one simple question:
What really matters here?
And it’s by asking the question that I found the answer.
CHAPTER FORTY
I ran outside, hoping Autumn hadn’t left school yet. I found her in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her car with Marci and a bunch of other girls. They had the windows unrolled so they could hear her radio. She was happy, smiling.
I tried to be brave and put one foot in front of the other. It was like I was walking into a thick, heavy wind. Each step was labor. Everyone saw me approach. They got quiet and watched me struggle.
I stopped feet from the bumper. The headlights were on, and I squinted into the spotlight. The winter wind whipped my hair into my mouth when I opened it. I coughed, and the squeeze it put over my body didn’t let go. I couldn’t breathe, like the icy air was freezing me from the inside out.
“Natalie,” Autumn said, springing to her feet. I heard the worry in her voice. She still cared for me, not that I deserved it. It felt like a dream, one too good for the nightmare life I’d been living. It was cruel, to have a moment of what our friendship once had been. A reminder of what I’d royally screwed up. I cried, because I didn’t want to wake up.
Autumn didn’t say good-bye to her friends. Or maybe she did, and I couldn’t hear her over my sobbing. She put me in her car, and I watched them walk off in another direction. “I’m taking you home,” Autumn announced, and climbed in the other side.
I cried the whole way.
Autumn helped me out of the car and walked me up the driveway. I leaned on her with all my weight, because I couldn’t hold myself up. I mustered enough breath to say, “This is turning out to be a terrible apology,” while Autumn found the spare key to our back door.
“It’s okay,” Autumn said. And the miracle was: As soon as she said it, things felt okay. Like I was getting where I needed to be.
When I’d run out of tears, Autumn and I sat on opposite ends of my bed, like it was a scale or a seesaw. I was still mustering up exactly what to say to her when she dropped a stone on my side.
“You never forgave me for what happened with Chad.”
It wasn’t so much the biting accusation of someone scorned as much as it was delivered in the calculated speak of a lawyer. An indisputable fact.
“I know,” I said. “I was mad at you for getting hurt. I shouldn’t have blamed you. It wasn’t your fault.”
Her bottom lip started to quiver. She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. “When I went to see Chad that day in the locker room, there was this little voice in my head, telling me not to go. But I didn’t listen to it. And that wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, either. There were other times. Lots of other times. I can’t explain it, but I think I knew deep down that Chad was no good. But I was too caught up in everything, how the fact that a boy liked me made me feel, that I thought I was in love with him.”
“But Autumn, you couldn’t have known that—”
“I’ve thought about this a million times. If I only would have listened to that voice, maybe none of that stuff would have happened to me. It was a lot of guilt to carry, on top of everything else. So I made a promise to myself that if I ever heard it again, I wouldn’t shut it off. I think that’s part of why I freaked out on you. Because that voice finally came back to me and told me that I was better than Fish Sticks. That I shouldn’t hold myself back anymore. That I wasn’t a bad person. And you were making me feel like a bad person, Natalie, when I was really just a girl who’d made a stupid mistake.”
I nodded. “And I used that to keep you close to me. I had no other friends—and that’s not your fault. It was mine. I’ve never been good at opening up to people.”
“I know. Which makes what happened even more weird.” She sighed. “I’m not saying this to be mean, but…I can’t believe you had sex with Connor Hughes.”
I thought about Connor and his last words to me. How I could spin things any way I’d wanted. I could never understand how he always seemed sure of himself. But now I did. It was because Connor really did know what kind of person he was. He had no regrets because he always shot from his heart. He was the total opposite of someone like Chad Rivington. Or me.
“I wanted to,” I told Autumn. It was the naked truth.
“Well, you’re a smart girl, and I trust that you’re going to make the right decisions for yourself.”
“Yeah, because I’m the queen of right decisions.”
Autumn took my hand. “You see, the best thing about wrong decisions is that they don’t prevent you from making the right decisions later on. It’s harder, but it’s not impossible.”
Time had taught her. And now she was teaching me.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Did I regret having sex with Connor? A little. But it wasn’t close to the earth-shattering regret I’d expected to feel. If anything, I regretted screwing up a beautiful moment because I was too messed up to see it as a good thing we’d done together, to see it as something shared by two people who really cared about each other.
The snow was falling steadily as I drove to Connor’s house, tiny flakes like confetti. My windshield wipers swished across the glass like a metronome.
There was traffic all the way up the driveway. A man with a flashlight directed cars to a parking lot. Mostly minivans or SUVs, full of kids with knitted hats and scarves.
The Christmas tree farm was crawling with people. The parking guy directing cars, young girls dressed as elves, burly men with saws. The gift shop had Christmas music playing inside and a table set up outside where you could buy hot chocolate or hot apple cider to keep warm. There was even a reindeer in an enclosure that kids were feeding pellets.
Families waited for their turn to walk through the trees. I saw Connor leading a family of four through the snow. He only had on a thermal and a ski hat. I was wrapped up in my down parka and wondered how he wasn’t freezing, until I saw one of the young boys pick out a tree. Connor grabbed his saw, dropped to his knees, and started to cut it down. He was there on the ground, working so hard. I watched as his muscles flexed. The tree fell against the snow and made the most wonderful sound. The family cheered. Connor tied some twine around the trunk and dragged it back through the snow for them.
He saw me then. I hoped he would come right over, but he looked away and kept dealing wit
h the family.
He was not going to make this easy on me.
I walked over. “Can I please talk to you?” I asked.
“I can’t right now, Sterling.”
“Connor. Please.”
He heard it in my voice, I’m sure. The pain.
“All right,” he said.
He walked us over to the cider table, where his mother sat.
“Mom,” he said, “I’m going to take a quick break.”
She looked me over. I couldn’t tell if she had recognized me from Thanksgiving morning. But she fixed me a cup of cider and Connor a cup of cocoa, a dollop of freshly made whipped cream on top.
Connor and I walked, our collective silence sad, layered over the sounds of families, of trees falling, of holiday music tinkling far away. The moon sat low in the sky, giving off barely enough light to see.
We didn’t go to the shed. We didn’t go to the house. We stayed in the woods, and I told him what I needed to tell him, unsure if it was what he needed to hear.
“I want to apologize for how I acted,” I said. “I was afraid to get involved with you. I didn’t want to admit that I liked you. I was afraid of how it would make me look.”
“I can’t be with someone who doesn’t accept me for who I am.”
“You have to understand, I’m new at this. And we both did things wrong. We got involved before we knew each other. I mean, I thought I knew you. But I didn’t. Not really.”
I tried to take his hand, only he wouldn’t let me. He was shivering now, the cold setting in. “Do you regret what we did?” he asked. “Because that’s been the worst part of this. Thinking you might hate me over what happened. I went through something like that once, with Bridget Roma. And it was terrible.” His voice caught in his throat, and he tipped his head down. I saw tears in his eyes.
“Connor, that’s not even close to what happened with us.”
Even though I put every ounce of earnestness I could muster into my words, Connor still seemed uncertain. And he wasn’t looking at me. He was focused on the footprints we’d left in the snow. “So where does that leave us now?” he asked.
“I want you to come to my portrait ceremony. As my date.”
He didn’t look up. “Really?”
“Really.”
This time when I tried to take his hand, he let me. We stood like that, and for a brief moment, we were the center of the world.
I heard his mom calling for him, and he heard it, too.
“Go,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Go. I’ll call you later.”
It felt so easy, and even though it wouldn’t always be, we were at least going to try.
I didn’t leave right away. I stayed in the woods. I heard the faint voices of other people. I felt the cold against my skin. But mostly, I was aware of my own breathing, my own thoughts, my own past, present, and future.
I realized then, and would have to keep realizing in all the years to come:
It didn’t matter if I was the kind of girl who had sex, or the kind of girl who had her portrait on a wall in the library, or the kind of girl who got into the best college, or the kind of girl who didn’t tell her parents everything, or the kind of girl who teachers loved.
I just needed to be okay with all the kinds of girl I was.
EPILOGUE
The library looked beautiful. Spencer had taken the lead and made herself the head of the decorating committee. She bought a nice tablecloth, cut cheese in perfect little squares, had the sparkling apple cider on ice. It was incredibly sweet, how proud she was of me. Like a little sister.
Everyone from student council showed up. My parents, Principal Hurley. I still caught some people whispering, but it didn’t matter.
I found Connor near the portrait wall. He was alone now, but earlier he’d been animatedly discussing fantasy football picks with Martin and David and Dipak. It was nice to see, because things had definitely been strained within Connor’s circle of friends. Those guys all still hung out together, playing Ping-Pong during lunch and drinking over at Bobby Doyle’s house. But Connor hadn’t talked to Mike since we decided to work things out. Mike hadn’t talked to him, either.
I wasn’t sure they’d ever speak again.
I had to believe their friendship would have ended eventually. Anyway, that’s what Connor told me whenever I brought Mike up. Maybe Connor said it to make me feel better, or maybe he honestly believed it. But I learned that there had been other fights, other arguments before me. Just never any this big.
As much as I hated Mike, and would never forgive him for what he did to me and to my friends, I still felt the weight of a friendship ending because of the secrets I’d tried to keep. But Connor seemed at peace with how everything had played out. Ultimately, I needed to trust that Connor would do what was best for him. And he paid me the same courtesy, knowing I’d be hearing from colleges in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, though, we simply loved each other.
“You look beautiful,” Connor said, staring up at my portrait. He leaned in close and whispered, “And you can’t see the hickey at all.”
“Natalie? Could you come with me for a minute?” Ms. Bee appeared next to us, hands clasped in front of her.
I kissed him on the cheek, in front of everyone. “Be right back,” I said.
Ms. Bee and I walked to the opposite side of the room without speaking.
It was hard for me to accept, how different our relationship suddenly was. After all, Ms. Bee wasn’t my mother. She had no business forming an opinion on what I did or did not do in my personal life.
She’d handed me my college recommendation letter a week earlier. It was in a sealed envelope, as was standard practice. I worried for a second that Ms. Bee might have written something nasty about me. I think she must have seen it on my face, because she said, “Any college will be lucky to have you.”
I knew she was still disappointed in me. And maybe it wasn’t over Connor at all, but the way I’d been acting. Irresponsible. Flaky.
But all that had changed, now that Connor and I were out in the open. I was back on my game, and Ms. Bee would eventually have to notice.
Three older women stood near the shelf that held Ross Academy’s old yearbooks. They had a bunch of them spread open on the table, poring over the pictures. Each of the ladies had name tags stuck to their dresses, but instead of names, they went by numbers.
Ms. Bee guided me forward. “May I present Natalie Sterling, number nine.”
“Aren’t you beautiful,” number six said.
“We’re so proud,” number five said.
“Congratulations,” number seven said.
I smiled my best smile. “Thank you so much for coming. I’m really honored.”
“Are you kidding? This is so much fun for us old biddies.” Number five squeezed my hand. “Getting to remember all the trouble we used to cause.”
“None more so than number four right here,” number seven said, pointing at Ms. Bee.
I’d never seen Ms. Bee blush before. Heck, I’d never seen Ms. Bee look anything other than perfectly poised. It was a huge relief.
Spencer flitted by with a bag of trash, collecting dirty napkins and empty cups. I grabbed her by the arm. “I want to introduce you all to Spencer Biddle, one of our freshmen representatives this year. I have no doubt that three years from now, her portrait will be up on the wall, too.”
Spencer grinned. “You can call me Perfect Ten.”
Ms. Bee almost choked.
Autumn came up and twirled me around. “I’m so proud of my best friend.”
“Me too,” I said. And we hugged each other as tightly as we could.
Of all the things to feel happy about, I was happiest that Autumn and I were friends again. No matter what the future held—new friends, new boyfriends, new directions—I knew we’d be in each other’s lives forever. Change wasn’t something to fear anymore. And even though my picture was o
n the wall, I didn’t care so much about how I’d be remembered. So long as I never forgot.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Not That Kind of Girl Page 19