I sighed wearily. If I expected her to open up to me, I supposed it went both ways.
“Was it just a prank?” she said when I didn’t start talking. “Did you mean to get Joel and his friends in trouble?” Her brow was furrowed in thought as she tried to put herself in my position. Her tone turned slightly hopeful. “Or maybe you thought it would show everyone that you and your friends know how to party and—”
“John Hughes.”
She blinked. “What?”
I crossed my legs in front of me and leaned my elbows on my knees. “Have you ever watched a John Hughes movie?”
She squinted at me like I was a raving lunatic. “Of course.”
“Not of course,” I said defensively. “Not everyone watches his movies.”
She eyed me curiously. “Not every guy.”
I glanced up at the sky in exasperation. “My two best friends are girls. Name a chick flick and I guarantee I’ve seen it. But for the record, John Hughes movies do not fall under that category.”
She pressed her lips together, clearly trying to smother a laugh, and she succeeded. “Okay,” she said, her eyes alight with laughter. “Continue.”
I let out a huff and swallowed my pride. “It wasn’t just John Hughes movies. It was every movie, book, music video…” I waved a hand as I tried to think of another medium and then realized where I was. “Even comics that take place in a high school setting. They gave me…I don’t know…ideas.”
She arched her brows. “Ideas.”
“Yes,” I said defensively. “It gave me ideas of what our high school years were supposed to be like. And that day…actually, for a while before that day…I’d look around and realized my friends and I were going into our senior year, our grand finale, if you will, and we’d never had the whole ‘high school experience.’”
I used air quotes and she let out a little snort of amusement. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shook my head in frustration. Maybe it was asking too much for someone like Julia to understand when my own friends—outcasts in their own right—still didn’t comprehend my reasoning. Heck, I didn’t even really get it myself. It’d been some sort of instinct that had propelled me into action, not common sense.
She put a hand on mine where it rested on my knee and I glanced up in surprise. Her eyes were surprisingly soft, filled with more kindness and empathy than I probably deserved. “You know what? I think I get it.”
I stared at her. “You do?” Then I let out a little laugh. “Then maybe you can explain it to me.”
She laughed softly as she scooted over closer, never letting go of my hand. “You grow up watching these movies about what high school is going to be like and then suddenly you’re a senior and it’s nothing like you thought it would be.”
I met her gaze and grinned, because yeah, she got it. Sort of. “Well, not everyone has the picture-perfect experience,” I said, nudging her with my shoulder. “But some definitely do.”
She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, even when it looks like it’s perfect, it’s probably not.”
I stilled. That was quite possibly the closest she’d come to opening up to me willingly. “So your life isn’t so perfect, then?”
She scoffed. “You were there last week. Would you call that perfect? I’m a freakin’ pariah.”
“That’s only because you were so popular. You know what they say, the higher they rise, the harder they fall…or something like that.”
She nodded. “I guess. It’s not like I wanted to be high.” She wrinkled her nose. “You know what I mean.”
“You’re telling me you weren’t trying to be popular all this time?” My voice was clouded with disbelief. “It was all just some sort of accident that you fit in so very well?”
She drew back a bit and I could practically see the walls coming up. “Not exactly.”
There was a silence for a second and I just knew that if I pushed now she’d clam up again. This was a give and take. A tit for tat, if you will. It was my turn to offer up something, something that no one else knew. I cleared my throat. “I guess part of the reason I did the thing with the photo was because I was pissed that my friends and I hadn’t had those experiences. It felt like we’d been cheated out of them, you know? Like all the popular kids got to have these experiences but we were excluded because we were different.”
She nodded, and I swore I could see the walls dropping as she listened. “That was only part of it?”
“Yeah, I—” I took a breath as I struggled to find the words. “Part of it was because I was just so sick of people thinking that they knew me. That they knew us, me and Suzie and Margo and Howie, and every other person in that school who didn’t necessarily fit in.”
She stayed silent but her eyes had grown thoughtful again.
“It drove me nuts. It still does. I hate how everyone thinks they know us when they don’t even take the time to talk to us. I hate how people just judge people on their clothes or their hair or their afterschool activities.” I let out a long breath. “Okay, yeah. I get how hypocritical I sound right now. I mean, I judged you without knowing you, right?”
She gave me a small smile of acknowledgment as she tilted her head to the side. “You know, I think that’s where we differ.”
I stared at her in incomprehension. “You’re saying you don’t judge?”
She shook her head quickly. “No, no. I’m sure I do. I think that’s just human nature, right? We can try not to have preconceived notions or buy into stereotypes, but it’s not that easy to undo years and years’ worth of ingrained beliefs.”
I nodded. “So then, what do you mean that’s where we differ?”
She shifted and looked away and for a second I thought she might retreat. But then she licked her lips and met my gaze. “You hate that people don’t really know you, and I love it.”
I had no idea what to say to that so I kept quiet. She hurried to fill the silence. “I mean, I don’t love it, not all the time, at least. But I do like having control over how other people see me. I like being in control of what people see.” She shrugged helplessly and I knew this was the first time she’d ever tried putting this into words. She let out a little huff of frustration. “It’s what I’ve built for myself, you know? An image.”
“You definitely have an image,” I agreed.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you making fun of me?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Just…trying to understand.”
She bit her lower lip and I figured that meant she was done talking about that. It came a as a shock to me, and maybe even to her when she blurted out, “You want to know why I got into comics?”
“Yes,” I said it quickly and with way more eagerness than such a simple question warranted. But man, I really did want to know. I wanted to know everything about this girl. I wanted to be the one who got past the image and the carefully crafted façade she’d built for herself. More than that, I wanted to know why she’d built it and I just knew we were getting close. I shifted closer. “How did you get into comics, Jules?”
She gave me a little smile at my use of the nickname that only her comics friends called her—to my knowledge, at least. “Thea got me into them, but the reason I loved them was because they were this escape.”
I kept quiet, waiting for her to talk. She looked over my shoulder, clearly lost in her memories. “The summer I met Thea, my mom had a miscarriage.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
She shot me a small smile. “Honestly, I hadn’t even known she was pregnant. I didn’t even really know what a miscarriage meant. But I did know that my mom was crying all the time. And my dad was more stressed than usual.”
I nodded, waiting for her to continue.
“My mom always said that perception is key and during that time I realized what she meant. While she cried her eyes out at home, she kept going about her day job and her duties as the pastor’s wife with a smile on her face.”
&
nbsp; She glanced over at me and her look was tentative…almost afraid.
I still kept quiet but I was on edge. One wrong move, the wrong response—she’d bolt.
“Anyway, I did the same thing.” She licked her lips and took a deep breath. “Cara was being mean to me at school and my house was an emotional landmine but I followed my parents’ example and smiled my way through it. It was the craziest thing—” She turned to face me, a flicker of amazement in her eyes as if she was realizing it all over again. “People fell for it.”
I found myself smiling at her amazement even though her words made me ache on her behalf. “No offense, Jules, but that’s…kind of a sad story.”
She surprised me by laughing. “It does sound pretty sad, huh?” She shook her head. “I’ve never told anyone all that before.”
I nudged her elbow, relieved that she wasn’t running away from me when that was clearly her instinct in the face of honest emotions. “So,” I said slowly. “You never did tell me how that led to your obsession with comics.”
She shrugged as if it was obvious. “Thea introduced me to comics that same summer and it was this amazing escape. For me, the mix of visuals along with the narration—it just clicked for me in a way that television and novels never had and never would.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.”
She toyed with the tinfoil that had been holding her hot dog, folding it neatly into little squares. “I loved them, and when I got to school I realized that most people I knew didn’t...” She turned to me and I caught a hint of pleading in her eyes, like she was begging me to understand.
I tried to put myself in her position, the burgeoning Miss Popularity of Grover middle school. “So you were embarrassed to admit that you liked something that was different?” I guessed.
She shook her head with a sigh of exasperation. “No, that wasn’t it at all. I wasn’t embarrassed by my love of comics then and I’m definitely not embarrassed by it now.” She turned to me with a fierce frown. “Graphic novels are an underrated but totally valid art form and—”
“Hey, you do not need to convince me,” I said, my hands up in defense.
She backed off a bit and looked up to the sky as she exhaled. “I wasn’t embarrassed, I just realized that it was my secret. I had something that was totally mine.” She met my eyes. “So you see, that’s what I meant when I said I liked that people didn’t know me.” She licked her lips and turned her gaze to that folded tinfoil in her lap. “I spend a lot of time and energy being the person that everyone wants me to be, but the only way I can do that is if I have something that’s mine.” She met my gaze. “Something that’s real. It keeps me…” She shrugged as she searched for the word.
“Grounded?” I said.
She grinned and I felt like I’d just won the Olympics. “Yeah, that’s exactly it. They make me feel grounded. Like I know who I am when I’m reading them because my love for them, for this—” She gestured around us to the comic-con at large. “It’s only for me. It’s not for anyone else.”
I nodded slowly as I took in what she was saying. “Yeah, I guess I get that.”
“You do?” She looked so hopeful, so freakin’ sweet. I couldn’t stop myself from kissing her if I’d tried.
“Yeah,” I said as I buried a hand in her hair and kissed her lips softly. “I do.”
When I pulled back, she sighed. “That was nice.”
I smiled at the sheer honesty of the moment. For right now, it was just me and Julia, kissing on a rooftop, and nobody was trying to be anything they weren’t. For right now, life was perfect.
But then what? The voice popped up out of nowhere and it wouldn’t be ignored. What would happen when we returned to real life?
As if on cue, Julia’s phone dinged where it sat between us. She glanced over at it with a frown.
“Do you need to get that?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s Taylor.”
Ah. Taylor of the cheer squad, formerly known as the Julia Farrow fan club. But that was before, obviously. However, when in the history of high school had anything ever really changed?
She wasn’t quite avoiding eye contact but her gaze kept flickering over to her phone.
“You can look at your phone,” I finally said. “I won’t be offended.”
She gave me a little smile but she shook her head. “No, I don’t want to think about any of that. Not while I’m here and having so much fun.”
I nodded but it took everything in me not to point out that we couldn’t stay here forever. The convention ended tomorrow and we’d be back at school on Monday. At some point she’d have to figure out how she was going to handle reality.
And I was going to have to deal with what that meant for me.
I wasn’t deluded enough to believe that one weekend together meant that we’d go back to Grover High and everything would be different. Scandal or no scandal, Julia Farrow was still Julia Farrow.
And I was still me. The nerdiest of the nerds. A proud outlier who never attended football games, let alone played in one. I had no use for sports and trust me when I said athletics had no love for me. But I had mad skills when it came to writing, and that would take me further in the long run.
Taylor’s text officially ended the moment and I think we both knew it. I was pretty sure we were both thinking about reality and what school would bring on Monday, even if neither of us was admitting to it.
We made our way back to the convention center but before we walked through the glass doors, Julia turned to face me. “Thank you,” she said. “For…that.” She waved toward the rooftop patio where we’d had our impromptu, chilly lunch date. She bit her lip as she reached for my hand. “It’s not always easy for me to let people in. I think sometimes that I’ve forgotten how…”
I tugged on her hand until she was firmly in my arms. “Thank you,” I said. “I feel honored to be one of the chosen few.”
She laughed at my melodramatic turn of phrase but I cut her off with a kiss…because I hadn’t been joking. I did feel honored.
I had no idea what real life had in store for us on Monday, but I wouldn’t have given this up for anything.
Chapter Twelve
Julia
The ball that night was everything the Valentine’s Day dance should have been but wasn’t. By that I mean, it was insanely romantic. Or at least, it started off that way.
No one really dressed up for the ball, it was just called that because—well, because we were a bunch of geeks. I wore a simple black dress and answered the door on the first knock.
Matt was wearing the same suit from the night before but with a button-down shirt and without the slicked hair.
He looked hot. And sexy. And every other word that none of my friends from Grover High would ever have thought to use to describe Matt Cartwright.
But then again, they’d never seen him in a suit. They’d also never seen him smiling—not this sexy, adorable grin.
Maybe they’d never seen him at all.
That thought took me back for a moment and I blinked up at him. I’d been so sure that Matt was the judgmental one here, but maybe I was no different.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
I gasped with delight when he pulled a bouquet of roses from behind his back. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Are you ready?”
“Let me just grab a purse.” I met him in the hallway and took his proffered arm as we walked to the elevator.
“Who knew you were such a gentleman?” I teased.
He shook his head. “Not me, that’s for sure.” He leaned over and lowered his voice. “Don’t tell Margo and Suzie.”
I laughed and was rewarded with a grin that made my heart leap. We met up with Thea and my friends in the lobby and when we entered the ballroom, it felt almost impossibly like a high school dance—probably because the only people who typically came to this all-ages party were the people who weren’t old enough to go to the twenty-one and o
ver parties. But I didn’t care—I didn’t come to these events to drink, I came to dance and hang out with my friends.
And that was precisely what we did. I think Matt got the fact that my time with Thea and Marnie and the others was precious—I rarely got to see them throughout the year—and he was supremely cool about us doing the group hang thing.
In a way it was a relief. I was still raw after that heart-to-heart this afternoon, not to mention the fact that I felt like I was holding something back. I mean, he probably wouldn’t care all that much about the gossip back home, right?
Still, I’d eventually checked Taylor’s text and it was all about how much of a power trip Cara was on, how she was more insufferable now than ever.
The subtext? They wanted me back.
I couldn’t say I hadn’t seen this coming. I might have been good about smiling my way through the politics of high school cliques and rivalries, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. Of course I was. Maybe I ought to have been pursuing a degree in politics when I went off to college rather than my planned English Lit degree. I understood politics, and after years of practice, I could maneuver the social minefield at Grover High in my sleep.
So yeah, I’d seen this coming. The reason Cara and I worked as friends—or frenemies, rather—was because we balanced one another out in a weird sort of way. I was the nice one, she was the witch. She kept the others from trying to take the alpha spot and I kept everyone appeased.
Did that sound callous? I supposed it was. But that was the way the world worked, to pretend otherwise was naïve.
Did I think everything would be peachy keen when I got home? No. But did I think I could reclaim my position within my circle of friends if I wanted it?
No doubt.
That wasn’t cockiness speaking, just confidence. One didn’t spend a lifetime cultivating an image for nothing, right? If I’d gone and overreacted before leaving town—if I’d burst into tears or gotten into a fight with Cara, then this whole thing would be blown even further out of proportion. But I’d kept my chin up and my smile in place. My guess was, the girls in our group were already missing my presence, and the guys? Well, they’d go along with what their girlfriends told them.
Once Upon a Comic-Con: Geeks Gone Wild #3 Page 10