“Everything okay?” Mom asks when I come trudging into the kitchen. I know I probably look like a mess. I haven’t washed my hair since Friday, and I didn’t even bother trying to find my makeup bag this morning.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You sure? You’ve been really quiet.” She puts her hands on her hips and peers at me, the way she does when she knows I’m not telling the whole truth. I’m surprised she even noticed. She and my dad have been locked in his study whispering for most of the weekend.
I perk my voice up and give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” My dad is sitting at the kitchen counter, and he taps his cheek with his index finger. I go over to him, and he pulls me into a hug. “Knock ’em dead, cookie,” he whispers to me. There’s no reason for him to say that today, but I’m not surprised. He has always known when something’s not right, and how to make it better. And today, more than anything, I wish I could go back to being a little kid, when my dad calling me “cookie” could turn back time and erase anything that was wrong. Instead I put on a smile, steal a sip of my dad’s coffee, and head out to Charlie’s honking car.
Olivia is in the back, her arms looped around the front seat. Twice in a week. We’ve definitely hit a new record.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry I’m late.” I slip in and click my seat belt into place. Maybe if I act normal, the world will play along.
“How are you?” Charlie asks. She’s turned to me wearing this grave expression, her features all set in a row. I expected her to be pissy about my being nonresponsive all weekend, or at least about my being late this morning, but if she is, she’s not acting like it.
“Um, fine. Are we going?”
Charlie glances back at Olivia.
“He’s an asshole,” Olivia says.
“She’s a traitor,” Charlie says.
I shrug. “It’s fine.”
“It is not fine,” Charlie says. She has that tone she uses with Jake when they’re about to get into a fight. I suddenly have the intense desire to bolt from this car. To run back into my house, curl up under my covers, and just never come out.
“It’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything,” I say.
“What?” Olivia interjects. “That’s so unfair.”
“It’s true,” I say. “We weren’ttogethertogether. And she was his date and all.…” My voice trails off, and I look out the window. We’re rolling out of my driveway. In the rearview mirror I can see my parents in our doorway. My dad is reaching up to the light fixture on the porch, and my mom has a hand on his back, holding him up for balance. I purposefully keep my eyes trained on my house as we pull away. I don’t look to the left, to Rob’s.
“I mean, I thought she was awful for asking to go with him,” Olivia says, “but this is too much.Kissinghim? She’s your cousin.”
They kissed?
“We’re aware,” Charlie says. I can feel her glance at me, but I keep my eye trained on the passing trees. Of course they kissed. They were practically glued together when we left. But the thought of his lips on hers makes me feel like someone is trying to suck my stomach out through my belly button and shove the whole thing back down my throat.
“It’s fine,” I force myself to say. “Honestly.”
None of us says much more after that. We drive in silence, aside from the music that creeps steadily from the stereo. Something low and dull that I don’t recognize.
When Charlie broke up with Matt, her sophomore-year boyfriend and the first guy she slept with, it was bad. She listened to crappy R&B love songs on repeat for, like, a week. And she didn’t even love him, I don’t think. Once, she said she liked that he wanted to be a doctor, but that was the only time she talked about anything besides the way he looked in a sweater.
The truth is that I feel humiliated and betrayed. How could Rob have been standing there, holding her, when just a few nights ago he was holding me? The entire school saw them together, dancing and kissing, and now I’m what? Yesterday’s hookup? The idiot who believed her best friend wanted to be her boyfriend? And who trusted that her cousin wanted to be a friend, rather than a backstabber?
When we get to upper, I try hard not to look for Rob’s car. I don’t want to see him. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll either fall apart, beg him to change his mind, or say something that will cut him out of my life forever. I want him gone, but I also want him here. That’s the worst part. The fact that I want him to make this better. That Ineedhim to make this better. He’s the only one who can fix it. Whenever there’s a problem, Rob’s the one that handles it. I need him to handle this, too. For him to call himself a jerk,maybe even punch himself in the face, and then bring himself back to me.
Olivia makes a move to head over to Ben, who has driven her car and is now waiting for her, but Charlie grabs her by herMIAMIbook bag, and the three of us make our way down to assembly with Ben trailing behind.
But we’re late, of course, because of me, which means assembly has already started and there is no way for us to get to senior seats. We actually have to stand in the Trenches. We’ve never stood here, not once, and all of the things that are wrong with this day sort of congeal into the fact that I don’t have a seat. That I’ve been kicked out of my whole life.
I see Rob in his usual spot on the far side, and my stomach flips so badly, I think I’m going to be sick. I hate myself for still thinking he looks perfect. Jeans and a green T-shirt, the one with the tree on it that I love, and for a second I think maybe he wore it for me, that when he was picking out his clothes this morning he saw it and thought of me. That he wanted to be wearing it when he tells me Friday night was a mistake, that he was only humoring Juliet, and where did I disappear to after we danced.
But then I know that is never going to happen, because sitting next to him, in a black skirt and pink candy–colored tank top, is Juliet.
Charlie puts her arm over my shoulder. Olivia stands on the other side, arms crossed, Ben behind her. They’re flanking me, like human pieces of armor.
