100 Days of Cake (3 page)

Finally T.J. asked why I was so mopey, but it wasn't like anything was actually wrong, and when I told him that, his face scrunched up into this fake sympathetic look like he'd stepped in dog crap. So I never said anything again, but I started to dread seeing him and having to pretend I was this ray of sunshine, when in reality it didn't even feel like I was there. It was like I was floating above, watching this undeserving girl with blue-green eyes and mouse-poop hair holding hands with Captain America dude, and French-kissing him at the end of the night. Then I'd go inside to my model-home bedroom and cry. Pathetic.

And then, the day before the divisionals meet, T.J. drove me home after practice, pulled into my driveway, turned off the ignition, and sighed. “You're a great girl, Molly,” he began. “You're just kind of different from what I thought before I got to know you.”

Oddly, out of all the appropriate times to start bawling, I didn't—I actually felt sort of relieved. But then when I
saw him the next day at divisionals talking to this blond junior, something inside me just broke . . . which led to my infamous freak-out at the start of the freestyle relay. For the entire rest of the school year I managed to avoid him—which is pretty impressive, since our school has only seven hundred people total—and then he was off to Florida State.

But I guess he's back now, and apparently he's also BFFs with bloody Chris Partridge! WTF!

“What's up?” I hear myself asking him.

“Well, FSU is awesome.” T.J. gestures to Chris's older brother, who I hadn't noticed before. “I pledged Kappa Sig with Robbie.”

“You guys make good punch.” I hold up my glass.

“Thanks. How 'bout you, Mol?” He tilts his head a little like he's trying to be extra sincere, the stuff that annoyed the crap out of me when we were dating. “This year go okay?”

The panic is circling in my throat.

“Yeah, it was peachy.”

I need to get out of here.

I can't have Alex come here and see this. See me. Can't let these people tell him that I'm not this really cool girl he works with. That the real me is a girl who randomly cries in the bathroom between classes. A girl who got hysterical on the starting block before the freestyle relay and ran away, disqualifying the team from the race and ruining the divisionals meet for everyone.

“Look, for a while now I've wanted to say something about what—”

“No, it's all good.” I cut him off before he can say any of this out loud. “Actually, I gotta hop. Great seeing you.”

Then I'm hurrying away, back into the house, the golden retriever following after.

I try to text Elle that T.J. is here and I have to leave. But I'm so screwed up that I fat-finger half the letters, and it's auto-corrected to:
The hart O gave to hp.

What?
Elle writes back.

Where r u? Have to leaf.

To what?

TJ HERE!!! Meet me at car.

OK

I'm nearly at the front door, but the dog is still following me, so I try gently pushing his face back, indicating that he should stay, but he just licks my arm. I try throwing an imaginary ball into the living room, but he's clearly on to me.

Ugh. I
need
to leave; already I can feel tears in the corners of my eyes. I can't be that girl, not again.

In the kitchen someone opens the refrigerator, and Lassie immediately loses interest in me and trots off. I make a run for the door, but my phone dings. I look down to read it and smack into a sheet of shiny dark hair smelling of lilacs . . . my sister.

Veronica is two years behind me at CCH, but she's with a group of older girls she works with at Jaclyn's Attic, a trendy boutique in the “revitalized” downtown. Some of the girls I vaguely know from school; the others must go to Maxwell with Alex. They all have perfectly applied eye makeup and smudge-proof lips. All of them are pretty in sundresses or designer shorts and tops that show off shapely shoulders. But even among the gorgeous girls, my sister is the standout.

V got the good genes from Mom—the razor-sharp cheekbones and gravity-defying boobs, the legs that go all the way up.

“Molly?” she asks, part terror, part straight-up confusion. “Why are you here?”

“Great to see you, too, V.”

“No, I mean, I thought you didn't do stuff like this anymore. Go to parties?”

“I don't.” I nod. “I'm leaving.”

Glancing down, I see a text from Alex:
Heading over now
.

I
need
to get out of here.

“Wait. Why don't you just stay?” V grabs my arm and holds it. She sounds like she might actually mean it, even if her friends are giving these WTF? looks. “We'll, like, bond or something.”

Just a few years ago we were super-close. But things have been weird since ADF. Since she started in high school too.

Another text. Not from Alex but Elle:
Finishing up here; there in a few.

“I gotta go. I'll see you at home.”

“Yeah, okay.” V lets me go, and I practically run to the door.

Behind me I hear one of the Jaclyn's girls snarl, “What was that all about?”

Closing my eyes, I try not to let it bother me too much. My shrink—Dr. B.—says that sometimes it helps just to take a couple of deep breaths, but it was like breathing through clam chowder. So I do.

How is it still so freaking hot out?

When Elle gets to the Jeep, she doesn't even object when I crank up the AC knob as soon as I climb in.

“Sorry I made you go,” Elle says. “I had no idea T.J. would be there.”

I shake my head and try the breathing thing again.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

The answer is probably no. I want to scream or cry or go to bed for a week. But it's almost worse to be honest and have people—even people like Elle, who's been my best friend for longer than our parents were married—look at me like I'm broken. So I try to rein it all in.

“Yeah, that was fun,” I say flatly. “We should definitely go to more parties.”

When Elle drops me off and I make it upstairs to my room, all I want to do is fall into the huge sleigh bed and
pass out, but there's a piece of horribly dilapidated blue-and-red-stained cake on a plate by my nightstand, along with a note in Mom's chunky handwriting.

Hope you had a great time tonight! Figured I'd leave this for you in case you're hungry. I have a good feeling about this one!

—Mom

Bunching the note into a ball, I hurl it across the room and miss the garbage can by at least a foot.

A
fter seeing T.J. last night, and all the weird confusion over being
Alex's Molly
, I want to never leave the house again. But if I stay home, Mom will ask a million questions about everything, and that will just make it all so much worse. Plus, I have an appointment with Dr. B. in the afternoon, and I always look forward to those.

Without incident, I manage to get out of bed, throw on clothes, and bike to the store in the oppressive heat. Since I'm free to work days now that school's out, I'm supposed to handle the swing shift today—half with Alex in the evening and half with JoJo Banks in the early afternoon.

During the school year JoJo opens the place and is gone by the time I get there, so she's just initials on the schedule to me. Based on the name, I thought she'd be some gray-haired soft woman like my grandma, but it turns out she's
maybe four or five years older than me with a streaky orange tan. Who fake-bakes when you live in Florida and it's a thousand degrees out?

Strike one against JoJo is that she has Maury Povich's show blaring on the TV so loud, I can hear it outside the store.

The little bell on the door dings when I come in, and she briefly looks up at me.

“Molly?” she asks.

“Yep.”

“Cool. I already checked the tanks,” she says, then turns back to some guy on
Maury
doing a “You're Not the Father” dance.

Strike two is that she gets vocally angry when the next guy insists he isn't the baby daddy, despite the paternity test results.

“Why can't these A-hats man up?” she yells. “That's your child!”

It doesn't seem like she's talking to me, so I don't feel any pressing need to respond. On the back of someone's discarded receipt, I sketch Maury, making his hair extra crazy. Art class was always my favorite before I dropped all my electives.

A commercial comes on the screen for some antidepressant. There's an attractive thirtysomething blond woman sitting in a rocking chair in a dark room, watching through the window as her attractive husband, attractive kids, and equally attractive dog are having the time of their lives
playing catch outside in the yard. As the announcer is reading off the laundry list of side effects—dizziness, drowsiness or tired feeling, upset stomach, dry mouth, changes in appetite, constipation—the woman heads outside, a little hesitantly, and starts playing with her family.

It's a different med than the one I'm on, and it seems to be working much more effectively for the Attractives than mine does for me.

I study my Maury sketch and hope JoJo doesn't have any commentary on the commercial, too.

“You go to CCH?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“I'm class of 2011,” she says.

“I just missed you,” I say, hoping to avoid that awkward conversation where we try to figure out if we have friends in common. She doesn't know Elle, and I hardly talk to anyone else anymore.

“Demarco still teaching geometry?”

“I think so.”

A look of righteous indignation falls across her face. “That A-hat sent me to detention at least once a week. For piddly shit too, like chewing gum.”

“Sucks.” I try to sound sympathetic. “I had Swinton; he was okay.”

“Lucky.” She turns back to the TV, where The
Jerry
Springer Show
is starting. Apparently today's episode features
a woman who wants to marry her husband's grandfather. I take a lap through the aisles to double-check the tanks in case she may have missed something. I even contemplate digging out the broom and sweeping.

I took the job here because Chuck thinks minimum wage is two bucks higher than it is, and that's what he's paying. But the fish really
are
beautiful. All the bright colors of the mandarin fish and the parrot fish, and the crazy shape of the nudibranch, the way that the tasseled angelfish can disappear in its surroundings. I totally get why people (well, not people in Coral Cove, who couldn't care less that we're here, but people in general) might get a tank to try to calm themselves down.

“Yo, CCH,” JoJo calls from the front. “I'm grabbing lunch from Wang's. You want in?”

All strikes against JoJo are erased. Any fan of Wang's Palace (yes, that is the actual name) is my sister from another mister.

Wang's opened a few months ago. It's this confused mishmash of different Asian cuisines—Chinese, Thai, Japanese—run by a family originally from Brazil. Inside it's decorated with black-and-white head shots of celebrities, like some of those famous places in LA and Manhattan, only none of those celebrities have ever actually set foot inside. (Not counting Jim and Joe Johnson from J&J Plumbing, the only famous person from Coral Cove is the guy who played the killer in the
Murder Island
movie. He hasn't been back
in years, despite numerous city council efforts to have him as the grand marshal in the Founder's Day Parade.)

Despite all that sketch, Wang's is actually crazy delicious, and their house special lo mein is clearly made up of whatever food in their kitchen is about to go bad. Sometimes it's beef and roast pork, sometimes it's unidentifiable seafood and veggies. Once it was broccoli rabe, a vaguely Mexican sausage, and cashews.
That
was a good day.

When JoJo comes back with the steamy clamshell containers, it looks like today is an indistinguishable protein—maybe duck?—and water chestnuts. JoJo and I eat behind the counter, and she gets worked into a lather about a “surprise proposals”
Jerry
episode, where men pop the question to girls they aren't even dating, with mixed results.

Her cell phone rings, and JoJo groans and hands me the remote. “This might be a while; it's my A-hat ex.”

I wonder if she means ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. In Coral Cove plenty of people get married right out of high school, so you never know. She's still in the back room yelling at the ex two episodes of
Family Ties
later (
Golden Girls
doesn't start until three), when Alex comes in to relieve her.

Immediately JoJo materializes in the front of the store and collects her stuff from behind the counter. “Audi, kids.” She gives a wave, and the bell on the front door dings her exit.