A Novel Idea (15 page)

Neil sat back down and smiled at me across the table. “I took the liberty of ordering for you,” he said, as if he always talked this way. “I hope it’s to your liking.”

Oh-kay. Neil was suddenly acting like … a player.

“I guess it depends what you ordered,” I said, folding my hands on the table. Right. We were about to eat an entire meal. God, dinner is
long
. And dating is a lot of work. It wasn’t fair; Rosamund always seemed to have
fun
with her charades. And mine were anything but fun—unless you considered constant humiliation entertaining.

“Tofu,” Neil said, and now I noticed that it wasn’t just his choice of words that was unusual. He was also speaking in a strange, low voice that sounded nothing like his normal self. “Didn’t you say you were a vegetarian at our last meeting when you were telling the Philippa story?” He winked at me. “I am too.”

The thing about winking is this: Only Griffin can get away with doing it and still look cool. Everybody else looks stupid.

“You know,” Neil said slowly. If he kept talking in that deep voice, I was going to have to crawl under the table to laugh. “All this time we were in the book group together, I had no clue that you had a crush on me.”

So
that
was why he was being—or trying to be—Mr. Suave. It was what I’d suspected when we’d gotten off the phone on Wednesday: Neil was now convinced I was in love with him.

Our food came then, which saved me from having to respond. I wished the waiter would stay forever as he set down our steaming plates. But, of course, he left swiftly and I was alone with Neil again.

And then Neil was doing something else very surprising. Only not that gentlemanly. He was reaching across the table with his chopsticks and plucking a piece of broccoli right off my plate.

“Thanks,” he said, grinning.

Uh …
no
, thanks. Audre and I eat off each other’s plates all the time, which is no big deal when it’s your best girlfriend—but on a first date? It’s like pretending the two of you are all close and intimate when, in reality, you’ve kind of just met.

That was when I decided: My first-ever date might have to be my last.

“When you called me on Wednesday,” Neil went on, digging into his pad Thai, “everything from the past four months added up.”

It did?

“The way you’re always looking at me during our meetings—”

I’m looking at James, who always sits next to you!

“And how embarrassed you were when I read that note at Audre’s party—”

Well, let’s see. Would you like to be publicly humiliated in front of everyone you know?

I was biting both my upper and lower lip to keep from cracking up. “Norah?” Neil asked. “Are you choking or something?” I shook my head, grabbing my water glass and drinking fast to pound back the giggles.

“Once I’d figured all that out, I called James,” Neil added.

Now I
was
choking. I put down my water and coughed. “Really? Why?”

“Well …” Neil poked his chopsticks into my plate again, but this time I didn’t care. “For some reason, I always thought he was into you. He kept saying he liked a girl in the book group but wouldn’t tell me who—he’s a private guy like that. I guess I wanted to—I don’t know—make sure he was okay with our going on a date.”

I tried not to gasp. James liked someone in the book group? “So was he … okay with it?” I whispered.

Neil shrugged. “Sure, yeah. He didn’t say much. I guess the girl he likes is maybe Francesca or Audre. So we’re cool.”

We’re cool.

The pain felt hot and instant, like I’d slapped my hand on a lit stove. It was over. James didn’t like me.
Thanks for nothing, Rosamund
. Abruptly, I realized that there was no point in being on this date anymore. I’d feel bad ditching Neil in the middle of dinner, but sobbing in public would feel much worse.

“I have a migraine—,” I started to say, my throat closing with tears, when the restaurant’s front door banged open and a gust of warm wind blew in. I glanced over to the door, forgetting my misery for a moment as a wave of shock hit me. The girl striding into MeKong was so unexpected that I was certain I was imagining things. I watched, numb with disbelief as she posed, hand on hip, just as she’d done when I’d seen her for the first time—back in the Book Nook. Then she shook back her glossy black hair and focused her gray eyes right on me and Neil.

“Hi,” Francesca Cantone spoke across the restaurant.

Excuse me?

I turned to Neil in confusion, but he shook his head, just as clueless.

Francesca click-clacked toward us in her skinny heels, brushing by a waiter and ignoring the stares of the other diners. Her face was flushed and her jaw was set.

Why was she
here
?

She stopped by our table and looked at me coldly. “Am I interrupting your time together?” she snapped.

Whoa—Francesca’s bitchiness was out full force. I racked my brain, wondering if I’d done something to upset her at our last meeting. I hadn’t made too much fun of
The Devil Wears Prada
, had I?

“Well,” Neil was saying, “we
are
on a date….”

“No,” I jumped in. “It’s okay.” Maybe I could use Francesca’s mysterious appearance as an excuse to escape. I started to push back my chair.

Francesca crossed her arms over her chest. Her face was turning pinker by the minute. “Well, are you or aren’t you on a date? Are you guys, like, serious now?”

I paused: Those were the exact words Griffin had used, yesterday in the Book Nook.

“Did Griffin tell you we were going to be here?” I blurted. That was the only reason I could think of that she even knew about our “date.”

Francesca took a deep breath, and nodded. “He called me last night,” she said softly.

“Why?” Neil and I asked at the same time.

Francesca lifted her bare shoulders—believe it or not, she was wearing a tube top, even though it was still coolish outside. “Because he knew,” she murmured.

“Knew what?” That was me and Neil again, doing our “in unison” act. This was feeling more and more surreal.

Very slowly, Francesca turned to Neil, and my mouth dropped opened in shock as I identified the expression in her eyes: longing and … desire.

“How I felt about you,” Francesca whispered.

To
Neil
!

I was dying. I wondered if I could reach into my bag for my cell phone and call Audre without their noticing.

“What are you—talking about?” Neil sputtered, looking stunned. He probably figured one girl (i.e.,
me
) liking him was doable. But two at once? And Francesca, no less?

Francesca turned to the bug-eyed couple at the table beside us—they’d obviously been listening to every word—and asked to borrow their extra chair. Then she moved the chair up to our table, next to Neil, and sat down, acting as if this was a perfectly normal setup. We could have been three friends from a book group having a casual dinner together. The waiter even came by to ask Francesca if she wanted a menu, but she waved him off.

“I have something to ask you,” she said to Neil, taking another big breath. Her hands were clasped in her lap and I noticed she was trembling. I wondered if I should excuse myself to give them privacy, but this moment was way too delicious/scary to miss.

“Do you remember going to an awards ceremony at Columbia last year?” Francesca asked quietly.

Oh, yeah!
The photo! I nodded eagerly, but neither of them looked at me.

“The City-Wide Physics Contest, sure.” Neil frowned. “How did you know I was—”

“There?” Francesca cut in, smiling. “I was there too, Neil. We sat next to each other at the winners’ dinner, and we talked about our favorite science-fiction writers the whole time. Remember?” She briefly stared off into the distance, her gray eyes dreamy.

Neil reacted like someone had dumped a tub of ice water on his head. He blinked and shook his head at least five times.

“That was …
you
?” he whispered.

You
do
like science fiction!
I wanted to cry.

Francesca smirked. “I’ve improved, huh?”

Neil’s face colored. “You weren’t too bad….” He must have been remembering those eyebrows.

Francesca laughed. “That’s sweet of you, Neil,” she said. “But I
was
pretty bad. I didn’t know the first thing about clothes. All I lived for was school, and science stuff. And for fun, my friends and I did”—she shuddered—“Dungeons and Dragons.” She whispered this last part as if it were a terrible, evil secret. For the life of me, I couldn’t picture Francesca Cantone playing Dungeons and Dragons. “But the night I met you,” Francesca went on, her face lighting up, “I realized I needed to change myself. I was so into you, but I knew you didn’t like me back. No guys ever did.”

I swallowed, suddenly feeling weepy. Who’d ever have thought I’d understand Francesca?

She kept going, her voice determined. “I decided to”—she gestured to her clingy striped tube top, gold nameplate necklace, and Lucky jeans—“fix myself up. Change my style, or whatever. I started to do it in little ways—like, getting contacts, kind of avoiding my friends.” She looked so guilty for a moment that I almost wanted to reach over and give her a hug. “Over summer vacation, I went for it big-time: I bought a whole new wardrobe, changed my hair, and even practiced how to act different. That was when I made friends with Mimi—she lives in my apartment building, and she noticed my new look, so we started hanging out together.” Francesca sighed. “When senior year started in September, I was suddenly, like,
in
Mimi’s crowd, I was a new person. I was … me.” Francesca grew quiet and I could see the relief on her face. She seemed much freer—more relaxed—now that she’d finally uncorked all her long-held secrets.

And now
I
couldn’t hold back my innermost thoughts anymore. “So do you really like to read
The A-List
and all that stuff, or was that just made up?” I asked. (For me, it always comes back to books.)

Francesca glanced at me like she’d forgotten I was there. “Oh. Yeah. I’d never read that stuff in my life. Mimi told me about it. I wanted everything I did to match my new … image, or whatever.” Then she faced Neil, her eyes very big and hopeful. “I wanted to be this … this perfect girl you’d fall for when I saw you again.”

“When you saw me again?” Neil repeated. He knitted his eyebrows together. “You knew I was going to be in this book group? Or was that just a coincidence?”

Francesca smiled sheepishly. “There’s no such thing as a coincidence,” she murmured. “
I
made sure you joined the group, Neil. When Griffin told me about a high school book group that was starting up in Park Slope, I thought of you right away. So I drafted a fake flyer about a sci-fi club—I knew you wouldn’t turn that down.”

Okay,
I realized.
She’s insane
.

“
You
mailed that flyer to my house?” Neil could barely get the words out.

Francesca nodded. “I had your address from the contest. I’m sorry, Neil. I know that basically makes me a stalker—”

Neil shook his head. “This is a joke, right? Girls always do stuff like this, don’t they?” He was back on his paranoia kick. “You’re going to, like, embarrass me in two seconds.” He glanced toward the door, as if he expected to see Ashton Kutcher and the whole
Punk’d
crew storming in.

“I swear it’s not a joke,” Francesca said softly. She reached for Neil’s hand. “I thought you even knew by now—I was always trying to flirt with you, get you to pay attention to me. I kept just waiting and hoping you would ask me out. But when Griffin told me about your date with Norah—” She tipped her head toward me. “I knew I had to
do
something.”

I shook my head in awe. As Neil himself had put it earlier, everything was adding up. Neil thinking our group was a sci-fi club that first day. Francesca leaving the Philippa Askance search when James told her Neil wouldn’t be there. Francesca cozying up to Neil at Audre’s party. And Griffin’s unnatural interest in my date tonight.

“So you’re
not
with Griffin?” I asked Francesca.

Francesca shook her head, laughing. “Griffin? Not at all. We’re just good friends—he’s one of the few people that knows about my … past. We kind of bonded as soon as we met, so I felt like I could trust him.”

“So is he with that girl Eva, then?” I pressed on, knowing Audre would want me to find out for sure.

Francesca giggled. “No way. She’s not his type. Neither am I. Lately, he’s totally been into—”

“Francesca?” Neil interrupted. He was staring at her. “I, um, still can’t believe you would do all that for me.” He cleared his throat. “But, okay, if this all for real, can I just say something?” Francesca and I both nodded, and Neil’s expression turned serious. “I wish you didn’t feel like you
had
to change yourself,” he said quietly, sounding more mature than I’d ever heard him. “At that dinner, I literally thought you were the coolest girl I’d ever met—we had so much in common. To be honest, half the time guys don’t even notice what a girl is wearing or what her hair looks like.” He shrugged. “At least, I didn’t then. I just noticed … you.”