B0160A5OPY (A) (19 page)

“Me? What have I done?”

“You’ve upset your mother.”

“
I
didn’t upset her!”

“You brought that girl into this house, knowing who she was and how it would affect us. What did you think would happen, Luke, tell us.” Dad’s face is growing even redder.

“What did I think would happen? I thought I would hang out with someone I liked, someone I cared about.” Cared about – past tense. “Someone who understands- understood me. Someone I could talk to.”

“We care about you. We understand you,” says mom. “We talk.”

“Oh, pul-leeze.” Did I say that out loud? I’ve gotten used to snapping back at my parents silently in my mind.

I try to brush past them – I need the privacy of my room – but dad blocks my way.

“And just what is that supposed to mean?” he demands.

“It means …” I pause for a fraction of a second. I have a choice here. I can be the good, understanding son and bite back the words as I usually do, or I can speak the unspeakable. My mouth decides for me. “It means that I consider this pure bullshit. It means you don’t understand a thing about me, It means that you haven’t cared about anything except Andrew in a year. It means that the day we lost him, I also lost my parents.”

“How can you say that?” Mom looks appalled.

“And ‘talk’?” I say to her. “We
never
talk! Not to each other, not about each other, not about anything that matters. We only chatter to cover the silence, because God knows what might come up, what we might have to deal with if we didn’t.”

Mom has a hand over her mouth, as if to press back words. Dad is swelling with rage.

“And,” I continue, almost shouting at them, “please don’t pretend, even to yourselves, that the reason you’re upset is because you’re concerned about
me
. You’re only angry because Sloane dared to tell you a few home truths. She saw how things are, and she called you on it. And you don’t like that, not at all. Because in this family, we don’t face the truth. We hide.”

Even as I say the words, I realize how crazy it is that I’m defending the person who just broke my heart. But what happened out there on the path, what she revealed – that’s between us. I could throw her in the deep end of the ocean for that, but it’s got nothing to do with this. With my parents. What she did in here was to hold up a mirror to our family. Or what remains of it.

“Now just you –” dad begins.

“We all hide. You hide at in your work. You,” I point at my mother, “hide in your bottle and your memories. I hide out in my swimming. And that way none of us really has to face what happened. None of us has to deal with the rest of our lives. None of us actually has to
connect
with each other, or anyone else. But we’re as good as dead, can’t you see that?”

“You have no right to talk to us like this!” mom yells.

“You are being offensive and disrespectful,” dad yells.

“Yeah, well, I’m not Andrew. He was the polite, respectful one. The perfect one.” The steam is going out of me now. “But as much as you might wish it, I can’t swop places with him.”

I say the last words softly, almost gently. But Mom’s stiff face cracks into something raw and exposed. She slaps me across the face, then bursts into tears. Dad stands frozen for a moment, then crumples into a chair, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

I sigh, and turn to go to my room. But then my mother speaks, and the words pull me back.

“Luke, please – don’t go. Let’s talk.”

35

Possible replacements

“Stop looking at him!”

“What?” I say, startled out of my daze by Sienna’s irritated command.

“You were staring again. You need to stop it – have some pride, girlfriend, and stop pining over the jerk.”

“Don’t call him that – he’s not a jerk.”

“Well he’s sure acting like one.”

My eyes do their familiar slide to the side. Luke is sitting across the cafeteria eating his lunch, and he’s not alone. It’s three weeks later, and Luke has apparently moved on. With Juliet. Juliet! Jayster extraordinaire and cat-who-got-the-cream. Juliet – who smiles smugly at me to let me know it tastes delicious. He even took her to the Homecoming Dance instead of me. I spent the night babysitting the triplets and eating ice cream – flavor: pity-party. I would say I can’t stand it but obviously I can, because he’s been seeing her since the week after he ditched me, and I haven’t dropped dead yet.

Of course, it’s possible that I’ve turned into one of the walking dead, like L.J.’s zombies, because I don’t really feel alive. I don’t feel much of anything except a dull, heavy pain through the core of me. I wish mom was here to give me a hug.

“I don’t get it.” Sienna is talking again. “If he realized it was an accident, and was prepared to forgive your mom, then why isn’t he prepared to forgive you? Okay, he might have been shocked and upset when you first told him, but after he calmed down and thought about it?”

I’ve wondered the same thing and I think I know why.

“I don’t think it’s because I was the one to pull the car to the side. I mean, it’s not a fact that delighted him, but it wasn’t the deal-breaker. It’s that I lied to him. That’s what he can’t forgive.”

“You never said you didn’t do it.”

“I never said I did, either. And he hates lying, he told me so when we were still together. I knew, after our Mexican date, that he didn’t know and I didn’t tell. He feels like a fool.”

“He
looks
like a fool – hanging over that cow.”

Sienna is nothing if not loyal, but Juliet looks nothing like a cow. She looks beautiful and happy. And unscarred. In my angry and desperate hope-fuelled moments, I’ve wondered if Luke hooked up with her just to spite me, or to prove that I meant nothing to him, or even to distract himself – because he did it so soon. And with
her
. But seeing them now – his arm draped around her shoulders, and laughing at something she just said – I realize that’s just delusional baloney. Why shouldn’t he genuinely like her? (I refuse to use the other word – the L word – about them.) She’s pretty and sexy and pleasant enough – to him, anyway. She’s shallow enough not to come with a bunch of hectic issues. Also, there’s that thing of her not having crashed a car into his brother and then lying to him about it to cover her ass. “I hope he’s happy now,” Sienna says sarcastically.

“So do I,” I say, but I mean it. Whatever makes him happy and gives him peace – he deserves that much. “I wish I could hate him, but I can’t. I fully get it.”

“Enough,” says Sienna. “Time for you to move on.”

“You don’t understand. What we had, what I felt for him – still feel for him – you don’t just
move on
from that.”

“He did,” she points out bluntly.

“Yeah. He did.”

Juliet has her face in the crook of Luke’s neck now and is nuzzling him. He must sense me, because he looks up to catch me watching him. I don’t know if the pain shows in my gaze, his own is impassive. I feel myself beginning to flush and I look away.

I wish I knew what he was feeling. I’ve checked his profile on
Sink-or-Swim
and his Twitter stream regularly, but there are no clues there as to what’s going on in his head. Or his heart.

“Sooo,” says Sienna, lifting her ever-present camera to her eye and looking around at the males. “For your next BF, how about Tyrone?” She clicks off a shot.

“Get serious. He’s still crushing on Juliet.”

Juliet dumped Tyrone as soon as word got out that Luke had dumped me. And she came running as soon as Luke crooked his little finger. I look over to where Tyrone sits. He has his laptop open on the table in front of him but he has eyes only for Juliet. He gazes longingly at her. I follow his gaze; Juliet is now nibbling on Luke’s ear. Argh!

“Tyrone looks like he still wants her and would do anything to get her back,” I point out.

“Yeah, he does. And anyway, you don’t want to be picking up Juliet’s cast-off’s.” Sienna wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“I’d pick up Luke – in a heartbeat – if she cast him off.”

“Something tells me that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

Luke pulls his ear away from Juliet’s incisors and for a minute a tiny spark of hope flickers inside me. Maybe he’s getting irritated by her clinging attentions. But then I remember that he didn’t like me touching his ears, either – said they were too ticklish and sensitive.

“How about L.J.?” suggests Sienna. “You seem to have a soft spot for him.”

“Not to date him, Sienna. I just feel bad for him. He always seems so alone and on the outside. I can empathize. After the accident, I felt different from everyone else – separate – like I couldn’t connect. People give him such a hard time, and his step-father is a real piece of work, but I don’t actually much like the guy. I’m not
attracted
to him.”

We speak softly, because L.J. is sitting just two tables away from us. He sits alone, taking occasional bites from the hamburger held in one hand while drawing with the other. Some fried onion and ketchup drop from the burger onto his sketch. He sticks a stubby finger into the mess and smears it around, incorporating it somehow into the drawing.

“Ew, gross,” says Sienna.

She adjusts the focus on her camera and takes a few pictures. I’m looking in a different direction.

“She’s feeding him now – jellybeans, I think,” I say, appalled.

“Will you stop looking at him!” she snaps and reaches over to physically turn my face in the opposite direction.

“Ben,” she says. “He’s nice, he’s single and he has no brothers – dead or alive.”

“No.”

She doesn’t understand.

“Don’t be so quick to reject him. Here, I’ll take a few pictures of him for you to study in your own time.”

The only pictures I study in my own time are the ones I’ve taken of Luke. For the first few days after our split, I poured over the pictures of him on my computer and phone, wondering and what-iffing and if-onlying. But the photos triggered the memories and the memories turned on the tear faucet. Finally, I decided that if I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life ugly-crying and being disgustingly feeble, I would need to ration myself, so I’m allowed to feast my eyes for only seven minutes every night before bedtime. Being back at school, being the object of his animosity – again – was brutal. Still is.

“Sienna, you’re missing the point. I’m still in love with he-who-must-not-be-looked-at. I’m not going to date anyone else. I don’t
want
to date anyone else.”

“Not even Coach Quinn?” she teases, taking a picture of the coach who is in the lunch line putting something on his tray. “I heard – from the horse’s mouth – that the story about him and Kazinsky was bogus.”

“Tempting, tempting … but no. Not in this lifetime.”

My eyes want to drift back to Luke and Juliet. Has she fed him all the jelly beans? Is he licking sugar off her fingers? I’ve got to stop this.

“Give me something to fix my eyes on, stat!”

“Here,” says Sienna, setting her camera to display mode and shoving it into my hands.

I blink hard and try to focus all of my attention on the photographs displayed on the small screen. She’s zoomed right in on her subjects and I’m amazed at the level of detail I can make out in the pictures. I can see that the items on Coach Quinn’s tray are a carton of strawberry milk and an iced cupcake. I can see the freckles on Ben’s blandly friendly face, and the pictures of L.J. show his sketch clearly. It’s drawn in pen, with hard strokes and lines which cross and re-cross each other and have torn right through the thick paper in some places. A sun in the shape of a crying eye hovers over the portrayal of a fight between a tall human figure with a sword and a zombie. The human appears to be disemboweling the zombie, and the fried onions of L.J.’s burger trail from the creature’s belly like intestines spilling into a pool of ketchup blood.

“Wow – that’s pretty sick!” I say and scroll backwards through the images.

Part of me is hoping there will be ones of Luke (with Juliet out of the frame, of course), although I already know Sienna will have steered clear of photographing him out of some misplaced sense of loyalty. But there are a few of a lovesick Tyrone pining over Juliet. He looks so pathetic, it’s pitiful. Struck by a sudden, horrible thought, I show Sienna the picture.

“I don’t look like this, do I?’

“Are we still hot on telling the truth, or do we want a nice, white lie?” she asks.

I pull a face at her but resolve to quit sneaking peeks at Luke and to avoid looking pathetic in public. I hoist a smile onto my face. It feels unfamiliar and strange. It must look odd, too, because Sienna asks me if I’m feeling sick.

“I’m not sick. I’m just trying to look happy and well-adjusted. Though I’ll settle for not looking as pathetic as Tyrone.”

“Good for you,” she says. Then she frowns and adds, “Keep practicing the look, though, it needs work.”

In spite of myself, I smile.

“How was L.O. today, with the jer- … with you-know-who?”

“Not too bad, I suppose.”

Luckily we finished Mrs. Copeman’s project while he and I were still dating, so we now have no reason to interact. I’m grateful that I chose seats far behind him in my first week of school here. They provide the perfect hiding place.

“He ignores me, and I stare at him,” I tell Sienna, but one look at her face has me backing up. “Which I will stop doing, as of today. Promise! I will get my pride on and ignore him as thoroughly as he ignores me.”

She nods approvingly, but it’s a promise I don’t get to keep, because in the very next class I share with Luke, he speaks to me.

We’ve just finished our English lesson with Perkel, and most of my classmates have left the room. Juliet has announced to Luke that she’s off to the “little girls’ room” to go reapply her eyelashes or top up her brains with toilet water, or whatever it is she and her gaggle of J-girls do in there all the time. Luke is taking his sweet time packing his things into his bag and I’m reluctant to pass by him, so I hang back, checking my phone and waiting for him to leave first. Perkel is up front doling out extra homework to L.J. who has failed to hand in the last two assignments for this class. I don’t blame him. What’s the point of doing any work if you know you’re going to get an F?