Cracked Up to Be (13 page)

Cry.

Chris is crying over my hospital bed the second time I wake up. The first thing I think is I can’t pay him back. It’s the first thing I say, too.

“Good boy.” Bailey wags his tail. I turn to Jake because I can’t shake this stupid sad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I snap my fingers. “Do you think he hates me for that? I mean, do you think he understands it was an accident?”

“He’s a dog,” Jake says. But then he looks at my face. “But sure, yeah. I bet he understands. He’s clearly smitten with you.”

“Clearly,” I echo. I shove my hands in my pockets. “You have a lot in common with my dog!”

“Har, har,” he says, reaching for another stick.

“I don’t feel comfortable letting him off the leash,” I say quickly, and Jake drops it and then I start feeling even worse for some reason. I shouldn’t be doing this with him. I should stop. “And I’m not hungry. We should skip the coffeehouse.”

His face falls. “Sure, that’s fine.”

“But we can still do this, though,” I say.

“What’s this?”

It’s a good question. We’re just standing here, Bailey sitting between us and glad to do it, but it’s not really anything and Jake wants something. So I think about kissing him, but then I don’t because that would be really stupid.

“I guess I’ll just catch the bus home then, is that it?” he asks. “I wish you’d told me you weren’t really into this, Parker.”

“It’s not that—”

“Then what is it?”

“Never mind. Let’s just go to the coffeehouse.”

He laughs. “Right, yeah, we’ll just do that when you’ve already said you don’t want to. You know, this is so typical—”

“No, I do! I asked you if you were asking me out and you said you were and I agreed to it, so we’re going to eat and we’re going to talk about our stupid art project, okay? You cancel a date before it happens, not during. So we’re going to the coffeehouse. That’s what we’re doing.”

“Fine, Parker. Whatever.”

We drop Bailey off at home and go to the coffeehouse and I order a bagel and a black coffee and Jake orders a chicken salad sandwich and a black coffee and neither of us says anything even though we’re supposed to be talking about our art project.

“If I knew why you liked me,” I say after the waitress drops the bill on the table, “I could probably handle it a lot better.”

“That makes two of us.” He hesitates. “Do you even like me at all?”

“I don’t know. It freaks me out. I try not to think about it too much.”

Jake sighs, grabs the bill and stands. I do the same. And then I start thinking of the dog and I feel guilty all over again and I want it to go away and snapping my fingers doesn’t help, so I do that really stupid thing.

I lean over the table and kiss him.

twelve

Chris wants to talk.

In homeroom, he hisses my name, but I ignore him. In art, he tries to start a conversation and I ignore him. After the bell goes, he tells me to meet him in the gym and—ignored. He either knows about Jake or wants to talk about Evan and I don’t want to talk about either, so I have to find somewhere else to spend my lunch hour, somewhere that’s relatively peaceful and not totally crowded.

Like the chapel.

Why didn’t I think of it before? If I’d thought of it before, I never would’ve tried the nurse’s office or made a habit of “hiding out” in the gym. The chapel. It’s only a Catholic school. No one goes to
the chapel.

But I’d forgotten just how awful and uncomfortable the place makes you feel until I push through the doors and step into the little God’s House adjacent to the caf. It’s like the walls know I’m a bad person. I stand before the altar, cross myself—force of habit—and try to pick the best pew of the lot, settling for one in the middle on the left-hand side. I could sleep away my afternoon classes and no one would ever think to look for me here.

“
Parker?
”

I groan.

“Oh my God. It’s true.”

“Go away,” I mutter. “I’m not talking to you.”

“You’re a mess.”

The thing about being drunk is people want to congratulate you for it, often in the form of giving you more to drink.

Or maybe this anomaly is only true of people in my high school.

Chris drags me out to the pool and for the next hour all anyone can talk about is how Perfect Parker Fadley is actually drunk, and then they slap me on the back and they say “way to go” all admiringly, and next thing I know, someone’s pressing a red plastic cup into my hand. And because I start feeling that rush I usually feel when I’ve done something perfectly and everyone knows it, I drink whatever is in the red plastic cup.

And then I get props and another red plastic cup.

Four or six red plastic cups later, I have:

Danced horrendously in front of everyone, even though Chris assures me I looked sexy and plenty of guys want to “tap” that, nearly fallen into the pool, told several people I loved them, apologized to most of the cheerleading squad for being a Nazi
—
except for Becky, fallen down and cried, was helped up and laughed, threw up, cried again, told Chris I hated him for doing this to me because I was being stupid and he promised me I wouldn’t and stumbled away to the front lawn, which is where I’m lying now, flat on my back with perfectly manicured blades of grass pressing into my legs, hands and neck.

Chris is probably searching for me all over the house and backyard where the party is, which is why I’m out front, where the party isn’t. The remaining minuscule sober part of my brain refuses to let me make a fool of myself in front of everyone any more than I already have and the remaining minuscule sober part of my brain says the only way I can do this is if I stay the fuck away from people altogether.

“Do you need help up?” Jessie asks. “If I get Evan and Chris and maybe Becky, I’m sure we can drag you up to Chris’s parents’ bedroom.”

I throw my arm over my eyes.

“Go away.”

She doesn’t. She sits down on a patch of grass close to my head.

“Still pissed at me over what happened at practice, huh?”

“Go.” I uncover my eyes and give her my best death glare, which I’m pretty sure is totally compromised by my total drunkenness. “Away.”

She smiles. “Nope.”

“I work really hard!” I struggle to sit up. “And you made a fool of me
—
”

“You made a fool of yourself by having a brain aneurysm in front of the entire squad,” she interrupts. “You should’ve seen your face. You were going apeshit over the stupidest things, like, oh my God, we missed the beat. We’ll get it. We always do.”

“I wasn’t having a brain aneur-an-any—” She laughs. I want to kill her. “Thing.”

“And Chris is worried about you,” she says.

I groan. “Shut up.”

“He actually came to me; that’s how worried he is. He’s afraid to talk to you. He thinks you’re fixing for a breakdown because you’re, like, obsessed with perfection.” She says this as breezily as someone relating the weather. And then: “So I told him about the panic attacks.”

My heart stops. “You didn’t.”

She leans over me. Her face blots out the sky, and a strand of long blond hair hangs in front of my face, tickling my nose. I turn my head.

“It’s the end of the year, Parker. Things are supposed to be winding down.”

She makes me tired.

“Give Becky captaining duties until the year’s over,” she continues. “She’s always wanted to do it and you can let her and say you did something nice. I’ve talked to the squad; they said if you do that, they’ll want you back next year
—
”

This sobers me up completely for about five seconds.

“No. Are you out of your mind? Becky will do the loser cheer and we’ll be a laughingstock
—
”

“It doesn’t matter! Everyone hates you right now. You’re an analretentive control-freak perfectionist and they need a break and so do you. And so do I
—
I can’t do damage control for you anymore!”

“They only hate me until they give the best performance of their lives thanks to me and then they love me!”

She snorts.

“That’s true and you know it,” I mutter. Everything spins and I close my eyes. “I’m that good.”

“Yeah, and the sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it or let them make mistakes and learn to live with it, the better. Until that actually happens, I really think you’re going to give yourself a stroke. You’re not responsible for everything, Parker. You can’t control the way things end up. Stop trying.”

“Then it’s my fault either way. Me, them. Everyone knows I do everything, so if they fuck up, it’s my fault, and if I fuck up, it’s my fault and
—”
I can barely think the words before I say them and start losing my thread. “The way it is, that’s good. I’m a good person because it’s the outcome that matters and I always do things that are right in the end
—
and that’s how you get away with being a control-freak perfectionist, because in the end you’re right . . . and there’s no excuse for anything less. I am not going easy on them
—
”

“I’m getting Chris. You are so wasted it’s unbelievable.”

And she’s right, but only about that. I’m right about everything else. A second later, I feel her brushing a strand of hair from my face. I push her hand away.

“Go, please. . . .”

“Look, Parker, I’m telling you this as your best friend. You’re freaking everyone out. If you don’t step down, I’m going to do everything I can to get you off the squad for your own sake, and Chris has agreed to help.”

It takes everything, but I push myself up from the ground and pitch forward. Jessie grabs me by the elbow and helps me regain my balance, but I don’t want her help. I jerk my arm from her grip and fumble sideways, reach out, rest one hand against the side of the house and wait for the world to right itself. This is cheerleading. Serious business. My reputation’s on the line and, and, and they know . . . they know I’m not
—

“I can’t believe you went behind my back.”

“Parker
—
”

“Evan’s cheating on you with Jenny Morse. They’re fucking.”

I slide down the side of the house until I’m sitting. Jessie looks like she’s underwater, wavery, discombobulated, but I can still make out her expression: openmouthed, white-faced, hurt. I didn’t want to tell her like this, but she deserves it. She shakes her head, totally shocked, and marches past me so she can break up with Evan, give him hell, ask him if it’s true, whatever. I don’t care.

“I’m only telling you this as your best friend,” I call after her.

“Parker?”

The voice comes as a total surprise.

Maybe if I stay really, really still she’ll go away.

“Parker, I know you’re there. I can see your feet.”

I heave a colossal sigh and sit upright.

“This is unexpected, Becky,” I say. “What do you want?”

She marches up the aisle in an annoyingly self-assured way, a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, and sits beside me.

“Chris has been going crazy trying to talk to you, but he said you’re avoiding him. So I said I’d talk to you because I know you won’t avoid me. And we should probably talk, shouldn’t we?”

“What about cheerleading practice?”

She shrugs. “Postponed.”

“I never postponed for anything.”

“This is important.”

“So self-sacrificing,” I sneer. “I bet it really turns Chris on. I bet he’s thinking it won’t be so bad being your boyfriend after all. Actually, I know he’s thinking it. And so do you. That’s the only reason you’re here.”

She inclines her head, like we’re playing chess and I made the first move and it wasn’t a bad one.

“I really wanted to start over with you after everything happened. I thought it was possible.” She stares at the wooden cross mounted to the wall. “For about five minutes, I almost felt like there was this mutual respect thing going on. . . .”

I laugh. “While you were wasting time feeling things, I was stealing your
Beowulf
essay and passing it off as my own.”

She clenches her jaw. “At least after
I
saw Evan I didn’t lose it.”

“I’m disappointed. That’s the best you can do?”

“Yeah, it is.” Becky nods. And then she nods again, like she really means it. “You know who feels sorry for you? Chris. That’s pathetic.”

“Yeah, it is pathetic that he’s still in love with me.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Do you feel sorry for me?”

It’s one of those questions I ask before considering whether or not I really care about the answer. Who am I kidding? It’s Becky. Of course I don’t.

“You’ve made a choice and it’s so obvious. I see it; I accept it,” she says. “Even if no one else can. You want to rot and I want to let you.”

If I was feeling generous, I’d congratulate her. The only person standing in the way of ultimate popularity—me—had stepped aside and she snapped up the position before anyone else even realized it was available. She probably watched me all year, waiting to see how my calculated fuckups could benefit her, and figured out my motivations in the process. That takes talent. She’ll make a great sorority sister after she gets out of here.

“Who would’ve thought that you of all people would be smart enough to get me?”

“Yeah, weird, huh?” She hands me the bag. “Consider that my contribution.”

I peer inside of it. “Becky, if I’m drunk in school again, I’m expelled. I still want to graduate.”

“Do you really?” She stands and stretches. “I’d better go. Chris is waiting for me. Is there anything you want me to tell him?”