Crazy in Love (3 page)

Girls. You gotta love us.

“Hey,” Cassie says, wiping her eyes with the flared sleeve of her vintage black velvet jacket, “how much trouble did you get in when you got home last night?”

"Enough,” I answer, shooting her a pitiful look designed to enhance the sympathy factor. Parent-friend dynamics can be pretty tricky, so I say no more. It is never cool to be grounded when you’re a senior in high school. But it’s also uncool
not
to be grounded when you do something grounding-worthy. Being trusted by the rents creates suspicion.

“My parents didn’t even wake up when I got in,” Samantha informs us.

“Thank goodness for late-night martini habits, huh?” Cassie says.

“Well.” Nicole is on the wrong side of the odds now—two to four. But she and Lauren are standing strong, unmoved, ambassadors to the Star. “I can’t be late to Spanish again,” Nicole says, turning to go. Lauren follows suit.

“Nicole!” I shout after them. She turns. “Tell Star I’m sorry if something I did upset her. Okay?”

She nods, but it’s more like a chin jerk. No smile. The kind of thing you’d do if someone gave you a left uppercut.

This is not over.

Yet as I walk into Attila Ill, my girlfriends surround me. We are comrades. We are one.

I am grateful.

But the day is young. And as we step inside the crowded, noisy halls of Attila Ill,
M.J.
is already murmuring,
Now where is that major hottie? Jackson House, here I come!

3

We Girls split
for our lockers, then dash to first-hour English. Half the class was at Cassie’s last night. The sleepy-looking half. At least I won’t be the only one to crash and burn on this test. What is it about Shakespeare that makes him so test-worthy?

Mr. Schram frowns as I skid in just under the bell. The man was born to be an English teacher. He looks like those old English kings in PBS movies, the seriously obese fellows, who graze from long wooden tables piled high with barely cooked pigs and enormous turkey legs they fling over their shoulders after devouring. His too-small tweed jacket, a souvenir of better days, has no chance of camouflaging his tremendous belly. The entire Attila Ill football team couldn’t apply enough power to button one button on that jacket.

“Cutting it close, aren’t we, ladies?” he observes, as Samantha and I step over outstretched legs to get to the empty seats.

“Sorry,” says Samantha, snatching the first empty chair.

I am not looking for Jackson House, although I can smell him and sense his presence. Plus, I know where he usually sits. I have blinders on as I slide through his territory, third row, third seat, and take a seat in the far back corner, where no one, not even Ambassador Nicole, can accuse me of flirting.

I am being watched. I sense this without looking around. Observed. And not just by our English teacher.

I risk a bored glance to the front of the room and can see Nicole out of the corner of my eye. She’s turned around in her front-row desk so she can keep an eye on me. I’m starting not to like that girl.

I long to gaze over at Jackson. What if I caught him looking at me? What if our gazes met?

“I hope you’ve all been studying your Shakespeare,” Mr. Schram warns. “
Julius Caesar,
to be exact.”

“The Shake!” Jonathan Anderson cries, fist raised in salute. I went to homecoming with him our sophomore year.

Jonathan Anderson,
Plain Jane
muses.
As I recall, he dumped you for Melissa Charbon because she had breasts.

Ah, the ever-insightful
Plain Jane.

But it’s
M.J.
who gets in the last word on the subject of Jonathan Anderson:
You could get Johnny back if you wanted
to, wrestle him right away from Theresa Magill, his current girlfriend. But Jonathan Anderson is no Jackson House.

I pull out my English book, hoping that I’ll magically spot quiz answers as I flip through the play. I heard enough of the plot in the background last night to know bad characters plotted against good characters. At least one person got killed. Somehow I don’t think these are the kinds of details Schram will be looking for. All I can hope for now is the essay question, friend and only hope of the unprepared. Or matching. I love matching. I’d like to meet the person who invented matching. Levels the playing field. Gives all of us a fighting chance.

Someone moves the chair next to mine and drops into it. That smell. That
presence.
It can’t be. But it must be.

“So, are you ready for this?”

I look up, and I’m staring into the most beautiful brown eyes—yes, I’ll say it, twinkling eyes—of Jackson House. I don’t care what
Plain Jane
says. No one on the face of this earth has brown eyes like these.

I am without speech, so I combine two gestures. I shrug and shake my head. At the same time.

This makes him smile, showing perfect white teeth. And a dimple on his left cheek. “Well,” he says, “at least we’ll go down with smiles on our faces. That was fun last night, Mary Jane.”

I want him to say my name again. If I could speak, I would ask him to.

Inside, I’m not only speaking—I’m arguing:

“No talking,” orders our teacher, as if speech were an option. He passes out his quiz, starting with the front row.

“Good luck,” Jackson whispers right before Schram gets to our row.

Our
row. I love the sound of it.
Our row.
Like
our
song. Or
our
house. Or
our
children.

“Miss Ettermeyer?”

I look up at Schram because that’s me. Mary Jane Ettermeyer.

“A pencil? Or pen? You’ll need one to answer the question. ” Our teacher says this as if he’s repeating it, as if he’s been standing there, asking me if I need a pen. I think he
has
been standing there, asking this frivolous question.

I reach for my pack and start to search for pen or pencil, when one appears in front of my nose. It is held by Jackson House. Oh, lucky, lucky pencil.

“Here. You can use this,” he says.

I think I manage to give thanks. Out loud. I take the pencil and can feel the heat of his strong fingers. I clutch Jackson’s pencil, lift it to my nose, and inhale. It smells like him, like a forest after the rain. Jackson House has given me his pencil.

I think I’m going to cry again.

When I come to, I glance around the room. At least a dozen pair of eyes are aimed at me. At
us. Us. Us. Us.

How much did they see? How much do they know?

“You have thirty minutes to answer the essay question with as much information as you can supply,” Mr. Schram announces. “You’d better get started.”

It’s an essay question.
Yes!
Maybe things are turning my way after all.

I straighten myself in my chair, feeling better about my chances of survival than I’ve felt in forty-eight hours. I can do essay questions. I can sound smart and logical, frequently without knowing anything about what I’m writing about. The trick is to number your points: “There are three main points the reader has to consider when discussing ...” Knowing names and dates, of course, is always a bonus. But even those can be omitted, with the artful use of
however
and
therefore.
Mix in a little smart-word exchange, like
utilize
for
use,
or
explicit
for
clear, cognitive processing
for
thinking,
that kind of thing. And you’re there. At least a C.

Then I read the question.

It’s a joke. I look up suddenly, suspiciously. Others are writing. Nicole is chewing on her pencil. Lauren is scribbling a hundred miles an hour. But they must have had a hand in this. It can’t be a coincidence.

The essay question is:

I’m still writing when everybody else appears to be done. It’s not that I’ve written so much. It just took me forever to get over the question.

Mr. Schram comes and stands beside my desk.

“Wow,” Nicole says. She acts like she’s saying it to Lauren, but she’s so loud I hear her clear across the room. “Looks like Mary Jane knows a lot about betrayal.”

I stop writing and hand over my paper and wish I were somebody else. Cassie doesn’t stand up for me. Neither does Samantha. Or Jessica.
Plain Jane
is pretty much agreeing with Nicole (which makes calculating the odds of “them” against “us” next to impossible).

I vow I’ll forever stay away from Jackson House. My girlfriends are too important to me. Girlfriends are forever. Nicole is right. How could I have even thought about being with somebody else’s boyfriend? I’m not like that. I’m loyal. I’m trustworthy. I’m—

“You can keep the pencil.”
He,
Jackson, stands up and smiles at me as if he hasn’t heard Nicole. “See ya.”

I watch him walk out of the room. I have his pencil. His gift to me. A token. His words, his
promise
—“See ya”—echoes in my heart. What does he mean by that? “See” as in “seeing each other”?

I will have to ponder those two words. I shall mull them over and over and over, reading between the lines. I will dissect those words within an inch of their lives.

The room has nearly emptied now. Except for Nicole. Cassie and Lauren are hanging by the door, like they’re waiting for the show to start.

I don’t want a show. I don’t want to talk to Nicole. (I am definitely not liking her now. Did I ever like her? Yes, we were on the same tree, but different branches.) I want to go somewhere quiet and ponder
“See ya.”

I move to the door, but Nicole blocks my path. I don’t think she’s the kind for physical violence, at least not on behalf of someone other than herself. Not that I haven’t seen my share of fights at Attila Ill, and the majority of them female. And she does have about an inch and ten pounds on me. And fingernails. But Nicole is too much of a girlie girl for hand-to-hand combat. I think.

M.J.
’s voice is the only one talking in my head because
Plain Jane
is too scared.

“Nicole,” I say, following
M.J.
’s lead and refusing to cower before the Ambassador, “who are you going out with these days?”

This appears to throw her off guard. She’s only here as an ambassador to the Star. Her personal life has nothing to do with the current situation. “I—I don’t know,” she stammers.

I give her a wan smile, the kind you’d give your mom if she’d ruined her favorite dress and you felt sorry for her, even though it wasn’t that much of a dress to start with. “Nobody? ” I query. “What about Travis? Aren’t you guys still talking? ” We all knew about her king-sized crush on Travis the first of the year. I also happen to know that he’s been going out with a junior cheerleader since October.

“Travis? No.” She tries to collect herself and get back the haughty ambassador look. “What’s it to you anyway?”

“I care about you, Nicole. That’s all. So shoot me.”

“Nicole!” Lauren calls from the doorway. “We’re going to be late to chem. I’m leaving.”

Nicole is still blocking my path. “You need to talk to Star, Mary Jane. You know she and Jackson are going together.”

I smile at Nicole. I could nod and be done with this. That’s what I
should
do, what
Plain Jane
in my head would very likely tell me to do if she were talking to me. But taking the easy way out is not
M.J.
’s style. And before I can stop her voice, I’m echoing it: “I know Star and Jackson have been going out, Nicole.
You
know they’ve been going out. Jackson must know it too, right? Star certainly knows this, at least most of the time, when her
interests
don’t lie elsewhere and she’s not going out with someone else.”

Nicole starts to interrupt, but I won’t let her.

“So if it’s true love and all,” I continue with impeccable logic, “what are you girls so worried about?”

I move around her and take two steps before she wheels on me and shouts, “Just don’t forget the way things are around here!” This is tree talk. To Nicole, Star hangs at the top of The Girls’ family tree. She is our leader, our guide, the most powerful Girl. If Star decides to claim one guy as hers, with half a dozen guys on the side, then those of us on the lower branches should just go along with it.

I take a deep breath, then turn back to face her. “And you, Nicole, don’t forget that the way things are doesn’t mean it’s the way things are meant to be.”

4

I walk out of
English class, trying to replay what exactly I said to Nicole. I’m grateful that there were no witnesses. Lauren and Cassie must have given up and gone to their classes. I can deny every word, if it comes to that.

But what
did
I say anyway? That the way things are doesn’t mean that’s the way they’re
meant
to be? Was that it? What does that even mean? How are things “meant to be”?

I know how I’d like things to be.

I stick Jackson’s pencil into the pocket of my gray sweater and hold on to it.