Emmy & Oliver (28 page)

“Oliver?
Seriously
, Caro? Is that what this is about?”

Caro stalked over until we were less than a foot apart. “It is
always
about Oliver,” she said, her voice low and venomous. “It's been about him for
years
. I thought now that he was home that maybe we could move on, that we wouldn't just be ‘Oliver's old friends,' or whatever the fucking press used to call us. But it's still all about him.” Caro held up her hands like she was dropping the past ten years at my feet. “So fine. He wins.”

“This isn't a competition!” I cried. “I'm still friends with you and Drew. I'm just . . . dating Oliver. That's all.”

“Then why didn't you tell me about college? Why didn't you mention it to me? You're not the only one who wants out of here, Emmy!”

“I didn't even think I would get in!” I cried. “It just happened!”

“Okay, then here's another question. Why don't you call and ask me to do something? Or—crazy thought—ask me how I'm doing!”

I didn't have an answer for that. It was no secret that I hadn't been spending as much time with Caro and Drew now that Oliver was home. With Drew, it hadn't really mattered because he was spending all of his free time with Kevin. But Caro . . .

“Caro,” I said. “Why don't you hang out with us this afternoon? We were just going to go to the Stand and get dinner, but you should come with us.”

Caro just turned around and started walking away again. “You'll have to forgive me if I pass on your pity date,” she called over her shoulder. “I know where I'm not wanted.”

“Caroline!” I yelled. “You can't just walk away in the middle of a fight. That's not fair!”

“Look who's suddenly upset when things aren't fair,” Caro yelled, and kept walking. She walked until she was just a speck in the distance, then she seemed to melt into the horizon. I watched her go, defeated, then turned around and trudged back to school where Oliver was waiting for me near the concrete statue of our mascot, a giant, soaring
bird that looked like it was constantly deciding which student to gobble down first. (Go Hawks.) At that moment, I sort of wished he would pick me.

“Hey!” Oliver said. It had gotten cloudy out and he had tugged his hoodie up over his head so that just a few strands of hair were peeking out. “Where'd you go? I saw Drew and he said something about Caroline and stew?”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “Caroline's not exactly happy about me getting into UCSD.”

“What?” Oliver frowned. “Why? She's, like, your best friend. I thought she'd be running around the school, yelling at people and lighting firecrackers.”

“Yeah, well,” I said again. “Apparently not.” I didn't feel like explaining that the problem had everything and nothing to do with him. “Ready to go?”

Oliver eyed me, then slung his arm across my shoulders. He didn't answer my question; instead, we walked toward my car, with only one place to go: home.

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T
he silent treatment from Caro went on for a week. My phone had never been so quiet. “Are you
still
not talking?” Drew said when he saw me at school on Monday, after a weekend with no Caro. “How am I supposed to have two best friends who are fighting? This doesn't work for me.”

“Learn to adjust,” I told him. “And I'm happy to talk to Caro. She just doesn't want to talk to me.”

Oliver, while understanding, was equally clueless. “Can't you just, like, text her?” he said. We were both studying in his room while Maureen made approximately twenty-three separate trips from downstairs to the linen closet, which meant that she
passed Oliver's room every time. “No closed doors, you two!” she said the first time, in a teasing voice that all parents use when they actually mean, “No, seriously, we will strip the skin off your bones if you close that door.”

Luckily, one of the floorboards on the second floor squeaks, so we could always hear her coming. With the twins fast asleep in their room and Rick watching TV downstairs, it was pretty easy to make out between laundry trips. “How many sheet sets do you even
have
?” I whispered to him as the floorboard squeaked and we sprang apart.

He just shrugged and picked up his pencil. “Yeah, but so then why does cosine . . . ?” he said as Maureen passed. “I have no idea,” he whispered once she was gone. “You know she's spying on us.”

“No, you want to figure out the tangent,” I said as she walked back, then waited to hear her footsteps on the stairs. I was supposed to be tutoring him in pre-calc since I had taken it the year before, but Oliver didn't need any help.

“Did you talk to UCSD yet?” he asked once the coast was clear.

“I have until May first,” I told him. “I don't have to decide until then.”

“So when are you going to tell your parents?”

“Um, hopefully as my car pulls out of the driveway on the way to San Diego.” I wrapped my hand around his, still holding on to the pencil. “That should be a good time, right? They can't run as fast as the car.”

“I think a lot of people can run as fast as your car,” Oliver said.

“What it lacks in speed it makes up for in personality,” I said. “Besides, all the sand probably weighs it down.”

He laughed and leaned in to kiss me. Who knew geometry could be so romantic? “No, but seriously,” he said after a minute. “You need to tell them.”

“Dude, I know. I will. Just . . . I have to do it on my own time. I know my parents, I know when it's a good time and when it's not.”

Oliver regarded me with suspicion. “You weren't joking about that driveway comment, were you?”

“ANYWAY,” I said. “Focus on geometry.”

“What do I get if I get the next one right?” His breath was warm on my neck, making goose bumps raise up on my arms as I shivered.

“You get a gold star,” I whispered back, then turned around to kiss him.

“Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

“Get it right and see,” I replied, and started to kiss him.

Cccccrreeeeeeaaaaaaakkkk!

“Laundry time,” Oliver muttered as we flew apart again.

“Worst chore ever,” I added, and he could only nod his head in agreement.

Oliver was right, though. The clock was ticking and I had only three weeks before I had to tell UCSD whether or not I would accept their offer. Which meant, of course, that I had only three weeks to tell my parents that there was even an offer to accept. I tried a few times—at dinner one night, while we were all in the car the next—but every time I started to say something, the words seemed to fall apart in my mouth and all that came out was a cough. “Are you getting a cold?” my mom finally asked after the third time at dinner. “You sound a bit wheezy.”

“I'm fine,” I said automatically.

“You're not eating very much,” she said. “I thought you liked this pasta?”

It was bow-tie pasta with cream sauce, my mom's secret recipe that she wouldn't even give to my grandmother. (And if you don't think
that
caused a ruckus at Thanksgiving last year, then you would be very wrong.) And yes, I did love it, but between Caro and school and college and Oliver, it felt like the anxiety boulder in my stomach left no room for food.

“I'm fiiiine,” I said again, suddenly aware that I was whining. “I'm fine,” I repeated, trying to sound like an almost college student and not a three-year-old. “I just have a lot of schoolwork and Caro and I . . .”

Both my parents froze with their forks to their mouths. “Caro and you what?” my dad said. “Don't leave us hanging. Caro and I are joining the circus? Caro and I have decided to become neurosurgeons? Caro and I have decided to reimburse our parents for the eighteen years' worth of room and board that they've so lovingly provided us?”

“Honey, she and Caro are
fighting
,” my mom said. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“How did you know we were fighting?” I asked.

“Because you're only sending a million texts a day, rather than two million,” my mom said, but I could tell that she was trying to be nice about it. “What happened?”

She was clearly dying for more information. I wonder if she and Maureen had discussed this at all. “We just had a stupid fight,” I said. “She said some things and I said some things, that's all. No biggie.”

“You and Caro have never fought before,” my dad said.

“We argued over that My Little Pony doll when we were four,” I pointed out. She won. I was still bitter.

“Well, I'm sure you'll make up,” my mom said. “You and Caro have been friends
forever.”

“Can I be excused?” I asked, wiping my mouth with my napkin in preparation to flee. “Oliver and I wanted to do some homework together.”

My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Where? Here or there?”

“There,” I said. Our house didn't have any squeaky floorboards.

“Two more bites,” she said, and I swallowed them in one, relieved to be off the hot seat.

For now.

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T
he high school had an open house on Wednesday night, one of those things where all the parents and their kids can come to the school and show off their work and talk to the teachers about how great/wonderful/abysmal their little darlings are. It's a big community to-do, and my parents, of course, haven't missed one ever. Even when my mom had bronchitis, she managed to make a miraculous recovery and show up to discuss my B-plus grade with my eighth-grade history teacher. (My mother thought it should have been an A-minus. She thought wrong.)

Oliver's mom, on the other hand, hadn't been able to attend one for ten years, so she was over the moon. “Come on, we're going to be late!” I heard her yelling that evening as she herded everyone into their cars. I heard this because I was being herded by my parents into our car.

“Emmy, step on it,” my mom said. “If we don't get there soon, there's always a line to talk to your AP bio teacher.” Mr. Hernandez was thirty years old and very, um, in
demand by most of the moms in our school. Not that my mom wanted to hit on Mr. Hernandez. She was probably the only mom who actually wanted to discuss my participation in class with him.

“Aren't you tired of talking to my teachers?” I asked them as I fastened my seat belt. “I can just reenact the conversation for you.”

“You're a poor man's Mr. Hernandez,” my dad told me.

“Oh my God.
Dad
.”

“Fasten your seat belt,” my mom said.

“It's fastened.” Like it always was every single time she asked.

Oliver and I both looked at each other as our respective cars backed out of the driveways. I was about to wave when he suddenly crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me.

I had to laugh. That's what I had done to him back on his first day of school, back when I could barely imagine talking to him, much less sitting on his lap or wrapping my arms around his neck or sprawling on the warm sand, my head resting against his shoulder as he ran his fingers up and down my back. He had been a friend, then a stranger, and now something more.

And going to UCSD meant that this time, I would be leaving him.

School always seemed so weird on open house nights, lit up in the dark and suddenly filled with parents. It was even weirder hearing your parents refer to your teachers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, like they were students, too. My parents were pretty much on a first-name basis with every other parent there, and my mom shouted “Oh, hell-
lo
!” at five other families even before we got inside.

I managed to hang in there for about thirty minutes, showing my parents where I sat in French class (“Why are you so far back?” my mom wondered), introduced them to my calculus teacher and let her talk about what a great math student I was, and waited with them in line for the famed Mr. Hernandez. “Emmy is an excellent diagrammer,” he told my parents, smiling at them, and I swear I heard half the moms swoon.