Firsts (29 page)

I bolt upright as the door opens. This must be a joke. There’s no boy who would want to see me. Unless it’s Charlie, here to gloat and rub in his victory.

“No,” I say, covering my face with my duvet. “I’m sick.”

“Well, it would be rude to send him away. He has been waiting for you. And he brought soup.”

I peek out slowly, just to make sure it’s not a ruse. But there’s only one guy who would bring me soup.

“Hey,” Zach says, taking a seat in my swivel chair and putting a Tupperware container on my desk.

“Hey,” I whisper. I almost feel like crying. Since when does soup make me so emotional?

To Kim, who is lingering in the door, I shoot what I hope is a menacing stare. “Bye.”

Kim gives me the world’s most obvious wink. “See you around, Zach,” she says. “Maybe you’ll let me win next time.”

When she shuts the door behind her, I lean forward on my elbows and turn to Zach. “Win at what?” I say. “Don’t—I repeat, don’t—gamble with Kim. She’ll take your money and run.”

Zach laughs. “You were out cold, so I taught her how to play Go Fish,” he says. “She had never heard of it. I told her she must be living under a rock.”

This should probably be weird, Zach playing cards with Kim. I should probably be embarrassed, because she undoubtedly showed off too much of her cleavage and most likely found some way to get Zach to compliment her on how young she looks. I have kept Kim hidden from people for a reason. But with Zach, it’s strangely okay somehow. If he has spent time alone with her and still isn’t running for the hills, he’s an even better person than I gave him credit for.

I pull back the covers and pat the mattress beside me. Zach hesitates but gets in fully clothed. We lie there like that for a minute, and I’m conscious of how much space he takes up, how long his legs and arms are. Then I lean over and do something I haven’t done before. I rest my arm across his chest and close my eyes and snuggle into his neck. I’m surprised by how good it feels, how well my chin fits against him.
I fit well here.

I’m surprised that of all the things Zach and I have done in this bed, just lying here together isn’t one of them. And it feels better than anything else. He wraps the other arm around me and kisses the top of my head.

Is this what I gave up for the virgins?

But when I start tracing circles on his chest with my finger, he pulls away and his face is hard. “I didn’t believe it when I first found out,” he mumbles. “I didn’t believe you could lie to me all that time when all I wanted to do was make you my girlfriend. I felt like a fool.” He clenches his jaw. “I watched the video a hundred times and still couldn’t believe it. All those guys, and I had no idea.”

I reach out to touch him, but he waves away my hand.

“You didn’t even write about me in that journal,” he says, averting his eyes. “You wrote about everyone else. I felt like I was nothing to you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Zach sounds like he’s about to cry. Hearing his voice like that is the worst feeling in the world. “I’m sorry, Zach,” I say. “I really am. You weren’t nothing.”

“I know,” he says, his voice breaking slightly. “But part of me, this pissed-off part, wanted to be done with you. All this time I thought I had a chance with you, that you’d finally come around. Now I know it’s never going to happen.”

I sit up, hanging my head between my knees and gripping the sheets underneath me. My body is made up of air, and I will float away unless I anchor myself here. I will float away without Zach.

“Hey,” he says, running his finger along my arm. “That was just a little part of me. I’m not done with you.”

My chest shakes when I take a breath. Everything hurts. I deserve it for hurting Zach.

“I’d do anything for you,” he says, squeezing my shoulder gently. “Anything. Just let me be your friend, okay? You can tell me stuff. Whatever is in your head.”

“What’s in my head right now is that I got what I deserved,” I say quietly. “I deserved what I got.”

“Never say that,” he says. “Don’t ever say that. You hear me?” He cups my face in his hands.

“Why do you even like me?” I say. “I’m selfish and dishonest and all I do is push people away. I wouldn’t even want to be my friend.”

Zach’s eyes darken. “You’re also real. You tell it like it is. You don’t let me get away with anything. And I love that about you.”

“I don’t see how you can like me after all this,” I say. “I wouldn’t have held it against you if you decided I was a big, dirty slut and joined the angry mob in the hallway. You probably had more right than anyone.”

He sets his mouth in a firm line. “Remember all the times you told me no? All the times you brushed me off when I tried to make you my girlfriend? I stuck around after that. And I’m sticking around now. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

I let my lips press against his so lightly that our mouths are barely touching. When I pull away, his eyes are still closed. I stare at his face, the mouth I have kissed a thousand times. For some reason the MIT acceptance letter flits into my head again, but this time it fills me with dread. In Massachusetts, I
will
be another number. I won’t be important to anybody. I won’t be around people like Zach who stand by me no matter what. People I can’t get rid of. People I don’t want to get rid of, not ever.

Zach opens his eyes slowly and wipes a tear away from under my eye. “Penny for your thoughts,” he says. “I told you mine.”

“I got into MIT,” I blurt out. “I haven’t told anybody yet.”

I wasn’t planning on blurting it out. The words from the acceptance letter race through my head.
Your commitment to personal excellence and principled goals has convinced us that you will both contribute to our diverse community and thrive within our academic environment.
The words that mean less to me than all the ones Zach just said.

He squeezes my hand and gives me a lopsided half smile. “I didn’t even know you had applied there,” he says. “Congratulations. You deserve everything you want, and I know how hard you work at school.”

I know he’s proud of me, but I also know he’s hurt. He’s drifting away again. Friends tell friends what schools they apply to. Friends cheer friends on. I know Zach would have cheered me on if I had given him the chance.

We sit there in silence until Zach says he has to go, that he has someplace to be. I don’t ask him where because it’s none of my business, but for some reason I’m insatiably curious. I have no right to be insatiably curious, but I am anyway.

“You should heat up that soup,” he says. “My mom says it cures everything.”

I smile weakly. I wish it would cure everything that’s wrong with me.

Before he leaves, he opens his backpack and takes out a binder. He rummages around in it and pulls out what looks like an essay and places it beside me on the bed.

“This is for you,” he says. “I did your home economics assignment from the other day. You wrote yours on the woman’s changing role in the workforce. And you did a pretty damned good job.”

“Why?” I ask. “Why would you do that for me?”

He shrugs. “I figure I owe you one. You know, for all the chemistry you’ve done for me.”

And then he’s gone, with a wave and a smile I haven’t seen before.

I’m left feeling like somebody I don’t even know.

35

Before school on Friday, I do what I have been avoiding for the last several days.

I watch the video.

It’s not hard to find. It’s embedded on some website that looks like it was thrown together without a lot of effort. It doesn’t look at all like something Charlie would create, and I’m sure that was exactly his intention.

The picture quality is grainy, but you can definitely tell it’s me. Charlie spliced it together masterfully, cutting out all the discussions that surrounded the sexual encounters so that it’s basically pure pornography. My stomach churns when I think about how many times he has seen this footage and how many times he probably jerked off to it. The entire student body of Milton High has seen every inch of my body. They have seen me on my back, on my stomach, on all fours, on my side, and even—with that idiotic mole Juan Marco Antonio—standing up.

Seeing myself doing that with so many different people makes me physically ill, like vomit could come up at any moment. I let them into my bedroom, let them into me, like it was no big deal. It’s like I’m watching somebody else entirely on that screen, somebody who doesn’t value herself at all. I thought I was in control, but I wasn’t. It was
him
the whole time, first Luke then every other guy I let into my bed to make up for him.

I remember talking to Angela about the staying power of video and text messaging. “Once something’s out there, you never get it back,” she had whispered to me with wide eyes when one of the girls in our grade-ten homeroom sent a naked photo of herself to some guy she was seeing, who in turn sent it to all of his friends. Angela couldn’t believe somebody would be so stupid. “Seriously. That photo will follow her everywhere. To college. To job interviews. Her future husband will probably see it.” I wanted to tell her to loosen her chastity belt and stop judging people, but she was right.

And if that girl’s photo made it to, say, 20 people, mine has made it to 1,601, at least if the obnoxious “visitor counter” Charlie installed at the bottom of the page can be believed. I wonder how many of them are perfect strangers, maybe some Internet perverts looking for new material to wank off to. It’s a truly sickening thought.

Even worse is seeing my journal pages up there and feeling what I felt when I wrote them, all over again. It’s physically painful, like being stabbed with needles from the inside. I think about the people I wrote about, if it’s like that for them, too. They must be humiliated, pissed off, regretful. At least I had a choice. I could have not written anything down and spared a lot of people a lot of grief.

I read every comment people left even though I don’t want to. They dig into my skin, burrow into all the parts of me I never wanted people to see.

Poor little bitch girl. She didn’t want to sleep with him? Sure didn’t seem that way.

THIS GIRL IS A HEARTLESS WHORE.

She thinks he’d make a good boyfriend? They deserve each other.

Dear diary, I am a fucked-up slut who deserves everything I get.

My phone starts to vibrate on the desk beside me. I jump, expecting it to be yet another nasty message, but luckily it’s Faye.

“You just about ready for your fifteen minutes of notoriety to be over?” she says, sounding much too chipper for seven a.m.

“Feels more like fifteen years,” I say. “But I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.” My throat feels like it’s closing up. Faye read those comments, too. Zach read them. Angela read them.

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Faye says. “All you need to do is show up at today’s assembly.”

“No, thanks,” I say. “I was planning on skipping that. Having everybody who hates me clustered into the gym just seems like a bad idea.”

“Be there,” Faye says. “Trust me.”

I do trust her, but she doesn’t give me the chance to say so. She keeps talking. “But there’s something I need you to know, before this goes down. There’s going to be fallout from this, and it’s going to seem like I threw a lot away. But I don’t care about the things a lot of people care about. I don’t want to go to college like you. What I really want is to go to beauty school.”

I bolt upright. “Why are you talking about all this? What exactly are you planning here? Should I be worried?”

She doesn’t answer any of these questions. “Just be at the assembly today. You’ll see.”

I guess I don’t have much of a choice anyway. Everyone goes to our assemblies. Even the kids who normally cut class—the pot-smoking slackers who take off to ride their skateboards in the park and the garden-variety slackers who take off to destinations unknown—are forced to go. Principal Goldfarb has teachers do a sweep of the school. More than once, kids have been caught when they’re already in the parking lot. They get corralled back in with resigned expressions and detention slips. Although that sounds more appealing than more public ridicule, I’m not going to let Faye down.

I spot Angela and Charlie on the bleachers. My breath catches in my throat. He hasn’t seen me, but just being in the same room with him makes my chest throb in terror. I almost talk myself out of the assembly, Principal Goldfarb’s punishment notwithstanding, until I see the way Charlie’s hand is resting in Angela’s lap, with his fingers pressed into her skin. It’s a simple gesture to somebody else, but not to me. He thinks he owns her. She’s pulling her skirt down so the sliver of skin between her knee sock and her skirt isn’t exposed. A typical Angela move, one that probably would have made me roll my eyes a few weeks ago but today makes me want to hug her and be alone with her and tell her everything. The letter I wrote is in my backpack, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to give it to her without her doing the same thing to it that Faye did to the piece of paper in Mrs. Hill’s classroom.

Faye and Zach are notably absent, which leaves me to sit by myself until thirty seconds before the assembly, when they both sneak in and slide into the seats beside me, which are not surprisingly vacant.

“Sorry,” Faye whispers. “Technical problems.” She grips my hand.

Zach stares straight ahead with his jaw clenched. I know that face well. That’s the face he makes during chemistry tests, when he freezes up. It’s his nervous face. But what does he have to be nervous about?

“Ahem,” Principal Goldfarb says from his podium. He taps the microphone with his index finger, leaving the room with the truly horrifying sound of feedback. Most people cover their ears. I relish the screeching, because it’s the first time at school since the video came out that I have heard something besides whispers about me.

“Sorry about that. Now, we have a lot of material to cover, so I’m going to get started right away. One of the topics we’re going to talk about today is sexual harassment.”