Firsts (34 page)

I roll her words around in my head.
Perfect love casts out fear.

Then, my own words.
Nothing you do will make him leave, no matter how many times you push him away.

I stand up so fast that the blood rushes to my head.

“Angela,” I say, “there’s somewhere I really need to be.”

40

The Jeep can’t get there fast enough. Every second is wasted time, grains of sand slipping through my hand. By the time I screech into my usual parking spot and run for the door, I realize I have no idea what I’m even going to say.

But I don’t let that stop me.

He’s not in the library, where he said he was going to be. I dart down every aisle and check every cubicle, hoping to see the top of his head. A few people look up as I dash by, but no Zach.

I sprint down the hallway, passing my locker. The blacked-out
WHORE
and
SLUT
have been joined by
BITCH
, but I don’t let any of those words slow me down.

I almost run right past the chemistry lab. It’s mostly dark and the door is closed. But something stops me. Instinct, or some greater force. When I look in the window, I see him at our old desk, with his head in his hands.

I don’t hesitate. I don’t give myself the chance to chicken out or change my mind and run away. I open the door and stride up to the whiteboard. I clear my throat and pick up a whiteboard marker, just like I did that day when I didn’t know Jillian was watching.

“Today, we’re going to be talking about ionic and covalent bonds,” I say, surprised at how steady my voice sounds, how sure of myself I seem.

Zach leans forward in his chair. “Mercy, what are you doing here?”

I keep talking. “You’re probably wondering what the difference is. Well, in an ionic bond, the oppositely charged ions are strongly attracted to each other.” I use the whiteboard to draw two little stick people, the extent of my artistic ability.

“Ionic compounds have high melting and boiling points.” I add arrows to one of the stick people. Highs and lows, ups and downs. “Lots of energy is required to melt ionic compounds or cause them to boil.”

Zach taps his pen against his notebook and squints at the board.

“Ionic compounds are hard and brittle.” I draw a box around the stick person, trapping it inside. “Hard because the positive and negative ions are strongly attracted to each other and difficult to separate.” I erase the first stick person and redraw it closer to the one in the box.

“But the electrostatic repulsion can be enough to split the crystal, which is why ionic solids are also brittle.” I rub out the box with my finger and whip around to face him. “Is any of this ringing a bell?”

Zach scrapes his chair back and raises his hand, something he never does during class because he never knows the answer. “Opposites attract,” he says. “Two things come together and make something stronger. Like table salt. Sodium and chloride.”

The corners of my mouth start to twitch into a smile. “You’re learning,” I say.

Zach grins. “Told you I wasn’t a lost cause,” he says, standing up and walking toward me. He stops when he’s right in front of Mr. Sellers’s desk. “I never thought I’d see the day when you’d actually tutor me.”

“I figure I have some lost time to make up for,” I say.

Zach leans over and I know he’s going to kiss me, but I step back. “Wait,” I say, holding out my hand. “I need to tell you something.”

I swallow hard and start speaking before I can talk myself out of it.

“I didn’t not write about you in my journal because you were nothing, Zach. That wasn’t the reason why.”

He cocks his head quizzically. “Why, then?”

I ball up my hands so hard that my nails dig into my palms.

“Because you were everything. You weren’t one night, one experience I had to record for proof that it happened. You were so much more than that. I didn’t write about you because I took it for granted that I would always have you.” I bite the inside of my cheek and try to stop myself from crying, but it doesn’t work, and I know my mascara is running, but this time I don’t care.

Zach reaches across and wipes my cheek with his thumb. “What are you saying?”

I smile through quivering lips. “I’m saying I want to eat spaghetti with you.”

Zach takes my hand and laces our fingers together, and I don’t stop him. I’m holding hands with a boy, and it feels so much better than I could have imagined.

“You know what this means,” he says slowly. “We can’t just be Wednesday friends anymore. This will probably involve more days of the week.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to be just Wednesday friends.”

“Good,” he says, stepping around the desk and wrapping his arms around me. “Because I’m busy that day. I mean, I switched into this home economics class just to be closer to this girl I’m totally crazy for, and I have all this extra homework now because she’s such a slacker.”

I press my face into his chest. There’s so much I want to say, so much to tell him about myself that he doesn’t know. But there will be time for that. There’s no need to rush.

“I don’t know how to be a girlfriend,” I say. “I’ve never done it before.”

Zach kisses the top of my head. “It’s okay,” he says. “That’s something we can figure out together.” He pulls away and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Now, former Wednesday friend, can you help me with this covalent bonds thing now? Because they still make no sense. Maybe one of your diagrams would help?”

I smile, bigger than I’m sure I ever have before, and his lips are on mine, and if this isn’t the best kind of chemistry, I don’t know what is.

41

It’s funny how giving up control can actually end up putting things back in place. But that’s what I’m learning, that too much of something ends up yielding the opposite reaction. It’s a logic that has taken me the longest time to figure out but the shortest time to mend. And in two weeks, my life goes from complete shambles to something resembling almost normal.

The best part—besides Angela and I being best friends again—is that Faye is allowed to come back to school. I don’t know exactly how it happened, and Angela won’t tell me the specifics, but she went into Principal Goldfarb’s office early one morning and didn’t come out for almost two hours. She must have had some serious ammunition.

“What did you say to Goldfarb?” I ask when she finally emerges, with a serene smile on her face. “If there’s one thing I know about Goldfarb, it’s that he never changes his mind.”

Angela just shrugs. “Maybe I’ll tell you, maybe I won’t. But come on. We’re late for prayer group.”

I’m still not sure I buy into prayer group, but I’m definitely starting to see the importance of having faith in something, or somebody. Even if that somebody is your best friend. Today’s prayer-group topic hits especially close to home. It’s forgiveness.

“Everybody open your Bibles to Ephesians 4:31,” Angela says with a broad smile. She clears her throat and reads with confidence.

“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

“Everybody” no longer includes Charlie, who hasn’t shown his face at prayer group since Angela gave back her engagement ring. Prayer group is a place I can count on never seeing Charlie again. I wish I could say that about everywhere, but I can’t. There’s no magic chemistry formula that will make Charlie disappear, but there is a little thing called the truth. And now that the former virgins know that Charlie was the one responsible for that video, I don’t think I’m the most hated person at Milton High anymore.

Plenty of people do still hate me, and there’s not much I can do to change that. But now I have Angela back. She doesn’t physically hold my hand when somebody hisses
slut
or
whore
at me in the hall, but she doesn’t have to. She is my strength just the same. Charlie didn’t get to be her first. That becomes my mantra.

Angela still wears her promise ring. When I asked her about it, she had a good reason.

“I’m keeping this,” she said, twirling it around her finger. “I picked it out. But it’s not a promise to Charlie anymore, it’s a promise to myself, that I’m always going to trust my gut.”

The best part is, she got me one to match and told me to make my own promise on it. Which I did, but I didn’t tell her what it was.

I owe Faye more than I could ever tell her. She somehow got the website Charlie made taken down from the Internet. I could have let it ruin my life, but I let it die a quick death at Faye’s hands instead. She’s another best friend now, somebody I trust with my life. But I don’t want to be her anymore. I’m still getting the hang of being myself.

Faye was right and wrong. I’m not quite old news yet. People still whisper when I approach them, and there are several girls who wouldn’t mind seeing me get hit by a car. I still have to deal with death stares in the hallway, and I probably always will, at least until senior year is over. I left a lot of pissed-off ex-girlfriends in my wake, and I’ll never be able to explain to them why I did what I did. I considered trying to, but maybe they’re trying to move on as much as I am. And no reason will ever justify what I did to them.

I guess the only thing I can do is leave the past in the past. Most of the couples are done for good. Laura Adams dumped Trevor Johnston in a profanity-laced text message. Isabella reportedly threw her shoe at Juan Marco Antonio’s face during soccer practice and told him she couldn’t wait for him to go back to his home country. Rafe Lawrence found himself at the receiving end of Caroline’s wrath, just like he wanted, although rumor has it he wants her back now and she’s not having any of it. Good for her.

Jillian Landry decided to give Tommy Hudson another chance. I still pass them in the hall, and they still hold hands. I don’t tutor her anymore, but sometimes I swear Jillian gives me the faintest hint of a smile, like she knows more than I have told her. Like she forgives me for what happened. I hope Tommy and Jillian make it.

I wasn’t expecting it when Toby Easton found me at my locker, waving his midterm report card in my face. He got an A in polymers. If he noticed the covered-over words on the locker door, the blacked-out
WHORE
and
SLUT
and
BITCH
, he didn’t show it. He lunged forward like he wanted to hug me but stopped short. He had probably seen the website, read the notebook pages. He was probably saying thanks, but no thanks. I didn’t blame him.

I waited for him to say good-bye, but he didn’t. He said something else.

“Same time, same place today?”

I nodded. Something swelled in my chest. I got to keep tutoring Toby. That meant everything to me.

“You really did save my life,” he said as he walked away.

Nobody else tells me that anymore. And if Toby is the last person I ever hear it from, I’m okay with that.

Some people think I’m a bitch, some people think I deserve to die, and some people think I’m a glorified prostitute. I hear all kinds of rumors about myself, most of which have absolutely no root in reality. They don’t just go away, but I knew they wouldn’t. They linger, but they’re no longer insults hurled across the cafeteria. They’re more like whispers, echoing off the walls.

“I heard she quit sleeping with high school guys and moved onto college ones,” I heard somebody say when I was sitting on the toilet taking a pee.

“I heard she got herpes,” another girl said.

“No, she didn’t get herpes. She got pregnant,” a third voice chimed in.

“No, you guys are wrong. She has an actual boyfriend now. I saw them holding hands yesterday,” a fourth girl said to a chorus of disbelieving laughter.

Thankfully, only the last of those rumors is true.

And tonight is a particularly special night. Tonight, Zach and I are having our first real date. My first real date ever.

“It’s about time,” Faye says with a wink. She and Angela are over at my place, helping me get ready. Angela is thumbing through Kim’s old copies of
Us Weekly
magazines, and Faye is trying to make me sit still while she does my makeup.

“I’ll say,” Angela says. “Mercy’s first date. This is a big deal.”

I roll my eyes. “Don’t make me more nervous than I already am,” I say. “You’re supposed to be helping me feel like I’m ready.”

“Please,” Faye says, swiping mascara across my upper lashes with a flourish of her hand. “You were born ready.” She squints at me and frowns. “Now close your eyes. I need to do your eyeliner.”

I do what she says. I never thought I would be able to sit like this, to give somebody control over even something as simple as my makeup. But I’m learning to take baby steps.

“So what’s the plan?” Angela says. “Knowing you, there’s a big elaborate plan. I’m dying to know, and you haven’t said anything.”

I smile, despite Faye’s instructions not to move my face.

“Nope,” I say. “There’s no plan. We’re playing it by ear.”

“There must at least be an outfit,” Angela says. “You have so many nice dresses to pick from.”

She’s right—I have a closet full of nice dresses that I never wear, dresses that Kim bought me for random charity events and dinner parties and other occasions I found a way to weasel out of. I have a closet full of dresses and drawers full of lingerie, some of which I have worn for Zach on multiple occasions. Lingerie that was supposed to say something.
I’m playful. I’m fun. I’m sexy. I’m a bombshell.

So maybe it’s telling that I’m wearing a cotton bra and underwear set that I haven’t worn in years. My days of letting my lingerie speak for me are long gone.

“No dress,” I say. “I’m wearing exactly what I have on.”

That statement is met with silence. I crack my eyes open and see the disappointment on their faces.

“What? You don’t like my jeans?”

“It’s just, you wore them all day,” Angela says. “I thought you were going to wear something more girly.”