Life by Committee (2 page)

The annoying thing about Sasha is that she's not cheerleader sexy. She's more like fortune-telling Gypsy sexy.

I white-knuckle it through math class, do homework in an empty classroom for a while after school to regroup, then walk to my family's coffeehouse, Tea Cozy. I have
earned coffee. And a cookie. Or, like, three cookies and a brownie. Joe and I haven't so much as made eye contact since he said he was falling for me. You'd think this would be impossible at a tiny school in a tiny town, but he makes it happen. There is a corset around my heart, and every time I calculate how long it's been since we've shared a secret wave or smile or breathy
hey there
, the corset tightens. I attempt one of Cate and Paul's meditation techniques: looking out the Tea Cozy windows and focusing on the mountains, losing myself in the way the fog collides with the snowy peaks, and thinking of nothing else.

It does not work. Meditation is bullshit. That's my official opinion.

“Long day?” Paul says, bringing me a coffee, no milk, tons of sugar. Cate hates the way I drink my coffee and tries to make me drink milk-heavy lattes like the ones she makes at home, or, ideally, green tea.

“Longest day,” I say, and take a few long gulps of the strong, sugary stuff.

“The mommy-and-me class that meets here just left, so I hear you, Tab. These women had guitars and tambourines and—what's the little silver thing called? The one that dings when you hit it? The one shaped like a triangle?”

“Um, a triangle?” I have already finished half a cup of
coffee.

“That's hilarious. Yeah. A triangle. Oh man. Hilarious.”

Paul is high. I know because his voice goes all squeaky when he smokes up, and his chattering is mostly of the
hehehe
variety. Cate's making drinks, manning the register, and looking all pissed at Paul and me, since she's stuck doing everything while we're in the corner hiding from my former best friends, who have paraded through the door like they've forgotten my family owns this place and they are not welcome.

Cate and Paul may be my parents, but I use that term loosely, since they had me when they were sixteen like me. Paul's a stoner and Cate's a flake but they're mine, and if nothing else, at least they care about stuff like that my former best friend, Jemma, and the girl who was our third wheel, Alison, are taking over the couch we used to all sit on together, and drinking my mother's famous hot chocolate like everything's fine.

“They don't even look, you know,
sheepish
,” Paul says. “Shouldn't they be embarrassed? They know we hate them, right?” He's a bigger kid than me, my handsome, scruffy father. He's also not talking quietly enough. Alison and Jemma crane their necks to look from the paisley couch to our collage-top table. Paul must be immune to things like the stink eye, or maybe all adults are, so he's rambling on. “You were basically doing them a
favor
, hanging out with them. Who are they to ditch
you
? They'll last about five seconds in college. You know that, right? Queens of the world right now, but in college being awesome actually counts for something, you know?”

Paul never went to college. He was too busy staying home with me and playing with blocks and teaching me the alphabet.

“I remember when they started getting all judge-y. I'll never forget the way they looked at you when you said you wanted to put in highlights. Like you'd said you wanted to start doing crack or something.” Paul keeps shaking his head. He can't get his mind around what happened with my friends, and I can't either. They stopped liking me. I guess it's simple, except for how surprising it was. Cate says sometimes change makes people very angry.

I can't stop looking at Jemma and Alison and the way they still feel 100 percent comfortable in my parents' café.

Cate used her parents' money to open Tea Cozy, and since there's pretty much nothing else to do in Vermont, it was super popular right away. Plus, like I said, there's Cate's hot chocolate, and that stuff's for real.

Jemma laughs, and it punctures the quiet. “She's playing some part. She, like, thinks she's in some movie
that we're all here to watch,” Jemma says. The whole place seems to be listening, and although it is absolutely possible she isn't talking about me, my heart drops and my limbs ice over with fear and shame.

She's smirking as she sips her hot chocolate. She was totally talking about me.

“I could use a hand, guys,” Cate calls out. She's got two mugs in one hand, a wad of cash in the other, and tortoiseshell glasses balanced on her head like a headband. She has hair like mine: fine and golden blond, easily tangled. She's knotted it at the base of her skull with a pencil, but damp, renegade pieces cling to her forehead and her ears, threatening to move into her eyes. She's the vision of the word
overworked
. Plus there's a growing line of after-school customers who are trying to be polite and calm but are jiggling their legs and sighing.

Paul doesn't even uncross his legs, and I want to stand up and help but get momentarily distracted by Alison's deep frown and new glasses. She's reading
The Fountainhead
. I am fascinated by
The Fountainhead
. I miss having friends who do things like wear uncool glasses and read
The Fountainhead
. I miss having more than one friend, period.

“Paul? Babe? Backup?” Cate calls out again.

Paul and I are even bigger assholes, because Cate's pregnant and it shows. She touches her stomach every few seconds and even puts a hand to her lower back from time to time, as if she is eight months in and not five.

“I'll go,” Paul says. “You stay right here. Show 'em who's boss.”

“You okay to work?” I ask. My dad's smoking up is no secret. Not to me, not to Cate, and not to the other town stoners. But a lot of people wouldn't like knowing he is high on the job. Around their kids. Making their soy lattes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You okay by yourself? Those girls aren't gonna start anything with you, right?”

“Paul,” I say, loving him even now, with his T-shirt fading and old and his hair a hot mess of bed head. “They're not, like, a gang. Their weapons are basically silence and backstabbing.” He nods. Alison and Jemma snort. They probably heard that, too.

I don't mind being at the table alone. The café is my home, and I collaged this table myself when I was ten and too small to know that Peter, Paul, and Mary are not actually cool, even though they are from the sixties or whatever. Pictures and lyrics from them are glued in overlapping enthusiasm, and then laminated. The table is one of my many masterful contributions to the decor,
which is all homemade craftiness and ironic kitsch. Heaven. And pretty much the same basic design choices as our actual home, a little house a few miles down the street in the shadow of a mountain.

Anyway, now that I'm at the table alone, I can turn on my computer and hope to see Joe already online.

No such luck. Maybe I imagined the whole ecstatic conversation last night. Maybe I've imagined every late-night conversation with Joe. I look up old chats, and there they are. Pages and pages of Joe calling me adorable and asking me what I love about used books, and telling me how out of place he feels around the other hockey players sometimes.

The chats are all there, but in real life, nothing has happened. I get headaches from thinking too hard about what it would be like to kiss him, but it can't happen while he has a girlfriend. Once in a while our fingers will touch in the middle of a card game, and that accidental touch is so electric, I wonder if I could survive an actual kiss.

My one and only friend, Elise, is online, and I throw out a
hey lady
, but she doesn't respond, so she's probably actually doing homework. Or she knows I'd be using her as a distraction. Even though we have only been friends since the summer, she sees right through me.

I don't love her with the decade-long devotion that I had for Jemma, but she's kind and effortlessly cool and
as smart as my old friends. But we don't share that special history of hot chocolate stands, snowball fights, pig Latin conversations, chocolate chip cookie baking competitions.

That said, she has also never told me I am going in the wrong direction as a person, so she wins.

I keep accidentally looking up and over at Jemma. If Joe were online, I'd be 100 percent distracted and wouldn't have to wonder what Jemma thinks of my clothes and my hair and the tightness of my black pants today.

Note: they are tight. But everyone is wearing tight black pants lately. And my ass has grown into a shape that makes every pair of pants look kind of tight. Not a bad shape. But a new shape.

I am a new shape. And they hate that shape.

My foot starts twitching of its own accord, and I'm dizzy with the anticipation and the knowledge that it could be hours
(hours!)
before Joe logs on and we can enter back into banter and whatever that other thing is: daring each other to push it further? Anticipating what could be? Gambling? I'm not sure, but it feels good and buzzing and warm, and it makes me ill with anxiety. I can't decide what makes me more nervous: the idea that it might happen in real life, or the worry that it might end before it begins.

I'm not a person who would kiss someone else's boyfriend. Except that I am someone who is desperate to kiss Joe. I've never been two people at once before, and I don't like it.

I send Elise a few more chats, begging her to stop being a good student and gossip with me instead. When that fails, I get up and sneak myself another mug of coffee from behind the counter. Paul winks at me. I head back to my table and stir in the requisite three and a half packets of sugar.

“Tabitha?”

Alison doesn't speak to me ever anymore. But Jemma butts in from time to time. I don't even hate it. It still feels good to have her close by, even though it then feels totally terrible if I actually listen to the words she's saying.

I look up and for a split second forget she's not my friend anymore. She has on the same style hoodie she wears almost every day, today in red, and she crosses her arms awkwardly over her chest. She's not pretty, not hot, not popular or talented in any particular way. She's smart, which is why I liked her so much. She's ambitious and listens to NPR and has a really fascinating opinion on almost everything. Including, lately,
me
.

“I mean this as, like, friendly advice,” Jemma starts. Alison looks on with interest. Hugs
The Fountainhead
to her chest like a raft. “But one of the seniors told me I
should mention to you that the black eyeliner is, like, a little out of control this week.”

Oh right. This. This is why we aren't friends.
Now
I remember.

My skirts. My makeup. The looks I give boys. Maybe even the looks they sometimes give me.

The looks her brother, Devon, gave me.

And okay fine, the fact that I started touching my hair a lot around him, and wearing extra makeup and my smallest skirts when I went over to her house. I started flirting. I guess that was sort of bad.

But not
that
bad.

“And today . . . are you wearing some kind of crazy padded pushup bra?” Jemma continues. “Because, um . . . that is a lot of cleavage. And my mom said some of the teachers are mentioning it as being a problem too. . . .” Jemma keeps the same look of bullshit-concern on her face for all of this, even cringing with mock humility at the word
bra
. We're sixteen, not seven. The girl has seen my nipples, for chrissakes. We compared nipple size in the seventh grade. I lent her one of my training bras when her mother wouldn't get her one. We Googled “blow job,” like, two years ago when we heard everyone was giving them.

“I'm wearing a normal bra,” I say, as if that's somehow the only pertinent part of the conversation so far. Jemma
gives me a look like she doesn't buy it, and I wish this was a problem a change of bra could solve. “What did you need, Jem?” I immediately wish that I'd stopped myself from using a nickname. It hurts, the remembered intimacy hanging in the air between us.

“You've just changed so much.”

“I haven't changed at all,” I say. And this I actually mean. Because a sudden jump in cup size isn't the same thing as changing who I am. Can't you be bookish and chill and also sort of a little bit hot? I'd still rather spend my Saturday nights curled on the paisley couch with a book and a chocolate croissant. I just want to do it with makeup on.

“It makes me sad, seeing you like this, hearing people talk about you the way they are, asking me what's going on with you,” Jemma says, gesturing vaguely at my face and maybe my low-cut peasant top, which is hardly stripper wear or anything. “We said we'd never dress like those girls, remember? We said we'd never prioritize guys over everything else. We weren't going to be like this.”

Maybe I shouldn't have let Paul go behind the counter. I'm obviously not capable of being on my own right now. Paul would have chimed in with something snarky and cool, something that shows Jemma's a bitch
and
that I
don't care.

I open and close my mouth like a fish because I can't think of actual words to say in response.

“You're becoming this Other Person,” Jemma says very, very slowly. “And hanging out with Elise . . .”

Elise wears baggy pants and a Don't Mess with Me look on her face. That's what Jemma's trying to get at, but she's choosing her words carefully so as not to sound judgmental. In Vermont we are not judgmental. We are
concerned
.

“Elise isn't exactly trouble,” I say. Also true. Elise doesn't party or wear low-cut shirts or anything. Just has short hair and pushes the dress code by wearing obnoxious T-shirts underneath her chunky cardigan sweater collection.

Scandalous.