Major Crush (20 page)

“It’s the same thing with my parents,” I said. “What are they going to do? Ground me for telling someone that my dad had an affair?”

A llison raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow. “I see your point.”

“A nyway,” I went on, “I want to tell him what I did. He told me what he did. I see now that he didn’t have to tell me, or even Mom. He probably could have hidden that it ever happened, but he decided to be honest. I need to give him the same respect.”

A nother knock sounded at the door.

“What!” A llison protested.

Mr. Rush swung the door open. “Sauter,” he barked. “Time to march back to the buses. Either come be a drum major or let me borrow your skirt.”

A s I walked toward the freshman bus I could hear them through the open windows. Girls screamed, “Eeeeeew!” as boys threw sopping wet items of clothing. I did not look forward to an hour and a half of riding home with these people.

A lone.

A t the same time, I wanted to get on the bus as quickly as possible, to escape the terrible sight in front of me. The bus was parked next to the U-Haul. Instrument cases were being tossed, hauled, and slung along a line of boys.

Including Drew.

In a soaked T-shirt that stuck to his strong chest.

Rat bastard.

Mr. Rush sat on the bus stairs. He looked wet and tired, like a small, ferocious dog who’d been into the pond after a tennis ball one too many times. I started to climb past him into the bus, but he patted the stair beside him. “Sauter. Sit a spell.”

I sat down next to him with a squelsh of water in my boots. “I don’t want to let you down tomorrow.”

“I don’t want you to let me down either. I don’t expect you to. You’re doing a great job, Sauter. True, it would be better to have Morrow. Lots better. The whole thing, the whole band is planned around Morrow being there. It’s Morrow who’s letting me down.” He lowered his voice.

“Tell me what’s been going on.”

“How much have you heard?” I asked.

“I heard about your dad.”

Drew handed a tuba case off to the next boy in the line. His eyes met mine for the briefest moment, and then he reached out for a drum case.

“Good news travels fast,” I said.

“Clarinets know all and tell all,” Mr. Rush said.

“Did you hear that Drew’s the one who told the twins, who told everybody?”

Mr. Rush turned and looked at me. “What? Because he was mad about this whole drum major election hullabaloo? That doesn’t sound like Morrow.”

“It had to be him. I didn’t tell anybody else.” I shifted uncomfortably on the step, and water squished between my toes inside my boots.

“Drew knows the twins have it in for me. When he told them, he knew they’d tell. But when I told Drew, I trusted him. I trusted him, you know? Like my dad trusted me when he told me in the first place.”

Mr. Rush didn’t say anything. We both watched the boys methodically tossing the black cases along the line. But I took his silence to mean that he was waiting for me to hear how I sounded.

“That’s the thing, isn’t it?” I asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t be mad at Drew. Maybe I am just mad at myself.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sauter,” Mr. Rush said. “It all goes back to your dad, doesn’t it? He did the deed. A nd he told you. He’s been sixteen. Or however old you were when this happened.”

“Fourteen.”

“Your dad’s been fourteen. He’d be a real dumbass if he thought a fourteen-year-old could take a secret like that to the grave. Is your dad a dumbass?”

“No,” I said.

“So he must have known you might tell. But he wanted you to know, and he would suffer the consequences. That’s the kind of person he is.”

A nd I’d wanted Drew to know. A nd now I was suffering the consequences too.

“Drew clearly is not into me like you thought,” I said bitterly. “What’s sad is, knowing that, and knowing what he did, I’m still into him. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard?”

“Yes,” Mr. Rush said. “Stupid and human.”

We looked at each other.

He was thinking about Ms. Martineaux.

We understood each other.

He went on, “Drew lights a fire under you. He’s responsible, like your dad wasn’t. A t least, you thought he was responsible. Now you can’t quite believe what he’s done. But when you believe it, the fire will go out.

“You light a fire under Drew because you know who you are. That’s something he wants so badly for himself, but he’s got too many people pulling him in different directions. If it’s any consolation, a long time after your fire goes out, he’ll still be burning for you. Trust me.”

I remembered what Drew said when Barry asked me out: One underhanded trick deserves another. I could spread a rumor about him like he’d spread one about me. I could tell everyone not to trust him because he told my secret. But that wasn’t my style.

A nd I couldn’t even be consoled by the idea that he might crush on me after I’d forgotten him. The thought just made me sad. It made me want to put my arms around him. A wwwwww.

How sick was that?

Well, Mr. Rush was trying to help. I could return the favor. “Can’t you tone it down for Ms. Martineaux?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was from Venus.

“What?”

“When I’ve seen you with Ms. Martineaux, you’ve talked to her straight just like you talk to me and Drew.” I glanced sideways at him. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if the way you’re coming off is driving people away, maybe you should change.”

“If she can’t stand the heat, she needs to stay out of the kitchen,” Mr. Rush insisted.

“Or you could air-condition the kitchen,” I said. “Or at least install a fan to ventilate some of the fumes.”

He chuckled, and gave me the first genuine, nonsarcastic, nonthreatening smile I’d ever seen on his face. “Get some sleep tonight.” He pushed off from the bus stair and headed toward the other buses without concern, like it wasn’t raining.

“Mr. Rush?”

He turned around.

“Thanks for telling me about that ‘I feel’ stuff. I think I’m going to do it on Sunday with my parents. I’m tired of being a troubled teen.”

He laughed. He guffawed. He bent over and held his sides. I thought he was going to bust a gut right there in the rain. The line of boys stopped passing instrument cases into the U-Haul and stared at him.

Except Drew, who stared at me.

Mr. Rush wiped his eyes. Which seemed kind of pointless, since he was standing in a downpour. “Oh, Sauter,” he said. “You’re not a troubled teen. I know ’em when I see ’em. I was a troubled teen myself not too long ago.” He turned and walked toward the other buses again. Then he tossed over his shoulder at me, “I spent some time in juvy.”

A llison and I were sitting in my car the next morning, watching the first bus park outside the band room for the trip to the contest in Montgomery, when my cell phone rang.

We looked at each other.

“Drew?” she asked.

I handed her my phone and the keys and got out of the car. When Luther came over to her house the night before, she told him that Drew had spilled the beans to the twins. Luther said it didn’t sound like Drew, and he planned to call Drew and ask. That’s probably why Drew was calling me now.

But if Drew wanted to be forgiven, I still didn’t want to hear it. A nd even if I eventually forgave him, I wasn’t sure I could ever take him up on his offer to make out on a hay baler.

I chose a sunny spot on the wall near the band room door and watched the second bus pull up. A fter Luther had left the night before, A llison had come over to my house. We had stayed up late, blotting our soaked boots and band outfits and very carefully blowing them with hairdryers so they wouldn’t shrink. My jacket and skirt and knee-high boots were warm and dry. A nd the stormy front had blown through, taking the cold rain with it, and leaving behind the warm morning sun.

But I couldn’t shake the chill.

The saddest thing was that despite everything, I wanted to sit in this sunny spot and watch Drew drive up in the farm truck and climb onto the senior bus. Just because.

It was actually kind of strange that he wasn’t there yet. He usually was way early because he was so responsible.

Except with other people’s secrets.

A llison got out of my car and walked across the grass toward me with her bag slung over her shoulder, still talking on the phone. “Here she is,” she said. She held the phone out to me.

I shook my head.

“Walter,” she said. “I told him about the rumors.”

I grabbed the phone. “Thank you so much for last night,” I exclaimed. “Football is so hard!”

He laughed. “You did a good job. You would be good no matter what. A nd at half-time the band sounded even better than at homecoming, technically. Did you work on that weird mellophone part in the middle song?”

I knew Walter. I knew there was a but coming. “But?”

“But at homecoming, the show had more … I don’t know.”

“Life.”

“Yes! A nd I think it’s Drew. I think the band sounds best when you and Drew direct together.”

The third bus parked in front of the band room.

“I didn’t make him quit,” I reminded Walter. “A nd I’m not inclined to beg him to come back, after what he did to me. To my family.” I did my best Tony Soprano. “Blood is thicker than water. The family sticks together. Capisce?”

“I’m glad you still have enough of a sense of humor to do horrible imitations.”

“Hey!”

“But listen, Don Corleone. I’m not convinced Drew told the Evil Twins. It doesn’t sound like something he’d do.”

“How can you say that? You hardly know him. A nd you call him Patton.”

“I just called him that because you liked him. I know him pretty well. I was in Boy Scouts with him for years.”

This I couldn’t picture. “You were in Boy Scouts?”

“It’s not that weird. When you’re ten years old and you live in a bus, you do what you can to fit in. A nd then, by the time you’re fifteen, you give up.”

The fourth bus parked in front of the band room.

“It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” I said. “Drew was really mad about losing drum major. But it still doesn’t make sense that he’d be out to get me. He doesn’t work that way. But who else could have told the twins? Drew is the only person I told.”

“Maybe your dad told someone. Does your mom know? Maybe your mom told someone.”

“They didn’t want A llison’s parents to find out. I doubt they told anybody.”

“It takes two to tango.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Who did your dad have the affair with?”

I shivered in the warm sun. “Some nurse named Lurleen at the hospital. It was over by the time he told my mom and me. I never met her.”

The line of boys from the instrument room pitched the last case onto the U-Haul and closed and locked the door.

“A nurse named Lurleen?” Walter asked. “That’s the Evil Twins’ mother.”

On cue, long hair, big boobs, and her sister pulled their car into the parking lot, late. Did this mean we really were the Evil Triplets? “It can’t be the same Lurleen,” I said calmly. But I pressed my hand to my heart thumping hard in my chest.

“How many nurses named Lurleen do you think work at the hospital?”

“Well, I don’t know. A nd how do you know all these people?”

“They rented a trailer in my camp-ground for a few weeks when they were between houses about five years ago, right after their dad left them.”

The twins hauled their bags and cooler and flute cases out of their used car and slammed the doors. I glanced over at my own car, which my parents had bought for me brand new when I turned sixteen. Then I glanced back at the twins. One of them was blatantly pointing at me and was probably making some choice comments about me to the other.

It did make more sense now, why they would come after me like they had. A nd it had never occurred to me that Dad had had an affair with someone I knew or the mother of someone I knew, but that made sense too. It was a small town.

“They must hate me,” I mused. “A nd now I steal their boyfriend? I’d hate me too!”

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Walter said.

What was I missing? I went over the whole thing in my mind for the billionth time, then gasped.