Populazzi (19 page)

"No, he's not here! I was just remembering. It was kind of ... big today."

"
It
was big?"

"That's not what I mean. I mean, it
was
big. I think. Not that I've
seen
it ... Even if I
had
seen it, I have no basis for comparison, so I still wouldn't know, really—"

"I'm going to start playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' on the phone keys unless you tell me
exactly
what happened
right now
."

"Okay, so you know how I said I was going to wear that stretchy skirt today?"

"Easy access," she confirmed.

"Right. Well ... he accessed."

"OH MY GOD!" Claudia screeched. A loud beep screamed in my ear.

"Ow! What was that?"

"That was my jaw hitting the floor. Or in this case, the pound key," Claudia said. "So was it ... you know ... good?"

"Yeah..."

"But?"

"No, it was good. It was. It was just really...
intimate,
you know? Almost too intimate. But I didn't think that until it was over. And then I just kind of wanted to cuddle up and wrap the comforter all around me."

Neither one of us said anything for a minute.

"Cair, are you okay?"

"Yeah! I mean, it felt incredible. Honestly, he didn't do anything I didn't
really
want him to."

"Swear on the Bell?"

"Swear on the Bell. Sorry, Claude, gotta run—Wegmans. I'll call you back after."

I thought about it while I did my quick-change act and decided I was making a big deal out of nothing. It wasn't like I was twelve. I was sixteen. Lots of sixteen-year-olds had actual sex. The fact that I'd maybe gone a little further than I might have imagined I would was seriously no big deal. And I hadn't been lying to Claudia: It had felt amazing. Really amazing. And I'd wanted it in a huge way.

So there we were. I was fine. I was better than fine. I was great.

Except that night I couldn't sleep at all.

It wasn't what we'd done that bothered me. It was Nate, and the way I was with Nate. We never talked. At all. Okay, yes, we talked about music, and we talked about pot, and we talked about how much he wanted me to hear his music and smoke his pot, but we didn't talk about anything real. And that was cool when we were just hanging out, but now we'd had this really deep, intense physical experience. But without the other stuff it felt kind of ... empty.

I desperately needed to know how Nate felt about me, but even the idea of asking made me burn with embarrassment. Too lame and sad-little-puppy. And I was sure anything Nate did feel would evaporate the minute I asked.

If I wanted to know Nate's feelings, I had to test them.

Since I wasn't Claudia, my test wasn't baroque. The next day, Friday, I simply didn't go out to the rock at lunchtime. Not right away and not after my usual lag time. I forced myself to stay in my car and eat my Zone bar with teeny, tiny bites, chewing thirty times before I swallowed. It was meditative, actually, and gave me something to concentrate on other than how Nate might—or might not—be reacting to my absence.

With five minutes left to the period, I hunkered down in my beast of a pea coat and made my way to the rock. My heart pounded. I glued my eyes to each skeletally leafless tree I passed, stretching time before I'd see what I wasn't sure I wanted to know: whether or not Nate had cared enough to leave the rock and look for me.

My insides deflated when I saw him, same as always, playing his guitar without a care in the world. I had another physical flashback to last night, but this time I didn't feel a shivery jolt. I felt stupid and embarrassed.

I was close enough now for Nate to notice. He smiled up at

HIT › me. Hey.

Normally, this was when he'd pull me close for a kiss, but I purposely stood out of his reach. He beckoned for me to come closer, but I didn't move. For the first time with Nate, I didn't have to concentrate on squelching my normal curly-haired energy. I had never felt less curly and bouncy than I did now.

"You don't look worried." I tried to sound nonchalant, but even I could hear the bitterness in my words. Not cool, but I couldn't help it.

"About what?"

"I always meet you during fifth period. Today I didn't."

He looked at me pointedly, clearly noting that I was indeed right there in front of him during fifth period. The fact that he was right didn't make me any less upset.

"Okay, I'm here
now,
but didn't you wonder where I was? What if I'd been sick, or hurt?"

"You weren't," Nate said.

"Yeah, but I could have been!" I screeched just as the bell rang. Without a word, Nate rose and strode toward the building. Halfway there he turned and looked back at me.

"I'm around later if you want to come over and study," he said, then kept walking.

I was floored. Seriously, I couldn't have been more offended if he'd asked if I wanted to go drown puppies. He didn't get it! Like I would actually want to go wade through pot smoke and get half-naked with him when he didn't care about me at all!

My shock didn't wear off. I spent the rest of the afternoon with my mouth hanging open. Our whole situation—our whole relationship, if that's what you could call it, which clearly you couldn't—was exactly what I'd feared. No matter how close we were physically, emotionally I meant absolutely nothing to Nate. But did that matter to him? Did that stop him? No. Nate Wetherill was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. By the end of seventh-period AP U.S. history I had proof. Know what you get when you rearrange the letters in Nate Wetherill? HATE WILL ENTER.

Halfway through eighth-period physics, I had transformed my pencil and some paper clips into an excellent Nate Wetherill voodoo doll and was mercilessly grinding another paper clip into its groin. The whole enterprise felt immensely satisfying.

"Cara Leonard!" called Mr. Feinhorn. "Why does that not disprove Einstein's theory of relativity?"

Uh-oh. Apparently we were in the middle of a lecture, but I hadn't heard a single word of it. I palmed the voodoo doll and racked my brain for any information that didn't have to do with my undying animosity toward Nate. I found none.

"Um, because ... because..." I scrunched my whole face as if struggling for the answer. I practically broke a sweat.

Mr. Feinhorn wasn't impressed. He sighed, then called on Seth Minkoff, who dutifully responded, "Because it was an invalid test."

"Yes," said Mr. Feinhorn. "
That
is the answer, Cara. It was an invalid test."

Mr. Feinhorn looked me in the eye as he said it, and suddenly I understood. Not the Einstein stuff—I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about there. But the invalid test—
that
made sense. Nate had failed an invalid test. He and I hadn't made specific plans to meet at the rock today, so it's not like I'd actually missed a set appointment. Sure, I usually met him there, but I had the freedom to show or not show as I pleased. Nate wasn't possessive that way. That was a good thing, wasn't it? And even when I laid into him, it's not like he'd dumped me or said he didn't want to see me. He told me I should come over and study. When I looked at it that way, Nate actually came closer to
passing
my test than failing.

Maybe testing Nate wasn't the best way to find out if he really cared about me. I still thought asking it outright was awful and lame and worthy of the kind of
are u mad @ me?
notes friends passed around in seventh grade. But maybe there was a subtler option. Maybe I could just ask about him, about his mom, about his dad or his brother or his life. Then he'd ask about me, and we'd talk and I'd know there was actually something real between us, and I wouldn't feel so hollow about everything else we were doing.

So after school I went to his place to study.

"Hi," I said, and before Nate could even try to offer me a smoke, I added, "I was hoping today we could talk."

"About what?"

"I don't know ... anything. About you. Maybe about your mom."

Nate grimaced like he smelled a skunk. "Ouch. Buzzkill."

"Well, yeah, but—"

Nate was no longer listening. Instead he was lighting up.

Okay, Mom was too painful. I could respect that.

"How about
you
decide what we talk about," I said. "It doesn't even have to be about you. You can ask
me
something. Anything. Anything you want."

Nate smiled and put his hands on my waist, slipping his fingers under my shirt.

"Anything I want?" he said.

His fingers traced up my body toward my breasts, both of which had clearly turned treasonous on me, because they were screaming for Nate's hands to keep climbing.

I stepped back.

"I'm serious," I said. "I don't want to fool around. I want to talk. It's important to me."

Nate opened his eyes wide, tilted his head back, and made a groaning sound like a giant garbage truck stuck between gears.

What was he doing? Had I pressed his self-destruct button? Who made noises like that?

Finally Nate pulled himself back from whatever brink he was on. He smiled and nodded, like he'd just solved a mystery.

"Ooh," he said. "I get it."

He took my hand and pulled me close. He kissed my neck, then whispered in my ear. "You're raggin' it. It's cool; it doesn't freak me out. I have my red badge of courage."

That was it.

"I gotta go," I said. I pulled away and darted to the door, already dialing Claudia on my cell.

"Beast with Two Backs Hotline," she answered. "You're calling early."

"I just broke up with Nate," I said.

Claudia's voice screamed into my ear with the impact of a major collision. "You
WHAT?
"

As I drove, I told Claudia everything. When I was done, she took a huge dramatic breath and slowly let it out. "Do not scare me like that again, Cara. I was afraid you actually broke up with Nate."

"I did."

"You walked out on him," she clarified. "Neither the word 'break' nor 'up' was ever specifically stated. Hence your place on the Ladder remains secure."

"Very nice. So even though I now feel completely horrible when I fool around with Nate, I'm supposed to keep doing it so I don't lose my place on the Ladder."

"Yes, Cara, I'm pimping you out," Claudia said. "No! Don't fool around with him at all! Just don't break up with him. Not until you've found a Penultimate for your next target."

"I can't
not
fool around with him. It's what he expects us to do."

"Gee, Battered Wife, I guess if he expects it, then it's what you have to do."

"I'm just saying, I doubt
he'll
want to stay together if we're not fooling around anymore."

"Not forever, no. But we're talking about a few days—enough time for you to find a target and focus in. And the timing's perfect. You have finals next week, right? So it's totally normal that you'd be too busy studying to go 'study.'"

"Okay, but what about at school? What if I'm hanging out with him on the rock and he wants to fool around?"

"Tell him you have a cold! Tell him you have a sty! Tell him you have herpes! No, wait, don't tell him you have herpes. That'd get around the school and ruin everything."

"Oh, good, thanks for clarifying. Because I was totally ready to go with the herpes thing."

"Just try, Cara. Do not let everything you've already done be in vain. Look at how hard you've worked to get to this spot on the Ladder. Look at all the success you've had! You snagged a DangerZone! Trista Camello, Supreme Populazzi, knows who you are! You cannot give up now. You
can't.
Do I have to invoke the Deer Friends? Because if I have to, I will."

I took a deep breath. I didn't want to stay with Nate. It didn't feel right. But I also didn't want to fight with Claudia, and it wasn't like I could do anything about Nate until Monday anyway. I wasn't going to go see him over the weekend, and breaking up over the phone or by e-mail wasn't at all okay.

"I won't do anything now," I said. "I'll figure it out on Monday."

She seemed satisfied with that.

I didn't leave the house all weekend. I vaguely remembered Archer and me talking about maybe playing Ping-Pong, but I texted him that I couldn't. Claudia had been right: after my week of "studying," I really did need to study if I was going to have a prayer of nailing finals, keeping up my average, getting into Northwestern, and avoiding the gutter that would certainly otherwise be my fate.

I spread out on the kitchen table surrounded by books, notes, and Diet Cokes and tuned out the world with my iPod and noise-canceling headphones. Karl even let me read during meals, which was unheard of. He and Mom were so impressed with my academic discipline that they took turns acting as my cut man, rubbing my shoulders and offering snacks and encouragement.

Come Monday, I woke up ready to attack two goals: acing my French exam and breaking up with Nate. I'd had plenty of time to prepare for both. At Chrysella, the finals schedule was totally different from the schedule for normal school days. Every day was broken into two two-hour exam periods, with lunch in the middle. We didn't even have to show up at school unless we had a scheduled exam. French was in my Monday afternoon slot, but I wanted to go a little early and squeeze in a lunchtime breakup at Nate's rock.

As I stopped at Wegmans to change, I was spotted by my nemesis cashier. He was in the parking lot gathering carts. He perked up at the sight of me and started singing to the galloping tune of the "William Tell Overture," "SuperGoth SuperGoth SuperGoth-Goth-Goth..."

I wondered how long after Nate and I broke up I'd have to keep changing at Wegmans. It had been fun and exciting at first, but now it was tedious. I figured I'd have to phase it out gradually. I'd probably be done by the winter formal, about a month away.

Of course, first I had to find Nate and break up with him. For most couples, this would be a nonissue, since they would know each other's schedules. I had no clue about Nate's schedule. I had no idea when he had any of his exams—I wasn't even 100 percent positive about all the classes he took. I could only show up at the rock and hope.