Summer of the Geek (21 page)

Dex laid a hand on my arm. “Miranda,” he began.

I shook his hand off. “Please don’t. Not right now.”

“We should talk about this,” Dex said softly.

I knew that if I stood there much longer, I was going to cry. I could already feel a burning sensation in my chest, pushing upward through my lungs and filling my throat. I turned and started to walk away.

“Where are you going, Miranda?” Hannah called after me. “It’s your turn!”

I didn’t look back. And Dex didn’t follow me.

A
lthough it was almost unbearably hot and muggy out, I decided to walk home. I knew I could call my dad for a ride, but I didn’t want to have to explain the tears sliding down my cheeks.

Dex had lied to me. He’d let me think that things next year would go on just the same as they had that summer. He’d let me think that we’d be together.

If it had been the other way around, if I were the one leaving, I’d have told him, I thought. And then I suddenly realized that this wasn’t entirely true. I hadn’t, after all, told Dex about the possibility that I might be moving to London for the upcoming school year.

But it wasn’t the same. Not at all. For one thing, I hadn’t decided yet whether I was actually going to move to London. Once I had made that decision, I would have told Dex immediately. The only reason I had kept the possibility from him was that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. He, on the other hand, had already made his decision . . . and he hadn’t told me. He’d told Brian, and probably told his other friends, also. But he hadn’t told me.

Why had Dex told me he was in love with me if he knew he was leaving? I wondered as a spasm of pain shuddered through me. Maybe if he hadn’t told me that—hadn’t used the word
love
—I could have protected my heart.

A car drove past me, its headlights glaringly bright, its wheels spinning through puddles left over from a late afternoon storm. I ducked my head to avoid the lights, and trudged on.

This must have been what Dex and Wendy had been talking about when they met at the mall food court, I realized. I remembered what Wendy had said when I saw her surfing at the beach.
“It was nice to get out on the waves again . . . I keep telling Dex how much he’ll miss it . . . Especially if he’s in the Northeast . . . You can’t surf much when there’s three feet of snow out.”
So she’d known, too. She’d known before me.

I didn’t hear the second car approaching until it slowed down next to me. I glanced up at it and recognized Emmett’s Jeep even before I saw Hannah in the passenger seat. She leaned out the window to talk to me.

“Get in, Miranda. We’ll drive you home,” Hannah said.

“That’s okay. I’d rather walk,” I said.

“It’s raining,” Hannah pointed out.

“It is?” I looked up. It had started raining, heavily, without my noticing.

“You’re freaking me out. Get in,” Hannah ordered.

I obeyed her, climbing in the back of the Jeep. The top was on, but the windows and back were open, and the resulting breeze felt good on such a humid, airless night.

Hannah twisted around in her seat.

“That was a dramatic exit,” she said. “You pretty much brought the bowling party to an end.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. I think everyone was bowled out,” Emmett said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

It was the first time I’d ever ridden in a car with Emmett. A year ago, this would have made my life. It was amazing how much things had changed in such a relatively short amount of time.

“Dex was pretty upset that you left,” Hannah said.

“He was?”

Even though the mere mention of Dex’s name caused a fresh wave of throbbing pain in the general region of my heart, I still wanted to hear every detail. Luckily, Hannah instinctively understood this without my having to ask.

“Yeah. He looked really sad. And then Brian came back, and Dex was furious at him for telling you. They got into a big fight,” Hannah reported.

“It’s not Brian’s fault that Dex has basically been lying to me,” I said.

“Yeah, well, Dex didn’t see it that way. For a minute there, I thought Dex was going to punch him. But then Dex just turned around and walked off, without saying good-bye to any of us. And then Brian took off, and then Emmett and I left,” Hannah said.

“What about Charlie?”

“She was still there. She and Luke seemed to be hitting it off,” Hannah said, sounding pleased with herself. “And the other guy, the one she likes—what’s his name?”

“Finn.”

“Right, Finn. He was definitely jealous. My plan totally worked. I told Charlie to report in tomorrow, so we’ll find out what happened,” Hannah said.

When we got back to the beach house, Emmett started to turn off the car, but Hannah put her hand on his arm. “Why don’t you just drop me off? I think Miranda needs some girl time.”

“That’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’m fine. Really.”

“No, it’s cool. I have an early shift in the morning,” Emmett said. He gave Hannah a quick kiss.

She made a face. “All you do is work,” she complained as she unlatched her seat belt.

“We can’t all have cush jobs standing in front of a camera looking pretty,” Emmett teased her.

“Gag,” I said, climbing out of the Jeep. Hannah giggled and climbed out after me.

“Bye,” she said, waving as Emmett drove off. Then she turned to me. “Come on. Let’s go see if there’s any ice cream.”

“Ice cream?” I asked.

“Yes, ice cream. That’s what girls are supposed to eat when they’ve had a romantic crisis,” Hannah informed me as she opened the front door. “It’s, like, a rule or something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. My stomach felt so cramped and sour, I doubted I’d ever be hungry again. “But you can have some if you want.”

Hannah looked shocked. “I don’t eat ice cream. Do you have any idea how many fat grams are in it?”

“You have got to stop obsessing about your weight,” I began, but then stopped. I heard voices coming from the kitchen. Angry voices. More specifically: Dad and Peyton. “Oh no. Are they fighting again?”

“Let’s go see,” Hannah said, heading off in the direction of the kitchen. I reluctantly followed her.

“. . . can’t believe you told that to Dr. Patel!”

“He told us to be honest with our feelings!”

Dad and Peyton were sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table. As soon as Hannah and I entered the room, they stopped fighting abruptly.

Peyton cleared her throat. “Hi, honey,” she said to Hannah, ignoring me as usual. “Did you have a fun night?”

“Sort of. We went bowling. I had to wear the ugliest shoes,” Hannah said.

“Is that sanitary?” Peyton asked.

“Doubtful,” Hannah said.

“Hello, girls,” Dad said, pointedly stressing the plural.

Peyton started. “Oh! Hello, Miranda,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t see you there.”

This was an obvious lie. I was standing right next to Hannah. Peyton would have to be blind to have missed me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Did you go bowling, too?” Dad asked.

I nodded.

“So you two are fighting again?” Hannah asked, hopping up onto one of the tall stools.

“No. Richard and I were having a discussion,” Peyton said stiffly.

“It sounded like you were fighting,” Hannah continued. She twirled a fine strand of pale blond hair around one finger. “I thought you weren’t doing that anymore.”

“Everyone gets into arguments from time to time,” Dad said mildly.

Hannah and I exchanged a look.

“Yeah, but it hasn’t really been, has it? Time to time, I mean,” I said.

“More like all the time,” Hannah said. “It’s getting annoying to live with.”

I nodded. “She’s right. It is.”

Dad and Peyton exchanged a look, and, surprisingly, Dad smiled at Peyton. Peyton didn’t return the smile, but that might be because her face was paralyzed by Botox (which she adamantly insisted she didn’t use, but totally did).

“We’re sorry we’ve been annoying you,” Dad said.

“And we’ve been trying to work out some of our issues with our therapist,” Peyton added.

“Is it helping?” Hannah asked.

“I think so,” Dad said carefully.

“I do, too,” Peyton said. She reached a hand across the table. Dad took it, holding it gently in his hand.

Hannah smiled at me, looking pleased.

I didn’t smile back. My head had started to pound. Too many thoughts were bouncing around it, too many emotions were slamming up against one another. Suddenly all I wanted to do was to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and shut out the rest of the world.

“I’m going to bed,” I said abruptly.

Everyone looked at me, surprised. “Are you okay, honey?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine. Just . . . tired. Really, really tired,” I said. I turned and left without another word.

C
harlie called me on my cell phone as soon as she got home. I was already in bed with my lights out, but I hadn’t been able to fall asleep. Instead, I just lay there staring up into the darkness, while thoughts of Dex—his leaving, his hiding it from me, the way we’d parted that evening—clattered around in my head.

“Hi!” she said when I answered. “Where did you go?”

I didn’t feel like getting into everything that had happened, so I just said, “I had a headache, so I went home.”

“You could have said good-bye,” Charlie said accusingly.

“Sorry.”

“You would not believe how well our big plan went,” Charlie said happily. “Luke was all over me! And Finn was
so
jealous!”

“Why? What did Finn do?” I asked.

“He started to completely ignore Phoebe. And he kept trying to get my attention.”

“How?”

“You know, typical Finn stuff. He kept saying how goofy I look when I bowl, and making fun of how I throw the ball. You know, generally insulting me. It was great.”

“Sounds like it,” I said dryly. “Um, Charlie?”

“Yeah?”

“You used to want to rip Finn’s face off when he insulted you. How did that suddenly become a turn-on for you?”

“This was a different kind of insulting. This time he was obviously trying to divert my attention away from Luke. And poor Phoebe,” Charlie said.

“Poor Phoebe? I thought we hated her.” Charlie had told me this many, many times, refusing to be swayed by the apparently irrelevant fact that I couldn’t hate Phoebe, as I didn’t even know her.

“We used to hate her. Now we feel badly for her,” Charlie corrected me. “She just sat there, her arms crossed, looking like she was on the verge of bursting into tears.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!” I exclaimed. “Charlie!”

“What? It’s not my fault that Finn was neglecting her,” Charlie said defensively.

“Of course it was your fault! It was exactly what you were hoping would happen!”

“Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?” Charlie demanded.

“Fine, go ahead.”

“I’m not going to tell you if you don’t want to hear.”

I was
so
not in the mood for this. “Okay, then don’t tell me.”

“Okay, okay. So anyway, we finished the game, and Phoebe got all pouty and said she wanted to go home. And Finn said, okay, but then he didn’t leave. He just stood there and looked at me. Phoebe asked him what he was doing, and Finn asked me if I was coming, too,” Charlie said.

“I thought you drove to the bowling alley,” I said.

“I did. That’s what I told Finn, that I had my car there. And he got all huffy. He was crossing his arms and shooting Luke suspicious looks. Finally, Finn asked if he could talk to me in private. I said fine, so he pulled me aside and told me that he didn’t trust Luke and he didn’t want to leave me alone with him. I told him I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself. And Phoebe finally got fed up and walked off. And Finn didn’t even notice that she’d gone!” Charlie was triumphant. “I knew it would work! Your stepsister is a genius.”

“So what happened after that?”

“We all left. Finn, Luke, and I walked out to the parking lot together, but neither of the guys would leave—Luke was obviously hoping Finn would get the hint and go away, but Finn just stood there, glaring at us, refusing to leave us alone. So finally Luke had to ask for my phone number right in front of Finn,” Charlie said.

“Did you give it to him?” I asked, curious as to how far Charlie was willing to take this.

“Of course! Why wouldn’t I?”

“But Luke’s going to think that you like him.”

“So?”

I closed my eyes and pressed a thumb and forefinger over them. A muscle next to my right eye had begun to twitch.

“Miranda? Are you there?” Charlie asked.

“I’m here.”

“So, what do you think?” Charlie was beginning to sound impatient.

I took in a deep breath. “I think that you should stop playing games before someone gets hurt.”

“Who’s going to get hurt?” Charlie scoffed.

“Luke. Phoebe. They’re both actual people with actual feelings,” I pointed out.

“Well, obviously, I don’t want anyone to get hurt. But how else am I supposed to make Finn realize how he feels about me?” Charlie asked.

“Have you considered telling him how
you
feel?” I asked.

This was met by an absolute silence that ticked on for so long, I wondered if Charlie had hung up on me.

“I can’t do that,” she finally said.

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The only way that would turn out well is if Finn responded by telling me he felt the same way about me. Otherwise, it would be an absolute nightmare. He might think I’m joking, and just laugh at me. Or he might say he doesn’t have feelings for me, and then he’d feel sorry for me. Or he could just say nothing, and everything would always be weird between us forever,” Charlie ranted.