Summer of the Geek (22 page)

“I still think it’s better than playing games with everyone,” I said. “You said that Phoebe almost cried tonight.”

“You’re supposed to be on my side!” Charlie said.

“I am on your side—” I began, but Charlie interrupted me.

“No, you’re not! You more concerned with Phoebe’s feelings than you are with mine! Besides, I can’t believe you’re being such a hypocrite.”

“Hypocrite?” I repeated, stung. “How am I being a hypocrite?”

“Because you’re giving me advice to do something that you would never have the guts to do!” Charlie continued, her voice thin with anger. “Do you remember when you had a crush on Emmett Dutch for, what, two full years? You never told
him
how
you
felt.”

“That was different. Emmett and I weren’t friends. He didn’t even know who I was,” I protested.

But Charlie wasn’t listening. “And then when you first liked Dex, you never came out and told him how you felt about him. And when he didn’t e-mail you while you were in London, you just automatically assumed that it was over. All because you were too afraid to just talk to him about it.”

I wasn’t really enjoying this trip down memory lane. It had been a stressful enough night already, without adding this to the pile.

“What’s your point?”

“You’re not in a position to be giving relationship advice. Unlike Hannah, who clearly knows what she’s doing.”

“Fine!” I said. “Then why don’t you just call Hannah?”

“Maybe I will!” Charlie retorted.

There was another long pause, and I again wondered if Charlie had hung up. Then I considered hanging up. But then I decided that I wasn’t up to getting into a big fight with Charlie right now. I had enough conflict in my life at the moment.

“Are you still there?” I finally asked.

“I’m still here. Do you really think I should tell him how I feel?” Charlie asked, in a very different sort of voice from the one she’d been shouting at me with a moment before.

“I don’t know. You’re probably right. I shouldn’t be giving out relationship advice.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Charlie said, sounding contrite.

“No, I mean it. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know about anything anymore,” I said wearily. My eye was still twitching, and a headache had started to throb at my temples. “But I probably should go and try to get some sleep. I have to get up early for work tomorrow.”

“Okay. Feel better. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Charlie said. Then she hesitated. “Sorry I yelled.”

“No worries,” I said. “Bye.”

W
hen Mrs. Fisher answered the door the next morning, she didn’t look happy. Her eyes were hard and narrowed, her mouth was a taut line, and her cheekbones were flushed high and bright. I took an involuntary step back from her, tripped over the edge of the step, and ended up stubbing my toe on the walkway.

“Ouch,” I said, standing on one foot to favor my throbbing toe.

Mrs. Fisher did not seem to have noticed my lack of grace. “Miranda,” she said, “please come in. My husband and I would like to have a word with you.”

“Mr. Fisher?” I asked tentatively. I’d never met Mr. Fisher. And, judging by how angry Mrs. Fisher seemed, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to meet him now. But I couldn’t think of a way to gracefully bow out, so I limped into the house.

It was silent again, but, even so, I glanced through the French doors into the living room, half expecting to see Amelia at her piano as she almost always was when I arrived. The living room was empty.

“Where’s Amelia?” I asked.

Mrs. Fisher didn’t respond. Instead, she strode off to the kitchen, heels clicking loudly against the tile floor, clearly expecting me to follow. My heart started to beat a bit faster. I had a bad feeling about this.

Reluctantly, I followed her. Amelia’s father was sitting at the table, looking somber and vaguely uneasy, as though he didn’t want to be there any more than I did. In person, he looked even more like Amelia than he did in the family photo I’d seen. They both had the same large, serious eyes, the same angular face, the same too-pale skin.

I managed a smile at Mr. Fisher, despite the nervous wriggling in my stomach. He didn’t smile back at me. Instead, he just nodded, looking grave.

“Michael, this is Amelia,” Mrs. Fisher said shortly. “Amelia, please sit down.”

I sat in one of the ladder-backed kitchen chairs and folded my hands on my lap. Mrs. Fisher took a seat on the opposite side of the table from me, next to her husband. She sat very erect, her shoulders squared.

“Do you know what we want to talk to you about?” Mrs. Fisher asked.

I’ve always hated it when you know you’re in trouble, and the person in charge—a parent or teacher—starts off with this question. What happened to my Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate myself? Sure, this might not be an official courtroom, but at the moment, it sure felt like one. Only Mrs. Fisher was the prosecutor and judge all rolled into one. What did that make Mr. Fisher? I stole a glance at him, and saw that he was gravely regarding me. He was the jury, I decided.

The thing was, I did have a pretty good idea why I was there—Amelia had talked to her mom about cutting back on the amount of time she spent practicing the piano, and somewhere in the midst of that discussion, my name had come up.

I drew in a deep breath. “Amelia talked to you about not wanting to practice quite as much.”

Mrs. Fisher looked surprised. “So you don’t deny that you know about it,” she said.

I shook my head. “No.”

“What business do you have telling an impressionable young girl that she should give up the great passion in her life, the one thing she’s been dreaming of and working towards for years?” Mrs. Fisher asked. Her voice was as sharp and cold as an icicle.

“I didn’t tell her that,” I said indignantly.

“You just said you did!”

“No, I didn’t. I never told Amelia that she shouldn’t play the piano!” I said.

Mrs. Fisher’s lips curled down, somewhere between a frown and a sneer. I could tell she didn’t believe me, so I turned to Mr. Fisher.

“Amelia was upset. Partly because she doesn’t want to change piano teachers, but also because she feels like she’s under a lot of pressure and that all of the decisions about the sort of life she’s going to lead have already been made for her. And I told her that she should talk to you about all of that,” I said.

“Would it surprise you to hear that Amelia told us that you told her she doesn’t have to be a pianist?” Mrs. Fisher asked.

I tried to remember if that was exactly what I’d said. “I guess I did say that, but I didn’t mean—” Before I could finish, Mrs. Fisher cut in again.

“Your story keeps changing, Miranda. One minute, you say that you just told her to talk to us, and the next you’re admitting that you told her to give up the piano. Which one is it?” Mrs. Fisher asked. She folded her arms over her chest and looked levelly at me.

I felt like I was standing on a hill of sand, and with every step up I took, I slid down even farther.

“It’s neither. Or, I mean, it’s both. Sort of,” I said, starting to feel flustered. “The main thing I told her was that she should talk to you about her feelings.”

“And that’s exactly what she did do. At dinner last night, Amelia announced that she was tired of practicing, and that she wasn’t going to play anymore. And she told us that you’d told her it was okay,” Mrs. Fisher said.

“No! I just told that it was her life and she needed to be involved in any decisions that were made about her future,” I said. “She’s just under so much pressure—”

Mr. Fisher looked up sharply then, his eyes troubled. But Mrs. Fisher just pressed her lips into an even tighter line and said, “The only pressure Amelia is under is that which she puts on herself. And she’s hardly an ordinary ten-year-old. She’s a musical genius. It would be a tragedy for her to throw her gift away.”

“I don’t think she really wants to do that,” I said, twisting my hands together my lap. “But she’s getting burned out. She needs to have a life outside of the piano. To get away from it sometimes.”

“You don’t get to make those decisions for Amelia,” Mrs. Fisher said coldly.

“I didn’t want to . . . I really didn’t mean to . . .” I gabbled. I wanted to say something that would fix this, that would assure the Fishers that all I had been trying to do was be a good friend to Amelia. But I couldn’t seem to find the right words to explain this. It was especially hard sitting there in their gloomy gray kitchen, with Mrs. Fisher spitting-mad and Mr. Fisher so quiet and watchful.

Mrs. Fisher seemed to notice her husband’s silence for the first time. She turned on him. “Don’t you have anything you would like to say to Miranda?”

Mr. Fisher cleared his throat. “Perhaps it would be best if we found alternate child care for Amelia for the remainder of the summer.”

I had been expecting this ever since Mrs. Fisher first led me back to the kitchen. Even so, hearing it said aloud—I was being
fired
—made my insides shrivel up. I’d been fired from my very first job. Epic fail.

I nodded and stood up, noticing that my legs somehow felt both shaky and wooden. I waited for the Fishers to say something further, but Mrs. Fisher seemed to have run out of steam—she stared down at the table, her arms still crossed, as though she couldn’t bear to look up at me—and Mr. Fisher had returned to his mute, contemplative posture. When it became clear that they weren’t going to say anything else, I turned and headed down the hallway, happy to see that despite the woodenness and shakiness, my legs were still capable of carrying me away.

When I got to the front door, I heard a noise from upstairs. I looked up, and there, sitting on the top stair, was Amelia. She looked very small and very sad, sitting hunched over, with her arms wrapped around her legs. I raised a hand in a halfhearted wave. Amelia waved back.

And then I turned away, opened the front door, and left.

I
t wasn’t that I was avoiding Dex. It was just that the first time he called, I was biking back from the Fishers’ house, still reeling from having been fired. I looked at the caller ID, saw Dex’s name, and decided that while of course I was going to talk to him—eventually—I wanted to be prepared and, if at all possible, somewhat poised when that conversation did happen. I stuck my phone back in my pocket and kept on biking, the ocean breeze drying the tears on my cheeks.

The second time Dex called, later that afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table in the beach house. I was trying to study for my driving test the next day, but was really just staring into space, contemplating everything in my life that had gone wrong over the past twenty-four hours and the very real possibility that it was going to get even worse tomorrow if I failed the exam. Which I was pretty sure was going to happen. This time when my phone rang, I was tempted to pick it up—my heart gave a small leap of excitement when I saw who was calling—but I hesitated, still unsure of what I should say to him.

Dex stopped calling after that, and instead began texting me.

I’m sorry
, the first text read.
Can we talk?

The second, which arrived five minutes later, read,
Please stop ignoring me . . .

Then, a little while later,
If I don’t talk to you, good luck tomorrow
.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little childish?” Hannah asked, reading over my shoulder. I jumped. I hadn’t even heard her come into the kitchen.

“Are you training to be a ninja or something?” I asked, pressing one hand over my heart, willing it to slow back down to a normal rate.

“You have to talk to him eventually,” Hannah said, ignoring my ninja crack.

“I know,” I muttered. “I will.”

“When?”

“When I can think of something to say. Besides, I have my driving test tomorrow. I need to stay focused on that. I’ll talk to him after it’s over.”

“You’re not seriously worried about your driving test, are you? I don’t know anyone who’s failed,” Hannah said.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I asked.

“Yes. Doesn’t it?” Hannah asked.

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

Hannah went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and stared in. Then, somewhat sadly, she closed the door.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m hungry,” Hannah said.

“So eat something.”

“Can’t. I have a modeling job tomorrow,” Hannah said.

“Another casting call?” I asked.

“No, I’ve already been hired! Didn’t I tell you? Jojo, the photographer I worked with for the catalogue shoot, got me the job. It’s for an advertising campaign for UFO Computers,” Hannah said.

“Isn’t that a national store?” I asked.

My stepsister nodded happily. “It’s a really big deal that I was chosen. That’s why I don’t want to eat anything and end up with a tummy bulge.”

“That’s great about the job, but you can’t go the whole day without eating,” I said. It was a horrifying prospect. I get weak if I go more than three waking hours without eating.

“I’ll have a salad or something for dinner,” Hannah said vaguely. She got herself a glass of water and then sat down at the table across from me. Without asking permission, she picked up my phone and began scrolling through the messages Dex had sent me.

“Hey!” I said. “Those are private!”

Hannah ignored me. “If you’re not going to talk to him, you have to at least text him back,” she said bossily. “Hmm. What should you say? I know!” She began to type into my phone.

“Stop!” I said indignantly. I tried to grab the phone out of Hannah’s hands, but she turned one shoulder away, deftly moving out of my reach. “What are you saying?”

“Here, see for yourself.” Hannah handed me the phone.