The Great American Whatever (2 page)

But I'm barely listening, because now I'm staring past Geoff to the rocky driveway outside, where he and Annabeth and I set up a lemonade stand when we were little. Ugh. I hate that word:
Were
. The only word I hate more than
were
is
was
. Annabeth is so not a past-tense kind of person. Frankly, my sister could be so present, it was intimidating.

I blink hard and kind of hope a zombie apocalypse might really appear: a real-life
Night of the Living Dead
(excellent popcorn flick), except set in the daytime, in our yard.
Somebody bite me, please,
I would yell out the window. But nope. No zombies. It's just that rocky driveway out there, with no lemonade stand in sight.

“All right,” Geoff says, “all set.” The floor creaks, which must mean he's moving toward the door. I'm on pause, stuck looking outside.

Then: “Hold up,” I say. “How much do you think air conditioners cost?”

I'm a little low on cash these days. Last night I had half a Hot Pocket for dinner and a packet of Theraflu for dessert. It actually wasn't so bad. That stuff will knock you
out
.

Geoff's tapping something into his phone. “I dunno. We'll use my mom's card if we have to.”

His parents have a nicer house than we do. Actually, ha, everybody does.

Now Geoff's in my bathroom, which never ends well. But when I go to tell him
no
, and to
use the one downstairs
, my shower squeaks on. Plot twist.

“Dammit,” I hear him mutter. He scalded his hand, I know it. Our sole luxury around here is instant hot water, and also an agreement that you don't have to make eye contact at the dinner table. Which is actually pretty great.

“Get in,” Geoff shouts to me.

“I'm not taking a shower with you,” I say—as a
joke
, obviously.

“You wish,” he goes, but not in a mean way. Also, we've never really talked about
that
, but I think he knows I do
not
wish. Frankly, there have been really good sandwiches I'd rather lose my virginity to than Geoff. He's not my type.

(I am still narrowing down my type.)

We switch places, and when he's back in my room, I step into the moldy chamber that's also known as my shower.

“I'm giving you two minutes,” he says from outside the door.

“Lay off,” I call back. “It's not like Pittsburgh is going through a drought.”

Geoff pushes the door back open and shakes his head at me. “Quinn, your friggin'
life
has been a drought. And this summer, we're gonna make some rain.”

So . . .
yikes
, am I right? I literally spend half my life wanting to rewrite Geoff's taglines.

“Very poetic,” I say, covering myself up. “I'd do a slow clap for you, but I don't want to expose my junk.”

He rolls his eyes and heads back into my room. I keep trying to think of good excuses to get him out of the house so I can just lie down in the bathtub and maybe try to fall back asleep. But it's been so long since I've engaged in an intellectual debate that stretched beyond “pepperoni or plain” that my brain stalls.

“This is your one-minute warning!” he yells.

I let the water gush into my mouth, and I close my eyes and plug up my ears with my fingers, and in the insistent
tip-tip-tip
on the tin roof of my head, I decide to decide that making some metaphorical rain this summer isn't the worst idea of all time.

Look at me. Attempting optimism.

I make a note to share this with my therapist at the next session. That'll buy me some brownie points. It's funny how I try to piss off my school counselor but try to
impress
my therapist. Throw the word “Doctor” in front of somebody's name and all of a sudden I want her to like me.

“Fifteen seconds!”

Who am I kidding. I want everyone to like me.

“Okay, hang out in the hallway,” I say to Geoff. I towel off in my room and throw on a clean-ish pair of shorts and a definitely not clean T-shirt, and then I slip on some Vans and duck my head out to check if he's still there or if I just made this whole thing up. If I'm back to my old ways, naively imagining things will turn out okay, like they do in the movies.

“You ready to jump-start June?” Geoff goes. He's there all right, sitting against the hallway wall, playing a game on his phone and not even pausing to look up. God, his outfits are ridiculous.

God, it's good to see him.

“I guess we'll find out,” I say.

He leaps to his feet and pockets his cell.

“Just, be quiet going down the stairs. My mom is sleeping.”

I watch his eyes flick over to the buzz mark in my hair, and right when I think he's going to say,
Put a hat on
—because my head really does look like a yard-work accident—instead he just goes, “See you in the car,” and he smiles.

That's the thing about best friends: They don't really care what you look like. The real ones don't, anyway.

He clomps down the stairs. He isn't quiet about it at all. Straight boys.

I take one more survey of my room, wondering how it'll feel to return to such a storm of dirty laundry and empty Hot Pocket containers later on today.

“Let's
go
,” Geoff whisper-shouts from downstairs.

I've gotta get out of here. Nobody ever talks about the fact that grief's best friend is boredom. Why is that? Why aren't we warning people about this?

“Shotgun,” I call back.

N
ot
to sound like an old lady, but has the outside world always been so loud? Or felt so awkward? For instance, there's maybe nothing more awkward than sitting on a lawn mower in Aisle 4 of a busy Home Depot, without a cell phone to pass the time, while your best friend is off finding an employee. Like: All-time awkwardness record.

“Oh my God, Quinn Roberts.”

Scratch that. There
is
something more awkward than all of that. It's being caught doing it.

“Oh, hey,” I go. I
knew
this would happen. The zombie apocalypse has arrived, and it's starring Liz Morgan. “How's it going.”

Liz was on the pep squad with Annabeth their freshman year. Annabeth wasn't the biggest fan of Liz, but my sister was so plainly decent to everybody that the entire school considered her to be, like, a second-tier friend.

I was third-tier, by association.

“How are
you
?” Liz says, while kind of absentmindedly peeling away a layer of country-club sunburn from her arm. She's first-tier, by the way—and giving me the kind of look you'd give a turtle that's been stuck on its back for six months.

You have to understand: Usually humans forget even the most crippling events if they're not personally inconvenienced themselves. My sister's blazing car blocked the only open exit from school that December afternoon, and thus Liz Morgan and every other student became a kind of victim. Trapped for an extra hour on the last day before winter break. . . .

“Um, I'm okay,” I say, remembering to cover the buzz mark in my hair.

Then: “Liz!” Geoff says, reappearing, thank God, and trailed by the kind of Home Depot employee who looks like he majored in Hating Teenagers at some junior college in Ohio.

“Mm, hey,” Liz says. She
might
not know Geoff's name. Regardless, I catch him checking her out—though, frankly, Stevie Wonder could probably catch Geoff checking Liz out.

“Uh, is someone buying an air conditioner or not?” the Home Depot employee says, and Liz giggles and covers her mouth and goes, “Well
I'm
not,” and then she backs away and takes off like this is the most hilarious and embarrassing mix-up in the history of comedy. Girls, man.

Geoff sighs in her wake. He's never had a girlfriend. I mean, look at his shorts.

The Home Depot guy casually puts his hand on the single most expensive air conditioner out of about a thousand options. “So, how big a room are you cooling off?” he asks me, and I realize I should stand up and pretend to be a human.

“Um.” I look at Geoff like maybe
he'll
just sort of intuitively know my bedroom's square footage—his mom is an architect—but then I tell myself to answer this question. Seriously, I go,
Answer the question, Quinn
, to myself. Because maybe answering an easy question like this one will help build my confidence up to the harder ones I'm bound to be getting any day now, like:
Do you think you'll graduate with the rest of the seniors next year?
or,
Are you still planning on making your famous movies now that Annabeth is gone?
or,
Speaking of Annabeth, why didn't you show up to
your own sister's memorial
?

“The room's big enough to fit a twin-size bed and eleven pizza boxes,” I say to the Home Depot guy, fast, and Geoff busts out laughing in a way that's so musical, it practically borders on “inappropriate underscoring” for the scene we're having.

In other words it's the best song ever.

The employee narrows appropriate AC models down to two, and I blindly point at the one that I think looks the “cutest,” God help me, and then Geoff goes, “Let's pay for this thing,” and whaps my shoulder pretty hard. I act like it hurts, but it actually feels good. It feels like another person.

We make our way to the parking lot. It is so unbelievably hot out that I can smell my Speed Stick wafting up like an Alpine fog. Beats the alternative.

“Hey, you did good back there,” Geoff says, after we slide the air conditioner box into his trunk. And I do mean
his
trunk. When your dad owns the biggest car dealership in town, you get your own car, and it's not even “pre-owned.”

“What do you mean I did good?” I say. “You
bought
this damn thing.”

“It was your first time being spotted in public,” he goes. “And you didn't even flinch.”

He's talking about Liz, of course. But he's wrong: I did flinch. I flinched when I saw Liz clicking her nails against her phone screen, because she has the exact same panda bear phone case that Annabeth has. Had. It's weird how you remember the little details. I don't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

“Quinn,”
Geoff says.

Actually: lie. I had a microwaved burrito and one spoonful of plain yogurt, having mistaken it, tragically, for vanilla.

“Hmm?” I say.

“I said, do you wanna get an icy or something?”

That sounds really good, actually. “Nah,” I say. “I think I just want to go install this thing and take a nap. I had a really long night.”

Of sleeping, I don't say. A long night of sleeping. Like: thirteen hours. I'm telling you, Theraflu
works
.

“Okay, no problem,” Geoff says, unlocking the car doors.

But then his phone
ding
s as we're climbing in, and he checks it, and he grins. Geoff has four distinct grins. This is his “trouble grin.”

“What?” I say.

He looks at me. He's still grinning.

“What?”

He turns on the car. “Sorry,” he says. “Our plans just changed.”

F
orget what I said earlier. Best friends very much do care what you look like. Especially when they are dragging you to your first ever college party, tonight.

“Yeah, you guys, this is going to be tricky to fix.”

Meet Zoë Phillips. Geoff and I are in her parents' basement, three neighborhoods over behind the park. Zoë is circling me like she's a trainee witch who's been left alone with the cauldron for the first time.

“You just have to be kinda quick about it,” Geoff says to her, “because Quinn and I have to get downtown before traffic hits.”

Zoë is a former classmate of ours who got her GED and is going to cosmetology college this fall—
not
“beauty school.” Do not call it beauty school in front of her, believe me.

“Just don't do anything too crazy,” I say to her. Zoë's own haircut seems to have been achieved by . . . setting fire to it? Sticking her head into a food processor? Hard to tell.

Zoë gathers most of
my
hair in her hands and then bites her lip. “You've got a lot of nerve,” she says, grabbing a strangely large pair of scissors. Like, the kitchen kind. “Demanding miracles after you left the house looking like
this
.”

That makes me feel kind of bad. If there's one thing I'm usually not
that
self-conscious about, it's my looks. I even did some modeling when I was little. I mean, just local stuff, but it was still modeling. Apparently there's a whole new thing to question about my life now: if the way I feel inside is actually eroding my shell into something legitimately ugly.

I watch Geoff collapse into this fugly love seat and act like he's having a seizure, just to make me laugh. It works.

“So, big plans tonight, guys?” Zoë says. Her voice is unsteady. A single clip of hair falls to my shoulder. She takes a step back. Here goes everything.

“Just some party,” Geoff goes, “at my sister's new place, in Squirrel Hill. Had to make sure Quinn didn't show up looking like a lost bet.”

He gives me the thumbs-up in a way that's so earnest, I have to look away. Too much kindness in one day and I might internally combust, or worse: cry.

I don't cry in front of people.

“Cool,” Zoë says, in a drone. She gives up on the scissors, reaches for electric clippers, and looks at me in the mirror. “You ready?” she asks, with a tone that suggests that
she
, in fact, is not ready.