The Thing About the Truth (18 page)

Anyway, obvious mental issues aside, the other reason it was a mistake to make out with Marina is because I like Kelsey. A lot. I know it sounds weird, but kissing Marina just cemented it further in my mind. Kelsey is the one I want to hang out with, to be with. I can’t stop thinking about her. And I know that I have to tell her that I kissed Marina. And I know she’s going to be pissed.

I think about calling her, but she didn’t seem too excited to talk to me on the phone last night. Plus she’ll probably just hang up once she hears what I have to say. So before I know it, I’m driving over to her house. Which is crazy. That’s, like,
movie shit or something, driving over to a girl’s house to confess your love. Not that I’m going to be confessing my love. Maybe just my like.

When I pull into her driveway, there are two cars parked there already, a gray sedan and a minivan. I’m assuming they belong to her mom and dad, since Kelsey doesn’t drive. There’s no way to tell if she’s home, so I get out of the car and head up to the porch.

I ring the doorbell.

After a few seconds a man opens the door. He’s tall and kind of grumpy-looking, and when he sees me, he frowns.

“Hello, sir,” I say, deciding to play the politeness card because parents love that shit. “I’m Isaac Brandano.” I emphasize the Brandano part because parents love that shit too. “Is Kelsey home?”

Usually, when parents meet me, they love me right off the bat. Partly because I can be very charming when I want to be, and partly because they know my dad. They get totally caught up in thinking that their daughter might marry a politician’s son, and that maybe
I’ll
become a politician and that maybe I’ll run for president or something, and that maybe their daughter will be first lady. Sometimes I want to let them know that the reality of the whole thing is very different from whatever crazy fantasy they’ve come up with, and that they should ask my grandparents on my mom’s side what they think about marrying a politician. But I don’t. Because then they wouldn’t be too happy to see me.

Anyway, I don’t have to worry about that with this dude. He’s looking at me like I’m a maggot or bug that needs to be squashed.

“Yeah?” he asks, like he didn’t hear what I just said.

I decide to start over. “Hello, sir,” I say, pasting on my best smile. “Is Kelsey home?” This time I decide to leave out my name since maybe he’s on the other side of the political divide.

“No,” he says, “she’s not. Why?”

“I’m her friend,” I say. “I was just coming over to, ah”—probably shouldn’t say I’m here to confess that I kissed someone else after I kissed his daughter—“talk about the school group we’re starting, Face It Down.” He’s still giving me that look, so I quickly add, “It promotes cultural and community solidarity.” And then, for good measure, “And abstinence.” Just in case he thinks I want to get into Kelsey’s pants.

“Kelsey’s not here,” he says again.

“Oh. Okay.” Why doesn’t he tell me where she is? And where could she be on a Saturday morning, anyway? He’s probably lying. This dude is very shady. I glance behind him, half expecting to see Kelsey standing there. But she’s not. Just some pictures of her on the wall. One of her at a picnic or something, with her mom and dad, which is actually very cute.

“Anything else?” The guy’s looking at me now, his arms crossed over his chest like he’s daring me to ask him another question.

“No, sir,” I say. “Um, it was nice meeting you.”

He shuts the door without saying goodbye. Wow. I get back
in my car, then drive around the corner and pull out my phone. I dial Kelsey’s number. She sends the call to voicemail. I can tell because it only rings, like, half a ring. I try again. Same thing. One more time, I think, because third time’s the charm.

She picks up.

“Yes?” Wow. She sounds very . . . cold. It kind of makes me nervous.

“Hi,” I say brightly. “What’s up? What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Liar.”

She snorts. “You should talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How do you know I’m not home?”

“Because I went to your house.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did.”

“What did you do there?”

I roll my eyes. Through the windshield, I see a guy wearing pink slippers and what appears to be a blond wig crossing the street to get his mail. “Did you know that one of your neighbors is a cross-dresser?”

“What?” she screeches.

“No, I mean, I’m not judging or anything, it’s just funny.”

She pauses. “Is she wearing pink slippers?”

“Yes, and she has a gray beard.”

“That’s not a cross-dresser. That’s our neighbor Mrs. Sullivan.”

I squint at her. I guess she does have kind of a feminine walk. “Huh,” I say, “she really should get that mustache taken care of.”

“Goodbye,” Kelsey says.

“How come every single time I talk to you, you’re trying to hang up on me?”

“Because I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“That’s not what it seemed like yesterday afternoon,” I say, grinning. “Not that you had a lot to say, but you weren’t complaining about kissing me.”

“Yeah,” she says, “well, it seems like you have a thing for kissing unsuspecting girls.”

“You weren’t unsuspecting,” I say. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

She doesn’t say anything. And I know she knows. About last night. About Marina. Fuck. I’ve blown my chance with her before it’s even started.

“Listen,” I say, “I need to talk to you.”

“No.”

“Then hang up,” I say, calling her bluff. But she doesn’t. “Can you meet me?” I ask. “At the mall or something?”

“The
mall
?”

“Yes.”

“You want to have a big talk at the mall?”

“Why not? I’ll even buy you something.”

“Like what?”

“A coffee? Some fries? That chicken teriyaki they have at the Japanese place?”

“That stuff is food poisoning waiting to happen,” she says.

“Please?” I ask. She doesn’t say anything. “Just for ten minutes,” I say. “And then if you want to leave, you can leave.”

She sighs. “Be there in fifteen.” And then the line goes dead.

Kelsey

This is a really stupid idea. Meeting Isaac at the mall? Why, why, why am I doing it? What’s that definition of insanity that people always say? “Doing the same thing over and over again, hoping to get different results?”

The mall’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the library, but there was no way I was going to ask Isaac to pick me up. I don’t need any favors from him, thank you very much. I call Rielle on the walk over, hoping maybe she’ll somehow talk me out of going to meet him.

“Rielle,” I say, “I am about to do something really stupid.”

“Really?” She sounds interested. “Like what?”

“I’m going to meet Isaac at the mall.”

“You’re not!”

“I am,” I say.

“Why?”

“Well,” I say, “last night he—”

“Hold on.” She covers the phone and I hear her talking to someone in the background. “Listen,” she says when she comes back, “I can’t talk right now. I’m at my grandma’s, and my parents are bothering me about being on my phone.”

“Okay,” I say, “but are you going to be around later? Maybe we could go to dinner or something. I could tell you all about my drama.”

“I wish I could,” she says, “but we’re going to be here all weekend.”

Rielle’s grandma lives in New Hampshire, and she’s the one who controls the purse strings in Rielle’s family. Every so often Rielle and her parents have to troop up there and stay for a weekend to keep her happy.

“Call me later, though, okay?” She lowers her voice. “I gotta go, Gran needs me to help her open her arthritis medicine.”

I laugh. “Okay,” I say, “I’ll talk to you later.”

I hang up. I think about maybe calling Chloe, but we’re not the kind of friends who can just call each other up out of the blue, especially not right after we just left each other. I look down at my phone, wondering if there’s anyone else I can call who might talk me out of this. But there isn’t. And besides, I’m not sure if I want to be talked out of it. So I just keep walking.

•  •  •

Isaac’s sitting at a table in the food court, and in front of him are five or six different drinks.

“I didn’t know what you like,” he says, “so I got you milk shakes, chocolate and vanilla—because, really, who likes strawberry?—an orange juice, a soda, an iced tea, and a lemonade.”

“Hmm,” I say, sitting down across from him. “Trying to be cute, huh?”

“Cute?” he says, putting an innocent look on his face. “Who’s trying to be cute?”

The thing is, trying or not, it
is
cute. Very cute. I mean, who does that? Orders six different drinks because he doesn’t know what I’d like? Adorable. I pick up the lemonade and take a sip.

He looks hot, too. Not the way he does at school, in his khaki pants and button-down shirts and expensive-looking sweaters. Now he’s wearing a rumpled-looking sweatshirt, and his hair is all messy, and he has on dirty, comfortable-looking sneakers and a pair of navy track pants.

Then I remind myself that I should not be swayed by his rumpled cuteness, because his rumpledness is most likely caused by the fact that he’s been out all night hooking up with Marina and getting into various other kinds of debauchery.

I put the lemonade back down on the table. “I’m not thirsty,” I say.

He shrugs and reaches for one of the milk shakes.

“You wanted to talk,” I say. “So talk.”

“What’d you do last night?” he asks conversationally.

“The better question,” I say, “is what did
you
do last night?” Suddenly I’m superaware of the fact that I’m looking just as rumpled as he is. At first I wish I’d gone home to change. At least then I’d have the upper hand in the appearance department. But then I realize that the fact that I look so rumpled could mean that maybe I’ve been out partying too. He doesn’t know.

But before I can come up with some great story about how I was at a fabulous college party with tons of hot, eligible college men, he decides to get serious and answer my question. He leans back in his chair, puts the milk shake down, and says, “I was at the beach, like I told you.”

“And?”

“And I called you because I really wanted to see you. But then . . . well, you seemed like you wanted nothing to do with me. And I’d had a really bad night, something to do with my dad, and I just . . . I started drinking. And I ended up kissing Marina.” I start to open my mouth to yell at him, but he goes on. “And it’s not an excuse, I know that. But I want you to know that it won’t happen again. I don’t want to kiss anyone else but you.”

He’s looking at me really intensely then, and I feel my heart melt just a tiny little bit. Because at least he’s being honest.

But I still want to yell at him. I mean, just because he’s telling me the truth doesn’t mean he’s not a shit. The only reason
he’s probably even telling me what happened is because he knows that I already know.

So I open my mouth to give him a little bit of shit. But before I can, I hear something coming from the other side of the food court. A laugh. A laugh that I know really, really well.

A laugh that belongs to Rielle.

Isaac

I really thought that Kelsey was going to go batshit crazy on me. I realized after I’d bought all those fucking drinks that it was going to make it really easy for her to throw a bunch of liquid at me. For a second I thought about maybe getting rid of at least a few of them since I wasn’t in the mood to get wet. But it was too late; she was there. And besides, if she
had
thrown a drink at me, I would have deserved it.

But then, right before she’s about to freak out on me, her whole face changes. She’s staring at something over my shoulder, and I turn around to see what she’s looking at. It’s a bunch of girls. A bunch of stuck-up girls. I know it sounds fucked up, but I can tell just by looking at them.

“You know those girls?” I ask. I’m trying to sound nonchalant and uninterested, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about girls, it’s that you need to stay out of their drama. If you don’t, you’ll end up regretting it. No one can understand teen girl drama. One minute they love each other, the next minute they hate each other. You just need to not get involved, and agree with whatever they’re saying. (But not
too
much, just in case they’re saying something horrible and then they end up making up with whoever it is they’re saying horrible things about.)

“Yes,” she says. Then she stands up and starts to walk out of the food court and toward the mall’s main entrance.

I chase after her, taking the lemonade with me. “Where are you going?” I ask.