The Thing About the Truth (20 page)

“So you and Isaac can gang up on everyone and get them to vote with you? No, thank you.” She picks up her books and then flounces out of the room, her dark hair bouncing as she goes.

“What’s wrong with her?” I ask.

“She’s mad because Isaac kissed her and then dumped her for you,” Marshall says. Marshall’s one of those people who has no filter. Seriously, he just says whatever crazy thing pops into his brain. He and Isaac have actually become sort of close, which is funny. They don’t seem like two people who would be friends.

“How do you know?” I ask, glancing at Isaac. He’s suddenly superbusy writing something down in his notebook. I hit print on my laptop, and the wireless printer in the corner whirs to life.

“Because she told me.” He shrugs. “Besides, everyone knows it.”

“They do?” I’m shocked by this. I didn’t know I was the subject of school rumors. Not that it’s really anything new. I was the subject of a few school rumors at Concordia Prep. Hell, I’m probably the subject of a few rumors over there right now. I can’t even imagine what crazy stuff they’re saying about
me. I suppose if I really wanted to, I could ask Rielle about it, but I don’t care to know.

Rielle. I still haven’t talked to her about seeing her at the mall a couple of weeks ago when she told me she was at her grandma’s. She’s called me a few times and sent me a couple of texts, but for the most part, I’ve been avoiding her.

“Yeah,” Marshall says. “Marina is very pissed off.”

“Apparently,” I say.

“She’ll get over it,” Isaac says.

“Maybe you should talk to her,” I say to him. I don’t really like Marina all that much, for obvious reasons. But maybe Isaac should try to smooth things over. I mean, even though I don’t like her, the last thing I want is to have enemies.

“Talk to her?” Isaac looks aghast, like I’ve just suggested he go talk to the Taliban or something.

“God no,” Chloe pipes up, looking equally horrified. “That’s just going to make it worse.”

“How can it make it worse?” I’m creating a mailing label now, typing in the address of Concordia Prep so that I can print it out and put it on the envelope. It’s addressed to Kristin Smith, the president of the student council. She’s this sort of type A control freak, but she’s going to love something like this. I just know it.

“Because if Isaac goes and talks to her like she’s some kind of pathetic loser, she’s just going to think you’re patronizing her,” Chloe says.

“He wouldn’t treat her like a pathetic loser,” I say. “And
besides, isn’t it better to just get everything out in the open?” I type in the zip code on the mailing label and then hit print again. “Then we can all move on.”

“I’m with Chloe,” Isaac says. “It will just make things worse.”

“You’re saying that because you don’t want to talk to her,” I say.

“True.” He wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me toward him. “I don’t want to have to talk to anyone but you,” he whispers so that I’m the only one who can hear. “Are we done here?”

I grin, and he kisses me on the lips.

“God, you guys are so cute it’s gross,” Chloe says. She’s sitting cross-legged on a desk, and she jumps down, then flips her head over and gathers her hair up into a ponytail.

“Seriously,” Marshall says. “Get a room.”

“La la la,” I say, pretending to ignore them. “Hey, we should all go out and do something to celebrate getting our letter sent out.”

“Celebrate writing a letter?” Chloe asks. “Isn’t that the easy part?”

“Yeah,” I say, “which is why we should celebrate it. It’s going to be weird having these kids at our school, and who knows what’s going to happen? Plus it doesn’t have to be all play. We can make it a working dinner, try to come up with a good list of ways to facilitate communication between the two schools.”

“Oooh, can we go to Chili’s?” Marshall asks. “I’m really in the mood for Mexican.”

“Chili’s isn’t Mexican,” Chloe says, rolling her eyes.

“They have chips and salsa,” Marshall points out. “And queso. If you’re good, I’ll even buy you some.”

Chloe’s cheeks flush. Huh. Are they flirting? I don’t really see her and Marshall as a couple, but I didn’t see me and Isaac as a couple either, so . . . who knows?

•  •  •

Two hours later Isaac pulls up in front of my house to drop me off.

“That,” he says, shifting his car into park, “might have been the most boring thing I’ve ever been involved in.” We spent the past hour and a half at Chili’s coming up with lists of questions and prompts to facilitate communication between our school and Concordia Prep. It was really productive, but he’s right—it was also really boring.

“Really?” I ask. “That’s shocking.”

“How come?”

“Because I would have thought that as the son of a senator, you’d have been involved in way more boring stuff—state dinners, inaugurations, that kind of thing.”

“Nope,” he says, and unhooks his seat belt. “My dad likes to keep me hidden away when the important shit comes up.” He gets out of the car, then circles around and opens my door for me. I step out and into his arms.

“So I’ll call you later?” he asks, and kisses my neck.

“Yes,” I breathe.

Suddenly the front door opens, and my dad’s standing there, his face stormy. Shit, shit, shit. There’s nothing worse than having your dad catch you in the middle of making out with a guy.

“Dad!” I say.

Isaac jumps back from me like I’m on fire. “Mr. Romano,” he calls, recovering quickly and pasting a smile on his face. He gives my dad a friendly wave. “It’s nice to see you again.”

I haven’t brought Isaac around my family. One, because it’s way too early for that. And two, because my family is crazy. My dad is definitely not going to be excited that I have a boyfriend. If Isaac even is my boyfriend. I mean, I’m assuming he is, but we haven’t exactly had the talk about us being official or anything. But we’re spending every second together, so that has to mean something, right?

“Nice to see you, too,” my dad says. But it’s all sarcastic, like,
“Nice to see you, too, even though I’ve hardly ever seen you before.”

“Well, I should get going,” Isaac says. He pauses for a second, waiting for my dad to say something like,
“Why don’t you stay for dinner?”
or
“You don’t have to leave on account of me”
or
“Where are you headed off to so fast? Stick around for a bit.”

But my dad, apparently, is not a fan of fake politeness or pleasantries. So Isaac squeezes my hand, kisses me on the cheek, and then climbs back into his car and pulls out of the driveway.

“So,” I say brightly to my dad as I push by him and into the house, “how was your day?” I take my shoes off and then
head over to the pantry, where I pull out a Rice Krispies Treat. I wanted to get dessert at Chili’s, but I could tell Isaac really wanted to get out of there.

“So that’s your boyfriend?” my dad asks, folding his arms across his chest as if it’s more of a challenge than a question.

I think about it. “Yes,” I say finally, deciding not to get into the whole I-don’t-know thing. But then I think, Fuck it, why shouldn’t I just tell the truth? “Actually, I’m not sure. I guess we’re just seeing each other.”

“Do you think that’s such a good idea?” my dad asks. “Given what you just went through because of a boy?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I say honestly. “But I know that I like him, and so I’m going with it.” I open the Rice Krispies Treat and take a bite.

My dad shuts down. I can literally see his face shutting down.

“Don’t get too full,” he says. “We’re going to dinner at the Marshes’.”

My stomach does a flip. “Dad,” I say, “I really don’t—I mean, I already ate, and I have a lot of homework.” I don’t want to see Rielle.

“I wasn’t asking if you wanted to go,” he says. “I was telling you that we’re going. All of us.”

•  •  •

An hour later I’m standing on Rielle’s front porch with my mom and dad, holding a Bundt cake. The awful thing about the Bundt cake (besides the fact that it’s a Bundt cake, and
honestly, who the hell wants a cake with a big hole in the middle?) is that it’s store-bought. Apparently, my mom had forgotten that she’d agreed to bring dessert, and so she didn’t have time to make anything.

My dad, surprisingly, didn’t really seem to care and said we could just pick something up on the way. But my mom freaked out, and was all, “Sharon Marsh would never show up with something store-bought,” because Rielle’s mom is kind of like Martha Stewart. (Of course, Rielle’s mom doesn’t have a job, and she took, like, private cooking lessons last year in France after reading that book about Julia Child,
Julie & Julia
. Actually, I’m not sure she even read the book. She might have just watched the movie.)

So then my mom had this great idea that she was going to go to this fancy bakery downtown to buy something because she’d had this warm fruit compote tartlet there once, and apparently it was very elegant and wonderful, the exact kind of thing you should bring to dinner at the Marshes’. But when we got there, the bakery was closed, so we had to go to the normal grocery store.

Which is how we ended up with this Bundt cake. Which is actually very plain-looking. It doesn’t have fruit or chocolate on it or anything. It was slim pickings at the store since most of the stuff looked like it had been sitting out all day.

Anyway, so my mom picked out this Bundt cake, and then she ran next door to Target and bought this very fancy-looking cake stand, and she put the Bundt cake on it. She did this in the
car, which caused one side of the cake to get sort of smushed, but in the end I think it helped because now it at least looks more homemade.

“How’s it going?”
Isaac texts to me while we’re getting out of the car.

“Mom bought a Bundt cake and is trying to pass it off like it’s homemade,”
I text back.

“LOL.”

Yeah. Real funny. Not if you’re here.

Rielle answers the door.

“Yay!” she squeals, jumping up and down. She’s wearing a black boatneck sweater and white capri pants. Her hair is pulled back in a messy bun, and she has a single string of pearls around her neck. She looks effortlessly put together, exactly like the kind of girl my dad would want as a daughter. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

She grabs me in a hug. It feels forced. And weird.

“We brought dessert!” my mom declares. “A Bundt cake!” She thrusts it into Rielle’s hands.

If Rielle’s surprised by my mom’s enthusiasm, she doesn’t show it. “Great,” she says. “Let’s go put it in the kitchen.”

When we get there, Rielle’s mom is pulling appetizers out of the oven, some kind of meat wrapped in a pastry crust.

“Here’s the dessert,” Rielle exclaims, and then plops it down on the counter.

“Great,” Mrs. Marsh says. She doesn’t even look at it twice. Yikes.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Rielle says, and grabs my hand. Whenever my family comes over here for dinner, Rielle and I go upstairs and leave the adults downstairs. Sometimes we’ll snag some of the appetizers her mom makes and munch on them while we hang out and gossip about boys. Rielle hates these dinners as much as I do, mostly because it keeps her from doing the two things she loves the most—talking on her phone and listening to music.

As soon as we get upstairs, Rielle heads to her computer.

“I have the best song for you to listen to,” she says. “I met the drummer the other night at The Stage.” Rielle is a bit of a groupie. And not just for one particular band or group. She finds these little local bands and stalks them down at different shows. Then she finagles her way backstage to meet the singers or drummers and dates them for a few weeks until she gets bored. Never the guitar players, though—Rielle thinks guitar players are too full of themselves.

The first bars of an alternative rock song start to filter through Rielle’s superexpensive speakers, the kind of speakers that can make almost any song sound good. Maybe that’s why she’s always falling in love with these guys.

“Good song,” I say honestly. I’m sprawled out on her bed, trying not to think about the fact that she lied to me about being at her grandma’s house for the weekend. I wonder what Isaac is doing right now. I want to pull my phone out and send him another text, but I’m afraid Rielle will ask me who I’m texting. And then I’ll have to tell her, and then she’ll be all up in my business.

I guess that’s one of the good things about not having many close friends right now. I don’t have to listen to anyone else’s opinion of what I’m doing with my life. Although, my dad obviously felt free to make it perfectly clear what he thinks about me and Isaac.

“I haven’t hooked up with him yet,” Rielle says. She pulls up the band’s website and shows me a picture. The guy in question looks the same as every other band guy she falls in love with. Spiky, highlighted hair that flops over one eye. Tight jeans. A wrist cuff. And eyes that look like they may or may not have eyeliner on them.

“He’s cute,” I say.