Unfriended (7 page)

“On Dave and Lisa’s status updates,” he said, swirling a piece of pancake in the syrup, “I’ve seen them leaving each other messages—like ‘one-four-three,’ I’m pretty sure.” He raised one eyebrow at me, something I always loved, as it reminded me of the first time I saw him do this, when we first went to the drive-in together.

“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”

“I think it’s some kind of code,” he said excitedly. “And I think we should figure it out. I bet it’s not that hard to crack.”

I smiled, feeling like I should have been expecting this. Right as Stanwich High had let out for the summer, Nate had read a book called
Spy, Spy Again
, an anonymous memoir of a high-ranking former CIA agent. He had become obsessed with it, and with codes and clues and espionage in general. He was in the middle of three other books on spying, and his DVD picks all tended now toward things like the Bourne trilogy. And because “watching a DVD” had become our mutual code for “making out on the couch” I found it very hard to concentrate on kissing Nate when things kept exploding on the screen and Matt Damon kept beating people up in foreign locations. Nate had even started texting me in code (but then usually texting me the key to the
code if we were pressed for time). I was trying to just roll with this, and even though he had insisted on giving me some of his spy books to read, I had yet to open any of them. But reading them myself actually didn’t seem to be necessary, as Nate was perfectly happy to recap them all—in detail—for me.

“It’s not hard to crack at all,” I said. “I can tell you what it means right now.”

“Oh,” Nate said, looking a little crestfallen. He’d probably hoped that we could have found the key to the code together. This had become Nate’s idea of fun.

“And it’s not even that complicated,” I said. “It’s an alphanumeric cipher.” I paused for a moment after saying that, not quite able to believe that Nate had gotten me using this terminology. “So each number stands for the number of letters in the word that they’re saying to each other.”

“Ah,” Nate said, tucking that one lock of hair that always seemed to escape (the hazards of growing out your bangs) behind my ear. “Impressive. I wasn’t sure you’d been listening.”

“Always,” I said, smiling at him. I had leaned forward for a kiss when Nate continued.

“So what are they saying?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, leaning back. “They’re saying—” I stopped short when I realized what I’d be saying to him when I told him the meaning of this code. I’d be saying “I love you.” Even though I’d just be explaining something to him, translating for someone else, I would still be saying those three words to Nate.

I could feel my pulse quicken as I tried to figure out how to handle this. I didn’t want the first time I said these words to him not to be real. “Well,” I said, my face getting hot. “Like I said, the code is the number of letters in each word. So
one
stands for
I
. And
three
stands for
you
. And so,
four
stands for …” I trailed off, hoping he would figure out the missing word without me having to tell him. After a moment, comprehension dawned and I thought I saw his own cheeks redden slightly.

“Ah,” Nate said. “Gotcha.” We both ate in silence for a minute before Nate put his pancake container down and turned to me. “But why the code?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve heard Dave and Lisa say that to each other. I’ve heard them yell it to each other across vast distances.”

I smiled. It was true; even though there had been a lot of drama about saying it to begin with, Dave and Lisa were now not at all shy about telling each other—and anyone else in hearing distance—how they felt. “Lisa came up with it,” I said with a shrug. “I guess sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s just between you.” This was, I realized, probably the reason I liked the Bluff so much. “Something that’s private.”

“I can see that,” Nate said. He leaned close to me, gave me a quick kiss, traced his finger down my cheek, then looked at me for a long moment.

I could feel my heart begin to beat quickly. Was this it? Was Nate going to say 1-4-3 to me? Did that mean—OMG, did that mean that
he
loved
me
?

My pulse was racing, and I looked into his eyes, searching his expression for a clue. I held my breath, my
heart hammering, wondering if it was going to happen. Nate took a breath, looking right into my eyes. But at that very second, the music playing from Nate’s stereo switched to something with thrashing guitars and a fairly tone-deaf singer who nonetheless sang very loudly. Nate looked over at the stereo and then back at me, smiling. I smiled back and tried not to let the disappointment I was feeling show on my face.

Nate pulled out his phone and checked the time, frowning (I knew that’s what he was doing, since at the Bluff, our cell phones were reduced to being very expensive clocks).

“Time to go?” I asked, feeling my heart sink. Nate no longer had a curfew, so whenever we had to cut our makeout sessions short, it was because of me. And even though my father wasn’t really aware of what I was doing, I knew that when he was home—and hungry, if the stove continued to baffle him—I couldn’t push the curfew thing too far.

“Time to go,” he confirmed, and we put our takeout containers in the white paper diner bag. We were always really careful about cleaning up after ourselves when we came to the Bluff. Not only because I’d paid attention in second grade and learned that nobody likes a litterbug, but also because we didn’t want to leave evidence we’d been there—just in case this property did still belong to someone who might not have liked the fact that teenagers were hanging out there several nights a week. Not to mention we didn’t want to attract ants or raccoons or bears. Even though Nate had assured me that bears were
exceedingly rare in suburban Connecticut, I thought it better we not risk it.

Nate got to his feet, then offered me his hand to pull me up. I stood, and together we folded up the blanket and then got into the truck. Nate started the engine and backed out of the deserted driveway carefully, not turning his lights on until we were on the main road. I pulled on my seat belt to give it some slack, and then slid across Nate’s bench seat (truly, my favorite feature of the truck) so that I was sitting close, leaning into him. Nate took one hand off the wheel and draped his arm across my shoulders.

He pulled up to a stoplight and we sat in front of the red, the truck rumbling beneath us. He bent down and kissed the top of my head. “I think it’s going to be a great summer,” he whispered to me.

Pete Townshend came on the stereo, singing our song, “Let My Love Open the Door.” I smiled and kept time by tapping my fingers on Nate’s arm.

“One thing that’s been bothering me about our song,” he said, shaking his head.

“And what’s that?” I asked, smiling up at him, feeling utterly peaceful and relaxed.

“Well,” said Nate, faux-seriously, “he keeps wanting his
love
to open the door. But really, wouldn’t you think he’d have better luck with a key?”

I shook my head at that but wasn’t quite able to stop myself from smiling. I leaned my head back against Nate’s shoulder, and as the light changed to green, I turned up the volume and let Pete Townshend sing us home.

I rubbed my hands together to try and get some feeling back into them and shifted my weight from foot to foot. From the research I’d done on the internet, hypothermia could be prevented if you kept moving.

I was in the walk-in freezer of On A Blender, trying to locate an elusive box of frozen strawberries. The walk-in freezer was a tiny space stocked floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes of frozen fruit and vegetables, and bags upon bags of extra ice. I’d learned from my employee handbook that we—the “smoothie operators”—were discouraged from revealing to the customers that we didn’t use fresh fruit. The handbook pointed out that
it had been fresh at
some
point, and unless they asked exactly when that was, we weren’t supposed to tell them.

I scanned the rows of boxes, but could not see strawberries anywhere. Which was a problem, as the Strawberry Jammin’ was far and away our most popular smoothie. I let out a sigh of frustration and noticed with alarm that I could now see my breath. I was wearing the ugly, ancient gray OAB sweatshirt that we kept underneath the counter for trips to the walk-in, but it didn’t seem to be helping very much.

I heard the door to the shop open, and the bell jangled loudly. But I didn’t hear the one thing I was listening for, my coworker giving the trademarked OAB greeting, “Who wants to go On A Blender?” In fact, I didn’t hear anything.

“Kavya?” I called, even though I knew that the freezer door was pretty much soundproof, so this was fruitless—much like me, at the moment.

I stood still, listening hard, hoping that someone wasn’t robbing us because my coworker had spotted something shiny and wandered off. There had been a section in the handbook for dealing with “smoothie criminals,” but I had just skimmed it in the hopes that I wouldn’t actually have to put the information to use. And I had seen my other two coworkers, Daryl Oliver and John Reyes, slipping out to the alley to take a “tea break” five minutes before, so I knew they weren’t inside. And that when they came back, they would have an irrepressible urge to giggle at inanimate objects.

I heaved open the heavy silver door and stepped out into the narrow hallway that led directly behind the counter, where the register and smoothie prep area were.

On A Blender had been in Putnam for a few years now, but after working there for a while, I was amazed that it had survived a week. There was a manager, allegedly named Gary, who signed our paychecks—but I’d never seen him, and this seemed to be the only managerial duty that he performed. He certainly wasn’t making sure that his employees were doing any work.

Daryl and John spent the majority of the workday eating all the mangoes and watching
telenovelas
on the TV (it was suspended from the ceiling and, according to the handbook, was meant to face the customers and only play—on repeat—the corporate OAB promotional video,
The Wonderful Whirl-ed Of Smoothies!)
. I hadn’t really known Daryl or John before this summer, but I recognized them from school, where they were central fixtures in the stoner crowd that hung out by the vending machines behind the gym, rarely seeming to attend classes. It seemed like the two of them were keeping up their extracurricular activities in the summer. I’d seen John, on more than one occasion, just staring at a whirring blender, mesmerized, as the line of people waiting on smoothies got longer and longer.

The smoothie shop was small, with the walls painted bright, primary colors and hung with blown-up pictures of laughing people and cuddling couples, all holding
smoothies and looking ecstatic about this. In front of the counter, there was a customer waiting, arms crossed, tapping her foot and making a big show of checking her watch. And completely unaware of this was Kavya, who was sitting on the back counter, scrolling through her phone.

I hadn’t known Kavya Choudhury at all before we’d started working together. She was from Stanwich, but had only moved there this summer, from Los Angeles. She was very unimpressed with the East Coast in general, and with Connecticut in particular, and spent most of her time on her phone, talking or texting with her friends back in California. But even though she did less work than I would have believed possible, her looks alone were probably helping us make a profit. If she’d gone to Putnam, she would have undoubtedly given Kittson a run for her money as prom queen. She had perfect skin and long brown hair. Though she was around my height, she managed to be both willowy
and
curvy, something I hadn’t even known was possible before meeting her. There was a steady stream of guys who seemed to come into the shop simply to gaze at her, and one particularly persistent, deluded middle schooler who asked for her number every time he came in. Last week I’d discovered, much to my distress, that she’d finally given him mine.

“Hi,” I said a little more loudly than usual, for Kavya’s benefit. She glanced up at me, looked over at the customer, then, apparently disinterested, turned her attention back to her phone. “May I take your order?”

“Yes,” the woman said in a tone of voice designed to let me know how unhappy she was. “I’ll have the Blender in the Grass. And
quickly
. I’m now running late.”

“Right,” I said, heading for the small refrigerator where we kept the wheatgrass. “Coming up.” I gave her my best responsible-employee smile, then turned to the refrigerator, which was right next to where Kavya was sitting. “Kavya,” I hissed.

Without looking up from her phone, she shook her head. “I can’t handle vegetables, Madison. It’s my enzyme thing. I’ve told you this before.”

In fact, she had. After we’d been working together for about a week, she had told me that she had something called OAS, which meant she was totally allergic to vegetables and couldn’t even handle them without getting “like, a rash. Ick.” This was in addition to not being able to scoop ice (“I have the worst circulation
ever
. And it’s so not good for me to let my hands get too cold.”) or deal with any of the cleanup duties (“I wish I could. Really. But I have this back thing, and I think sweeping might really aggravate it.”). Which basically meant, even when there were
four
of us working, I was sometimes the only one actually doing any work, with Kavya refusing to touch vegetables, and Daryl, when he hit his paranoid state, convinced that the blueberries were staring at him.

“I know,” I said as I pulled open the fridge door. I took out two of the small wheatgrass plants, set them on the counter, and heaved over the weird metal wheatgrass juicer. “But can you ring her up while I do this?”

Kavya looked up from her phone, then gave a deep sigh. But she climbed down from the counter and walked over toward the register and our (most likely) non-repeat customer. I fed the wheatgrass through the machine—really, a ridiculously large amount of wheatgrass to produce such a small, foul-smelling dribble of juice. I poured the juice into a small cup, set it on a plate with an orange slice, and placed it on the counter. The woman took her change from Kavya, frowned at me, then downed her juice in one shot and hustled out the door, the bell above her head jangling.

“Bye, now! Return to Blender!” I called after her, even though I had a feeling that she would not be doing this. But according to the employee handbook, this was the required farewell. The door slammed behind her with window-rattling force. “Kavya,” I said, trying my very best to sound calm and reasonable, but even I could hear, not really succeeding, “why weren’t you waiting on the customer?”

“I can’t touch vegetables,” she said, shaking her head as she reached for her phone again. “I
told
you that.”

I opened my mouth to respond when the bell jangled again. I looked up and saw, to my surprise, my ex-boyfriend standing in the doorway.

Justin Williamson, as ever, looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of an Abercrombie catalog. I always half expected to see a muddy golden retriever and a group of shirtless rugby-playing guys just to the left of him. He was undeniably cute, but after Nate, it
was a kind of cute that no longer seemed all that interesting to me.

Justin’s eyes scanned the store and rested on me. I gave him a tentative smile, trying to decipher his expression. After Justin and I had broken up, he’d remained on the fringes of my friend group, and we’d been cordial when we’d seen each other in school. Because of this, I’d felt like we could turn to him for a favor during Promgate. We’d asked him to distract Isabel by pretending to be romantically interested in her at a crucial moment. Isabel had taken the bait, and the plan had succeeded. But afterward, perplexed as to why I’d asked him to flirt with a total stranger, Justin had wanted to know the reason. At that moment, I had been exhausted and not sure how much I should reveal to him. So Justin had jumped to his own conclusion—that I’d been using him. Over the last remaining weeks of school, he had taken to avoiding me in the hallways. It’s not like Justin and I ever talked that much—not even when we’d been going out—so it wasn’t an enormous change. But it bothered me that he thought I’d just used, and then dismissed, him.

“Yum,” Kavya breathed. I saw that she’d walked to the front of the counter, her eyes not leaving Justin—who, at this moment, was backlit in a golden haze from the late-afternoon sun. “Who is
that
?”

“Justin Williamson,” I murmured as subtly as possible, since he was starting to walk toward us—and it’s not like the shop was all that big. “My ex.”

Kavya glanced at Justin, then back at me, and raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Really?” she asked, her voice heavy with disbelief. Which was actually fairly insulting.

“Really,” I hissed at her as Justin reached the counter and smiled at me.

“Hey, Mad,” he said easily. “How’s it going?”

I blinked at him. He was acting utterly normal, as though he hadn’t been turning away from me whenever we passed each other in the hall. But maybe this was his way of letting me know he was over it. “Fine,” I said, recovering. “Good. Really good. How are you?”

“Can’t complain,” he said, giving me a lazy smile and leaning his elbows on the counter. I heard a strange bleating sound and realized after a second that it was coming from Kavya’s phone, which was dangling, forgotten, at her side. Clearly, I’d never heard a message go unanswered before. Kavya was staring at Justin, all her L.A. cool gone, and it was the longest time I’d ever seen her focus on something other than her texting. Justin also glanced in Kavya’s direction and just stared for a second. She tended to have that effect on people. This was generally followed by a temporary inability to speak English, and most of the male customers just ended up pointing silently at one of the happy-couple smoothie posters.

I could tell that Justin was not an exception to this. He blinked at Kavya, opening and then closing his mouth. It was the way that he used to look at me, and then the way he used to look at Kittson. It was the look of Justin becoming smitten. I felt myself give a half
smile as I watched. But, unbelievably, with what seemed like an effort of will, Justin turned away from Kavya. He took a gulp of air, then smiled at me again. “I heard you were working here,” he said.

I was about to point out that he probably hadn’t
heard
this from anyone, but rather had seen it on Constellation, when Kavya nudged me out of the way to stand in front of him.

“Hi,” she said, giving him a wide smile. “I’m Kavya Choudhury.” She smoothed down her white employee T-shirt, the one with
Love Me Blender
written across the front in curly red script. I realized I was still wearing the enormous gray sweatshirt, and I unzipped it and shrugged it off, shoving it underneath the counter next to the lost and found basket.

“Hi,” Justin said. He looked at her for a moment longer before, unbelievably, turning his attention back to me. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Kavya’s jaw drop. Her phone bleated again and I realized that this was probably the longest her friends had gone without getting a response from her. They probably assumed that she was in some kind of mortal peril. “So what’s good here?” he asked me.

“Well,” I said slowly, still trying to figure out what was going on. Justin had practically had cartoon hearts circling his head as he’d gazed at my esteemed coworker. And
no
guys ignored Kavya, especially when she was turning on the charm. She was even able to use it to get Daryl and John to do things that she refused to, like take out the trash or work on Saturdays.

I looked over at Kavya, who seemed as thrown by this as I was. I cleared my throat and looked back to Justin, hoping he wouldn’t request anything with strawberries. “The Yes, We Have Some Bananas is good. And so are the Boyz N The Berry and the Vanilla Milk S-Moo-thie.”