What Would Emma Do? (5 page)

“Because you seem to have stopped caring! No one cares here. This entire town is a black hole of progress. The instant there’s the tiniest shimmer of a new idea or a new way to do anything, it gets sucked down.”

“You make it sound like we’re out there plowing fields behind a horse.”

“I’m not talking about farming! I’m talking about life. Life isn’t supposed to be predictable. Take Darci Evers. She’ll be queen of the spring dance for sure, she’ll be voted Miss Community Service, she’ll get married in her daddy’s church as soon as possible to whoever in town has the most money, and she’ll be head of the Wheaton Ladies’ Society before you know it.” I threw up my hands in disgust.

“Some people like knowing what’s going to happen.”

“You didn’t used to. Now you’re turning into someone who does exactly what’s expected.”

“You didn’t expect me to kiss you,” Colin said.

I felt my face flush red-hot. I pulled the sweatshirt neck up higher until it covered my nose. I could feel the steam of my breath filling the shirt.

“Yeah, well.” I waved my hands vaguely in front of me like I was shooing something away.

“Yeah, well,” he said. I could feel him looking at me, but I didn’t look over.

The squeal of the barn door being yanked open cut off whatever he was about to say. Darci ran outside skipping, a can of beer held aloft in one hand. Justin, her long-term boyfriend, ran after her, and she squealed and ran just slow enough that he caught her in no time flat. He carried her back to the Barn and she pounded on his back with one tiny fist in mock indignation while making sure not to spill a drop of beer. Kimberly stood by the door, wavering back and forth.

“Now you put her down. Right now,” Kimberly slurred, and then stumbled after them. A voice inside called for someone to close the door, the wind was cold.

“Great, Darci and Kimberly are here. And they brought a bunch of beer.” I wasn’t against drinking, but most of my classmates were not made any wittier by the infusion of alcohol. You have to wonder how Miss Jesus-Would-Just-Say-No preacher’s daughter justified being such a hypocrite, but she never seemed to even notice.

“Don’t you want to know why I kissed you? Or have you decided you know everything about here?”

I sucked my lower lip in and chewed on it, not saying a word.

“Emma?”

“I can predict Joann would never forgive me for sitting out here in the truck with you talking about this. I’m going to go in.” I opened the door and jumped out.

I started walking toward the Barn, waiting to see if Colin was going to follow me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to or not. Why did he have to pick this particular subject to be unpredictable on? I heard his door screech open and I stopped. He walked over with his hands shoved in his jeans pockets.

“What is this all about?” I asked. “Are you trying to prove a point, that I don’t know everything?”

“No.” He looked down and kicked at the ground. The earth was torn up by deep tire tracks in the mud that had dried into rock-hard, solid waves of dirt. “I would never want to do anything to hurt Joann,” he added.

“Me either.”

We stood, not looking at each other. It could have been a real teen dream kind of moment, except suddenly the sound of someone vomiting interrupted it. We looked over and saw Kimberly leaning against the Barn wall, heaving up her dinner and, if I had to guess, a few cans (or a case) of Miller Lite. Funny how you never saw beer advertisements ending like this.

“Eew, gross,” Darci said, her head peeking out. She crossed her arms and watched Kimberly. I waited for her to look around and notice us, but with the lights and music coming from the barn, she must not have been able to see us standing off in the shadows.

“I really don’t feel good,” Kimberly muttered.

“What did you take?”

“I don’t know, a whole bunch of stuff.” Kimberly dry-heaved a few times. Even from here I could see that she must have been sweating. Her face looked oily in the moonlight. “I think I need to go to a doctor or something. My heart is beating all funny.”

“Are you kidding me?” Darci screeched. “You can’t go to the doctor. Your parents will find out and they’ll tell my parents. How about we just take you home and you go to bed?”

“I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”

“Don’t be a fucking baby. How sick can you be? They advertise that stuff on the Internet. Do you want to get everyone into trouble?”

“No.” Kimberly started to sniffle. It had the sound of full-blown waterworks on the rise. Darci stepped forward and rubbed Kimberly’s back in slow circles.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. I just meant if we got in trouble for drinking, we could get booted off the Spirit Squad! I know you don’t want that. And your parents will ground you for sure from the spring dance, and Justin was just telling me inside that he thought Richard was going to ask you.”

“Seriously?”

Darci crossed her heart with one pink fingernail.

“Totally seriously. Here, swish out your mouth with this water and take a Tic Tac.” Darci handed over a plastic water bottle.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want Richard to ask someone else?” Darci raised an eyebrow.

Kimberly spit the water on the ground, debating her options.

“Do you have any lip gloss?” she asked, holding out her hand for a mint. They wandered back inside.

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered to Colin.

“You sure?”

“This is lame. I have a motto: ‘Never join a party once the throwing up has started.’”

“Sounds wise.” Colin swung back into his truck, and I plunked down on the seat next to him.

“Do you remember that game we played as kids?” I asked as we drove back to my place.

“Which one?”

“The one where one person goes ‘My house…’ and then the other person has to add to the sentence.”

“Sort of. It wasn’t much of a game.”

“It was a great game. Let’s do it. My house…is in Chicago…”

“And it’s as large as a castle…”

“With a room just for my shoes…,” I added.

“Just one room?” he asked with a snort. I jabbed him in the side.

“You’re not playing right. With a room for my shoes…”

“And a room to watch football with a fifty-inch high-def TV…,” Colin said.

“Fifty-inch? Overkill…okay, and my house has a pool and a track around the roof…”

“That I designed…”

“See! I knew you still wanted to be an architect. Farmer, my ass,” I said.

“Now
you’re
not playing,” he interrupted.

“Okay, that I designed myself…winning major awards…,” I said to encourage him.

“Which I put next to my Olympic gold medals I won for track and field…”

I gave a hoot of appreciation. We played the rest of the way home until Colin pulled to a stop just down the road from my house. He clicked off the lights. My real house was dark; Mom must have gone to bed. I reached over to open the door when Colin grabbed my arm. I spun around as if he had grabbed my nonexistent boobs instead of just my arm. He dropped his hand immediately.

“Hang on a minute.”

I sat back, but he didn’t say anything else. He put his hands on the ten and two of the steering wheel as if he was getting ready for a particularly tricky maneuver on the driver’s ed test.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you,” he said finally.

“So talk.”

“About what happened at Christmas.”

“Look, don’t worry about it. It was some kind of freakish mistake.”

“That’s the thing, it wasn’t a mistake. I mean, it wasn’t like I had a plan, but it wasn’t a mistake.”

All the air seemed to be sucked out of the truck cab. I couldn’t take a deep breath, and I noticed that my hands were shaking, so I sat on them. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to say. This was Colin, for crying out loud. We had watched
Sesame Street
together. He was the closest thing I had to family other than my mom. He was my best friend’s boyfriend.

“I like you,” he said.

My heart was speeding up.

“I like you, too.”

“I mean, I think I really like you.” Colin was moving closer. I could smell the detergent his mother used on his clothes, and over that, the smell of freshly dug earth. He must have been working on the farm after school.

“What about Joann?” I said in a whisper, as if someone might overhear us. As if she was going to pop up from the backseat and yell surprise before bursting into tears.

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell, Colin?” Part of me desperately wanted him to shut up and never say another word about this, and another part of me, a part I didn’t like so much, wanted him to keep talking.

“I don’t know. I’m not trying to piss you off, but I feel that I have to say something. I’ve liked you for as long as I can remember. I liked you since before I fully understood what it meant, but you were always so clear about wanting to be friends, just friends, that I never said a thing. Heck, I half convinced myself that I didn’t care. That I was fine with that. Besides, even if you liked me, I knew the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere. You’ve talked about leaving since you understood there was a road out of town. But I think I never stopped liking you. I felt like you should know. Then I kissed you, and you kissed me back.” Colin looked over at me. “You did kiss me back.”

“What did you expect me to do? Run screaming?”

Colin shook his head and looked back out the window.

“You kissed me back. Like you had been waiting for me to kiss you.”

I didn’t say anything. Instead I focused on pulling a loose string from the cuff of my shirt. I wondered if it was a key string, the one that was holding everything together, and maybe if I pulled it too hard, my whole shirt would unravel.

“Look, Colin, it’s complicated.”

“But you’re not saying no.”

“Joann’s my best friend,” I said, finally reminding him and myself at the same time.

“If I weren’t dating her, would you go out with me?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? You
are
going out with her.”

“What if we’re meant to be together?” he asked.

“Then I guess none of this would have happened.”

“But it did. And you kissed me. And then here we are, so the question is, what do we do now?”

I could feel my heart pounding, and I couldn’t look at Colin. I fully expected a bolt of lightning to come out of the sky and take us out in the truck. If God had more room on those stone tablets, I’m pretty sure the Eleventh Commandment would have been “Thou shalt not betray thine best friend with her boyfriend—even if he is hot.” Colin reached his hand over; his finger ran down my arm. Every hair on my arm stood straight up as if wanting to meet his touch. I yanked my arm back, cracking my elbow on the truck door. The feeling racing through me was not one that you had for a brother, or a best friend’s boyfriend.

“Guess that’s my answer, huh?” Colin said, pulling back over to his side of the truck.

“You’re one of my best friends.”

“The famous ‘let’s just be friends’ talk, huh?” Colin said, trying to make it sound like a joke, but I could tell it wasn’t.

I jumped down out of the truck and then leaned back in.

“I’m thinking we shouldn’t tell Joann about this.”

“About what?”

“Tonight,” I said, wondering if he was trying to be annoying or if it just came naturally.

“What about it?”

“Are you trying to piss me off?”

“Maybe.” He gave me a smile, and I felt my stomach do a slow turnover. “Anything else we shouldn’t tell her?” he asked.

My heart pounded, and I had the feeling he was going to kiss me again. Part of me wanted to slam the door shut, and the other part wanted to lunge across the seat and kiss him first. I waited for God to strike me dead.

What would Jesus do? I mean, what would Jesus do if he were the kind of guy to consider kissing his best friend’s girlfriend? Why doesn’t the Bible cover these kinds of situations?

“Nope,” I squeaked, and then cleared my throat. “Nothing else.”

“I’ll make sure you get back in safe.”

“In case the Boston Strangler took a serious wrong turn and is lying in wait for me?” I asked. Wheaton was not exactly a hotbed of crime. One time a bunch of junior high kids stole the plywood cutouts the Hansens keep on their lawn of a fat lady bending over showing off her bloomers. It rated the front page of the paper; it was that big of a deal.

Colin shrugged. He was going to wait anyway. He had that sort of John Wayne–type sense of nobility. I gave Colin another look and then jogged back to my house. I turned back, but I couldn’t see anything in the dark expect the outline of his truck. I slid the window open and hoisted myself up. Once I was in, I saw Colin flash his headlights and heard the engine start up. I could hear the sound of a siren in the distance. Maybe the cops were on the tail of the Strangler after all.

8

God, is it so bad to want something that you know is wrong? I mean, I know it’s bad, but is it
bad
bad? Damned to hell kind of bad, or the kind of bad where if I feel really sorry about it later all can be forgiven? On a bad scale, where one is having a nasty thought and ten is setting kittens on fire, where does this fall? Is there a special level of hell for those who screw over a friend?

I lay on my bed staring up at Johnny. I couldn’t sleep. The only way I could tell time was moving forward was by counting the times I heard the fridge fan motor kick on. I punched my pillow in an effort to fluff it and tried not to think how tired I was going to be at the track meet in the morning. It wasn’t a regional, but I still wanted killer times. Who knew how Northwestern was going to make their final decision? I pulled the blankets up and rolled back onto my side, curling up around Mr. Muffles. The whole thing was stupid. There was no reason to be thinking about it at all. Colin felt the need to ask, and I gave a clear answer. Now if I could only convince myself that I didn’t want to go running after his truck screaming, “Do-over!”

I tried to sort out what I was feeling. It shouldn’t have been that hard, because when you stripped away all the fluff, it really came down to two options: