When You Were Mine (16 page)

“Um, fine. Are we going?”

Charlie glances back at Olivia.

“He’s an asshole,” Olivia says.

“She’s a bitch,” Charlie says.

I shrug. “It’s fine.”

“It is not fine,” Charlie says. She has that tone she uses with Jake when they’re about to get into a fight. I suddenly have the intense desire to bolt from this car. To run back into my house, curl up under my covers, and just never come out.

“It’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything,” I say.

“What?” Olivia interjects. “That’s so unfair.”

“It’s true,” I say. “We weren’t
together
together. And she was his date and all. . . .” My voice trails off, and I look out the window. We’re rolling out of my driveway. In the rearview mirror I can see my parents in our doorway. My dad is reaching up to the light fixture on the porch, and my mom has a hand on his back, holding him up for balance. I purposefully keep my eyes trained on my house as we pull away. I don’t look to the left, to Rob’s.

“I mean, I thought she was a bitch for asking to go with him,” Olivia says, “but this is too much.
Kissing
him? She’s your cousin.”

They kissed?

“We’re aware,” Charlie says. I can feel her glance at me, but I keep my eye trained on the passing trees. Of course they kissed. They were practically glued together when we left. But the thought of his lips on hers makes me feel like someone is trying to suck my stomach out through my belly button and shove the whole thing back down my throat.

“It’s fine,” I force myself to say. “Honestly.”

None of us says much more after that. We drive in silence, aside from the music that creeps steadily from the stereo. Something low and dull that I don’t recognize.

When Charlie broke up with Matt, her sophomore-year boyfriend and the first guy she slept with, it was bad. She listened to crappy R&B love songs on repeat for, like, a week. And she didn’t even love him, I don’t think. Once, she said she liked that he wanted to be a doctor, but that was the only time she talked about anything besides the way he looked in a sweater.

The truth is that I feel humiliated and betrayed. How could Rob have been standing there, holding her, when just a few nights ago he was holding me? The entire school saw them together, dancing and kissing, and now I’m what? Yesterday’s hookup? The idiot who believed her best friend wanted to be her boyfriend? And who trusted that her cousin wanted to be a friend, rather than a backstabber?

When we get to upper, I try hard not to look for Rob’s car. I don’t want to see him. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll either fall apart, beg him to change his mind, or say something that will cut him out of my life forever. I want him gone, but I also want him here. That’s the worst part. The fact that I want him to make this better. That I
need
him to make this better. He’s the only one who can fix it. Whenever there’s a problem, Rob’s the one that handles it. I need him to handle this, too. For him to call himself a jerk,
maybe even punch himself in the face, and then bring himself back to me.

Olivia makes a move to head over to Ben, who has driven her car and is now waiting for her, but Charlie grabs her by her
MIAMI
book bag, and the three of us make our way down to assembly with Ben trailing behind.

But we’re late, of course, because of me, which means assembly has already started and there is no way for us to get to senior seats. We actually have to stand in the Trenches. We’ve never stood here, not once, and all of the things that are wrong with this day sort of congeal into the fact that I don’t have a seat. That I’ve been kicked out of my whole life.

I see Rob in his usual spot on the far side, and my stomach flips so badly, I think I’m going to be sick. I hate myself for still thinking he looks perfect. Jeans and a green T-shirt, the one with the tree on it that I love, and for a second I think maybe he wore it for me, that when he was picking out his clothes this morning he saw it and thought of me. That he wanted to be wearing it when he tells me Friday night was a mistake, that he was only humoring Juliet, and where did I disappear to after we danced.

But then I know that is never going to happen, because sitting next to him, in a black skirt and pink candy–colored tank top, is Juliet.

Charlie puts her arm over my shoulder. Olivia stands on the other side, arms crossed, Ben behind her. They’re flanking me, like human pieces of armor.

Rob can’t see me from this angle, which is worse than if he could, because it means I can stare as hard and as long as I like. He whispers something to her, and she laughs, then brings her finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet. But it’s in that cute way certain girls have that lets everyone know they don’t really mean it. That she wants him to go on bothering her forever. Even while turning him down she’s inviting him. Forget the lip biting. This is definitely her power move.

He’s leaning so close to her that it takes everything in me not to run right over and tear them apart. And part of me wants to. Part of me wants to fight. To tell him to pick me. To beg him to stop what he’s doing, erase the last three days, and just come back. But I’m already fading into the background, like a house in the rearview mirror. I can feel myself getting smaller and smaller, shrinking, so that when Mr. Johnson says, “Have a great day, everyone!” I think I might have just disappeared.

And then assembly is over and students grab their bags and descend from the bleachers. We start getting trampled, jostled to the side. Olivia yells, “Owww!” pushing back against the crowd, but I let it shuffle me outside.

I feel like a pebble in the river—small, smooth, and sinking.
I don’t even have enough weight to settle, though. I’m just kicked forward by gravity.

Someone’s hand is on my shoulder, and I turn around. It’s Charlie, and she buries her chin into my hair and whispers, “She is so going down. Don’t worry.” I wish there really was something we could do to fix this. That ostracizing Juliet would in some way keep them apart. More than that, though, I just wish this wasn’t happening. That she’d never invited him. That he’d never said yes. And that it hadn’t taken me so long to realize he was the one I wanted to be with.

“It’s fine,” I say.

“It is not fine,” Charlie says again.

“Listen, I’m going to be late for calc.” I wiggle myself out of her grip. “I’ll catch up with you at lunch?”

“Okay,” Charlie says, but she’s squinting at me, trying to read something off of my face. “Hey, Rosie,” she says. The sound of my nickname startles me. Rob is the only one who usually calls me that.

“Yeah?”

“It’s going to be okay.” She says it firmly, like she’s trying to convince herself as much as me.

“I know,” I say, but it’s not true. For the first time it feels like nothing is going to be okay. Like something went very, very wrong. That the course of things, the natural order, has been
tampered with. As I trudge up to the math cubicles, I can’t help but keep thinking,
This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

The day moves absurdly slowly, like it’s dragging its heels. Everything seems to be happening in slow motion, like I’m falling backward, except I never hit the ground. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be from now on. If I’m going to be stuck in high school forever.

AP Bio is even worse than last week. Mrs. Barch gives us a pop quiz at the beginning of the period that I haven’t done the reading for because I’ve been moping around my room all weekend like somebody died.

I literally do not know the answer to a single one of these questions. I’m sandwiched between Lauren, who is bent down intently, methodically working through the problems, and Len, who is scribbling animatedly, like he’s trying to piss me off. I feel beyond pathetic. Even the class joker is managing to ace this thing.

The worst part is that after we’re finished, Mrs. Barch makes us grade each other’s quizzes while she runs an errand. Since it’s an AP class, we’re supposed to “use our sense of merit” while she’s gone. Of course, since Len’s my lab partner, we’re meant to swap quizzes.

He gives me that lopsided smirk and rubs his hands together. “Hand it over, Rosaline.”

He tosses his to me freely, like he’s Charlie passing me a sparkling water at lunch. I look it over. I’m surprised to see his handwriting is actually neat and his problems look fairly organized.

“Since when have you shown any initiative?” I ask, holding it up.

He shrugs. “I was in the mood to study this weekend.”

“Right. Sure. You just felt like it.”

He smirks. “Why so blue?”

“Mrs. Barch is ruining my life,” I mutter.

“She’s not so bad,” he says, knocking me on the back. “You know she runs drama?”

“How is that relevant?”

He makes a face like,
Yikes,
and holds his hands up. “You get extra credit if you help out with one of her plays.”

“For bio?”

Len nods. “So are you going to show me that thing?” He gestures to the quiz that’s still tucked neatly under my elbow.

“I didn’t . . . ,” I start, but I’m not sure what to say, so I give up and hand it to him.

He whistles. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Are you kidding me?” I hiss. “I couldn’t answer a single question.”

“I know,” he says. “Ballsy.”

“Not ballsy. Incompetent.”

“Relax,” he says. “It’s a quiz, not the goddamn SATs.”

“Relax?” I say, my face getting hot from frustration. “Do you know quizzes are twenty percent of our grade? If I get an F on this one, that means that even if I pull As on all the rest, the odds of still getting a B in this class even if I work and study constantly for the rest of the semester is very likely. And a B is a 3.0. Do you know what Stanford’s admission average is? It’s like a 4.3.”

“Breathe.”

I exhale and fold my head down onto my desk, knocking my forehead on the wood. When I look up, Len is smiling.

“You’re so dramatic,” he says. “The way I see it, it’s not that big of a deal. But if it really means that much to you, fine.”

He takes his quiz out from under my hand and erases his name, putting mine in its place. Then he takes my quiz and erases mine, writing his own.

“Could you cool it with the hysteria now?” he says. “’Cause that panic attack was really getting in the way of my Monday.”

My mouth hangs open as he puts a one hundred on one quiz and a zero on the other and hands both of them to Lauren to pass up to the front.

“What did you do?”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Helped a fellow classmate out. Revolutionary, I know.”

“You just
cheated
.”

He looks behind him. “I cannot catch a break around here.”

“You’re going to get an F now.”

“So?”

“Don’t you care?”

“Not really.”

“
That’s
your problem,” I say, anger boiling up to my throat.

“My problem?”

“You don’t care about anything.”

“Correction: I don’t care about anything unimportant.”

“But I just explained to you—”

Len holds up his hand. “I get you’re anxious about Stanford, or whatever. All I’m saying is that there’s more to life than obsessing over quizzes.”

“I get it. I’m lame. Just some totally type A spaz you have to work with. I just can’t believe you’d go so far to prove it.”

Len laughs. “You must have had a really rough weekend. Because you sound insane.”

I sniff. “I did.”

“Look, that guy’s an ass,” Len says.

“Rob?”

“No, Spartacus. Of course Rob.”

I blink. I’m not sure what to say. Thankfully, the bell rings before I’m forced to answer.

“Don’t sweat the quiz,” Len says, stuffing his notebook into his seemingly empty backpack. “See you tomorrow.”

I’m blowing my nose, leaving bio, when Rob grabs my elbow.

“I need to talk to you.”

Len is in front of me, and for one brief moment I see him glance at Rob’s hand on my arm. But then he’s walking off toward the math cubicles.

I’m so defeated by the quiz debacle and surprised by Rob’s presence that I let him lead me away, over to behind Cooper House. It isn’t until we’re facing each other, alone, that I pull away.

“Look,” he says a few times, and then sighs, starting over. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “I didn’t expect this to happen.”

“What?” I ask. We both know
what
, but it feels important that he clarify.

“Her,” he says. “You know, Juliet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. I don’t want him to see that I’m upset. I bite my bottom lip and will my voice steady.

“It does matter. The thing is, I didn’t expect to fall for her. But there’s just something about her. It feels right.”

I don’t say anything, because the fact that he used “fall for” instead of “meet” has sent my heart throbbing. It feels like someone’s just jabbed the sharp end of a pencil right into the center.