Tease Page 4

  I close my eyes again. “My keys are downstairs,” I say.

  “Well, good, then you’ll know where to find them.” I can hear her picking things up off my floor and I can’t even find the energy to tell her to stop.

  But after a long pause, I sit up.

  There’s a semiclean T-shirt on the foot of my bed and I grab it, pulling it on, which requires taking the towel off my head. Mom hangs my abandoned clothes over the back of my desk chair. Her eyes linger on the stack of summer school books on the desk, but she doesn’t say anything. When she turns back to me she holds her hand out, and I silently pass her the towel.

  “I wish you’d help out around here,” she says.

  “The boys aren’t home.”

  “There’s a lot that needs to be done besides driving the boys around. The kitchen is a mess, there’s no food down there but cereal—”

  “I’m supposed to do the grocery shopping now?” This is a new one. I mean, run to the store for extra supplies, sure, but—

  She sighs again and sits on the foot of my bed, still holding the towel.

  “Bear,” she says, the nickname startling me. I haven’t heard it in months, and for some reason it makes my chest hurt. “I know you’re going through a rough time. But Natalie says this is all going to blow over, we’ll be back to normal soo—”

  “When did she say that?” I ask sharply. I never heard her say that.

  Mom must interpret my question differently, though, because she says, “I talk to her on the phone sometimes,” and her voice is angry again. Or defensive, I guess. “I’m sorry I can’t always be there for your meetings, but this affects me, too.”

  I shrug. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s gonna blow over,” I say. “I mean, they had some other lawyer there today, and they’re still asking me about everything. There’s a lot of . . . like, notes and stuff. Everyone was taking notes.”

  I don’t really feel like talking to her about this, but I figure she should know. About a month ago we sort of silently agreed she didn’t have to come with me to Natalie’s anymore. It’s not like there are set appointments, exactly, and when the office does call, Natalie always wants to see us during business hours. It was getting to be too much time away from my mom’s job, and all the questions were for me, anyway.

  But then we kind of stopped talking about it altogether, I guess. We were never one of those, like, crime-fighting mother-daughter teams on TV who tell each other everything about their days. And now we don’t see each other much at all. Even when we’re in the same room.

  “That’s just procedure,” my mom is saying now. “If they don’t write everything down, they can’t bill us.” She huffs a little, like she’s trying to laugh, but I can see she doesn’t really think it’s funny. Natalie isn’t the fanciest lawyer in town, but that doesn’t mean she’s working for free.

  I look down at the quilt on my bed, pulling at the frayed edge of one of the squares. It’s handmade, but not by anyone I know. My parents got it for me at an antiques fair a long time ago. I remember Mom was carrying Tommy in the baby pouch, which is what we always called the little carrier thing, and Dad got all excited about this guy selling old vinyl records. I think they wanted me to feel happy about having a baby brother, so they were redecorating my room. But we only got as far as buying this quilt, cornflower-blue and sunny-yellow squares stitched together to make a big star. On the way home we’d stopped for ice cream and Tommy started crying, so Mom had to sit in the car and nurse him while Dad and I kept eating at the little outdoor table next to the parking lot. Even then, Dad didn’t really know how to talk to me, or hadn’t wanted to. We’d just eaten in silence, then gotten back in the car to drive home.

  “I’m parked on the street,” Mom says, standing up again. “You just need to get out of the driveway for a second, it won’t kill you. Where are your shorts?” She’s shaking out my towel and hurrying out of my room.

  I guess we’re done talking too.

  The thing that sucks about summer school is everything. All the things about it suck. The school itself just feels totally sad—the parking lot is practically empty; the halls are only half lit; the

  grown-ups wear clothes so casual you realize they were actually trying to look professional during the regular year. And the air-conditioning isn’t turned on all the way, so the whole place is sort of sticky and smelly all the time.

  Brielle’s parents worked something out where she doesn’t have to be here, but when you can barely afford to pay your lawyer, much less make a donation to the school board or whatever they did, you don’t get special tutors. So it’s just me and the usual slackers, the kids you don’t see during the year because they’re skipping to smoke weed or drink or play video games all day at, like, their older brother’s apartment.

  Dylan and the other guys didn’t miss very much school this spring, and Dylan didn’t get kicked off the baseball team. The charges were filed in April but things didn’t really get going until almost the end of the year, so I guess no one saw the point of derailing the boys’ senior year. And anyway, people weren’t as mad at them, Dylan especially, as they were—are—at me and Brielle. I don’t know why. I’m mad at him. I think. My mom used to say he was just as responsible as anyone; that he and Jacob and Tyler should take more of the blame. But lately I think she blames me and Brielle the most too.

  Of course, Tyler is up on his own charges, since Emma was under eighteen and he wasn’t. So maybe the guys are getting their share of punishment, I don’t know. Natalie says we won’t see Tyler even if we go to court.

  No one seems to care anymore that Emma was messed up. I mean, who starts at a new school and within three months has had that many hookups? Obviously someone who came to that new school because she’d been messed up at her old one—someone who was already in therapy, already on antidepressants, already a head case.

  Seriously, if what happened to Emma at Elmwood pushed everyone to suicide, every high school in America would be empty.

  “Okay, people, follow the steps on the board. And write down your work. One of you does the work, one of you writes it down, got it?”

  I’m sitting in summer school Chem class and wishing Irish O’Irish was here. And I wish I was still good at this class—or that I still cared enough to try to be good again. Ms. Enman isn’t here; a guy from the university, Mr. Rodriguez, is our teacher for the summer version of almost all our classes. He’s really young, like just out of college, and always kind of sweaty, like this job is already wearing him out.

  Today we’re doing a titration experiment—basically just pouring stuff into beakers. Less boring than taking notes, but still pretty freaking boring. My lab partner isn’t here half the time—little-known fact: it’s just as easy to skip summer school as it is the fall-winter-spring kind—but today he shows up. Carmichael. That’s his last name, but no one calls him by his first name, ever. He’s like a character from a TV show or a book or something: tattoos even though he’s underage, crazy hair, the whole one-name thing. He’d be good-looking if he wasn’t trying so hard to look terrifying. He’s tall and under his black T-shirt you can see he has decent biceps and probably really flat abs. But the T-shirt itself is black and ripped and says DISCO KILLS ART, whatever that means, and the whole look just screams I’m too cool to talk to you.

  It’s not a look that goes well with safety goggles. But they probably look just as ridiculous on me, so I try to concentrate on the acid and base beakers on the table in front of us. I can see a blurry Carmichael out of the corner of my eye, silently staring at the instructions.

  Once I’ve got the burette set up, Carmichael wordlessly hands over the funnel and waits while I start pouring the acid. Then I turn the knob on the burette, letting the liquids mix, waiting for it to turn pink like it’s supposed to. I close the stopper and watch as the acid slows to a drip and the base goes clear again.

  “Lot of weird words in this thing,” Carmichael says, almost under his breath. I’m s
urprised by his voice but I keep my hand steady as I open the stopper again. The mixture turns pink and stays that way. I turn to make sure he’s writing down the volume on the assignment sheet.

  Then without thinking I say, “What words?”

  He puts his goggles up on his head, pushing his hair back, even though we’re not done with the experiment. Then he puts a finger on the instruction page. “Titration,” he says, like it’s obvious what he means. “And meniscus. And that thing”—he lightly taps the knob on the burette—“is called a stopcock.”

  His voice is totally matter-of-fact, but I feel my cheeks go red. I can’t tell if he’s trying to make me uncomfortable, but I am.

  During the school year I wouldn’t have talked to Carmichael under any circumstances. Back in junior high I actually had kind of a crush on him—I thought his wild hair was the sign of an artistic soul, and back then I wanted to be an artistic soul too. But Brielle saved me from all that. Turns out when you actually have fun things to do on the weekends, moping around reading poetry and listening to indie rock totally lose their appeal.

  I figure I should probably go back to ignoring Carmichael now. And then at the front of the room Mr. Rodriguez says, “Five minutes,” and there’s too much noise to say anything else anyway. Carmichael takes our whole beaker set to the sinks, leaving me at our table to put my book back in my bag.

  When he comes back he looks at me and says, “Good job.”

  His eyes are really green. I never notice that kind of thing, but they are, and they’re actually really pretty. And I’m so surprised by how serious he is that I say, “Thanks,” forgetting all about my decision to not talk to him. He shrugs and smiles. “I like that shirt,” I add. I’m completely lying to him, and I don’t even know why. Two seconds ago I thought he was a freak. Maybe I still do. But it feels good to talk to someone. If this counts as talking.

  We switch rooms for our next class, but we still have Mr. Rodriguez. We just don’t need to be in the lab for English. Some of the courses, like Chem, just cover the same stuff from the school year, or mostly the same. And others, like this one, do different stuff, I guess so we can’t cheat. So instead of reading Macbeth we’re doing Hamlet. I can barely follow it—I didn’t understand a word of Macbeth, either, and Mrs. Thale was a way better teacher. Mr. Rodriguez says we’ll watch the movie when we’re done, but I have a hard enough time with Shakespeare when I have the book and a dictionary and SparkNotes in front of me. Watching the movie will be either torture or a good chance to nap.

  Carmichael sits next to me again, and for a second I wonder if I’ve made a mistake talking to him. I know what Brielle would say—he’s a loser, a slacker. She wouldn’t be impressed with the tattoos or almost-bad-boy vibe. She’d call him a Carless, her term for guys who don’t have cars and thus are not worth a second look. Or a first one.

  Mr. Rodriguez starts talking about how Hamlet is too introspective to get revenge right away, how he has to think about everything before he takes action. I sneak a glance at Carmichael, at the infinity symbol inked on the inside of his right wrist. There’s another tattoo just visible under the left sleeve of his T-shirt; looks like a curled snake or something. He’s nodding a little, his book open, like he’s good at Shakespeare. And he’s not actually that bad at Chem. I wonder why he’s here—I mean, I know he skips class a lot, even now, but he seems kind of smart.

  Suddenly he looks over and I jerk my eyes back to the book in front of me, my cheeks burning again. God, am I really so desperate to hang out with anyone my own age that I’m drooling over Carless Carmichael now?

  When we’re finally done for the day, I practically sprint to the parking lot. There are two other girls ahead of me already: Beth, who got mono last year (but in one of those sad, non-hookup-related ways), and Cherrie, who’s just a slacker. “Cherrie” is short for something Latina, but we all pronounce it like the fruit. She used to correct everybody, I guess because we were saying it wrong, but the name just stuck. I suddenly wonder if maybe she skips school all the time because it’s hard to get picked on every day, or called the wrong name or whatever, like you don’t belong. Like I’ve been feeling. But then she turns to Beth and they start laughing about something. They get into Beth’s car together and I remember: even among the outcasts, I’m the biggest loser.

  I’m pulling my Honda around the side of the building when I spot Carmichael on his bike. He’s standing up on the pedals, jumping the front tire up and off the curb. He actually looks like he knows what he’s doing. I’m already braked at the stop sign, and I pause there for a minute, watching his crazy black hair and the muscles flexing under his T-shirt. He jumps again, turning the front wheel, but he comes down awkwardly and has to jump off the bike and sort of dance away while it crashes to the ground. It’s surprisingly goofy and sudden, and I don’t realize I’m laughing until he turns—my window is rolled down, trying to cool off the car, so I guess he heard me—and scowls. Like I was laughing at him, even though I totally wasn’t.

  “Sorry, I just—” I start to call out, but he already has the bike back in his hands and he’s jumping on and pedaling out of the other end of the lot.

  Fine. Who needs these delinquents anyway.

  “We haven’t really talked about Dylan. Would you like to tell me about that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say with a shrug. Then I add, cattily, “Do you want to talk about Dylan?”

  It seems funny right before it comes out of my mouth, but once it’s said I have to look away. I look down at my nails and say, “I wish I could get a manicure.”

  “Why can’t you?” Teresa asks.

  I pick at a flake of the glittery gold color I have on now. It’s all coming off, like I’ve been out partying nonstop, instead of the exact opposite.

  “It’s expensive. And people look at me funny.”

  Brielle used to drag me to the salon at the nice strip mall, the one with the Anthropologie and Williams-Sonoma. But I can’t really afford that one on my own. After we had to stop hanging out, I tried the cheaper place in the crappy strip mall, next to Taco Bell. That’s when I started noticing that going out in public was going to be impossible. Actually, anyplace where you sit down for more than five minutes is a pretty bad idea—and way worse if they have a bunch of local newspapers.

  I can see Teresa nodding out of the corner of my eye. “It can feel like a pretty small town sometimes,” she says.

  “Try all the time,” I say. It’s psychotic how many pictures of Emma have been plastered everywhere. My mom says the media loves when bad things happen to pretty girls. You’d really think there weren’t any, like, wars or elections or random shootings to talk about, given how much ink has been devoted to printing and reprinting Emma’s last school picture.

  “And you don’t see Dylan anymore?” Teresa asks, trying to bring it back to her original question, I guess.

  I look up. “I’m not supposed to, remember?” I say bitterly. “But whatever. It’s really complicated. I mean, it got really complicated. I don’t think it was Dylan’s fault, I just . . . I mean, you had to know Emma. She was such a . . .”

  “She was such a . . . what was she, Sara?”

  I puff out my cheeks, pushing out a whoosh of air. “She was one of those girls, you know, who are always hanging out with guys, who don’t have any friends who aren’t guys. Because all the other girls at school knew she’d steal their boyfriends.”

  “She stole boyfriends?”

  “God, yes. Like, daily.”

  “Including Dylan?”

  I scrunch my shoulders up to my ears, curling my arms around my chest. I push my breath out in another big sigh and let everything drop and finally say it. “Yeah. Including Dylan.”

  “That must have been hard for you,” Teresa says.

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, but then I have to bite my lip. “I don’t really want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Okay. Why don’t we wrap up for the day?” Teresa sets down her note
book.

  “Great.” I stand up and take off the cardigan I finally remembered to bring, since it’s about fifty degrees warmer outside than it is in here.

  I’m stuffing the sweater into my bag when Teresa adds, “Love is a really complicated thing. I know it must still hurt.”

  I look down at her and pause. “Okay,” I say. I can’t think of anything else, so we just stare at each other for another second. And then I leave.

  When I pull up to school on Wednesday, Carmichael is riding his bike through the parking lot, his dark hair flying out behind him. He hasn’t been to classes in a few days and my stomach knots, remembering how I accidentally laughed at him last week. I pull into an empty space as slowly as possible. I don’t know if I’m trying to go slow so I’ll bump into him, or so I can avoid him. But then I remember: either way, I’m going to see him in class.

  Or right now. I’m walking toward the doors just as he’s locking his bike, and he looks up.

  “Hey,” I say, for lack of anything better.

  “’Sup,” he says easily, but he goes back to fiddling with the bike. I’m frozen there, pinned to the sidewalk like a weed growing out of it. The clouds overhead are heavy and dark—it’s another hot, sticky day, the kind that makes you wish it would just rain already—and I feel weighted down by the humidity, by the fact that any movement will make me even sweatier than I already feel.

  “So . . . ,” I say, staring at his back. There’s an old black JanSport at his feet and his copy of Hamlet is falling out of it. “You like the book?”

  He turns back around, kind of squinting at me, confused.

  I point awkwardly to his feet, the backpack. “Or, I mean, the play?”

  “Oh, right,” he says. He grabs his bag and pulls the zipper closed, hiding the thing I was just pointing at. “Yeah, it’s okay, I guess.”

  I nod. God, I haven’t talked to anyone in a really long time. Not anyone my own age, anyway. And now I keep talking to Carmichael, of all people, like I can’t help myself. He’s so weird. And he really does scare me a little bit.