All the Way (22 page)
Authors: Megan Stine
“I'll stop and buy the beer,” Adam said. “I've got creds.”
“Cool.”
When we got to David's house, the porch light was on, and so was one light in the family room in back. But as advertised, the rest of the house was dark, and his parents were already snoring away. (For real. I know, because when I went to the powder room in the hall, I heard them.)
“There's a ton of stuff in the fridge,” David said, flipping on lights. “Help yourselfâI think my mom made some spinach dip last night, and there's chicken wings, and a bunch of leftover quesadillas. And I could order pizza. Anyone want anything other than pepperoni?”
“Veggies,” Emily and I both requested.
“Sausage,” Adam ordered. “Tell 'em I'll pick it up on my way to get the beer.”
David called Alforno's and ordered the pizza while Emily and I looked through his parents' DVD collection to see if there was anything good.
Nope. Not unless you call sixteen hours of documentaries about bears and the Alaskan pipeline good.
Not on prom night, thank you very much.
Oh, well. Who cared? We kicked off our shoes, put on some music, and danced on the heavy wooden coffee table in our stocking feet until Adam came back. David pulled out a camcorder and shot a few minutes of us rocking out, which was awesome. I mean, this had been the best night of my life. I definitely wanted some video to remember it by.
After we pigged out on pizza, David disappeared and came back carrying his laptop computer.
“Oh, man, it's prom night,” Adam said. “Don't tell me you're whipping up one of those PowerPoint shows now.”
David didn't flinch or blink; he just opened his computer and started typing.
“What are you doing?” Emily asked him point-blank.
“You'll see,” he said.
“Maybe he's buying graphing calculators on eBay,” Adam joked, making fun of David's geeky image.
“No, they're having a sale on hair gel. I'm ordering you a case,” David shot back.
Adam laughed.
Way to hold your own,
I thought, proud of him for tapping into his real, inner personalityâthe guy who had things to say about something other than probabilities and parametric curves. It was cool to see David being himself around someone like Adam, who was way cooler.
I thought, proud of him for tapping into his real, inner personalityâthe guy who had things to say about something other than probabilities and parametric curves. It was cool to see David being himself around someone like Adam, who was way cooler.
Emily leaned over David's shoulder and peeked at the computer screen to see what he was doing.
Adam and I just sat staring at each other, clueless and curious.
“I don't believe it! How did you do that?” she screamed.
“Ta-da.” David turned his computer to face us, and I saw that he was on the opening page of Joey's Joint. “Now I have control. I'm logged on as him. I told you I could hack into it easily.”
“Are you kidding?” I sat bolt upright.
“Not kidding,” he said. “We can write whatever we want, or load picturesâwhatever. And it'll look like it came from him. I can even lock him out of the site now, so he can't delete anything we put up. All I have to do is change his password.”
“Oh, do that!” I screamed.
David typed a few words and then looked up at us with a smile. “In case you ever need it, his new password is
prick
. And it's case-sensitive.”
prick
. And it's case-sensitive.”
“Perfect!” Emily cheered.
“So what do you want to post on his site?” David asked, waiting for me to answer.
“Too bad you don't have a picture of him walking down that dirt road,” Adam said.
I thought for a minute about all the things Joey had posted on his blog over the past few monthsâall the ways he'd bragged about himself, all the great exploits he'd described, even the story about his butt sticking to the saucer sled.
Had any of it been true?
After the lies he'd made up about me, I wondered.
“We should just write another entry, like it's from Joey, about what happened tonight,” I said. “Only this time, we'll tell the truth. The flat-out truth.”
“But make it sound like him.” Adam was liking this idea. “Do a total parody of him, only tell the truth.”
“Exactly!” I said.
Emily's eyes lit up, and David got an approving but sneaky little grin on his face, so I knew this was a great plan.
For the next hour, we worked on it together, writing it until it sounded as arrogant and self-important as everything else on Joey's Joint. We were tossing back some brews at the same time, so it might not have come out as brilliantly as we thought. But it felt pretty damn good at the time.
When we were done, David posted the new journal entry to Joey's blog. It read:
Subject: An Asshole-Kicking Night
Yo! Don't look now, but I got my tail whupped tonight by the hottest chick at Nortonâthe only one who wouldn't put out for me even when I begged for it.
Yeah, can I help it if Carmen was so pissed at all the bullshit I wrote about her, she wrote her own ending to my pathetic story?
Don't blame me for falling for her bait, either. Just because I've got such a big head, doesn't mean there's anything in it. But if anyone says I was too embarrassed to come back to the prom, tell them to shut their traps. That's total bullshit. Everyone knows I'm too stupid to be embarrassed. More like I got lost walking all the way home from some frigging farm road.
But who the hell cares? When you're as big a stud as I am, with a girlfriend as stupid as Molly, you can stand her up on prom night and still get plenty of nooky the next day . . . okay, week. Month. Whatever.
“Yes!” Adam cheered when we saw the new entry on Joey's Joint.
“Do you think he'll see it tonight?” Emily asked.
“Who knows,” I said. “But just the thought of Joey sitting home on prom night diddling with the Internet is enough to make my whole sucky senior year worth it.”
Adam opened another beer and raised it in a toast to David. “To the right guy for the job,” he said, slightly drunk but totally sincere.
“To mad geek skills,” I agreed, toasting David and meaning it in the nicest possible way.
“To getting the hell out of high school,” Emily said, tossing back a big swig of Rolling Rock.
David raised his bottle of beer and stood up on the coffee table. I think he was a little trashed by then, but who knows. Maybe not.
“To Carmen,” he said, “the most original person I've ever known, who did a complete makeover on Norton High School, and showed us all how to be our best possible selves.”
Even slightly drunk, everyone knew that was a seriously corny line.
“Are you kidding?” Emily blurted out, staring at him like he had lost it.
“I've been planning to write that in your yearbook,” David said. He turned to me, as if we were the only two people in the room. “But I thought, why wait? I'd rather tell you tonight.”
“Cute.” Emily nodded her approval.
“Whatever,” Adam mumbled skeptically.
I had to smile. Was this a spectacular prom night or what? I mean, here I was with David Ulster, the last person on earth I thought I wanted to spend prom night with, and yet here he was making me feel like the most special, most valued person in the world.
And suddenly I flashed back on what I'd told Ariel and Emily a week ago.
Yeah, I thought. I'd gotten what I wanted, and turned my life around, and it had worked for one reason only: because sometimes, when your life sucks, the only way to make things right is to take the big risk . . . really go for it . . . stand up for yourself and do something you'd never had the nerve to do before. Go all the way.
Because why not?
You have nothing else to lose.
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