Do-Overs (22 page)

-55-

Undoing Do-Over Damage

“She’ll come around,” Al had advised.

“She’ll get over it,” Butch added.

“She’ll just have to get her happy panties back on sooner or later, cause this being mad and sulking just ain’t a working for any of you,” La—ah said, putting it all in perspective.

It had been a week since Olivia had moved to a new room on the third floor. I guessed she was trying to get as far away from us as possible while still living in the same building. It was a Wednesday lunch and we were eating in the cafeteria. It was so sad. All of us together: Al, Stina, Rachel, Trevor, Butch, La—ah, Kasha, Kaylee, Kyra, and me. All at one table. Olivia was as far away as possible, sitting with none other than the jerk soccer player. Had she totally deserted us, even Keesha? Or was she working on revenge, cutting us out of the equation? Because, Lord please, oh please, don’t let her have been so depressed and insecure that she was really considering him as a friend or even possibly a date.

The K’s had noticed Olivia’s new dining partner also. I tuned in to their conversation.

“She had better be working on a plan and not a date, or she’s going down with him,” said Kyra. It was at that moment I realized two things. One that they were thinking the same thing about Olivia as I was and two, I could finally tell the K’s apart.

I just played with my food. Ever since Olivia’s departure I had felt like Benedict Arnold. I had caused two bosom friends to be enemies and couldn’t find a way to correct the situation.

“Lottie, it’s not your fault,” Al consoled yet again. “You have to quit blaming yourself for Olivia’s overactive imagination. If Rachel didn’t tell you anything,”

Rachel interrupted, “Which I didn’t!”

Al continued, “You can’t fix something you never did.”

Little did he know how insightful his words were. How could I fix something that I never really had done? It was my mess and my responsibility to find a solution. I had thought that time would settle the storm, but instead the battle lines between Rachel and Olivia were being dug even deeper. Not only had I ruined their friendship, but also others who had confided in Rachel, our amateur psychologist, were beginning to give her suspicious looks and avoid any confidences with her. I had to do something. The only problem with that brilliant conclusion was I had no idea what. I had already told Olivia that Rachel was telling the truth and that hadn’t worked. I couldn’t tell her the real truth. Come on, would anybody really believe that load of hooey?

“Darling,” He said ‘Darling.’ Some parts of my life might have been filled with remorse and guilt, but when Al Dansby said
Darling
, it was like a ray of glorious sunshine bursting through the clouds. “You really need to eat.” Then sometimes he sounded just like my mother.

-56-

Didn’t See That One Coming

I was in her room. That was a step in the right direction. When I had set out to find a solution to reconcile my suitemates, I had doubted that Olivia would even let me through the door into her new room. But there I was, standing like a kid in the principal’s office trying to think of a credible excuse to get me set free.

Olivia sat on her bed fiddling with her iPhone. I couldn’t get her to make eye contact with me. “Lottie, it’s nice of you to keep trying to patch things up with my lying ex-best friend, but be honest, it’s not gonna work. Somehow you know about my horrible past and there is only one person other than my family who could have told you. So either tell me the truth or leave.”

The truth. What a novel idea. Maybe it was time to tell the truth. My time-altering eraser, which I had thought was the best invention since tampons, had turned out to be the cause of unintended deception. The truth. Right then and there I had a plan. I’d tell Olivia the truth. If nothing else she’d think I was mental, and it was my entire fault and maybe in some twisted way forgive Rachel. And if it didn’t work I’d just do it over.

“Here it is Olivia. You are the person who actually told me about your stepfather and his molesting you and his sudden, accidental death.”

Olivia was furious. Up until that point she had only been guessing that I knew her past. With my revelation she knew that the pitying looks had been for real. Unfortunately, my honesty sounded like another lie.

“I never told you anything like that,” she said in a low, whispered hiss.

How was I ever going to explain? “It’s like this, I have this magic eraser.” I held it up to show her. Obviously the believing me part wasn’t working, but the insanity defense was beginning to build. “My aunt gave it to me last summer. I thought she was crazy, but one day I accidentally used and it worked. When I want to change time, I just give it a wave and I go back in time. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes up to an hour. Anyway, one night you were a little tipsy. Well, if it’s time to be honest, you were totally wasted. And you told me about your stepfather. Then right afterwards I could tell that you wished you hadn’t. So, I thought I’d make things better for you by redoing it. That way you would never have told me. The only flaw is that when I redo things, I still remember them. You were so sad. I can’t forget it. And it shows on my face no matter how hard I try for it not to.”

Olivia sat there in a stunned silence. It had worked. I should have just told the truth from the very beginning.

Finally she spoke. “I expected better from you, Lottie. I might have been able to someday forgive Rachel for spilling my secrets. But for this ludicrous lie, trying to make me believe something so asinine just so you two don’t have to confess that you’re not trustworthy. That’s just absurd.”

Olivia walked to the door and pushed it open. “Please leave. And please, don’t try to talk to me ever again.”

The truth was supposed to have been the answer. But it didn’t work. At least I could do that scene over and know not to try telling Olivia the real story, but work on some better explanation. I looked at the eraser in my hand and went to wave it through the air.

“How dare you have the gall to keep playing this stupid game,” Olivia shouted and grabbed my hand as I started the do-over.

Something happened that had never happened before. It was as if my life was passing before my eyes. Except it wasn’t my whole life, just the parts that had been done over. There was me spilling my spaghetti, and changing seats in O.T. and oversleeping and on and on and on and there was Olivia telling me her horrible childhood and Al kissing me and me falling down seventeen times on the mountain. In an instant I had seen every single do-over I had done the past seven months.

Then I was back standing in Olivia’s room. Olivia was sitting on her bed. But that time change was different than all the others. Olivia was looking at me with pure terror on her face. “What—the hell—was that?” she finally said.

“Did you see it too?”

She only nodded.

“You see. I was telling the truth. I’ve been doing this all year. At first it seemed like an answered prayer. Any mistake I made I could just flip out my trusty eraser and do it again. But, sometimes it didn’t make things better. The hardest thing was that I still remembered the first reality. So I’d refer to things that others never thought had happened. I saw it in y’all’s eyes a lot, when I talked about things then realize I hadn’t kept my stories straight. No wonder it was so easy for you to think I was lying about Rachel. It seemed you had caught me in lies and half truths all year.”

Then we sat there. Time passed. Olivia kept looking at me, starting to say something, stopping, shaking her head and then looking at me again.

Finally she spoke. “Seventeen times. You fell down seventeen times on that stupid mountain, just to impress a guy.” Then she started to laugh. I though at first she was going to become hysterical, but no, it was just a belly busting laugh of pure relief. I joined in. Every time we would almost stop, Olivia would say, “Seventeen,” and we’d start again. It felt so good to laugh. It felt better to finally have someone to share my crazy secret with. By the time we were able to regain our composure we both had mascara smeared down our faces from the tears and our sides hurt from laughing.

Olivia got up, went to her closet and started pulling out clothes throwing them on her bed. I was afraid she was cracking up from my revelation after all. “Let’s get this place packed up. I’m ready to move back ‘home.’”

-57-

Mission Un-Possible

When Al told me he had to be out of town the next weekend on a recruiting trip with various campus bigwigs, I should have looked more distraught. But the truth be known, the ninja force was almost ready to put the plan into action—and the less he knew, the better. It wasn’t that I wanted a relationship filled with deception, it was simply that there will always be things that are only shared with the sisterhood.

Right after we moved Olivia back into Rachel’s room, we started to finalize the plan. Mr. Soccer Player or LSPS as he was affectionately known on our wing of the dorm, was going down. After sharing my secret about the eraser with Olivia, she had confessed that she had had a niggling sort of half dream thought of remembering our conversation about her stepdad. Not quite an all there memory, more like seeing something out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned to look it wasn’t there. Her revelation along with Al’s once mentioning a half dream of having spaghetti thrown on him had helped to solidify the plan. Once we had ascertained that subliminal thought residue remained after a do-over we decided to make that work to our advantage.

Our background checks and surveillance of LSPS had shown that his Achilles heel was his place on the soccer team and his soccer scholarship. Not only was it his biggest ego boost, but without it he wouldn’t be able to remain at OkMU. So ruining that for him, seemed the best retribution of all.

We had tried out many scenarios, but all either seemed too dangerous or illegal. No, it had to be something that with minor manipulations from us was truly his own fault.

“No, the Craigslist thing is too overdone,” said Olivia at our council of war meeting one evening. Our room was filled with the remaining three K’s, La—ah, Stina, Rachel, General Corazon, and me. The door was closed and the curtains drawn. This was to be a top-secret undertaking. In no way could the LSPS or anyone else know our plan.

“Olivia’s right. Half the listings nowadays are pranks being played on others,” Rachel agreed. “I thought a big scarlet
A
tattooed on his chest would be good. Kind of poetic justice.”

La—ah shook her head no. “He’d just think that was cool. We have to find something that will hurt him like he did Keesha.”

“But legal,” I reminded them.

“But legal,” they all repeated in a monotone. I guess I had stressed that a few too many times.

“So what is his major weakness?” Rachel asked for the hundredth time. “We know he thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

“Right,” we chanted.

“But we can’t set him up with someone. That could be damaging to her. And he’d just be proud if there were compromising photos of him on the web,” Olivia said. We had been over and over this territory. How to do a sting operation that only hurt him and no one else?

“Maybe if we could convince him that there is someone after his body, when really she isn’t,” suggested Stina.

“But who? We already have enough people involved,” said Kasha.

“She doesn’t have to be involved. In fact the less the better. He only has to think she likes him.” I was seeing a devious side of our sweet, lovable Stina I had never seen before. “Who on campus would it be the absolute worst for him to be caught in bed with?”

“Me,” laughed La—ah. “Cause I’d kill him.”

“The president’s wife,” laughed Kyra.

“Almost,” said Stina like their answers had been at all credible. “Who is the one person who could make or break LSPS’s career?”

“Coach Biggs!” we said in unison.

“But he’s straight,” I blurted out.

“Not him, his wife,” Stina laughed.

“But he and his wife have a great marriage. She’s not gonna be sleeping with some stupid college boy,” argued Kasha.

“No, but LSPS has such a big head, we could easily convince him that she wants to. And admit it, of all the faculty wives around she is the hottest,” Stina countered.

I had to speak up on this one. This couldn’t happen. We couldn’t ruin someone’s marriage just to get revenge for Keesha. And I said as much.

“No, Lynette Biggs will have nothing to do with it. It will all be in LSPS’s mind,” Stina explained. “Here’s my plan.”

We spent the rest of the evening devising a plan of counter-espionage that would have made the CIA proud. Olivia and I gave each other some knowing looks. We could find a way to use the magic eraser for good.