Going Vintage (16 page)

What we decide at our first official pep club meeting:

1. We don’t want to have too many meetings
.

2. We need more members. We force Vance to join
.

3. Oliver needs to chill (Ginnie’s contribution)
.

4. We are going to do a float, or a trailer. We’ll work at Oliver’s house, since he lives near the Circle and has a detached garage in the back. We still need a theme. Decorations start early next
week. We’ll have five days to finish before the parade
.

Pep club is wrapping up and I’m feeling good. Like maybe I actually would want to do an extracurricular activity, even if my boyfriend hadn’t cheated on me, even if my grandma hadn’t had the perfect adolescence, even if I could pull out my phone right now and pretend to be looking up something really important because … crap. I see Jeremy across the quad and he is COMING. OVER. HERE. NOW.

He looks marginally tortured. Before I can let pity creep in, I have to remind myself that his torture is self-inflicted and only 0.083 percent of what I feel.

“All righty, then. I think we’re good until next week.” Oliver glances up and sees Jeremy approaching. He shoots me a quick look before jumping up and giving Jeremy a fist bump.

“What up, cuz,” Jeremy says. “What’d I miss?”

“The meeting,” Ginnie says. “Good thing.”

Cardin slides her hand over mine and squeezes. “You okay?” she whispers.

Jeremy gives me a nod. “Hey, Mallory.”

“Hello.”

I used to not mind the fact that Jeremy always nods in greeting, but when it’s directed at me, the gesture feels forced. Also, what is he doing here? We broke up, he sent flowers, I ignored them. This is very cut-and-dry stuff, right?

Oliver doesn’t look at me when he says to Jeremy, “I’ll fill you in on the meeting later.”

“Fill him in on what?” Ginnie stands up and brushes her jeans. “As VP, I say he can’t join the club.”

“I second that motion,” Cardin says.

“I thought you needed more people?” Vance says.

“People. Not tools.” Ginnie tries to yank me up. I’ve gone statue. “Come on, Mallory. I’ll call Mom to pick us up.”

“I can give you a ride,” Jeremy says.

“So can I.” Cardin pops up to my right, my sister and my friend a barrier on either side. “We’re not going to leave you with him.”

“
I
still need a ride,” Vance whines.

“Vance, shut up. I told you that I’ll take you.” Oliver seems to be holding his breath too.

I wish I wasn’t in this tight dress, regardless of how nice my legs look. I wish I was back in my sweatshirt phase so I could pull a hoodie over my head and hide. I squint up at Jeremy, who’s standing right in front of the sun. “I don’t need a ride.”

“Can we talk for a second?” he asks.

“No, Toolerina.” Ginnie sticks her hand on Jeremy’s chest and pushes him away. “We don’t have a second. I need to get home for soccer practice.”

“I’ll give Mallory a ride,” Oliver offers. We all turn and stare at Oliver, curious why he’s stepping into the Mallory tug-of-war. He holds his hands out in front of him, like he’s blocking off a possible attack. “I mean, if you need to go, Ginnie. Then Mallory can talk to Jeremy but doesn’t need to ride with him. We have a few more club things to talk about anyway.”

“What about me?” Vance hops from one leg to the other.
Ginnie’s so mature, sometimes I forget how clueless freshmen can be.

Cardin jingles her keys. “Okay, I’ll give both of the freshmen a ride.” She points at me. “I’ll text you later.”

“No texting. You’ll
call
me later,” I say. “At home.”

“I hid the cordless phone,” Ginnie reminds me.

“We’ll figure it out.” I exhale, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. A phone, at this moment, is not my biggest problem. “Go. You’ll be late for practice.”

Ginnie gives me a skeptical look and follows Vance and Cardin out of the quad, leaving me alone with my ex-boyfriend and the boy I’m pretty sure just ambushed me. Jeremy nods at Oliver. “Thanks, cuz. Can you give us a second alone?”

The
cuz
? Annoying. Did Jeremy use that before when he talked to Oliver? Wouldn’t I remember if he did, or was I just blinded by love?

Oliver glances at me, checking that I’m okay, which is pretty chivalrous considering that he’s the one who invited Jeremy here in the first place. “I’ll get something from Blake’s fancy vending machine.”

Jeremy sticks an arm on each side of me, pinning me against The Tree of Life. “You look adorable in that dress.”

I cover my face with my hands. “You don’t get to say that.”

“Mallory, I know you’re upset, but it’s nothing we can’t work—”

“Don’t.”

Jeremy actually kneels down in front of me and grabs my hand. It’s the kind of thing he would do in public, when
everyone is around, to show how in love we are, how romantic and sweet he is. It’s the kind of thing I used to crave, but now it’s too much. Like he has to be all touchy-feely to prove that we’re together, when really, we shouldn’t be worried how other people look at our relationship, just how we both feel.

No one is watching now, except maybe Oliver, but I don’t look over to check. I pull my hand away. “You don’t go stick OVER IT on Friendspace and then try to hold my hand. And, by the way, OVER IT? Was that the best you could come up with?”

“I wasn’t trying to be a douche; I just reacted to what you did to me,” Jeremy says reasonably, or what he thinks is reasonably. “It’s not cool to have your girlfriend hack into your account.”

“‘Hack’?” My voice echoes across the quad. “I did not hack. I clicked online to write your paper—on
moral
philosophy, by the way—and saw the Authentic Life page that you left up.”

“I don’t know what you saw, or thought you saw. But this is the truth.” Jeremy is still kneeling, looking up at me. I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, which makes this a little easier. He’s always had really earnest eyes, brown and soft. I wonder if they’re as fake as the rest of him. Can you fake eyes? “I met Jenny online.”

“Who is Jenny?”

“Oh, er, BubbleYum.”

She has a name. He used her name. I hate that name. “Okay.”

“And she’s really advanced at Authentic Life, knew all these levels and stuff I didn’t, so she offered to help me out. We
started e-mailing as our different, you know, characters. You always talk like you’re living in the Authentic Life world. That’s part of the game.”

“But you just called her …” I can’t even say it. Jenny and Jeremy, it’s practically the same name. They can paint it on their mailbox, all alliterate and cute. “You just said her name.”

“Right.” Jeremy stands, his knees creaking, and starts pacing instead. He’s not facing me anymore. How can I know if someone who has lied to me is telling the truth now? “Well, obviously we, uh, blurred the boundaries a bit. But it was still just this fantasy, this alternate reality. She lives in Illinois, she’s eighteen, and she’s—”

“Not me.”

“This had nothing to do with you. It’s not like I talked to her because of anything you did or didn’t do.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because she wasn’t, like, real. So it was easy.”

“I’m easy!” I roll my eyes. “I mean, easy to talk to.”

Jeremy rubs his neck. “Yeah? What if I told you I had a bad day or I was depressed or my parents are fighting again?”

“That’s the reason you have a girlfriend, so you can share that kind of stuff!”

“But you’re different. You’re always happy, you don’t get mad at people …”

“Ha, yeah.
You want to see mad
?” I am about to walk away because I am shaking again, physically shaking, and I can’t keep that quiver out of my voice, can’t stand how weak I feel in this moment, don’t know why I can’t just turn off my emotions and
get out. It’s almost like I
want
to hurt. Asking Jeremy these questions that I don’t want answers to changes that vague, haunting ache into a piercing jab of truth.

The way he describes me, like I’m this vapid girl who doesn’t care about deeper things … that’s so off. I listened to all his problems when he shared, and he never even asked about my issues, because he never thought I had issues.
Everyone
has issues.

“Did you ever meet her?”

“No.”

Relief. My next question is answered—nothing physical happened. But that’s not what matters here. Jeremy got plenty of physical from me. BubbleYum was his emotional connection, the girl who knew his truths. In some ways, she was more real than me.

“How long have you been married to this girl?”

“Dude, we aren’t married!”

“That’s not what your profile said.”

“I don’t know why you’re getting so mad about this. It’s a stupid game!”

I look over at Oliver, who’s leaning against the vending machine, his phone in one hand and a bag of popcorn in the other. He glances up, catches me staring, and looks down at his phone. I wonder how involved he was in orchestrating this little conversation, if he has any idea what Jeremy and I are even talking about.

“Okay, how long have you been in contact with her?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Last spring. Maybe April.”

Five months, give or take. Jeremy and I had been together for almost a whole school year by then. He’d already been to one of our family reunions. We’d already started talking in sentences like “Let’s go snowboarding at Big Bear next winter,” which shows that we were planning for a future together, maybe not forever, but at least for the immediate soon. “When did you start saying
I love you
?”

Jeremy freezes, which is my breaking point. I never actually read
I love you
in an e-mail, but his reaction tells me it’s happened. How can someone say something like that to two different people at the same time? Not only did he
write
that to his cyberlove, but I believe he
felt
it. For her. And they weren’t just words he said to get the girl to blur her physical boundaries. He said it because Jenny knew him—all of him.

And all I got was a piece.

“Mallory, look, I shouldn’t have gotten pissed online, and in class I should have acted different. But what’s past is past and—”

“No. The past isn’t just the past. You don’t get to use that as a cop-out. You have to learn from the past, or else it repeats.” I turn away from him. I will not let him see me cry. I will not. I am just like my grandma—strong and independent and … peppy. Think pep. I march over to Oliver. “I need you to take me home now.”

Oliver looks at his cousin. I don’t know what expression or gesture Jeremy makes in response. “Are you two good?”

“Oliver, do I look good? Can you please take me home before I break down in front of him?”

“Mallory!” Jeremy calls. “Don’t be dumb. Come back!”

“I’m parked in the senior parking lot. Let’s go.” Oliver doesn’t say anything else as he hurries out to his battered maroon Nissan and opens my door for me. I slump into the passenger seat. He has three hula girls on the dash, three more in the back. I wonder what they think behind those vacant smiles, their plastic shells. These are women who will never wear a shirt, who must spend their existence dancing on demand. There’s something so sad about that, about me, about this situation, that the tears come hot and fast.

Oliver gets into the car, glances over at me, and sticks the key into the ignition.

“What’s with the hula girls?” I have to pause between words, I’m crying so hard. “Do you hate women … or something?”

“You know, I got one, and then everyone thought I had a collection and I started getting them as gifts. But it’s pretty rock-and-roll, how they stay stationary and move at the same time. Like a bobblehead.”

“I collect bobbleheads. Baseball players.”

“Do you hate baseball players?”

“I don’t care about baseball. I just like the bobbleheads.”

“Then do you hate men?”

“That’s not a good question … to ask me right now.” I snort, and with it comes snot that I hide with my hand.

Oliver leans across me and opens his glove box. He smells like oranges. I mean, we do live in the city of Orange; citrus is not a rare scent, but they are my favorite fruit, and the smell is so strong, the kid must have showered in orange juice. He
grabs a few wadded napkins and hands them to me. I wipe, trying to be discreet but not caring much.

“Um, where do you live?” he asks.

“I need … a few minutes … I don’t want my family … to see this.”

“Too close to rush hour to go to the beach. You want to go to El Modena for a few minutes so you can cool off?”