Life by Committee (22 page)

The conversation ends abruptly, after that comment. I stare at it for a while, wondering if I should participate. Wondering if Star is getting into trouble. Wondering what happens next. I consider asking Star what I should be careful about, asking Zed if we are ever allowed to stop, if we ever graduate, proclaiming my devotion to the site, to This Way of doing things. Telling Star to push through and propose already.

I say nothing, though. I listen to my semidistorted
audio file again and picture people all over the country doing the same. Only a few people, of course. Only my people.

I start a new post. Because it's time. I have more work to do.

I have a different kind of sick feeling, reading the comment. Not the adrenaline, not the heart-leaping courage. Not even the nauseous fear. I don't know if it was Star's strange almost-warning, or the idea of letting go of Jemma for real, or having to do something large and aggressive and destructive, but I feel tired and ill, not inspired.

I don't reply. I don't even know what I'd do. I'm sure Zed would have ideas. I'm sure they all would.

“There she is,” someone says to my back when I'm heading into assembly the next morning. I turn around, hoping it isn't actually being said to me, but there's Luke, grinning, glowing practically. He raises his eyebrows. Wiggles them. Apparently that's his signature move. Even more depressing is the knowledge that it is currently working on a good half of the Circle Community population.

“Who's your next target?” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“You don't think he'll keep hooking up with you now, do you? Cover blown. No way. He's gotta cut his losses to keep his girl.”

I hate the way Luke talks. I'd have to actually get stupider to understand it. I give him a look that hopefully verifies how completely idiotic I find him to be. It doesn't seem to register, though, because he puts a sweaty
hand on the back of my neck, underneath my ponytail. It's a place Joe has touched with his fingertips and his lips and even the crook of his arm, and I hate it being touched by Luke.

“You know what I'm saying,” he says into my ear. I jump away from him. Elise is walking by at the same moment, and I try to give her a
help me out of this
look, but she gives me a
you like the attention, don't you
look instead, and I'm so shocked by it, I can't even squeak at her.

“Get off me,” I finally manage, when Elise is in her seat and I remember I have no one but myself to protect me against things like King of Hockey and Tool-ness, Luke.

“Don't kid yourself,” he says, but he does get off me and head toward his own seat. I wipe the back of my neck, like somehow I can wipe away the memory of him or at least the physical sensation of his hand on my skin, a feeling that lingers too long and makes me queasy.

It's already basically the worst morning ever, but Jemma's been watching the whole thing with a pinched, horrified, just-tasted-sour-lemon face. And I am that sour lemon.

“No one told Sasha,” she says. It's a whisper, and judging by the way she flips her hair with the words, a massive favor she thinks she's paying me. And maybe
she's right, but I hate that she wants me to owe her, after everything.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” We both know it's crap, but it's, like, the only thing I can possibly say at this point.

“I used to be jealous of you, you know,” Jemma says. The lights are dimming in the auditorium, and in a minute the teachers will instruct us to find our seats, but for a moment it's me and Jemma and a decade of feelings between us. “Seems like a long time ago now. Nothing to really be jealous of anymore.” She says it like she's only now figuring it out, like she's putting together her deepest feelings right in front of me, in real time. “I mean, you look pretty. Don't get me wrong. Obviously you look pretty. Or hot or whatever. But look what you had to do to get there.”

She heads to her seat, not giving me a chance to respond or breathe or blink or anything, really. She's wrong, of course. But goddamn, it hurts.

The day gets worse from there.

I sort of think everyone except, apparently, Sasha Cotton knows about me and Joe. And Sasha Cotton
really
doesn't know about me and Joe. She compliments my purple polka-dotted scarf and asks me if I got a haircut, because my hair looks “like, swingy.” Elise lets me sit with her at lunch but she doesn't say a single word,
and when I try to take one of her fries, she actually pushes the tray away from me. Mrs. Drake approaches me in the hallway and says we need to have an appointment later in the week.

And Zed has come forward with a specific idea for how to take down Jemma, thus starting the twenty-four-hour ticking clock.

I read it in my car at the end of the day, blinking back tears. I grind the palms of my hands into my eyes, like that will stop the feelings, but it doesn't. I shake my head, but Zed and the rest of my friends can't see it.

Star doesn't say anything. I refresh and refresh and refresh, but she's nowhere to be found. I even go so far as to give her a specific shout-out, asking her opinion of
my Assignment, which I'm pretty sure is completely against the rules, but I need something to hold on to, and I have so few options left. Zed hasn't posted on her page again, and I hate being left out of her life. I thought we were in it together. I'm scared for her. And for me. And for Jemma, sort of, too. I guess I'm scared for us all.

I'm down to twenty-three hours to basically destroy my former best friend.

I look in my glove compartment for my copy of
The Secret Garden
with all the notes that I so, so hope are Star's. But it's not there. The feelings, all of them, every feeling I've ever had maybe, are boiling in my stomach, and I'm going to tell Cate and Paul, I'm absolutely 100 percent going to tell them everything, and tell Elise everything too, because I cannot take the pressure on my own for one more second, with my life kind of in shambles around me.

But.

Joe texts me.

Come over. Now. I miss you
.

Six words, and the whole world changes. I don't even think. I drive. I drive fast and straight and smiling until I'm in his driveway. If it's not a sign of our soul-mate status, it's at least a sign that things are coming together, that the things I'm doing are adding up into something
beautiful.

Joe and me together is something beautiful.

His mouth is on mine before I can say hello.

He tastes brand-new, like he just squirted a tube of toothpaste into his mouth and doused himself in cologne and aftershave. I can taste the effort, and it doesn't have the appeal of Joe's messier side. I pull back.

“Hey there,” I say, and touch his face like it has all the answers written in braille on it.

“Hey, sexy,” Joe says, but the words are lost in my mouth and accompanied by his hands squeezing my ass.

“It's been, like, the worst few days,” I say. He helps me out of my coat and I take a few steps in the direction of his kitchen, with the idea that he'll offer me some water and we can sit at the breakfast bar and talk for hours, the way we used to do online but haven't been doing lately.

“Been missing you,” he says. His tongue lingers over the
s
of
miss
, and the little whistle of breath makes it sound like a huge lie. He has a shit-eating grin and he wraps one hand around my waist, pushes me gently against the wall. We kiss for a minute, so hard I forget to breathe and I think, yeah, okay, I could get lost in this instead of talking. This is the swooning part anyway, right? This is the passion. I wrap my arms around his
neck and pull him in closer, think about relaxing my shoulders, which keep inching up to my ears like they have a mind of their own when they're under this much stress.

I pull back again, try to do it the way a sexy person might. Slowly and looking into his eyes, with a little sigh like,
I can't really handle how great this feels so I'm going to take a quick breather
. It works, and I get some eye contact, and there's a crazy spin-cycle feeling in my stomach at how much I think I could really love this guy whose hands are holding me steady as tiny bits of my world fall apart.

“People sort of, like, know. About you and me. And they all are hating me. Are they hating you?” It's not exactly a romantic thing to say, but he rubs my back and kisses my earlobe like it totally is.

“Don't you worry about me. I'm fine. Okay? I've got it under control.” He moves his lips to my throat. He doesn't ask me if I'm doing okay. I don't tell him not to worry about me. If anything, I'm trying to tell him
to
worry about me. He pushes his hands into my hair. My whole scalp tingles in the most incredible way. I wonder if I could faint from my hair being touched.

“I mean, honestly everything is sort of falling apart at once, you know?” I say, doing my best to not give in to how good his hands feel. I want to talk, not make out. I
want him to hear me. “My parents are totally freaking out,” I say. “Like, get this, my mother is taking some time off from, um,
living
with us. What is that? That's not normal, right?”

“Totally weird.”

I sort of wiggle out of his arms so we can look at each other and have an actual, nongroping conversation. It works for about a second.

“Is everyone talking about it?” I say. “Do people know? It's so weird. They're so weird.”

“Yeah,” Joe says, but his eyes are looking down into the space between my breasts. “I don't know, you should ask your friends.”

“My friends?” I say. The word, even, is a punch in the stomach.

“Your friend, I guess,” Joe says. I think it is supposed to be a joke. He gives a laugh that is mostly breath and assholery, and shrugs. A month ago, online, I described what happened with Jemma the night of the dance last spring. I described every detail, down to the dress I was wearing (yellow, vintage chiffon, scoop neck, knee-length), the song that was playing (Beyoncé. “Single Ladies.” Practically mocking me.), the relative temperature (so hot I had to put my hair into a terrible makeshift bun) and the look on Jemma's face (contempt mixed with envy and topped with an extra sprinkle of total
disappointment in me as a human being).

The point being, Joe knows how it is I ended up with no one but Elise on my side, and the idea that he would joke about it makes my head spin. I give him this look I think is maybe meant for just the two of us. The kind of look you give your boyfriend in the middle of a crowded room that communicates something particular and sacred between the two of you.

“Let's go watch a movie in my room,” he says. Like the look didn't even hit him.

“What movie?”

“Any movie. I just want you in my room, pretty girl.” His hands run up and down from the top of my rib cage to my pointy hip bones, and he smiles at the curve they find there. I go in for a kiss. I want a little one, the kind that is mostly lips and nothing else. The kind that says,
I care
. I put a hand on his cheek and another around his waist and keep my lips pressed together, but he probes them apart. It feels good, the warmth, the hitch of desire, the swimming feeling in my head. But it's not what I wanted. Today is not what I wanted.

“You're so hot,” he says when I pull away. I miss our first kiss, and the way it seemed like it meant something. Without warning, without even the preliminary pulse of heat behind my eyes, I start to cry.

“Why'd you say that, about my friends? I can't talk to you about stuff?” I try to keep the tears in the realm of pretty. I don't sniff or snort or let the crying make its way to my mouth, where it would get all wet and distorted. I let the tears fall down my face and drip from my chin to the space between my body and Joe's.

“I didn't think you came here to talk,” Joe says. He keeps his voice in a whisper, like that makes the words he's saying nice, somehow. He takes my pinkie finger with his hand, but that's it. Just hangs on to that one tiny finger and rubs it with his thumb. “I do a lot of talking already, you know? I sort of . . . you're sort of . . . a break from that stuff. Like, a vacation. Like the best vacation.”

I am a vacation. I am the Caribbean, and a fruity drink and a sunburn and a break from real life. But I am not real life. No one lives in the Caribbean. No one wants a fruity drink every day. I'd rather be water: necessary.

“Oh,” I say. The tears do not stop. Joe rubs his forehead like there's an ache there.

“I have a girlfriend.” Whispered again. Thumb rubbing pinkie. Eyes on mine. He lifts his other hand to my face and brushes away some of the tears, but it's a sloppy effort. He uses the rough back of his hand instead of one single, gentle finger, and he uses so much force that it hurts.

“I thought Sasha and you—”

“I mean, you know how stressful that all is for me. I have to be a total rock for her, and I've always liked how independent and confident and together you are.”