Life by Committee (3 page)

Elise wants to go to Harvard. She volunteers at the hospital and plays with sick kids. She's practically a saint. A lesbian saint.

Jemma has glassy eyes like she might cry.

It didn't only make her angry, when I started liking boys more than sci-fi movie marathons and when I started getting catcalls in the halls. It also made her sad.

I think I hate her sadness even more.

Which makes no sense, because I'm the one who got ditched and is still getting assaulted by random insults
and slut implications, even if I'm in the supposedly safe haven of Tea Cozy. If anyone should be crying, it's definitely me.

“I hate everything about this conversation,” I say, because at a certain point you have to say exactly what you're thinking.

“It's a small school,” Jemma concludes. “People notice. That's all I'm saying.”

I feel myself blush even though I want to stay tough. I feel a little sinking in my stomach, and my hands go to my collarbone, protecting the naked parts of me. I wish I had a turtleneck sweater and a big knit scarf to cover up whatever they're seeing. I wonder which customers are listening in on our conversation. I know if the situation were reversed, I would be eavesdropping the hell out of this moment. I love little more than watching other people's lives happen to them.

Jemma sees the blush spreading on my face and pats my shoulder.
Pats. It
. Like I'm a child and she's a teacher and I have sooooo much to learn. I shrug her off and turn my attention to my computer, where Joe has finally logged on, and the machine is pinging at me urgently.

I see Jemma see his name.

I don't cover the screen, even though I should.

She nods at it, and I know she's taking note and that I will hear a rumor about me and Joe in the next week.
Except by this time next week, maybe it won't really be a rumor so much as the truth. I'm a terrible, terrible person for how good that feels, buzzing inside me. The thought of there being an
us
.

I grab hold of my huge mug and let it cover my face (and my smile) as I take a long sip.

Jemma wrinkles her nose and is going to say more, I think, but Paul reappears, hands on hips as he stands too close to her for it to be comfortable.

“Are you and Alison getting something else? Because I really can't let you take that table for very long if you're not purchasing food or another beverage,” Paul says. Sometimes I think my father is a high school girl too.

“I'll get a cookie,” Jemma says. Jemma and Paul used to be friends in their own right. She would tease him about his spaciness, and he would fight back with jokes about her crazy knack for organizing everything, including our own refrigerator when its messiness started really bugging her.

Then they would talk books for, like, hours. Because the only people in the world who read more than me are Jemma and Paul.

“I think we're out of cookies,” Paul says. An entire glass display case filled with cookies of every variety is a few feet behind him. He looks over to it and shrugs at the
trays and trays of cookies.

I have no idea if I am proud to have Paul as my dad right now, humiliated, or a little scared he's going to get in trouble for harassing a teenager. He leans on the spare chair at my table and makes a kind of clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. I'm sure Jemma can sniff out the stale, hay-like, almost-sweet smell of just-smoked weed coming off him.

Jemma knows too many of my secrets.

She looks back at my computer one more time. Joe has not stopped chatting me. I doubt she can read the words from where she is, but she can definitely see his name, in bold, popping up a half dozen times in a row on my screen. She opens her mouth to comment but changes her mind.

“Right” is all she says. It seems to be a commentary on everything she has disdain for at this moment: my cleavage, Paul's childish meanness, my flirtation with Joe, the rules of being a normal human being.

I am left in the wake of the things she said, and I don't drown in them, exactly, but I'm having some trouble catching my breath. She and Alison stay in their corner, after Alison purchases a tea that Cate doesn't know better than to give her, and they share a set of headphones and lean over an iPhone together. I picture the bespectacled or maxidress-wearing angry rocker chick they are
probably listening to and Googling right now. She is probably singing a song that somehow tells them how right they are to hate me.

I'm not really listening to much music lately. I don't know who to listen to, or what it would mean about me if I started liking them. I'm determined not to become someone else. So I've given up music altogether basically.

“Ridiculous,” Paul says. He is still gripping the top of the chair and rocking back and forth a little with the music Cate's playing over the sound system. “And also, ballsy.” He grins. Almost everything terrible in life kind of amuses Paul. I'm hoping I'm moments away from growing into that trait, and that I will be a little more like him someday soon.

Except without the yoga mat.

“You can't be weird about them, okay?” I say. “Like, give them cookies. It's fine. They can eat cookies if they want.” I want to chat with Joe and watch the rest of the day float away.

Especially the part when Joe grabbed Sasha's ass.

“I'll find something else to be weird about, I guess,” Paul says, and he nudges his foot against the bottom of my chair so that it shakes a little.

“Can't wait.”

“I have the perfect Forgive Your Ridiculous Father
present,” he says, and reaches into his back pocket. Pulls out a beat-up copy of
The Secret Garden
. It's not
A Little Princess
, but it's the author's other beautiful effing book, and I'm dead-on impressed. Not to mention, books from New York City are the best, because anyone could have written in them, and they have this infinite sense of possibility that books from the town bookstores don't have. People in New York, or other cities, are probably like that too. Full of all kinds of hope, while I'm stuck here being small and limited.

“Seriously?” I say, and grab it from his hands, flip through the yellowed pages, and see them covered, absolutely slathered, with margin notes. Dark-red pen. Curly, swirly, beautiful handwriting.

“You haven't had the easiest time, and I figured my favorite daughter needed something good,” Paul says. His dimples deepen, if that's even possible, and there are one hundred things wrong with my life right now, and a few of them are in Tea Cozy with us, but man, I lucked out in the dad department. “Plus I found a marked-up copy of the terrible live-in-the-moment, self-help, we-are-all-small-specks-in-the-universe book I hate,
The Power of Now
.” Paul hates positive-thinking books.
Hates
them. They don't jibe with his yoga and meditation. Seems like all the same thing to me, but whatever. “So it was worth walking around the East Village for an extra
hour before driving back today. Hate those quick trips. Turn around the second I get there, basically.”

I'm not even really listening anymore, because this book is amazing and whoever wrote these notes is amazing, and I want to dive right in. I wave him away, and he chuckles as he walks back to the counter. I have described the plot of
The Secret Garden
to him many times. He knows all about sullen Mary and her trip to her uncle's kind-of-creepy mansion and her discovery of a beautiful, secret garden that leads her to be a better person and to live a brand-new, unexpected life. Paul's never been super interested, but he likes when I'm excited about things, even if he doesn't share the excitement.

On the front page, the Red Script Note Taker has drawn a picture of a garden and written a haiku about rose petals and loneliness.

I'm all in.

I blast through five chapters of
The Secret Garden
and linger on every margin note like it's a message from the universe directly to me. The note taker writes,
Mary is real. Confused by life. Pissed at circumstance. Forgotten. Ready to explore the world, regardless. Brave
. That place between my jaw and my eyes swells, and I am teary. I'm a sucker for a character who other people hate.
And Mary has long been a favorite of mine. Not only after she finds her garden and makes friends and changes. I love her from page one. She may be cranky, but she's also honest. She explores that terrifying house and its grounds with a delicious anticipation and openness, in spite of the fact that her life so far has sucked.

When I finally remember to look up, my computer's still pinging, Joe all desperate and wanting me to be there.
Tabby?? You there? Tabitha? I'm missing you!!

I kind of can't believe I forgot about him for as long as I did. I have a distracting kind of liking for him. Sometimes I stare at my math homework for hours but can't do a single problem, I'm so busy suffocating from feelings. But whoever wrote these margin notes in
The Secret Garden
captivates a different part of me.

I turn back to the computer, and Joe and I swim in our special brand of awkward ecstasy for the next hour. We recall, for maybe the twentieth time this month, how we fell for each other. It's one of our favorite conversations to have, the way mothers tell their children the stories of their births. I recount his smile and the zap of interest on the first day of school this year, how good he looked after a summer of football drills and beach days.

You told me I looked good
, I type.
You asked me why
I wasn't with my friends
. I remember how his face fell when I struggled to explain that my friends weren't my friends anymore.

You did look good
, he types, his signature winking face punctuating the sentence.
And kind of sad but also kind of like . . . you weren't going to let them win. You looked determined. I liked that
.

I smile at that, because it reminds me of Mary. Sad and determined.

You liked that my hair was longer and blonder
, I type, winky-face-ing right back at him.

Hey, that didn't hurt
.
But it was electric, right? Like, immediately I just . . . I had these feelings for you that I hadn't had before
.

I guess it doesn't qualify as love (or lust, or whatever) at first sight, because we'd known each other for years. But what do you call it when you see each other for the thousandth time but everything has changed all at once? Our liking each other wasn't gradual or earned. It was sudden, immediate, and overnight. Love at thousandth sight.

Invite me over
, he says. No ellipses. No question mark. Certain.

“Tab, I need a latte assist here,” Cate calls out across the café, and the customers who aren't too lost in books and laptops and overly intimate conversations giggle.
Cate is good at making strangers giggle with her funny turns of phrase.

I can't today
, I write back. But I don't say no. I don't say never. I don't say,
Not until you break up with Sasha Cotton
. I know I should say all of that, but I can't. My fingers won't do it.

A gaggle of young moms has all ordered skim lattes, so I tell Joe I'll be back, and head behind the counter to help. I burn a whole bunch of milk, so stuck I am in the wonder of what Joe and I will do or say next. I try to imagine the exact texture of his thick black hair and wish myself pressed against those red, red lips.

I decide not to care about anything else.

Tomorrow
, Joe has typed by the time I'm back at my computer. He's signed off, but the word remains and I keep it on my screen, staring me down, for the rest of my time at Tea Cozy. I sort of capture the word inside me and let it stir things up and get me excited and anxious and terrified and blissed out.
Tomorrow
, my brain says on repeat.
Tomorrow
.

Tomorrow does eventually actually occur, thank God.

Tomorrow is today
, I text when we're playing hearts together during a free period. I get to watch him check his phone, register that it is me texting, arrange his face into something casual after reading the words. He types a response immediately, and my phone buzzes. I inspect my cards instead of checking the message. Let him sweat it out for a minute.

He grins. He likes the anticipation, too.

Your place after school to do homework?
his text reads when I finally look in my lap. I try not to blush. I rearrange my cards so that the hearts are all together on the far right side. I can't look at him, for fear of breaking into a ridiculous grin.

It's not a decision so much as a reflex when I type back
Yes
.

A few hours later, we're on my carpet, I've got a Top 40 playlist shuffling, and we're singing along to every stupid song that's come out in the last few months. We are also “doing homework,” and Joe keeps giving me this look like he has to have me. He moves about a half inch closer to me every five minutes.

“You have a good voice,” he says.

I do not have a good voice.

“You're in my room,” I say, and giggle like it's the world's greatest secret.

“I'm definitely in your room,” he says with a grin. “I like your room.”

“I like you in my room,” I say. My mouth feels funny. My limbs feel funny. I can't stop swallowing. And we are having the world's stupidest conversation.

“I like that you like me in your room,” Joe says. He puts a hand on my knee and sort of taps along with the music. I can feel myself shaking but I don't want him to feel me shaking, so I try tensing every muscle in my body to see if that works.

I give what I hope resembles a smile, but my mouth feels so strange that I can't tell.

Then Joe's mouth is on mine and it tastes exactly the way I thought it would: sweet and red from the berry-scented ChapStick he uses. His body is wide, and he has a thick, scratchy stubble, so he can do things like
use girls' lip balm and not seem any less the tough guy he is.