Love and Other Theories (8 page)

B
y the time Patrick Smith and Leila Court arrive to pick us up for the party, it’s nearly ten thirty, and even though we’ve eaten two large pepperoni pizzas, we’re still pretty tipsy.

“Hey,
my
lovelies!” Leila says. That’s the way she talks, as though everything is hers. “
My
lovelies.” “
My
bestie.” “
My
Steve Maddens.” “
My
Patrick.”

“
My
, oh
my
,” Shelby says, and we all burst out laughing as we squish together in the backseat of Patrick’s Jeep Cherokee. Shelby always makes fun of Leila, sometimes right in front of her, because she never gets it, and if she does, she doesn’t seem to care. We actually like Leila,
though. And it’s not because she’s more popular than us, because she definitely is. Not by much, but she’s a cheerleader and her best friend is Celine McGillicutty. We like her because she’s seriously fun and nearly evolved.

“I brought my cherry vodka,” Leila says, swiveling around in the front seat to show it off.

“You’re
my
favorite person tonight,” I say to Leila. Shelby shakes from laughter next to me, and soon I’m laughing so hard I can barely keep my eyes open. Everything is whirling around me.

Leila claps at our excitement and leans over to kiss Patrick on the cheek. When I say Leila is nearly evolved, Patrick would be the hiccup in her growth. She was completely cool when Shelby lost her virginity to Patrick two summers ago during one of Leila and Patrick’s many, many breaks. Very evolved of her. Leila’s only downfall is TGS. After about a month of being on with Patrick, she always demands to be his girlfriend. When he ignores this demand and rebels against it by either flirting with a big-breasted junior or forgetting to return Leila’s phone calls, it’s always the same: Leila cries, sometimes in public. Sometimes she even throws stuff at him—yes, in public too. And predictably, he tells his friends, and girls like Shelby, Danica, Melissa, and me—the only females at Lincoln who understand that this is unacceptable—that Leila is a “crazy bitch.” We gave up trying to defend her the day she threw a tennis ball at his face during PE and
gave him a black eye. And to think, it all could have been avoided if she’d just kept the g-word out of her mouth. Say “girlfriend” and boys say “good-bye.”

We get to the party and some guy I don’t recognize greets us as we walk into the shabby apartment. Unidentified guy waves and says, “Who’s getting lucky tonight?”

Patrick high-fives him. Leila is too busy hugging her vodka to know what’s going on. Melissa frowns at the boy. Danica glares at him. Shelby rolls her eyes, but as soon as we’re away from him, she turns to me and says, “Speaking of getting lucky.”

She points across the party to Tommy Rizzo. His curly black hair is tucked under a white baseball cap and he’s teaching some skinny blonde wearing dark red lipstick how to pump the keg.

There’s a moment when our eyes meet. He’s got his arm around the girl and he’s leaning into her, and I’ve spent the last few days making out with someone else. There’s an unanswered message from him on my phone from two days ago. But that doesn’t matter now.

“That’s over,” Shelby says, but she still glances at me, waiting for confirmation.

Tommy Rizzo raises his glass in my direction, freeing his arm for the moment. He motions to the keg. An offering. But since we’ve brought our own vodka, I shake my head. He nods and turns away.

We’ve detached. Just like that.

“That’s over,” I tell her, looking away from him.

“Kiss that Wintermint breath good-bye.” Danica giggles. We’ve all made out with the Riz at one time or another because he’s an amazing kisser and always chews Wintermint gum. I was the last one to kiss him.

Full disclosure: I spoke to Tommy Rizzo via text every day over winter break, and the day after Christmas we went to second base. I was semi-using him to distract me because Trip hadn’t called, even though he’d been in town at his dad’s for Christmas. I’m fairly certain Tommy Rizzo was using me, too.

Sometimes I’m still amazed at how easy it is to move from hooking up over winter break to being distant acquaintances at a party. Like after Shelby had sex with Forest Lester, he stopped calling her, but he would still high-five her during football games and give her piggyback rides to Spanish class and pick her up for parties. It was like, no harm, no foul. He still wanted to hang out with her, he just didn’t want to be with her—and that wasn’t her fault. He was a high school boy: he didn’t want to be with anyone. At the end of the day there was no awkwardness, and Shelby could say she’d screwed Forest Lester.

I know that with all the frat-boy high-fiving and how the four of us pass Tommy Rizzo around like a good sweater, it must seem like we’re really slutty. That’s completely wrong. Danica has only had sex with four people,
which is two more than Shelby, three more than me, and four more than Melissa.

Shelby puts her hands on my shoulders and smiles at me. “At least you didn’t have to use Nathan as your Exit Strategy.”

Shelby always knows how to cheer me up and remind me that what’s irking me isn’t something I should care about at all.

The Detach is simple. The Exit Strategy is hard. It means action, sometimes a conversation. It means you have to be cruel. Melissa cried last year when she had to employ an Exit Strategy. I don’t blame her. She’d been making out with Todd Ahlstrom pretty consistently for about a month, but she was over it.

To Melissa’s credit, she detached from him in the exact way she was supposed to. She stopped texting him and stopped returning his texts. She was aloof in the halls and didn’t indulge in conversations lasting more than three minutes. Todd should have taken the out, backed off, and moved on to some other girl like most boys would have done. But he didn’t. So there was no other choice.

The night Melissa employed her Exit Strategy, I was her accomplice. One of Trip’s best friends, Liam Poole, had mentioned he thought Melissa was hot, so the four of us went to a basketball game together. Trip and Liam stood behind us on the bleachers with their arms dangling around our shoulders, kissing our necks whenever
they felt like it and rubbing up against us as though no one could see.

But of course, everyone could. Including Todd. I’ll never forget the way his face looked when he noticed Melissa and the six-foot-four senior god with his lips pressed against her cheek. He looked like his heart was breaking. Melissa closed her eyes and let Liam kiss away her guilt.

Yes, I never wanted to make anyone’s face look the way Todd’s did the night Melissa employed an Exit Strategy. But I never wanted be on the receiving end of an Exit Strategy, either.

After about an hour at the party, I’m sick of hearing Nathan’s name. Everyone’s asking me about him. And they won’t just call him Nathan; they all say “Nathan Diggs,” like he’s famous, which I guess at Lincoln he is, but still.

My friends get tired of it too.

“This party is so typical,” Shelby complains.

It’s not typical to me, but I can see what she’s saying. Dingy apartment. Filthy carpet. Flat screen sitting atop an entertainment unit from IKEA. Posters taped to the whitewashed walls. Rap music, cheap beer, smoky air, and lame locals.

We quarantine ourselves in a corner of the living room near an open window.

Shelby and I are nestled together on a large recliner,
and Melissa and Danica sit across from us on an ottoman. We’ve taken the cherry vodka, since Patrick is making out with Leila and she’s completely forgotten about her alcohol. We pass it around, sipping it slowly because we’re all already pretty hammered.

“Oh my God, no!” Shelby bursts out. Not so discreetly, she points to the far end of the room, where Chiffon Dillon has made an appearance. This is the first time I’ve been here to witness a Chiffon run-in since Tommy Rizzo’s barbecue last summer, when Shelby was unsuccessful in calling a truce. I don’t know if my friends will ignore her or chase her away or provoke her, since they’re bored. I take another sip from the bottle, but it does nothing to calm me.

“What is she wearing?” Melissa says, leaning toward us. Danica snorts with laughter. “Her boots! Ew!” Melissa continues, wrinkling her nose but smiling like she’s on the verge of laughter herself.

“Those are townie-hunting boots!” Danica says.

They all start to laugh, and I join them—I can’t help it. I don’t know if it’s the vodka. It must be. I can’t stop laughing about how Chiffon only dates the guys who haven’t moved out of their parents’ houses since high school—who wouldn’t have looked twice at her when they were
in
high school. Shelby clutches my arm and looks right at me, like she wants to make sure I’m really here with them. It’s been so long since I’ve stayed out late
laughing like this with my best friends.

“Didn’t you hear?” Shelby says, out of breath. “She’s caught one!”

We try to contain our laughter because we don’t want to miss Shelby’s gossip. Shelby is always the first one to hear anything worth repeating.

“And surprise, surprise, he’s keeping their ‘relationship’ a secret.” Shelby rolls her eyes as she makes air quotes.

“Who?” Danica squeals.

“Guess!” Shelby yells back, and we all groan because we’re too impatient for this right now.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Shelby says. “Chiffon should really be wearing a shirt that says ‘Stepmom in Training.’”

“Zane Chapman?” Danica and I guess at the exact same time. Shelby confirms that we’re right by repeating his name loud enough for everyone in the living room to hear over the music. Besides being the legendary older Chapman brother, Zane Chapman is also the father of a one-year-old named Billy—he knocked up his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Jamie, just four months after meeting her at the community college. He used to be the hottest senior at Lincoln, but that was three years ago, so since he still lives with his dad and is
still
gossip around Lincoln High, he has adapted to townie status.

“Oh hell, I need a cigarette!” Danica says this
whenever she hears something shocking. She means it only about 50 percent of the time. She digs a cigarette and a lighter out of her purse. Melissa makes a big deal about moving the bottle of vodka away, like it’s going to ignite into large flames if it gets anywhere near the lighter.

“Better paranoid than sorry” has always been Melissa’s motto, and she screams it at Danica after Danica not so subtly rolls her eyes at her.

“‘Cowards die many times before their deaths,’” Danica says.

“Huh?” Melissa’s mouth hangs open.

“From
Julius Caesar
,” Danica says.

“Obviously,”
Shelby says.

We laugh so hard and loud that there’s no way everyone doesn’t assume we’ve just lit up a joint instead of a cigarette.

Chiffon makes the mistake of walking past us. To get through the living room, she’s forced to. My stomach takes a quick dive. The last time there was a Shelby/Chiffon face-off, Shelby told Chiffon her chlamydia was showing.

When Chiffon is close enough to hear, Shelby says, “So they’re just letting in strays; are they immune to the smell of trash?” Her voice melts immediately back into laughter. The kind that makes it hard for her to breathe.

It’s contagious, that kind of laughter, and we all bust
up. I don’t feel uneasy when I’m laughing like this, and I take another sip to chase the last of my nerves away for good.

Chiffon glares at us before leaving the room. It’s a look that, thanks to that night at Tommy’s barbecue, we know means
Die, bitch
. We’re laughing even harder now. I’m so glad she’s gone.

I’m dizzy. From booze. From happiness. From the smoke lingering in the air from Danica’s cigarette. But this is my favorite moment of the entire day. Melissa topples over, drunk and giggling, and we all pull her up, the four of us collapsing into a BFF pile on the chair. This even trumps watching Nathan attempt an Irish accent in Drama, and the way he stared at me the whole time. Like I was the only audience member who mattered.

The three of them have been having this kind of fun all through high school. This is what they’ve done countless nights. Every weekend. I can finally join them. Just in the nick of time, too.

You could have left for college a lightweight
, Shelby used to joke.

You could have left for college without knowing what a good drink was and been one of those girls who order nothing but Midori.

You could have left for college a virgin.

It was all true.

You could have left for college with a boyfriend.
And this
would have been my worst offense by far.

I love my friends because my friends are real. We can be loud and destructive and crazy, but there’s nothing fake about us. So even though we’re just laughing and drinking—and in about an hour we’re going to bum a ride off of Celine’s forever-sober little sister and pass out in Shelby’s room—it still makes me feel happier, and more successful, than I’ve felt all week. Maybe all year. Because getting into Barron is a huge accomplishment, but having good friends, real friends, the kind you keep forever, is an even bigger triumph.