Meant to Be (18 page)

is Jason still being a total ass? —P

“A
nd this window treatment was selected by Queen Victoria herself, the first monarch to live in the palace, just before the first attempt on her life,” our tour guide says, his voice rising in excitement as he gestures toward some truly hideous drapes. Then he chuckles softly to himself. “One hopes the two things were unrelated!”

I clutch my notebook, scribbling furiously.
Q. Victoria. Drapes. Assassination attempt?
*

Underneath this, I add my own commentary: *
Why are we learning this?

Our tour guide at Buckingham Palace today has been about as interesting as a Latin translation of the Boston phone book. He’s got a monotone voice and only shows hints of excitement when discussing the historical significance of the different draperies throughout the palace. He can’t stop talking about fabrics and color swatches. I’m a fan of symbolism and all, but sometimes a tassel is just a tassel, okay, guy? I’m willing to go out on a limb and say the gold thread in the drapes in
the throne room has very little to do with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

I turn to say this to Jason, but he’s planted himself in the very back of the crowd. He’s been cranky all morning. He started the tour at my side, following our guide closely while I scribbled notes in my book. He kept looking at his phone, then snapping it shut in disgust. He barely paid attention to anything our tour guide said, and as we moved through the palace, he quickly drifted away from me.

Our tour guide leads us down a hallway and into a library. My heart quickens as I gaze over the shelves of leather-bound books. I stop to run my fingers along a shelf full of gorgeous editions of Shakespeare, but the tour guide is at it again. This time it’s the fabric on a gold-striped wingback chair in the corner. Something about how Churchill once sat here on a visit. If he can connect that chair to Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz, even
I’ll
be impressed. I flip to a clean page in my notebook and scurry back toward the front of the group. I get almost right to the front, but Deirdre is blocking my view of whatever our tour guide is gesturing to now. Her giant, unruly blond mane could seriously block the sun. I stand up on my tiptoes and dance around a little, trying to get a good view, but there’s no seeing around or over her hair. I’m going to have to get physical.

I clear my throat a little, then sort of step widely around her, giving her a gentle hip bump along the way.

“Hey!” she whispers.

“Oh, sorry,” I reply, giving her a sympathetic look. “I’m such a klutz!”

I turn to see what we’re looking at now, and I instinctively give a half-whispered yelp of fear and take a quick step back.

Perched atop a table is a perfectly taxidermied goose, wings spread as if in mid-flight.

“Are you okay?” Deirdre asks, surprisingly forgiving, considering I just hip-checked her to get a better view.

“Yeah,” I reply, trying to tear my eyes away from the animal in front of me. “It’s just … geese. I hate them.”

“Oh yeah, totally,” she whispers back with a little laugh. “There was this one time when a goose
crapped
on my new messenger bag, which thank God was waterproof, and …”

Deirdre charges on, but I’m not listening. I’m already thinking about my own horror story. I was five years old, and my family was at a neighborhood picnic held at a local park. I was playing with some of the other kids near a pond when a flock of geese landed nearby. I toddled my little kindergarten legs over to one and tried to pet it.

From my fuzzy little-kid memory, that bird let out the loudest, longest, scariest screech I’d ever heard from any animal of any kind, and snapped toward my hand. I screamed like a banshee and ran like hell, and that bird chased right after me. I thought I was going to die (or at least that’s what I screamed like, said my dad). Dad ran over and scooped me up, and all of a sudden I was bigger than that dumb bird. With me held high in his arms, we chased that stupid goose together.

Still, I’ve always been afraid of them. Whenever I see one, it’s a reminder that I’ve got to chase the geese on my own now. At least this goose is stuffed and shellacked and mounted on a wooden platform. Phoebe-the-vegetarian would kill me for saying so, but it kind of gives me a sick sort of satisfaction.

Luckily, our tour doesn’t linger long. When we finally make our way back to the grand hall, the class disperses to wander around the room, looking at the portraits set into the walls and examining the marble staircase. I tuck my notes into my bag for safekeeping and hurry over to where Jason is gazing out an oversized window. He’s tossing his phone back and forth between his hands, and I’m guessing he’s
not
contemplating the political ramifications of the purple brocade covering the window.

“Everything okay?” I ask him. “You get up on the wrong side of the bed or something?”

“What?” Jason starts, as though he didn’t even notice I’d appeared at his side.

I wave a hand in front of his face. “You haven’t made a sex joke in, like, two hours. Are you feeling okay? Do you have a fever?”

Out of nowhere, he blurts out, “Is Mark Bixford seriously your type?”

My brain powers down completely. “Excuse me?” I say. It’s all I can do not to choke on the words.

“I mean, he seems kind of shallow,” Jason says. My face must not be betraying the fact that I’m having a mini meltdown that is happening in my brain.

“Where did you hear that?” I say, struggling to keep calm, struggling to keep the panic from my voice.

“Where else? Sarah Finder, Queen of Gossip.”

Of course. Suddenly, I feel sick. The gilded room is spinning around me. Who else has Sarah told? Does Mark know? And how the hell did
she
find out?

Oh my God. Did she tweet about this?

Jason charges on. “But then again, he’s probably really
charming
, and not a complete
ass
like me.” His voice hangs on “charming” in a way I don’t like. I hoped we could forget about my flipping on him yesterday. He certainly didn’t seem mad last night when we went to Cue-2-Cue, but he’s clearly still a little pissed about it now.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I finally squeak. I hope he doesn’t notice the beads of sweat forming on my forehead.

“You can chill out,” Jason says. “Like I even give a crap who you swoon over. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“I’m not swooning over Mark. And even if I
was
, why do you care?” I try to sound confident and dismissive, but all I can think about is that my knees are wobbling like they’ve been replaced with mint jelly. I try to casually drape my arm across the back of a wingback chair for support,
but instead, it looks like I’m clinging to a piece of furniture as the
Titanic
is sinking. I hope the chair isn’t a priceless piece of history in case I pass out in it. Or barf on it.

“I don’t,” Jason replies. He plops down in the chair, and I imagine we must look like we’re posing for some bizarro portrait. Only I probably look like I’m participating at gunpoint.

“Then why did you bring it up?” I demand. My face is burning.

“You totally don’t get it,” Jason says, rolling his eyes.

I plant myself directly in front of him. “Listen, don’t hate on Mark just because he’s everything you’re not,” I say right to his face.

“Excuse me?” Jason looks up at me, his eyes narrowed to angry slits.

“You heard me. Mark
is
charming, and respectful, and he’s not always vying for attention.” Jason opens his mouth, but I charge on before he can say anything. “He’s a really great guy who’s never said a bad word about anyone, and for you to trash him for no reason is pathetic.”

“You know what, Julia? You—”

Before something really nasty can come out of Jason’s mouth, my phone starts buzzing in my back pocket. I hold up a finger at him, the international symbol for “ ’Scuse me, I have something more important to pay attention to, so you’re gonna have to hold on.” I glance around for signs of Mrs. Tennison, but unwilling to take any chances, I crouch behind one of Queen Victoria’s fancy-pants drapes and flip open my phone to find a new text from Chris.

Sitting in a café with a burnt caramel mocha
watching the rain dreaming of u …

My face burns even hotter. No one has ever sent me a text this sweet before. I read it again. And again. Then I feel a finger poking at me through the drapes.

“You in there?”

I push on the drapes, trying to find my way out, but Jason is in the way and I can’t find the opening. I feel his hand poking me, but I can’t follow it out from behind the drapes. I have a brief, panicked fear that I’ll never get out of here, and my mummified body will become part of the palace tour.

I finally have to drop to my knees and wiggle out the bottom. When I emerge, Jason is rolling his eyes and giving me a total “you’re the chief resident of crazytown” face.

“What is your problem?” I ask, trying to pretend I didn’t stage an epic battle with a set of velvet drapes.

“If you’re soooo obsessed with Mark, if he’s your MTB”—here he makes air quotes—“or whatever, then why are you chasing after this dude Chris? For someone who probably irons her underpants, you’re pretty all over the place, aren’t you? Just like all the girls you look down on.”

“I don’t look down on people!” I protest.

“Don’t you? Haven’t you spent most of this trip thinking that all your classmates are shallow horndogs who couldn’t appreciate the history and literature of London if it kicked them in the teeth?”

“Well, Sarah and Evie
are
shallow,” I retort. “
Especially
Sarah. Why can’t she mind her own business? She acts like other people’s lives are her personal
Us Weekly
.”

“You don’t even know her,” he replies. “If you spent a second reading a Sarah Finder guidebook, you’d know she’s in everyone’s business because she wants to protect her friends. You’re too busy in Julia Land to notice anyone else.”

“Whatever,” I mutter. My throat is having spasms. Jason makes me sound like an awful, uptight, self-involved monster. I’m not like that! He thinks he knows me! He doesn’t know me at all. I inhale deeply and lower my voice. “Mark is none of your business, okay? Just because you’ve dated a bunch of girls doesn’t make you an expert on love. I
mean, yeah you’ve had girlfriends, but have any hung around for more than like a week?” I bite my lip, regretting the words as soon as I’ve said them.

“If I’m such an idiot, then why did you ask for my help?” He tosses something small and silver at me. I catch it before it smacks me in the cheek. My phone! “Here. Good luck with your texting.”

“What? How did you—When did you—” I sputter.

“Slimeballs like me have sticky fingers,” he deadpans.

Oh my God. The drapes. When he was trying to “help” me out, he must have snatched my phone. My breaths are coming fast and deep, like I’ve just climbed out of the pool after a hard sprint. Everything is upside down. If there is such a thing as spontaneous human combustion, I fear I’m about to experience it.

“Leave me alone” is all I can whisper.

“Gladly.” Jason brushes past me, bumping me hard with his shoulder. I take a stumbling step backward … and run smack into a suit of armor.

The whole thing starts to teeter on its tiny base. I reach out to grab it, but it’s too late. It seems like slow motion as the armor, surprisingly heavy for a mini replica, crashes to the ground. The sound bounces across the marble floor and swirls around the room like a tornado. I stand frozen in horror. Everyone is looking at me, including Jason, his face registering a mixture of annoyance and amusement.

Our tour guide gives a tight, choking laugh and says to the staring faces, “Just a reproduction, just a reproduction. Do be more careful, though, won’t you, miss?”

“Julia Lichtenstein, what has gotten into you?” Mrs. Tennison stage-whispers through clenched teeth. It’s clear she doesn’t want to make even more of a scene in front of our tour guide, but she is capital-
P
Pissed. She plods heavily across the floor in a pair of beat-up Uggs, which Mrs. Tennison probably thinks make her look trendy, though actually she looks
like she has clubfeet. She takes me by the arm and leads me quickly over to a side hallway.

“Miss Lichtenstein,” she begins, winding up for a serious talking-to, “your behavior on this trip has been
completely
unacceptable. I was hoping you would be a role model for your classmates, but instead you have been impulsive, thoughtless, and disrespectful. I did
not
expect this from you, of all people.”

Her words pack a punch right to my gut. I feel like all the wind has been knocked out of me, and my eyes burn with tears. I’ve
never
been talked to like this by a teacher.
Ever
.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. Suddenly, my throat is squeezing shut and I realize I’m about to cry.

“Really. What
has
gotten into you?” she asks, staring me hard in the face, eyes narrowed. She turns on her heel toward the rest of the group, waving me along after her. Apparently she wasn’t looking for an answer, which is good, because I don’t have one. What
is
wrong with me? Did a teacher just seriously refer to me as
impulsive
? And
disrespectful
? Jason’s calling me shallow; Mrs. Tennison is calling me thoughtless.… What’s next?

I trudge after Mrs. Tennison, rejoining my classmates. As I wipe the tears from my cheeks, I catch a glimpse of Sarah Finder, standing near the back of the room. I expect to see a smirk, but all I can see is … pity. She actually looks like she feels
sorry
for me. Which doesn’t make me feel better. In fact, it makes me feel worse. Maybe I
am
shallow. Whatever. I just know that I’m sick of being ignored, pitied, judged … by everyone.