My Invented Life (14 page)

She doesn’t understand what I mean. Calling me Chub must be a reflex for her.

“You’ll leave her alone now that you know,” she says. She grabs hold of the scarf and chokes me lightly. “Don’t blab it around. She’s afraid her mom will disown her. I don’t trust you. Here’s your chance to prove me wrong.”

The calculator in my head keeps adding things up. “Did she say she was bi?”

“She’s not bi,” Eva says.

“But she could like boys.”

“Girl plus girl equals lesbian, Chub.”

“What about Jonathan?”

“What about him?”

“If Carmen’s a lesbian, why is she Jonathan’s new girlfriend?”

“What?” Eva makes a face like the star in a daytime soap when her ex-husband’s evil twin comes back from the dead. Then a slow smile spreads across her face. “I get it. You’re joking.” She takes back her hat. “Good one, scrambled-eggs-for-brains.”

W
hat happened at school
today?” Mom asks over dinner.

Let’s see now. Jonathan went to the cafeteria to make out with Carmen. Carmen ambushed me with a limerick in homeroom. I retaliated. Sapphire almost canceled the play. Eva informed me that Carmen is an undercover lesbian.

“I have to write an essay on a historical figure,” I say. “I’m thinking Amelia Earhart.” These irrelevant tidbits make Mom believe she knows what’s going on in my life. I bolt the rest of my dinner to escape more questions and Dad’s brooding stares. Eva follows suit.

“Dishes, girls,” Mom says.

“I promised to help Roz with math tonight,” Eva says.

Only she didn’t. Fortunately, I catch on fast. “Yeah, trig’s a beast,” I say. Mom will clean up herself rather than interfere with a sibling bonding opportunity.

My sister winks at me. The Three Faces of Eva. I’m a slave to hope, so I risk being alone with her. One locked door later, she fixes me with her interrogator’s smile.

“Forgot your promise yet?”

“It’s only been a few hours,” I say. “But I’ll take the secret to my grave. Why don’t you trust me?”

She grins at me. From her rakish look I can tell that I’m in for it. “You know how some people have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? Well . . . your angel hangs out around your heart. But your devil is in charge of your tongue.” Her phone twitters just then, and she checks the call.

I’m glad for the diversion because my throat suddenly hurts like I swallowed a fish bone. What she said is true, of course, and the list goes on—self-absorbed, competitive, and insecure. Still, I wish I could be perfect in her eyes. At least she sees the angel in my heart.

“Let’s get started on that trig homework,” I say when she closes her phone.

She laughs at that. My fish-bone moment escaped her notice. She drops a plain manila envelope in my lap. I open the clip and two magazines with racy covers slide out onto the bed. One shows a woman wearing chaps and not much else leaning against a horse. The other features a man with chiseled abs wearing micro undies and a baseball cap. He’s staring at me like I’m Aphrodite in the flesh.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Porn,” Eva says.

“Duh. Why are you giving it to me?”

“I thought it might help you figure out where you are on the dashboard.” She arranges them side by side on her desk, watching me closely for a reaction. “They won’t jump up and rip off your clothes,” she says.

My eyes have trouble focusing.

“Well?”

“The lighting in here isn’t quite right,” I say.

“Keep them. But if Mom discovers them in your room, I know nothing.” Her computer clicks away, nibbling on electronic potato chips. “I don’t want her to think I’m tacky.”

“You don’t have to explain,” I say. “Is it weird that your ex–best friend has a crush on you?”

“Not that weird.”

“How did she tell you exactly? Did she come on to you?”

“I have things to do,” Eva says, dismissing me with her diva wave.

Talking to her is like eating Jell-O with a fork. Just when you’re about to pop the yummy bite into your mouth, it slips off the tines and splats on the floor.

The magazines glow red-hot on my desk, despite my effort to ignore them. I turn on my computer to distract me. I think about what Eva said—that I have a devil in charge of my tongue. My persistent case of big-fat-mouthitis probably does affect my friendships a little. Then again, Sierra used to laugh her head clean off her shoulders around me. I check my email, but she hasn’t written back yet.

Am I a good friend? There’s an online quiz to test your friendship quotient, so I take it and pass without cheating. To be honest, I won’t stay friends forever with someone who constantly needs me, and I don’t share every detail of my life, especially my mistakes. Who needs to be liked by the whole world and their cousin? I don’t like every single person on the planet, either. But a little more kindness to balance out my less tactful side couldn’t hurt. I vow to work on it.

The second I figure out who I am.

With the door locked and the lights off, I make a tent out of my covers and climb inside with a flashlight and Eva’s porn. I skip the articles and go straight for the pictures. Neither photo spread tickles me all that much. Maybe the unnatural poses remind me that the models were under hot lights and in front of cameramen. Ugh. The guys are hunky and the girls are curvy, but in the end they’re only strangers. I consider burning the magazines in the field next to our house. With my luck, though, a volunteer fire fighter would happen to be lost in our neighborhood at just the wrong moment.

The residual pot smoke clinging to Eyeliner Andie in homeroom escapes everyone’s notice somehow. The beads she sewed onto the tattered fringe of her jeans jacket click as she shifts in her seat.

“I have a plan,” she whispers. “To stop Carmen from hanging all over Nico.”

“I think we should be nice to Carmen from now on,” I say.

“What’s with you?” she says.

“I feel sorry for her.”

“Okay, we’ll be friendlier,” she says. “After I’m through with her.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You’re not usually such a kiss-ass.”

Mr. Beltz shakes his pointer at us, and we revert to hand signals to continue our conversation. I pucker my lips to prove that I mean to suck up. Andie makes the universal loco sign. I flip her off. She bares her teeth at me. I
see Mr. Beltz approaching and slice a finger across my throat. She doesn’t see me in time, screws up her eyes, and sticks out her tongue. For some unfathomable reason, her tongue is bright blue.

“Maybe you girls would like to move your performance to the front of the class,” he says.

“No, thank you,” I say in a polite-little-girl voice.

Carmen snickers at us. When Andie raises her hand to give Carmen the bird, I grab it. Andie’s friendship style could be called more cactus than fuzzy bear. Still, I don’t have to dodge spines around her because I’m almost positive she’s on my side. More or less.

After Mr. Beltz has retreated to the front of the class, Andie writes a few words in her notebook for me to see.
I’m doing her a favor today. You’ll see
.

As I approach the cafeteria dishwasher, competing smells—eau d’aging dishcloth and a miasma of chemical disinfectant—assault my nose. Felicia shows me how to fill the racks with dirty trays and then leaves me alone to suffer. Twenty minutes of mouth breathing later, she returns and tells me to empty the deep fryer.

“Please don’t spill the oil all over the floor,” she says. It’s the “please” that gets me, and I do my best. After I clean up the oil slick, she calls me to the break table and slides a plate in front of me. At the center rests a leather brown disk.

“What’s this?” I say.

“A meatless patty,” she says. “The first thing on my new vegetarian menu. Enjoy.” She sits down next to me with a mug of coffee.

The thing cuts like leather too. “Muy delicioso,” I say.

Her smile beams intermittently like a flickering motel sign.

“You’re not a whiner,” she says. “I hate whiners.”

I chew the first bite for a long time before swallowing. Felicia might not be up on the Heimlich maneuver. “Thanks,” I say.

“Or a quitter. I have a daughter your age. She could learn something from you.” She slurps her coffee.

I won her over, and that means a lot to me. Maybe I’m not a big hit with the pep squad, the football team, or even the German club. I’m not always the most popular with my homies the theater geeks either. But I managed to bridge some serious gap with a cafeteria worker. Make that Cafeteria Commando. When she leaves, I wrap up the remains of the pucklike patty in a napkin for Blue-Dragon.

At rehearsal we roll through two whole scenes without a single crumb of harassment. Whenever Andie and Nico are offstage, though, they go into a corner together and giggle like preteens at a slumber party. This worries me because I know they are plotting against Carmen. Instead of crashing their party or braving the chill from the ice man formerly known as Jonathan, I pretend to want to hang out by myself.

After the last scene, Sapphire leaves us to clean up. Eva and Carmen have a brief public conversation for the first time since their fight. A minute later, Nico abruptly stops sweeping the stage and points at something brown near his foot.

“Who let BlueDragon in here?” When several geeks move in for a closer look, he picks up the turd with his bare hands.

“Eww. That’s so gay,” Carmen says.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” I say.

“Don’t be obtuse. Everyone knows that
gay
doesn’t mean
gay
. It means
gross
.”

You must really hate yourself
. My thoughtless tongue almost gets away from me, but I manage to stop it in time.

Next Nico sniffs the brown thing in his hand, and a chorus of horrified noises lifts the roof off the Barn. The rest happens as if in slow motion. He raises it to his lips and bites into one end. Several geeks scream. Andie’s usually pale face glows scarlet. She’s about to pop from hilarity. When Nico takes a second bite and says, “Yum,” there’s a mass stampede out the door. I’m left alone with Andie, Nico, and the dog doo.

“Carmen will NEVER touch you again,” Andie gasps out between bouts of hysteria.

My face must be a frozen mask of disgust because Nico holds out the remaining half of the pooplike object for my inspection. “It’s a hazelnut energy bar. Andie shaped it.”

Oh, great. The one boy in a hundred-mile radius crushing on me couldn’t be normal?

“Good one,” I say. “Later.”

Eva calls Mom to say that she’ll be eating dinner at Carrie the Cheery Cheerleader’s house. I happen to know that Carrie flew to Minnesota for a cousin’s wedding, but I keep my mouth shut for the second time today. It feels good. Knowledge is power.

“I’m glad she’s branching out after this whole Carmen thing,” Mom says.

The meal passes like a trig class in slow motion, while my mind whirrs and clicks in hyperkinetic mode. If Eva isn’t with Carrie, where is she? Maybe with Carmen. Carmen could be propositioning her while I eat onion soup. Carmen could be trying to kiss her while I chew on my last crouton. After clearing the table, I hear Eva’s Honda hacking in the driveway. I sprint from the kitchen to the driver’s-side door before she can get away.

The skin around her eyes looks puffy. “Go away,” she says when she sees me.

“What’s wrong? Prithee, speak, my poor child,” I say.

“I said GO AWAY.”

She opens her bedroom window and climbs through, slamming down the sash behind her. There’s a problem with the “knowledge is power” thing. I don’t know anything.

Back in my room I flip on my computer because it’s always willing to talk to me. Right now I need a heartwarming coming-out story to soothe my ragged nerves. With Jonathan in mind, I enter “African-American gay teen.” After a long and almost fruitless search, I discover that a lot of black lesbians pour their hearts out online. Black gay boys do not. I score only one story, posted by Derek.

The church has always been a big part of my life. The fear of losing it, and of losing my family and friends, kept me quiet for a long time. I was afraid to disappoint anyone. But when I finally came out to them, our connection grew stronger. I had forgotten how important honesty is
to good living. Some of the people I care about joined my new church, and that showed me the depth of their feelings.

My cell rings and I reach for it. It’s Bryan.

Me:
Hey.
(Still a little choked up from the story.)

Him:
Hey. Been thinking about you.

Wherefore the sexy rock-star voice? Omigod.

Me:
What exactly about me?

Does he notice the squeak at the end of my question?

Him:
Ready for the real thing? Let’s go for a drive after rehearsal.

M-o-n-u-m-e-n-t-a-l. Bryan asking me on a date + Eva crying in her room = they broke up.

Me:
What do you mean?

Him:
Just you and me.

While I consider this, my heart booms louder than a tuba in a marching band. Eva and I had many firsts together—first rotten peach fight, first time skinny-dipping at the reservoir, first time roller-blading under a cow at a fair. Then rumor had it she went all the way with Bryan when I didn’t even have a boyfriend.

Me:
We should take it slow.

Him:
Whatever you want.

Me:
I don’t want to hurt Eva.

Him:
Me either.

A
fter Bryan’s bombshell
, my online Ouija session goes like this:

Should I take a drive with Bryan? YES

Is Bryan serious about me? YES

Would Eva be upset if she found out? YES

Should I go anyway? YES

It’s unanimous. Living a guilt-free life involves too much self-sacrifice for my taste. Unfortunately, guilt causes my nervous mannerisms to attack in force, knee bouncing, cuticle picking, lip chewing—the whole menu. I try breathing into a paper bag. I try tap-dancing. I try tap-dancing while breathing into a bag. Am I dumb enough to risk my new closeness with Eva over some boy? Then again, that boy is Bryan. And if Eva and I really were close, she would’ve come to cry on my shoulder tonight instead of hiding in her room. And for another thing? She forgave me the other times I went after her ex-boyfriends. Eventually.