P.S. I Like You (3 page)

“Lily!” Jonah said, running in and sliding to a halt in front of me. “Look! I have a loose tooth.” He opened his mouth wide and pushed on his top right tooth with his tongue. It didn’t move at all.

“Cool, buddy.”

“Okay, bye!” He was out just as fast as he came in.

“Shut my door!” I yelled after him, but either he didn’t hear or didn’t want to. I sighed, got up, and shut it. Then I focused back on the video and my guitar.

Two minutes later, there was a knock and then my mom appeared. “Your turn to unload the dishwasher.”

“Can I just finish this?” I ask, nodding down toward my guitar.

“I can’t start dinner until the sink is empty and the sink can’t be empty until the dishwasher is.”

I considered fighting for five more minutes but then I glanced up at my mom. She looked even more tired than usual.

“Okay, I’ll be right there.” I closed my eyes and played one more strum, letting the notes vibrate through my arms. My whole body relaxed.

“Hurry up, Lily!” my mom called.

Ugh.

The next morning before school, I stopped in the kitchen to grab some cereal. Mom had already dropped off Jonah and Wyatt, and was folding laundry in the den. Ashley was still getting ready (it took her hours) and my dad was at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper.

I took a box of cereal from the pantry and was pouring some into a bowl when I saw something on the counter that made me shake my head. Two necklaces lay on the beige granite, a piece of paper beneath each one. The necklace on
the right had two checkmarks on the paper. The one on the left had two checkmarks.

“No,” I said.

My dad peeked over the top of his newspaper. “Just vote. It’s not a big deal.”

“You say it’s no big deal but then you make it a big deal. Whose friend did you rope into voting this time?” I asked, noting there were already four votes without mine.

“Voting is a privilege. There is no rope involved. It’s all in good fun.”

“Then they’re both equally pretty. I vote for both of them.”

“Nope. You have to choose.”

“You and Mom are weirdos. There is no hope for any of us when you two do weird things like this.” I poured myself some milk and sat down at the table. Dad’s newspaper was still in front of him as though he were reading. He was just trying to lull me into a false sense of security. Pretend like the competition didn’t matter.

“You know Mom is not going to leave you alone until you vote,” he said.

“Sure. It’s Mom that cares. Just tell me which one is yours and I’ll vote for it.”

“That would be cheating, Lil.”

“Why did you start this tradition? Mom doesn’t take over your job and try to outdo your fancy carved furniture.”

Dad chuckled. “She’d win for sure.”

I took a bite of cereal. To get his mind on a different track, I asked, “Why do we still get the newspaper? You know you can find these same stories on the Internet … yesterday?”

“I like to hold my words.”

I laughed, then stopped when I saw something on the page he held in front of him that changed my mind about newspapers.

Suddenly, I loved newspapers.

Songwriting Competition
.
Earn five thousand dollars and a three-week intensive with a top professor at Herberger Institute for Music. Visit our website for more details!
www.herbergerinstitute.edu

“You ready to go?” Ashley asked, coming into the kitchen. She was yawning, but, as usual, she was perfectly put together, in skinny jeans, a pink scoop-neck T-shirt, and platform shoes, with her hair in a ponytail and her makeup flawless. Although we looked alike—same long, auburn hair, hazel eyes, and freckles—our style was totally opposite. Ashley would have fit in well with Lauren and Sasha at school.

“What?” I blinked at my sister, confused. “I mean, yes. I mean, Dad, can I have that?”

Dad looked at his plate, which had a half-eaten bagel on it, shrugged, and pushed it my way.

“Gross. No, the newspaper.”

“The paper? You want to read the paper?”

“Yes.”

Ashley came over and snatched the bagel off his plate.

“Hey, that was for Lily.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I want the paper, not the bagel.”

He grunted. “Nope, it still didn’t sound believable the second time I heard it either.”

“Funny, Dad.”

“You can have the paper if you go vote.”

I rolled my eyes, pushed my chair away from the table, and went back to examine the necklaces. The one on the right had feathers. My mom was going through a feather phase. I was normally a fan of my mom’s jewelry but the feather thing was a little too hippie for my tastes. Other people seemed to like it though. I lifted the one on the left. “This is your winner.”

My dad pumped his fist. “She voted for mine, Emily!”

I held out my hand.

Dad gave me the newspaper, kissed my cheek, and went off to find my mom, I was sure.

“It’s funny how they think we don’t know whose is whose,” Ashley said. “Like the score would be so close every time.”

“I know. We should really make Mom win by a landslide every time and then maybe they’d stop the competition.”

“It’s good for Dad’s self-esteem. Now let’s get you to school, little one.”

I clutched the newspaper to my chest, hugging the words, and followed after my sister. Now I just had to write the perfect song and win this competition.

T
here was something about Chemistry that stimulated every thought in my mind to fire at once. Maybe it was the mixture of boring subject, monotone teacher, and cold seat. I wondered if there was a chemical equation for that. Those three factors, combined, created slush brain. No, that was the wrong term. My brain didn’t become lazy. It became full. Hyperactive brain. A brain that made it impossible to concentrate on the sluggish words exiting Mr. Ortega’s mouth. Were his words coming out slower than normal?

Today, amidst all the usual thoughts and words that I now couldn’t write down in a notebook, I had the song I had learned to play on my guitar the day before looping through my mind. It was a torturous song—one I loved and hated. I loved it because it was brilliant, the kind that made me want to write a song equally as good. I hated it because it was brilliant, the kind that let me know I’d never write a song anywhere close to as good.

And I kept thinking about that contest.

How was I going to win? How would I even
enter
it?

My pencil hovered over my paper—the single Mr. Ortega–approved page. If I could write the song down, it would get out of my head and let me focus on the lecture. This paper would go in front of Mr. Ortega in exactly forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes?
This class was never-ending. What was he even talking about? Iron. Something about the properties of iron. I wrote the word
iron
down on the page.

Then, as if my pencil had a mind of its own, it moved over to the fake wood desktop and jotted down the words playing in my head:

Stretch out your wilting petals and let the light in.

I added a drawing of a little sun, its rays touching some of the words. Now, just forty-three minutes left of class.

I was in the midst of writing in my notebook and walking down the hallway—something I hadn’t quite mastered, despite how many times I had done it—when I heard the laughter.

I thought it was directed at me, so I looked up. It wasn’t.

A blond kid—a freshman, maybe—stood in the middle of the hall, books gripped to his chest. Balanced precariously on top of his head was a baseball bat. Cade Jennings stood behind him, holding his hands out to his sides like he had just let go of that bat.

“Toss me the ball,” Cade said to his friend Mike, who was standing across from him and the poor freshman.

Mike did just that and now Cade was trying to figure out how he was going to reach the top of that bat to place the ball. The kid looked too terrified to move.

“I need a chair. Someone find me a chair,” Cade said, and people immediately scrambled to do his bidding. The bat began to wobble, then fell, bouncing across the tile floor and coming to a stop against the lockers.

“You moved, dude,” Cade said to the freshman boy.

“Try it again,” someone in the watching crowd called.

Cade smiled his big, perfectly white–toothed smile. The one he used a lot, knowing its power. I frowned. I seemed to be the only one immune.

As much as I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I knew I should probably help the cowering kid.

But I wasn’t sure what I could do. Being the center of unwanted attention thanks to Cade Jennings was something I was very familiar with …

I thought back to freshman year P.E. I wasn’t one of those girls who thought she was horrible at everything. But I did know my weaknesses, and P.E. was one of them. And co-ed basketball was the ultimate form of P.E., so I did my best to stay as far away from the ball as possible.

For reasons that I later realized were probably malicious, the ball was constantly thrown to me. By my team, by the opposing team. And I could never catch it. It was like being the only target in a game of dodgeball. I was hit in the shoulder, the back, the leg.

That’s when Cade, who had been sitting on the bleachers, shouted for everyone to hear, “It’s like she possesses a force of energy that sucks the ball straight into her. A black hole. A Magnet. Lily Abbott, the Magnet.”

He’d said that last part in a movie announcer voice. Like he had transformed me into some sort of clumsy superhero. Then all through the gym, everyone copied him. Using that same voice, and laughing.

They’d laughed and laughed, and the laughter had stuck in my ears just as the nickname “Magnet” had apparently stuck in everyone’s heads.

And now that kind of laughter was happening again, in the hall, and it was directed at Cade’s latest victim.

I cleared my throat and said, “Oh look, a game to see who is more thick-headed—Cade or his bat.” I nodded to the side, trying to tell the kid to leave now that I’d distracted Cade.

Cade’s smile doubled in width as he took me in, from the top of my hair—its waves feeling crazier under his scrutiny than normal—to my Docs with mismatched shoelaces. “Oh look, it’s the monitor of fun. Is there too much of it happening here, Lily?”

“I only see one person having fun.”

He glanced around at the hall crammed full of students. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” He lowered his voice. “I get it. It’s hard to see anyone beyond me, right?”

If I showed how annoyed I was, he’d just be winning. “I’m just here to rescue another soul from your arrogance,” I said through gritted teeth.

Although maybe I wasn’t rescuing anyone at all. The kid hadn’t moved. I’d given him a wide opening to leave and he still stood there. In fact, he opened his mouth and said, “What if you put the ball on the bat first and then put the bat on my head.”

Cade patted him on the back. “Good call. Where’d the bat go?”

I sighed. There had been no need for an intervention. The kid liked abuse, apparently. I resumed my walk.

“Next time, come by earlier. We wouldn’t want things to get out of hand,” Cade called, to more laughter.