She's So Dead to Us (21 page)

It turned out I didn’t care. That was the thing. I didn’t care that Hammond and Ally had hooked up. I thought that every time I looked at her I was going to see him, but I didn’t. All I saw was her.

And I couldn’t stop staring.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” Ally lifted her rubber-gloved hands toward her nose.

Snagged. “No. Sorry. I just zoned out for a second,” I said.

It was our third morning of detention, and we were still scraping gum. I never knew the people at my school chewed this much gum.

“Oh. Okay.” She got back to scraping. “So, Jake Graydon, tell me about yourself.”

My brain went completely blank. I picked up my putty knife and went to work on a wad of pink gum. “Tell you about myself?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna be here every day for the next seven days.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “May as well talk.”

We’d talked yesterday. And the day before. About basketball and soccer and lacrosse and swimming and the shore and the city and Baltimore, where she’d lived before moving back. But I guess we hadn’t talked about anything real, really. The way girls seemed to love to do.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What’d you do for Christmas?” Ally asked. She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder as she bent over the table.

“Visited my grandparents in Philly,” I said. “It’s the only time all year I get to see all my cousins at the same time, so it was pretty cool.”

“Really? How many cousins do you have?” she asked.

“Twenty-three.”

Her jaw dropped. “Shut up!’

“Why? How many do you have?” I asked, sitting up straight.

“Um, five,” she said. “And they all live in California, so I never see them. Can you, like, name them all?”

“Sure,” I said. I recited the list from oldest to youngest. Told her all about how everyone was excited to see my crazy cousin Devon, who’d spent the past year studying art in Italy and then come back and acted so superior we’d all ended up throwing canapés at him until he finally broke and launched a counterattack. I told her about Leanna, who had sent in applications to be on
The Bachelor
for five years in a row and had finally made the cut, so she refused to consume anything other than celery and water. When I told the story of how the toddlers had tried to use my uncle’s old waterbed as a trampoline she laughed so hard coffee came out her nose.

“Omigod!” she said, lifting a paper towel to her face. “I’m so gross!”

That was it. She didn’t squeal, scream, run for the bathroom, or leave the school never to return. She sniffled and got back to work, telling me all about her chill Christmas and how her mom had loved her present.

This girl was effing awesome. As I listened to her relate the details of the Christmas tree and the dinner and the presents, I realized I wasn’t bored.

“Then, of course, we spent the day after Christmas with the Nathansons,” she said, shaking her head. “This is a new tradition, apparently. Day-after dinner with le boyfriend. Except this time it was at their place, so I got the full tour of Quinn’s very pink, very huge bedroom suite. Not that she wanted to show it to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say I’m not so sure Princess Quinn is too psyched about having to hang out with a Crestie reject like me,” Ally said, then blushed.

I felt hot all of a sudden, too. Since it was my friends who had made her a reject. I sat back on my butt and fiddled with the putty knife. “Is that weird, your mom dating someone?”

“Everything’s weird,” she replied, sitting back as well.

“What do you mean?”

She dropped her knife and leaned back on her hands. Her gloves made squishy, squeaky noises on the floor. “I don’t know . . . it’s like I’m back but I’m not back. I’m here . . . I’m home . . . but nothing’s the same. My friends are here but they’re not my friends. My house is here but it’s not my house.”

I looked down at my hands, feeling responsible somehow. I would’ve given her her room back if I could.

“And my family . . . it’s just weird being here without my dad. Everywhere I go it’s like I expect to see him there waiting for me. There are all these memories, but he’s not here.”

Her voice broke, and she stopped. My heart did this weird clenching thing at the mention of her father. But I couldn’t tell her what I knew. Because I didn’t really know anything for sure. And it also was none of my business. Wouldn’t it freak her that someone she barely knew kind of knew where her dad was?

I wished my friends were here listening to this. They’d never be able to blame her for all the crap her dad did if they knew what it was doing to her. And they also wouldn’t be able to laugh about where her dad was now. Or about the fact that they all knew and she didn’t. Not that there weren’t other reasons for them not to like her, but only Shannen and Hammond knew about those.

“You know that box score?” she said suddenly. “The one from the JV championship?”

“Yeah.”

“That was the night we left. I wrote that in while my dad was yelling at me to get in the car,” I said. “I had this, like, need to record it there before we left. Like it would somehow mean something if it was there. It should have been the best night of my life, but instead it was the worst. I never got to go to the banquet and get my championship ring. I never even got to go over the play by play with Shannen and Hammond like we always did. Instead it was all just over. My life as I knew it was just over.”

“Wow. That sucks,” I said. “You never even got your ring?”

She cracked a sad smile. “Nope. I figured they’d mail it to me, but . . .” She shrugged and looked down at her hands.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.

“No. It’s okay. Maybe we should just change the subject.” She quickly reached for her putty knife, but it slipped out of her hand. We both grabbed for it, and my gloved fingers closed over hers. We froze. I stared down at our plastic hands, my heart pounding.

“Well,” Ally said. “That’s romantic.”

And we laughed. Suddenly my palms were sweating under my gloves. I slid my hand away and we got back to work, but I felt as if my whole body was on high alert. There was no getting around it anymore. I was falling for this girl.

Big-time.

“What about this? You’d look
hot!
” I sang, holding out a brown suede jacket to David in the middle of the men’s section at Macy’s. “Your groupies would be all over you.”

David looked at me dubiously, and I paused, suddely hot with guilt. Did he realize I was trying too hard? When he’d asked me to come to the mall this afternoon to help him construct a new look for his band, I’d practically pole-vaulted at the chance, feeling like I somehow had to atone for all my Jakesession over the past week of morning detentions. But all I’d been thinking about since arriving at the Garden State Plaza an hour ago was how I had to break up with him. How I liked him too much to do this to him anymore. My stomach was in knots, my heart was in pain, and my brain felt like it was going to explode from trying to make myself appear chipper when I was anything but.

I kept thinking about that moment before Christmas. When he’d held my hand and jokingly made me promise that if I went to the Crestie going away party, I’d come back. He was so cute and clueless to the fact that I was the most awful girlfriend ever. And now it looked like I was never coming back.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of seventies,” he said. “Besides, do you really want my groupies to be all over me?”

He looped his arms around my waist and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

I was a horrible person. A horrible, dishonest, nefarious person.

David turned away without waiting for an answer. As he flipped through a rack of plaid cowboy-style shirts, I felt like I was going to cry.

“What about this?” He lifted a distressed waffle-knit T-shirt off a separate rack.

“Jake has that shirt,” I said, before I could edit myself.

David’s face fell. He turned and jammed the shirt back on the rack. “Never mind.”

“Sorry. I just . . .” I followed after him, my underarms prickling. Was it always so damn hot in this place? “Is something wrong?”

“No. Nothing,” David said facetiously. “But do you even realize that’s, like, the tenth time you’ve mentioned Jake today?”

He turned to face me between two huge racks of Tommy Hilfiger sweaters, his jacket folded over both hands. This was it. This was my chance. I had to tell him the truth. I had to tell him how I felt about Jake. He’d just given me the perfect opening.

“Ten times?” I said with a gulp. “Come on.”

Chicken. Sorry-ass chicken.

“Okay, ten is a stretch, but still. In the Gap that guy behind the counter looked
just
like him, and in the food court? That whole story about how he ate five Egg McMuffins one morning during detention?”

Crap. Was it really that bad?

“Um, that adds up to three,” I joked lamely.

“You like him, don’t you?” David said.

Okay. It was now or never. I took a deep breath and held it for a moment. This was going to suck. Hard. “David, I’m really sorry—”

“I knew it!” He turned away from me and started speed walking for the aisle. “I am such an idiot. The guy asked you to dance right in the middle of me asking you out. If that’s not a sign, what is?”

“David. Come on. Wait up!” I said, hustling after him as best I could with my bulky coat over my arm and my bag slung over my shoulder. “Can we just talk about this?”

We burst out into the aisle, and a woman wielding a perfume bottle squeaked as she sidestepped out of our way. David stopped in front of a Calvin Klein fragrance display and whirled on me. I’d never seen him angry before, and it was not a good look for him. His face was all blotchy, his nostrils flared, his eyes wet. My heart collapsed in on itself. It was my fault he looked like that. All my fault.

“What’s to talk about? My girlfriend likes some other guy,” he said, looking me dead in the eye. “So I guess she’s not my girlfriend anymore.”

Ouch. That hurt everywhere. David turned on his heel and stormed away.

“David. Wait!”

I wasn’t sure why I was calling after him. What I expected to say. I just didn’t want him to leave like that. I didn’t want him to leave hating me so much that his entire walk was different.

And just like that, my first relationship ended. With all the Macy’s fragrance-spritzing ladies as an audience. I supposed I should have been relieved. I’d known for weeks this was going to happen, and now it was finally over. But I’d hurt David. Just like Annie had predicted I would. And he was definitely one of the top four people I never wanted to see hurt.

Valentine’s Day. The moment Quinn bounced into my homeroom wearing a fake cotton diaper over her Seven For All Mankind jeans, carrying a foam bow and arrow and a quiver full of carnations, I knew I should have stayed in bed. It was an annual cheerleading fund-raiser, selling flowers for V-Day. White meant friendship. Pink meant secret admirer. Red, true love. The order forms had been handed out the week before. I’d torn mine up into exactly forty-eight pieces before tossing it into the garbage.

I wasn’t with David, who refused to return my texts, my e-mails, and my calls and was now sitting with his bandmates at lunch every day. I wasn’t with Jake, who I hadn’t spoken to since our detention stint had ended almost a month ago because he’d never approached me in public, which made me feel like I shouldn’t approach him—which, after all the fun we’d had together, seriously sucked. And my mom was going away to the Adirondacks with Gray Nathanson for the weekend. Valentine’s Day could bite me.

“Flower delivery! Someone loves you!” Quinn announced, bouncing down the aisle distributing flowers. When she stopped next to my desk, I almost dead-legged her. “Hi, Ally! Somebody loves you!”

My heart stopped as she reached into her quiver and extracted a huge bundle of pink carnations tied with a red ribbon. Her grin was wide as she placed them in front of me. Probably she felt happy that I wasn’t as big of a loser as she’d thought. I, however, was stunned speechless. Then she took out one lone pink and dropped that in front of me too.