Shuffle, Repeat (15 page)

“Don't,” he says. “You can't make this better with big words or flowery speeches. Maybe you think I'm this big, stupid jock who always runs around punching people—”

“I don't think that, I swear!”

“—but just for the record, I've never hit someone unless it was during a football play. Now, because of you, I'm a guy who punches people.” He glares at me and I'm scared by what I've done to him, by his anger. “Thanks for that, June. Thanks a lot.”

Oliver whirls and stalks away down the hall. I watch him go, the fear blossoming, expanding inside me. It's not that I'm afraid he'll hurt me. I'm terrified that I have hurt him in some way that can never be healed.

I don't go back to physics. Instead, I wait by study hall until the bell rings and students pour out of the classroom. When Itch sees me, he turns and walks in the opposite direction, so I have to run to catch up with him.

“Itch, please.” I'm practically jogging beside him. “I'm sorry Oliver hit you.”

He jerks to a halt and narrows his eyes at me. “Oliver is already sorry that Oliver hit me. Oliver told me so about a hundred times, and then Oliver insisted on buying me several cold sodas to hold against the place where Oliver's fist connected with my mouth.” I zero in on Itch's lower lip. It's swollen but not too bad. I feel a tiny bit better. After all, I've seen Oliver throw a football. He has a hell of an arm. There's no way he put full effort into that swing.

“Why didn't you tell him?” Itch demanded. “Why pretend we were still dating? You're the one who broke up with me, so what the hell is your problem?”

The only thing I can say is 100 percent true: “I don't know.”

For a while, Itch stares down at me without speaking. He finally says, “Actually, I don't really care what your problem is. Your problem is not my problem. Not anymore.”

And for the second time in one day, I'm left standing in a hallway while a boy walks away from me.

The next morning, I gear up for the day by spending some quality time with the sweet note Dad sent with my birthday flowers. I try to convince myself that I am a decent person. That's why I keep the note on my bedroom bulletin board: for just such emergencies.

It doesn't really help.

However, since
Oliver
is a decent person, he shows up in front of my house, just like every other weekday morning.

“I didn't know if you were going to come,” I say as soon as I climb aboard the behemoth.

“I honor my promises,” Oliver says, backing out into the street. I appreciate that he didn't add the words “unlike you.” Still, he doesn't look at me.

“I'm sorry,” I tell him.

“I know.”

“What can I do?”

Oliver is quiet for a while. He finally says, “You can explain why.”

“It's high school, remember? People just know when you're dating; people just know when you break up.”

“Friends know
before
the random people know,” he says. “Friends tell each other when big life events happen. I thought…”

He stops and I fill in the rest of the sentence for him. “You thought we were supposed to be friends.” Oliver nods. “We are,” I say.

Snowy fields go by in silence. The highway happens in silence. Main Street is nothing but painful, empty silence. I can't think of the right way to break it, to make this okay. All the sentences I write in my head seem flat and cliché. All apologies, all excuses. They don't make any sense, because…

Because I don't make any sense.

That's what I realize as we drive onto campus: I, myself, June Rafferty, don't make any sense. So that's what I tell Oliver.

My friend Oliver.

As he pulls into a spot, I set my hand on his arm. “Wait.”

Oliver puts the car into park but doesn't turn off the engine. He keeps his eyes pointing straight ahead through the windshield and does what I ask. He waits.

“There was no
reason.
Itch didn't do anything wrong. He was exactly the same as he always was. I just…” I stop as guilt washes up and over and through me again. “I just didn't like him anymore. Not like that. It all went away and was gone, and no matter what I did, it wouldn't come back.” My words tumble out faster now that I'm giving voice to my confusion. “I hate that I did that to Itch, but it would have been worse if I'd continued on with it, if I'd kept putting one foot in front of the other, moving in the same direction when all I wanted to do was jump to a different path and—”

“What path?” Oliver turns to look at me. The morning sun is brilliant behind him, blazing his white-blond hair into a halo, and just like that, I'm speechless again. Oliver leans closer. He stares directly into my eyes. “What different path did you want to jump to?”

I swallow. “I didn't…I just knew this one was wrong.”

Oliver gazes at me for a long, long moment. I go warm inside and he finally pulls away, settling back against the window. “You did the right thing.”

“I did?”

“Not the part where you didn't tell me. That sucked. I mean breaking up with Itch.” He pulls his keys out of the ignition and twists in his seat so he can retrieve his backpack from the floor behind him. “It would be worse to stay with someone because of convenience or because senior year is halfway over or something. That would be worse.”

Before I can answer, he opens his door and swings out of it. “So you're forgiven,” he says. “But from now on—”

“No secrets.” I cut him off. “Promise.”

“Good,” Oliver says, and slams the door.

Ainsley is standing in front of my locker when I arrive to switch out one science book for another. Her eyes are extra sparkly against her light brown skin. “Dude!” she says, wrapping an arm around me. “You are at the center of some very epic drama. What happened with you and Itch? Did he cheat on you with Zoe?”

Oh, good. Now I get to deal with this.

“Did someone tell you that?” I ask to buy time, twirling the combination dial.

“
Several
someones.”

“Well, they're wrong.” I pull away from her so I can open the door and toss my environmental science textbook inside. “Itch didn't cheat on me. I broke up with him and then he started dating Zoe. Completely legit and no big deal. It was all a misunderstanding. Oliver shouldn't have punched him.”

I turn to find that Ainsley has a startled look on her face. Her eyes lock on mine and her brows slowly move toward each other. “What?”

Whoops.

I didn't tell Oliver I had broken up with Itch, and Oliver didn't tell Ainsley he had punched him. She heard about the breakup from someone else (or, rather,
several
someones), but it hadn't gotten back to her yet that her boyfriend had roughed up my ex-boyfriend, probably because how do you tell someone that?

Suddenly, it's really awkward up in here.

“Oliver
hit
Itch?”

“Uh, yeah?” It comes out of my mouth like a question. “Oliver saw him kissing Zoe and thought he was cheating on me. From what you're saying, it sounds like he wasn't the only one who thought that, but I guess Oliver got a little…overly zealous.”

Ainsley doesn't say anything. She studies me, like she's trying to figure something out. If she succeeds, I hope she'll let me in on it. “Why didn't Oliver know you broke up with him? You're with him every single morning.”

Ah, the million-dollar question.

“Oliver and I don't get personal.”

It's not exactly the truth, but it's not completely a lie, either. How are you
supposed
to tell someone you've pledged a friendship of honesty with her boyfriend? It's on the up-and-up…but somehow, it doesn't sound like it.

How did this get so complicated?

Ainsley keeps staring at me, and I can't tell what she's thinking. There's a long pause, during which I can't help wondering if she has any inclination toward violence. After all, her boyfriend did just throw a punch. Maybe they were brought together by their shared love of physical savagery?

Ainsley makes a move toward me and I flinch backward, but she's fast. In a second, her arms are around me. “You poor thing,” she whispers into my ear. “It's so embarrassing.”

Embarrassing? I think other words are more appropriate, but I'm not about to quibble over semantics. I just go with it. “
So
embarrassing.”

“I mean, Zoe Smith.” Ainsley says it with a shudder. “You know she only passed chem last year because she let Mr. Welch look at her tits.”

I try to imagine Zoe doing such a thing. She's artsy and quirky, but an exhibitionist? I don't know.

“Don't worry,” says Ainsley. “You're way prettier than her.”

Where I fall on the beauty scale in relation to Zoe is actually the least of my worries, but given the weirdness of this whole situation, I'm willing to let Ainsley think that's where my concerns lie. “Really? You think so?”

“Totally,” Ainsley assures me.

“Awesome,” I say, even though this conversation is anything but awesome.

I manage to catch Oliver alone as he's going into the cafeteria for lunch. “Heads up. Ainsley was a little surprised to find out about the whole Itch debacle. You might want to tell her that you have a thing about cheaters or something….What?”

Oliver is grinning at me. “It's all good, Rafferty. Ainsley is into knights in shining armor or something. She thinks it was chivalrous.” He sees my look. “Don't worry. I'm not about to make it a thing, where I go around hitting people. I'm just saying that in this one scenario, this one time…it ended up just fine.”

“Except for the part where Itch got a fat lip for no reason.”

At least Oliver has the good sense to look uncomfortable. “Right, except for that,” he says.

God, I can't wait to get out of here.

I meet Shaun at his locker after homeroom. He gives me a dead rose and I give him a burnt heart-shaped cookie, and then we hold hands on the way to AP English. No one even looks at us funny. “Are you sure you can't just be straight?” I ask him. “It would make everything easier.”

“It would.” Shaun's tone is more earnest than usual, making me wonder what's going on with him.

“How's Kirk?”

“Fine, I guess.” Shaun heaves a long, deep sigh. “But I wish he was here and we didn't have to be long-distance. We could go to a movie or do our homework together or make out on the bleachers or whatever people do when they live in the same place.”

“Making out on the bleachers isn't all it's cracked up to be. You're either too hot or too cold, and someone is always at an uncomfortable angle.”

“It's got to be better than this.” Shaun pulls me to a halt. He reaches for my other hand, and as kids flow around us in the hallway, he closes his eyes. “Nope.” He shakes his head. “Not good.”

“What are you doing?”

“Close your eyes.”

I oblige, because it's Shaun. “Now what?”

“Pick someone. Someone like Itch, from your past. Or someone else. Whoever, just as long as it's someone you know. Try to picture him.”

I imagine Shaun. “You look cute today. Nice shirt.”

Shaun squeezes my hands. “Come on, someone who makes your heart go
whammo.
”

Oliver rises behind my lids. He's grinning so I can see the top row of his teeth. His eyes are crinkling straight at me and he's happy—so happy it makes the corners of my mouth tug upward in response.

“Got someone?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” says Shaun. “Can you see the person? Like
really
see him?”

My imagined Oliver's grin widens. He leans toward me and suddenly I can do more than picture the way he looks. I can smell the clean, soapy scent of him; I can hear his laugh the way it sounds when it rings out in the behemoth. “Yes,” I whisper. Shaun doesn't answer, so I open my eyes.

He's looking at me with sadness written all over his face. He gives me a smile that is rueful and agonized and heartbreaking all at once. “When I close my eyes, I can't see Kirk anymore,” Shaun says. “I used to be able to picture him so clearly. There was this hallway downstairs in the main building where we met at Rutgers. The first time we kissed, it was in a corner down there, under one of those crappy fluorescent lights that make everyone look terrible. Everyone except Kirk. Even under that flickering, greenish light, he still looked like a Greek god. That's what I could always picture, what he looked like under those lights.”

“But technology,” I say. Because it's Shaun, he understands.

“It makes it worse. We talk on our phones or our computers and it's supposed to be better, it's supposed to connect us, except now when I close my eyes, all I can see is the tech version of Kirk. He's pixelated or blurry or frozen because the connection has died.” Shaun sighs again and my heart hurts for him. “Maybe that's it. Maybe our connection has died.”

“You're such a poet,” I tell him, and his eyes snap to mine. Then he grins really big, because he gets it—that I'm defusing, I'm softening, I'm making it better the only way I know how.

“You're such an asshole,” he tells me.

“I love you,” I say, and hug him hard.

“I love you, too.”

“Happy Valentine's Day, Shaun.”

“Happy Valentine's Day, June.”

After lunch, I'm trudging toward Spanish III when everything goes dark red. Someone has covered my eyes with their hands. I spin, which puts me right in the circle of Oliver's arms, and I'm looking up at him. We both immediately break apart, stepping backward. “What are you doing?” My tone sounds belligerent, which is the opposite of how I feel.

“I have a present for you.”

Color rises up my chest and past my collarbones, making me feel the unholy triumvirate of flushed, pissed (at myself), and embarrassed. “Oh, really?” It's supposed to come out nonchalant, but…

But it doesn't.

Oliver reaches under his jacket and I see that his left side is bulky because he's got something hidden there. “I made it myself.”

My blush deepens, and I try to distract from it with a glare. “Why?”

He laughs. “You're so dependable.” He pulls out the thing that's been in his jacket, and presents it to me with a flourish. I accept it and…stare.

“It's a pillow,” I say.

Oliver laughs again. “Your powers of perception are overwhelming.”

“Thank you?” I am honestly not sure what I am supposed to do with a pillow that might be made out of felt and is definitely turquoise on one side and hot pink on the other. Also, one corner is truncated, like someone lopped it off and sewed it back together.

“It's for the mornings,” Oliver explains. “Because you think my car is too big and you're never quite comfortable. You can sit on it.”

What Oliver has just given me is—by a long shot—the most awkward gift I have ever been given, but that's not why I feel awkward. I feel awkward because it is a gift. All I can manage to do is accept the pillow and mumble some gratitude. “Thanks.”

“Happy Valentine's Day!” Oliver says, and he doesn't look at all awkward. He just looks happy.

Damn it all to hell, Oliver is more than good-looking.

He's beautiful.