The Book of Luke (26 page)

“
J
osie called while you were out,” my mom told me when I came through the kitchen door.

“But I was just at her house.” It didn’t make any sense for Josie to call me fifteen minutes after I left her.

My mom shrugged. “She just said that you should go to Friendly’s. Somebody’s there waiting for you.”

“Who?” I asked.

“I think his name was Eliza Doolittle.”

I found Luke in a booth toward the back of the restaurant, sitting all by himself. He didn’t notice me at first, and when I sat down across from him, he looked so startled I almost wondered if Josie hadn’t told him I was coming.

“Why are you here?” I asked, sliding along the vinyl seat.

“You tell me. Josie called and told me to meet you here. She said you had something to say to me.”

I did? I guess I did.

“I’m sorry.”

Before Luke could say anything, a waitress appeared at our table. “Are you ready to order now?”

I watched Luke before I answered. There was no way I was going to order something before I knew if he planned on staying. But then I changed my mind. I wasn’t going to wait for Luke’s response to gauge what I should say. I already knew what I wanted.

“I’ll have a strawberry Fribble, please,” I ordered.

Luke hesitated and I found myself crossing my fingers for good luck. “I guess I’ll have a Fribble, too. Strawberry.”

Once the waitress collected our menus, we were alone again. Unfortunately, it was going to take more than an extrathick milkshake to make Luke forget about everything that had happened.

“I never meant for the guide to go as far as it did,” I tried to explain. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.”

Luke shook his head and tore the corner off the paper napkin sitting in front of him. “How was it supposed to turn out, Emily? Because as far as I can tell, you had plenty of chances to end this long before it got this far. But you didn’t.”

“If I’d told you about the guide you would have hated me.”

He continued tearing the napkin into pieces until there was nothing left except a pile of odd little shapes.

Finally, he looked up at me. “And how would that have been different from the way I feel now?” he asked.

“You don’t hate me,” I told him, and hoped I’d be able to convince him it was true. “You can’t just hate me overnight.”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore. I don’t know when you’re telling me the truth or when you’re just pretending.”

“I’m not pretending, I swear.” My voice cracked and I could feel a lump growing inside my throat. I swallowed hard and hoped it would dissolve. “I couldn’t fake the way I feel about you.”

Luke silently considered my answer, but he wasn’t offering any immediate forgiveness. And so I watched as he reached for the napkin dispenser, pulled another white sheet, and added to the growing mound in front of him.

“Did you really think I was so bad that you had to change me?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I didn’t even really know you,” I admitted. “I guess I wanted to think so.”

And that was the truth. It was so much easier to believe that Luke was some bad guy who needed to learn how to be good. Or to think of my dad as the one who was wrong. Or even to look at Sean and see somebody who’d intentionally hurt me. It was so much simpler than trying to understand that sometimes people do things and say things and make decisions that aren’t always right—just like I did with Luke. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad. It just makes them human.

“They’re hiring, you know.” Luke pointed to a red sign hanging in the front window. “Maybe they’d let you bring your own apron.”

“Maybe.” I tried not to smile, but it didn’t work.

“Why didn’t you just tell Lucy and Josie about us? Or tell them that you didn’t want to do the guide anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I told him, hating my answer even before I said it out loud. “I guess because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake.”

“Is that what I was, a mistake?” he asked.

I shook my head and wanted so badly to take his hand, only I was afraid he wouldn’t let me. “I made a lot of mistakes—lying to you and then lying to Josie and Lucy. But how I feel about you isn’t one of them.”

Luke reached for the salt shaker and held it in his hand while he thought. “You know why I sent you that valentine in sixth grade?”

“Because your mom made you?”

“No,” he answered, and then broke out into a grin. “Well, maybe a little. But I could have sent it to anyone. I sent it to you because I thought you were nice.”

“I was. I still am.”

Luke sat back against his seat as the waitress placed our Fribbles on the table. “Anything else?” she asked, laying down two straws.

“How about an order of fries,” I suggested.

She started to write on her pad of paper and then stopped. “Just one?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “We’re going to share.”

Luke smiled and bumped knees with me under the table. Instead of moving my leg, instead of saying “excuse me” and politely giving Luke room, I kept it there pressed against him. And instead of feeling wrong, it felt absolutely right.

I’ll never have any idea why Luke and I ended up together. We probably seemed like two of the most unlikely people to wind up making sense. Even now, looking back at how Josie and Lucy and I had changed, how our friendship would be different but not necessarily worse, I had a feeling we’d be all right. I guess relationships are just funny like that. It’s impossible to figure out why some work out and others don’t. Why someone can be so imperfect and still be the perfect person for you. Maybe, in the end, it’s not about changing the person you care about. Maybe it’s about learning what you can live with. Or maybe it’s really about learning what you can’t live without.

In ten years the Heywood Academy class of 1016 will open our time capsule and find some crusty old lip gloss, a few discolored magazines, and other remnants of our senior year. They’ll think they know all about us—what we liked and disliked and what we thought was important. But they’ll never know how over the course of four months so much happened and yet we all managed to survive—me, Lucy, Josie, Sean, TJ, my mom and dad, even Luke. They’ll have no idea that I’d left behind a boyfriend and two best friends and come close to losing two best friends and a boyfriend. They’ll have no clue that hiding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn’t make you nice, it just makes you a liar.

They’ll never know why there’s nothing in the capsule from three girls on the senior class list, and probably just think that someone made a mistake.

And I did. I made several, actually. But you know what? Sitting there with Luke sipping my strawberry Fribble, I wouldn’t change a thing.