The Sweetest Thing (19 page)

“Tell me about it,” I said. I was trying to keep my cool, but I guess I looked upset, because Philippa tilted her head at me, all concerned.

“Hey, Flan, is everything okay?” she asked.

“Well, I'm just looking around for my boyfriend, Bennett.” As soon as I said the word
boyfriend
, I realized that it was probably no longer true. “Has he come through here? He's wearing a Kermit suit.”

“I haven't seen him,” said Philippa. “Mickey?”

“Hang on just a sec, there's my cell.” After some groping around, Mickey found his phone in his pants pocket. “Hey, it's your brother!” He flipped open his phone. “Patch, you're back from the dead!”

“I don't think he's seen him,” Philippa mouthed.

I nodded and wandered away before Mickey could think to put me on the phone with Patch. The last
thing I wanted right then was to talk to my crazy family.

I went back inside to check the kitchen again and was about to give up the search when I suddenly spotted Bennett coming up from the door that led to SBB's basement. He'd taken off his Kermit costume and was wearing some sort of stained, torn green suit with a V across the front of it and moon boots splattered with what looked like raw fruit. I rushed up to him.

“Bennett, listen, I'm so sorry,” I panted. “I know this looks bad, but just give me a chance to explain, please?”

“Leave me alone, Flan. I'm going home,” he muttered.

“But Bennett, I just want to explain!”

“I don't want to hear it. It's obvious what happened—I don't need the details.” He pushed past me and started down the hall, but I caught up with him again when he ran into a group of former United States presidents.

“Well, at least tell me what happened to your clothes? And why aren't you baby-sitting your cousin?” I asked, squeezing past Abe Lincoln.

“I was never going to baby-sit my cousin,” he shot back. “I just wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise me?” I repeated, baffled.

“You were so upset about your frog dissection unit, I wanted to help you.” He barked out a sharp laugh. “So I've been at Stuyvesant with my brother all night, rescuing the frogs out of your bio classroom so he could take them all upstate to the nature preserve he works at on the weekends.”

“Oh my God. I can't believe you did that.” I wanted to reach out to hug him, but he was looking at me with such a disgusted expression that I let my arms fall limp at my sides.

“Yeah, well, it seemed important to you. Afterward I put on this Buck Rogers costume—remember, that old comic book space hero from the movie we watched at your house? No, of course you don't—you were probably daydreaming about third downs or whatever the whole time.”

“I was not!” I protested. The fact was, though, I
had
kind of tuned out most of the movie. When I told Bennett I loved old films from the '40s, he apparently thought that meant I liked guys who talked like radio announcers and dressed like rejects from the starship
Enterprise
, when what I really liked were towering romances and vintage Chanel ball gowns. Bennett had made the movie even more boring by constantly pausing it to talk about how it was different from the
“groundbreaking” comic book series, the first four books of which he'd found on microfiche at the library. I tried to think of something that would prove I'd been paying attention. “There was a girl astronaut in it who wore an aviator cap, wasn't there?”

He went on as if he hadn't heard me. “But when I cut through the parade to get here, I wound up getting pulled onto this float covered with people dressed up as angry gorillas, and well …” He looked down at his ruined costume.

“Oh, Bennett,” I said.

“When I got here I got sent down to the basement by some guy named Thorn, and it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life: all these rusted chains and iron shackles were hanging on the walls of the stairs. Down at the bottom, this guy done up as some sort of leather Viking shoved me in a frog suit.” His eye flashed angrily. “You know the rest.”

I blurted out. “Bennett, I know you're mad—and you have every right to be—but if we could just talk about it—”

“Mad? That's a huge understatement. Flan, this has been the worst night of my life. I think I'll exercise my ‘right' to be ‘mad' somewhere really far away from you.” And with that, he stormed out of the party, the door loudly slamming shut behind him.

I was sitting in the upstairs guest room on the patchy black velvet cushions of an ancient sofa, crying, when Sara-Beth Benny flitted into the room. She may not have been a fairy godmother, but there was no one in the world I wanted to see more.

“Sweetness, I just heard,” she said, flinging her bony arms around me. She sat down on the couch. “I could kill that boy—he's absolutely ruined the party. I mean of course no one noticed but I just can't believe anyone would talk to you that way.”

“But I deserved it.” I sniffled. “I'm a terrible person, Sara-Beth. I've messed everything up tonight.”

“Don't say things like that!” She looked shocked. “Flan, this is all a question of bad luck and bad timing. No jury in the world would convict you, and with all the courtroom dramas I've been in, I should know.”

“I'm not saying I should go to jail.” I blew my nose into one of the black napkins with fanged purple spiders on them from a stack Sara-Beth Benny had handed me. “But I've been a lousy friend and an even worse girlfriend.”

Sara-Beth shook her head. “Everyone makes mistakes, Flan. Think of how many times I've decorated this place in absolutely hideous styles! There was the Moroccan nightmare, the life pod, the 1960s bubble furniture, the French country—”

I blinked away some of my tears. “Bubble furniture? I don't remember that.”

“Oh, you must not have been here that day.” She sighed. “But anyway, my point is, if people couldn't make mistakes and change their minds, we'd be sitting on floor pillows right now, surrounded by bronze elephants, and quite frankly that's one of the last things I need in my life. Now listen.” She seized my hands in hers. “All I want in the world is for you to relax and enjoy yourself. Please, please, please don't let this party become the party where my best friend has a nervous breakdown! I've had too many parties like that already.”

I nodded. “I'm sorry, Sara-Beth.”

“There's no reason to apologize to me! I just want to see you smile.”

I smiled weakly, and Sara-Beth clapped her hands. She's such a funny girl: she'll fill her house with spiderwebs, taxidermied kittens, and rotting Victorian furniture, but she's got pretty good sense when it comes to cheering me up.

“Okay,” I told her, drying my eyes. “I'm going to go talk to Meredith and Judith. I think I'll feel a lot better if they don't hate me, at least.”

“Hooray! And I know just where they are, too.”

For the party, Sara-Beth's decorator had hung heavy black curtains over her guest bedroom's windows; the only light in the room came from pinpricks in the fabric that were patterned to look like spooky constellations—an octopus, a UFO, a skull. A bunch of kids were sitting on the floor by the bed, sticking their hands into bowls filled with food designed to feel disgusting and scary. When Sara-Beth and I went in, everyone groaned and covered their eyes at the light from the hallway.

“Ew! Peeled grapes,” Sara-Beth shrieked, plunging her hand into the nearest container. “They're so gross and sticky! Don't they feel like eyeballs or something?”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed Meredith and Judith, leaning against the taxidermied carcass of a grinning wolf. They were glaring at me.
Between them sat the bowl of spaghetti I'd abandoned on the snake cage earlier in the evening.

“Hey,” I said, feeling weird and shy. “Mind if I sit here?”

They kept scowling at me, but they didn't say no, so I sank down near them on the blue furry-monster carpet.

“I really need to talk to you guys,” I said in an undertone.

“Dried apricots!” Sara-Beth was shrieking. “They're all shriveled!”

“Somewhere quieter,” I added.

“Who says we want to talk to you?” Judith still sounded snippy, but not nearly as mad as she had earlier. I decided to take this as a good sign.

“I don't know if you guys want to talk to me or not, but I really want to talk to you. Come on, please?” I gave them my best beseeching look, which wasn't too hard—I really didn't know what I'd do if they wouldn't hear me out. “Please? You can hate me again as soon as I'm finished, I promise.”

Meredith and Judith looked at each other. Meredith shrugged. Judith sighed.

“Okay, okay,” she muttered. The three of us got up and left the room.

Out in the hallway, Judith folded her arms. “So what's your explanation?”

I bit my lip. It suddenly occurred to me that even though I'd dragged them out here, I still had no idea what to say.

“You totally, totally have the right to be mad at me. Furious even.” I took a deep breath. “I'm furious with myself. But I just can't stand the thought of losing your friendship over this. You both mean more to me than any guy ever could.” Meredith and Judith glanced at each other doubtfully.

“If that's true, then why did you kiss him?” Meredith asked accusingly. “Didn't you make us promise not to go after him just so you could have him for yourself?”

I shook my head. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but I swear I didn't. I didn't even think I liked him then. At first he just seemed like this random jock, and I thought you were crazy to let him come between you. Then I got to know him a little better—in bio class and stuff—and I started to see what you both liked about him. I didn't tell you because I thought I could just keep the feelings stuffed down inside—I honestly never dreamed anything would happen between us.” My voice started to crack. “And I really regret that it did. I'm so stupid sometimes.”

“I just can't believe you'd act like this, Flan.” Judith was still scowling.

“I seriously screwed up. But you guys mean the world to me. I can't imagine Stuy without you. And that's the truth.” I took a deep breath. “I think we all let the Adam situation mess with our judgment.”

Judith puffed herself up. “No, we didn't! At least not the way you did.”

But Meredith just looked down at her shoes.

“Judith, I have something I have to tell you,” she admitted. “Earlier, when we all split up … well, I wasn't really exploring the house. I was looking for Adam. And when I got outside, I finally found him.”

“You did?” Judith turned bright red with anger. “You kissed Adam too?”

“Well … not exactly. See, there was this guy in a Kermit suit, and something about him—the way he was standing by himself, all
contemplative
, you know—I thought it was Adam. So I started flirting with him. I quoted some poetry and stuff, and told him about how I've liked him for a long, long time. He seemed really thrilled—almost like no one had ever said that stuff to him before. I kissed him, but when he took off his Kermit head …” She hesitated. “Well, it turns out it was Jules. I was so embarrassed, I didn't know how to tell him I'd mixed him up with someone else. So …” She smiled timidly. “We're going to the movies on Friday.”

Judith looked flustered. “I can't believe you'd do something like that, Meredith.”

Meredith shrugged sheepishly.

At that point, a whole series of weird expressions crossed over Judith's face. One of them was this sort of nasty, smug expression, like she was about to launch into some long, dramatic thing about how she was oh so morally superior to her backstabbing friends. But the other expression was something I'd never seen on her face before, a kind of terrible, contorted frown. Finally, the second face won.

“Okay, I have to tell you guys something,” she exploded, “but you have to promise not to laugh. Okay?”

Meredith and I nodded.

“When I went off to go to the bathroom, I was looking for Adam too. And I thought I finally found him in the upstairs hallway, because this frog looked kind of tall and football-playerish. So I was being all flirty and touching his arm, and I even made some horrible pun about ‘pirate's booty' … I almost couldn't believe it, but he seemed totally into it and said, ‘I guess you like me,' and I was like, ‘I can't know if I like a guy until he kisses me,' and then I kissed him. But when he took off his Kermit head—” She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, I just can't tell you, it's way too embarrassing.”

“Tell us!” Meredith and I both shrieked.

Judith slowly lowered her hands from her face. “It was Kelvin!” she whispered.

Meredith and I immediately broke our promise and started laughing hysterically, and after a long moment, Judith did too.

“But in art class he was building a Jar Jar Binks mask! You know, from
Star Wars!
” Meredith exclaimed. “What happened?”

Judith threw up her hands. “Yeah, apparently some mariachi band bumped into him when he was getting on the A train and the giant head got crushed in the subway doors.”

Meredith started laughing again, but I just frowned. As funny as it was to picture Kelvin with his alien head stuck in the doors of a subway car, it reminded me a little too much of what Bennett had gone through earlier.

“At least you know you can hit on guys you like now,” said Meredith. “It just sucks that it was Kelvin this time. Of all the guys at the party to randomly flirt with …”

“Tell me about it. It was sooo embarrassing,” Judith said. “I don't know if I can stand to face him in bio next week.”

“Maybe Mr. Phelps'll let you switch lab partners,”
Meredith suggested. “Or you could tell him you'd rather just work alone.”