Life totally sucks, so I do not see Joe all day.
Or rather: I do see Joe, but only with his girlfriend, Sasha Cotton, wrapped around him. She sits on his lap in the cafeteria, eating cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches, taking bites so small, I wonder if she is even human. During assembly she crosses her legs over his and puts one arm around his neck and another around his stomach. Sasha Cotton grabs him from behind in between classes and kisses the place where his hair meets his neck while he smiles and rubs his thumbs against her wrists. When we play cards during free periods, Sasha Cotton doesn’t actually play, but she rests her head in Joe’s lap and reaches up to touch his chest from time to time.
It is torture.
He walks her to math class, which she and I are in together, and he squeezes her ass before leaving her at the door. If it were me, I’d giggle and push him away. I think that’s how most girls flirt. But Sasha leans into his touch. She doesn’t smile. Locks her green eyes on his. Puffs out her lips, a slight opening in between the top and bottom lip. That small space is the difference between Sasha Cotton and every other girl in the world.
The annoying thing about Sasha is that she’s not cheerleader sexy. She’s more like fortune-telling Gypsy sexy.
I white-knuckle it through math class, do homework in an empty classroom for a while after school to regroup, then walk to my family’s coffeehouse, Tea Cozy. I have earned coffee. And a cookie. Or, like, three cookies and a brownie. Joe and I haven’t so much as made eye contact since he said he was falling for me. You’d think this would be impossible at a tiny school in a tiny town, but he makes it happen. There is a corset around my heart, and every time I calculate how long it’s been since we’ve shared a secret wave or smile or breathy hey there, the corset tightens. I attempt one of Cate and Paul’s meditation techniques: looking out the Tea Cozy windows and focusing on the mountains, losing myself in the way the fog collides with the snowy peaks, and thinking of nothing else.
It does not work. Meditation is bullshit. That’s my official opinion.
“Long day?” Paul says, bringing me a coffee, no milk, tons of sugar. Cate hates the way I drink my coffee and tries to make me drink milk-heavy lattes like the ones she makes at home, or, ideally, green tea.
“Longest day,” I say, and take a few long gulps of the strong, sugary stuff.
“The mommy-and-me class that meets here just left, so I hear you, Tab. These women had guitars and tambourines and—what’s the little silver thing called? The one that dings when you hit it? The one shaped like a triangle?”
“Um, a triangle?” I have already finished half a cup of coffee.
“That’s hilarious. Yeah. A triangle. Oh man. Hilarious.”
Paul is high. I know because his voice goes all squeaky when he smokes up, and his chattering is mostly of the hehehe variety. Cate’s making drinks, manning the register, and looking all pissed at Paul and me, since she’s stuck doing everything while we’re in the corner hiding from my former best friends, who have paraded through the door like they’ve forgotten my family owns this place and they are not welcome.
Cate and Paul may be my parents, but I use that term loosely, since they had me when they were sixteen like me. Paul’s a stoner and Cate’s a flake but they’re mine, and if nothing else, at least they care about stuff like that my former best friend, Jemma, and the girl who was our third wheel, Alison, are taking over the couch we used to all sit on together, and drinking my mother’s famous hot chocolate like everything’s fine.
“They don’t even look, you know, sheepish,” Paul says. “Shouldn’t they be embarrassed? They know we hate them, right?” He’s a bigger kid than me, my handsome, scruffy father. He’s also not talking quietly enough. Alison and Jemma crane their necks to look from the paisley couch to our collage-top table. Paul must be immune to things like the stink eye, or maybe all adults are, so he’s rambling on. “You were basically doing them a favor, hanging out with them. Who are they to ditch you? They’ll last about five seconds in college. You know that, right? Queens of the world right now, but in college being awesome actually counts for something, you know?”
Paul never went to college. He was too busy staying home with me and playing with blocks and teaching me the alphabet.
“I remember when they started getting all judge-y. I’ll never forget the way they looked at you when you said you wanted to put in highlights. Like you’d said you wanted to start doing crack or something.” Paul keeps shaking his head. He can’t get his mind around what happened with my friends, and I can’t either. They stopped liking me. I guess it’s simple, except for how surprising it was. Cate says sometimes change makes people very angry.