“Yes!” Cate says. “She’s been the crankiest. I can’t take it. I have enough of my own hormones.”
“The girl wanted coffee,” Paul says, because he apparently has some kind of death wish. “You gave her the saddest drink imaginable. And called it good parenting. Come on, Cate. That’s not the woman I married.” He says it with a wry smile and a wink, but man, it comes out rougher than anything he’s ever said to her. Elise swallows so loudly, it sounds like a dead bolt clinking into place. This is literally the worst possible day for me to smoke up with my dad, but I can’t imagine being the girl on LBC who fails. I don’t want to be Lucky15, alone and sad and looked down on. I can’t let the idea in my head of who I could be fade away already.
I can’t fail at this. I have to be one of them.
“Please leave the café until you sober up,” Cate says. It’s under her breath, I guess, but customers at the tables near us could definitely hear her. Elise takes a few steps to the door, and I do a mini calculation that tells me four hours is still totally enough time to go to the bookstore, get coffee and baked goods, wait for Cate and Paul to cool off, and then do what I promised myself and my new friends that I would do.
I can do it all.
“We’ll be back,” I say to no one.
“So? Heather?” I say when Elise and I are huddled in the poetry corner of the bookstore. The navy-blue polka-dot carpet is plush, and we’ve been known to sit on it for hours. “You like her?” I try to be really good about checking out who’s around when talking to Elise about girls. Her eyes dart around too, and then she grins.
“She’s so cool. She’s really into making her own perfumes and soaps and stuff. And she’s inviting me over, like, all the time. And she never talks about guys.”
“But?”
“Don’t be a downer, Tab,” Elise says. She says it lightly, but her face grimaces. It’s that extra step of actually making a move on another girl that Elise never seems to get over. So the crushes get to this place, and then halt when Elise can’t nudge them along any further. She never says she likes them as more than a friend, never asks if they like girls, never leans in to try kissing them.
“Do you have a plan?”
She’s looking right at me, and her dark eyes are blurry with feelings. “I have to just do it. Right? Tell her how I feel about her. I mean, either way, it won’t freak her out, hopefully. Or if it does, she’s not my friend anyway, right?”
“Totally,” I say. And it’s true. But I also love Elise enough to feel the nervousness that comes with that confession. The horror of it. The way it could emerge from her mouth and drop to the floor with a huge, hollow thud. It’s hard enough to tell someone you have a crush on them. It’s made even harder for Elise, who isn’t totally sure if Heather’s even gay. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I say. I don’t usually speak in platitudes, so Elise looks at me funny, and I can’t figure out where that came from, either. And then I realize it’s in Zed’s profile on LBC.
“People don’t just do whatever pops into their heads, you know?” Elise says. “We’re not all the way you are with Joe or whatever.” I recoil. She might as well have hit me.
“What do you think I’m doing with Joe?” I say, not really wanting the answer but needing the answer anyway.
“I hope nothing, but I think you have a skewed sense of how romantic crap happens. I’m not going to, like, throw myself at Heather and see what sticks. I mean, it’s cool. That you are being all . . . um . . . free. But that’s not me. That’s all I mean. I, like, totally envy your . . . way of being or whatever. But I’m going to feel it out and wait and see.”
I try very hard to come up with the right response. I don’t want to fight with Elise, but I also don’t love the weird implication that I’m kind of a huge disaster.
“I meant it as a compliment,” Elise says, I assume because the look on my face is one of horror and shock. “And, you know, thank you for wanting to help with Heather. I’ll get there.” She raises her eyebrows and plays with the collar of her shirt.
“People do get what they wants sometimes, you know?” I say, and Elise nods and that’s basically it for that portion of the conversation. We both look at our feet and our phones to recover.
Mine reminds me I now have three hours.
“So. Informal poll. What’s the weirdest book in this place?” Elise says. “I’m bored with poetry and self-help. Can we find something new?” She walks over to the religion section, but we’ve done that before, too, so it won’t be much more interesting.
“I’d go for one from the ‘local writers’ section,” I say. The bookstore features a whole display of self-published texts from people in town, and the people in town are pretty damn weird, so it’s a good bet.