Elise wears baggy pants and a Don’t Mess with Me look on her face. That’s what Jemma’s trying to get at, but she’s choosing her words carefully so as not to sound judgmental. In Vermont we are not judgmental. We are concerned.
“Elise isn’t exactly trouble,” I say. Also true. Elise doesn’t party or wear low-cut shirts or anything. Just has short hair and pushes the dress code by wearing obnoxious T-shirts underneath her chunky cardigan sweater collection.
Scandalous.
Elise wants to go to Harvard. She volunteers at the hospital and plays with sick kids. She’s practically a saint. A lesbian saint.
Jemma has glassy eyes like she might cry.
It didn’t only make her angry, when I started liking boys more than sci-fi movie marathons and when I started getting catcalls in the halls. It also made her sad.
I think I hate her sadness even more.
Which makes no sense, because I’m the one who got ditched and is still getting assaulted by random insults and slut implications, even if I’m in the supposedly safe haven of Tea Cozy. If anyone should be crying, it’s definitely me.
“I hate everything about this conversation,” I say, because at a certain point you have to say exactly what you’re thinking.
“It’s a small school,” Jemma concludes. “People notice. That’s all I’m saying.”
I feel myself blush even though I want to stay tough. I feel a little sinking in my stomach, and my hands go to my collarbone, protecting the naked parts of me. I wish I had a turtleneck sweater and a big knit scarf to cover up whatever they’re seeing. I wonder which customers are listening in on our conversation. I know if the situation were reversed, I would be eavesdropping the hell out of this moment. I love little more than watching other people’s lives happen to them.
Jemma sees the blush spreading on my face and pats my shoulder. Pats. It. Like I’m a child and she’s a teacher and I have sooooo much to learn. I shrug her off and turn my attention to my computer, where Joe has finally logged on, and the machine is pinging at me urgently.
I see Jemma see his name.
I don’t cover the screen, even though I should.
She nods at it, and I know she’s taking note and that I will hear a rumor about me and Joe in the next week. Except by this time next week, maybe it won’t really be a rumor so much as the truth. I’m a terrible, terrible person for how good that feels, buzzing inside me. The thought of there being an us.
I grab hold of my huge mug and let it cover my face (and my smile) as I take a long sip.
Jemma wrinkles her nose and is going to say more, I think, but Paul reappears, hands on hips as he stands too close to her for it to be comfortable.
“Are you and Alison getting something else? Because I really can’t let you take that table for very long if you’re not purchasing food or another beverage,” Paul says. Sometimes I think my father is a high school girl too.
“I’ll get a cookie,” Jemma says. Jemma and Paul used to be friends in their own right. She would tease him about his spaciness, and he would fight back with jokes about her crazy knack for organizing everything, including our own refrigerator when its messiness started really bugging her.
Then they would talk books for, like, hours. Because the only people in the world who read more than me are Jemma and Paul.
“I think we’re out of cookies,” Paul says. An entire glass display case filled with cookies of every variety is a few feet behind him. He looks over to it and shrugs at the trays and trays of cookies.
I have no idea if I am proud to have Paul as my dad right now, humiliated, or a little scared he’s going to get in trouble for harassing a teenager. He leans on the spare chair at my table and makes a kind of clucking sound with his tongue against his teeth. I’m sure Jemma can sniff out the stale, hay-like, almost-sweet smell of just-smoked weed coming off him.
Jemma knows too many of my secrets.
She looks back at my computer one more time. Joe has not stopped chatting me. I doubt she can read the words from where she is, but she can definitely see his name, in bold, popping up a half dozen times in a row on my screen. She opens her mouth to comment but changes her mind.
“Right” is all she says. It seems to be a commentary on everything she has disdain for at this moment: my cleavage, Paul’s childish meanness, my flirtation with Joe, the rules of being a normal human being.
I am left in the wake of the things she said, and I don’t drown in them, exactly, but I’m having some trouble catching my breath. She and Alison stay in their corner, after Alison purchases a tea that Cate doesn’t know better than to give her, and they share a set of headphones and lean over an iPhone together. I picture the bespectacled or maxidress-wearing angry rocker chick they are probably listening to and Googling right now. She is probably singing a song that somehow tells them how right they are to hate me.