“Watching Sophia. Waiting for Paul to come home and tell me what a failure I am. Why?”
She pulls a folded piece of blue paper from her pocket and flips it over twice, before shoving it back and saying, “I don’t want to go to Jeff Diggins’s party. I want you to take me to one in Cross Pointe.”
“There are no Cross Pointe parties.” At least, not that I know about. None that I’m invited to.
She juts out her chin. “Really? They don’t party in Cross Pointe? What do they do all weekend—listen to Mozart? Eat caviar? Count their money? What?”
“Carly, why do we have to do this again? I thought we were done with this.”
“Because I want to see who you’re with when you’re not here.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not with anyone.” I’m being careful to keep my voice level, but the pauses between my words are a dead giveaway that I’m annoyed she’s brought this up again.
“Are you ashamed of me or something?” she asks. Her chin’s not out anymore. She’s lowered it and is barely looking at me through her eyelashes.
“You’re kidding, right?” I schedule my life around when she’s free for phone calls. I’ve driven an hour round-trip just to watch one of Marco’s soccer games with her, or study next to her at her parents’ kitchen table with our ankles and fingers linked beneath it. “I’m sorry this week was crazy and I couldn’t get over here—” But I don’t know why I’m apologizing. She was the one who was busy, not me. She’s the one who turned me down every time I offered to drive up.
“If you’re not ashamed of me, then why won’t you ever take me to things at CPH? You’ve lived there since January; why haven’t I met anyone yet?” She narrows her eyes. “Why couldn’t we go to your prom?”
There are so many answers to that last question: because I didn’t want to spend a night in a rented tux surrounded by snobs who probably own theirs, because then you’d see what a loser I am, because I already emptied my bank account to rent a limo for Hamilton’s prom after you hinted—“I hear all Cross Pointe girls get them; what do you think it’s like to ride in one?”
Carly can’t seem to grasp that just because Paul has a bottomless checkbook doesn’t mean I do. I have no clue how I’m going to pay for the post-graduation dinner she wants at La Fin, Cross Pointe’s most expensive restaurant.
But I won’t tell her any of these things. I can’t. Carly’s always asking for funny anecdotes about Cross Pointe excess so she can mock their superficiality. The last thing I want is for her to make a poor-little-rich-boy joke about me—or turn my new life into a punchline.
There’s nothing I can say, so I don’t say anything. A pattern that’s becoming too common with us lately. When she gets sick of waiting, she snaps, “What are you hiding?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She looks away and says quietly, “You think I don’t know what’s going on, but I do.”
I touch her face, trace the line of her cheekbone, and slide my hand to the back of her neck. “Carly, nothing is going on. Nothing’s going on in Cross Pointe tonight, and nothing’s going on with me.”
She grasps my hand and places it back in my lap.
I know I’m only going to antagonize her—bring out the famous Carly temper—but I can’t help it. “I don’t believe I drove all the way over here so you can play prove-you-love-me games.”
“Games?” Her eyes snap wide open. “I’m not the one playing games! Screw you, Jonah.”
Except, apparently, I’m not getting screwed tonight. I turn away and glare out the window.
Carly speaks first: “I think we should break up.”
“What?” I sit up so fast I hit my head on the roof of the car. “Why? Because I won’t take you to Cross Pointe? All right, let’s go. When we get there we can buy eight-dollar coffees at Bean Haven or try and have a civil conversation with Paul and my mom—it’ll probably be a fascinating discussion about something important like if the landscaper is cutting the lawn too short or their endless debate about whether Paul has enough support to run for a spot on the country club’s board of directors. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”
She shakes her hair out of her face and meets my eyes. A lock sticks in her gloppy lip gloss and she frowns as she extracts it and smoothes it behind her ears. She’s wearing large gold hoops, not the ruby studs I saved up to buy for her birthday.
“You’ve changed.”
“I haven’t,” I lie.
“Yes! Yes, you have. You’ve become another Cross Pointe snob and you treat me like I’m not good enough for you anymore.”
“That’s crap.”