“He’s such a jerk,” Phoebe mumbled after a while, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her sweater.
“I know.” I reached into my backpack for a packet of tissues.
“You have tissues.” She shook her head as though I’d just offered her an embroidered handkerchief.
“My mom buys them in bulk. I’ve got hand sanitizer, too, if you want to cleanse Luke’s face from your fist.”
“You don’t have to be so nice to me,” she muttered.
“Well, you sort of defended my honor back there.”
“I slapped Luke Sheppard.”
She said his name as though it meant something. As though she didn’t even have the right to expect him to say hello to her in the hallways, and he really was as big a deal as he made himself out to be. It killed me, Phoebe sitting there in her ponytail and glasses, a year younger than me and so tiny that her toes barely touched the concrete, appalled at herself for being the only one of us brave enough to call Luke out on his bullshit.
“He was being a backpfeifen—whatever. His was the face that launched a thousand fists,” I said. “So don’t worry about it. You didn’t give him anything he didn’t deserve.”
“Now I sort of wish I’d slapped him harder,” Phoebe said thoughtfully.
I snorted.
“God, I can’t believe he said that.” Phoebe winced, like she was replaying it in her head. “No one thinks of you like that. With pity, or whatever. Luke always used to compare himself to you, how you both ran things. He’d complain about it constantly, how you were this smug, brainless jock who did nothing but took all the credit. And now you’re on the same side, and you’re actually pretty cool, and it’s killing him. I mean, if there’s anyone who doesn’t belong at our lunch table, it’s me.”
It had never struck me that Phoebe was insecure about sitting with us. Maybe it was because I’d always seen our table as co-ed, rather than a group of boys with their girlfriends, or maybe it was because Phoebe got along so well with everyone. But I couldn’t stand to see her awash in self-doubt like that.
“Hey,” I said sternly, the way I did back when I had to give pep talks to the team. “Listen. Everyone at our lunch table loves you.”
Phoebe regarded me like she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.
“But what if they stop?” she asked, wincing.
“If you and Luke break up?”
Phoebe shook her head. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?”
“Everyone feels like that,” I said. “Even Luke.”
“You’re wrong. Luke doesn’t care if everyone thinks he’s a horrible person, so long as they do what he says.”
I realized then that Phoebe knew him infinitely better than I ever would. That Luke had put his arm around her at the movies and his tongue down her throat at debate tournaments, and not once had she ever seemed happy about it, about them.
“Just once I want someone to be afraid of losing me,” Phoebe said. “But the only thing Luke’s afraid of losing is power.”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say, so I didn’t say anything for a while. I stared out at the gym across from the swim complex, and after a few minutes, I put my arm around Phoebe, because she was small and crying, and it seemed like the thing to do. And we sat like that until the bell rang.
WE HAD VOTING for homecoming court that week, the glitter-encrusted ballot box mocking me as it sat in the front of my homeroom. We were supposed to nominate one boy and one girl for the court, and I was never good at that. It felt weird voting for myself, even in things like student government elections where I’d had to take the initiative to run, and I always felt like my votes were disingenuous when I wrote down my friends. In the end I left my ballot sheet blank.
When I sat down at my lunch table, it was oddly empty. Luke and Sam had driven off campus, to Burger King or somewhere, and we didn’t talk about it—where they’d gone, or if they’d be back.
Phoebe had swiped half a bag of candy corn from the journalism room, and we each took a handful. Cassidy showed us how to pinch off the bottom parts so they looked like teeth. Well, she didn’t so much show us as pretend she’d knocked a tooth out, and then laugh when we realized what had happened. But our laughter felt too small, as though we were in a theater with an overwhelming number of open seats, and nothing we did could make the space less empty.
Our lunch table stayed like that for two days, until Luke and Sam reappeared as though they’d never been away. There was a smug cast to Luke’s shoulders, and when he unpacked his sandwich, a flash of silver glinted on his finger. A purity ring. At first I thought it was meant to be ironic, so I didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. But it turned out Luke meant it—or wanted us to think he did.
“What can I say?” he shrugged humbly. “I’ve seen the error of my ways.”
Phoebe snorted and whispered in a way that suggested she wanted Luke to overhear her: “More likely he’s hooking up with a girl from his church.”
It was fantastic. Instead of Luke reappearing at our table in a massive cloud of awkwardness, the way these things usually went, his holier-than-thou attitude and Sacred Gift Ring gave us all an opportunity to poke fun at him, an opportunity Toby seized with glee. It was as though the fault in our lunch table had resolved itself into a jagged crack, with Luke and Sam on one side, and the rest of us on the other, wondering how we’d missed the earthquake in the first place.
23
FRIDAY MORNING BROUGHT with it the second pep rally of the year. The balloon arches over each section of the bleachers were in fall colors. God, brown and orange balloons. It was like the world’s most cheerless carnival.
I joined Toby and Cassidy in the third row of the senior section; Toby had saved me the end.
“Sure you don’t want to switch to the teacher bleacher?” he joked.
“Screw you,” I said, not really meaning it.
“Screw your girlfriend,” Cassidy added, laughing. It was something we did now; the phrase had become a joke among our group of friends, and I was glad of it.
We settled into the bleachers, waiting for the pep rally to begin. In the row below us, Staci Guffin’s hot pink thong rose magnificently out the back of her jeans in a neon whale tail.
Toby pointed it out with a disapproving frown that sent Cassidy into muffled hysterics, and I felt sort of bad that they were laughing, even if Staci was one of my ex-girlfriends. The pep rally started then, with SGA coming out in plaid shirts to dance to some hideous Katy Perry number. I glanced at Toby, who shook his head as though embarrassed for them.
“SENIORS! SHOW SOME SPIRIT!” called Jill, putting her hand on her hip.
The noise was deafening.
It went on like that for a good five minutes, with the requisite I can’t hear you’s and That’s more like it’s.
Tiffany Wells, our hopelessly blonde social events chair, took the microphone. She’d written notes at SGA meetings the year before with a pen topped by a cloud of pink feathers. You got the impression that her friends made fun of her to her face, and she didn’t quite understand why they were laughing.
We all paid attention as Tiffany announced the theme for the homecoming dance: Monte Carlo. She said it as though it was particularly thrilling that we’d have cardboard backdrops featuring casino motifs and “real live blackjack tables.”
Toby almost died.
“Sober, fake gambling,” he whispered. “In the gym.”
I had to admit, it was terrible.
And then Jill handed Tiffany an envelope.
“Okay,” she said, drawing out her vowels in that particularly Californian way, “we’re going to announce the homecoming court nominees, and I’m, like, super excited about this, you guys!”