7
If there was one thing I was good at, it was pretending. Actually, that’s not true. If there was one thing I was good at, it was complete avoidance and denial—which counted as one thing in my mind because I never did one without the other—but pretending definitely came in a close second. For the next few days I put all my years of practice at pretending to very good use. As I walked to class I pretended that it didn’t matter that Brandon had tracked down my cell phone number, which was unlisted, and that he was somehow sending me texts when I was fairly certain he didn’t have access to a cell phone. I pretended it didn’t bother me that his texts had gone from subtle to aggressive threats. I pretended I wasn’t concerned by all the evidence that someone out in the world was helping him harass me, and that I wasn’t at all worried that this someone might come after me for real. By the time it occurred to me to change my number—the pretending was really slowing down my brain—I’d already received enough threatening texts to last a lifetime. Though Emily accepted my “lost phone” story without question, I was pretty sure the message I’d left on my parents machine would elicit a string of questions all leading back to Brandon.
Not that it bothered me.
The girl with the blonde hair was another thing that wasn’t bothering me. Nope, not in the slightest. I certainly wasn’t thinking of her as I sat through class on Monday, avoiding looking in Lucas’s direction—which wasn’t exactly easy, seeing as he was sitting directly next to me. And I certainly wasn’t thinking about how close together they were sitting on that bench or the emotions her words had brought out in him, or the intimate way he’d touched her face. Nuh-uh, I wasn’t thinking about that at all, just like I wasn’t thinking about how, an hour before, that same hand had been caught up in my hair.
Most of all I was pretending that whole night at The Limo hadn’t even happened.
While all this pretending was going on I was also on a healthy-eating kick, which was really my biggest delusion of all. Those three days of refrigerator-emptying madness were the last straw, or so I sternly told myself, and it was time to get smart about my diet. On a snowy Wednesday evening I went to the store and stocked up on veggies, fruit, whole-wheat pasta, and quinoa and bookmarked all kinds of good-for-you recipes on my laptop. I bought a soup pot; I bought beets; I bought another box of healthy cereal.
All this lasted for about a day and a half when I realized I had a fridge full of ingredients and no idea how to cook them. The recipes all required abilities I hadn’t yet mastered and cooking implements I didn’t own. (A cheese grater? A wok? A working oven?) Also, whole-wheat pasta tasted like cardboard. In an unprecedented moment of solidarity, the cat was completely rejecting the more expensive, vet-approved, healthy cat food I’d bought him. The stony eyed glare he gave me every time I opened the bag exactly matched the look I gave all the food in my fridge whenever I opened the door.
Which is why on Friday, after my economics class, I was at a diner around the corner from campus eating a cheeseburger with extra bacon and curly fries when Mariella sat down in the seat across from me.
“That’s right,” she said, fixing me with a try-and-stop-me look, “I’m rudely interrupting your lonely lunch by sitting down in your booth. I’m one of those people who can’t eat alone, so sue me.” She set her plate of food down in front of herself and began to unfold her napkin.
“Oh, hi!” I said, trying to sound simultaneously unalarmed and delighted to see her—pretend, pretend, pretend—while also quickly glancing around for a stray child. “Where’s Ethan?”
“Ethan is at school, and then he’s staying with his grandparents,” Mariella explained as she dipped her fries in my ketchup. “Thank God! I mean, I love the kid to death, but I feel like I haven’t sat down in about four years. He’s wreaking havoc on my figure! Look at how much weight I’ve lost in the last month because I’m running after that little munchkin all day!” She pulled her sweater away from her sizeable stomach and gave me a horrified look.
Oh, Mariella. Why do you have to be so awesome?
I could feel myself giving in to her undeniable charm and for once I didn’t feel like pretending I didn’t love her. Emily was in a three-hour film class, and I was in desperate need of some conversation. And if there was one thing I could count on Mariella for, it was conversation.
“Don’t you have work?” I asked as I picked up my burger with both hands and took an enormous bite.
Mariella nodded appreciatively and clinked my burgers with hers.
“Hell, no,” she said. “By some miracle I have the day off, and you’ve caught me during my free half-hour in between doing groceries, cleaning the entire apartment, going to the dentist, baking cupcakes for the bake sale, and folding all the laundry I did this morning. Aren’t you lucky?”
I was definitely feeling pretty lucky after hearing that list.
Mariella grinned. “So I’ve got all the time in the world to ask you which boy did what to put that sad look on your face. Did he run over your kitty with his car? Or was it just your heart?”
“Nobody ran over anything,” I said, though the strain of all this pretending kind of made me feel like I had been. “I’m just worried…about an assignment…for my art history class.”
She gave me a look. “Well, that was pathetic,” she commented. “Art history class? That’s the best lie you could come up with? Make up a fight you had with your sister or something at least. Put some effort in.”
“I am in a fight with Emily, actually,” I said. Truthfully, she was acting like there was nothing wrong and I was letting her do it, our spat over her abandoning me at The Limo disappearing as though it had never occurred, like always.
“What’s his name?” Mariella said, taking a bite out of a fry with each word. “You’re crying over a guy, so just tell me his name.”
“I am not crying!” I protested.
Mariella gave me that same look again, her jaw working as she chewed. I knew she’d wait me out all day if she had to, even if it meant missing her dental appointment.
“His name is…Lucas,” I said reluctantly, giving her a sour look. “And by the way, still not crying over here.”
“Lucas!” she cried, a little louder than I would have liked. “Oh yeah, Lucas. I like it. It’s a good name. It’s very…white boy. But that’s okay. That’s all right. We all have our weaknesses, myself included, obviously. So what’d white boy Lucas do to you?”
“He didn’t do anything,” I said, setting my burger back down and wiping my mouth. “We just danced and there was… He thought I was Emily and then he gave me that look… And brownies and texting and putting his hand in my hair—”
“Oh, hand in the hair,” Mariella said knowingly.
“And there was a moment on that loveseat,” I added.
“Oh, loveseats are trouble,” she agreed.
“And calling me Hero and giving me a cat and then he goes and touches that blonde girl’s face!” I cried, slamming my hands down on the table.
Mariella frowned as I stared at her grumpily, my chest heaving with aggravation. “Wait, so what did he do?” she asked.
“I just told you!” I answered so loudly the people at the next table glanced over, which had literally never happened to me before in my life.
As amazing as I was at pretending and denying and avoiding, it also tended to turn me into kind of a basket case.
“There was this other girl…” I added more quietly.
“So now he’s with this other girl instead of you?” Mariella asked as she pushed her plate to the side.
“Well, I’m not really sure, he—”
“But you saw him with this other girl after he said he liked you?”
“He didn’t exactly say he liked me. And I’m not exactly sure what I saw, because—”
“What did he say when you asked him about it?”
“You see, I haven’t actually asked—”
Mariella shook her head so vehemently that I couldn’t go on. “No, girl, no,” she said. “I will not have you falling apart over something you don’t even know is real. You’ve just got to ask him straight up what the deal is. Does he like you or does he like her? I don’t want to hear another stuttering excuse about it.”
I stared down at my plate. “But what if I don’t like the answer? I want him to like me best,” I said miserably, and the words, as I heard them coming out of my mouth, stunned me to the core. I wanted Lucas. I wanted him to be mine. No, I needed him to be mine.
Oh God, I was so screwed.
Mariella put her hand on my arm. “He will,” she said. “You just have to give him a chance to get there.”
“Or maybe he’s just playing me, like Jeremy did you,” I said. (This was Jeremy of the canoe of douches.)
“Well, that’s no problem,” Mariella said with a sly grin. “Because in that case you know you’ve got your trusty friend Mariella to help you whoop his lily-white ass!”
We cackled so loudly the entire diner was looking, and I didn’t even care.
Later that day I was coming down the stairs outside the library after spending two exhausting hours researching my art history paper on Gauguin when I spotted Lucas leaning against the building. I hovered on the stairs, my arms laden with books, wondering what I should do. He was facing the other way and so hadn’t spotted me yet, his back against the bare ivy that snaked over the bricks. I could slip away unnoticed. I could escape. A week and a half ago that was exactly what I would have done. I’d made an art form of avoiding students I knew peripherally from class, or professors, or even people I knew better like Melissa or Anita. I’d once run out of a building to avoid Sally. A week and a half ago my life had been orderly and predictable, all of my actions fitting a mold I’d made myself years ago.
And then Lucas had come along.
The feelings I’d expressed to Mariella came back to me as I looked at him gazing forlornly down the road, his hands deep in his coat pockets. There was no point in trying to pretend anymore, or trying to force myself to give him up. I’d already failed at that twice. If a part of me tried to avoid him, there would always be another part of me looking for him everywhere I went, trying to find him, trying to keep him. As furious as it made me, both with him and with myself, Lucas was in my life now. I guessed I might as well get used to it.
As I walked toward him across the snow, I considered asking him Mariella’s question. I pictured myself demanding to know who it was going to be, the blonde or me, while Lucas stared at me in surprise. Even in my imagination the scene disintegrated before it was fully formed. How could I possibly ask him a question I already knew the answer to? Lucas was a flirt and he’d flirted with me just as he did every other girl. It didn’t mean anything. I had to stop giving it meaning. Silently, I gave myself the same kind of pep talk I had given to Emily in the tenth grade when she was lovestruck over Brad the Cad.
He doesn’t like you like that. You need to stop liking him like that, too. You need to try to be friends. And if you get the urge to kiss him, you need to resist. Resist!
Emily hadn’t been able to follow that last piece of advice. She’d kissed Brad at the end-of-year dance, in front of the whole school, in front of his girlfriend.
As I called out to Lucas and he turned to me, his face lighting up, I finally understood why Emily had done that. Because goddamn, it was hard to think about anything but kissing when he looked at me like that.
“Damn!” Lucas said as he took in my pile of books. “You know you can photocopy the pages you need, right? You don’t have to check out all the books in the library.”
I didn’t want to explain that photocopying meant spending even more hours in the library looking up all the appropriate passages in the books, and then standing at the photocopier for an interminable amount of time while other students stood behind you sighing and urging you to hurry. I preferred to do my research in the safety of my apartment. I would live my entire life inside my apartment if I could.
“Well, what are you doing skulking beside the library, anyway?” I said with an obvious note of irritation in my voice. “You know you have to read the books to learn something. You can’t just suck up the knowledge through the walls.
I knew something was wrong when that didn’t get a chuckle out of him.
He pointed down University Avenue. “This is the route I used to take to the gym. I used to walk this way every day when I was on the team.”
We both looked down the street, almost as though we expected to see the Lucas of the past walking by, his gym bag over his shoulder.
“When’s the last time you went in there?” I asked quietly. I didn’t know why Lucas had quit basketball, but I knew a thing or two about avoiding things and places and people. I knew what it felt like to be afraid of going back.
He shook his head, and his small smile didn’t reach his eyes. He was trying to make light of it. “A long time. Months. It doesn’t matter.”
“We should go there, together. We should go to a game,” I said, startling myself as the words left my mouth.
We should what?
“That’s the kind of thing friends do, isn’t it? Friends go to games together. Sporting events are very friendly.” I clamped my mouth shut and bit my cheeks to keep it closed.
Lucas raised his eyebrows, not capable of holding back his laugh this time. “Sporting events are friendly?” he repeated carefully.
“Well…” Having no explanation for that nonsensical string of sentences, I decided to start over again. “Isn’t there a game tonight? A basketball game?” This was a wild guess. I had no idea if there was a game tonight.
“Actually, there is,” Lucas said. “They’re playing against Carleton tonight. But I’m not going. I’d love to go out with you, Katie…”
Resist!
“But I can’t go to a game,” he finished. “I can’t sit there and watch them play. I just…I can’t.” He wasn’t even looking at me anymore, just looking out at the snow and the street. He looked so melancholy. I just couldn’t leave it at that.
“What if you didn’t have to watch?” I said. He frowned at me, but I could see the hope in his eyes. The desire to believe that I could find some way to get him into that gym again, that he could leave his fear behind.
“What’ve you got up your sleeve, Hero?” he said, that reliable grin hovering at the edges of his lips again. I should have known. A guy like Lucas could never resist a little mystery.
“Take me to the game tonight and find out,” I said.