“No. I’ll be fine. Can we stop talking about it already?” She rubbed her temples and gave me a pleading look. I didn’t really want to talk about it anymore either, so I nodded my consent.
“I need some Tylenol and greasy food. Let’s get Amber and Jenny and go to Whataburger.” She pulled herself off the bed and shook her arms and legs, ridding herself of the previous night. “And please don’t say anything to them about this, okay? I don’t want them to know. Jenny can’t keep her mouth shut to save her life, and I’d rather not have to relive the whole incident through rumors in the hallway.”
“Okay,” I said. She had a point. You didn’t tell Jenny something unless you wanted everyone to find out. And with the way rumors worked at our school, it would morph and twist into something worse than it really was. By the end of a day people would probably say I’d been in the room watching. Ugh. It was better to keep it between the two of us, assuming Logan could keep his fat mouth shut.
We went downstairs, Miss Violet Beauregard yipping excitedly at our heels, and found a very angry Jenny pounding on the locked patio door, the towel from the night before wrapped tightly around her half-naked body. She wore a miserable scowl and there were chair marks on her face.
“Open the Goddamned door!” she shrieked when she saw us come into the kitchen. “Who the hell locked me out here last night? What the crap, people!”
And just like that, everything seemed like it would go back to normal.
*
When Sunny didn’t show up to school on Monday, I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t completely unlike her to skip out on classes after a weekend of heavy partying. Plus my mind was on other things, like Justin. That morning he had shown up at my house, his backpack slung over his shoulder and a grin stretched across his face.
“I thought I’d stop by and see if you wanted me to walk you to school,” he said when I answered the door and my mouth dropped open at the sight of him. My hair was dripping wet and my skin clear of any makeup, so I immediately started looking for a rock to crawl under.
“Who’s this?” My mother asked when she saw him standing there with his hands in his pockets. “And why aren’t you inviting him inside?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Anderson,” he said politely, stepping across the threshold as I held the door open for him. “I’m Justin. I hope it’s okay that I stopped by so early.”
My mom raised her eyebrows at me when they shook hands, as if to say “what happened to Logan?” I gave her an “I know where you sleep so don’t you dare embarrass me” look.
“Are you a coffee drinker, Justin? I just made a fresh pot if you’d like some while Taylor finishes getting ready.”
“Thanks, that would be great,” he said as she led him away from my embarrassed makeup-less face. Normally I’d have thrown myself in front of his path to stop the inevitable grilling, but I wanted him to forget the just-out-of-the-shower sight of me as quickly as possible.
When I came back into the kitchen twenty minutes later, Justin was finishing off a plate of eggs and bacon. My mom watched him from behind her newspaper, and it was all I could do to shuffle him out the door before she could say something embarrassing like, he’s a total Beatle.
We walked the five blocks to school with our fingers intertwined like the teeth of a zipper. I don’t even remember what we talked about. I only remember thinking that life couldn’t get much better.
Most mornings Sunny hung out on the front steps of our high school, sipping her coffee while she waited for me to show up so we could talk about whatever it was we needed to talk about before we had to separate for the day.
“Where’s Sunny?” I asked Jenny and Amber when I saw them chatting with our normal circle sans Sunny. Amber shrugged, flitting her eyes back and forth between me and Justin.
“This is new,” said Jenny, her eyes lingering on our linked hands. “You don’t waste any time, do you Taylor?”
She gave me a hard look, as though I’d done something I should be ashamed of. Normally I would have said something bitchy to put her in her place, but I was too high on Justin to bother. Instead I gave her an eye roll to let her know she sucked, then followed Justin inside.
It was some time after lunch when I started to notice the strange looks people gave me. I would walk by a circle of whispering girls and suddenly they would stop, their eyes resting on me as I passed by them in the hallway. A guy would incline his head in my direction and say something to his friend, who would laugh, shaking his head back and forth like a bobble-head wobbling on someone’s dash. A few times (although it was hard to be sure) I thought I heard my name whispered in the clusters of students that ebbed and flowed along the hallways.
It made me think of something Sunny once said: “You know you’re popular when people care enough to stare.” I’d never really thought about it until that moment, but it gave me satisfaction to think my new relationship (or whatever it was) with Justin was deemed gossip-worthy. Assuming, of course, that Justin and I were what everyone was whispering about.
I was dropping my books off in my locker when Jenny came barreling toward me, her mouth pressed into a thin white line. She looked around to make sure no one else was nearby, then leaned in and whispered, “Is it true? Please tell me it’s not true.”
I closed my locker and looked at her. “Is what true?” I flipped my hair behind my back and turned around to glare at her.
She gave me a meaningful frown and leaned in even closer, so our noses were almost touching.