“Whatever,” he said. “I mean, if you want to screw my loser brother—” Pearl flinched, and in spite of himself, he stopped. “You know he’s just using you, right?” he said after a moment. “That’s what he does. He’s never serious about anyone. He gets bored and he moves on.”
Pearl maintained a defiant silence. This time, she was sure, was different. They were both right: Trip got bored easily, and seldom thought about girls once they were out of his sight. But he had never encountered a girl like Pearl before, who wasn’t embarrassed to be smart, who didn’t quite fit into the orderly world of Shaker Heights, whether she knew it or not. Over the past two months she had wormed into his mind at all hours of the day: in chemistry lab, during practice, at night when he normally would have fallen asleep quickly and dreamed banal dreams. The girls he’d grown up with in Shaker—and the boys, too, for that matter—seemed so purposeful: they were so ambitious; they were so confident; they were so certain about everything. They were, he thought, a little like his sisters, and his mother: so convinced there was a right and a wrong to everything, so positive that they knew one from the other. Pearl was smarter than any of them and yet she seemed comfortable with everything she didn’t know: she lingered comfortably in the gray spaces. She thought about big things, he discovered, and in those afternoons after they’d been together, big things were what they ended up talking about: How bad he felt that he and Moody didn’t get along (“We’re brothers,” he said, “aren’t we supposed to be friends?”). How he wasn’t sure, at seventeen, what he wanted to do with his life: everyone was asking; he was supposed to be thinking about college, he was supposed to know by now, and he didn’t, not at all. There’s time, Pearl had reassured him, there’s always more time. Being with Pearl made the world feel bigger, even as being with him made Pearl feel more grounded, less abstract, more real.
“You’re wrong about him,” she said at last.
“It’s fine,” Moody said. “I guess if you don’t mind being the latest of his conquests. I just thought you had more respect for yourself than that.” If he looked up, he knew, he would see the pain in Pearl’s eyes, so he kept his eyes pointedly on the guitar in his lap. “I thought you were smarter than the sluts who usually agree to do it with him.” He thumbed one of the strings, nudged the tuning peg a little higher. “But I guess not.”
“At least there’s someone who wants me. At least I’m not going to spend high school as a frustrated virgin.” Pearl fought the urge to cross the room and yank the guitar from Moody’s hands and smash it against the desk. “And for your information, I’m not a conquest. You know what? I was the one who started it with him.”
Moody had never seen Pearl angry before, and to his embarrassment his first reaction was to burst into tears. He didn’t know what exactly he wanted to say—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—only the ever-deepening regret at how things were turning out between them, the desperate and impossible desire to go back to the way things had been. Instead he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from crying, until the sharp, salty taste of blood spread over his tongue.
“Whatever,” he said at last. “Just—do me a favor and let’s not talk about it. Okay?”
As it turned out, this meant they stopped talking at all. The following morning, they walked separately to school for the first time, took seats on the opposite sides of the classroom in first period and every period after that.
More than anything, Moody told himself, he was disappointed in Pearl. That after all, she’d been shallow enough to pick Trip, of all people. He hadn’t expected her to choose him—of course not; he, Moody, was not the kind of guy girls had crushes on. But Trip—that was unforgivable. He felt as if he’d dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you’d expected.
In the middle of algebra, when Pearl was in the bathroom and no one else was looking, he opened her bookbag and pulled out the little black Moleskine notebook he had given her all those months ago. As he’d suspected, the spine hadn’t even been cracked. That evening, in the privacy of his room, he tore the pages out in handfuls, crushing them into wads and tossing them into the garbage can. When the can was heaped with crumpled paper, he dropped the leather cover—empty now, limp, like the husk stripped from an ear of corn—on top and kicked the can under his desk. She never even noticed that it was missing, and somehow this hurt him most of all.
Lexie, meanwhile, was having romantic troubles of her own. Since coming home from the clinic, she’d been understandably skittish about sleeping with Brian again, and the strain was starting to show. She’d said nothing to him about the abortion, and it sat between them like a scrim, blurring everything. Brian’s patience was increasingly wearing thin.
“What’s with you,” he grumbled one afternoon, when he’d leaned over to kiss Lexie and she had, once again, turned her face to offer her cheek instead. “You PMS-ing again?”
Lexie flushed. “You guys. You think everything’s about hormones. Hormones and periods. If men ever got periods, believe me, you’d all be in a ball on the ground from cramps.”
“Look, if you’re pissed at me, just tell me what it is you think I’ve done. I’m not a damn mind reader, Lex. I’m not going to apologize at random.”
“Who says I wanted an apology?” Lexie looked down at her hands, as if she might find a note scribbled on her palms, like a cheat sheet to guide her through. “Who says I’m even pissed at you?”
“If you’re not pissed, why are you acting like this?”
“I just want some space, that’s all. You don’t have to be pawing me all the time.”
“Space.” Brian slammed his hands against the steering wheel. “For the past month I’ve given you nothing but space. You haven’t even kissed me in like a week. How much more space do you need?”
“Maybe all of it.” The words fell out of Lexie’s mouth like stones. “I’m going off to Yale and you’re heading to Princeton—maybe it’s better this way.”
Stunned silence filled the car as Lexie and Brian both picked over what she’d said.
“That’s what you want?” Brian said at last. “Okay. We’re done, then.” He clicked the unlock button on the car door. “See you around.”