She flushes and her hands fly up to her cheeks, which are bright pink. She doesn’t actually consent, but I feel like this is a definitive answer. Maybe we’ll become a thing and we’ll inspire a one-name couple moniker, like Bennifer. They’d call us Simowen, which sounds all badass and exotic, with beaches and tropical birds. It’s kinda perfect.
Pizza forgotten, we grin at each other like a couple of morons until Mallory pounces so hard on the riser that the aftershock knocks over my soda. I laugh and right my can, saying, “You’re stomping on these stairs like they owe you money, girl.”
Mallory practically falls over as she stops in her tracks.
She watches as I take a slug of my soda and a drop spills onto my awesome vintage Quint’s Deep Sea Fishing T-shirt, a nod to Jaws, one of the greatest movies ever made. The way Spielberg built tension in so many ways, like the underwater camera POVs and John Williams’s score? Epic filmmaking. First flick to break the hundred-million mark at the box office.
Mallory narrows her eyes at me. “Is there anywhere else you need to be, Owen?”
I look around, from the trees tinged in golden light to the cardboard box full of the best pizza on earth to the fascinating lady at my side. Robert Frost wrote a poem in which he claimed that nothing gold can stay, but I feel like he might be wrong in this instance. I lean closer to Simone and tell Mallory the truth.
“Nope. This is exactly where I need to be.”
Braden
3:45 PM
u around?
Mallory
3:45 PM
running stairs, where r u?
Braden
3:46 PM
weight room. can u text when ur done?
Mallory
3:47 PM
...
Braden
3:50 PM
never mind, will email u later
12
MALLORY
Oh, honey, didn’t anyone tell you that ironic T-shirts are so last year?
“Cheers, Mallory!” Simone raises her soda in greeting while leaning in to Owen Fucking Foley-Feinstein.
Of course she’d be into him.
Of course she would.
My heart’s racing in my chest and rivulets of sweat stream down my back. I hop from one leg to another so that the lactic acid doesn’t have a chance to collect in my calves, causing a cramp. Anyone else and this wouldn’t be my business, but I feel like I need to interject. I say, “Can I talk to you for a second, Simone?”
She pats the spot next to her. “Have a seat.”
I shoot a pointed glance at Owen. “In private.”
Shrugging, she replies, “Okay. Shall I come up, or would you prefer to come here? Wait, on second thought, I’ll pop around to you. You’ve done enough up and down. I’m exhausted just sitting here.”
Please. Like she knows exhaustion.
Like I didn’t witness her sitting there in Constitutional Government class today, all unapologetic, all, “Dreadfully sorry, didn’t get to it,” when the teacher was collecting our homework. I wanted to scream, “If you have time to sleep, you have time to work!”
You can survive on three hours of rest a night. Ask me how I know.
She stands and brushes the dust off her weird front-snapped pants with the low crotch. They’re cut like she’s trying to accommodate an adult diaper. Again, she did this to herself voluntarily? I thought Europe was the fashion capital of the world!
She moseys up to me and it’s all I can do to not just unleash on her. What is she thinking, just wasting the afternoon with that loser? Who does that during her senior year? And how is it that she’s gotten involved in exactly nothing since she’s been here? Mr. Gorton told me this in confidence because he was worried; his concern was that I’d somehow fallen down on the job as tour guide explaining expectations and it’s reflecting badly on him, me, and the school.
“Trust me?” I’d replied to him. “Not my doing.”
Seriously, though, she’s in no extracurricular activities. Zip. Nada. Nothingburger with a side of zilch sauce. She’s going to have a big fat goose egg to record on her college applications. I mean, when I do finally lie down at night, I can’t sleep because I’m overwhelmed. Every second of my day is booked and I still I feel like I’m not trying hard enough and here’s this girl who’s got zero going on and she’s just sitting around, calm as can be, not turning in homework and swilling high fructose corn syrup with assholes like it’s her job!
UNFAIR!
“You’re sweating a lot—do you have a towel?” she asks, looking at me like I’m a bug on the business end of a microscope.
I swipe at my forehead with the back of my hand and run a fingertip under each eye to catch any stray mascara. “I’m fine.”
“We have loads of napkins,” she persists.
This is not how this conversation is supposed to go; this is not about me. I need to take control. “I see you’re hanging with Owen,” I begin. “Are you sure that’s the best idea?”
She cocks her head. “Meaning?”
Damn it, is she going to play dumb?
Am I going to have to break this down for her?
Owen is headed exactly nowhere in life. Trust me, I know him. I’m glad our parents don’t get together anymore. He was the worst influence. He loved to spout drivel like, “Get off the treadmill, Mal. Literally and figuratively.” As though I’m somehow having a problem? I’m not the person who’s all Welcome to Losertown, Population: You. He’s the one throwing off the stats here, not me. I’m setting the curve, the goddamned standard, while he’s part of the 2 percent of NSHS students who likely won’t go on to college, despite everyone’s best efforts to prepare him for the real world.
If he’s lucky?
If he’s lucky, he moves to LA after graduation, gets cast on some lame MTV reality show, has an on-camera threesome in a hot tub, and then spends the next ten years tending bar and living on people’s couches while he milks his infinitesimal bit of fame until he’s eventually sent to rehab and then moves back home to his parents’ house.
Then we’ll all be embarrassed when we see him at our class reunion when he’s, like, “Hey, remember how we used to par-tay back in the day?” And we won’t because we’ll have been too busy becoming neurosurgeons and litigators and tech gurus. Or, investment bankers, like me.
Ugh.
But I don’t say any of this.
Instead, I say, “Meaning, are you sure that’s a good idea?” I gesture down at him with the tip of my right sneaker before I return to my light jog-in-place.
“Why? Because of the weed?”
Oh, good, so I don’t need to explain. “Obviously.”
She surprises me by snorting. “Um, Mallory? Snoop Dogg stayed at my house when my mum was photographing him for Vanity Fair. Trust me, I’m familiar with controlled substances. I tried an edible brownie once, giggled the whole time and I’m not a giggler.”
I must be giving her the impression that I’m interested, because she continues.
“My best friend, Cordy, and I inhaled about six bags of crisps apiece and she encouraged me to tell everyone on Instagram that I loved them. Which ended up being massively humiliating, by the way. Mr. Knapton, our math teacher, was so amused when Cordy and I showed up in his Algebra II class that Monday morning. He said he was glad at our enthusiasm about his first attempt at making sourdough bread because no one at his house cared much for the loaf. Too spongy.”