Текст книги "Let It Snow"

Автор книги: John Green

Соавторы: John Green,Lauren Myracle,Maureen Johnson
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

“I know you’re a girl,” I said defensively.

“Really? Does anyone? Because I walk into the D and D and I’m the Duke. And I’m one of the three wise men. And it’s gay to think that James Bond is hot. And you never look at me like you look at girls, except . . . whatever. Whatever whatever whatever. When we were walking here right before the twins came, I thought for one second that you were looking at me like I was an actual female, and I was, like, hey, maybe Tobin is not the world’s biggest superficial jackass, but then you go and I’m breaking up with Billy and I look up and you’re talking to some girl like you’d never talk to me and whatever.”

And then, belatedly, I got it. The thing that I was trying to unthink was a thing that the Duke had also thought. We were trying to unthink the same thought. The Duke liked me. I looked down. I had to think it through before I looked at her. Okay. Okay, I decided, I will look at her and if she is looking at me, I will take one good look at her and then I will look down again and reassess. One look.

I looked over at her. Her head was cocked toward me, her eyes unblinking, containing all of the colors. She sucked her chapped lips into her mouth and then let them go, and there was one strand of her hair coming out from under her hat, and her nose was rosy red, and she sniffled. And I didn’t want to stop looking at her, but finally I did. I looked back down at the snowy parking lot beneath my feet.

“Will you say something, please?” she asked.

I spoke into the ground. “I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.”

“Do you know why I wanted to go? Why I wanted to go back up that hill, Tobin? I mean, surely you know it’s not because I cared if Keun had to hang out with the Reston twins or because I wanted to see you fawn over cheerleaders.”

“I thought because of Billy,” I said.

She was really looking at me now, and I could see her breath all around me in the cold, surrounding me. “I wanted us to have an adventure. Because I love that crap. Because I’m not whatever-her-name-is. I don’t think it’s oh so hard to walk four miles in the snow. I want that. I love that. When we were at your house watching the movie, I wanted it to snow more. More and more! It makes it more interesting. Maybe you aren’t like that, but I think you are.”

“I wanted that, too,” I said, half interrupting her, still not looking for fear of what I might do if I looked. “For it to keep snowing.”

“Yeah? Cool. So, cool. And so what if more snow makes a happy ending less likely? So the car might get messed up—so what! So we might ruin our friendship—so what? I’ve kissed guys where nothing was at stake, and all it ever made me want to do was to have a kiss where everything—”

I looked up at about the “nothing was at stake,” and I waited all the way until the “everything” and then I couldn’t wait anymore, and my hand was on the back of her head, and then her lips on mine, the cold air gone and replaced with the warmth of her mouth, soft and sweet and hash-brown-tastic, and I opened my eyes and my gloves touched the skin of her face pale from the cold, and I had never before had a first kiss with a girl I loved. When we parted, I looked at her, bashful, and said, “Wow,” and then she laughed and pulled me back toward her and then from above and behind us, I heard the ding-dong of the Waffle House door opening.

“HOLY. CRAP. WHAT. THE. HELL. IS. HAPPENING.”

I just looked up at JP, trying to wipe the goofy smile off my face.

“KEUN!” JP shouted. “GET YOUR FAT KOREAN ASS OUT HERE.”

Keun appeared at the doorway, looking down at us. JP shouted, “TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!”

“Um,” I said.

“We kissed,” the Duke said.

“That’s kinda gay,” Keun said.

“I AM A GIRL.”

“Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin,” Keun said.

JP was still shouting, seemingly unable to modulate his voice. “AM I THE ONLY PERSON PROFOUNDLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE WHOLE MAKEUP OF OUR GROUP? WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE GOOD OF THE GROUP?!”

“Go gawk at cheerleaders,” the Duke said.

JP looked at us for a while and then he smiled. “Just don’t get all gooey with each other.” He turned around and walked inside.

“Your hash browns are getting cold,” I said.

“If we go back in, no flirting with cheerleaders.”

“I only did it to get your attention,” I confessed. “Can I kiss you again?” She nodded and I did, and there was no second-kiss drop-off whatsoever. I could have kept going forever, but finally, through the kiss, she said, “I actually really do want my hash browns,” and so I opened the door and she ducked beneath my arm and we ate dinner at three A.M.

We hid in the back amid the giant steel refrigerators, our time interrupted only occasionally by JP coming back to give us the hilarious details of his and Keun’s aborted attempts to engage the cheerleaders in conversation. And then the Duke and I fell asleep together on the red tile of the Waffle House kitchen, my shoulder as her pillow and my jacket as mine. JP and Keun woke us up at seven, and Keun briefly broke his vow never to abandon the cheerleaders and drove us to the Duke and Duchess. It turned out that Tinfoil Guy drove the tow truck for them, and so Tinfoil Guy gave us a tow, and I jacked the car up in the driveway so the axle wouldn’t break and just put the wheel in the garage, and then the Duke and I went over to her house and opened presents, and I tried not to make it incredibly obvious to her parents how incredibly gooey I felt about the Duke, and then my parents came home and I told them the car got jacked when I was trying to drive the Duke home, and they yelled at me about it, but not for too long because it was Christmas and they had insurance and it was just a car. I called the Duke and JP and Keun that evening after the cheerleaders had finally left the Waffle House and everyone had eaten their Christmas dinners. They all came over, and we watched two James Bond movies and then stayed up half the night recounting our escapades. And then we all fell asleep, all four of us in four sleeping bags, like we’d been doing forever, and nothing was different except that I didn’t actually fall asleep, and neither did the Duke, and we just kept looking at each other, and then finally got up at, like, four thirty and walked a mile in the snow to Starbucks, just the two of us. I overcame the confusing French of the Starbucks ordering system and managed to get a latte, which contained the caffeine I so sorely needed, and then the Duke and I were sitting next to each other in plush purple chairs, sprawled out all over those chairs, as tired as I had ever been, so tired I could barely even smile. And we were talking about nothing, which she was still so good at, and then there was a pause, and she looked over at me with sleepy eyes and said, “So far so good,” and I said, “God, I love you,” and she said, “Oh,” and I said, “Good oh?” and she said, “Best oh ever,” and I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.

the patron saint of pigs

lauren myracle

For Dad and for the lovely mountain town of Brevard, NC . . .

both chock-full of grace

Chapter One

Being me sucked. Being me on this supposedly gorgeous night, with the supposedly gorgeous snow looming in five-foot drifts outside my bedroom window, double-sucked. Add the fact that today was Christmas, and my score was up to triple-suck. And add in the sad, aching, devastating lack of Jeb, and ding-ding-ding! The bell at the top of the Suckage Meter couldn’t ring any louder.

Instead of jingle bells, I had suckage bells. Lovely.

Well, aren’t you a merry little figgy pudding, I said to myself, wishing Dorrie and Tegan would hurry up and get here. I didn’t know what figgy pudding was, but it sounded like the sort of dish that sat cold and alone at the end of the buffet table because no one wanted it. Like me. Cold and alone and probably lumpish.

Grrrrrr. I hated feeling sorry for myself, which was why I’d called Tegan and Dorrie and begged them to come over. But they weren’t here yet, and anyway, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for myself.

Because I missed Jeb so much.

Because our breakup, which was only a week old and as raw as an open wound, was my own stupid fault.

Because I’d written Jeb a (pathetic?) e-mail asking him please, please, please to meet me at Starbucks yesterday so we could talk. But he never showed up. Didn’t even call.

And because, after waiting at Starbucks for nearly two hours, I hated life and myself so much that I trudged across the parking lot to Fantastic Sam’s, where I tearfully told the stylist to lop my hair off and dye what was left of it pink. Which she did, because why did she care if I committed hair suicide?

So of course I felt sorry for myself: I was a brokenhearted, self-loathing, plucked pink chicken.

“Addie, wow,” Mom had said yesterday afternoon when I’d finally come home. “That’s . . . a pretty major haircut. And you got it colored. Your beautiful blonde hair.”

I gave her a why-don’t-you-shoot-me-now look, which she answered with a tilted head warning that said, Watch it, sweetie. I know you’re hurting, but that doesn’t give you permission to take it out on me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m just not used to it yet.”

“Well . . . it is a lot to get used to. What inspired you to do it?”

“I don’t know. I needed a change.”

She put down her whisk. She was making Cherries Jubilee, our family’s traditional Christmas Eve dessert, and the tang of the mushed-up cherries made my eyes prickle.

“Did it by any chance have to do with what happened at Charlie’s party last Saturday?” she asked.

Heat rose to my cheeks. “I don’t know what you mean.” I blinked. “Anyway, how do you know what happened at Charlie’s party?”

“Well, sweetie, you’ve cried yourself to sleep almost every night—”

“No, I haven’t.”

“And of course, you’ve been on the phone with either Dorrie or Tegan pretty much twenty-four/seven.”

“You’ve been listening to my calls?” I cried. “You eavesdropped on your own daughter?!”

“It’s hardly ‘eavesdropping’ if you have no choice.”

I gaped at her. She pretended to be so motherly in her Christmas apron, making Cherries Jubilee from an old family recipe, when really she was . . . she was . . .

Well, I didn’t know what she was, just that it was wrong and bad and evil to listen in on other people’s conversations.

“And don’t say ‘twenty-four/seven,’” I said. “You’re too old to say ‘twenty-four/seven.’”

Mom laughed, which pissed me off more, especially since she then suppressed her amusement and regarded me in that Mom-way of, She’s a teenager, poor thing. She’s bound to go through heartache.

“Oh, Addie,” she said. “Were you punishing yourself, sweetie?”

“Oh my God,” I said. “That is so not the right thing to say to someone about her new haircut!” And then I’d fled to my room to bawl in private.

Twenty-four hours later, I was still in my room. I’d come out for Cherries Jubilee last night and for the opening of presents this morning, but I hadn’t enjoyed it. I certainly hadn’t been filled with the joy and magic of Christmas. In fact, I wasn’t sure I believed in the joy and magic of Christmas anymore.

I rolled over and grabbed my iPod from my bedside table. I selected my “Gray Day” playlist, which was made up of every single melancholy song that ever existed, and hit play. My iPenguin gloomily flapped her wings as “Fools in Love” hummed from her plastic body.

Then I returned to the main menu and scrolled through until I reached “Photos.” I knew I was entering dangerous territory, but I didn’t care. I highlighted the album I wanted and punched the button to open it.

The first picture to come up was the very first picture I ever took of Jeb, snapped sneakily using my cell phone a little over a year ago. It had been snowing that day, too, and in the picture, there were snowflakes caught in Jeb’s dark hair. He was wearing a denim jacket even though it was freezing, and I remember wondering if maybe he and his mom didn’t have much money. I’d heard that the two of them had moved to Gracetown from the Cherokee Reservation, which was about a hundred miles from here. I thought that was cool. He seemed so exotic.

Anyway, Jeb and I had sophomore English together, and he was heart-stoppingly hot with his jet-black ponytail and smoky eyes. He was also wa-a-a-ay serious, which was a new concept for me, since I had a tendency to be a big ol’ spaz. Every day, he bent over his desk and took notes while I snuck peeks at him, marveling at how shiny his hair was and how his cheekbones were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. But he was reserved to the point of possible aloofness, even when I was my bubbliest self.

When I discussed this extremely problematic issue with Dorrie and Tegan, Dorrie suggested that maybe Jeb felt uncomfortable in this tiny mountain town where everyone was real Southern, real Christian, and real white.

“There’s nothing wrong with any of those things,” I said defensively, being all three.

“I know,” Dorrie said. “I’m just saying that possibly the guy feels like an outsider. Possibly.” As one of two—count ’em, two—Jewish kids in the entire high school, I suppose she knew what she was talking about.

Well, that got me wondering if maybe Jeb did feel like an outsider. Could that be why he ate lunch with Nathan Krugle, who was definitely an outsider with his all–Star Trek, all-the-time T-shirt collection? Could that be why, in the mornings before the school was unlocked, Jeb leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets instead of joining the rest of us and dishing about American Idol? Could that be why he didn’t succumb to my charms in English, because he felt too uncomfortable to open up?

The more I thought about it, the more I worried. Nobody should feel like an outsider in their own school—especially not someone as adorable as Jeb, and especially since we, his fellow classmates, were all so nice.

Well, at least me and Dorrie and Tegan and our other friends. We were very nice. The stoners weren’t so nice. They were rude. And not Nathan Krugle, as Nathan was a bitter person who held grudges. I wasn’t all that psyched about what crazy ideas Nathan might be planting in Jeb’s head, to be honest.

And then, one day as I was obsessing over all of this for the thousandth time, I shifted from worried to huffy, because really. Why was Jeb choosing to spend time with Nathan Krugle over me?

So that day in class, I jabbed him with my pen and said, “For heaven’s sake, Jeb. Would you just smile?”

He jumped, knocking his book to the floor, and I felt terrible. I thought, Smooth, Addie, why don’t you blow a bugle in his ear next time?

But then his lips quirked up, and amusement flickered in his eyes. Something else, too—something that made my heart beat faster. A flush reddened his face, and he bent down quickly to pick up his book.

Oh, I realized with a pang. He’s just shy.

Leaning against my pillow, I gazed at the picture of Jeb on my iPod until the sting of it grew too strong.

I punched the center button, and the next picture popped up. It was of the Great Hollyhock Blitzkrieg, which took place last Christmas Eve, only a couple of weeks after I told Jeb to smile, for heaven’s sake. Since Christmas Eve was one of those days that lasted forever, with all the waiting and finger drumming for Christmas itself, a group of us had tromped to Hollyhock Park in order to get out of our houses for a while. I made one of the guys call Jeb, and miraculously, he agreed to come with us.

We ended up having a snowball fight, boys against girls, and it was awesome. Dorrie, Tegan, and I made a snow fort and set up a snowball-distribution system that involved Tegan packing, me stacking, and Dorrie pummeling our enemies with dead-on accuracy. We dominated the guys until Jeb cut around behind us and tackled me, using his body to drive me into our snowball pile. Snow went up my nose, and it hurt like heck, but I was too exhilarated to care. I rolled over, laughing, and his face was right there, inches from mine.

That was the image captured in the photo, this time taken by Tegan on her cell phone. Jeb was wearing his denim jacket again—the faded blue so sexy against his dark skin—and he was laughing, too. What I remembered, as I looked at our happy faces, was how he didn’t get off me right away. He braced himself on his forearms so that he wasn’t squishing me, and his laugh softened into a question that made my stomach quivery.

After the snowball fight, Jeb and I went out for mocha lattes, just the two of us. I was the one who suggested it, but Jeb said yes without a moment’s hesitation. We went to Starbucks, and we sat in the matching purple armchairs at the entrance of the store. I was giddy; he was bashful. And then he grew less bashful, or perhaps just more determined, and he reached over and took my hand. I was so surprised I spilled my coffee.

“For heaven’s sake, Addie,” he said. His Adam’s apple jerked. “Can I just kiss you?”

My heart went crazy, and suddenly I was the shy one, which was nuts. Jeb took my cup from my hand and put it on the table, then leaned in and brushed his lips over mine. His eyes, when at last he drew back, were as warm as melted chocolate. He smiled, and I melted into a swirl of chocolate, too.

It was the most perfect Christmas Eve ever.

“Hey, Addie!” my little brother called from downstairs, where he and Mom and Dad were playing with the Wii that Santa brought him. “Want to box with me?”

“No, thanks,” I called.

“How about tennis?”

“No.”

“Bowling?”

I groaned. Wii did not make me say “Wee!” But Chris was eight. He was only trying to cheer me up.

“Maybe later,” I called.

“Okay,” he said, and his footsteps retreated.

I heard him tell our parents, “She said no,” and my melancholy deepened. Mom and Dad and Chris were downstairs together, merrily strapping on nunchucks and punching each other in the face, while here I was, gloomy and alone.

And whose fault is that? I asked myself.

Oh, shut up, I replied.

I scrolled through more pictures:

Jeb posing cheesily with a Reese’s Big Cup, because he knew it was my favorite and he’d brought it for me as a surprise.

Jeb in the summer, shirt off, at Megan Montgomery’s pool party. God, he was beautiful.

Jeb looking sudsy-adorable at a car wash Starbucks held as a fund-raiser. I gazed at the picture of him, and my insides went soft. That had been such a fun day—and not just fun, but cool, too, because it was for a good cause. Christina, my shift manager at Starbucks, had gone into labor early, and our store wanted to help with the hospital bills not covered by insurance.

Jeb volunteered to pitch in, and he was a total stud. He arrived at nine and stayed through three, scrubbing and slaving away and looking pretty much like he should be in one of those beefcake Hottest Guys in the Universe calendar. He went way beyond what boyfriend duty required, and it made my heart happy. After the last car pulled out of the parking lot, I wrapped my arms around Jeb and tilted my face toward his.

“You didn’t have to work so hard,” I said. I breathed in his soapy smell. “You had me at the very first car.”

I was going for flirtatious, along the lines of the scene in Jerry Maguire when Renée Zellweger told Tom Cruise, “You had me at ‘hello.’” But Jeb furrowed his brow and said, “Oh, yeah? Uh, good. But I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Ha-ha,” I said, assuming he was fishing for more praise. “I just think it’s sweet that you stayed the whole time. And if you were doing it to impress me . . . well, you didn’t have to. That’s all.”

His eyebrows went up. “You thought I washed those cars to impress you?”

My cheeks grew warm as it dawned on me that he wasn’t kidding. “Uh . . . not anymore.”

Embarrassed, I tried to pull away. He didn’t let me. He kissed the top of my head and said, “Addie, my mom raised me on her own.”

“I know.”

“So I know how hard it can be. That’s all.”

For a moment, I felt pouty. Which was totally lame. But while I knew that Jeb’s wanting to help Christina was a good thing, I wouldn’t have minded if at least part of his motivation had to do with me.

Jeb pulled me close. “I’m glad I impressed you, though,” he said, and I could feel his lips on my skin. I could also feel the warmth of his chest through his wet shirt. “There’s nothing I want more than to impress my girl.”

I wasn’t quite ready to be teased out of my sulk. “So you’re saying I’m your girl?”

He laughed, as if I’d asked out loud if the sky was still blue. I didn’t let him off the hook but instead stepped backward out of his embrace. I looked at him, like, Well?

His dark eyes grew serious, and he took both of my hands in his. “Yes, Addie, you’re my girl. You’ll be my girl forever.”

In my bedroom, I squeezed shut my eyes, because it was too hard, that memory. Too hard, too painful, too much like losing a slice of myself, which, in fact, I had. I pressed the off button on my iPod, and the screen went black. The music stopped, and my iPenguin stopped dancing. She made her sad you’re-turning-me-off? sound, and I said, “You and me both, Pengy.”

I sank into my pillow and stared at the ceiling, rehashing just how things had gone wrong between Jeb and me. How I’d stopped being his girl. I knew the obvious answer (bad, yuck, didn’t want to go there), but I couldn’t help obsessively analyzing what got us to that point, because even before Charlie’s party, things were less than great between us. It wasn’t that he didn’t love me, because I knew he did. As for me, I loved him so much it hurt.

What tripped us up, I think, was the way we showed our love. Or, in Jeb’s case, the way he didn’t show it—at least, that was how it felt to me. According to Tegan, who watched a lot of Dr. Phil, Jeb and I spoke different love languages.

I wanted Jeb to be sweet and romantic and affectionate, like he had been at Starbucks when he kissed me that first time last Christmas Eve. I ended up getting a job at that same Starbucks the month after that, and I remember thinking, Sweet, we’ll get to relive our kiss again and again and again.

But we didn’t, not one single time. Even though he stopped by all the time, and even though I always broadcasted with my body language that I wanted him to kiss me, the most he would do was reach across the counter and tug the strings of my green apron.

“Hey, coffee girl,” he’d say. Which was cute, but not . . . enough.

That was just one thing. There were others, too, like how I wanted him to call and say good night every night, and how he felt awkward because his apartment was so small. “I don’t want my mom hearing me be all mushy,” he’d said. Or how other guys were totally fine holding their girlfriends’ hands in the school halls, but whenever I grabbed Jeb’s hand, he gave me a fast squeeze and then let go.

“Do you not like touching me?” I’d said.

“Of course I do,” he said. His eyes got that look in them that I guess I’d been trying to stir up, and when he spoke, his voice was raw. “You know I do, Addie. I love being alone with you. I just want us to actually be alone when we’re alone.”

For a long time, even though I noticed all that stuff, I mostly kept it to myself. I didn’t want to be a whiner-baby girlfriend.

But around our six-month anniversary (I gave Jeb a play-list of the most romantic songs ever; he gave me nothing), something turned sour inside me. It sucked, because here I was with this guy I loved, and I wanted things to be perfect between us, but I couldn’t do it all on my own. And if that made me a whiner-baby girlfriend, well, tough.

Like, with the sixth-month-anniversary thing. Jeb could tell I wasn’t happy, and he kept asking and asking why, and finally I said, “Why do you think?”

“Is it because I didn’t get you anything?” he said. “I didn’t know we were doing that.”

“Well, you should have,” I muttered. The next day he gave me a quarter-machine necklace with a heart on it, only he took it out of the plastic egg and put it in an actual jewelry box. I was underwhelmed. The next day, Tegan pulled me aside and told me that Jeb was worried I didn’t like the present, because I wasn’t wearing it.

“It came from the Duke and Duchess,” I said. “The exact same necklace is in the quarter machine by the exit. It’s, like, one of win-this! display necklaces.”

“And do you know how many quarters Jeb had to feed in before he did?” Tegan said. “Thirty-eight. He had to keep going back and getting change from the customer-service desk.”

A heaviness descended. “You mean . . . ?”

“He wanted you to have that particular one. With the heart.”

I didn’t like the way Tegan was staring at me. I shifted my gaze. “That’s still less than ten dollars.”

Tegan was silent. I was too afraid to look at her. Finally, she said, “I know you don’t mean that, Addie. Don’t be a jerk.”

I didn’t want to be a jerk—and of course I didn’t care how much a present cost. But I did seem to want more from Jeb than he could give, and the longer we went on like that, the crappier we both felt.

Flash-forward several months, and guess what? I was still making him feel crappy, and vice versa. Not always, but way more often than was, like, healthy or whatever.

“You want me to be someone I’m not,” he said, the night before we broke up. We were sitting in his mom’s Corolla outside Charlie’s house, but we hadn’t gone in yet. If I could go back to that night and never go in, I would. In a heartbeat.

“That’s not true,” I told him. My fingers found the gash on the side of the passenger seat and wormed into the foam rubber.

“It is true, Addie,” he said.

I changed tactics. “Okay, even if I do, why is that necessarily bad? People change for each other all the time. Take any love story, any great love story at all, and you’ll see that people have to be willing to change if they’re going to make things work out. Like in Shrek, when Fiona tells Shrek that she’s sick of his burping and farting and everything. And Shrek’s like, ‘I’m an ogre. Deal with it.’ And Fiona says, ‘What if I can’t?’ So Shrek takes that potion that turns him into a hunky prince. He does it out of love for Fiona.”

“That’s in Shrek Two,” Jeb said. “Not the original.”

“Whatever.”

“And then Fiona realized she didn’t want him to be a hunky prince. She wanted him to turn back into an ogre.”

I frowned. That wasn’t how I remembered it.

“The point is, he was willing to change,” I said.

Jeb sighed. “Why does the guy always have to be the one to change?”

“The girl can, too,” I said. “Whatever. All I’m saying is that if you love someone, you should be willing to show it. Because, Jeb, this is our one shot at life. Our one shot.” I felt the familiar tightening of despair. “Can’t you just try, if for no other reason than because you know how important it is to me?”

Jeb stared out the driver’s-side window.

“I . . . I want you to follow me onto a plane and serenade me in the first-class cabin, like Robbie did to Julia in The Wedding Singer,” I said. “I want you to build a house for me, like Noah did for Allie in The Notebook. I want you to fly me across the ocean at the prow of an ocean liner! Like the guy in Titanic, remember?”

Jeb turned. “The guy who drowned?”

“Well, I don’t want you to drown, obviously. It’s not about drowning. It’s about you loving me enough to be willing to drown, if you had to.” My voice caught. “I want . . . I want the big gesture.”

“Addie, you know I love you,” he said.

“Or even the medium gesture,” I said, unable to let it go.

Frustration and anguish warred with each other on his face. “Can’t you just trust in our love, without asking me to prove it every single second?”

Apparently not, as demonstrated by what happened next. No, not “what happened.” What I did. Because I sucked and I was a jerk, and because I downed thirty-eight quarters worth of beer shots, if not more. Or maybe not thirty-eight, but a lot. Not that I can blame it on that, either.

Jeb and I went inside to the party, but we went our own ways because we were still fighting. I ended up in the basement with Charlie and some other guys, while Jeb stayed upstairs. I heard later that he joined some theater geeks who were watching An Affair to Remember on Charlie’s parents’ flat-screen TV. It was such a horrible irony that it would have been funny, except it totally wasn’t.

In the basement, I played quarters with the guys, and Charlie egged me on because Charlie was the devil. When the quarters game broke up, Charlie asked me if we could go somewhere to talk, and like an idiot, I stumbled obediently after him to his older brother’s room. I was a little surprised, because Charlie and I had never had a heart-to-heart before. But Charlie was part of the group of guys we hung out with. He was arrogant and smarmy and pretty much an overall asshat, to steal a term from a Korean guy at school, but that was just Charlie. Since he looked like a Hollister model, he could be an asshat and get away with it.

In his brother’s room, Charlie sat me down on the bed and told me he needed advice about Brenna, a girl from our grade he sometimes hooked up with. He looked at me in an I-know-I’m-cute-and-I’m-going-to-work-it way and said how lucky Jeb was to be dating someone as great as me.

I snorted and said something like, “Oh, yeah, whatever.”

“Are you guys having problems?” he asked. “Tell me you guys aren’t having problems. You guys are golden.”

“Uh-huh, that’s why Jeb’s upstairs doing God knows what, and I’m down here with you.” Why am I down here with you? I remember wondering. And who shut the door?

Charlie pushed for details, charming and sympathetic, and when I got teary, he moved in close to comfort me. I protested, but he pressed his mouth to mine, and eventually I submitted. A guy was paying me all sorts of attention—a really cute and charismatic guy—and who cared that he didn’t mean it?

I did. Even during the moment of betraying Jeb, I cared. I’ve replayed that moment again and again, and that was the part that killed me. Because what was I thinking? Jeb and I were having problems, but I still loved him. I loved him then and I loved him now. I would always love him.