Текст книги "She's So Dead to Us"

Автор книги: Kieran Scott

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

ally

Five thirty in the morning in January may as well be midnight. It’s so freaking dark out that it should be illegal for anyone to be up, let alone working. And it’s freezingly, frigidly, bitingly cold. By the time I’d walked up the hill to the school and around to the service entrance—located directly across from the annex of infamy—my nostrils were frozen together.

But as I knocked on the door, I was actually trembling more from excitement than the cold. Excited for ass-crack-of-dawn detention. What was wrong with me?

A rotund man with red hair and a matching moustache opened the door for me. He was wearing perfectly clean, pressed coveralls. Color: paper bag brown.

“Good morning! So. You must be Ally!” he said brightly.

“Yep.”

“I’m Barry,” he said, offering a meaty hand. “So. Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks. You too.”

We stepped just inside the door. He stood there for a prolonged moment and just smiled at me. Jake was clearly not here yet.

“So. Got yourself into some shenanigans, did ya?” he said.

The “so” thing was going to get old really fast. “Apparently,” I replied.

“So. Should we wait for your friend, then?” he asked. “Or would you like to just get started?”

“Uh, I guess we should—”

There was a bang on the door. One loud bang. My heart skipped a nervous beat. I hadn’t seen Jake since the morning our punishment had been handed down. My mouth went dry as Barry leaned by me to open the door.

“Jake Graydon?” he said.

“Yeah.”

His voice sent a shiver down my spine. This was very not good. In a deliciously forbidden way. Jake slipped inside, hands in his jacket pockets. He’d gotten a haircut. It was all buzzed short on the sides. He looked hot. He gave me a quick sideways glance and I started to smile, but he quickly averted his eyes.

Ouch. What was that about? Was I wrong when I thought he’d be looking forward to this, too? Hadn’t he smiled at me that morning as he was walking out? I’d thought that had meant something. I’d been counting on it, actually.

Barry introduced himself and they shook hands.

“So. Let’s get to it then.”

Barry led us down the dimly lit hall, past the science labs, and into one of those rarely visited corners of the school where there were random offices and a bathroom no one ever used. Jake and I fell into step behind him, only about two feet apart, but it felt like there was a wall between us.

Barry shoved open the door of a closet marked CUSTODIAN ONLY and went inside. It wasn’t big enough for all of us, so Jake and I waited on either side of the door, facing each other but not talking to each other.

I had no idea what was going on, but I was not going to be the first to speak.

“So. Here you go!”

Barry reemerged and handed us each a putty knife and a plastic bucket. They looked as if they had seen better days.

“What’re these for?” Jake asked.

“They’re for scraping!” Barry announced happily, walking past us. He was like a Disney World ice cream hawker. On speed. “Come on!”

Scraping. Why did I not like the sound of this? Barry led us down the main hallway, which was quiet as a church on Friday night, and into the cafeteria. The lights were ablaze, and every single table in the place was turned upside down. Instantly, I knew what we were going to be scraping. The tables’ undersides were all pimpled with a disgustingly colorful array of gum wads.

“We didn’t get a chance to clear away all the gum over break,” Barry said, putting his hands on his hips and sticking his gut out as he surveyed the tables with what seemed like pride. “I got ’em all turned over before you got here, so I saved you that.” He whipped out two pairs of plastic gloves as if from nowhere and handed them to me. Then he slapped us on our backs. “So. Enjoy!”

The cafeteria door let out a loud squeal as he shut us in together. Jake and I looked at each another. It was almost like he was seeing me for the first time and he didn’t like what he saw.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, unable to take the silence any longer.

“No. What could be wrong?” he asked, dropping to the floor next to the first table. His vibe was so cold I was turning into a Popsicle.

“I don’t know. You tell me.” I sat down next to him, my bucket clunking against the floor. “Are you mad at me? Because it’s not like it’s my fault we’re here.”

“I know that,” he said through his teeth.

“Then, what?” I asked, my voice small.

Jake looked up at me. He did a sort of double take and rubbed his forehead with his hand. “It’s nothing. Sorry. I just . . . I guess I’m not a morning person.”

I snorted a laugh, relaxing a little. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring coffee.”

“Yeah. Good idea.”

There was a long moment of silence. I fiddled with my putty knife and bit my lip, trying to think of what to say next.

“Listen, I’m sorry about all this,” Jake said finally.

I handed him a pair of gloves. “I should have figured out they were setting me up. You were just trying to help.”

Jake looked down at the gloves and blushed.

“So, really I should be thanking you,” I rambled on, “for, you know, swooping in and trying to save me.”

Jake smiled for the first time. “I thought you didn’t need a knight in shining armor.”

I was pulling on a glove as he said this, and it snapped against my wrist. Ow. But I couldn’t believe he’d actually remembered something I said back in September.

“Yeah, well . . . I guess sometimes I do,” I said, tugging the other glove over my fingers. “But in the future, try saving me before the cops show.”

Jake’s laugh filled the cafeteria and melted my insides like s’mores over a flame. He had this deep, uninhibited laugh. I could listen to it all day.

And then I realized that I would be listening to it—to his laugh, his voice—for two hours every day for the next ten school days. Who ever said detention was a bad thing?

ally

“Heads up!”

I looked up just in time to stop the basketball that was hurtling toward my head. I batted it down with my forearm and glared at Shannen as she strolled across the gym toward me.

“Nice reflexes.” She picked up the ball and cradled it between her wrist and hip. “Wanna warm up?”

She had to be kidding me. I got up and walked past her, grabbing a ball from the rack near the wall and shooting it over her head. It swished through the hoop, and I grabbed another.

“Oh. So, what? You’re not talking to me now?” she teased, tossing her ball from hand to hand.

I glared at her and shot another perfect, arcing shot over her head.

“Come on, Ally. It was just a joke. God, you’re as bad as Jake,” she said, grabbing my third ball out of my hands.

“A joke?” I blurted. “I thought we called a truce. What the hell, Shannen?” I jogged over to the corner, picked up my ball, and shot a layup, then got out of the way as some of our teammates started to take their warm-up shots.

“Calm down,” Shannen said, looking me up and down. “It wasn’t even my idea.”

“Oh, please. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know you,” I said, unzipping my hoodie and tossing it onto the ground. “You’re always the mastermind of these things.”

“Not this time! This one was all Faith,” Shannen protested.

I looked at her doubtfully. “Okay, fine. Let’s say I believe you. That means you had nothing to do with it? What is Faith, the Megatron of the crest or something? She’s so freaking unstoppable? You can’t talk her out of doing something intensely mean and stupid to people you supposedly like?”

“I didn’t know Jake was going to be there,” she said.

“Right. So if you did, then you would have stopped her,” I said, turning away as my face started to burn. “Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Shannen said, the eye roll obvious in her voice. “Come on, Ally, take a joke.” She bounced her ball off the center of my back, right between my shoulder blades.

“It’s not a joke,” I said through my teeth, turning to face her. “And you can take your truce and choke on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

I stepped up and squared off with her. “It means unless we’re on the court, don’t talk to me. Don’t come near me. Just leave me alone.”

Shannen took a step back, shoving her tongue into her cheek. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure about this?” Shannen said, her tone growing darker.

“Sure about what?”

“About making an enemy of me, knowing what I know?” she said.

My cheeks colored. She was threatening me now? My adrenaline took over, even as fear sliced through my heart. “I’m pretty sure you won’t say anything about that, knowing what I know.”

She gaped at me, stunned. It was a low blow, considering how much more personal and potentially devastating the secrets were that I held. What she didn’t know was, I would never tell anyone about them, even if she called my bluff.

Which was why it was called a bluff.

Then Shannen’s eyes flashed with ire, and for a moment I felt uncertain. She looked like she was about to say something—something devastating—and my stomach hollowed out. What? What horribleness was hanging on the tip of her tongue?

Coach blew her whistle to start practice, and I turned around, acting casual. Trying not to let her see that I was shaking. I grabbed a ball off the floor and shot one last three, which bounced off the rim and flew toward the bleachers. As we lined up for drills, I made sure to avoid any and all eye contact with Shannen and tried not to think about what we’d just done. What she’d been about to say. What it might actually mean.

jake

It turned out I didn’t care. That was the thing. I didn’t care that Hammond and Ally had hooked up. I thought that every time I looked at her I was going to see him, but I didn’t. All I saw was her.

And I couldn’t stop staring.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” Ally lifted her rubber-gloved hands toward her nose.

Snagged. “No. Sorry. I just zoned out for a second,” I said.

It was our third morning of detention, and we were still scraping gum. I never knew the people at my school chewed this much gum.

“Oh. Okay.” She got back to scraping. “So, Jake Graydon, tell me about yourself.”

My brain went completely blank. I picked up my putty knife and went to work on a wad of pink gum. “Tell you about myself?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna be here every day for the next seven days.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “May as well talk.”

We’d talked yesterday. And the day before. About basketball and soccer and lacrosse and swimming and the shore and the city and Baltimore, where she’d lived before moving back. But I guess we hadn’t talked about anything real, really. The way girls seemed to love to do.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What’d you do for Christmas?” Ally asked. She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder as she bent over the table.

“Visited my grandparents in Philly,” I said. “It’s the only time all year I get to see all my cousins at the same time, so it was pretty cool.”

“Really? How many cousins do you have?” she asked.

“Twenty-three.”

Her jaw dropped. “Shut up!’

“Why? How many do you have?” I asked, sitting up straight.

“Um, five,” she said. “And they all live in California, so I never see them. Can you, like, name them all?”

“Sure,” I said. I recited the list from oldest to youngest. Told her all about how everyone was excited to see my crazy cousin Devon, who’d spent the past year studying art in Italy and then come back and acted so superior we’d all ended up throwing canapés at him until he finally broke and launched a counterattack. I told her about Leanna, who had sent in applications to be on The Bachelor for five years in a row and had finally made the cut, so she refused to consume anything other than celery and water. When I told the story of how the toddlers had tried to use my uncle’s old waterbed as a trampoline she laughed so hard coffee came out her nose.

“Omigod!” she said, lifting a paper towel to her face. “I’m so gross!”

That was it. She didn’t squeal, scream, run for the bathroom, or leave the school never to return. She sniffled and got back to work, telling me all about her chill Christmas and how her mom had loved her present.

This girl was effing awesome. As I listened to her relate the details of the Christmas tree and the dinner and the presents, I realized I wasn’t bored.

“Then, of course, we spent the day after Christmas with the Nathansons,” she said, shaking her head. “This is a new tradition, apparently. Day-after dinner with le boyfriend. Except this time it was at their place, so I got the full tour of Quinn’s very pink, very huge bedroom suite. Not that she wanted to show it to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say I’m not so sure Princess Quinn is too psyched about having to hang out with a Crestie reject like me,” Ally said, then blushed.

I felt hot all of a sudden, too. Since it was my friends who had made her a reject. I sat back on my butt and fiddled with the putty knife. “Is that weird, your mom dating someone?”

“Everything’s weird,” she replied, sitting back as well.

“What do you mean?”

She dropped her knife and leaned back on her hands. Her gloves made squishy, squeaky noises on the floor. “I don’t know . . . it’s like I’m back but I’m not back. I’m here . . . I’m home . . . but nothing’s the same. My friends are here but they’re not my friends. My house is here but it’s not my house.”

I looked down at my hands, feeling responsible somehow. I would’ve given her her room back if I could.

“And my family . . . it’s just weird being here without my dad. Everywhere I go it’s like I expect to see him there waiting for me. There are all these memories, but he’s not here.”

Her voice broke, and she stopped. My heart did this weird clenching thing at the mention of her father. But I couldn’t tell her what I knew. Because I didn’t really know anything for sure. And it also was none of my business. Wouldn’t it freak her that someone she barely knew kind of knew where her dad was?

I wished my friends were here listening to this. They’d never be able to blame her for all the crap her dad did if they knew what it was doing to her. And they also wouldn’t be able to laugh about where her dad was now. Or about the fact that they all knew and she didn’t. Not that there weren’t other reasons for them not to like her, but only Shannen and Hammond knew about those.

“You know that box score?” she said suddenly. “The one from the JV championship?”

“Yeah.”

“That was the night we left. I wrote that in while my dad was yelling at me to get in the car,” I said. “I had this, like, need to record it there before we left. Like it would somehow mean something if it was there. It should have been the best night of my life, but instead it was the worst. I never got to go to the banquet and get my championship ring. I never even got to go over the play by play with Shannen and Hammond like we always did. Instead it was all just over. My life as I knew it was just over.”

“Wow. That sucks,” I said. “You never even got your ring?”

She cracked a sad smile. “Nope. I figured they’d mail it to me, but . . .” She shrugged and looked down at her hands.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.

“No. It’s okay. Maybe we should just change the subject.” She quickly reached for her putty knife, but it slipped out of her hand. We both grabbed for it, and my gloved fingers closed over hers. We froze. I stared down at our plastic hands, my heart pounding.

“Well,” Ally said. “That’s romantic.”

And we laughed. Suddenly my palms were sweating under my gloves. I slid my hand away and we got back to work, but I felt as if my whole body was on high alert. There was no getting around it anymore. I was falling for this girl.

Big-time.

ally

“What about this? You’d look hot!” I sang, holding out a brown suede jacket to David in the middle of the men’s section at Macy’s. “Your groupies would be all over you.”

David looked at me dubiously, and I paused, suddely hot with guilt. Did he realize I was trying too hard? When he’d asked me to come to the mall this afternoon to help him construct a new look for his band, I’d practically pole-vaulted at the chance, feeling like I somehow had to atone for all my Jakesession over the past week of morning detentions. But all I’d been thinking about since arriving at the Garden State Plaza an hour ago was how I had to break up with him. How I liked him too much to do this to him anymore. My stomach was in knots, my heart was in pain, and my brain felt like it was going to explode from trying to make myself appear chipper when I was anything but.

I kept thinking about that moment before Christmas. When he’d held my hand and jokingly made me promise that if I went to the Crestie going away party, I’d come back. He was so cute and clueless to the fact that I was the most awful girlfriend ever. And now it looked like I was never coming back.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of seventies,” he said. “Besides, do you really want my groupies to be all over me?”

He looped his arms around my waist and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

I was a horrible person. A horrible, dishonest, nefarious person.

David turned away without waiting for an answer. As he flipped through a rack of plaid cowboy-style shirts, I felt like I was going to cry.

“What about this?” He lifted a distressed waffle-knit T-shirt off a separate rack.

“Jake has that shirt,” I said, before I could edit myself.

David’s face fell. He turned and jammed the shirt back on the rack. “Never mind.”

“Sorry. I just . . .” I followed after him, my underarms prickling. Was it always so damn hot in this place? “Is something wrong?”

“No. Nothing,” David said facetiously. “But do you even realize that’s, like, the tenth time you’ve mentioned Jake today?”

He turned to face me between two huge racks of Tommy Hilfiger sweaters, his jacket folded over both hands. This was it. This was my chance. I had to tell him the truth. I had to tell him how I felt about Jake. He’d just given me the perfect opening.

“Ten times?” I said with a gulp. “Come on.”

Chicken. Sorry-ass chicken.

“Okay, ten is a stretch, but still. In the Gap that guy behind the counter looked just like him, and in the food court? That whole story about how he ate five Egg McMuffins one morning during detention?”

Crap. Was it really that bad?

“Um, that adds up to three,” I joked lamely.

“You like him, don’t you?” David said.

Okay. It was now or never. I took a deep breath and held it for a moment. This was going to suck. Hard. “David, I’m really sorry—”

“I knew it!” He turned away from me and started speed walking for the aisle. “I am such an idiot. The guy asked you to dance right in the middle of me asking you out. If that’s not a sign, what is?”

“David. Come on. Wait up!” I said, hustling after him as best I could with my bulky coat over my arm and my bag slung over my shoulder. “Can we just talk about this?”

We burst out into the aisle, and a woman wielding a perfume bottle squeaked as she sidestepped out of our way. David stopped in front of a Calvin Klein fragrance display and whirled on me. I’d never seen him angry before, and it was not a good look for him. His face was all blotchy, his nostrils flared, his eyes wet. My heart collapsed in on itself. It was my fault he looked like that. All my fault.

“What’s to talk about? My girlfriend likes some other guy,” he said, looking me dead in the eye. “So I guess she’s not my girlfriend anymore.”

Ouch. That hurt everywhere. David turned on his heel and stormed away.

“David. Wait!”

I wasn’t sure why I was calling after him. What I expected to say. I just didn’t want him to leave like that. I didn’t want him to leave hating me so much that his entire walk was different.

And just like that, my first relationship ended. With all the Macy’s fragrance-spritzing ladies as an audience. I supposed I should have been relieved. I’d known for weeks this was going to happen, and now it was finally over. But I’d hurt David. Just like Annie had predicted I would. And he was definitely one of the top four people I never wanted to see hurt.

february

God, I hate Valentine’s Day. Whose idea was this stupid holiday anyway? Are they dead, or can I still kill them?

Whatever. It’s one day.

Says the girl who has the boyfriend.

Well, don’t worry. I sent you a flower.

Ugh! The flowers! I forgot about the stupid flowers.

I only ever get the white ones. It’s so humiliating.

Well, the flower sale is the cheerleaders’ thing. Maybe you can just kill them.

Huh. That might make me feel better.

At least you’re not a leper like Ally Ryan. Now that

Dorkus Drake dumped her I bet she gets nothing.

Oh, sad. But that would make me feel better.