Life by Committee (11 page)

“Need help?” I say, smiling.

“Not really a team game, Tab,” Joe says, keeping his gaze squarely on the cards and not letting his eyes dart even for an instant in my direction. I guess he didn't like my email. And maybe the avoiding eye contact is supposed to let me know that he's not interested, but it does the exact opposite. All I gather from that lack of eye
contact is how scared he is. And how sad at the prospect of losing me.

“Then I'll watch,” I say. I don't say it sexy or move any closer to him. I don't think I have to. I can just sit here and watch him and trust in the slow simmer between us leaping into a boil.

Joe doesn't respond except to bite his lip.

I watch. He keeps not looking my way. I lean in from time to time like I want to get a better look at his cards. I steel myself against the girls who look at me funny when they walk by. If I were Sasha I'd seduce him, or write him a sexy poem, or, if last night is any indication, slip him a naked picture of myself. But I can't do any of that. So I sit, and wait, and watch the game unfold play-by-play.

Until: The school day officially ends, and everyone puts their cards down, gets up to leave. Joe has to pack his cards back up, and while he does, I take his chin and press on it so that his face has to finally shift toward mine. It does not feel the way it looks when women in movies with hair extensions and diamond earrings do it, I can tell you that much. It's a lot more awkward, for one thing. He looks at me like I'm going to knock him out.

“Can we talk?” I say. There's a shake in my voice. It's not smooth. It's not pretty or breathy or low or intimate. And even as the words come out, I can feel that head-swell of feeling and the possibility of crying. I am
becoming one of those crying girls, but only in theory, because I never actually let the tears out in public. Which is maybe a mistake, since it's apparently so becoming on Sasha Cotton, but I won't sink to her level.

He nods in agreement. I wasn't expecting it to be that easy. I was amped up for more convincing, so I let out a funny laugh. It's contextually awkward, but probably better than the crying or vomiting that my body is threatening to do, so I'll take it.

“Car?” I say. I need to get this done quickly so I don't miss my meeting with Mrs. Drake.

“No. That will look weird.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Gym,” he says. Which seems much weirder to me. Plus, it's a hike from here, a good seven-minute walk, since our campus is sprawled out over acres and acres of Vermont's finest land.

“Fine,” I say anyway. I can do this anywhere.

And we start the walk down to the gym.

We don't talk. We keep a safe distance between us, like maybe we're walking together but maybe we aren't. Halfway there, Joe doesn't shift his gaze to meet mine, but he finally speaks up. His voice is a beacon in the cold November air. It interrupts the white-noise whooshing of wind.

“Okay,” he says. “Talk.”

I shake my head. “You said at the gym. We can have our talk at the gym.” This is an unformed plan. I have never done something like this without a mapped-out strategy, a script in my head about how things will go. I breathe deeply while the silence between us stays put.

Once we're at the gym, Joe looks at me like he's expecting a beating, and for a minute that's all I want to do. I want to bitch him out, tell him how much I feel for him, how messed up what he's doing to me is, how ridiculous a human being Sasha Cotton is.

I want to beg him to be with me.

And I almost do it. I almost give in to the dizzy about-to-cry feeling and the shakiness of my limbs and the tough handsomeness of his face, and the way the very fact of him makes me feel: unhinged and furious and in the worst kind of love.

Almost. But I don't. Instead, I grab his face, feel the stubble on the palms of my hands, and thrill at the way he pulls back a little as I keep pulling his face to mine. His mouth to mine.

And then there it is. The lips, the berry taste, the heat inside, and even his rough cheeks burning up under my hands. He kisses back. Like he can't help it, and only with his mouth, at first. His hands don't reach under my shirt or through my hair. He doesn't slam himself against
me. Until he does. Until the kiss takes over for both of us and we are lost in something warm and crazed and close.

Secret:

I ran into the woman who almost married my father. I followed her through the mall for forty-five minutes. She bought a really ugly black dress. She called someone on the phone “baby.” She dropped a receipt on the ground and I kept it.

—Brenda

I walk back from the gym alone and keep rubbing my index finger back and forth over my lips. They're swollen from the last twenty minutes in the gym, and the boat-neck top of my dress is stretched out from where Joe tried to pull it down over my shoulders to get at the skinny, freckled blades.

I'm dizzy and my face hurts from where his stubble rubbed too hard against my chin. I thought I could only feel this way about someone who was actually
mine
.

I feel closer to Star, to her supersize romance and bravery. It's almost like she's watching me and smiling on. It's like we did it together, me and her and the rest of LBC and the worn and well-loved copy of
The Secret Garden
with all the answers to everything inside.

I start planning the epic poem I will write about the way his lips felt on mine and the beautiful danger of doing the wrong thing that may turn out to be right.

I get back to the main schoolhouse not too late for my meeting with Mrs. Drake. She lets me into her office and motions for me to sit down on the corduroy love seat while she crosses her legs and makes herself comfortable in her pleather armchair.

“I'm so glad you made it by, Tabitha,” she starts. She's Cate's age, early thirties, and was definitely a gawky teenager in her day. She's got a long floral skirt and wire-framed glasses and curly brown hair. She looks like a preschool teacher. She looks exactly the way Jemma and Alison will look fifteen years from now.

“I can't stay for long—”

“I'm sure you have a little time to chat.” She cocks her
head and smiles, like I'm supposed to already know what we're going to talk about. “So,” she says at last, “I want to start by saying I think you're very lucky to have so many people who care about you.”

“Oh yes?” I say. Paul and I share a disdain for authority, and Cate says when I'm talking to teachers or policemen or librarians, I take on his subtly dismissive attitude. I guess I'm proving her right.

“Some of the girls are concerned about your reputation. Now I know you are a great kid who makes her parents very proud.” She says this to remind me that she's cool. It's crap. She sniffs like her nose is stuffed up or something, but I don't buy that either. “But that said, your current . . . exploration . . . of your . . . adulthood . . . is making some students uncomfortable. And more importantly, worried about you.” Mrs. Drake looks proud of herself. She is convinced that she has found a way to call me a slut without actually saying anything substantial.

“Exploration of my adulthood?” I tuck my hair behind my ears. I'm not even pretending not to understand or anything. But I want her to hear how insanely vague and strange that phrase is. “Like . . . I'm growing up too fast?”

“The way you're dressing, Tabitha,” Mrs. Drake says, uncrossing her legs and leaning in closer to me. “The
way you're carrying yourself. Now, we're not stodgy old fuddy-duddies here. We're not
conservative
s, of course. And you have the freedom to dress how you want.”

“But?” I say.

“But I'm concerned about your relationships with other girls and maybe that you are being . . . naive.”

“Naive,” I say. No question mark. No need for her to answer. My legs itch all of a sudden, and I try to scratch with just one finger, but it's not enough. I start scratching my thigh kinda vigorously.

“Do
you
feel comfortable with the way you've been dressing?” Mrs. Drake says. Her eyes go to my thighs. It doesn't seem to matter that they are covered in tights.

“It's from the Gap,” I say, echoing Cate.

“What kind of message do you think your clothes are projecting? I know things at your home can sometimes be rather . . . adult . . . and I want to encourage you to stay in childhood as long as you can.”

My mouth goes dry and our eyes meet. She is daring me to counter this statement, to remind her that
she's
one of the people who've been known to keep things “adult” at my home. She raises her eyebrows so high they meet her widow's peak.

Usually Mrs. Drake deals with hot, popular girls bullying nice, smart ones. As a guidance counselor, that's,
like, her primary role.

This is something different. She knows it and I know it.

Alison and Jemma are not the hot, popular, bullying girls. And I'm not a loser or a druggie or a slut or a cheerleader at the top of the social pyramid. This is two nice, boring, borderline nerdy girls feeling pissed that their former friend got a little bit cuter last summer.

And this is Mrs. Drake taking their side.

Jemma says she's sad about how quickly things changed, and maybe that's true, but being sad doesn't give you permission to, you know, be a bitch.

Except Mrs. Drake thinks it maybe does.

Never mind that I'm the humiliated one on the corduroy love seat in the cramped cubby-office.

“It seems like maybe you're choosing boys over your girl friends,” Mrs. Drake says after a bit of a pause. I'm about to scream. “All this flirting and carrying on and wearing those tiny skirts and all that makeup . . . it's alienating your friends, and it's making your classmates see you in a very particular light. I'm worried about you. You've changed so much, and whenever I see that kind of drastic shift, I wonder what else is going on.”

And with that last bit, she's also managed to maybe-sort-of accuse my parents of being bad parents, on top of everything else.

You know what I'm really starting to hate? How
superfast my feelings change. How impossible it is to hang on to the okay feeling. Like some bouncy puppy, I have it in my hands and it's totally
great
and then all of a sudden it wriggles right out and runs around and I can't catch it again.

“Well,” I say. But I can't think of a snappy retort. The high from kissing Joe on Assignment has stopped banging around in my body. And I'm left on this stupid couch, blushing. “Well . . . ,” I say, much more quietly this time. I'm hyperaware of the length of my dress and my huge boobs and my ridiculous mascara.

It's a nearly intolerable amount of discomfort. There are floor-length floral curtains in Mrs. Drake's office, and I would do anything to hide behind them right now. For a good long while.

“So do you understand?” Mrs. Drake asks. She doesn't look concerned, even though I know I'm sweating a little and my eyes are going watery to match my shaky, quiet voice.

“Um, I guess,” I say, hating myself for the slump in my shoulders, my rounding back.

“Those are sweet girls who have expressed concern. Those are lovely girls looking out for you, and you should be very grateful.”

Implied but not said: Tabitha, you are not a nice girl anymore.

“I just wanna say,” I start in a small voice, “this isn't right.”

“Mm-hmm?”

“I don't know why they're telling you that stuff? But the bigger problem is basically that they stopped liking me.”

“Sometimes things seems very simple, but they're actually very complicated,” Mrs. Drake says, taking her time with the words.

“No, but in this case I think it was more sort of simple. They were sort of terrible and I was totally surprised and that's basically it.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Drake says. “And what about changes you've made? What about your role?” This is not a real question. There is a right answer, and a wrong one.

“I don't exactly need to, like, have therapy about this or anything,” I start. I move some of the pillows around on the love seat. I'm sure she will find some way to use that against me too. “But they were my best friends and then we went to a dance and they literally said they were disappointed in me. As a person. And that I wasn't who they thought I was. And that they weren't sure we should be friends anymore. I mean, it'd been building a little. They'd made some comments for a few months, I guess. But they basically decided to give up on me one day. So, like, I don't know why they're feeling all sad and angsty about it. Because they obviously chose to
do it.” I don't know why I'm telling her this, because she's on their side. Maybe it's the calm vanilla candle flickering on the windowsill or the vague watercolor paintings hanging up on the wall or the simple fact that I am in the guidance counselor's office and I am giving in to the implied rules of being here.

“It seems like it's still upsetting to you. And I'm here to tell you that it's still upsetting to them, too,” Mrs. Drake says. In her eyes the whole world is a balanced, even thing, with my upset on one side and Jemma and Alison's equally valid, very important feelings on the other.

And that's all lovely and Vermont-y and yoga-y. But it's not the reality.

“You think I did something to them?” I almost yell. “I kissed a lacrosse dude from another school. I wore a V-neck and some eyeliner. I talked about boys a few times. That's not normally grounds for dismissal! But fine. We're different. They don't like me. Okay. But now they're bringing you into it? Now we're going to all pretend I'm some troublemaker?” Mrs. Drake is nodding along with my words like she is a neutral party, but her jaw is tight and her eyes are not looking directly at mine.