Life by Committee (25 page)

Then I see a nipple.

It is that nipple that forces everything to click into place.

Two nipples, actually, and small breasts, but all so perky and smooth it does look, legitimately, like art for
even an instant longer. Sexy art, art that shouldn't be hanging in a high school, but art nonetheless. That's the first picture or two.

But the third one has a face, and a body, and a nipple, and some gauzy skirt that is all too familiar. And Sasha's honey hair and long lashes on top. Sasha, in the nude, biting her lip. Sasha, half covering

her breasts with crossed arms that still show basically everything. Sasha crawling toward the camera like Victoria's Secret models do in commercials for the newest lacy, structured, push-up bra. Except there's no lace, no structure, no push. Just the expanse of her body and the total joy she seems to have at exposing it.

And the fairy wings.

Holy. Shit
.

I sit on the floor. Collapse onto it, practically. Cross my legs. Put my head in my hands.

And I'd scream at the pictures if I could, I'd deface them, I'd draw mustaches on them. But the more pressing issue right now, the much, much, bigger problem, is that I have clearly been an idiot.

Didn't I see Sasha taking these photographs of herself late at night?

Didn't I squirm with discomfort at her poem?

Doesn't this seem like something no normal person would choose to do to herself?

Didn't Agnes say we BOTH had big, scary Assignments today?

NO
, my mind yells at my body.
NO. AGNES LIVES IN FLORIDA OR SOMETHING
.

My phone's low on batteries, so I practically sprint to the computer lab and hold my head in my hands while I wait for LBC to load. I don't care who sees. I don't care about anything right now except learning that Agnes and Sasha Cotton are not the same person, because they
can't
be the same person, because the world is not that tiny and I am not that stupid.

I hit the mouse a million times—I'm shaking so hard that I keep clicking the wrong links. But when I'm on Agnes's page, staring at her sad-girl avatar and the hundreds and hundreds of posts she's written over the last year, I start to see it all.

Agnes, talking about suicide and falling in love, and jealousy and sexuality.

Agnes, testing the boundaries of herself, her family, her boyfriend, her schoolmates.

Agnes, writing a poem about sex and printing it in her school's literary journal. An Assignment, of course, from before I joined.

Agnes, doing a nude photo shoot a few weeks ago, admitting it to her LBC friends last night, and then being assigned the task of hanging the photos, in frames, in the
school's lobby.

It's right there. It's been there all along.

Now that I see it, it's impossible to unsee. I can hear her breathy, uncertain voice speaking the words on her page. It's all there in the dense writing of her storytelling and the Sylvia Plath worldview. I review every interaction we've had online, and bile rises from my spinning stomach to my squeezing-tight chest to my now dry, jaw-dropped mouth. She's been advising me on
Joe
. She's been supporting me and telling me I should go for it and reading along as I kiss him.

I swallow down the vomit that is insisting it come out. I'm sitting, but I couldn't get up if you paid me. Everything from my knees down has gone numb, and everything from my knees up is trembling.

I put my head between my legs, the way that I've seen people do on TV and movies but that I've never actually witnessed in real life. I'm not sure what exactly it's supposed to do, but it gives me vertigo, a blood rush to the
head, and makes me heave. Nothing comes out, but I cover my mouth with my hands anyway.

And then I step out of the glass cave of the computer lab and into the buzzing, laughing, high-five-giving world in the hallway. I stagger my way through to find Elise, who is bright red and watery-eyed next to Heather. Both girls look at the photos with something way too close to awe.

“I need to talk,” I say, slipping my hand into Elise's. She cringes a little and pulls away. Heather clears her throat, and I know they've been talking about me.

“Tab. It's not all about you, you know?” She's looking at the photographs. More and more students and teachers gather around them, but I don't see Joe or Sasha.

“There's, like, a whole reason she did this,” I say. I'm begging Elise with my eyes to be my best friend again, if even for just a few minutes.

“I know there is. You. Going after her boyfriend. Making her feel like she had to do something insane to keep him.”

Heather clears her throat again. Elise shakes her head, and I try to unhear those words. The things Jemma and Alison and Mrs. Drake and Luke think about me—those are the same things Elise thinks about me. It's all over her face: disappointment, disgust, distance.

“How did I—” I try.

“You pushed her. Excuse us, Heather.” Elise takes my elbow and moves me away from the photographs and Heather. We're just a few feet away, so Sasha's big eyes and smooth skin are still haunting the whole conversation. “Did you sleep with him? With Joe? You did, right? I mean, you must have. And she knows. Or suspects. And is trying to compete. Why couldn't you just let her have him, you know? You could be with some other hockey-playing guy.”

“I'm not—”

“What if a college hears about her doing this? What if she gets kicked out? I mean, look at those douches, staring at these pictures like it's porn. She's going to have to live with that. That's who she is now. Because of you.”

I glance to Elise's left and catch sight of Luke feeling up the photograph. He cackles while pretending to grab her breasts, his grubby fingers circling the nipples. Elise is wrong about a lot of things, but she's right about something: Sasha shouldn't have to see this.

“Maybe it's a good thing,” I say, but the words are weak and small and sound ridiculous when I can hear the boys in the background talking about how her boobs are too small and her stomach too round. It's hard to see how this could be a good thing.

“I literally have no idea what you're talking about anymore,” Elise says. “I don't recognize you or understand anything you're saying or doing at this point.”

“I mean, we don't know what the future holds, and maybe this somehow will turn out to be a good thing? Or, like, her life will change and shift because she did something scary and strange and special?”

Something happens while I watch Elise's face respond to my words. Zed's words. The words I've been relying on the last few weeks.

They sound all wrong.

I grip my backpack. The Ziploc full of Paul's weed is in there, begging me to bring it to Mrs. Drake, or plant it in Jemma's locker, or do something shocking and daring and LBC-worthy. My mind is in some strange tug-of-war with itself, on one side thinking maybe LBC is a terrible idea, and that Zed is a dangerous dude or at the very least a total stranger, but on the other side still needing to believe in something bigger than my own pathetic life.

Elise's face tells me I should be afraid of what LBC has done to me. She looks not only disappointed or angry or annoyed. She looks scared. Scared of the person I'm becoming, and scared of the possible reasons I have become this person instead of the one she loved looking at books with.

“I have to go,” I say, and fly out the door, hoping maybe I'll run into Sasha Cotton, but her car is already gone, so I hop into my own car and drive away.

I drive in circles for an hour before ending up back at Tea Cozy.

My mind's not working that fast, and I couldn't think of what to do or how to understand what's happening until I remembered how it all began: with Paul. With
The Secret Garden
.

“Tabitha! I told you to go to school!” Paul says. He and Cate are at the counter with coffee and cookies and no customers. “I told her to go to school,” he says to Cate. They are sitting close enough that their knees touch, and
I'm happy to see that, but I want him to see that I am sweating and crying and fighting back more dry heaves, so obviously school is so not the point.

“Where did you get my book?” I say, and I'm out of breath even though I haven't been running or anything. I didn't know I could get out of breath from living life and nothing else.

“You need water,” Cate says, running behind the counter to pour me a huge glass.

“I need to know where you got that book,” I say again, and I rummage through my backpack, because I can't keep talking and explaining—I need to get answers. I throw my copy of
The Secret Garden
at him, and he blushes the second he sees it.

“Oh shit, Tab,” he says.

“Language!” Cate says, and I want to strangle her because she can't change everything about who our family is. She hands me the water and I gulp it down and Paul gives a sheepish smile because he doesn't really know how one tiny lie can change everything.

“I was such a di—a jerk. I was a jerk. I forgot to get you a book in New York. It was too short a trip. And you had been so sad and I wanted to give you a lift, you know? So I found that at Recycled Books in town, and it seemed like something you'd love and that you'd love it
even more if it was from New York. . . .” He shakes his head, and I well up with tears. A million or so of them.

“I just . . . I thought that book was from far away, you know? And I thought the person who wrote in it was some mysterious person who lived in, like, a loft in the Village and had all this special New York wisdom, you know?” I'm not ready to tell him the whole story, and I'm too breathless with tears and fear and the rush of knowledge and understanding to get more out anyway.

“Hey, maybe it still was! New Yorkers love Recycled Books! And Vermont in general, right? Who knows, right? Where that book came from?” Paul grabs my hands and squeezes and Cate nods along, partly agreeing with him and partly, I think, pleased with the man he is becoming.

“I have to go,” I say, wiping tears and blowing my nose and scrambling to get my stuff back into my bag. My fingers brush against the bag of weed and I have a grip of feeling in my chest. I guess, somehow, I still haven't totally decided whether I will go through with the Assignment.

I can't. I know I can't.

Except: If I leave LBC, I will be really, truly alone. No Elise. No Joe. No Jemma. No Life by Committee. I can't quite stomach it yet.

“You're going back to school, right?” Paul says.

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, but I'm lying, and as soon as I get in my car, I speed in the opposite direction. To the house with the purple door. Sasha Cotton's house.

Sasha's car isn't here, there's no sign of Sasha anywhere, so I wait in the driveway. She has to come home eventually.

An hour passes, two, but I don't even think about giving up. I wait it out, and I can't feel time passing at all, to be honest. I turn up the music in my car and thank the universe that my phone is out of batteries so I can't spend the afternoon looking up everything Agnes/Sasha has been saying and posting over the last year that she's been on the site. I can untangle the whole mess later.

I do sort of halfway consider smoking the weed in my backpack. But that's not me, and I know that now.

I know that Zed is counting down the last few hours on my Assignment, and that it's probably strange that I have suddenly vanished. I make my mind veer away from that too, though. I focus on the mountains. I haven't done that since I found LBC, and I know it doesn't work as well, it's not really a solution to all the problems in my life right now, but they're there and they're majestic and snow covered and will exist regardless of what happens in the
next few hours.

By the time Sasha's car turns into her driveway, my countdown is over and Zed must be sending out smoke signals, trying to figure out what happened to me. Sasha drives a mint-green super-old convertible that her mother drove around for years before Sasha got it. It's been a staple in town for as long as I can remember, and it's either totally lame or completely sexy, depending on whether I am feeling annoyed with or jealous of Sasha Cotton at any given moment.

I get out of my car while she parks hers. She's all streaky-faced and messy-haired, and I hate her for being such a sexy, sad person. She sighs as she slams her car door, and she tucks her hair behind her ears as she walks toward me.

I had hours to think about what to say, but I didn't actually make a decision. Every configuration of the sentence “I know all your secrets” sounds ridiculous and soap-opera-y and lame. But I have to say something, because Sasha Cotton doesn't ask any questions. She shifts one hip to the side and lets her hair fall back over her eyes and waits for me to speak.

“You're Agnes,” I say, looking at the mountains so I don't have to look at her face. “I'm Bitty.”

There's a long pause and I shift my eyes from the mountains to Sasha's face, but there's nothing written
there. She's a blank stare, a total and complete lack of understanding.

“I didn't know it was you,” I say, and hand over her copy of
The Secret Garden
. There's a shudder of recognition as she flips through the pages.

“This is mine,” she says. I wonder if Sasha Cotton smokes. If that's why her voice always sounds like it's telling a secret.

“My dad got it at Recycled Books,” I say, matching the quietness of her words, the emotionless tone.

“These notes were only for me. I never would have brought it in there. These are my private—this is like reading my diary. I don't understand. . . .” Her voice drifts away at the end of the sentence, and she seems to remember something. “The yard sale,” she says, shaking her head to herself. And though it's not meant for me, I remember the yard sale too. I thought about it the night Sasha took the crazy pictures. All the strange and wonderful things the Cottons were getting rid of. Including, probably, some of their books.