Love and Other Theories (22 page)

I
’m quiet when I leave the bedroom. The entire upstairs is silent, including the kitchen. My heartbeat feels loud. It’s beating so fast and heavy that it’s echoing in my chest, my ears. There are a lot of reasons Nathan and Shelby could have stopped talking, but there’s only one reason I believe right now.

I have to see if it’s true. When I reach the steps, I turn my neck, glancing back toward the kitchen. It looks empty. But I barely get a peek before I’m falling, tumbling down the stairs. I land on my back in the entryway, having rolled down the last step.

I blink a few times. Robert is staring down at me. He
helps me up and dusts off my shoulder, which I realize is symbolic, as my shoulder didn’t really need dusting. My left ankle feels like it’s on fire.

“Are you okay?” a voice from behind me says.

I turn around, gripping Robert’s extended forearm so I don’t fall. Nathan and Shelby are at the top of the stairs looking down at us. “Are you okay?” Nathan repeats.

“Yeah,” I tell them. Then I tell things only to Robert because it’s easier that way. “I—I was just leaving. Trip needs—” I realize how ridiculous it would be to finish. To say,
Trip’s car broke down and I have to go get him so he can make it to church tomorrow for extra credit.
“I just—I have to go.” I give all of them a pathetic wave and turn to leave.

“Where is she going?” I hear Shelby say to Robert or Nathan, to someone who’s not me.

Robert’s the one who answers. “Who is: Trip Chapman.”

It’s hard, and I have to ball my hands into fists to do it, but I walk on my ankle like pain isn’t shooting at it from all directions. I ignore the pain. I’m lucky it’s my left ankle so I can still drive.

Trip is right where he said he was going to be on the side of the road, almost to the highway. Halfway to his destination.

“What’s the matter?” he asks me as I lift my hood with too much force.

“Think it might be time for a new car?” I snatch the
jumper cables out of his hands and hook them to the battery and the engine block without looking at him.

“It overheated,” he says. “Now it just needs a jump and it’ll be good as new.”

I know exactly how to jump Trip’s truck, exactly where the negative and positive terminals of my battery are without looking at the labels and how it takes all of three minutes before Trip can restart his truck.

Trip smiles when his truck starts. I stay in my car. The cars need to run together for a few seconds longer. Trip doesn’t even need to signal me; I know when to turn off my car. He walks toward me with a victorious smile on his face.

“Thanks again, Housing,” Trip says, placing his hands on the car door. He leans over and peers at me through the open window.

“Yeah, sure.” I move to start my car even though it’s still too soon to know if Trip’s truck will stay running.

“Wait a second.” Trip reaches across me and puts his hand on mine, over the keys. “What’s the matter?”

I release the keys and let them fall into Trip’s hand. He opens the door for me, so I climb out.

“What’s wrong?”

I haven’t said anything; I’ve hardly moved except to get out of the car. I’m not looking at him. I don’t acknowledge when Trip puts his hand on my shoulder and rubs it. I squeeze my eyes closed. I wish I was someplace else,
someplace where I could be alone with all my feelings. I wish I looked indifferent right now so Trip would just let me leave. I wish I felt indifferent.

“Aubrey?”

When I face him, he looks worried, confused. All the things that I am.

“My ankle hurts,” I say.

“Your
ankle
?” Trip steps back, his hand falls from my shoulder. “Why are you lying to me?”

But my ankle really does hurt, so now I’m angry. My ankle hurts and it’s Trip’s fault. Nathan is alone in the quiet part of the house with Shelby and I’m not there, and it’s Trip’s fault. Trip and his stupid old truck. “Why did you call me? Why didn’t you ask Earl or Zane, or anyone else, to come help you?”

Trip takes another step back from me. “Earl is working the night shift and Zane was drinking when I left.” He looks to the ground, pops his jaw. “And there wasn’t anyone else I wanted to call.”

Last year I would hold my hand up to Trip’s jaw while he popped it. I would laugh at the way it felt under my palm. It stings that I can remember things like that so easily.

“My ankle really does hurt.” It’s important that he knows I have a legitimate reason to feel as awful as I do. And that it’s his fault.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“And it’s because of you—”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, a little louder this time, so I raise my voice too.

“It’s because I fell on my way to help you—”

“I’m sorry!” he yells. He walks toward me, his voice completely unsteady. “I’m sorry for everything, okay? I’m sorry you had to leave your party. I’m sorry you hurt your ankle.” He hesitates when a large semi truck drives past and it’s too loud to hear anything else. He looks away, but only for a second. “I’m sorry I left last year and stopped calling you like you meant nothing to me.”

Now I’m the one who has to look away. I wasn’t supposed to be nothing, and yet, that’s also exactly what I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be better than all the other girls because I didn’t need him to call me after he left. I didn’t need to mean anything to him.

“Can I take a look?” He gestures to my ankle. I nod, and lean against the car as Trip kneels in the dirt. He slips off my shoe, sets my foot in his lap, and gently touches it. “Tell me when it hurts.”

Trip puts light pressure on the inside of my ankle, right under the bone, staring up at me like he’s afraid and concerned and sorry. For a second I feel it—the one thing it’s important never to feel, the emotion that violates the theories in the worst possible way: hope. They can detach and leave, and then come back. And be sorry
for leaving. There’s hope in that and it’s wrong, and I can’t let it fool me.

“It hurts.”

Trip frowns. “And how about here?” He touches the other side of my foot.

I shake my head.

He stands up, not even bothering to brush the dirt off his jeans. “Let’s go back, put some ice on your ankle.”

“I drove all the way out here so you could make it to school tonight, and you want to go back?”

Trip shrugs. “I can always leave in the morning.”

“No.”

“No?” There’s the faintest smile on his face at this response. But when I don’t smile back, Trip stops smiling altogether. “Come on, Aubrey. You’re hurt.”

I’m pushing him away and he’s pushing back. I’ve seen this a hundred times. When Chiffon ignored Ronnie; when Melissa stopped texting Todd; when Shelby stopped asking Sam to do body shots. All the times when pulling away from Trip’s kisses only made him want to kiss me more. Trip is still completely at the mercy of the theories, that’s all this is. Would he be here, offering to take care of me, if I had agreed with him the night he said we made a great team; if I had let him kiss me in his room the day he asked me for help; if I’d had sex with him the night we fell asleep in his bed; if he’d thought I expected
him to call me after he’d left for college? No. The answer is always no.

That’s why I leave Trip standing next to his pickup on the side of the road. That’s why I don’t go back to the party. That’s why I turn off my phone.

M
elissa says everything without saying anything at all. She comes over on Sunday afternoon. “Because your phone is off,” she says. “And to study.” This is a lie, because Melissa can’t study around other people, not even in a library. She studies at home alone at her desk with noise-cancellation headphones on.

I don’t make her pretend. I turn on the television in my room, even though I really do have a test tomorrow. Studying doesn’t feel as important as showing Melissa that I’m okay. She won’t tell me the real reason she came over here, which means there is a reason. I probably don’t want to know.

“So. You and Trip Chapman. Again,” she says. She smiles. “I think it’s sweet.”

I nod. For the briefest moment, I debate telling her the truth.

I wonder if everyone else thinks it’s sweet. Or if they think it’s lame, me with Trip. No different from last year. “You’re a repeat offender,” Shelby would say.

“Boys are so predictable,” Melissa says as she stares at the television. “It almost makes them reliable.” She laughs, shaking her head.

Nathan has always been predictable, but it took me until now, these past few weeks, to really see it. He met my parents so he could see me topless in his BMW. He invited me to his hometown so he could make out with me during Drama. He acted surprised by the theories, but they still worked on him. He lied to me about Barron the very first day I met him. That should have been my first clue he would turn out to be perfectly predictable.

“Where are Shelby and Danica?” I ask her.

Melissa shrugs. But she never was good at keeping secrets. Or lying. “With Robert and Nathan. I think.”

I stare at the television like I’m actually interested in what the too-excited girl is saying about peasant skirts. I give Melissa a slight nod.

That’s the last we talk about Trip or Nathan. It’s a relief, but it’s also like having an elephant in the room. I want to ask exactly what happened between Nathan
and Shelby. But I can’t bring myself to ask Melissa about something that’s not supposed to matter. Because really, it doesn’t matter.

This is what I remind myself for the next hour of television and fashion talk with Melissa, and when I close my eyes to go to sleep that night.

IT’S NOT SO bad at school. Mary Ann is by Nathan’s locker. Leila squeezes his arm when she passes him in the halls. Robert is his favorite person at Lincoln High. The junior girls laugh too loudly at his jokes and follow him around. Nathan asks me to study after school on Wednesday, but the location he chooses isn’t his car or his room. He asks me to meet him in the library.

I arrive thirty minutes early to grab us the table in the back. The one that’s blocked off by bookshelves and a corked wall displaying the Book of the Month. My English teacher allowed me to leave class early since the place I’m going is the library.

When I get there, the table is already occupied. Shelby and Nathan sit with their chairs pressed together, with Nathan’s laptop on the table in front of them. Nathan says something quietly, and Shelby covers her mouth. Her whole body shakes as she tries to contain her laughter, and Nathan smiles, saying “Shh,” but he looks like he wants to laugh too.

They’re sitting so close. They’re talking so close.
They’re laughing so close. I wait for them to kiss, that’s how close they are. A boy has never been that close to Shelby Chesterfield and not kissed her. I step behind the corked wall.

It takes me a few seconds to realize that they aren’t going to kiss. They don’t even seem to be debating it. They’re just talking.

For some reason that’s worse. The pit in my stomach deepens. I have no idea what Nathan and Shelby could possibly be talking about with such vigor and ease. They have more to say to each other than I could have ever imagined. They even have their own secrets.

I step forward, and the second I do Shelby spots me. She waves me over. I put on my best smile as I walk toward them.

Nathan leans back, away from Shelby. “I thought we weren’t meeting until after school.” He speaks too quickly. Shelby and I exchange a glance. It makes me feel powerful. Shelby is still on my side.

I’ve been here before, I remind myself. We all have. Trip and Shelby kissed at a party five weeks before he kissed me at Dion’s. Patrick followed Shelby into her bedroom and stalked Leila’s locker the next day. I stopped calling Tommy Rizzo and now he’s hitting on Melissa. It’s all about the numbers. It’s
only
about the numbers. This is no different. No. Different.

“You’re so punctual,” Shelby says because I haven’t said anything. She gestures to the chair across from her. I sit down in the chair across from Nathan, though their chairs are pressed so close together it’s like I’m sitting across from both of them.

“What are you guys doing?” I nod at the open laptop in front of them.

“Nathan’s trying help me figure out what to do next year.” She stops talking to lick her lips, the only sign I get from her that the thing she’s about to say next will be something that’s going to surprise me. “He’s got a few outrageous ideas as to what I should do with the money from my dad.”

The lick of the lips wasn’t just a warning of surprise. It was a signal to play along. Because Shelby and I are supposed to know everything about each other. She doesn’t want Nathan to know she told him a secret. She doesn’t want him to know how special she’s made him.

“What money?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

Nathan glances between us. Shelby blinks at me, but she’s quick to put on a smile. “Oh, you remember. You remember how he gave Sienna some money after she graduated?” She continues before I have a chance to answer. “Anyway, I saw him the other day and he gave me a check.”

Nathan’s staring at the screen. He’s holding his pencil
like any second he’s going to start taking notes, but his notebook is closed. He clears his throat.

Shelby ignores him. I try to ignore him also.

“So, what are you going to do with it?” I ask her.

Shelby goes off, chattering, moving her hands. I briefly hear the words
IRA
, and
CD
, and
interest rate
, as well as
moving costs
and
out-of-state community college
. She’s ending all her sentences with “or something,” which she does whenever she doesn’t really know quite what she’s talking about or wants to downplay what’s actually important to her.

I’m staring at Nathan. He’s staring at the screen. He’s helping her. He’s got his fingers all over her future. Like he cares about it. Like it matters to him. He’s investing in it like he’ll be in it.

“Sounds complicated,” I say when Shelby stops talking.

“It’s not that complicated,” Nathan says, looking at me finally.

But I can’t look back at him for very long. “As it turns out,” I tell Shelby, because it’s easier, “I actually have more to study than I thought. So I’m just going to go.”

“You don’t have to go,” Nathan says. “I can help you with the overload. You know that.”

But I’m already standing up, already turning to leave.

“You better stop her now,” I hear Shelby say to
Nathan. “Because I’m not going to study. Not tonight. No way.”

I glance back. Their eyes are locked, their mouths are smiling. It’s like I’ve already left, the way he’s looking at Shelby, the way he’s no longer nervous. So I just leave.