Love and Other Theories (29 page)

I
come downstairs around seven fifteen the next morning to my mother force-feeding Trip eggs, bacon, and orange juice. I notice the orange juice is untouched and feel the urge to laugh. Orange juice is a dinner beverage to Trip. What he really wants is black coffee, but my mother knows this. “I don’t serve coffee to growing teenagers,” she said once last year when she offered us sweet tea and Trip asked for coffee instead.

“That’s nice,” Trip says, nodding at me, his voice tired and low. The entire just-woke-up look is working for him in ways that make me embarrassed to be in the same room with him and my parents and my little
brothers. “It’s nice to see you smile like that.”

I return this compliment with a cheese-tastic, over-the-top grin with my mouth full of toast, which makes my brothers laugh. Trip says, “Very classy, Housing.”

My mother and Trip leave for the bus station at the same time that I leave for school. She called Trip by his actual name and to his face, instead of her usual way of talking to him: through me, addressing him as “your friend”—so I suspect she might drive him back to State herself.

I’M LATE GETTING to school on purpose. I haven’t spoken to Nathan. I haven’t spoken to Shelby, either, and though it doesn’t seem like very long—not even twenty-four hours—it’s the longest we’ve ever gone without a phone call or a text message or an email or some kind of correspondence, even talking face-to-face.

I arrive just a few minutes before the first bell. I don’t look for Nathan. I walk right up to Melissa and Danica. They’re laughing by our lockers. They stop when I walk up to them, and that’s when I know they’re both privy to Shelby’s situation. Or, really, her nonsituation.

“Hi, Aubrey,” Melissa says, her voice a mixture of enthusiasm and sympathy.

Danica doesn’t say anything. She focuses on a renegade curl that’s loose and hanging over her eye, pulling on its end and watching it spring back.

“How’re you doing?” Melissa says. “Are you—” But
she stops. Danica is glaring at her. It’s a warning look. I’m not supposed to be upset. It’s not allowed. So acknowledging my bad behavior isn’t allowed either. Danica’s face suddenly loosens and she smiles. I don’t even have to guess why.

“Hi, losers.” Shelby bumps Danica with her hips, and the laughter of my best friends, loud and relieved, bellows around me. This is a sound that I love, these are the people who I love, but right now they feel like enemies. And the worst is that they’re looking at me like I’m the traitor for not laughing with them about nothing, the way we always, always do when we’re together. It was easy happiness, and now I have to take a stand against it.

“You heard the good news, right?” Shelby says to me. She’s got a perma-smile on her face and all I can think is How is she going to look bored or displeased or indifferent when her entire glowing face screams:
I just dodged a bullet and I’m so happy.

“I heard,” I tell her.

“He said you were mad,” Shelby says, her lips still curved up despite her flat tone. She shakes her head, rolls her eyes. I was being silly. I was having a moment. This is what she’s saying with just one look.

It would be so easy to lie to them. Smile. Stick out my tongue to show I’m mad like a six-year-old. Give her a lecture about
wrapping the pickle
in a tight, urgent voice reminiscent of my mother’s.

“I am mad.”

Shelby is no longer smiling.

“She’s not
really
mad,” Danica says. It sounds like a command.

“She’s recovering from the stress of it,” Melissa says. She even reaches around to rub my back. “Nathan shouldn’t have told you.”

Danica nods in agreement. Shelby’s face doesn’t move; her gaze stays on me.

I don’t know if this ever would have stayed a secret. I picture Shelby waving around the negative test in one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other, while Danica lights her a cigarette and Melissa ducks under the table because she’s always afraid the cork will poke her eye out and Shelby is never careful about where she points the bottle.

It’s easy to think nothing has changed. But don’t they see how greatly and suddenly things
can
change?

“If only everything could be blamed on stress,” I say. I arch my back so Melissa will stop rubbing it. “You guys don’t understand.”

“Understand
what
?” Shelby’s voice sounds like venom, and I wish she’d play dumb with me because that would sting too, but in a different way.

The bell rings and I think we’re going to separate, disappear into the crowded hallway, and go to class, and that we’ve been saved from this moment, but Shelby is
still giving me the coldest stare I’ve ever seen. Danica is shaking her head like she’s disappointed in me. Melissa is hugging herself since I won’t let her touch me.

I don’t know how to make them see. They’re waiting for me to rise above this, get over it as if there was nothing to get over in the first place. The way they think I got over it when Nathan and Shelby hooked up.

“It’s funny,” I say before Shelby can say anything. And before I can think better of it. “It’s miraculous, actually, that none of us except you has ever hooked up with Patrick Smith. Even though he’s the hottest guy in our grade. Even though you told us he was really good in the sack, and that he was so easy and typical, someone who’d never accuse us of having the Girlfriend Stigma. No matter what—even if we called him twenty-seven times after we hooked up with him, or came to his house in the middle of the night, or showed up at Robert’s every time he was there.”

Shelby swallows, shrugs, and then shuts her eyes for just a second. “Are you upset that Patrick never wanted you or something?” I can see how afraid she is. Nervous that I’ll reveal the truth about Patrick—the truth about her and the theories. It could have been so different. The same experience could have taught her how sometimes it’s impossible to be indifferent, but instead she focused on all the reasons it was best to pretend that’s what she was. Because even though Patrick was back with Leila, it
didn’t change the truth: Shelby wanted something from him—she needed to be treated a certain way. It makes me sick that she kept this from us.

I look at Shelby directly. “You should never have hooked up with Nathan in the first place.”

Shelby’s mouth falls open slightly, her eyes shift toward the crowded halls, like maybe for once she doesn’t like that everyone watches her. I know what the answer’s going to be before she tells me. “Why not?”

Melissa hugs herself tighter. Danica continues looking at the floor.

“We should get to class,” Melissa says. The halls are nearly empty. Danica nods, and though they hesitate, they’re eventually walking down the hall away from us, looking back every few steps when they notice Shelby and I aren’t moving.

“You know I’m right.” I don’t know if this will make her run away or roll her eyes or if she’ll finally be honest with me. She chooses the first option.

“You’re pathetic,” she says as she brushes past me, letting her history book clip me in the arm.

“I could say the same thing about you.” I raise my voice so she’ll hear me.

She turns around quickly and walks toward me, head tilted forward, eyes narrowing. “What did you just say?”

I don’t repeat myself because I know she heard me. Now I know that she understands what it’s like to want
so badly to believe someone when they say they want you and that they don’t want anyone else, even if she tries to never let herself feel that way.

“I shouldn’t have to explain anything to you. Ever.” She’s so close to me now I can smell the hazelnut from her coffee clinging to her breath.

We hear a door creak open, a sharp squeak coming from the other end of the hall, where the office is. We could end it here; Shelby could go right and I could go left, and we’ll avoid getting written up by whoever might be coming out of the office. But instead she nods toward the exit sign just a few paces away.

T
he morning is still in recovery from the rain of last night and the sun is having a hard time infiltrating the gray of the sky. I get a random thrill as we walk quickly through the parking lot, sliding around side mirrors and bumpers, not knowing if someone will notice us and make us go back in. Shelby and I have never cut class together. She does it sometimes with Danica and Melissa, and they spend the afternoon at the diner ordering coffee and pie, or they’ll go to the movies and brag about matinee pricing and how they had popcorn and Junior Mints for lunch. It makes me sad that this is how we’re doing it now.

“Where should we go?” I ask her when we’re buckled in.

She shrugs and stares out the window, and I think that maybe she won’t actually ever talk to me again.

The place I end up taking us is the park. There’s a small lot on the north end, right along the river. The north end is the unpopular end. It’s overgrown with shrubs, and unless you’re fishing there’s not really any reason to come up here. Shelby rolls down her window and I follow suit. I can faintly hear the sound of the river hitting the shore, sliding over the rocks.

“Why is the weather so shitty?” Shelby says. “It’s ugly as hell up here, especially without the sun.” She digs around in her purse and pulls out a cigarette, then raises the pack to me, offering. I shake my head. She doesn’t look at me as she puts the cigarette in her mouth but doesn’t light it. I’m not surprised. I can’t remember the last time I actually saw Shelby smoke one of her own cigarettes. Usually she gives them away.

“Will you tell me what happened?” I say.

“I thought I was knocked up. I’m not. Fascinating, isn’t it?” I have the urge to bash the cigarette out of her mouth. It makes her sound mean, the way it dangles against her lips while she speaks.

“I mean what happened with you and Nathan.”

I need to know when I lost him, officially. When he chose to believe everything we’d said about nothing
lasting. I want to know when my best friend and the boy I liked decided they wanted each other. It’s the details that weren’t important before that seem the most important now.

She breathes heavily out of her nose in a way that’s supposed to be insulting and make me feel like a pain in the ass, and it does. She takes the cigarette out of her mouth and rolls it between her fingers.

“Did you really think hooking up with him wouldn’t hurt me?” My voice sounds aimless, pathetic, even, but I can’t stop asking the things I shouldn’t ask. The things I shouldn’t
have
to ask.

“It takes two to tango, Aubrey.”

And it’s true, but right now all I want is to know how she could have possibly overlooked that her best friend had found someone important. Even if he didn’t get to be important forever. Why would she want to be the one who helped take him away? It’s different than if after he detached he’d gone to Mary Ann or even Celine. Shelby and I are best friends.

“This is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.” As the words strangle out of my mouth, I don’t know if I’m talking about now—how things with Nathan are so broken. Or if I’m really talking about the first time they kissed, the first time they hooked up, or that day on the football field when she finally convinced me that the theories were right and wounding each other was impossible.

“You don’t think I’m sorry?” she says. “You don’t think I would take it all back? Get over it, Aubrey, it’s in the past. I can’t take it back, so you can’t be pissed about it anymore. And Nathan wants you. You’re getting what you want.”

“But why did it have to happen in the first place?” I talk over her. I’m almost yelling. Can’t she see that she’s known all along? The experience that made her the biggest advocate of the theories also proves the theories don’t always work. She knew how easily it could all matter. How the high fives, and the never depriving ourselves, and the fun without the caring, couldn’t really protect us.

“Is that why you came up with the theories?” I ask her. “If Patrick could hurt you, then everyone could.”

Shelby rolls her eyes and holds her cigarette up like she’s going to stick it back in her mouth, but she never does. She’s too mad to do anything. “Patrick or Ronnie or Nathan. They could all hurt us, don’t you understand?”
And they all have
is what she doesn’t say.

“But now you’ve hurt me, too—”

Shelby interrupts me. “Do you want to know about the first time I kissed Nathan?” Her voice is cold. Her eyes are strained like I’ve never seen them before.

The thought of it makes me sick. But I want answers. “Tell me.”

“The first time we kissed, we were at Patrick’s.”

“During spin the bottle.” I nod. It seems cruel and
twisted that I had been there to watch it. That I’d thought it was just a game.

“Not during spin the bottle. That doesn’t count.” Shelby gives me a look that tells me I’m so wrong she can’t even fathom it. “The next morning. Before he left.”

“Why did he kiss you before he left?”

“Why do you think?”

But I have no idea what to think.

“Because we felt like it. He was awake before anyone and I couldn’t sleep, so we sat in the living room talking for a little while before he left. He told me he was going back to San Diego for the week, but he wasn’t excited. He said it felt like an obligation. He said you didn’t ask him to stay. I told him that you wouldn’t ever ask him to stay if he said he wanted to leave, and he told me he knew that. Then he asked me if I remembered our kiss during spin the bottle or if I was too drunk, and I said I remembered and asked if he did. He said, ‘Not very well,’ so I asked him if wanted to relive it.” Shelby shrugs and looks away. “He did.”

I touch my face to see if I’m crying. It feels like I am even though my cheeks are dry.

“But you’re
with
him again, Aubrey. You wouldn’t even care about what Nathan and I used to do if you didn’t know about what happened yesterday,” she says.

I take a minute to consider this. The truth is I’ll never know if those weeks Shelby and Nathan were together
would have made themselves known in other ways. If our denial about all the things that had happened before we left for Barron would have eventually been harder to ignore than a screaming baby.

“I always knew he’d go back to you,” she says, her eyes flicking up to meet mine directly. “It was so obvious he wanted you. But he was still like everyone else. He was starving for other things.”

I think she might be right, but I don’t allow myself to think about that for very long. “I can’t believe you kissed him at Patrick’s” tumbles out of my mouth. I remember waking up alone in the cold, empty bed and having no idea. And Shelby never said anything.

“It was nothing.” But her voice is too quiet to be convincing.

“Is that the evolved answer or the real one?”

“Both,” she says with a straight face. She’s holding my eye contact. Her mouth is a tight line. She looks strong, but now I know she’s not.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she says. “Nathan and me, it was supposed to be random, and exciting. A quick fling, just for fun. Because he’s different and funny, and . . .”

She doesn’t have to finish because I know all the things that Nathan is.

“It was never supposed to be anything more than that.” Shelby’s face turns sad suddenly, twisting to reveal
a kind of despair. It’s shocking, coming that soon after resentment. I wonder if this is how her face looked on Tuesday.

I imagine her whittling her thumbnail down to nothing while she waited with Nathan, chewing furiously with her eyes shut so tightly her eyelids wrinkled. She probably hugged Nathan when she found out it wasn’t true. Because then she could really say that it was nothing. It’s a comfort to say something is less than it is. And even better if you can trick yourself into believing it. Then Shelby came to school and saw my face, and learned that I wasn’t going to let her forget what she’d been through. I was going to make her explain it to me.

She’s been failed too. The theories meant the most to Shelby. They were supposed to protect her—they were supposed to protect all of us. They were tricks and treats for boys, but they were shields for us. And they made Shelby feel invincible for a long time. It’s so obvious now that it wasn’t real, that we confused our power with acceptance. And Shelby had been the most desperate for it. We let people throw us away, all the while pretending that we were throwing them away too, because we thought that was the only way they would want us at all. I know Shelby was used to being thrown away. But this isn’t supposed to be something we accept, and definitely not something we invite. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want Shelby to, either.

“You could have told us you were upset about Patrick,” I tell her. “You could have told us about your dad, and about the money.” The theories made us keep secrets, even from each other.

“
You
could have told me that you and Nathan were . . .” She hesitates. “You should have told me how you felt about him.”

She doesn’t look convinced, though, about my statement or hers. It’s not allowed, the things we’re saying. To want the things that don’t seem attainable—to be Nathan’s girlfriend; for Patrick to be kind. Shelby, Danica, Melissa, and I didn’t indulge each other in unattainable desires. But we should have realized that it’s still worth it to try to get what we want, and we could have been there for one another if it fell apart.

“Why did you tell Nathan about your dad and about the money?” I want to know how she knew she could trust him. Despite the theories.

“Nathan was helping me figure out how to make it last, because it’s not that much.”

“I could have helped you with that.”

She shakes her head, and I honestly think she’s about to tell me she doesn’t know why she chose Nathan. But then she licks her lips and looks as certain as she always does. “He asked,” she says. “He asked what I was going to do next year.”

“You always give a bullshit answer to that question.”

“He asked until I ran out of bullshit answers and there was nothing left but the truth.”

I take a deep breath and what comes out next is a groan. Nathan can be persistent. It hurts to think about him—about how we were right about him; about the worst things, and the best. It also hurts that I wasn’t the one so persistent with Shelby that she ran out of bullshit answers.

“I already admitted that I’m sorry,” Shelby says. “Do you want me to say that I was wrong, too?”

“But you
were
wrong,” I tell her. “We were all wrong.”

Shelby rubs her temples like I’m giving her a headache, and I probably am. But I want her to tell me that she gets it. The things we do matter. Even if we set ourselves up for the pain, even if we promise it will come and wait patiently for it, that doesn’t numb it or dull it or stop it. It doesn’t change what’s done to us; what we do to each other.

That was probably the worst thing Chiffon did. Surprise us with pain.

“Have you talked to him?” she asks quietly. “I mean, besides when you told him to fuck off.”

“Not really.”

“You should.”

I want to tell Shelby that I’m through doing what I
should
do, according to her. But part of me feels like she’s still looking out for me, that even though we’re fighting
the way we never thought we would, and I’ve abandoned the theories, she still doesn’t want me to feel like this.

“Maybe,” I tell her. I start the car because there isn’t anything else to say.

We’re back at school a few minutes before second period is about to start.

“Aubrey,” Shelby says, turning back to look at me with one foot out of the car. She doesn’t look strong. She doesn’t look certain. She doesn’t look indifferent. “I’m sorry.” Her voice gives out and I have the urge to cry.

She pivots again after she’s taken a few steps toward the school, her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide, but I don’t wait to hear what she has to say. I don’t go inside with her. I just drive, and keep going.