Love and Other Theories (30 page)

I
head back to school later for Drama because my grade is based on participation, even if Mrs. Seymour sometimes doesn’t stay for the last half of class. I don’t sit with Nathan. I sit in the front row. During improv Nathan doesn’t tag himself in when I’m in the middle of the circle. I’m trying not to look at Nathan, so I can’t be sure if he’s trying not to look at me, too.

At lunch, I wait until everyone is in the cafeteria before I go inside. The second I walk in, I wish I had left school. I can be chased away, and from people I was never supposed to be running from. I hate that.

Shelby is texting furiously to someone who’s not
me. Maybe to no one, just to keep her thumbs busy so she doesn’t chew her nails and give herself away. Danica stares vacantly at Robert as he tells her something he and Patrick find really amusing. Melissa is looking around the cafeteria, probably for me, her hair flipping over her shoulders as she turns her head. Nathan sits at the end of the table with his physics book open. Finals are coming up and Nathan is studying prior to the review sessions so that he can treat them like practice tests. I know he’s doing this because it’s what I do. What I don’t know is why he’s doing it here instead of in the library.

Across the cafeteria, closer to where the food is served, Marnie and Ella are sitting. I know the regulars who sit at their table—Ella’s boyfriend, other people in AP classes—but right now it’s just them.

“Can I sit here?” I ask, but I’m already lifting my legs over the bench, sliding in next to Marnie.

“Sure,” Marnie says. They both glance in the direction of my friends at my usual table closest to the exit.

“So, what’s up?” Ella asks. She gives one more glance toward the other table.

“I’m upset.” It feels horrible to be so honest, but I go on, thinking maybe it will start to feel okay if I just embrace it. “I’m pissed off. I don’t want to see Nathan right now. Or Shelby. Or any of them.” Admitting the truth about why we’re hurt is hard—embarrassing, even. It feels like the worst kind of exposure.

Marnie is nodding vigorously, her entire face like an apology. Ella looks back at them again.

“Did something happen?” Ella asks.

The answer to this will not be so simple to them. They probably noticed the Detach. They probably noticed those few weeks when Nathan and Shelby were inseparable. They definitely noticed Nathan’s and my recent public displays of affection. But this is normal behavior for a high school boy. And for me. They don’t know what makes this time different.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell them.

“Of course,” Marnie says. She reaches over and puts her hand on top of mine.

Ella doesn’t seem so convinced, though. Or she’s not pleased with my answer. There’s a lot I’ve never told them. Ella’s looking at me like she knows it. And maybe she doesn’t like it.

“I thought it was pretty bitchy that she—” Ella stops abruptly because Melissa is standing there holding a tray with a half-eaten piece of pizza. She shrugs her left shoulder to keep her purse from sliding off.

“Can I sit down?” she asks in a small voice.

Ella nods. Melissa takes a seat across from me.

“Are you okay?” she asks me. I can tell by the way she’s talking so quietly, and won’t make eye contact with Ella or Marnie, that honesty makes her uncomfortable too.

“Not really,” I admit.

“What did she say to you?” Melissa asks.

I just shake my head. Maybe it’s important to tell Melissa that Shelby apologized, but I don’t. Maybe it’s important to tell her that the theories are wrong. I think she’s probably been skeptical all along.

“She should have realized how much you liked him,” Melissa says. “What she did . . . she’s just as bad as Chiffon.”

Ella and Marnie don’t know anything about what this means, except that it’s awful to be like Chiffon. To them, Chiffon is a trashy, slutty girl who has no respect for other girls or herself.

I can’t take back the things Chiffon might’ve said to them in the past that weren’t very nice, but I can take back what I’ve said about Chiffon. It doesn’t really matter who started it, or if it’s been a cycle of insults with no beginning and no end. I want to cut my part out.

I shake my head again. “Chiffon’s not so bad.” I’m staring at Melissa but I can still see Marnie and Ella turning to look at me, shocked. “I don’t think she would have gone out with Ronnie,” I tell Melissa. “If we had never stopped being her friend, I don’t think she would’ve been his girlfriend before he left.” It feels wrong to justify this, to admit there are stipulations that make us fragile to one another, conditions to friendship involving boys. That we sometimes have to choose between preserving what
others want or taking what we want for ourselves—that boys can wedge their way in, and how we feel about them can make us hate the people we’re supposed to cherish the most. “Or maybe she would have, but it would’ve happened differently. It would’ve been okay. Chiffon was a really good friend.”

Marnie’s forehead scrunches again. Ella looks away, glancing at the place Chiffon usually sits. It’s empty today. I think they must get it: at least part of what they believe about Chiffon isn’t true.

Melissa’s eyes are watery as she nods.

Marnie fills the silence asking about our physics study sheet, and we spend the rest of lunch talking about school, acting like it’s not strange that this is the first time I’ve ever sat with them in the cafeteria.

W
e meet at our spot in the housing development after school. It’s not completely vacant anymore. Foundations have been laid, driveways and sidewalks poured. Some of the lots even have frames up, skeletons of homes. We don’t stay in the car. We stand outside in the open.

“You have something to say.” I can tell by the way Nathan keeps looking at the ground. The way he rubs his hands together as if he’s chilly in this eighty-degree weather.

Nathan nods, squints against the brightness. There’s something determined in his face, too, which gives him away.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I’ve already said it, but I wanted you to hear it again. Without all the noise.” I think what he really must mean is without the expectation of him getting something out of it.

It’s the first time I don’t want an apology from him. I’m about to tell him so, but I decide against it. Maybe an evolved girl would accept the apology, and then trust the boy to never do anything to be sorry about again. Points for Team Girl, maybe, if boys knew that when they said they were sorry, they had to mean it.

“Will you be completely honest with me?” I ask him.

He nods quickly and I watch his throat hitch as he swallows. He’s already been completely honest with me, about almost everything.

“Where do you actually want to go to school next year?”

His eyes dart away. He stands up straighter. A few seconds pass, and Nathan pushes his lips together. It makes me think he wants to laugh. He doesn’t. He sighs. “Did I ever tell you what my safety school was?”

He didn’t, but I still know. He’s mentioned only one other school the entire time I’ve known him. The place his friend, who had the birthday party, would be going next year. “The university by your hometown with the
innovative
engineering program.” That’s what he said about it. It’s in the opposite direction from Barron.

He nods, clears his throat. “It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“I’m going to Barron.”

The thing I want to say, but don’t, is:
Don’t tell me you’re going to Barron for me
. I think it might make him stop frowning if I say it—it might make him laugh, even—but self-deprecating humor has never worked for me, and even thinking about saying it makes me want to cry.

“Does anyone know where you really want to go?” I ask.

“Apparently, you do.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. “But Barron’s a great school.”

“It doesn’t matter how great it is if it’s not what you want.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”

“Nathan.” My voice sounds dry, like I need water. Our eyes meet—mine out of embarrassment, his out of concern. “You said you’d be honest with me.”

He tugs on his hair, looking away, shaking his head slightly. “There is nothing about Barron that makes me want to spend the next four years there.” The second he’s done he runs his fingers over his lips.

There’s a pause, a space of silence when the wind should pick up or a cell phone should buzz, but nothing happens. Just Nathan and me, taking turns looking at each other, and then the ground or the sky.

“It’s really over between us, isn’t it?” he finally says.

Even though Nathan and I are already cracked and broken and exposed, it still hurts. I hold my breath. I
don’t say anything. I don’t even nod, though I want to. I keep thinking about what Shelby said.
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.

“I’ve never done this before” is what he says next.

“Me neither.” Admitting to good-bye, surrendering to it, is new and foreign and hard.

“Why’d you ask me about Barron?” he says. There’s probably a part of him that thought my only questions for him would be about Shelby. But I know Shelby and I know Nathan, so I can make sense of it. And I’m tired of guessing their secrets.

“Because . . .” I’m not sure how to explain it to him. There’s so much we can’t dictate—and shouldn’t—that the things we can control about our future, we should. We should at least make the attempt.

“Because it’d be stupid of you not to fight for what you want,” I tell him. I feel the squeeze in my throat, a small tremble in my bottom lip. “Don’t you know that by now?”

I hate that that’s how I end our conversation, but I have to get out of here. I cry the entire drive home. I debate going around the block. Like maybe I can out-drive my tears. But in the end I just go home, fall into bed, and cry on my pillow. My mother comes in without knocking and climbs into bed with me. She rubs my head and doesn’t ask me to explain.