Love and Other Theories (31 page)

I
eat lunch with Marnie and Ella the rest of the week, and I don’t go out that weekend even though I don’t have to work. I don’t mind staying home. Melissa and Danica come over to my house on Sunday. I’ve been avoiding them at school. I think they understand. They don’t ask me about Shelby. They don’t mention Nathan or if he went out with them Saturday night. Danica’s getting excited about next year. She turned in her dorm preferences this week. Melissa blushes and tells us about Tommy Rizzo.

“I’m not going to have sex with him before I leave,” she blurts out. As if this question has been chasing her
around and has finally cornered her. We laugh at this admission.

“You’re so easy,” Danica says. “We’re
all
so easy. It’s easiest for Melissa to just say no. It’s easiest for me to just give them what they want.”

I hope that when I see them again next year, we’re all different. That we understand better what we want and what those things are worth.

Melissa raises one finger in the air. “Just to be clear,” she says, “sometimes it’s not
that
easy to say no to the Riz.”

Their laughter explodes around me. I close my eyes. There’s a part of me that wants to carry these moments with me, no matter the weight. There’s a part of me that understands they’re precious. I try to hold on to that.

I EAT LUNCH in the library the next week. It’s the best place to prep for finals and I still don’t want to sit in my old spot. I still don’t want to be around Shelby.

I catch myself looking at her a lot, though. Watching her, just like everyone else. The way I’ve always watched her. But this time, what I see is different. I remember when Shelby was thirteen, her face beaming after Patrick kissed her at the pool. The way she used to frown when Patrick chose Leila. The way she laughed when she discovered she could have him whenever she wanted, she just had to throw him back.

I watch her exchange sly smiles with Patrick; poke
fun at Robert until he’s laughing too hard to return her teasing; whisper in Sam’s ear, making him blush; roll her eyes at the things Tommy Rizzo says to Melissa. She’s biding her time. She’s waiting for someone to surprise her.

Nathan saw through her, I think, the way I’m seeing through her now. Past that face no one can make sense of, past the mocking jokes, the razor-sharp tongue, and the cheeky commentary. The girl who says she doesn’t believe in love but hopes she’s wrong.

I think she must know the theories don’t work, that they aren’t real.

Sometimes I catch her watching me, too.

NATHAN EATS IN the library for the same reasons I do. We don’t talk. On Friday, he’s wearing a sweatshirt from his safety school. His dream school. His sleeves are rolled up. It’s the middle of May, we’re on the cusp of summer, and only the mornings and evenings are chilly. So I ask him. I think he probably wore it so that I would.

“We’re no longer the only two students from Lincoln High in seven years to be attending Barron, are we?”

He smiles, closing his eyes a little. He shakes his head.

“Were they mad?” I ask.

“
Mad
is probably an understatement.
Disappointed
is the word they used the most.”

I sit down across from him and he tells me about his
parents’ reaction—his mother storming out of the room and refusing to make eye contact with him the next morning, his father shaking his head, saying “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life” and “Education is the most important thing.”

“That’s not ideal,” I say.

“No, no, it’s not,” he says, shrugging. “But they have no idea how disappointed they could have been.” His lips turn up slightly, like he’s smirking at himself. “I have a theory that everything is relative.”

I stare at him for five beats too long.

“What?” he says. His lips are still curled up, but his right hand is tracing small circles on the table. He’s not sure he wants to know.

“Never mind.” I pull my physics book out of my backpack. I pretend not to notice that he takes a moment to watch me. We don’t say anything else.

AFTER SCHOOL I go to my locker without waiting for Shelby to leave first. I’m standing right beside her before she notices me. I watch her eyes widen, just slightly.

“Hey, Brey,” she says.

“Hi.” After I shut my locker, I really look at her. She still looks like my best friend.

“We’re on our way to my house. You should come,” she says. She shrugs, but her expression is not indifferent. Her smile looks painted on; her eyes are searching me.

“Maybe,” I tell her. And part of me thinks that I really will go over there. Have drinks. Eat pizza. Wait for someone to pick us up. Go to a party to experience all that I forgo when I stay home. Lie in Shelby’s bed elbow to elbow with Danica and Melissa, laughing ourselves to sleep. There’s a nagging sadness, though, because deep down, these are things I already miss. These are things I’ve already let go of. I can’t see myself not being friends with Shelby, and I probably will go over to her house again one day. But I also know things will never be the same.

“All right,” she says, waving before she jogs down the hall to catch up with Danica and Robert. They wave when they see me, too, and I feel dizzy with grief.
This is how it’s going to be from now on
, I think.
People saying good-bye
.

T
rip is at my house when I get home from school. He’s sitting on the front porch with three mitts and a baseball lying next to him. My brothers fight with light sabers on the grass. He’s been defeated. I take a seat next to him.

“I should have told you about Nathan.”

Trip gives me a small, crooked smile. “Not gonna argue with you.”

I can’t help but smile back. “So what are you doing here?”

“I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“You’re worried about me,” I guess.

“Not really. That’s the excuse I’m using.”

“Why do you have to have an excuse at all?” I turn so I’m facing him.

His laughter is soft. “I don’t know. I thought you wanted one.”

He’s probably right. “I was wrong about you,” I tell him.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he says, “that’s because I’ve been trying to prove you wrong.” He leans his back against the railing.

“I guess it worked.”

Trip laughs again, louder this time. “You fell for some skinny kid who wears leather. It didn’t work.”

I don’t know what to say, so I just shake my head.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“Trip?”

He raises his eyebrows in response.

“I really missed you after you left.”

“I know,” he says, closing his eyes for just a second.

It’s the most infuriating thing he could say. It’s also the most perfect. I laugh. It’s the best I’ve felt all day.

“And Jill is just a friend.” He says this slowly, with his usual confidence stemming from years and years of always saying the right thing. He taps my temple with his finger.
What’s going on in there?
is what he’s asking.

I tell him exactly what I’m thinking. “I’m glad there’s
nothing between you and Jill.” Because there will always be a part of me that’s exhilarated by Trip wanting me. Maybe I’ll never stop trying to be the girl I think boys see when they give me that look—
I’m all yours.
Maybe one day the visions will line up.

“But I think we should just be friends,” I say. “Like we already are.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to resist me?”

I must be blushing, because the corners of Trip’s mouth turn up.

“Trip.”
Just like last year, he’s leaving again, but this year so am I. The real difference is, now we don’t have to lie about how it makes us feel. I know that when Trip thinks of next year, he’s not thinking about what it would really be like to have a girlfriend ten hours away. Still, I ask him, “What do
you
want?”

He leans in close. “What I want is not something I’m going to say in front of your brothers.”

I cover my mouth, hiding my smile and shaking my head because he said just the right thing. He smiles at me, though it’s not as bright, like he knows I can’t say the right thing back.

He shrugs. “But I like being your friend, too.”

I take hold of his hand and squeeze, trying for a friendly gesture.

Trip looks down at my hand and smiles. “Although I still don’t think you’ll be able to resist me.”

I drop his hand and swat at him; I’m laughing too hard to object.

Trip and I stay out on the front porch long after my brothers have defeated the Death Star and moved inside to fight their video game aliens. We even have dinner outside and my mother doesn’t insist we come in. It’s the first really hot day. It feels like the longest the weather’s stayed nice too. But maybe I haven’t been paying attention before. The flowers are in full bloom at our feet—yellow roses, my mother’s favorite—and I wonder why I never noticed those, either. Endings, beginnings; before and after; coming and going; loving and leaving—it’s all blurred together.

“Do you think it will always be like this?” I ask Trip. It’s getting dark, but the sky still looks blue. Navy, like a veil is draped over it. “That everything will always feel like it’s changing? We’ll always be leaving, we’ll always be moving on?”

“Not always,” Trip says. “Not right now.”

T
he hardest part and the easiest part about graduation night is that Nathan’s not there. He went back to see his friends, to go to the graduation parties of his old school, his old life. To play Scrabble and wear Burger King crowns.

We throw our mortarboards into the air and duck as they fall right back down on us, faster and harder than the force we used to release them.

Graduation day is like a giant eraser. Nothing that’s happened over the past four years matters, because now we’re all in the same boat. And that boat is leaving.

We’re all saying good-bye.

I hold hands with my best friends. Even Shelby. I let my mother cry on my shoulder and I cry a little on hers, too. I’m laughing in the picture I take with family because my dad whispered a corny joke in my ear right before the flash went off; something about
How many graduates does it take to change a lightbulb?
Jason is laughing too, and Gregory is rolling his eyes, finally acting like a proper middle-school boy.

I pose in a zillion photos and forget that Celine is passive-aggressive, or that Patrick uses girls, or that Leila is clueless. It doesn’t matter that Marnie and Ella and I don’t have anything in common except for which classes we took, or that Chiffon hasn’t said anything to me since the day after she rescued me. I stand in a circle with Shelby, Melissa, and Danica, and we link hands and smile at one another. We don’t mention the theories we used to follow to make ourselves invincible.

I COULD NEVER have predicted how fast summer would fly by.

I spend a lot of time at the French Roll, serving baked goods and coffee, and I leave every day smelling like cinnamon. Ella and Marnie come in when my shift’s over to eat lunch with me, and we provide updates on things like how cool or weird our roommates seem. Danica joins us some days. All of us are still undecided majors, except for Danica, who knows she wants to be an English major.
There’s no rush, there’s no rush,
is what we tell each other.

I spend time at Shelby’s, too, with Danica and Melissa, sitting on Shelby’s front lawn playing cards while Melissa reads us our horoscopes and Danica braids the long strands of grass.

I hang out at the Chapmans’, dining on fruit and red meat, and sitting for hours on the porch listening to Earl give out random advice about how to prepare for the weather at Barron—
it’s a different altitude
, he claims. Zane and Trip decide to teach me self-defense—mostly things they’ve seen on TV—and we practice the moves in the driveway, kicking up gravel and clouds of dust until it starts to get dark and the bugs come out.

Sometimes Trip tells me,
They won’t know what to do with you at Barron,
in a way that makes me smile and blush. I tell him,
It’s fine, because I know exactly what to do at Barron.
And, sometimes, I even believe myself.

I DON’T GO to so many parties, but I do go to the going-away party Patrick throws for Nathan in July. Nathan’s leaving early to start a summer internship with a civil engineering company by his new college. There are several internships he could’ve taken at the plant. That’s why people move here, after all, to work for the plant—it’s a pinnacle for people who study science or engineering, like Nathan’s parents. But Nathan wants to leave. Robert and Patrick don’t understand it. They only understand that it’s a reason to throw a party.

Everyone comes. Even Chiffon. Shelby doesn’t say anything to her. She doesn’t give her dirty looks. I told Shelby about Chiffon coming to get me that night when I’d had too much to drink at Sam’s. She was very still and quiet as she listened. She looked sad. I think she probably wishes she had been the one to take care of me, the way she’s always the one to take care of Melissa when Melissa is drunk. The way she used to take care of me in so many other ways. She must’ve been thinking about Chiffon, too, about the friend we used to have.

Halfway through the party, Shelby leans forward, like she has a secret, so we form a huddle, my shoulders tight with Danica’s and Melissa’s.

“I heard she’s no longer fucking Zane,” Shelby tells us. The three of them look at me.

“It’s true,” I confirm. Chiffon broke up with Zane almost three weeks before graduation.

Shelby’s eyebrows rise and she smirks. It’s nothing like the face she makes when she’s insulting someone. She’s impressed, and looks at each of us, like this is a feeling we’re all sharing. She doesn’t mention girl points, none of us does, but I think we’re all thinking about them.

At midnight, Leila, Shelby, and I walk in on Nathan making out with Mary Ann in the den.

“Oh myyyyyy!” Leila says, rushing to shut the door as Mary Ann scrambles to put on her shirt. Shelby and I laugh so hard we drop the vodka. Leila yells at us to be
more careful with
her
vodka, and that makes us laugh even harder. We laugh so hard it’s impossible to walk. So we roll around on the floor in the hall kicking our feet and holding our stomachs. Mary Ann storms out of the den, stepping over us as she walks down the hall.

“Mary Ann finally got what she wanted and now she’s swimming away from him,” Shelby says in between laughs. It’s funny because Mary Ann moves her arms in long strides like she’s always in water. What’s really funny, though, is that Mary Ann is just going to be a senior and has no idea what it is to really leave. And she’s walking away from Nathan like it’s nothing.

Nathan comes out of the den and says, “Thanks a lot,” but he slides down the wall so he’s sitting on the floor with us. He starts laughing so hard that his entire body shakes and he has to cover his face because it’s so red.

THE MORNING BEFORE Nathan leaves, I tell him it was the best party I’d ever been to. He thinks I’m kidding and tells me to knock it off.

He tells me to knock it off again when I start to cry. Nathan’s room is like a fortress of boxes, half for storage, half to be mailed so they’re waiting for him at his dorm, so all he has to take with him is a few suitcases. I’m transporting my things the exact same way.
Great minds
, Nathan said when I told him.

His room is so empty. There aren’t even any sheets on
his bed. I tried to keep myself from crying, but nothing worked, so now I’m just letting the tears fall. Nathan’s going to the place he really wants to be. He’s fading from my life almost as quickly as he entered it, and I wonder if this place will ever be home to him because it’s where his parents are, or if it will always be the place that built him up and wrecked him.

He hugs me until I’m not crying so much. We don’t say anything. After he pulls away, I stare at him for a long time and he stares right back at me. It feels like a balancing act; we break the stare and Nathan really disappears.

My throat tightens like I’m going to start crying again, so I blurt out whatever pops into my head. “I have a theory,” I start. My voice is shaking, but I keep going. “I have a theory that your new college will have a place where you can buy seven-pound burritos.”

His face opens up, and he smiles, even though his eyes look like they’re about to flood.

“I have a theory that improv is the most valuable thing I learned in high school,” Nathan says.

“I have a theory that no one can ever drink too many strawberry milkshakes.”

“I have a theory you’re going to love Barron even more than you thought you would.”

“I have a theory that nothing is going to turn out how we predict it will.”

Nathan nods, then shakes his head. “But please, let
the strawberry-milkshake theory be fact.” He shrugs and doesn’t seem sad or scared, and I can’t believe I always saw his bravery and his sincerity as things that were uncharacteristic to him, when really they were a part of him all along. According to Shelby, the longer you know someone, the longer they have to let you down. But sometimes, the longer you know someone, the more time they have to surprise you.

I say a final good-bye, and he walks me to my car. I feel a sort of shock as I drive away. Good-byes are sad, but they don’t have to be. We always knew we’d be moving on, we just never understood what it took to do it, what it meant to do it, and what we got to take from the people and places we left. My first thought, after I’ve turned the corner and can no longer see Nathan in my review mirror waving at me from the sidewalk, is that I can’t wait to call him in the fall, after classes have started and things about our colleges are still new and weird, but we’re getting the hang of it too. To laugh at the things we predicted wrong, and to gloat about everything we saw coming. To make new predictions or just ramble about the present. I don’t know if he’ll answer when I call, but I hope he will.