Shutout (10 page)

“Dan,” Mom called. “I need you.”

“Okay, but the zombies are about to eat the biker's guts while he watches.”

Mom gritted her teeth. “This is more important than
Dawn of the Dead
, honey.”

Dad came out, saw me, and said, “What's wrong?”

“What's wrong,” Mom said, “is that Amanda lied to us and went to a party tonight instead of going to Lena's house.”

Dad's face suddenly hardened, and he said in this quiet voice that was so much scarier than if he'd been yelling, “Well. Let's talk about this.”

So even though I was exhausted and needed to sleep, I had to go and sit in the living room while they asked me all kinds of questions. Whose party was it, who was there, had we been drinking, blah blah blah. Mom actually asked the questions; Dad just sat there and didn't speak. Dad never has nothing to say. I knew I was in serious trouble.

In the end, Mom told me I was grounded from anything but soccer and yoga for a month, and I had to give up my phone on the spot. Also I wasn't allowed to IM on the computer, which meant I could only use the computer with supervision, even though Mom always snoops on my computer use anyway.

I sat there and took it all without arguing. I felt like it was fair. Finally, Dad spoke up. “Amanda. I didn't think this was who you were. I'm really hurt, and I'm really disappointed.” He left the room without saying anything else, and I felt hollow and despicable.

Fortunately for me, Mom gave me something to get mad about so I didn't have to focus all my energy on feeling guilty. “I'll call Rachel then,” Mom said.

“What?” I nearly screamed. “You can't call Lena's mom! You can't!”

“Not only can I, I have to. She's my friend, Amanda. Did you really think I could keep this from her?”

“But now Lena's going to be mad at me for getting her in trouble! This is so not fair! I never would have told you if I had known you were going to get her in trouble too!”

“Just another example of not thinking things through tonight, I guess.”

“But”—I was yelling now, and crying too—“she's going to hate me! You're going to kill our friendship!”

“She's not going to hate you,” Mom said. “Maybe she'll be mad, but she won't hate you. It looks like she was going to get mad at you one way or the other. Maybe it would have been better if she got mad at you because you refused to go to the party.”

“You don't understand anything!” I yelled. “I did the right thing! I told you! And you're punishing me for doing the right thing!”

Mom shook her head. “Amanda. Who ever told you doing the right thing was easy?”

I went to Lena's locker on Monday morning, but she was already walking away down the hall. There were a lot of people around, so I didn't want to yell or go running after her, especially if she was going to ignore me or be mean to me. I put a note in her locker: “I'm
so
sorry! Mom found out and I begged her not to call. I'm grounded from everything for the next
month
. U? Love, your best friend, Amanda.”

I hoped that writing “best friend” there would make it still be true. But when I got to lunch, I was pretty sure that she saw me come in the door and turned away to talk to Duncan. I didn't think butting in on them would help my case any.

Besides, Shakina was sitting right there, and she smiled and waved and said, “Namaste, bitch!”

“Namaste, bitch!” I called back, and sat down with her.

“So how was the party?” Shakina asked.

“Nightmare. Total and complete nightmare. I sat there and watched boring people get drunk while Lena made out with
a boy and then I got caught sneaking in”—I didn't want to admit that I'd been so wimpy about lying to my parents. God, I'd folded at the first sign of guilt. I was never going to be any good at being a teenager—“and I got grounded for like forever. I don't get my phone back for a
month.
”

“Whoa. That sucks.”

“Yeah, that's really the only bad part. I still get to go to soccer and yoga, and it's not like there are so many parties I'm dying to go to anyway. But yeah, it sucks.”

“Did Lena at least apologize to you?”

“For what?”

“For getting you in trouble! Didn't you do this whole thing for her?”

“Yeah, but . . . but. No.”

Shakina shook her head. “Well, I'm glad you get to go to yoga anyway,” she said. “I was afraid you were gonna make me do the dead bug all by myself.”

I was glad too. But not so glad that I could stop worrying about Lena and whether she was mad at me. I finally caught up to her in the locker room before practice.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” Yep. She was mad.

“I'm sorry. You know I had no idea that I was going to get you in trouble, right?”

She whipped her head around and hissed at me. “No, Amanda, I don't know that. I don't know a lot of things. I thought you were my best friend, but you stabbed me in the back because you were jealous.”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open for a minute before I could speak. “What? What are you talking about?”

“You're jealous of me and Duncan, you're jealous that I made varsity and you didn't, and so you deliberately got me in trouble to sabotage me!”

“I . . . how could you even think that? I would never do that! I just couldn't lie to my mom's face, and—”

“Oh, that was a great touch. Perfect little Amanda is
honest
with her parents, while bad Lena gets caught.”

“You know, I got grounded too!”

“Like it matters. You don't have anywhere to go! How am I supposed to be Duncan's girlfriend if I can't even talk to him on the phone?”

She'd just thrown every one of my failures in my face, and she was gloating about Duncan, so I said something I probably shouldn't have: “Can the kid even put two coherent sentences together? What kind of phone conversations could you possibly have? ‘Gee, Lena, I really like you!' ‘Gee, Duncan, I really like me too! We're perfect together!' ”

We had long since stopped being quiet, and when I looked around, I realized that a crowd had gathered to watch us yell at each other. I felt stupid, and mean, besides. I
had
been jealous of her. Was I trying to sabotage her chances with Duncan without even realizing it? I didn't think so. But I couldn't say for sure.

But Lena could.

“Bitch,” she said, and turned away and kept dressing.

It's kind of funny how hearing that word from Shakina
just a couple of hours earlier had been funny, but now, spit out of Lena's mouth at me like that, it hurt worse than if she'd slapped me.

It was incredibly bizarre to be standing there in the locker room and thinking this was the moment that the best friendship I'd ever had ended. I really thought I had done the right thing when I told my mom the truth, but now I wasn't sure anymore. It didn't feel like there had ever been a right thing to do—just a bunch of wrong things.

I stood there stunned for a minute, then trotted out to the field, my eyes completely dry. Later, maybe much later, I would cry about this, but there was no way I was going to let Lena see how badly she'd hurt me.

I think every one of my teammates was probably thankful for Sever's disease that afternoon, because if I'd been able to run, I would have plowed through anybody who got in my way, and it might have been people instead of soccer balls that got pummeled. As it was, I had a shutout for the scrimmage. I wasn't letting so much as a mosquito get into my goal.

“Great intensity,” Beasley said to me afterward. “Everything okay?”

And because I was tired and dripping sweat and I had grass stains on my legs from diving after balls, I answered, “Yeah, except for being grounded and losing my best friend, everything's just peachy keen.”

Beasley did not do that annoying thing that a lot of adults do when they hear about kids' problems—that sort of frown that's really a smile that basically says isn't it cute that you have such silly problems. She didn't tell me I'd get over it or
that it wasn't so bad. All she said was “I'm sorry. I know how hard that is.”

“Yeah, well, I'll get through it. I'm tough as an old boot.” I thought maybe saying it might make it true.

“I don't doubt it, Amanda,” Beasley said. She gave me a kind smile and walked away.

I grabbed my stuff and headed home without showering, figuring I could be gross and smelly on the two-block walk home and shower there. That way I could avoid Lena and all the spectators who'd be hoping that Round 2 would start after practice.

Now that I was alone on the street, I started to cry. I just felt like my whole life had fallen apart. Everything I thought I was—good at soccer, Lena's best friend, a daughter who made her parents proud instead of crazy—all that was gone. I didn't know who I was anymore, and I missed my old self. I liked being that person.

I was so absorbed in my misery that I didn't hear the bike coming up behind me. I only heard Conrad's voice bellowing, “I just want you to know when you walk with the ball under your arm like that, it's really, really tempting to knock it out, but I know you're in a bad mood, so I'm not doing it.”

I sniffled and turned to look at him. He was smiling, but I didn't feel like smiling. “Yeah, well, thanks for that,” I said.

“No problem,” he said. “I mean, I know going through school with that face all day can't be easy on you.” He started to pedal away, but when he saw my unhappy expression, he got off his bike and walked next to me for a while without talking. It was nice, but annoying at the same time.

“So you should tell me next time you want to sneak out,” Conrad said.

“Why?”

“Because I don't like the idea of you being at a party like that by yourself.”

“Well, I was with Lena.”

“Yeah, well, that's not much consolation. Jeez, I can't believe I used to like her.” If only he'd told her, my life would be awkward because my best friend was dating my brother instead of because my best friend hated me. “Anyway,” Conrad continued, “you really shouldn't go to parties like that without—”

“A chaperone?” I barked.

“Nah. Forget it,” he said. I wanted to yell at him that I was fourteen years old and I didn't need him to protect me, but it was kind of sweet in a dumb, sexist way, and since Conrad was one of the few people in my life who wasn't pissed off at me, I decided to let it slide.

“I just mean,” he said, “that I'm way better at lying to Mom and Dan than you are.”

I couldn't help laughing. “Yeah, I guess it would be hard to be any worse than me.”

When we got home I showered and did homework and ate dinner and did some more homework. Homework seemed even more boring than usual because I couldn't punctuate it with quick calls and messages to Lena. Even though I probably got it done faster, it still felt like it took forever.

Dad was giving me the deep freeze too, which also made
it weird to be in the house. It actually made being grounded a lot worse. Normally if Mom or Dad was being odd for some reason, I would have run to Lena's house. Now I had to sit there and feel the disappointment rolling off him.

At least my brothers were being cool. Whenever one of us is in trouble, we all pull together. So Conrad gave me an evening off from teasing, and Dominic gave me the evening off from annoyances. The three of us actually sat there and played a game of Crazy Eights that lasted for forty-five minutes and probably would have lasted longer if Dominic hadn't had to run off and watch some TV show.

So it was a slightly boring but conflict-free evening of sibling bonding, but I wasn't really surprised at the end of it when the switch in my brain that allows me to fall asleep didn't work again, and I just lay in bed thinking about how my heels hurt. I went downstairs and found Dad watching TV.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi,” Dad said, not turning his gaze away from his show.

I sat down and watched for a minute. Some fishermen hauled a guy in a rubber monster suit on board and he killed them all. I don't know how it is that Dad can always find the crappiest horror movie on any channel at any given time. I guess it's a gift.

After a period of awkward silence, I finally said, “So, are you going to stay mad at me forever?”

And now Dad looked at me. “I'm not mad, Amanda. I am proud of you for telling the truth. I'm just kind of . . . Mom says I'm being stupid, but I thought maybe the fact that you
and I had been through such a horrible time together would mean we wouldn't have to do the whole adolescent war of attrition thing.”

“Dad, it's not . . . I shouldn't have lied, but—”

“Did it occur to you to ask?”

“What? No! I mean, you would have said no, right?”

“I know you well enough to know as soon as you signed that paper you wouldn't take a drink. So going to a party when I know you're not going to drink or get into a car with someone who's drinking and you have your phone with you? I probably would have gone for it.”

Dad was nuts. There was no way he would have said yes to that. “And then Mom would have had to call Rachel, and we wouldn't have been able to go, and Lena would have been mad at me,” I objected.

Now Dad looked at me like I was nuts. “But isn't she mad at you anyway?”

I watched as a humanoid from the deep claimed another victim on the TV. “You make a strong point, Father.”

“That's why they pay me the big bucks around here,” he said, smiling.

We watched the movie in silence for a while, but this silence was comfortable instead of awkward. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked.

“Not as much as I'd like. Lots to worry about, you know. I have to make sure I get all my worrying time in, and I'm so busy during the day that I need to carve out a few hours at night.”