The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (15 page)

[2:55 PM]

Me

THAT MEANS I TOLD YOU SO.

 

12

My stomach rumbled
through both of my last classes until I was positive that I could feel the vibration in my temples. I pushed through, my fingers flying over the keys of the electronic quiz Mr. Holbrook had set up.

I'd spent lunch in the library to study. Jack had also been forgoing sustenance, his wide back hunched over the keyboard of his laptop next to a pile of textbooks.

“Programming Languages sucks,” he'd said as I passed him.

“Agreed.” I paused. Jack had been ghosting around the cafeteria lately, appearing in line and then disappearing again. A wriggle of annoyance twanged up my vertebrae as he ducked his head behind his screen again. I didn't like Jack Donnelly, but there was only so much damage I could be responsible for. I cleared my throat. “Hey, I'm sorry about that evil twin comment from the other day.”

He didn't look up. “Who wants to be the good twin?”

It was a fair point.

“You didn't come back to sit with us,” I said. “I didn't want that to be my fault.”

“I don't have a problem with you. But Ben West never shuts up.” He set his hands to the keyboard again and started typing. “I'm not Peter. I don't have to spend time with the student council when I don't want to.”

No one would ever mistake you for Peter.

“Okay. Good talk,” I said.

I'd found an empty table and rummaged for my notes. My stomach protested, but I promised it a sandwich and spent forty-five minutes trying to commit the three equality functions equations to memory. It seemed to work. I finished the quiz with seven minutes to spare and watched the clock in the corner of my screen until the bell rang.

I was the first person out the door—although I had to shove Nick Conrad for the privilege. All but running, I scampered out of the front gate, making my way to the deli between the Mess and the park near my house in record time. Sweating despite the chill hanging in the air, I darted inside the deli and purchased the largest hummus-and-sprout sandwich available. I scarfed a bag of chips on the walk to the park, washing it down with half a bottle of soda.

I really should have taken Meg's advice on the merits of breakfast. The Great Thought Experiment wasn't always wrong.

The park was deserted. Each blade of grass in the field moved eerily in the light breeze. The chains on the swings creaked. Metal and wood groaned under my feet as I climbed up to the play structure. I threw myself down and inhaled my sandwich with far less chewing than I would normally employ. I crumpled the parchment paper and flipped open my bag to retrieve my comics and a cardigan. With food in my stomach and a sweater on, I was immediately less frantic. I hopped down off the play structure, dragging my bag by the strap, and crawled through the bark under the small slide.

The cement cubby between the slide and the stairs had always struck me as some kind of design flaw. Thousands of local kids had probably hidden from their parents in it when told it was time to leave. Someday, the city would realize there was a nonplastic park still in existence and would rip the cement and splintered wood out of the ground. But, until then, I had one perfect place to go.

I wedged myself inside the cubby, pressing my back to one wall and my feet against the other. Once upon a time, I'd been able to fit here with Harper. We'd hidden during a third-grade birthday party that our parents had forced us to go to. I couldn't remember whose birthday it was, but I could vividly recall Harper and I squeezing into the cubby to avoid playing Red Rover on the green. Back then, it was our personal submarine; I'd been in my Jules Verne phase. Now, it was my personal sanctuary. Call it yet another pitfall of having no siblings, but I liked my private space.

I let out a contented sigh as I opened the first comic I'd brought with me. The cubby was protected from the breeze, keeping my pages from ruffling. I read leisurely, savoring each panel and speech bubble as though I had all the time in the world—instead of a backpack full of new homework.

Halfway through the third comic, I heard footsteps outside of the structure. I lowered the soda from my mouth, praying that it was a jogger or someone else who wouldn't interrupt my quiet time. It was almost too cold for anyone else to be outside. I really didn't want to have some prodding child discover me hiding under the little slide.

But instead of the pitter patter of obtrusive feet, the stairs beside me shuddered with heavy footfalls.

“This is huge. No, gargantuan. This is so frakking ginormous that I have to use made-up words and possibly apply Hubble's Law to the situation.”

I sat up straight, thwacking my forehead against the cement as I recognized Meg's voice. I started to slide out of my hidey-hole when Harper's voice said, “We can't tell Trixie.”

With one hand pressed to the wall of the cubby—and the other pressed to my throbbing head—I froze. The concrete scraped against my palm as my arm slid down the wall into my lap. Granted, the last few weeks hadn't been the coziest our group had ever seen and I knew that they were continually having conversations that weren't for my ears, but I'd assumed that they were upset about me not getting along well enough with the student council. But this was information that I wasn't supposed to have. I stared up, as though I could will myself to have X-ray vision and see my best friends.

We didn't hide things from each other. We'd never needed to. Harper told me when my essays veered off topic. Meg told me when I was projecting. We were all in charge of making sure no one's bra straps were showing. It'd been us against the world since elementary school.

“We have to tell her,” Meg shouted. I felt a swell of relief in the pit of my hummus-lined stomach. At least she was on my side. Whatever my side happened to be.

“No,” Harper countered. “I swore to Cornell that I wouldn't tell her. I probably shouldn't even have told you, but I couldn't keep it a secret anymore.”

In my head, I tabulated a list of secrets Harper and Cornell could be fostering. She'd been fairly mute about the physical part of their relationship. Had they moved past chicken-peck kisses?

That wouldn't be damaging to me personally. I wasn't the guardian of Harper's nether regions and I'd been the one threatening to push them into closets.

“If he was in love with me, I'd want to know,” Meg said loudly. “I'd run across town, bang on his door, and throw myself into his arms.”

“But you aren't Trixie,” Harper protested. “She'd laugh in his face if she knew he was in love with her.”

My mouth flopped open. Someone was in love with me? Beatrice Watson me? Who in the world could be in love with me? Or, more to the point, who could be in love with me and would have confided that to Cornell?

I thought about Peter at the harvest festival and his offer of a relationship by default. Had I misread that entire exchange?

Now I was sure I wasn't going to climb out of the cubby. Not until I was absolutely positive about what was going on. Or until I got the feeling back in my toes.

“We should give her that option,” Meg said. She sounded frantic, her voice constantly changing volume. “She could—”

“She won't,” Harper said. I felt the vibration of her stamping her foot against the play structure. “You know she won't. She'll tear him apart for this. God, you know what she's like.”

What she's like?
I thought, my hands crumpling my comic.
Your best friend? Loving and nerdy if a little opinionated?

“I know,” Meg said. There was a thump and her voice was suddenly closer. I guessed that she'd sat down. “But maybe she could see that he's, you know … perfect. I mean, no offense to Cornell—”

There was another thump and Harper's voice was closer, too. “No, I get it. Cornell is amazing, but Ben … Ben is geeky and smart and funny and considerate.”

Ben?!
I mouthed the name, trying to make it sink in. There was no way to confuse Ben with Peter. But the idea of Benedict West being in love with me was so ludicrous I almost laughed. Remembering that I was eavesdropping, I slapped my comic to my face. Obviously, someone had their wires crossed. There was absolutely no chance that Ben was in love with me. He couldn't even be in the same room with me without verbal bloodshed.

“Do you know what he did when he heard that Kenneth Pollack was trying to frame his frosh?” Harper continued. “He wrote an affidavit. He even had it notarized before he brought it to Dr. Mendoza. He said that if Brandon Calistero went on academic probation, then he would strip himself of his ranking in protest. Who else would do that? I mean, Trixie's been really nice to Brandon, but Ben went above and beyond.”

“He's more mature than any other guy on campus,” Meg mused. “And when he showed up today with that haircut and his mustache shaved, I almost fainted. He's legitimately hot.”

I tried to picture Ben West's face, sans silly mustache. The haircut was definitely an improvement. And he did have a strong jaw, there was no denying that. The problem was the mouth attached to it.

“Did he cry?” Meg asked suddenly. “After the harvest festival? I couldn't even believe how awful she was to him.”

I started to shout at them that I had no way of knowing that West was lurking under that stupid clown mask. I'd been fighting off a panic attack. I couldn't control the nonsense coming out of my mouth when I was surrounded by zombies, even if they were just the sophomores caked in makeup.

“He's devastated,” Harper said. “Cornell and Peter are so worried about him. Because even after what she said—”

“The idiot savant thing or the part where all of his old friends ditched him?”

“Both. Even after that, he's still completely and utterly in love with her. I guess he always has been. Have you noticed that he's never even looked at another girl on campus? He's only ever loved Trixie. Since the first grade when the thing with the monkey bars happened.”

“Is that why he pushed her?” Meg asked.

“That's the worst part,” Harper wailed. “He didn't mean to. He told Cornell that he'd been trying to hold her hand and she slipped. He's been trying to make up for it for years and she's so—”

“Blind,” Meg simpered.

“Exactly. She'll always hate him.”

“You're right. We can't tell her,” Meg said softly. “If she knew that he wasn't really fighting back because he loved her, she would eviscerate him. He deserves better than that. Can't Cornell or Peter talk him out of it?”

“They've tried,” Harper said. “But it hasn't done any good. And he's been trying so hard this year. Like when he recited that Oscar Wilde poem at lunch? And she just ignored him.”

Because he was trying to steal B's spotlight.
But that didn't seem right. Why would he try to stomp on B's moment if he'd risked having his ranking stripped so B could walk free? Ben had been looking at me while he quoted the poem. He hadn't even noticed when the rest of the table around him had gone back to planning.

Dear God. Were they right? Was this real? Did this really span all the way back to the monkey bars?

“The boys keep trying to tell him to stop talking to her,” Harper continued. “But he insists that it's better to let her tear into him because at least she's paying attention to him.”

“We should tell him to stay away from her. Who knows what she'll say to him next? One wrong word and—I don't even want to say it. He'll—he'll—”

Harper's voice was barely loud enough for me to hear. “He'll kill himself.”

I was starting to feel the walls of the cubby closing in. My skull felt like it was packed with fiberglass. I was trapped in this alternate universe where up was down and black was white and I was some kind of horrible demon who had never noticed that Ben West was in love with me.

Ben West was in love with me. Like telling-his-friends-and-possibly-on-the-brink-of-suicide-if-I-kept-making-fun-of-him in love with me.

Oh my God.
I puffed out my cheeks to keep from hyperventilating.
The mustache. He shaved off the mustache. Because I went too far. I hurt him and I didn't even know. I thought it was all the same game.

But it'd never been a game. Ben had been trying to silently communicate his love for me since we were six years old on top of the monkey bars. And I had been trying to make him shut up—or cry—for just as long. Every time I made a dig about his intelligence or mentioned his mother moving across the country to start a new family or anything else in my arsenal.…

I was a bully.

I was a monster.

Even my best friends knew that I couldn't be trusted. I was the Hulk and they were the Illuminati deciding to ship me off to a planet where I couldn't hurt anyone.

What could I do about it? I couldn't run across town and bang on his doorstep, the way that Meg would have if it had been her. First of all, I didn't even have my bike with me. Second of all, I had no idea what I would say. I was in no way prepared to deal with this.

“I need to get home,” Harper said. “I still have to start my American Immigrant paper. But after lunch today, I couldn't study with Cornell. Ben looked so depressed when he realized she wasn't coming.”

“But what about Monday?” Meg asked. “What do we do?”

“I'll try to get to Ben before Trixie can. I'll tell him that he should stay away from her as much as possible. Maybe he can switch to different classes next term. I bet Peter could pull some strings in the office to make sure they aren't taking anything together. That might help. Cornell said that Ben was having a hard time focusing with her in American Immigrant. He's already dropped in the ranking. You know he almost beat me for second last year.”