The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (25 page)

So, Cornell had gone back to the dance. I pictured him wearing that patronizing sneer as he sought out our friends, keeping his word to Mendoza, afraid that telling anyone what had happened would reflect poorly on him. My hands started trembling again and I bunched them in my skirt, hoping Ben wouldn't notice.

“How'd you find me?” I asked.

“Peter and Meg took the van toward Harper's, in case you followed her. Meg told me how to get to your house, but she said that I should stop here and check under the tube slide.” He paused, looking around at the surrounding green. “You hid under there at my eighth birthday party.”

Red rover, red rover, send Benedict right over
. Harper and I had fought over what to name the giant squid from our cubby submarine. It was the only year we hadn't had someone to force us to play with the other kids. Before, there'd been her mom. After, there was Meg.

“I couldn't fit under the slide in this dress,” I said, plucking at the
Star Wars
panel.

“It's a very cool dress. Did you make it?”

“I just added the panel.”

He ran his hand over the raggedy wood planks, tracing the grain. He jerked as he caught a splinter and stuck the pad of his thumb into his mouth. His jaw worked and he examined the damage in the sliver of light coming through the slats. “So, what'd I do wrong?”

“You ran your hand against the grain instead of with it. Don't you remember when we made that block plane when we studied Roman engineering? When was that? Fifth grade? Sixth?”

He cut his eyes at me. Millennia of disappointment bloomed there with a couple of days of annoyance lurking underneath. “You stopped answering my texts.”

“Oh,” I said. “That.”

He scuffed the heel of his shoe between two planks. “I know I'm not good at this.”

“This?”

“This.” He brandished his injured hand, gesticulating wildly between us. “There's probably supposed to be something other than school and comics. But I'm just school and comics. It's all I have. You don't get D&D references.”

“You could teach me D&D references,” I said.

“I could if you answered my texts.”

We both stared at his hand, still hovering in the half-light. There was a spot of blood stuck between the grooves of his fingerprint. I imagined what it would be like to fold my fingers with his. It looked so easy when other people did it.

“You didn't do anything wrong,” I said. “I was projecting, I think. Normally Meg clarifies that for me, but I didn't want to…”
Admit that she was wrong about you being in love with me and that I was having a fit about it.
“I'm not good at making new friends. Obviously. Before this year, I only had two friends. But I like being friends with you.”

“I like being friends with you, too,” he said flatly.

“Good,” I said, stressing it until I could almost believe it. “Meg's stupid thought experiment got under my skin. Everyone kept hyping up the dance and the dressing up and the corsages and the driving places together. It got very datelike. Date-y.”

“Date-esque,” he said in the same wafer tone.

“Right. I'm sorry I took it out on you. It's not your fault. That's where the projecting comes in. You did me a favor buying my ticket. A friendly favor. Like Peter getting suckered into driving me and Meg. I get it now. I'm caught up. It won't happen again.”

He squinted at me as though I'd spewed a stream of gobbledygook at him. “I thought you wanted to ride in with Peter. You went on and on about how he was going to take you and I was going to go solo. So, he drove you and I went solo. I figured you wanted to go with him. And then, I don't know, stay with him?” His nose twitched and I could have sworn he turned a little green as he muttered, “I mean, he is better than Jack and Shep.”

“You thought that I wanted to go to the dance with Peter? For dating purposes?” It was wrong to be excited that he'd been just as nervous as I was, but I couldn't help but smile. “Have you considered that being equally smart makes us equally dumb?”

“No, but it's starting to make a lot of sense.”

“For the record, I have zero designs on Peter,” I said. “Dateish or otherwise.”

“Me either.” He rubbed down the line of his jaw. “And I don't have my driver's license. I didn't take my test before I went to DC and since I've been back—well, you know, the Mess.” He motioned to his bike overturned in the bark. “Thus, the two wheels. It's not great for motives related to dating.”

“Unlike the Donnelly family minivan?” I asked.

“Hey, the van has TV screens in the headrests.”

“And smells like Fritos and socks,” I said. “So, if you had your license, would this week have gone differently? I've seen the Yahtzee episode of
Community
. I know alternate time lines are tricky and all.”

He laughed. “I would have offered to be your ride. If, in this time line, I was a decent driver who wouldn't possibly maim you. At least I would have gotten to spend more than five seconds with you.” A blush crept out of his collar and continued up to his cheeks. “You left so fast, I didn't even get to tell you that you look beautiful. In the alternate time line, I would have monologued about that.”

I averted my eyes, my face warming in tandem with his. “I'm wearing makeup. It's performance enhancer for my face.”

“I see you every day. It's not the makeup.” He reached over tentatively and lifted my chin. His fingers shook, just a little. “Your eyes really are gray, aren't they? I thought they were blue, but they're almost silver.”

“Very low melanin levels,” I said, faltering.

“You gorgeous mutant.” A smile wobbled across his face. “That would have been a pretty good line to use to kiss you. If you … I wouldn't—not without asking.”

My thoughts fluttered back in time. I remembered the amazement as realization after realization had come crushing down on me in the cement cubby we were now sitting above. But my limbic system had known since the harvest festival.

This was the risk that I wanted.

I swallowed and found the process more arduous than normal. “Did you really write a sworn affidavit to keep B from getting expelled?”

“What?” He frowned. “Who told you about that?”

“It doesn't matter.” My pulse was slamming in my ears now, shushing everything else. “Did you do that?”

“Well, yeah. It wasn't a huge deal. He obviously didn't hack into Ken's account. He hadn't even set up his password—”

“Say it again,” I interrupted. “The mutant thing.”

His eyes widened, but he bobbed his head and shook out his shoulders. “Okay. Ahem. You—”

His voice broke.

I inched closer to him and set my hand against the back of his neck. Under a short rustle of hair, his skin burned. “My eyes have very low melanin levels.”

“You're perfect,” he stammered. His eyes flickered up to mine and held. “Don't ever stop being you.”

“I'm just school and comics, too,” I breathed. “I don't know how to be anything else.”

“Don't be anything else. Be Trixie.”

He lowered his mouth to mine, catching more of my bottom lip than the top. His nose brushed mine, a hinting nudge. My mouth opened to mirror his. There was a pattern to kissing. It was a chain of individual kisses of varying sizes strung together to make the verb. I'd never considered that before. But, for once, my body seemed to know something that my brain didn't.

The pattern wasn't a pattern. It was a parabolic wave. It was chaos falling into rhythm and forgetting it again. It was hot breath and my hands in his hair and the taste of cola. I strained into it and he was pulling me closer until I couldn't tell whether I was in his lap or he was in mine. He laughed, the sound echoing off my teeth like a triumphant yodel, like we'd found the cure for something together and both realized it in the exact same moment.
Eureka!
Archimedes may have coined the phrase, but Ben and I were revolutionizing it.
We have found it
.

Suddenly, everything I'd ever read made sense. All of the clichés about electricity and drowning and falling and other sinister metaphors for a kiss all swept over me. It was nuclear fusion. It was the door to Narnia. It was a cacophonic wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey symphony regenerating us into a spectacular and overwhelming new form.

I broke away from him, out of breath and shivering. Half of me wanted to throw myself back at him, to lose myself entirely in the feeling until I could pinpoint exactly why it was so entrancing.

But Harper's face exploded into my head, the quaver of her chin as she cried in the front seat of her dad's car. Guilty tears boiled up in my eyes. Mortified, I shoved my face into my hands.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

He pried my fingers off my cheeks and held them firmly between his. It was easy. Fingers folding together like they belonged there. Tears started to leak down my lashes. I blinked fast, trying to keep them from spilling.

“I don't have a ton of experience here,” he said with a bashful cough. “But, generally, I'd assume that crying after making out to be a, uh, bad sign.”

“It's not that.” The embarrassment seemed to be acting like a steroid to my tear ducts. Saline poured in earnest down my face, undoubtedly ruining the makeup Meg had applied. “That was fine. Great, even. If I had a gold star in my purse, I'd put it on your lapel. If I had my purse.”

“I have your purse. It's in my backpack with your soda,” he said, with a beam of pride that dissipated as he seemed to remember that now was definitely not the time for it. With his free hand, he swept away some of the deluge from my cheek. “You're still crying,” he murmured. “Which makes me feel bad because that was kind of the best thing ever.”

I let my head fall forward, resting it on his shoulder. His arms came up automatically and wrapped around me. I continued crying on his neck, wishing that my nose weren't stuffed so I could enjoy the smell of him or at least not drip mucus onto his suit. I hoped it wasn't a rental.

“That's the problem,” I gasped. “I can't be happy now, Ben. I can't. Not after—not with—”

“Harper. You're worried about her,” he said into the top of my head, his hands combing through the ends of my hair.

“Of course I am,” I said to his Adam's apple. “She would never cheat and she would never set other people up to fail. It's completely absurd. And now she's expelled and humiliated and she didn't do it.”

“If she didn't—”

I reared back, disentangling myself from him. Strands of hair stuck to my face, glued in a combination of hairspray and saline. I shoved them out of the way. “She didn't.”

He loosened the knot of his tie. “Okay, since, beyond a shadow of a doubt, she did not do it, then she's safe. They'll look into it and find out it was all a misunderstanding.”

“And if they don't? Her own boyfriend, the vice president of the student council, said that he believed it was her.” I struggled to stand and paced the play structure like a cage. “God, I could kill him. He's supposed to love her. And he turned on her the second they accused her, because he thought it might hurt his reputation. That worthless piece of—”

Ben leapt to his feet, the rubber of his sneakers shining white in the darkness. “That's not fair. He just said what he saw.”

“Then he should have lied,” I shouted. “I hope whoever set up Harper goes for Cornell next. If I could do it, I would. I would destroy him. I would watch him cry about his future going out the window and I would drink his tears. And it still wouldn't be enough. Nothing would be enough to make up for him hurting Harper. She loved him more than anything and he abandoned her. He took her future and took a steaming dump on it.”

I choked down a lungful of air. My hands were shaking violently. I closed them into fists, feeling the futility washing over me. There was a tiny tilde of a wrinkle between Ben's eyebrows.

“What can I do?” he asked, taking a brave step toward me. He ran his hands over my bare shoulders, at once warming them and keeping me in place. “Do you want me to help you find who framed Harper? Do you want me to egg Dr. Mendoza's house? Tell me how to help because I'm at a loss here.”

“Punish Cornell.” The words slipped out of my mouth with no assistance from my brain. But after I said it, it made sense. “Make him hurt the way Harper hurts.”

His arms flopped back to his sides and he shook his head until a spike flopped over his eyebrow. “No. Trixie, no.”

“Yes,” I said, a spark of hope flaring inside of me. Plans started locking into place in my head, clear as crystal. “You're his best friend. No one else would have the dirt that you have. You could do it. You must know something. Something that happened in DC over the summer or if he's a bed wetter or—”

“It won't help, Harper. It's petty. It's beneath you. Hell, it's beneath me and that should tell you something. Look, I'm not saying what he did was right—”

“That's exactly what you're saying. You can't sit back and let him get away with this. ‘Men should be either treated generously or destroyed.'”

He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Not that quoting Machiavelli doesn't make you crazy hot, but it's also the normal kind of crazy.”

“Fine,” I snarled, marching toward the stairs. I stepped on the fabric of my dress as I went, no longer caring if I tore out the extra panel. “Do whatever you're going to do. I don't care. I am going to do what it takes to help my best friend.”

“You're asking me to turn my back on mine!”

I charged down the stairs. “You've been friends for less than a school year. You stopped talking to Mike Shepherd without any remorse. All he did was tear down your campaign posters and tell everyone that your mom left.”