The Other Girl: A Midvale Academy Novel (23 page)

“Wow,” Madison said. “That was almost romantic.”

“Who is supposed to spin now?” Cullen shouted. “Let’s keep things moving!

“How about Pilar?” Cullen said. “She is kind of the guest of honor, after all.”

Nicholas poked his head in from the other room. “Hey Pilar,” he said. “Could you please explain to me how exactly you got that problem today? I mean, how did you get it that fast?”

Pilar shook her head and smiled. “I don’t know. It just reminded me of—a problem I used to do a lot.”

“It reminded you of a problem you used to do a lot?” Nicholas said. “What the hell does that mean?”

What if Pilar got me?

If we kissed, and I thought the right stuff, I could get out of her head. But it would have to be for a long time. And people
didn’t kiss for that long in this game. If she got me, I would have to force the kiss to last longer, and that would be weird. But seriously…whatever. So I would look weird. But I would be out of Pilar’s head. I could deal with people thinking I was weird.

Pilar spun the bottle. I shut my eyes and willed it to come to me, and when I opened them, there it was.

We went to the center of the circle. Everyone was looking at us. Gid put his drink to his mouth and drank furiously. Cullen put his hand on his crotch and said, “
Oh
yeah.” Madison put an unlit cigarette in her mouth. Pilar and I started kissing. I made it last longer. I felt her pulling away from me, but I kept kissing her. I wouldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let up. I knew her well enough that I could follow the trajectory of her thoughts, and I thought right along with her:
Is Molly wasted? What ees she doing? She must be so into Gid that she is, like, trying to turn him on by making out with me, or maybe she’s
…Silence.

Silence so complete it felt almost as if I were floating through space. I kissed her just a tiny bit longer, to make sure that this was in fact really happening, that I was really out of her head.

I was.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and pulling away from her, I ran up the stairs, ran through Mrs. Gwynne-Vaughan’s living room, and went to my dorm and lay down on the floor of the closet—Edie had been nice enough to leave a camping pad, a blanket, and a pillow—and fell asleep.

I did like lying there in all that absolute darkness and silence.

My brain was mine.

My thoughts were mine. I was alone. Very alone. It doesn’t get much more alone, I think, than being in a dark closet while your boyfriend is having sex, for the first time, with a very beautiful girl right down the hall.

I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. In a little while there was a knock at the door.

“Edie?” I said.

The door opened. It was Pilar Benitez-Jones, standing in a strip of moonlight, her hair loose, her eyes tired but luminous.

“Can I come in?” she said.

She crowded into the closet with me, and we sat facing each other, hugging our knees.

“I know you would never try to make out with me like that eef you weren’t totally into Geedeon,” she said.

“I had lots of reasons for making out with you,” I said. “I don’t want to get in the way of you and Gid anymore. I swear.”

“I know that you just put me on ATAT because you thought I was pretty,” Pilar said.

This must have been one of the thoughts I didn’t hear.

I was embarrassed. Pilar said, “Don’t be embarrassed. I knew from the beginning.”

“OK,” I said. “So why’d you do it?”

“Because I wanted Geedeon to think I was smart,” Pilar said. “Smart like you.”

That was hilarious. “I always wanted him to think I was pretty like you.”

I snuggled down under my blanket. I smiled. “I feel like we’re at camp, trading secrets in the dark. If we met under other circumstances, do you think we’d have been friends?”

Pilar considered this. “I don’t know,” she said. “That depends on whether you think it’s funny that Devon is such a fat fuck and thinks he’s hot.”

We had to put pillows over our faces.

“I know Geedeon still loves you,” Pilar said when we stopped laughing.

My immediate thought was that she was inside Gid’s head now. “What do you mean?” I said. “What do you mean, you know?”

“I just know,” she said. “Well, and when we were about to have sex, he called me Molly.”

I felt bad for her as only someone who totally understands can. “Maybe it was your name and it just sounded like Molly.”

Pilar smiled, grateful for my feeble attempts to make her feel better. “English may be my second language,” she said, “but Molly and Pilar don’t sound the same.”

It was weird that I really did want to make her feel better. “Look,” I said. “When I was with Gid, he thought about you. Now he’s with you and he thinks about me. It’s not rocket science.”

That’s why I knew I was out of her head for good. Because I really knew I no longer needed to see what made her tick or to feel what it felt like to have Gid look at her. She probably wanted to know what it felt like to have Gid look at me. He was just a person, with eyes—however he looked at us, we just imagined how he was looking.

Gid poked his head in. “Here you are,” he said.

“Are you talking to me, or Pilar?” I said.

Gid seemed to think about this for a second, and then he said, “I’m looking for you, Molly.”

Pilar Benitez-Jones sighed and stood up. “Good enight,” she said.

Now Gideon sat on the floor with me. “Pilar told me to get back together with you. She said that she thinks we’re really in love.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I never didn’t love you,” Gid said. “You broke up with me.”

“Because I knew you were into Pilar. You thought about her all the time. Don’t try to tell me that you didn’t.”

“So what?” Gid said. “And I didn’t think about her that much.”

I didn’t want to argue with Gid about how much he thought about Pilar. I was lucky that Pilar had enough of a sixth sense that she knew Gid was thinking about me, so Gid wasn’t wondering how I knew that he had thought about her. Was the problem not really Gid? Was the problem that when you went out with someone, you just wanted their mind all to yourself? Maybe being inside someone’s mind was just a worse version of the general problem of life—we spent so much time trying to figure out what everyone is thinking, and when we find out, we just wish we hadn’t.

Now it seemed like Gid was reading
my
mind. “Molly, my thinking about you, my thinking about Pilar. That’s going to happen with every guy you ever know, Molly,” he said. “So the question is whether you want it to be me or not.”

I actually smiled. “Is that the only question?”

Gideon shrugged. “Pretty much.”

It wasn’t fair that girls had to live like this. For the rest of my life, whether I was inside someone’s head, whether I was with Gideon or not, it was just going to be this way, whether I
liked it or not. Never knowing. Being scared. Wondering if someone really loved you or not, no matter what they said, and even what love meant, if it meant anything at all. I closed my eyes and let myself be sad about this for a minute. Then I opened them and decided, for this instant, to be happy. “Yes,” I said.

“Yes, what?” Gid looked cute and hopeful.

Hopeful is not nothing.

“Let’s go to the chapel. I think we have some unfinished business there.”