I LOGGED IN TO THE LIBRARY SYSTEM AND PRINTED OUT THE ID numbers of everyone who'd been there second period on Friday. Bridget promised to meet with her source and give me a list of their names by the end of the day. She was due at choir rehearsal right when school let out, and I had history last period, so she told me she'd place the names in an envelope and tape them to the underside of the desk closest to the window.
At lunch, I took my usual spot at the soccer table, next to Patrick Penrose, the head of our group and also our goalie. He was tall and kind of bulky, muscular but not so much a brick house as a mud house that swayed and leaned with the wind. Soccer balls stuck to him; he had an uncanny ability to put himself in their path. Off the field he was pretty chill, but he took the game seriously and he was determined to keep a clean sheet this season to impress college scouts.
Patrick was always organizing trips to Maxwell Park and Wildwater Kingdom. His cousin worked there and helped us bypass the endless lines by calling ahead on his walkie-talkie, claiming our last ride had broken down and shooting us straight to the front. For this he was rewarded with "superior customer service" pay bumps each quarter.
I opened my thermos of coffee and took a swallow. It was cold now, but it was still tinged with the hair of the dog that had bit me and hadn't let go since Ellie ditched me at Café Kismet.
There seemed no reason to sober up today. I'd been framed, blackmailed, and presented with a false alibi, all before noon.
"Top it up?" Josh said quietly, waggling a miniflask under the table.
I was surprised. I didn't think Josh liked me. When I got moved to defense this season, Josh was bumped to second string. I used to play center forward, the glory position, sort of the equivalent of quarterback in football, but coach had decided my particular skill set was better utilized elsewhere.
Now we were both fullbacks, but Josh only got to play if I needed a break or got benched for fouling someone, and he resented me for it. In contrast, I never gave Delinsky, my own replacement for center forward, a hard time. The game was the game. Maybe this was Josh's way of making peace and saying there were no hard feelings anymore?
I accepted the offering and drunkenly observed my fellow classmates for the rest of the hour.
The sheriff's deputies didn't even try to be discreet. They called someone new out of the cafeteria every two minutes. I enjoyed Fred's perp walk in particular; it was probably the most terrifying moment of his life.
I probably should've jotted down the names of everyone who was summoned, because one of them had driven my car and dumped West Side Story Maria at the hospital, but I was too out of it to think clearly, and I was bracing myself for my follow-up interrogation.
The strange thing was, nobody seemed to care about Maria Salvador. Or at least, no one was talking about her. Every conversation I overhead was about how "annoying" and "unfair" it was that the final college-counseling sessions had to be rescheduled to accommodate the investigation into her overdose.
Palm Valley High was a cold-ass place, but it was not without irony: the conscientious people who'd set up their college meetings for today would get screwed, and the slackers like me, who'd signed up later in the week, wouldn't be affected.
I stumbled into history class early, dehydrated and fighting off a headache, and sure enough Bridget's envelope was there, under the desk by the window. The location she'd picked was perfect because on Monday nights for the last several months I always did a favor for Ryder. All I had to do was make sure the window was unlocked when I left, and on Tuesday he'd give me forty dollars. Easiest money I ever made.
Most of the time it was a cinch, but every once in a while I ran into trouble, like maybe a kid stayed late to talk to Mr. Donovan, or Mr. Donovan himself lingered to organize the supply closet, in which case I was supposed to draw a small red X on the back of Ryder's lock with a wax pencil as I passed by his locker on my way out.
Today was an easy day-I unlocked the window before anyone else arrived-and I was happy for it, until I remembered I had no one to spend the forty dollars on, not anymore.
Ellie was only one classroom away, right behind us, but she may as well have been on the moon. I got a sickening thought: had she dumped me because forty dollars wasn't enough to take her to nice places? Just as quickly, I dismissed the theory. We'd been happy before I had any money. We'd been happy going to free events and occasionally watching DVDs with her brother, Jonathan. We'd been happy.
So why did she end it?
Mr. Donovan taught history and served as the debate coach. He was widely regarded as the best teacher at Palm Valley, definitely the best hire of Mom's and a shining example of how to teach "to the test." (Conveniently, Fresh Start also wrote and sold the quarterly tests used to measure whether students were learning above, at, or below their grade levels.) My mom's crowning achievement was tying teacher salaries to performance. If they failed to meet their student achievement quotas, they'd lose pay, and their pet projects, deemed frivolous, would lose funding as well. Donovan's efforts were single-handedly responsible for keeping the debate team alive.
He was the kind of teacher whose enthusiasm made you feel embarrassed for him. He even wore jackets with patches at the elbows, a parody of a professor. It was like, protect yourself, dude. Why do you have to make it easy for us to mock you? Have some self-preservation.
The debate kids (the lincoln-douglases) loved Mr. Donovan, though. They fed off his enthusiasm. It fueled them, and the rest of us couldn't touch them. They were nerds, but they didn't care, because they didn't need our approval or acceptance. They were what the groups were supposed to be but hardly ever were: close-knit, insulated. Tight. And they were this way because they wanted to be, not because of an arbitrary choice they made freshman year that lumped their fates together.
Maybe that's why Ellie had taken up with Fred. Maybe that earnestness appealed to her.
I held my textbook up as a cover and opened the envelope Bridget had left me. The list was thirty people long. I rolled my eyes and glanced at the first four.
Danny: freshman, category unknown. Great. I'd have to figure out which group he ran with and get permission to talk to him.
Sound of Music Maria, head of songbirds: I could talk to her tonight after soccer, during the girls' choir rehearsal. (It didn't hurt that Ellie would be there, too.)
Josh, my fellow beckham: the simplest to approach. He also had history class with me.
Jennifer, consigliere of chekhovs (the tiny, elite group of AP students who studied dead Russian lit. Derogatory nickname: cherkoffs). Bridget had drawn an arrow and written, "She's in my English class and I saw her trying to crib off my exam last year." (Doubtful, I thought. It was probably the exact opposite.)
I was already exhausted and bored by the list. My motivation to solve the "Case of the Missing Flash Drive" waned with each passing minute of class. My order of priorities was as follows:
1. Win back Ellie
2. Find out who framed me
3. Win the game against Agua Dulce
56. Laundry
327. Locate Bridget's flash drive
She had me over a barrel, though. Until I'd confirmed that the deputies had bought my fake alibi, and until I erased all the fake sexts from Bridget's phone, I had to at least pretend to help her. We were all faking something, and faking it hard. It should've been the school motto.
Nevertheless, when the bell rang, I darted next door to Ellie's chemistry class to wait for her instead of questioning Josh.
She slipped out of the room and into the throng and I called out to her. Her back stiffened and she kept walking so I scurried to keep up.
The top half of her hair was looped back with bobby pins, almost invisible in her dark hair. I wanted to tug the tendrils loose.
"Ellie, please wait."
"I don't have your keys," she said, and rejoined the exodus.
"I know." I reached out to touch her arm.
She turned to face me, and her shoulders lifted in the smallest of sighs. "I have to go."
"We all have to go. Carry your books?" I said.
I glanced up to see a small smile on her face, like we were in this together, like last night was a battle, but we were on the same side now. We'd been in the trenches but this was us, after the war.
She stepped out of the swarm and hefted her books into my arms. We strode down the hallway together. She smelled like rain, which was impossible. I was just so thirsty.
"How are you feeling?" she said.
"Terrible."
"Too sober?"
"Ha." We reached her locker all too quickly.
"I'm pretty sure I have a gin-soaked rag in here you could suck on," she said, spinning the lock.
I leaned against the lockers and glanced at hers while she opened it. She still had a picture up from Homecoming, taped below her mirror. Our tongues were sticking out. She'd worn a velvet dress, the kind you could draw patterns on in darker shades by stroking it the wrong way, but it was nothing compared to the softness of her hair, which had framed her face in spiraling curls. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel a fistful in my hands.
I envied the Charlie in the picture. He might've been a little insecure, but in the photo he looked stupidly happy, and he had no idea what was right around the corner. What interested me now was happy Ellie's expression. Was she faking it for the camera? Was she counting the days, minutes, seconds till she could get rid of me? Was the dance a last hurrah to her?
"You want to slug me," I said.
"I'm considering it."
"I wouldn't blame you. In fact, I'd welcome it."
She took her books back from me, placed them in her locker, and turned to regard me. "Crashing Maria's party and calling me out? Really?"
I looked down, embarrassed. "I know."
"Why are you drinking so much?" she asked softly, no more sarcasm.
"You know why," I mumbled.
"You can't blame this on me."
"I'm not. For some, hell is other people. For me, it's endless reality."
"Try again," she said. "Less Sartre, more you."
"When I'm sober, you definitely broke up with me-right? It's never going to stop being true," I said. "But when I'm drunk, maybe it didn't happen. Maybe. And maybe it can be fixed."
"Charlie…"
"I drink to forget. And I drink so I can imagine that tomorrow things will be different. If I had to accept reality as the only truth, I'd obliterate."
She turned back to her locker, for no reason, and without doing anything. Her hands eventually lifted to her face and covered her eyes, and we stood there for a moment, not talking.
She had asked the wrong question. Instead of wondering why I'd started drinking, she should've asked, "How come you didn't drink when we were together?" because the answer was simple: I hadn't needed to. Ellie was my drink, and I'd spent the whole time we were dating fearing the moment my glass was going to run out.
Eventually, I forged ahead. "I can't believe you poured me into Bridget's car, knowing I was miserable, knowing I'd seen you with Fred, knowing something could happen with her."
Her eyes flashed. "I was pretty knowledgeable for a three-second conversation, wasn't I?"
"It meant you were testing me or else you didn't care what happened, and either way I couldn't take it."
She let out a strangled noise of frustration. "You think it means I didn't care? Saving you from crashing your car or killing yourself means I didn't care?"
It felt good to get a rise out of her, like we were finally at the same level of upset. "I just mean-" I started.
"She lives next door to you, it made sense for her to drive you home, it wasn't a test, there was no subtext. I just wanted you to get home okay because I still-" she stopped abruptly and my whole body tensed.
"Because you what?"
"Because I still worry about you," she said angrily.
I chose to focus on the words and not the way they were delivered. I chose to focus on the door that had swung wide open, inviting me back into her life.
"It's only been a couple weeks, Charlie. I can't just shut off my emotions. I don't want you to get in an accident. God."
I let her outburst dissipate and settle in the air around us for a moment.
"Last night, you said I changed. So I'll change back. I'll keep changing or I'll stop, just tell me what to do, tell me what I did wrong," I pleaded.
"I kissed Fred," she blurted out. "It was…sloppy. Terrible."
My smile was just as terrible. "I knew something was going on between you two."
"But it wasn't. Don't you get it? When you saw us, we really were just talking." She laughed joylessly. "About school. About how to get Jonathan into debate next year."
"He's only in seventh grade."
"His teachers think he should skip ahead a year, and he's really freaking out. I promised to make sure he had a group lined up so he doesn't get bullied. Fred said he could help: meet with him before school this week, introduce him to the right people. But then you accused me-in front of everyone! And the fact that you assumed we were together, that you actually thought I'd moved on from you that quickly, pissed me off. So during Spin the Bottle I made sure I ended up with him."
I was angry, but then I was relieved. We'd both messed up, and now we could move forward. Bonus: The kiss had been terrible, reminding her of what she was missing.
"You played Spin the Bottle after I left? Really? That's what songbirds do for kicks at parties?" I teased.
"Well, that and LSD, apparently," she said tonelessly.
My hands shook. "What do you know about that?"
"Not nearly as much as you do."
I was stunned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
She looked at the wall clock. "I'm late for choir."
I followed her. "Talk afterwards?"
She didn't answer, and I stood alone in the hallway like a chump, watching her walk away, no better off than I'd been before our chat.
