did what?”
“I broke up with Luke.”
Her mouth hangs open. Then she says, “How can you break up with a guy if you’re not even going out with him?”
This annoys me. “We’ve been hooking up for the last two and a half months, Ash. We were doing something. And now we’re not.”
“Right,” says Ash. She jams her coffee cup into the cup holder. “Ten bucks says you’ll change your mind.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.” I check myself as I say this, wondering if I’m telling the truth. But I am. I feel it. At the party, as Luke was buttoning up his shirt over that body, a body so perfect that it was like a punch to the throat, I’d said, “Well, it’s been fun. ‘Bye. Have a nice life,” and walked out of the bedroom without looking back. “I just don’t want it any more, that’s all,” I say.
“Can you hear yourself?” she says. “You don’t want Luke DeSalvio. Everybody wants Luke DeSalvio. Hell, if you guys kept hooking up, maybe he’d ask you to the prom.”
“I’m not going to keep hooking up with some random guy in case the cheerleading squad isn’t available to escort him to the prom.”
“Bite my head off, why don’t you?” She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “He’s not exactly random. I thought you liked him. I thought you more than liked him.”
I sigh. “I do. I did. I can’t figure out if I wanted him or I just wanted, well…”
“You dog!”
“That’s the point. I’m not. I’d like to be able to talk to the person I’m hooking up with.”
“Talk? To a guy? What for?” She sees my face and laughs. “Kidding, kidding.” She digs around underneath the doughnut for a still-smokable butt, giving up when she doesn’t find one. “I guess I’m just surprised. I mean, I think it’s totally the right decision. It’s great. It does say something that he went for you, though, as much as I hate to say it.”
“Thanks a lot,” I say.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “You, Miss Skip-a-Grade, 9.45 GPA, off-to-the-Ivy-League prodigy—”
“I wish you would stop saying that.”
“And him with the bazillion varsity letters, the golden tan, and the…”
“Amazing ass?”
Ash pulls an I’m-so-shocked face and adopts her British accent. “Such a cheeky girl!”
“Such a dorky girl,” I say. “Who knows why he was hanging out with me. Maybe I was next on the list.” I reach back and rebundle the hair at the back of my head, thankfully blonde again. “I tried the casual hookup thing. It’s not for me. It’s like I was trying to be someone else. Trying to be him.”
Ash considers this. “I’m not sure that’s such a bad idea. To try to be like guys. Look at them. They just do whatever they want and nobody cares. Why shouldn’t we be like them?”
I sigh. This is not the Ash I’ve known for ever. The Ash I knew used to be totally and completely in love with Jimmy—poet, guitar guy, future rock star. They went out for a year and a half, until he had some sort of schizoid butthead attack and cheated on her with a freshman girl with shiny Barbie hair and enormous Barbie breasts. Since then, it’s all she thinks about. How free guys are. How they go after what they want, how they get it, how happy they are doing it. How hooking up is so much better than having a boyfriend, how it can keep you from getting hurt.
But I know that’s not true, and I know better than to bring up Jimmy. After Jimmy, Ashley became Ash and Jimmy became a ghost. He might as well be dead, even though his locker is right down the hall from ours. “This particular prodigy doesn’t have time for Luke DeSalvio or any other guy,” I say. “This prodigy has to keep her grades up so that the colleges come knocking with the big bucks.”
Ash smiles. “My list is up to six now. I’ve got Rutgers, Oberlin, NYU, SUNY, Sarah Lawrence. I’m hoping that they’ll ignore my math grades. And my chemistry grades. And that D I got in cooking freshman year.”
“I still don’t know how you managed a D in cooking.”
“Mrs Hooper had us make mayonnaise. How is that cooking?”
“You said six colleges.”
“I’m also applying to Cornell.” She gives me a knowing look. “Bet that’s your safe school.”
I pull Ash’s cup out of the holder and take a swig of cold, gritty coffee. “Nothing’s safe.”
First-period study, and Chilly’s on an Audrey hunt. He lopes into the library and gives me a wicked grin. He sits in the seat across from me, his brows waggling, suggestive of God knows what. I ignore him, grab one of my books and flip it open without really seeing it. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Blah blah blah, says Beatrice. Blah blah blah, says Benedick. Your lips are like worms.
“Nice party?” Chilly says.
“Fine.” I try to make my voice flatter than a robot’s in the hope that he’ll leave me alone. No such luck.
“Did you hook up?”
“You have sex on the brain,” I say.
“I have sex other places, too.”
“I don’t think you have sex anywhere, and that’s why you have to live vicariously through the rest of us,” I say.
“Vicariously,” he says. “V-I-C-A-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y. Is that one of the words in your SAT practice book? I bet you use flash cards.”
“Is there a reason you always have to sit near me? Isn’t there anyone else you can irritate around here?”
“You’re my favourite.”
He props his chin in his hands and bats his nuclear-accident eyes. Chilly would probably be nice to look at if he wasn’t such a jerk, but the jerkiness overwhelms every other thing, the jerkiness is like a great cloud of nerve gas that causes the eyes to roll and the knees to buckle and disgust to claw at the back of the throat. When he first came to our school from Los Angeles in the middle of sophomore year, the girls took notice. Tall, lanky, skin like coffee ice-cream, those freaky blue-green eyes, a movie-star strut—what’s not to like? I liked it, I’m embarrassed to admit. Oh, he started out great. Notes and gifts and all this attention that I’d never had from anyone. My mom called him “charming”. But then Chilly started feeling more comfortable. He started opening his big stupid mouth. He took all the same honours classes that I did, but while I did hours of homework and studied every night, he seemed content to do the least amount possible. He almost never had a book with him. At least not one that he was supposed to. He made fun of me for my study habits, my friends and my work on the sets of the school plays. He said that the only thing worth my time was him. I finally told him that if he wanted a pet, he should go out and get a poodle.
He’s never forgiven me for it.
Today
