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.”
“We have to do what’s right for him,” Meg said firmly. “He’s such a catch. He’s brilliant and funny and handsome and—”
“In love with the wrong girl,” Harper finished sadly.
The structure creaked again and I felt each of the girls’ retreating steps vibrating against the walls of the cubby. And then I was alone with a destroyed copy of the newest issue of Daredevil, shivering and close to tears.
* * *
“Trixie?”
“Beatrice Lea?”
My head snapped up and I stared at my parents, who were watching me in mirrored concern. The bowl of vegetarian chili steaming in front of me sent sleepy spirals of steam into my face.
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“Oh, lots of things,” said Dad. “We contemplated changing the curtains in the living room and then moved on to discussing buying a DeLorean and then we decided it would be best if we skipped dessert and played a rousing game of beer pong.”
“What?” I asked on the wrong side of shrill. My brain had been the consistency of pudding for close to two hours. I felt it attempting to create thoughts through the sludge. “Beer pong?”
“We asked how your Programming Languages quiz went,” Mom said. “And then Sherry ate the biscuit you dropped on the floor.”
“Oh.”
I glanced down and saw that Sherry’s nose was covered in crumbs. Normally, I would have pointed a threatening finger at him for stealing portions of my dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. There was too much hummus and anxiety pushing around inside of me, fighting each other for dominance.
“Rough day at the salt mines?” Dad asked me.
“Kind of,” I said.
I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of laying the Ben West situation out for my parents. I was sure they were full of the usual roundabout adult wisdom about unrequited love, things like Let him down gently and Treat others the way you want to be treated. But I was incapable of thinking of anything else at the moment. I kept replaying snippets of Harper and Meg’s conversation.
You know how she is.
He’s in love with the wrong girl.
“I think I’m having lady problems,” I grumbled, pushing my bowl away.
Mom immediately sprung to attention, her face setting into its official Doctor Watson lines. Pursed lips, narrowed eyes. “Do you need a heating pad or some anti-inflammatory—”
Dad gargled his chili in discomfort. My hands twitched the universal sign of No, stop now, please.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll take Sherry and lie down for a bit.”
I stood and snapped my fingers lightly until Sherry jumped up and followed me, probably thinking that I had a stash of biscuits for him somewhere. I grabbed a bag of his treats from the top of the fridge and retreated to my bedroom. I stuffed a Milk-Bone into his mouth before sprawling onto my bed. I curled myself around my Iron Man pillow while Sherry crunched happily on the floor.
Seventeen years of life had prepared me for a lot of things. I was a fine cricket player and I could sew a dress in two hours and I could strip down any literary text until it was just metaphor and authorial intention. But I was utterly lost when it came to this newfound issue of boys. Or boy, I guess.
On the one hand, I was horrified. Not just that the first person to fall in love with me had been Ben West, but that it’d happened a decade ago and I’d never noticed.
On the other hand, it was almost nice. I’d always assumed that I wasn’t the kind of girl that anyone would stay up late thinking about. And here I was with a boy who was thinking about me. It just happened to be a boy whom I spent hours torturing.
And what did that say about Ben that he’d accept that kind of punishment from me without losing interest? Was that a sign of psychological damage?
I decided that wasn’t fair. Because the constant dueling was fun. Even West wouldn’t have been able to deny that. Some people played Sudoku or chess to flex their intellect. Ben and I used words. Not only with each other, but with everyone. If I changed tactics to avoid continuing to crush his soul, it wouldn’t necessarily be all that different. Meg had pointed out that West and I were similar. We read the same comics and watched the same TV shows. There had to be a way to converse with him that wouldn’t end in further destruction.
Somehow.
I frowned and glanced over at my phone, sitting silent on top of my covered sewing machine. The thought of undertaking this change of heart without the help of Meg and Harper was disconcerting. I wanted to call them over and have them reassure me that I wasn’t the monster I thought I was. Stubborn, sure, and maybe even a little too dogmatic and crass, but not entirely without hope.
But I couldn’t tell them I’d overheard their conversation. There were too many things I wasn’t ready to talk to them about. I didn’t have a plan of action and they had already decided to keep me away from Ben. Which wasn’t the worst idea ever. If they could talk him out of his feelings for me, then I’d never have to tell anyone that I knew about it.
The idea needled at me. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. I couldn’t lie—to myself or anyone else—and say that I’d ever had a similar inclination toward Ben. Except in the haunted house.
The haunted house. Why hadn’t I seen it the second I realized that Ben and the clown were the same person? He’d leapt in to rescue me, offered me his arm, made me laugh. I’d felt more in five minutes with him than I had in an hour alone with Peter. I’d come home and obsessed about it and made plans to track him down.
He’d been there the entire time, hidden behind a ghastly piece of facial hair and ten years’ worth of rivalry.
If I was being honest with myself—and I was, far beyond my comfort zone—I did look forward to seeing him. Not exchanging words with Ben during the day was as disappointing as not talking to Harper or Meg. Attempting to say something nice to him would be like sparring with a foiled blade. That made it a sport instead of a bloodbath.
Monday morning, Harper and Meg intended to corner him and tell him to stay away from me. I couldn’t let that happen before I had the chance to talk to him for myself. At the very least, I needed to apologize.
But more than that, I wouldn’t know how I really felt about this until I was standing in front of him.
[6:22 PM]
Harper
Cornell told me he loves me.
[6:23 PM]
Me
Whoa! Already?
[6:24 PM]
Meg
OMG OMG OMG. Yay! Tell us everything!
[6:25 PM]
Harper
He had dinner with me and my dad at that new Indian place. And then he drove me home and said it. And I almost forgot to say it back; I was so surprised. But I did and we are and it’s amazing. Chicken tikka masala is the food of nerd love!
[6:27 PM]
Me
Congrats! (Is that antifeminist? I mean: congrats that your feelings are reciprocated not that a man has proven your worth?)
[6:29 PM]
Meg
Please email me all details that you’re comfortable with. I need the notes for my thought experiment.
[6:30 PM]
Harper
*Pylean dance of joy*