Three

When I woke up there was a coating of snow on the ground. It wasn’t much, just enough to make things look pretty and wintry. I was hoping for a two-hour delay but no such luck. I didn’t feel up to trudging to school in the slush, so I called Jenelle.

“Hey, can I get a ride with you?” I asked.

“That depends,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay being in the same car with me?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t take my calls, you never called me back last night, I’m not sure if you’re still interested in being my friend.”

“Oh, relax. We’re still friends. Anyway, things got kind of tense here last night. I’ll explain in the car.”

Jenelle’s parents had given her an old Honda for her sixteenth birthday. It was small, belched blue smoke, the speedometer was broken, and one of the doors was the wrong color, but it ran and it was hers. All I had was occasional use of the family minivan. When the Honda pulled up to get me, Shawna was in the front seat with her shoes up on the dashboard. She’d ditched the kitten heels and had on a pair of pretty but completely impractical-looking canvas boots.

“I’m trying to dry them on the defroster,” she said when she saw me looking at them. “They got wet in the snow.”

“That’s sort of the idea behind boots,” I said.

“So, you’ve decided you’re not mad at me anymore, or you just want a ride?” Jenelle asked.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “But did you really have to say all that stuff to Gracie?”

“Oh, come on, I can’t tell you two apart on the phone, and she was totally going along with it like she was you, so how was I supposed to know?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I said. “Gracie’s a bitch.”

“Wow, I so did not say that at all,” Jenelle said.

“No, she is,” I insisted. There was enough snow on the road to make things slippery and the little car slid about some, but Jenelle was keeping things under control. “She ran into Annie’s old flame at Mr. K’s and told him to stop by the house sometime.”

“Wait,” Shawna said. “By Annie’s old flame, do you mean the guy? The guy who like broke her heart and made her into this depressed, lovesick, jilted spinster chick?”

“Um, I think spinster is kind of a dated term,” I said. “And besides, she’s only twenty-six. She’s not exactly an old maid. But, yeah, him.”

“So, wait, what was the fight about?” Jenelle said.

“She invited this guy—who dumped Annie and pretty much completely ruined her life—over to our house.”

“I think it’s sort of romantic,” Jenelle said. If I didn’t look so much like Gracie, I would think Jenelle and Gracie were sisters.

“It’s not,” I said.

“Speaking of romance,” Shawna said, “what’s going on with Zach? Is he going to ask you to the carnival?”

“I told you I don’t want to go with him.”

“But do you really not want to go with him?” Shawna asked, “or are you just saying that so you don’t seem over-eager if he doesn’t ask you? Because, I mean, I can understand not wanting to look too eager and all, but I can’t understand why you don’t want to go with Zach to the carnival.”

Jenelle must have noticed the look of annoyance rapidly turning to rage on my face because she suddenly said, “So, today’s the volunteer assembly. Have you guys figured out what you’re doing for your project?”

One of our graduation requirements was that we had to do a service project of some sort. Which basically boiled down to logging twenty hours of community service. Technically we had four years to get this work done, but just about everyone waited until sometime in senior year to get their hours in, and to that end we had a special assembly where we could pick out a volunteer project to do.

“I’m just going to use my assistant Sunday school teaching hours,” Shawna said.

“I thought you just did that to get out of having to sit through church service,” Jenelle said.

“Yeah,” Shawna agreed, “but it still counts as volunteering.”

“I was thinking of maybe doing the animal shelter,” I said. “That way I don’t have to deal with people.”

“I was thinking that too, but my neighbor told me she did that her senior year and it was basically just cleaning up shit. So, I don’t know, maybe I could do the candy striper thing at the hospital.”

The nearest hospital was fifteen miles away, which meant the hospital was out for me. Annie would never agree to drive me there; I couldn’t even get her to go there when she was actually sick. Unless I got the same schedule as Jenelle and we could commute together, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

“How do you know that’s not emptying out bed pans?” Shawna asked.

“No, they just, like, deliver the meals and stuff,” Jenelle said.

“But what if someone coughs on you or something and you catch some nasty disease?” Shawna asked.

“Look, just because you got your volunteer hours in doing your stupid Sunday School thing doesn’t mean you need to rub it in my face,” Jenelle said.

I was kind of glad the two of them were arguing. It took the pressure off of me.

Jenelle’s car did a little fishtail as she pulled into the school parking lot, and she had to swerve to avoid hitting a black shiny car driving a little too fast through the lot. We couldn’t help it; we all turned to look.

“Who was that?” Shawna asked.

Closer inspection revealed that the car was a Mustang, an old one, though it was so sleek-looking it had either been recently restored or was very well maintained. The vibration from the engine actually made the Honda’s windows rattle. We watched as the car pulled into a spot and the engine’s roar was silenced. The driver’s side door opened, and out stepped, who else, Zach Faraday.

“Wow,” Jenelle said.

I spent the day doing my best to avoid Zach Faraday. I skipped lunch, making up some excuse about having to get extra help in Physics. In English class I pretended to be so engrossed in the free-writing exercise we were assigned that I didn’t even notice him next to me. When we got to the volunteer assembly, I was prepared to go straight to the animal shelter booth and sign up, then beat a hasty retreat to the girls’ room, but as I marched across the room, I noticed a familiar figure milling about in the vicinity of the animal shelter booth. I could probably have just run over, signed up, and run off again before he even noticed me, but what if he signed up for the shelter? I could wind up doing my volunteer time right alongside Zach Faraday.

I looked around at the bright-colored banners displayed in the media center. I was hoping to find something so unappealing that Zach wouldn’t even consider signing up for it, but I noticed something else, a little sign taped to the front of one of the tables that read, Sorry, boys, this opportunity is for girls only. I made a beeline straight toward it.

“Hi,” said the cheery woman behind the counter. “Are you interested in signing up to volunteer for the women’s support hotline?” She was ready to launch into a spiel about the hotline and how I would be able to help others by generously volunteering my time, but I cut her off.

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

I wrote my name and contact information down on her clipboard, thanked her for the magnet she handed me, and all but ran out of the room. I was still moving at a pretty fast clip down the hallway when I rounded a corner and plowed straight into Zach Faraday. Smooth, I silently told myself. Also, nice work on avoiding Zach.

“Hey,” Zach said in that friendly, laid-back, perfect voice of his.

“Oh,” I said, and then, proving that I was skilled in the art of conversation, added, “hey.”

He flashed me one of those smiles and held out his hand. “Zach Faraday. I don’t think I’ve ever properly introduced myself.”

He obviously expected me to shake his hand. I hesitated.

“Barbara Bunting,” I said. I shook his hand quickly.

“See, I feel better now.”

I certainly didn’t. I felt nervous and weird, and I prayed that someone, anyone, would walk through the deserted hallway and interrupt our meeting, but no one was in the hallway. They were busy scoping out the volunteer opportunities and eating the free chocolate chip cookies.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Okay, I’m starting to get paranoid. Was it something I said?”

Yes, it was everything you said. It was also everything you didn’t say, just the way you can look through me with those cold blue eyes or set me instantly on fire with that perfect smile. How could I explain to him that I knew I needed to avoid him at all costs, at the risk of throwing away everything I’d always wanted.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said. It was the best excuse I could think of on short notice. I hated it.

“Oh, okay, um,” Zach stammered. I knew he wanted to say something but I didn’t want to hear him say it.

I speed-walked in the direction of the nearest girls’ room, doing my best impersonation of someone who desperately needed to pee even though I think he knew I was faking it.

I locked myself in a stall and just stood there trying to remember how to breathe. What was wrong with me? Why was I allowing myself to get so freaked out over some random guy? I told myself that he was just a guy, that he wasn’t really special, but like my excuse about needing to pee, it was a complete lie. Zach was not just some guy, and if being the best-looking guy to ever set foot in Shallow Pond’s high school qualified as special (and how couldn’t it?) then Zach Faraday had specialness oozing out his ears. So I tried a different tactic. I tried telling myself that someone who looked
like that and dressed in those sort of clothes and drove a car like that must be a stuck-up snob. I told myself that he was probably a complete asshole. The only problem there was that, so far, he seemed more like a nice guy than an asshole. I clung to the flimsy excuse that the nice-guy thing was just an act to hide his true asshole nature.

As for why I clung to this excuse, the answer was once again simple. If I allowed myself to start seeing Zach as a sweet, gorgeous guy who had the ability to turn me into mush with a single glance, then it was only a matter of time before we started dating, before I became head-over-heels in love with him, before I made him the sum total of my existence, only to have my heart smashed to smithereens when he dumped me. Maybe it was a lot to infer from a few encounters, but I’d seen the scenario play itself out with Annie and I had no desire to follow in her footsteps.