Good Girls Part 5

"Jeez," says Ash.

Cindy Terlizzi and Pam Markovitz walk by. Pam grins at me and gives me the thumbs-up sign.

Ash scowls, then sighs. "It's bad now, I know. Really bad. But people will forget."

"Yeah?" I say. "When?"

"Soon. They always do."

I know they will, someday, but that doesn't help the frozen spot where my guts should be. That doesn't stop the stares and snickers and giggles in the hallway. That doesn't stop Chilly from whispering poison in my ear.

That doesn't keep the more girl-impaired of the male honor students from eyeing me with this strange curios- ity, like they want to pin me down to a dissecting tray and prod me with sharp instruments. Even Ron "Valedictorian" Moran, who's had a girlfriend for the last year, stares. I stare right back. What was Ron doing 56 with his girlfriend when they thought no one was paying attention, when they thought their parents were out for the afternoon? Ron looks away.

All day, I bury myself in work, in words. I sink into them like a bath. My friends give me my s.p.a.ce, but the teachers yammer all around me. Limits, amendments, oxygen cycles, Shakespeare. This is important and that is important and all of it will be on the test. I write, underline, highlight, repeat. I get text messages and delete them. A few people pa.s.s me stupid notes that I know say horrible things, and I shove them into my books or backpack without looking at them. At lunch I will go outside and set them all on fire. Ash will throw the ashes out her car window.

"What I really want to know is, Who took that pic- ture?" Ash says. She's taken me to the diner to eat. "Do you really think that Luke had nothing to do with it?"

"I don't know," I say.

Ash scoops up a spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy, what she orders every time we come to the diner , day or night. Her eyes narrow. "What about Chilly?

He's still d.o.g.g.i.ng you like he owns you."

"I don't know," I say.

Ash puts down her spoon. "Don't you want to know who did this? Doesn't this make you mad?"

"Well, yeah," I tell her.

"Well, yeah?" she says. "I'd be furious! I'd want to 57 kill someone! You got more upset that time Madame Kellogg gave you a B plus on your French report."

"I just wish it never happened," I say. "I wish I'd never done it."

She tucks a stray curl behind her ear and sighs. "You love him, right?"

That seems funny to me. I love my parents. I love Ash and Joelle. I love my cat. Luke is-was-a different story. Luke is like a creature from another planet. Can you ever really love a creature from another planet?

Someone who could jump on his s.p.a.ceship and rocket off to Pluto at any minute? "I don't know."

Ash is getting annoyed with all that I don't know.

"Yes, you did. Isn't that why you were all weirded out with the friends-with-benefits thing? Weren't you jealous of all those other girls? Didn't you want to go out with him?" She eats another spoonful of mashed potatoes.

I want to tell her the whole story. I should tell her .

She's my best friend and I need her to understand. But I'm not sure if she will. After Jimmy, I'm not sure if she can. So I agree with her. Yes, I was weirded out. Yes, I was jealous. I don't know what else I was-insane?

obsessed?-but I think if I say "I don't know" one more time, she'll kill me.

Luckily, or unluckily, she decides to let me live. Sixth period, and I've gotten through most of my cla.s.ses and even managed to eat two bites of Ash's potatoes at 58 lunch. Even though I've got my eyes pinned to the floor, I see Luke walking down the hallway as I'm trying to get to history. It's not the blond hair that catches me, it's the movement-the rolling, easy walk, the walk that says he could run very very fast if there were ever any need to.

He's alone this time, no gaggle of rockheads shoving phones at him. Then he sees me. He never said much more than "hey" to me in public before, but this is a new low. His face stiffens and his eyes narrow, and his lip curls up as if he's disgusted, as if he can't even bear to look. He speeds up, pa.s.ses me, and keeps on rolling, like a wave that jumps the beach and takes you out at the knees.

59 Once More, with Feeling The first time was Ash's party, a back-to- school barbecue without any of the actual barbe- cuing. There must have been a shortage of parties that weekend, because the entire senior cla.s.s showed up to mourn the end of the summer.

Ash's parents had taken her little brother out of town, stupidly trusting Ash not to do anything 60 stupid (like, say, throw a party for the entire senior cla.s.s). But there we were, in Ash's house, with everyone packed inside and spilling outside, a blur of cutoffs and halter tops and precancerous brown skin, all of us hug- ging our friends and hugging total strangers and loving the world. Even Chilly seemed less Chilly somehow- less obnoxious, less angry-maybe because there were chicks there who'd never met him before and were will- ing to give him a shot. I remember looking out the open window to the backyard and seeing a girl run by wear- ing only her underwear, but moving too fast for me to see her face. I could hear her , though. She was giggling like a maniac.

Once in a while, Ash would announce that the drunk and otherwise hammered would have their keys and maybe even their cars confiscated to guard against pos- sible injuries and subsequent lawsuits (her dad is a lawyer), but as these things go, the party was tame.

Something was in the air , some late-August-evening magic-fairy nice dust that made us all mostly friendly and sort of giddy and not too destructive. It seemed that we all understood that this was our last summer together , that next year at this time most of us would already be gone-off to start the rest of our lives.

Even I wasn't exactly me. School hadn't started yet, and I had nothing in particular to hyperventilate over .

I'd already taken all my entrance exams, and my college 61 applications weren't due for months. I felt so strange- untethered from myself, like I was watching myself from a distance. Like I was my own shadow.

It felt kind of good. A relief.

Being me is tiring.

The only problem was the late arrival of Jimmy and his ho girlfriend. I guess he figured that since he and Ash had broken up six months before and there wasn't another party in the whole town, he could show up and blend in without getting Ash too crazy. Right. Like Jimmy could blend in anywhere with a chick named Cherry, the very same chick that he dumped Ash for.

Since they'd broken up, Ash had serious radar for Jimmy. I think she could spot him a mile away. She could sense him. She could smell him.

So when he showed up with Cherry on his arm and tried to mingle, Ash cornered them in the kitchen, screamed at him, told him what a loser he was, how much she hated him and how he needed to take his s.l.u.t out of her house. A normal person would have gotten all embarra.s.sed, but not Jimmy.

"Listen, Ashley," he said, drawing out the "sh"

sound as if he were singing a lullaby.

"Ash!" said Ash. "The name's Ash."

"Ash," he said. "Look, I'm sorry about everything. I never meant to hurt you. Never ." He brushed his long rocker hair out of his enormous brown eyes. Jimmy has 62 c.o.c.ker-spaniel eyes, eyes that could get you to believe almost anything he says. "I'm really, really sorry. How many times can I say it?"

"You can say it again, you Arsch! And then you can get out of my house!"

Jimmy nodded, tipping his head as if digesting her words. "I hear you. But it's been a long time now. Don't you think we all need to move on?"

Cherry slid her arms around Jimmy's waist and looked at Ash. "I hope that we can be friends." Then she reached up and yanked at her bra strap, maximizing all visible cleavage.

Ash spat a vast array of truly inventive swearwords in several languages. I thought she was going to gut Jimmy with a steak knife or rip out Cherry's throat with her teeth, so I tried to drag her from the room while giv- ing Jimmy my fiercest best-friend evil eye.

I was still trying to convince Ash to come with me and cool off when I saw Luke DeSalvio peek into the room and then double back. "Whoa! Rumble!" he said, but n.o.body listened; Ash was too busy screaming, Jimmy too busy looking sad and soulful. Luke's eyes went from Jimmy to Cherry to Ash to me to Jimmy again, until he pulled Jimmy and Cherry into the dining room. We couldn't hear what else Luke said, but we could see them through the doorway: Jimmy nodding, glancing at Ash, looking at the floor, nodding again.

63 Finally, Jimmy came back and mumbled something like, "Sorrynevermeanttohurtyouwe'releavingbye." Then he grabbed Cherry by the elbow and steered her out the door and out of the house.

Ash gaped at Luke. "What did you say to him?"

Luke shrugged. "I told him he was being a tool."

"That's all?" Ash said.

Luke's mouth turned up at the corners. "I might have said a few other things. Like, this is your house and if you didn't want him here he had to get out. He was being a tool, right?"

"Among other things," said Ash.

"And this is your house, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then."

"Okay," Ash said, bewildered by this show of gal - lantry from the Jock King, someone we had admired from afar but never had much reason to talk to.

"Thanks."

"No problem," Luke said. He paused. "You're not going to be all depressed now, are you?"

Ash said, "Excuse me?"

"You're not going to throw us all out so that you can drown yourself in your bathtub, right?"

"Don't worry. The party must go on." Ash tossed her curly hair . "I might fling myself out the second-floor window, but I'll wait till everyone's gone home."

64 "Great to hear it," he said.

"And not because I'm depressed; because I'm really really really p.i.s.sed off."

"Even better. You're beautiful when you're angry."

Ash raised her eyebrow, the one that she had just got- ten pierced a few days before. "I'm beautiful all the time."

Luke laughed. "Is that the only piercing you have?"

"Maybe."

"And do you have a tattoo to go with it?"

"Maybe."

"Where?"

"Like I'd tell you."

I thought I was witnessing this amazing thing. He wasn't her usual type-she normally went for the tall, dark, and smoldering, and not the medium-sized, sunny, and golden-but he was hot by anybody's standards. If anyone could take Jimmy off her mind, it would be Luke. He didn't seem like a bad guy, not after he got Jimmy to leave. Plus, he had the most incredible hands I'd ever seen. Man hands. Big, long-fingered.

He turned to me. "Hi."

"Hi," I said.

"You're Audrey."

"You're Luke."

"You know, one of my friends thinks that your hair is fake."

65 "Her hair isn't fake!" said Ash.

"I didn't say it was what I thought, I said it was what one of my friends thought. He doesn't think hair could grow that long. That you must be wearing those exten- sion things."

"Your friend's a bonehead," I said.

"Yeah," said Ash.

I was so busy getting my head around the fact that Luke DeSalvio and one of his friends had discussed my hair that it took me a second to notice that Luke had lifted a lock and was rubbing the ends between his fin- gers. He looked directly into my eyes, so that I could see his had rings of dark blue around rings of light. "Feels real enough," he said. He dropped the lock, smoothing it back over my shoulder . "I'll have to go tell my friend."

"So go," Ash told him.

But he didn't. He hung out with me and Ash in the kitchen, making stupid jokes about googly-eyed guitar guys, about Big b.o.o.bs Barbie, and about hair extensions till he got Ash to laugh out loud. After a while, his friend Nardo ambled in, wondering where Luke had disap- peared to and who with. Nardo was a jock, too, an odd one, one who played sax for the school jazz band. He was also on the track team, where he got a lot of atten- tion for jumping as far as he possibly could.

The four of us ended up sitting at the kitchen table, playing blackjack with a deck of cards Ash scrounged 66 up. Luke foraged for alcohol and found beer for himself and Nardo and some kind of hard lemonade stuff for me and Ash from G.o.d knows where. I hate cards and I don't like my lemonade spiked with anything but sugar, but I don't remember any of it being that much fun before, with the drinks fuzzing my vision around the edges and Luke's hand brushing my hair and my arm. I thought Ash would be mad that he'd sat next to me instead of her, but she didn't seem to mind it at all. Nardo was really cute, all long arms and legs, with a smile that opened up his whole face.

At some point the game got so stupid we weren't really playing, and Nardo got busy inspecting Ash's eye- brow ring up close, so I grabbed up the cards and started to build a house with them. Watching Nardo prod Ash's still-raw eyebrow with his pinky made me nervous-it seemed so personal, digging around in someone's fresh, if self-inflicted, wound. I tried to concentrate on the card house, but Luke was watching me. That made me ner- vous, too.

"Was it him?" I blurted, pointing at Nardo. When I was nervous, I blurted.

"Him what?" Luke said.

"Yeah, me what?" Nardo said. He had one hand on Ash's forehead, as if he were checking if she had a fever .

"Luke said that one of his friends thought my hair was fake. Was it you?" I said.

67 "Oh, that," said Nardo. "He must not have heard me right. I was telling him that my hair was fake." He dipped his head toward Ash. "Feel it."

Ash ran her hand through Nardo's short, dark hair.

"Totally fake. What is that? Nylon?"

"Polyester," said Nardo.

"What happened to your real hair?" Ash said.

"Lost in a bizarre weed-whacking incident," Nardo said. Then he leaned in and kissed Ash. She stared at him cross-eyed for a split second, then kissed back.

"Don't watch the mating animals," said Luke. "They could get violent." He handed me another card and gave me a drumroll on the seat of his chair while I balanced the card on top of the others.

But Ash and Nardo kept kissing, not caring that me and Luke were sitting right there. When Nardo pulled Ash onto his lap, Luke said, "I think that's our cue."

We left Ash and Nardo making out in the kitchen. It was late, really late, because most of the people had gone home and the few that were left were crashing all over the place. Underwear girl turned out to be Joelle, who was sleeping on one of the couches in her hot-pink bra and red shorts. I should have known. Joelle has a killer body that her personal trainer works very hard to achieve, and she's never afraid to show it off. She says that an actor has to be ready to use every a.s.set at her disposal.