What Would Emma Do? Part 3

"Don't be a f.u.c.king baby. How sick can you be? They advertise that stuff on the Internet. Do you want to get everyone into trouble?"

"No." Kimberly started to sniffle. It had the sound of full-blown waterworks on the rise. Darci stepped forward and rubbed Kimberly's back in slow circles.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to yell. I just meant if we got in trouble for drinking, we could get booted off the Spirit Squad! I know you don't want that. And your parents will ground you for sure from the spring dance, and Justin was just telling me inside that he thought Richard was going to ask you."

"Seriously?"

Darci crossed her heart with one pink fingernail.

"Totally seriously. Here, swish out your mouth with this water and take a Tic Tac." Darci handed over a plastic water bottle.

"I don't know."

"Do you want Richard to ask someone else?" Darci raised an eyebrow.

Kimberly spit the water on the ground, debating her options.

"Do you have any lip gloss?" she asked, holding out her hand for a mint. They wandered back inside.

"Let's get out of here," I whispered to Colin.

"You sure?"

"This is lame. I have a motto: 'Never join a party once the throwing up has started.'"

"Sounds wise." Colin swung back into his truck, and I plunked down on the seat next to him.

"Do you remember that game we played as kids?" I asked as we drove back to my place.

"Which one?"

"The one where one person goes 'My house...' and then the other person has to add to the sentence."

"Sort of. It wasn't much of a game."

"It was a great game. Let's do it. My house...is in Chicago..."

"And it's as large as a castle..."

"With a room just for my shoes...," I added.

"Just one room?" he asked with a snort. I jabbed him in the side.

"You're not playing right. With a room for my shoes..."

"And a room to watch football with a fifty-inch high-def TV...," Colin said.

"Fifty-inch? Overkill...okay, and my house has a pool and a track around the roof..."

"That I designed..."

"See! I knew you still wanted to be an architect. Farmer, my a.s.s," I said.

"Now you're not playing," he interrupted.

"Okay, that I designed myself...winning major awards...," I said to encourage him.

"Which I put next to my Olympic gold medals I won for track and field..."

I gave a hoot of appreciation. We played the rest of the way home until Colin pulled to a stop just down the road from my house. He clicked off the lights. My real house was dark; Mom must have gone to bed. I reached over to open the door when Colin grabbed my arm. I spun around as if he had grabbed my nonexistent b.o.o.bs instead of just my arm. He dropped his hand immediately.

"Hang on a minute."

I sat back, but he didn't say anything else. He put his hands on the ten and two of the steering wheel as if he was getting ready for a particularly tricky maneuver on the driver's ed test.

"I've wanted to talk to you," he said finally.

"So talk."

"About what happened at Christmas."

"Look, don't worry about it. It was some kind of freakish mistake."

"That's the thing, it wasn't a mistake. I mean, it wasn't like I had a plan, but it wasn't a mistake."

All the air seemed to be sucked out of the truck cab. I couldn't take a deep breath, and I noticed that my hands were shaking, so I sat on them. I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to say. This was Colin, for crying out loud. We had watched Sesame Street together. He was the closest thing I had to family other than my mom. He was my best friend's boyfriend.

"I like you," he said.

My heart was speeding up.

"I like you, too."

"I mean, I think I really like you." Colin was moving closer. I could smell the detergent his mother used on his clothes, and over that, the smell of freshly dug earth. He must have been working on the farm after school.

"What about Joann?" I said in a whisper, as if someone might overhear us. As if she was going to pop up from the backseat and yell surprise before bursting into tears.

"I don't know."

"What the h.e.l.l, Colin?" Part of me desperately wanted him to shut up and never say another word about this, and another part of me, a part I didn't like so much, wanted him to keep talking.

"I don't know. I'm not trying to p.i.s.s you off, but I feel that I have to say something. I've liked you for as long as I can remember. I liked you since before I fully understood what it meant, but you were always so clear about wanting to be friends, just friends, that I never said a thing. Heck, I half convinced myself that I didn't care. That I was fine with that. Besides, even if you liked me, I knew the relationship wouldn't go anywhere. You've talked about leaving since you understood there was a road out of town. But I think I never stopped liking you. I felt like you should know. Then I kissed you, and you kissed me back." Colin looked over at me. "You did kiss me back."

"What did you expect me to do? Run screaming?"

Colin shook his head and looked back out the window.

"You kissed me back. Like you had been waiting for me to kiss you."

I didn't say anything. Instead I focused on pulling a loose string from the cuff of my shirt. I wondered if it was a key string, the one that was holding everything together, and maybe if I pulled it too hard, my whole shirt would unravel.

"Look, Colin, it's complicated."

"But you're not saying no."

"Joann's my best friend," I said, finally reminding him and myself at the same time.

"If I weren't dating her, would you go out with me?"

"I don't know. Does it matter? You are going out with her."

"What if we're meant to be together?" he asked.

"Then I guess none of this would have happened."

"But it did. And you kissed me. And then here we are, so the question is, what do we do now?"

I could feel my heart pounding, and I couldn't look at Colin. I fully expected a bolt of lightning to come out of the sky and take us out in the truck. If G.o.d had more room on those stone tablets, I'm pretty sure the Eleventh Commandment would have been "Thou shalt not betray thine best friend with her boyfriend-even if he is hot." Colin reached his hand over; his finger ran down my arm. Every hair on my arm stood straight up as if wanting to meet his touch. I yanked my arm back, cracking my elbow on the truck door. The feeling racing through me was not one that you had for a brother, or a best friend's boyfriend.

"Guess that's my answer, huh?" Colin said, pulling back over to his side of the truck.

"You're one of my best friends."

"The famous 'let's just be friends' talk, huh?" Colin said, trying to make it sound like a joke, but I could tell it wasn't.

I jumped down out of the truck and then leaned back in.

"I'm thinking we shouldn't tell Joann about this."

"About what?"

"Tonight," I said, wondering if he was trying to be annoying or if it just came naturally.

"What about it?"

"Are you trying to p.i.s.s me off?"

"Maybe." He gave me a smile, and I felt my stomach do a slow turnover. "Anything else we shouldn't tell her?" he asked.

My heart pounded, and I had the feeling he was going to kiss me again. Part of me wanted to slam the door shut, and the other part wanted to lunge across the seat and kiss him first. I waited for G.o.d to strike me dead.

What would Jesus do? I mean, what would Jesus do if he were the kind of guy to consider kissing his best friend's girlfriend? Why doesn't the Bible cover these kinds of situations?

"Nope," I squeaked, and then cleared my throat. "Nothing else."

"I'll make sure you get back in safe."

"In case the Boston Strangler took a serious wrong turn and is lying in wait for me?" I asked. Wheaton was not exactly a hotbed of crime. One time a bunch of junior high kids stole the plywood cutouts the Hansens keep on their lawn of a fat lady bending over showing off her bloomers. It rated the front page of the paper; it was that big of a deal.

Colin shrugged. He was going to wait anyway. He had that sort of John Waynetype sense of n.o.bility. I gave Colin another look and then jogged back to my house. I turned back, but I couldn't see anything in the dark expect the outline of his truck. I slid the window open and hoisted myself up. Once I was in, I saw Colin flash his headlights and heard the engine start up. I could hear the sound of a siren in the distance. Maybe the cops were on the tail of the Strangler after all.

8.

G.o.d, is it so bad to want something that you know is wrong? I mean, I know it's bad, but is it bad bad? d.a.m.ned to h.e.l.l kind of bad, or the kind of bad where if I feel really sorry about it later all can be forgiven? On a bad scale, where one is having a nasty thought and ten is setting kittens on fire, where does this fall? Is there a special level of h.e.l.l for those who screw over a friend?

I lay on my bed staring up at Johnny. I couldn't sleep. The only way I could tell time was moving forward was by counting the times I heard the fridge fan motor kick on. I punched my pillow in an effort to fluff it and tried not to think how tired I was going to be at the track meet in the morning. It wasn't a regional, but I still wanted killer times. Who knew how Northwestern was going to make their final decision? I pulled the blankets up and rolled back onto my side, curling up around Mr. m.u.f.fles. The whole thing was stupid. There was no reason to be thinking about it at all. Colin felt the need to ask, and I gave a clear answer. Now if I could only convince myself that I didn't want to go running after his truck screaming, "Do-over!"

I tried to sort out what I was feeling. It shouldn't have been that hard, because when you stripped away all the fluff, it really came down to two options: I didn't like Colin.

I did like Colin.

Given only two options, it shouldn't have seemed so complicated, and at the same time, it was. I can't remember a time I haven't known Colin, and although I hated that everyone was always trying to fix us up, I think I had a.s.sumed we would go out at some point. There is no doubt Colin is good-looking. He has a sort of Zac Efron, guy-next-door thing going on. Then there's the fact that all the work on his parents' farm, plus football, has given him a pretty darn nice body. Not that I've spent a lot of time checking him out, but a girl can tell. Colin is smart, and his idea of humor doesn't rely on fart jokes. I liked that about him. I liked that he could make me laugh, and how we could be together and not talk about anything and still have a good time. I never wanted to risk our friendship with mucking things up, but in the end I guess he felt that he belonged to me. That he was mine.

Then there were all the reasons not to like Colin (separate from the whole ruining-my-life aspect of him dating my best friend). Colin loved Wheaton. Sure, he might act like it bugged him once in a while, and it's possible it did bug him, but in the end this was home. Colin would hate Chicago, and I would hate staying here, so it left us in this position where we didn't want the same things at all. Colin hadn't even bothered applying to any college. He figured he'd just take a few cla.s.ses at one of the community colleges. Not as a fallback safety plan, but as his main plan. Granted, I had no plan B if the scholarship at Northwestern didn't work out, but at least my plan was ambitious. Who has the community college that accepts anyone as their plan? Was having a good time with someone right now the same as wanting to be with that person sometime later? Where would we go from here? High school would be over in a few months. What then? What's the point? To say that we did? To see what would happen, when we sort of know what would happen?

I could argue that there was no reason to like Colin at all, just fond memories of an old friend. An old friend who just happens to be hot. Friends can be hot, but it doesn't mean that you have to act on it, that it causes you to feel anything. The problem was, I couldn't argue with the fact that I felt something.

I rolled over. Even if I could sort out how I felt, then there was the issue of how Joann would respond to this revelation. If I told Joann that Colin and I were destined to be together and that we were going to be a couple, there were a few ways she could respond: She could be angry.

She could be understanding.

She could reach a new level of rage in which her eyes shot fire and she raised the town locals up against me and they would come for me, ready to stone me alive.

I wondered what Colin would do. Would he break up with Joann regardless of what I decided? Would he tell her he harbored these feelings for me? What if he had already told her? What was that going to do to Joann? Colin was her first real boyfriend, as I don't think we can count Barry, who used to push her down and kiss her when we were in fourth grade. Playground violence does not a relationship make, even on the Jerry Springer show. I rolled over again.

Was Colin lying at home tossing and turning too, or was he doing the guy thing and not even noticing at all?

Lastly, even if I sorted out how I felt and survived the fire from Joann's eyes, there was still the fact I would have to live with myself, and I wasn't sure I could do that. Which brought me pretty much back around to where I started. Liking him, not liking him, and not able to really do either very well.

9.

G.o.d, here's a question for you: There are winners and losers, and I'm pretty much betting everyone is praying to be the winner, so how do you decide whose prayer to grant? You can't fool me that it's always the most deserving, so there must be some other criteria. Not that I'm trying to imply you can be bought off, but if there was something that made you more inclined to favor one prayer over another, I would be open to hearing about it.

Someday when I appear on the Today show to talk to Matt Lauer about my Olympic win, I will have one nice thing to say about Wheaton: It's where I learned to run. Wheaton has no public transportation-unless you count Mr. Kundert, who drives his tractor everywhere and will pick you up if you're walking by the side of the road. If you don't want to wait for the tractor train, then you have to either rely on your parents to give you a ride, own a bike, or get your own car. Or you hoof it.

Parents: As I have already detailed, I do not have parents, I have only the singular parent. One who works long hours and "can't be cruising around like some kind of Greyhound bus driver."