The pain on his face gives me an answer before he does. “I can’t.”
“You can’t?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I throw my backpack over my shoulder. “Let me guess. This girl in your life is also a big crazy secret that I’m just supposed to ignore and pretend she doesn’t exist? I’m just supposed to smile and nod and forget all about how she’s saved in your phone with a heart by her name and how she texts you all the time?”
Derek opens his mouth to object but I cut him off. It’s easy to feel like I should agree with him, but when I say it all out loud I realize how completely moronic it sounds. “Tell me who she is, Derek. Tell me now.”
He looks down, shaking his head slightly.
A delirious laugh escapes me. “That’s what I thought. We’re done, Derek. You can’t have two girls in your life. You can’t have both.”
I slam the door closed and jump into Mom’s Corolla without looking back. My eyes fill with tears. He doesn’t deserve me if he’s going to keep secrets from me. My stomach hurts and my head throbs in pain. I know I did what was right by standing up for myself. But that doesn’t mean I don’t cry on the whole drive home.
The musty smell of the auditorium makes my stomach churn. This is the last place I want to be. I’m starting to think I don’t really need a college education…I could just quit this whole nightmare right now and go work at Quilts by the Bay for the rest of my life.
It’s Monday. Three days after my dinner with Derek and I haven’t heard from him at all. Not that I expected to, but I hate that I kind of hoped I would get a text from him. I made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want to talk to him and he’s respecting that. At least he can do one thing right.
Part of me hopes he will skip rehearsal today. But he appears, five minutes late as usual, hair tucked under a beanie as usual, freaking apathetic look on his face—as freaking usual. I lift my glitter notebook and pretend to study my to-do list as he walks down the aisle and hops onstage.
I want to take it as something that it isn’t but I must keep reminding myself that Derek isn’t doing this play for me, he’s doing it to fulfill his community service hours. Killing time backstage has to be better than picking up trash on the side of the road with a rusty pokey stick.
A strong chemical smell catches my attention from my seat in the front row of the auditorium. “Gwen,” I groan, setting down my notebook and brushing glitter off my fingers. She’s sitting on the borrowed bed of Jeremy’s bedroom set, a bottle of clear top coat in her hand. “Why are you painting your nails? We should be rehearsing. Where’s Jeremy?”
“You mean Ricky?”
“Yeah, whatever.” Ricky may be his real name, but to me, he’s my Jeremy. The main character. The guy who is currently NOT AT REHEARSAL. “Why isn’t he here? He’s twenty minutes late.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know, he hasn’t answered my texts.”
I walk to the front of the stage and repeat the question loud enough for everyone to hear. The cast all gives me pretty much the same answer.
I find Greg backstage, trying to rewire the speakers using his laptop and a Google search as his only instructions. I think about telling him to stop that because he could get electrocuted and die, but he’s getting so sweaty back there that he’s taken his shirt off and, well, it’d be an outrage to society if I made him put it back on.
Oh, and he doesn’t know where Ricky is either.
After making the rounds backstage, I find myself facing Derek for the first time since our argument, asking him the same question. “Where’s Jeremy?”
“Ricky?” He looks out into the audience even though no one is out there because the crew is backstage and Gwen is still giving herself a manicure on the unmade bed. “Have you tried calling him?”
With the buffer of twenty other students around, it’s easy to pretend that nothing is bothering us. Or maybe Derek really doesn’t have anything bothering him; it’s hard to tell with guys.
I find my notebook and search for Ricky’s phone number. He answers on the first ring. “Dude, where are you?”
“I’m suspended from the play. I thought I told you that?” I hear what sounds like a very violent video game in the background.
“Suspended? What the hell, Jer-Ricky? No you did not tell me that very important fact.”
“Sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he really means it. He probably misses Gwen’s super pouty lips.
“Is this a forever suspension, or just temporary?”
“Temporary, kind of. It’s that No Pass No Play bullshit.”
“What class are you failing?”
More loud video game noises. “Just math, I think.”