“Just a young boy feeling his oats,” Mama muttered.
“Oats, huh? Flirting with other girls?”
I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it was better to let someone else fill in the blanks using his or her own imagination. That way, it seemed as if you didn’t lie so much.
“Well, you don’t worry about it,” Papa said, patting my hand. “If he doesn’t know how lucky he is to have your attention, then he’s not the young man I thought he was. Besides, you’re too young to be having love problems.”
I nodded. “Yes, Papa. You’re right,” I said. I gave him the best smile I could muster, and he quickly changed the subject.
As soon as Mama and I finished cleaning up, I went to my room and saw that Carol Lee had bitten on my e-mail. In big block letters, there was a response.
You’re kidding. Tell me more about it.
After having dinner, talking with Papa, and listening to him and Mama talk about some of their future plans for all of us, I had lost a good deal of my passion for revenge. Suddenly, it seemed juvenile and quite unimportant. I had started something, however, and I had to do something to end it, at least for now.
It’s too disgusting to write about, I told her, and shut off my computer.
Despite what had occurred between us at school, I still clung to the hope that Evan might call. By now, he probably had heard I had left sick, and I thought he would at least care about that and call to see how I was, but the phone never rang.
I tried to put on a pleasant face for Papa in the morning, even though this sense of dread washed over me almost the moment I awoke. School loomed before me like a place of gloom and doom. I was very nervous about how the other students would treat me. Would they all be laughing and hiding their gleeful smiles? Of course, I wondered if Evan would even look in my direction. I didn’t care about Chastity. Whatever would happen to her was well deserved.
I walked so slowly to school that I was almost late and had to rush from my locker to homeroom. As soon as I entered, I could see that my e-mail to Carol Lee had already taken effect. Chastity was sulking in her seat and avoided looking in my direction.
I took my seat. When the bell rang, Carol Lee and Cathy Starling were at my side almost before I could rise out of my seat.
“We want you to join us at lunch today,” Carol Lee said.
“We’ve got a lot to tell you,” Cathy added as an incentive. “Apparently, you’re not the only one she’s told these disgusting things.”
That surprised me. Was there someone else Chastity had been courting to be her best friend behind my back?
“And you have a lot more to tell us,” Carol Lee reminded me.
Their eyes twinkled with glee as they shot off ahead of me. I looked back and saw Chastity walking slowly with her head down.
Patty Marcus nudged me and nodded in Chastity’s direction. “They really gave her a hard time this morning. Did you hear?”
“No, I was almost late today. What did they do?”
“Someone put a bag of cucumbers in her locker with a disgusting note,” she said, laughing. “Everyone’s talking about it now.”
At one point during our morning classes, I thought Chastity was on the verge of apologizing to me. I imagined she’d heard the other girls talk about the confab that was going to take place in the cafeteria. I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to add anything to what I had already revealed. I knew I should have felt good about the result I had already gotten, but I didn’t. Who really wins when two friends damage each other? It all made me sick, and it was beside the point, anyway.
The point, which no one but me would understand, was that Roxy was still very much in my life, whether she wanted to be or not and whether I wanted her to be or not. And there wasn’t very much that either of us could do about it. How I would go about dealing with it was all that mattered now.
The first thing I did when I went to lunch was look to see where Evan was sitting. He was with some of the boys in his class, and they were sitting way off to the right. I stood for a moment to see if he would look my way. He did, but he turned right back to one of his friends as if he had never met me and had no idea who I was. Right now, it seemed our short romance had been nothing more than one of my fantasies.
What did all of those beautiful words he had said really mean? I was a discovery. Je t’aime. I love you. Was spending words like spending pennies? How much worse would I feel now if I had gone further with him in his room? How do you know when a relationship is solid and significant? How did Mama and Papa know? Was it something so special that only a very few ever have it? Was this something Roxy had realized? Did she decide to do what she was doing because she knew she would never have a relationship, never fall in love?
How could Evan tell me I was special, enjoy my company, be proud to be seen with me, and want us to be a couple one day and not even give me a second look the day after?
Maybe most important for me was the realization that I didn’t see this failure in him. I was naive. Why wasn’t there a class in school that would teach us how to recognize sincerity? Wouldn’t that be the most important class of all?
I decided not to sit with Carol Lee and the other girls. I sat at another table with girls in the ninth grade, who didn’t know much about me or what was happening. They were surprised. I just smiled and s
tarted eating. It took Carol Lee a few moments to realize it, but when she did, she came over quickly. I felt her standing there but kept eating.
“What are you doing? I told you to join our table,” she said.