Complete Nothing (3 page)

“I had a girlfriend back in Boston, but she dumped me as soon as I told her I was moving.” Orion stared out across the trees as the wind rustled through them.

“That sucks.” I said it lightly, but inside my heart did this awful spin-around-and-die maneuver. Me and Claudia were both seniors. In exactly nine months we’d be graduating, and in eleven months she’d be going to college and who knew where the hell I’d be. Sometimes I lay up nights just thinking about her
off at Princeton—her number one choice—or Harvard or some other smart place like that next year, flirting with a brainiac in a corduroy jacket or some shit, forgetting I ever existed. I tried to tell myself it would never happen, that we would never break up, but who was I kidding? At least here I was good enough for her. I wasn’t in the honors classes with her, but I was the star of the football team, the most popular guy in the senior class, and everyone at our church loved me because of the time I spent volunteering. I had other things to make up for the fact that I was never going Ivy League. But once she was out of this lame-ass town and meeting guys who were as smart as her? Guys with dreams and ambitions and the possibility of actually achieving them? Forget about it.

“What’s up, man? You just went quiet,” Gavin said.

“Nothing, it just . . . it sucks.” I looked back over my shoulder at the boosters and couldn’t see Claudia anymore. “There’s, like, a ticking time bomb on this whole thing.”

“What whole thing?” Orion asked.

I threw my arms wide. “This. Football. High School. Friends. Girlfriends . . .”

“Dude. Claudia’s never gonna break up with you,” Gavin said, giving me one of his don’t-mess-with-me stares. “She lives for the Marrott love.”

Orion snorted a laugh.

“What? She totally does,” Gavin said. He cracked his knuckles again. Orion stopped laughing.

“Please. Everyone knows long distance doesn’t work.”

I started to jog. Just because. My blood was pumping suddenly, and I needed to do something to work it out. The two of them started to jog too. Within a minute we were rounding the turn and
I spotted Claudia again, holding up one end of a sign while her best friend, Lauren Codry, held the other. It read
GO MARROTT! #11
in huge blue letters. I smiled, but my heart felt sick.

“You don’t know, man. Maybe you guys’ll end up at the same school,” Orion said, pacing me.

I laughed him off. “Yeah, right. Claude’s crazy smart. She’s applying to Princeton early admission. My best hope is some triple-A school gives me a football scholarship, and who knows where the hell that’ll be.”

“Whatever, man. You think too much,” Gavin said, shoving me. “We’ve got the whole year. Just chill.”

I paused near the opening in the fence, with the boosters and cheerleaders right up the hill from us. The cup, which I was still holding, had been squeezed into a sweaty, twisted stick of cardboard. I threw it in the nearest trash bin.

“I’m chill,” I said, raising my palms and forcing a smile. “Do I not look chill?”

“G! A! V! I! N! What’s? That? Spell?”

We froze. The JV cheerleaders had just started up this loud chant. I looked at Gavin. He pushed his wet hair back from his face and shrugged.

“G! A! V! I! N! What’s? That? Spell?” they repeated.

Six girls in front were holding up big placards spelling out his name in red, the sixth one holding a heart. Then this girl, a sophomore named Tara Schwartz, popped up from behind the line of them. Two girls held her up by her feet as she raised her arms in the air. Gavin had been tutoring her in Spanish since last spring, and I knew they’d hooked up a couple of times.

“Gavin!” she shouted solo.

Gavin was the color of a lobster and looked confused. Greg
Howell stepped up alongside us to take a few pictures of both the cheerleaders and Gavin’s stunned face.

“Gavin Dunnellon! Will you go to homecoming with me?”

“Awwwwwww!” someone on the Boosters moaned.

It was official—homecoming season was here. Every year my school had this tradition where we asked each other to homecoming with these big, stupid displays. As soon as one person started it, there’d be, like, twenty crazy stunts a day, like dudes coming to class in gorilla outfits, girls having pizzas delivered to the caf for a guy and his friends. Last year someone even hired a skywriter.

Everyone looked at Gavin. The girls holding Tara up started to shake.

“Um, sure?” Gavin said.

The hill erupted with cheers. Tara popped up into the air and her friends caught her. Then Gavin climbed the whole hill in, like, five long strides to talk to her, and he was smiling for real, so I knew he hadn’t just said yes to keep from embarrassing her in front of everyone.

“Dude. What was that?” Orion asked.

“Welcome to Lake Carmody High,” I said with a grin. “Where nothing you do is too cheesy.”

“Hey, guys! Come check out what we’re doing!” Claudia shouted down to us.

Orion and I jogged up the slope next to the bleachers, and I kissed Claudia hello. She reached up and hugged me, full-body, not caring that I was covered in sweat. Then she gestured down at the signage.

“We’re making one for each starter,” she said. “We figure we’ll hang them over your lockers tomorrow and then bring them out here the day of the game.”

There were a couple dozen girls and, randomly, one guy on the boosters. They looked up at me, waiting for my reaction.

“Cool,” I said with a nod. “They look awesome. And hey, you’re gonna have to make one more. We got a new starting running back,” I added, slapping Orion’s chest with the back of my hand.

“Congratulations! That’s so great!” Claudia said, her eyes lighting up. “But all the boosters are taken. We’re gonna need someone to double up.”

Every starter on the team is assigned their own booster. Basically the girl (or guy) decorates your locker for you, makes you a big basket of food the day before the game, and does other random cool stuff throughout the season.

“Does anyone want to be Orion’s booster?” Claudia called out.

“I’ll do it!”

The girl from that morning—the one who had stolen Claudia’s scarf out of her bag at lunch on the first day of school—stood up from a seat on the bleachers. I hadn’t even seen her sitting there until now.

“You’re not even on the boosters,” Claudia said, her face falling.

The girl clomped down the stairs and then walked up the hill and over to us. Her long dark hair streamed out behind her in the wind, and she had the most unbelievable blue eyes I’d ever seen. She was gorgeous, not that I’d ever admit that out loud. When it came to boosters, Orion could do worse. Maybe he’d even just landed himself the new girlfriend he was obviously looking for. At least he had two more years of high school to be with her. Lucky bastard.

“So? Sign me up,” the girl said, looking directly at Orion. “I’m in.”

Claudia sighed and turned to Orion. “Are you okay with . . . what’s your name again?” she asked the girl.

“True,” she and Orion said at the same time.

Claudia and I locked eyes, both surprised he already knew her name.

“True Olympia,” True said with deep meaning, as if that was supposed to be significant to Orion somehow.

“With True?” Claudia finished.

“Sure.” Orion shrugged.

“Okay. Go see Wallace over there,” Claudia gestured toward the one dude in the group, who scrambled to his feet with his iPad. He was wearing a black T-shirt and checkerboard shorts with a chain connected to the wallet in his pocket and had dark floppy bangs like mine. He lifted one scrawny arm and waved. There was ink up and down his forearm, but it looked like a doodle, not a tattoo. “He keeps the booster lists and attendance and everything.”

“Got it.” True made her way over to Wallace, tripping over a paint can and half crumbling a sign. It seemed like she couldn’t take her eyes off Orion, and she was plowing everything over to do it.

“You ready to go grab dinner?” I asked Claudia. “Me and a couple of the guys are going to Pizza City.”

She checked her watch. “Crap. How’d it get so late?” Dropping to the grass, she shoved her phone and a notebook into her bag, then stood. “Lauren, can you hang out for a while and make sure everything gets put away?”

“No problem, Skipper,” Lauren said, saluting.

Claudia rolled her eyes, but laughed.

“I’ll see you at the Studio.”

“Hey, guys, before you go, can I get a shot of the senior class couple?” Greg asked, wielding his camera.

Claudia and I grinned, both of us loving being called the class couple. Like I said, nothing was too cheesy. “Sure,” I told him.

We turned toward each other and hugged, smiling for the camera. Greg reeled off about half a dozen shots, then gave us a thumbs-up.

“Thanks.” He checked something on the screen and then moved off to photograph the cheerleaders.

“No problem!” I shouted. “Hey, Orion! You coming for pizza?”

His eyebrows rose. “Yeah? Cool.”

“Gavin! Let’s go!” I shouted, raising an arm to wave him down.

He said good-bye to Tara and jogged over to join us. I slipped my arm around Claudia as we made our way down the hill, Orion and Gavin in front of us. There was still an annoying pinch in my chest from my conversation with the guys, but I tried to ignore it.

“I’m so nervous!” Claudia said, raising her tiny shoulders as we walked.

“About what?”

“Tonight’s the night!” She skipped once. So frickin’ cute. “I’m gonna find out if I got the audition!”

She slipped through the opening in the fence ahead of me, and I paused for a second, my heart dropping. The audition. Right. Claudia had sent in an application to this prestigious dance program right outside Princeton for next year. The hope was, she’d get into her dream school and her dream dance program and they’d be within walking distance of each other. Suddenly my chest was heavy with dread. If she got this audition, it would be a sign. Because if she got the audition, she’d get into the dance program. And if she got into the dance program, there was no way she wasn’t going to get into Princeton. After tonight, she could be one step closer to getting everything she wanted. And everything she wanted would take her away from me.

“Can I get you guys anything else?”

The waitress at Pizza City stood at the end of our table, smiling at Peter. She was a girl from school, a junior I was pretty sure, and she was always here. I think her family owned the place, but I wasn’t sure what her name was. What I did know was that she wanted my boyfriend. Of course she did. Everyone wanted my boyfriend. He was Peter “QB-1” Marrott. But this girl was making it totally obvious, with her sly half smile and by the way she was leaning one hand into the faux-wood table, pushing up her boobs by angling her triceps against one of them. Why didn’t she flirt with Gavin? Or Orion? Or Peter’s annoying friend Lester? One of the guys at the table whose girlfriend wasn’t sitting right next to him.

“You can get
me
something else,” Lester said, leering at her.

Well, okay. I understood why she didn’t flirt with Lester.

She stood up straight and sighed, looking down her nose at him. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

Lester Chen’s skinny face turned purple. “Oh, um, nothing. I was just kidding.”

The girl looked hopefully over at Peter again. I leaned in closer
to his side and looked her in the eye. “Thanks. We’re fine.”

Emphasis on the “we’re.” She gave me this look, like she couldn’t believe I was sitting there with him even though we came in here together twice a week, every week. Then she finally,
finally
walked away, flipping her weirdly orange hair over her shoulder.

I tugged Peter’s large class ring out from under the collar of my shirt, where it hung on a gold chain, and toyed with it. It wasn’t as if I could blame the girl for her confusion. Honestly. It had been fifteen months, three weeks, and two days since Peter had first asked me out, and even I sometimes found myself wondering how and why it had happened in the first place. We’re talking about Peter Marrott here, people. He was the hottest, most popular, most athletic guy in the senior class. Girls had started crushing on him in kindergarten. He’d been voted best-looking in eighth grade by a landslide (I was in charge of counting the votes, so I knew). Before me he’d gone out with Aura Sen, who was a year older than us and the hottest of Lake Carmody’s legendary Hot Sen Sisters. (There were five of them, and the youngest had already won some pageant that put her on the cover of the local paper last year.) But they’d broken up after the junior prom scandal two springs ago. (Rumor was there was vomit involved. Lots of vomit.) Three weeks later he’d come to his sister’s dance recital, which had just happened to also be my dance recital, and afterward he’d waited for me—yes, me—to come out of the dressing room and now here we were, sitting at Pizza City together for the hundredth time with his superhot and popular friends.

Lester excepted, of course. From the hot part, anyway.

So yes, I’d been surprised when he’d first asked me out. While I do have good hair and a tight body, I’m not Aura Sen–level beautiful. But now that I knew Peter so well, I wasn’t surprised
we’d been together as long as we had. We didn’t have any classes together and we hung out with different crowds at school, but opposites attract, right? And besides, when it came down to it, we had more in common than anyone could imagine. We were both family-oriented athletes with responsible natures, and we supported each other. Would little miss cleavage-shover understand any of that? My guess was no.

“What do you want to do this weekend?” Peter asked me as I leaned into his side. Gavin launched a grape tomato at Lester, and Lester caught it in his mouth. Orion, meanwhile, texted on his phone with a crease between his eyes, like whatever he was doing was super serious.

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling up at him. “The usual?”

“You mean sit around and be boring?” Lester said with a cackle. A grape tomato hit him in the temple and bounced along the floor.

“Dude. Back off,” Peter said, reaching behind me to shove Lester’s head.