Outcast (20 page)

I picked up the book that lay open beside me, trying to unearth the answer. “Rejection?” I asked.

Chad
shifted lazily from the pillow so that he looked dreamily down at me. “Good versus evil, I think.” I felt his gaze as I wrote the words down on the worksheet. “What’s your family like?” he finally asked.

I set the page down on my stomach and stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom. White like any other, yet so very different. “I don’t know.” My eyes finally settled on his. “My dad’s just…a dad. He’s basically around to put food on the table and do what my mom says.”

Chad
listened intently, studying the contours of my face.

“Becca’s a girly girl. She likes fashion, talking on the phone, and boys.” I let my thoughts drift back to the ceiling.

“Don’t you like boys?” he asked, moving closer until I could feel his breath on my cheek.

“
Boys
no.” I turned to him. “
Boy
yes.”

“I love these freckles,”
Chad
said, running a finger over my cheeks and nose. He seemed drunk from the intimacy.

“Stop,” I said, embarrassed. I pushed his hand away, and he captured it with his own.

“And these lips,” he continued, grazing them with a touch, then with his mouth as he continued to hold my hand. He felt soft and warm and filled with the stuff of blankets, hot chocolate, and a crackling fire on a bitter cold winter’s day. “I wish we could stay like this forever,” he said when he pulled away.

“Me, too.” I smiled up at him.

“What about your mom?” he asked, tracing lines on the palm of my hand, across my knuckles. I let him, loved the feel of his skin over mine.

“She’s ultra religious. Controlling. A total dictator. I think she hates me.”

“How could anyone hate you?” he asked, watching me, my hand still in his.

I simply shrugged. “What about your family? They’re never around. When do I get to meet them?”

“When they’re around,” he said softly, teasingly. “They’re at work right now, silly.”

“So is it just you and your parents?” I asked, taking my hand from his and touching the perfection of his face: the line of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, and the lips I kissed—that I longed to kiss again.

“Right now,” he said, a sleepy look overtaking his eyes as he considered me. “My sister’s away at college.” He ran the back of his hand down my arm. “Why do you think your mom hates you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe because I remind her of her old self. It seems like she wants to erase me.”

“No one could ever erase you.”

But
Chad
didn’t know my mother. If she could manage it, she’d do her best to make sure everything she hated about me disappeared.

Play tryouts again.

Cassie thought theater was a waste of time. Her theory was that Drama was for people who have no life, so they have to act lie someone else. At this point, pretending to be another person didn’t seem so bad.

Father Dodd wanted desperately to perform
Barefoot in the Park
. Again, the administration refused to allow it. I saw the frustration painted on his face. He was a tormented Munch, resurrecting his own version of
The Scream
. The play would be
The Merchant of Venice
. Shakespeare again, and a huge departure from Neil Simon.

Chad
and I quietly rehearsed lines while other students tried out. As he recited, I dwelled on the weekend. Questions jumped to mind. Did he feel for me what Lorenzo felt for Jessica? What Lysander felt for Hermia, then Helena, then Hermia again? Where was our relationship headed? And particularly, did what almost happened between us happen to him before? And if so, was it with Trina?

“Noelle. Your line,”
Chad
said.

“Have you ever had sex before?”

He looked at the copy of the play, searching for that line. Not there.

“What?”

I simply looked at
Chad
, wanting and not wanting him to answer.

“I don’t think here is the best place to talk about this.” He glanced around to make sure no one was listening.

“Yes or no?” I pressed.

“Yes.” It wasn’t what I hoped to hear. But Aunt P had said that boys crave more than hand holding. I set down my book; I was through running lines. Though I really didn’t want details, I persisted. “With Trina?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

My stomach bottomed out. I wished he had lied. I looked into the empty space of the theater, trying to pull my unraveling feelings together. Then I spotted Grace. She was talking with Trina. I watched the two of them chat like they were long, lost friends. Trina had slithered her way into so many parts of my life, invading it like a nasty tapeworm, feeding off the people and things I loved:
Chad
, Grace, Acting. The girl had no boundaries, no end to where she would stop.

“Noelle.”
Chad
tried to capture my attention.

“I better watch it,” I said to myself as I glared at Trina. “She better watch it.”

“What?”
Chad
asked.

I willed the tears away that started to pool in my eyes before turning to him.

“I have to go.” 

I couldn’t believe
Chad
had sex with Trina. How could I be with someone who was with the girl I hated more than anyone else on the face of the earth? I sat in the end stall of the girls’ bathroom, my own private retreat from the problems I couldn’t face.

I wondered if other high school girls entered the stalls of bathrooms all over the world, contemplating feelings, crying about things over which they had no control. Or was it just me? Was I the only loser who sat on the toilet seat, demanding that the answers present themselves in the graffiti on the walls? A black heart ensnared the initials
JT + CD
.

What was wrong with me? What did I expect? The two of them dated. Why was I so surprised that they slept together? I must have stared at the door so long that it finally offered up answers to my questions. Nothing was wrong with me. I had morals, and I expected the same thing from a boyfriend. I was entitled to my anger. Why should I tolerate someone who treated such an important thing like sex so callously? I bolstered myself and exited the stall.

Chad
was auditioning when I reentered. I decided to sit in another row.

I stared at the back of Trina’s head, two rows in front of me as she recounted her brush with death.

She sounded a little shaken. “…totally terrified,” Trina said in true drama queen fashion. “I mean, it was a rat. Completely and utterly nasty.”

Listening to her made me feel even more gratified by what Cassie and I had done.

However the more I listened, the more I realized they were on her side. Supporters told her that it was probably some sick stalker who had been watching her for a long time. They sympathized with her. Cassie and I may have placed a scare in her, but we also turned her into a martyr. Everyone who heard the story offered consoling words and friendship. When all was said and done, she wound up more popular than ever.

I relayed the details to Cassie.

“Of course they’re going to feel sorry for her. She’s popular. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that she’s affected by it. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t be telling the entire school. By the time we’re through with that bitch, she’ll have plenty more to talk about. Believe me.”

Cassie was right. Who cared if people felt sorry for her? That wouldn’t change the fact that she would always have the vision of a rat hanging by a noose from her bedroom window. Now I wished it had been her. But now the rat stunt seemed tame. I wanted to truly pay her back for everything she’d done.

Cassie never shared much information with me about herself. She, like most of the other students at Saint Sebastian’s High, lived in
North Scottsdale
. She told me she was an only child and was given all the freedom she wanted from her parents. According to her, they were cool. She had me come over to her house to work on the chemistry project.

I had seen houses like hers from the roadside and always wondered what kind of people lived in them. She, like Trina, lived in the
Pinnacle
Peak
area. However, her parents shoveled out the money for a security gate. The house rested on the side of a mountain, and it was enormous. With seven bedrooms, six baths, a guesthouse, a diving pool, a three-car garage, and private tennis courts, they were their own self-contained community.

The house was immaculately cleaned; it looked like a model home. It must have been the maid service that they tipped so well. We started out in the kitchen with its top-of-the-line appliances and a stove usually only found in cooking shows. I doubted her parents ever used it. We wound up in the basement—a rare thing for homes in the Phoenix Metro area. It was an elaborately-decorated recreation room with a wet bar, pool table, leather couch, and aquarium.

It was six o’clock at night, the time most parents arrive home from work. Cassie’s were nowhere around. When I asked her where they were she said,
probably still at work
. She didn’t seem to care. I guess I would be happy too if my parents weren’t home by six o’clock. But then her parents were cool, mine weren’t.

Cassie said she moved from
Santa Monica
, and she hated it there. I wanted to know what happened to her, but she didn’t share. Somehow I suspected she experienced something similar to Trina. I realized that there were bullies like Trina all over. It didn’t matter if you came from a rich household in
California
or the mountains of
Tennessee
; kids still tormented kids.

Grace and I rode the bus home after tryouts. It was stuffy inside, filled with the stagnant air of a blow-up mattress. The windows were smudged with fingerprints, dried saliva, and snot. Outside the bus, brittlebush sprouted at the sides of the road.

“I saw you talking to Trina. Was she telling you about her horror story, too?”

“She mentioned it.”

“What else did she
mention
?”

“The play.” Grace avoided looking at me. Instead, she studied a splotch on the opposite window. It looked like Adam Sandler. I wondered if she thought the same thing. It’s something we both would have noticed in the past and laughed about. Now a silence passed between us that seemed to last for hours despite the fact that the bus ride was only twenty-five minutes.  

“The two of you seem to be good friends now.” Grace finally broke the quiet.

“Who?”

“You and … what’s her name. Cassie?”

“Is that why you’re mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you.” She continued looking out the window, ending the conversation.

Chad
headed me off at my locker. I hadn’t talked with him since the audition. He acted as if nothing happened.

“You’re going to the dance with me, right?”

How cocky! How arrogant! Did he completely disregard the fact that he had sex with Trina? As much as I wanted to go, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of presuming I would be his date.

“I don’t want to go this year.” I was amazed at how easily the words pirouetted off my tongue.

“Everyone wants to go to the dance.”

“Not me.” I closed my locker and walked away from him. He trailed, like a tail, at the base of my heels.

“Why not?” Trying to be a gentleman, he took my books from my arms, gallantly carrying them. I didn’t want him to be nice to me. It made it that much more difficult to be upset with him. I snatched my books back.

“This is about Trina, isn’t it?”

“What?” I picked up my pace, dodging students like traffic. He grabbed my arm and whirled me around.

“Listen Noelle. What happened between Trina and me meant nothing. You’re the one I’ve always wanted to be with. You’re the one I want to be with now.”

“Yeah, right. If that was true, you never would have slept with her.”

People slowed and stared, but I didn’t care. I wanted to hurt
Chad
like he hurt me.

“It was a mistake. It hurt when you rejected me. I’m not going to make any more excuses. I’d change things if I could, but I can’t.”

He stung me with his honesty. I was too crippled to fight back.

“I still don’t want to go to the dance.”

“Okay. Can we still be together? Maybe see a movie, grab something to eat?”

“Maybe.”

“Come on,” he said. He placed his hands on my shoulders and bent to my level. A smile broke across his face. “Didn’t I ever share with you how eating pizza solves everything?”

I felt a smile come on. “Yeah, okay.”