Sometimes It Happens (11 page)

“Fine,” Lacey says, “I have to get to class anyway.” But her tone is slightly clipped, like she can’t imagine she’d be interested in hearing any of Ava’s drama anyway.

Ava grabs my hand, then pulls me into the bathroom in the math wing. There are two other girls from our class, Ivy Defalco and Charlotte Sylvain, doing their makeup at the sinks, and they nod to us as we come in. Ava says hi, but in a really fake cheery voice that I’ve heard her use sometimes on parents or when she’s in trouble. And when she says it, her hand tightens around mine.

She pulls me into a stall. The same stall. Great. Now, not only do I have to worry about a Noah rumor, I have to worry about those girls out there spreading some weird rumor about how Ava and I are lesbians. Not that I care about being thought of as a lesbian. In fact, it’s way better than a rumor about me and my best friend’s boyfriend.

“Ava,” I say. “What. Is. Wrong?”

She holds her finger up to her lips, and I stay quiet. The
sound of the bell ringing reverberates through the bathroom, signaling that we’re both late for third period, but it doesn’t really matter because this is more important. Plus, it’s pretty easy to get away with being late on the first day of school—you just say you were in guidance or you read your schedule wrong.

Once the bell stops ringing, it’s like some kind of switch flips inside of her, and Ava kicks open the door to the stall and stomps over to the sinks. “I’m a mess!” she raves. She reaches into her buttery leather tote and pulls out a huge makeup bag. She starts washing her face off with some sort of makeup remover-towelette thing, then flings it into the garbage can forcefully. Okay, then. I guess she’s feeling violent.

“It’s Noah,” she says, almost spitting out his name. She looks at me, her brown eyes huge. “Hannah,” she says. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

I can hear the sound of my heart beating. I can literally
hear
it beating, throbbing really, and the sound of the blood rushing through my body vibrates in my ears, even though I know I’m just being paranoid. If Ava knew, she’d be screaming at me in the hall, not bringing me into the bathroom for a talk. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean,” she says, turning back to the mirror. “That if there’s anything you want to tell me about what happened this summer, then you should tell me.
Right now
.” I look into the mirror, seeing our reflections, the two of us standing
there side by side, as we’ve been every day on the first day of school for the past six years, everything the same but completely different.

“What kind of thing?”

“Anything!” She pulls out another towelette and starts scrubbing the makeup off her eyes.

“Anything having to do with what?”

“Anything having to do with Noah and another girl! You guys spent like all summer together, right? Did you see anything? Were there any suspicious girls that would come into the diner all the time?”

The breath I’ve been holding in goes whooshing out of me in one big rush of air. “Why are you asking about Noah and another girl?”

“Because,” she says. She throws another towelette into the garbage, then looks at herself in the mirror. I watch as her reflection says, “He just broke up with me.”

“He just
what
?” This I wasn’t expecting. “What do you mean he just broke up with you?” My head feels all light, and I look around for someplace to sit, but of course there’s nowhere. It’s the bathroom in the math wing, not the bathroom in Blair Waldorf’s house.

“Just what I said,” Ava says. “He. Broke. Up. With. Me. God, Hannah, I’m so upset.” Her face crumples and I reach out and put my arms around her. I can’t believe that on the last day of school, Ava was comforting me, and now I’m here comforting her.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I just . . . I can’t believe it.” This part, at least, is true. “What did he say?”

“Well.” She sniffles, then plops herself down on the floor of the bathroom and looks up at me forlornly. “I kept having to follow him around all day, you know? And you know me, Hannah, I do
not
follow people.”

“I know,” I say. It’s true. Ava doesn’t follow people. She’s always the one getting followed.

“But he was just acting so weird all morning, and I had no choice, you know? He, like, seemed like he didn’t want me around.” She sniffs again. “So finally, after second period, I was like, ‘are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ And then he was all, ‘I didn’t want to tell you this in school, Ava, I wanted to wait until after.’”

She stands up now and returns to the mirrors where she starts relining her eyes in a sparkly plum liner that’s different from the one she was wearing this morning. I guess maybe she decided that a dramatic morning calls for a more dramatic makeup look. “And then he said he felt like we’d grown apart over the summer, and he didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”

“Wow,” I say. I’m leaning against the sink, not sure what to do, what I should say, how I’m supposed to feel. The one thing I do know is that I feel horrible for Ava.

“And the worst part,” she says, “is that he acted like it was my fault that we grew apart.”

“Well, you weren’t really around that much this summer,” I say carefully.

“Like you can blame me?” she says. “I was away following my dreams. And besides, being apart for a summer isn’t enough reason to break up with someone.” She pauses, like she wants me to say something, but I don’t. Mostly because I don’t know if she really
was
following her dreams. Ava’s never expressed interest in any kind of career path. In fact, she always kind of acts like even talking about things like that is stupid. She’s never said she wants to be a teacher or a counselor, or even that she wants to work with kids. And it wasn’t like she got some great internship in Paris that she’d been wanting. She got a last minute summer job as a camp counselor in Maine.

We’re silent as Ava finishes her makeup. Then she takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders and gives herself a big smile in the mirror. “Getting my teeth whitened,” she says, “was so the right choice.”

She starts to walk toward the door.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“To class,” she says.

“You’re going to go to class?”

“Hannah,” she says. “I’m not going to ruin my senior year grades because of some guy.” And then she pushes through the door and slips out into the hall, not even waiting for me to follow. I wash my hands in the sink, then take a piece of
spearmint gum out of my bag and pop it into my mouth. I leave the bathroom and start walking to my own class, my footsteps echoing through the empty hallway and my mind racing. Did Noah break up with Ava because of me? Is he going to try and talk to me now? Was he just waiting to talk to Ava before he came up to me? How upset is Ava really? Is there a chance she might get over it pretty quickly? Does she even—

I round the corner toward C-wing and almost smack right into Noah.

“Oh!” I say. I reach out to steady myself and end up grabbing his shirt, and for a second, I’m afraid I’m going to pull him close to me, but I don’t. I take a step back. “Sorry,” I say, “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

He’s so close that I can see the curve of his collarbone, the top of his T-shirt, the way the hood of his sweatshirt is twisted a little bit in the back. “It’s fine,” he says. I take a breath and look up at him and his eyes meet mine. Tingles rush through my body and I wait for him to say that he broke up with Ava, that we should meet up after school to talk about everything, that we should figure everything out together.

But all he does is brush by me as he goes down the hall. And so I blink back my tears and head to third period.

“What are you doing?”

I look up from where I’m sitting on the front porch (well, technically sprawling since I’m laying on my back with one arm and one leg hanging over the side and onto the cobblestone path that leads to our driveway). I haven’t moved since Lacey dropped me off an hour ago. Actually, that’s not really true. About a half an hour ago I realized I had to go to the bathroom, so I did. And then I wandered into my bedroom for a second, where I did something very stalkerish that had to do with Sebastian and Facebook. (It totally didn’t violate the agreement I made with Lacey, since that was limited to driving by people’s houses. Even so, I still feel a little guilty.) But then I came right back to the porch. Talk about a complete and total regression.

I look up to see who’s talking to me—Noah. Probably here to yell at me for looking at his computer. Whatever. There’s nothing he can say that can make me more upset than I already am.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just . . . sitting.”

“But you’re not sitting,” he says. “You’re laying.”

He sits down next to me on the steps, right near my head. I look up at him, then turn toward the yard so that he can’t see my face. The whole situation is suddenly too shameful for words.

“Then I’m just laying,” I say. “What are
you
doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“I live here,” I say, rolling my eyes. Duh.

“Yeah, but what are you doing here, out on the porch, just laying?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

He looks me up and down. I’m still in my Cooley’s uniform, my eyes are wet and my body is lethargic.

“Not really,” he says.

“I’m depressed.” God, do I really need to spell it out for him? I thought Noah was supposed to be smart.

“About what?”

“About what? Are you seriously asking me that question?”

“I know about what,” he says. “I just meant has anything new happened? Because you seemed fine a little while ago.”

“Yes,” I say. “There was a pink Jeep in Sebastian’s driveway.” I look up at him from under lowered lashes, gauging his reaction to this critical piece of information.

Obviously, he’s too dense to get the ramifications, because his response is to look confused and then repeat, “A pink Jeep?”

“Yup,” I say, turning back to look out into the yard. “A pink Jeep.” A mosquito lands on my leg, probably to suck my blood and give me a huge itchy bite and maybe even some West Nile. But I’m too upset to move, and so I just let it do its thing.

“Is Sebastian . . . is he . . . I mean he’s not . . . he isn’t gay now, is he?” Noah asks.

“No!” I smack his leg. “Are you saying I could turn a man gay?”

“No,” he says. “I just heard pink Jeep and Sebastian and it was the logical place to go. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

“The pink Jeep,” I say, “Belongs to
her
.”

“Her?”

“The sophomore,” I report. “And,” I rush on before he can say anything else, “she has a bumper sticker that says ‘Sophomores Do It Better’.” I sit up then, fast, and my head goes a little woozy because I’ve been lying down for so long. “Is that true?” I ask him. “Do sophomores really do it better?”

“God, no,” Noah says. I lie back down, satisfied.

“So what are you doing here?” I ask.

“Ava said you left her a message sounding kind of upset, so she asked me to come over and check on you.”

I sit up again. “Are you
serious
?”

“Yeah.” He uncrosses his legs.

“I can’t believe her!” Suddenly, I’m fuming. “Why would
she send you here when I left her a message? She couldn’t call me or text me?” I pick up my phone and check it. “Nothing!” I say. “Not one call. Not one voice mail. Not one text, not even an email or a Facebook message!”

“She didn’t have that much time,” Noah says weakly.

“What. Ever.” I’m so upset, that I burst into tears.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Noah says calmly. “No crying.” If he’s startled by the fact that I’m now sobbing, he doesn’t show it.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just . . . I just . . .”

“Come on,” he says, standing up and holding out his hand. “We’re going for ice cream.”

I stop crying. “Any kind I want?”

“The secret to a great ice cream,” Noah says fifteen minutes later, as we stand in line at The Big Dip Ice Cream Stand, “is crunch coat.”

I look at him, aghast. “
Crunch coat
? Oh, Noah darling, you are so wrong.” I almost wish I hadn’t heard that, it’s so upsetting. He gives me a look, like he wants an explanation. I sigh. “Everyone knows that you ruin ice cream by putting crunch coat on it,” I say. “Crunch coat isn’t even peanuts, it’s . . . I don’t know what it is, some kind of weird, synthetic . . .”

“Crunch coat?” he offers.

“Exactly.” The line shuffles forward, and we shuffle with it. The line’s pretty long, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s eight o’clock on a gorgeous summer night—one of those
nights where it’s warm, but not humid, with a nice breeze that rustles the leaves and makes the smell of fresh-cut grass and smoke from the grill waft through the air.

“Crunch coat,” Noah says, “is delicious. And besides, I’m supposed to be taking advice from you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You listen to Lady Gaga.”

I gasp. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve heard it pounding out of your iPod when me, you, and Ava hang out.”

I consider telling him that I only listen to Lady Gaga because she’s on my workout mix or something, but then I think better of it. I mean, I’m not embarrassed. “Lady Gaga is fast-becoming a cultural icon, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Madonna,” I report.

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The line moves forward again, and I move with it, enjoying the last few minutes of sun on my face. “And besides, the fact that I listen to Lady Gaga has nothing to do with my knowledge of ice cream.”

“What about the Jonas Brothers? Does the fact that you listen to them have anything to do with your knowledge of ice cream?”

“I don’t listen to the Jonas Brothers!” This one, I definitely have to lie about. Lady Gaga is one thing, but Joe, Kevin, and Nick are another altogether. “And even if I did, they’re very popular with the kids. And they wear purity rings.”