Starstruck (9 page)

Terra nods in agreement.

I swallow. Not only do I not particularly like Jell-O or any food that bears such a striking resemblance to my butt, I’ve never had a drink in my life. Ever. Not even a taste of champagne at a family wedding. And I’ve never really felt the desire to have one, either. “Okay,” I say, as brightly as possible.

“What are you wearing?” Terra asks Destiny, and Destiny launches into this long-winded description of every piece of merchandise that will be on her body, filled with many more foreign names with squiggles and accents. Terra then does her rundown. I make a mental note that everyone is going to be wearing sundresses, and pray I have something suitable in Melinda’s magic bag.

“What about you?” Destiny asks me. The snootiness hasn’t disappeared from her voice.

I’m about to say I’m still thinking about it when Erica chimes in, “You can just wear what you have on. It’s hot.”

A hand appears on my shoulder. It’s Wish. I’d somehow, in my lovefest with Erica, forgotten all about him. But Destiny hasn’t. She gives him a smoldering look and then catches sight of his hand on me and shakes her head in dismay. “Would you ladies like to begin another day of learning?” he says, bowing and directing us to the front door.

They all giggle at him. He hooks his arm through mine, and I don’t have to worry about trailing behind him. For the first time that day, I almost feel safe.

I
N HOMEROOM
, I expect things to deteriorate quickly. I expect Terra and Erica and Destiny to ignore me. Destiny turns her back on me and starts to inspect a lock of her platinum mane for split ends, but Erica offers me a stick of gum. It’s a new, funky passion fruit–smoothie flavor that only cool people like Erica would possess. I take it like it’s a bar of gold and for a second think about preserving the wrapper in my diary. Terra must have decided that since Erica finds me suitable enough to share her gum with, I’m worthy of conversation. She starts snapping her gum and talking faster than an auctioneer.

“So, like, you’re friends with Wish, huh? He’s my cousin. Did you know? Well, he is. He’s, like, a really cool guy. How long have you known him?”

It’s thrilling and dizzying at once. These girls are buzzing around me, asking me questions about Wish, like I matter. But they’re acting like I just appeared out of nowhere. Like I haven’t been sitting in class with them for the past four years. It’s like I’ve been wearing an invisibility cloak. I say to myself, No, it’s because they’re so busy doing Jell-O shots or texting messages to each other or whatever they do that it’s only momentary forgetfulness. They have to realize I’ve been in classes with them all these years, even if they did ignore me, right? I’m about to answer, “Hello? I’ve known him since first grade?” when Erica speaks. She leans over and says, “So, did you move here from California, too?”

Unbelievable.

Okay, there are over fifteen hundred kids in the school, and since I’ve always been in the advanced curriculum, I haven’t shared a lot of classes with these girls. Erica has school-wide fame for the sex-kitten thing she has going on, and though she’ll never be a Rhodes scholar, I thought that having the occasional homeroom or lunch with her meant I was at least on her radar. And I always assumed that Terra knew I had some connection to Wish, because they’re cousins. She must; she’s thrown enough icy glares my way to freeze the equator. She’ll straighten Erica out.

Right now.

Okay, now.

Instead, Terra looks expectantly at me, waiting for an answer.

My mouth opens, but nothing comes out, so I look like part of a bad ventriloquist act. “No, I …,” I begin. What do I say? I’m the doofus who sat behind you the past few years, and you just never noticed because I was too doofy to breathe your air? I swallow. “Um. Uh. Yeah.”

“Cool, L.A.?” Terra asks, oblivious to my mouth, which is hanging open wide enough to swallow her head.

“Um.” I turn and look at Destiny. She’s suddenly interested in the conversation again.

She drops her hair over her shoulder and gives her head a shake, like she’s the lost child of the Pantene family, and her lips curl over her teeth. “I thought everyone in Southern California was thin,” she drawls.

“Um …,” I begin, emotions flooding me so quickly that I can’t even bother to be insulted by Destiny’s fat comment. I’m well insulated against fat comments, I guess. The only things going through my mind are that 1) none of these girls realize I have been part of their class since the beginning of junior high, and 2) this is the absolute best thing that has ever happened to me.

I mean, before Wish, I wasn’t just a random nobody that everyone detested. No! I have no history at Cellar Bay. I could have partied with Britney and Paris in L.A. for all they know. I could be George Clooney’s love child. No past embarrassments, like the time I threw up on my teacher’s head or the time I wore white pants over my hot pink Tuesday undies. Nothing! I am free!

“We’ve been dating for a few years,” I say vaguely, still not convinced that they won’t suddenly go, “Hey, waaaait, I remember you.…”

Erica leans in. “Seriously? So tell me. Wish must be really good, right?”

I gulp. Yeah, sure he’s good, but that’s probably not the way she means it.

“Ew,” Terra gasps, and stuffs her fingers in her ears, preschool-like. “I am so not listening to this. He’s my cousin.”

Erica seems to enjoy making Terra squirm. “He has such fantastic lips. He’s a great kisser, right?”

Destiny narrows her eyes. “Have you done it with him?” She looks at Erica. “I think she’s still a virgin.”

What about all color draining from my face screams “virgin”? I wonder.

Erica crosses her arms and addresses Destiny like she’s a mental patient who’s just been caught wearing her pants on her head again. “She said they’ve been going out for a few years. You do not go out with someone for that long and not do it with them.”

There it is, the Erica Proclamation. Sex must happen if you date a person for a few years, and if not, you are obviously a candidate for hanging from the neck until dead. As she says it, trumpets sound. I half expect a little scribe to come by with a very official parchment scroll and take down every last word. So let it be written, so let it be done. It’s strange; I thought that to win the undivided attention of these three, I’d have to, I don’t know, gnaw off my own foot or something. I didn’t realize all I’d have to do is make up a sex life with Wish.

The room gets a little fuzzy, but I recover and choke out, “Oh, of course we have.” My mind says stop, but for some reason my mouth keeps going. “I thought you meant … um, like, was he good with charity work or something.”

So even though I supposedly do Wish, which should make me a rock star, I still cannot shake the cloud of lameness that follows me. Luckily, they don’t seem to notice. Erica raises her eyebrows. “So he is good?”

This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had. It’s like trying to converse with three extraterrestrials. Even if I’d had sex with Wish, I wouldn’t have anything to compare him to. But then again, this is the new Gwendolyn Reilly. New clothes, new hair, new past, new sexual history. “Yeah,” I say. “Really good.”

“I knew it.” Erica grins her little sex-kitten grin again and pulls out a small notebook. “Wish always comes out on top.”

Terra still has her fingers in her ears and is singing “Do-Re-Mi” to herself. Destiny rolls her eyes and says, “Everyone knows how Erica likes it on top.”

Erica shrugs. “It’s just better that way.” Then she looks at me. “Don’t you think so, Gwen?”

I nod ferociously, hoping we can change the subject before they realize that my being on top of anything is the quickest way to turn it into a pancake. “Oh. Yeah.”

“He has the nicest ass, too. You must just want to squeeze it all the time.” She makes a motion like she’s squeezing produce for freshness. I peer over at the notebook as she turns the pages. “Hottest. Sweetest. Nicest body. Most athletic.” She grins at me. “Your boyfriend is at the top of all of them. Well, not best dressed and nicest car. But everything else.”

“Really?” I can’t say anything else. I guess I’m waiting for one of them to pipe in with “But you, on the other hand …” But it never comes.

“Ever since he’s moved back, he’s been our Would You Rather champion,” Erica says instead.

“Champion?” I ask. I never thought there was any way to win at Would You Rather. Wish and I used to play it all the time. Eat someone else’s fingernail or walk fifty miles? Go to school naked or eat someone’s puke?

Terra sighs. “Not with me.” She looks at me and explains. “Would You Rather is where one person names two people, and you have to say which one you’d rather sleep with. Wish always wins.”

I should have known they’d find a way to turn even the most innocuous memory of my childhood into something sex-related. I bet when they play Monopoly, they pretend the little red hotels are brothels.

“He wins out over all the guys in school. Most of Hollywood, too,” Erica says.

I feel the banana I ate for breakfast trying to force its way up my throat. So Erica and Destiny would rather spend a night with Wish than with, say, a gazillionaire Hollywood actor that millions of teenage girls lust after on a nightly basis. And yet nobody’s looking at me and thinking there’s something wrong with me and Wish together. Well, maybe they are, but they’re not saying it.

“So, is his ass really as perfect out of those jeans as it is in them?” Erica asks, pressing me.

I don’t answer. I don’t know how to. I just smile dumbly. I’m not sure if I’m feeling uncomfortable because I don’t know (or care to know) the answer to that question right now, or because I’ve watched enough soap operas to know that girls like Erica don’t let a measly thing like a girlfriend stand in the way of getting what they want. And Erica obviously wants to treat my boyfriend’s backside like a cantaloupe.

“You must squeeze it constantly. I mean, how can you not want to squeeze that ass of his constantly?”

I shrug. “Um, I’m not really an ass girl,” I say, which is true. I read in
Cosmo
or
Glamour
that some guys are boob men, while other guys like legs. At the time, I wondered how hard it would be to find a guy who was a beer-gut man. Anyway, it must be the same for girls, right? There’s nothing wrong with not being an ass girl.

“Oh, you should just squeeze it a little, every day. I would.” Erica gives me a little playful pinch on the elbow. I jump, because I’m not expecting it, since people like Erica strike me as the type who would sooner touch doggie doo than unimportant people like me. “So, tell us more.”

I fight the overwhelming urge to run for the door. I’m still not convinced that this conversation—this day—can be happening to me. Maybe a little part of each of their brains did remember the goober Dough but then decided that it was a mathematical impossibility for the butt of all their jokes of previous years to be involved with Wish. So to deal with this new and impossible information, their brains simply created a new me. It’s a psychological coping mechanism. I hear the words of encouragement Christian gave me: Act confident until you are confident. I remember thinking that that philosophy was crazy, that people would see through it quicker than through cellophane.

Now he sounds like a genius.

So I put on my biggest, most confident smile, say, “What would you like to know?” and hope that Wish doesn’t find out about this conversation while I’m alive. Considering how fast my heart is beating, that might not be for long.

T
HE REST OF THE MORNING
, two girls offer to share their notes with me, three tell me they love my outfit, and some dude picks up my pen for me when I accidentally drop it. This is a big step up from my previous status, which was the human equivalent of packing peanuts and three a.m. infomercials. You know, just taking up space.

Before I know it, it’s lunch. Time to see Wish again. As I navigate away from my locker, I see a row of couples engaged in PDA. This isn’t something I noticed before, maybe because I steered clear of that stuff. Now I can’t stop looking. Something tells me that if Erica were going out with Wish, she’d be all over him. Maybe I should run up to him and surprise him with a big first wet one, the stuff of movie legends, so romantic and heart-stopping that he pulls away from me, breathless, and says, “Wow. Gwen, never leave me.”

Instead, the first thing I do when I see him, standing at the A-list table with his Phillies cap on backward and a french fry crammed between his lips like a cigarette, is blush. Then he turns and notices me, and a slow smile spreads on his face as he sucks the last of the fry into his mouth. Somehow he manages to do this and still look sexy. So the heat on my cheeks, which was mild before, gets cranked up so high that I think steam starts coming off them. Everything in my line of vision gets fuzzy.

It’s not like I didn’t know he was beautiful and hot and something that the girls would go crazy for. But now that I’ve seen him topping every one of Erica’s lists, the whole “acting confident until you are” I’ve been trying to do seems pretty freaking impossible. It’s one thing to talk sex with Erica and the girls, but another thing entirely to perform. If I ran up to kiss him, we’d most likely end up bonking heads.

“Hey,” he says as I near him. “You want something up at the line? My treat.”

Food is the last thing on my mind, obviously, because I can’t get the conversation with the girls out of my head. What, exactly, makes Wish’s butt the object of such enthusiasm? He’s half turned toward me, so I have to crane my neck at a rather unnatural angle to see it, and then, suddenly—

“Hello?” My eyes trail upward, to Wish’s questioning face. “What are you doing?”

I shrug, innocent.

“Want something at the line?”

I shake my head, and I see Erica throw her books down on the table beside me. I wonder what she would do at a moment like this, but it doesn’t take long to know the answer. Wish starts digging into his pockets for change. He’s close to me, thus so is his backside. Now would be the perfect time to do it. Now. Right now. And it’s like I can’t control myself. As if I’m having an out-of-body experience, I see my hand, shaped like a crab claw, going in for the kill.…

“Whoa!” Wish jumps and stares at me, clearly astonished. As do half the people in the cafeteria.

“Um. Hurry back, now,” I say, giving him my most seductive, pouty gaze, which I think probably looks like I pressed my face up against a window, from the way he recoils in horror. Okay, totally not the reaction I was aiming for.

Instead of going up to the line, he walks over to the windows. “Is it supposed to rain today?”

The day started out brilliantly sunny, but now clouds are moving in. And it doesn’t just look like an afternoon thunderstorm, which are common during hot days in Jersey. It looks like we’re in for a good dousing. “Um, I think. But it’s supposed to end by early evening.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Okay,” he says, then heads off toward the line.

I can still feel the denim of his jeans and the firm flesh beneath them on my fingertips. Nice, I guess, but I don’t really have anything to compare it to. I have to clasp my other hand over my fingers to keep them from trembling. When I look up at Erica, she’s giving me a satisfied smile. Like she’s proud of me.