The Book of Luke (5 page)

“Or, at least, we used to be,” Josie added, looking more hurt than mad.

They were right. They were my friends, years ago. And if they were going to be my friends again I couldn’t be afraid to come clean, swallow my pride, and admit the truth. I wanted Josie and Lucy to think of me as the girl who had the perfect life. The girl who would never get dumped by her boyfriend as soon as the moving truck pulled up in front of her house. Someone who was smart enough to get into Brown early decision. I wanted to be the same girl who was voted Most Likely to Be Nice in eighth grade.

I took a deep breath and then let it out. “I didn’t break up with Sean. He broke up with me.”

“Why? When? I just talked to you a few months ago and everything was fine.” Josie sat up and waited for my answer.

“When I asked him to come over to my house and say goodbye one last time.”

“The night before you left?”

“Actually, the morning. While the cab was parked in our driveway waiting to take us to the airport.”

Josie let out a painful moan. “Ugh. I bet you wanted to smack him.
I’d
want to smack him.”

“Smack him, have the taxi run him over, let an icicle fall from the gutter and spear him through the chest. Any one of those would have done just fine.” I tried to laugh as if I was joking, but instead it came out sounding like I had something caught in my throat.

“So go on,” Josie encouraged. “That can’t be the whole story. There has to be more to it than that.”

“Well,” I began, but then stopped, realizing how pathetic I was about to sound.

“Keep going,” Lucy encouraged, reaching over and squeezing my knee. “We’re listening.”

And so I told them everything. I repeated every mortifying minute in detail, and when I finished the story both Josie and Lucy groaned.

“Oh my God, that’s just too cliché,” Josie exclaimed. “It’s like something from a made-for-TV movie.”

“Really? Who would play me?” I asked, even though I knew it was slightly off-topic. I wanted to hear what they’d say.

“Maybe Sarah Michelle Gellar from her Buffy days?” Lucy suggested, and I loved her for it. And I loved the idea that I could slay Sean like an evil demon. It seemed highly appropriate, given the circumstances.

“That is such bullshit.” Josie turned to me, then reached out and touched my arm. “Not that Sarah could play you, of course, but that Sean would pull such a dick move right before you’re supposed to leave.”

“Total bullshit,” Lucy agreed.

“The least he could have done is brought you going-away flowers or something.”

“I’m really sorry.” Lucy reached over and squeezed my hand. “But, hey, look at it this way: You’re here and he’s there, and while he’s probably sitting around talking to his idiot friends about who’s going to win the Super Bowl, you’re here with us.”

“Were you sleeping together? Do you have a picture of him we could see? Did you love him?” Josie asked.

I shook my head, but didn’t bother answering any question specifically.

“So, that’s everything,” I told them, even though there was still the small matter of my parents’ separation. But I didn’t bring it up, maybe because I was hoping my dad would still show up on our doorstep and say it was all a mistake. Or maybe because I still wasn’t ready to think about what would happen if he didn’t.

Josie gave me a reassuring smile, one that said they still loved me, screwed-up life and all. “See, aren’t you glad you told us? Don’t you feel better?”

I wouldn’t say I was all that psyched about having even more people know about how messed up my life was, but I did feel a little better. Maybe even slightly relieved that I didn’t have to hold it all in anymore.

Lucy suddenly clapped her hands against her thigh like she always did before she ran onto the soccer field. “Okay, no more talk of
him
. We hate him.”

Josie pretended to wipe her hands clean of the subject. “As far as we’re concerned, the boyfriend-formerly-known-as-Sean no longer exists.” She tossed the Abercrombie catalog on the floor. “Thank God I didn’t sleep with Luke.”

“You didn’t?” I didn’t bother hiding the surprise in my voice. For some reason I guess I’d assumed Josie slept with Luke, probably because I couldn’t imagine she’d be
that
angry to discover Luke cheating on her. Josie had gone out with cute guys before, and, even though they weren’t as hot as Luke, when things went bad she’d just moved on and never looked back. Josie went through boyfriends like my mother goes through antibacterial hand wipes. I couldn’t think of a single guy who actually mattered to Josie the way Sean had mattered to me. I guess I figured sex had to be the one thing that made this time different for her.

“She was planning to surprise him on New Year’s Eve after she got home from the Bahamas,” Lucy explained. “But then she walked in on the sophomore.”

“At least he didn’t know what I had planned.” Josie pulled her legs up to her chin and hugged her knees. “That would have sucked even worse.”

“Forget about them,” Lucy suggested. “We have to talk about the time capsule.”

I frowned. “I can’t even believe they’re still doing the time capsule.”

“Believe it. Every senior class talks about how stupid it is, but we all do it.”

“Can’t we come up with anything better than a few CDs and an Abercrombie catalog?” I asked. “Isn’t there something more useful? Something the class of 2017 would really be glad to find?”

Lucy shrugged. “Who even knows what the class of 2017 will be like?”

“One thing I can guarantee,” Josie declared. “The guys in the class of 2017 will be pulling the same crap the guys in the class of 2007 have pulled on us.”

Boy, was that the truth.

Lucy nodded. “It’s too bad the girls can’t learn from our experiences. They’d be so much better off.”

“Maybe they can,” I ventured. “Maybe we can help them out so they have it easier.”

“What, you want to give them our old exams?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “No, something even better.”

“The essays we’re using for college applications?” Lucy tried again.

“I mean something that they can really use.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, like a handbook for guys.” The minute I said it, I knew a handbook was exactly what we had to do. It was perfect. “Something that could spare a future generation of Heywood girls from all the garbage we’ve had to put up with, like an instruction manual that teaches guys how to treat girls, something that they can use as a reference guide to avoid all the glaring ‘guy don’ts’ the guys in our class seem to have mastered.”

Josie made a little
hmm
sound, rubbing her chin as she considered my idea. “And does this manual of yours have a title?” she wanted to know.

I thought for a minute. “The Guy’s Guide to Girls—A Handbook for the Clueless.”

Josie and Lucy stared at me silently, their eyes wide and unbelieving.

“You hate it?”

“Hate it?” Josie cried. “We love it!”

Lucy agreed. “We have
got
to do it. It’s perfect.”

Josie hopped up onto her knees and leaned forward. “I mean, really, how do they learn about girls? From one another. It’s the blind leading the blind. They have no idea what to do, and the cycle keeps repeating itself. They have no clue about relationships, no less relationships with girls. We’re looking at guys who have no problem pulling their dicks out in front each other at a urinal, but they don’t even know their best friends’ birthdays.”

“Or their middle names,” Lucy added. The middle name thing was always a sore subject for Lucy, whose own middle name was Agnes-Georgina after her two grandmothers.

“The fact is, they don’t know any better,” Josie rationalized. “And that’s where we come in. We can teach them. It’s just like what your mom does in her articles and books, right?”

Josie was right. It was pretty much exactly what my mom does. Only my mom gets paid for it, and she’s always nice. Too nice. “Wait a minute, this can’t be some watered-down ‘gee, it would be great if you acted like this’ guide,” I said. “It has to call guys out on all the crappy things they do. We’re not here to coddle their ego. We’re here to straighten them out, not play Miss Manners.”

Josie looked at Lucy and they both seemed a little shocked by my response. I don’t think they expected me to be the one to suggest we shouldn’t be anything other than kind.

“I’m not doing this to be nice,” I continued. “I’m tired of being nice. Now it’s their turn.”

Lucy nodded. “We couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Do you think Mr. Wesley will go for the idea?” I asked.

“He doesn’t have to go for it, as long as we adhere to the guidelines—no sexually explicit content, nothing valued at more than one hundred dollars, and no drug paraphernalia—they added that after the roach clip thing. So as long as we’re not offering sex tips, which, granted, a lot of guys could use, we should be fine.”

Sounded good to me. “So how do we start?”

Josie leapt up and went over to her desk, returning with three pencils and a pad of paper. “Here,” she said and tore off three sheets. “Start writing down everything that ever drove you crazy about a guy. We need to catalog all of their annoying habits and the stupid things they do.”

Lucy waved her sheet of paper in the air. “One page? I could fill an entire notebook with this stuff.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Josie told her. “But first I think we should begin by taking an informal survey of senior girls to find out what bothers them the most. To prioritize our grievances and make sure we tackle the worst things first.”

“I don’t think anyone but the three of us should know what we’re planning to do,” I told them. “We’ll ask the girls questions, but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t give away that it’s for the guide.”

“I’ve got it!” Josie cried out, startling Lucy and me.

“What do you have?”

“I have the first ‘guy don’t.’” Josie scribbled something on her sheet and then read it aloud to us. “Don’t lay your hand on the top of a girl’s head and pretend to stroke her hair in a not-so-subtle attempt to push her facedown into your lap—you’re not fooling us.”

Lucy and I smiled. That was a Guy Don’t we could all identify with.

While Lucy worked on the questions for the survey, Josie and I started our Guy Don’t lists.

“We should probably swear off any guys for the rest of the year,” I decided, as if, given my current situation, that might actually be a problem.

“Already done,” Josie told us. “I’m through with guys until they get their shit together.”

“When do you think that happens?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when they’re older? Like twenty?”

“Twenty!” Lucy repeated. “I’m not swearing off guys until I’m twenty.”

If anybody was going to object to our ban on guys, I thought it would be Josie. She wasn’t one to sit around and lament an ex-boyfriend. She was more likely to call out “next!” But Lucy? What did she care? Guys were way less interesting to Lucy than the win/loss record of Heywood’s soccer team. Or at least they used to be.

“Okay, then let’s just promise that we’re done with guys until we finish the guide. We can’t very well be objective if we’re dating someone.”

I didn’t think there was much danger in that. Sean had pretty much cured me of any interest in the opposite sex.

“A future generation of Heywood girls will thank us for this some day,” Josie declared, already on her sixth Guy Don’t: Don’t say you’re going to call unless you really plan to pick up the phone, dial my number, and talk to me. Which dovetailed nicely into Guy Don’t #7: Don’t call me and then sit there expecting that I’ll carry on the conversation by myself.

“That’s a good one,” I told her, remembering some brutal phone conversations I had with Owen our freshman year. He’d call me and then sit there with the TV on in the background. “Do not call a girl unless you actually have something to say and plan on carrying on a conversation—and playing with your Xbox while I tell you about my cat is not a conversation,” I added, motioning for Josie to write down my contribution to her Don’t list. “Neither is phone sex.”

Lucy and Josie laughed at me. “You’re really serious about this not being nice thing, aren’t you?”

“You bet I am.”

They both grinned and seemed almost proud. “Then this should be interesting.”

“Not just interesting,” I told them. “This is going to be fun.”

In ninth grade we may have been bonded together by our complete and absolute devotion to Josh Hartnett and Neutrogena self-tanning cream, but now we had something even better. Something stronger. Josie, Lucy, and I were taking matters into our own hands and taking back control. Misery might love company, but we loved something else. It’s called getting even.

And that’s exactly what we were going to do.

Even if it wasn’t nice.

A
round five o’clock, Josie said she’d drive me home and I took her up on the offer, not even getting depressed about going home to a house that was filled with brown cardboard boxes, but absent one father. For the first time in days, I felt like I had something to look forward to—and I knew that Lucy, Josie, and I were on to something fabulous. Every time I thought about it I couldn’t help smiling. It was truly amazing how much could change in three days. Now I had hope. I had purpose. I had control over something. Finally.

I don’t think Josie and Lucy expected me to be so into the idea of picking apart the guys in our class. Every time I came up with a new Don’t, they kind of looked at me like they were trying to figure out if I was serious or not, like they were wondering if justbelow the surface of the Emily they thought they knew, this lessnice Emily had been lurking, waiting for the right time to come out. Well, I was out. Big-time.

Gone was the girl who used to listen to her mom’s advice that if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Now I just wasn’t going to say it, I was going to write it down and let future generations know that Emily Abbott was tired of being the good girl.

“Hang your next right,” I instructed Josie, trying to get my bearings straight in the dark. I’d only been to the new house in the daytime. “Then it’s the third house on the left.”

When I moved to Chicago, none of us could drive, no less tool around in our own black BMW 3 series still reeking of new car smell. I never in a million years would have predicted this. Josie used to hope she was going to get to drive her dad’s old Jeep with the duct tape keeping the torn plastic top from flapping in the wind, and now here we were getting our butts toasted on heated leather seats.

“Don’t forget, tomorrow we begin our research for the guide,” Josie reminded me as I opened my car door and started to get out.

“How could I forget?” I asked. “Tomorrow is the beginning of the end for the guys in our class.”

“You know, I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you, but I almost think you’re going to enjoy writing this guide.” Lucy shook her head at me. “Makes me glad I never did anything to piss you off.”

I narrowed my eyes and attempted to sound menacing. “Let’s keep it that way.”

She laughed at me and they sped away.

Even though it was only five o’clock, it was already pitch-black outside. And, because I’d lived in my new house for all of two days and nobody had bothered to shovel the front walk, I had to make my way through almost a foot of snow to get to the front door. If my dad were here, he would have been outside shoveling the walk before we were even up this morning. But, of course, he wasn’t here. And all of a sudden I envisioned the front walk piling up with snow all winter, and how the job of shoveling would naturally fall to me. Not because I especially relished the idea of laboring with a shovel, but because I knew I should offer. And I knew TJ never would.

I left my boots and coat in the front hall and made my way into the living room, which was beginning to resemble some form of order, even if discarded bubble wrap and packing tape still littered the hallway. As tempting as the bubbles looked, I resisted the urge to step on them. My mother would definitely not approve, which is why, when we were packing up our house back in Illinois, she forbade TJ to go near the bubble wrap. While my brother and I both knew better than to pop all the little air pockets, my mom knew us well enough to know that TJ wouldn’t follow the rules. And I would.

“So, how was it?” my mom asked, stepping out from behind a stack of cardboard boxes, her hair held back by a red bandanna, looking vaguely like her idol, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, only without the dark sunglasses and presidential seal of approval.

“It was okay,” I answered, almost surprised by how
okay
my first day back at Heywood had been. “It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“It never is,” she singsonged, picking up a matching pair of candlesticks and walking them over to the fireplace mantel. “I knew you’d be fine all along.”

Of course, my mom would never admit otherwise. She’s eternally optimistic. It’s an occupational hazard.

“I’ll be upstairs,” I told her, even though I knew I should offer to help her unpack. I had my own unpacking to do.

“Your dad already called to see how it went today,” she told me. “You can call him on his cell phone.”

My dad. The man who’s lived with Polite Patty for twenty years and yet still managed to handle the past two weeks all wrong—which, come to think of it, didn’t bode well for our ability to change the way Heywood’s guys treat girls.

I stopped next to the pile of bubble wrap. “Do I have to call him now?”

My mom looked over at me and frowned. “It would be nice.”

Of course it would. “Maybe later,” I told her, turning to go upstairs. And then I stopped. And instead of walking away on the hardwood floors, I stepped to the right and let my foot land on a sheet of bubble wrap, setting off a series of little pops that sounded a lot like firecrackers.

“Emily.” My mom gave me her best disappointed look, which included a furrowed brow and a slight shaking of her head.

But instead of apologizing I found myself smiling. Yeah, I knew better. But the new Emily didn’t care. And she certainly wasn’t returning her father’s phone call.

“Don’t forget to call your dad,” my mom called after me as I headed upstairs, as if oblivious to the fact that she was reminding me to call a man who had decided he was better off nine hundred miles and an entire time zone away from us.

But I wasn’t oblivious to that piece of information, and there was no way I’d be picking up the phone to call him. He’d made his choice, and now I was making mine.