The Opposite of Hallelujah (26 page)

As soon as Hannah had disappeared, Mom wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in for a nice long hug.

“You’re smothering me, Mom!” I cried, struggling halfheartedly against her.

“You did a very nice thing for Hannah today,” she said softly. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Yeah, well …” I wriggled out of her embrace and set about straightening my rumpled hoodie.

Mom put a hand to my cheek. “You have a very good heart, Caro. I just wish it didn’t embarrass you so much.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Mom didn’t answer. She just gave me an enigmatic smile (Hannah had learned from the best) and then walked back into the kitchen to check on dinner.

17

“So,” Erin said two days later, setting her lunch tray down on the table. I looked up at her. “I’ve decided to forgive you.”

“And what brought on this sudden burst of generosity?” I asked, taking a bite out of my turkey sandwich.

Erin shrugged. “I’m not mad anymore. Can’t explain it.”

That was how Erin was. When she was mad, she was furious, but she could never sustain it for long, and when she was done fuming, she was more than happy to let things return to normal immediately. Sometimes, when
I thought she was completely out of line, I’d fight her on it, confront her and force her to admit that she was wrong, but this time I couldn’t have been gladder that she’d absolved me.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did it.”

“It’s okay, Caro,” she said. “It’s not like I haven’t lied to you before.”

“You have? When?”

Erin waved me off. “It’s not important. We’re friends again, that’s all that matters.”

I gave her a dubious look but decided to let it go. The quicker we dropped it, the better I would feel. “It’s too bad you couldn’t have forgiven me two days ago.”

“What do I look like, Jesus?” Erin scoffed.

“Now I’m partnered with Pawel for the science fair!” I whined.

“Yeah, well, so it goes,” Erin muttered, popping a french fry into her mouth.

Pawel had taken to sitting on the opposite side of the room from me in French and precalculus. I guess he had to counterbalance the hour a day he spent with his back five inches from mine in physics, because there was no way Mr. Tripp was letting him change lab groups. It wasn’t complete radio silence. The day Erin forgave me, he knocked twice on my desk as he passed it in French,
and when I looked up, he nodded at me. The day after that, he bumped into me in the hallway and said, “Excuse me, Caro.” Each time, my heart fluttered like a ribbon in the wind, twisting and gyrating and making me slightly nauseous, but there was no more flirting, no more joking, and definitely no more kissing. It was as if I’d completely imagined our brief relationship, if that was even what it had been.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Reb said. She was driving me home, and we’d stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through for crullers. “High school relationships generally have the life span of a fruit fly, and they end for stupider reasons than lying about your family. Did you screw it up? Yes. Are you alone in having screwed up a probably-going-nowhere junior-year crush-plus? Absolutely not.”

“Crush-plus?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a term I invented. It means one of those flings that’s basically a prolonged make-out session and nothing more,” Reb said, taking a bite out of her cruller and edging her way into traffic.

“Pawel and I were
not
a crush-plus,” I insisted. “We really liked each other.”

“I know,” Reb said. “I’m just trying to get you to see that you’re not the only one who’s ruined a fledgling relationship. We’ve all done it. Remember me and Sam Hansen?” I did remember it. Sam had been infatuated
with Reb, but even though she’d liked him back, she had played it way too cool and ended up making him feel like an idiot by laughing when he asked her out. They hadn’t spoken since, and Reb seemed to be over it, but every once in a while she’d mention it and I could tell how much she still regretted it. Even now, as she wiped sugar from her mouth, I could see it on her face.

“Good point.” I was picking my doughnut to pieces. I didn’t really want it, anyway. “I just don’t want him thinking I’m some sort of crazy person. That’s not who I am.”

“I know that,” Reb said. “And Pawel will figure it out eventually, if he’s not a total moron.”

“What if he just doesn’t care anymore?” I asked.

“Trust me, he still cares. When you talk in class, he listens. He looks up when you walk through the door. I’ve noticed. He’s just being stubborn.”

“How can you be sure?”

Reb shrugged. “I can’t. But my intuition tells me it’s true.”

“I’m supposed to trust the future of my romantic life to your intuition? Oh, God, I’m doomed,” I moaned, only half serious.

“Caro!” Reb laughed. “Rein it in, drama queen. In all likelihood, Pawel is not the future of your romantic life. He’s just a boy you like. You’ll like other boys, I promise.”
She put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a hard look. “It’s a long life.”

“Not if you don’t keep your eyes on the road!” I cried as we nearly sideswiped a Hummer. Reb drifted back into her lane and stepped on the gas.

“Don’t drop your crumbs everywhere,” she warned me. “Those crevices are a bitch to vacuum out.”

I glanced into the backseat, which was littered with to-go cups and Taco Bell wrappers. “Yeah, I’d hate for people to think you were a slob.”

“Everybody’s a critic,” she muttered.

On Friday, Mr. Tripp gave us the class period to discuss our science fair projects. Pawel didn’t look thrilled to be sitting next to me, but he didn’t look upset about it, either. It was the indifference that was killing me.

I sat on my stool, stiff and silent, with a thousand possible opening lines whipping through my mind. It was impossible to settle on something casual but worth saying. He was slouched over the table, drawing meaningless shapes in the margins of his notebook. I tried hard not to be too obvious about watching him. I started going through my textbook, turning the pages as if I was searching for something.

Finally, I spoke. “Single-bubble sonoluminescence,” I
said without taking my eyes off the page I’d been staring at for several minutes. Real sexy.

“Huh?” I felt Pawel sit up and glance at me.

“For our project,” I explained, turning my head slowly and letting my eyes meet his. He blinked and looked away, but before he could cover it I saw the softness of his expression. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or depressed. For the first time, I could tell that his interest hadn’t been completely eradicated by my stupid lie, but it was obvious from the way he was acting that he wouldn’t be letting me off that easily.

“What’s single-bubble sonoluminescence?” he asked, returning to his drawings. I took a good look at them; he wasn’t an artist, not like Carson Gallagher, who could sketch an entire true-to-life portrait in a fifty-minute class period. They were just rough symbols to keep his hands occupied. It was endearing.

“Basically, it’s an experiment where you turn sound into light,” I explained.
Make something
, Father Bob had said. I wasn’t crafty; I wasn’t going to take up knitting, even though I was almost 99 percent positive he was joking about that. But I did love science. I’d been thinking long and hard about our project, how I could use it for creation, not destruction. I’d spent several hours scouring the Internet for the perfect experiment, and when I read about single-bubble sonoluminescence, I knew I’d found it.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light
. Nothing like taking a cue from the pros. Or rather, The Pro. Father Bob would be proud. Or horrified. It was hard to tell with him.

“How?” Pawel asked.

“By directing a sound wave into an air bubble trapped in liquid.”

“Oh, that sounds easy,” he said, smirking.

Mr. Tripp loomed large behind him. “What does, Mr. Sobczak? Hopefully not your science fair project?”

“Actually, that’s what we were talking about.” I scrambled to gather some notes I’d made earlier in the period. “I think I—we—want to do single-bubble sonoluminescence.”

Mr. Tripp’s eyebrows jumped. “That’s a little too advanced for this classroom, Ms. Mitchell, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “It’s a challenge.”

“It’s not really something you can do at home,” he told me. “You’d need access to the lab, and it’ll be difficult to provide a demonstration at the fair.”

“What if we video our results and show them on a laptop?” Pawel chimed in. “Is that allowed?” I looked at him in surprise and he gave me an encouraging smile.

Mr. Tripp looked unconvinced, but he said, “I suppose so.” He seemed to have caught on to the fact that this lofty goal was entirely my doing. “Are you confident you two can pull this off?”

I nodded slowly. “Yes.” I wasn’t really sure; I definitely
didn’t think I could count on Pawel for anything, except maybe to watch as I did the entire experiment myself. But I liked the idea of a project that would keep me out of the house and my mind on other things. I was doing very well in physics, which was probably why Mr. Tripp was allowing me to attempt this giant project. It felt good to excel at something, even as my entire personal life was falling to pieces.

“Okay,” Mr. Tripp said. “I’ll put you down for single-bubble sonoluminescence. You’ll have to sign up for extra lab time and provide any materials we don’t have here. Once you’ve worked out how your experiment will proceed, we’ll make a schedule.” He looked us over one final time and shook his head a little. “Good luck, you two.”

As soon as the bell rang, I hopped off my stool and left the classroom as fast as I could without sprinting. Pawel called out behind me, but I didn’t turn or stop. I was getting that weightless feeling again, like I wasn’t part of my own body anymore. I needed to remain in control, so that I wouldn’t say something awful or embarrassing to Pawel. Escape was the best course of action.

But Pawel was faster than me. He caught up to me near the stairs and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you … running away from me?” he asked, furrowing his brow. He looked cute like that, confused and awkward. I knew the last thing he wanted to do was chase me. We were in such a weird place. I thought I
might explode from how rapidly our relationship was changing. New friends one minute, boyfriend and girlfriend the next, then nothing, now science partners. It was too much; I was vibrating at a thousand different frequencies at once.

“No,” I said. “I have to meet someone.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t quite believe me. “I just wanted to ask you about the project.”

“What about it?”

“It doesn’t seem like a good idea to do something so complicated,” he told me. “I mean, extra lab time? Can’t we do something a little less … involved?”

A sudden fury grabbed hold of me. I didn’t know why I was so angry with him—or rather, I did know, but I didn’t know why it was this, his reluctance to do a stupid science fair project we were being coerced into teaming up for, that tipped me over the edge, but it did; my face was so hot that I thought the blood underneath my skin might be boiling.

“You know what, Pawel? I don’t care what you do. I’m doing this project, and you can help me, or not help me, or whatever. I’ll do all the work, I’ll even put your name on it and you can get the same grade—which will be an A, by the way, because that’s just how smart I am. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for any help. Okay?”

“Uh, okay?”

“I have to go,” I said. I took the stairs quickly and burst out into the crowded first-floor corridor, where I weaved my way through the pack until even if Pawel was following me, I would have been lost to him.