Keep Holding On Page 4

  “Oh, for sure. No pressure.”

  Why do people say “no pressure”? It’s like as soon as they say it I feel all this pressure.

  “If you could let me know by next week that would be great,” Simon adds. “I really need to find a replacement soon.”

  “Thanks for the offer.”

  “Thanks for thinking about it.” Simon smiles, all confident. Like he could go up to anyone and say anything to them. That must be an awesome feeling.

  five

  friday, april 15

  (45 days left)

  I’m going out with Matt Brennan tonight.

  No more sneaking off during study hall.

  No more hooking up on the DL.

  No more keeping our relationship a secret.

  After tonight, everyone will know we’re together. The last thing anyone wants to do is piss off Matt. And of course Matt will want to protect me. So everyone will stop tormenting me. Including Carly. She rolls with his crowd. Which may be awkward when I start hanging out with his friends, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to avoid her.

  I cannot wait for my life to get easier.

  Every time I open my locker, I see all these cool things I taped up. Pictures of me and Sherae. A mini mobile with shapes in primary colors. A postcard of Bird in Space. The first cootie catcher Sherae and I made this year.

  But when I open my locker this time, all those things are ripped into tiny pieces and scattered over my books.

  Awesome.

  There’s no way I’m going to let my frustration show. Carly is watching from down the hall. I’m sure she’s loving this. She can’t wait for a reaction.

  I’m not going to give her one.

  Carefully keeping my expression unchanged, I take what I need out of my locker. Some bits of ripped pictures fall to the floor. I leave them there. I refuse to give her the satisfaction of seeing me pick them up. How did she even get my combination?

  Whatever. I’m going out with Matt tonight. I just need to keep focusing on how being his official girlfriend will make all of this go away.

  I’m actually smiling when I close my locker.

  Sherae and I have this thing where we meet up at her locker before second period. It’s tradition.

  “Things are looking up,” Sherae reports. “No pathetic note from Hector today. And he finally stopped leaving me messages.”

  “Ooh, that is an improvement,” I agree.

  “Plus! You know that heinous English test I’ve been stressing? It got postponed!”

  “Sweet!”

  “Okay. You’ve been smiling since you got here. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Why do you think something’s up?”

  “Please. Since when are you happy at school?”

  “I’m not.”

  “We’re not leaving until you tell me.”

  I desperately want to tell her about Matt. I have to tell her about Matt. Everyone’s going to know we’re together after tonight anyway. And I’ve been waiting for this moment for a really long time.

  “I have a date,” I announce.

  “Oh my god!” Sherae gasps. “With who?”

  “Matt Brennan.”

  “You know Matt Brennan?”

  “We’ve been …” The bell for second period rings. “It’s a really long story. I’ll tell you later.”

  We branch off in separate directions. It’s not until I’m at my desk in English that I realize I didn’t tell Sherae not to tell anyone about Matt. But of course she won’t. That’s why she’s the only person in the whole world I can trust.

  Getting ready for my date with Matt makes it glaringly obvious that I’m in desperate need of a shopping trip with Sherae. Why didn’t I ask her to go to the mall this week? I could have gotten a cute top that actually fits. It might be time to rethink this whole baggy look.

  This date is already a disaster and I haven’t even left my apartment yet.

  Sherae drove me home after school and I told her all about Matt. She was not liking our secret status. But I said that not all boyfriends operate on the same schedule. Matt just needed more time. I explained how everything will be out in the open after we’re seen together at the mall tonight.

  There’s no way I was letting Matt pick me up here. He’d probably want to come in. That was not happening. So we’re supposed to meet outside Friendly’s. Taking the train is my only way to get to the mall. The good news is that the mall is like half a mile from the train station. And there’s a back way I can walk between them so no one will know I took the train to get there. Sherae said she’d drive me, but that would be lame.

  I write a quick note saying I went to the mall with Sherae. Then I leave before mother can get home and ruin date night with her toxic negative energy. I’m excited just to be going somewhere. Unless I’m hanging out with Sherae after school, I never go anywhere. And even then we pretty much only do stuff before dinner. This is the first time I’ve been out at night in forever.

  When I get to the mall, I walk the long way across the parking lot. This makes it look like I drove here and I’m just coming in from my parking spot. No one takes the train to the mall. No one walks half a mile.

  I sit on the bench outside Friendly’s and wait. The mall is a world that never changes. No matter what’s going on outside, you can always rely on the same overplayed music, bad lighting, and irritated shoppers inside.

  Waiting for someone shouldn’t be hard. All you have to do is sit there. But it’s actually one of the hardest things. When you’re sitting by yourself at the mall, you might as well be wearing a flashing neon sign that says LOSER. I try to make it as obvious as possible that I’m waiting for someone. I exaggerate the motions of looking around. I check the time by throwing an exasperated glare at the big clock on the center island. I want anyone who might be watching or passing by my bench to know that alone is just my temporary state. There’s a person who wants to be with me. A person who will be here any minute.

  Five minutes of waiting turns into ten.

  Then twenty.

  Half an hour later, Matt still isn’t here.

  He said Friendly’s, right? Did he mean somewhere else?

  Matt is thirty-seven minutes late when the worst thing ever happens. A group of kids grabs a window booth at the Olive Garden across from Friendly’s.

  Of course they’re kids from school.

  Of course Warner Talbot is one of them.

  There has to be a way to hide. The second they look over here, they’ll totally see me. Alone on a bench outside Friendly’s on a Friday night. Waiting for my secret boyfriend who’s almost forty minutes late.

  I concentrate on the polished floor. People’s shoes walk by. If I don’t look up, maybe Warner and those guys won’t notice me.

  A loud popping noise makes me jump. I turn to see what it was. There’s a minor commotion at the candy stand over a big balloon popping. From his booth at the Olive Garden, Warner sees me through the window. His eyes get big. His mouth opens wide. Then he’s saying something to his friends and gesturing out the window.

  They all turn to look at me. They see me see them.

  One of them says something.

  They all laugh.

  I check the time. Matt is forty-five minutes late.

  Maybe something happened. Maybe he was in an accident. He could be in the hospital right now. There’s no way for me to know because I don’t have a cell phone. I’m not about to call him on the pay phone with everyone watching. Or maybe there was some other emergency. He could come bursting in any second now, saying he’s sorry and explaining everything and feeling horrible that I had to wait so long.

  Or not.

  I wait for over an hour. Shoppers filter on and off of the center island, taking breaks on the benches. They check their devices. They make calls. These two girls have been staring at me. I’m sure they’re speculating why I’m still sitting here alone. A disgruntled middle-aged guy has been sitting there for a while. Bags are spread o
ut on the bench next to him. His wife stops by to add three big bags to their collection, then takes off to do even more shopping. The poor guy looks miserable.

  Warner is eating and watching me like I’m a movie. One of the girls in the group blows her straw wrapper at him. She says something. The whole table cracks up.

  I can’t take the humiliation any longer. I get up to leave. Which means that I was officially stood up. And those kids from school saw the whole thing.

  As soon as I get home, I check my messages.

  There aren’t any.

  I check my email.

  Nothing.

  Then I call Matt.

  It goes straight to voice mail.

  six

  monday, april 18

  (44 days left)

  I kept thinking Matt would call.

  He never called.

  That was the longest weekend of my life.

  I left a message when I called him Friday night after I got home. It wasn’t an angry rant or anything. I just said that I waited a long time for him and that I hoped he was okay and please call me back. When he kept not calling all weekend, I kept wanting to call him again. I wanted to keep trying until he picked up.

  But I didn’t. It was obvious that he didn’t want to talk to me.

  I’ve gone over everything a million times. I can’t figure out what I did wrong. What made him change his mind about me?

  Am I really that impossible to love?

  When I was in ninth grade, the captain of the football team asked me out.

  I know. It seems impossible. The most popular guys don’t ask out the most unpopular girls.

  Unless one of those guys doesn’t know who he’s talking to.

  It was the first day of high school. I was terrified. But for Trevor Burke, it was just the beginning of yet another awesome year of his consistently awesome life. He wouldn’t become captain of the football team until the following year, but you could already tell he’d get it. Some people’s destiny is understood.

  Our algebra class was mainly sophomores. I was ahead one year in math. Trevor was one year behind. That’s how he ended up sitting behind me in algebra on the first day of school.

  “You’re cute,” he whispered to me.

  Of course I didn’t respond. He was just setting me up to believe he actually thought I was cute. Then he would humiliate me in front of the entire class.

  I waited for the teasing to continue.

  It didn’t.

  “Can I get your number?” Trevor whispered.

  He was serious. I decided to save him some time.

  “Ask about me,” I whispered back.

  “What do you want me to ask?”

  “Just ask around. They’ll tell you.”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone who knows me. You’ll see.” I’d given up any hope of being with a boy like Trevor Burke. He existed on a whole other level. The all-American, sun-kissed, handsome football star. The kind of boy parents hope their sons grow up to be.

  When Trevor came to class the next day, he didn’t look at me. He didn’t talk to me ever again.

  We belonged to two very different worlds. Even though he sat behind me in algebra.

  Sherae is on the warpath.

  “He’s not getting away with this,” she promises at our daily meetup. I was too depressed to call her when I got home Friday night, so I told her about Matt when she called Saturday morning. She was way angrier about it than I was.

  “Please don’t do anything,” I beg. “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

  “Are you delusional? We already saw what happened. What happened was Matt Brennan being a scumbag.”

  “But we don’t know why he didn’t show up yet.”

  “Because he is a scumbag. That is why.”

  “Maybe he—”

  “No.”

  “He could have—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “He needs to apologize. I find it highly suspect that he hasn’t yet.”

  “Just … I’ll take care of it.”

  “Are you sure? Because I’m ready to rumble.”

  “Yeah, Ponyboy. I picked up on that.”

  Spontaneous eye contact with Julian Porter has only happened a few times at lunch. Usually, I’ll just sneak glances at him. Sometimes I can feel him looking at me. Or I’ll see him looking at me out of the corner of my eye, but I’ll pretend that I don’t.

  Attempting eye contact at lunch always involves a huge degree of risk. If I’m trying to look at Julian without looking like I’m actually looking and I accidentally look at someone else, there could be a problem. They could take it as an invitation to launch a verbal attack.

  Tommy’s sitting alone again at his usual table. Apparently, having money isn’t always enough to avoid persecution. It’s amazing how two rejects like us can force everyone else to deal with having two less tables available. I guess we have some power in a warped way.

  When I got to the cafeteria, I tried to anticipate where Warner and those guys would sit. Then I picked a table far from there. Most kids sit at the same table every day. But with Warner, it’s like this incessant game of musical tables we’re playing where he’s the only one having fun.

  Of course Warner sits at the table behind mine. His friends immediately swoop in after him.

  “What’s for lunch?” Warner asks from behind me. I don’t turn around. I know his question is meant for me. I’m reading. Which at lunch mostly consists of pretending to read. But I find that when I read or listen to music in here, people pretty much leave me alone.

  I keep Pretend Reading.

  “Lettuce sandwich again?” Warner inquires. “Ooh, or maybe you got the mayonnaise and mustard one this time! Aren’t those the best?”

  “Maybe her mom wiped her butt and put that in a sandwich,” his friend says.

  Warner’s whole table cracks up. I hear the slap of a high five.

  My face burns. I stay as still as possible in Pretend Reading mode. If I make any kind of move like switching seats, they’ll know they’re getting to me. And that will just make it worse.

  My lunch bag of sorry kitchen scraps remains unopened on the table. I can’t deal with it today. I’m just relieved that Julian’s sitting like five tables away. If he heard what Warner and his friend said to me, I would die.

  I peek at Julian. He isn’t looking.

  There’s a group of girls at the table in front of mine. They look so happy, talking and laughing like school’s the most comfortable place in the world. I know their names. I know the clubs they belong to and the instruments they play and the teams they’re on. But I can never really know them. Not anymore.

  I tried to sit with them on the first day of school. They said all the seats were taken. I used to be really good friends with some of them. They’d come over to my house to play and I’d go over theirs. That was back in elementary school before mother started to change. Back when she was almost like a real mom.

  Before we moved to our apartment, mother and I lived with Lewis in a big house like everyone else. Mother met Lewis when I was two. He was a professor at the college near the bar and grill where she worked. He went there for lunch and always sat in mother’s section. His wife had divorced him and moved to France a few years before. His kids were in college. He had the whole house to himself.

  Living with Lewis was nice. I had most of the same things other kids had. There was lots of room. There was always enough to eat. And I could have friends over without feeling like I had to hide anything. I even had a huge birthday party in third grade. My entire class came. Back then, it felt like I fit in. It felt like I had a place to belong.

  Then Lewis got cancer.

  He died when I was eleven. Lewis and mother weren’t married, so we had to move out. He left the house to his oldest son. Most of his savings went to his other kids and relatives. Lewis left mother some money, but he didn’t have much to leave and she used it up quick
ly. She didn’t want to move to another town. That’s when she found our apartment. That’s when people she thought were her friends started fading away. And that’s when I started lying.

  Lying isn’t something I ever wanted to do. I lied because I had to. When mother stopped taking care of me, I made up this story about how she was in the hospital. Which somehow evolved into this whole big thing about how she might die. I was only trying to justify my humiliating clothes and lunches. The plan was to tell everyone she got better after a few weeks. But my friends found out I lied. One of them saw mother at the post office and told everyone. Sherae was the only one who didn’t hate me. People started calling me a liar. Warner started making fun of my lunches. Carly started bullying me. And they never stopped.

  The thing is, I don’t entirely regret that I lied. I’d rather have the whole school hate me than everyone know my truth.

  The girls at the next table are laughing again. I refuse to open my flat lunch bag. Pretending I’m looking at the clock, I peek at Julian.

  He’s looking right at me.

  I look back at him.

  He doesn’t look away.

  He smiles at me.

  I smile back.

  And then a gob of something smacks into the back of my head.

  The girls at the next table stare. Warner’s table is roaring with laughter.

  No one comes over to help me.

  More kids turn to look. It gets eerily quiet.

  I do not want to know what’s in my hair.

  I have to know what’s in my hair.

  I reach back and tentatively touch the gob. It’s mashed potatoes.

  Warner finds this to be hilarious.

  But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that Julian saw the whole thing. He was looking right at me when it happened.

  Julian Porter just saw me get smacked in the head with a gob of mashed potatoes.

  There’s only one option.

  I stand up, grab my things, and head for the door. Some mashed potatoes slide down my hair and hit the floor with a splat. Kids are giving me wide eyes and covering their smirks and gawking as I pass them.