How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-Boyfriend

  I mean, how serious was underage trespassing? For example, would Judge Rossmar—who’d gone into considerable detail about how I could be incarcerated if I got in trouble again—would he consider it a bad thing if I went into a bar?

  I stopped a good ten feet in front of the door. Just stopped and stared at the building.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan surveyed me, then put one hand on his hip. “Don’t tell me—you hate country music, don’t you?”

  “No, it’s just that it’s illegal for a minor . . . and I’m already on probation and all—”

  His eyebrows lifted. “You’re on probation?”

  This is not the kind of information you want to divulge on a first date, and he actually took a step away from me. “Probation for what?”

  “Oh, not anything bad,” I said quickly. “The school caught me with stolen frogs, but it wasn’t my fault, and they were already dead . . .”

  Which is also not something you want to tell a guy on the first date and probably didn’t make the situation any better. “It’s a long story,” I said, “but I can’t get in trouble again.”

  His gaze traveled from me to the front door and back again. “Okay, no trouble then.” He let out a nervous laugh. “I promise not to start any barroom brawls if you don’t.”

  My feet moved forward again. I needed to stop worrying about every little thing. Of course nothing bad would happen. The police didn’t raid bars for no reason. Besides, I wouldn’t actually drink or anything.

  We walked inside and sure enough, no one carded us. The guy at the door and Nathan exchanged greetings and beyond that no one paid any attention to us.

  I guess I’d expected the place to be some dark, cramped, smoke-filled room, with a bunch of broken-down, half-conscious men parked at the bar. Instead the room was big and well lit. To the side of the bar was a dance floor, eating area, and a pool table. Several planters with huge silk trees were scattered throughout the room, and pictures of horses lined the walls.

  We walked slowly across the floor. “You want to play a little pool before we eat?” Nathan asked.

  “I don’t know how,” I said.

  He turned toward the back of the room where the pool table stood and motioned me to follow. “No problem. I can teach you.”

  I followed after him, feeling grown up. Here I was with a guy in a bar playing pool. So there, Jesse.

  Nathan picked up two cue sticks and handed one to me. I leaned up against the table while he captured all of the balls inside a triangle thing.

  “This is the eight ball,” he told me, pointing to the black one. “It’s the most important ball on the table. You’ve got to watch it carefully.”

  I don’t know what made me look up right then. I mean, Nathan had just told me to watch the eight ball, but instead I glanced up.

  It was then that I saw Dad, Gabby, and another couple coming straight across the room. They hadn’t seen me, but stopped with their backs to the pool table and surveyed the place as though looking for somewhere good to sit.

  I dropped to the ground, cue stick and all.

  There is probably a reason children should pay attention to their parents’ schedules, and if I ever sneaked out again I would definitely find out where Dad and Gabby planned on going first. But really, you couldn’t blame me for being surprised. I mean, since when did they like country music, ribs, or pool? Granted, maybe I didn’t know that much about what Gabby liked because I tried to block out her presence as much as possible, but still, the woman was in her forties. You wouldn’t think she’d step foot in a place with a mechanical bull.

  “Okay . . .” Nathan tilted his head to look at me. His voice took on that tone you use when you talk to small children. “What are you doing on the floor?”

  I peered around the table’s leg to see if my parents were still there. They were. If I had wanted to spit on Gabby’s pink flowered heels, I could have. “Shhh,” I told Nathan. “Pretend I’m not here.”

  He leaned down toward me, his eyes wide. “And where am I supposed to pretend you are? The moon? The funny farm maybe?”

  “Shhh,” I said again. “Don’t look at me.”

  He straightened, looked at the cue stick, then shot me another glance. “So, do you have some medication or something that I should know about?”

  I motioned toward the pairs of legs on the other side of the table and mouthed the words, “Those are my parents.”

  “Oh.” He nodded and lowered his voice. “And they won’t be happy to see you in a bar? I can explain that we just came in for the ribs. It’s not like we were drinking or anything.”

  I shook my head. “I’m supposed to be grounded right now.”

  He nodded again, more slowly. “Grounded, huh?”

  Let me say right now that despite Daphne’s assurances that she was setting me up with an understanding guy, she really hadn’t.

  An understanding guy would realize why I had to crawl over to the nearest planter, wait there until the coast was clear, and then dart out the front door like the place had caught on fire. An understanding guy would not pretend that he didn’t know me as we walked across the parking lot, or act all ticked off because now his bouncer friend would think he was hitting on mentally challenged girls. I mean, I’m sure the people who noticed me crawling across the restaurant floor figured I had a legitimate reason for doing it. Like maybe I’d lost a rolling contact and was trying to find it. Up close and really fast.

  I tried to laugh the whole thing off, but the ride back home was silent and awkward. The only thing Nathan said was, “So your parents don’t let you out much. Any particular reason why?”

  Like I was going to explain anything to him after all that.

  Chapter 10

  All Saturday we cleaned for Dante’s party. Gabby didn’t buy any ice sculptures or hire a band, but she did decide on a theme for his party: Patriotic. Everything was done in red, white, and blue. The dishes, the tablecloth, the sugar cookies—her outfit. It was blue velour. We had star-spangled centerpieces and Fourth of July lights leading up to the doorstep from the sidewalk.

  At seven thirty Raine, Charity, Stephen, and Brandon showed up. Gabby and Dad went upstairs. “But,” Gabby told us pointedly, “we’ll be down to check on you.”

  During the next half an hour a dozen freshman boys showed up, all of whom had signed my petition and seemed to think I personally wanted them to come hang out with me. And okay, I might have smiled when I asked them to sign their names, and maybe I’d flirted a little on account of being desperate to get my quota of signatures, but really, you’d think Dante would be grateful. But no, every time he passed me on my way somewhere trying to avoid or lose one of them, he’d say, “So tell me again how you don’t use people like Wilson and I do?”

  Yeah, I hoped Wilson was having as hard a time with all the girls he’d flirted with as I was having with my freshman groupies.

  I tried to deflect some of the guys toward Charity and Raine, but Charity immediately pulled out her I-can’t-date-until-I’m-sixteen defense to ward them off, and Raine invented a jealous boyfriend from Swain Academy. His name was Thor, and he spent all of his free time weight lifting and ripping off the limbs of guys who spoke to her.

  If you ask me, Raine totally took the coward’s way out, but if I’d thought of it first, I would have invented a story just like it. In fact, I would be dating Thor’s twin brother, Zeus, and then we could double to prom.

  But no, it didn’t occur to me until it was too late to jump on the Thor bandwagon, so I was stuck with a constant herd of freshman guys encircling me.

  Emily, the freshman girl who’d given her phone number to Dante, showed up with her friend, Isabella, and the two of them sat perched on the couch next to him, trying to out-flirt each other. They called him “Mr. President” and asked if he had any interns yet. This made Charity glare at him and mutter things into her drink.

  Dante didn’t notice her reaction. No one did, and I wondered how long this sort
of thing had gone on before I’d picked up on it.

  Daphne came with a guy named Derek from Swain, who was muscley enough that he might very well have spent a lot of time in the gym with Thor, but luckily none of the freshman guys asked.

  At eight forty-five Dante cornered me in the kitchen. “Do you think these are all the people that will show? I’ve got your friends, my friends, and a small flock of freshmen. That’s it.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged. “It’s a cozy party. That’s not a bad thing.”

  “I’ve got a twelve-foot sub sandwich in the kitchen that we’ve eaten a little over three feet of. We won’t be able to fit the rest of it in the refrigerator. I’ll have to go out looking for homeless people to give it to.”

  “No you won’t. Those freshmen are skinny, but they eat a lot.”

  Dante clenched his jaw and looked at the table. The overflowing bowls of potato chips, the neatly arranged plates of cookies, the stacks of unused red, white, and blue dishes all seemed a pathetic reminder of our goal.

  Wilson was going to win the election by a landslide. This meant my friends and I would see our social standing slide even further. My brother would carry around this experience as one more reason to be cynical about life, and I’d have to eat a pair of shoes.

  Plus, after a week or so of leftovers, both Dante and I would have an aversion to submarine sandwiches and Fourth of July decorations for the rest of our lives.

  Dante picked up the cordless phone and the white pages. “I’m calling anyone who answers their phone and personally inviting them here.”

  Well, as long as his plans didn’t involve blazing potted palms, I wasn’t going to protest.

  A little after nine o’clock the doorbell rang and Dante let Rich, Brett, and Shane inside. They were part of the delinquent crowd at the high school. The type of kids who spent more time smoking in the parking lot than they ever spent in front of books. Mostly they wasted their weekends drinking, and apparently this weekend wasn’t much different, since none of them appeared to be sober. “Hey, thanks for inviting us,” Rich told Dante. “Wilson wouldn’t let us in to his party with our friend.”

  “Your friend?” Dante asked.

  “Yeah, our buddy Jack Daniel’s.” Then all three of them laughed like this was hilarious.

  Brett leaned over and patted Dante on the shoulder like they’d known each other forever. “You’ve got our vote, man. You’re the greatest.”

  Dante smiled stiffly and motioned them toward the kitchen. “Well, you don’t need your friend here. I’ve got nine feet of sandwich for you to eat.”

  The three stumbled off in that direction, talking to each other instead of us, until Shane called out, “Hey, you got any tequila?”

  “No, but there’s Cokes in the ice cooler,” Dante said.

  I sent him a “Gabby will freak out” look, but he ignored me and followed them into the kitchen. Maybe to keep them from going through our cupboards. None of them came out again, so I assumed they either were in there eating or had passed out.

  Emily and Isabella kept throwing looks in the direction of the kitchen, as though they wanted to go in after Dante. I decided to do Charity a favor. While I changed out CDs in the stereo, I called Brandon and Stephen over to me. “See those two girls sitting on the couch? They’re really impressed with upperclassmen. You should go talk to them.”

  Brandon glanced at the girls, then back at me. “I thought Dante liked one of them.”

  I shook my head. “No, he likes someone else. In fact, it’s a little awkward for him to have those two tagging around after him all night.”

  Stephen smiled lazily. “I think we could help him out then.”

  Brandon let his gaze rest on them, appraising them with a satisfied nod. “Maybe they’d like to catch a late movie. You know, as a favor to Dante.”

  The two went over and sat by the girls, and I started a new CD playing. By the time the first song ended, the four of them headed out the door. I hoped Dante wouldn’t notice, and if he did notice, that he wouldn’t be too mad at me.

  I walked toward the family room so I could talk to Charity, but before I made it there, three freshman guys cornered me. I may have been stuck there indefinitely, listening to their opinions on Final Fantasy, but after a few minutes Daphne emerged from the family room and came over to rescue me. She smiled at the guys, said, “Excuse me, I need Giovanna for a minute—you know, for girl stuff,” and plucked me from their midst.

  We walked upstairs to my room. I would have been relieved, except I knew she wanted to talk to me about my date with Nathan, which—let’s face it—was not going to be pretty. I mean, if Nathan hadn’t told her how it went, then I was going to have to do it. And there is no good way to explain to your friend that the date she arranged for you ended with the guy comparing you to the mentally challenged.

  I sat down on one end of my bed, and she sat down on the other. She forced a smile at me. “Well, they say, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’ ”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “However, you may have noticed that they never say anything about hiding under a pool table and crawling across the restaurant on your hands and knees.”

  “It didn’t happen like that—”

  She held up both hands to stop me. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all history now. We just have to move on and find someone who doesn’t know Nathan, so they can’t compare notes. That might be a little difficult, since from what I understand, rumors of your date are already making the rounds of Swain Academy.”

  I put my hand to my forehead. My head suddenly hurt. “He told people about our date?”

  “Giovanna, you let the guy know you’d been arrested for stealing dead frogs and then crawled underneath a pool table. You didn’t think he’d tell people about it?”

  I gulped and felt my face flush. “If he was a gentleman, he wouldn’t have told—Jesse wouldn’t have.”

  “Well, you broke up with Jesse.”

  Her statement hit me hard. I’d broken up with Jesse, and yet I suddenly realized that despite everything, I wanted him back. Forget loyalty. Forget this stupid election. I just wanted my boyfriend back.

  Daphne reached over and momentarily put her hand over mine to get my attention. “It will all be fine. You just need some prep work for your next date. You know, a game plan of what to say and how to act.” She let out a sigh, but not one of resignation. This was the breath you let out before you tackled something huge. “I’ve gone about this matchmaker business all wrong. I’ve tried to set you up with guys I thought would be good for you. But I never found out what you’re looking for. So let’s start with that. We want to find someone who is absolutely compatible. So you tell me, what do you want in a guy?”

  “Jesse,” I said.

  “You want a guy like Jesse?”

  “No, I want him. I want Jesse back.”

  Daphne’s lips twitched in frustration. “But I thought you were mad because he’d betrayed Dante’s trust.”

  “I am. I want him to be sorry when he comes back, but mostly I just want him back.”

  “You want your ex-boyfriend . . .” Daphne tapped her fingers across my quilt.

  I bit my lip, watching her expression change from frustration to doubt. Almost to herself she murmured, “That won’t be easy.”

  “But you told me you didn’t think he was over me, because he doesn’t want me to date other guys. So isn’t there a way we could take the ex out of ex-boyfriend?”

  “Hmmm.” Daphne stood up and turned around my room. She crossed her arms and looked, unseeing, at my window. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to disturb her thought process.

  Finally she turned back to me. “He’ll have to think it’s his idea. That’s the thing about guys. They love a challenge. If you come crawling back to him, it’s like admitting you aren’t capable of doing better. He’ll think you’re a B-list girl. Then the only way to salvage his dignity—so
he’s not lumped together with all the guys who wouldn’t have you—is to dump you right back. I mean, he’s already got Bridget itching for an invitation to prom, and most guys think she’s A-list.”

  Without meaning to, I clutched the side of my quilt. The situation suddenly seemed very bleak. I mean, with probation, and now the pool table incident—exactly how far down in the alphabet had I fallen? I was probably languishing somewhere down by Q.

  “Daphne, I’m not A-list material.”

  Daphne let out a snort and waved one hand to dismiss my objection. “No one is, Giovanna. It’s all perception. The trick is to make other people think you’re A-list.”

  “How do I do that?”

  She sat down on the bed again, looking at me intently to emphasize her point. “Well, first off, you’ve got to think it yourself.”

  “I’m supposed to act snobby?”

  “No, not snobby. Snobby people might as well walk around with a sign that says, ‘Look at me—I’m trying to be A-list.’ You have to like yourself, that’s all. When you like yourself, you have confidence. Confidence is an A-list quality.”

  “Confidence.” I sat up straighter to show her I was trying.

  “And of course you’ll need to go clothes shopping.”

  “Shopping? What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  She tilted her head at me. “Nothing is wrong with them. They just could be more . . . right. We’ll talk about your hair later.”

  My hand automatically went to my head. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “Later,” she said.

  It was suddenly hard to have confidence.

  “And of course we’ll have to set you up with some guys from Swain.”

  Even the word Swain made me cringe. “But I just told you I want Jesse back—”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And it’s a well-known fact that nothing makes a girl more attractive to an ex-boyfriend than to see her with a new guy. It’s that whole challenge thing. We’ll find out where Jesse is going to be this week and make sure you’re there too with a totally A-list guy.”