I bit my lip. None of this made sense.
“I’ve had some crazy dreams about you. I even drew you.” He pointed to the easel. “Last year. I woke up from a sound sleep and I couldn’t do anything else until it was done. But the rest of the story never came to me. Just the one sketch.”
“You drew that?” He was Nate? Not Nate’s offspring?
“I have the original here.” He pulled it out of his pocket, unfolded it, and showed me. “Someday I’ll have the story that goes with it.”
“You carry it everywhere with you?” I asked, stepping closer to get a look at it. How could he have the original if I had the original?
Nate blushed. “I—yeah. I guess I do. The dreams are—I just feel like I need to keep it with me.”
He squinted at me, assessing me. I caught sight of the rough stubble shadowing his cheek and my mouth went completely dry. I had to play it cool, but it was killing me. Was he really my Nate?
I couldn’t afford to have my heart ripped out again. I sort of needed it. But he looked so good. His shaggy haircut hadn’t changed, and I guess guys wore Levi’s and t-shirts in every decade. He hadn’t changed at all.
But I had. I had changed so much in the year since that night with the mirror.
“Can you come in?” Nate pointed to the shop. “I can close up in an hour. Can you hang out and talk? It should be quiet. Nobody ever comes in on Sunday afternoon.” His eyes looked a little desperate. “I’m not sure what’s going on…but I think we need to talk it through.” He must have taken my inability to answer as hesitance. There’s coffee,” he added hopefully.
“What if I don’t like coffee?”
He raised the one eyebrow and nodded, “Oh, you like coffee.” Then he bunched his brows together again. “I’m not sure what it is about you…but I feel like…”
“Yeah. Me too.” Times one hundred.
“I’m Nate, by the way.”
It had been a long, difficult year. Being handed exactly what I wanted, yearned for, scared the crap out of me. I’d pined for him, ached for him, and needed him. Now that he was standing right here, I didn’t know what to do with him.
But wild whores couldn’t have dragged me away. “Coffee sounds nice, Nate. My name is Carri.”
He held the door open for me and then directed me to a stool on the counter. He poured my coffee and prepared it exactly the way I like it without asking. As he handed it to me, he said, “This isn’t how I usually meet girls, you know. Drawing them into life, I mean.”
“You could have fooled me,” I answered, since that seemed to be standard operating procedure for us.
“I must have seen you around or something, you know? And then I drew a picture of you.”
“Sure.” That conveniently didn’t explain how he knew things about me, but if it made him feel better for now, a little denial was probably healthy. “Do you go to Serendipity High?”
“No. I live outside city limits. I go to Columbia High.”
I almost forgot to listen to his answer; I was too busy drowning in those steel-blue eyes. A slow smile spread across his face—an overly confident smile that said, “I have this girl exactly where I want her.”
And that cocky attitude got me right back in the game.
I looked at my watch. “Listen, I have to meet my mother in an hour. If you’re going to sell me on why I should date you over this cup of coffee, you’d better get a move on.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “What makes you think I want to date you?”
“Dude, you carry of picture of me wherever you go. You want some of this.” I smiled over the rim of my coffee cup.
Nate leaned over the counter, bringing his face close to mine. “This, whatever it is, scares the hell out of me, dream girl.”
“I think it’s supposed to. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
I’ll never know for sure what happened to make me travel time—if that’s what I even did. It could have been a dream, but how many dreams have you had where you brought back a picture? Maybe it was an alternate timeline—but then how did Nate, but nobody else, end up being a teenager in both places?
I think I understand life better now—and by that I mean I understand that there is no understanding life. You just live it, best you can, day by day. You seize what you can each morning you wake up and look fondly on the past without obsessing that the best has gone by or will never come. Your reflection in the mirror doesn’t tell the whole story about who you are.
Oh, and don’t judge someone unless you’ve walked a mile in their jelly shoes.
Gwen Hayes, author of Falling Under, lives in the sparkly Pacific Northwest. She’s also a nerd. If you’re not sure you believe that, check out her Twitter page sometime. You’ll be amazed.
Gwen is a child of the '80s. To this day, she misses her really big bangs but consoles herself often with her totally awesome music collection and stash of Molly Ringwald movies. One day, when hanging out with her teen daughter, Gwen wondered if the two of them would have been friends if they had gone to the same high school. This curiousity was the inspiration for Totally Tubular.
To find out more about Gwen, please visit her website http://www.gwenhayes.com.
SO OVER YOU
Copyright © 2010 Gwen Hayes
Copy Edited by Jennifer Barker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CHAPTER ONE
EVEN though I’d already blown right past the “do not exceed” warning on my Excedrin bottle, I popped two more without water and surveyed the scene before me.
A sorrier crew of journalists would be hard to find. Fitting, since, technically, we no longer had a school newspaper due to district budget cuts. What we did have, besides the bunch of fools currently yelling at each other, was a classroom with three ancient computers, an unpaid advisor, six “journalists,” and two co-chief editors. Yours truly and…well, I liked to call him Beelzebub.
Everyone else called him Jimmy Foster.
Our after-school staff meeting began the same way we’ve begun every staff meeting this year—with an argument. Only this one was pretty heated. We had a forest fire on our hands, and my co-editor seemed to be clutching a lighter instead of a fire hose.
Foster and I stared each other down from opposite ends of the thirty-year-old folding table while the rest of the crew tried to get individual points of view across by raising the volume of the argument and moving their arms a lot.
The argument wasn’t even relevant to the news. Nobody fought for first dibs on a hot story or argued over bylines and cover copy. No, they were upset over fundraisers. More specifically, our fundraiser.
Chaos.
I missed the days of hard-boiled reporting. We only had one returning staff member. The rest were too young, too idealistic, and far too grating on my nerves. That was probably my fault, though.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call me neurotic. I’m not good with people. I tend to be brisk and seemingly uncaring. I’m the girl who never got hired to babysit a second time by the same family. It seems I lack certain…skills. Namely patience.
Mr. Blake kept reminding me that I needed to be a mentor, so I kept hitting the Excedrin and praying for a break in the clouds.
Or at least a little help from my “partner.”
I folded my arms across my chest and raised one arched brow. My nemesis responded by unfolding his limbs in a giant stretch and then clasped his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Of course, he had to do that maneuver every so often. His big fat head would cause him terrible neck
strain if he didn’t take frequent breaks to support the weight of it in his hands.
This was going to be a long year. I worked hard to get this position on the paper, and I wasn’t pleased I had to share it with such an arrogant excuse for a reporter. I’m sure he had some good traits; I’d just never witnessed any in the years we’d worked on staff.
I checked my watch. We needed to calm down the children or Mommy and Daddy were never going to put the first issue to bed.
I stood up slowly and cleared my throat. Several times. I shot the evil genius a look that meant do something, so he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Everyone covered their ears and shut up; he had a way about him, that’s for sure.
Foster appealed to some girls. I didn’t understand the draw, but several of our staff were girls with new “aspirations” in journalism, and they hung on his every word. Blech. While it’s true his evil black soul didn’t show from the outside, he still wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want a poster of on your wall. At least I wouldn’t. Unless I drew a bull’s-eye on it and used it for dart practice.
It was annoying the way the new girls pandered to his ego all the time. “Jimmy, what do you think?” “Jimmy, is this a good idea?” “Jimmy, I always get confused—is it their or there?” “Jimmy, do you think it’s annoying or cute when a girl dots her “i”s with a heart?” “Jimmy, is it true you won the Aronsen Achievement Award for Excellence in Journalism last year?”
Well, okay, he did win the award. We were both finalists, but his interview with a survivor from Wesley High after a student shooting incident was exceptional. I’ll give him that much.
And he could sure whistle.
Since I finally had everyone’s attention, I began, “I’m not sure the calendar idea is going to work.”
The whining commenced immediately, but Foster brought his fingers back to his lips and everyone shut up and covered their ears again. I fought a smirk—they had no idea how easily they were being trained. When we were freshmen, the editor used to smack our hands with a ruler. I’m not an advocate of corporal punishment, and he did serve a lot of detention over it, but our staff meetings ran a lot smoother that year. Just sayin’.
I restarted, tapping my fingers on the pseudo-wood table even though I itched for a ruler. “As a fund-raiser, the idea is original but problematic. For one thing, it’s objectifying.”
Foster laughed. “I’ll never understand why girls wear tight clothes and short skirts and then complain that we like to look at them.”
I exhaled and counted to five. “Some girls haven’t learned yet that their real value isn’t what part of the body they are exposing. This newspaper is not going to capitalize on their low self-esteem.”
Foster stood and all heads snapped back to his end of the table. “Some girls have high enough self-esteem to realize that their appearance is an asset, not an obstacle.” He scanned my outfit meaningfully, as if he found it lacking, and then grabbed both corners of the table and leaned toward me. “We need a fundraiser. We’d have to have a car wash every Saturday until May to earn the kind of revenue we could earn from making a calendar.”
I copied his pose. “I won’t endorse this idea just so you can ogle a new cheerleader every month.”
“You jealous, Logan?”
“No, but I’m beginning to taste bile, Foster.”
Like at a tennis match, the staff followed our word volley with their turning heads.
“Fine, we’ll do a calendar with the football team, then,” he answered. As if that solved anything.
“So it’s not objectifying if it’s boys?”
“We don’t care. For crying out loud, my mother has a calendar of cats in the kitchen. Do we need to call PETA? Is she objectifying felines?”
I rolled my eyes. Did Foster ever take a break from being Foster? “Why do you want to do a calendar so badly? I don’t see what’s in it for you.”
He shrugged. “You may not see what’s in it for me, but when you stand like that, I can see down your shirt.”
I had to bite my tongue. There wasn’t much I could do about the flush creeping across my skin and threatening to set fire to the roots of my hair, but I could control my temper. Barely.
Resisting the urge to check the status of my shirt, I unclenched my fingers from the table and eased back into my chair.
“We wouldn’t have to objectify the boys,” said Maryanne, one of the newer sophomore girls. “What if we wrote meaningful exposés on each player?”
Chelsea snorted. “How many meaningful things are you going to find about the football team?” Thank goodness for returning staff. I knew she wouldn’t let me down. “We should do the soccer team instead. They have a broader ethnic background too. And ohmigawd, their butts are to die for.”
Though gaping is unattractive, I couldn’t help it. I thought for sure Chelsea would have agreed with me that the whole idea of personifying any student’s physical appearance as character traits to be lauded in such in impersonal way was just wrong. I mean she was a vegan. She wore sandals and patchouli.
All the girls began arguing again, this time over which team was the sexiest and therefore deserved a year of leering. I nibbled at the inside of my cheek and rubbed small circles into my temples as I watched Jimmy Foster make notes in his spiral notebook. An evil grin spread across his face and I narrowed my eyes. What was he up to?
He scribbled in earnest, bent over so I could only see the top of his mussed-up hair. The little gelled-up spikes were dark, but when you get him in sunlight, his hair is redder, especially at his temples. He looked up from his notebook, but I didn’t avert my gaze. He’d already caught me staring at him; I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of being embarrassed by it.
A slow smile slithered across his face and he winked at me. He was plotting something horrid. There was no other explanation for his apparent happiness. Every time that boy smiled, somewhere a puppy died.
“Okay, we got it.” Chelsea smiled, playing with the ends of her braid. Speaking for the group, she stood. “We want to do a photo shoot with each boy from a different school club or sport.” She shot me a quelling look. “We’ll have meaningful verbiage for each one and the whole project will be about diversity and un-objectifying the male species on campus.”
“It’s a great idea,” I chirped, despite the throbbing in my temples and the churning in my gut.
Foster narrowed his eyes. “Did you just say it was a great idea?”
“Well it goes against all my principles, which means it’s sure to rake in the dough. And we need a lot of it.” I wanted to thrash Chelsea with her own Birkenstocks, but instead I smiled complacently.
We’d already resigned ourselves to putting out the Follower, our newspaper, digitally only this year, but we still needed better software to pull that off. The school had given us a budget of minus one hundred dollars (they still wanted the money we went over budget last year). If that meant we had to whore out our integrity, so be it. The one thing I wouldn’t do was let the paper fold. Not on my watch.
Mr. Blake, our esteemed and unpaid advisor, and the sophomore he took with him—I forget his name—returned from the coffee run. So, of course, all forward progress stalled as he called out complicated coffee orders.
“Tall half-skinny, sugar-free vanilla.”
“Right here,” said Maryanne.
Ugh. This was going to take a while. I pushed away from the table and found the box of freebie software we’d liberated from an old storage closet. Hopefully, there would be something compatible with the three different operating systems we had to choose from.
Another order up. “Quad shots with heavy foam and Splenda, not Sweet’N Low.”
Foster pitched himself onto the table next to the box. “What is going on in that devious head of yours?”
“What do you mean?” I held up an eight-inch square. “What is this?”
“That’s a floppy disk. I’d say circa 1985. And you know what I mean. You hate the
calendar idea. Why’d you go along with it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have much choice. I’m outnumbered.”
“Soy frappé, no whip. Who had the soy?” Mr. Blake asked.
“Chelsea,” everyone answered, and Foster and I rolled our eyes.
“It will make a lot of money, Logan. We need it.”
“I know, I know.” I sighed. “I bet we can get the cardstock donated if we advertise the stationery store.”
“Two black coffees.”
Foster and I raised our hands.
Mr. Blake joined us. “What’s this about a Stud of the Month the girls are yammering about?”
“Fundraiser,” I offered.
“And,” Foster added, taking both coffees and handing me one. “A really great feature story.”
“Feature?” Something told me I was going to hate this idea.
“Listening to all those girls argue about which guys were worthy enough to make the calendar, I couldn’t help but wonder…” He looked me straight on with his devil eyes. “What is it, exactly, that girls are looking for in high school boys?”
“Are we Cosmo Teen now?” I asked. “And you sound like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City with all that ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ crap. Where is the feature story in this? I don’t see it.”
Using his TV announcer voice, Foster began, “A year of dates in six weeks. Our intrepid girl reporter de-objectifies the calendar boys by spending time with each model and extolling the experience in an award winning exposé into the mind of a teenage female.” Nerves under my skin began racing to get away. Far, far away. “Culminating, of course, with the release of the beefcake calendar.”
“So you want to send one of our reporters on twelve dates with virtual strangers?”
“No, I want to send you on twelve dates. The stranger part is just a bonus.”
Like hell. “Me? I don’t date high school boys.”