Devon Delaney Should Totally Know Better (16 page)

“You were at Lexi’s,” he says. “Okay, and . . .”

“And we looked up stuff online about the signs of affairs. You know, like how to tell if your husband is having one.” I don’t tell him the part about how I was trying to apply them to our own relationship, and figure out if I should be worried about him and Bailey. This information is being given on a need-to-know basis.

“Oh, Devon,” he says, sighing. “Why would you do that?”

“Um, because I wanted to know if my dad was having an affair?” Isn’t it obvious? Luke’s usually much smarter about this stuff.

“Devon, the way to find out what’s going on with
your dad isn’t by looking up stuff on the internet.”

“But the internet is the information superhighway,” I tell him.

“Yes, but that superhighway is also filled with tons of people writing tons of things that make no sense. Anyone can post whatever they want.”

“Oh, well, I know that.” I’ve stretched the phone cord all the way over to the other side of the room now, and I grab a cushion off one of our kitchen chairs and plop it on the floor. Then plop myself down on top of it. “That’s why I made sure that the article was written by someone with a PhD. And it said that one of the signs is working late, and taking more of an interest in one’s appearance, aka, going to the gym, buying new clothes, etc.”

“And because your dad is going to the gym, and you read it in some article, you think that it’s true?”

“Yes.”

“Devon, that’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

Are we really fighting about this?

“Look, you need to ask your dad about it.”

“Yeah,” I say. I feel the tears burning up behind my eyes. “Listen, I gotta go. But I’ll call you later, okay?”

And I hang up before he tries to convince me not to.

Stephanie. Her name is Stephanie. The
woman my dad was meeting that day. I know because after he left for the gym, I looked at his phone. I know, that was very bad and a very big violation of his privacy. But I couldn’t help it. It was just sitting there, on the counter, plugged into the charger. It was almost screaming,
Devon, come and look at me, please!
So I just very carefully maybe kind of sort of went over and peeked at it. And then I maybe kind of sort of just went over and scrolled through his call log.

I mean, come on! My dad hasn’t been to the gym in, like, forever. I never even heard of him wanting to go jogging or anything. And now all of a sudden he’s all about getting in shape? So now I’m sitting in the kitchen, with the chili on the stove, wondering what I should do next. Tell my mom? I don’t exactly want to be the bearer of
that
bad news. Plus, what if my imagination
is
going all crazy? I’ll get everyone all worked up over nothing.

Maybe Stephanie is just a friend. Or maybe she’s
his boss or something.

Maybe if I could talk to this ridiculous Stephanie person, I’d know. Like, for example, if I just happened to go over to his phone and maybe dial her number, and I got a voice mail that was like, “Hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of Stephanie, boss of the company” or something. Then I would definitely know it was just a co-worker.

I pick up my dad’s phone and run my fingers over the buttons. I can hear Katie in the other room, talking to the television set. (“That is not an Olympic scandal! That is just a misunderstanding!”) And my mom is running the vacuum upstairs. No one would need to know. I could just call, and hang up. She’s probably used to hang ups. Aren’t people who are having affairs always hanging up on each other?

I scroll through the names until I get to “Stephanie.” I know it’s definitely going too far, even for me, but I can’t help it. I push the call button before I can change my mind. One ring . . . two . . . three . . . Please, please, please let it be a work friend, I say a silent chant in my head.

The sound of the vacuum disappears, which means my mom is done vacuuming. Not good. What if she comes down here and sees me with my dad’s phone
to my ear? What if she’s all, “Devon, hand over that phone,” and then she takes it and is like, “Why are you calling a woman named Stephanie” and then I have to confess everything to her? What if—

“Hello?” a woman’s voice says on the other end. And I just know it’s her. She sounds blond. And very sort of throaty, like she has a cold. Or is a smoker. I hope my dad doesn’t plan on marrying her and moving us all into a smoker’s house. I have very sensitive lungs.

“John? I was hoping you’d call, listen, are you able to get away for an hour or so? I have something I’m just dying to show you.”

Well. That settles that. I switch the phone back off. Then I go up to my room, lie down on my bed, and burst into tears.

Bzzzz
.
Bzzzz
. What?
Bzzzz
. I’m half asleep, in bed, and my phone is vibrating on my nightstand, making a horrible buzzing sound that sounds loud enough to wake up the whole house. But is, of course, only waking up me.

I check the display. Five new text messages.

Number one:

YOU SHOULD SEE MY OUTFIT FOR MY NEXT ROLE, BABE
!

From: Greg/Ryan

Number two:

DO YOU WANT TO GO SHOPPING FOR DRESSES AFTER MEL’S TMR
? From: Lexi

Number three:

ANSWER UR PHONE
!!
I CAN’T BELIEVE I ASKED HIM
!

From: Mel

Number four:

WHAT TIME SHOULD I BE THERE TOMORROW
? from Greg/Ryan

Number five:

HEY—YOU NEVER CALLED ME BACK. MISS U, SEE YOU IN SCHOOL
. From: Luke.

I check the clock next to my bed. Seven a.m. Ugh. I must have fallen asleep, and no one bothered to wake me up—they just let me sleep through the night. Not that I would have been much company, I mean, I am not talking to my dad, and I wouldn’t even know how to act around my mom.

I take a quick shower, tie my hair back, and slip into jeans and a soft pink wool sweater. When I get to school, Luke’s waiting for me at my locker.

“Hey,” he says. He goes to hug me, and I return it halfheartedly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “Except for the fact that my dad is having an affair.” I spin the dial on my combination lock, and I’m so upset, that I go past the right number and have to start over twice.

“Are you still on that?” Luke ask, smiling at me like I’m a child who’s just said something cute. “Really, Devon.”

“Is that all you have to say, is ‘really, Devon’? How would you like to know that it really
is
true? You probably wouldn’t feel so happy then, would you?”

Luke takes a step back, like I slapped him. “Hey,” he says. “I was just trying to help, you don’t have to go crazy.”

“Crazy? I’m being
crazy
?” I’m yelling a little bit now, and Luke leans in close.

“Calm down,” he says. “Listen, maybe we should talk about this later.”

“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t really want to talk about it at all.”

And then I slam my locker door shut and stomp off down the hall.

Okay. So maybe that was a little dramatic. I mean, Luke
was
just trying to help. And there’s no way he could have known that I looked in my dad’s phone
and called some woman back who said something very
affair-like
to me, thinking it was my dad. But God, it’s like, you make up one fake boyfriend, and everyone thinks you have an overactive imagination, and you can never get taken seriously again. And yeah, okay, so maybe I made up
two
fake boyfriends, but Luke doesn’t know that. He just knows about the one fake boyfriend from a few weeks ago. And when it comes to parents potentially having affairs, one should get the benefit of the doubt.

“Well, you shouldn’t have ignored him at lunch, Devi, that wasn’t very nice.” Lexi admonishes. She’s sitting at Mel’s kitchen table, while we wait for Greg/Ryan to get here.

“I wasn’t
ignoring
him,” I say. “He wasn’t talking to me.” All throughout lunch, things with Luke and I were definitely awkward. He hardly even looked at me, and all we said to each other were a few words about the weekend. Oh, and at one point, he told me I had mustard on my hand. I was eating one of those soft pretzels, and I can never keep the mustard from getting all over.

“You could tell he was upset,” Mel says. She’s sitting next to me, munching on sour cream and onion chips and looking surprisingly calm for someone who’s
academic future is maybe about to be decided.

“You could?” I perk up.

“Yes,” Mel reports. “I saw him looking over at you with a very sad look on his face a bunch of times.”

“Is that true, Lexi?” I ask. No answer. “Lexi?” I give her ankle a little kick under the table.

“Oh, sorry,” she finally says. “I was thinking about how sometimes when I wear purple, it washes me out, even though it’s my fave color. So unfair.” She sighs. “Anyway, what was the question?”

“Did Luke look sad at lunch today?”

“Oh, yes, very sad, kind of like a puppy dog.”

“Well, he didn’t seem too sad to me, talking to Bailey the whole time.” Luke and Bailey got involved in some dumb conversation about some case they want to ask Mr. Ikwang if they can do in mock trial. And I couldn’t follow it, because it wasn’t a case I’d ever heard of, it was something they just heard about or knew about somehow. And they kept going on and on, and I’m not sure if it was my (overactive?) imagination or not, but I could swear Bailey was throwing me little smirks.

“Oh, come on, Devon,” Mel says. “He can’t just ignore her when she’s talking to him. Luke’s a nice guy, he would never do that. And would you really want to
be with someone who did?”

“I guess not,” I grumble. My cell phone beeps then, and I look down. A text from Luke! “Sry about this morning,” it says. “Do U want to come over and talk?
” Yay! Luke wants to talk it out! I mean, he wouldn’t have said he was sorry if he didn’t, right? And he sent a smiley! A smiley definitely means he wants to work it out. I’ll go over there, and his mom will make us hot chocolate (not sure why I think that, since she’s never made us hot chocolate before, but it sounds nice), and then we’ll talk for hours and hours, and we’ll make up, and he’ll tell me that Bailey is the most ridiculous, horrible, insane—

Crap. I can’t go over there. I have to be here for Mel. I can’t just abandon her and Lexi before Greg/Ryan gets here. But what can I tell Luke? If I say I’m hanging out with Lexi and Mel, he’ll think I don’t want to come over that badly. But I can’t tell him it’s because Greg/Ryan is coming over to pretend to be Ethan.

“I’m sry 2,” I text back. “Can’t come over now, at my grams—will cal u later xxxo”

The text is just going through when the doorbell rings.

“He’s here,” Mel says, her face drained of color. She puts down the bag of chips.

“Yup,” Lexi says happily. She claps her hands.

The plan is pretty simple. Basically, we told Mel’s mom that Lexi’s cousin might stop by. Then when he gets here, we’re going to let her know he goes to St. Mary’s. Then hopefully Greg/Ryan will say tons of weird stuff as Ethan so that Mel’s mom will realize private school isn’t full of all the great influences she thinks it is.

I take a sour cream and onion chip out of the bag and wonder if Greg/Ryan will be any good at playing a bad boy. I mean, how hard was it to play my boyfriend? All he had to do was play himself, pretty much. And he even kind of screwed that up. Hopefully we won’t be in the same situation here.

“Oh, hello,” I can hear Mel’s mom saying from the living room. “You must be Lexi’s cousin.”

“Yes,” Greg/Ryan says. “I’m Corbin.” Corbin? Who said anything about a Corbin?

“I thought his name was supposed to be Ethan,” Mel whispers.

I shrug. I thought his name was supposed to be Ethan, too. But now that I think about it, Corbin definitely sounds much better. Kind of uppity, in a good way. I mean, you could find an Ethan at any public school in America, I bet. There’s a bunch of them at
my school, even. But a Corbin? A Corbin you definitely have to go to a private school to find.