Mission (Un)Popular (23 page)

“My mom's out right now.” She dug her hands into her pockets and looked him straight in the eyes.

“Does she have a cell phone? I'd like to call her,” Bryan said as Em led us out to the huge marble foyer.

“Awesome party, guys,” Zoe yelled, as she and Kiki headed for the door.

“See you later, someone's dad,” Kiki said, waving to Bryan, then she burst into a fit of giggles. Bryan didn't even react; he was still looking at Em, waiting for a phone number.

“Don't embarrass me in front of Em's mom,” I pleaded. “Let's just leave, all right? I'm getting in the van. See?” I opened the door. He didn't follow. “She said her mom isn't here. You can talk to her later, all right?”

Bryan finally gave in, but as we headed down the front path, he looked angrier than I'd ever seen him. Then again, he'd just embarrassed me on the best night of my life. I was pretty mad too.

T
HE THING ALL STEPPARENTS
need to understand is that they should never try to act like real parents. Because they're not real parents. At all. They're more like random people your real parents decided to marry, usually against your wishes.

Think of it this way: It's not like I'd go pick up some kid I met on the street and bring him home and tell my mom, “Guess what! I found this kid. I think I'll make him my new brother. He's
your family
now, and you'd better be nice to him, and clean out a closet for him, and buy him Christmas presents.”

But that's exactly how my mom expects me to be with Bryan. And this shouldn't be news to her (or to him) by now: it's not happening. The more “fatherly” things he tries to do, the more I want to murder him in his sleep.

I slammed the passenger-side door of the van shut and stared straight ahead, determined not to say a single word. Thankfully, Bryan didn't feel like talking either. The only sound in the van was the squeaking of the windshield wipers.

We would have probably made it the whole way home like that, too, if it wasn't for the way my stomach turned against me. I tried to take deep breaths, then rolled down the window to get some air, but nothing helped. “Pull over,” I groaned. “Pull over, pull over, pull over.”

“Just a moment,” Bryan said.

“No,” I shouted. “Now. I'm going to be sick.”

“Hold your horses, Margot.” His voice was irritatingly calm. “I need to pull safely out of traffic.” I gagged, but thankfully nothing came out.

After what felt like forever, he finally signaled and pulled off to the side of the road. I pushed the door open and leaned out as far as I could, which didn't turn out to be far enough. I threw up a little bit on the seat, a lot on the door, and even more on the floor of the van.

“Come on.” I hadn't even noticed Bryan getting out, but he was suddenly in front of me. “Let's get you some fresh air.” He helped me hop toward a bus shelter with a small metal bench in it. I sat down, leaning my head against the glass.

“Were you drinking?” Bryan asked.

“No,” I said. “I swear I wasn't. I think it's the flu.”

“What about your pain meds?”

“I took them,” I said.

“Did you have anything to eat with them?”

“No.”

“How many did you take?”

“Four,” I answered.

“You know you're only supposed to take two every two hours,” he said.

“I know,” I answered. “But I missed a dose, so I took four. It's basic math.”

“You can't take four at a time, Margot, even if you miss a dose. And you need to take those on a full stomach.”

“Nobody told me that! All they said was don't operate bulldozers. Nobody tells me anything!” I leaned my head back again. All I wanted to do was get home and sleep. “How did you find me, anyway?” I asked.

Bryan jingled the van keys in his hand. “You left the Web site with the taxi information open on the computer screen,” he said. “I called to find out where they'd driven you.”

“You were spying in my room?” I said. “At my computer? Bryan, that's private.”

“It's not private when we're worried about your safety,” he answered in his fake-fatherly way. I rolled my eyes, but he was looking toward the van and didn't even notice. He was probably busy worrying about being illegally parked. “Are you feeling ready to go?” he asked, definitely eyeing the No Parking sign.

“So, what now?” I asked, after he'd gotten in and closed the door. “Are you and my mom going to punish me by making me babysit on weekends, too?”

Bryan did a shoulder check and pulled onto the street before answering. “As far as your mother knows, you're in bed.”

I gave him a confused look.

“She asked me to check on you, but she was asleep by the time I got back to our bedroom. She's got so much on her plate these days, I couldn't face waking her up with bad news.” He pulled up at a stoplight and turned to look at me. “And there's the fact that your mother and I had a conversation about my tendency to avoid conflict with you. She'd like to see me take on a more active parenting role.”

I rolled my eyes again, not caring if he saw this time.

“I suppose,” he said carefully, “we could keep this between us. As long as you promise to always tell your mother or myself where you're going in the future.” The light changed and he stretched his neck out like a turtle, looking for cars, even though the streets were deserted. “It's important that we know you're safe.”

The active-parenting stuff made me want to vomit all over again. But at the same time, I almost couldn't believe my luck.

“I'd still like to speak with Em's parents, though,” he added.

“You can't,” I said. “Her dad's dead.” I don't even know why I said it. As far as I knew, he was alive and well, making multimillion-dollar music deals in New York, even if he
had
been symbolically stabbed through the chest with a steak knife.

“Well, that's unfortunate. I'm sorry for her loss. In that case, I'd like to speak with her mother.”

“You can't. She's deaf.”

He sighed. “Was she aware that an unsupervised party was going on in her home?”

“Oh, yeah. Em told her. Through sign language.” I could tell he knew I was lying, but he didn't bother to say so.

Instead, he just took a deep cleansing breath. “Is there another adult in their home I could speak to?”

“They live alone.” I bit my nails to keep from having to look him in the eyes. “You could still talk to her mom, though…if you learned sign language. I know some. This means ‘microwave.'” I demonstrated the one sign I knew. Erika and I had learned it at a Brownie-pack sleepover once. “And this means ‘I love you.'” Everyone knew that one.

“And how would that apply to a conversation about an unsupervised party?” Now he sounded mad.

“I don't know,” I admitted. We drove in silence for a while.

“When young teens get together, things can often get out of hand, Margot. Sometimes there's drinking, or fights break out, or worse. It's serious business.”

“I know,” I said, thinking about how scared I'd been when Matt had showed up.

“Prescription drugs can be dangerous too, if you don't follow the pharmacist's directions. I want you to promise me that you'll speak to your mother or me if you aren't sure how to take your medication.”

I nodded. I wasn't planning to make that mistake again.

“All right,” I said. “Fine. I promise.” Then I closed my eyes the rest of the way home.

“I'll just clean up,” Bryan said, after he'd opened the van door and handed me my crutches. “I'll be right in.”

“Okay.” I climbed out, being careful not to get puke on my shoe. I almost hated to admit it, but for once in his life, Bryan was actually acting kind of cool. When I got to the door, I even stopped, planning to say thank you, but he had his back turned. All I could see was the moon shining off his bald head while he uncoiled the garden hose at the side of the house.

I
N THE MORNING
, I
WOKE TO
the sound of barking. I opened my eyes to look at the clock. It was 8:15. I flopped back down, trying to ignore the noise, but it only got louder.

Have I mentioned yet that we don't have a dog?

“Magoo,” the triplets called. Six tiny paws hammered at my door.

When I didn't answer, they were quiet for a second, then they started barking again.

I put a pillow over my ear, then shouted as loudly as I could without hurting my own head: “Stop barking.” My voice came out gravelly.

“No,” Alice shouted back.

“We're doggies,” said Aleene.

“A hundred and one damn nations,” Alex added.

The barking started again.

“Go away!” They stayed put.

“I'll pay you a hundred dollars to stop barking.” They didn't even consider it.

Then I had a stroke of brilliance. “The school bus is outside.” I pulled the pillow off my head. “It's waiting for you. And it's full of dog bones.” There was immediate silence in the hall, followed by the pitter-patter of tiny feet moving in the opposite direction. I took a deep breath, ready to drift back to sleep. But a minute later, my door opened.

“Margot?” Bryan was standing in the same pajama pants from the night before, with his hands on his hips. A patch of hair was poofing from his bathrobe. His face looked gray, like he'd barely slept, which, come to think of it, he probably hadn't. “Did you tell your sisters there was a school bus full of dog bones outside?”

I rolled over, pulling the blankets up all the way to my chin. “I was kidding.”

I could hear screaming coming from the kitchen—the kind of anguished wailing only three two-year-olds deprived of a school bus full of dog bones are capable of. “I'd like it if you came and apologized. Then have some breakfast with us. I'm making scrambled tofu from scratch, with sun-dried tomatoes and feta.”

The thought alone made me nauseous, but after what Bryan had done for me the night before, I owed him big-time—even if that meant eating tofu for breakfast, in the same room as my mother, who I was still furious with.

“Good morning, Margot,” she said, once she'd finally gotten the triplets to stop whimpering and settled them down in their high chairs. “How's your leg feeling?”

“It hurts.” I poked at my tofu with my fork and took a small bite. It wasn't as horrible as it sounded. At the very least, it wasn't VTV.

“I talked to Sarah's mother yesterday,” she said.

I looked up.

“She declined my invitation for tea. In fact”—my mom stabbed a tofu chunk—“she barely gave me the time of day.” I wasn't all that surprised to hear it. Meanness must run in the family. “According to her mother, Sarah says she didn't push you down the stairs or have anything to do with a poster campaign. And when I suggested that perhaps Sarah might have some long-standing issues with aggression, she actually hung up on me.”

I couldn't believe my mom had actually said that to Sarah J.'s mother.…But before I even had the chance to tell her how embarrassing it was, Bryan stepped between us, setting down the triplets' bowls on their high-chair trays.

“Do you have something you want to say to your sisters, Margot?” he prodded. Mom glanced up, obviously impressed by his
active parenting
.

“Sorry I said there was a school bus full of dog bones when there wasn't,” I mumbled. “That wasn't very nice of me. We can play dogs together after breakfast if you want, okay?”

And that's how I ended up spending my entire Saturday morning pretending to be a dog in a house made of sofa cushions.

It was after lunch before I got to the computer. There was an IM waiting from Em.

I felt my stomach flip. Hilarious? She obviously had no idea what had really happened between us.

I'd almost forgotten about the mittens. In the light of day, it
did
sound kind of dumb.

My stomach flipped again.

I tried to remember everything I'd said to George the night before. I knew he'd told me he liked my hair. And he also said he thought I was pretty cool. Weren't those definite signs that he liked me? But then other memories started to surface, too. Like, did I actually say something to him about vegetable korma?

Talking to George had felt so easy at the time, but now the events of the night seemed fuzzy around the edges, and I wasn't certain that I'd seemed nearly as charming and cool to him as I'd seemed to myself. What if I
had
acted like a weirdo? And now he thought I'd been using him for a bet…when, really, all these years I'd loved him.

I couldn't help it. Tears sprang to my eyes.

My heart leaped up again. I couldn't believe he'd actually said that!

Maggie and Joyce? We were getting more popular, for sure, and things were bound to be even better after word got out about how good the party was. But Maggie and Joyce were Sarah J.'s best friends. Would they actually sneak out with us? Plus, wasn't sushi raw fish? Still, I knew better than to doubt or contradict Em. If she'd suggested we eat dirt, I would have probably done it.

I quickly Googled “types of sushi,” then picked one randomly off the list so I'd sound convincing.

I desperately wanted to change the subject back to George before we stopped talking. Had he mentioned the moment when I touched his hair? Did she notice if he'd been looking at me when I was sleeping on the couch? What, exactly, did he say about me after I left? If it had been Erika, we would have analyzed the entire party, minute by minute, drawing diagrams of where everyone was sitting and what they were wearing, dedicating at least two hours to a serious discussion of the Gorgeous George thing and what it might mean…but this was Em. She'd already logged off.

After that I spent the rest of the day feeling exactly like this two-headed doll named Benita I'd had when I was little. She was made of cloth and had a skirt you could flip back and forth to hide whichever one of the heads you weren't using. One of the heads was frowning and had blue tears stitched to its face (sad Benita) and the other had rosy red circles on its cheeks and was grinning (glad Benita).

When I finished talking to Em, I lay on my bed for a long time with my sad-Benita head on. I was disgusting. There was no way he liked me. I cupped my hands over my mouth and exhaled into them, then tried to smell the air I'd breathed out. I had to do it a couple of times before I could tell for certain, but I definitely had bad breath. I also had a zit just starting to form beside my nose—the kind that hurts when you press on it. I was positive he'd noticed.

Eventually I dragged myself to the living room, where the triplets were building monsters out of giant Lego blocks.

I sat down beside Aleene on the couch and added two special googly-eyed blocks to the top of her monster, plus a red piece for a tongue sticking out. She looked up at me in amazement—like I was the number one top Lego builder on earth…and there was something in that look of surprise and delight that I recognized. I could have sworn that, as I'd reached out to touch his hair, I'd seen it cross George's face too. Then I remembered how sincere he'd sounded when he'd said he liked my hair.

But sad Benita showed up again when I was washing my face before bed and noticed that the zit had grown even bigger and that my eyebrows were still uneven. Then glad Benita pointed out that he
had
told Em I was hilarious and that I looked like a different person. Plus, what do guys know about eyebrows anyway?

Then sad Benita remembered the way he'd looked at me like I was an alien when I brought up the hockey stick mittens he'd worn in third grade. But glad Benita said if he really liked me, some weird conversation about mittens wasn't going to change it. Then sad Benita was like, “Oh please, mitten girl. Do you actually think he'd like
you
?”

And it basically went on like that until 12:30, when I couldn't sleep because the Benitas wouldn't shut up, and it occurred to me that this whole talking-to-myself thing might be kind of lame and pathetic, at which point sad Benita said, “Lame and pathetic? Kind of like telling him, out loud, that you think he's ‘gorgeous and
so
cool'?” and even glad Benita was too depressed to think of a comeback.