One Night That Changes Everything (12 page)

“No,” Clarice says. “I mean, I know he lives in Newton, but I don’t know exactly where.”

“Great,” I say. Clarice is on her phone now, trying Marissa.

“Voice mail,” she says. “She probably went somewhere with Jeremiah.” She wrinkles her nose and then leaves a message. “Hi, Marissa,” she says. “It’s me again, we were just wondering where you are, you know, because you have the CAR and everything, and me and Eliza really have no way to get BACK HOME without you, so if you could give us a call that would be great, k, thanks, bye!” She ends the call. “Honestly, that girl,” she says. “What is so great about Jeremiah Fisher?
You know, I used to have gym class with him sophomore year, and I’m not trying to be mean, but he really has this kind of, like, weird body-odor problem, and it’s not even BO exactly, it’s more of this weird musty smell, and I really hope he’s gotten it under control because—”

A car pulls up next to us then, and the passenger-side window rolls down.

“Hey!” the driver says.

And then I notice the car. A brand-new red BMW that I would know anywhere, that I
should
know anywhere, because I spent, um, more than a few hours making out in the backseat. Cooper. WTF.

“I thought I told you,” I say, “to stop following me.”

“Get in, I’ll drive you to Tyler’s,” he says. I look at Clarice. Clarice looks at me.

“No,” I say. I grab Clarice and start dragging her down the sidewalk.

“But Elizzaaaa,” she whines. “My feet hurt. And it’s really cold out.”

“It’s not that cold out,” I say, even though it kind of is and we’re dressed completely inappropriately. “It’s unseasonably warm for November. And besides, I don’t care if we have to walk all the way back to Newton from here, we are NOT getting in his car.”

“But we can’t walk all the way back to Newton,” she says, obviously missing the point. “Besides, we don’t know the way.”

“We’ll look the directions up on your phone,” I say. “Or we’ll take the T back to Alewife and wait for Marissa.”

“I’ve never used my phone as a GPS before. I don’t know if it works.” She looks doubtful. “Plus we don’t know where Tyler lives.”

“THEN WE’LL STOP AND ASK SOMEONE FOR DIRECTIONS!” I scream.

“Um, okay,” she says, obviously deciding I’m not in a mood to be messed with. She gets quiet, but we keep walking, and then I realize that Cooper is still following us. He’s driving really slowly against the curb, just about as fast as we’re walking. You’d think more cars would be parked there, or that there’d be more traffic to block him, but no-o-o. He’s totally able to car-stalk us.

“Go away,” I say, leaning down and looking into the passenger-side window at him.

“Eliza, get in the car,” he says. “This is crazy. Let me take you to Tyler’s. And hurry up before someone sees us together.”

“No,” I say, and keep walking.

“Clarice?” Cooper pleads. “Don’t you want to get in the nice warm car? I’ll let you pick the music.”

Gasp! That is totally hitting below the belt, since Clarice LOVES to pick the music in the car! And Cooper knows that Clarice loves to pick the music. He better not be trying to get all chummy with Clarice. We hate Cooper.

“No,” I say. “We hate you.”

“Eliza,” Clarice whines. “Come on, he’ll drive us back to Newton.”

“We have a ride back to Newton,” I point out. “Marissa’s taking us. “But my voice is already faltering.

“Do you see Marissa anywhere?” Clarice asks.

“No,” I admit.

“And do you think she’s coming back anytime soon?” Clarice raises her eyebrows at me. Damn. I know she’s right. At last year’s prom Marissa took off for, like, hours and didn’t resurface until almost five in the morning. I still don’t know what she was doing.

“No,” I say. “But we can’t just leave her.” It’s a last-ditch effort of a losing battle, and Clarice knows it. She looks at me incredulously, like she can’t believe I’ve kept up the charade this long. “Fine,” I say, sighing. I point my finger at her. “But don’t you act nice to him.”

“I would never,” she says, looking offended at the thought.

But the second we’re in the car, she leans over the front seat. “Coop,” she says. “You know what I want.”

Cooper plugs his iPhone into the car charger, opens up his Pandora, then scrolls through until he hits the listing for “Clarice’s Jams,” the station Clarice made for herself when Cooper and I were together. The sound of Fuel comes through the speakers, and Clarice settles happily into the backseat, texting away on her phone, probably with her cousin Jamie.

“What are we doing?” I demand.

“You want to go to Tyler’s house, right?” Cooper asks. He starts heading back toward the Mass Pike, navigating down
the super-narrow streets of Boston like a pro. “To try to get your notebook?”

“Yes,” I say. “But how do I know it’s really there? How do I know I can trust you?” I’m starting to sound like a broken record.

“Because you can,” he says. “Why would I lie?”

“Why did you lie about any of the things you lied about?” I ask.

My phone vibrates. One new text. Tyler. “
POST PICTURES OF YOURSELF IN A BIKINI ON LANESBORO LOSERS
,” it says. Oh, Jesus Christ.

On Lanesboro Losers, girls can create profiles too, with a photo gallery and everything. Only unlike the guys, girls are totally in control of their own information. I think Kate had intended it to be like, “Look at us, girl power, we’re not afraid to post pictures of ourselves and our friends being happy” but that idea kind of … disintegrated. Girls started posting pictures of themselves very scantily dressed and used it in more of a “Look what you wish you could have” kind of way.

“Is that your next task?” Cooper asks.

“Yes,” I say. Wait a minute. If I’m already getting what I’m supposed to do next, it means that the 318s must realize that I’ve completed the last thing they told me to do. “Did you tell them I made out with Nigel?” I ask Cooper.

“Yeah,” he says. He shifts in his seat.

“Good,” I say.

“Although I probably should have told them it shouldn’t
count as a task, since you seemed to kind of like it.” There’s a sharpness in his voice, and if I didn’t know better, I would think that Cooper was jealous. And then I remember. Cooper always had this … thing with Nigel. One night when we were all hanging out, Marissa let it slip that I used to like Nigel, and ever since then Cooper always seemed super-competitive with him.

“Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot about how you’re jealous of Nigel.” I roll my window down and let the cool night air rush into the car, blowing my hair back from my face.

“Jealous? Of Nigel Rickson, are you kidding me?” Cooper signals and pulls onto the highway. “The kid wears his jeans so low you can see his boxers. How 1990s is that?”

“I think it’s hot,” I say. Which isn’t totally a lie. I did think it was kind of hot at one point, and I’m not sure what I think about it now. Not totally hot, maybe, but it really doesn’t bother me that much either. I mean, it’s his
style.
He
owns
it.

“Are you kidding me?” Cooper says again. “So lame.” He shakes his head. From the backseat, I can hear Clarice now on the phone, talking away. There’s silence for a few minutes, punctuated only by Clarice saying, “I know … I know, totally.”

Until finally, Cooper says, “Girls are crazy.”

“Oh, hello, Random Thoughts That Make No Sense,” I say. “I’m Eliza.”

“I mean that girls are crazy if they think that Nigel Rickson is hot.”

“He’s a good kisser,” I say.

“No, he isn’t,” Cooper says. He sounds shocked. I steal a
glance at him out of the corner of my eye. His eyebrows are knit together in concentration and confusion.

“How would you know?” I ask. “Have you kissed him?”

“No, I haven’t kissed him,” Cooper says, rolling his eyes.

“Then why did you say he wasn’t a good kisser?”

“Because a guy like that knows nothing about what girls want.”

“A guy like what?”

“A guy who says
dope
and
fly
and thinks he’s Eminem,” Cooper says.

“As opposed to a guy who drives a BMW and does whatever his dumb, super-lame friends think? That kind of guy really knows what girls want?”

That shuts him up for a second, and I turn and look out the window again. I think about how it used to feel to be in this car, when Cooper and I would go for rides, to anywhere and everywhere. We’d look up the best places to get ice cream on Yelp, then plug the address into his GPS and go, not caring if we had to drive for miles. We’d give all the sundaes points for taste, size, and flavor. And now … here I am, in the car for what is probably going to be the last time, ever, and it’s for the worst reason ever, and that makes me really sad, and I hate myself for even being sad a little bit about it, because Cooper Marriatti is the biggest jerk in the whole world.

“Does this mean you’re speaking to me?” Cooper wants to know.

“What do you mean?” I ask, turning back toward him.
His jaw is set in a straight line, and he’s gripping the steering wheel with two hands, looking straight ahead.

“Well, last time I talked to you before tonight, you said you never wanted to speak to me again,” he says. “And now you’re speaking to me.”

“I am speaking to you, out of necessity,” I say. “Otherwise, no, I am not speaking to you.”

“Ever again?”

“Ever again.”

“Unless it’s out of necessity?”

“Yes. I mean, no.”

“No, you won’t speak to me, even if it’s out of necessity?”

“Yes, because I don’t foresee any circumstances in which talking to you would be a necessity.”

“None?”

“None.”

“But I’ll bet you didn’t foresee this circumstance, so how can you really say for sure that you won’t encounter another circumstance in which you will be forced to speak to me out of necessity?”

“I can’t,” I say. “But I
can
say with 99.999 percent accuracy that I will not be talking to you again, out of necessity or otherwise.”

“But what if,” he says, “I somehow became best friends with Nigel Rickson?”

“What if you did?” I say. “I would not want to talk to you even then.”

“But what if you needed me to relay a message to him, like if you wanted him so badly that you just couldn’t control yourself, and you needed him to know that you were lusting after him, and so you wanted me to tell him for you?”

“That would never happen,” I say happily. “And if you want to know why, it’s because I have already successfully hooked up with Nigel, and it took me about twenty minutes with no help from you, thank you very much.”

“Okay,” Cooper says agreeably. “But what if you and Nigel fall in love, and Nigel and I become BFFs, and then you guys get married, and Nigel wants me to be the best man, and you and I have to talk about the wedding plans?”

“That would never happen, because since Nigel would be so in love with me, he would have dumped you as a BFF as soon as we got engaged and/or told you you were not allowed to be best man at our wedding, per my wishes.”

“Yes, but—”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Did you just say ‘BFF’?”

“Yes,” he says. He looks at me and shrugs. “I’ve been watching a lot of Disney Channel.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Sarah’s had it on a lot lately,” he says. “And I don’t have the heart to ask her to change the station.” Sarah is his eleven-year-old sister. She is obsessed with all things Hannah Montana.

“Sounds fun,” I say. I roll my eyes and try to sound all sarcastic, but the thing is, it kind of does sound fun. Hanging
out with Cooper and his sister, who I adore, watching TV and eating snacks, lip-synching to Hannah Montana songs and critiquing her outfits. Not that Cooper lip-synchs to Hannah Montana songs. Although … he did do that JT song earlier like it was the most natural thing in the world. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and try to picture him doing “The Climb.”

“It’s not as fun,” he says, “as watching hip-hop videos with Nigel.”

“Well, nothing is as fun as that,” I say. “Nigel would teach me how to do all the hip-hop dances.”

Cooper nods sagely. “Probably even crumping.”

“Are you kidding?” I ask. “Especially crumping. That’s, like, the staple of Nigel’s dance knowledge.”

Cooper looks at me and smiles, and I smile back. Are we flirting? Ohmigod. I think we are. For a second, I almost even forgot that Clarice was in the backseat. Which is definitely not a good sign. I can’t just go around forgetting that my best friend is in the backseat; I’m supposed to be staying on task here.

And I definitely cannot just start flirting with Cooper, joking around with him about crumping and hip-hop dancing and all manner of tween shows on Disney!

I look at him suspiciously. This is just what he wants me to do! He wants me to lose my focus, he wants me to trust him, just like I did before, so that at the very moment he has me where he wants me, he can pull the rug out from under me and watch while it all goes crashing down.

I remind myself again that Cooper is despicable, that not only did he date me on a dare, he then turned me in to the school for what I wrote about him on the Internet.

“So what’s your next task?” Cooper asks. But I’m over it and not going to be nice anymore.

“Like you don’t already know,” I say snottily.

“I don’t.” We’re in Newton now, and Cooper’s signaling and pulling down a side street.

“Is this Tyler’s street?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Cooper says. “We’re almost there.” He’s slowing down now. “So I’ll probably just let you off at the top of the street, so that they don’t catch us together.”

“Fine,” I say, mostly because I don’t have any other choice.

“So what is it?” he asks.

“What’s what?”

“What’s the next thing you have to do?”

“Stop acting like you don’t know,” I say. “It’s not you and me against them; it’s all of you against me.” From the backseat, I hear Clarice say, “Bye, Jamesers, kisses!”

“And Clarice is on my side too,” I say proudly.

“Are we here?” she asks, leaning forward. “Thanks for the tunes, Coop.”

“My pleasure,” Cooper says.

“Stop being nice to him,” I demand. “And yes, we’re here. Well, we’re sort of here.” I look around at where we are. A nice, quiet street in nice, quiet Newton, where everyone has a golden retriever and all the houses look the same.