One Night That Changes Everything (17 page)

I think he might really want to go to NYU, which is supposedly his safety school. They have a great computer department, and I know he’s always wanted to live in New York
City. But his parents want to keep him close to home. His mom thinks living in New York City is crazy. Plus, both his mom and dad went to Brown, and so they think he’ll be happy there.

“It was kind of a blessing that I didn’t get in,” he says.

“So then why are we going through this whole charade?” I ask, frustrated. “If you don’t even care about Brown.”

“I told you, this wasn’t my idea,” Cooper says. “It was Tyler’s.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I say. “I forgot. You do everything Tyler says.” I mean for it to come out snotty, but instead it comes out half-snotty, half-sad.

“That’s not true,” he says.

“If you didn’t care so much about Brown, then why did you file a complaint with the school?” I ask. “About what I wrote?”

Cooper sighs, his green eyes crinkling at the sides. “I didn’t,” he says. “I told you, that was Tyler. And, Eliza, honestly, I—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I say. And it’s true. I don’t want to hear his dumb excuses for how he’s so sorry, and it was just a joke, and he never meant to hurt me, and blah blah blah. I click around on the computer and upload the picture, reminding myself that I’m not supposed to cry over him for one more second. And definitely not in front of him, that would be completely and totally unacceptable.

Once the picture is uploaded and posted, I turn and look at Cooper.

“What now?” I ask.

“I don’t know, I guess we wait.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll have to leave within the next ten minutes or so though. I need to get back to Izzy’s.”

“Oh, right, Izzy’s,” I say. “You wouldn’t want to keep her waiting, that would just be horrible for the poor thing, she might die without her boyfriend for two whole hours.” I put on a fake shocked expression.

“Her boyfriend?” Cooper frowns. “Izzy’s not my girlfriend.”

“Well, then you should probably have a talk with her,” I say. “Because she most definitely thinks she’s your girlfriend.”

Cooper’s frown deepens. “No, she doesn’t.”

“Yes,” I say. “She does. In fact, she told me tonight on the T.” Although that’s not exactly true. I mean, she didn’t come out and say, “Cooper is my boyfriend, woo!” But she definitely implied it, I mean, she was doing everything short of getting his name tattooed all over her, like a big “COOPER AND ISABELLA FOREVER AND EVER” in a heart or something.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Cooper says again.

“Really?” I ask. “Then why were you watching her party?”

“She asked me to,” he says, shrugging. “We’re working on a project together for psych class, so I was over there last night.” I give him a skeptical look. “We’re just
friends,
I swear. I’ve never even kissed her.” He holds his cell phone out to me. “Do you want to call her right now and ask her?”

“No,” I say. “Whatever, I don’t really care.” Which isn’t
true. I do care. A lot. Now that I know he isn’t hooking up with Isabella, I can almost let myself believe that maybe he does really miss me. I
could,
but I won’t.

“Eliza—”

“Stop,” I say, holding my hand up.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”

“Yes, I do,” I say. “You were going to say how you never meant to hurt me, and how the whole thing just got out of hand, and how you’re a really nice guy who would never do something like that to me on purpose, and OMG peer pressure.”

“‘OMG peer pressure’?” Cooper repeats.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It MEANS that you are going to say it was all peer pressure that made you do what you did.” Honestly!

“What does
OMG
mean?”

“Oh my God.”

“So you think I was going to say ‘oh my God’ peer pressure?” Cooper asks. He’s looking at me the way he used to look at me, with this cute little half smile that makes me feel like whatever I’m saying is adorable.

“No, I think you were going to say a bunch of bullshit about peer pressure and how it pertains to what you did to me, and my ‘OMG’ was symbolic of all the bullshit you were getting ready to spew at me.”

“Oh.” The half smile leaves his face.

“That’s all you have to say? Oh?”

“No.” He sits down on my bed and then swivels my desk chair around so that I’m facing him. I look down at the ground. He takes my face in his hands and tilts my chin up so that I’m looking at him.

“Stop,” I say. But I don’t really move. I can’t move. It’s like I’m stuck, and I can’t get away from him. Okay, that’s not really true. I
can
move, there’s nothing, like,
wrong
with me or anything. But I kind of like the way his fingers feel on my face.

“Stop what?” he asks.

“You’re not allowed to tilt my chin,” I say. “You lost that right when you broke up with me.”

“
You
broke up with
me
,” he says.

I guess technically he’s right. I broke up with him as soon as I found out what he was doing, as soon as I found out that there was a list, a disgusting list filled with things that were disgusting, of points and things that he would get for getting me to go further with him.

“You lost the right to tilt my chin when we broke up, then,” I correct myself.

“Okay,” he says. But he doesn’t move. Now his finger is drawing little swirls across my chin and onto my cheeks and over my lips.

“You’re still doing it,” I tell him.

“I never wanted to break up with you,” he says.

“Of course not,” I say. “Because being broken up with means you got caught.”

“No,” he says. “That’s not why.”

I shiver a little, and then move my eyes up so that I’m looking at him. “If that’s true,” I say, swallowing, “then why didn’t you fight for me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You could have fought for me, you could have tried to get me to change my mind, you could have followed me the night I found the list.”

His eyes shift to the side then, and the spell is broken. Because he knows it’s true. If he really wanted to be with me, he would have fought for me. He would have tried to chase me, he would have tried to be with me, he would have tried to change my mind, he would have told Tyler that he didn’t want to be in the 318s anymore. But he didn’t. Because everything Cooper tells me is a complete and total lie, always.

“Eliza,” he says finally. “Why do you think you ended up on that list?”

“What list?” I ask, frowning.

“The list of the girls that were eligible for our initiation task?”

“There was a list?” I say, pushing the chair back from him and wheeling myself away. “A list of girls that were eligible? For you to
fake-date
?” Seriously! Just when I think he can’t sink any lower!

“Yeah,” he says. He’s hunched over now, his elbows resting on his knees. “I thought you knew that.”

“No, I did not know that!” I say, throwing my hands up. “And I have no idea how I got on that list! Probably because
I’m quiet, or because I don’t have a perfect body, or maybe because I’m Kate’s sister and in your warped, dumb little minds you guys thought that would be funny.”

“No,” Cooper says. “You were on that list because I wanted you on it.” He says it like this should make me happy. I look at him. Cooper might be insane. Seriously.

“Oh, great,” I say. “That’s a wonderful reason, that really makes me like you a lot better, Cooper. Thanks so much for clearing that up.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, I wanted you on it because I wanted a reason to talk to you.”

“Oh my God,” I say, standing up out of my chair, furious. “Are you seriously that delusional? You think that you saying you wanted to date me as a joke because you wanted to get to know me better makes me feel any better? If anything, it just makes it SO. MUCH. WORSE.” I look him right in the eye. “You disgust me,” I say. “Now get out of my room.”

“What?” he stands up and looks at me. “Did you not hear what I just said? I said that I wanted you on that list because I found you interesting, and cute, and I wanted an excuse to talk to you.”

He takes a couple of steps toward me, but I step backward, away from him.

“And that was your idea of a good excuse?” I say. “To put me on a list of girls you guys thought it would be funny to use?” I’m almost crying now, and I do NOT want to cry in
front of him, so I turn around so he can’t see my face. “Go,” I say softly. “Please, just get out of my room.”

There’s silence for a minute, and neither one of us moves.

“Eliza—”

“I’m SERIOUS,” I say. “GO.”

“Fine,” he says softly. He stops when he gets to the door. “Um, do you mean just get out of your room, or get out of the whole house?”

I think about it. “Well, preferably the whole house, but I might need a ride from you, so don’t go just yet.”

My cell phone rings then. Clarice. I pick up the phone. “Hiii,” she trills, like nothing’s wrong, and she didn’t just steal Marissa’s car and leave me stranded at Tyler’s with no way home.

I’m already all worked up because of my fight with Cooper, and so it starts to come out in the phone call. “What the
hell
is going on?” I ask. “Why did you just abandon me and Marissa?” I start pacing back and forth, I guess because I have all this nervous energy that needs to come out.

“What do you mean?” Clarice asks. “I had to go and pick up Jamie. Honestly, it was horrible. Madeline left her at this arcade in Southie and, Eliza, you know Southie is NOT a good part of town.”

“She couldn’t take the T?” I ask. “To get home?”

“The T doesn’t run this late,” Clarice reports. “And besides, Jamie doesn’t take the T.”

“What do you mean, ‘Jamie doesn’t take the T’?” I repeat.
Who doesn’t take the T? It’s like saying you live in New York and don’t take the subway. Although. I guess there are a lot of people who live in New York and don’t take the subway. A lot of rich, snobby people who are always taking cabs. “Let me rephrase that,” I say. “What kind of person doesn’t take the T to get out of a bad neighborhood?” It’s totally counterintuitive, when you think about it. Not taking public transportation because you’re afraid of it, yet risking your life in a bad part of town? Although I’m sure they were exaggerating about how much danger they were in. Clarice’s cousins Jamie and Madeline are always exaggerating things.

“Jamie and Madeline don’t,” Clarice says. “And she was so scared, I really wish you would have heard her.”

“I’m sure she was really scared,” I say, still pacing and trying to keep control of myself so that I don’t lose it completely. Cooper’s still standing by the door, trying not to laugh, which is just annoying me even more, because I know why he’s laughing.

Cooper met Jamie and Madeline once, at this cookout he had. Clarice just showed up with them, and we couldn’t exactly ask them to leave, even though they were kind of weird. They spent the whole time under these huge umbrellas they brought because “their delicate skin couldn’t take the sun’s ultraviolet, ultra-cruel rays.”

Later, we surmised that they must have a thing with umbrellas, because when Cooper served them drinks, they produced pastel-colored paper umbrellas for their glasses out
of their purses and then sat by the pool, under their umbrellas, sipping away happily and talking only to each other.

I shoot Cooper a death glare now and curse myself for ever letting him get so invested in my life. What was I thinking? We were only together for a couple of months! It was a horrible plan to let him meet my friends and spend so much time with them.

“She was totally scared,” Clarice is saying. “They were showing a boxing match on one of those big screens there, and you know how Jamie gets about violence.”

“Why did she go there in the first place?” I ask.

“She was dared,” Clarice reports. “She lost a bet.”

“She lost a bet and so she had to go to an arcade in Southie?” Then I realize I’m getting too caught up in the details of Jamie’s life, when I have much bigger things going on. “Never mind,” I say to Clarice. “Look, where are you?”

My phone vibrates in my hand and beeps, cutting off her answer. “Hold on,” I say. “I have a text.”

I check my phone. “
SAW THE PICS
,” Tyler says. “
NOT BAD. now get back to the city by 3 am to get your next task.
”

Jesus. How late is this going to go? And when are they going to JUST STOP ALREADY? I take a deep breath. “Clarice,” I say calmly. “Where are you?”

“Um, I’m leaving the city right now.” Shit, shit, shit. She’s never going to have enough time to get me and then bring me back there by three o’clock. “Okay,” I say. “Can you go and grab Marissa at her house?”

“Marissa went home?” Clarice asks. “That wasn’t very nice, Eliza. She shouldn’t have left you.”

“Marissa
didn’t
leave me,” I say. Has Clarice forgotten her recent carjacking? “
You
left. You left us all alone.”

“No,” she says. “I left you with Cooper. Where is Cooper, anyway?”

“He’s right here,” I say, looking at him warily.

“Hi, Clarice!” Cooper yells.

“Hi, Cooper,” Clarice yells back. Ugh. But I really don’t have time to get into a big discussion about her loyalties, so I’m forced to let it go.

“Look,” I say. “Marissa got arrested.”

“Marissa what?!” Clarice exclaims.

“She’ll explain everything to you when you see her,” I say. “Call her first, because she’s going to have to sneak out. Tyler wants me back in the city by three, so go and get her, and then meet me at the Perk on Newbury.” Perk is this all-night coffee place that usually gets pretty busy on weekends after everything else is closed. I figure it’s a good place to meet, since it’s in a safe area, and there should be at least
some
people around.

“Got it,” Clarice says, and then she clicks off.

I look over to where Cooper is sitting. “So,” I say. “Uh, you want to take me with you, back to Boston?”

He grins. Ugh.

I make him wait in the living room while I change into comfortable jeans and a soft gray sweater. Then I head downstairs
and follow him angrily and silently out of the house and back into his car.