Sticks & Stones (13 page)

I smiled. And I didn't.

Downstairs, the party was totally raging. A DJ was hanging out in Holland, one of the hotel's huge conference rooms. Before we went in there, Olivia and I learned a cool soccer ball trick in Brazil, made our own anime characters in Japan, looked at some fancy art in Italy, and ate some awesome cheese and chocolate in Switzerland. Then we ran to the dance floor. I couldn't believe how much stuff I was doing, and without thinking one bit! Could it be that I was actually having
fun
at a party without my old best friend or my own personal pop star?

Just as we were getting our groove going, the music slowed down.

“Time to find someone special,” the DJ crooned. No! I didn't want to find someone special. I wanted to keep dancing! Unless Liam was around …

The crowd thinned out, and Nice Andy came toward me from far away, almost in slow motion.
Don't think about it,
I told myself. Just do things. Be nice and dance with Nice Andy! He bought you soup. He called you awesome. He made you pictures after all the class CAV chats. You owe him!

As he came closer, though, it occurred to me that,
ew
, no way did I want to dance with Nice Andy. Even if he gave me all the beef stew, string cheese, and pictures in the world, he would still have spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth and a goofy, toothy grin and hands even sweatier than mine. The second my eyes spotted the shiny red exit sign, I knew I had to make a run for it. When Nice Andy turned his head for a second, I bolted, and I didn't stop running until I had safely reached Antarctica across the hall.

So maybe this wouldn't be the night of my first slow dance. It should be with Liam, anyway
,
I told myself, and squealed a little in my brain. We were
sooo
getting back together!

Olivia caught up to me and dragged me two rooms down, to Jamaica, otherwise known as the hotel's ginormous indoor pool. It was dark, but strings of multicolored lights strung all over made it seem like a bright paradise. Except it was really still a pool. I froze.

“Let's go swimming!” Olivia said as she glanced over at the complimentary bathing-suit shop set up by the locker rooms. Most people had brought their own suits, but Jeg had probably figured that some people would forget and she wouldn't want anyone to miss any swimming fun.

I let out a quiet groan. I was one of the people who forgot, except actually I hadn't brought a suit on purpose. Wearing a swimsuit meant showing my word-covered arms and legs to Olivia for the first time. Maybe she already knew, but she had never said anything, so maybe she didn't know. And while my words were mostly cool at the moment, it was still a big deal to explain the whole thing to people who didn't know about it. Not to mention, I'd be reminding all the people in my grade who had forgotten or stopped caring. But since I was all about doing stuff now instead of thinking, did that mean I had to grab one of the freebie suits and swim? I didn't want to do it. Even though the water looked all warm and sparkly and I was still a little bit chilly from my minute in Antarctica.

My phone buzzed with a text from Dad.

Will be there soon. They say you spend six months of your life waiting for red lights to change. I am well on my way. Hope you're having fun!

I didn't totally want to leave, but I didn't totally want to stay, either. I knew that this was probably the best opportunity I'd have to make my exit.

“I actually have to go,” I told Olivia in a voice that I tried to make sound really sad. “My dad's coming. Boo! I really wanted to swim.” Not.

I sprinted out of the pool area in record time and hopped into the elevator.
I would have gone swimming if I'd had time,
I told myself as the elevator took me to the ground floor.
Even if that meant Olivia would see my words. I would have. Dumb Dad had to come and interrupt.
Still, I smiled. Except for a few little details, the night had been totally perfect.

I ran into Jeg's mom on my way out.

“Hey, girlfriend! How are ya?” She kissed both of my cheeks.

“Good.” I smiled up at her. Wow. She had grown like another five inches since I'd see her last—actually, that was just her shoes. Holy high heels, how did she walk in those things? Or even stand? Other than that, she looked the same as always. Her long, wavy black hair fell all the way to her hips. Her makeup was perfect, down to her dark purple lips and silver sparkles clinging to her eyelashes. It must have taken her, like, more years to get ready than I'd been alive.

“Your outfit is adorbs,
dahling
. You are just fab. Kisses!” She took a sip of her drink and looked away, so I guess the conversation was over. I should have been annoyed—Jeg's mom talked a lot like Snotty Ami, after all—but I was too excited from the awesomeness of the night. Anyway, if you're all fancy and famous, you can probably get away with talking however you want. And
FAB
and
ADORBS
were very new and interesting words to have on my body.

“How'd it go?” Dad asked when I got in the car. I slunk down in the front seat and leaned against my seat belt. It was just hitting me that I was completely exhausted.

But happy. Adorbs. Fab. Probably getting back together with Liam.

Holy high heels. Liam. I felt my face getting hot and red. This was probably not a Dad kind of conversation. I'd try to talk about things he was interested in instead.

“It was good. Weather's not too bad tonight, huh? Did you make it through all the red lights?”

As if right on cue, the yellow light in front of us turned red and we stopped. Dad looked over in my direction. He was smiling, but he had big, sad eyes. What did he have to be sad about?

“Yeah, I made it through the red lights. Except this one.” He laughed awkwardly. “Ha, ha, ha.”

The conversation came to a quick end after that. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, pretending that the hum of the car and the peaceful night had rocked me right to sleep.

And then we were home. Dad gently jostled me “awake,” and I got into my own bed and actually went to sleep and had very nice dreams of Liam and me getting back together and being weird together and traveling across the world. It was only when I woke up in the morning that I realized I had never gotten any cake.

 

22

A PROJECT

By Monday morning, not getting any cake was the least of my worries.

The first day back after winter break is always the worst thing ever. But on this Monday, not only did I wake up with the super-bummed ugh-I-have-to-wake-up-early-and-go-to-school feeling, I woke up with a funny feeling, too. Something felt
off
, like it had that day when Liam broke up with me. When I got to school, I noticed Jeg bouncing in, wearing about a dozen jangly beaded bracelets, her dumb one-fourth-of-a-peace-sign necklace, and an enormous smile on her face. She was probably just happy that she'd had a good party.

Really happy.

But then Liam came in with a big smile, too. And then they looked at each other, still grinning all goofy, and then Liam grabbed Jeg's hand and held it all the way to her seat, where he let it go, then kept grinning stupidly all the way to his seat on the way other side of the room.

I really thought I was going to throw up, but somehow I didn't. Which was very lucky, because I'd had rainbow sprinkles on my pancakes for breakfast and it would've been a very colorful, very embarrassing kind of vomit.

The room started buzzing, but I couldn't hear or see or think. I couldn't do anything. I overheard little bits and pieces. “Going out!” “Since the party!” “He's liked her forever!” “So cool!” “Great couple!”

My face grew hotter and hotter. How could this happen? Liam was supposed to be getting back together with me, not going out with her! And she was supposed to be someone who sort of cared how I felt about things like that! Why had she invited me to her party if she didn't?

I couldn't look at either one of them for the rest of the day. I sat in the bathroom at lunch with my book because I couldn't possibly face the two of them, all happy and stuff, parading around like they were the king and queen of England, and I didn't want to talk to anyone else, either. I especially didn't want to talk to Nice Andy and stare into his nice face and watch him eat his nice food and nicely tell me how cool and awesome I am even after I had abandoned him in Amsterdam. How cool and awesome could I possibly be if Liam would rather go out with Jeg than me? Even Mr. Todd's announcement over the loudspeaker that he'd be making the Explorer Leader decision this week couldn't cheer me up.

*   *   *

By nighttime, my face had changed from sort of getting gross to totally puffy and full of nasty I've-been-crying-forever eyeball gunk. Disgusting. Like even more disgusting than disgusting. Like, disgusting-looking people would be embarrassed if they saw me. They'd be disgusted, in fact.

DISGUSTING
settled on my arm and made itself comfortable (and me miserable). Mom stuck my hands in oven mitts so I wouldn't scratch and made me look at a zillion old pictures with her as a distraction. All it did was remind me that I'm older than I used to be and I should be having an awesome pre-teenagery life but instead I'm stuck spending my nights with my hands in oven mitts.

Seeing myself looking happy should have made me happy, but it didn't. We looked at this whole photo album filled with pictures from my cupcake-themed ninth birthday party, which we'd had at a bakery. Everyone was dressed up. I'm in a sleeveless pink-and-purple-striped dress. My arms are draped around Jeg in picture after picture after picture, so you can't see all the words on me, but you can see
AWESOME
,
FUN
,
FUNNY
,
COOL
, and the one I loved the most,
FANTABULOUS
. Jeg used to call me fantabulous all the time. In our world, it was the biggest compliment you could get. No one even cared how many compliments were on me, though. Or how many not-so-great words. They weren't a big deal to any of us, not even to me. They were just there, like our birthmarks and freckles.

That birthday party was so fun. I mean, it was no Jeg party, but I had all my friends and all the cupcakes we could eat, and I was happy.

I kinda thought it would always be like that. Seeing the pictures just made me remember that that's another thing I was wrong about.

It's so weird, how one day you can feel on top of the world, and the next, that same world is crashing down in your face.

After Mom went to bed, I got up and went over to my desk. It seemed like as good a time as any to write my monthly letter to myself.

El,

Please tell me you're reading this. I need to know that you survived, that you're done with
DISGUSTING
, and maybe that the whole thing was a terrible dream because there's no way Jeg and Liam would ever really go out with each other.

All of this doing stuff has been for nothing, basically. Doing stuff has been a good distraction from thinking, but it hasn't really made my life better, and it hasn't made me Explorer Leader yet. And it hasn't stopped bad things from creeping into my brain and coming out on my body. So. I guess that's that, then.

Goals:

• None. Why bother?

From,

January Girl

*   *   *

I put my notebook back on my desk, and that's when I saw it.

In my
house
.

Well, technically it was peeking out of the smallest zipper compartment of my backpack. But my backpack was in my house. In my room. Hanging off my desk chair.

Which meant that someone had been
in my backpack
.

How was this possible? And when and where had it happened?

But, of course, there was a more urgent question on my mind: What the heck was this blue note going to say?

Elyse,

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

(I can't take credit for that. Shakespeare came up with it. Pretty smart guy, wasn't he?)

For whatever reason, today was hard for you, but try not to think anything bad about yourself. Just be.

Tomorrow will be better.

Hmm. I folded the paper up and zipped it safely into the compartment it came from.

That was surprisingly nice of my mystery person. No tough jobs today, just some friendly advice. Despite everything, it was good to know that there was one person still in my corner.

*   *   *

I tugged at my sleeves, pulling them all the way down so my thumbs fit through the holes designed specifically for them. For some reason, there were always more words on my arms during the winter, so many that my arms didn't have room for them and they'd travel down to my hands. Mittens looked a little awkward indoors, but crazy long-sleeved shirts didn't. In fact, they were sort of stylish this season, according to
Gurly
magazine. So that was a relief. I glanced over at the puzzle in the waiting room. Maybe, if I went over there and worked really fast—

“Elyse Everett?”

Darn.

Mom and I dashed into the office and got settled in our usual chairs as Dr. Patel came in.

“How's it going today?” He smiled.

Mom and I exchanged a look.

“Not great,” I said. “Shocker, right?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Show me.”

I pushed up my pants and my sleeves. There were a couple of good words still there from my quick chat with Jeg's mom, but they had mostly faded and you had to squint really hard to see them. The bad words were the boss again.

“Hmm.” Dr. Patel scratched his beard. “So last time you were here, you were contemplating whether to participate in that talent show. I take it that didn't go well?”