The Book of Luke (10 page)

But my mom never suspected a thing, and Owen didn’t give me a wilted bouquet or cheesy stuffed animal. He gave me a five-dollar gift card to Starbucks. And, while it might not sound like the most romantic gesture in the world, I thought it was perfect. The first time we went anywhere together it was freezing cold in December and he took me to Starbucks for a hot chocolate. So that night at the Valentine’s dance, Owen scored some serious points for the gift certificate and also landed the honor of copping a feel of my new satin bra (color: coral peach).

Luke hadn’t been at that dance, although at the time I didn’t really care where Luke was. Luke Preston wasn’t somebody you noticed back then. It wasn’t like he was an outcast or anything like that, more like he just didn’t stand out. Sure, he played sports, but he wasn’t exactly a jock. He did well enough in classes, but his name never appeared in the framed list of honor students that hung in the front hall (my name was always first, mostly because the list was alphabetical and Abbott was pretty much guaranteed to land me first in any alphabetical listing). Luke was the type of guy who seemed to always be in the background, one level removed from what was going on. Owen and I were going out, Matt LeFarge and Carolyn Mills were dating, but Luke never seemed interested in any of the girls in our class, and, with his braces and an odd little cowlick on the back of his head, it wasn’t like Luke was much to look at, although, now that I thought about it, and as time has proven, both of those things were easily remedied. All he had to do was remove the silver brackets from his teeth, grow his hair a little longer, and shoot up a few inches. He also used to be one of those guys you’d call “husky,” but it seemed that everything had equalized in the three short summer months between freshman and sophomore year. And here it was taking me two years to grow out my bangs. Go figure.

Now Owen and Luke were best friends, and all I could think about was that Owen had probably told Luke about feeling me up. That, when it came to the jiggle scale, Owen had firsthand experience—literally. Maybe that’s why Luke said he’d meet me at the dance. Maybe he thought he’d be able to cop an easy feel.

I kept telling myself that I was immune to anything Luke could try. I was practically Teflon-coated, I was so impervious to what limited charm Luke might lay on me. I was no sophomore. I was a senior who knew what she was doing. And what I was doing was teaching Luke Preston a lesson.

“Where can Luke be?” Lucy asked after an hour had passed and we were still sitting on the bleachers, waiting for him to walk through the door. Even TJ had come and gone, bored with the whole scene. He never actually came over and said hello to me or anything, just sort of nodded in my direction and acknowledged my presence. Or maybe he was merely making sure I noticed him so I’d vouch that he’d put in his forty minutes and then he could leave without feeling like he’d lied to our mother about where he was going to be. Even my younger brother thought he was too cool for the dance, yet here I was sitting on the bleachers like I had nothing better to do. I mean, I didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I got the feeling that we were being stared at by everyone in the gym, like they were trying to figure out what the hell we were doing here.

“Do you get the feeling people are looking at us?” I finally asked.

Lucy nodded. “Yeah, I do. Mandy Pinta’s little sister was even pointing at us before.”

“I saw that,” Josie exclaimed. “She pointed right at us and then whispered something to her friend.”

That was definitely not normal. When I was a freshman, I would never have whispered about a senior. There was always a sort of unspoken reverence for the senior girls, and there was no way we’d talk about them. At least not while they were right there to see what we were saying. Even though my mom had drilled into me that I shouldn’t talk about people, sometimes I just couldn’t resist. Like the time I heard a rumor that Stacy Voland, a senior who wouldn’t give a freshman girl the time of day, was pregnant and had to go to Connecticut to have an abortion. But I wasn’t the only one talking about it. Everyone knew, so somehow that made me not feel so bad about repeating it.

But none of us was pregnant or the source of anything else remotely scandalous, so what the hell were all the looks for? “Is there something going on that we don’t know about?”

Josie shook her head. “No, I just think they’re wondering why three seniors are here.”

“I’m beginning to wonder the same thing myself,” I muttered.

Lucy patted my knee, trying to make me feel better. “Maybe Luke had some family thing he had to do at the last minute. Or he could have gotten sick. I heard something was going around, you know.”

“Maybe his car got stuck in the snow,” Josie offered, but we all knew the truth. Luke wasn’t stuck in the snow. He wasn’t at home with his family or in bed with some debilitating disease. There was nothing wrong with him. But there had to be something wrong with me. Because, even though none of us said it out loud, we all knew why he wasn’t there.

Luke Preston was blowing me off.

I’d been stood up. And even though I shouldn’t have cared, even though I should have let it roll off my back as yet another example of how badly Luke needed our guide, all I could think was that it was just another example of how my life was circling the toilet bowl.

“We should just get out of here,” I told them, gathering up my coat and standing. “He’s not coming.”

“Maybe we should give it another half hour?” Josie suggested, but all that would do was give me another thirty minutes to watch groups of freshman girls dance together while I thought about what a loser I looked like, sitting there waiting for Luke to show up.

I shook my head and headed for the balloon-covered door, where Mr. Wesley wore a set of little feather wings and pretended to shoot me with his arrows of love. Getting broken up with on moving day was bad, but now I’d hit a new low. Stood up on Valentine’s Day while Cupid watched. “Let’s get out of here.”

On the way to Josie’s car I couldn’t help but think about Sean. There were so many reasons to think about him at that moment, not to mention that less than two months after he broke up with me I was getting blown off by another guy. So what if I didn’t really like the guy blowing me off? That wasn’t the point. The point was, here I was supposed to lure Luke into a date, to get the hottest guy in school to fall for me so I could show Sean that he’d blown it, and I couldn’t even get the guy to show up.

“You can sit in the front seat,” Lucy offered, as if my consolation for an evening of rejection was a warm ass courtesy of the heated leather passenger seat. But I didn’t offer to sit in the back, in the dark, where I could avoid having to talk about what just happened. It was February, after all, and even though I’d just been humiliated in front of my two best friends, I wasn’t about to turn down a heated seat.

Lucy leaned forward from the backseat, her hands holding on to the headrests as she talked to me. “Look, it was just our first shot, we still have time.”

“She’s right,” Josie quickly agreed. “If anything, this just goes to prove how badly our guide is needed.”

I understood what she was trying to say, but I also realized that the reason Luke didn’t show wasn’t because he didn’t know better. He didn’t show because he didn’t really give a crap about seeing me.

“This should motivate you even more, not bum you out.”

Lucy nodded. “Yeah, use this to your advantage. Don’t get mad, get even. Get him to change.”

How was I supposed to get motivated to change a guy who was so obviously beyond help? And that’s when it hit me. The ugly truth. What if it wasn’t Luke who had the problem? What if the person beyond help was me?

“What a prick,” I mumbled, throwing my coat against the bench in the laundry room.

“Who’s a prick?” The light in the kitchen flicked on and TJ was standing there waiting for my answer.

“Nobody.”

“It wasn’t nobody,” he corrected me, pouring himself a glass of orange juice. “I know who you’re talking about.”

“How would you know who I’m talking about?”

“Two words: Luke Preston.”

“And why would I be talking about Luke Preston?” I wanted to know, even though I already knew damn well.

“Because you were supposed to meet him at the dance tonight.”

I froze, my hand in midair as I reached to take the carton of orange juice from TJ. “How do you know about that?”

“It’s a small school, Emily. Everyone knows everything. Especially if it involves Luke.”

“When you say everyone, you mean…”

TJ wasn’t one to sugarcoat the situation. He told me exactly like it was. “I mean
everyone.
”

He had to be kidding. “So tonight, when we were at the dance?”

“Everyone knew you were waiting for Luke.”

Oh. My. God. Mandy Pinta’s little sister wasn’t pointing at us—she was pointing at me! And we weren’t getting stared at because we were the only seniors at the dance,
I
was getting stared at because I was the pathetic girl waiting for a guy who was never going to show up!

Now I was pissed. This was even worse than getting blown off. This was getting blown off and publicly humiliated at the same time. And there was no way I was letting Luke Preston get away with that. He wasn’t going to win this battle. I was. This wasn’t just about the guide anymore or helping the girls in the class of 2017. This was personal.

“The Celtics were playing the Lakers tonight,” TJ informed me, as if I should have studied the NBA schedule before making any plans. “There’s no way Luke was ever going to show up. Everyone knew that.”

Everyone, apparently, but the three idiots sitting on the bleachers.

I grabbed a glass out of the cabinet and poured my own glass of juice. “And how did everyone know that?” I demanded.

“Like I said, it’s a small school. Everyone knows everything.”

Not everything,
I thought. Not everybody knew I was going to change Luke Preston. Or kill myself trying.

I
wanted to tell Luke that he was a dick. That he had no right standing me up or making me look like a complete idiot in front of my friends and the entire school. My God, there was a forty-five-year-old headmaster donning feather wings and shooting imaginary arrows around the gym, and yet everyone was looking at me like
I
was the loser! But, even though I should have called Luke out for not meeting me at the dance, I didn’t. Not because I was incapable of being cruel like Luke (although, at this point, Polite Patty’s daughter had yet to prove she was capable of acting less than considerate—I was working on it), but because treating Luke the way he treated me wouldn’t help prove the guide worked. It would only prove I was capable of being nasty, too. Which was what I wanted to prove, what I wanted to
do,
but in an entirely different way.

So confusing.

I had to forego my short-term gain, and the personal satisfaction I’d get from bitching out Luke, for the long-term goal. Permanent change. And ultimate humiliation.

So, instead of saying what I wanted to say, I stuck to the plan. Only now it was my plan. Luke wasn’t just going to like me, he was going to fall big-ego, bloated-head over heels for me. He was going to want me more than he’d ever wanted anyone before—and definitely more than he wanted some sophomore from St. Michael’s. And then I was going to dump him on his perfect little ass. Hard. And everyone was going to know about it. I swear, in the end, everyone was going to know that Luke Preston didn’t get the best of me. And they’d know that I was the one who got the best of him.

On Monday, right before lunch, there he was, standing at his locker while an adoring group of eighth graders giggled as they walked by. Yes, they actually giggled. I knew Luke wouldn’t say anything to them—they were eighth graders, for God’s sake. But just as the girls peered over their shoulders for one more look at Almighty Luke Preston, he did something that shocked the hell out of me. He winked. And in that instant, Luke gained the admiration of an entire generation of young giggly girls who would never forget that moment for as long as they lived. I knew this for a fact. And it made me want to throw up.

When we were in eighth grade there was a senior, Billy Stratton, who everyone—and I mean
everyone
—was gaga over. The thing was, he had no idea. I don’t think he dated a single girl his entire time at Heywood. That’s why I never felt bad when he didn’t notice me smiling at him or how I’d circle the hallway outside his classes even if it meant I was late for mine (okay, by now you know I’d never be late for class, but I came awfully close, thanks to Billy Stratton). I always chalked Billy’s lack of interest in me up to the fact that he never seemed to notice anyone, rather than the reality that I was a five-foot-tall, thirteen-year-old with pink rubber bands on her braces and hair in a perpetual state of static cling (a situation I have cured with ample amounts of styling product).

Luke was definitely as cute as Billy Stratton, but he also enjoyed it way too much. Billy seemed oblivious to his effect on the girls in our school—Luke Preston reveled in it. Luke was the type of guy who had girls sidle up to him at movie theaters and introduce themselves. He was the kind of guy who had strange girls pass him notes with their names and phone numbers written in big bubbly writing, their i’s dotted with little hearts. And it made me hate him even more. Which was probably just as well. I found my disgust highly motivating.

I waited until the posse of adoring girls disappeared down the hall, then I took a deep breath, put on my best Polite Patty smile, channeled my mother’s finest cocktail party banter, and went to work.

“Hey, I missed you on Friday night.” Asshole.

Luke looked over at me and shrugged. “Yeah, I didn’t go.”

Obviously.

“Well, I missed seeing you there,” I said softly, biting my lip to keep from telling him he made me look like a total fool.

He gave another halfhearted shrug and offered a very unconvincing, “Sorry.”

Yeah, right.

“Hey, no problem.” I mustered up a laugh that I hoped didn’t sound as fake as it felt. And then I charged on. “It was pretty funny, going back and remembering what it was like to be a freshman and all excited for a dance.” I flashed Luke my most sparkly smile, exposing two years’ worth of braces, rubber bands, headgear, and retainers and six months’ worth of Crest Whitestrips.

Luke turned back to face his locker, completely dismissing me. “I don’t think I’ve ever been excited for a dance.”

My pearly whites and twelve thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia were lost on Luke. Could this guy get any more annoying? Did he not notice I was attempting to flirt with him?

Apparently not, because whatever he was looking for in his locker was about a billion times more interesting than the excruciating conversation he was having with me. And, honestly, I couldn’t really blame him. I sucked at this.

I swallowed hard and gave Luke another smile that was supposed to appear coy, but probably just made me look constipated. “Maybe you just never danced with the right person,” I told him. Jesus, after this I’d be able to write my mom’s next chapter on how to grovel at the feet of the most annoying guy in the world.

Luke stopped pulling books from his locker and stood up. “Really? You think so?” he asked, an amused grin spreading across his lips. It was a grin that so obviously meant,
If you’re trying to flirt with me, you’re doing a crappy job.

“And why is that?” he asked.

“Well, I just meant that maybe if the right person was waiting at the dance for you, you’d actually be excited,” I answered, pretty much just paraphrasing what I’d already said. So much for my witty repartee.

“So, did you actually have fun at the dance?” Luke leaned against his locker and waited for my answer.

“Not so much. I guess I was just waiting for the right person to show up.”

Luke tipped his head to the side and squinted at me as if all of a sudden he realized who he was talking to. It was like a lightbulb went on. Literally. His face seemed to turn on as if he’d flipped a switch. All of a sudden he wasn’t looking at me like I was the girl who’d given him nasty looks before English class. Instead, I was the next conquest, someone who would bask in the glow of his usual charm—although if this was his attempt at
charm,
he could use a few lessons. On second thought, that’s what I was here for.

“Are you doing anything for lunch?” Luke asked.

I shook my head and gave him a vague, and what I thought was a slightly teasing, “No real plans.”

Luke grabbed his coat and slammed the locker door shut. “I was going to go to Sam’s and get something to eat. Want to come?”

I knew Lucy and Josie were already waiting for me downstairs in the cafeteria, but they’d kill me if I didn’t take Luke up on his offer.

“Sure. Sounds great.”

“Grab your coat and I’ll go get my car. I’ll pick you up out front.”

What, he couldn’t wait three seconds while I got my coat? Boy, I was really letting him off easy. Polite Patty would have insisted he wait for me and then come around to open my car door.

But instead of pointing this out, I just smiled and gazed at Luke like he was the greatest thing since concealer. It was sickening. And it was working. “Great. I’ll be right there.”

Sam’s is a little general store that’s about five minutes from Heywood. Only seniors are allowed to leave school premises during the day, and mostly they just go to Sam’s. Not that there’s anything to do there except buy food—they have amazing potato logs, these huge french fry wedges that you can get loaded with sour cream and cheese and just about anything else in the deli—but at any rate, it’s somewhere to go. Usually there’s at least a few Heywood seniors sitting in their cars in the parking lot killing time before they have to make it back for the next class. But when we pulled into the gravel parking lot, it was empty.

“I used to wonder what went on here,” I told Luke, glancing around the vacant lot. “Apparently I wasn’t missing much.”

“That’s funny. I used to picture all the seniors huddled over a bong in Billy Stratton’s car feeding their munchies with potato logs.”

Was Luke talking about
my
Billy Stratton? The Billy Stratton I used to imagine coming over to my house one afternoon and proclaiming his love for me? “Billy Stratton used to carry a bong around in his car?”

“I don’t know if he actually carried it around in his car, but he was always stoned, so it had to be somewhere.”

“Are you sure? How do you know all this?”

“Everyone knew; it’s a small school, Emily. What, did you think he walked around with his head down because he found the pattern on the linoleum floor fascinating?”

“I just thought he was shy and aloof.”

“No, Emily, he was baked out of his mind most of the time.”

And, just like that, my fantasy of shy, perfect Billy Stratton with the faraway eyes evaporated in a puff of pot smoke.

Luke must have noticed I was spending way too much time thinking about this news, because he waved his hand in front of my eyes in an attempt to get my attention. “Not you, too.”

“Me, too, what?”

“You were hot for Billy Stratton.”

“I was not,” I protested, although I don’t know why. It’s not like I was the only one.

“You don’t have to deny it. We knew all the girls were hot for him.”

“And how did you know that?”

Luke squinted at me and tapped his head with an index finger. “I watch things,” he told me, his voice soft, like he was telling me a secret.

“Like what things?” I wanted to know.

Luke leaned across the seats and got so close I swear I could smell the fabric softener on his collar. “Like how you were standing outside Mrs. Blackwell’s class waiting for me.”

“What?” I pulled away too fast and smacked my head on the passenger window.

“I saw you there talking with Owen, how you wouldn’t go in until you knew I’d seen you,” Luke explained, still hovering awfully close.

God, the ego on this guy. What next, I moved back to Branford just to be near him? “I was not waiting for you,” I insisted.

“You weren’t?” He sat back and toyed with the buckle on his seat belt. “Then what were you doing out there?”

I almost told him that I was preparing myself to go into the classroom, that I was thinking about everything I’d left behind in Chicago, when I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be trying to convince Luke that I wasn’t interested in him. I was supposed to be convincing him I
was
. Step one was earning Luke’s trust, and I was about to try and do that.

“Okay, you’re right,” I admitted, trying to sound like he’d found me out. “I was waiting for you.”

Luke smiled and leaned toward me again. “See, I thought so.”

I avoided looking at him, and instead stared at the windshield, which, with all our conversation going on inside, and the frigid temperatures outside, had fogged up.

This was probably how Luke approached all the girls he thought he could make out with. He lured them into his car, parked in a deserted parking lot, and then moved in. Maybe this was even how he confirmed the accuracy of his jiggle scale.

I stared straight ahead and braced myself for what I was sure would be a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of my lips. But instead of making a move on me, Luke opened his car door, letting in a cold gust that wasn’t nearly as warm as the kiss I’d been expecting. “Come on, I’m starving.”

Luke ordered Sam’s famous potato logs and I asked for a turkey sandwich, something I figured wouldn’t make a mess in Luke’s car. Not that I should have been all that concerned about messing up his upholstery, but I couldn’t help it. I’d been brought up to believe that cleanliness was next to godliness, and that godliness extended to the interior of automobiles.

Once we were back in the car, Luke really did seem more interested in his potato logs than the girl in his passenger seat. Mainly, me. The very same girl who was supposed to be taking care of step one.

“Thanks for inviting me to have lunch with you,” I said, and then couldn’t resist adding, “I mean, sacrificing your tableside service and all.”

Luke laughed and suddenly seemed awfully intent on the Styrofoam container in his lap. “Yeah, well…” Luke avoided looking up at me and, if I didn’t know better, I’d say he almost looked embarrassed.

“When you asked me to come to Sam’s, I almost thought you’d expect me to carry your lunch to the car,” I went on, enjoying his discomfort a little too much.

“They’re sophomores,” he told me, tearing open a couple of packets of ketchup and squirting a pool of it next to his potato logs. “What can I say?”

There was a lot he could say. He could say it was disgusting to expect a bunch of girls to serve him lunch every day. He could admit that it verged on degrading every single girl who stood next to his table asking if he needed a straw for his drink. He could even tell me that tomorrow he’d ask them to stop.