The Book of Luke (3 page)

Get over it. As if catching your boyfriend with his tongue down someone else’s throat is akin to twisting an ankle during a football game. It was like Sean telling me he didn’t want to do the long-distance thing when I knew he had unlimited cell phone minutes. It was bullshit. I may have been gone from Heywood for almost three years, but it seemed like we were right back where we’d left off. So far we seemed to be having the same conversation we’d had the week before I moved to Chicago, when I’d nursed Lucy through three tubes of Toll House cookie dough after Matt LeFarge told the entire baseball team he’d popped her water bra with his watch band when he tried to feel her up. Add shitty guys next to Pantene on the list of things that just don’t seem to change.

“I really can’t picture Luke cheating on you,” I admitted. “I can’t picture him cheating on anybody.”

“Oh God, you have no idea. He’s nothing like the guy you remember. Totally different. ‘I’m sure I sent it to you,’ ” Josie mimicked. ‘Check your e-mail when you get home. Maybe it got put into your spam folder by mistake.’”

Lucy and I tried not to smile. Josie did a wicked imitation of her ex-boyfriend.

“Like it’s AOL’s fault he’s a prick. I swear, I am so done with guys,” Josie concluded. “The rest of the year, there’s nobody.”

“There’s nobody left,” Lucy pointed out. “You’ve gone out with everyone.”

“Well, in a school this small, the pickings are slim.”

As if on cue, a few of those slim pickings came walking toward us.

“Hey, Emily, what are you doing here?” Matt LeFarge asked.

“I moved back.”

He nodded in agreement, as if I needed his approval of my explanation.

The water bra incident had happened almost three years ago, but still, I didn’t know how Lucy would react to Matt. I waited to see if she would ignore him or make a sarcastic comment about the piece of toilet paper pasted under his chin where he’d obviously nicked himself shaving, but there was nothing. When I left, the water bra incident was huge, but obviously Lucy had gotten over it. That’s why I couldn’t figure out the look on Josie’s face, a look of annoyance that verged on being completely and totally pissed. Maybe Josie still held a grudge against Matt out of loyalty to Lucy?

And that’s when I saw him. Luke Preston. Except the guy coming toward us wasn’t the Luke Preston I remembered from freshman year. And all of a sudden I understood why Josie was so pissed. Luke Preston didn’t just get his braces off and buy a new electric razor. Luke Preston was gorgeous.

Josie hopped off the radiator. “We should get going,” she told us, taking her books out of her locker and slamming the door shut so hard the lockers on either side flew open. “The bell’s going to ring any minute.”

I glanced down the row. “I haven’t been assigned a locker yet.”

“You can use mine until you get one,” Josie offered, waving her arm in front of locker number 117. “Voilà. Your new home away from home.”

“I’m right here,” Lucy told me, pointing to number 115. “You can put your coat in mine for now.”

How could I have doubted they’d be the same? How could I have even imagined we wouldn’t be best friends again? I stuffed my coat in the locker before taking a notebook out of my backpack.

Even though I was facing Josie as she took my backpack and tucked it into her locker, I couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder at the guy standing a few feet away. And I wasn’t the only one. Down by the junior lockers a group of girls were watching as Luke Preston ran a hand through his floppy brown hair before telling a joke that had Matt LeFarge cracking up. He might be a prick, but that sophomore who snagged Luke Preston had to be one happy girl. She’d scored big-time.

“Come on, we’ll walk you to your first class,” Lucy offered, looking down at my class schedule.

If I’d been worried that things would be different between us, I wasn’t worried anymore. Heywood Academy could change the wall color and remove the locks from the lockers and paint them blue, but some things would always be the same. I looked down the hall at the freshman watching me walk away, and I couldn’t help smiling. I knew exactly what he was thinking. The new girl wasn’t new at all. She was Josie Holden and Lucy Denton’s best friend. And she was back.

J
osie wasn’t sporting a new Rolex or channeling Paris Hilton. Lucy wasn’t fighting off recruiters or taping up offer letters in her locker (something a senior did a few years back when he was being courted by a few Ivies for their squash teams—it was completely obnoxious but it almost seemed cool at the time). All in all, as I followed Josie and Lucy down the stairwell toward the English classrooms, I was feeling a lot better about things. Lucy and Josie were on my side. And right now, that was the only thing I needed to get me through first period.

Or so I thought.

When we got to the lower level, Lucy pointed down the hallway. “Mrs. Blackwell’s class is the second on the left.”

“I’ll see you in history,” Josie told me before they both said good-bye, wished me luck, and headed off to French class.

As they walked away, their shoulders bumping into each other while Josie laughed at something Lucy had said, I felt on my own again.

I walked the ten feet to Mrs. Blackwell’s room and reached for the doorknob. My fingers stayed wrapped around the smooth stainless steel while I watched Josie and Lucy disappear into the stairwell. They gave me one last wave before heading up the stairs, and I waved back like everything was fine. But instead of turning the knob and going in, I stepped away from the door, feeling like the monkey in the middle, wavering between being glad I was back and feeling like I just wanted to go home. To Chicago.

It was an hour earlier back in Chicago. While I was standing outside Mrs. Blackwell’s classroom on the East Coast buying time before going in and facing a roomful of semistrangers, my two best friends for the past two years—the ones who knew that my boyfriend didn’t want to see me anymore and that my chances of getting into Brown at this point were slim and none—were probably finishing up breakfast and getting ready to catch the bus. Today was like any other day for them, except I wasn’t there. Lauren couldn’t bum a pencil from me before math class, and Jackie would be bumped up to salutatorian now that Will Simmons was going to take my place at the head of the class. It was only an hour earlier in Chicago, but it already felt like it was a world away.

“Aren’t you going in?” a voice asked, jolting me back to the glossy beige hallway. I looked up and saw Owen Lyle coming toward me.

“I guess I have to go in sooner or later,” I answered, waiting for Owen to reach me.

“The bell’s going to ring in about fifteen seconds, so it better be sooner.”

I used to consider Owen my first real boyfriend, until I started going out with Sean. Once Sean and I were together, all the boyfriends who came before him paled by comparison. It was like believing you liked chocolate and then tasting Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk—up until that point you had no idea how amazing chocolate ice cream could really be. There was no way to even compare how I felt about Owen to how I feel—make that
felt
—about Sean. Owen and I held hands and kissed. Sean and I could spend all night on his couch making out, and our hands were doing way more than holding. For the past four months I’d thought of Sean as my real
first
. Not
the first
in the way most people think about it. We never had sex, even if, before I found out we were moving, I did think it was inevitable. That’s probably why the thought of having sex with Sean consumed about eighty percent of my waking hours (the other twenty percent was evenly split between obsessing about my application to Brown and deciding what to get Sean for Christmas).

After a while I actually started to feel like I’d be better off just having sex with him so I could stop planning for it like some elaborate event that required orchestration and forethought, if not a party planner. First there was the question of
where
it would happen. There were so many options, including my favorite, the beach. I knew the reality of sand creeping into my private parts didn’t sound all that comfortable, but it always looked so nice in music videos and romantic comedies. But being that it was almost December when I decided that Sean would be my first
in that sense,
the beach was pretty much out of the question. Then there was the
how
—a question that Jackie, Lauren, and I decided to answer by reading an old Kama Sutra Lauren found in her basement. After close examination and much discussion, we decided the
how
would definitely depend on the
where
due to potential space constraints and limited mobility. Admittedly, the illustrations also required a level of flexibility I had no hope of ever achieving, so it wasn’t like I was in danger of performing the Yugmapada with my lotus-crossed feet any time soon. Of course, there was also the
when,
which almost created more questions than it answered. It got to the point where I’d put so much thought and planning into it that I almost felt like I should send Sean an invitation to the grand event—
please join me as I celebrate the loss of my virginity
—and the appropriate instructions to RSVP.

But even if we didn’t end up sleeping together, Sean was the first in an entirely different way. Owen may have been the first, and at that point
the only,
guy to feel me up, but Sean was the first person I thought I truly loved.

Owen stopped in front of the classroom door. “I heard you were moving back. When did you get so tall?”

I stood on my tippy toes and attempted to look down on him. “When did you get so short?”

Actually, Owen wasn’t short at all. He was the perfect height for things like kissing, resting your head on his shoulder during movies, and staring into his grayish green eyes. Owen was always cute. He was the guy everyone liked.

For a minute I wondered how easy it would be to get back together with Owen, even if it was just to get Sean out of my system. He could be the sprig of parsley that eliminated the bad taste of Sean from my mouth (parsley is a natural odor neutralizer, as pointed out in my mom’s best-selling book
Everyday Etiquette for Everyone
). So what if I was on the rebound? Owen was still cute, still had that mellow walk that made it seem like he was in no rush to get anywhere. I used to love watching him come down the hall toward me after history class, how it almost looked like he was walking in slow motion. Or maybe I’d just been brainwashed by the Hollywood idea that special effects were supposed to substitute for love.

But, instead of being the least bit turned on by Owen, there was nothing. Not even a single spark for the first guy who’d successfully unhooked my bra. Sean had ruined it for me. Right now, the only sparks I wanted were the ones that could set Sean and his L.L.Bean field coat on fire.

“You remember Luke, don’t you?” Owen asked, gesturing to his left where Luke now stood watching us.

Luke nodded at me. “Hey, Emily.”

“Hi Luke,” I answered cheerily, and then before I could stop myself added, “How’re you doing?”

Damn!

If I could have smacked myself, I would have. This was the guy who’d dumped my best friend and here I was acting like I actually cared about how
he
was doing. Why should I care about Luke? It was Josie I cared about. What kind of friend was I, chatting up the guy who’d screwed over my best friend?

Luke smiled at me and I fought the instinct to smile back, which wasn’t all that easy. After a lifetime of my mother ingraining pleasant and proper greetings in my brain, I wasn’t sure how to kick the habit.

Even though I could hear my mom’s voice telling me to say hello, maybe even extend a firm handshake and say it was nice to see him again, I didn’t. If I was going to break the nice habit, now was a good time to start.

“Forget it,” I quickly recovered, not bothering to hide my disgust as I looked Luke up and down. “I know how you’ve been. I already heard all about you, and it’s more than I care to know.”

At first, Luke seemed surprised by my reaction. In fact, he seemed almost confused.

I could guess what he was thinking—the Emily Abbott he knew would never be such a bitch. But then again, the Luke Preston I’d known wouldn’t cheat on my best friend. And he wouldn’t look like a model out of an Abercrombie catalog.

All of a sudden Luke smirked at me, and I knew he understood the situation. He knew he was too late. Josie had already gotten to me, and I was a loyal friend. I wouldn’t just ignore what Luke did to her. I cared about Josie’s feelings—I wasn’t
a guy
.

“I’m sure you do,” Luke muttered, and I shot him a look that said, in no uncertain terms, that he and I would not be friends.

Before I could lose my courage and dissolve into apologies for being so rude, I turned the doorknob and walked into the classroom just as the bell started to ring.

By lunchtime I almost felt like I was getting back into the swing of things. I had four classes under my belt and, thankfully, I wasn’t completely lost. Not that it mattered much at this point. After hearing from Brown the day before Christmas—a lovely little Christmas Eve gift from the admissions committee who, come to think of it, should have just written “bah, humbug” on the envelope and called it a day—I’d sent in my applications to a bunch of other colleges, so the rest of this year was more about making it through in one piece, rather than attempting to graduate first in my class. I already knew that wasn’t going to happen. Mr. Wesley, the headmaster, made it clear that no matter how well I did my last semester at Heywood, and no matter how well I’d done in Chicago before I left, I couldn’t be valedictorian after returning midyear. My mom had actually thanked Mr. Wesley before hanging up the phone and telling me this news, and I’d wanted to tell her to call him back and say that wasn’t fair. That I’d busted my ass for four years, and there was no way I was going to sit with the rest of the class at graduation and act like it was no big deal. It
was
a big deal. But ultimately, like everything else that had taken place in the last three weeks, I had no choice in the matter. Everyone else was making decisions for me and I was just being handed my life on a plate—and I was supposed to graciously accept it and say thank you. Even if it was a plate I didn’t order and wanted to send back.

Besides, my mom told me, I should be thankful Heywood was willing to take me back at all, considering how late in the school year it was. But the only thing I was thankful for at that point was that I’d already be accepted at Brown by the time we moved back and it wouldn’t matter. Goes to show what I know.

Lucy and Josie were waiting for me in the cafeteria after fourth period, just like they used to. They’d even saved me a seat, even though I was running late after having to go see Heywood’s secretary about getting my own locker.

“How were the rest of your classes?” Lucy asked, scooting over to make room for me. “I heard you knew all the answers to Mrs. Blackwell’s questions about
The House of Mirth.
What’s up with that?”

I carefully laid my tray on the table, making sure not to spill my chili, and sat next to her. “Yeah, well, I read it last semester.”

“Every time I open that book, my eyes glaze over. There’s no way I’m going to do well on our test next week.”

Josie peeled open her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and scraped the purple goo off the bread with a plastic spoon. Josie’s hated jelly ever since seventh grade, when she bit into her pb&j and a glob of grape jam fell into her lap. Josie claims jelly is disgusting, but I think part of the reason she still goes to all the trouble of scraping her sandwiches until they’re jelly-free is that Curtis Ludlow told our entire class Josie had gotten her period and no matter how many times she insisted the reddish stain was Welch’s grape jelly, everyone had liked Curtis’s version of the story better.

I thought maybe Josie’s mom would have finally given in and let Josie bring her lunch from home to avoid the daily scraping. But when meals are included in tuition, I guess it’s hard to justify brown bagging it—at least that’s what Josie’s mom told her when she brought up the idea right after the Curtis incident.

“Oh, who are you kidding?” Josie asked. “The test hardly matters. You’ve got UNC and Duke battling it out for you.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “They’re not ‘battling it out.’”

“Then what would you call it?”

“They’re ‘actively interested,’” Lucy paraphrased, even though we all knew it pretty much meant the same thing.

“Hi, Emily, welcome back.” Mandy Pinta put her tray down on the table and took a seat across from me. “Are you guys talking about what you’re going to do for the time capsule?”

“They’re still doing that?” I asked, kind of flattered that Mandy would automatically assume Lucy, Josie, and I would be doing something together for the time capsule even though I’d been back at Heywood for all of four hours.

“Of course,” Mandy assured me. “It wouldn’t be Heywood if we didn’t have the time capsule, right?”

Ever since Heywood Academy’s class of 1973 came up with the idea of creating time capsules before graduation, every single senior class has created one, throwing in stuff like a few magazines (mostly
Sports Illustrated
s from the guys, and
Seventeen
s or
Cosmo
s from the girls), some
Boston Globe
s, and music. It sounded cool in theory, but the truth is every time the capsules are opened nobody really cares. The most interesting thing that was ever uncovered was the roach clip the class of 1983 claimed to have used on a senior trip to a Police concert. When they opened the time capsule ten years later, the class of 1993 supposedly put the roach clip to the test, but I think that’s just Heywood legend, like the year they claim a class opened the time capsule and discovered somebody’s middle finger with a mood ring still on it.