The Book of Luke (4 page)

Lucy shrugged. “We haven’t even thought about what we’re going to do. What about you?”

Mandy waited until she’d finished chewing her turkey sandwich. “Pam and Carolyn and I were thinking that maybe we’d do a scrapbook of our senior year.”

Not exactly original, but then again, nothing in the time capsule ever was.

While Mandy continued to give us a rundown of the other mundane options they’d considered for the capsule—a video, a photo collage, or a collection of quotes from everyone in the senior class—I noticed something weird taking place over in the far corner of the cafeteria. It wasn’t just weird. It was completely bizarre. A group of six girls, probably sophomores because I didn’t recognize any of them, were walking in a line over to the table where Matt and Luke and Owen were seated. Only Luke didn’t have any food in front of him. And the girl leading the line walking directly toward him was holding a lunch tray out in front of her like it was an offering she was preparing to lay at the foot of a god. Or, I was quickly realizing, at the foot of Luke Preston.

“What’s up with that?” I asked Josie, and pointed my spoon toward the line of handmaidens now gathered around Luke’s table.

“Luke’s fan club.”

“Don’t tell me they do this every day.”

Josie licked a glob of peanut butter falling out of her sandwich. “Okay, I won’t.”

“So they bring him his lunch? That’s insane.” I watched as Luke sent the girls away and dug into his own bowl of chili. “Don’t those girls have any self-respect?”

“They’re sophomores,” Josie told me, as if that was enough of an excuse.

It was truly nauseating the way Luke just let the girls lay his tray on the table and walk away without so much as a thank you. I mean, letting a group of girls wait on you hand and foot is arrogant enough, but not even acting like you appreciate it is inexcusable. The whole scene was outrageous, and what made Luke’s Lunch Legion even more annoying was that I couldn’t help seeing a little of me in those girls. Because I could recall more than a few times when I’d brought Sean his lunch. I hadn’t felt pathetic at the time, but seeing those girls look at Luke like he was perfection incarnate, I realized for the first time that I’d felt like that about Sean. I’d wanted to believe he was perfect, too.

“What a jerk,” I mumbled into my chili.

“Oh, wait. The best is yet to come. When Luke’s finished with his lunch he’ll just walk away and the girls will clean up his crap so he doesn’t have to.”

I reached for my chocolate milk and held it up. “Guys suck.”

Josie tipped her bottled water against the carton, toasting me. “Here, here.”

“So, do you have any ideas, Emily?” Mandy asked me, and I managed to take my eyes off Luke before she could notice I’d been staring.

“Any ideas about what?”

“The senior class time capsule.”

“We’ll probably do the same as every other class—a few CDs, some newspaper clippings, maybe a lottery ticket.” Lucy looked to Josie and me to see what we thought.

“Come on, we can come up with something better than that, can’t we?” I asked, attempting to balance a spoonful of chili without spilling it all over the table, but failing.

Lucy passed me a napkin. “We could try.”

“How are you getting home this afternoon?” Josie asked me.

“My mom was going to pick me and TJ up. We’re still figuring out what to do.” Since Heywood students came from at least six towns in the area, we didn’t have very many buses, just two or three for the towns with the most kids. The rest of us were either picked up by school vans, carpooled with other families, or, once we got our licenses, drove ourselves. When I left Heywood, none of us had our licenses yet, so it was bizarre to think that all the cars parked in the parking lot now belonged to the same classmates who couldn’t ride a moped without causing bodily injury during our freshman class trip to Block Island. Even though Mr. Wesley had repeatedly warned us to be careful, half the class had ended up with gauze around their ankles after burning off several layers of skin on the mopeds’ tailpipes. Josie still had a vague scar on her ankle, I think.

“Why don’t you call your mom and tell her you’re coming home with me and we can try to come up with something better than a copy of
People
magazine with Britney Spears on the cover?”

Wait out front with TJ for my mom to pick me up, or catch a ride with Josie. There was no contest. “Consider it done.”

After last period I went to meet Lucy and Josie by their lockers, but only Lucy was there. She didn’t see me at first, and I didn’t call out her name or do anything so she’d notice I was walking toward her. Instead I stopped and watched her sort through her books as she obviously tried to decide which ones she needed to take home. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like Duke or UNC or any other school that was recruiting Lucy would turn her down because she didn’t do well on a French quiz. Which was ironic, now that I thought about it. Here I was, the one who used to help Lucy conjugate French verbs—even though I took Spanish—and yet she was being wooed by schools while all I had was a wrinkled letter with a tear-smeared Brown University logo. Standing there watching Lucy spend so much time figuring out which books she needed, I felt something so unexpected, so urgent, I almost didn’t know what it was. It was like how all of a sudden you’re not hungry until someone mentions a cheeseburger and fries, and then it’s all you can do to keep your stomach from growling. But what I was feeling weren’t pangs of hunger. They were worse. They were pangs of jealousy.

I’d never envied Lucy before. Not when she’d be waiting at the finish line, barely out of breath, long before the rest of us completed our run around the soccer field. Not when she was asked to be on the varsity team when most freshmen were just hoping to sit on the JV bench in a uniform. And not even when she stood up at school assemblies and accepted yet another athletic award for “outstanding this” and “extraordinary that.” It never bothered me because each of us seemed to have our place, our little niche where we fit. I was the good one, the nice girl who got good grades. Lucy was the amazing athlete. And Josie was the scholarship student who made decent grades and didn’t stand out in any particular way except that she seemed to have a confidence that made her seem special, like how some stars seem to shine brighter or twinkle faster than others when you look at the sky, even though you can’t quite figure out why. Which is why it was even more unbelievable that Luke Preston would ditch her for some random St. Michael’s sophomore. Nobody ever ditched Josie. She was always the one who did the ditching.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Lucy asked, finally noticing me standing there watching her.

“Nothing.” I went over to her. “I thought we were all meeting here after last class.”

“Josie’s finishing up in the art room; she’s still got some pictures developing or something.”

Josie is fanatical about her photographs. I’d say that more than half of all the yearbook pictures from our freshman year were taken by her, which is why there’s only one candid picture of Josie and about a million of me and Lucy. And even in that one picture, Josie isn’t alone. Lucy and I are standing right next to her, laughing as the shutter of the camera snapped closed.

“I don’t know why she just doesn’t do it at home,” Lucy wondered aloud, moving aside so I could grab my coat out of her locker. “She has her own photo lab in the new house, you know.”

No, I did not know. “Really? An entire photo lab?”

“Oh yeah. Wait until you see the Holdens’ new place. You’re not going to believe it.”

Even more unbelievable than a house with a photography lab was the fact that Josie was actually one of the few scholarship students at Heywood before I left. Not that it made her any different from the rest of us, at least not in any real noticeable way. We all had to follow a dress code, so Josie didn’t stand out from anyone else. I don’t even know if anyone besides me and Lucy knew Josie received a scholarship to attend Heywood Academy; it was that much of a nonissue. There were only a few times when I can really remember thinking that Josie felt different from the rest of us, like when we took our freshman class trip to Block Island. The whole time we were there, everyone was buying souvenir T-shirts and baseball hats and little shot glasses with whales etched into the sides. But when we were all on the bus heading back to Branford, I noticed that Josie was the only one who didn’t have a plastic shopping bag stuffed with mementos of our trip. She only held a small keychain with a gray plastic whale dangling off it.

“She doesn’t seem that different, though,” I told Lucy, wondering if Josie still had the keychain.

“Oh, she’s not, really. I mean, in the beginning when they started building the new ‘estate,’ as Josie’s mother calls it, she was into it. But then she realized that her parents were
way
into it—or at least her mother was.”

It was hard to picture Mrs. Holden, the woman who lived in a velour sweatsuit every day of the week, insisting on calling her house an estate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mrs. Holden in anything but a running suit, although I’d never seen her actually run anywhere.

“Does her mom still wear those velour running outfits?”

“Oh yeah, only now they’re Juicy Couture and she wears them to do yoga in her meditation room.”

“A meditation room?”

“I told you. Wait until you see this place. You’re not going to believe it.” Lucy waited for me to grab my backpack out of Josie’s locker. “Come on, Josie said to meet her at the car.”

“I still can’t believe she has her own car.”

“Not just a car,” Lucy assured me. “A shiny new BMW.”

“A
re you ready for this?” Lucy asked over her shoulder as we slowed down and prepared to turn into Josie’s driveway. At least, I thought it was a driveway, although it didn’t look like any driveway I’d ever seen before. It looked more like some sort of cobblestone road.

“Wait until you see the stables,” Josie told me. “My mom thinks I’m supposed to become some sort of equestrian just because she always loved reading
The Black Stallion
. I am now the proud owner of a pair of britches and a velvet riding helmet, if you can believe it.”

“They have two horses, Ginger and Pinecone.” Lucy lowered her voice. “Josie hates them.”

“Only because they hate me.”

“They don’t hate you,” Lucy insisted. “They just need to get used to you.”

“Well, they had no problem getting used to Lucy. She was practically National Velvet out there, jumping over fences.”

“Don’t listen to her. I wasn’t jumping over any fences.”

The thing is, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was. Lucy was the kid who could ride a two-wheeler while the rest of us were still just thrilled to have pink streamers on our handlebars.

“Prepare yourself, we’re here.” Lucy tapped on the glass with her index finger, and instead of the silence I expected, there was a clicking noise as she rapped the passenger-side window. Lucy actually had fingernails! She’s always been a nail biter, despite her mom’s best efforts, including special gloves Lucy had to wear to bed at night, and even some toxic polish that was supposed make Lucy gag if she even put her fingers near her mouth. I never expected Lucy to ever stop biting her nails, but there they were. It wasn’t like she had long red nails with rhinestones glued on the tips or anything, but, still, they weren’t the nibbled-on fragments I was used to.

“Don’t hold it against me,” Josie said before flipping on her blinker. “I had nothing to do with this.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about until we pulled into the driveway and were face-to-face with two stone pillars flanking a wrought-iron gate with a huge script
H
in the center.

“The
H
is for Holden, obviously, but I think it’s for horrifying. It’s obnoxious, I know,” Josie apologized, pointing to the gate. “Not to mention that it sucks when you’re in a rush.” Josie pushed a code into the number pad tucked inside the stone column and the black iron gate slowly opened.

Lucy pointed toward the end of the long driveway. “You think this is good, wait until you see the house.”

Calling what was waiting for us at the end of the driveway a house was like calling the ten acres of rolling lawns a yard. I mean, there was a stone turret, for God’s sake! I almost expected knights on horseback to be jousting on the front lawn, like the time Mandy Pinta had her eleventh birthday party at Medieval Times.

“What, no moat?” I joked.

“Oh, my parents would have tried, but the town probably wouldn’t have given them a permit,” Josie answered, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “So we have some CIA-endorsed security system instead. I swear, I’m lucky they didn’t go for the attack dogs. That was an option for a while.” In addition to horses, Josie is afraid of dogs.

The massive stone mansion wasn’t anything like the house I used to go to for sleepovers, Crystal Light, and an endless supply of Pop-Tarts. It had to be five times the size of Josie’s old house.

“Welcome to my world,” Josie announced, pulling around the circular drive before coming to a stop in front of two huge front doors with monstrous bronze door knockers that appeared to be staring at us.

“Are those lions’ heads?” I asked, climbing out of the backseat.

“Oh yeah,” Josie confirmed, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe it herself. “Wait until you see the hippopotamus statues out back by the pool. It’s like freaking Wild Kingdom around here.”

As Josie led us through the front door and down the cavernous marble hallways that twisted and turned around impeccably decorated rooms, I felt totally out of place. It was like visiting a museum, not somebody’s house. And definitely not
Josie’s
house. How could she possibly be comfortable surrounded by chandeliers and fluted columns and intricate oil paintings? And that was just in the powder room we passed on the way to her room. It almost made me wonder if this was how Josie used to feel around Heywood before she traded in her scholarship money for a field named after her dad.

“Incredible, huh?” Lucy asked, grabbing my hand and pulling me around a corner before I could bump into a bubbling fountain of water in the center of the hall. “Come on, Josie’s room is this way.”

It was surreal. Here we were sitting on Josie’s bed just like we used to, only the bed had been upgraded from a twin to a queen, and instead of a hodgepodge of pictures Scotch taped to the wall, Josie’s black-and-white photographs were artfully displayed in frames like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. I would have killed for a room like this when I was younger, but it was slightly overkill for a seventeen-year-old. I mean, there was a sheer white canopy covering the bed and a huge quilted headboard with a billion little pink rosebuds. It looked like something out of a feminine hygiene commercial. The only thing missing was the gentle breeze and the billowing curtains—and the voiceover of a woman talking about feeling fresh as a daisy.

No, this wasn’t the bedroom I remembered. In fact, Josie didn’t even have a bedroom anymore. She had what most people, like my mother, would refer to as a “suite.” There was the sleeping area, where we were sprawled out on the bed, and the sitting area, with a love seat and ottoman that looked as if they’d never been used. And then there were the panels of mirrors creating some sort of fun-house effect outside a walk-in closet that could have housed a family of four. Very comfortably.

“It’s called the ‘
dressing area,
’” Josie explained, without me having to ask. “It’s ridiculous, I know. But not nearly as ridiculous as the ass fountain in the bathroom.”

“She means the bidet,” Lucy told me.

Josie sighed. “The interior designer insisted.”

An interior designer, now that made sense. I knew there was no way Josie’s mom was responsible for the perfectly matched fabrics, impeccably placed furniture, and tastefully arranged throw pillows. Maybe if they’d been velour.

“So, give us your take on Heywood.” Lucy propped up a throw pillow behind her back, grabbed a catalog from the stack of magazines on Josie’s night table, and sat cross-legged while she waited for me to provide commentary on our school from an outsider’s perspective. Or, at least the perspective of a former insider coming back.

I gave them a preliminary rundown—Mandy Pinta looked way better than she used to even though I couldn’t figure out why, our headmaster had lost about forty pounds, and the new gym teacher reminded me a lot of our nurse. I intentionally left out any commentary on Luke, although he was probably the person who had changed the most.

They filled me in on a few details that made my observations make more sense—Mandy got a nose job last year for her birthday, Mr. Wesley joined Weight Watchers after he realized he could no longer button his headmaster blazer with the Heywood Academy crest, and the new gym teacher was Nurse Kelly’s brother.

I waited for them to go on, to continue talking about the people in our class, but instead they both sat there waiting for me to say something. Only I didn’t know what else they expected me to say.

And that’s when it happened. The awkward silence. The moment we ran out of things to talk about because, apart from sharing the same school, we really hadn’t shared anything else in way too long.

I knew it had been too easy.

My eyes darted around the room looking for something to comment on, something to talk about. All I could hear was the second hand on the grandfather clock in the corner of the room counting how long it would take for us to find something,
anything,
to say to one another. But, unless I wanted to bring up the pleated trim on the love seat in the sitting area, I couldn’t come up with anything.

Just as I was approaching a level of desperation so dire I almost considered asking to see the bidet, Josie finally broke the silence. “So, is Chicago as windy as they say?”

I explained how the Windy City actually referred to the long-winded politicians and not the weather. “Even though it can get pretty cold by Lake Michigan,” I conceded, beginning to get depressed by our conversation—or lack thereof.

Really, the weather? Was this what we’d been reduced to? Was it my turn now? Was I supposed to ask them about the average accumulated snowfall for the month of December? This entire scene reminded me of an exercise my mom would give her clients for a seminar on the art of small talk.

Lucy shifted uncomfortably and punched her throw pillow twice, like she was trying to buy time before having to come up with another topic and an insufficiently plump pillow was part of the problem. “We don’t want to inundate you with a bunch of questions, but there’s so much we don’t know. Like who your best friends were or even where you’re applying to college. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Yeah, it is,” I admitted, slightly relieved that she felt like I did. “But ask away, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Where do you want me to start?”

“How about with your friends?”

So that’s what I did. I told them about Jackie and Lauren. “Jackie and Lauren?
J
and
L
? Do you see any sort of coincidence there?” Josie asked, and I realized for the first time that my best friends in Chicago and Boston shared the same first initials. I gave them the abridged version of my school in Evanston, including a brief description of the city and how we could go to the beach and still see the top of the Hancock Building in downtown Chicago. I told them about Sean, and how we’d broken up before I left for Boston, but I left out the part about it not being a mutual decision, and made it sound like a rational agreement between two people instead of an arbitrary decision by one. Instead of repeating the scene, instead of going through the gory details, I told Lucy and Josie the same thing Sean told me:
It wasn’t like we’d be able to see each other anymore, so it just made sense.

Then I told them I was applying to Amherst, Swarthmore, Northwestern, Smith, and Bowdoin, but I didn’t tell them I’d been deferred at Brown. I just wasn’t ready to go there yet. I knew it was ridiculous. It wasn’t like I needed to impress them, but in a way I wanted to. Maybe not
impress
them exactly, but at least give them the Emily they remembered instead of the reality, which wasn’t a pretty picture. I didn’t want them to take a second look at me and realize I wasn’t the same person who’d moved away or that I wasn’t someone they still wanted to hang out with. My mom would call it “focusing on the positive.” I’d call it leaving out the mortifying details.

“I thought you always wanted to go to Brown,” Lucy commented, noticing I’d left it off my list. I didn’t know if it should make me feel good that she remembered, or make me feel even worse for not telling them in the first place. “Remember how, in sixth grade, you told Mrs. Fitch she couldn’t give you an A minus on your King Tut diorama because you had to get into Brown?”

Josie laughed. “You were obsessed.”

“Well, it was one kick-ass diorama, if you remember. I deserved better than an A minus.”

“Sure, but don’t you think asking for a second opinion was a little out of line?” Lucy asked.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“Maybe?” Josie repeated. “You wanted her to call the freaking curator at the Museum of Fine Arts!”

I debated whether or not to tell them the truth about Brown, and decided to take the chance. It was either that or spend the next five months pretending that everything was rosy and fabulous. And I just didn’t have it in me anymore.

“I applied early and got deferred,” I finally admitted.

Lucy nodded as if she understood, but then I caught her giving Josie a look. I recognized those raised eyebrows and the flat, knowing smile. It meant there was something else Lucy wanted to say. But she didn’t. Instead she reached for a Victoria’s Secret catalog—as if she’d ever trade in her boy shorts for a sequined thong.

And then the room fell silent again as Josie and Lucy pretended to be busy reading catalogs.

I had a hard time believing that pages filled with striped cotton pajamas were that exciting. So that meant one thing—I shouldn’t have told them the truth. “What’s wrong?”

“You could have just told us about Brown,” Lucy answered. “It’s not like we’d think you were a loser or anything.”

“I know,” I agreed, even though I wasn’t sure I did. “It’s just that I don’t really want to talk about it with anyone.”

“We’re not just anyone.” Lucy put down the catalog and looked right at me. “We’re your friends.”