The Book of Luke (6 page)

T
he next day Lucy, Josie, and I went to work. We’d decided that the most efficient thing to do was split up the girls in our class and find a way to bring up a topic that would get us the information we wanted. We had to be subtle, so we wouldn’t give away our time capsule idea, but we needed to get honest answers.

Before lunch I took a walk by the library and peeked in, looking for a few seniors I could start with. And I found exactly what I was looking for. Pam Stoddard and Carolyn Mills were hunched over a table, flipping through what looked like art history books.

I couldn’t just walk over and start playing twenty questions. I needed a reason to sit down and start a conversation.

I pulled open the library door and walked in, grabbed a
National
Geographic
from the shelf, and sat down across from Carolyn and Pam.

Art history. There had to be an opening there somewhere. I tried to remember everything I learned from class field trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Statues of perfectly chiseled men who seemed to be superhumanly endowed? While it may give me a chance to bring up anatomical preferences, it wasn’t exactly the right direction. Maybe tormented artists with super-sized egos? That was a little closer to what we were after. Didn’t Van Gogh cut off his ear to impress a girl?

I laid my magazine on the table and opened to a random page.

“Is that for art history?” I asked, glancing up at them.

Carolyn nodded. “Yeah. We have to pick an artist for our term paper.”

“Who are you looking at?” I asked nonchalantly, pretending to be interested in an article on mating rituals of Madagascan aye-ayes.

“Pretty much the regulars: Jackson Pollock, Mary Cassatt, Monet, Van Gogh.”

Bingo!

I looked up from the aye-ayes and prepared to get the ball rolling. It was the moment of truth. Could I, the person who’d been raised to believe that honesty is the best policy, get Carolyn and Pam to give me the information I wanted without coming right out and asking for it?

“Hey, is it true that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend?”

“That’s what they say,” Pam told me. “Why? You think we should do Van Gogh?”

Carolyn shrugged, like that wasn’t such a bad idea. “There is a ton written about him.”

“I was just thinking how a guy today would never do something like that,” I started, hoping that Pam and Carolyn would take my lead and run with it.

Luckily, Pam took the bait. “Yeah. Or if he did he’d show his friends first, just so they knew how tough he was. And they’d probably think he was, even if the rest of us knew he was an idiot who’d be hard of hearing the rest of his life.”

“Or, he wouldn’t even show his friends,” Carolyn said, “because God forbid he actually acts like he really likes her. Instead he’d walk around with a bloody bandage strapped to his ear pretending like nothing happened. And his friends wouldn’t even ask.”

“Of course they wouldn’t. Why ask a personal question when you can rehash the Red Sox World Series for the billionth time.”

That was all it took. Pam and Carolyn were off and running. I pushed aside the
National Geographic,
tipped my notebook against the edge of the table, and pretended to write about the aye-aye’s diet of insect larvae. It was time to take notes. And fast.

• That gargling noise guys make in the back of their throats before they hock a loogie six feet (the farther the better, for some reason).
  
• How they can remember every single word to a movie that’s twelve years old, but they can’t remember what we told them fifteen minutes ago.
  
• The way a guy scratches his crotch or adjusts his junk in public, rummaging around like he’s looking for something he misplaced.
  

It was amazing. I could barely write fast enough to capture the stream of intolerable traits flying across the table at me. And, although their answers were exactly what I was looking for, it wasn’t the quality of the material that kept a smile on my face as I scribbled down gripe after gripe. It was that I felt like I was part of some covert operation only Lucy, Josie, and I knew about. I’d never belonged to a secret club where you picked a code name like Penelope or Leticia and made up some secret handshake (secrets are rude, after all). But that’s exactly how I felt right then, sitting across from Carolyn and Pam as they gave me exactly what I was after without even realizing it. Like I was going undercover. Like I should be wearing dark sunglasses and a trench coat. Okay, maybe that was too much. In any case, I didn’t have time to plan out an appropriate wardrobe for my mission. I was having a hard enough time keeping up with Carolyn and Pam as it was.

It was like they’d saved up every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating action of every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating guy they’ve ever known. By the time I was on the third sheet of paper, my fingers were cramping and I was writing so fast my hand was smeared with black ink from dragging along the page. They’d given me more than enough material to start with.

“So, what do you think?” Carolyn asked. “Which artist should we do?”

“Mary Cassatt,” I told them, collecting my notebook and standing up.

“Really? Why her? I thought you said we should do Van Gogh.”

“I think the guys have gotten enough attention already. It’s time us girls got a little airtime, too.”

“Hey, don’t you need your magazine?” Pam called after me as I made my way toward the door.

“That’s okay,” I answered. “I’ve got everything I need.”

This wasn’t going to be so hard after all. In fact, I almost wondered why someone hadn’t done this sooner.

As I passed a guy in the hall or sat next to one in class, I started to look at all of them differently. I studied their every move, dissected every word they spoke. Out of the corner of my eye I caught some junior basketball player cupping his crotch, rearranging himself like it was the most normal thing in the world—almost something to be proud of—while a group of freshman girls diverted their gaze, embarrassed. I watched two sophomore guys sit with their eyes glued to a pair of boobs as they bounced down the hallway toward earth science class, and then break into big grins before making snide comments filled with innuendo.

And, once I started looking at them as specimens to be scrutinized and examined before we cut them up into pieces, they almost became more interesting than annoying. Almost.

Luke still bugged the crap out of me. I may have been on my way to looking at Matt LeFarge, Curtis Ludlow, and Ricky Barnett with a sort of detached scientific curiosity, but I couldn’t help but get irritated every time I saw Luke. Not that he had much to say to me; in fact, ever since our encounter outside Mrs. Blackwell’s class, he seemed to look right through me, instead focusing his attention on the adoring little twits who were dumb enough to get snagged in his web of floppy hair, perfect teeth, and an ass that begged to be wrapped in a pair of faded Levi’s. And it grated on me. Not just because his adoring posse of girls seemed incapable of seeing him for the asshole he was, or because, for the first time
ever,
I didn’t care if someone didn’t like me—because that part I loved. It felt great. I didn’t care if Luke thought I was a raging bitch. Let him. In the end we’d expose him, and the rest of the guys, for what they were. No, what bothered me was that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the Luke Preston I remembered could become just like the rest of them. Make that the
worst
of them.

And it was obvious Luke knew how I felt. There was just no way he
accidently
bumped me while passing in the hall. And, yes, I am genetically programmed to utter polite phrases regardless of the situation, so I did mutter “excuse me” the first time—but the second time I knew better. And the third. And the fourth.

Luke wasn’t just annoying, apparently he was persistent, as well.

I still had a hard time reconciling everything Josie and Lucy said with the person who was Owen’s best friend. I could see it if they were talking about Ricky Barnett. He’d always been the kind of guy who went out of his way to be annoying, like the time he found a loose bolt behind my chair in algebra class and turned to me and asked, “Wanna screw?” But Luke Preston was nothing like Ricky. Until now.

It didn’t seem possible that Luke could change that much. That I could move away for a few years and return to find an entirely different person. Because the person I remember was nothing like the Luke that Josie and Lucy described or the guy I watched walk down the hallway like he owned Heywood and the rest of us were just lucky to be visiting.

In sixth grade I came home from school one day and noticed something strange in our mailbox. And, from the curved red cardboard keeping the mailbox door from closing, and the imitation lace etched along its edge, I knew exactly what it had to be. It was five days before Valentine’s Day, after all, and Carl Mattingly and I had been talking on the phone every night for weeks, even if he just sat there watching ESPN the whole time. I grabbed the candy-filled heart and the rest of the mail, as well (because, even in my state of utter ecstasy, I knew it was the right thing to do), and ran inside the house. I dropped everything on the kitchen table and tore open the heart-shaped box’s cellophane wrapping, revealing sixteen perfectly plump chocolates. It was so obvious Carl loved me!

“Aren’t you going to open the card?” my mother asked, frowning at me. You
never
opened a gift before the card, and I knew that.

So I slipped my finger inside the pale pink envelope that had been taped to the top and pulled out its contents. But when I opened the card it wasn’t Carl’s scratchy block writing professing his undying devotion. It was Luke’s name scrawled across the bottom, directly under a picture of Snoopy declaring “Dog gone it, I like you!”. There was no “Love Always” or “Yours Truly” before his name. Not even a “from.” Just Luke’s first name and last initial: Luke P. My first thought was,
Luke?

My mom had watched me open the box of chocolates, so there was no hiding it. And there was no getting around what I knew was coming next.

“Aren’t you going to call him and say thank you?” she asked, watching me pick out the pieces I wanted to keep (caramels, dark chocolates, truffles), and then offering her the ones I didn’t want (coffee liqueurs, white chocolates, and peanut clusters).

“I don’t know his number,” I’d told her, hoping she’d take my excuse and let it drop; of course, she didn’t.

“Look in the Heywood directory,” she told me and grabbed the book out of her desk drawer. “It’s got to be in there.”

There were times when the school directory came in handy, like when Lucy and I wanted to call Carl and see if Brian Conroy wanted to go to the movies with us. But now it was no help at all. Now it just meant I’d have to call Luke and act like I was actually appreciative of his chocolates—which I was, I love chocolate. I just didn’t love them from Luke Preston.

With my mother standing there watching me stuff two caramels into my mouth, there was no getting around dialing his number. She handed me the cordless phone. And I dialed.

The thing is, when he answered and I told him it was me, Luke didn’t say anything. Not one single word. There was complete and total silence on his end of the line. What could I do? Sit there and listen to him breathe? I said thank you for the chocolates and waited—for something, a “you’re welcome,” or a “hope you enjoyed them.” But all I got was a single-word response. “Okay.”

And that was it. I never mentioned the Valentine’s chocolates to him again, and he never mentioned them to me. For a few days afterward I almost convinced myself he’d sent them to me by mistake, that his silence upon learning it was me on the phone wasn’t due to an inability to speak, but a result of his complete mortification that he’d sent chocolates to the wrong girl. But in a class of fifty students, I was the only Emily. And he wasn’t that dumb.

I never told Josie or Lucy about my Valentine’s surprise. It was more of a nonevent than anything else. Besides, I still liked Carl Mattingly, and the last thing I needed was Lucy and Josie reading all sorts of meaning into the cardboard heart and Snoopy card, or, worse, asking Luke the question I kept asking myself. Why?