The Book of Luke (8 page)

Lucy and Josie immediately started giving me a crash course on Luke. If the only way to lure him into this was to play nice, then we needed a plan. A three-step plan, to be exact.

Step one: Gain Luke’s trust. As probably all dog trainers would agree, this was just common sense. You don’t approach a dog and start calling out orders, you offer him your hand, let him sniff around and feel comfortable, and then go to work.

Step two: Guide Luke in the right direction. It’s the whole “you get more bees with honey than vinegar” theory—a theory my mother subscribed to, by the way. Pointing out everything Luke is doing wrong wouldn’t help him change, and it sure wouldn’t make him like me. But giving him a little nudge in the right direction could get us where we wanted to go.

Step three: Reward Luke’s changes. When he did something right, I was supposed to let him know, tell him how great he is, give him a little pat on the back. Praise and acknowledgment would be my Milk-Bone.

“What happens when it’s over and we have what we need for the time capsule?” I asked, assuming I’d be able to do what I was charged with. “I mean, once we’ve proven the guide works and a guy can change, what am I supposed to do then?”

“You dump him, of course,” Josie answered.

Dumping Luke Preston. Doing to him what he did to Josie. And what Sean did to me. Just thinking about it made me smile. I couldn’t get closure with Sean nine hundred miles away, but Luke could be my surrogate, my chance to get even right here in Branford.

I didn’t have control over moving, or my dad staying in Chicago, or getting deferred at Brown. I didn’t even have any control over the fact that my boyfriend broke up with me. Now there was something I could do to take back control. Only it turned out that something wasn’t a something at all, but a some
one
. And that someone was Luke Preston.

T
hat night, I was supposed to be lying on my bed finishing up chapter twelve of
The House of Mirth
. At least, that’s what I told my mom I was doing. In actuality, I was lying on my bed reading the same sentence over and over again because the only thing I could think about was the assignment Josie and Lucy had given me.

Imagine it. Me, daughter of Patricia Abbott, etiquette guru and minister of all things mannerly, taking on Luke Preston in a scheme that was so deceitful, so deceptive, he’d never see what hit him. I’d get to be a bitch without acting like one. I was going to fool the biggest player around and enjoy every minute of the fact that he was the one getting played. Even though my job was going to be a million times harder than my mom’s, who just had to teach eight-year-olds proper dinner manners (in her seminar Elbows Off the Table: Manners for Munchkins) or tell brides the appropriate seating arrangement for wedding guests (in her seminar I Do, Don’t I?: 101 Etiquette Tips for Brides-to-Be), I was sure I could do it. And I wanted to.

I was still imagining Luke’s face when I told him it was over, that he’d been nothing more than an experiment, when my cell phone rang. Again. For the fourth time in the last hour. I watched the silver case vibrate slightly on my desk each time the phone played its Asian-inspired ringer (the least obtrusive of my ringer options, of course), the red light blinking to tell me I had a call. But, just like the last three times, I didn’t get up to answer it. I figured it had to be my dad, and I just wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. He’d called last night and talked to TJ, but I got in the shower before my brother could pass me the phone and force me to say something. Avoiding my dad had become a daily test and so far I’d been passing with flying colors. TJ, on the other hand, didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass that my dad had conveniently bailed out on us. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how TJ could talk to him and act like nothing out of the ordinary was going on, like it was normal to talk to your father on the phone every night instead of sitting at the dinner table asking him to pass the peas (you always pass to your right, by the way, just in case you were wondering).

Every time TJ hung up the phone he told me how Dad asked for me, and then Mom would give me a look of disappointment, like I should feel bad for hurting my father’s feelings. But I wasn’t about to let her guilt trip get to me. What about
my
feelings? What about how
I
felt? He certainly wasn’t taking that into account when he drove away in the backseat of a cab like he was just dropping off visiting relatives for their flight. Avoiding a few phone calls paled by comparison. Let him leave a message.

When the phone finally stopped ringing, I stared at it, trying to decide what to do. I’d never seen the one-bedroom apartment on Ohio Street where my dad was currently living, but I figured it wasn’t nearly as nice as our new four-bedroom Colonial house. Or at least I hoped it wasn’t. I secretly hoped that the tiny apartment in some corporate housing complex was about as homey as a public restroom. See, I was already getting into the persona of the new un-nice Emily. And it wasn’t that difficult, at least not when I had such unpleasant circumstances to draw upon.

But as I attempted to read each page of my paperback book, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the red flashing light that pleaded for my attention. Every little red burst seemed to send a subliminal message to me—selfish…ungrateful…cruel…rude…. There was only so much a girl could take, evena girl who had pretty much convinced herself that, in the last two days, she’d grown a thicker skin (or maybe that was just the result of the dry, cold air and the fact that I’d run out of moisturizer). So, against my better judgment, I finally got up and went over to the desk to listen to my voicemail. Only when I flipped open the phone and looked at the last number I’d missed, it wasn’t my dad’s. Instantly, I felt a wave of relief rush through me, and I quickly scrolled through my programmed numbers, passing by Sean’s along the way, until I came to the seven digits I wanted.

“Hey, it’s me,” I told Lauren as soon as she answered.

“Jackie’s here,” she informed me. “I’m going to put you on speaker.”

“Hey, why haven’t you called to tell us how it’s going?” Jackie asked a second later, her voice echoing a little over the speaker. I figured they had to be in Lauren’s bedroom. “Did you forget about us already?”

She didn’t sound mad, exactly, but I got the point. They’d been expecting me to call last night, and now they were calling to check up on me and make me feel appropriately bad for blowing them off.

I explained that I’d been busy unpacking and everything, and they seemed all too willing to forgive me. As I knew they would.

“Tell us all about it,” Jackie instructed and I could almost see them both sitting on Lauren’s pale blue carpet, waiting for me to give them my exciting news. Only I really didn’t have any. After a few minutes telling them about my classes and Lucy and Josie, I’d pretty much summed up the last four days—as long as you didn’t count the guide. And I didn’t. For some reason, I wanted to keep it a secret, to separate who I used to be in Chicago from who I wanted to be now, and that was someone capable of pulling off the greatest deception ever. Someone who could get the hottest guy in school to fall for her so she could get back at her ex-boyfriend.

I knew Jackie and Lauren were expecting me to ask about him eventually. The ex-boyfriend. I just hated myself for even bringing him up so soon. “So, have you seen Sean?” I asked, knowing that there was no way they
hadn’t
seen Sean. They went to school with him every day. Jackie even sat next to him in homeroom.

“Yeah,” Lauren told me and then hesitated slightly before adding, “he’s acting like nothing’s changed.”

“He sucks,” Jackie declared, even though I knew she was only saying it for my benefit.

“He isn’t acting like anything’s different?” I repeated, cringing at the sound of my own voice. Can you say needy? Whiney? Desperate?

Jackie paused. “Uh-uh.”

How was it possible that Sean could just wake up and go to school and not even acknowledge what happened? I don’t know what I’d been expecting, that he’d be moping around or seem repentant or something—anything to demonstrate some level of remorse for being such an asshole to me.

I knew I should let it drop. I knew I should forget about it and move on. But Sean was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking.

“Do you think I did something wrong?” I asked, even though, when I’d called Lauren from the airport, she’d insisted I wasn’t the one to blame.

“God no,” Lauren instantly shot back, just like she had when I’d asked her the 837 times before. “You were probably the nicest girlfriend ever.”

If this is what being the nicest girlfriend ever gets you, I’d take being a bitch any day.

“Should we tell him we talked to you or anything?” Jackie offered.

I shook my head, even though they weren’t there to see me. “No, don’t say a word. I don’t want Sean to think I care.”

I went over to my bed and crawled under the covers. “I don’t want to talk about him. Tell me what else is going on back there.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jackie and Lauren had me laughing as they told me stories about people I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again. They even almost had me forgetting about Sean. I had Jackie and Lauren and Josie and Lucy. Who needed a guy?

“Are you sure there isn’t anything you’d like us to tell Sean?” Jackie offered again, right before we hung up. “Like that you’re already dating the hottest guy in school or something?”

I would have told them they were crazy, if it wasn’t so close to the truth. “Not yet, but tomorrow I’m going to start working on it.”

Heywood Academy doesn’t have a prom. The school is so small we also don’t have a homecoming or homecoming parade, and the closest thing we have to a marching band is four guys walking to the parking lot listening to their iPods. But we do have a Valentine’s Day dance. Although nobody knows the real reason why Heywood throws a dance for a Hallmark holiday that caters to couples, everyone’s always speculated that our headmaster read an article that said the majority of kids lost their virginity on Valentine’s Day, or something equally ridiculous. We assumed he thought that we’d be less likely to have sex in a gymnasium decorated with little pot-bellied cupids shooting arrows all over the place.

So with the Valentine’s Day dance coming up, Lucy and Josie thought it was the perfect opportunity to put Operation Luke into action. After working on it for weeks, we’d finally completed the guide, which came in at a whopping fifty-one pages of tips, don’ts, and miscellaneous advice to be followed. Now it was my turn to take over where the guide left off. Only, by the time I had to actually
do
it, the idea of asking Luke to the dance wasn’t exactly as appealing as when Josie first came up with the idea. It wasn’t just that he was horrible, or that seniors never went to the dance and I’d look pretty lame for even asking him. It was that, faced with actually asking Luke to the dance, the bravado I worked up at home in my bedroom and in front of Lucy and Josie just wasn’t nearly as convincing when I was face-to-face with him. Besides, I still had to undo the damage I’d done my first few days back at Heywood. And that required swallowing my pride and sucking up to Luke. Not exactly something I looked forward to.

My lame attempts included:

• A garbled “hi” on my way to history class, while I had a mouthful of M&M’s and gobs of melted chocolate probably caked in the corners of my lips.
  
• An ever-so-casual “mm, bad cramps” as I laid my hands against my stomach in the vicinity of where I figured my uterus must be positioned, in hopes that Luke would attribute my prior attitude to a dire need for Midol.
  
• Nonchalantly dropping a copy of a
  Psychology Today
  article on courtroom strategies onto the library table where Luke was studying. I figured temporary insanity was more easily forgivable than plain old bitchiness.
  

If Luke was suspicious of my sudden change of heart, he didn’t act like it. In fact, he didn’t act like anything. And Josie and Lucy were getting restless waiting for me to make the ultimate move—asking Luke to the Valentine’s Day dance.

It had been easy enough to declare that the old Emily Abbott was gone, but it was one thing to sit in Josie’s bedroom talking a good game, and an entirely different thing to pull it off in real life. I think they were giving me the benefit of the doubt, but they were starting to lose patience.

Maybe a part of me was hoping someone else would get to him first, that I’d be spared the first step in our plan. But let’s face it. Chivalry may be dead and asking a guy to a dance may be perfectly acceptable, but when that guy is incredibly hot and has his pick of girls, who wants to risk the ultimate in humiliation? Certainly not a freshman or sophomore who’s still naïve enough to harbor thoughts of Luke Preston walking up to her in the hall and proclaiming his love for her in front of a group of friends. And not a junior who’d like to think she’s past caring if Luke asks her or not, even if she isn’t. And not a senior, who would just look desperate.

So if anyone was going to ask Luke to the dance, it was going to have to be me.

“You have to ask Luke to the dance,” Lucy finally reminded me on Monday. “It’s only a week away.”

It was actually more than a week away—twelve days, to be exact. But I got her point. I had to make my first move on Luke if we were going to really do this.

“What if he says no?” I asked, looking for some positive reinforcement.

“Who cares if he says no, it’s not like you’re really asking him. If he turns you down, we just have to come up with another plan. We need to persevere.”

“Besides, Luke’s never turned down an interested girl, so I can’t imagine he’ll start now.”

If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. Luke wasn’t choosy, so if I couldn’t do this I’d really look like a complete idiot.

“Okay, I’ll ask him soon,” I conceded.

“Get on it today.” Lucy used her soccer captain’s voice and I almost expected her to tell me to drop and do twenty. “We’re all depending on you.”

“You can do it,” Josie encouraged. “Maybe the old Emily Abbott couldn’t fool someone so badly, but the new Emily can. Right?”

I could. All I had to do was think of Sean and remember how it felt to be standing there in the freezing cold, wiggling my toes to make sure I didn’t lose feeling in my feet, even as it felt like my heart was being ripped out.

Lucy patted me on the back. “Of course she can do it.”

“I feel like I’m going off to war,” I told them.

“You are,” Lucy confirmed. “This is the battle of the sexes and we can’t afford to lose.”

But, even if I was prepared to do what I had to do, I still wasn’t that thrilled with the idea of asking Luke to the dance. I couldn’t help but think Luke would see me as the desperate new girl, like I moved back and now I was rushing to ask Luke to the dance because I wanted to be with the hottest guy in school. I couldn’t help thinking he’d see me as one of his adoring lunch legion. And I was done being adoring. And I wasn’t about to carry his lunch trays no matter how much I wanted to show Lucy and Josie I could pull this off. I had my limit.