The Opposite of Hallelujah (6 page)

“I bet,” I said, returning to my task, which was starting to seem impossible. “Mom, I think we’re out of egg noodles. Do you want to use penne instead?”

“No, we have some,” Mom said. “Look harder, Caro.”

“I’ve looked, there’s none here.”

Mom narrowed her eyes at me. “What do I get if I find them?”

“Um … the credit?”

“Look harder.”

I did another halfhearted search through the pantry before calling it quits on the egg noodles. “Okay, a week of dishes.”

“With no complaining?”

“With
minimal
complaining.”

“Even if you make dinner?”

“Even if.”

“Deal.” Mom walked to the pantry, and within a
minute she’d found a bag of egg noodles shoved behind a giant Costco pack of Stove Top stuffing. She handed them to me with a self-satisfied smirk. “Be sure to put the rubber gloves on before you wash. A week of that will give you dishwater hands.”

“Thanks for that helpful tip, Martha Stewart, I’m going to write that down,” I said good-naturedly.

“Next time let me look first,” Hannah suggested, in an attempt to get in on the joke. I jumped; I’d forgotten she was even there.

I didn’t hear from Derek at all that day, or the following morning. I spent the entire night tossing and turning, and I wasn’t the only one. Hannah’s bedroom was right above mine, and even though she’d supposedly gone to bed right after dinner, insisting she was tired, I could hear her treading the carpet restlessly above my head into the wee hours of the morning.

It was a strange sound, louder and more anxious than the lazy creaks and settling noises the house usually made. The things we think about at night, in the dark, are much more phantasmagorical than the things we think about when the sun is up; as I was kept awake by Hannah’s footsteps looming over me, my mind wandered, not to what she was doing at that moment, but what it had been like for her in the convent. I’d never been in her
room there, and it had never been described to me, so I imagined it—dark and cold and empty, Hannah in the center of it, alone and lonely, dreaming of escape.

I slept through Sunday breakfast. Mom had taken Hannah shopping, and by early afternoon, they still weren’t back. We were less than twenty-four hours away from the start of junior year, and Derek still hadn’t found the time to let me know he was alive. Well, I knew he was alive. He’d updated his Facebook around midnight, and again at noon on Sunday. I left a comment on his wall but got no response. A couple of hours went by and I called him. No answer.

“Hey, Derek, it’s me—Caro—you know—your girlfriend,” I said, pressing the heel of my palm into my forehead. That was the first time either of us had used that word to describe me. I shouldn’t have been the one to do it. “Anyway, I was just calling to talk, see how you’re doing, maybe see if you’re free tonight to get together or whatever. So, um, call me back. Okay … bye!” I shut my phone and flopped backward onto my bed, burying my head under a pillow. I hated myself so much in that moment.

“Do you think he’s avoiding me?” I asked Erin over the phone minutes later. I didn’t really want to talk to her about this, but I thought maybe if I was on the phone with somebody else, he would call. Staying off the line and staring at it, waiting for it to light up, hadn’t worked.
Maybe directing my focus elsewhere, making myself a little bit less available, would. I don’t know where I get this stuff, honestly.

“Um … no, probably not,” Erin said. It was obvious to me that she was barely listening.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m on IM,” she told me.

“With Peter?”

“No, Joe.”

“Joe
Price
?” Joe was another guy from our high school. I didn’t know him very well, but he had dated our friend Jessica the previous year, with more or less disastrous results. They’d broken up in March, but it still seemed wrong for Erin to be hitting on him—if that was what she was doing. I’d give most people the benefit of the doubt, at least at first, but Erin used IM as a tool of seduction. She was much wittier and braver over the Internet than in real life, and she used that to her advantage, to reel them in.

“Yeah, we’ve been chatting all summer, pretty much,” Erin said. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d think I was betraying Jess, but really, they broke up a long time ago, and it’s high school.”

I drew a deep breath. “Okay, whatever. You didn’t sound too sure when you said Derek wasn’t avoiding me. Do you think he’s avoiding me? Tell the truth.”

Erin sighed. “I don’t know. It’s hard to say. You two
have been apart for months, so while I wouldn’t normally tell you to worry, if everything’s fine between you, then he should be dying to see you, if only to get some action. Summer camp can be a lonely place for a guy with a girlfriend back home, if you catch my drift.”

“I catch it, thanks for that.” I shook my head. “So you’re saying he got with some other girl at camp?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Okay, so you’re saying he wants to break up?”

“Again,
not what I said
.”

“Then what? What was your point?”

“I didn’t have one! You asked a question and I answered it: yes, it is weird that he hasn’t called.” Erin paused. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. What would you do?”

“Break up with him first,” Erin was quick to say. “Never get dumped. That’s my motto. Never, ever, ever get dumped. It’s totally humiliating. If you think someone’s going to break up with you, you should launch a preemptive strike.”

“You should really cut back on the military history documentaries,” I advised.

“My grandma had the TV set permanently on the Hitler Channel this summer,” she told me. “I didn’t have a choice.” Erin called the History Channel the Hitler Channel, because every time she switched it on, they were showing a program about World War II. Erin swore
that at least a third of the time, the first word she caught was “Luftwaffe.”

“Try reading a book next time.”

“Whatever.”

“You really think I should break up with him first?” I asked, twisting a chunk of hair around my pointer finger. It was a nervous habit I’d had since childhood.

“I think you should do whatever you feel like doing,” Erin said. “But yes, I think you should break it off first. Even if he doesn’t
think
he wants to break up, if he’s not breaking down the front door to see you, his head’s obviously not in the game.”

“Don’t you mean his heart?”

“Uh … no.” I heard the IM ping in the background. “Caro, I’ve got to go, Joe wants me to meet him for coffee in ten. Are you okay to be on your own?”

“Yeah,” I said. What did she think I was going to do, stick my head in the oven because I hadn’t heard from Derek in forty-eight hours? Not likely. “I’ll live.”

“Great. See you at school tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone and paced my room for a while, thinking about what Erin had said. It was typical Erin advice—get out clean. She’d dated a lot of guys and considered herself an expert at playing the game. But I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t Erin; I was me. What would I do? I had no idea.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door.

“Come in,” I called. Hannah poked her head through the door, as if she was trying as hard as possible not to disturb my privacy or pry. She glanced around the room with interest, and I felt a geyser of protectiveness surge up inside me until I realized that she was just trying to remember what the room had looked like when it had belonged to her. “What’s up? I didn’t hear the garage door.”

“I was tired, so Mom dropped me off and went back out, to the grocery store, I think.”

I nodded, waiting for her to elaborate, but she just stood there, running her eyes over every inch of the place. “So … how can I help you?”

“Oh, right. I wanted to see if you were interested in taking a walk,” she said.

“I thought you were tired,” I said.

“Of shopping,” Hannah told me with a sheepish smile.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m kind of busy.”

“Busy doing laps around your bed?”

“Busy trying to decide whether or not to break up with my boyfriend before he breaks up with me,” I said, chewing on my thumbnail. I shouldn’t have told her that. It was too personal, and it wasn’t like she was going to have any useful advice for me on the subject.

“Oh.” She looked embarrassed, like she’d trespassed on me in some way. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Thanks,” I said. She closed the door, and as I heard
the click of the latch, I thought maybe I should call her back. But then what? I wasn’t going to get her involved just because I felt guilty about not needing her around.

But I couldn’t keep my thoughts to myself, so I called Reb. The first thing I did was sell Erin out.

“Erin’s out on a date with Joe Price,” I told her.

“That’s kind of skanky, don’t you think?” Reb asked.

“Totally,” I agreed. “What does she think she’s doing? Jessica’s going to run her up the flagpole if she starts dating him. And what was all that crap with Peter on Friday night, if she’s going to hook up with Joe?”

“Maybe she’s keeping her options open. It’s not unheard of,” Reb pointed out.

“How can she like two guys at the same time? I can barely keep my head on straight with one.”

“Derek issues?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“The tone of your voice. You sound a little bothered.” She paused. “Also, common sense.”

“Derek hasn’t called since he got home from camp. He texted me yesterday when I was getting—when I was with my family, saying he’d call me later that night, but he didn’t. I called him today, but no answer. Do you think he’s trying to avoid me or something?”

Reb hesitated. I reminded myself that it didn’t necessarily mean anything, that she always took her time before answering the hard ones.

“Reb?”

“I’m thinking. Did you talk to Erin about this?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

“To break up with him before he breaks up with me.”

“Flawless.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. She and Erin didn’t always see eye to eye on things like this. And by “didn’t always see eye to eye,” I meant
never
did.

“So you think that’s what I should do? You think he’s going to end our relationship?”
Say no
, I thought, but only because I believed she would say yes.

“I have no idea,” Reb said. “It’s hard to say. But not calling after you guys have been separated for most of the summer isn’t a
good
sign.”

“Ugh, why won’t anyone just say what they think?” I cried, knocking my head softly against the wall.

“Okay, you want to hear what I think?”

“Yes!”

“He’s probably going to dump you.”

“What? Seriously?” I wanted to throw up.

“Yes. Derek is a cool guy, but he’s not the relationship type. He likes girls in general, but I don’t think he wants to be with one girl specifically. Even if that one girl is as awesome as you are, Caro,” she added, because she’s a good friend like that.

Even though I hated what Reb was saying, I couldn’t disagree with it. Derek had always seemed out of my
league, not because he was smarter or better-looking or more popular than I was, but just because he never seemed to need anyone. He held everybody at arm’s length; he was friends with a lot of people, but best friends with nobody; he liked a lot of girls, but he didn’t love any of them. When he started to pay special attention to me, at first I couldn’t trust or believe it, but when he finally won me over, I thought I’d changed him, or his feelings for me had. Maybe he’d thought that, too, for a hot second, but it was becoming very clear to me that we were both wrong.

I sank onto my desk chair and put a hand to my forehead. “So how do I do this?”

“Break up with him?”

“Yeah. I’ve never done it before. Obviously.”

“You sure you want to do that? I mean, without talking to him first?”

“If I talk to him first, he’ll beat me to the punch,” I said. “Erin’s right, getting dumped is completely humiliating. I won’t be able to show my face at school tomorrow if that happens. I have to do it, and I have to do it tonight.”

“Okay,” Reb said. “Let’s come up with a plan.”

5

Hannah was upstairs, Mom was still out, and sneaking out of the house when Dad was watching sports was almost criminally easy. I felt a little pang of guilt for boosting his car, but I wasn’t going to be gone for very long; I just hoped Mom wouldn’t get back before I did.

Ten minutes later, I was standing at the end of Derek’s driveway, sending him a text: “I’m outside, we need to talk.” Within a minute, I got one back: “Okay, be right there.”

I felt like I was going to be sick right there in his mother’s hydrangeas. This was where it was all going to end. Maybe I should’ve known that from the start; maybe
I had. I never thought I’d be in this situation, though, treading through a conversational minefield to break up with him before he could break up with me.

A few minutes later, Derek came out his front door and strolled toward me. He smiled when he caught my eye and held out his arms for a hug. I let him hold me, because I loved the feeling of being touched by a boy, especially this particular boy. I loved the way he always squeezed me a little too tightly, the way he ran his fingertips lightly down my back as he released me. He didn’t try to kiss me, though, I noticed.