The Ordinary Life of Emily P. Bates (9 page)

              “Fine,” I said. “You can give me the cold shoulder all you like.”

              He just stared at me and cocked his head to one side.

              “Two can play at this game.”

He stayed silent.

“You forget that Shannon is my best friend,” I said. “I’ve gone days without breaking her silent treatments.”

              He raised his eyebrows, clearly pointing out that
I
was still talking while
he
was not.

              At this point, Shelly returned with our burgers. She placed them in front of us and gave us a broad smile. “Is there anything else I can get for you?” she asked, looking at Ethan specifically.

              He looked back at her and smiled, but still said nothing.

              “No?” she asked, turning to me now as her smile faltered. I shook my head at her. She nodded and we both watched her leave. She turned back twice to throw a confused glance in our direction.

              Ethan and I stared each other down across the table. Neither one of us had touched our food. My stomach rumbled angrily, but I ignored it. Ethan looked quite comfortable where he was, still as a statue, but I was getting more and more irritated. After about five minutes, I decided enough was enough.
              “All right!” I said. “I’m sorry! Can we eat now?”

              “I was never preventing you from eating,” He picked up his huge burger and took a healthy bite, and I did the same. It was kind of greasy, but definitely worth the six dollars advertised on the menu.

              “Sure,” I muttered.

              He laughed suddenly. “
Days
?” he sputtered. “You’ve gone
days
?”

              “Yes!” 

              “I think I just broke you in less than five minutes!”

              “Shut up! I was hungry!”

              He raised one eyebrow. “Are you sure you want me to do that?”

              “No!”

              He grinned triumphantly and took another healthy bite.

Eight

              “What do you
mean
you had a date with Ethan Friday?” If Shannon hadn’t been wearing lab goggles at the time, I would have been a little abashed at her tone. Monday was lab day in Chemistry. Enough said.

              “You know, I can’t take you seriously in those goggles, Shannon.”

              “Just answer the question!”

              “How many connotations of the phrase, ‘I had a date with Ethan on Friday’ are there?”

              “How could you not have told me?” she asked. “What did you do? How did it go?”

              “We had burgers then we went to the movies.”

              “What did you see?”

              “
Dead End
.”

              “You saw a
thriller
on your first date?” She groaned and clawed the air in frustration. “That’s not even supposed to be a good thriller!”

“It really wasn’t.” I adjusted my own goggles, wincing as the sharp edges dug even further into my face. We were both going to have huge lines around our eyes for the next hour, but the fact that everyone in our class was sharing our doom made the humiliation much less.

              “So how did he ask you?” she asked. “What happened exactly?”

              “Why aren’t you dating anymore?” I asked, suddenly annoyed. “You used to always have plans with some guy on the weekends. Now you’ve resorted to pretending you have plans when you don’t really. I haven’t even seen Charlie around lately.”

              “How is my love life relevant right now?” she asked, stung.

              “Because you’ve been so caught up in everyone else’s for the past two months!”

              “Well don’t worry,” she said, turning back to our lame little experiment. “I was just happy that you finally got your date with Ethan. Please forgive me. I’ve given up meddling as a hobby.”

              Guilt washed over me. Maybe my comment on Shannon’s love life hadn’t been exactly necessary. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say those things.”

              “But you did say them whether you meant to or not.”

              “I know. I’m sorry.”

              “You know, it’s not like I haven’t been asked out several times this year already,” she said. “I just felt like a break. That’s all.”

              “I know.”

              She cast a sideways smile at me and shrugged. “It’s all right. I
have
been meddling.” She hesitated, and then continued in a low voice. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’ve been talking you up to Ethan every day in
Spanish
class.”

              “What?”

Mr. Lankford glared at us from across the room where he was helping Randi Feldman light her Bunsen burner when my voice echoed across the lab. “What?” I whispered. “I didn’t even know you
had
Spanish
class together!”

              “I’m sorry! I stopped, I swear. I stopped bringing it up last week!”

              “You stopped?”

              “Yeah. I told you. I’m giving up meddling.”

              “Why the change?”

              She shrugged, avoiding my eye. “I guess I just saw the error of my ways, that’s all. But hey, it worked, didn’t it?” She seemed more hopeful than excited.

              “Yeah.” I grinned a little despite myself. “It worked, I guess.”

              She smiled, relieved. “See? It’s all working out.”

              “Yeah.”

              “So,” she eyed me carefully. “Did you kiss him?”

              “No.”

              Her face fell. “Oh well. There’s always this weekend.”             

              “What’s this weekend?”

              “My party, stupid.”             

              “I’m not going to your party,
stupid
.”

              “Ethan is, though.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes as she leaned back down to write a couple of figures in our lab book. “And he seemed to have eyes only for you this morning at breakfast.”

              Really? I fought a grin. “No he didn’t.”

              “Sure he did. I’m starting to feel like a fifth wheel. Finnegan and Margo have hooked up, and now you and Ethan. Maybe you’re right. I do need to get a date.”

              “No! If you need a date for the party, I’ll go with
you
. Ethan can be the one who’s left out in the cold. But not you.”

              She laughed quietly. “Don’t worry about me, Emily. I won’t have a problem getting a date. I’
ve actually had my eye on
Charlie for a while now
.
”

              “Really? Charlie?”

              “Yes. Charlie. What of it?”

              “Nothing,” I said. “I just thought that the two of you didn’t really date, that’s all.”

              “What’s that supposed to mean?”

              I shrugged. “I don’t know. You always say you’d never date him because he’s-” I shuddered, “-too pretty.”

              “
He’s not too pretty! He’s good looking! Isn’t he good looking?
”

              “Too good looking.”

              “No he’s not. And he’s funny and he really likes me. What’s the big issue?”

              I stirred the mixture in our beaker absentmindedly. “The big issue is that you don’t really like Charlie and you’d just be toying with him. The boy follows you around like a puppy dog.”

              “I would not be toying with him! I do like him!”

              “Fine!” I said. “Ask Charlie.”

              “I will.”             

              “Good.”

              “Great.”

              And she did. She asked Charlie Hamilton after school that day to go to her stupid party with her, which subjected the rest of us to his company for the entirety of the week preceding it.

              “Dude,” Ethan muttered to me at breakfast the next morning. “It hurts to look at them.” I glanced up from the orange Finn had just handed me and saw exactly what he meant. Seeing Shannon and Charlie talking and laughing together practically ruined my retinas. They were both just so beautiful. And together, they seemed to feed off of each other’s radiance and practically became a supernova of super-model wonderfulness.

              I’m pretty sure they were discussing the finer points of Charlie’s game-winning catch in the last football game.

              “Yeah,” I replied, not bothering with my more colorful descriptions. Ethan would probably just
mock my vocabulary again
.

              “I think it’s nice,” Margo said, just as Shannon smiled. I had to look away. Margo was sitting across from me, writing something on my cast.

              “What piece of wisdom are you adding today?” I asked, turning my whole arm so that I could read the words she had written at the very edge of the plaster near my knuckles.

            
 
Oh crap… Am I dreaming?

              “Sweet,” I said.

              “Yeah,” she said, and then turned to look shyly at Finn whose nose was still buried in a book. I frowned. Suddenly her quote seemed more lovey-dovey than comical.

              “What are you reading, Finn?” Ethan asked suddenly. My eyes slipped over to the cover of Finn’s book and  stared, horrified. I hadn’t recognized it before because Finn had removed the plastic cover. But now that I saw the title printed on the binding, I wished more than anything for the warning bell to ring.

              It didn’t.

              “
Mouth, for Goodness Sake
,” Finn replied, glancing up at me. “By Mr. Jeremy Bates.”

              Ethan laughed, comprehension dawning on his face. “Your dad’s book?”

              “Yeah,” I muttered. “The most recent one, anyway.”

              He turned back to Finn. “Okay, you have to loan me that when you’re done.”

              “No!” I said.

              Finn closed the book and handed across the table to Ethan. “Take it now. I’ve read it before.”

              “What’s it about?” he asked, flipping to the first page.

              Finn’s smile stretched even wider. “It’s about Emily.”

              “Oh no.” I thumped my head on the table.

              “Really?” Ethan was intrigued. He turned and grinned at me, but I was glaring determinedly at my food. “A comedy, eh?”

              “It’s about Emily when she was little.”

              “You’re enjoying this,” I said to Finn.

              “Very much so.” He turned back to Ethan. “When Emily was little, she got the words ‘damn’ and ‘darn’ mixed up.”

              “Finnegan!”

              He ignored me.

              “And so she was always getting in trouble. And she would always say, ‘My damn mouth for goodness sake!’ whenever she got in trouble, which just got her in even more trouble. It took he
r
–how long Shannon?”

              “Two years,” Shannon supplied, not even turning away from her conversation with Charlie, who was flexing his bicep for her.

              “Two years to finally get it straight.” He grinned and tried to pat my outstretched hand. I jerked it away from him. “Emily was rather a precocious child.”

              “And your dad wrote a book about this?” Ethan asked me dubiously.

              Finn nodded. “It’s actually really good. He based the main character, Emma, off of Emily and her shenanigans.” He pronounced the last word with true finesse, watching my irritated expression impassively. “Don’t be mad, Em,” he said. “He’d have found out eventually.”

              A metallic ringing echoed through the cafeteria. Great,
now
the bell rings. I said nothing, just glared at Finn as I scooped up my bag. I accidentally banged my cast on the table as I did so, but managed not to yelp in pain by biting down on my lower lip. I stalked off to class without a backwards glance.

              I handled my silent treatment pretty well all day. I didn’t say one word to Finn all during lunch or the two times I passed him in the hallway. I didn’t even look at him. Instead, I sat and chatted with Margo. She had brought a pack of cards with her to school that day, and we spend most of our lunch hour pounding through an animated game of war.

              But I couldn’t avoid him during Lit class. I was stuck in the seat across from him for a whole hour. I was at his mercy.

“Come on, Emily,” Finn said. “It’s not like I shot your dog or anything.”

              I couldn’t keep it in any longer. “You brought that book on purpose! You brought it just so that Ethan would see it!”

              “I swear I did not!” he said. “Who cares what Cavanaugh reads? I certainly don’t!”

              “Then why’d you bring it?”

              “Because it’s a good book!” He leaned toward me across the table. “Why do you care if he reads the stupid thing, anyway?”

              “I don’t care if
he
reads it!” I said. “I care if
anyone
reads it. Anyone who knows that I’m Emma! It’s embarrassing!”

              “It’s endearing. Nobody cares if you got your vocabulary mixed up when you were eight.”

              “I do!”

              “Well you shouldn’t!” He sat back in his chair and frowned. I glared at the table for several minutes while Ms. Walsh copied out the daily quote at the blackboard.

“You need to bring back your Shel Silverstein book. It’s due Monday,” Finn said.

              “Yeah.”

              “You wanna drop me off at work after school? I don’t feel like walking in the rain.”

              “Whatever.”

              I glared down at the table for the rest of the
period
. Finn, on the other hand, went about his business as usual as if we’d never argued at all.

              I made plans with Ethan after school to come in early the next day to do our homework.

              “Why, you doing something now?” he asked. He eyed Finn who was waiting in the drizzle by my car. The obvious look of jealousy on his face sent a thrill through me, even though it was completely unfounded.

              “No, I’m just gonna take Finnegan to work,” I said.

              He shrugged. “Whatever. Some of the guys wanted me to stay behind at the gym for a pick-up game anyway.” His dark face lit up with his usual grin and he brushed a piece of hair out of my face for me. My cheek burned where his fingers brushed against it. “See you in the morning.” He turned to head back towards the building, then paused and turned back. “Hey, you and I are going to Shannon’s party, right?”