The Reinvention of Moxie Roosevelt (16 page)

Guadalupe put her hand up.

“Save it. Seriously,
mira
, you know what? The Yankees are the greatest ball team in the world. They’re not hurting for fans. I don’t appreciate the charade, okay? But I’m definitely not interested in the little drama you’ve got going on here. I missed the first half hour of
General Hospital
for this, and enough is enough. So whatever your deal is Moxie, and whatever your deal is, Kate, leave me out of it.”

“What’s this? A party?”

Finally. Spinky had appeared in the doorway. Only now I wished she’d stayed away.

“Not a party,” Lupe said, pushing past Spinky. “I’m out of here.”

“It’s enough now, Kate,” Haven said. “Stop it.”

“What’s going on?” Spinky asked. The smile left her face as she looked around. “Did someone get kicked out?”

“Your roommate has been lying to everybody, and keeping notes in a book so she’d get her stories straight. Here, look at it.” Kate grabbed the book from me and thrust it toward Spinky. Spinky looked at her, but made no move to take it.

“That’s enough,” Haven said, louder.

“She’s not a Wiccan. She didn’t even know what one—”

“I don’t care! Stop it!” Haven shouted.

Everyone gaped at her. I don’t think any of us knew she could shout.

“I care,” said Reagan.

She looked really angry. And she wasn’t making eye contact with me.

“Reagan, listen,” I said anxiously. “I actually am incredibly—”

“There
is
no sea cow group that owns a sloop,” Reagan said. “You made the whole thing up.”

I took a deep breath.

“I did make that part up, Reagan, and I’m sorry. But I really do—”

“There isn’t even a sea cow to be endangered!” Reagan yelled.

My mouth dropped open.

“I—”

“Do you know why? Because it’s ALREADY extinct. I finally looked it up this morning, Moxie, because I was going to be stupid enough to tell the dean about it myself. The North Atlantic sea cow was discovered in the 1740s, and less than thirty years later humans had hunted it to extinction. Hunted the entire species to extinction!”

How could that be? I had
invented
the sea cow. Or so I’d thought. I half laughed in disbelief. I was an environmental psychic.

“You might find that funny, but it isn’t a
joke
to me!” Reagan cried.

“No, I didn’t . . . of course it’s not a joke. Reagan, the amazing thing is I didn’t even—”

“Everybody in this room is just a lab rat to Moxie,” Kate said.

“No, no, it isn’t like that at all!” I said wildly. “Reagan, listen. I didn’t do it as a joke. I just wanted to get your attention. I was trying to
be
like you.”

Reagan was shaking her head, and I could see she had tears in her eyes.

“You are
nothing
like me,” she said.

“I was going to tell you. And Haven, and Guadalupe, and everyone. I was going to explain it all.”

“Then why didn’t you? I asked you if there was something wrong. I told you that you could tell me anything,” Reagan reminded me coldly.

“Because I was waiting until I found my . . .”

There was no point. Ms. Hay was right—I never should have put it off. What difference did it make whether I had the stupid Personality Log back or not? That wasn’t a reason, it was a delay tactic. I’d been putting off the unpleasant task of fessing up. I wanted to do it totally on my terms, in my way. I wanted to control the way the truth unfolded. Now it was too late.

“I was being a coward about it, Reagan. There’s really nothing else to it.”

Reagan stared at me, then nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve gotta be someplace.”

She brushed past me, followed by Sage, who gave me a puzzled look as she walked past me and out the door.

I turned to Spinky, who was looking at me, her eyebrows furrowed.

“I’ve never been in trouble,” I said. “I came to boarding school because I got a music scholarship and there’s no high school in my town. I never planned on getting a tattoo. I’m not detached, or cool, or unique. I’ve never even heard a Frank Zappa song. I wanted to be like you, Spinky. I wanted to be like Haven, and I wanted to be like Reagan. I wanted to be everybody but me, and I made up stories, and I’m sorry, Spinky, I’m really, really sorry . . .”

Spinky came over to me and put her arms around my shoulders.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” she said in my ear. “But you’re my friend. Just sit tight.”

“Look, there’s other stuff in here about you,” Kate said. “You need to read it, Spinky.”

Spinky fixed Kate with a long look.

“No, I don’t think I do,” she said. “I think I’ve heard enough. I don’t want any fighting going on—especially in my own room. I don’t care who did what, period. I’ve got plenty of flaws, but I don’t talk trash about people, and I don’t judge. That’s me. I already told you that, Kate.”

“
She
had no problem telling you things about me that were none of her business,” Kate said. She folded her arms over her chest, but the look she gave Spinky was almost pleading.
She wants to be Spinky
, I thought.
That’s the thing.

“Telling me what about you? Moxie’s never told me anything about you,” Spinky said.

“About my family,” Kate said. She glanced quickly at Haven, the only other person in the room, and ducked her head.

“Kate, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Moxie hasn’t told me anything about your family, or anything else relating to you that I can remember.”

Kate looked flabbergasted. Which was how I felt.
That
was why Kate had done this? Because she thought I’d told Spinky who she was?

“I’ve never said anything to anybody about your family, Kate,” I said, glaring. And the impulse to reveal who they were now had never been more overpowering. But still I didn’t.

“Say what you want, but it’s all right there in the note you left me,” Kate muttered. “You told, you were about to tell, what’s the difference?”

What was all right there? All the stupid note said was that we needed to talk right away. How deluded was Kate to turn that into a threat?

“Tell what?” asked Haven.

I shook my head. It would be so easy to do it now. Nobody would blame me for blabbing a secret that sooner or later the whole school was going to find out about anyway. Kate was an idiot if she thought she could keep her identity hidden for long. I ought to know.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said, gritting my teeth.

Kate glared at me. She was going to hate me no matter what I did. Whether I blabbed, or kept my mouth shut, she’d find a way to justify despising me. She was going to decide my note had been threatening no matter what it had actually said.

“People, I don’t do conflict,” Spinky said.

“Neither do I,” Haven piped up.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Kate said. “Everyone does conflict. Conflict is a part of life.You either face it, or you’re just pretending it isn’t there.”

That was the only partly true thing I’d heard Kate say, but I wasn’t about to agree with her.

“Whatever. I avoid conflict, then. Add it to my list of character flaws,” Spinky said. “This is finished, though. Leave Moxie alone. The stuff she told me that wasn’t true is between her and me, period. And whatever you thought she said to me about your family, you made a mistake.”

Kate looked genuinely pained for a moment.

“You . . . but you . . . I asked if you wanted to go to Van Kempen and Crumble to check out their sale. And you said, ‘I’m not like you—I can’t shop there.’ Then you gave me this look and said, ‘And don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’ ”

Spinky gave Kate an astonished look, then let out a short, loud laugh.

“Kate, are you serious? Van Kempen and Crumble never stocks anything above a size four—it’s like, their motto or something. I can’t fit into their clothes. That’s what I was talking about.”

“You . . . but . . . you made that crack about
The National Enquirer
,” Kate muttered.

“Yes, when I was explaining that I don’t talk trash about people. Were we having the same conversation? I’m not going to tell you again—I don’t do conflict. Take it somewhere else.”

Kate looked like she was grasping for words. I stared at her. I was past the point where I thought I might cry. Now I just felt sick, and mad.

“Forget it,” Kate said. “None of it matters anyway. I’m just going to end up at a new school again, as usual, so what’s the point.”

Then she stormed out through the open door like she was the one who’d just been publicly humiliated.

I felt the sudden need to sit, and since there was no furniture nearby, I sat on the floor.

“So,” Spinky declared, plopping down next to me. “
That
happened.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Don’t play into Kate’s hostility,” Haven said, sitting down on the other side of me. “This is her negative karma playing out, not yours.”

“No,” I said. “It’s mine too. You guys, I am so sorry I lied to you. I brought this all on my own head because I decided when I came to Eaton I wouldn’t be my boring self anymore.”

“The Buddhists believe that attachment to self is the root of all suffering,” Haven said gently.

“Then I must either be a very good Buddhist, or the worst one ever,” I told her.

“Well, you’re a good
roommate
,” Spinky said. “And it isn’t like you set out to hurt anybody.”

They were both being so nice. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t want anyone to be nice to me at the moment—not until I could get the sick feeling out of my stomach, and the panic out of my heart.

“I have to go,” I said.

And I was out of the room in a flash, running, getting away from my troubles as fast as I could.

My
feet knew where I was going before my mind did. There are places everyone goes instinctively when they need to be completely safe. My father was at home alone once and got struck by lightning while he was walking out to our garage. He said he didn’t remember anything that happened for the next ten minutes but he woke up in his own bed. His brain was temporarily scorched, but his feet automatically knew where he needed to go and got him there.

My feet took me, in record time, to the small piano in Sage Living Room. The practice rooms, the music wing itself, were too far away. I usually avoided the Sage piano so that people wouldn’t wander by and hear me, but I needed to play now. I played Béla Bartók first, because his pieces—Miss Nimetz had forced me to memorize some of them to exercise my fingers—make me mad, and I was so furious at Kate Southington, I felt like the top of my head was going to blow off. My fury was only increased by the knowledge that I was not an innocent, wrongly blamed victim, and that Kate was right—I had been deceiving people, both people I didn’t know well and those I now considered my friends.

I hadn’t started out thinking what I was doing was lying, but not even the biggest blob of Mr. Tate’s good mayonnaise could disguise this. I had lied. And though my intentions had not been bad, the results were. Especially where Reagan was concerned. All I wanted was to take advantage of the opportunity to reinvent myself. Now I had blown the chance, been publicly humiliated, and hurt one of the people that had become the most important to me at Eaton.

I abandoned the Bartók mid-measure and switched to Bach, because I needed to think logically. What did this all mean? What was my next move? My Eaton life was basically over. I felt like such an idiot. Why not just tell my parents the boarding school thing wasn’t working out, and go home? That offer had been on the table from the beginning, after all. I could live at home forever, growing white-haired and teaching piano and taking in stray cats until the neighborhood children started weaving tales of my tragic past and my story was adapted for Lifetime Television.

I stopped just a few lines into the Well-Tempered Clavier and launched into Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata instead, because now I felt so highly emotional, I could hardly stand it. I didn’t
want
to leave Eaton. I loved it here. I loved Spinky, and Haven, and Reagan, though they were so different from one another. I wanted to spend the next five years with them. And with Ms. Hay. And I could hardly imagine piano lessons without Mr. Tate. But how could I stay? Reagan might never talk to me again. Kate was probably already broadcasting what had just happened to the four corners of the earth. How could I hold my head up now? I was the Dope of the Decade.

My fingers moved almost by themselves while my ears and heart listened. The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata always made me cry. I played the two final, quiet chords, then just sat there looking at my hands until I heard someone breathe out very quietly, in a tiny muffled sigh.

Spinky was standing in the doorway of Sage Living Room, her mouth hanging open.

“How could I have not known about this?”

I ducked my head.

“The Personality Log?” I mumbled.

Spinky made an exasperated sound and rushed into the room.

“No,
this!
”

She grabbed my hand and plunked it onto the keys.

“What? I play the piano,” I said as Spinky slid onto the piano bench beside me.

“You play the piano,” Spinky repeated. “Yes. Johnny Depp acts. Donald Trump makes money.You play the piano. I knew you took lessons. But Moxie, you’re amazing! How could I have not known you could play like this?”

I shrugged.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“I followed you. I was worried when you rushed off like that. I had no idea where you were going. I came down the stairs after you, and you came in here. And then I hear this beautiful music—Moxie, you play like one of those concert player people!”