The Way I Used to Be (10 page)

Totally Slutty Disgusting

“How's that?” she asks Amanda with a smile.

“Perfect!”

“And why is she a totally slutty disgusting whore, again?” She laughs.

“Trust me, she just is,” Amanda says as they stand back and admire their work. “Besides, she practically screwed some guy out by the tennis courts after school yesterday!” she lies.

I cover my mouth with my hand. I would have killed her, would have pushed her out the window. I would have screamed at the top of my lungs at her. Except I'm paralyzed.

“Oh, gross!” Snarky shouts.

“Yeah, completely,” Amanda agrees. “Okay, come on, we don't have much time.”

Then they leave. I let them leave. But I still can't move. I'm frozen, crouched on top of the toilet, my mouth hanging open, my hand still covering it.

I don't know how much time goes by before I snap out of it. I push open the stall door and walk up to the wall in absolute disbelief. I touch the black, inky, hateful words with my fingers. I hear a voice in the hall. And a locker slams shut. People are getting here. I quickly pull a whole armful of paper towels out of the dispenser and soak them in soap and water. Then I go to the wall and scrub, scrub, scrub against those words, using the strength of my whole body, until I can't even catch my breath, until I'm crying. I look at the wall. The words still stare back at me. Unchanged. I let the sopping wad of paper towels fall to the floor. I clench my fists, digging my fingernails into my palms, wanting to punch the wall, wanting to punch anything.

Just then these three pretty, popular senior girls push through the door, midconversation. They assemble in front of the mirror. I turn my back to them as I wipe my eyes dry. Then I walk to the sink to wash the wet paper towel crumbs off my hands.

“Oh, ouch!” one of them shouts. My head snaps up to look at her. She points to the wall with her mascara wand, and says, “Someone's been a bad girl.”

They all laugh. My heart feels like a bird trapped in a cage in my chest. Its wings flapping violently against the bars of bone. I want to smash this girl's pretty face into the mirror so hard. Then another one of them asks, “Who the hell is Eden McCrorey, anyway?”

“A whore, apparently,” the third girl answers, laughing.

“No,” the first girl corrects, “a totally slutty disgusting whore, you mean.”

And they cackle like little witches, following one after the other back out into the hallway. I just stand there and let them get away with talking about me like that.

I race out into the hall, my head in a fog, determined to find those girls and tell them they can't treat me like that. To tell them it's all lies. To go find Amanda and pound her into the ground. But I stop after only a few steps. The halls are beginning to fill with people and noise. And those girls have dispersed already.

I go to my locker instead. I try to act like nothing's different. Try to just get through the day as if I don't know, as if there's nothing
to
know. I manage to avoid every single person who knows me. But Mara finds me in the library during lunch.

“Hey,” she whispers, coming up behind me as I'm shelving books. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

It was inevitable. I let her pull me by the arm deeper into the aisle.

“So, Edy,” she begins, “I have to tell you something. It's bad. But before I do, remember, it will be okay. I just—I think you should know.”

“I know,” I tell her.

“You do?” she asks, her face in a grimace.

I nod—try to smile, shrug like I don't even care.

“It's insane! I don't know who would start rumors like that. About you of all people!”

“I don't know,” I lie.

“Well, Cameron and I went through
all
the bathrooms and tried to scribble them out. We've been doing that
all
morning, so it's okay. I hoped you wouldn't have to see it, though,” she admits.

“Cameron went into the girls' bathroom?”

“No, the boys' bathrooms.”

I hadn't even considered they would have gone into the boys' bathrooms too. “Thank you for doing that, Mara. I mean it. I think everyone's seen it already, though,” I tell her. “Can't undo that.” I laugh bitterly.

“Well, fuck everyone!” she says too loudly, and a bunch of heads turn toward us. “I'm really sorry, Edy,” she whispers. “I don't understand this at all.” She's so sad it's almost like it's happening to her and not me. “Want to come over tonight? We can eat all kinds of junk food and just veg out?” she tries.

“I can't. I actually have plans.”

“You do? With who?” she asks, shocked.

I look around to make sure no one can hear, and lower my voice so that I'm barely speaking. “Josh. Joshua Miller.”

“Oh my God! Are you serious?” she whispers, her smile stretching wide. “How did this happen?”

“I don't know, it just . . . happened. He asked me out.”

“Edy?” Mara's smile suddenly contracts. “You don't think it was him, do you? Because if it was, then you definitely don't want to go out with him, right?”

“It wasn't him.”

“Yeah, but how can you be sure?” she asks, rightfully suspicious.

“I'm positive,” I assure her, but she doesn't look convinced.

“Edy, I'm worried now. You're gonna be really careful, right?” she asks, her voice trembling faintly. “Because he's kind of from this whole different world. He's older. I mean, what if he's expecting something, you know?”

“So what if he is?” I answer immediately. “I don't know, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.”

“Really?” she asks in disbelief. “But—but aren't you afraid?”

“No,” I lie. I am afraid. But in this other way, I'm also more afraid of
being
afraid. Afraid of not doing it too. Afraid that maybe I would be too afraid to ever do it. That Kevin would continue to control me in these ways I had never even dreamed of. And suddenly the thought of having someone else there in place of him is something I required-wanted-needed, in the most severe of ways. And I don't really care who, anyone else at all will do. This guy, Josh, he's good enough. He did, after all, pick me a weed.

“Maybe the rumors aren't such a lie after all,” I muse.

“Shut up, Edy,” Mara says, her face completely straight. “Don't you ever say that again. That's not true and you know it!”

“Sorry,” I tell her. She stares at me for a second too long, like she wants to keep arguing the point, but she doesn't. “I'm sorry,” I repeat.

“Edy, you have to be sure,” she says firmly. “If you're going to do it—like really, really sure. It's not like you get to take it back if you—”

But I have to stop her. “Don't worry, okay? Who knows if anything will even happen?” I lie, trying to make her feel better.

“Oh God,” she moans, both horrified and delighted at even the possibility. “Joshua Miller—that's big. Like. Huge.”

I grin in spite of my fear, at the thought of things being different—the thought of me being different. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

I STAND ON THE
sidewalk near the tennis courts after school. It feels like I've been waiting for hours, but it's only been seven minutes. I'll give him three more, and then I walk. I adjusted my hair and makeup in the bathroom before I left. I brushed my teeth. I even wore my new silky floral dress that I got before school started. I run my hands through my hair one more time. Just as I'm considering making a break for it, I see him walking toward me.

“Hey! You're really here?” he says, greeting me with that smile.

“I said I would be.” I smile back.

“I know, exactly. That's why I wasn't sure,” he says with a laugh. “Come on.” He reaches for my hand. My heart stops. He doesn't seem to notice, as he leads us through the parking lot, that everyone is staring at us. He stops at the blue station wagon that picked him up yesterday and lets me in first. When he gets in the driver's side, he starts the car and looks at me sweetly. “You look really nice, Eden.”

I mumble “Thanks,” and look out the window so he doesn't catch me blushing. But that's when I see these guys—guys I'm sure he's friends with—staring and pointing and laughing.

“So, where you wanna go?” he asks me, clearly not seeing what I'm seeing. Not living in the world I'm living in.

“Anywhere but here.”

“Okay,” he says with a laugh. “Are you hungry?”

I shrug. I don't feel like eating after the day I've had.

“Okay, movie?”

“Is there anywhere to go where there won't be other people around?” I try to laugh, even though I'm entirely serious.

“Mostly everywhere has people around these days.” He grins, still expecting an answer. “My parents were doing something tonight so I borrowed my mom's car just so I could take you somewhere. So come on . . . just name a place, any place, and we'll go.”

“What are your parents doing?” I ask, an idea forming in my mind.

He looks at me like I might be crazy. “I promise they aren't doing anything we'd want to do, if you're looking for ideas.”

“No, I just mean, what if we went to your house? No one's there, right?”

He looks confused for a moment, but then a wave of clarity passes over his face. “Um, sure. I guess we could. Isn't there somewhere else you'd rather go, though?” he asks, putting the car in drive.

“Not unless you know of some uninhabited island we could go to and be back by ten for my curfew.”

He just smiles as he pulls away.

Next thing I know, we're in the middle of his bedroom standing opposite each other. “So,” he says, shuffling through a stack of CDs on his dresser. “Do you want to listen to anything?” He still listens to CDs—that's unusual. But my mind is racing too fast to follow that thought any further.

“Sure.”

“What do you like?” he asks.

“Anything.”

He selects one of the CDs. It starts quiet and slow. He stares at me. He puts his hands in his pockets. He takes them back out. I shift my weight. “You like this?” he asks. I think he's talking about the music, but I also wonder if he means
this
as in being here with him.

The answer is the same either way, so I tell him the truth: “Not sure yet.”

He sits down on his bed and gestures for me to follow. I feel everything inside of me start to race and pulse as I move to the bed. I could never have imagined a year earlier I would be in the bedroom of the guy I so violently had the urge to bludgeon to death that day in the hall. I find myself evaluating every detail of the situation: him, me, the distance between us, the way his comforter feels soft against my legs, and everything smells like clean laundry, the sports posters on his walls, the hardwood floors, the curtains parted just slightly. I try hard to keep breathing as the fear tightens its knot around my heart. His lips are also slightly parted. I wait for him to speak, but he doesn't. My jaw is clamped so tight my teeth throb.

I study his face closer than I have before. His nose, I thought at first, seemed large, except it's not actually—
aquiline
, my brain whispers, flashing back to seventh grade, when I had to look up the word after reading it in
Sherlock Holmes
—but now I can't imagine a nose that belongs more perfectly to a face. And his eyes again, the colors seem different every time. I look down at my hands in my lap, my fingers twisting around one another, and I wonder if his mind is racing like mine, if his brain is working in overdrive just to understand my face. Somehow, I think not.

“So,” he begins. “You're Caelin McCrorey's sister? Or something, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I don't know.” He shrugs. “Just conversation. We played together. He was a cool guy. I mean, I didn't actually know that he's your brother. I asked around about you. That's all anyone really could tell me—you're a mystery.” He grins, raising his eyebrows.

I don't know what I'm supposed to say to that, though. I'm not such a mystery? Not so hard to unravel? And what about me being a slut all of a sudden, hadn't he heard that one?

He smiles out of the corner of his mouth and asks me, “What—you don't wanna talk?”

“Not about my brother.”

He makes a sound like
phffsh
and I can't tell if it's a laugh or just an exhale, but then he adds quietly, “Yeah, me neither.” He has this gravelly, running-words-together way of speaking, like he's not thinking much about how he sounds. Not like Kevin. Kevin always enunciates his words so that they come out smooth and hard and precise and borderline loud. His voice is different. But everything about him is different. This is going to be okay. I'm going to be okay. He smiles again, and reaches out to touch my cheek, so lightly. I think my heart stops. Nodding his head toward the space between us, he says, “Why are you way over there?”