What's Your Status? (9 page)

“Hey, Dave,” I said, heading over to him. It was a little strange to see him so soon after hearing Lisa talk about their issues, and I tried to keep my face from revealing anything. I knew from long experience with Jimmy and Liz that it was sometimes tricky to be friends with both halves of a couple; I’d just never before had this problem with Lisa and Dave.

Putnam Pizza was deserted except for Little Tony—the owner’s son and Dave’s boss when Big Tony wasn’t around—who was sprawled in one of the booths, typing furiously on his phone. He glanced up, disinterested, as I passed, then went right back to typing.

“Since when do you work weeknights?” I asked Dave, pulling up one of the stools by the counter. On the other
side of it were the pizza ovens, cash register, and prep area.

Dave took off his black-rimmed glasses and polished them on the bottom of his T-shirt, which had the
Mona Lisa
on it.
She Was Framed,
read the type underneath. “We’re swamped this week,” Dave said. “Big Tony asked for a favor.”

I looked around the empty restaurant. “Yeah, I can see that,” I said. “Really busy.”

“Catering,” Dave clarified. “We have about a million events this weekend. Everyone else is cooking in the kitchens across town, and someone has to mind the store.” He turned, pulled down the huge metal oven door, and looked inside. “You’re here to pick up your order?”

“You got it,” I said. “The Demon Spawn called it in?”

“Just a few minutes ago,” he said, closing the oven. “It’ll be ready in about ten.” He leaned his elbows on the counter and raised his eyebrows at me. “So what’s the haps?”

I looked at him and realized that I had a great opportunity to get a male perspective on things. “Dave, you and Lisa have a song, right?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “
‘Quelqu’un m’a dit.’
Carla Bruni.”

“It’s in French?” I asked with a smile.

“Naturally,” Dave said. “But it’s also a really great song. Why? You and Nate still don’t have one?”

This was the problem with being friends with a couple. There were no secrets. I sighed. “Well, I tried to talk to him about it today, and he said that he thinks it’s not
a good idea. But I just want to be able to dance with my boyfriend, to our song, at the prom.”

“You want me to talk to him?” Dave asked. “I’ve been meaning to correct some of his misguided opinions on modern cinema, anyway.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.” When Nate had started to hang out with my friends, I had been thrilled when he and Dave hit it off. They had become friends, even though you might not have realized it to be around them, as their friendship seemed to consist of the two of them constantly insulting each other.

“You sure?” Dave asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not even the biggest thing we’re dealing with right now. I think Nate thinks that I proposed we sleep together on prom night.” Dave’s eyebrows shot up, and his face turned red. “It was an accident,” I said quickly. “But I’m not sure how to handle things now.”

“Whoa. What happened?” a voice behind me asked.

I spun around and saw Brian McMahon sitting up and looking over the back of the booth that had been camouflaging him. “Brian!” I said, hearing how strangled my voice sounded. I hoped against hope that maybe he had become temporarily deaf in the last five seconds and hadn’t heard any of the details of what I’d just said. Brian was a friend of mine, and one of my Marine Bio lab partners, but we didn’t exactly share our deep feelings. Under normal circumstances, I never would have told him what I’d just told Dave. This was for many reasons, the primary one being that Brian was actually good friends
with Nate—they’d met at summer camp when they were kids. “When…um…did you get here?” I turned and glared at Dave, feeling that he should have warned me that there was someone there besides Little Tony, who was still utterly absorbed in his phone.

“About an hour ago,” Dave said drily. “He’s picking up an order.”

“I’m paying for it!” Brian said. “I just have to count my money first.” I took a step closer to his booth and saw that the table was covered with change that looked like mostly pennies. “Grounding,” Brian said by way of explanation. Brian was always coming off one of his father’s groundings, or throwing a party that would get him grounded again, but this last grounding had been epic. It had been six weeks and counting, because he’d thrown a party while he was still technically grounded for throwing his last one. I hadn’t seen Brian outside of school in ages. He’d told me that the staff at Karl’s Keg Kompany had sent him a get-well card, figuring that some grave illness must be the reason he hadn’t required their services in so long.

“What does the change have to do with it?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “I’m allowed out of the house for three things: school, Young Investors Club meetings, and to pick up dinner. So I try to extend each one as long as possible.”

“What about the prom?” I asked. “Are you going to be able to go to that?” When Brian had last filled me in, while we’d pretended to do a Marine Bio lab, he’d been lobbying his father hard for permission, but hadn’t yet gotten an answer.

Brian smiled. “I’m going,” he said. “As of last night, I officially have permission.”

“That’s great!” I said. “Who are you going with?”

“Well,” Brian said, looking down at his pile of coinage, “that’s still…um…”

“Tell her about the website,” Dave prompted. Brian glared at him.

“What website?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

Brian sighed. “It’s called Save the Last Dance,” he muttered. “It’s this site for people looking for last-minute prom dates. Mostly, it matches you with people from other schools.” He looked up at me, then added defensively, “When you’re grounded, you spend a lot of time on the internet.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said quickly. “Seriously.”

“Right,” Dave added unconvincingly, a moment later.

“Well,” Brian said, frowning at Dave, “I’ll have you know, the quality of girls looking for prom dates went way up after the Stanwich prom was canceled. It’s people who want to go to a prom, not just people who can’t get dates.”

“Like you,” Dave pointed out helpfully.

“I’ve been
grounded,
” Brian said testily.

“This probably isn’t the best idea, then, is it?” I asked, gesturing to his pile o’ change. “I mean, isn’t your dad going to get suspicious that you’re out having fun?”

Brian handed me his phone. “I just updated my
status,” he said. “My dad can see my location.” I looked down at his Q feed.

Grounded_Brian
Picking up pizza! Still!

“But how does your father know it’s you sending it?” Dave asked. “I mean,
I
could have just sent that from your phone, and you could be off doing whatever.”

Brian’s eyes lit up. “Now
there’s
an idea!” he said.

“No, no,” I said quickly. “That wasn’t a suggestion—”

“But what happened with Nate?” Brian asked, turning back to me.

“Seriously,” Dave said.

“Yeah,” Little Tony called from the corner of the room. As we all turned to look at him, he blushed and focused on his phone again.

“Nothing,” I said as quietly as possible. “Forget I said anything at all.”

“Um, that’s not going to happen,” Dave said. “Spill it, MacDonald.”

“No,” I said, not wanting to discuss it in front of Brian. Or, for that matter, Little Tony.

“Want me to ask Nate what happened?” Brian asked, taking back his phone. “I could send him a text right now—”

“No!” I said. Brian waved his phone threateningly at me, and I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell you guys. Just
don’t text Nate.” I moved closer to the counter, and Brian leaned farther over the booth. It seemed that I was going to get
two
male perspectives on the situation. “Okay, fine. I think I
accidentally
said something that implied that I wanted to sleep with Nate on prom night. But all I really meant was that we could keep making out on prom night. But I don’t know what Nate thinks I meant. And I don’t know what to do now.” I looked from Brian to Dave, both of whom were silent. “Guys?” I asked.

“Man,” Brian said, eyes slightly glazed, “I really need to find a girlfriend.”

“Well,” Dave said, leaning forward, “you should probably clear it up with him. Because if you implied something, that’s probably what he heard.”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “Right now, he probably thinks that you meant what you said. Because that’s probably what he’s
hoping
you meant. He is a guy.”

“This is true,” Dave agreed.

I realized that I might have been better off not having the male perspective. “You think?” I asked, my stomach dropping.

“Wait, Mad,” Dave said, looking surprised. “Are you considering this?”

“I…don’t know,” I stammered.

“Well, that’s just great,” Dave fumed, and I looked at him, wondering why he was suddenly so upset.

“Dave?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong,” Dave said, “is that you’ve been dating Nate for, what, six weeks? Maybe? And you’re thinking about
sleeping
with him?”

“Nice,” Little Tony called appreciatively from the corner of the room. I couldn’t help wishing that Dave would turn down the volume a bit.

“Well,” I said in a low voice, “not exactly—”

“And at my house, too, right?” Dave asked.

“Well…” I stalled. Dave was throwing the afterparty, mostly because Brian’s was no longer an option, Dave’s parents were gone for the week, and his house had a pool. I was planning on going, and bringing Nate, but the issue of what we would be doing there hadn’t really occurred to me until now. “Kind of.”

“Meanwhile,” Dave continued, looking more and more incensed, “I’ve been dating Lisa for a
year
now and she’s barely even talking about it, because she wants to wait until Bastille Day.”

“Well, when’s Bastille Day?” Brian asked reasonably. “Like, next week?”

“July fourteenth,” Little Tony called from his corner. We all looked at him, and he waved his phone in the air. “Wikipedia, fools.”

“Anyway,” I said, turning back to Dave and trying to pretend that there wasn’t someone listening in on the conversation, “this has nothing to do with you and Lisa. So you don’t need to get all upset about it.”

“Upset?” Dave asked, yanking down the oven door with such force that it bounced halfway up again. “I’m not upset. Who’s upset?” He pulled the pizza from the oven with the long wooden spatula-thing, slid it into a waiting box, and slammed the lid shut. “Eighteen dollars,” he said to me, and I handed him a twenty.

“Keep the change,” I said. “Seriously, Dave, this has nothing to do with you guys. It’s just a misunderstanding with Nate.”

“Well, if it is just a misunderstanding, you should probably clear it up,” Brian said. He swept the change into his cupped palms, walked over to the register, and dropped it in front of Dave, who sighed. “Because by now, Nate probably just thinks it’s normal or something.”

Not understanding, I looked at Brian, who was taking his pizza box from Dave. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Brian said. “Just that I heard last year’s prom night was when he slept with Melissa for the first time.”

CHAPTER 5

Song: Mutiny, I Promise You/The New Pornographers

Quote: “He blinked, like some knight of King Arthur’s court, who, galloping to perform a deed of derring-do, has had the misfortune to collide with a tree.”

—P. G. Wodehouse

The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and I grabbed on to the counter for support. “Wait,” I said, staring at Brian, “what?”

“What?” Brian repeated, looking at me. Maybe my face was showing something of what I was feeling—that is, total shock—because he suddenly began to look very nervous. “Wait, you didn’t know that?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said, not sure I trusted myself to say other words. Not entirely sure that I remembered any. I was in a state of complete shock. Nate had slept with somebody? He wasn’t a virgin, like me? I’d just assumed that he was. But it hit me that I’d been assuming a lot of things about him. Because he’d never told me he hadn’t slept with anyone. And we hadn’t talked about it. It was
beginning to occur to me that while we’d been talking a lot, maybe we hadn’t been talking about the right things. But I would have thought that something like this
might
have come up, just in the course of conversation.

“Well, it might have just been a rumor,” Brian said, speaking quickly. I glanced at the corner of the restaurant and saw that Little Tony was just watching us, his phone trilling occasionally, but seemingly forgotten, because clearly we were much more interesting. “I mean, I didn’t hear it from Nate. And I didn’t hear it from Melissa. I’ve never even met her. So who knows? Not me. Hey, is that the time?” Brian looked up at the
PIZZA TIME!
clock, where a knife and fork circled the toppings that stood in for numbers. “I’d better get going. See you in class, Mad.”

Brian hustled out, and I watched him go, utterly stunned. Maybe Nate
had
always assumed we were going to sleep together on prom night, since apparently that was his habit….