You Wish (2 page)

“Ahoy, vapid wannabe.” I do a mock salute and walk right past her toward the sink.

She rolls her eyes. “You’re
so
weird.”

I slap my hand over my heart, trying to look as theatrical as possible. “Ay, it be the scurvy,” I say, screwing my mouth up to the side and crinkling one brow so low my left eye is almost closed.

That sentence probably doesn’t even make sense, and Janae makes a noise that sounds like a combination of a snort and a gurgle and then pushes past me, ramming into my shoulder and making me bounce off the cinder block wall.

I holler after her, “Does this mean tonight’s pillow fight is canceled?”

I’m not even sure where that came from, but by the look she gives me as the door swings shut, I figure it’s a victory. Even with the door closed, I can hear her thick wedge sandals as she stomps away, making enough noise to rouse the dead.

I laugh to myself as I enter a bathroom stall, but now I know that I can’t take the tights off. There’s no way I’m giving her the satisfaction, even if changing had nothing to do with her. Damn. Now I’ve wasted my extra-credit points and my legs are still going to itch all day. This is shaping up just perfectly.

Did I mention that today is my birthday? Well, it is. I’m officially sixteen. Sweet? Not exactly. I stopped being sweet when I stopped eating a dozen gumballs a day, back in elementary school.

Every birthday seems to be worse than the last one. By the time I’m seventeen, I’ll probably be having an eighth life crisis.

I finish in the stall and head to the sink. I have no desire to get back to history, so I spend what must be a full five minutes washing my hands. A few mousy-brown strands of hair have escaped from my still-damp-from-the-shower ponytail. I’m wearing zilcho makeup, because even designer mascara wouldn’t make my plain brown eyes any more alluring, and my thin lips aren’t going to get any bigger no matter how much I spend on plumping lip gloss. My dress sort of hangs off me, because I’m probably a little too thin and a lot too boobless to pull it off.

Before I can decide that I hate my ears, too, Nicole walks in, her cute little ankle boots clacking on the white bathroom tiles. “Oh, good!” she says when she sees me, as if she didn’t spend all of biology ignoring me.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing a couple scratchy paper towels. “What’s up?”

Nicole heads to the sink and starts washing her hands, even though she hasn’t used the bathroom yet. Very suspect. Then she leans forward far enough that her blonde bangs fall into her eyes and she doesn’t have to look at me. I watch the silver bangles on her wrists flutter around as she runs her hands under the water. Nicole got really tall over the summer, so she has to sort of lean over. She’s still working her way through her gigantic new fall wardrobe, and today’s jeans look like two hundred dollars’ worth of perfection.

“Not much.” She starts pushing the soap dispenser over and over, until the soap begins to drip from her hands.

I stop watching her and pretend to fix my ponytail. “I am really,
really
not looking forward to tonight. I wish I could get my mom to cancel it. It’s going to be so lame.”

She looks up at me in the mirror. I notice her skin looks really nice today, almost glowing, with only a few blemishes on her chin and one on her nose. Her mom probably dragged her to the dermatologist again, part of her never-ending quest to fix Nicole’s acne. “About that,” she says.

I meet her eyes and wait for her to finish.

“I kind of forgot your party was today. I mean, just for, like, a second. Ben and I went out last Saturday and he told me about this great idea he had for our three-month anniversary and I kind of agreed before I realized it was the same day as your party,” she says, all in a rush, and then flips the faucet on full bore, so that the water hits her hands and starts splashing big sudsy drops all over the black-freckled counters.

My heart twists around and drops to my stomach. Just before school let out last spring, Nicole got her first-ever boyfriend. For a while things were just as great as ever, but then August hit, and it’s like now there’s not enough room for a best friend
and
a boyfriend. That shy girl I’ve been best friends with for the last six years has
finally
been coming into her own, and I’m really happy for her . . . but I don’t know what that means for me, if she’s going to outgrow me, move on, forget me. Because I’m the same person I’ve always been, and she’s not.

And something’s gotta give.

I grip the edge of the countertop, even though it’s all wet. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shakes her head. “But I’ll only be a little late, I swear.”

“Where are you going?”

She probably has a really good reason for this. Like she just found out she won the lottery and she has to be there tonight to claim the check in person.

“He thought we could go to Anya’s, that place on the waterfront, and do you know how cool that place is supposed to be? It will be my first real anniversary
ever
and it’ll be super-romantic
.
I totally won’t go if it’s a big deal, though.” Nicole is talking really fast, the words flowing out like they’re falling over the edge of Niagara Falls. “But he’s been at the track a lot lately and now that school has started, we haven’t had as much time together, and I really want to go. I don’t want to let him down.”

All I can do is stare. It just seems so wrong that she’s
asking permission
to ditch me, as if there’s any way to refuse her without being a total brat.

I take in a long, slow breath, rubbing my eyes. “You know I’m dreading this party, Nicole. I mean yeah, I would ditch my own party too, if I could. But how am I going to survive the torture if you’re not there to make fun of it with me?”

Here’s the thing about my sweet sixteen: My mom is the one who wants it, not me. She’s an event planner for a living, and she’s been talking about my sweet-sixteen party for oh, a thousand years. When I was little, it sounded like great fun, and we’d sit around talking about how cool it would be.

But things change, and so do people, and the idea of a frilly party revolving around yours truly is now my worst nightmare. I’ve been telling her for over a year that I don’t want my party anymore—that I’d prefer a quiet dinner—but it doesn’t help. She’s throwing me a party whether I like it or not.

The worst part is that Nicole is the only person I invited. I figured with her to goof off with, even a Miley Cyrus concert could be bearable.

My mom, on the other hand, invited every relative we have, plus some we don’t, like the neighbors and my bus driver. Seriously—she invited my school bus driver. So the entire place is going to be filled with people I don’t want to be around.

And there will be games. Oh, there will be games.

“We wouldn’t miss the whole thing, I promise. Just the first hour, tops. But only if you’re cool with it,” Nicole says.

We stare at each other for a long moment, the faucet still running in the background, my hand still gripping the countertop. My evening begins to stretch out in front of me, like a never-ending desert.

I can make it through an hour, right? No biggie. Nicole will get there before everything gets unbearable, we’ll laugh at the silly decorations, eat ridiculous hors d’oeuvres, and it’ll be like she didn’t miss a thing.

“Okay,” I say. “I can handle an hour.”

“Okay? Really?” she says, her voice rising an octave. It’s almost so high pitched only cheerleaders could hear it.

I nod, my stomach sinking. She springs forward and hugs me, smearing her soaped-up hands all over my sailor sundress.

“You’re the bestest best friend,” she says. “I promise, I’ll be there by seven.”

I just nod. I’ll have to suck it up and grin and bear it until she arrives. My birthday is just one night.

The real problem is I know that Nicole is spending more and more time with Ben, and less and less time with me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

That’s not even the worst part.

The worst part?

I’ve been completely and utterly in love with Ben Mackenzie for three long, agonizing years.

And she has no idea.

2

I MAKE IT THROUGH
the rest of biology without a meltdown and then move on to trigonometry and slide into my seat next to Ben’s empty desk. By some act of God—or maybe the devil, I still haven’t decided—the random seating arrangement ended with us next to each other.

Three months and four days ago—June 19, to be exact—I would have died of happiness to be seated next to Ben. I mean, finally, I’d have the opportunity to talk to him.

Of course, him becoming my best friend’s boyfriend kind of changed that.

I never told her about my crush. If I’d only said something months ago, before she went out with him, maybe I wouldn’t be in this mess. But I didn’t.

Oh, sure, I told her how hot he was, how amazing he looked in jeans, how beautiful his blue eyes were. But there was no way I could
really
be in love with a guy I’d hardly spoken six words to, right? What else could I tell her? That we’d had a connection for a long time, only he didn’t know it? That I knew, without a doubt, that he was my soul mate?

Right. And ponies fly. So of course we would always talk about how hot Ben is, and I’d never reveal my deeper feelings, and that was that.

Until June 19.

Maybe June 19 was the day Nicole decided she didn’t want to be shy anymore, the moment of change. It’s easier to see now, in retrospect, that there’s the old Nicole and the new one, and June 19 is the day smack in the middle of it all.

I know Nicole better than anyone in the world, and so I know that though she comes off shy, once she’s around someone long enough, she warms right up. And she got paired as Ben’s partner in table tennis, and they spent two weeks playing together.

And I still have a hard time picturing it, but somehow, she got up the nerve to ask him out. She probably blurted it out and turned all red, but she did it.

And he said yes.

She was totally beaming when she told me, bouncing around as if she’d won the lottery.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was almost positive I’d been in love with him for years. And now that I know him better—through Nicole—now that Ben and I talk and joke in class and he tells me all about his dates with her, I’ve only become more sure. More sure that he and I fit together.

Ben is that one guy for me, my perfect match.

Except he’s already matched, and now they’re celebrating their three-month anniversary. Three months is, like, a decade in high school years. I spent most of the summer at that stupid diner, so I haven’t been forced to endure that much quality time with both of them at the same time.

Thank God.

For the next fifty-five minutes, I will hold my breath, my heart will beat erratically, and the hairs on my arm will stand on end. This is life inside Ben’s orbit, and it is the height of every day of my otherwise meaningless existence.

My crush on Ben began a few years ago, the summer after sixth grade. Nicole and I were at Flaming Geyser. It’s a state park just outside our hometown of Enumclaw, a tiny cow town about an hour southeast of Seattle. The park is at the north end of the Green River Valley, and you have to drive long, windy roads to get to it. It’s surrounded by achingly tall fir trees, where the river is wide and slow and perfect for swimming and tubing. On a hot day, cars line up on either side of the road for almost as far as you can see.

That day, I was wearing the last bikini I’ve ever owned, a teeny pink triangle top with white polka dots, the sort of thing I’d never be caught dead in now. Nicole was in a matronly one-piece—plain navy blue, the kind of thing a high school swim team would wear. By then, she was at least a C cup, and she wore a white sarong over her suit. I didn’t tell her that it just made her chest look even bigger, because I didn’t want to make her paranoid. She was even shyer back then, afraid to talk to just about anyone but me.

Nicole wanted to spend most of the day on the shore, lying out, eating Doritos, and reading one of her romance novels. Back then she was on this acne medication that made her skin really sensitive to light, so she was slathered in the thickest layer of 60 SPF I’ve ever seen. She was paranoid about actually swimming and letting it wash off. I guess the only thing worse than a face full of acne is a sunburned face full of acne.

I, however, could not tolerate sitting still. I guess you could say I’m a little impatient, forever ready for adventure.

So I swam across the river and then climbed up the reddish-brown clay banks, using tree roots as handholds, my feet getting muddy and slick. Although my hair was still dripping with the icy water, the short hike made me sweat. Even in the middle of summer, Enumclaw didn’t often get hotter than ninety degrees, but that fateful day, it was ninety-seven.

There is a cliff on that side of the river, about twenty feet high. People jump in from up there, but you have to aim for this perfect little swimming hole; otherwise you’ll slam into the rocks six feet under the surface of the water, likely breaking a leg.

Rumor has it someone died jumping off, years ago. I heard they drank too much and jumped headfirst. It scares a lot of people and they’ll spend ten minutes up there, staring down, only to chicken out and climb back down the way they came.

Sometimes spectators, people smart enough not to climb up there at all, will tie their tubes up to the shore and just float there, waiting to see who has the guts to actually jump, mocking those who don’t.

That day I met Ben, he was up there with three other guys, all of them staring down at the water with eyes full of worry. I guess he wasn’t quite the daredevil yet, not the one he is now. I didn’t recognize any of them, not even Ben, but I found out later they went to Thunder Mountain, the other middle school in town.