I grabbed her arm. “Please ride home with us today. Don’t leave me alone with Josh and Bob.”
She took a deep breath, looked at the car roof, then back at me benevolently. “All right. But only because I love you, Cassidy.”
After school as we walked across the parking lot, Elise sang the words to “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
I appreciated that.
Suddenly Elise stopped. “Wow.”
I peered over at the car and saw Bob next to Josh. “Wow,” I agreed. He did look great. He barely looked like Bob anymore.
When we got to them, Elise said, “I guess clothes do make the man. You look awesome.”
The clothes did look good. They relaxed him somehow, turning him from a Dilbert-waiting-to-happen into a normal teenager, but what really made the difference was the haircut. It no longer looked unruly and bush-like. It was sleek, with just a little bit of wave to it.
“Thanks.” Bob smiled nervously then tapped the sides of his pants. Josh shot him a sharp look. Bob immediately dropped his hand.
“How’s your computer program going?” I asked.
“Pretty good,” Bob answered. “We had a problem when our transpose matrix function wouldn’t compile so we . . .”
Josh gave him another look.
“It’s going fine now, though,” Bob said.
We got in the car and talked about school. Bob did impersonations of the teachers. He was good at it.
“You ought to be in drama,” I told him.
“Don’t have time. Now here’s my impersonation of Mr. Jones as Yoda the Jedi chemistry teacher.” Bob’s voice turned high like Yoda’s. “Mmm . . . So . . . chemists you want to be? Learn the way of the nuclear force, do you?”
Elise was still laughing when they dropped me off at my house.
The next day on the way to school I congratulated Josh. “How did you do it? You turned Bob into a normal person. Into a better-than-normal person. He was funny yesterday. Where did that come from?”
“Bob is a funny guy. He just gets nervous around girls.”
I looked out the window, still shaking my head in wonder. “He didn’t mention a bug once all the way home.”
“I told him they were off limits—along with computers, the Unified theory, or anything else that would require a PHD to understand.”
“Amazing,” Elise said.
“After we work on our program today,” Josh went on, “we’re going to the mall in Moscow to see if we can attract college women. Eat your heart out, Cassidy.”
I shifted my backpack on the seat. “It never would have worked out between Bob and me anyway,” I said with a theatrical sigh. “Next September when he goes off to college, to live on his own out of state, I’ll still only be sixteen. I’ll have two more long years of high school.”
Josh glanced at me through the mirror. I could only see his eyes, but I could tell by the way they crinkled that he was smiling. He didn’t say anything, though. Elise looked questioningly from Josh to me, but she didn’t say anything either.
Really, things between Josh and I would have probably gone on like that forever if I hadn’t changed everything with a slip of the tongue.
Chapter 12
The night my tongue slipped up, Elise had come over to my house so she could copy some of my biology notes. She didn’t have them because she’d skipped out on class a couple of times, but our teacher let us have one handwritten page of notes with us during our tests.
While she wrote out the names and functions of cell parts, she kept looking at my bedroom. “Your furniture all matches,” she said. “You were one of those girls who got a canopy bed when you were little, weren’t you? I bet your parents bought you everything you wanted.”
I was sitting on my bed with my laptop, finishing off my English assignment. “There’s a flip side to having matching furniture. If you think you have no privacy with your brothers and sisters, you should try living with just your parents. They want to know what I’m doing every second of the day.”
“They care.”
“They’ve poured all their parenting efforts into one person. Me. If I get a B on my homework instead of an A, they want to know why. If I bite my nails, they notice. When I come home from school and they ask, “What did you do today?” they really want to know. They want a synopsis of my life every single day. Sometimes it’s smothering.”
“But at least they know who you are.”
I kept tapping out my English assignment. “They worry about me all the time. Their guilt trips are horrendous. If I let them down, they don’t have anyone else. If I said to them, ‘I’m not going to college. I want to be a traveling street performer,’ they’d die.”
“My parents would pack my bags.”
“They constantly embarrass me,” I went on. “Every time Josh has come over, my parents have hovered around and then grilled me about it as soon as he left.”
Elise looked up from her notes. “Josh has come over? Why?”
Why was right. Why didn’t I know when to keep my mouth shut? I couldn’t tell Elise he had come over to talk about her—that he’d asked me to be her friend.
“Um . . .” I felt myself blush. “He came over . . . a long time ago . . . because I left things in your car. My sweater . . . and my cell phone.”
Elise contemplated this. “Why didn’t he give them to you the next day?”
“I don’t know.”
“And why are you blushing?” She raised her eyebrows in question. “Is something going on between you and Josh?”
I was trapped. I took the only way out I could think of. “Um, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, okay, yes.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“We want to keep it a secret.”
“Why?”
I felt like a living object lesson about the perils of lying. I knew I had dug a hole for myself, and I knew it was getting deeper. But I couldn’t get out of it now. I had to keep digging.
“Because of my parents. It’s like I told you. They’re overwhelming when it comes to guys. They’d be all over my case if they thought I was . . . getting too serious.”
“How serious are you?”
The shovel kept hitting the dirt. “Not very, but my parents would start an inquisition if they knew I’d been out with him more than a few times. We’ve had to be, you know, discreet.”
Elise blinked, incredulous. “You could have at least told me.”
“I wanted to, but we decided it would be safer if no one knew. Besides, I think he’s touchy about dating a sophomore.” That part at least was true.
Elise grunted. “Josh thinks I’d tell someone, doesn’t he?”
“He never said that. But he did seem adamant about not telling you. In fact, I bet if you confronted him right now, he’d deny it.” I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “You won’t confront him, will you?”
“Not if you don’t want me too.”
“Good. He’d be mad at me if he knew I told you.”
Elise shook her head. “And to think of all the grief I’ve gone through over Chad. I thought you still liked him. Every time I was with him and saw you, I felt bad. You could have at least let me know you were okay about it.”
“I did,” I reminded her. “I talked to you right after you started dating him.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you meant any of those things. I thought you were just being nice.” She laughed a little. “I should have known something was going on. Those looks you two exchange on the way to school, and Josh not dating anyone—then he expects me to believe it’s the dog’s fault.”
“Remember, you don’t know anything about this.”
She put her hand up. “I know how to keep a secret.”
* * *
The next morning as we walked across the parking lot to school, Elise asked if I was ready for the biology test.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I still have to finish my algebra homework.”