It turns out that kissing isn’t very loud. I know this because when I round the corner into the back section of the library, where the old, outdated computer monitors are, I see Tony making out with some girl who’s not even in our class. It’s like something out of a bad movie.
They’re stupid to be making out in the library in the middle of school. They’re lucky I’m not a teacher. I stand and I stare, and they just keep going at it until finally Tony pulls away. His mouth is wet. I’m totally grossed out, even though I used to think Tony’s kisses were delicious.
“Velvet!” He looks guilty.
Well, he should.
If this were a movie, I’d spin on my heel and storm out of the library with him following behind, begging me for forgiveness. The whole world has felt like a movie over the past year and a half, and not a romantic comedy, either. This is just another kind of horror flick.
“Velvet?” The girl turns. Talk about trashy. I wonder what his mother will think. “What kind of lame name is that?”
“It’s from a book about a horse,” Tony says.
The only reason he knows is because I told him the same thing when we first started going out. He’d asked the same question, without the “lame” part of it. My mother named me after the heroine of one of her favorite books, National Velvet, and it’s true it’s a book about a horse. But the girl who’s been making out with my boyfriend doesn’t seem to have any sort of clue.
“Velvet’s a fabric,” she says with a roll of her eyes.
“Her sister’s name is Opal,” Tony offers, like that helps.
“Shut up,” I whisper, since this is the library.
My hands are clenched at my sides. Tony’s skin is normally pretty tan, but from the sun, not spray, like his mother’s. Now he goes a little pale. He looks back and forth between the two of us. Me and whoever she is.
“Velveeta,” he says, but my look stops him.
“Do not call me that. Ever again.” It was cute when I thought I loved him, but it’s not cute now. “You suck, Tony, you know that?”
“Wow,” says the girl. “I thought you told me she dumped you?”
“Maybe he has a time machine and was just a little early.” It’s a line worthy of a movie, and I’d like to deliver it all cool and bold like a movie heroine would. It comes out sounding shakier than that. “Because I’m dumping him right now.”
“Cool,” she says. “So, like, can you get lost?”
“Velvet!” Tony says this too loudly. He’s going to get kicked out of the library. Maybe get detention.
I don’t care.
“I’m sorry!”
I stop. Twist. He looks sorry, but maybe only sorry he got caught. Not sorry he was kissing some other girl. Not sorry I broke up with him.
“I guess your mom will be happy about this.” I flick a glance at his new… whatever she is. “Although good luck with that.”
“Hey!” The other girl puts her hands on her hips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She moves toward me, her face a storm cloud, and I realize that she’s going to… what? Fight me? Here in the library, the middle of school? I recognize her then. She’s got a reputation for fighting, for going with lots of boys, for dressing like a skank. Exactly the sort of girl Tony’s mom had always accused me of being and I never was.
Suddenly I’m grinning and laughing. None of this is funny, but I can’t stop. My heart is probably broken and maybe I’m losing my marbles, just a little, but I look at Tony and I look at what he’s replacing me with, and I think, better now than after a wedding ring and a couple of kids.
I’m only seventeen. There will be other boys. Tony’s not such a good guy, after all. And, though it hurts, I start to walk away for good.
She follows me. “Hey!”
Her hand snags the back of my coat, jerking me back a step. “Listen, he’s with me now! You lost out!”
My mother always told me there was no point in fighting over a boy. If he wanted to be with me instead of someone else, he would be. If you have to force someone to want you, she said, it’s not really love.
My impulse control isn’t damaged by a hole in my brain, just by being tired and stressed, and I want to haul off and punch this girl right in her mouth… but I don’t.
This time, I’m glad to say I walk away.
This time, I make my mother proud.
SIX
MY DAD WAS A TALL, SKINNY GUY WITH RED hair and freckles. My friends liked to call him Mr. Weasley, and he always laughed when they did. He liked Harry Potter, too.
He worked as a district sales manager for a computer company. He knew a lot about computers. He was always fooling around on his laptop—watching movies, playing games. My dad played The Sims more than I ever did. He knew about computer viruses and how to get broken emails to work, and he knew how to use netspeak properly even though he always told me that if I was going to be writing something, it would behoove me to know how to spell it correctly.
That’s how my dad talked. Behoove. He had red hair but not the temper that’s supposed to go with it. He was usually pretty quiet, even if we were annoying him, which I know we did because we were kids.
My dad was also part of the first wave of the Contamination.
He and my mom had decided it was time to go on a diet. He spent too much time playing computer games and was getting a little potbelly. Her job in an insurance office meant she spent too much time at her desk. My mom joined a gym close to where she worked, but my dad decided to try the popular new diet everyone was raving about. All the talk shows, all the Hollywood stars. All the magazines had ads for it, every TV show had commercials for it.
The ThinPro diet plan was everywhere. High protein, low carbs, six small meals a day. The weight, according to the ads, would fly right off. They had special candy bars, cereal, bread, pasta, protein bars… the works. And, of course, the water.
All kosher! All vegan! No animal products used! Protein water was already popular, but sales of the ThinPro water went through the roof. Even people not on the diet bought it and drank it by the case. It was supposed to be the best, the healthiest. Not the cheapest, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was designer water, like shoes or purses or sunglasses. You couldn’t look anywhere and not find a vending machine dispensing it or see it in some starlet’s hand at some red-carpet party. Even the president drank it.
My dad bought cases of it. He guzzled it. And, yeah, he lost weight. Dropped ten pounds in a couple of months, right from the start, while hardly exercising at all. My mom, who was spending hours on the treadmill and not ever having dessert, held off a little longer, but pretty soon she was on ThinPro, too.
Why not? Everyone else was, at least everyone in America. It was so popular, a famous late-night comedy show even started doing skits about it. I watched them, up late on a Saturday night with Tony on the couch beside me, both of us eating popcorn and drinking soda in between kisses. I didn’t think the skit was that funny when I saw it, but I’d laugh really hard if I saw it now.
The premise of the joke was that the ThinPro company had put something addictive in the water to keep people buying more and more. It was based on one of those urban myths that get passed along in email chains and posted on blogs. In the skit, the guest host gulped water from the bottles, spilling it down her face and over her body, while the others shouted “Chug! Chug! Chug!” until she started to twitch… and shake, and with a quick use of special effects makeup, she became a monster. In the skit she grew to Godzilla size and destroyed New York.